U.S. Bans New Chinese Humanoids, Zuck’s Op-Ed, eBay's $56M Lawsuit | 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.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  The US government has banned Chinese humanoid robots. The US is banning new imports of foreign-made humanoid robots, quadruped robots, robot dogs. You might know them, but very controversial based on, we got to get General Catalyst to weigh in on this because aren't they anti-robot dog? Wasn't that the whole thing of the video?

• 0:20Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:21John Coogan?

  So they must be celebrating.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  Some platform VCs are very pro-robot dogs.

• 0:27John Coogan?

  Everyone should be pro-robot dog. Anyway, it's, there's nothing wrong with a robot dog unless it's a geopolitical discussion and then there's another, another layer to the debate. So the Federal Communication Commission's FCC today announced some restrictions and these apply to new versions of those products. FCC Chair Brendan Carr said the move is intended to, quote, "secure America's critical supply chains." China, meanwhile, has condemned the decision as protectionism. Is that because they're protecting the, like, the small children from getting smacked in the face by the humanoid robots? It is protectionism.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  I know, I know. That video, I think that you're referring to.

• 1:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, brutal.

• 1:09Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely brutal. We should try to pull it up. Try to find the humanoid kicking a child, please. Sounds wrong, but I just want to get at the truth.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  I just want the truth.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  The move comes as Chinese companies have established a commanding lead in humanoid robot, robotics. Of the roughly 15,000 humanoid robots shipped worldwide in 2025, China's Unitree and AGI Bot, AGI Bot, I'm not sure how you pronounce that, each delivered.

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we have the video of the robot kicking the child.

• 1:40John Coogan?

  Brutal. There's another one where he's spinning around and gives him sort of like a spinning back fist, but that is a crazy.

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  That is.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Seeing that, you're kind of like, yeah, I'm up for some protection.

• 1:50Jordi Hays?

  Gross negligence.

• 1:51John Coogan?

  If it's going to, if it's going to protect children, I think it's maybe in the best interest. No, that's not why this is happening, of course.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  Deeply wrong.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  So 5,000 units were delivered from, from each Unitree and AGI Bot. By comparison, US companies, including Tesla and Figure, shipped only a few hundred robots each, if that. China is also estimated to control about 85% of the global humanoid robotics market and also a ton of the deep supply chain, obviously. According to the Associated Press, the restrictions are expected to add new tension to US-China relations ahead of a planned September meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump. The FCC argues the measures are necessary to reduce potential risks posed by connected foreign-made devices that could become part of critical American infrastructure.

• 2:43John Coogan?

  What's interesting here is that we're seeing a ban on a Chinese technology that is so nascent that you don't have a coalition of companies that are saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, I've deployed, my business is built on top of Unitree. I know there's geopolitical considerations, but I can't make the cars that I make without them. I can't run my business without them, and so this is going to hurt me. No one's really stepping up in the same way that they are with Chinese LLMs, which a lot of companies are like, no, I'm actually going to cut my inference costs by 80% if I can.

• 3:17Jordi Hays?

  And you have all the, the various cloud businesses that are already making money.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  Making money from them.

• 3:23Jordi Hays?

  These models.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 3:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm, I saw a bunch of people that were sort of saying that they didn't like this, that it was, you know, protectionist and, and that there must have been some American humanoid or robotics companies that were pushing, lobbying for this in DC. Maybe there were, but I personally don't want 100 million humanoid robots in this country running around that are not made by a US company or at least a Western ally.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where, since there's been the DJI ban, there's been various surveillance tools that are banned, but there's still so many different pieces of technology from, that come from all over the world. I wonder where people would like to draw the line generally on technology, like, is it okay if the Wi-Fi router is made internationally?

• 4:16Jordi Hays?

  We drew the line on Huawei.

• 4:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, on Huawei, on the 5G tower specifically, but most, you can still get a router that, you know, a Wi-Fi router for your house that comes from China. And you have to imagine that many of the actuators, the motors, the batteries, CATL, Cattle, that company, ships batteries for all sorts of stuff. The, the Google Waymo approach, I think, is probably the correct, like, binding the line. So Waymo is sourcing, like, almost all the parts for the new Waymos from China, but they are building them, I believe, in the United States, and all of the software is from Google or Alphabet or Waymo. And so you have to imagine that they're able to tear all these pieces down and sort of maintain their own cybersecurity posture, which is really what this is all about. But it is interesting.

• 5:02John Coogan?

  Do you think this actually accelerates the American humanoid market?

• 5:07Jordi Hays?

  I mean, these companies have already raised a lot of money. Elon's putting billions into it. Figures managed to raise billions. I think that the first thing that we need is profitable use cases for humanoids. And so I think there's a lot of work that the industry needs to do to make these, to make these products like genuinely valuable in the home, in workplaces, in factory settings, all these things. I think that's a bigger problem. I think if you, it does feel inevitable at this point, just because there's so much money going into it, so many smart people dedicating all their time to it. It feels inevitable. Maybe it speeds it up a little bit. It just felt like we were going to end up in a situation where they would just continue

• 5:50Jordi Hays?

  to dump humanoids onto our, you know, you could buy, you probably still can buy.

• 5:55John Coogan?

  Can you?

• 5:56Jordi Hays?

  Unitree robot on Walmart.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  I was asking Tyler about this because you used to be able to buy a Unitree G1, I believe, one of their robots on Walmart, which was sort of crazy, and the price was accessible. I mean, it was still tens of thousands of dollars, but it was something that a research lab could buy pretty easily. I wonder if there will be other ways for companies to, to get access to this, these products, at least for benchmarking, because they will be competing internationally, like, even in a world where, you know, Tesla gets to the frontier of humanoid robots with Optimus and then they're going up against a, a Unitree.

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  For a deployment in Germany, like BYD, right? BYD and Tesla compete internationally, even though Tesla's, Tesla's can still be sold in China, but not vice versa. But internationally, there needs to be a lot of like, what are the capabilities so you can actually sell against your competitor?

• 6:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So far, everything Unitree I'm seeing on Walmart is out of stock. So I don't know if they just marked it out of stock when this went live or they had just sold out.

• 7:00John Coogan?

  These will probably spike if they hit Cars and Bids or Bring a Trailer. I think you throw a Unitree G1, last edition, final edition, banned, can't buy anymore.

• 7:09Jordi Hays?

  Who's making Bots and Bids?

• 7:10John Coogan?

  Bots and Bids, that might be it. I was listening to Elon Musk on The Economist. He sat down with The Economist for a long-form interview. There were, there was a clip that went sort of viral for some, some sharp jabs back and forth about the media and, and how the public perceives the media. But the much more interesting substance was about his vision.

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  You're describing the crash out?

• 7:33John Coogan?

  Yes, it was, it was described as a crash out, but that seemed like a very small section of what was actually interesting about the more than an hour they talked. One was, I mean, he talks about humanoid robots and he paints a very clear vision for the Optimus program, and it made me really hope that there's a lot of focus there because that feels like an industry where, like, he obviously has a very strong philosophy around XAI and Grok, and you saw it in the SpaceX S1 where the market for enterprise software was like 22 trillion or something like that. And so there is some value there.

• 8:13John Coogan?

  It might make sense from a business perspective, but it was less inspiring than rockets, less inspiring than self-driving electric cars. Because you, as you go back, you think about SpaceX and you think, if he hadn't worked on that, probably wouldn't have a rocket company in America. And same thing with the electric cars, like, yeah, GM had the EV1, there were a couple other companies that were sort of like testing things, but we'd probably be 10 years behind if he hadn't sort of like sheer force of will that into existence. And it feels the same for humanoid robots, where if he can really go and push that extremely hard and marshal all the capital and do all the difficult things to build the supply

• 8:55John Coogan?

  chain, make it happen, make it work, you, you can get to a place where there is a national champion in America. But if, if Grok stopped training and there were no more XAI LLMs, like, there would still be a massive competition between OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, like, there's plenty of really well-funded hyperscalers and leading labs that are going to provide that service of like, ask a question and get an answer or fire off a prompt and get some code back. That, that, the, the American humanoid robotics industry feels much more fragile in the sense that if you don't have this massive hammer of capital and will coming to bear, you could

• 9:39John Coogan?

  just wind up with it never happening, which I worry about.

• 9:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and America needs to figure out how to make billions of robots itself.

• 9:48John Coogan?

  I do wonder how this is going to play into all the other discussions that are going to happen at that US visit by Chinese leader Xi Jinping. He's scheduled to meet with US President Donald Trump in September. I'm, I'm interested to see, are they going to be trading this?

• 10:05Jordi Hays?

  Nick, can you, can you see if we can possibly get him on the show? What if Xi was just like, yeah, I'm meeting with the president, but I'm also going on a 50 podcast tour while I'm here?

• 10:16John Coogan?

  Get him on, yeah, there's a bunch of good shows he could, he could do. He should do.

• 10:22Jordi Hays?

  Modern Wisdom, I want to understand his mindset.

• 10:24John Coogan?

  Hot Ones would be great. I'd love him to, I'd love to see him on Hot Ones.

• 10:28Jordi Hays?

  Joe Rogan, of course.

• 10:30John Coogan?

  Rogan is a no brainer.

• 10:31Jordi Hays?

  That should be kind of the, the, the last show.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  But Nelk would be like the obvious choice.

• 10:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  A lot of world leaders.

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, they have a history of.

• 10:37John Coogan?

  World leaders have been on there. That's true.

• 10:39Jordi Hays?

  Controversial world leaders.

• 10:41John Coogan?

  That's true. Why not Xi Jinping? Dean Ball is going back and forth with Will Minnitis. Dean says, do we think the Silicon Valley leaders who were so up in arms about using Chinese LLMs last week will be similarly outraged about the US government's decision to ban import of all advanced robotics from all foreign countries? Is Minnitis going to write an essay about how the US robot companies need to be nationalized in exchange for this policy favor? Will says, you're welcome to tag me if you want a take. What's your take? He does ask him for it. And Will says, Dean seems to not understand that the FCC is issuing a published rule under statutory authority with a waiver process and judicial review is different than a thinly

• 11:22John Coogan?

  veiled suggestion that regulators carry out an extralegal whisper campaign to protect the interests of his employer. The robotics companies need not be nationalized until they also ask for public infrastructure preemption, federal backstop of their debt, and a swept market just so they can call themselves national institutions. When they do, send them my essay. And Dean Ball says, so wait, if the US straight up ban Chinese LLMs using explicit statutory authorities, e.g. supply chain risk, that wouldn't necessitate lab nationalization, but doing it through soft law would? What? Your instance that my analytic prediction was a thinly veiled suggestion continues to be bad faith. I do wonder, I do wonder if we'll just see more, you know, figure shows up in those secondary demand tables.

• 12:07John Coogan?

  I wonder if this is bullish for that? I don't know. I, I, One Ax just seems to be on a good path. Sunday Robotics just seems to be on a good path. We've talked to a lot of other companies where the, the regulatory and competitive landscape has always, it hasn't seemed like it's a driver of financings, right? It's not like, oh, you're waiting for approval or you're waiting for some, some rule to break. It's like, yeah, at some point in the future, America is going to want indigenous, like, you know, robotic supply chain.

• 12:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the compelling teams have raised anywhere from a hundred million dollars to billions of dollars. And now they need to effectively deploy that and get commercial use cases starting to ramp. And then I expect them to be able to raise an order of magnitude more capital each, right? So I don't, again, I don't think capital is really a constraint here. But I think they've raised their sort of like, they've raised their like five rounds, let's say.

• 13:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Mark Zuckerberg is in the Wall Street Journal. Paywalled, you gotta pay to read what Mark has to say, but he penned an op ed and he says the US should accelerate AI development, not restrict it. He says the, the AI future is for everyone. There's some interesting quotes in here. He's taken shots. He's taken shots at doom, fear based marketing. He says, it is surprising that the discourse from many of those who are developing artificial intelligence is so filled with doom. I don't understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future.

• 13:43John Coogan?

  The only, the notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems dangerous. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened.

• 13:58Jordi Hays?

  Is he talking about machines of love and grace?

• 14:00John Coogan?

  I think so, something like that. Hasn't led to safer, positive outcomes. Humanity has witnessed many transformative advances. Each time, there is fear that people will be left behind, but each time humanity has come out with more people sharing greater prosperity, health and freedom. We believe this will be true with AI as well, and the abundance of the future can be shared by everyone. He's abundance built. And so I think it's good to sort of reset, you know, where he is. He's been, he's been, he's talked about AI a bunch, but it's never been like right on the cusp, but he's just like throwing his hat firmly in this camp of, you know, he's, he's, he's obviously playing in AI, but has a particularly positive vision.

• 14:44John Coogan?

  And he's sort of throwing down the gauntlet. If you think, if you think AI is so bad, then stop working it and let me, let me work on it.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  Let me cook.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  I don't know. But not too much like chatter around this. It did stand in, in opposition, you know, he's saying you, the United States should accelerate AI development. At the same time, there's this open letter from a bunch of lab employees saying like, hey, maybe we should do a mutual pause, maybe we should all slow down. And I, I think even some meta researchers signed that as well, but there's like a wide group from OpenAI, Anthropic, a bunch of other firms, Google, that all signed. John Palmer, of course, ever the TBPN promoter says, TBPN must publish an open letter against distillation after their model was distilled by every competitor in the industry. And I said, I'm advocating for a complete and total podcast ban, multi-federal year,

• 15:38John Coogan?

  multi-year federal approval process for new RSS feeds to get issued.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  He says, better hurry up and write that open letter before Chinese technology network launches. I think a Chinese TBPN would actually be electric. I think that'd be amazing.

• 15:53Jordi Hays?

  Love to watch.

• 15:53John Coogan?

  I would love that. You know, just wildly different. They just don't do the going direct thing over there the same way. You know, there was like the DeepSeek investor meeting, four hours that was like leaked. That's not the same as actually sitting down with someone that has a particular point of view.

• 16:09Jordi Hays?

  Sitting down with a stack of 200 posts and just chit chatting.

• 16:14John Coogan?

  I don't know, maybe it does exist, but when Dwar Kesh went to China, it was such a funny observation, a bunch of observations, but the one that really stuck out to me was he was like, I asked everyone and I, and it is clear, China does not have a Joe Rogan. Like they don't have someone who is like a larger than life, yapper, political commentator, just like a guy who talks about everything, including politics. And there's a political reasons for that, but it's also maybe cultural and it's just interesting because the demand for that would be electric. I, I feel like you have to, you have to imagine that like Joe Rogan clips make them, make their way around the world and are sort of like a barometer for where the American psyche

• 16:54John Coogan?

  is at in a certain, in a certain way, like a certain group of, of Americans feel that way. There's this other post that's sort of interesting to see where the Anthropic back and forth on the open letter goes. Obviously Anthropic clarified their stance on open source, not advocating for a complete and total ban, but they're very worried about distillation. They're very worried about cybersecurity and they're very worried about authoritarian uses of AI, all good points. Chetan over at Benchmark says, Anthropic very publicly claiming there needs to be a crackdown on distillation is puzzling. It's a $1 trillion company with incredible resources and the distillation attacks at the scale they described would seem easy to detect. I don't know how easy they are to detect.

• 17:38John Coogan?

  I think the people, you know, harness up a whole bunch of different VPNs and stuff, but at the same time, it's like, it's an AI company, put AI on the job, maybe you should be able to detect it. So we'll take his point.

• 17:49Jordi Hays?

  He's asking AI to be able to find a needle in the biggest haystack of all time.

• 17:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:55Jordi Hays?

  The, the world's largest haystack.

• 17:56John Coogan?

  The final benchmark. But he says, the only cost would be giving up the associated API revenue. So you should have a very aggressive, a very aggressive internal policy around if you're suspected of a distillation attack, you're kicked off the API. Of course, in a very short amount of time, you can fire off a lot of prompts and get a lot of tokens and you can do that a lot of, around across, across a lot of different accounts. What do you think about this?

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, detecting distillation seems like a very hard problem. I think if it was trivial, they would have just done it.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  And also seems like it's not that big of a, like percentage of their revenue. Like I'd be surprised if, if like distillation attacks accounted for a large amount of, of like.

• 18:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't think, I don't think.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also, so it does, it does feel like it's hard. Because a lot of it doesn't actually go through the direct API necessarily. Like it goes through a, a company that is vending a service and then someone is prompting that service. And so you're further obfuscating it. Like there are a number of different sort of wrappers that effectively wrap various frontier APIs. And, uh, and if you're getting hit in a bunch of different, you're blending all of that together. You're looking at open source stuff. There's also just people that will, like this just happened with, uh, was it Matt Schumer? He, he basically uploaded to GitHub a game that he made with Opus 5 along with the prompt. And so you, you can sort of distill on that. Like it's only one

• 19:20John Coogan?

  data point or, you know, you know, a, a small bag of tokens, but there's a lot of people that will share a prompt and the actual output. And so you can train on that and there's no way to detect that you found that. What's interesting here is that the knock on effect of Chetan's point is that if Anthropic takes Chetan's advice, you wind up giving out the model less frequently and being more closed about it, which is something three months ago, everyone in the ecosystem was like, this is annoying. Like I'm a small startup. I can't get into the Mythos tier. I can't get access to Project Glasswing. I'm not an enterprise level, uh, you know, customer, but I still, so I just don't get frontier intelligence and I just get steamrolled by, you know, Microsoft who has access to it

• 20:05John Coogan?

  or Apple who has access to it or whatever. Um, and so this, the whole idea of like, if the, if, if, if, if amazing intelligence and amazing model is made, should it be widely available? That's actually at odds with distillation because you have to hunt those bad actors down and you play this whack a mole. So I don't know. It is, it is tricky. We'll see, we'll see where it goes. We'll see where it goes. Anyway.

• 20:27Jordi Hays?

  Apparently over on Facebook Marketplace, people are adding as a sort of gold aura to their listings.

• 20:33John Coogan?

  What is this?

• 20:34Jordi Hays?

  Would this make you more likely to buy John?

• 20:37John Coogan?

  Oh, it does look like a rare drop.

• 20:39Jordi Hays?

  Yes. For only $25, picking up this table with that level of aura, certainly tempting.

• 20:47John Coogan?

  I, it, it does make me like it more. I think it actually works. I've seen people do this where they add, they'll add like a woman to it as like the salesperson basically with AI and that draws more attention on Facebook Marketplace. I don't know if I've ever bought anything on Facebook Marketplace, but maybe, uh, maybe we should try and have Tyler do like a trade, a trade, a paper clip into a car challenge. Have you ever seen these?

• 21:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:12John Coogan?

  Ryan Trahan and.

• 21:13Jordi Hays?

  Tyler would be exceptional at that kind of thing.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  You think you could, you think you could trade up from something on your desk?

• 21:18Speaker 02

  I think this would definitely help it.

• 21:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Giving it some kind of.

• 21:20John Coogan?

  So, so basically you have to look for the most unoptimized listings that are undervalued. And then, and then, once you buy them, give them the ultimate glow up on, uh, on, uh, with AI images, put them back up for a higher price, in, increase your margins, start printing. This is a very Gary V S cussel for sure.

• 21:43Jordi Hays?

  Pretty incredible story. eBay pays couple fix $56 million for its role in cockroach harassment campaign.

• 21:53John Coogan?

  That is a crazy headline.

• 21:54Jordi Hays?

  A couple received threatening deliveries, including funeral wreaths after criticizing the e-commerce retailer in a blog. So this couple, David and Ina Steiner were harassed, it sounds like for years for criticizing, criticizing eBay. Who knew that criticizing eBay could get you, uh, in this much trouble? Of course, it's eBay that ended up getting in trouble. Um, but, uh.

• 22:22John Coogan?

  So they had an online e-commerce blog called E-commerce Bytes and they criticized eBay, uh, on that. And then back in 2019, so this has been going on for like seven years. There's a whole new executive team in, in, in place now, but there were actually criminal charges in 2020. Seven employees of the company were sentenced to prison terms ranging between one and five years.

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  And so what were they doing? Uh, eBay leadership apparently mailed a series of threatening deliveries to the Steiners' home in 2019.

• 22:51John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 22:52Jordi Hays?

  Including a box of live cockroaches, a bloody pig's head mask. I don't even know what that is.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  Head mask?

• 23:00Jordi Hays?

  Is this a real pig head that's been turned into a mask? Or is it hopefully just a, uh, a sort of a Hollywood remake of that? Uh, and a funeral wreath. The Steiners also accused executives of online harassment, including online posts inviting strangers to their house for sex.

• 23:18John Coogan?

  Also.

• 23:19Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely insane. Who, like, in what, in what world is, is a company, is a public company like eBay just getting some criticism, which all companies do?

• 23:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, I'm sorry.

• 23:33Jordi Hays?

  Takes it this personally, that you're going to try to ruin the lives of

• 23:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:37Jordi Hays?

  two people that are already in your, in your industry.

• 23:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Was the impact of e-commerce bytes blogs showing up in your quarterly reports? Like, was it actually that?

• 23:46Jordi Hays?

  eBay pleaded guilty in 2023 in a criminal case over harassment and paid a $3 million penalty following criminal charges in 2027. Employees of the companies were sentenced to prison terms ranging from one to five years.

• 24:00John Coogan?

  It's absolutely brutal.

• 24:01Jordi Hays?

  According to court documents, eBay executives grew increasingly upset by the Steiners' critical coverage of the company in early 2019, leading then executive Devon Wenig to test, to text another executive that it was time to crush the Steiners and take her down, referring to, uh, Ina. That summer harassment against the Steiners escalated from threatening messages to delivering items to their home, which also included a book about surviving spousal bereavement.

• 24:31John Coogan?

  That's like sort of a death ride, I guess?

• 24:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:33John Coogan?

  Right? What's?

• 24:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, also sending, uh, adult magazines to neighbors' homes in the husband's name. So just like completely trying to destroy this couple's life and, and, uh, marriage. eBay employees also traveled to Massachusetts to vandalize the Steiners' home and stalk them around their hometown. All the employees involved in the harassment were fired in September 2019, eBay said. Uh, the lawsuit was actually started in 2021. Under the settlement, so we have a, we have a, a good ending here. I think it's a fair ending. Under the settlement, the couple will receive 48 million in compensation from eBay and former employees. eBay will

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  also pay $6 million to charitable organizations and Wenig will pay $1 million to a free speech charity in Ina Steiner's name.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  This is like the ultimate Streisand effect. I never would have heard about e-commerce bytes or their criticism of eBay if they hadn't done all this. What a mess.

• 25:37Jordi Hays?

  E-commerce bytes.

• 25:38John Coogan?

  I'm, I'm looking up exactly what they said because eBay is, in my opinion, just the most set it and forget it company that's just had the same service for 20 years, basically.

• 25:49Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 25:50John Coogan?

  But now we're going to get to the bottom of it. Big news out of the Fed. Uh, the Fed holds rate steady, but three officials voted for a rate increase. The rate has been unchanged in, in this July meeting. Uh, the split shows pressure building inside the central bank to act on inflation two months after Chairman Kevin Warsh took over and the Dow skids 1,100 points as investors worry about Fed next steps. They're thinking that there might be a rate hike in the, uh, in reaction to inflation, of course, uh, somewhat driven by energy prices, oil prices, oil is spiking again. And so lots of tricky news for the, uh, global economy, but fortunately the economy chugs on and the economy is strong. So.

• 26:35Jordi Hays?

  I believe in it.

• 26:36John Coogan?

  I believe in it too. Never, never black pill.

• 26:38Jordi Hays?

  I have faith.

• 26:39John Coogan?

  Dwarash Patel certainly not black pilling. Gavin Baker, uh, quote tweeted Dwarash's, uh, post that predicted, uh, lab revenues and the trillions very shortly. Uh, Gavin Baker says, I see a, a series of fairly wild thoughts from Dwarash. I thought I was bullish, but even I am not assuming that the price to rent compute continues to go up. I will say that I am in Silicon Valley this week and Dwarash is capturing the zeitgeist. Net-net, public markets would probably be trading differently if they saw the OpenAI Anthropic Grok cursor and open source numbers over the last six weeks because everything is growing, even in you, you, there's so much horse race around, oh, open source is going

• 27:21John Coogan?

  to come and grow. And it's like, well, sometimes open source comes and grows and everything else grows too. And that's what we've seen, uh, throughout the whole deep sea saga when the lab revenues grew a ton, even though open source was big.

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's a comment here that I think is on the nose.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  Please.

• 27:34Jordi Hays?

  Jay Capital says, timeline is very interesting. All private AI companies have their best six weeks while retail AI slash semis have their worst six weeks.

• 27:42John Coogan?

  Very, very interesting.

• 27:43Jordi Hays?

  Disconnect there.

• 27:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, one of them, uh, uh, SK Hynix, uh, $64 billion in quarterly profit. It was a disappointment for chip investors and SK Hynix fell 10% despite record results powered by the AI boom. The, the, the profit increase was incredible. I think they, uh, the, they, they grew profit over 500%, something like that. Uh, and still the stock traded down because expectations are so high, everything's priced to perfection. Uh, in other news, HBO Max is launching HBO Max Shorts for those who don't have the attention span to watch an episode of TV. Uh, it's a mobile feature designed for users to watch iconic and memorial scenes from the HBO library in a vertical and scrollable feed. This is

• 28:29John Coogan?

  already happening on Instagram and TikTok. Uh, you see a lot of movie clips, just great moments, and it actually is great content. So I can understand why they're trying to own a piece of that.

• 28:38Jordi Hays?

  You've got to get the Jeffrey Katzenberg apology form.

• 28:41John Coogan?

  Oh, for sure. Yeah, for sure. Uh, but yeah, uh, High Yield Harry captures it pretty well. Watching society become too cooked even to watch TV episode. And this is from Idiocracy, Mike Judge's, uh, one of his best works, the creator of HBO Silicon Valley, actually, who will now be available in short form because you will be able to watch short clips from, uh, from HBO Silicon Valley on HBO Max Shorts and sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 29:14Jordi Hays?

  Love you.

• 29:14John Coogan?

  Goodbye. That's the outro. Goodbye.