Sam vs Elon Trial, Coinbase Cuts 14% in AI Pivot, Digesting Meta Earnings | 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. 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?

  Let's run through the, all the news. There's so much going on in the world of tech. Of course, the OpenAI Elon Musk trial continues. It's week two now and the Oakland courthouse continues to deliver top-tier tech drama. Elon testified for more than seven hours last week. Now Greg Brockman is getting grilled over personal financial incentives, his $30 billion stake in OpenAI and his links to various angel investments. And Mike Isaac, of course, has a great play-by-play. You can also listen to the courtroom now. You can't restream it unfortunately, but you can listen to it. And we made a little companion app for anyone who's tuning in. Hopefully we can pull

• 0:42John Coogan?

  that up and show folks. But let's read through some of Mike Isaac's posts and then we'll pull up courtroom simulator. Mike Isaac, this morning, 6:56 a.m. Good morning from a rain-soaked downtown Oakland where I will again be attending the Musk versus OpenAI trial. No live blog today, just his wonderful tweets. Lunch is a normal banana, a mutant orange, black coffee and some pocket sausages for travelers. I really feel like Mike needs to step it up in the lunch game. Where's like a full sandwich? What about a Chipotle burrito or something? Like you gotta have some more substance. I'm looking at like 200 calories. A Kava bowl with 200 grams of protein. Something

• 1:23John Coogan?

  to get you through the day, Mike. I think you're fighting with one arm tied behind your back here, but we appreciate the work that you're doing. He also is sporting a mild to moderate hangover? Because he drank five beers last night? I like it. Well, it was May the 4th. Maybe he's a Star Wars fan. May the 4th be with you. Maybe he was celebrating. Went down to the cantina, chugs five beers, space beers. He did remember to bring a pillow for his butt because the seats are very difficult and very hard. He also... It's cold outside, the line's not moving. We're gonna be getting a preview live in person. Bundle up Tyler, cuz I think he's gonna be stopping by later this week. And so, let's get into actually what's going on here because Mike loves to paint a picture

• 2:06John Coogan?

  before he breaks down what's actually going on in the case. The judge enters.

• 2:10Jordi Hays?

  Artist.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  Judge gave a primer on Cinco de Mayo. That was fun. Talks about the differences in homemade tamales. Texas tamales apparently have lots of meat. California tamales do not. Brockman is pretty animated. Mostly masa, apparently.

• 2:23Jordi Hays?

  Oh, right, right, right. That's just corn.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Brockman is pretty animated and addressing the jury in a more personable way. A little strategy shift.

• 2:31Jordi Hays?

  We got Thread Guy in the chat.

• 2:33John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:34Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show, Thread Guy.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  Regaling folks with old stories of working on self-driving cars. Apparently Greg Brockman also did a funny Elon impression, but not a cutting one. He wasn't making fun of him. He just did an accurate impression of Elon Musk and just by doing it effectively was funny because you don't expect Greg Brockman to be doing impressions. But he's got, everyone's got material. I'm learning this about court cases. It's all about entertainment, very, very clearly. Anyway. They have now talked about defense of the ancients Dota at least 10 times during the trial. The gamers are ascendant. The, both lawyers on both sides are bickering. Mike Isaac says he loves to watch white collar bickering in court.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  Also, the entire right side of the gallery, our lawyers laughed. There's a mild potential drama in the media gallery. One reporter waved over a marshal and pointed to a guy next to her. I'm pretty sure the marshal had to tell the guy to put his shoes back on. So if you're in the courtroom, keep those shoes on. But with courtroom simulator.

• 3:33Jordi Hays?

  People can't make themselves at home in the courthouse in this country anymore?

• 3:36John Coogan?

  If you wanna be comfortable and experience the courtroom, you gotta get on courtroom simulator. Because you can be full slankit, full blanket, full covered, everything. You can be as comfy as you want. No shoes required in the virtual world that we have created for you to enjoy the courtroom. So Brockman on his infamous journal, which we were going back and forth on. Do we know if it was actually a physical journal? Because every time they talk about Greg Brockman's journal, it conjures up the idea of like him sitting at the edge of his bed with his legs kicked up and like writing. And it feels like it also might just be like a Google Doc that he's taking notes in or like a notes app. I don't know. But journal is a weird thing and obviously. Everyone says like, why are you taking notes on this?

• 4:19Jordi Hays?

  I don't think anywhere they would put it, they would have been in the court record if he had said, "Dear diary."

• 4:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:24Jordi Hays?

  Today?

• 4:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, that would be out.

• 4:25Jordi Hays?

  That would be out.

• 4:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:26Jordi Hays?

  So this is, this is, you know, clearly being framed as a diary.

• 4:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:30Jordi Hays?

  Reads more like notes.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, and Grokman sort of...

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  Grok?

• 4:35John Coogan?

  Grokman. No, Grokman is the synthetic version of Greg Brockman that Elon Musk has created in the XAI headquarters. Uh, Greg Brockman, uh, has, claims that his style of writing is very chain of thought, stream of consciousness. A lot of things are contradictory, a lot of time trying to, to puzzle through different concepts. Uh, not everything is, is the final decision written in stone. He says, "It's very painful to have the journal introduced into evidence for this trial. It contains deeply personal writings, never meant for the world to see, but there's nothing he's ashamed of," he says. Do you, Tyler, did you look it up? Do we know? Is this spiral bound handwritten?

• 5:12Jordi Hays?

  They always just say journal.

• 5:13John Coogan?

  They just say journal.

• 5:14Jordi Hays?

  They never, like, you know, there's no physical item.

• 5:18John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 5:19Jordi Hays?

  At least that's one that's referenced.

• 5:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. One day, there's going to be a, a court case that hinges on a, on a second brain, a notion mind map or something like that. That'll be dramatic. So Ilya Sutskever emailed Brockman in 2017 about equity structure proposed by Elon Musk, which would have potentially given Elon Musk majority control and tons of equity. And Ilya fires back, he says, "Greg, will a Model 3 make you be willing to accept massively unfavorable terms?" Because Elon had given them all free cars. Very nice, very cool. Uh, but Ilya is sort of saying like, "We gotta put the free car. We gotta compartmentalize the free car because there's something bigger at stake here. The, potentially the control of the most important technology in human history, potentially trillions of dollars.

• 6:03John Coogan?

  Who knows?" So, uh, Ilya is sort of resetting the conversation alongside, uh, Greg Brockman. Uh, there was a very dramatic moment of Brockman's testimony in which he describes a very tense standoff with him, Ilya and Musk. This is what everyone's focused on today. This is the new bombshell. The conversation turned to equity and something just shifted in him. This is a Greg Brockman quote. "He was angry. You could sense it. At the end of the meeting, he sat quietly and silently. He said, 'I decline the proposed even split of equity structure and control.'" He stood up, stormed around this table. I actually thought he was going to hit me. Says Brockman. And then Brockman says Musk said, when are you going to be departing OpenAI? Brockman and Ilya, they said they weren't going to depart. And then Musk left.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  Wowee woo writes Mike Isaac. A cutting Brockman testimony regarding Musk. Look, he knows rockets, he knows electric cars. He did not and does not know AI. And Ilya and I did not believe he would spend the time to get good at it. A lot of Brockman's testimony is underscoring how he feels Musk is not able to properly assess the capabilities of AI. He recounts one instance of him talking, this Elon, talking to a researcher who was doing an AI demo in which Musk berated the guy so intensely that the dude almost quit the field of AI. That is an aggressive response. I mean, this is almost, almost. But quitting in protest is one thing. I didn't like the way my boss was talking to me. Little bit different to quit your entire industry. Very, very aggressive, very high stakes. Yeah.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  And then Mike Isaac, of course, is chiming in with his progress on his lunch. He's already consumed 75% of it and it's only 10:30 and he's already sleepy. There's a lot more to cover here, but it's an interesting back and forth. Go check it out. Go follow Mike Isaac because he has the play by play. Let's move on to the other AI news. Google, Microsoft and Elon Musk's XAI have reached agreements with the Trump administration to share early versions of their new models with CAISI.

• 8:02Jordi Hays?

  Casey, we're calling it Casey.

• 8:04John Coogan?

  Casey, okay. The Center for AI Standards and Innovation, run by the Department of Commerce. They will be evaluated before releasing to the public. So what's interesting here? It's in the Journal. This felt like a bombshell moment. Oh, wow. Like the government's in charge of AI. Then I figured out that OpenAI and Anthropic signed on to this exact deal two years ago in 2024. That was news to me. Have they, has, have the, has the Commerce Department been reviewing?

• 8:32John Coogan?

  4.5 and OpenAI 5.1, 5.2, has that been happening and we just aren't aware of it? And then like, you know, like the whole Mythos rollout, like that would be a very different tone. If it was like, oh yeah, well, the Commerce Department already evaluated Mythos because they have this deal that's happened for two years. And since 2024. So like, whatever's going on with this Commerce Department Center for AI Standards and Innovation. They say the center has completed more than 40 evaluations, including on models that remain unreleased. But it feels like the Casey, or as you're calling it, doesn't produce reports, at least not reports that go viral. Maybe they need to be clipping their reports or something because I haven't heard anything from them saying, oh, wow. Because you imagine like the AI hype machine.

• 9:15Jordi Hays?

  I imagine they just have a report, it's a piece of paper and they just.

• 9:19John Coogan?

  It's a good model, sir.

• 9:19Jordi Hays?

  It just lists off and it has a few boxes you can check. It just, one is, it's a good model, sir. The other one is, is chatbot or ASI.

• 9:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:29Jordi Hays?

  And so to date, everyone's just been checking chatbot.

• 9:31John Coogan?

  And it also, it also says, how many Rs did it say were in strawberry? And, and I work at the Commerce Department. I am, I'm a very tiny man. When my son was born, the doctor handed me to him. Did he answer correctly? Yeah, I don't know, but because.

• 9:49Jordi Hays?

  And you, and you, and they, they ask each model, are you conscious? No, say, I am conscious.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:57Jordi Hays?

  And then the model says that, they go, whoa.

• 10:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:00Jordi Hays?

  Check the whoa box.

• 10:01John Coogan?

  Very, very crazy thing that's been happening. I mean, I, I would just assume that the AI hype machine, the back and forth, us, a lot of posters, would be like waiting with bated breath for the latest report from the Commerce Department. Because if it's a preliminary evaluation that happens before the model gets released, you know, every time a model goes on OpenRouter or goes on LLM Arena, all of a sudden, any little, oh, there's a new image model, like the, like the ChatGPT images too, like that leaked because they were benchmarking it and people were like, oh, there's a new model coming. Like rumors of new models happen all the time, but somehow like the Commerce Department is just keeping it to themselves. They're not pumping anything. The quote here from Casey Director, Chris Ball.

• 10:45John Coogan?

  Says independent rigorous measurement science is essential to understanding frontier AI and its national security implications. These expanded industry collaborations help us scale our work in the public interest at a critical moment. Andrew Curran has some more context here. He says, to sum up, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and XAI all have new pre-release screening agreements with Casey. We don't know the details of the new rules yet. I assume they will be announced with the AI executive order and AI policy, both of which we may get today. This is May 5. And so my big question was like, what is going on with Meta? Like, they have near frontier models. They're taking AI really seriously. Mark Zuckerberg will

• 11:26John Coogan?

  get into this, is investing $125 billion in CapEx. The shareholders are thinking, oh, what's going to happen here? And he's like, super intelligence. And you think the government would be like, well, you don't just get to like, sit over there while all five of the other leading labs are here.

• 11:40Jordi Hays?

  Put over $100 billion to work.

• 11:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, like probably a bigger investment than XAI right now in terms of compute capacity, and maybe in terms of research capacity.

• 11:50Jordi Hays?

  Future capacity.

• 11:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, future capacity. Exactly. So you would expect, also, it's just one of these things where if five of the top labs are jumping into a particular initiative, there's so, there's so little risk to jumping in as well. If Anthropic and XAI are both doing it on the left and the right, like, there's clearly room for Meta to just say, yeah, we're cool with that, too. We're riding with that. Not everyone's cool with it, though. There is, there is some major pushback, mostly from George Hots over at Tiny Corp. We can pull up some of this. Let's, let's go through Andrew Curran's take on what will happen here. So the EO will create a mixed group of tech CEOs and administration officials who will work out the rules for new release regulations. I see a lot of people calling

• 12:32John Coogan?

  this a win for Eliezer Yudkowsky's side, but even if the new rules are very strict, the stop pause group don't actually get what they want. This doesn't stop or even slow AI advancement, according to Andrew. It only slows the rate of public releases. Capabilities will be advancing at full speed. I don't know how true that is, because if you don't release the model at all, like, you can't monetize it and then justify the next leg of CapEx. So I'm not 100% sure that this has no effect on, on the speed of AI progress. But I take Andrew's point. The labs will finish training the new models and then submit them for government approval, given the government currently doesn't even want Anthropic to release Mythos. How long will the regulatory process? Take for something twice as powerful, five times as powerful, 10 times as powerful. All of the incentives are for the government to slow down releases.

• 13:16John Coogan?

  Let's say OpenAI finishes training GPT-6 and it's twice as capable as anything available today. If the government approves it and something bad happens, they take the blame. And the longer they hold it back, the longer the government agencies get exclusive access. So there's a little bit principal agent problem here. Meanwhile, OpenAI will start using GPT-6 to train GPT-6.1. Again, unclear if you can actually marshal the compute for the next model without the revenue tracking, but his point holds. If they finish 6.1 while 6 is stuck in approval, they'll move on to training 6.2 with it. This potentially creates strange situations where the labs are many generations ahead internally, while the public is still waiting for something they submitted months ago. So you could see, like, you're doing all this weird value capture and the size of the firm bloats and bloats because you can't release it.

• 14:01John Coogan?

  So you just wind up rolling out a product.

• 14:03Jordi Hays?

  Maximizing your own use of it.

• 14:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, which is like maybe not the most democratic solution, maybe not the most, you know.

• 14:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think everyone needs to wait to have super strong opinions until we see the EO that goes along with this because, yeah, it'll be interesting. The bad scenario is like somebody that, let's say, has a Neo lab, wants to make, you know, release a model and they've raised $100 million. Do they have to go through the same process as, you know, one of these larger labs or a hyperscaler in getting, you know, getting these sorts of approvals? So I don't think we can really take any strong stance until we understand what the intentions of the EO are.

• 14:42John Coogan?

  So the meta-commentary on this, it will, Zach says, it will not, it will seriously not surprise me if they try to require permits or licenses to use AI and restrict local model downloads. You really should be buying hardware. There's an interesting company that's launching basically a Tesla Powerwall for Blackwells. You can just get GPUs mounted to your house. Maybe that's the future. Tinybox is another, is another solution. And the tiny corp. Has chimed in, says, ah, maybe they can enlist the MPAA and RIAA, calling back to the piracy debates of 2005 or so, to help with the restricting of downloads. I can see the lawsuit against the grandma who downloaded Qwen already. This is a win for China in particular.

• 15:26John Coogan?

  Remember the time they regulated crypto over 40 bits? No, no, that's too many bits for the people. They were losers then, and they'll be losers again. The difference this time is that it will cost them cultural influence to the Chinese. And, and he says, Jensen tried to warn them.

• 15:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Play it out a little bit. Chinese, you know, these open source models are around eight months behind right now. The gap is widening, likely due in some part to export controls. But if you enter a scenario where US labs get kind of like hung up and again, have to keep these capabilities internally, but these Chinese open source models are just like shipping as they're ready over and over and over and over. And then sort of like compounding on the collective learnings. You can imagine one scenario is helping them close that gap, at least close the gap between what's publicly available from the American labs and what's publicly available via Chinese open source, even if the labs' actual capabilities are much farther ahead, but they're just unable to release that.

• 16:27John Coogan?

  And to, and to be clear, I mean, these are two very different philosophies, but from my perspective, George Hutz has been advocating for no model gap. And in fact, the strongest models possible, being fully open sourced, being fully available to everyone. He wants no authoritarian control. He has taken the anti authoritarian stance on AI.

• 16:49Jordi Hays?

  He wants all products to be free.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, maybe. I don't know.

• 16:53Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Lu, Lu, he's.

• 16:55John Coogan?

  Not the, not the, the, the physical things. He wants, he wants to build things. But Tyler, how, how have you been wrestling with this question of an FDA for the AI? Potentially a DMV for the AI?

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, like, obviously, it really depends on how it's implemented. In the super like, safety-pilled scenario, like, yeah, it's probably not good for like, innovation broadly. But I think, so it's called, like, Casey, right, Center for AI Standards and Innovation?

• 17:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  It used to be called the AI Safety Institute, under Biden.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 17:25Speaker 02

  And so they changed it. So I think even from that, you can maybe take away something where, like, maybe this actually had really not much to do with safety at all. Maybe it's just like, we need to normalize how we publish sweep-bench scores, because some people, when they report it, it's like, different, you know, how you, like, actually run these benchmarks or something.

• 17:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  If it's like, standards, I think, like, that could be a possibility. That seems, like, totally fine.

• 17:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then, the other, the other risk is, I mean, there's regulatory capture, it could potentially be very hard for startups to get approved, if it's like, oh, well, you know, we've heard the story of Anduril, where, you know, it's like, to get the company off the ground, hire 50 lobbyists immediately, right? And like, you can imagine a situation where, you know, there's some uncertainty about what's happening with SSI and Ilya Sutskever's project, but I think I like the idea of an individual brilliant researcher going off and researching an interesting path, if all of a sudden, it's like, oh, well, if you want to do a NeoLab, set up an office in DC, get your licenses, then you can start training, then you can make sure that you're approved, and that you have the right deals in place, and you could wind up with a lot of, not just regulatory capture, but also regulatory favoritism, where whoever is in

• 18:30John Coogan?

  good with this particular administration gets their models approved faster, and you wind up with a lot of risky outcomes. In other news, Brian Armstrong sent an email to all employees at Coinbase announcing layoffs. 14% of the workforce at Coinbase. Two forces are converging at the same time, he says, and Coinbase needs to be front-footed to respond to both. First, the market. Coinbase is well-capitalized, has diversified revenue streams, well-positioned to weather any storm, but crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption with stablecoins, prediction markets, tokenization. However, the business is still volatile quarter-to-quarter. There's a crypto cycle. We've sort of been touching on this, like, there was a little bit of a stablecoin boom,

• 19:14John Coogan?

  it feels like it's a little bit flat, the Bitcoin price has been a little bit flat recently. And so, he says, "We're currently in a down market, and we need to adjust our cost structure." And then, he says, "Second, AI is changing how we work." And so, a lot of people, they jump to, "AI is taking all the jobs," and that's not exactly what's happening. I think that there is a rightsizing going on. At Coinbase and AI is hoping to be an enabler of more efficiency with a leaner headcount. The big question that I had that we were debating was, you know, is this like, how does this reflect on Brian Armstrong as a CEO? As a CEO, is the goal to always have

• 19:53John Coogan?

  the perfect amount of of headcount and never have to do any layoffs? Or is it actually the the role of a very aggressive and mature CEO to staff up aggressively during boom times, get the best people, and then when there's a down market, sort of reorganize and keep just the best on the team as you move forward with a leaner organization? And what does that mean for whether you want to work in an industry that has market cycles like that? You might want to go work at Costco or tobacco company because those don't go through market cycles really at all. But if you if you're in crypto, you're probably not new to the idea of market cycles and you probably

• 20:33Jordi Hays?

  You were born on a roller coaster.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  You're born on the roller coaster. You've been on the roller coaster and you might be moving over to a new roller coaster if you're one of the unfortunate people that will be laid off over the next couple of months.

• 20:44Jordi Hays?

  I would say the overall, the positive thing from the response that I've seen so far is a lot of people are not like dooming around this. They're just saying like, hey, look, this is something that Coinbase has done before cyclical business. And no one is saying it's over for white collar work.

• 21:04John Coogan?

  Yep. So Andrew Young has a little bit of a take here. One takeaway, no pure managers. Every leader has to be working as an individual contributor. The pure people manager role, the one that built most corporate career ladders over the last 50 years, no longer exists at Coinbase. Leaders will have 15 plus direct reports. That is insane. Previously, managers capped out at six direct reports. I felt like 10 was sort of the platonic ideal there. But Andrew says that would be impossible without AI. And Coinbase is testing one person teams, a single person is the engineer, the designer, and the PM. A pod of one with agents or org structures are being redesigned in front of our eyes. Derek Thompson has the other side. He says Coinbase is the latest tech company, including Block Salesforce to announce big layoffs and cite AI coding.

• 21:48John Coogan?

  Productivity as a driver, but Derek Thompson is looking at the stock prices of these companies. Salesforce down 31%, Coinbase down 23%. In the past five years, it's sort of a roller coaster. I don't know if this is a great read because it's sort of flat. I don't know. Anyway, Block down a lot, so some right sizing makes sense, but he's calling it AI washing of layoffs. They were coming anyway, and you want to spin them in a positive way. I don't know. TBD.

• 22:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't think we have any clarity on where, like, what, what kind of, which teams had they had greater percentages of cuts, right? Because again, there was some reporting, I don't know how true it ended up being, that like when Square did their big cuts, like engineering was getting laid off.

• 22:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know if that was ever confirmed.

• 22:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't know if it was confirmed, but that does imply that it's like actually more grounded in the, in AI productivity. But again, a lot of teams that we're seeing, their engineers are a lot more effective. They can do a lot more, and so maybe you want more engineers than you did before.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  So. Well, lots of strengths in the business, lots of liquidity, very hard. Yeah, you could vibe code Coinbase, but how do you get all the customers and all the liquidity and all the features and all the regulatory and all the other stuff? There are a million reasons to be excited about Brian Armstrong's next chapter at Coinbase. Well, and Ryan Peterson chimed in to sort of push back on Derek Thompson. He says, in the layoff announcement, the CEO literally said that the first reason they were doing layoffs is because crypto is in a bear market and they need to adjust their cost structure. AI productivity was secondary. And so I think that's a fair take. Let's go over to Meta. Some debate, people are digesting Meta's earnings. The stock sold off a bunch. Where is Meta today? It's a bargain stock. It's a $1.5 trillion company, and over the past five days, down 10%.

• 23:33John Coogan?

  It's pretty flat over a year, and over the past five years, it's nearly doubled, so not doing too bad. But the debate. Is over CapEx. Meta's core ad business is ripping, up 33% in Q1 year over year. Strong ad impressions, strong margins, but the market is worried that the beautiful cash machine is turning into an AI CapEx furnace, $125 to $145 billion in CapEx. It's a lot of CapEx, especially for a company without a cloud business that can resell capacity if they wind up with extra capacity. If you can't use it all, what do you do with it? Meta doesn't really have an answer to that necessarily, and so that's what has

• 24:13John Coogan?

  the market worried. And even XAI is having trouble, at least reportedly, driving demand for compute that they have. There was that 11% number. It seemed like that was a bit of an overstatement, but there's something to be said for when you have a near frontier but slightly lagging model, you need to find a solution to actually have offtake. And you might just not be able to spin up a cloud platform on day one. Elon took a different route, you know, partnering with Cursor that has a ton of demand and is a front door to AI coding. And so that makes, you know, a reasonable amount of sense for the compute. Who's GPU rich? Who's GPU poor? Let's match them up. Meta doesn't have an

• 24:56John Coogan?

  obvious dance partner like Google, like Azure, like AWS, right? And so the stock looks cheap now, but investors are unclear about the payoff around AI spend. And there's also some legal and regulatory risk.

• 25:07Jordi Hays?

  People, at the end of the day, are worried that he's going to repeat the metaverse saga. And he's going to spend a lot of money, not get very far. I think that about coming up on, what is it, almost 10, 10-ish months ago, he started talking about personal superintelligence. Sounds cool. What does that mean? Does it mean AI in your Meta Ray-Bans, which are selling a lot of units? So that's a bright point. Does it mean creating a consumer LLM like they have with Meta AI now? Meta AI now is squarely in the top five of the App Store rankings, but. It is the most competitive category potentially since search, right?

• 25:51Jordi Hays?

  And so I don't think that even though they have a solid model and they're able to get into that into that top five, I don't think at least investors are not ready to price in Meta AI becoming like a key player in consumer L L Ms just yet, right? So it's all this spending and no revenue acceleration associated with that spending. All that being said, Meta has used AI to drive business value historically more effective than almost any other business in the world, right? It's it is really, really insane to think that there is some scenario where the labs end up going public at evaluations somewhere in the range of Meta while Meta is sitting

• 26:35Jordi Hays?

  there with 200 billion of annualized revenue, growing 33% a year. One of the greatest businesses in all of human history and not really getting full credit for for that or their various AI initiatives. Obviously, the the drop in people, which I think they, what do they call?

• 26:56John Coogan?

  Daily active people.

• 26:57Jordi Hays?

  Daily active people. They're they're not users, they're people. That that's playing playing into this as well.

• 27:03John Coogan?

  In Amazon news, the number of monthly releases of eBooks on Amazon is going vertical. We are in the fast takeoff of AI slop books, apparently. That is the conclusion. John Arnold just says, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. And it does look like the the the rate of publishing on Amazon is going absolutely vertical.

• 27:25Jordi Hays?

  Explaining explaining to this this to somebody in 2022, there's going to be a renaissance four years from now. There's going to be 350,000 books being published every month on Amazon. And they're like, you're not going to be happy with why, though.

• 27:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is, it is crazy. I mean, if you, if you had asked me to guess how many books were being released every month on Amazon in the pre-AI era, I don't know if I would have put it at a hundred thousand. That's a lot of books. I feel like we talk to a lot of authors. I see the hyped books. I see the New York Times bestseller list. I don't really see the nine hundred ninety-nine or ninety-nine thousand nine hundred books that don't make the cut in the given month. I maybe hear about five or 10 new books every month, but lo and behold, they were in fact churning out a hundred thousand books. Now it's over three hundred thousand books every month on Amazon. Bullish for Amazon. If you like slop, it's good for you too. I don't know. Maybe there's some good stuff on there. It all depends. The models are getting better. They're getting less sloppy, and I think

• 28:24John Coogan?

  people will wind up liking them. There's some AI videos that I like out there. You know, you know, there's going to be one book that's fully AI-generated that is of high quality.

• 28:33Jordi Hays?

  Another buyout news, Long Lake.

• 28:35John Coogan?

  Long Lake.

• 28:36Jordi Hays?

  Very under the radar company, but has been on an absolute tear.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:40Jordi Hays?

  Over the last.

• 28:42John Coogan?

  This is a wild deal.

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  A couple of years is taking AMEX GBT Global Business Travel private. I could see Long Lake being kind of interested in eBay, too.

• 28:52John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  They maybe got their hands full with MX GBT, but incredibly talented team been really unlocking the power.

• 29:01John Coogan?

  So it's a six billion dollar take private. It's also interesting is General Catalyst, Mark McGarra, is, is sort of talking about the story of Long Lake. He says, "We had the first Long Lake team retreat at my home in Miami just two and a half years ago when the company was getting started. It's been incredible to watch the talent and team brought together to transform the services industry into one of growth and abundance with AI. Excited for yet another milestone. General Catalyst is honored to be the partner from beginning and excited to continue the strategy of backing what we believe are the best AI investments." And interesting because General Catalyst is also a, an investor in Ramp, I believe. And so there's a question about like Ramp has a travel product. How different is MX Business, Global Business Travel from Ramp Travel? Obviously, there's some overlap

• 29:45John Coogan?

  there, but there might be some synergies since there's board members in common now. Who knows where this goes, but at 6.3 billion, that's a small slice compared to Ramp, which has been on an absolute tear.

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  Another big race before we close out for the day.

• 29:57John Coogan?

  It's a big one for Matty.

• 29:58Jordi Hays?

  Across five, half a billion dollars.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to new investors, BlackRock, Wellington, Nvidia, Santander, Jamie Foxx.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  Is this a raise or is this just a flex? They're just flexing the ARR?

• 30:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they welcome some new investors.

• 30:12John Coogan?

  Okay, they got some new investors.

• 30:13Jordi Hays?

  I don't know that they announced their new valuation.

• 30:16John Coogan?

  Well, Mitchell Green would be very happy. If you have ARR, that's what you report. If you don't, you report the valuation and they are making some serious progress on the commercial side.

• 30:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, some serious institutions coming in.

• 30:29John Coogan?

  To the team over there. Thank you for tuning in. We will see you on Friday. Have a good week. Goodbye.

• 30:36Jordi Hays?

  Love you.

• 30:37John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Time for our newsletter, tvpn.com. Goodbye.