Apple’s MacBook Neo, OpenAI’s Pentagon Agreement, Anthropic’s Investors Silent on DoW | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console - https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  There was some big news this week. Of course, everyone knew that Apple was launching new products. But there were some surprises and there's some cool stuff, starting with the MacBook Neo. The more downstream take is like, how is Apple affected by the AI boom? But let's start with the actual products because this thing, in the video, it looks so small. It looks like an eight inch laptop. So this is the MacBook Neo, sort of designed to compete with the Chromebook. It comes in at $599.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, not even just the Chromebook, just all PCs.

• 0:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, you're not going to get this for, like, if you're in a professional workplace, go to a desktop with multiple monitors, plug in, you're doing like advanced work. Like, this is for students, this is for the low end, and it is-

• 0:48Jordi Hays?

  Or just a personal computer.

• 0:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 0:50Jordi Hays?

  I think it's designed for people that have an iPhone but don't have a Mac.

• 0:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:55Jordi Hays?

  Because of cost.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 0:57Jordi Hays?

  And now they can have an integrated suite.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  I love the launch video too. It's very weird when they start because it's just this like blank block and then they're adding features to it with CGI. Does a really good job. It's sort of anticlimactic because every feature they add is just like what you'd expect. Yeah, I was kind of like, oh, is this going to be a touchscreen? And then it's like, oh no, it's just a normal screen. It's like, oh, like, guess what? It has a keyboard. Boom, mic drop. Oh, it has two USB C ports. It is kind of cool that they put the headphone jack a little bit further down. And then they're like, check it out, you're never going to guess this, a camera, we put it on the computer.

• 1:33Jordi Hays?

  They're like, hey, we heard you liked having an iPad that you could attach a keyboard to. So we basically took an iPad and put a keyboard-

• 1:41John Coogan?

  But it's very cool how they like sort of expand the product, like show you, okay, there's the speaker, it's pretty big. It goes on the side, there's two of them, 13 inch display, 16 hour battery life. The price is the really crazy thing. So $599, for students, it's $100 cheaper, so $499. That is one of the cheapest Apple products they've ever made. I'm pretty sure the headphones cost more. The Apple Pro, the Apple AirPods Max costs like 500 bucks. Remarkably cheap, A18 Pro chip, 250-

• 2:10John Coogan?

  56 gigs or 512 of storage, four colors. They got it in ramp yellow. They call it citrus, but I think everyone's gonna be.

• 2:17Jordi Hays?

  And it now costs the same amount as the entry level iPhone?

• 2:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20Jordi Hays?

  Seventeen E.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. People are sort of like, ah, it's underpowered, but look at the price. This is, this is crazy. The last time Apple had a product that was anywhere near this cheap was in 2014. So 12 years ago, they sold the MacBook Air for 899 and now they have this down at 499 or 599, which is remarkable. Really, really cheap. Cheap for 2026, cheap for an Apple product, even cheap when compared to other laptops. So this is sort of like their, their escape hatch, their pressure release valve. So they can actually increase the price on the other products more because if you're price sensitive, well, they have a product for you.

• 2:58John Coogan?

  And there was something similar that happened with the, the new suite of iPhones where the iPhone Pro Max was getting so big and the camera notch was so in your face. And the phone was bigger and heavier and the battery life was great. It was very powerful and a lot of people want that, but there were also a lot of people who were complaining, I just want a thinner phone. Well, then, then you have the iPhone Air and there's going to be crazy trade offs. You only get, I think, one camera, the battery life's not nearly as good.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  Lags.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  It lags, but for some people, if they're going to be complaining about the, all the features of the Pro Max, it's like, well, we got the air for you. Stop complaining. And I think that's a lot of the strategy there. The other products they launched, MacBook Air with a, with an M5 chip, MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro and M5 Max chip. How much memory did you wind up going with?

• 3:41Jordi Hays?

  Forty-eight.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  Forty-eight. Is that enough?

• 3:43Jordi Hays?

  I feel a little, I feel a little soft.

• 3:45John Coogan?

  Is that enough to pull up tweets and react to them on a live stream?

• 3:50John Coogan?

  It's up there. Apparently you, you actually have been maxing out something like 32 gigs of RAM, which, uh, which took me by surprise. I have not had, I've not been memory constrained, but I do, I do actually love the idea of getting the top end memory, which is the thing that constrains you on running LLMs locally. Is that correct, Tyler?

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, you can always like, if you have a really good model, you can like get around the memory thing, but then it gets like super slow because you're like loading it in and out.

• 4:17John Coogan?

  Okay. You're loading it in and out for like every token that you're generating.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. You need a lot of memory to run.

• 4:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. But, but so, so if I go with the 128 gig, the top of the line chip, I should be able to inference like a pretty smart model locally, pretty reliably.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  I mean, it's also like the, you can always just quantize the models down and so like.

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  You can actually run like really frontier like

• 4:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:39Jordi Hays?

  resource models on like

• 4:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:41Jordi Hays?

  pretty normal hardware now?

• 4:42John Coogan?

  I'm I'm just purely thinking for, you know, doomsday prepping. The idea of, you know, you have your library in case you're bored during the apocalypse. You have your DVD collection. You can watch all the movies from start. That's that's the big one for you because you're going to be able to watch all of American cinema from the beginning.

• 4:56Jordi Hays?

  I I still I still don't think I'd actually watch.

• 4:59John Coogan?

  You wouldn't do that. What would you be doing? Assuming that the internet's down, this apocalyptic scenario, you can't scroll.

• 5:04Jordi Hays?

  Plenty of other things to do.

• 5:05John Coogan?

  What would you do?

• 5:06Jordi Hays?

  Take a walk on the beach.

• 5:07John Coogan?

  What if you can't go outside because there's nuclear fallout everywhere? You're stuck in your bunker. What are you doing? Whittling? Do you get into whittling?

• 5:14Jordi Hays?

  I actually used to love whittling as a kid.

• 5:16John Coogan?

  Called it. What else did they launch? In a world where computers keep going up in price, it's kind of wild to see Apple drop a $5.99 laptop, says Theo.

• 5:24Jordi Hays?

  A phone priced Mac.

• 5:26John Coogan?

  Agree. More. Fry says, oh, man, they're going to sell 5 billion of these things. Yeah, this is this feels like more of a no brainer for kids than an iPad for some reason. I don't know if I'm just like old school and I'm like, if it has a keyboard, it's for work.

• 5:39Jordi Hays?

  iPads with kids just have really bad aesthetics.

• 5:42John Coogan?

  It does.

• 5:43Jordi Hays?

  Kid with an iPad.

• 5:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:44Jordi Hays?

  zoning out, right?

• 5:45John Coogan?

  You get them a keyboard, they're locked in.

• 5:47Jordi Hays?

  But you get them there.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  I I think there's something here.

• 5:49Jordi Hays?

  You're like, are they are they day trading?

• 5:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're doing something. I I I think there's something about, you know, typing on a keyboard that does lend itself to more creation and less consumption. Like, the iPad is a media consumption device. That's where where most people use it for. Throw on Netflix, play a game, do something. There there aren't that many people that are power users, but as soon as you get the keyboard, you're ready to type, you're ready to you're ready to work. Hilarious chart from Andreessen Horowitz. Apple on CapEx? Nah, we're good. They looked at the standard standardized quarterly capital expenditure for Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Apple. All of the four companies that are working on AI, Amazon, obviously through AWS and Anthropic, Microsoft through OpenAI, Alphabet through Gemini and Meta through MSL. They are all.

• 6:36John Coogan?

  Absolutely off to the races, going to the moon on CapEx and Apple is down 19% since 2015. Very, very funny. And it's just interesting that Apple has been so unaffected by AI costs. Not just on the CapEx side, which is where every hyperscaler sort of had to say, yep, you know what? Our business is fundamentally different now. We are not the high-margin, cash-flow-generating business. We're going to draw down on that cash. We might be taking on some debt. Like, this is a big, big, different financial model. It's a very different financial model from years past. And buckle up, you're coming with us shareholders. And the stocks have done well because a lot of shareholders have believed in the goal,

• 7:17John Coogan?

  believed in the value of AI, believed in the value of building compute infrastructure broadly. And they've been rewarded for it in most cases. But Apple's just sort of sat that out and said, hey, we're not, we're not going to train a foundation model. We're not going to build a whole bunch of compute infrastructure.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  We're going to serve Gemini.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  We're going to serve Gemini. And we'll pay them, what, a billion dollars a year, something like that?

• 7:38Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 7:38John Coogan?

  It's like.

• 7:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, this, this year will be really interesting. It'll be fascinating to see what the new Siri actually looks like, what it can really do. We'll start to see that, I think, in Q2.

• 7:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:49Jordi Hays?

  And then separately, we're expecting new devices from OpenAI, right?

• 7:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:54Jordi Hays?

  Teasing the Puck, Dime, whatever you want to call it.

• 7:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:58Jordi Hays?

  It'll be interesting to see if they can kind of break the AI hardware curse that I feel like is.

• 8:04John Coogan?

  Well, I wanted to think about that because I wonder if the story's over for some of those like cursed, bad launches product. Like, we saw Friend apparently has found a little niche, very controversial. But Humane has sold to HP. It seems like they're not working on that product anymore, the PIN, the AI PIN. But the Rabbit R1, I think his name's Jesse, you know, that product, there's, there's something there where with enough iterations, I feel like that might sell well. There's still these niche applications that I think you could potentially, if you have a hardware team, you have the ability to sell something. It's, it wasn't polished, the AI wasn't good enough. Well, the AI got better, you still have the supply chain. Maybe there's a way to cut through, but it probably needs to be a little bit more niche.

• 8:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:50John Coogan?

  Like, everyone's going to have one. Tyler, what do you think about hardware in the age of AI?

• 8:54Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I think the Mac Mini is like a good example of like AI hardware, right?

• 8:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, that's a great example. I wonder what. Like how exposed the Gemini APIs will be in iOS? Because if you if you fully expose like Gemini Kit like, you know, in iOS, just like you can call like a weather API or Maps API like Uber exists because there was like a there was like a GPS API that you could just call within an iOS application with a couple lines of code. And you didn't have to like figure out where the user was because the iPhone just told you that as long as you clicked like, yeah, share my location with Uber. If you now get an app that has not just Apple's local L L Ms that are sort of,

• 9:39John Coogan?

  you know, mediocre, but it can go and call Gemini and do a whole bunch of crazy stuff. You you start running into like, will someone build an open cloth app? Or something like how much of Apple's AI strategy will wind up being vended into the third party ecosystem, which has served them so well for so long. They've sort of turned their back on it. They locked down Apple Vision Pro a little bit more. There was a there was way less uptake there. And there's a ton of risk because if I develop like a free iOS app that then incurs like a ton of Gemini tokens and ton of charges. How do those get passed through? Is Apple just biting the bullet on it?

• 10:21John Coogan?

  But there's something interesting there where turning app developers loose to to build software that takes advantage, not just of local L L M capabilities, but Gemini under the hood and and sort of wrap it up in a neat bow that is, you know, available to the consumer could be very cool. The big question that I had, so Apple's unaffected by CapEx costs, but they've also with this release been unaffected by memory costs and the RAMageddon. I get the strategy of Apple saying, look, we're good with Google handling the AI inference stuff. They have G C P, they have the T P U, they got Demis, who's got a book written about him by Sebastian Malaby. Like DeepMind is great, we're working with them. Capex unaffected, I understand that. How are they not affected by memory prices?

• 11:06John Coogan?

  RAMageddon has come for us all. Apple always overcharges for RAM.

• 11:12John Coogan?

  If you went to build a computer or a phone or laptop or, you know, iPad equivalent, and you just went to retail, getting an extra 128 gigs of memory or a slight memory upgrade might cost you 30 bucks. In the Apple ecosystem, that's like $200. So, Apple has built in this pricing buffer for a very, very long time. Many companies are dealing with ramageddon this year, and some stats that are interesting. DRAM prices rose 172% throughout 2025. DDR5 spot prices have quadrupled since September of 2025. TrendForce expects PC DRAM to roughly double in price just in Q1 of 2026, with LPDDR pricing seeing the steepest increases in history.

• 11:56John Coogan?

  So, every wafer that's allocated to an HBM stack, a high bandwidth memory stack for an Nvidia GPU, is literally a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module of a mid-range smartphone or consumer laptop SSD. So, they are truly commodities. There's only so many of them, and they can only go to one place or the other. Apparently, OpenAI's Stargate initiative alone could consume up to 40% of global DRAM output as it stands today. And this is the problem because there's only three major companies in the memory category. It's Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron. Together, they control 95% of the global DRAM production.

• 12:35Jordi Hays?

  Remember, Micron has been trying to build a new facility in New York.

• 12:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 12:39Jordi Hays?

  And six people basically blocked it. The rumor is that it's like foreign funding.

• 12:43John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 12:44Jordi Hays?

  Actually trying to hold Micron up.

• 12:47John Coogan?

  I mean, Micron has been very, they've been a huge beneficiary of AI margins and higher prices. So much so that they've actually reallocated all of their capacity to AI, and they pulled out of their consumer brand, which is called Crucial. So, if you ever tried to build a gaming PC, you probably found Crucial Ballistics, which was like this very aggressively X-Games branded like PC gamer DDR memory.

• 13:12Jordi Hays?

  Like the Monster Energy of RAM.

• 13:14John Coogan?

  Exactly. Couldn't have said it better myself. No, it really is. Gamers will be rising up soon with Monster Energies in hand to, uh, to take the, the, the RAM by, by force if they need to. I already see memes about this all the time. Uh, I see these like the worst AI slop video you've ever seen, just absolute junk. And then the caption will be like, so this is why I can't afford RAM, you know, and, or this is why RAM is $800 a stick or whatever. And then on the flip side, people will say, uh, you know, occasionally there'll be a good AI slop video and people will be like, okay, it's worth paying $800 for RAM. Because this is so good, right?

• 13:51Jordi Hays?

  Goes both ways.

• 13:52John Coogan?

  It goes both ways, but clearly people are feeling the, the, the pinch. Uh, but Apple fans will be sitting out the fight thanks to a few key moves from Apple that helped them avoid disaster this year. So, uh, one, Apple has long-term supply agreements that allow them to secure memory 12 to 24 months in advance. They also benefit from vertical integration, uh, and custom silicon. So instead of buying consumer-grade commodity DRAM modules that you see go into either gaming PCs or Nvidia GPUs, for example, they negotiate multi-year contracts directly with Samsung and SK Hynix for custom LPDDR packages that meet Apple's exact specifications. And so I think-

• 14:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So this is like, RAM's always been cyclical.

• 14:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:35Jordi Hays?

  And so it makes a lot of sense for Apple to set basically like lockup pricing, Samsung's locking up the demand. They, they, I, I don't even think Samsung would have predicted this level of demand even three, four years ago. Otherwise they may not have priced, priced it in the way that they did.

• 14:51John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 14:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the other thing that, that, uh, maybe you get to is-

• 14:55John Coogan?

  And Samsung's still making their default margin. They're just like, the opportunity cost is so high because we could, we could reallocate.

• 15:01Jordi Hays?

  The other thing is, is they, they probably have so much margin in the upsell that they could have some margin compression.

• 15:09John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 15:09Jordi Hays?

  Still be-

• 15:10John Coogan?

  So, Apple at various times has had over a hundred billion dollars in cash. They currently have over sixty-six billion in cash. Like, they can take the hit there. They can also just take a hit to their margins.

• 15:20Jordi Hays?

  Every AI lab looking at that cash being like, "Tim, I could really put that to you."

• 15:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're the only hyperscaler that hasn't really shelled out to the tune of ten, twenty, thirty billion into one of the frontier labs. My takeaway is like, this is an incredible testament to the operational prowess of Apple to pull this off at this scale. The Sony PlayStation Six is allegedly going to be delayed until twenty twenty-eight or twenty twenty-nine because of rising memory costs. They're going to wait it out. Because there are three players, it's not just TSMC in this case, it does feel like there'll be more pricing competition and there's more of a race to build capacity. Whereas at TSMC, if they don't build the next fab, they can just continually raise prices and increase margins once the next

• 16:06John Coogan?

  contracts go up for renewal. Whereas if Samsung has a bunch of capacity and Micron doesn't, like Samsung wins. And so, there's more of this game theoretic, like they got to, they have to build. Phil Harrison says that, quote, "We ran the math. OpenAI is buying three to four times more memory than it could possibly need in the short term. The most charitable explanation is aggressive forward positioning. The less charitable one is that they're cornering the supply to kill on-device AI before it starts." Well, if the on-device AI happens on Apple products, that doesn't seem like that real of a scenario. But it is, it is an interesting thesis. Across the frontier labs, everyone

• 16:50John Coogan?

  is just very AGI-pelled. They're seeing the increase in capabilities, but also the, the, these sort of like stacked exponentials. When you went from L L Ms to reasoning, the number of tokens, the number of compute required just to get a single answer when like, you know, 10x all of a sudden. And then we saw the same thing with coding agents where these long running tasks are squaring the amount of compute. And so you just keep stacking these things on and you just get more and more compute demand, but you get more, more economic output. So it winds up being all worth it. When will Apple release the iPhone 18? Call she has before October at 35%, before 2027

• 17:34John Coogan?

  at 34%. What is the chance that they don't release it this year? That would be probably zero. And I think it is, it is zero.

• 17:42Jordi Hays?

  So T S T submitted a new semiconductor fab construction plan for the Southern Taiwan Science Park last week.

• 17:48John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:48Jordi Hays?

  The site is located on Tainan's An Ding district adjacent to the F 18 fab.

• 17:55John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:56Jordi Hays?

  And covers 15.46 hectares.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  They're doing more 2 nanometer production, the leading edge with eight hectares allocated for the production area and one hectare for administrative facilities. The project is expected for completion and production start in 2028, says Semi Analysis. So.

• 18:17Jordi Hays?

  More importantly, Wendy's US president posts new video amid burger battle with McDonald's and Burger King.

• 18:24John Coogan?

  Let's see.

• 18:24Jordi Hays?

  Let's, let's rate, let's rate it. Okay. I like the way that he's holding it, you know?

• 18:28John Coogan?

  Okay. Seems normal. Yeah. Wonderful.

• 18:31Jordi Hays?

  Kind of.

• 18:34John Coogan?

  I like the burger. This is good.

• 18:36Jordi Hays?

  I like talking, talking about food in his mouth. Okay. Yeah. Going, going, going back for a second.

• 18:41John Coogan?

  You gotta top it off with the fries and frosty.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  He's saying burger. He's not saying product.

• 18:45John Coogan?

  Product. What did he do at the end there? He dips a french fry in the frosty? Whoa, okay.

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  Okay, doesn't call it a product, no hesitation, talking with the food in his mouth.

• 18:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's bold, that's bold.

• 18:59Jordi Hays?

  Bold. I'm giving this an eight out of 10.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  If you scrolled out, I like Colonel Sanders after seeing this, just knowing.

• 19:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, also, also the way he, he kind of puts the fry in.

• 19:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:10Jordi Hays?

  And quickly, you know, kind of pulls, pulls the hand back. It's got style points.

• 19:14John Coogan?

  Dude, here's a good job. If you're looking for a gig that will bring home the bacon, apply for the job of CEO at McDonald's. Apparently, the guy makes 18 million a year. It is funny that there's just like one after another of CEOs. Uh, this is probably good for all of them. I don't know. Uh, I want no jump cuts. Somebody should have seen swa- somebody should be seen swallowing the food. Oh.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  People are, people are analyzing.

• 19:40Jordi Hays?

  That's somewhat, somewhat fair.

• 19:42John Coogan?

  Analyzing the details.

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

  Altman defended OpenAI's Defense Department contract in all hands yesterday, calling the backlash, quote, "really painful. This was an example of a complex but the right decision with extremely difficult brand consequences and very negative PR for us in the short term," he told staff. "I still stand by that, uh, given, given the events that have transpired in the world."

• 20:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:05Jordi Hays?

  "Since last week, being there to like meet, meet the government."

• 20:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  "Feels like, uh, being on, on the right path."

• 20:12John Coogan?

  It was just, yeah, it was just odd that, uh, Google's strategy was to not say anything. Do nothing win, basically, I would think. Or, or do nothing, don't go up or down. Like, uh, Gemini just.

• 20:25Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but I don't think Gemini is involved in this contract. It's, it's Grok.

• 20:30John Coogan?

  It's Grok?

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  Grok was the other one that, that, uh, came in with the same term.

• 20:34John Coogan?

  So Gemini doesn't have any relation with the Department of War? I think they do. I, I, I think, I, I thought that there was a, there was an announcement.

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  I might be, they, they might. I just don't think they were involved in this contract negotiation.

• 20:46John Coogan?

  OpenAI announced its Defense Department deal on Friday, hours after the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated rival Anthropic a supply chain risk. There's still a question as to whether or not that's going to go through. So, Kalshi has it at a 42.8% chance, and it hasn't really moved. I mean, I have to imagine that at this point, uh, both the Department of War and Anthropic are talking to each other. Do you have more information?

• 21:09Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, Gemini does have deals with

• 21:11John Coogan?

  They do.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  The DOD, yeah.

• 21:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  So there was the 200 million one that was, uh, in July.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  That was, Anthropic was also in that one.

• 21:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  And then they did, there was the recent, like, genai.mil, but they're like involved in that too.

• 21:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I, I am, what I'm so shocked by is how does AWS have an advantage in 2026 on FedRAMP and like federal classified network? But I, I don't know, I guess, I guess AWS does have like a, a material advantage there still.

• 21:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Scott Besson went on CNBC this morning and said, no private company will ever dictate the terms of our national security. Anthropic's attempts to push, uh, to push use clauses into their contracts with the United States government are unacceptable and their products will no longer be utilized by the US Treasury or any other government agency. So doubling down there. Uh, there was also a story in, in Semaphore

• 21:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:58Jordi Hays?

  this morning from Reed. Anthropic's investors don't have its back in its fight with the Pentagon.

• 22:03John Coogan?

  This is very interesting.

• 22:04Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic may be standing its ground against the Pentagon, but the AI powerhouse is doing so with a noticeably quiet quarter, its own high-profile backers. Despite the company's defiance, Silicon Valley's biggest players have remained silent. In a recent meeting between Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and Pete Hegseth, the issue of Anthropic came up, according to two people. Amazon has invested billions in the startup, a crucial part of Amazon's custom chip strategy as the largest consumer of the company's Tranium AI chips.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  And Hegseth has been threatening to designate Anthropic a supply train risk, which would make it impossible for many of the military suppliers to do business with the company. Jassy demurred, declining to take Anthropic's side, the people said. He wasn't alone. Despite Anthropic CEO Dariyamadi's very vocal opposition to the Pentagon's demands and rival OpenAI's Sam Altman's running commentary on the matter, a number of Anthropic investors have remained silent. One investor told Semaphore that speaking up might further inflame things with the admin and that they were still holding out hope the issue could be resolved. And others said that Anthropic requested they say nothing. Anthropic and Amazon declined to comment.

• 23:06John Coogan?

  The most important thing here is that we get Pete Hegseth on Twitch. Amazon, Andy Jassy is sitting down with Pete Hegseth. Hegseth likes Twitter, he likes X. Get him live streaming those press conferences. Put him on Twitch, that's the goal here.

• 23:19Jordi Hays?

  Go direct.

• 23:20John Coogan?

  We gotta talk about this.

• 23:23John Coogan?

  I mean, me and Tyler were, were talking about the, the, just the general like AI safety discourse on both sides always ends with people just saying like, we gotta talk about this.

• 23:34Jordi Hays?

  No one has any answer, you know, we gotta figure this out, guys. We all gotta, we gotta talk to each other.

• 23:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no one's like, no one's like, I have a clear plan. You might disagree with me, but this is my plan. And this is what we're gonna do. And here are the steps. And like, I think this gets us the good, the good outcome. Everyone's, everyone's just like, I don't know. It's very, very weird. It just from a comms perspective, it's very weird.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I feel like that's how decisions get made in companies. Like if, if a decision is really obvious, you can handle it over text.

• 24:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  If you, if it's not, it's like, let's, let's discuss live.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  Anyway, my portfolio every day at the opening bell looks like D-Day says, Humaan. This is an absolute disaster. It really is so crazy. I was trying to explain yesterday to a friend, like how the market, I was like, you're probably getting destroyed, right? And he was like, yeah, it's terrible. And I was like, well.

• 24:24Jordi Hays?

  Is this your retail investor friend?

• 24:26John Coogan?

  Yes, it might shock you to learn that the market overall is like flat for the year. It's a, it's an absolute tale. Korean stocks are crashing. The COSPI index, the Korea Stock Exchange is down 10%. Korean stocks are crashing, says Joe Weisenthal. The South Korean stock market fell over 8% and triggered a circuit breaker. Jim Cramer said, beware of South Koreans spill over to our markets. WDC, STX, SNDK, MU, all still vulnerable. So there's lots of companies that are at risk.

• 24:59Jordi Hays?

  Pseudo says, developers are cooked. I vibe coded a worse version of an existing product in four weeks with serious security flaws.

• 25:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a wild time. Be careful out there. There's new data on, on serious, serious traffic declines across tech publications. This is from Danny Crichton. Says, no discussion of tech media can get past this basic traffic fact. In the AI world, Google and social no longer refer traffic, which means the vast majority of readers just never find you in the first place. This is of course, a reaction to Trey Stevens' proposal that, but maybe that he should buy Wired. And it's unclear if he's just having fun, but there's been, there's been, there's been a call from the tech community to like, bring back the Wired we read in the magazines as a kid, you know? It used to be so techno optimistic.

• 25:51John Coogan?

  Now it's this hypercritical, maybe semi-political outlet. But what Danny is pointing to is that these. Publications have have seen just in the last two years since 2024, traffic declines of between 30% and 97% for digital trends. The interesting one there, I think it was of course Wired. In November of 2024 Wired was putting up 7 million, 7.7 million views in traffic. Now it's down at 2.9.

• 26:24Jordi Hays?

  I wonder how much of this is due to AI overviews and and you know, Google search results now are more ads, more more paid links than organic links.

• 26:36John Coogan?

  There's a lot of that. There's a lot of.

• 26:38Jordi Hays?

  But I think I think.

• 26:39John Coogan?

  Something happens and it's just screenshot and shared on.

• 26:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, all yeah, the screenshot. There's 100 for each one of these publications. There's 100 or 1,000 people that will take whatever.

• 26:51John Coogan?

  Reconstitute.

• 26:52Jordi Hays?

  And just make it more socially native. So I would imagine that the stories these companies are telling are getting a similar amount of impressions overall. That's just not happening.

• 27:02John Coogan?

  Potentially more because a lot of the stories that they write about, at least the ones that do scoops are are more interesting than ever.

• 27:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, we're not seeing a decline in VC podcast viewership.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 27:15Jordi Hays?

  There are a number of VC podcasts that are racking up a million views.

• 27:20John Coogan?

  A million views.

• 27:21Jordi Hays?

  Interviews with series A or series B founders.

• 27:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:25Jordi Hays?

  Very, very impressive numbers.

• 27:26John Coogan?

  I mean, it's a white pill. It's a white pill. A lot of people think that, you know, technology is niche. Some series A founder that you haven't heard on, they can't attract a million people to sit down and watch them on Zoom, talk about their business for an hour. But apparently they can't and the and many venture capital firms have showed us that it's possible. You do have to pay the people to watch and the views might be a little low quality. But if you pay the viewers.

• 27:51Jordi Hays?

  People won't comment.

• 27:51John Coogan?

  If you pay, yeah, they won't comment. Yeah, that's an extra bill you got to pay. And it's very unclear why they aren't buying comments because if you're buying the views.

• 27:58Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. The reason, the reason is that the reason is that they are running paid traffic on Meta at their own YouTube videos.

• 28:06John Coogan?

  Oh, is that what's going on?

• 28:07Jordi Hays?

  They're getting the views. The the Meta ads as of a couple of days ago were public. You could see them. They're just like.

• 28:13John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 28:14Jordi Hays?

  On Instagram, you'll get an ad for a podcast and then people.

• 28:17John Coogan?

  That was, that was on Meta. I thought because.

• 28:19Jordi Hays?

  And Google.

• 28:20John Coogan?

  Because you can actually just run ads for your content on YouTube. And then you get people who are in YouTube to click on that content now. Are they less likely to comment? Absolutely. Like, the example on the right is Dwar Cash. He got a million views and it had 4,700 comments.

• 28:37Jordi Hays?

  Kyle Corbett is highlighting some news. The New York Legislature is rapidly pushing through a 2025 bill that would prohibit LLMs from providing substantive legal analysis or advice in New York. It seems that LLMs could still provide substantive help to lawyers under this bill, as written. Consumers, however, would be stuck with the chatbot, refusing to answer their legal questions. So, again, this just seems bad. The entire point of LLMs and AI is to give intelligence to anyone, right? Like, the fact that an individual can get the equivalent of five hours of legal work in a single prompt by, like, uploading a contract is very good

• 29:22Jordi Hays?

  for consumers. I don't even know how bad it'll be for lawyers, especially given that, at least right now, even if I could generate entire legal docs, I still want a lawyer to, you know, play a part in it. Again, Kyle Corbett says, "I sold my company last year. GPT-5 Pro was at least as valuable in that negotiation as our attorneys who billed us $450,000."

• 29:43John Coogan?

  Things that were not on my bingo card. One, Anthropic marked as a US supply chain risk by the government, same as Huawei. Again, that hasn't actually happened, but it's predicted. Two, Claude going viral across non-tech people as a result. Number one on the App Store. Three, mass ChatGPT cancellations, thanks to OpenAI becoming the government AI supplier. And Prime Agent says, "Then they will release 5.4. Everyone will say AGI and forget all about the last week and this week." That's why it's so fun to cover AI, because everything changes every two weeks.

• 30:11Jordi Hays?

  Julian Weiser interviewed a founder named Ben Sarah. He's building a company called Pulsia. They've gotten to 1.5 million of ARR in two weeks with zero human teammates. Very, very cool progress. But Zareem says, "Why is the company named AI Slop backwards?"

• 30:32John Coogan?

  Is that intentional? Is that a nod? Or did they just get lucky or unlucky?

• 30:37Jordi Hays?

  Maybe a happy accident.

• 30:38John Coogan?

  That's so funny.

• 30:39Jordi Hays?

  Donald Trump is at a roundtable, I believe, on the data center buildout. And Donald Trump, according to Mike Isaac, wistfully at the tech roundtable, speaking about OpenAI's Brad Lightcap. Brad, so young. Look at how young.

• 30:57John Coogan?

  That's so funny. Brad Lightcap does look very youthful. He has aged very, very

• 31:04Jordi Hays?

  A very youthful businessman.

• 31:05John Coogan?

  Also, an absolute dog who's been on a generational run and done fantastic things throughout his career. That's a total like, record scratch, freeze frame, "Yep, that's me. Here's how I wound up at a White House roundtable with the President of the United States saying..." So young. Look at how young. Thanks, Mike, for finding that up.

• 31:28Jordi Hays?

  And a good place to close out the show. Brian Johnson walked at a fashion show at Paris Fashion Week. A Capital says, "From immortal unk to runway unk." The only thing is, it kind of looks like a futuristic funeral.

• 31:44John Coogan?

  It does. He's looking jacked. That is true. He is looking very strong. This is some mass surveillance going on. They're surveilling his mass.

• 31:53Jordi Hays?

  We hope you have a wonderful

• 31:55John Coogan?

  Wonderful day.

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

  Evening. We'll be back

• 31:57John Coogan?

  We'll be back tomorrow.

• 31:58Jordi Hays?

  For a big show.

• 31:59John Coogan?

  Goodbye.