Shifts In The Creator Economy, Kylie Jenner x Meta, GPT 5.6 Limited Release | 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 Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ 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.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  We're back.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  France.

• 0:01Jordi Hays?

  We miss you guys. We miss you guys a lot.

• 0:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was rough.

• 0:04Jordi Hays?

  It's genuinely brutal. We feel deeply unwell.

• 0:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:08Jordi Hays?

  By around 1pm, if we haven't gone live.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

  Regardless of the time zone.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  The sweating and shaking is crazy.

• 0:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:14John Coogan?

  It is a full withdrawal.

• 0:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the withdrawals, I mean, maybe it would get better after a few weeks.

• 0:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:20Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, the symptoms are brutal.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  Anyway, it was a high stakes trip. Of course, Jordy has battled with French President Emmanuel Macron in the past. And then, what appeared to be a direct shot at me, France recently banned nicotine pouches, fully. Very controversial.

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  Pretty much all oral nicotine products banned.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, so.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  As of April.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Cannes Lions, it used to be mostly about creative advertisements, giving awards for creativity. And there's a big focus on the creator economy. It's not packed with A-list celebrities, but it feels like everyone has a following of some sort. And that was a big point of discussion, like, there was one level of conversation that was just like, creators are the future, everyone's heard this pitch a million times. But the bigger discussion was something that Andrew Ross Sorkin, from Squawk Box CNBC, Dealbook, mentioned, talking about the trade-offs between independence and consolidation. You've talked about this before, just the idea of a roll-up of independent substackers. Where is the right economy of scale in the creator economy? Maybe not everyone should be independent, maybe not everyone should be with a large organization.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  And this trade-off, sort of interesting to dig into, as we see both creators go bigger and produce more expensive shows, and then also, the legacy media companies are getting better at social media-type content, so we can kind of dig into this. I'm flying back from Cannes, something I've been thinking about. I was taken aback by how some of what I thought were the most successful influencers say that they need to spend so much money to keep up that they're not making the kind of headline-popping numbers we often read about. And he asks for thoughts. I think there's a few things happening. One is the big transition from independent creators pivoting from making content to making shows, and you can look at Subway takes in this way.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  The other show is keep the meter running, much more high, much more produced, much more edited, much more costly to, to produce, but you're still faced with some of the awkwardness around, how do you actually monetize that? There isn't a logical ad break, although I think there should be in a three-minute Subway Takes video, a three-minute episode. I think that it would be fine to have a five to 10-second mid-roll in the middle of that, but that has not been done, like that floodgate hasn't opened yet. So, most creators are doing, it's either a really polished, vertical video about their own content, and then they'll do a promoted post that's another 30-second, 60-second, multi-minute, vertical video in their same style, but purely sponsored content. And a lot of those

• 2:55John Coogan?

  videos don't go as viral. And so, you have this awkward trade-off where the content that's great, that people want, can't be monetized. You have to do one and one. It'd be a little bit tricky, like, part of the way our show works is that we're just talking about whatever, and then we'll tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real-time experiences, a new value with Cisco. It would be different if we had to do every other, every other episode is just purely about Cisco, and then we go back to about just the news and talking. And so, that's, that's something that's like, starting to evolve. And those higher-cost structures, I think that they still have more enduring

• 3:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Forbes came out with their top creators list in earnings. Mr. Beast was at the top with 300 million, I would imagine.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  But that's revenue.

• 3:40Jordi Hays?

  That, yeah, like, earnings is, is not the right word here. It should just be gross revenue.

• 3:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I, I have no idea what, what Jimmy's margins actually look like on that 300. It, it would appear he's spending like

• 3:54John Coogan?

  But he's obsessed with reinvesting for the future of growth.

• 3:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's always been a part of his brand.

• 3:57John Coogan?

  As opposed to Joe Rogan, who has these big deals, and he seems completely content to be in a tiny set. And, yeah, people are still breaking through, but they're breaking through with new, more polished products that, of course, have higher costs. Simultaneously, traditional media companies are starting to dial in content strategies for traditionally creator-led platforms. I think the New York Times has done a fantastic job here. You have the Ezra Klein Show and Ross Douthat, who are sort of like the left and right perspectives, and their shows have become really successful on YouTube. A lot in due to the packaging. They understand how to get a good title and thumbnail together. The editing, the production values are really, really high quality. And so those

• 4:38John Coogan?

  podcasts do very well on YouTube in a way that other shows from legacy media companies, it's been hard for them to break through traditionally, but they certainly have. And it's interesting that it's recent.

• 4:50Jordi Hays?

  The other thing that was interesting, France appeared to put Brian Johnson on

• 4:56John Coogan?

  Wait, what happened?

• 4:56Jordi Hays?

  A pack of cigarettes. Pull up this image.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  That does look like Brian Johnson.

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  Really out of pocket to take, to take an asset.

• 5:07John Coogan?

  It works pretty well, though. Don't die, don't smoke. You know, it's his, it's his message. I think he would approve this.

• 5:13Jordi Hays?

  But I saw, I saw this and I had to take a picture because I was like, is it actually uncanny? He has like a lot of pictures of himself.

• 5:21John Coogan?

  It does look like him.

• 5:22Jordi Hays?

  Laying down like that, eyes closed.

• 5:24John Coogan?

  Also, this looks like a man being put in a body bag, but at the same time, it looks like just a man who got a, getting beautiful nights of sleep, getting tucked in after a nice couple of hot heaters. He ripped a couple darts, had a couple of years, crushed a couple of cold ones, and now he's ready to get put to bed by someone.

• 5:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is actually much more tame than some of the other.

• 5:44John Coogan?

  Oh, some of them are gruesome. Like so gruesome, showing like the x-rays of cancer patients and like black lungs and stuff. Like this is pretty mild. If you look like this guy after you're smoking a whole pack, like you're doing pretty well. The end state of, of this debate, it's, it's interesting. There's a little bit of grass is always greener on the other side going on with independent creators thinking, ah, maybe it'd be better if I was with a larger organization. And then vice versa with a lot of the folks inside big organizations saying, ah, if I left, I could probably make so much more money. I don't think it's a one size fits all approach here. I think it's more of a sorting process. Some creators will find elegant business models outside of large organizations. Like those 80 to 90% EBITDA margins still exist for certain categories, certain products.

• 6:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, look at a procession, right? It's like a low margin, highly competitive, but it's hits driven. So you can have one breakout hit.

• 6:34John Coogan?

  That's a great example.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  And, you know.

• 6:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:36Jordi Hays?

  Have insane margins.

• 6:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I think it's more of this like sorting process. Some creators will find elegant business models outside of traditional organizations. Others will probably wind up leveraging the possibility of going independent into more meaningful contracts within traditional media organizations. But it's increasingly clear that a one size fits all approach, perhaps with a tagline like independent creators are the future. I don't think that quite fits anymore. To each their own, I think everyone sort of needs to find their own way and figure out what's right for them. Smart glasses are inevitable, but what or who are they for? Says Christopher Mims in the Wall Street Journal. This is on the back of the new Meta glasses that launched.

• 7:18John Coogan?

  Chris, Christopher Mims says the deluge of smart glasses has begun. Has it? It feels like, I don't know if it's a deluge. It feels more like a, like a, just a trickle or like a steady stream. But maybe I've been following it too closely. I think that's all of my problems with analyzing this category and we'll get into that. My criticisms are like very odd, technical.

• 7:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's, and it's, and it's, so Meta has been selling a lot of glasses. The products are, the products are.

• 7:44John Coogan?

  Dozens, hundreds?

• 7:45Jordi Hays?

  No, they've been selling, I believe they've already, I believe they're already in the, in the millions of units of not, not, not the.

• 7:52John Coogan?

  Hundreds of millions of dollars?

• 7:53Jordi Hays?

  I believe so. Ben?

• 7:55John Coogan?

  I think it's getting, I, I, I, I agree with you. I think it's getting material, I think it's getting material.

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  What I was gonna say is that it's for products that are functionally like a great pair of glasses with a camera attached. Right? These are not like, I, I don't see a lot of people talking about like, oh, I'm replacing AirPods entirely with these, even if, even if that is one.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  Is that just because?

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  And that is also with like having, being able to sell through a one of one ad unit on the greatest distribution platform in history.

• 8:25John Coogan?

  But they're going up against stiff competition, like the Apple Vision Pro is so good. That like, you know, it's like we are, job's finished. Like, we have the Apple Vision Pro, why?

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  It was so, it was so funny. So I had never tried the Apple Vision Pro until this trip. And I asked John, I was like, hey, can I, can I take him for a spin? And you were like, oh, it's like kind of a hassle to set up.

• 8:46John Coogan?

  It is.

• 8:46Jordi Hays?

  And it.

• 8:46John Coogan?

  You have to like put it in guest mode.

• 8:48Jordi Hays?

  But John was like, no, I want Jordy to experience this.

• 8:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:52Jordi Hays?

  And so we go through this whole like hassle of setting it up. And I'm like 20 seconds into the dinosaur demo. And the flight attendant comes up and is like tapping me on the.

• 9:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, like actually.

• 9:03Jordi Hays?

  Taking me out of virtual reality. And I was like, the audacity.

• 9:07John Coogan?

  And I think the question was just like, are those cool? Or something like, it wasn't, it wasn't like, sir, you need to put on your seatbelt or something. It was like.

• 9:14Jordi Hays?

  I was, I was fully immersed.

• 9:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:16Jordi Hays?

  And it, and it completely ruined it for me.

• 9:17John Coogan?

  And what's funny is like the whole pitch for the Apple Vision Pro was like, you don't need to take it off to talk to somebody because it will show the eyes. And no, Tyler's on his way back.

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  You guys went to France for raising.

• 9:28John Coogan?

  Raising canes, yes. Raising can. Raising can is good.

• 9:33Jordi Hays?

  Yes, Tyler got left at CDG.

• 9:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:37Jordi Hays?

  Chiodity.

• 9:37John Coogan?

  But.

• 9:38Jordi Hays?

  So I have the. We got T-Moo.

• 9:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, T-Moo, T-Moo Tyler.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  But I have the answer for the Meta glasses.

• 9:48John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. How, how are we doing?

• 9:49Speaker 02

  So since 2025, there's been 7 million plus sold across OP and Meta. $2 million was just the Ray-Bans.

• 9:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 9:57Jordi Hays?

  And. Wait, 2 million units?

• 9:59Speaker 02

  2 million units.

• 10:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  And that's the estimated gross retail sales was 2.1 to 3 billion estimated.

• 10:04John Coogan?

  That's pretty good.

• 10:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, John, you, the way you were framing it, it was like, yeah, we've sold 7 million. And you're like, $7 million? And it's like, no, it's 7, 7 million. Like, it's a lot of units. It's a lot of units.

• 10:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's getting there.

• 10:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and if it wasn't Meta.

• 10:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:19Jordi Hays?

  We'd be like, wow, this company has like insane product market fit.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:24Jordi Hays?

  Selling seven million units of a new

• 10:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, if it was O-ring or whoop or something like that, we'd be very impressed.

• 10:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:30John Coogan?

  I, I, I think you're a hundred percent correct.

• 10:32Jordi Hays?

  And it, and it would be like, it could probably be like a standalone

• 10:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:35Jordi Hays?

  public company.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  But people would still be slamming it for it for being like way worse than the Apple Vision Pro. In terms of watching, watching old films. I watched Master and Commander on it. It was great. Anyway, let's go back to Christopher Mims in the Wall Street Journal. He says, "At the low end, there's a new line of Meta glasses which start at $299 and play well with vision benefit plans. Interesting. So you can buy them with insurance. For another $100, there's a pair aimed at fans of Kylie Jenner. We saw these in action and they looked great. They, they, and I think reviews are very, very high quality.

• 11:09Jordi Hays?

  If, if I hadn't seen the launch, I wouldn't have noticed that they were Meta glasses at all.

• 11:15John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 11:15Jordi Hays?

  I would have just assumed they were like

• 11:17John Coogan?

  It has this jewel. You can see it. It's that small, uh, white like glint right there. And I was so confused by this, but this is purely a me problem because I assumed that that was a recording light because, or, or some sort of display because if you look at the Meta Ray-Ban displays, you'll see that there's slight grooves in the glass for forming the beams to show you the display. And so I was like, oh, that's a, that's a smart feature, but it's in fact not. It's purely aesthetic and people who are in the market love this. Uh, I was confused by it, but I think I might be the only person that is confused by it. So I, I don't think it's a

• 11:56John Coogan?

  problem whatsoever. But Metas is $800 and specs from Snap is $2,200. They are so chunky, they look like something you might see in a Prada ad and never in real life. Silicon Valley has been trying to make smart glasses happen for more than a decade. Remember Google Glass? Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms has captured more than 80% of this market. Not bad. But in 2025, that meant selling just seven million pairs of glasses. By comparison, the world buys more than 100 million smartwatches a year and more than a billion smartphones.

• 12:29Jordi Hays?

  What does it say about like the broad, uh, investor views on smart glasses overall? If Meta has 80% of this like emerging category that's selling seven million units and they get like basically zero credit for it?

• 12:43John Coogan?

  When I see seven million pairs of glasses compared to 100 million smartwatches, I feel like This is perfect trajectory. Like, this is great.

• 12:50Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that Meta ever makes a free pair of glasses that's ad-supported?

• 12:56John Coogan?

  I don't know. I think that an ads business would actually be much more attractive. When you say, "Oh, they're making a billion dollars in revenue," that's not 100% margin. I think about, "Well, what is Threads' revenue going to be?" And that's going to be much higher margin. Threads is probably more exciting to the core business and to the financial outcomes.

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just think, I think if you...

• 13:18John Coogan?

  I understand it's exciting. I like hardware. Like, it's cool. It's just like, it's hard to underwrite to, like, some, "Oh, it's moving the needle on cash flow." This is going to pay for another data center.

• 13:26Jordi Hays?

  I would expect to see, just like we saw the ad-supported Kindle, I think we'll see the ad-supported Meta glasses.

• 13:32John Coogan?

  Are the ads on the inside for wear or on the outside for everyone interacting with you?

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  For the user. So you're walking on a street, and you walk past a restaurant, it pops up like, you know, "Get a free matcha."

• 13:43John Coogan?

  I don't like that. I like the other way. I want to be wearing the glasses, and I want it to be barking ads at everyone around me while noise-canceling those ads to me, so I don't have to hear them.

• 13:53Jordi Hays?

  You become a loud billboard.

• 13:55John Coogan?

  Exactly. I pay for the no ads version, but you didn't pay, and you're sitting next to me.

• 14:00Jordi Hays?

  You dress up as a guy on the street, and you're pretending to do, like, "What do you do for a living?" interviews, but then, right when you get up, instead of saying, "What do you do for a living?", you just activate the ads, and you just try to bark, like, four or five ads.

• 14:11John Coogan?

  "What is your intelligent cloud provider? Is it Railway?" Which one is it? Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to play web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. That would be a great ad to bark out of your glasses. The idea of a face-worn computer has garnered skepticism, even hostility, which is understandable. When most of us are trying to reduce our time in front of screens, it seems absurd to mount them right in front of our eyeballs. Why should we be okay with everyone we meet pointing internet-connected cameras at us? It feels like an assault on what little privacy we have left. It's why you carry a flashbang around. Then there's the built-in AI. Artificial intelligence lets these glasses identify objects in our field of view.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  That is not a very compelling use case for me.

• 15:00Jordi Hays?

  Hot dog? Not hot dog.

• 15:02John Coogan?

  It's just like, I'm looking at a building. What is this building? It's a building. What is this tree? What do you see? It's a tree. I don't know. Do you care if it's a ficus tree or not? It's pretty rare. South African meerkat? How often are you running into an unidentified meerkat? This is not that big of a problem. The bigger one is that you're just able to talk to an AI agent and have it look up things for you, have it do whatever you want in on your phone, in your world, on in your agent. But it's very rare that you're seeing things in the real world. Oh my God, what can is this? What is this? I need to know. It's like, come on, I know what a Diet Coke is. And yet there will be smart glasses and you and I might even choose to wear them. Their technological inevitability, a new consumer tech arms race for the last and best real estate on our bodies.

• 15:47John Coogan?

  I envision that someday all glasses should could be smart glasses, said a man who should know. Zaid, who heads the division of Qualcomm, responsible for making the chips that go into Meta, the Meta Snap and Samsung smart glasses. Well, Meta's working on a bunch of other stuff. They're working on artificial intelligence. You may have heard. Zephyr says they seem to be pretty focused on coding right now. I'm pretty sure this is the largest coding trading, training data generation effort in the world. They have the compute. Thirty to 50% of engineers on core teams have been forcibly forcefully reassigned to data labeling. Meta's radical plan to become a leader in AI will require vast amounts of capital and her door was open to discuss innovative financing, financing structures and partnerships.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  They might wind up raising billions more to fund the build out of MSL and Meta's AI efforts. One engineer told this reporter that the whole situation feels like the movie The Hunger Games, when tributes are randomly selected and then removed from their environment to something completely different. Except at Meta, many more folks are being affected with between three to five from a 10 person team going from building products used by hundreds of millions to giving human feedback on AI generated GitHub repos over and over. So a wider impact than in The Hunger Games with less drastic consequences. Yeah, still air conditioned with free snacks, which they are improving, apparently.

• 17:11Jordi Hays?

  So Doc is, we're going to have Meta code.

• 17:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it seems like they're trying to have a model that they would sell it on the API or something.

• 17:21Jordi Hays?

  I was expecting Meta to spend enough money to get the Meta AI, you know, chat, GPT Gemini Claude competitor

• 17:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:29Jordi Hays?

  to the top of the charts and keep it there.

• 17:31John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:31Jordi Hays?

  Because I expected Zuck to think like, hey, if I get people asking questions all day long, I can just target them much better.

• 17:38John Coogan?

  Oh, you mean the App Store charts?

• 17:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I expected them to go super hard on consumer.

• 17:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:42Jordi Hays?

  They don't have background in enterprise. They bought Manus, but even Manus was like, sort of unclear what they were gonna do over time. Maybe they would integrate it into Ads Manager. But I expected them to just say like, Zach say like, hey, I'm gonna spend a lot of money.

• 17:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:57Jordi Hays?

  And I have billions of users already. I'm gonna do whatever it takes to get a consumer chat app to the top of the charts, keep it there. And over time, uh, just focus on this one thing.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:09Jordi Hays?

  And the Meta AI app sitting at seventeen in the App Store right now, um, you know, not, not, uh, not nothing. Like, the market is not, is clearly not like sending signals like, hey, we're really excited for you guys to like pivot into enterprise and like

• 18:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:25Jordi Hays?

  spend hundreds of billions of dollars competing against

• 18:28John Coogan?

  Google.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  AWS, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, uh,

• 18:32John Coogan?

  SpaceX.

• 18:33Jordi Hays?

  You know, all the Chinese labs, SpaceX, like, this would be an absolutely incredible come-from-behind story.

• 18:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:41Jordi Hays?

  But I think it's reasonable that the market is saying like, no, they're not pricing it in.

• 18:45John Coogan?

  Certainly. Um, well, there's other news. Zuckerberg directed Meta to build a prediction markets app, which is a wild shift. Uh, the experimental app internally called Arena would be independent of Facebook and Instagram. It could compete for attention with Polymarket and Kalshi, the biggest prediction markets, has Mike, Isaac.

• 19:04Jordi Hays?

  I think, um, sentiment is at near rock bottom.

• 19:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  Sentiment on poly, uh, on, on prediction markets is like, I don't know if it's at an all-time low. I think users actually like generally

• 19:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:18Jordi Hays?

  like, they, they like

• 19:19John Coogan?

  It's way lower when it was like, oh, we're gonna find out who the next president is. And now it's like, it's a gambling thing for sports. And it's like, the vibe has very much shifted.

• 19:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I think, I think a lot of people have had like, have benefited from using prediction markets as a data source.

• 19:33John Coogan?

  Okay, a lot of people have benefited from sports betting. There's a story about a guy who won six million dollars on DraftKings and built a mansion with a bowling alley in it.

• 19:41Jordi Hays?

  So what I was saying is like prediction markets are

• 19:43John Coogan?

  Skill issue. That's what you're saying.

• 19:45Jordi Hays?

  You know, you know, revenue is exploding.

• 19:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:47Jordi Hays?

  Think that's a sign that users like the product.

• 19:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:49Jordi Hays?

  I appreciate them as a data source. I always have.

• 19:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  But sentiment around them broadly is like bad.

• 19:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and then sentiment around Meta.

• 19:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  Is at almost an all time low, at least in the capital markets. People are, you know, very, very unhappy. And so maybe Zuck is just saying like, F it. I don't think it can get any worse.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  But feedback to the Kylie Jenner Meta glasses has been way, way better. Wow. Silicon Valley finally figured out who controls consumer spending. This is not finally. Meta has been partnering with great celebrities for a really long time. This does not come as a shock to me, but it is the right person to.

• 20:30Jordi Hays?

  And it's so, it's so, uh, it's fascinating because we were trying to estimate like how much Meta spent on this like partnership campaign.

• 20:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:40Jordi Hays?

  I had, I was putting it at like somewhere around like 50. I have no information on it.

• 20:44John Coogan?

  Million?

• 20:45Jordi Hays?

  Like 50 million. Yeah. Yeah. How much does it cost to get the top influencer?

• 20:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  In the entire world to do a campaign like this?

• 20:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:53Jordi Hays?

  And launch a product with you?

• 20:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:55Jordi Hays?

  You know, maybe something like, uh, 50 million dollars. Then Alex Heath, Heathenator.

• 21:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:01Jordi Hays?

  Who we were with this week.

• 21:02John Coogan?

  Scoop athlete.

• 21:02Jordi Hays?

  Scoop athlete.

• 21:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:04Jordi Hays?

  Comes out and scoops that, uh, Snap is working on a deal with Robert Downey Jr. To spend a hundred million dollars.

• 21:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:12Jordi Hays?

  Potentially for a partnership there, which is deeply confusing.

• 21:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 21:18Jordi Hays?

  For like, you know, a lot of reasons, like the Kylie Meta.

• 21:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  Campaign makes a lot of sense. Kylie is like one of the, like, probably the or one of the top influencers on, on Instagram.

• 21:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:29Jordi Hays?

  Right? So it's a deep existing partnership.

• 21:31John Coogan?

  You don't know that this couldn't be, this isn't deep. It could be a super deep integration. We could be looking at like Iron Man four, Snap spectacles. And the whole movie could revolve around.

• 21:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:40John Coogan?

  Iron Man taking off the suit and only using the Snap spectacles to stop Thanos for the fifth time in a row.

• 21:47Jordi Hays?

  Previewing today, GPT 5.6 soul, next generation model.

• 21:52John Coogan?

  Named after soul bro? That's crazy.

• 21:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't know about that one.

• 21:56John Coogan?

  Because I would assume Sol is the biggest, then Terra is the medium, and then Luna is the smallest in terms of the model size.

• 22:04Jordi Hays?

  Of course, by US government directive, access is limited to only 20 pre-approved companies.

• 22:11John Coogan?

  Twenty, that's so small.

• 22:12Jordi Hays?

  Which is brutal because our very own Dan Shipper will not be able to do a vibe check on it, at least.

• 22:18John Coogan?

  He's got to get access soon. But a lot of this comes on the back of the distill gate that's happening in Thropics as Alibaba has distilled Claude many, many times. And I saw a chart of the amount of tokens that are getting resold off the back of that API, and it is staggering. It's a true, somebody was like, they professionalized fraud, which seems accurate. And so having really tight control, it makes sense in the distilling world. It's still very unfortunate.

• 22:47Jordi Hays?

  To go back to your other question, so Sol is the frontier model. Terra is a balanced model for efficient, everyday work. And then Luna is a fast and affordable model for high-volume work.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  Okay, cool. There's more data center backlash, data centers, how do they work? Theo Von says, nobody wants a data center, dude. And the people that want them to me, they seem kind of evil. Nobody wants this. One of these companies is going to own all this information. He had some very funny takes about.

• 23:14Jordi Hays?

  Emotional credit score.

• 23:16John Coogan?

  Emotional credit score would be weird. Yes, the data center issue needs to be messaged much more clearly.

• 23:23Jordi Hays?

  And I think.

• 23:25John Coogan?

  There's just such a wide gap between the water and the power.

• 23:27Jordi Hays?

  I'm assuming, I'm assuming he starts this way, but then he says, I'm going to be switching to distributing my podcasts on CD.

• 23:35John Coogan?

  That's such a bad, that's such a bad counter take because truly like the data centers that are required to power the YouTube and podcast stream, it's like so, so small compared to what AI is doing in terms of data center construction and, and the power requirements and the build out requirements. I mean, like you fire off one AI agent and you're using like YouTube, it's equivalent to YouTube for like 10 years, probably. Anyway, we should move on to other stuff. OpenAI limits access to new models citing government security concerns. Company says White House review of AI releases. Shouldn't become long term default. Ban on Mythos model remains. Opening, I said it's limiting access to its newest artificial intelligence models

• 24:20John Coogan?

  after discussions with the Trump administration, but warned that the recent trend of the White House restricting industry activity on national security grounds on a case by case basis shouldn't become the norm. Maker of ChatGPT. Yeah, I saw a lot of like safety people being like, this is the worst of both worlds. It's not some sort of like broad reaching, apply, you know, just like the rule exists and then everyone can easily comply. It's like the highest touch government intervention and it makes the government have much more power over AI, which is something the safety folks, I think, at least the ones that I saw talking about this, were not a fan of, but.

• 24:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's also just like, you know, there's the new, it's GLM 5.2.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:59Jordi Hays?

  That a lot of people saying like, hey, I could use this as a daily driver.

• 25:01John Coogan?

  And all the lab leaders have said, open source is like six months behind. And so now we're like approaching six months past like the last jump in paradigm and like massive cyber capabilities. So those cyber capabilities are coming to fruition in the open source world. There's an interesting dynamic between the risk of like bio stuff and cyber stuff. So if you have a model that can hack a system, it can usually patch that system for that hack in far less than six months, like probably in like an hour. It like, it can, it can see, oh, there's a, there's a, there's a exploit here and we shipped the code, merged it in, and now that exploit is closed. And so the gap between like, you create the hack machine 9000, you can hack everything,

• 25:46John Coogan?

  but instead you use it for legal reasons, for economic reasons, to patch all the systems. That's great. The, the problem that I'm worried about now is if there is a, if there is a world where building the counter, building the counter, like the good version of something takes longer than six months. So the example I'll give is, is in bio. So let's say that you have a next generation model. It's really good at finding viruses that if created would wipe out a ton of people. It's also really good at, at building. Early warning detection systems and, you know, counteractive like take this pill and you'll no longer, you know, be susceptible to that deadly virus that is now possible.

• 26:29John Coogan?

  That's fine, as long as you continue to roll out the biosecurity initiatives first, you should be good because by the time the open source hacker nefarious actor, state actors get access to the the bioweapon 9000, you've already patched your society so that you have bio risks, security, early detection, all the different medicines that you need to fight back. But if manufacturing all of that and actually deploying the biosecurity, the bio risk, the the the like the good version takes a year, but the frontier is only six months behind, you could wind up in a situation where manufacturing the virus is much shorter

• 27:13John Coogan?

  than manufacturing the antivirus. Well, let's go back to the OpenAI news. OpenAI followed a similar process with the versions of GPT 5.5 like cyber, which demonstrated an ability to discover vulnerabilities in software that could be used in cyber attacks. The similar capabilities of Anthropic's Mythos models prompted the White House to increase its oversight of the industry and overhaul its light touch approach to AI. There was, of course, that news that the NSA commented that Mythos was able to hack into a bunch of their systems. That was during a red teaming exercise. The unprecedented intervention led Anthropic to halt all access to comply with the new rule. Anthropic had previously worked with the administration on a limited rollout of an earlier version of Mythos. And OpenAI said it hoped to make 5.6 generally available in the coming weeks and that the

• 27:58John Coogan?

  government's current approval process represents a transition period while President Trump's recent executive order on model oversight is implemented. Quote, "We don't believe this kind of government access process should become the long term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them. We are taking the short term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability, especially as the open source frontier advances. It feels less and less reasonable to keep closed source models locked away."

• 28:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, why is the open source model frontier advancing is because the models are widely available. If you make these models available. Through everyday consumer subscriptions, there will be groups that will create networks of, you know, thousands of accounts and distill the models. And then you're giving away this like advanced capability. Whether or not that causes like, you know, these sort of like doomsday scenarios, you know, not not entirely clear. Do you think Meta's stock would pop if Zuck could go get a preliminary ban?

• 29:01John Coogan?

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 29:02Jordi Hays?

  On some of their new models?

• 29:03John Coogan?

  The ore farm of the ban, it does seem to be working. It's too powerful. There's other OpenAI news. I mean, the the chip jalapeno launched designed with Broadcom. Jalapeno is purpose-built for LLM workloads powering ChatGPT Codex API, future adentic products. Very exciting.

• 29:21Jordi Hays?

  Crazy, crazy, crazy timeline here.

• 29:25John Coogan?

  What?

• 29:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, just how quickly they were able.

• 29:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. A lot of people are saying like, this is the first chip designed with AI agents in the loop. So you can write the instruction set much quicker, sort of unclear exactly.

• 29:36Jordi Hays?

  You gotta give a lot of credit to the humans on both sides.

• 29:39John Coogan?

  But it is just cool because for a long time it was like, oh, it'll take five years to launch a chip. And now companies are clearly doing it faster. And so the the go-to-market cycle is tightening. Also, apparently OpenAI made deals to purchase forty percent of the global raw undiced DRAM wafer output until 2029. Millions of raw DRAM wafers that cannot be used until they're processed. Smart move, going deeper and deeper into the supply chain. Always, always interesting moves from the deals guy at the top.

• 30:08Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of timelines.

• 30:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  People are comparing GTA six with the Burj Khalifa.

• 30:14John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:15Jordi Hays?

  Burj Khalifa was built for one and a half billion dollars and took six years.

• 30:20John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  Apparently GTA six is two billion dollars and it's taking 12 years.

• 30:27Jordi Hays?

  But but at the same time, people really have said like it is the Burj Khalifa of video games.

• 30:32John Coogan?

  It's got two Burj Khalifas. OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, and Bill Gates are putting $500 million into funding a new organization called Intercept. Intercept's goal is to prevent the common cold and the flu and eventually eliminate all respiratory viruses completely. Incredibly cool project. Yeah, just like an incredibly cool, like tangible thing. I saw a stat that I saw this chart of what percentage of weeks are parents sick with something viral generally as a function of how many kids they have? And it's like a fast takeoff curve. So it's like one kid and you're sick like 25% of the year, you have like some virus in your system, a cold, a flu, something.

• 31:13John Coogan?

  And then as you get to like two, three, four kids, it ramps to like 50% of the year you are sick. And people will feel that if they're like, yes, I'm getting less sick, it's working.

• 31:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when, when the podcasts, you know, optimizers that struggle to have, you know, two drinks and continue podcasting, like they are so woefully unprepared for having children. Fortunately, most podcasters, they don't tend to go down that path of having, of having families. But.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  It's a monastic practice.

• 31:49Jordi Hays?

  But if they did.

• 31:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 31:51Jordi Hays?

  We could potentially see the strategic podcast reserve decline meaningfully.

• 31:56John Coogan?

  Anyway, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, sign up for a newsletter at tbn.com, and we will see you on Monday.

• 32:03Jordi Hays?

  Have a wonderful weekend.

• 32:05John Coogan?

  Goodbye.