Neural Computers, GameStop’s $55B eBay Offer | 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.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  Would you look at that?

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Would you look at what, Jordy? Everything looks fine to me.

• 0:03Jordi Hays?

  We're back.

• 0:03John Coogan?

  We're back.

• 0:05Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm looking at.

• 0:07John Coogan?

  We're getting ready at the last second. We may have installed Modern Warfare 2 on this large screen and gotten a little bit behind schedule with some of the interns playing Rust 1v1. It was a knockout drag out fight. You won by a lot, right?

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  Well, we'll have to have rematches throughout the show.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  It was pretty embarrassing for Ben, considering that he is still in that, not, not, not, not chief producer Ben, but other Ben, considering he's still in like the main kind of like

• 0:39John Coogan?

  demo.

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  video game demo.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  But at the same time, I mean, you were probably two years old when Modern Warfare 2 came out, so you gotta sort of relearn the, the old, the old tricks, the old tricks on Rust.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, I hope you guys had a great weekend.

• 0:54John Coogan?

  Hope you had a great weekend. Big week. We'll be, we are going to a conference on Wednesday and Thursday, so we might be off both those days, but we have some great shows for you planned Monday, Tuesday, Friday. It's a conference.

• 1:07Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I thought you said concert.

• 1:08John Coogan?

  No. Although I think there might be a concert.

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  That would be extremely out of character.

• 1:14John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, there's a bunch of news we're gonna go through, but first I was just sort of reflecting on, there was a great interview with Andre Karpathy at Sequoia AI Ascent, I think last week it went up on YouTube, and it was, he was sort of reflecting on how his workflow is changing around vibe coding, and I was sort of reflecting on how my knowledge workflows are changing, particularly around image generation, now that image generation is really good at infographics and effectively designing slides or output. And so we're, we're starting to see the rumblings of this idea of like the neural computer. There was this, people have been talking about this for years since the AI boom began, but the basic idea is like you would have a computer that basically has no software whatsoever on it.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  It would just have an LLM or just an AI model, just inference capability or potentially connection to cloud inference that would generate whatever you want, whatever you need. On demand, on the fly. And so I think Elon talked about this with macro hard a little bit. That was a piece of the vision. This has always been theorized, but it's becoming more and more real. And so Karpathy describes this idea of like a neural computer this way. And I think it's an interesting framing. Obviously, it'll have implications for SaaS products that might be used in a headless, under the hood scene way, or might be competed with against these neural computers.

• 2:40John Coogan?

  But Karpathy describes it as, imagine a device that takes raw video or audio into basically what's a neural net and uses diffusion to render a UI that's unique for that moment. And so this sort of like on the fly instantiation of the exact UI that you need for that particular question, or whatever problem you're trying to solve, whatever you're trying to do, is an interesting paradigm shift that it feels like we're starting to see glimpses of. So I most recently felt it when I was trying to understand Ryan Cohen's proposal for GameStop to take over eBay. This is a big story. We'll go through it today. But I haven't tracked each, either, either company closely. We've had Ryan on the show. And we've talked about eBay and GameStop intermittently, but I couldn't tell you off the top of my head, what's the revenue for each company?

• 3:25John Coogan?

  What's the profit like? What are the different multiples? And so in a pre chat GPT world, I would have gone to Google Finance or Yahoo Finance and pulled some data, maybe had two tabs up, maybe used one of their comparison tools. If I wanted to be really advanced, I would have copied and pasted the stats into a spreadsheet. If you're really working on Wall Street, you might have like CapIQ or Bloomberg plugging into a sheet, an Excel sheet that then can build you a comparison table and do like comps. And then, once we got into the chat GPT world, you might do a deep research report, pull all that data, put it into a table, which is effectively markdown. Sometimes the tables renders a little weird and like you can kind of bounce around. But now the whole process from start to finish is just a single prompt.

• 4:08John Coogan?

  It outputs an image, so you can pull up the image that I generated. So this was, this was one prompt. I said, do a bunch of research on GameStop and eBay's valuation and key financial metrics. Things like growth rate, top line, earnings, revenue, valuation, how the multiples fit together. Build a nicely designed side by side comparison of the two companies. And you wind up getting something that is very digestible. Like it just, looking at this, I mean, it's obviously a little zoomed out, but you can zoom in and see, okay, eBay has about three times the revenue, 50 billion versus 15 for GameStop. And revenue growth, eBay is growing while GameStop shrunk by 5%. eBay grew 8%.

• 4:47John Coogan?

  Operating income, eBay has 10 times the operating income at 2.28 billion versus 232 million for GameStop. And so you just get this like very easy, okay, what's the operating margin? eBay's up a 20%, GameStop's down at 6.4%. And so you can start to see on a price to sales ratio, GameStop's at 4X, eBay's at 4.5X. But on a, on a market cap to net income, GameStop's higher, has a higher value, 34X versus net income versus eBay's 25X. So you can just sort of see this table, and this is something that usually would have been like three or four steps to get here. And instead it's just this single prompt. And so I think that there's, like, this is not a perfect result.

• 5:30John Coogan?

  Like in that image, you can see that like it chose red as the color for all of GameStop's financials, which is not what you'd normally do because red is usually for negative numbers, but those revenue figures are positive. Like it could be better. I could probably go further and prompt it a couple more times to get exactly what I wanted. But it solved my problem of having like, here's the summary of the question that you were actually asking, which is like, how do these companies stack up to each other? What's the relative size of the business? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each of them? And then boom, you have a square image that you can easily text to someone and it's ultimately shareable. More importantly, I don't care what it used under the hood. It could have puppeteered a spreadsheet and put it all in.

• 6:11John Coogan?

  Comma separated values and make a CSV and it could have transformed it with Excel or Google Sheets under the hood. It could have written Python. It could have used Pandas or scikit-learn. It could have done anything it wanted to, but it's all abstracted to me and I don't even think about it. And this is different from the previous era of like, okay, well, if I wanted to do some sort of stock comparison tool, I could vibe code a stock comparison tool with API integrations, make sure you have the the data connections, but it's just kind of less necessary as the models get fatter and they sort of eat more and more of the process. And so Karpathy describes this concept as software 3.0 and we should pull up his example because it's very similar. Of course, it happened like months ago because he's ahead of me on everything, obviously, but he gave a good example of shifting from like,

• 6:55John Coogan?

  you have a problem that there's no solution for, so you're going to vibe code an app to just a few weeks or months later, like the AI tools can just do it and you don't need any code. You don't need any system to build, even though it's fun to build a system and it's interesting and it allows for more, maybe more speed, more reliability, like more and more things are like one shot able by the model. So let's pull up Andre Karpathy talking at Sequoia AI Ascent about his experience with software 3.0.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  I think one more maybe example that comes to mind that is even more extreme than that is when I was building MenuGen. So MenuGen is this idea where you come to a restaurant, they give you a menu. There's no pictures usually, so I don't know what any of these things are. Usually I like 30% of the things I'd have no idea what they are, 50%. So I wanted to take a photo of the restaurant menu and to get pictures of what those things might look like in a generic sense. And so I built, I vibe coded this app that basically lets you upload a photo and it does all this stuff and it runs on Bursail and it basically re-renders the menu and it gives you like all the items and it gives you a picture that it uses an image, you know, generator for to basically OCR all the different titles, use the image generator to get pictures of them and then shows it to you.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  And then I saw the software 3.0 version of this, which is, which blew my mind, which is literally just take your photo, give it to Gemini and say, use Nano Banana to overlay the things onto the menu. And Nano Banana basically returned an image that is exactly the picture of the menu that I took, but it actually put into the pixels, it rendered the different things in the menu. And this blew my mind because. Actually, all of my menu gen is spurious. It's working in the old paradigm. That app shouldn't exist. And yeah, the software three point paradigm is a lot more kind of raw. It just neural network is doing more and more of the work. And your prompt or context is just the image and the output is an image. And there's no need to have any of the app in between.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  So I think that people have to kind of like reframe.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  It's over for apps. Yeah, it, it, it, I mean, it's, it's, it's real. And I had some takeaways from this, like, what are the implications for this? And I think there's a few things. The, the, the first thing that was on my mind was that although we have gone through this crazy vibe coding boom, where everyone is vibe coding apps, it feels like a very temporary aberration. And also I know that, that even though there are millions and millions of people that have used Codex and Claude Code and Open Claw, like, the numbers are big, but it's not at 20% of the US population. Like, it's just not at that level of adoption, as opposed to chat apps, which are at like 70, 80% penetration, right?

• 9:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other, the other thing that's been interesting is non, like, people outside of tech that have gotten into vibe coding, that have been pitching me their ideas here and there. Almost every time they're pitching me the idea, it is something that Claude Code and Codex can do themselves pretty well today, like, just in one chat thread.

• 9:58John Coogan?

  Or the app, like, the apps can do them. And that's what I'm like, what's blowing my mind now is that, is that in many ways.

• 10:04Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying. So I'm like, they're using vibe coding tools to vibe code something that doesn't necessarily need to exist, because you could just use the app itself to do the thing.

• 10:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:15Jordi Hays?

  And they're already widely available. So it's, it's been, been interesting.

• 10:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, so I think there's, I think there's two things. Like, one is that if you've been like hesitant to jump into vibe coding, because like, it's just, it's a little bit too much a hassle. Like, Andre Karpathy is like, obviously very, very comfortable being like, oh yeah, let me deploy to Versal and do all this. Like, you can figure all that out, but that leads to this world where it's like, oh, I was staying up all night. I was, I was really, really like burning the midnight oil to get this app deployed and like do all this stuff. A lot of that's going to go away and like you're not going to need to do that. But then there's also the, the, this question, what you had, which is like, there needs to be this higher order loop of thinking around, okay, you have a problem. Should you actually vibe code as an app? Or should you just try and one-shot it with the current model capabilities? Because for a lot of things, like

• 11:03Jordi Hays?

  And within

• 11:04John Coogan?

  Within, yeah, within chat, within Gemini, within Claude, the actual apps. Like you can like, take a picture of your food and say, hey, start tracking my calories. Like, there's a lot of things that the, that the apps can just do in one chat thread that people are doing. But I think that, uh, there, there's like this tension between when, when you actually need to for sure go and vibe code something versus when you can just do it in like a one-shot LLM context. Frontier models are already able to, in basically 90% of situations, I feel like instantiate exactly whatever's required to solve the actual problem, uh, under the hood, uh, entirely abstracting away like code and tools. Like you will just not be aware of what's happening and it doesn't matter. And then, uh,

• 11:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, and I, yeah, I would, I would add to, to my previous statement by, by saying that doesn't mean that there's not necessarily a business there because sometimes taking a raw capability and presenting it to people in a way that's very easy for them to digest. You can still deliver value and you can get customers and people will pay you money.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:04Jordi Hays?

  But it is, it has been fascinating to see like, does this actually need to be an app?

• 12:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's, there, there's a ton of apps and software that will still be valuable, whether it has a liquidity pool or some sort of unique, uh, source of strength or some differentiation point that, that the existing chat apps can't hack at all. And then there's also just like, like marketing ARBs effectively where it's like, okay, yes, the, any, any frontier model in a chat app could do this, but you weren't aware of it. And this company was really good at running ads to actually get awareness going and then drive downloads of this specific thing. And so we see those in the, uh, in the app store all the time. The other thing that I was, uh, uh, reminded of was, did you ever read Union Square Ventures 2016 blog post FAT protocols?

• 12:55John Coogan?

  Are you familiar with this? So FAT protocols was this concept around how in in the web like web, I guess 1.0, 2.0, there were protocol layers, which are like TCP, IP, HTTP, SMTP, like file transfer protocols, HTTP. And there and a lot for like a couple of years, the crypto community was like the group that developed and maintained HTTP, they basically created the standard that the web ran on, and yet very little value accrued to the creators and the maintainers of that protocol. And crypto would be different because the Bitcoin protocol had the value capture component like baked into it. And so there was this idea of like, the application layer in blockchain would accrue

• 13:40John Coogan?

  very little value, and the protocol layer would capture the vast majority of value. So this is on the web, the application's on top of HTTP. You can think of like Facebook as a beneficiary of the protocol of HTTP, because that's what how how the actual information, the photos and the text gets transferred to you. But the HTTP standard does not accrue the value. The value accrues to the to the application on top. And if you scroll down, you'll see the blockchain example, which was sort of borne out, that the application layer was pretty thin on top, and most of the value went to like the tokens and the protocol below. Ethereum. Yeah, exactly. Ethereum's a good example. Solana's a good example. Of course, there's there's value in the application layer, and there's some companies that are being built.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  But this was basically this thesis that the he says, we see the very early, we see this very clearly in two dominant blockchain networks, Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Bitcoin network has a 10 billion market cap. Wow. I think it's like a trillion now, right? Isn't it 700 billion? Yet the largest companies built on top are worth a few hundred million at best. Now we have Coinbase, which is in the tens of billions. So both sides of the protocol application layer did very well, but the point is still true. Similarly, Ethereum has a $1 billion market cap even before the emergence of real breakout applications on top, and only a year after its public release. And so that was sort of the core thesis on this FAT protocols thing.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  And I think the there's something similar happening in the AI value chain. Of course, there's like a bunch of other dynamics going on in in the AI value chain, and there's a lot of capture and complicated market dynamics. But The models feel like they're getting fatter every month and they're sort of eating away at the edges of what you can do with them. And so increasingly, you can just get more and more out of the core model, which is an interesting dynamic. Third, there's still like this huge question of like walled garden jumping. We've talked about this before, but it's almost that we need like a different term for like the dead internet theory. It's like the it's like the walled garden internet theory. Like, the internet's not dead. There's great information in Substack on certain legacy webs, legacy media websites and on

• 15:50John Coogan?

  Facebook and on X and on YouTube. But like, all of those companies don't want to interact with each other. And so that's where you get something like, oh, well, like, if you write code, you do get access to it loosely. Or if you're puppeteering a browser on a Mac Mini, you get access to that. Or if you're digging through iMessage locally, like, that can require a different workflow. But that's more of like a legal and business discussion than a technical one. Like, there's no reason technically that a single LLM wouldn't be able to just query every single web resource, except for the fact that the big, the various tech companies don't want each other to talk to each other. And so, the models, I think, will continue to find a way under the walled garden, over the walled garden, through the

• 16:34John Coogan?

  walls, like, they'll seep everywhere. And it's more of a question of just inference cost, how long it takes to actually grind through the wall. But they are already figuring out a way around. And then, and Open Claw is a good example of that. A lot of the walled gardens were sort of brought down by running.

• 16:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, except I think SAP came out and said, no unauthorized agents here. They're trying to, they're trying to put up the walls, they're trying to build a moat, they're trying to get some alligators to scare off the agents.

• 17:03John Coogan?

  Yes, but I would be very surprised if they're able to stop me from, if I have SAP and I'm running it locally, for me to take a screenshot of my computer and then tell the mouse to go where it wants. Like, it's very hard to fight back against these.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Rune had a good tweet where he was like, you know, people are now just like vessels for the AI, where they just like, the AI tells them what to do, and then they just act exactly like what the model says.

• 17:26John Coogan?

  Wasn't John Paulson talking about this?

• 17:30John Coogan?

  John Collison was saying, uh, like the humans get the thing off the high shelf. Every time I have to like go and like export a PDF and upload it to chat GPT because I can't get it in there by default, even though I could just give them a web URL, I have to export it to print or whatever.

• 17:44Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about, I think we should talk about GameStop.

• 17:47John Coogan?

  Let's do it. What's up with GameStop?

• 17:49Jordi Hays?

  What's going on with GameStop? Yesterday, it came out through Wall Street Journal, GameStop was preparing to make an offer for eBay as part of Ryan, CEO Ryan Cohen's plan to turn the retailer into a hundred billion dollar plus juggernaut. GameStop has been quietly building a stake in eBay's shares ahead of a potential offer and could submit an offer as soon as later this month, which they did, uh, this morning. If eBay isn't receptive, Cohen could decide to take the offer directly to eBay's shareholders. And, uh, they released a letter yesterday to, uh, Paul Pressler, who's the chairman of the board over at eBay, happens to be a friend of mine.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  Really?

• 18:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:28John Coogan?

  Wait, really?

• 18:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah. Uh, I, I, I, um, his daughter and my wife are good friends.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 18:36Jordi Hays?

  Um, so I end up, we end up hanging out a decent amount. Um, and we're neighbors.

• 18:41John Coogan?

  Does he do a lot of, does he do a lot of, uh, like podcasts or press appearances?

• 18:46Jordi Hays?

  It can, it can, we can, it can be discussed.

• 18:48John Coogan?

  I, I'm just saying like

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  I want to get

• 18:50John Coogan?

  determinism of Pressler would be like somebody who dominates the press.

• 18:53Jordi Hays?

  The press circuit.

• 18:53John Coogan?

  I think you would be doing a press circuit all the time.

• 18:55Jordi Hays?

  Um, anyways, Paul, Paul is fantastic.

• 18:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:58Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, Ryan wrote this letter to him yesterday, saying, "GameStop is proposing to acquire all common stock of eBay at a hundred and twenty-five dollars per share. We have accumulated a 5% economic stake in eBay through derivatives and beneficial ownership of common stock and are filing, filing a Schedule 13D and HSR notification tomorrow. Our offer is a hundred and twenty-five dollars per share comprising 50% cash and 50% GameStop common stock, which we will get to in just a little bit, um, because Ryan Cohen discussed this on CNBC this morning."

• 19:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that represents a 46% premium to eBay's unaffected closing price on February 4th, 2026, the day GameStop started accumulating its position in eBay.

• 19:37Jordi Hays?

  And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But let's go straight to the CNBC.

• 19:42John Coogan?

  So quickly, there was a question. So Bizlett said, can someone please tell me how GameStop has $56 billion? It's not a $56 billion company. There were questions and Ryan Cohen went in the ring with Aaron Sorkin over at CNBC.

• 20:00Jordi Hays?

  Put the gloves on.

• 20:02John Coogan?

  Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC Squawk Box to interview about the GameStop eBay acquisition. We can play this.

• 20:08Speaker 04

  Through how you could get to that price and how it would work.

• 20:14Speaker 05

  It's on our website. It's half cash, half stock. But the details are on our website.

• 20:26Speaker 04

  Can you help? I've read them, but can you help our audience understand them?

• 20:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, which part exactly?

• 20:36Speaker 04

  Well, I think we can start with the idea that the market cap of GameStop is, call it $11 billion. You have $9 billion on your balance sheet. Arguably, if you're providing effectively all of your stock and then the cash that gets you to 20. You have this letter from TD. That's another 20. We're now at 40, but we're still off by, call it 16. And the 20, as far as I understand, while it's considered a highly confident letter, meaning TD's saying they're highly confident that they would provide the financing, it's not locked financing.

• 21:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, we'll see what happens.

• 21:29Speaker 04

  Never doubt. I hear you. Dead air. I understand that. I'm just trying to understand where the rest of the money would come from.

• 21:39Speaker 05

  It's half cash, half stock.

• 21:43Speaker 04

  I hear you. I'm just saying that that math doesn't get you to the price that you're offering.

• 21:55Speaker 06

  Ryan, that's a pretty straightforward question. I don't get it.

• 21:57John Coogan?

  I like that, you chiming in.

• 21:59Speaker 06

  Where's the rest of the money coming from? Andrew laid it out pretty clearly.

• 22:05Speaker 05

  I don't understand your question. We're offering half cash, half stock, and we have the ability to issue stock in order to get the deal done. But the full details of the offer are on our website.

• 22:18Speaker 06

  But you're on our air. We thought we'd get...

• 22:23Speaker 05

  But I don't understand your question.

• 22:26John Coogan?

  Where's the money coming from? That's the question.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  You're wondering, record scratch, freeze friend, you're wondering how I tried to buy a $55 billion company with $40 billion earmarked.

• 22:38Jordi Hays?

  Do you think he was expecting this to go out on Sunday, Monday, GameStop stocks to pop like crazy?

• 22:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:46Jordi Hays?

  And it's actually down today?

• 22:48John Coogan?

  I guess that's possible. I don't know. I also don't understand why he can't just say like, "Hey, we're in the process. Like, we got a highly likely letter from a bank for 20. Yeah, we need 16 more, but we're gonna go get more letters from other banks. We're gonna go get other equity investors. Like, this is a whole process. We're excited to announce this, and this is like our first close. Like, we're not like, we're fully ready."

• 23:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:11John Coogan?

  But maybe you can't do that?

• 23:13Jordi Hays?

  So the tough thing is he took this offer to Paul, impairment of the board.

• 23:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:16Jordi Hays?

  Now, Paul has to look at this and be like, "Okay, is this a real offer?"

• 23:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:21Jordi Hays?

  And I imagine Paul will watch CNBC, and that's not gonna give anyone a lot of confidence.

• 23:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's, yeah, I mean, you can imagine it in the context of like buying a house. You know, you show up and someone says like, "I have 80% of the money, and like, my bank will underwrite me for 50%, and I have 30% in cash," and you're just like, "Look, I need the full amount."

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the tough thing is like, I'm wondering, I'm wondering what Ryan, you know, eBay is an incredible business. It's been remarkably durable. They've faced an onslaught of competition for every single category from sneakers to watches to... Art to name any cars, right? Any category, there is like a vertical competitor to eBay.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:05Jordi Hays?

  And yet, the business has done, has been remarkably, remarkably strong.

• 24:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:10Jordi Hays?

  It's up pretty meaningfully this year, right? Like, management is executing.

• 24:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:15Jordi Hays?

  And it's unfortunate for Ryan and his bid that the most viral sort of video clip out of all of this is just him failing to answer, like, you know, a pretty straightforward question and not having an opportunity to talk about, okay, why do you, you know, presumably if you're buying this company, you think it can and should be worth a lot more. What's your, what's your plan? What's your plan for the business? Why are you better suited to run it than, than Jamie, who's been in, in the seat since 2020? Worked at eBay from 2001 to 2009.

• 24:47John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 24:47Jordi Hays?

  So he's a veteran, knows the business very well. And you're coming in $16 billion short. At least, that's what it looks like. Anyways, this bid could be, could be over before it really started.

• 25:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. Or, I mean, it could attract a bunch of investors who want to line up and fall in line and wind up producing the 55 or so required. But it does feel like it's, it's a ways away. Breaking news for gamers out there.

• 25:16Jordi Hays?

  What's that?

• 25:17John Coogan?

  I know a lot of gamers out there, they have laptops, they're worried about the price of these laptops, the batteries, electricity's getting expensive, what are you gonna do? How are you gonna charge? We got the solution for you. It's a gas, it's a gasoline-powered laptop. So, it's pretty simple. It's a one-of-a-kind gasoline-powered laptop. It's offered for just $850. Looks like it's running Windows XP. You might not be able to play the latest and greatest games. Will it run Crysis? Maybe, maybe not.

• 25:45Jordi Hays?

  With a full tank, you can get an hour and a half of runtime out of this.

• 25:48John Coogan?

  It runs a two-stroke engine, and it's perfect for off-grid computing. That's hot right now. And so, the laptop specs, let's take you through it. It's got an Intel Core 2 Duo. 2 gigs of RAM. RAM's going up in price. This is valuable. This is an appreciating asset. 120 gigs of hard drive space. That's gonna hold a lot of games when you're off-grid. You only have a little bit of gasoline. You want a game? This is the laptop for you.

• 26:14Jordi Hays?

  And of course, it's running Windows XP.

• 26:17John Coogan?

  And it says that it starts easy. The, the, the two-stroke engine on the gasoline-powered laptop, yes, it does start easily.

• 26:24Jordi Hays?

  Colin in the X chat says it gets 300 tweets to the gallon.

• 26:32John Coogan?

  Oh, no, I accidentally set GTA V to max settings. Well, at least it'll serve as a benchmark test. How many Chrome tabs can it open before it crashes? People are having fun with this. But the gasoline powered laptop, this is true hacker mindset. Whoever built this is an incredible engineer and did something, they did the impossible. They built a gasoline powered laptop. I've seen a couple of other of these like gasoline powered projects, people making all sorts of different things. It's always a funny gag, obviously.

• 27:02Jordi Hays?

  The actual breaking news is the White House is considering vetting AI models before they are released.

• 27:07John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 27:07Jordi Hays?

  Trump admin, which took a non-interventionist approach to AI, is now discussing imposing oversight on AI models before they are made publicly available.

• 27:15John Coogan?

  Well, FDA for AI, we'll see.

• 27:17Jordi Hays?

  It would be potentially an executive order to create an AI working group that would bring together tech executives and government officials to examine potential oversight procedures. Okay, so this would be an executive order to create a working group that could potentially create an oversight body.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  Okay, so we're a couple of steps away, but seems reasonable. I don't know, depends on what the, what the, what the, what the benchmarks are, but you certainly don't want.

• 27:43Jordi Hays?

  And Trump says, we're gonna make this industry absolutely the top because right now it's a beautiful baby that's born.

• 27:51John Coogan?

  Interesting way to put it.

• 27:52Jordi Hays?

  We have to grow that baby and let that baby thrive. We can't stop. It's a real quote.

• 27:56John Coogan?

  Are you messing with me?

• 27:58Jordi Hays?

  It's a real quote that Trump said about AI. He said, we have to grow that baby and let that baby thrive. We can't stop it. We can't stop it with politics. We can't stop it with foolish rules and even stupid rules.

• 28:09John Coogan?

  It's not a baby. It's a $10 trillion industry. It's like the, the engine of the global economy. Anyway.

• 28:18Jordi Hays?

  Dean Ball's got a quote in here. He said, the technology is moving extremely fast and there are few formal procedures, but they don't want to over regulate. Said it's a tricky balance.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  I say, don't release it unless it's acing tax bench. It's gotta be able to do the taxes before it gets out into the wild. No, obviously you want these models to be safe. You want them to be reliable. You want them to avoid negative externalities and anything that gets us in that direction is probably good, but everything comes with trade offs, so.

• 28:46Jordi Hays?

  Final post of the day from Tommy.

• 28:50Jordi Hays?

  Hi, PhD in hammerology here. Alright, so what we're looking at is a nail.

• 28:56John Coogan?

  That is the correct mindset. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Also, go check out Riley Walls' new project. He's shipping stuff every week. This one got a million views. You probably already saw it, 27,000 likes. 10% of AMC movie showings sell no tickets at all. So if you want to go see a movie in a private theater with no one else, he made a site that finds empty theaters and tells you exactly when you should go and book. You can go see Project Hail Mary at 12:30 PM today in New York. If you don't have work, you can go see Project Hail Mary in your private theater. It's available at walzer.com/empty screenings,

• 29:37John Coogan?

  W A L Z R dot com, empty screenings. You can search by zip code. Let's see what's around us. Is there anything good?

• 29:44Speaker 03

  There's 10:45 PM Devil Wears Part II.

• 29:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:47Speaker 03

  Around us, zero seats.

• 29:48John Coogan?

  Enjoy it. Enjoy being allowed.

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  You gotta.

• 29:52John Coogan?

  This is very funny. Yeah, there's, he does, he does surface some that have one seat or two seats. Interesting way to make a new friend. Me and you. Because you think so, you think, oh, I got the zero seat theater. You're in the one-seat theater and somebody's like, I want to meet the psycho that went to the empty theater. And then they're talking your ear off. Who knows? Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tvp.com and we will see you tomorrow.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  Love you.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  Goodbye. A little bit mistimed there.