U.S. AI Execs Warn as China’s AI Push Grows, Substack Adds AI Detection Tool | 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.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  China, China, China, China is in the news. Top American execs are sounding alarms. The White House is divided on how to respond to recent advances in Chinese AI, has weighed crackdown measures. We talked about how this was coming. It is interesting, there's a lot of like hurry up and pedal to the metal and then pull back and then ban the American model and then are we going to ban the Chinese model in a similar way? And lots of contradictions, lots of insider baseball, everyone's critiquing everyone else, lots of interesting takes, also just some interesting data about what's actually going on with these models. How advanced are they? Where do they come from? How cheap are they to make? What are the economic impacts in America?

• 0:47John Coogan?

  But the Wall Street Journal has a nice little roundup here we can take you through. So Silicon Valley in Washington are debating a multi-billion dollar question. Should American companies be able to use Chinese artificial intelligence models? They certainly have been able to, hasn't been a problem for years, but now they're getting stronger. OpenAI and Anthropic executives are sounding the alarm about the rise of cheap AI, particularly powerful new models produced in China suggesting that they will lead to quote "a dystopian AI future" and present unacceptable security risks without regulation. And that is the point of debate. Are you on the side of dystopian open source or liberating open source? The George Hawes frame.

• 1:29John Coogan?

  Some analysis, some analysts who study the AI industry say the two companies which are preparing for public listings in the next year, they just want to eliminate the competition. The emergence of highly capable, open, autonomous AI systems, including Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 model and Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 Max. And Alibaba is actually a massive investor in Moonshot. They have their own Anthropic Google over there going on. Alibaba is like very much the Google too, in the sense that they have a large position there. Which were released in recent days and viewed favorably by investors and users has turned the AI race on its head once again. Kimi K3 was also competitive with US models on some benchmarks.

• 2:14John Coogan?

  The debate over the new models which are quote "open wait" but not yet, they're about to open source them, we'll see what happens next week. Allowing users to download and customize them with company data for specific tasks, very, very good, very useful. Coincides with division in the Trump administration about whether to take steps to limit the use of models in the United States. Quote, "One probable outcome of an open wait model dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes rather than a market product. AI is a public good which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of digital public infrastructure." Dean Ball, OpenAI's head of strategic futures, said in an ex post Friday. Dean Ball made it to the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Now, the AI communism is just at the model level, like there would still be a bunch

• 2:59John Coogan?

  of like, a lot of people who are long compute, long Neo cloud, they say like, this is where the value should accrue, the data centers will accrue a reasonable margin and they will still continue to make money. And so it's not that this automatically leads to nationalization of compute in any way. People would still be paid, but the margins might be lower is at least the formulation here. So Ball, a former Trump administration official, called such a scenario "a dystopian hellscape", and he said he expected the Trump administration to make moves toward reducing the use of open source models. Ball later clarified that he wasn't advocating for the United States government to discourage Chinese AI.

• 3:43John Coogan?

  He also highlighted a central challenge with the AI race. Top tier AI companies raised billions of dollars to pay for the vast computing resources needed to continue improving AI systems. If everyone uses AI systems that people largely don't pay for, there would be no way to finance continued frontier AI development. Ball, who started at the company earlier this month and focuses on policy and strategy and OpenAI, have said his comments don't reflect the company's official positions. He's just posting, "The company has developed its own models, own open models, and chief executive Sam Altman had previously said that OpenAI's past approach of only developing closed tools was unwise." Other top AI executives have warned that open models present huge risks since developers and policymakers lack control over how they are used and modified. Lot of risk of cyber attacks, lot of risk of annoying spam attacks.

• 4:28John Coogan?

  The cyber thing is very concerning and annoying if that really ramps up. But the good news is that the closed source models have been available to cybersecurity firms and a lot of big, major companies. The finance industry, for example, has had access to Mythos and GPT-Cyber for almost six months. And then just today, Google announced a specific model, Flashlight Cyber, I think. So they're trying to offer a similar capability, but really go down the cost curve because a lot of the cyber tools, there was incredible breakthroughs with Mythos, GPT-Cyber, like great benchmarks on those, but could be very expensive. We heard, I think, wasn't it Indikesh Rora said, I think he spent like a million dollars

• 5:11John Coogan?

  to find some zero day bug and it was like totally worth it, but that's expensive for smaller companies that might just need, it'd be great to just be able to go to a cheap cyber tuned model, get approved by Google and say, hey, just go and read every line of code and just let me know if there's anything that's obvious. And that could be good.

• 5:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and just to be clear, they released 3.5 Flashlight and 3.5 Flash Cyber. So it's not like Flashlight Cyber.

• 5:35John Coogan?

  Okay, but Flash is still cheaper than the big model, right?

• 5:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's like the Pro and then there's

• 5:39John Coogan?

  And so I have to imagine that if you, given the choice, if you're like a mid-sized company and your choice is like, go beat down the door to get into Project Glasswing, to spend $5 million to have Mythos read every line of code, or you're like, oh, well, I'm already a Google partner, I have a really solid business relationship with them because I've been buying ads and I have Google Webmaster tools set up and I just want to go set up Flash Cyber, not Flashlight Cyber. I imagine that the cost would be cheaper because they fine tuned this model for the specific thing. So Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei, for years, has worried, warned about the risks of powerful and open AI systems, saying in a recent Bloomberg interview that having AI models

• 6:24John Coogan?

  with advanced cybersecurity capabilities that are free to download could be harmful. He said, "It's a serious concern. Use of Chinese models, which are far cheaper than US counterparts, is surging at US companies, prompting some investors to question the staying power of top model makers such as Anthropic and OpenAI. The current US open source frontier is starting to catch up with China's. On Wednesday, Thinking Machines Lab, led by former AI technology chief Miramirati, released its fir, first AI model as open wait. Nvidia's Nematron 3 Ultra is starting to see traction." That's interesting to hear. I haven't heard nearly enough buzz around Nematron. I know Jensen has been investing in it, he's also investing in a lot of up and down the stack.

• 7:04Jordi Hays?

  I've been hearing buzz about the name, John.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  Nematron's a good name.

• 7:07Jordi Hays?

  Nematron, very cool name. People are, you know, there's some talks bubbling, people are saying it's one of the best names for a family of models ever.

• 7:18John Coogan?

  What comes after Ultra? Isn't that what the, didn't Apple first do that with the M4 Pro, the M4 Max, the M4 Ultra? So we got to come up with an even better word for what happens after Ultra.

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  Giga.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  Giga, maybe?

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Hyper.

• 7:33John Coogan?

  And then Exa. The market's faith in Anthropic and OpenAI continuing to build more capable models that push the frontier, AI frontier, has been at the heart of the boom, helping justify trillions of dollars in spending on infrastructure in the coming years. The threat that new players will vastly undercut what they can charge for advanced AI pushed down some tech and AI company stocks prices last week. David Sacks, the venture capitalist and White House AI advisor, suggested that he read Ball's post as a confession to a regulatory capture strategy. Sacks and others have long seen calls for AI regulation by companies such as Anthropic as efforts to use new laws and policies to stymie competitors. The weaponization of regulatory uncertainty as a competitive tool should be completely unacceptable, he said.

• 8:16John Coogan?

  Security-focused administration officials in the past year have considered a slew of measures to crack down on Chinese AI companies developing open models. People familiar with the discussion said they've weighed adding the businesses to trade blacklists, security warnings on Chinese AI companies and a potential executive order targeting open models. So it does seem like, even though Tyler Cowen, we were going back and forth with him about this, about like, can you even ban it? You can't really ban anything in the land of the free. Like, the solution to piracy was not really to ban piracy, like you can still torrent things, but it's just so easy to use Apple TV and Spotify and Netflix that most people

• 8:55John Coogan?

  just wind up just paying $5, $2 for a song or $10 a month for something, that it effectively killed it just because the product experience was better.

• 9:05Jordi Hays?

  This morning, our Treasury Secretary Besen was on Fox and said, "This administration supports open source models, but what we do not support is IP theft. If we see, especially their overseas models are stealing from our great companies, we have the ability to sanction them because of this theft." So it will be, if the admin does take serious action here, I would expect that to be the line of reasoning, where they could just sanction the companies behind these models, which I imagine would create a real opportunity for American open source. You would ultimately see a lot of these, you know, Neo clouds unable, I imagine, to

• 9:50Jordi Hays?

  serve the, you know, traditional Chinese open source models. I imagine that even OpenRouter would probably have to

• 9:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 9:59Jordi Hays?

  Stop supporting them.

• 10:00John Coogan?

  But again, with an open source model, like, how do you even define it? Because if there's a research paper and then you go and implement that and you train it or you take it, you fine tune it, or you use the data to bootstrap your own model, like, just like where, where in the supply chain, how many steps away do you need to be to like not count on there? Didn't Perplexity do like a 1776 DeepSeek very quickly? They did a fine tune, I think you did a fine tune on DeepSeek as well.

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was like using sparse autoencoders. I did it first, so.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  But, and what nationality was the model that you used as the base?

• 10:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, it was DeepSeek, it was Chinese.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  Wow, confession. You can go now.

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people are already angry at Besson's comments and are saying funny that he's not mentioning that yesterday, US judge approved Anthropic's one and a half billion dollar copyright lawsuit settlement. Or I don't think they, I think they settled that they were in possession of books that had been torrented or basically acquired unlawfully. I don't believe that.

• 11:10John Coogan?

  Annoffally sounds like they stole the book. I think they bought the books.

• 11:14Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no, no. I think this was, no, they separately, they bought a bunch of books, trained on them and destroyed.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  And that just made people upset because no one likes the idea of books being destroyed, of course.

• 11:25Jordi Hays?

  I think those were rare, like rare, rare books.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  The Wilmanitis collection was destroyed. Rare PDFs.

• 11:32Jordi Hays?

  Judge William Alsup of the US District Court for the Northern District of California issued a preliminary approval of the settlement last year after ruling that Anthropic had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books and the settlement was signed off on by a different judge yesterday. The payout will deliver $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works, shared among the authors and publishers who hold rights to them.

• 11:58John Coogan?

  Anyway, there was some news about like whether or not Kimi K3 is distilled. Tyler, can you take us through this Lisan Algaib post?

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so he didn't actually make this chart. It was from someone else, but basically this shows a bunch of models compared to another and it's like the kind of semantic similarities between them. So it's like if you use similar kind of diction or phrases, stuff like this, you just like pump the model a bunch of times and you kind of can tell what's similar to each other. And you can see in this version, it looks like like Kimi K3 is very similar to Fable 5.

• 12:31John Coogan?

  Fable 5 and then also Opus 4.7, Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5. So they might have gotten tokens from like all four of those models sort of mixed them together.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Also, I think this exact example, like only like a few prompts were used. It's not like super involved. It's also like, this is very much just like correlation. This is not like proven that they distill or anything. They could have just used like similar, you know, post-training techniques or something like this.

• 12:52John Coogan?

  Totally. But notably, GPT 5.4, 5.5, 5.6 share very little similarity to the Anthropic models and vice versa. The Anthropic models don't seem to be correlated with the OpenAI models, although the OpenAI models are correlated with them with each other. So 5.6 Luna looks pretty correlated with 5.4 because they probably were like, well, we're building on the shoulders of the work that we've been done. And it's the same thing with Anthropic where Fable has some of the same flavor as an Opus or a Haiku. And that makes sense.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  That makes sense because people have like been saying, oh, maybe those models were actually distilled from the big like mythos pre-train, right?

• 13:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, or vice versa, or vice versa, you have a bunch of users that are doing rollouts on Opus, trying to vibe co different things and you take all that training data and then you feed that into Fable and Fable sort of like picks up on a lot of that because that's what the user said, wow, you really did a great job on this Opus or you did really poorly. It pulls that out, but it's still learning the textual similarity. Well, people will go back and forth on this and debate the level of distillation and also what the punishment for distillation should be. Should it just be a slap on the wrist or should it be something bigger?

• 14:13Jordi Hays?

  The only thing I would say here is like distillation against, against the terms of service. And I think that suing Chinese companies, it would be a complete and total waste of time. Ask anyone who's built a product that's been knocked.

• 14:29John Coogan?

  I disagree. Incredible aura farm. If you, if you personally serve Xi Jinping, the next time he's in San Francisco, meeting with a world leader, you show up.

• 14:41Jordi Hays?

  You have been served.

• 14:41John Coogan?

  You show up to the UN, serve the world leader. There's something about that that's, you know, extremely bold. But I know, I agree with you. Very difficult. I don't even know if you went to your law firm and you said like, hey, we want to sue this Chinese company, like how they would trace that down. Jim Cramer says, we must not let our companies use these Chinese models to save a few bucks. OpenAI and Anthropic are correct. This is vital national security. Please, please read Bing West's just released CAT 5. I respect the Chinese people greatly, but these companies are run by the PLA. For heaven's sakes, George Hotz fires back under the tiny grad handle. He says, isn't this a joke? I'd be happy to use Anthropic if they put their weights on hugging face like the Chinese.

• 15:26John Coogan?

  American tech companies are rent extraction machines that have lost the plot. No point continuing to defend them. They need to change if they want to win people back.

• 15:36Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, China is also thinking about export controls in the Financial Times. Apparently Alibaba, ByteDance and Zhihu.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  Mothcom.

• 15:46Jordi Hays?

  Mothcom. Talk to AI companies, including Alibaba, ByteDance and Zhihu on limiting the transfer of key data for the training of their models overseas, as well as allowing their model weights to be downloaded.

• 15:56John Coogan?

  Or Ministry of Commerce, probably their Department of Commerce.

• 15:58Jordi Hays?

  That seems more like it. China would still let overseas customers access the models and services, but it sounds like they're leaning towards not making the weights open. We're gonna, we're gonna see with the new Kimi K3, if they actually release the weights next week. Dean Ball says, wow, two days in a row where things I said are likely to happen seem likelier to happen from two adversarial countries, almost as though my analysis was right and as though people should not have deliberately misinterpreted, misinterpreted me as of making prescriptions, huh?

• 16:30John Coogan?

  Dean Ball victory lap.

• 16:33John Coogan?

  You gotta take a victory lap for Dean Ball. He called it. No, he, I mean, he was saying like, I don't necessarily agree with this, but just from his experience, this is how things might play out. And people were.

• 16:44Jordi Hays?

  Raj in the chat says Ministry of Commerce, People's Republic of China.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  It's their Department of Commerce.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  That would go hard on a business card.

• 16:53John Coogan?

  It would.

• 16:54Jordi Hays?

  The great slop wars.

• 16:55John Coogan?

  Slop wars continue.

• 16:57Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video from Substack. They say, today, Substack is launching an AI detection feature via an integration with Pangram. Going forward, you'll be able to scan posts, replies and comments on the Substack app to see an estimate of how much of it was written by a human or with AI assistance. We care about this at Substack because it gets to the core of our mission to build an economic engine for culture.

• 17:19John Coogan?

  This is gonna be bad for Tyler since he's mastered the ability to write exactly like an AI. What was that sentence, sentence you wrote by hand that was like, according to studies, you're absolutely right. And you just threw in every possible AI-ism and got flagged 100% by Pangram. No, I think people will enjoy this. The, the revealed preference is probably that people don't care if it's good and they enjoy the, the content, but we'll, we'll, we'll go back and forth and debate it with Chris Best today and see where all of that is going. Now, do you think that Substack writers should admit when they hire essentially ghostwriters?

• 18:02Jordi Hays?

  Probably.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  Because sometimes you start a brand under a name, like not every post on Bloomberg.com is from Michael Bloomberg. In fact, none of them are. They're all from other people, but they disclose this is from, you know, some writer. This is from Joe Weisenthal, right? But some new influencer brands have grown, even in the pre-AI era. I had a writer on my team when I was doing YouTube videos where I would write something, he would do a draft, we'd try to go back and forth. I'd put him in the credits, but I wouldn't like kick it off with like, hey, just so you know.

• 18:40Jordi Hays?

  It says, book authors don't. That is certainly.

• 18:42John Coogan?

  That's 100% true. Some book authors will put like, this is written by this person and this person. It depends on like the aura of the ghostwriter. Some ghostwriters actually do get credits in the book, but yes, most book authors, like Tom Clancy, I think passed away and they're still producing books. There's a number of writers where their, their individual brand grew so big that they can, you can have like a new. Yeah, they become their own brand and so.

• 19:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would, I would imagine that 30% of the books in like an airport bookstore are just 100% ghostwritten and probably don't disclose it.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  I think, I, I do think it should be, it should be possible to get to the truth if you hunt hard enough, but I don't necessarily need you to put it front and center.

• 19:27Jordi Hays?

  For a Substack author or creator, just put it somewhere that you have a team of people that help you create your work.

• 19:35John Coogan?

  Well, Dave Eggers took to the Financial Times saying that no one is gonna read AI books. He's of course the author of The Circle. He's an American writer, editor, publisher. A heartbreaking work of staggering genius is his 2000 memoir, bestseller, final for finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He says, gullible and ridiculous. No one will read AI novels. I think people are already reading AI novels. So he, maybe he means like no one who's cool or no one who he likes or something. Let's read through a little bit of this Financial Times article. Dave Eggers offers a hand so I can clamor aboard his 23-foot sailboat, moored in the shadow of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

• 20:20John Coogan?

  It's a grand setting with few frills as we sit on the stern a meter apart, fuel cans and fishing nets at our feet. There is no one around to disturb our conversation. The nearest toilets are portaloos, a short bike ride away. The birthing fees are negligible, making it one of the cheapest places to live in uber wealthy Silicon Valley. I hadn't thought of that sailboat. If you're at a tech company, this has got to be the next big lock-in trend.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Antonio Garcia Martinez did this. He talked about in his book, Chaos Monkeys.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  I'm not, I won't be satisfied until I see LARPers posting images on Twitter being like, hey, I just moved to San Francisco. I'm building the next one person, 25 billion dollar company.

• 21:00Jordi Hays?

  I'm finding a houseboat in San Rafael.

• 21:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, how much?

• 21:04Jordi Hays?

  For 1,000.

• 21:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it, it actually works out to $1,483 a month, apparently, if you finance it through Boat Trader.

• 21:14John Coogan?

  Goodbye Tyler.

• 21:15Jordi Hays?

  It's only about $200,000 to live in a 2022 houseboat.

• 21:19John Coogan?

  2022, that's a brand new houseboat.

• 21:21Jordi Hays?

  Yes, you have to think about the, yeah, the slip fees, but you could easily come in, have your own house on the water.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  No, the average, the average one bedroom rent in San Francisco is like two grand, three grand right now.

• 21:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you could have a whole house and a boat.

• 21:34John Coogan?

  And a boat. It's amazing. This is the hack. If you get a job in tech and you're printing, making six figures.

• 21:42Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 21:42John Coogan?

  Move into a houseboat.

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull this up.

• 21:45John Coogan?

  Is this an option in LA? Should members of the team be doing this? Should we, should we recommend this to?

• 21:50Jordi Hays?

  Look at this brand, almost brand new.

• 21:53John Coogan?

  I feel like Jackson is a great.

• 21:54Jordi Hays?

  2024 La Mer Modern 11. It's a 36 foot houseboat. We have a video here.

• 22:00John Coogan?

  Well, Dave Eggers says, they call it a $10 dock with a million dollar view.

• 22:05Jordi Hays?

  Look at this, John. This?

• 22:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:07Jordi Hays?

  Couple thousand bucks a month.

• 22:09John Coogan?

  This is where the next great startup will be born.

• 22:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, garages are out.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  Garages are completely out. And also like, oh, take your shoes off. It's no, it's natural to take your shoes off when you're on a boat, you know, right? Let's get boat shoes. Wear boat shoes to the boat.

• 22:23Jordi Hays?

  The La Mer Modern 11 offers reliable performance and strong power with two Yamaha 25 high thrust engines, providing a total of 50 horsepower. Its two cabins and one head ensure overnight comfort for extended stays. How about year long stays? How about a decade long stay? The boat's design includes an upper deck terrace with flexi teak flooring, enhancing its appeal for relaxation and entertainment. And might I say locking in standard features such as air conditioning? We have air conditioning on our houseboats.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 22:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, with reverse cycle heat, heated floors, LED lighting.

• 22:58John Coogan?

  Heated floors.

• 22:59Jordi Hays?

  LED lighting.

• 23:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  The inclusion of foam filled composite floats and galvanized steel subframe ensures durability and stability.

• 23:08John Coogan?

  Did we just solve the housing crisis? Send this to Sagar and Jetty immediately. This is seasteading. This is the teal thesis. Everyone living in houseboats, just more.

• 23:18Jordi Hays?

  BoatTrader.com is saying that this.

• 23:21John Coogan?

  This is amazing.

• 23:21Jordi Hays?

  Modern houseboat would come out to just $2,259 with only $52,000 down. I promise that we have no financial relationship with BoatTrader.com.

• 23:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:33Jordi Hays?

  Even though I'm making a pretty strong pitch here.

• 23:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:38John Coogan?

  I love it. Um, should you recline your airplane seat? What do you think? People are going back and forth on this.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  Brandon Duck says, I don't remember subscribing to this channel, but I've been listening for 10 minutes. I'm having a good time.

• 23:51John Coogan?

  Welcome.

• 23:51Jordi Hays?

  Last name Ducks comes on just for the half.

• 23:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, make it make sense. Make it make sense. He's just like, I just happen to be here for the duck section of the, of the show.

• 24:01Jordi Hays?

  Andrew says, I'm gonna need a double wide houseboat lol. Bootlegging distilled anthropic models on the houseboat.

• 24:08John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 24:10Jordi Hays?

  Living the dream.

• 24:14John Coogan?

  Okay, so should you recline your airplane seat? Uh, there's a central, investigating the central dilemma of our time. Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker wrote a, a piece. Imagine this scenario. After a long drive to the airport, you've just taken off for a 15 hour flight. Where are you going? 15 hours is so long. How long was the flight to Austria from LA?

• 24:35Jordi Hays?

  I think it's like 12 hours.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  So you're going.

• 24:37Jordi Hays?

  You're going to the Middle East.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  You're going to the Middle East, maybe. Okay. Uh, you're in coach and a family of three is sitting behind you, a man, a woman and a toddler. They seem nice, but as the flight continues, the kiddo grows restless. He kicks your seat and pokes her toys into your shoulder. Stop that, you hear the father say. The toddler incredibly quiets down. The cabin lights dim. It's time to sleep. Yet just as rest closes in, you sense motion. The seat in front of you is reclining. You watch as it comes all the way back. Now you feel cramped with someone else's seat in your face. You also notice some stiffness in your shoulders. Your fingers caress your own recline button. Surely the reclined upon are entitled to recline. Just as you start to lean back, you hear a clearing throat.

• 25:18John Coogan?

  You turn around to see the dad who fixes you with his gaze. Excuse me, he says, would you mind keeping your seat up? I think it's game on. They put the button there. They would just take it away.

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think I've always expected everyone to just recline.

• 25:30John Coogan?

  Everyone reclines. Everyone has the same amount of space. It's the conservation of space and the whole pitch.

• 25:36Jordi Hays?

  Hard to make the argument that the, the vertical seat is more comfortable than the reclined seat.

• 25:40John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 25:41Jordi Hays?

  So I think everyone commit to comfort.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  Everyone commits to comfort.

• 25:44Jordi Hays?

  Chat is sharing the real alpha. Stand up immediately when the flight lands.

• 25:49John Coogan?

  Have you seen those Meta Rayban videos where people sprint to the front? It's so rude. The guy is like, like, you know, he's like, as soon as he goes beep, he just bolts and passes everybody and gets to the front. Very rude. I don't think you should do that.

• 26:03Jordi Hays?

  This is antisocial behavior. I don't think you should recline your seat.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  How is it antisocial?

• 26:07Jordi Hays?

  Because you're infringing on some, just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  But they put the button there.

• 26:11Jordi Hays?

  Horrible take.

• 26:12John Coogan?

  They're, they're.

• 26:12Jordi Hays?

  Horrible take.

• 26:14John Coogan?

  That, that, that's like, don't use the bathroom on the, on the plane. They put the bathroom there. It's okay to use the bathroom.

• 26:19Jordi Hays?

  Entire life, even as a child, I was looking up, waiting for, for, you know, the, the seatbelt sign to, you know, to be up in the air. Seatbelt signs off, you recline your seat. Everyone reclines. All good.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, what, what about, what about ordering a Diet Coke on a plane? If I'm sitting next to you, will you order a Diet Coke or is that antisocial behavior?

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  That's completely different.

• 26:40John Coogan?

  Okay. What's your stance on JBL in the airplane?

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  Little petty walk. JBL, you know.

• 26:46John Coogan?

  I, I, I do think, I do think that could be the next, the next trend.

• 26:50Jordi Hays?

  The big question is, are you bringing on your, you know, smart portable beaker?

• 26:56John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 26:56Jordi Hays?

  Maybe from a, from a, from an open AI. Are you bringing that on the plane and talking to it the whole time? Is that offensive?

• 27:04John Coogan?

  I think that's deeply offensive.

• 27:05Jordi Hays?

  Have you seen when like a, a band is traveling?

• 27:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:08Jordi Hays?

  And they start playing on the plane? Have you seen these videos?

• 27:10John Coogan?

  No, I haven't. That's not school though.

• 27:12Jordi Hays?

  I'll send you one.

• 27:13John Coogan?

  I'd be down.

• 27:13Jordi Hays?

  That would make me jump.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  So this all started because, uh, in 2014, 538, we gotta have him on the show. Uh, Nate, obviously. Uh, 538 asked around a thousand flyers what they thought about reclining their seats. 41% of them said that reclining was rude. So they lost. It's not rude.

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 27:32John Coogan?

  That number seems to have risen though. In 2020, Eric Jones, a math professor who writes about travel statistics on the website, The Vacationer, conducted a similar survey and found that 77% of respondents objected to reclining. Wow. Sheep, sheeple over here. We got sheeple in the building.

• 27:48Jordi Hays?

  I think you should be able to recline if you're like dressed nicely. If you're wearing sweatpants, then you don't get to.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  You don't get to recline. Sort of a conditional recline.

• 27:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Should kids be able to kick the front, the seat in front of them as much as they want?

• 28:01John Coogan?

  See, that's something I will pull, I will totally put up with. I'm totally fine getting kicked in the back by a kid. Because it's so brutal as a parent, as a kid to be on a plane. They're locked up in the plane. That's miserable. And just, just tough it up. You're, you're reclined. You have multiple inches of padding. Unless you got Ronaldo back there, you're gonna be fine.

• 28:21Jordi Hays?

  Order that hot pizza pocket. Live life in the permanent underclass. Live a little for God's sake.

• 28:27John Coogan?

  Ramp launched a model router. Uh, Brexton loves it. He says, Ramp launching a model router is god tier. Product expansion. The winds are blessing it. The market is exhausted with token maxing. Proliferation of new models, sovereignty. This is the first time I've looked at a launch and went, wow. This might be the start of a new core product. Yeah. Uh, there's been a bunch of speculation about this, but it makes a lot of sense. Ramp's pro, promise is to save you time and money. The CFOs are increasingly annoyed by token, uh, routing. We talked to Eric Lyman about this last week. Are you using the craziest frontier model, burning millions of tokens to answer the weather?

• 29:07John Coogan?

  Maybe that should have an expense report attached. And, uh, so, uh, very, very exciting to see where this goes. How they roll it out. I know it's in alpha with a number of customers. And I believe that the product's actually available to non-ramp customers as well. So you can use their product exclusively.

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  You says, going after everything time and money touches.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. Anyway, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and.

• 29:37Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  We love you. Goodbye. Flashbang in the horse.