Apple Sues OpenAI, Experts Sign Another AI Warning Letter, Paramount Threatens CA Exit | 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.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Huge news over the weekend dropped, Mark Gurman dropped a massive scoop right after we got off on Friday night, Friday afternoon, Mark Gurman broke the news that Apple is suing OpenAI, Apple and OpenAI are going to war. The Wall Street Journal called it thermonuclear, echoed past attacks, calling back to the Jobs era, we'll get to that. But first, the accusations. Apple is suing OpenAI, accusing it of stealing Apple's trade secrets. Apple Inc. sued OpenAI for trade secret theft, accusing the artificial intelligence startup and its hardware chief of engaging in a coordinated campaign to steal information about upcoming products. The iPhone maker said in a suit Friday that OpenAI encouraged Apple employees to share

• 0:41John Coogan?

  information, components, drawings, and other materials related to upcoming products. So like, the robot? What are the upcoming products from Apple right now? Part of efforts by the AI company?

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  The lamp.

• 0:51John Coogan?

  The lamp, yeah.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  The lamp, the Cobra lamp.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  The AI company developed its own suite of devices. I feel like rumors around the devices have gone back and forth. Is it a phone? Is it headphones? Is it something else? A pin? We're having Mark Gurman on the show today to break it down for us. He's coming on at 12:45.

• 1:09Jordi Hays?

  Funny thing is, I bet Gurman knows more about OpenAI's devices than we do, because we specifically

• 1:15John Coogan?

  That's why we're having a

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  Didn't want to be read in on anything device related, because we knew there was going to be so much speculation, then we just said like, yeah, we're going to be in the dark.

• 1:24John Coogan?

  We'll find out.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  We'll find out, like, everyone.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  From the timeline.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  From the timeline.

• 1:27John Coogan?

  So at the center of the lawsuit is a former Apple employee named Chang Liu, who left for OpenAI and allegedly kept his Apple laptop for weeks after he left the company, downloaded proprietary Apple files and encouraged other Apple employees to do the same. Yeah, if that happened, that's a big no-no. When you leave a company, you got to leave your device. On the day you leave, usually, I mean, I was remembering back to, I mean, we had a very graceful transition to this business from Founder's Fund, but, you know, I had like emails from, in Founder's Fund, from like, people that went to Hereticon, people that'd be good guests. And I was like, I'm not even going to export that. I'm just going to like, leave that, and I'll reestablish those connections to people, cold email them, find their information independently. Just don't take any files, leave them with the other

• 2:12Jordi Hays?

  Standard practice.

• 2:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is standard practice. You know, some people can make mistakes. Also, these are just allegations, none of this is confirmed. And this lawsuit will be going on for like months, if not years. We can go through some of the other historical examples that are sort of interesting to sort of set the table on what might play out here. So, Apple's filings also spends quite a few words on the fact that OpenAI has poached more than 400 employees from the company in recent years. That's not going to make anyone in Cupertino happy. They hate poaching. There's the famous Steve Jobs Adobe back and forth. Tang Tan left Apple in 2024 to co-found the AI hardware startup I/O with Johnny Ive, which OpenAI acquired in 2025 as part of its consumer AI device effort. Tan is now

• 2:58John Coogan?

  OpenAI's chief hardware officer, and he's leading the consumer device effort there. In his lawsuit, Apple says Tan systematically solicited sensitive information from Apple employees who were interviewing for roles at OpenAI. A lot of perspective on this flying around the timeline, but Ben Thompson and Rolf Winkler in the Wall Street Journal, both had interesting angles here.

• 3:16Jordi Hays?

  Wait, they have a Ben Thompson at the Wall Street?

• 3:18John Coogan?

  No, no, no. Ben Thompson extra-techery, and Rolf, I said that wrong. Brandon got it correct in the newsletter. We can read a little bit of what Ralph said in the Journal. He says, "Apple's OpenAI suit echoes past attacks. Steve Jobs declared thermonuclear war." If you're trying to fire up your staff and you're going to battle, even if it's mundane

• 3:39Jordi Hays?

  We're not just going to battle.

• 3:40John Coogan?

  Even if it's just for like, will the next device have 12 gigs of RAM or 32? That's boring. Thermonuclear war is exciting. You got to fire up the staff.

• 3:49Jordi Hays?

  The troops.

• 3:50John Coogan?

  So he declared, Steve Jobs declared thermonuclear war on Google, on Google's Android operating system in 2010, calling it a stolen product. Now his successor is going to battle against Apple's most, new most dangerous rival. In one of his last acts, as Apple's chief executive before successor John Turnus takes over, Tim Cook fired a missile at OpenAI. In the lawsuit filed Friday, Apple alleged that senior OpenAI executive, who once sat atop Apple's own product design team, was involved in a months-long campaign to steal Apple trade secrets. OpenAI has replied at this point and said, "We have no interest in Apple's trade secrets." But Ralph continues, he says, "Although it isn't clear yet what evidence the company has to back up all of its claims, the suit lands

• 4:35John Coogan?

  before OpenAI has released a product and as the technology industry races to build artificial intelligence-powered devices that can move society beyond the smartphone era." And there's a whole debate to be had for, you know, where that goes and the value of devices in a world where the agents are just kind of off working and you can maybe just text them or send them a message on Telegram. There's a whole debate over what the, is the future of devices, more devices and different devices, or is it just no devices? But OpenAI has clearly been working on devices, as we know from the I/O acquisition. The winner could dominate the future, just as Apple's iPhone ruled the consumer market for the last 20 years. Quote, "I am not afraid of Apple, but I have tremendous," got to

• 5:18John Coogan?

  flip to A6. Let's see. "Tremendous respect for them," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X Saturday.

• 5:26Jordi Hays?

  And he said S-tier company.

• 5:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, he said, "Oh, that didn't make it into the paper." Maybe the Wall Street Journal readers aren't familiar with the proper tier list. They think S is down at the bottom, when in fact, it is above A. Big tech rivals have long tried to supplant Apple, but so far, Google, Samsung, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Amazon.com have all failed. It is crazy. People think, you know, okay, Android was successful, but captured like, one-tenth of the actual value, because the margins on Android devices are so much lower. But you forget that Jeff Bezos stood on stage and said, "We're launching the Amazon Fire Phone, and we're going to win." And then Microsoft had the whole Microsoft phone, and they were really pushing that. And Facebook, Chamath was at Facebook working on the Facebook phone.

• 6:07Jordi Hays?

  Sort of a rite of passage.

• 6:08John Coogan?

  It is a rite of passage. It's an ultimate long shot as an up-and-coming hyperscaler to, it's a rite of passage to go and challenge Apple. Now, OpenAI is emerging as a new threat. It has built powerful AI models and is working toward an unspecified family of devices, interesting to hear that, to run them, devices that could supplant Apple's. Company observers say to slow poaching of Apple staffers, for instance, so this could just slow the poaching that's happening. Friday's lawsuit has echoes of one of Apple's, of the ones Apple's filed against various Android ecosystem players beginning in 2010, a legal battle royale with hardware makers producing rival phones that played out over eight years. The central

• 6:53John Coogan?

  allegation then, as now, was a rival stole Apple's innovations. Apple said Samsung slavishly copied the iPhone with smartphones it was already selling by the millions, which Samsung denied. The company settled in 2018 after a long costly battle, eight years. In AI years, that's like a million decades.

• 7:12Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 7:13John Coogan?

  At the center of each case Apple has pursued was perceived breach of trust. So Google's then-chief executive, Eric Schmidt, sat on Apple's board as his company developed Android. So there was like, you're on the board of Apple saying, "Yeah, we should definitely launch

• 7:30Jordi Hays?

  Kind of similar to the Krieger Figma dynamic.

• 7:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, very, very tricky. "I'm going to destroy Android because it's a stolen product," Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson. Apple alleges in its new suit that, quote, "At every level, OpenAI has been stealing Apple's trade secrets." A more junior employee appeared to cross the line by using an Apple employee's login to access Apple servers, but Apple has also accused OpenAI's hardware chief Tang Tan of soliciting trade secrets from its employees in interviews for jobs and encouraging them to bring, quote, "actual parts from Apple for show and tell sessions at OpenAI." Tan worked at Apple for 24 years, rising to vice president of product design. "But bringing parts to an engineering interview

• 8:15John Coogan?

  isn't unusual," say people familiar with the tech hiring process. That was shocking to me. It does feel unusual to me. Interviewers want candidates to talk through their work. The question is whether the parts were sensitive, something Apple doesn't offer evidence of and is seeking discovery to determine. A spokesperson for OpenAI said, quote, "We have no interest in other companies' trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers everyday people everywhere." Tan and a more senior employee, Chang Liu, didn't respond to requests for comment. At Apple, Tan worked very closely with Johnny Ive, its famous industrial design chief. Ive left Apple to build his own design firm, later poaching Tan. OpenAI bought that company, I/O Products, in 2025 to spearhead

• 9:00John Coogan?

  its own device development efforts. Bedfellows can quickly become enemies in tech. OpenAI made the I/O acquisition, revealing its intention to wean customers off smartphone screens a year after announcing a partnership with Apple to integrate ChatGPT into some parts of the iPhone. The Wall Street Journal has a content licensing partnership with OpenAI, of course. Bigger companies have so far failed to dent Apple's dominance. And they talk about Amazon's Fire Phone, Microsoft Windows Phone. Mark Zuckerberg also tried to do an end run around the iPhone with the metaverse that never fully disrupted the iPhone, of course. Elon Musk has also chafed at Apple's control of the digital economy. A unit of SpaceX is suing Apple for disadvantaging its AI app, and the company

• 9:41John Coogan?

  is now prototyping its own smartphone-like AI device. Apple has said that its App Store relies on algorithms and expert curation and doesn't suppress rivals. The irony of Apple's case against OpenAI is that Apple itself has so frequently been accused of stealing others' companies' ideas that it has spawned a new verb, Sherlocking, which is a reference to an app for the Mac that allowed you to hit, I think, Command Space and get a Finder window to search everything across your entire desktop. That eventually became the spotlight feature baked into Apple, but it was not very good for the company that was running Sherlock. And so, Apple, this is the same, like, you know, the labs will steamroll this, or this, these many companies just got put out of business by

• 10:26John Coogan?

  this company. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It just sort of depends. Apple recently tried to Sherlock Partifal, but it seems like Partifal is doing fine. And so, it sort of depends on the actual

• 10:37Jordi Hays?

  You have not gotten a single, haven't gotten a single invite from Apple's

• 10:42John Coogan?

  True, true.

• 10:43Jordi Hays?

  Invite system.

• 10:44John Coogan?

  At the same time, when was the last time you paid for a flashlight app? Probably never, right? Because all of that stuff's baked in. Apple's trying to catch up.

• 10:51Jordi Hays?

  I saw someone actually go pretty viral on Instagram with the world's most expensive flashlight app. I think it was like 100, it was like $5 to turn the light on, and then $129 to turn it off.

• 11:06John Coogan?

  That's great. Genius. I like those.

• 11:08Jordi Hays?

  Pretty smart. Ben Thompson read through the filing as he would. He says, you can read Apple's filing here and almost everything you need to know is actually on the first page in the first four paragraphs. Paragraph one is a succinct introduction to the case. This case is about Apple's former employees stealing trade secrets for the benefit of OpenAI. Apple brings this suit to put a stop to it. Paragraph two recounts how Apple has spent a lot of time and money building products that delight customers. Paragraph three basically says that everything they do is a trade secret. And paragraph four introduces Chang Liu and spends the next page and a half recounting his crimes. Ben Thompson says Liu is almost certainly guilty and an idiot to boot, not mincing words there.

• 11:49Jordi Hays?

  Apple has a lot of details about Liu's behavior, including dozens, downloading dozens of proprietary Apple hardware related files and encouraging other Apple employees to do the same because he did it on his Apple issued laptop. And furthermore, logged on to Apple servers for weeks after he had already left the company. Ben says Apple's security says, as depicted in this case, is shockingly poor. First, the company lost track of the fact that Liu didn't return one of his laptops or disable it remotely. Second, due to what Apple claimed was a bug, Liu continued to have access to the company's internal servers for weeks. He talks about how, you know, Tan is the point person for the 400 people that Apple says that OpenAI has hired away from the smartphone maker.

• 12:33Jordi Hays?

  That is no crime, of course, although one does get the sense Apple sure thinks it is.

• 12:37John Coogan?

  The funniest moment in here is where he says a couple of quick points. A few weeks ago, there was a bit of hubbub about meta capturing keystrokes from employees in order to train AI. What confused me was people's surprise that a company had this level of access to company issued hardware in the first place. Moreover, while that access may very well be theoretical for a lot of companies at Apple, it has always been a well-known fact, going at least as far back as when I was an intern there, Ben Thompson was an intern there 16 years ago, that the company could and would go through everything if you ever cross them. And so it's, it's, yeah, everyone should know this, but somehow it, at least Apple alleges that it was not known or, or just a terrible mistake or brazen, you know, brazen mistake.

• 13:22John Coogan?

  He does, he does talk about a little bit of the, the motivations for why you're going to thermonuclear war. He says, AI era has sucked for Apple.

• 13:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So he says, Tan is the face of Apple betrayal. OpenAI is the face of AI generally, and it's hard to escape the sense that Apple just really hates AI and why shouldn't they? Go back to 2022, Apple had it all figured out. They had a lock on the premium end of the smartphone market, which they continued to slowly expand, even as they had figured out how to earn services revenue from every iPhone user basically forever. Business was good. AI has ruined all of that. Suddenly, Apple has to make existential decisions about whether or not to compete in the model game. They totally embarrassed themselves with the 2024 new Siri introduction, had their most prominent blogger declare that something is rotten in the state of Cupertino, had to completely overhaul their software and services teams, lost their position as kings of the supply chain and most favored customer of TSMC, to the point where they had to enact

• 14:15Jordi Hays?

  an emergency mid-cycle price rise, and then worst of all, have to actually wrestle with the possibility that AI is such a paradigm shift that it might actually threaten the iPhone. And then on top of all that, they lost, they lose 400 of their best employees recruited by the lead hardware engineer for the iPhone in partnership with their most famous executive outside of Steve Jobs, and have to know that all 400 of those employees are getting hit up by their former colleagues looking for a job as well. The AI era has sucked for Apple, even if they aren't necessarily doomed, and even if they relaunched new Siri ends up working out, their position is still more fragile than it was, and everything about life is worse. Given that, how sweet it must feel to suddenly have a smoking gun in the form of a seriously dumb employee blatantly lifting documents and to use it as a cudgel to exact revenge

• 15:00Jordi Hays?

  on the company that represents everything that is making your life miserable. The perspective does make one wonder if that phrase rotten to its core was projection in the end. AI is changing the world and Apple's contribution is to deliver two-year-old technology differentiated by exclusive access to data it won't share. It certainly has no interest in delivering on a new AI-driven paradigm that endangers its iPhone franchise in any way. Any of its employees who wish to do exactly that meanwhile are being told loud and clear that Apple doesn't just think it owns your laptop, but also your mind and knowledge. I think it mostly stinks, but then again, rotten things usually do.

• 15:36John Coogan?

  It's thermonuclear.

• 15:38Jordi Hays?

  Cupertino.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  But it's not the first.

• 15:40Jordi Hays?

  Go sign up for a stratechery, read the whole article. There's a bunch of context. And we're going to come back to the story with the germinator. Rohan in Semaphore says Paramount weighs leaving California over Warner Brothers Rift. What's going on here, John?

• 15:58John Coogan?

  So this is on the basis that California is trying to block the Paramount, the Paramount acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. Rohan says, I'm told that if the states do choose to sue, they would have to assume the damages stemming from that action chiefly 600 million to 1 billion, 1.2 billion in ticking fees would potentially be paid out to state taxpayers. So if, if they leave, those, those fees would not be paid to the state. Paramount just issued this response to the state AG lawsuit, Brian Stelter is breaking it down, saying the complaint distorts settled antitrust law and is based on misrepresentation of competition in the, in the entertainment industry today.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  So Paramount is weighing whether to shift major operations out of California after Attorney General Rob Bonta and 11 other state attorneys general, I always get that wrong, filed today to block its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. This story was back and forth. Will Netflix get it? Paramount wound up with the highest bid, the most cash to offer. It got approved. Huge windfall for David Zaslove over at Warner Brothers Discovery, but a very controversial acquisition.

• 17:10Jordi Hays?

  And all the shareholders?

• 17:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, everyone did very well. But people were very worried because they own two, two historic studio lots in Los Angeles. Would they need both of those? Would they convert one to apartment buildings? This was sort of the nightmare case for fans of Hollywood filmmaking, that it would become a more agile, lean, globally distributed studio. Would they be making less films? Would they change their, their pattern? Because as they are two separate buyers of intellectual property and scripts that come to Hollywood, they can pay higher prices, there's less competition, potentially the, the price of the, that the industry becomes more monopolistic and there's less buying activity.

• 17:54John Coogan?

  So the proposed deal was the, is the largest merger in Hollywood history. It would combine two of the five major film distributors and give the resulting company control of roughly 27% of US film distribution and basic cable channels. Of course, anyone who's in favor of this was arguing that, well, people are watching Instagram and YouTube all day long and listening to podcasts and live streams. You can't look at Hollywood in isolation. It's okay if there's a little bit of consolidation in an industry that's facing incredible pressure from a new disruptive industry. We saw this play out with the shutter stock Getty Images question where you have immense

• 18:35John Coogan?

  pressure in the stock image market from an entirely new outsider technology. Consolidation makes a lot of sense usually in those scenarios. But if you're just looking at it, if you're just defining the industry as only Hollywood studios, then yes, this is, this does represent more consolidation. Friends and advisors to Paramount CEO David Ellison had reportedly been urging him to reconsider the company's California footprint in the event that California sued over the deal. Previously Paramount had offered to keep both of its historic studio lots in California open and release 30 films annually, which was basically just adding the 15 and 15 that were made from both studios, I believe, something like that. But executives have privately complained that Bonta refused to negotiate.

• 19:20John Coogan?

  Worth noting that the Justice Department has already cleared the merger while China and other international regulators have raised no comparable, comparable objections thus far. So from a antitrust perspective, it looks like the merger can go through, but the state of California is potentially trying to block it now. So Paramount says California's complaint distorts settled antitrust law and is based on misrepresentation of competition in the entertainment industry today. It'd be very interesting to see where they actually go if they do leave California. There's been so much, so much movement to Texas and Florida, but in terms of filmmaking, Toronto, London, Atlanta, exactly. So maybe Georgia. I don't know.

• 20:01John Coogan?

  I'm sure every other state is gunning for this because bringing, bringing an industry to town is, is almost always a good move. More jobs for your local economy, more, more tax dollars going around. There will probably be a competition, but we'll see, we'll see where this, where this develops and we might have someone from the media analysis industry come on the show later this week to discuss.

• 20:27Jordi Hays?

  There is a new letter, new letter just dropped. We were hoping for a new billion dollar PDF, but we got another letter. More than 200 researchers and economists, including Jack Clark, Jeff Dean, Dome Brown, Tyler Cohen, Schulto, John Schulman, Eric Schmidt, Dean Ball, Yoshua Bengio.

• 20:50John Coogan?

  Yoshua Bengio.

• 20:51Jordi Hays?

  Have signed a statement urging governments and institutions to act now to prepare for AI's economic impact. They start the.

• 20:59John Coogan?

  Pretty simple letter.

• 21:00Jordi Hays?

  By saying, AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.

• 21:06John Coogan?

  They don't, this isn't like the start. It's just three statements, the entire message.

• 21:10Jordi Hays?

  So they're signing, but they're signing.

• 21:11John Coogan?

  They're saying, we all agree with these three statements.

• 21:13Jordi Hays?

  They agree that AI could possibly become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.

• 21:19John Coogan?

  Which feels very conservative.

• 21:20Jordi Hays?

  That's. Like an incredib-- you're not committing to anything at all.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  Uh, no. I mean, there are plenty of people that are saying that AI will go away in the next 10 years. Like, it's useless, you know?

• 21:31Jordi Hays?

  No one's really saying that.

• 21:33John Coogan?

  Ed Zitron saying that, and like 100,000 people are liking his posts when he says that. So like, there are 100,000 people out there that are like, "It hallucinates. It's dumb. It's not useful. It's going to go away."

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  100,000 people out of billions believe it's gonna go away.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  I'm just saying, there are people that don't believe this. But yes, this does feel like actually an easier statement to agree with than the short timelines of fast takeoff in two years, recursive self-improvement, anything that's coming out of basically any lab is much more aggressive than this. Elon's timelines have been solving new physics in two years, stuff like that.

• 22:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Point one: AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years. Point two: This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the industrial revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter timeframe. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains and living standards. And three: Economists, policymakers, and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.

• 22:42John Coogan?

  So that last one's not a probability.

• 22:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:44John Coogan?

  The first one, it feels like you can sign if you're at 1%. 1% chance that it gets more radically more powerful over the next 10 years. 1% chance that it drives an unprecedented transformation of our economy. But as long as you agree that economists, policymakers, and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI, you sign this. So three is really the strongest, the strongest, the most strongly worded bullet point.

• 23:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, and it's interesting because the people signing this are technology leaders.

• 23:16John Coogan?

  But not, not the actual top leaders, interestingly. So if you look at who signed this, you have a ton of people from OpenAI, Anthropic, Stanford, Meter, like every Harvard, like every lab--

• 23:29Jordi Hays?

  Bam Margera, I think you said?

• 23:31John Coogan?

  No, no, no. Google, Jeff Dean. Like, you have people from top, from top institutions, but not the CEOs, not the investors. Like, there's been other, there's been other, I mean, I guess Reid Hoffman and Jan Thalen and who else is, I mean, Eric Schmidt's on here. But notably absent are Sam Altman, Daria Amade, I don't believe Demis is on here. Is he on here?

• 23:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you have Jack Clark, Sarah Fryer.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, so, but what's interesting is that it's sort of like the proxies. It's like the right-hand men and women of the AI leaders that are signing. And so you have to imagine that, that Daria, Sam, Elon, Demis, Sundar, Satya, like, they got the message. This was received to them, and they were like, "You guys can solve this, but you can sign this, but we're not signing it." Because this doesn't feel like something that happens behind the scenes where Sarah Fryer doesn't go to Sam, or Sholto doesn't bring this up to Daria. "Oh, there's a new letter. I'm thinking of signing it." Like, it feels like it's--

• 24:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, because there was the, like, that big pause letter that Elon did sign at one point.

• 24:37John Coogan?

  A lot of people signed it. And in that one, every lab leader actually did sign. And this one isn't even a pause, but somehow didn't rise to the aura level. And maybe that's deliberate, because then it gets clipped and turned into headlines where it's like, "Blank lab leader, fill in anyone." It's gonna be a--

• 24:57Jordi Hays?

  Leaders at XYZ lab.

• 24:59John Coogan?

  Yes. It's gonna be, "Head of blank lab." If you're the first one to jump, if you're Sam, or Daria, or Demis, or Elon, they just said that it could bring large-scale job displacement. So you're gonna have that headline tag next to you, as opposed to if it's like someone at a lab who is not the CEO of that lab says it can bring large-scale job displacement. Because right now, it seems like, at the very top, a lot of the lab leaders are sort of backing off of the near-term job displacement worries.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I think this still feels much more like the AI doc than like AI 2040, right? And that, like--

• 25:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  The message I got from the AI doc was like, "We all gotta talk about this. You know, let's get everyone in a room and like, figure something out. We don't know at all what it's gonna be. We gotta figure something out." Where AI 2040 is like, "Okay, we have this. This is our Plan A. We should be doing this specific set of, you know, policies, tasks, whatever."

• 25:54John Coogan?

  Yes. It's like--

• 25:55Speaker 02

  This is much more like--

• 25:56John Coogan?

  Specifically--

• 25:57Speaker 02

  We all gotta talk about this.

• 25:58John Coogan?

  Unifying rules with China. Like, US and China, like, nuclear-level negotiations on how things slow down. It's a global slowdown of large-scale AI training runs, essentially. And this is very, yeah, this is very, very different. So, much easier to sign, but AI 2040 didn't have, like, signatories. I mean, it had people that, like, helped out with it in general. And then they did poll them as to, they polled some of the authors to say, like, "Which one do you think is most likely to play out?" But I guess by any, I guess everyone implicitly in the AI 2040, if you contributed to that document, you're sort of alongside advocating for, is it Plan A? Because it's the fourth one that they offer. Is it Plan D?

• 26:43Speaker 02

  I think Plan A is what they--

• 26:45John Coogan?

  Plan A?

• 26:46Speaker 02

  There's a bunch of plans, and then, I think, like, in the order on the website, I think it is the fourth one. But that's arbitrary.

• 26:52John Coogan?

  AI 2040. I'm trying to load the site, but it's not loading. Anyway, we can come back to that. "We must act now." I like this. I like, I like the idea of more economic research, more policymaking research to understand these things. It's not, like, it's hard to get wrong, because the end result is just more information, more studies, more, you know, conversation and proposals. It's not anything specifically. Like, if it was like, like, "Large-scale job displacement is coming next month. We need to, you know, print money and do economic stimulus broadly like we did during COVID," I would be like, "I don't

• 27:34John Coogan?

  know. What if the job displacement doesn't come up, and we just create a bunch of inflation? Like, I don't know if we should do that." But we should be ready for if we hit 10% unemployment, 15% unemployment, that we do have stimulus in the back pocket. And I think we do with where interest rates are and with the history of how we've dealt with employment shocks in the past. So I think we are, like, set up pretty well if that happens. It doesn't seem like it's happening at this moment, but--

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  Tell us about the muster.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  The critical, the critical view on this is the people building the technology say that we gotta do something about this. Like, it's kind of just continuation of like, that we gotta do something about this, and maybe you just need to do a new letter every single month forever.

• 28:18John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 28:19Jordi Hays?

  But--

• 28:20John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 28:21Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of our previous conversation--

• 28:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:23Jordi Hays?

  --on betting, Risk Maxing says, "A nine-to-five isn't a career. It's a supply chain for casino ammo." And that is certainly one way to look at it, although that's not how we think about our work here, gentlemen.

• 28:36John Coogan?

  No, we respect the dollar, like Nick Cage. Ty Lopez calls Bunny "fuel units." I always thought that was a funny, funny turn of phrase. I call them "fuel units." I call them "fuel units." Well, this person calls them "casino ammo."

• 28:50Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this last video. We'll close out the show with it, from Emily--

• 28:55John Coogan?

  She's been on a tear.

• 28:56Jordi Hays?

  Who is a--

• 28:57John Coogan?

  Every video's going viral.

• 28:58Jordi Hays?

  Voice actor.

• 29:00John Coogan?

  I think she's a, she's a real, she does voice acting for radio ads, but of course is making fun of the tech industry, I think.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  Your business runs on business, but your business's business is stuck in the past, until now. Introducing Business AI for Business.

• 29:16John Coogan?

  Sounds like something we would promote.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  Business AI for Business leverages the power of--

• 29:20John Coogan?

  Get him a deal.

• 29:20Speaker 03

  --Business AI for your business, transforming your business into AI business. With Business AI for Business, Business AI does your business in seconds, leaving your team to focus on the important business of your business, business. Now your business is free to run your business at scale, at speed, at AI. The future of business isn't coming, it's here. Business AI for Business. Business AI, business, business, AI, AI, AI.

• 29:52Jordi Hays?

  Very talented. The funny is she's saying every voiceover script right now, which I would assume that this kind of, like, audio is, like, AI is really good at.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:02Jordi Hays?

  But, but I think some of the AI companies are LARPing, and they don't know how good the voice models have gotten, so they haven't actually--

• 30:09John Coogan?

  So they hire a voice actor to read the most AI-laden script of all time?

• 30:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I, like, sometimes I listen to the radio on the way to work, and I hear ads like this, and I always buy these, like, big legacy companies.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  So I assume that's why they're not using, like, actual cutting-edge technology.

• 30:23John Coogan?

  Bullish for voiceover artists, I guess. Reading AI for Business ads.

• 30:28Jordi Hays?

  Last video of the day.

• 30:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:30Jordi Hays?

  Did you see this? There's a clip from--

• 30:32John Coogan?

  This is so--

• 30:33Jordi Hays?

  SpaceX's new launch site.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  It looks like Dune. It actually looks like Dune. I'm pretty sure SpaceX accidentally built the transformer. At least that's what it sounds like here. This is designed to hold all the rockets, so they can launch them, I think, every hour.

• 30:53John Coogan?

  The engineering that goes into this, just so, thinking so far ahead, like, I think this is designed to launch a starship every hour.

• 31:02Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 31:02John Coogan?

  And it's like--

• 31:04Jordi Hays?

  They said that something like an Olympic swimming pool's worth of water that they use to--

• 31:09John Coogan?

  Cool everything? Yeah, the deluge. This is crazy.

• 31:12Speaker 04

  --in the neighborhood of about 650,000 gallons per minute.

• 31:18Speaker 04

  That's approximately in the range of about, like, one entire Olympic swimming pool being drained in the course of a minute.

• 31:27John Coogan?

  Thank you for tuning into TBN, and leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbn.com.

• 31:34Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 31:35John Coogan?

  We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.