Astra Reactions, Jobs Print, Cybercab Launch | 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 news in the AI world, obviously. Astra GPT-6 launched yesterday. We went through the blog post briefly. It went up mid-show. A bunch of impressive benchmarks. We talked about Arc AGI. We moved the goalposts because Arc AGI V3 is now saturated, which is particularly crazy because of how detailed those games are when you play them. The thing that stuck out to me, though, was watching the demos of people build 3D scenes in Blender using Astra. Clearly, a bunch of people got access to the model before and were able to fire

• 0:42John Coogan?

  off one prompt, maybe a few prompts. It feels like it's very, very capable to just fire up Blender and do a full task and model a whole world.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  That said, Matt Schumer, who had a couple of the most impressive examples, he has been talking about how the art of prompting is back.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:04Jordi Hays?

  He has, he had a very specific process where you have like

• 1:08John Coogan?

  A loop.

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  manager agent and subagents.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  And it's, and it's not, still not as simple as just like, you can get a good output Yeah. doing, you know, in one shot, but to get some of these really incredible outputs does take a little bit of refinement.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I'm sure a lot of that information will propagate across the internet as it already has. I'd love to pull up some of the images from, or the videos, from the launch from folks who are actually test-driving GPT-6 Astra. First, Sharif said, "GPT-6 Astra recreated the Palace of Fine Arts in Blender. This is my favorite building in San Francisco because it was built for the World's Fair in 1914," I didn't know that, "where the Steam locomotive and telephone were showed off." Wow. "It was a time when technology gave us all a deep sense of optimism for the future." I feel like, like some of that sense has been lost since, certainly, but I hope models like Astra can help restore

• 2:07John Coogan?

  it and push us towards a more hopeful future. So if we can play that actual video, you can see. So I imagine that it pulls images from the, from the internet. There's a whole bunch of, obviously, reference diagrams. There's a whole bunch of different ways that you could ground a 3D modeling exercise. You could even pull the blueprints. There might be free models out there.

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  Architectural plans.

• 2:26John Coogan?

  And, and yeah, it is this odd thing where you could use an AI image generator because the AI image generators are knowledgeable about what the Palace of Fine Arts is. It could generate a bunch of images there. So there's all these different ways to triangulate it. And then you can also just go on, I think Sketchfab is one of the big free 3D model purveyors online. And so you could potentially go grab an actual 3D model build off of that for your scene. So there's all these different ways to solve a problem and Astra seems to be good at actually going and doing it. There's a few more that we should look through. There's one comparison, since this is the new Pelican bench, apparently. Same prompt, same goal of creating this fly-through video for a real estate scene. And this feels

• 3:11John Coogan?

  like something that could be useful. I've already seen on Zillow, there is the ability to restyle images. So if you're looking at a house on Zillow, you can see the interior photos and then you can say, "I'd like to redecorate this in a modern style or in a contemporary style or in a colonial style." And it will go and use AI image generation on the backend to do that. It's only available on a fraction of Zillow listings. It's clearly some sort of feature that they need to turn on, but you could imagine this being something, especially for spec homes that are selling that maybe haven't been, that they don't have the budget to actually go do proper rendering, just be lowering the cost. You

• 3:56John Coogan?

  get sort of a Jevon's paradox moment. There's another one from Thomas. He says, "Astra is very good at 3D modeling and the lighting is way better than this one." This is, this is what, this actually looks properly ray traced, properly lit, really thoughtfully designed. Maybe that's in the prompt. Maybe that's just the way this one turned out based on the photos. From a Blender scene to then an Unreal Engine 5 walkable experience. So everything becomes translatable. You'll be able to take your tweets, turn them into blog posts, turn them into videos, turn them into 3D games on Steam.

• 4:26Jordi Hays?

  GTA-style video games.

• 4:27John Coogan?

  Basically, basically. And so there's a little bit of a prompt and Thomas reveals a little bit about his process here.

• 4:34Jordi Hays?

  I would like to see VCs, if you're going to put out an AI blog post, you know, blog posts.

• 4:40John Coogan?

  Like a market map.

• 4:41Jordi Hays?

  Essay. No, if you're going to put out an essay that was clearly written by AI, you should be required to put out a video game that accompanies it.

• 4:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:48Jordi Hays?

  That's sort of playable, that gets the same concept.

• 4:50John Coogan?

  I'm thinking like, instead of, instead of a market map, make it a Fortnite map. I want to be able to play in the different, you know, town is a popular AI startup, might land on a market map, should land on the virtual Fortnite map. There's some debate over this last one, whether there was like a different harness involved, but same thing, give it a Zillow listing, it can 3D model the house. So this, it's, it's always with these new releases, it's interesting what makes you feel the AGI or not. Realistically, Frontier Math Tier 4, I think they scored 99% on that, Terminal Bench Science 0.1, they're just numbers to me. Like, they, they don't do anything for me emotionally because

• 5:31John Coogan?

  I don't have any grounding in how hard those particular things are. And also, I sort of, I sort of assume that computers are good at math.

• 5:39Jordi Hays?

  And you didn't get past algebra and like, look how successful you are, right?

• 5:43John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. So, so those, those are rarely.

• 5:47Jordi Hays?

  I accomplished all of this off of Algebra 1.

• 5:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:51Jordi Hays?

  A freshman-level math Olympiad.

• 5:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. So those are never really feel the AGI moments for me, but this, but I've actually spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours in 3D modeling software, mostly in Cinema 4D and Houdini. And it was really fun. I really enjoy making 3D renders and motion graphics. And it was also useful when I was making YouTube videos. But every step in building a scene requires, you got to watch a YouTube tutorial, then you got to look up how all the different functions work. And then ultimately, you're tweaking settings in literally four dimensions because it's a 3D scene. But then over time, you have to map where the camera goes, where the different objects are moving, how things progress

• 6:37John Coogan?

  over time. And it can also be very compute-intensive. So there's, there's a whole bunch of times where just to preview the scene in low-res, you might have to cache and load and pre-bake certain animations so that you can just see what it looks like. And then you're like, "Ah, it's not there. I got to go back and change some setting for some sort of smoke simulation or some sort of fracturing that's going on." And so it's fun, but it is extremely cumbersome. And ultimately, you're doing this on a two-dimensional screen and it can be very time-consuming and frustrating. And so by the time I stopped spending time on motion graphics, which was around 2021, I'd been building the YouTube channel and I hired a few, and a few editors. Some of them were good at After Effects. Some of them learned

• 7:21John Coogan?

  Blender. Blender was ascendant at that time. So Blender is the open-source, community-led effort. Cinema 4D is a closed-source piece of software, very expensive, was very expensive, was like over a thousand dollars to get a license that would be good for like a year. Then they eventually went subscription. And so there were pieces of software that were used by Hollywood but were very expensive, very high barrier to entry. So you didn't have as much of a flourishing ecosystem. Blender at, in 2021 was clearly on this trajectory where it was going to build this ecosystem and become very, very popular. And, and it did. But by 2021, I was able to hire video editors who were able to go do scenes in Blender. But still, it was a huge ask. If I was like, for this YouTube video, I was

• 8:04John Coogan?

  posting every single week, I'd like a motion graphic to illustrate something. And I did this one where we built a 3D battleship board for this US-China military competition, competitive analysis. And I mean, it's like, it sort of ties up an editor for a week while they're working on this. And, and this just speeds all of that up. So you're going to get back to like the, is it over for motion designers that worry about job displacement? I think we've been through enough of these cycles that hopefully we're Jevon's paradox pilled at this point. We imagine.

• 8:40Jordi Hays?

  You should just comp it to software engineering.

• 8:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 8:43Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot more 3D renders. It seems like everything that can be, anything that can be rendered will be rendered.

• 8:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:52Jordi Hays?

  And, and it's just, and more people are going to try to make something themselves and then hit the point where they're like, okay, there's this sort of area where, where the models can't, can't get it to 100%. Now I need to actually go find, you know, find somebody who's an expert and work with them.

• 9:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. And so we're back on the, is this AGI question? The Wall Street Journal said, "Yes, we are entering the era of artificial general intelligence." It's in the Journal. They've declared it. Although entering the era, like the door, the house is AGI, the door, and we are entering, we're like almost in the AGI era, according to the Wall Street Journal? I don't know. Stripe called it AGI. Didn't they call it AGI Jan 1? Something like that? And there's been various calls. Tyler Cowen called it AGI like three years ago. He was ready to rock.

• 9:42Jordi Hays?

  I think that was GPT-4.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  Something like that. No, it might have been 01. I think 01, he was like, this is a, this is AGI. But it's clearly artificial, clearly intelligent.

• 9:50Jordi Hays?

  And don't, don't you think he'll end up looking like pretty good in the fullness of time on that call?

• 9:55John Coogan?

  100%.

• 9:55Jordi Hays?

  Because it clearly is this like, you know, timeline, a spectrum.

• 9:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:58Jordi Hays?

  I do like to imagine the Stripe, the Colossians, just like at, like, just after midnight, you know, there's champagne, maybe some sparklers, some fireworks, and they just go, "That's it. It's AGI."

• 10:10John Coogan?

  It's AGI. But the question is no longer, is it artificial? We know it is. The question's no longer, is it intelligent? We know it is at a lot of different tasks. The question is, how general is it? Because Blender is open source, can be downloaded and copied a million times into reinforcement learning environments. We know that OpenAI bought, quote, "tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac studios to do computer use training on." And so the question is, is it only good at Blender? Will it work in Cinema 4D? Will it work in Houdini? Will it work in a small piece of software that does 3D modeling that has been fallen by the wayside? Now, there's an interesting dynamic here where I was in the boat of, I could see that

• 10:53John Coogan?

  Blender was going to be the new hot thing, the best tool, that I should have moved, but I already had so many plugins and textures and rendering and I knew the layout, that I downloaded Blender, I opened it up and I was like, "Ah, I really don't want to have to get over this learning curve," even though I know in five years Blender's going to be way better than Cinema 4D, there's this switching cost. Now, you're in this weird world where it's pretty good if you're a software company, where the frontier labs bullseye lands on you. And I'm thinking about Slack, like Alex Wang at Meta just moved them to Slack off of Teams or they had like an internal workspace thing. And specifically, he said-

• 11:32Jordi Hays?

  Give it up for Benioff.

• 11:33John Coogan?

  Give it up for Benioff, truly. And specifically, he said Slack is better for work with AI agents. And why is that? Well, it's because the frontier labs all use Slack. And so they have Slack as a reinforcement learning environment, and so it got really good at Slack. And I think that even though there are open source Slacks and you can vibe code a Slack competitor, as we have tested, Slack was the logical tool to pull off the shelf for the AI companies, for the AI agents, for the models, and Blender seems to be that. So, the interesting thing is that I do wonder if people will wind up shifting from Cinema 4D to Blender because the models are better at Blender, or will the models generalize

• 12:16John Coogan?

  and say, "Yeah, this looks a little bit different because it's a slightly different piece of software, but I've trained so many hours in Blender that I can also do Cinema 4D or also do Houdini." Because some of those other softwares are better at certain things, some of them are better at smoke simulations, some of them are better at water simulations. There are advantages to each piece. I don't want to degrade any particular piece of 3D software. I love them all equally.

• 12:37Jordi Hays?

  There are some reports that it's quite effective at video editing.

• 12:41John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 12:42Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 12:43John Coogan?

  I'd be interested to take it for a spin. I wonder, the interesting thing is that most video is still edited in Adobe Premiere. It's a closed source Adobe, you know, they have their guardrails, they probably, they might not want to, you know, say, "Oh yeah, sure, take 10,000 licenses, no problem. Pay us $10 a month for that." They might, they may have a different opinion, they may want an AI agent that's internal. There might be all sorts of different things. But then again, there are, I mean, I know that there are open source video editing suites out there. I think that they lag a little bit, but there are some that are free or open source at least. The other interesting thing, I mean, video editing, like all these things, like taste

• 13:24John Coogan?

  is so important in these, it's often less about the exact instructions and more about telling the right story, using the right tools, not creating slop whether you're doing it yourself or with an AI agent. But I think that gets to the core question of like, how do you evaluate these model launches? We were discussing the idea that like, the benchmark era might be coming to a close in some, in some way, because as soon as the benchmark's created, it's hill climbed very, very quickly, and then it's at 99 or 100% pretty quickly, and everyone sort of, their eyes start glazing over in benchmark discussions. And it just goes back to like the vibe check. I think the best thing to do when a model comes out is just take it for a spin.

• 14:09John Coogan?

  And mostly, point it at something that you know really well, because you don't want to be in the, you want to expose the model's, what's the, what's the gelman amnesia? That's the one I'm thinking of. You basically want to test if gelman amnesia is triggered by you using the model. So, point it at something that you intimately understand and see if you're impressed. And then-

• 14:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You would be horses.

• 14:39John Coogan?

  What?

• 14:40Jordi Hays?

  You'd be horses.

• 14:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we gotta do the horse bench again. We have a couple more ventures. Let's see comedy. I want to, I want to see some new jokes. Shrimp fried rice bench. Oh, there are other reactions to Astra we should go through in the timeline. The big one comes from Joe Weisenthal. He says, "You're never going to believe it, but someone one prompted the new model to make a completely new and immersive 3D game." Yes, the bar has already been raised, the goalposts have been moved. It's not enough to make a game, it has to be funny, entertaining, and I don't know, I know how, I feel like a lot of people are taking the easy way out with these web-based games, playing a game on a MacBook Pro in a Chrome tab. That's not real gaming. It's gotta be, it's gotta be running-

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  In Steam?

• 15:27John Coogan?

  On a PC, on Steam or on a PS5 or on an Xbox. It's gotta, it's gotta have more to it than just some fun game that you can play around with in the browser. There's also some updates. Token pricing is effectively meaningless now, the benchmarks are meaningless, the token pricing charts are meaningless, everything's meaningless. No. So, Stephen Hydel is sharing the cost efficiency, how you should think about cost efficiency in the modern era. So, 3.8 Flash looks 13 times cheaper when measured per token, but Astra is cheaper per task since it's far more efficient. Measure your costs per task, not per token. So, interesting.

• 16:08John Coogan?

  Will we see a decline in, if models get more token efficient, will we see a decline? I mean, we probably won't see an actual decline in token volumes, but you know, we've seen Sundar Pichai from Google and Alphabet stand on stage and talk about the exponential increases in token volumes. But you might see a kink in that graph or like a deceleration to some extent if models just get way more token efficiency. Like if the next version of Gemini or 3.8 Flash is 100x more token efficient, you might see a little bit less growth in token volumes, but they might be doing more valuable work than ever.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  So, sort of an interesting nuance, you gotta adapt to the modern times, I suppose.

• 16:54Jordi Hays?

  Jack Altman saw the benchmarks and said, "Sam, exclamation point, I guess even a blind squirrel can find a nut sometimes." Congrats.

• 17:03John Coogan?

  That's good, that's good. We should move on to the jobs report because even though AI is getting better, so is the US employment picture. The US added 162,000 jobs in August. Sheesh. That is a lot of jobs. Also, what's interesting is that the Wall Street Journal had an op-ed- Narrative violation. Had an op-ed just, I mean, just printed today, it went to, it went to print online yesterday, but saying, "Why we'll have to get used to meh job reports? The economy doesn't need to generate all that many jobs to keep the labor market steady, but that won't keep low job growth from feeling dissatisfying."

• 17:44John Coogan?

  So, economists think, or they thought that Friday's jobs report will show, the US added seasonally adjusted 53,000 jobs in August. The number came back 162,000, three times what these, what these economists, what were the economists doing, asleep at the wheel? They're on summer vacation, maybe, who knows? That would be a step up from July's unexpected loss of 23,000 jobs, which of course was now revised upwards, so we actually did add jobs in-

• 18:13Jordi Hays?

  We got an upwards revision.

• 18:15John Coogan?

  Upward revision.

• 18:16Jordi Hays?

  You don't see that much.

• 18:17John Coogan?

  No.

• 18:18Jordi Hays?

  Usually-

• 18:19John Coogan?

  Narrative violation.

• 18:20Jordi Hays?

  Usually.

• 18:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's a narrative violation. There's a whole bunch of interesting dynamics going on in the economy. The Wall Street Journal's been doing a great job highlighting the Main Street millionaire, the small town entrepreneur, what's happening in the broader real economy, not too focused on what's happening in tech and tech jobs, where obviously, a very small employee base can create a really outsized outcome. Nothing shows that better than hugging face. Couple hundred employees, $12 billion outcome. That's not the nature of the US economy. That is the power law, that is the outlier, but it's easy to track and say, "Oh, well, like if you're making a $12 billion business with just a couple hundred people, there's not going to be any more jobs." But that's not the way the actual US economy works.

• 19:05John Coogan?

  So, what is going on with the US economy? The August jobs report is out and it is good. It blew past expectations with the US adding 162,000 jobs. Economists polled by the Wall Street Journal said that the US would add 53,000. That comes after both the June and July jobs reports were revised up to 31,000 and 21,000 respectively. So, the unemployment rate remained at 4.1%, which is historically low, which indicates that we generally have a healthy labor market. The jobs added were fairly broad-based from the Wall Street Journal. Food services and drinking places were standout.

• 19:45John Coogan?

  With an increase of 59,000 jobs and people were worried about this post World Cup slump. You remember this?

• 19:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so it seems like whatever happened there, whatever gyrations happened, people are still dining out, people are still going to bars and so they're hiring.

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  I think it's quite possible that, you know, recent model advances are allowing people to, you know, have more power lunches.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:10Jordi Hays?

  Might have historically been a Friday thing.

• 20:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:12Jordi Hays?

  Maybe now they're adding Monday to the Wednesday.

• 20:15John Coogan?

  Sort of a let Astra take the wheel scenario.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  After 1:00 PM in many offices across the country. Could be a, could be a thing.

• 20:23Jordi Hays?

  Could be that.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  Similarly, local government education gained 42,000 jobs after losing 58,000 jobs in the prior months. Manufacturing was among the, was among the sectors registering job gains, as was healthcare, as has always been the case, healthcare continues to boom. The information and finance sectors shed jobs while economists are divided over how artificial intelligence will divide the market. Those sectors are generally viewed as among the most exposed to technology. At a minimum, the report is an argument against the Fed lowering rates in September.

• 20:55Jordi Hays?

  Wah, wah.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  Before the report, markets have been roughly divided on the prospect of a hike. It also seems that the AI jobs apocalypse is still on hold, at least for another month. And of course, we'll discuss this on the show.

• 21:08Jordi Hays?

  The great Dyson.

• 21:09John Coogan?

  The great Dyson debate. TJ Parker kicked it off. He said, apparently unpopular opinion. Dyson products are generally not very good. Strongly agree, though my girls love their air wraps, says Bryce Roberts. A couple of other people saying, yep, my wife got a vacuum. It was terrible. Felt like a total psy op. A lot of people are upset. The Matic founders chiming in, I got an alternative for you.

• 21:34Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, he's saying that it's likely ruining your rug slash carpet.

• 21:38John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Dyson rug shed and Dyson suction is very adept at making it shed faster than necessary.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. Uh, okay. I'll start with what I, I think the Dyson business is incredible. The story is incredible. I think that the making things that look like Halo weapons for stuff around the home is a very cool way to differentiate and I appreciate the over engineering, like everyday objects. I, I'm not saying I'm buying into it, but I'm, but I appreciate that, that someone's doing it. Somebody needs to make a $500 toothbrush.

• 22:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 22:16Jordi Hays?

  But that being said, I saw this and I was like, you know what? That kind of, that does resonate because every time I have a Dyson vacuum at home and I've had various Dyson products over the year, vacuum in particular, it just feels like a little bit like, like it's like creaky. It feels a little bit, it feels a little bit cheap.

• 22:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:35Jordi Hays?

  And I always want to put it away because I don't like this like Halo weapon, you know, a home cleaning device doesn't exactly fit into the overall.

• 22:45John Coogan?

  Just say you don't live at the city. Just say your house doesn't look like it would be welcoming to the flood. Come on. You gotta, you gotta design your whole house to fit the aesthetic.

• 22:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:55John Coogan?

  You gotta have a banshee out front.

• 22:56Jordi Hays?

  A banshee out front would fix me.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  I think you forget how bad it was before Dyson.

• 23:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:02John Coogan?

  It was so bad. Vacuums were so rattly and clanky and like, they used to have bags on the back that you would have to like take out and they have this felt inside and the stuff would be going everywhere. Like this is such a step forward. Maybe you could say that like it's plasticky and, and it doesn't feel like super rock solidly built now, but it moved the whole category so far forward and so far into the future. Just the fact that you don't have to plug it in. It has a battery. That was an innovation. Like their most, most, most vacuums, you would have to take it out and then you would unwind this long cable.

• 23:44John Coogan?

  And I think they still make some of these, but you would have to find the load, the nearest plug, plug the vacuum in, and then you could only vacuum as far as the cable would go. And then you'd want to move to another room. So one of my early like chores, I think, I, I don't know why I have so many memories of this, but I guess I, I vacuum.

• 24:01Jordi Hays?

  I have, I have formative memories of like.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  Vacuuming.

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  Trying to get to a spot.

• 24:06John Coogan?

  And you're like, oh, and you're trying to extend it and then you have to like.

• 24:08Jordi Hays?

  And as a kid, you're trying to be, you're trying to be as efficient as possible.

• 24:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course. You don't want to move the cord in only two seconds.

• 24:13Jordi Hays?

  There's four plugs in the house that I need to hit to vacuum the whole house.

• 24:17John Coogan?

  And so you gotta, you gotta optimally, it's a traveling sales problem all of a sudden. It's NPR. Like you gotta plug in over here, reach under there, get under the couch, go over there. Then you gotta move the cord over the couch so you can get to the other side. Then you gotta move the cable all the way to the other side of the room. So you can get the other side of the room. Huge problem, completely solved, one shotted by James Dyson, one of the greatest to ever do it. And put some respect on his name. What is going on with the Cyber Cab? Is, uh, there's an interior tour here with Whole Mars catalog and IB says.

• 24:48Jordi Hays?

  The doors go up, John. Did you know the doors go up?

• 24:50John Coogan?

  Yes, I saw that. Uh, this will completely replace Uber for me. Holy mackerel. I like this. There's a couple of other data points about the Cyber Cab rollout. So famously, YouTuber and electronics reviewer, Marquez Brownlee, attended the previous Cyber Cab event and came away impressed and optimistic about the future of self-driving, but skeptical of the timeline. And he said that if Elon could make good on his forecast, which was for sale by the end of 2026 for under $30,000, no steering wheel, full self-driving, you can just put it out in the world and it will go do tasks and earn you money. That was the pitch.

• 25:33John Coogan?

  And Marquez said, I think that's too aggressive.

• 25:36Jordi Hays?

  Does for sale mean they're being delivered?

• 25:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:39Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 25:40John Coogan?

  For sale.

• 25:40Jordi Hays?

  Because they did throw up, they did throw up like a.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  Pre-order doesn't count. You gotta pay the 30,000. You gotta get the Cyber Cab by December 31st. And so if you get the.

• 25:49Jordi Hays?

  Elon took that personally.

• 25:50John Coogan?

  Elon took that personally. Yeah. He has a preorder where you can buy a whole stack of them for, for a million dollars and run a fleet. But, uh, I think Marquez is looking good. The stakes were high. Marquez Brownlee said that he would have to, he would shave his head if this happened on Elon's original schedule. And of course, every time there was a Cyber Cab that was spotted, I actually saw one here in LA. Uh, every time there was an update about the progress of the Cyber Cab program, people would respond with an AI image of bald Marquez, which is very funny, but the.

• 26:25Jordi Hays?

  Should we be making predictions with, with head shaving as a, as a consequence?

• 26:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. If Elon doesn't ship this by the end of the year, I'll shave, Tyler said.

• 26:36John Coogan?

  I'm willing to do that.

• 26:40Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Is that, do we have a deal?

• 26:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:43Jordi Hays?

  Wait, if he doesn't ship it?

• 26:44John Coogan?

  If he doesn't ship the Cyber Cab for under $30,000 by the end of the year.

• 26:49Jordi Hays?

  Actual deliveries.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  No steering wheel and it drives itself and earns you money.

• 26:52Jordi Hays?

  Economically viable.

• 26:53John Coogan?

  So I'm inverse Marquez Brownlee. No.

• 26:56Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 26:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:57Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 26:58John Coogan?

  No, no, no. Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. If he doesn't do it, yeah, you're the opposite of, of, of Marquez. If he doesn't do it, you shave. If in the, in the, in the world where he does do it, then you don't have to shave your head. I do like the head shaving as a, as a bet. I don't know exactly.

• 27:18Jordi Hays?

  When's the last time you had a buzz cut?

• 27:19John Coogan?

  High school, football season. I would shave it before the season started, easier to put on the helmet. And then I would grow it out all year and I had long flowing hair.

• 27:28Jordi Hays?

  I.

• 27:29John Coogan?

  Electric.

• 27:30Jordi Hays?

  Will pay a lot of money for pictures of John.

• 27:32John Coogan?

  I'll find an old one. It was, it was good. It was, it was a wild look. It was a lot of fun. It was also just like easier, lazy bones. I'm actually really bullish on the Cyber Cab. I tested Model S recently and I ordered a Model Y L and, uh, the self-driving capability is 100% ready to rock. Like it, it is, uh, you know, Brandon and our team are saying that he's at 95% of the miles that he's driven in the car have been in full self-driving mode. You add a little bit of tele-op for that 5% that's not there. And with a cab, you don't have to negotiate, uh, driveways and, uh, drop-off points and valets as much.

• 28:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:10John Coogan?

  It's solved. Like truly, the only time you're driving a Tesla, if you have the full self-driving on the latest hardware is you pulling into your garage or negotiating a parking lot, something like that. Interestingly, Tesla has a feature, Smart Summon. You can pull out of a, of a parking space and come and pick you up. Uh, it's a little janky right now, not quite there. You have to sort of puppeteer it yourself, but, uh, they don't have a banish mode and there's huge demand for banish, which is the inverse of summon. And Brandon just coined this and I was like, that's actually great. And then he was like, yeah, that's probably what they're calling. And I was like, yeah, I guess, but I wouldn't have thought of that. I don't know.

• 28:50Jordi Hays?

  Seems like a very Elon, uh.

• 28:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:53Jordi Hays?

  Word.

• 28:53John Coogan?

  So I love the idea of being able to take the full self-driving vehicle, get out of it just on the curb, actually at your destination and say, banish, go pay for parking. If you want to pay for parking, go find a spot on the road, go drive around until you find something. Uh, I'm going to be here for an hour. Deal with it. Deal with it. AI, you know, like that's what, that's what everyone wants. Yeah. For sure, for sure. Um, anyway, uh, what did Elon actually say about Cyber Cab? He said, uh, 20 cents a mile to run 30 or 40 with taxes. And yes, you can buy one for under $30,000. Get ready to shave your head. MKBHD. Somebody's shaving their head.

• 29:34John Coogan?

  It's either Tyler or MKBHD. We'll see. Uh, I think the cost of autonomous transport will be so low that you can think of it like individualized mass transit. The average cost of a city bus per mile, not the ticket price, because that is subsidized, is about a dollar a mile. The operating cost of a Cyber Cab will be around 20 cents a mile, including taxes and everything else, probably 30 or 40 cents a mile. Yes, you'll be able to buy one. We expect the cost below 30,000. It is crazy that I'm in a world where I think they're going to ship Cyber Cab before Roadster. Cause they announced Roadster a decade ago.

• 30:09Jordi Hays?

  I know, but we were expecting something around the Roadster in August.

• 30:11John Coogan?

  Right? Yeah. Flying. And he told Rogan, he was, he was going to show a demo that was going to blow everyone's mind.

• 30:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So I would expect that hopefully this month.

• 30:18John Coogan?

  So you think, you think you'll be able to buy a Roadster and get it delivered before you'll be able to buy a Cyber Cab and get it delivered?

• 30:24Jordi Hays?

  I never said I thought you could ever get a Roadster delivered.

• 30:27John Coogan?

  You just think it's never going to come?

• 30:28Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. Uh, but, but I would assume if they're going to do a demo.

• 30:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  Then we're still over a year out.

• 30:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:35Jordi Hays?

  From delivery.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:36Jordi Hays?

  At least.

• 30:36John Coogan?

  I mean, just from a financial position, Cyber Cab makes so much more sense as a business than Roadster. Roadster, I mean, even at $250,000 for the crazy specs, like it's still like, there aren't that many buyers that want that. A lot of people that are spending $250,000, they want a manual, they want an experience, they want a weekender. They don't necessarily want this.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  There's going to be so many buyers for the Roadster.

• 30:55John Coogan?

  There will be.

• 30:55Jordi Hays?

  At least in, at least where we are.

• 30:57John Coogan?

  There will be, but we're talking about so many buyers, oh, 10,000 cars a year or something. It's not the way people get around.

• 31:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:05John Coogan?

  Every day like taxis, you know, like it, it, it's just completely different TAM, completely different, uh, situation in general. So, um, I don't know. I, I might go, oh, I, I'm shaving this side of the head if it's Cyber Cab first. This side of the head if it's Roadster first, and I think I'll have a head here for over a year.

• 31:23Jordi Hays?

  The National Weather Service forecasts dangerous beach conditions for the Malibu coast.

• 31:27John Coogan?

  Dangerous.

• 31:28Jordi Hays?

  Starting today.

• 31:29John Coogan?

  Dangerous for novices or dangerous for someone at your level? That's impossible.

• 31:33Jordi Hays?

  Dangerously good surf. Dangerously absolutely electric surf conditions heading into this weekend.

• 31:38John Coogan?

  Be out there.

• 31:39Jordi Hays?

  Hope to see the TBPN Nation in SoCal, taking advantage of this hurricane swell. Uh, we're going to have back-to-back days of, you know, phenomenal.

• 31:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, activity in here on the Pacific. So I'm thrilled. I'm excited. Uh, hope to get you out there, John. I would love to see you.

• 31:58John Coogan?

  I might be tinkering with Astra. Who knows? Have a happy Labor Day.

• 32:01Jordi Hays?

  Have a wonderful.

• 32:02John Coogan?

  Have a wonderful weekend.

• 32:03Jordi Hays?

  Day weekend.

• 32:05John Coogan?

  And we will see you.

• 32:06Jordi Hays?

  Zeke says, great weekend to get out on the pontoon in Malibu. Pontoon would be insane.

• 32:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:14Jordi Hays?

  Pontoon, might flip it. We love you guys. We'll see you Tuesday.

• 32:18John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. And we will see you on Tuesday.

• 32:25Jordi Hays?

  We love you.