John Reviews The Social Reckoning, Muse Wonder, Apple’s HomeView | 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?

  How was your weekend?

• 0:03Jordi Hays?

  It was great. Too long. Too long.

• 0:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, four days is way too much.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  I missed you. I missed us. I missed the Ultra Dome. I'm glad to be back.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  We are back and yeah, it was a good, good weekend. I saw the social reckoning. Big drop, big weekend, because I think it was opening weekend this weekend. The theater was completely empty. But it's interesting. Do you think that the Meta team tried to time up Muse Wonder, all the good news to like fight back? Like the Cheeky Pint appearance? Because they completely steamrolled the movie.

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  They won.

• 0:38John Coogan?

  I don't think they needed to because the movie got really packed.

• 0:40Jordi Hays?

  The crazy thing is that I had, I have zero desire to see the movie. I will not be going to the movie. And in many ways, it's my job to at least go. I feel like, I figured you were gonna go. So I felt like we were covered.

• 0:54John Coogan?

  So I did go.

• 0:55Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy that I'm like, it's crazy how excited I am to go see the Nathan Fielder film. And how little I even cared even know about, I don't even care about your review.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  Okay, well, you're about to care.

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  Others might.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  My review is gonna be riveting, okay?

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:11John Coogan?

  So it's Saturday. It's a little rainy in LA. And so I'm like, I'll throw on this jacket. I'll get a little cozy.

• 1:20Jordi Hays?

  You go see a film.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  I had to go to some other events, went over to our friend's place, and then I go to the movie. So I walk in and I'm, and I think I'm looking good. I'm dressed for like a, you know, a nice rainy day in LA. I walk into the theater, I sit down for the social reckoning and it stars, you know, it focuses on this Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz. And in the movie, I'll pull up a picture of what he wears in the movie because I looked like a kid from Spider-Man who dressed up as Spider-Man going to see Avengers. And I was like, wait, that's my exact jacket, my exact, I had the same jeans and boots too.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  It was, it was really, really striking. I just accidentally wore a costume to the movie. So it was very funny. And I was like, that is exactly my jacket. Like, it's not even just the same brand. I think it's the exact same jacket. Anyway.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  That's so funny.

• 2:15John Coogan?

  It was a very funny moment. It's not quite a sequel to The Social Network. Like, it's not the same structure of protagonists, antagonists. It's not really about the internal operations at Meta, at Facebook. It's very much about the, so the Mark Zuckerberg character is now played by Jeremy Strong instead of Jesse Eisenberg. And it's a much more peripheral, the story follows data engineer Francis Haugen and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz. The whole thing feels very out of date in the scaling era. The race towards superintelligence so dominant in the minds of tech people right now. I'm not surprised that this movie is an underperforming because it doesn't answer the questions that people are asking about tech companies right now.

• 2:54John Coogan?

  Worldwide opening was nine million on a budget of 40 million. So it's like gearing up to be a flop, but not, you know, the game's not over yet. And Rotten Tomatoes has a 55% score across 215 reviews. The acting's fairly compelling, the lighting, and it moves quickly. Story ebbs and flows nicely over the two hour runtime, but it feels like a time capsule from a completely different era. Mark Zuckerberg has so thoroughly reinvented himself that it felt like, I was like, who is, who is Jeremy Strong playing? And I'm like, oh yeah, Mark was kind of like that in 2019. But since then, it's like UFC, complete fashion makeover. Changed the company's name. They have fashion line now with like glasses and so many different elements.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  And then AI, obviously, personal assistants. Like even hearing the word Facebook feels antiquated now. Because people have actually shifted to, well, Instagram's the more important social platform. And then MSL and the AI stuff is really important. So Muse is a more important buzzword than, than Facebook. And then they renamed the company and stuff. So it felt like a blast from the past. You know, people often say the job of media is to speak truth to power, ask the hard questions. And I came away thinking Aaron Sorkin refused to ask the hard questions. There are so many hard questions to ask about Meta. You could ask, you know, will Muse margins be comparable to Meta's core ad business? But Sorkin doesn't ask that. Or you could ask, like, does Muse Wonder jumping really good on the benchmarks, does that change the underlying?

• 4:24Jordi Hays?

  Is it benchmarked?

• 4:24John Coogan?

  Is it benchmarked? That's a hard question.

• 4:26Jordi Hays?

  And even Cheeky Pint, even, even Cheeky Pint was pushing on that, right?

• 4:29John Coogan?

  Exactly. But Sorkin completely drops the ball.

• 4:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  Doesn't, doesn't address the fact that if Muse is, if Muse Wonder is competitive, does that change the underlying frontier model economic thesis? Like, that's the question that people want to ask. That's the question that media has a responsibility to ask and to investigate and to interrogate. And yet, Sorkin completely shirks his duty there. Will the retention curve for Muse smile? You know, right now, there's some, there's a post by Didi Dasch showing that Muse, you know, there's a lot of excitement on day one. After 14 days, a lot of people have stopped using the product. Sometimes these things come back. What's going on there? Completely ignored by the movie. It was very, very odd. And so instead, he focuses on old stories that have been settled in the courts essentially.

• 5:16John Coogan?

  But there were a bunch of other funny things. I was taking notes. And it's hard because, Michael, are you, are you here to give your review?

• 5:23Speaker 02

  I have to be very careful because I'm a fan of Aaron Sorkin. I think he's great. He has made a lot of great work. This did not feel like one of those great works.

• 5:32John Coogan?

  What specifically was lacking? Because I thought the acting was pretty good and I thought like, if it had been three hours, I would have been like, oh, that was a drag. But like two hours, I thought it was okay. Was it just like too contrived? Because like, I feel like my critique of it is probably very different than yours.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, contrived feels like a good word. It just feels like, it felt like all the, all the character dynamics and the dialogue and everything just felt so forced. And it felt like it was trying to be like an 80s, like journalistic thriller, like all the president's men or something like that. But it just felt like kind of out of place and it felt too polished to actually fit in that, in that scope. I don't know.

• 6:07John Coogan?

  It was a total glaze piece on the Wall Street Journal. Because Jeff Horwitz.

• 6:11Jordi Hays?

  Maybe I want to watch it now.

• 6:12John Coogan?

  Jeff Horwitz, I mean, sure he's in shape, but let's be honest, Jeremy Allen White, the guy is diced. He's absolutely shredded. And they've made, they cast him as like the ultimate Chad. There were a bunch of other funny moments where Jeff Horwitz, the character, the journalist, shows up. And he's like, I don't even have a Facebook. I don't know how to use the GPS stuff in my, he's like the extremely offline guy. And, and there's a whole bunch of funny, funny moments where the benefits of social media are kind of revealed through this. Because part of it takes place during COVID and the Francis Haugen character is like, oh yeah, I set up a Facebook group for all these scientists.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  And everyone like really understands how serious COVID is going to be. And, and, and the journalist who's like offline and like doesn't care about tech is like, that's a bunch of mumbo jumbo. And it's like, wait, like you're kind of pitching me the whole idea of like the internet. Like, it's like the biology calling COVID so much earlier. Like, there clearly are some benefits here. Oh, they have this funny moment where they're like, Mark Zuckerberg has a bulletproof couch. And they're framing it as like, look at how weird this guy is. And it's the meme, like literal coolest thing ever. Like this thing sucks. Because I'm watching there, I'm like, bulletproof couch? That's amazing.

• 7:23Jordi Hays?

  A couch that's always watching your back.

• 7:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. So the idea is that you can hide under it. And, and they kind of frame it as like he's being a coward by having it. Because like, you should obviously like charge straight into the hail of gunfire if you're being attacked. But, and they're like, he would be hiding behind his bulletproof couch.

• 7:37Jordi Hays?

  Did I not kind of call this like two months ago that no one would care at all about the, the whole premise of this movie anymore?

• 7:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:44Jordi Hays?

  Like the, the whole, the, the narrative, like even the media itself is so far moved on.

• 7:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:52Jordi Hays?

  That they, I would have liked to see this kind of production on the current AI race.

• 8:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:01Jordi Hays?

  And I think we're getting something like that with artificial. But it's interesting because like The Social Network, I don't know, I don't know if I can say this, is a cult classic?

• 8:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:13John Coogan?

  I mean, it was, it was a box office success as well, but it became a cult classic.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  Box office success, but within tech, it's like, it's a classic. It was so, it was so influential on the culture. Sort of had the opposite effect that, that the, the, the makers of the film maybe wanted it to have. Where everyone was like, I want to be like Zuck. I want to be that guy. At least, at least on the inside of the industry. And, and in some ways, like I could imagine that, that Zuck and his team were worried about

• 8:42John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 8:43Jordi Hays?

  this movie because the last one was like such a hit outside, in the outside world and within the tech industry. And they've had to, it was like, I'm sure hard to reinvent like Zuck or figure out who he was outside of, you know, the, at some point in the 2010s. It felt like he was just becoming the character. He was looking more and more like the character in the movie in some ways, like almost like becoming.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  Wait, when?

• 9:05Jordi Hays?

  This was like late.

• 9:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then PT has that idea that it's, it's funny and ironic that Mark Zuckerberg became the Justin Timberlake character from the movie.

• 9:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or that, or that was it. But it was like so influential on, it was so influential on the industry. And especially the next generation of founders that it seemed like it had an influence on Zuck.

• 9:29John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 9:30Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 9:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's funny. I mean, it definitely, it definitely feels like the, the, the post 2020 UFC, uh, like, you know.

• 9:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that, that was like, wait, who am I? Who do I want to be?

• 9:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:42Jordi Hays?

  I have to figure out.

• 9:43John Coogan?

  And it created a ton of distance because the Jeremy Strong character, it feels like it's a completely different person. And then he also, Jeremy Strong reads is kind of older, but he's playing a much younger character than what you see on Cheeky Pint, who's like actually Jeremy Strong's age, but has become something else. So, yeah, there's a whole bunch of interesting weird things. Yeah, there's also a bunch of things where you're like, oh, that just doesn't, that doesn't, that's not how things work. Like, there's this scene where Mark Zuckerberg is like addressing the board and explaining how the algorithm will work. And he's like, emoji reactions will be worth five points and retweets will be worth 50 points.

• 10:20John Coogan?

  And it's like seen as like, oh my God, he designed the algorithm for controversy. And it's like, that's, you know that the algorithm's like 12 levels deep. It's like, he goes to Adam Mosseri, who goes to the chief technology officer, goes to VP of engineering, who says like, okay, what are we doing? It's like, well, we created this optimization pipeline for retention that balances all these things. It's a bunch of, it's a bunch of data and we have no idea what's going on in the black box, but we saw the retention went up. There's no, there's no one at Facebook who's like, add another three points to retweets or reposts or whatever, shares. Um, it's like, it's like more, more signal than can be humanly understood, uh, for sure. Uh, also, it's just hilarious, uh, view of like Hollywood's perception of tech that like the final shot of Mark Zuckerberg is him

• 11:05John Coogan?

  sitting in front of like a 42 inch TV in this like war room and he's just like sitting there like this and he's just watching code scroll by, just like really fast code scrolling by. And it's like, why would you be reviewing code at extreme speeds during like, it happens during like January 6th. It's like, that's not how you monitor a situation.

• 11:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you could just open Instagram.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And then also like they go through the Trump ban in this weird way where it's very much, it's framed as like his decision. And it's like, if you were, if you were paying attention on that day, it's like very clear that all of the different tech CEOs were like in a group chat together, talking about like, hey, if we're going to do this, we all got to do it at once because like, otherwise, uh, we will be, uh, you know, singled out as like the one that did, that did it. So there's a bunch of interesting things. Anyway, also very weird that, uh, like Aaron Sorkin, like seems to be under the impression that Francis Haugen and Jeff Horowitz like had a romance of some sort, like, uh, which they deny.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  And Jeff Horowitz was like, Aaron Sorkin, please don't make it seem like it was romantic. We were, I would, she was my source and we just worked together on this, but we weren't romantically involved. And there's like so many scenes where you're like, okay, they're trying to make, they're kind of making it look like they're going to date. And then they like sail off into the sunset and you're like, oh, so do they get married? And you look it up and it's like, no, they were both married to other people. Anyway, funny movie. But the big news of course is, uh, Meta, uh, Zuck says Meta has reached the frontier with its new Muse Wonder agent. What was the exact line? He said, he said he, you know.

• 12:40Jordi Hays?

  Oh, let's get it. We'll, we'll get into, we'll get into that. Let's, let's talk about it.

• 12:43John Coogan?

  So this is from the Financial Times. Mark Zuckerberg says Meta has reached the AI frontier. FT interview, tech billionaire touts release of new Muse Wonder model after vast spending to challenge rivals in AI race. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So speaking with the FT, as Meta released its Muse Wonder AI model on Monday, this is, uh, watermelon, right? Everyone's doing the, the fruit thing. There was strawberry and then there's banana and now there's watermelon. Uh, he said, uh, the new system was going to allow much more sophisticated behaviors that are at the frontier of what's being done in the AI field.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  The Silicon Valley group claims Muse Wonder outperformed or performs better than comparable models released by Anthropic and OpenAI in some tasks, according to technical benchmarks. The release marks, marks a major milestone for Zuckerberg, who since last year has committed billions of dollars to shake up Meta's AI leadership, build vast data centers and hire star AI researchers on multimillion dollar salaries, all in a bid to keep pace with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Uh, quote, getting to this point required both a large amount of compute and investment and a lot of very rigorous scientific work by the group working on it over an extended period of time. So he's bullish. He's posting on X about it. What's your take, Jordy?

• 14:00Jordi Hays?

  I was trying to understand how, uh, Mark and Alex like really felt about the model by watching Cheeky Pint.

• 14:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:10Jordi Hays?

  On the, on the drive to work today, I was listening. It's great to have Cheeky Pint back.

• 14:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I thought that they were all like, I mean, this was the most candid I've ever seen Zuck.

• 14:20John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  He felt like he was just hanging out, having a beer.

• 14:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:24Jordi Hays?

  Trying to have a couple of beers.

• 14:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:27Jordi Hays?

  Um, and so I thought, I thought it was great.

• 14:29John Coogan?

  Tyler, Tyler cataloged it.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  He did. How, how many exactly, Tyler? It was, uh, 1.4 pints.

• 14:35John Coogan?

  1.4? Okay.

• 14:36Jordi Hays?

  Okay. And I will just go out and say, as somebody who's had a couple of drinks while recording a podcast, as we would celebrate whenever we would double way back in the day. I certainly, we always felt that the content just got worse.

• 14:51John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 14:51Jordi Hays?

  Like, it was like each sip, it was getting like a little bit worse. And so we basically.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  No, it's a funny idea. You think it'll be looser, it'll be better content, but that's just not what happens.

• 15:00Jordi Hays?

  You're just not as sharp.

• 15:01John Coogan?

  You're just not as sharp.

• 15:02Jordi Hays?

  Like, you're just period not as sharp and, and, uh, I, yeah, it wasn't like, suddenly it was like, you, you, there's no reason we're here for three hours.

• 15:09John Coogan?

  If you're going to do it, you gotta practice. You gotta, you gotta be drinking six to 12.

• 15:13Jordi Hays?

  So, so anyway, if I'm, if I'm Zuck and I have to launch this new model family and talk about Muse and all these things, you gotta give him credit. Cause I, I either, either one, he was practicing having like 10 beers a day. So that when he had 1.4, he was still feeling like sharp.

• 15:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I like to imagine.

• 15:32John Coogan?

  He built up his tolerance.

• 15:33Jordi Hays?

  Built up his tolerance.

• 15:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:34Jordi Hays?

  Um, but either way, ballsy to come on and, and, uh, and just start throwing them back. So, yeah, I was, I was trying to understand, uh, you know, the benchmarks are all amazing. Muse is a great product.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  People love it. They like manage by, by being like later movers. They manage to solve a bunch of problems.

• 15:55John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 15:56Jordi Hays?

  And like created just a more compelling user experience. I thought it was cool. They were even talking about how, they even talk about their experience with like OpenClaw.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 16:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which was cool. But I was trying to, if you actually listen to the wording, uh, Zuck's wording, he said, the, the quote that stood out to me and I had to play it back. He said, this is the beginning of like MSL kind of being at the frontier. This is the beginning of like MSL kind of being at the frontier.

• 16:26John Coogan?

  I mean, it's so hard.

• 16:27Jordi Hays?

  At the 24, at the 24 minute mark. Brother Collison then said, so you think this is Astra or, or, or Fable level?

• 16:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:34Jordi Hays?

  And, and they, and then Alex and Zuck kind of both like fight over each other for a second, which can't knock them for, we do the same thing.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but then they said, by looking at the benchmarks, one would conclude that. Which to me is like, yeah, we all see the benchmarks. They look amazing.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  We all, but you've been accused of benchmarking before. And so we all wanted to know.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  No, no, I don't think they've been accused of benchmarking before. Oh, maybe like early llama stuff.

• 16:58Jordi Hays?

  Like everyone went through this with, with.

• 17:00John Coogan?

  Uh, maybe.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  Sparks bench, you know?

• 17:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 17:03Jordi Hays?

  But it's not like, and, and so to me, if it's like, so you think this is Astra or Fable level? And then you answer, by looking at the benchmarks, one would conclude that. So, so again, like, I don't think that they are actually, based on a few of these factors.

• 17:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:18Jordi Hays?

  I don't think they're, I don't think they're really at the frontier.

• 17:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 17:22Jordi Hays?

  Um, and I think it will become pretty obvious that that's the case.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:26Jordi Hays?

  As people.

• 17:27John Coogan?

  I mean, these things are always like the, the, the crown goes back and forth so quickly. Like they're, you know, they've been working on this for a long time. They launch it. Who knows what the other labs have up their sleeves to fire back, et cetera. I, but I, I do think the, the language is odd because it feels like there's pretty little downside to just being like, yeah, this is a Fable class model. And just use the anthropic terminology because everyone has an idea of what Fable means. It's like big model, we're, you know, uh, really expensive. And you're like, yeah, we're giving this away. We, we, we're putting it in the same category, but it's basically free because it's integrated into the product.

• 18:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  And.

• 18:03Jordi Hays?

  But here's, here's what, here's what is, I think, here's what I think is interesting.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  And then people can quibble over like the.

• 18:08Jordi Hays?

  I think you have to be way more excited about, you have to be way more excited about what MSL is doing.

• 18:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:14Jordi Hays?

  Than, than Google or, or SpaceX at this point.

• 18:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:18Jordi Hays?

  And you have to give, like, everyone should be giving Mark credit for that because if you're thinking about rewinding a year, even after the talent raids.

• 18:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:26Jordi Hays?

  Hey, a year from now, you're going to be more excited and more interested about MS, what MSL is doing than Google and XAI, SpaceX.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:36Jordi Hays?

  You know, this was, this was pre-merger, but.

• 18:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:39Jordi Hays?

  Um, so yeah, they're, they're competitive.

• 18:42John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. Yeah, it is interesting that, that SpaceX has yet to launch a model. Like Elon's been very, very cautious with the words on like, when the progress will come from that team on Grok and different versions, but obviously they have cursor, they have great team inside. So you would think that there'd be, there'd be more progress there, but he's been sort of downplaying it a little bit more.

• 19:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Uh, the, the, the big debate, uh, the funny thing about the, the interaction with like the meta universe and like the EA world is, I mean, going back to the movie, there's this moment where, uh, they're like, somebody asks Francis Haugen, like, what, what, uh? What percentage of teenage girls having a bad experience on Instagram would be acceptable to you, like developing body image issues? And she's like, 2%. Maybe 1%, she like backtracks it. And they're like, it's 34%. And that's like a bombshell. But from like an EA perspective, it's like, oh, so like potentially net good if like, if like 46% are positively impacted and only 34% are negatively impacted. It's like, you take that trade all day long because

• 19:51John Coogan?

  it like maths out in the spreadsheet. Not how people actually think about things, but it really goes to show you how different philosophical, how different philosophically some of the, some of the worlds are right now. And, and this is like, the, the, the AI safety world is like colliding with Mark Zuckerberg right now. Like Andrew Curran summed it up. He said, pacing is out the window. For it to work, every American lab needed to be on board. Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly make it, made it clear that he is not interested. One defection among US labs breaks it all, as the others will be forced to accelerate or get passed. Mark has a staggering amount of compute and, and has been all in on compute capex for years, even in the face of some investor opposition. He never stopped building his in for once. He said on the earnings call a couple of years ago that he'd rather

• 20:36John Coogan?

  overspend now and potentially even be wrong than not have the compute when he needed it for the next 10x. He's finally hitting his stride and he's not going to slow down for team pacing to solve a defection like this. They would have needed a supportive pro pacing administration that was passing capable capability regulations and was willing to use the power of the federal government to enforce them and bring non compliant labs into line. They don't have any of this. In fact, it's the opposite. Mark has Trump's ear. President Trump, Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen are all completely aligned on policy. It's full speed ahead. And if you want to pace yourself, go ahead, but don't tell anyone else what to do. That, this breaks pacing. And so the interesting thing is like, the, like, are we on the frontier? Are we not? There are benefits to being on the frontier

• 21:19John Coogan?

  from a prosumer adoption perspective. Like people will be like, oh, I gotta try the new model. It's Fable class, or it's, it's, it's Astro, but it's cheaper, or it's Astro, but it's integrated by Instagram. People will be excited to try that. But if you actually say like, now we're on the frontier, we're the most important AI lab. It's like, okay, so what are you doing about the potential problems from AI? Like now you're the one getting the hard questions about that stuff. Being like a strong second, a strong third actually gives you a little bit of cover because you can say, oh, well, like the, you know, the most dangerous stuff, like, yeah, like Muse Wonder is great at coding, but you can't build bioweapons. Like, that's not, that's not anything. Like, we'll see that emerge at the frontier labs first. We'll see those problems confronted by anthropic OpenAI.

• 22:03Jordi Hays?

  And that's one of the reasons, that's one of the reasons why you can say like, they're not at the frontier, because the researchers that are at the frontier sometimes, sometimes have this like, you know, you know, stare where you're like, oh, you've seen things that no, you've seen manmade horrors, you know, beyond.

• 22:18John Coogan?

  Beyond all comprehension. Yeah.

• 22:20Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video on Saturday. Zuck, Zuck went live.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  He went back to the barbecue.

• 22:25Jordi Hays?

  Went back to the barbecue, back to the egg.

• 22:27John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 22:28Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video. Let's get some sound on.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, Tank, we're smoking sausage. Smoke whatever the fuck we want. Wow.

• 22:39Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  Is this real?

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  Catch me up this beat. I was, I was just a boy during this era, but he didn't used to like post selfie videos during the social network era.

• 22:49John Coogan?

  Well, he was in and out of going direct through the entire journey.

• 22:54Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 22:55John Coogan?

  So he like.

• 22:57Jordi Hays?

  Cause like, part of the reason that this new, the new, the new movie doesn't hit is because you just see Zuck all the time, talking to people. And he'll go on podcasts.

• 23:07John Coogan?

  And, and you could do an impression of the new Zuck and make fun of him and do a more exaggerated version of this character and poke fun at the quirks of this character. But it's a completely different vector of like comedic attack than the previous arc. It is funny that they're talking about deploying capital for AI spend and Alex is like, you have to make this very large investment. You have to make big decisions about how you're going to invest and develop the technology before you know that there's data to support this. And it's funny because you go back and listen to Dario on Dwarke and he's like, there's these people that are just yellowing. And everyone's like, oh, he's talking about OpenAI. But it's like, oh no, he was actually, he was talking about

• 23:49John Coogan?

  Meta too. And it was absolutely the right thing to do. So this is funny.

• 23:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it seems that way so far, but I just didn't, yeah. The, the, using like this line to try to criticize Zuck's management style is like, he's always operated the business this way. He's always been willing to bet the company. He's always been willing to invest more. He did, he did this with the metaverse. You think, I don't think if you look back, it's like.

• 24:11John Coogan?

  Company if you're just spending.

• 24:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not betting, not betting the company. Not betting. So that's not the right word.

• 24:15John Coogan?

  He'll just be like, I have this cash machine and I'm going to spend it. Like, he actually treats $10 billion like it's $10 because he makes $200 billion, you know? And like, to him, it's like, you know, a nice car.

• 24:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:27John Coogan?

  And for other people.

• 24:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I, I just never thought that with the metaverse, he was like, oh, like, this is a hundred percent going to work. So that's why we're going to invest so much. It was like, there's a chance that this is the next paradigm on a shorter time horizon than the rest of the world thinks. And we're going to invest against that. And it's okay if it doesn't work out. Clearly, the company has been fine.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  It is remarkable how, how quick companies can catch up in AI, can, can get another foothold, can train a new model, can get near the frontier or to the frontier with enough effort versus metaverse and VR where, you know, Microsoft has a hollow lens and like, it didn't really go anywhere. And like Apple, when are they going to fire back with the next Vision Air or Vision Pro or something? It's just completely, when you're, when you're operating in the domain of pure software, things move so much faster. Anyway, speaking of Apple, Apple just announced Home View, a $299 smart home hub. John Turnus posted it on X. Let's play the video. And I want to know, are you in the market for this? Looks

• 25:29John Coogan?

  like a big Apple watch, like the rounded rectangles or the rounded square. You're spinning like it? Yeah, we heard about this and I thought it was going to be much more like the Pixar lamp, like with an articulated arm. It has a much simpler design to it. I think it just swivels and then you can manually adjust it up and down. But I guess it can follow you around the room. If you put it on a kitchen island and they're touting the new Apple intelligence and they think that will catch up. It, it is interesting how, what they will have to do to catch up to Muse and Instinct and Dot and Grokbot. Like there are several AI agent products that are fairly fully featured at this point.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  And they all have pros and cons based on what they integrate with. Apple has an incredible integration point and an incredible model partner with Gemini. I think if you, if you went to Noah Shin and said, you can only use DeepMind models, but they're free, he would say, yeah, game on. Like I, I can build a great product. But it'll be interesting to see like, when do they have the, hey, go and, go and, you know, plan a birthday party, reserve, make a reservation, create the invite, send it out to all my friends and, you know, just come to me with the key decision-making questions. And, and I don't

• 26:49John Coogan?

  want to be involved. I want you to actually do this agentically. That, that functionality, that ability feels far off.

• 26:58Jordi Hays?

  Screams, you know, screams stagnation.

• 27:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, it's hard to get excited about this. I would be, so here's, here's where I would get excited, John. If Apple actually, and maybe this is where they're going.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:11Jordi Hays?

  If Apple was committed to actually making this device be able to control all of the electronics around my house, from like my gates to cameras, to lights, to HVAC, all that kind of thing. I would be extremely excited because the current system I have in my house is like some random tablet thing. I don't even know who makes it.

• 27:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 27:33Jordi Hays?

  Attached to the wall and it controls everything and the software is really bad.

• 27:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:37Jordi Hays?

  And if they were going to actually, is that what they're doing? Or is this literally just like a half iPad, half computer that sits on your kitchen counter?

• 27:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's an iPad. And that functionality exists, like Astro or Fable can like straight up reverse engineer the API to your garage door clicker and make it work on the smart home. But then they bump into the OS layer all over the place. But I think they're going to reverse engineer that too. I think, I think the end, the end state might be buy this and jailbreak it and run your own software that's, you know, sort of instantiated on the fly or forked from something. But in terms of industrial design, looks pretty nice.

• 28:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, really solving a problem that no one has.

• 28:29John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Money change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 28:34Jordi Hays?

  John, John needed to break the ice. So he ran another ad for the New York Stock Exchange.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  Oh, I did? Sorry.

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, solving a problem that I don't have. You know, when you're FaceTiming and you need the phone to follow you around the room and it's hard to hold it because you're cooking and you want it, and you want the camera to follow you around the room.

• 28:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  But we built the solution for that.

• 29:00John Coogan?

  So Meta had a product that competed with this called the Portal. Same thing.

• 29:03Jordi Hays?

  And I was, I like that for the name. It's portal time, baby.

• 29:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I actually did get a bunch of them for family members during COVID and we used them like once and then, and then they started collecting dust. They worked as like picture friends, basically. But they, they, they did not become like the smart home. Although maybe they should bring that back now that they have Muse.

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I'd just be curious how Apple thinks about this. Is this like, yeah, we have enough customers that like a million people will buy this. Like, does it actually move anything? I, I would just like to, I would love to see that like really bold bet on like, we are actually going to provide iPhone level software for your entire home. Some big news on the timeline. OpenAI discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of their offices. They used models to understand the device and where it came from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier. We refer the matter to the FBI and we're grateful to the agents and prosecutors who moved quickly to make an arrest. The FBI's investigation is ongoing and we will continue

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  to support their work. Just reading the OpenAI newsroom. At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weight, source code or customer data. The employee was terminated. We take protecting our technology data and people seriously and as a matter of national importance, our security program is designed to protect against a wide range of threat actors from insider risk to cyber criminals to nation states. And this case is an example of how an AI, of how AI can help address these sophisticated security threats. Federal prosecutors say an employee from Saudi Arabia planted an audio recorder and left another unattended in his bag. I'm not going to be able to fully

• 30:51Jordi Hays?

  pronounce this. Duhul Rahman Al Fazan, a Saudi national, was arrested Friday and charged with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications. He made his initial appearance in federal court today.

• 31:08John Coogan?

  This photo is crazy. They have a camera back there that caught it? What is going on?

• 31:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, was this maybe his own device that he recorded himself with?

• 31:15John Coogan?

  Maybe. I don't know. I don't know why you need video from behind the TV. That's very odd.

• 31:19Jordi Hays?

  No, but it was, it said it was a recording device.

• 31:22John Coogan?

  But I thought it would just be audio.

• 31:24Jordi Hays?

  I know, but maybe it just happened to.

• 31:25John Coogan?

  Well, that's crazy, crazy, crazy. Interesting.

• 31:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, really, really wild.

• 31:31John Coogan?

  He wanted to be a fly on the wall for the wrong reasons. You gotta be in those meetings just to, for the mindset, like, like our, our friend, the poster who wanted to be on the fly on the wall at the White House dinner. You know, this is, this is very, very crazy. Really underscores like the stakes here, that there are like, potentially like nation states and spies afoot, all sorts of crazy, crazy stuff going on in the AI race. We'll see you tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And we'll see you tomorrow.

• 32:04Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.