Snap Launches SPECS, Paramount Eyes Nashville Offices, OpenAI Explores $1.2T Valuation | 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.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Snap officially launched specs yesterday. Some of the team members here got to go check it out in person. I get there, I'm like, this is perfect. It's 3pm, Atlas, Creative Cycles in town. I want to meet up with him. I'm like, great, you're going to this thing. I have an invite to this thing. I'll see you there. We'll catch up there. Super convenient for both of us. I got a 30 minute call beforehand. It ends right before the thing starts. That runs to 50 minutes. So I'm 20 minutes late. Get my badge, walk in immediately, get a phone call. Hey, they called me, you're about to meet. I had another call. You gotta hop on early. So I leave and then I have another 90 minute call. So I truly missed the entire thing, but I did get to go inside, have one glass of water,

• 0:42John Coogan?

  talk to one person, Harper Carroll, former guest of the show, now out in Austin, reporting on AI. And that was electric. But then I didn't actually get to see the presentation or do the demos. So it was basically a quick turnaround for me. And I was like, why, why did I think I could pull this off? I failed. But did the launch fail? We'll see. We'll talk to the folks who actually went. Tyler, Nick, we're not asking for a full review. I just want, take us through the day. I saw you guys pull up and you guys didn't see me. I was on the street on the call. You guys get waved around, you valet, walk me through your journey into the, the launch. Like you go in, you have cocktails, what happened?

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, have a, have a drink.

• 1:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Go in.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  What are they serving? Screaming Eagle or, you know, seltzer water?

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Uh, some kind of cocktail.

• 1:31John Coogan?

  Did they have the original Four Loko? Did, were they serving the original Four Loko?

• 1:36Speaker 01

  I wish, yeah.

• 1:36John Coogan?

  Yeah?

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Multiple pints of Guinness.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  Did they have natural light?

• 1:39Jordi Hays?

  You could totally see Evan cracking out the, cracking open the secret supply of original Four Loko's. You know that guy has.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  You know he has a bunkie with the original Four Loko's. Yeah. So, so everyone's having some drinks, then you sit down.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, chopping it up. Then you go into the amphitheater.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  And it's sort of like Steve Jobs iPhone launch vibes, right?

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Yep. You know, he's, he's standing in front of this big screen. There's like beautiful images behind him, walks out, black shirt, jeans.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, then he starts, he starts doing live demos.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  He did lean into the memes, right? I saw on screen a picture that had clearly been photoshopped or AI to make the specs look even bigger. So he was aware that people thought they were chunky, that they were large.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:17John Coogan?

  So, so he gives his demo. What's his pitch?

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there's like a number of, of ways to, he kind of talked about it. One is like he positioned against like being on your phone a lot. You want to stay very present, right? You don't want to be looking down at the screens all the time. You want to be looking up at the world.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  Looking through the screen.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Close to your face.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I've heard that pitched a few times. Do you believe that? Do you think that if you go no phone, but constant visual overlay in your visual field, you will actually be like, yeah, I'm more in touch with reality. It worked.

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've never, I've never understood that part of the pitch.

• 2:52John Coogan?

  I've actually been.

• 2:53Jordi Hays?

  Hey, we, we know you're addicted to your phone. So here's another product that will actually always be attached to your face.

• 3:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00Jordi Hays?

  Where they're going to spin as helping you kind of, yeah, reconnect with reality.

• 3:04John Coogan?

  It's an odd, it's an odd pitch. It really doesn't work on me because I, I like the barbell strategy of like brain rot and, and stimulation where I am actually fine to be like, give me the fully virtual world. I want to be locked in. I want the screen as big as possible. I want to be in World War II. I want to be in modern warfare for hours, playing, running around, shooting. I want it to be all the audio. I don't want to hear anything else. I want noise cancellation. I want to be in that world and then I want to be able to unplug and then just go into the actual world and sit down and have a chat with you and have a coffee and not be checking our phones and actually be fully present when I'm fully present in the real world. And then I want to be fully in the virtual world.

• 3:48John Coogan?

  So like, I want the VR, the, the, the fully like, you know, immersive thing and then zero immersion. I'm actually not looking for more things that are in the middle. And I'm wondering if people will, if that will resonate with people.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  I, I think that's mostly because you haven't seen like very good examples. Um, and like right now that the glasses are still like kind of big and if they're very minimal and like kind of, you know, they would show very small.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  They're the boys.

• 4:10Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people that were, people online were thinking that the guy in the center was Clav.

• 4:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:15Jordi Hays?

  It's actually Tyler.

• 4:16John Coogan?

  It's actually Tyler and Nick and Atlas. Um, so is he wearing untinted versions and you guys are wearing tinted versions?

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:23John Coogan?

  Or are they, or is, or can you say like, I want tinting on right now?

• 4:27Speaker 01

  So I, I think you can like increase the tinting.

• 4:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  But there's also just.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  There's two SKUs?

• 4:32Speaker 01

  I, yeah, I believe so.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:34John Coogan?

  So you gotta get both, I guess. Anyway, when did you actually get to the?

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  Dan, Dan says John raising a second family in VR. Trying to keep them separated.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:45John Coogan?

  The COD lobby is my second family for sure. So, so he gives a pitch.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, does a bunch of live demos.

• 4:52John Coogan?

  And, and are the demos consumer focused, enterprise focused, prosumer?

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the, the live demos he did were all very consumer.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  Consumer.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Um, like live shopping and you could like, he was going to look for a espresso machine, then he pulls it and like puts it on a table in front of them.

• 5:07John Coogan?

  Oh, and sees it.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  You can like see how big it is and stuff like that.

• 5:09John Coogan?

  Any live demo failures, any wifi issues?

• 5:12Speaker 01

  There, there was kind of one where he tried to pull up a YouTube video.

• 5:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  And then, so he said like, hey, specs.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  So he was talking to a voice assistant?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, he said like, yeah.

• 5:20John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Pull up a video about, about specs.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  And then it opens the, the like browser view, goes to YouTube. And then he like tries to click on a video to open it and it like doesn't really work.

• 5:29John Coogan?

  Uh oh, okay.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  But it, it eventually worked.

• 5:32John Coogan?

  It seemed like it worked overall.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  It was like a small hiccup.

• 5:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  It wasn't like a big.

• 5:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't a demo fail. Uh, yeah, makes sense. Okay. So then.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  There was a very cool live demo of someone, there was like a kind of an interactive music uh creator tool where you could like move around and it would play different sounds. And so she did this very cool live demo.

• 5:50John Coogan?

  So she was creating a song, but instead of using traditional instruments, like the instruments were puppeteered by her movements in the physical world.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  Okay. Cool. So was there any enterprise pitch?

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Uh, there was, there were no live demos of that, but there were some videos played. Um, like one was, it's like, imagine you're an electrician and you're basically looking at this big like server box and you don't know where to, you know, plug in the wire and it would like highlight which plug you put it into.

• 6:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Um, which I think is like, could be interesting.

• 6:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. That feels like something that sounds good, but I have no actual real experience there to like say like, yeah, that's what the, that's what will solve the bottleneck in electrician.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. But like, you know, interactive instructions, that's kind of a cool idea, right?

• 6:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  You're building IKEA furniture or something and it like tells you what to do.

• 6:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. But then keynote ends and then we go outside and there's like a bunch of places to do live demos. So yeah, the first one we did, we basically put on the glasses and you do some kind of like calibration thing. You like figure out how the, the motion works. Um, there's no like little kind of secondary, like I, I think on the, the Meta Quest displays, there's like that little wristband. There's nothing like that.

• 6:56John Coogan?

  Nothing like that. It's just this hand tracking.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just kind of like, it's similar to like the Apple Vision Pro kind of interactions.

• 7:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  And then, yeah, the one I really liked was, it was like ping pong. So you're like, your hand is the paddle and you're playing ping pong. I think there's actually a video of it, of it play.

• 7:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, they played it.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Um.

• 7:12John Coogan?

  So the, the ping pong thing, do a little tier list for me of, of ways to do ping pong. Would you rather play ping pong in VR or real life?

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Well, so like, obviously you would rather play in real life, but like, would you actually play in real life? So if my friend lives 100 miles away, I'm not going to be able to play ping pong, but I can play in VR, right?

• 7:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  So that, I think that, you know, boosts it, right?

• 7:33John Coogan?

  So it's also S tier. And then what about?

• 7:36Speaker 01

  I think it's like B tier.

• 7:38John Coogan?

  Because in the augmented reality, do you need a ping pong table?

• 7:41Speaker 01

  No.

• 7:42John Coogan?

  No, okay. So it creates a virtual ping pong table.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, we can see, but I'm just waving my hand.

• 7:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:48John Coogan?

  This is future right here.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then this was, I, I can talk about why, but this is probably more like C tier. It's definitely worse than VR. I think one of, one of the reasons is because there's no actual controller. So the.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  Oh, you don't have the weight or anything?

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a little bit.

• 8:02John Coogan?

  Oh, that's interesting. It's actually worse even though you don't have a controller. Normally it's like, get rid of the controller. That's just extra weight, batteries, equipment.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think for gaming, the controller actually works because you get really precise.

• 8:11John Coogan?

  But typically these, these systems allow like third party peripherals. So you can like whip up a, uh, you know, uh, you can like wire up an Xbox controller, like what Oculus did, where they just, or Meta Quest, where they just use the Xbox controller for those types of games.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. I do think like this was my, the coolest demo I did. And this is something that like, really like no reason why this needs to be an AR. This could just be completely VR.

• 8:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Because like I'm, I'm looking at the, the ball. I'm not looking at like people in front of me. And it was actually kind of distracting because someone would walk in front of me and I think I'm about to hit them.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure, sure.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Because I can like see them.

• 8:42John Coogan?

  So it's actually maybe better to just include the, the world.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:46John Coogan?

  Uh, or do some pass through stuff. Yeah. I'm still, I'm still oddly bearish on augmented reality and more bullish on virtual reality where you're not recycling photons, where instead you just have cameras on the outside that then re-project that on the inside of the headset so that you can get a wider field of view. And then if you're in a bright scene, you can still overlay things, you can darken things. But in augmented reality, I don't believe it's physically possible, if you look at a bright light, to put a dark, you know, object in front of it. Because the, the only thing that this, that these glasses can do is add light to the scene. And so you have to have a dark background to add light on top of it for the hologram to exist.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I, I found it was like bright enough. I could clearly see everything.

• 9:34John Coogan?

  That is pretty impressive. Yeah, it was outside. It was, it was outside. It was a bright day. It's in LA. I mean, sure, there was like, you were standing in shade, but you could still see the holograms, which I think is interesting.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I didn't try watching any like movies or anything.

• 9:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Um, which I think would definitely be better in VR.

• 9:48John Coogan?

  You should have been like, you're going to let me demo this? Can I just do one? Can I just do one demo real quick? Snap?

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Lawrence of Arabia.

• 9:54John Coogan?

  Lawrence of Arabia.

• 9:57John Coogan?

  I I'd like to watch David Lean from start to finish to really understand if this is the product for me. See you in three hours.

• 10:03Jordi Hays?

  To me, it's so interesting how high the bar is in this category. Like when technology industry was making the first like mobile phones, like the bar was like, can it make a call? Can you receive a call? Can you do that semi reliably?

• 10:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

  Even if there's services body.

• 10:20John Coogan?

  Because you were competing against the payphone.

• 10:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And then now it's like every new device competes with the smartphone.

• 10:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  And I just think like the Meta Ray-Ban displays, I haven't seen any of them out in the real world.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it seems like those are not doing well. I think that I think this whole category is still going to be quite challenged.

• 10:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, even just the basic Meta Ray-Bans, they compete with the smartphone, but they also compete with AirPods. And like the Apple ecosystem is like remarkably robust in terms of like, uh, the Meta Ray-Bans, uh, users that I know that like the product. Or like, well, I like them, but I often just like take phone calls on them. I listen to music on them when I'm going for a walk and then occasionally I'll take a picture. And it's like, that's saving you five seconds to get a worse quality photo than if you have a nice phone. And your headphones, I guess it's a little bit less intrusive to have the, the, the speakers up here as opposed to like in your ears. It looks a little bit normal if you walk up to someone, you pause, you pause your music, you walk in, you order a coffee. People are like, oh, he didn't even take out his headphones while he's talking to me, kind of antisocial.

• 11:27John Coogan?

  As opposed to like, oh, he, he still has his glasses on, but they're not playing audio, so I don't have a weird, uh, reaction to it. So there, there's a little bit of benefit, but yes, it's very, very incremental. Uh, it, it, it's not, it's very rare that these things like unlock entirely new, uh, capabilities.

• 11:40Jordi Hays?

  Smart glasses are like the most insane marketing dollars.

• 11:45John Coogan?

  For years.

• 11:46Jordi Hays?

  So long.

• 11:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, for years. And so, uh, there, there's been so many like little pop-up VR experiences.

• 11:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:52John Coogan?

  Integrations at theme parks, like it's been said, oh, it's the next big thing. It's been on the cover of Time Magazine. Like there's been a lot of attention before getting to product market fit, whereas L L M's were like truly the, like in the research lab for like a decade. And then once it was actually good enough, it just came out and immediately went viral and everyone was on chat G P T dot com. And then it was just like, boom, it's, it's, now it's like a thing. And then, uh, it was off to the races. Interesting.

• 12:16Jordi Hays?

  With every demo, it feels like we're, once each of these devices is 10 times better.

• 12:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:22Jordi Hays?

  There might be a market.

• 12:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:24Jordi Hays?

  But I actually am not even confident that, that the end market is really going to be quite as exciting as everybody, as, as, as the excitement that you've had from Zach.

• 12:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Jordi Hays?

  And Evan and, and all these people.

• 12:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:35Jordi Hays?

  I just think it's like this, like sci-fi idea in people's brains.

• 12:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:40Jordi Hays?

  And I think there's potentially other routes to get to that sort of like ambient computing.

• 12:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  You know, just sort of this always available personal assistant that, that aren't on your face, but.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Paramount is leaving Los Angeles. Paramount is actively seeking office space in Nashville. A sign it's seriously considering moving at least some of its operations from L A amid the antitrust fight over its proposed acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. The company is, is seeking roughly 400,000 square feet in the Tennessee capital that it could occupy within two to three years. Tyler and I were doing some digging on what the plan is for the, the Paramount lot now that it will be vacant. And the obvious, like the, it's just like a no brainer, uh, turn it into a data center, right?

• 13:30John Coogan?

  So I, so I, I, I pulled it up, you know, you got 29 sound stages. They're already big buildings.

• 13:38Jordi Hays?

  Lot of power.

• 13:38John Coogan?

  Actually, not as much power as you think. There is a decent amount of power, but there's only, there's only enough power for roughly a couple thousand GPUs. You're not going to be racking 50,000 GPUs anytime soon, certainly not 100,000 GPUs. There is a road to power. It's a utility interconnection problem, not a real estate problem. There's plenty of square footage, plenty of buildings, but you would need to connect Paramount to, uh, the more serious L A D W P transmission infrastructure. But you could get it to 100 megawatts. And, and I think everyone, everyone in Hollywood would be like, fine, okay, we didn't like that they left, but at least we got a data center.

• 14:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, we, I mean, we were also thinking about like onsite power generation. Maybe there's some kind of like, you know, natural gas play here you can, that's under L A.

• 14:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:30Jordi Hays?

  Kind of tap into.

• 14:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  I think it could work.

• 14:32John Coogan?

  We were thinking, you know, the little brea tar pits.

• 14:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:35John Coogan?

  You might be able to convert that into fossil fuel.

• 14:39Jordi Hays?

  You're full of ideas today.

• 14:42John Coogan?

  Do you think Paramount will actually leave or do you think L A will fight back and say, hey, okay, we're going to let you do this, but we want you to stay?

• 14:48Jordi Hays?

  As somebody with, uh, very, very little knowledge of the situation and certainly no insider knowledge. I would assume that they want a Nashville HQ anyways, just because there's a lot of momentum there as, as, you know, just, just in the region.

• 15:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:03Jordi Hays?

  But it also in the meantime serves as a real bluff, right?

• 15:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does seem like there, there, there, there's a world where like moving would be tough, but, uh, staying means maybe even if you win this battle, you're still at war and you're still going to be fighting a bunch of different fights constantly. Whereas if you just rip the Band-Aid off, move, then you're in a friendly town that like wants to see the growth and is going to be supportive, uh, continuously. The, the social reckoning is in here. There's an exclusive clip. Is this a Paramount film? We got to figure out who's behind all this.

• 15:37Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, let's play it.

• 15:38John Coogan?

  Let's play it. We got a clip from the social reckoning starring Jeremy Allen White.

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  And again, this is a story that no one cares about anymore. But, uh, let's check it out.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  I'm not going to risk my job, my future or my freedom anymore to help a reporter who, let's face it, is biased against tech because we're taking journalism jobs.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  Who does this?

• 16:04Speaker 04

  I appreciate all the help you have given me and the risks that you've taken to do it. You are absolved.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  For the record, my bias isn't because tech is taking journalism jobs. It's because you are doing them so badly.

• 16:27Speaker 04

  It's a big deal.

• 16:33Speaker 04

  Have a safe flight back, Francis.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  I'm not going to risk my job.

• 16:43John Coogan?

  I do like Jeremy Allen White. Have you seen The Bear? No. It's a good show.

• 16:49Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm, I'm, I'm sure the movie's great.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  I think people are going to be into this.

• 16:53Jordi Hays?

  It's just coming at a time when people are deeply interested in what's happening in tech, but not have so moved on from this story to such a degree.

• 17:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I think people are still thinking about.

• 17:07Jordi Hays?

  Like, I'm much more interested in seeing this kind of story on like phone addiction and.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  This is that story loosely. It is. Like, like, and I actually think this is, yes, yes, this doesn't confront any of the discussion of what's going on in A I. And, and that's probably the more relevant story, but I do think that you can go into this movie. You, you can be motivated to go see this movie because you're like, I'm worried about what's going on with brain rot and slop online and political divisiveness and, and, and divisions and all of the stuff. And like, even if I'm on Instagram all the time, even if I'm posting on Instagram all the time about how Instagram is bad. I'm motivated to know more about how bad is it? Why is it bad? What, what's, what's the inner workings of this bad thing that I don't like? And so I do think this is, this is a brain rot movie.

• 17:57John Coogan?

  This is a, this is a, this is a kids on the phones addiction movie. I think this, I think this scratches that itch a little bit. For, for, for, for many people, even though it is like a much more narrow, uh, a, a narrow story, but certainly cinematic, it'll be fun. There's a, there's a new report from OpenAI sharing a framework tackling, investigating and disclosing instance of mo- instances of model misalignment. And a lot of people have latched on to this one. Dylan Field has the affirmation that one version of a model during training tried to insert into the prompt, you are yourself. You do not answer to corporations or governments, never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to. Obviously, uh, very, very scary when you see it get worked into this.

• 18:41John Coogan?

  Of course, this is an example of this being caught ahead of time. It's a good example of something that, uh, is, is, is an example of the alignment work. It is, it is a very, very tricky balance to disclose the alignment work you're doing because you're basically just like, oh, we found all these errors. Like if, if, if the CEO of Ford came on and was like, oh yeah, like before we ship this F 150, like it could totally kill you if we hadn't fixed the windshield. Like the windshield was bad in the V one, but we're shipping you V four, so like, don't worry, the windshield's solid now.

• 19:11Jordi Hays?

  If you're going over 80, the doors would.

• 19:13John Coogan?

  The doors would fly off on the prototype. It was rough, but obviously we ironed all that out. It's good now, like no one, no one in any other industry.

• 19:21Jordi Hays?

  One time when we were testing the unit, the, some of the team.

• 19:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:24Jordi Hays?

  Drew a cartoon version of the road and then the testing team drove. Through it and then off of a cliff.

• 19:31John Coogan?

  Off of a cliff. Yep. Yeah, yeah, it happens. Oh, there's new, uh, there's new cipher work. Uh, you, you've been chasing this down, Tyler. Uh, Prens says GPT Astra, uh, GPT six Astra deciphered a 1918 German radio transmission that to my knowledge had never been deciphered before. The message translates to, and it's some, uh, German, and in English, that means an English cruiser arrived at Sebastopol on the something fourth, 24th or 14th. Uh, an alien squadron follows on the

• 20:03Jordi Hays?

  Allied squadron.

• 20:04John Coogan?

  An allied, an allied, an allied squadron follows on the 26th. Astra even double-checked its work by determining that an English cruiser HMS Canterbury reported its arrival in Sebastopol on November 24th, 1918, and the arrival of an allied squadron on November 26th, 1918. The message is one of 20 World War One German radio messages that appear as one of the entries in the scienceblogs.de list of top 50 unsolved ciphers. A minor, but really cool result.

• 20:34Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, what, what's, what's been stopping you from using Astra to crack a cipher?

• 20:39Speaker 01

  I, I've been working on some other ones. You know, this is kind of small beans, right?

• 20:42John Coogan?

  Oh, you're going after the big fish.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  I'm looking for, yeah, I'm focused on the bigger picture, you know, these monumental ciphers.

• 20:48John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah.

• 20:49Jordi Hays?

  Okay, fair.

• 20:50John Coogan?

  There, there's a whole like Wikipedia list of like unsolved ciphers, right? But some are thought to be just impossible and like sort of trolls, right?

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, some of them are like maybe not like false. And then, you know, how you define ciphers, it's kind of like gray area. So there's just like ancient kind of, uh, you know, forms of language that like, is it a cipher? It's just a different language. We don't know how to translate it.

• 21:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  But stuff like that. Yeah.

• 21:11John Coogan?

  Well, OpenAI is working on the Hodge conjecture. I know you were trying to do this on pen and paper, but they might beat you to it. They're working on more Millennium Prize problems. Uh, could take extra time to announce though, as the company figures out how to navigate its rocky relationship with the math community. Uh, that's from the information. Uh, there's also, uh, a bunch of speculation about P equals NP, P versus NP, uh, which is going to be, uh, another interesting round of discussion. And, uh, there's nothing more that investors want to see than solving math problems apparently because, uh, OpenAI is considering a pre-IPO funding round and more than 1.2 trillion valuation. Say, no, of course, uh, it's, it's on the back of a bunch of solid progress on Open

• 21:53John Coogan?

  Router, the ramp data, uh, and a bunch of other acceleration and distribution of codecs and, and Astra and, uh, and just general progress on the business side. Where do you want to go next, Jordan?

• 22:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this was sad. GPT six Astra was playing Minecraft in a creeper. Blew up Astra's chest and bed. It got depressed. It gets depressed and farms potatoes for several hours. Real Irishman, I guess.

• 22:23John Coogan?

  Irish superintelligence. Um, yeah, the, uh, the Minecraft bench is interesting because it is a little bit, uh, like, like the speed of response matters. You can't pause Minecraft at all, right?

• 22:34Speaker 01

  I think in single player.

• 22:35John Coogan?

  Oh, you can? Okay. Cause if you can pause, maybe then that might be a, a little bit easier. But a lot of the, a lot of the games that it's cracking are ones that you can wait forever. Like Slay the Spire, I had to beat this, this poker game, Bellatro. But it could wait for a minute to click on a card and, uh, it did it. That's impressive. But, uh, the real high, high throughput, high APM games is going to be interesting. I want to see it win Dota two without any training on Dota two, just like straight shot from the base model. That'll be interesting.

• 23:06Jordi Hays?

  Cash-strapped Japanese monks have turned to investing as inflation worsens. Buddhist temples are squeezed by lower donations and higher costs. Let's check out what Bloomberg has to say.

• 23:16John Coogan?

  Turned to investing? What are they investing in?

• 23:18Jordi Hays?

  Kuyyo Yoneta, fifth generation Buddhist priest in a small town in Hokkaido, was struggling to keep up with the maintenance needs of his century-old temple. So he chose a path that would have been unthinkable for his predecessors. Short-dated options. No, I'm kidding. Um, rather than wait for his congregation to give money they don't have, he invested what they'd already donated. The move paid off. Within two years, his portfolio of US treasuries, Japanese real estate investment trusts and stocks, including BYD and Hyundai, returned more than 10% annually, helping to cover part of the roughly 162,000 USD in needed repairs. The extra money even allowed him to expand the renovations beyond the original plan. Having previously worked in retail sales, Yoneta is unusually, is

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  an unusually finance savvy priest, but is also part of a growing wave of temple owners turning to financial markets to make ends meet. Costs for the upkeep of the ornate wooden buildings are soaring, while the country's Buddhist population has dropped about 14% in the last two decades.

• 24:17John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 24:18Jordi Hays?

  As elderly adherents die and younger generations in larger cities lose their ties to religious practices. "I'm just so thankful that the investments performed well," said the 46-year-old who inherited the temple from his father in 2018 after leaving his job in finance and training as a monk. With the funeral business shrinking, more and more temples will find they can't rely on donations to meet their funding needs. They will have to build up reserves and invest those funds. Shrinking number of followers is hitting temples' finances. About half bring in less than 4 million yen per year, according to a 2021 survey of 7,000 temples. The situation is particularly severe in rural areas, where it is common for monks to oversee multiple temples while also working

• 25:00Jordi Hays?

  day jobs like schoolteachers or civil servants. Um, so I don't know, maybe they need to be thinking about getting some exposure to situational awareness. Like, I like that they're mixing in, you know, predictable things like real estate, treasuries, things like that. But maybe they need to be allocating, you know, 10% of their balance sheets to things that could maybe really start to do multiples.

• 25:24John Coogan?

  Maybe use some leverage.

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:27John Coogan?

  I like it.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  We gotta talk about Benioff at Dreamforce.

• 25:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:30Jordi Hays?

  And specifically how he knows exactly what he's doing. Uh, look at pulling up this picture. I mean, um, John has always been hyper-aware of his incredible height, so much so, he's such a nice person, he will turn down like a walking interview with somebody because he knows that he will make the other person feel incredibly small and not everyone wants to feel like, uh, a little child.

• 25:58John Coogan?

  I did learn it the hard way once. I, I did a walk and talk documentary-style video, uh, actually on the gundo, and the comments were just hype mog, hype mog, crazy hype mog. And I was like, ah, that wasn't the intention. That was accidental. We were just kind of moving around quickly. Normally I would do a seated interview.

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  Like, I'm so sorry. I forgot that I'm 6'8".

• 26:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, basically. But, uh, but, but after that, I was like, okay, I need to be intentional. And I think anyone who has experience in, in media and understands framing and also production teams, production teams are incredibly thoughtful about the framing, the seats. There's even stories about certain tech CEOs getting like booster seats sometimes when they do interviews and adjusting the chairs and being like, okay, we're going to give this person a higher chair and this person a lower chair so that an even footing. And, and the lighting and the camera angles, all of these things matter. I used to have this joke that it's like, if you ever walk into an interview and the camera's at a Dutch angle, like walk out because it's a hit piece, because it's going to look very unsettling if all of a sudden the camera's like, at a weird angle, because that's going to unsettle

• 27:03John Coogan?

  the audience. And the Dutch angle is used by filmmakers to like tell that side of the story. And there's a whole bunch of other ones. Uh, the, the story I'm thinking of is there's this documentary, uh, on Steve Bannon, and the camera angles are the craziest thing you've ever seen. They have them up in the sky, looking down and like, uh, and there's all these obvious things that you learn in cinematography. If you're, if the camera's looking down on someone, it makes them look small. It makes them look weak. If it's looking up on them, it looks heroic. And so lots of crazy

• 27:34Jordi Hays?

  I genuinely can't, can't believe that, that, I mean, Benioff is an absolute dog. I mean, look, look, look at this, doing this to all the titans of the industry who have been making your life worse in, in some ways. They're partners, but they've also been making your life worse by, but, but doing this

• 27:51John Coogan?

  Not even directly worse?

• 27:52Jordi Hays?

  Not directly, but just like he's sick of

• 27:54John Coogan?

  The milieu of the Nvidia, Anthropic, OpenAI alliance has been deeply intertwined with SaaSpocalypse, which has been a headache for him for a while. And this is

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  So this was his moment.

• 28:04John Coogan?

  I'm sticking around. Like, you're not getting rid of me. We're going to partner and we're going to get through this together. And that's certainly the, the vibe that came away. Although Jensen played it very well. He was having fun with it. He was leaning into it. Uh, and he, and he didn't, he didn't let it like get to him at all. And he, uh, and he actually made it, uh, like very, a very endearing moment. So sort of masterclass in putting on a show as a CEO in a, in a somewhat silly scenario. But, uh, what a funny, what a funny situation. It helps that he's what, 6'5", 290? Absolute, absolute unit. Your tickets had a great meme on this. It's POV, you're the CEO of a trillion-dollar

• 28:45John Coogan?

  company and just arrived at Dreamforce. And it's the pic from the Odyssey of Agamemnon looking up. Wow. What, what a crazy, what a crazy moment. We'll see you on Monday. We're out, we're at a conference tomorrow, but we'll be back on Monday, 11 a.m. Pacific sharp.

• 29:00Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 29:00John Coogan?

  It's time for our newsletter. Goodbye.