Pod Insights TBPN Apple-Intel Chip Deal, U.S Adds 115K Jobs, DeepSeek Eyes $50B Valuation | Diet TBPN About this episode 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.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 John Coogan? The great lock-in continues. We will go into a review of the last few days. It's Friday.
0:05 Speaker 01 We're having fun. We're gonna be hanging out here on the screen telling you about the American economic roller coaster. You've heard this story before.
0:18 John Coogan? It's just non-stop. Okay, so the American economic.
0:21 Jordi Hays? It's good to be back. We miss you guys.
0:22 John Coogan? It's good to be back. Yeah. We got a bunch of stuff going on. A whole bunch of economic news over the last couple of days. Stock market is absolutely ripping. We should be in white suits. Intel's up 20% today, almost. And there's this split between the AI economy and the real economy, the American economy. And there's a whole bunch of different things that like you need to puzzle together to get a picture of what's going on. And then I'm discovering that there are K shapes within the K shapes. Even in the real economy, there's divide between different companies. And so I wanted to walk through that. So let's start with the Intel news. It's up almost 20% today on the news that they will be making chips for Apple. There's a report in the Wall Street Journal about this. They've really reached a preliminary chip-making agreement.
1:03 John Coogan? It's not completely locked in, but there's a whole bunch of extra context here that we've been tracking for the last six months, 12 months. As some of this was expected, the revitalization of Intel was something that a lot of folks were clamoring for. Ben Thompson, myself, a lot of folks, we're all hoping for something and then plans are starting to come together. So the talks have been described as intensive, intensive talks between the two companies have been ongoing. For more than a year, Apple's been talking to Intel. Interesting, of course, Intel and Apple have been long-term partners for, what? The 90s, 2000s, up until the Apple silicon program where they started going, Apple started going direct to TSMC. Can they get them back? It seems like potentially in some form factors, but we're going to dig into it.
1:47 John Coogan? So they have hammered out a former deal in recent months. And it's still unclear which exact Apple products Intel would make chips for and manufacture them, both its own designs. So Intel has two main businesses. It's both a design shop and a manufacturer. They have a fab and a, and a design unit in its foundry unit. Both businesses have been underperforming for years before Liputan came in as the new CEO and was vowing to revitalize them. And so last summer, the Trump administration struck a deal to convert nearly $9 billion in federal grants into Intel stock, giving the US 10% stake.
2:23 Jordi Hays? Roughly $20, $21 a share. It's now at $125 a share.
2:28 Jordi Hays? White House has got to be feeling pretty good.
2:30 John Coogan? Yeah, huge. I mean, I'm pretty sure Jensen has made over a billion dollars on the $5 billion investment. I mean, just today, if it's up 20%, and he must have seen a big growth in that position since then. So just today, probably a one or $2 billion print. And so the reporting here in the Journal says that the Trump administration was actually key in bringing Apple to the table, putting pressure on sort of both sides to say, hey, let's think about the future of American manufacturing, resiliency, reducing Taiwanese dependence on a foreign supply chain, and giving Intel a real shot at underwriting the next big fab that they want to build.
3:07 Jordi Hays? Nvidia got in at $23 a share with their $5 billion investment, so up around a 5X.
3:15 John Coogan? Not bad. That's not bad at all.
3:17 Jordi Hays? The guy really needed it.
3:18 John Coogan? He paid for Grok with that. That's pretty sick.
3:21 Jordi Hays? Oh, yeah.
3:21 John Coogan? He just paid for Grok perfectly.
3:24 Jordi Hays? That's why he wired before they actually closed.
3:25 John Coogan? Yeah, he's like, I'm up. I got gains. I need to offset these. So Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has met repeatedly over the last year with high-ranking Apple officials, including CEO Tim Cook, as well as SpaceX chief Elon Musk, Nvidia chief Jensen Wong, to try and convince them to get into business with Intel. There was a discussion about should Nvidia dual-source the Grace CPUs from Intel, SpaceX, and Elon's been with Samsung for a lot of Tesla chips, but there's been discussion there. There was that rumor about global foundries, and Elon's always been in and around the fab world, and he's obviously going a lot deeper with the long-term tariff fab project. So Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was trying to convince them to get into business with Intel. Some of the people
4:08 John Coogan? familiar with the matter said with the Apple deal, Intel is now signed partnerships with all three. So over the last decade, Intel fell badly behind rivals, this is from the Wall Street Journal, such as TSMC and Samsung Electronics. After a series of technical mishaps, leadership changes, and failed attempts at consolidation led outside foundry customers to pull or curb their businesses. When Intel hired Tan in March of 2025, wow, just a year ago, to replace ousted chief executive Paul Geltzinger, President Trump raised concerns that Tan's close ties with China would compromise him and called for his ouster. It was a very, very dramatic moment, but... Tan won Trump over with a charm offensive. I like that. And the government announced its 10% investment in Intel shortly after.
4:51 John Coogan? Following the investment, Intel shares price rose sharply on Friday morning. It rose seven and a half percent to an all time high of nearly $118 per share. It's up more now. Tan has been reshaping Intel's top leadership ranks in recent months, including hiring former TSMC executive Weijen Lo, a move that prompted a lawsuit from TSMC. So they're not friends anymore. Intel CEO has also ousted his head of product and hired new executives to lead the company's data center processor and client computing units, as well as newly formed custom silicon business. He's also invested heavily in Intel's most advanced manufacturing process known as 14A. And that is the node that Intel is hoping that all of the potential customers will jump together and say, hey, we're going to buy from this if you make it.
5:36 John Coogan? If you build it, we will come. President Trump personally advocated for Intel to Cook in a meeting, which is funny because it sounds like he's advocating for Intel just to cook generally. But he's, no, he's advocating for Intel to Tim Cook in a meeting at the White House, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump said, I like Intel in January. He said that the government made tens of billions of dollars from Intel deal and that the government's backing of the company had attracted important partners to Intel. As soon as we went in, Apple went in, Nvidia went in, a lot of smart people went in, Trump said. Nvidia, the world's largest chip firm, invested $5 billion in Intel in September, and the two companies announced a partnership under which Intel would build custom data center CPUs, the processing brains for most computer systems for Nvidia.
6:21 John Coogan? And last month, Elon, of course, announced the TeraFab project. And so Apple relies on TSMC to make chips for iPhones, iPads, Macs and other devices, and is under pressure to find additional chip suppliers. There's also chip shortages, so it could be good to dual source, independent of the geopolitical discussion. On Apple's last two earnings conference calls, Cook blamed a lack of availability of advanced chips for Apple's inability to meet customer demands for iPhones. The constraints are expected to continue in the current quarter, affecting several Mac models, Cook said. Quote, "We think, looking forward, that the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio may take several months to reach supply-demand balance."
7:03 John Coogan? And after the earnings call, Apple raised the Mac Mini's starting price. And so TSMC's manufacturing capacities capabilities far surpass those of Samsung and Intel. Makers of other kinds of chips for memory and storage, for example, are more competitive with one another, giving Apple multiple sources of supply, although of course they aren't memory constrained. Apple's long been TSMC's top customer, but skyrocketing demand for its manufacturing capacity from Nvidia and other designers of AI chips means Apple's no longer has as much leverage to secure the supplies that it needs. Starting in 2006, Apple used Intel-designed CPUs as its main processor of its personal computers, but switched to its own custom CPUs based on ARM design in 2020. That's the dawn of Apple silicon.
7:48 John Coogan? And so there's been an incredible economic and financial performance concentrated in just a handful of trillion-dollar tech companies. Intel's starting to join and starting to perform like that. There's a few memory stocks. I saw one report that referred to it as the Mag 10, and they'd added a few other AI names to that group. But there's just a few companies that are driving the vast majority of returns in the stock market.
8:14 Jordi Hays? We had three sort of beautiful weeks where pretty much everyone started saying, there's no way it's a bubble.
8:20 John Coogan? Yeah.
8:21 Jordi Hays? Look at the revenue growth. There's no way it's a bubble.
8:23 John Coogan? Yeah.
8:23 Jordi Hays? But now people, Steve over at Bloomberg, we can pull this chart up. The concentration.
8:28 John Coogan? Sure. Yeah, I've seen this.
8:31 Jordi Hays? The market, you can see.
8:33 John Coogan? The AI Big 10, so Mag 7 plus AMD Broadcom and one other. Who is that? Micron.
8:41 Jordi Hays? And.
8:42 John Coogan? Now make up 40% of the market. Railroads, for reference, during 1835 to 1910 were 63% of the market. And he comps it to Japan, the Nifty 50, tech and telecom throughout various periods of time. And so I was reading this post by, or this piece by Greg Ip in the Wall Street Journal, and he was trying to disentangle what's happening in the overall American economy from the AI economy. What's, where is the growth coming from? He. Sort of back the envelope did. He said the AI economy grew 31%, while the non-AI economy just 0.1%. And he cites a few economic statistics that are recent. Personal consumption,
9:26 John Coogan? the biggest component of GDP, grew a relatively muted 1.6%. Investment fell in housing, business structures. I think we're building, we're spending more in data centers than housing now, or office buildings, I guess. I think it eclipsed office buildings and factories, and transportation equipment like trucks and aircrafts. Meanwhile, investment soared, 43% in tech equipment, obviously that's chips and GPUs, 23% in software, surprising, and 22% in data center.
9:53 Jordi Hays? SaaS has had a pretty meaningful bounce back.
9:54 John Coogan? Certainly on the revenue side.
9:55 Jordi Hays? Datadog, Atlassian.
9:57 John Coogan? Yeah.
9:58 Jordi Hays? There's been some re-acceleration.
10:00 John Coogan? And it really was extremely widespread where you had, I mean, you had like DoorDash and companies with strong network effects where the software was not their mote. They still had to go and answer to the market. And some of them got in and out of that in a week or a month, and some of them it took a quarter or two to show that there's resiliency. Some of them are still beaten beaten down. But overall, you know, software is still doing very well. On the flip side, there's another headline that hit the Journal yesterday. U.S. adds 115,000 jobs in April with solid hiring across sectors, retail, transportation, warehousing, and healthcare. All showed, all showed strong growth and led to expectation beating jobs growth.
10:45 John Coogan? And so, this is the weird dynamic that, you know, you're seeing all of this growth in the, in the AI economy, and yet, the overall employment is still chugging along. We can pull up the chart from the Wall Street Journal, but the U.S. job market blew past expectations in April, buoyed by gains in industries including retail, transportation, warehousing, healthcare. Not completely unexpected, given that those are not particularly AI-targeted areas, whereas you might see, you know, the layoffs in the tech community, but that doesn't, it's just not enough, because the, the U.S. employs over 100 million people. And so, a layoff of 4,000 people at some tech company just doesn't really move the needle when you're talking about overall.
11:30 Jordi Hays? Breaking news from Gave in the chat, Texas Roadhouse is up.
11:33 John Coogan? What?
11:34 Jordi Hays? He says 20%. I'm seeing 15% either way.
11:36 John Coogan? Why is it up so high?
11:37 Jordi Hays? Uh, he says, you're not bullish enough on Texas Roadhouse. I have never been.
11:42 John Coogan? Maybe they beat, uh, yeah.
11:43 Jordi Hays? This thing out.
11:44 John Coogan? Everyone says this is a Kiriyaku, uh, filter. It really, it really is.
11:49 Jordi Hays? It's crazy how vi- how viral that
11:51 John Coogan? Incredibly viral.
11:51 Jordi Hays? That meme format has gone.
11:53 John Coogan? Incredibly viral.
11:53 Jordi Hays? I thought that was just like a thing that I, I sent to you because I'd be dying laughing about it.
11:58 John Coogan? No, no, it's quite po- quite popular. Broken containment, fully. The American economy added 115,000 jobs in April. Uh, this was down from a net gain of 185,000 jobs in March, uh, but it was much better than what expectations were for April. Uh, analysts polled by the Wall Street Journal were expecting 55,000 jobs and the real number came in more than twice that, which is like, it just breaks the narrative a lot. There is this disconnect between like the AI economy and the real economy. I was talking to Saagar about this. It's like, in, in some ways, it's like AI is, Nvidia earnings is holding up the global economy and it's holding up the global stock market. It's not actually holding up the, the, the economy. If you view the economy as all
12:41 John Coogan? of the different, uh, jobs and, and, and activities that happen, even if there isn't incredible growth there, there's actually a surprising amount of strength and resiliency. So the unemployment rates
12:51 Jordi Hays? Personally, I'm, I'm waiting to hit the gong until we see what the revisions come out in that.
12:57 John Coogan? We haven't seen any revisions from March this time. I don't know.
13:00 Jordi Hays? Yeah, no, it comes like, it comes like, it comes like over six months later.
13:03 John Coogan? Uh, the April report coming in after strong job gains in March shows how the labor market is holding up better this year than last. While healthcare is still leading the way in job gains, other sectors now appear to be picking up. Businesses are seeing conditions stabilizing and they have weathered the tariffs. So many are hiring. It's looking somewhat better than it did last year. Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG, says it's still a high anxiety job market. Those who have a job are clearly clinging on, while those who are looking for a job are feeling frozen out. I was, uh, I was digging into, you know, where, where is there strength within the real economy? Once you go outside of AI, what is going on? And, uh, there were two recent earnings reports that were sort of
13:47 John Coogan? Disconnected, but showed a little bit of the picture of what's going on. So it was Whirlpool and Six Flags both had very different reports. So Whirlpool, you probably know from refrigeration and washing machines, dryers, that type of appliance. They've been making appliance for over 100 years. And they've also been paying a dividend since the 1950s consistently. They've never, they've never suspended their dividend, even through all the Great Recession, the dot com crash. Every year, they've been able to pay that dividend. They just cut their dividend, which is a really, really big deal for this company, since it's a dividend stock. The stock traded down on the news, and the stock is down 80% of the past five years. And they're in some
14:29 John Coogan? financial trouble, like they have a lot of debt, and they have a lot of competition. But you could play that as like, okay, the real economy is like completely chugging to a halt. At the same time, you had Six Flags, which is should be the thing that is the most discretionary. Like, do you go to the roller coaster theme park or not? And Six Flags just reported higher first quarter revenue. They're growing, and they're growing attendance and customer spending. And so now Six Flags, it's not exactly a juggernaut of business. It's only worth 2.3 billion. And the stock is down over the past two years, about 50%. But the business is growing, and you wouldn't expect that during a time of like, deep economic weakness. And so there's something odd going on
15:13 John Coogan? there, where as you think of refrigeration as extremely necessary, roller coasters as the ultimate, like, you don't, you can definitely skip it if you are cash strapped. But the actual dynamics of the market are very different. So Whirlpool sells big ticket necessities, these refrigerators. But they're deferrable. So you can put off getting a new refrigerator. You can repair an old refrigerator if money is tight. But your kids are only really roller coaster age for a limited time. And Whirlpool also faces brutal global competition, and existing home sales are down 3% month over month. And so all of that drives fewer appliance upgrades, and they are not necessarily beneficiary of all the international competition that they face
15:56 John Coogan? from LG and Samsung and other international players. And so I've sort of been-
16:00 Jordi Hays? Quick correction, Six Flags, or new information, Six Flags has been up since around, around November. It sort of bottomed, Travis. I remember, I was thinking of this because one, they have the ticker FUN.
16:15 John Coogan? Yeah.
16:15 Jordi Hays? Which is fantastic. The stock has not been having fun, but Travis Kelsey and a group put in 200 million.
16:21 John Coogan? That's right. We talked about that.
16:22 Jordi Hays? The stock traded down pretty substantially.
16:25 John Coogan? Yeah, I remember that.
16:26 Jordi Hays? After the investment, but it's basically recovered to where it was.
16:30 John Coogan? Yeah.
16:30 Jordi Hays? And it's.
16:31 John Coogan? Well, it's still down over the past like five years.
16:34 Jordi Hays? Yeah.
16:34 John Coogan? Like two years ago, it was, it was like a $5 billion company.
16:37 Jordi Hays? Yeah, down, down big.
16:38 John Coogan? But, but, but, but, but what's interesting is that at this time of like economic uncertainty and all these questions about hiring, questions about economic resilience, they are increasing revenues, increasing attendance, increasing customer spend, and that's what's driving the stock today. And so I was looking at these two companies and I was like, they, they sort of fit into this, this barbell thesis of the AI future, which I've been seeing pop up more and more. And the two examples that I always give are, one, the Ellison family is both like long slop and long anti-slop. They have a ton of infrastructure investments in AI through Oracle, and then they own legacy media like Batman, Superman through Warner Brothers. And then Josh Koshner is doing a similar thing with OpenAI and the San Francisco Giants, like two completely opposite ends of the spectrum.
17:23 John Coogan? So you can think of roller coasters as potentially like anti-slop, because you can't vibe code Space Mountain. But, but, but it, it, it's interesting to sort of like dig into the weeds of what's going on in the global economy and the American economy and seeing like where the unsuspecting winners are. Ryan Peterson shared a post from the, or a chart from the Financial Times that perfectly illustrates our possible futures. This is so funny that this is in, in the Financial Times, but they, they fully embraced what happens in the human extinction tech singularity and the end of scarcity tech singularity. In the bull case, real GDP per capita goes north of a million dollars.
18:07 John Coogan? And in the human extinction scenario, it goes to zero, of course, but the AI boosted growth path is a steady trend upwards. And that is, that is the goal that I think everyone should be working for, potentially the end of scarcity outcome as well. And I, and I think this, this chart that Ryan shares is sort of. Sort of, I think, why there's anxiety in the market because there's this, you know, the whole like you're not prepared if it's not a bubble concept. But there's, there's like a dual anxiety where like if, if AI gets too good, there's mass unemployment, everyone's worried about that. But if AI is a bubble and it collapses, you go into a recession and everyone loses their job and like you're in a similar scenario of like economic anxiety.
18:49 John Coogan? For both the, not necessarily the true doomers, I mean, obviously they, they face a similar, you know, opinion. But even if you're just like in the, it's overheated camp, there's real risk to the stability. And I think that's where a lot of the, the, the bubble concerns come from, although we're certainly not seeing very many signs of, of the bubble. I mean, obviously the evaluations are high, but so are the revenue growth charts. So we can go through some of the folks that are arguing.
19:19 Jordi Hays? Before we do that, are you more of a back of the envelope guy or a napkin math guy?
19:24 John Coogan? Oh, that's interesting. I have a napkin here from WonderCo from the event I brought in.
19:29 Jordi Hays? And would you look at that? A little souvenir.
19:31 John Coogan? I like, I like a napkin. I like a napkin. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, napkin math is insane. It's extremely hard to write on a napkin.
19:40 Jordi Hays? Totally.
19:40 John Coogan? It's way easier to write on the back of an envelope.
19:42 Jordi Hays? Yeah, you've got a lot more space.
19:43 John Coogan? And you can get a big envelope. You can get an envelope that's eight and a half, it's effectively.
19:47 Jordi Hays? And an envelope is sophisticated. An envelope is, is, is kind of a core business utility.
19:54 John Coogan? Yeah.
19:54 Jordi Hays? Napkins can be used for anything.
19:56 John Coogan? If you're in napkin math, you've got to pivot.
19:58 Jordi Hays? I will say I'm much more of an napkin math guy.
20:00 John Coogan? Why?
20:00 Jordi Hays? I can't, I mean, just, just, just.
20:03 John Coogan? The phrase that you pull.
20:05 Jordi Hays? Spiritually and the phrase that I pull. But if I can't get excited about an opportunity based on what can fit on a napkin. Then I'm, I'm never going to get excited about it.
20:15 John Coogan? So you think a napkin is, is definitionally smaller? It's a less amount of math?
20:20 Jordi Hays? It's not, it's not, it's a, it's a lesser vehicle than an envelope.
20:26 John Coogan? Yeah, because a big envelope, you could do a full spreadsheet on.
20:29 Jordi Hays? Totally.
20:29 John Coogan? You could, you could write out comms.
20:30 Jordi Hays? Totally.
20:31 John Coogan? And have multiple cells.
20:33 Jordi Hays? No, so I'm, I'm, I'm, in, in practice, I'm a napkin math guy, but if something was really serious, I would probably trade it out.
20:43 John Coogan? Yeah, we've been doing too much napkin math around here. It's time to pull out the big guns. Let's get out the envelope.
20:48 Jordi Hays? Speaking of envelopes, so this morning, I was telling Tyler, I'm incredibly overwhelmed with Slacks, emails, you know, DMs on every platform, LinkedIn DMs, Instagram DMs, X DMs, all the different messaging apps. And I was thinking, how cool would it be if there was a service where you connected all your inboxes to? And then every day, they would print out all of the different messages and then bring them to you. And you could put like a box. You could put a box outside of your house and they would just put them in there. And then at a specific time, you know, maybe in a roughly like two hour window,
21:27 Jordi Hays? you could go out and grab all the printed out messages and sort of like leaf through them, decide what you need to respond to. You would potentially, because you're only getting messages once a day, you would probably be a lot more intentional about what you wrote back and forth. Right? And I think that could be.
21:45 John Coogan? Sort of the opposite of Earth class mail, those virtual mailboxes. Cause they'll, they'll, they'll take your physical mail.
21:50 Jordi Hays? Yeah, but I want everything, I want everything coming in this box. I want to put a box outside of my house that people put. And I think there's something there.
21:59 Speaker 03 Yeah. Trump, I mean, Trump literally does this.
22:01 John Coogan? He does that, right?
22:01 Speaker 03 He gets emails printed out and then he'll, he'll write with a big marker his response and then his assistant will scan it and then email it back.
22:08 John Coogan? Yeah.
22:09 Jordi Hays? More, more on, uh, Sea Fry says a napkin is more available than an envelope. Very true. Often the best, often the best business meetings were not scheduled as a business meeting.
22:21 John Coogan? So there aren't envelopes around.
22:23 Jordi Hays? There's no envelopes around, but there's plenty of napkins.
22:25 Speaker 03 Also, I mean, you're saying napkins are smaller, but if you're at a restaurant and you have like a fabric napkin and you unfold them, those can be pretty big.
22:31 John Coogan? So you're, you're, but I feel like it's bad form to be at a restaurant. Like you're not supposed to ruin the napkins. Or do you carry a pen that has washable ink?
22:40 Speaker 03 You have the crayons for the kids, right? People are.
22:43 Jordi Hays? The chat is saying.
22:44 John Coogan? They don't ask you to.
22:45 Jordi Hays? The chat is saying I could call my service, the United States Postal Service.
22:48 John Coogan? That's a good name.
22:48 Jordi Hays? Thank you, Alex. That's a great name.
22:50 John Coogan? That's sort of like the, the, the San Francisco artificial intelligence company or something like that. Or the browser company of New York. It would be inspired by that. Yeah. I, I, I, I think that even with the crayons of the kids.
23:03 Jordi Hays? Cran, closed fisted grip, right on the table.
23:06 John Coogan? Right on the tablecloth, okay. I, yeah, I feel like if you're given crayons, you are expected to maintain that the child uses the crayons only on the children's menu, which is typically made out of paper, very disposable. If you see the child using the crayons on a cloth napkin, you are expected as a patron to intervene.
23:29 Jordi Hays? Jackson says, "Digitize this service and call it email."
23:33 John Coogan? There we go.
23:34 Jordi Hays? We gotta establish the mailbox first.
23:37 John Coogan? We got an idea.
23:39 Jordi Hays? But then we can go there. But I like where you're going.
23:41 John Coogan? Well, there's some other posts about the markets. Justin Spitler says, "Be careful buying semis here." Obviously, the market's very, very overheated.
23:53 Jordi Hays? Travis.
23:54 John Coogan? Let's play this video. Oh, this is Travis Pastrana?
23:56 Jordi Hays? Yes.
23:57 John Coogan? That's amazing. Nitro Circus, we've mentioned many times on the show. Is he drinking a Red Bull?
24:03 Jordi Hays? Yeah, no parachute.
24:05 John Coogan? Oh, no parachute?
24:06 Jordi Hays? Yeah, so he jumps out of the plane, no parachute.
24:08 John Coogan? That's crazy.
24:09 Jordi Hays? Drinking a Red Bull.
24:10 John Coogan? That's actually insane.
24:10 Jordi Hays? And then he connects, he's gotta do some tricks first.
24:13 John Coogan? He's really taking his time here. The tension is building, building, building. And so he connects with someone who wraps him up? And then do they pull the parachute?
24:23 Jordi Hays? They connect to each other.
24:23 John Coogan? Or do they?
24:24 Jordi Hays? They strap him to them.
24:26 John Coogan? Oh, okay, there is a strap.
24:28 Jordi Hays? Strap themselves to him.
24:28 John Coogan? Because it seems sort of crazy just to bear hug and hope for the best.
24:32 Jordi Hays? I don't think you're bear hugging.
24:33 John Coogan? I don't know. It's Red Bull, anything could happen. I would expect him to be delivered a full parachute, his own parachute, that he then, you know, dons. And, but he made it. Wow. Well, that's what it's like investing in semiconductors right now, I guess. Anyway, how was your last two days, Tyler? What'd you get up to?
24:52 Speaker 03 It was sick. I was at the, I went to the trial.
24:54 John Coogan? You went to the trial?
24:55 Speaker 03 OpenAI Elon trial.
24:57 John Coogan? Okay, walk me through it. You left the studio on Tuesday. You leave the office at 2:00 after we wrap the show on Tuesday? You went straight to the airport?
25:06 Speaker 03 I did.
25:06 John Coogan? Okay. And then what time did you go to bed? Because you woke up really early, right?
25:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, so I got to the trial, so it's in Oakland. I got to the courthouse at, I think, like, something around like 5:30.
25:16 John Coogan? 5:30?
25:17 Speaker 03 Yeah, because you gotta get in line. So basically, you know, it's a public, because it's like a federal case.
25:21 John Coogan? Yeah, yeah.
25:22 Speaker 03 There like has to be some room for the public. Uh, but there's only like, I, I think the number is somewhere like 20 or 30. Cause I, I think it's closer to 20 because I think part of the 30 is reserved just for media.
25:33 John Coogan? Okay. And when you got there at 5:30, were there already people standing in line?
25:36 Speaker 03 Yeah. So, so there were, I think there were like three or four people there already.
25:39 John Coogan? Okay.
25:40 Speaker 03 Um, in line.
25:41 John Coogan? Early bird getting the worm. That's good.
25:42 Speaker 03 But yeah, well, I, cause I didn't want to be late, obviously. Cause you know, I, cause. Did you talk to the other people? Uh, a few of them. I, so, so. Were you there before Mike Isaac? I was there before Mike Isaac.
25:51 John Coogan? But he has a media pass.
25:52 Speaker 03 So, yeah, because last time when Mike Isaac came on the show, he said that, because each like news.
25:58 John Coogan? Yeah. Uh, New York Times got one pass and he was splitting it with Cade Metz. And so they were sort of going back and forth and I guess he had a media pass that day.
26:06 Speaker 03 Yeah. So that day he had a media pass. He, he got there pretty late. He got there at like 7:30 or 8.
26:10 John Coogan? Okay. So you're there from 5:30, he gets there at 8. What time does the trial actually start?
26:15 Speaker 03 Around 8:30.
26:16 John Coogan? 8:30, okay.
26:17 Speaker 03 Yeah. So basically I'm just posting up for like three hours.
26:19 John Coogan? Okay. And then this is Wednesday. So walking through like what, what, what are you seeing? There's these opening remarks from the judge, this sort of welcome everyone in.
26:26 Speaker 03 Yeah. Jury comes in.
26:27 John Coogan? Okay.
26:28 Speaker 03 Um, so there are basically three main like segments. So basically I'll say it starts 8:30, ends at I think 2:00 PM. There's, uh, two breaks, two 20 minute breaks.
26:38 John Coogan? Okay.
26:38 Speaker 03 So starts off and we, we watched like the deposition of Miramarati. So this is all live streamed, right? The, the, the audio is live.
26:45 John Coogan? The audio is live. But you're seeing a video.
26:47 Speaker 03 We're watching the video of her deposition.
26:49 John Coogan? Okay.
26:49 Speaker 03 It's mostly covering the, the ousting, the timeline of the ousting.
26:52 John Coogan? And, and.
26:53 Speaker 03 This is where, this is where all the, the texts came out to that.
26:55 John Coogan? Yeah, yeah. And, and, and were they showing you the actual text? Were they playing a video? Or were they playing the AI, uh, reenactment of the texts? Cause we have this, someone turned, uh, Sam Altman's text to Miramarati into a 2011 style emo teenage, teenage heartthrob anthem. Did this make it into the courtroom or no? Let's play this. We have the audio.
27:29 John Coogan? Good motion graphics too.
27:32 John Coogan? Whoever made this is talented.
27:42 John Coogan? What is this Suno? Can you put in text into Suno and get a full song?
27:47 Jordi Hays? Play this for an AI skeptic.
27:48 John Coogan? Yeah.
27:49 Jordi Hays? And, and see what their reaction is.
27:51 John Coogan? Yeah. How do you see this and not want to build? I, I've, I've seen these before and I've always really enjoyed them, but with most of the AI music tools, I've never found a great way to put in a full script that I've written to get the results, but does Suno have that?
28:06 Speaker 03 So the author said his steps to make this.
28:08 John Coogan? Okay.
28:08 Speaker 03 So first, he OCR'd the images and turned them into plain text.
28:11 John Coogan? Okay.
28:11 Speaker 03 So images of the actual text messages.
28:13 John Coogan? Easy.
28:14 Speaker 03 And then removed the names from the dialogue, pasted into Suno and iterated like 20 to 30 times.
28:18 John Coogan? Ooh.
28:19 Speaker 03 And then finally thought this one was catchy.
28:20 John Coogan? Okay.
28:21 Speaker 03 Yeah.
28:22 John Coogan? Put up a version of this with the, with the Gen Z brain rot slide. Yo fam, can you give me a vibe check on, am I cooked or nah? For real, for real. Sacha and the gang low key stressing. Murmurati, yeah, you're skibbity. This isn't a rare L. This is an Ohio level generational oral loss. Little brow. Who ratioed me? Sam Altman says. Murmurati, some rando zesty NPC Twitch looks maxing Sigma. I'm not even gonna go further. What else happened? Did someone actually get on the stand or was it all video?
28:53 Speaker 03 Yes. So the first like hour.
28:55 John Coogan? It's straight up teacher played a movie. It's movie day. You went to the movie day.
28:58 Speaker 03 The judge actually did get angry because like she was like, oh, the jury's gonna get bored and like she was like offering them coffee and stuff.
29:04 John Coogan? Okay.
29:04 Speaker 03 So basically, yeah, the first maybe hour was mirror deposition video. And then we go through some of the actual like documents again of the text messages. And then Siobhan Zillis is testifying. So she's physically there.
29:15 John Coogan? Okay.
29:15 Speaker 03 She was a OpenAI board member 2020 to 2023.
29:18 John Coogan? Okay.
29:19 Speaker 03 And she steps down when Elon started XAI.
29:22 John Coogan? Yep.
29:22 Speaker 03 I have no idea how long that was. That was the majority of the.
29:25 John Coogan? It was during the whole conflict.
29:27 Speaker 03 Yeah.
29:27 John Coogan? Perfect person to testify.
29:29 Speaker 03 Well, no, so she actually left the board before the ousting. So she left in February 2023. Ousting is November.
29:36 John Coogan? Oh, okay. Interesting. I didn't, I, I.
29:38 Speaker 03 Yeah.
29:39 John Coogan? The timeline always gets so jumbled up because like, there's like 2018 battles between Sam and Greg and Ilya and Elon. And then there's the board.
29:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, because all throughout this hearing, there's like, yeah, there's basically two
29:50 John Coogan? There's sort of two main moments, right? Yeah. And we're sort of clicking back and forth between them.
29:55 Speaker 03 Yeah.
29:55 Jordi Hays? Chat wants to know what kind of wambos were being thrown around with Lorraine being used, people saying, can you please Lorraine? This email.
30:04 Speaker 03 Uh, Siobhan was actually dropping some good lingo. I, I, I don't know if I can remember any.
30:08 John Coogan? Yeah, there's something, uh, like Mike Isaac always, uh, talks about like they're keep referencing Dota and they keep, everyone on the stand is using a ton of jargon. How jargon-y was it? Was it like Dwar Kesh Patel podcast level jargon? Or like actual like researchers like talking to each other jargon?
30:25 Speaker 03 I would say it was not very sophisticated, especially among the lawyers, right?
30:29 John Coogan? Um, okay.
30:29 Speaker 03 Siobhan, she did drop some good lingo.
30:32 John Coogan? Okay.
30:32 Speaker 03 I, I, yeah, it was some referencing some like why she got into AI.
30:36 John Coogan? Sure.
30:36 Speaker 03 But, you know, acceleration and all this.
30:37 John Coogan? Okay, okay.
30:38 Speaker 03 And then after that, it, we watched another like hour long video of Helen Tonner's deposition.
30:43 John Coogan? Wow.
30:43 Speaker 03 That was just about the, the ousting.
30:44 John Coogan? Okay.
30:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, it was very fun. I enjoyed it a lot. Like basically almost everyone like sitting in my section, which was basically the public and the, in the media.
30:51 John Coogan? Yeah.
30:51 Speaker 03 Like everyone that came as the public were basically also media. They just didn't get the media pass.
30:56 John Coogan? Sure, sure.
30:57 Speaker 03 So everyone surrounding me is, is on their laptop like typing basically.
31:00 John Coogan? Blogging.
31:00 Speaker 03 Yeah, just like taking down what's, what's being said.
31:02 John Coogan? Yeah, yeah.
31:03 Speaker 03 And then I'm just sitting there enjoying it. Cause it's like, you know, it's good stuff.
31:06 Jordi Hays? How, how would you rate Mike Isaac's like snack and overall food supplies for the day? Did he burn?
31:12 Speaker 03 It looked pretty good. I, I believe he did bring the butt pillow.
31:14 John Coogan? It seems like he's not making progress on the food front. I would expect by day seven of this, he would have a smorgasbord in front of him.
31:22 Speaker 03 I, I fasted the whole time. I was kinda, I just talked it out.
31:24 John Coogan? Why didn't you figure it? We, we have talked about the food situation so many times. How did you not think ahead there?
31:29 Speaker 03 I just wanted to make it more challenging.
31:31 John Coogan? Okay.
31:31 Speaker 03 Yeah, I was like, this is gonna be too easy.
31:33 John Coogan? DeepSeek is raising a monster $7 billion round at $50 billion valuation, making it China's largest ever AI raise. But what shocks A-Jaws here CryptoPunk the most is the founder. He's personally contributing 40% of the round himself. Wow. $3 billion coming from the founder directly, owns 90% of the company, unheard of at this valuation. DeepSeek was founded inside of his hedge fund, one of China's most successful funds. What a beast. Uh, he's got to acquire as much compute to push out new DeepSeek models. You know, we saw that chart that showed that, uh, Chinese open source models were sort of falling behind a little bit on a different growth curve in terms of performance. But, uh, you know, he's certainly betting on getting back in line, having a, uh,
32:18 John Coogan? You know, frontier model within a couple of months. Zach Brock says, "Congrats to Anthropic for defeating Grok in the market and feasting upon the compute of their fallen enemy."
32:27 Jordi Hays? Yeah, basically, every time we take a day off the show, like something big happens, on Wednesday was the XAI or SpaceX Anthropic deal. A lot of people have been predicting that. I was not, simply because I thought it was like the rational decision for the parties. But I thought that the tension between Elon, who had only a couple of months ago been hurling insults at the Anthropic team, I didn't think they would be able to uncover those cultural differences.
32:59 John Coogan? Totally.
33:00 Jordi Hays? But demand for compute finds a way.
33:01 John Coogan? Yeah, I think that you and others had identified the possibility of becoming a NeoCloud, selling the compute.
33:08 Jordi Hays? Yeah, last year, I was talking about that a lot, all the time. I was like, "Look, they're incredible at building infrastructure, really, really fast, bringing power online." This feels like a very strong, a strong use for Elon, Inc.
33:22 John Coogan? Yes.
33:23 Jordi Hays? And, but as things evolved, I just didn't see, I didn't see this coming together.
33:28 John Coogan? I didn't see this coming together specifically because of the cursor deal. I thought the cursor deal was the long-term solution for all that compute, and then the compute sort of got sold twice, maybe. But of course, there are multiple clusters, multiple colossus data centers.
33:41 Jordi Hays? Yeah.
33:42 John Coogan? And plenty of work to be done as SpaceX continues to grow their ambitions.
Previous Airbnb CEO on Why AI Will Create a New Era of Consumer Products Next Swatch AP Collab, Cerebras IPO, Trump Visits China | Ferdinand Dabitz, Spencer Rascoff, Eric Olson, Matt Lohstroh, Jay Azhang, Amir Sadeghian, Alexander Taubman, Quaid Walker Page updated October 2, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
