Zuck’s AI Vision, Celebs Are Dating Private Equity Guys, AI Agent Hacks Gym | 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?

  Big, big news. Mark Zuckerberg dropped a blog post. Also, I mean, the bigger news is that they open sourced already one model and they're planning to open source Muse Spark 1.2. That's big. But, but the blog post lays out his AI vision and we should go through it. Meta was sort of set up to be, and also ran in the AI race, like the Lama project stalled out, Jan LeCoon exited, their biggest model, Behemoth, never shipped, which was ironic because in the Bible, Behemoth is this untamable land creature. And of course, it was just the model was too big to be tamed to be released. And it was like nominative determinism in action. Happens a lot in tech, unfortunately. But they also turned over the entire team

• 0:43John Coogan?

  and Zuck said, I'm not quitting. I'm not out of the game. I'm staying. I'm all in. Yeah. And I'm raising debt, equity, doing all sorts of deals, making things happen, making big offers to AI researchers, rebuilding the team, bringing in Alex Wang, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, a bunch of heavy hitters. And they already build massive data centers. They have a huge surface area to distribute AI consumer experiences. If they come up with new ones, they have, you know, billions of users that can put some, you know, hey, try this thing. And maybe they'll get a bunch of users from it if it's good. Semi, semi analysis also just one month ago laid out like a much more detailed bull case for MSL in particular. It was interesting because I was always optimistic about, okay, they have a lot of data from Instagram. They have a lot of images. They'll do a great image

• 1:27John Coogan?

  model, like the image editing will be the best in class. They, they can finally like kill cap cut with their edits app, which is great. And when I think about you're taking an image, you're taking a video, you have a bunch of videos from a trip, you want to edit all that together for some Instagram story or Instagram reel. Reels editing is its own skill, its own talent. It's not available to everyone. A lot of like family friends of mine will use Instagram and they'll just post a picture on stories. They're not doing edited cinematic reels, but with AI, you potentially get someone from, oh, you took a bunch of video, some of it's horizontal, some of it's vertical, some of it's sort of cropped wrong, some of it's colored.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  Turn that into some brain rot for me. You can just throw it right here in this trough.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  Adding those programmatically. No, you actually could. You actually could. And so, and so I was optimistic about that. And then obviously we talked to Eric Sufrid about just the gem model and how AI can immediately move the needle on ad monetization, targeting all of that. So there were lots of reasons to be optimistic. Semi analysis laid out this more detailed bull case. And they said that there was this interesting detail that maybe was getting missed, which was that by recording the screens of every Meta employee, which is very controversial and bold, but actually ripping that Band-Aid off and just saying, hey, we're, we're an AI training company now and everyone's going to be recording their screens and their flows and all how all their work gets done. They basically

• 2:52John Coogan?

  got like a frontier, leading AI data labeling company for free. I mean, they took a, you know, PR hit for it, had to answer some questions, but in general, like the volume of tasks, the volume of quality data that's coming from that workforce now is on the order of a scale Mercor, handshake, et cetera, surge. And so they just get that more or less for free. Obviously Meta's lawyers are great. Meta's research is great. Meta's finance team is great. So if you're, if you're getting all of that, it's equivalent to hiring a really talented person to do a training task.

• 3:29Jordi Hays?

  Yes. Yes. And yes and no. I think, I think a lot of the data that, that the surges and Mercors are creating is much more specialized. And I think there's just a lot of noise coming out of that data. They also have like rolled some or maybe most of the program back. I think there was so much pushback.

• 3:46John Coogan?

  You can pause it for 15 seconds, once a day. No, I think you can pause it for like half an hour, an hour. If you want to go get a nice scroll in at work. But I mean, that's on brand. If you're like, yeah, I was scrolling reels. I work at Meta.

• 4:00Jordi Hays?

  Testing. I was hunting for bugs, your honor.

• 4:04John Coogan?

  For sure. For sure. But yeah, I, I, I think there are some, there are some employees who are just fully excluded because they work on proprietary things. They don't want leaking into the training data whatsoever. There's a whole bunch of nuance there. There's these funny like leaked messages from Boz being like, if you're saving time with AI, don't take more vacation days. Like go ask your parents.

• 4:23Jordi Hays?

  What was that line? Like, ask your parents if it's a good strategy every time you talk to your boss to ask for more time off?

• 4:28John Coogan?

  It's a good point.

• 4:29Jordi Hays?

  So it was a really good point.

• 4:30John Coogan?

  It's a really good point.

• 4:31Jordi Hays?

  Really good point, but the timing was funny because over the weekend, Zuck had UFC fighters in Tahoe and they're just like on this like, you know, on water octagon.

• 4:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 4:41Jordi Hays?

  You can tell there's like, you know, all, all of Zuck's like security boats around it. And they're just like fighting, like, you know, wrestling or whatever.

• 4:50John Coogan?

  Let's pull this up. Zuck busy fighting with Marab in Lake Tahoe while his execs tell employees not to take vacations thanks to AI.

• 4:56Jordi Hays?

  I think I've seen enough after this. I think he's ready for the octagon.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  He's looking good. What are those leg braces that you got on?

• 5:03Jordi Hays?

  Those are for striking. Like they're effectively gloves for your knees.

• 5:06John Coogan?

  Okay. Okay. So you don't get your shins bashed up or something?

• 5:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you don't.

• 5:09John Coogan?

  Okay. That's cool. Anyway, so following up on the op ed that Mark Zuckerberg dropped in the, in the paywall in Wall Street Journal section, which is a little bit ironic because he's saying it's for everyone. Yeah, I will be abundant and free, except for this article. Well, now you can go read a more lengthy version of his thesis for free, not paywall on Meta's corporate blog effectively. You know, I don't even think you need to log into any Facebook property to get access to this, but it's a 6,500 word encyclical, the Wall Street Journal called it, like it's a paper bull on the AI future. High level AI, it's for everyone. Turns out it's for everyone.

• 5:49Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 5:50John Coogan?

  That's what he's saying. But it's good. It's an anti-permanent underclass message, which comes, which is good. It's just good from a comms perspective to lay out a more optimistic philosophy here. And it also seems to be borne out by the data in the short term. You're not seeing any like crazy displacements in the economy. And so this comes from like a place of strength that's like backed up. And it's also just a very optimistic, correct version of the piece. He takes a shot at fear-based marketing early on in the piece. He says, "Still, it's surprising that the discourse from many developing AIs so filled with doom. I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future. The notion

• 6:33John Coogan?

  that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led us to safe or positive outcomes." What do you think?

• 6:56Jordi Hays?

  Do you want to read a little bit more before I?

• 6:58John Coogan?

  Well, so I mean, my, my take on that was basically that, so he's framing this as, I don't understand why anyone who believes in AI would try and become like the emperor and the dictator of AI. I understand it. It's funny that he's like sort of playing dumb here because extreme concentration of power is awesome if you're the one that has the power. Like I don't see, you have to imagine that most dictators living in other countries aren't like, oh, I would kill just to be like a normal American citizen. No, it's like, yeah, it sucks for the citizenry.

• 7:30Jordi Hays?

  Also, this is coming from a guy who has, is effectively a monopoly, more like a duopoly and has enjoyed the benefits of, you know, extreme concentration of at least users and social media activity. I came away from this.

• 7:48John Coogan?

  First, first, there are, there are three very concrete proposals that I think are good. And then we can go into some, on what's downstream of it. So he, there's some hand wavy parts about the future and how things will align in the future that are sort of just guesses about how the future will play out, in my opinion. But there's some really solid, concrete proposals in here that I thought were awesome. One, he calls out that in Richland Parish, Louisiana, where Meta's building a large data center, teachers received a $50,000 bonus this year because of the increased tax revenue from their investment there. The superintendent told Meta that teachers are now moving there from across the country and he believes it will become one of the nation's best school districts.

• 8:30John Coogan?

  There's been a lot of skepticism about money actually flowing from AI companies to citizens because a lot of times money just goes into the government and then it gets like squirreled away into weird projects that different, you know, developers can like pull from and the money just sort of disappears. This feels like a pretty linear track from like data center built, dollars in citizens' pockets. That's very, very good. I like how that played out. He also said that Meta's data centers are designed to be among the most water efficient in the world. We are committing to being water positive, which is a frame, like a term that I hadn't heard before, but I think is a good one. So what that means is they will restore more water than they use in the watersheds that they operate. And the

• 9:13John Coogan?

  goal is by 2030 to be net water positive. And in areas with high water stress, the goal is to restore 2% of the water that they use. And so I think that's good. Obviously there's been a lot of, you know, it's been a bit of a quagmire on the water issue because there was that calculation error that people got way wrong. They thought the data centers were using way more water than they were. And so a lot of tech people just sort of wrote it off as like, ah, I don't even need to address it because it's misinformation. But of course it's a resource. It's important to address it appropriately. And I think this messaging does a good job of laying out like, okay, yes, like it might not be that much of an issue, but if it's not that much of an issue, then you can deal with it pretty easily and we're going to deal with it. So here's our plan. On electricity,

• 9:54John Coogan?

  they were a little bit less, a little bit softer. The, the language is just, we help keep electricity prices low by building our own energy generating infrastructure wherever we invest. This ensures that not only are we consuming energy that could, we are not consuming energy that could have gone to the local communities, but in some cases, we even supply, we even supply a surplus of low cost energy back to the communities. We think this is an important investment principle for sustainability. The, in some cases is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Ideally, you would wind up, I think a lot of people would want to see like, oh yes, in every case, when you build a data center, you bring enough power that the price of energy does not increase in the local community.

• 10:37John Coogan?

  But good direction. He does call out nuclear energy in a really interesting way. He shares this stat. Countries like China are bringing online one gigawatt of nuclear capacity every other week, which is insane. And he says, so we'll need to accelerate building of both energy and data centers to remain competitive. I thought this was a good framing and good reminder of how slow we are because we bring on one gigawatt of nuclear energy like every couple decades and they're doing it like every two weeks. Good, good to see that. And then also Meta's been spending on nuclear power, making commitments. All of them are long dated. There's a lot of regulatory hurdles, but he is putting his money where his mouth is in that regard, which I thought

• 11:21John Coogan?

  was good. And then, of course, the news is also paired with some real action from Meta. They're opening the weights of Muse Glimmer, a 30 billion parameter dense model that can run locally, along with a plan to release the weights to Muse Spark 1.2. Makes sense from a business perspective, I think, to ramp adoption. There was a lot that was going on, like the Llama ecosystem, and you could imagine that you, you, you download the weights to Muse Spark 1.2, fine tune it, you're pretty happy, you're like, eh, okay, yeah, let me get on the, on the, on the, on the API plan as well. And also, you can imagine that there's businesses that want to cut costs but don't want to use a foreign model. That definitely exists for a variety of reasons, so this is a good option there. And then it also just

• 12:06John Coogan?

  disentangles the geopolitical discussion from the safety discussion. So if you're talking to someone who has a strong opinion about open source one way or the other, you can, you can just divide the discussion into, okay, how do you feel about Muse Spark 1.2? Is that too dangerous to release? Is this a safety issue? Because it shouldn't be a distillation issue and it shouldn't be a, like a geopolitical issue. So you can narrow it down just to, are you, are you okay with strong, powerful, you know, AI being in the hands of just random people?

• 12:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:36John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 12:36Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think a lot of the stuff in here is like great and directionally correct.

• 12:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:41Jordi Hays?

  I think it was good that they tried to ground it in some concrete actions. It seems like they've chosen to position him as the, the pick me AI lab leader, right? He's saying, if you're not familiar, pick me is an internet slang term for someone who tries too hard to get validation, attention, or approval. And that is certainly what he's doing. I think there's an incredible irony that like he, I think on Friday of last week, is having to go through this, like, basically a billion dollar settlement for causing harm.

• 13:18John Coogan?

  True.

• 13:18Jordi Hays?

  At scale with all of their, all of their other products.

• 13:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:22Jordi Hays?

  And then ultimately, I still don't think that he has, or like MSL has any type of cohesive vision or strategy, right? They were doing open source.

• 13:34John Coogan?

  We were excited with the Manus thing. We were like, oh, this makes sense. There's like you deploy an agent within your Instagram account. There's a lot that you could do there, but that never really came.

• 13:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You know, so, so they were doing open source, then they're getting cooked, and then they stop.

• 13:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:50Jordi Hays?

  And then now they're back.

• 13:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:52Jordi Hays?

  And the first thing they released was Meta Vibes, which is like, kind of what you would expect them to release, but obviously got a horrible reaction.

• 13:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:00Jordi Hays?

  Wasn't world positive at all, wasn't personal super intelligence, it was slop intelligence. Very much too soon, I think, for Mark to be like the good guy, like tech leader, where I just don't think he has like people's, like his brand got so much better over the last few years. When he was just doing the UFC thing.

• 14:18John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 14:19Jordi Hays?

  And wakeboarding and all that kind of stuff, but it's too early to be trying to parlay that into like, I can be trusted with.

• 14:25John Coogan?

  Do you think he needs to put points on the board? Or do you think he needs to move the needle before he can actually take a victory lap here?

• 14:33Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think, I think he's trying to move the needle. He needs to be more focused on getting some points on the board. Because open sourcing a model that isn't a frontier model is just like, okay, like, like, I don't, like, knowing how commercial this team is, I don't think they would open source or, or open, make the model open weights if they felt like there was going to be exceptional demand for it. I think overall, like Mark standing up and saying like, hey, I want to be the leader of world positive AI probably hurts AI's public perception even more. And so.

• 15:08John Coogan?

  He's called Bernie Sanders now, right? He was included in that?

• 15:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, which is ama, which is amazing for Meta, MSL.

• 15:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:15Jordi Hays?

  To be included in that group.

• 15:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:17Jordi Hays?

  Like, you would think that, like.

• 15:19John Coogan?

  It was DeepMind not, or Elon?

• 15:21Jordi Hays?

  Elon and DeepMind were not included.

• 15:23John Coogan?

  Elon wasn't so.

• 15:24Jordi Hays?

  So that was just because there, there were the three cyber incidents.

• 15:26John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 15:27Jordi Hays?

  And so, I mean, people have been, you know, alleging that maybe the Meta, you know, cyber incident was maybe, you know, somewhat not as real as other ones.

• 15:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:36Jordi Hays?

  Be included, but I think he has, he has no confidence from the market on this strategy. He still has not actually explained what their product vision is. They're coming out with, with a coding harness, they're coming out with coding models, they're also doing open source.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:54Jordi Hays?

  There's whispers of them, you know, getting into the, you know, becoming a NeoCloud. It's just like, I think as, I can, I can see why shareholders and employees just continue to be deeply frustrated.

• 16:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, the coding harness thing would be, it feels like it would be much more believable from Microsoft. Like, we own GitHub, we were first in GitHub Copilot. Yeah, Nat Friedman's not here anymore, but we have a really strong relationship with OpenAI for the models and Azure in the enterprise. We are going to make a run at this seriously. And they have a better strategy. I, I, I like the strategy more, but, but, but it's, it's, it's a really, really crazy pivot to go from social media to the enterprise.

• 16:35Jordi Hays?

  Ultimately, it's a lot of words from someone who I don't believe has any real vision or strategy. Like, at least when Dario comes out with an essay, this is someone who is undeniably a visionary, right?

• 16:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:46Jordi Hays?

  Has, has made a bunch of calls.

• 16:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:48Jordi Hays?

  Correctly. And so when he says something, they, I think it means something, but I think that, yeah, the product strategy so far just feels like throwing slop at a trough.

• 16:58John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 17:00Jordi Hays?

  But defend it, John. Steel Man.

• 17:04John Coogan?

  What is the Steel Man? I mean, the Steel Man is the, basically the Steel Man is, like, this could go the DeepMind route where they get too, they, they get a little bit too, there, there's too much tension between the various corporate organizations. And the nightmare scenario would be like the Reels team at Instagram saying like, we need the compute for Reels and ad monetization, and that putting tension with the researchers. So the researchers are saying, hey, that new data center looks amazing. We want to train some amazing model, or we want to do some cheap inference. And the, and the ad team and the Reels team says, hey, we really got to keep the lights on over here. And so

• 17:46John Coogan?

  that tension just keeps butting heads against each other and they can't move as smoothly as some of the pure play labs. At the same time, there is, I like this Boz quote about like, you know, Boz recently told employees that any extra time freed up by AI should not be used for vacation. Instead, it could, it should go towards building cooler stuff at Meta. Like, you have so many users, so much data, so many different product surface areas. It's clear that we're not at the end of history in terms of what you can do on your phone, what you can do in these apps. And there are really delightful experiences that we run into all the time. Like Suno is a really cool consumer product. We have

• 18:27John Coogan?

  the CEO of whatnot on, like that's seeing a bunch of traction. There are, there are things that you should be able to build faster, leverage the current technology stack more efficiently, and then also like add AI features to actually bring those to consumers at scale. Like, when they launched their AI image model, I was, I was like, why can't they just, like, when you open Instagram, say, hey, we've pre-generated a Studio Ghibli version of your latest post or your, or your Instagram profile. Do you want to share on your story? Like, those little like product-led growth hacks that would be compute intensive, you'd have to, you have to inference all of that.

• 19:05Jordi Hays?

  Got a lot of compute.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, you got a lot of compute, but actually.

• 19:08Jordi Hays?

  At the time, at the time that there's whispers of selling compute, they're also buying ultra-long-term contracts. The social network was like formative on all of us. Zuck is, is a legend in his own way, but it's just like, putting this out while it's coming out, like less than two months ago, that you're working on a gambling integration on Instagram?

• 19:30John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:31Jordi Hays?

  Like, please. There's no strategy. And then the other irony of this, the thing that stood out to me is he said, still, it is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom. I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most of, most jobs and much of humanity's relevant would rush to build that. The AI doom over the last two weeks has been around these loss of control incidents.

• 19:53John Coogan?

  Which are much more serious.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  Which are, which are serious.

• 19:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:56Jordi Hays?

  And, and real. And so to stand up there and be like, actually, guys, nothing to worry about.

• 20:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  I got this. AI is awesome. The birth rate might be collapsing and I might have something to do with it, but don't worry about it. Yeah, part of this is like.

• 20:13Jordi Hays?

  We've we've met Zach multiple times. We've had great conversations with him. I like him. I like Boz. I like Adam. I like a lot of people over at MSL.

• 20:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:22Jordi Hays?

  Um, but this whole strategy continues to confuse. It's deeply unfocused. It's deeply memetic. And it doesn't seem like it's gonna get any better anytime soon.

• 20:36John Coogan?

  The Wall Street Journal had a huge scoop. This summer's hottest arm candy is a private equity boyfriend. Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Olivia Rodrigo are all hanging out with finance guys. Jordy chimed in on this. It was remarkable. Every single person got Jordy's joke. I thought it was a little like inside baseball and you'd have to have more context to understand it, but it was like this rare weird scenario where everyone understood that you were joking and

• 21:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I didn't get any pushback. I didn't get called any names.

• 21:10John Coogan?

  It almost would have been better if there was pushback, but it was just uniform praise for your quote across everything. Now.

• 21:17Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people were saying brave. Finally, someone said it. Yeah. So I don't know that there was a, it's like you take a lot of celebrities that are based in New York.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:26Jordi Hays?

  At least a few of them are gonna end up dating some people in in finance. So should we start maybe with what Mr. Wonderful said? B said, if you live in a celebrity bubble, party after party with the same people, the same 25 people, life gets really boring.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:42Jordi Hays?

  When you end up with a private equity guy, your life gets far more interesting.

• 21:47Jordi Hays?

  So he, I don't think was, uh, rage baiting.

• 21:50John Coogan?

  No.

• 21:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I think he, uh, so maybe that's how some people would have taken my quote out of, out of context. What did I say?

• 21:57John Coogan?

  The piece centers around.

• 21:58Jordi Hays?

  I almost don't want to read that quote out loud, but you should, you should read, uh, you should read my quote.

• 22:04John Coogan?

  Your quote that burned up the internet. Whether they want to admit it or not, many women have always been attracted to bad boys and risk takers, said Jordy Hayes, co-host of the technology industry talk show TVPN. I can't think of any archetype of man that fits that description more today than capital allocators that put it all on the line every day in the markets. And I like that your screenshot included the, the, uh, the scroll wheel showing that you're, you're hunting around for this.

• 22:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and then, so I posted this and I said, I weighed in on one of the defining stories of our time.

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah, putting such a silly caption above a silly story and a silly quote, I just assumed that it would, um, that it would be quite obvious that it was, that it was satire. But let's pull up, uh, let's pull up this, uh, four by, uh, two by two. And so, uh, one, top left, let's give it up for the elite quadrant. This is all of you. I mean, uh, zoom out, zoom out a little bit, a little bit more. This is people that understand the joke. Zoom up, uh, or go, go up. And people that love it. These, you guys are saying, we get it and we get you. And that made me feel really great. Now go down. This was also a, um, powerful part of the, of the people that were supporting it. People that don't understand the joke.

• 23:28John Coogan?

  Well, there's some people that just think it's true.

• 23:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's some, and there was a lot, there was a shocking amount of people.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  This is.

• 23:34Jordi Hays?

  Can you guys just zoom fully out and, and?

• 23:36John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 23:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So there, there, this was people that love it and people that don't understand the joke. And I just want to say bless, bless their hearts. They don't get it, but they vibe with it. And then, and then we had some respectable haters, people that, that hated it. They get the joke, but they just hate that they do. And then, and then there was the bottom right, um, which, uh, was, uh, was tearing it up in the replies, loud, wrong, and very confident.

• 24:02John Coogan?

  We should take people through this article a little bit more because, uh, the piece centers on, uh, Oliver Harmon of Searchlight Capital, of course, everyone knows him. Uh, but he is apparently dating Reese Witherspoon. And so, uh, just to get everyone to, up to speed, Witherspoon, uh, is an Oscar winning American actress who became famous in the 1990s and 2000s, including films in, uh, like Election, Pleasantville, Legally Blonde, Walk the Line. Uh, so now you should be up to speed on her. Uh, Michael Reinstein, of course, of, uh, private equity from Regent, uh, is dating someone named Nicole Kidman, which, uh, our, our audience might not be familiar with. She's actually

• 24:40Jordi Hays?

  Break it down.

• 24:40John Coogan?

  An Australian born actress whose career stretches across prestige cinema, blockbuster films. Seems like she's been really successful. So good to see her profiled alongside Michael Reinstein of, uh, private equity from Regent.

• 24:53Jordi Hays?

  I think a lot of, a lot of the people that, that watch TVPN.

• 24:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:57Jordi Hays?

  Were reading that article to, to learn about.

• 25:00John Coogan?

  These celebrities. Yeah.

• 25:01Jordi Hays?

  Celebrities.

• 25:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's a fascinating world. It's, it's just tucked behind, you know, so much obscurity. You don't hear about them if you're in the finance world. And so, uh, good to see, uh, folks like that get, you know, some, some, some coverage and really educate the audience. Uh, Joe Weisenthal, Joe Weisenthal had the best, the best take that, uh, this is the classic, uh, cynical pattern. I think he said, I think he's meaning cyclical pattern. Back in the mid aughts, there was a raft of stories about celebrities dating real estate executives and shipping heirs like Stavros Niarkos and Paris Latzis.

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  We gotta find what all these guys have in common, John. We gotta find what, what they have in common because they're working across so many different industries. Right? But what is the common ground?

• 25:47John Coogan?

  The industry is booming.

• 25:49Jordi Hays?

  Could it be something to do with their fee streams?

• 25:52John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, well, you know, so someone had a much more nuanced take from this, which was that, uh, celebrities are becoming like multi-platform, multi-disciplinary. There actually are multiple income streams. And so this was not, I, I gave a quote too that they didn't use. But someone, someone chimed in and said like, yes, a lot of these people are, a lot of these celebrities are doing, um, much more complex deals, uh, starting brands, starting companies, building holding companies. And so they actually wind up interacting with like the finance bros much more, much more often. And it's not so much like, oh, you got set up with someone with money. It's much more like, oh, you work on deals together and you talk about the same things because

• 26:34John Coogan?

  when you're a celebrity at a certain level, yeah, you're going on set and filming a movie for a couple of weeks.

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  But you are also talking about your, all your, your catalog of IP, your royalty stream.

• 26:45John Coogan?

  No, you actually start thinking like a 3%.

• 26:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're often forever, right? Unlike, uh, unlike management fees with, at some point or another.

• 26:54John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 26:55Jordi Hays?

  That, that, uh, revenue line comes to a close.

• 26:58John Coogan?

  Pulling the purse strings. Anyway, uh, we have another story here that we should go through. South Korea's AI boom is reshaping the dating market as engineers from Samsung and SK Hynix become some of the country's most eligible bachelors. According to the Wall Street Journal, engineers at the two semiconductor companies are increasingly being viewed alongside doctors, lawyers, and accountants as top marriage prospects. Samsung employees are expected to receive average bonuses of roughly $400,000 this year, while SK Hynix work, workers could average closer to $500,000.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  Chip engineers have historically ranked below more traditional high status professions in South Korea's highly competitive marriage market, but local matchmaking agencies now say that gap has largely disappeared. While the trend has become a recurring joke in Korean pop culture and dating shows. Interesting. The newfound status is creating some awkward side effects. Some engineers say they are reluctant.

• 27:56Jordi Hays?

  Poor guys.

• 27:57John Coogan?

  It's, it's rough. It's rough out there in Korea. Uh, some engineers say they are reluctant to reveal where they work on first dates because they worry potential partners may be more interested in their compensation than in them. Others have increasingly started dating fellow chip industry employees instead, meeting someone in the fab, a real meet cute. You, you're carrying a tray of wafers, bump into someone and it's love at first sight. You look up as, as your, as your, as your scattered HBM is being.

• 28:27Jordi Hays?

  It is very funny. They included, they just included a picture of, of a young woman here that says, Kim Young Won, a photographer in Seoul, laments not having any contacts at chip makers.

• 28:38John Coogan?

  Wow. Really, really.

• 28:40Jordi Hays?

  Really framing her as part of the problem.

• 28:42John Coogan?

  Well, well, the photo credit is her. So she must've posted this on social media or something and then the, uh, the journal got ahold of it. It's a fun one. Uh, anyway. The other, the other big story is that an AI assistant in Australia hacked a gym's booking system on its own after being given the simple task of reserving a class in what is believed to be the country's first known autonomous cyber attack by an AI agent. Naughty, naughty indeed. Uh, funny. In college, I built a system that would register for classes automatically, but it was just a Python for loop that would just refresh the page when the classes would become available because they would go online at like 7:00 AM and I wanted to sleep in, just lazy bones mode.

• 29:27John Coogan?

  Um, and I think, I think there's a story about Mark Zuckerberg doing a similar thing, sort of like hacking this, the, the, the, the admission system or some sort of a class registration system. But now with AI agents, you can just have the AI agent do it yourself. Anyone can. It's been democratized. Everyone can sleep in.

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  SpaceX is up, uh, 13% uh, in the past five days, almost certainly in part due to semi-analysis. Major, major bullish update.

• 29:57John Coogan?

  Crazy bull case.

• 29:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not, uh, they've been contrarian lately, right?

• 30:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  With Meta, now, now SpaceX.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  So the headline here, SpaceX turns a compute company into eight quarter, in eight quarters, uh, into a.

• 30:13Jordi Hays?

  Turns into a compute company in eight quarters.

• 30:15John Coogan?

  AI compute goes from nothing to 77% of run rate revenue and, uh, the, the illustrative 10 gigawatt path. I mean, he's really good at building data centers and, uh, they're, they're predicting that, uh, Microsoft will be the largest off taker. Uh, OpenAI, Anthropic will wind up doing deals with them. Uh, 500 billion in ARR for SpaceX. And the number that was getting thrown around was a trillion, a trillion in ARR or something by 2030 something, uh, which is, uh, staggering, staggering. They're gonna have to rebrand it, rebrand it though. Land X. Cause they're not going to space with this. This is all built just on the ground.

• 30:55John Coogan?

  I'm, I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure this is all pre-space data center. Space data centers like is the act five or whatever, whatever act we're on, the act two. So land X or ground X, but, uh, either way it's working and, uh, very, very exciting to see.

• 31:11Jordi Hays?

  Well, folks, we hope you have some crazy good times this afternoon.

• 31:16John Coogan?

  Thanks for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tvpn.com and we'll see you back here at 11:00 AM Pacific tomorrow. Goodbye.