Hank Green Faces AI Backlash, Astra Makes 10 Math Advances, Million-Dollar Solo Firms | 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.

• 0:01Jordi Hays?

  Let's get into the show. What happened over the weekend? Did anything happen over the weekend, John?

• 0:05John Coogan?

  There were a couple of things. The big debate that I was tracking, sort of outside of tech, but tech adjacent, was the cancellation of Hank Green, the YouTube creator. Not quite a cancellation, more just some backlash. Hard to always put a proper sizing on a mob when a mob comes after a creator. But Hank Green, the YouTuber and really media entrepreneur, he's grown a huge business, which we can sort of go into, is getting pilloried on social media over using ChatGPT for research. Very controversial these days. Only a billion people do it, but it's the number one app in the app store. But he's getting, he's getting a lot of backlash from certain members of his audience. I don't want

• 0:50John Coogan?

  to characterize the whole audience as being part of this, but it's a very silly situation.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  There's at least thousands of people that are really mad about it.

• 0:58John Coogan?

  It's always hard to tell. I mean, thousands of people that are liking a post about it. There's like maybe dozens of posts. I don't really know how to put, how to put a scale on these things, but Hank Green is definitely going through it, having to sort of apologize or qualify or sort of, you know, state that he will adjust things in the future. And it's just sort of interesting to hear how he went through this process, what he says is going to change and where the backlash is coming from, because there's a lot of misunderstandings about it. And what's interesting is that he is a science and education creator, and science and education are potentially the most affected by AI right now. And so it's a real challenge to simultaneously say, I'm going to cover math, I'm going to cover

• 1:40John Coogan?

  science, but I'm not going to touch AI. That AI stuff's bad, because as we also saw over the weekend, AI is making a bunch of advancements on math. We've been seeing this for a while, but the latest version of the story comes from Noam Brown Polignio over at OpenAI. He says, "An internal version of Astra, OpenAI's next major model family, solved 10 major open problems in mathematics, quantum complexity, and theoretical computer science." The achievements are so, so extreme at this point that I don't even think it's worth us trying to break them down. Like, we did that with the human distant problem.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  Tyler is going to run a 5K here in the UltraDome to do a little victory lap for the research team.

• 2:20John Coogan?

  But not everyone is impressed with it, because Gary Marcus says, "Wake me when Astra solves a significant open world problem that doesn't revolve around formal verification." And of course, Daniel E. says, "The goalposts are on a completely separate planet." It is a good point. Obviously, AI is doing better in formally verifiable tasks. At the same time, still impressive, because there's a lot of things that are useful and verifiable, like, did this drug cure your cancer or not? Or did this job get done or not? Like, we've been using these recommender systems for lots of things. They're very valuable all over, but it is funny. The debate over is this AGI, is this ASI? Those terms will always be vague.

• 3:03Jordi Hays?

  Going back to Hank, so all he did was admit that he used some sort of AI tool for research?

• 3:11John Coogan?

  Yes. So I will take you a little bit more through it. So Hank Green, he's an OG YouTuber. He joined YouTube in 2007, I think less than two years after the platform actually launched. And he grew, he got a lot of views, but he also built a huge audience and created a real media company around it. So he has Vlogbrothers, like Vlog Channel, then he has Crash Course, which is a really, really huge educational channel. He runs VidCon, which is basically the, the premier conference around YouTube and the creator economy. I've been, I think, once or twice. It's a lot of fun. And over the last 20 years, he's become one of the most trusted educational creators in the platform. He's also just like, he gets the vibe of YouTube very well

• 3:56John Coogan?

  because he's been, been around it so long. Never really stepped back fully, but always been, you know, solid audience there. So last, last Wednesday, he published an episode of a show called Ask Hank Anything, and it's an interesting concept for a show. So he brings on a guest, but then instead of just doing the interview, tell me your life story, ask the, ask the guest a whole bunch of things, the guest brings questions for him about science or whatever. They, they have a big, long conversation. And if there's something in the show that he can't answer on the fly or he's not prepped for, he will go do the research and then get the actual answer and then cut that into the final episode. So you'll be watching them hang out. They'll talk about some odd thing. He was

• 4:40John Coogan?

  talking about this, have you heard this Kiki and Booba thing? There's like two words that, that one basically, there's two shapes. One's like a fluffy cloud, the other's like spiky, spiky like star, essentially. And if you ask people generally, which one would you assign the word Kiki to? And which one would you assign the word Booba to? People always pick Booba is the cloud and Kiki is the spiky one. And it's like, the sound of the word has a shape to it, even, and this is just something in our language that shows up all over the place. So he's like, telling the story of this, like, just somebody ran a science experiment, they, you know, put a bunch of people here, they polled a bunch of people, they put together this result, and this is what happened. And so he needs to compile all of that quickly, because you get off the show, you have the rest

• 5:24John Coogan?

  of your job, but then you have to go answer these questions and have all the information. And of course, he uses all sorts of research tools, but he was accused specifically of using ChatGPT to write the script, which is interesting, because after the episode went up, manager JoJo posted a clip of him from the episode and accused him of using ChatGPT to write the script. The key line is Hank saying, quote, "I appreciate the pushback." That's sort of an AI phrase, but that wasn't one of the really trigger AI phrases, like, you're absolutely right, or it's not this, it's that. "I appreciate the pushback" is something that the AI models say occasionally, but you wouldn't think it would make it into a script, but that's why people jumped on it. They

• 6:05John Coogan?

  were like, wow, he was so careless that he left in a turn of phrase that was the model talking to him about, "I appreciate the pushback." That's not what happens. He's actually responding to the guest pushing back on him and about this concept, and then he answers it. But he was just talking, but it's, but it feels out of, out of place, because he's talking to the camera at that point, even though in the video, he's talking to the guest after the fact. The way it's edited is him direct to camera, so him saying, "I appreciate the pushback" to the camera. What is this? Beans? I don't know. But him, him saying that, "I appreciate the pushback," feels a little weird when you just watch it, but it makes sense in the context of the longer video. So the headlines

• 6:50John Coogan?

  proliferated over the weekend to the tune of Hank Green accidentally reads AI prompt feedback left in his script. Hank has to not, has to deny this, but he goes on to admit that he does use ChatGPT for research. Dun, dun, dun. This did not land well. People don't like the idea of him using ChatGPT for research. And clearly, it's just a small subset of his audience that actually takes the time to flame online about AI usage, but it is, there are still dozens of posts, maybe hundreds of posts, about how AI cannot be used for research, because it hallucinates or it removes some key human element of the process of learning, something like that. It's very odd for anyone

• 7:30John Coogan?

  who's used modern models, because there's a lot that AI can't do well yet, but pulling a bunch of links and quotes together from across the internet is something that they're pretty good at. And it's definitely reliable for that. And so Hank clarified, the script was not written by AI. He was just going on ChatGPT and saying like, hey, where, where did this original research come from? Pull up the paper, download the PDF, crunch it all together for me, you know, pull some quotes from it, change this into a different format. I want it in this units instead of that units. But those types of questions. He still said that he has not been happy with how he's been using AI and may wind up publishing less as a result. He feels like he's on a little bit of a treadmill,

• 8:13John Coogan?

  because he's more productive with AI, but then he posts more, and then that's a feedback loop. And of course, like, at this point in time, he's like, built his career over 20 years. He has a very sustainable business. He probably doesn't need to be on, on as much of a treadmill as perhaps an early-stage creator might be. It doesn't feel like it's total audience capture, but there is this interesting opportunity here that I was sort of just identifying. Like, AI is clearly this wedge issue. Billions of people use AI and get value from it, but at the same time, it's deeply unpopular, and there's lots of people who like to post angrily online about how AI is bad for a variety of reasons. But education and science in particular are going to be intertwined with AI for the foreseeable future. Like, every advancement in science is going to be AI-enabled. And so if

• 8:57John Coogan?

  you're a science educator and you constantly have to be dancing around AI and be like, oh, yes, like, they solved this math problem, but I don't like it because AI was used. Well, you're going to wind up just not being able to talk about math or science or whatever's happening, because you're, you're constantly doing this dance around AI. And so that's fine. There's that audience that will love that. But there's also an opportunity for a new audience that's maybe a little bit more nuanced about this, and maybe just, yeah, it's fine that you use that for doing research. As long as the script sounds good, I'm fine, or as long as you are clear about your policy, which is odd, because that's what he, he was always clear. He's just still got attacked and

• 9:38John Coogan?

  had to go on this defensive. I believe he has like a published policy around how him and his employees at his media company can use AI or do use AI or don't in various scenarios. But this was the first time I've seen a, like, real backlash to just pulling that up on ChatGPT. A lot of people in tech, I think, were getting like, sort of whiplash from, from watching all of these arguments pile up. Someone put together a cool chart here of the good arguments and the bad arguments from the pro-AI crowd and the anti-AI crowd. So an example of a good argument around this from the pro-AI crowd would be, AI is a powerful and capable tool. And then, like, a bad argument from the anti-AI crowd would be, AI is useless in, in research slash in general.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  But there were bad arguments that were put forth by pro-AI people, something like, you use, you use data centers, like Hank uses data centers. And it's like, yes, YouTube is hosted on a data center.

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so are you to write this comment.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  Yes, but that's not that the the actual like data center that's required to host an online comment is wildly different than a massive gen AI system like cooking tons of tokens and actually setting the GPUs on fire, right? And then a good argument, the best argument from the anti AI crowd was said that AI usage in science communication reduces trust at least a little, which is which is interesting. I mean, yeah, you do have to check these things. And we do see tons of examples of people actually leaking, you know, AI phrases and weird AI like hallucinations into scientific research. There was that example of there was some PDF that was scanned and there was a word

• 11:18John Coogan?

  on in one column and a word in another column that got bled together when the document was imported. And then a whole bunch of a whole bunch of scientific research started referencing this phrase that doesn't exist and just came from basically a hallucination or like a quirk of the optical character recognition. So anyway, they canceled my goat for using LLMs to search papers that he would need to read to make his videos. They want him to use Google search like a caveman in big 2026. That about sums it up.

• 11:49Jordi Hays?

  The crazy thing is I don't can you can you even turn off AI mode in Google now?

• 11:53John Coogan?

  I think you can. I think you can. You can use duck, duck, go. I don't think that has AI yet. We'll see.

• 11:59Jordi Hays?

  Brian Low on X is sharing a heartbreaking essay by a mathematician last week for this most recent news drop. So this was before Noam Brown showed the recent breakthroughs by Astra. Said, there's nothing I can do. There may be nothing you can do. I have no prescriptions, policy recommendations, or coherent call to action. I just want to be honest and open about my emotional and spiritual response. I want to feel seen. I want folks like me to feel seen. I need the architects of our new mathematical paradigm to look me in the eyes and acknowledge our shared humanity and soul before they deliver the coupe de gra. I need most of all for us to understand what we are really doing.

• 12:40John Coogan?

  The dark knight of mathematics, Kerwin Hampshire, mathematician researcher from the University of Oakland, who recently authored the viral essay, studied mathematics. Interesting. I it feels like I would be surprised if if mathematical education goes away. It feels like a lot of these problems should be interesting to apply, but I understand that's a different that's a completely different discipline. It will be interesting to see what happens next because there are more advanced problems, the the the millennium prize problems, P versus NP, Navier-Stokes, right? There are a number of problems that are still unsolved. What happens when they're all solved? Do we create new problems? Where do we go from there?

• 13:24John Coogan?

  Do we start applying them in different ways? What do you think, Tyler?

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, obviously, like.

• 13:28John Coogan?

  Any advice for mathematicians?

• 13:29Speaker 02

  I think so. So in the scuttle article, he says like mathematicians are paid to like solve.

• 13:33Jordi Hays?

  Twenty one year old podcaster has advice for mathematicians.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  Exactly. Like, so he says like mathematicians are paid to solve theorems, which like, obviously, I'm not in academia, but like, it seems like that it's like kind of their job, but also it's like, you're in a university, right? It's like teaching.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's plenty of there's plenty of math professors that they'd sort of try and solve theorems, but also mostly teach and, you know, don't solve that many theorems.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. And also, like presumably, if you can solve all these conjectures, like there's going to be new questions that open up. This is like the entire history of all science, right?

• 14:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it will be interesting to see the application of this stuff because it's so abstract at this point and and and it's it's it feels like it's a very everyone's saying like, okay, based on this, like, this is going to like flood through material science and flood through chemistry and biology and that would be awesome. Everyone would love, you know, oh, all of a sudden, like the electric cars have twice as much range because we solved some fundamental thing. It'll be interesting to see where the new bottlenecks are. There of course will be always. Math professors hate AI for one simple trick, just scale, scale, scale, I suppose.

• 14:40Jordi Hays?

  It's time.

• 14:41John Coogan?

  What?

• 14:42Jordi Hays?

  It's time to talk about the rise of one person, one dollar companies. Wall Street Journal is saying AI tools make it easier for founders to get started alone, and many stay that way as they grow. Ben Brokha launched a company last December that offers AI tools to entrepreneurs.

• 14:57John Coogan?

  That name's familiar. We've had him on the show.

• 14:59Jordi Hays?

  Already added 10,000 paying customers and is on track to bring in 10 million in revenue this year. One thing he hasn't added, any other employees. The 40 year old is part of a class of entrepreneurs who are launching and often running new companies on their own. Artificial intelligence tools answer Brokha's emails, help write and debug code, field requests from customers, sign up new subscribers and grant refunds when issues arise. Brokha relishes his ability to make whatever decisions he wants on his own, often from his sun drenched, Sausalito, California, living room. I think compromises make lukewarm results, he said. Once upon a time, running a business of a certain size required a team. AI is turning that assumption upside down, and more aspiring entrepreneurs are going it alone.

• 15:40Jordi Hays?

  An analysis by the payments company Stripe, Tyler, look up Stripe, shows there are thousands of solo operators on the company's platform that are generating over 1 million in revenue with their ranks doubling between 2023 and 2025.

• 15:53John Coogan?

  That's pretty crazy. So this is on Pulsia, right?

• 15:56Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no, no, no.

• 15:57John Coogan?

  Oh, on Stripe?

• 15:58Jordi Hays?

  Definitely not.

• 15:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 16:00Jordi Hays?

  This is just Stripe.

• 16:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  The number of solo, I'm sure, I would be curious if Pulsia has any companies that do more than, you know, a thousand dollars.

• 16:10John Coogan?

  I mean, you're you're looking at the.

• 16:11Jordi Hays?

  Because because to be honest, because to be honest, like, I actually do think success for Pulsia is like just making back a dot, like even a dollar more than you're spending on on Pulsia, right?

• 16:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. There's a YouTuber who's been demoing different AI systems, Fable and Soul and Kimi and saying like, go make me money is the basically the only prompt. And he lets it cook for like a week and he'll be on like a 200 months, $200 a month subscription, see if it can make six cents, see if it can make $10. And he's getting closer every time. And he, of course, has to do some things, set up API keys and do little things. But it's an interesting experiment. Ben Awad, you should go check it out.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  So the number of solo operators, according to Stripe, also crossing the $10 million threshold nearly tripled in that same span. In the past, people without business contacts or particularly savvy might not have known how to get their ideas off the ground. Now AI can be a built in business partner.

• 17:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, we how does how does Stripe know if you're a solo operator? Like, if you're because if you're a podcaster and you set up a Stripe account to accept money from advertisers, you could be having a million dollars move through there. But if you hire an editor or not, that doesn't necessarily show up in Stripe. So they must do some sort of polling and ask.

• 17:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think I think in your account, at some point, you say, how many employees do you have?

• 17:31John Coogan?

  Okay. And if you say, yeah, I just got one.

• 17:33Jordi Hays?

  But I guess one question.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  It's definitely wrong.

• 17:35Jordi Hays?

  One question I have with the data is like, what if you just set up your Stripe account? And it's like, how many employees do you have?

• 17:39John Coogan?

  And you one and then you wind up adding people and you don't go and update. Yeah, possible.

• 17:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because they don't have the payroll. I don't know how I don't know how they would have visibility into into payroll, especially like individual employees.

• 17:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:54Jordi Hays?

  They do have a sense for how many people obviously are like added to your account, but sometimes it's like.

• 17:58John Coogan?

  Oh, true.

• 17:59Jordi Hays?

  Account if you add your CPA.

• 18:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  You know?

• 18:02John Coogan?

  And that's a contractor, not an employee.

• 18:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. AI's ability to handle various administrative tasks makes it potentially useful for launching solo businesses in many fields, but the technology's ability to handle key tasks in tech like coding make that field a particular hotspot. Among all industries, new business applications in the information sector.

• 18:17John Coogan?

  I've seen the biggest percentage increase, nearly 45% over the past year. Yeah. At the same time, the rate of information sector applicants saying they plan to hire workers has experienced the sharpest decline of any measured industry. This census data set doesn't track solo operated businesses, but the numbers broadly show in tech and beyond that applications are flat among businesses likely to hire workers, but generally rising elsewhere. Economists say that's a strong sign that solo operators are in the upswing. Wow, yeah, that chart is really up and to the left. New business formation, this is in the information sector in particular.

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  So Tyler, update.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Okay, so they basically calculate the number of like solopreneurs based on how many people have like, there's like special plugins or platforms that are directly for like the solopreneur. So they basically use that to like get a proxy of the general like percentage of solo people on Stripe.

• 19:09John Coogan?

  On Stripe, oh, they have like a special flow for solopreneur.

• 19:13Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 19:14John Coogan?

  Oh. Cool.

• 19:15Jordi Hays?

  So they say that they're almost certainly underestimating the number.

• 19:18John Coogan?

  Hey, Julian Weiser, I know him, says the bar is getting, the bar for getting started has never been lower, said Julian Weiser, who runs a San Francisco-based accelerator for solo founders working in tech. The accelerator, which offers founders seed money and mentorship in exchange for an equity stake, attracted 4,500 applicants for 10 slots made available in its most recent cycle, nearly five times the number it drew when it launched last May. Now, he's been growing this a lot, but that is staggering. A lot of people want to be solo entrepreneurs. Going it alone with AI can still be surprisingly expensive. Broca said he was losing money on many customers' accounts while paying to access Anthropic's Claude to run his clients' requests, that AI company, as well as others charged based on usage. He has since switched

• 20:03John Coogan?

  to free open source models from China. Broca says he has raised $30 million from investors and at the same time has saved millions in salaries since he hasn't needed a team of software engineers. Another risk, if it's easy for one entrepreneur to launch an AI-assisted business, copying them can be easy, too. This creates anxiety for founders like Troy Johnson, who runs an AI-assisted business alone in Orlando, Florida. Everybody has the sword, and we all have the ability to unsheath Excalibur now. Johnston, what a great quote for the journal. I love it. He's 40. He used AI to code an app that helps people get the most out of credit card benefits. Huh, that's interesting. Pick which card you want to use, because you might have multiple cards, one that's good for dining, and you build

• 20:48John Coogan?

  an app for that. There's been a few apps that do that. The Points Guy had a whole blog around it, a whole media company around it, still does, but interesting to sort of like, yeah, go and actually vibe code that. A lot of those things, it's like you could probably just use the models themselves for this. Just have a thread that says, hey, these are the cards I have. Go pull all of the data. When I'm about to buy something, let me know. But at the same time, there might be some value for something new with a deeper integration somewhere. The company makes around $3,000 a month in profit with no employees and continuing to grow. What a run for Troy Johnson.

• 21:25Jordi Hays?

  Great story.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  Who loves, who loves King Arthur-related metaphors for business. What one-person businesses will mean for the labor market remains to be seen. Polling has shown that Americans are worried that AI will replace jobs, and top economists are wrestling with that possibility, too. But AI is also creating lots of new jobs, and the go-it-alone entrepreneurs show the technology can both open doors and limit employment opportunities. If everyone's hiring less, but you get four times more firms, what does that do to headcount, said Rembrandt Coning, an associate professor at Harvard Business School who studies entrepreneurship. He co-authored a recent study that found that among 50,000 startups the researchers examined, those focused on AI tended to operate with 25% fewer employees. It's interesting,

• 22:05John Coogan?

  because haven't we seen the ramp data that said that AI adopting companies were hiring faster? But maybe they still operate, lower operational headcount, but hiring faster because of hiring growth. There's like three different factors that are going on here, sort of mixing all together. Coning, the professor, also believes in a, believes a soft hiring environment that has left some people mired in long job searches, has encouraged more to try their hand at launching businesses. That makes sense. Some founders cite different motives. It's a perfect storm of post-pandemic burnout and a reevaluation of one's priorities, and also booming AI and a sense of what's possible, said Samir Ahmad, 39, who lives in Brenningsville, PA. Two years ago, Ahmad decided to leave the corporate job he had

• 22:49John Coogan?

  worked at Verizon for almost two decades to start a solo coaching and consulting business. He had been seeing social media posts touting the ease and virtues of AI, which he liked to chart, which he used to chart a business plan and help with marketing. It was like my chief of staff, second in command. The business ultimately petered out within months, though, and Ahmad is back to full-time corporate role with a utility company. For Claire Voe, 41, AI helped turn her passing impulse into a business. She was working full-time as a tech executive when she tapped AI in late 2023 to help code an app that would help manage documentation and design for new products with customers ranging from financial services to healthcare firms. "I was copying and pasting from ChatGPT," said Voe, who lives in San

• 23:33John Coogan?

  Francisco. She put her app online for $1 a month. Wow, that is cheap. And within weeks, people downloaded it.

• 23:40Jordi Hays?

  I thought we didn't know how to make apps that cheap anymore.

• 23:42John Coogan?

  I mean, it is a subscription, at least, not one time. But she put it online for $1 a month, and within weeks, people downloaded thousands of times. Nearly three years later, Voe's company, which she ran solo for nine months before hiring an engineer, now has 100,000 users and is on track to make seven figures in profit this year. Wow, that's remarkable. At $1 a month, that's crazy. AI handles the company's marketing, sales, and customer support. While AI is a shortcut, Voe said her network and credibility in the industry were key. I think people over-index on how easy AI is and under-index on how much I did to get to this point, she said. She's still.

• 24:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just want to see, I want to see five companies that make more money from their business than they give Pulsia every month.

• 24:28John Coogan?

  Yes. So Pulsia has some public dashboards for how much people are spending or something like that?

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so right now, you can see all the different things that the companies on Pulsia are doing, or at least some of them. Right now, so far today, companies on Pulsia have spent $373.

• 24:46John Coogan?

  Is that today?

• 24:47Jordi Hays?

  On ads.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  Today?

• 24:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:49John Coogan?

  Well, it's still morning.

• 24:50Jordi Hays?

  It's still morning, so we're pacing, only about, I don't know what time zone this is in. But yeah, the big question is like, is any of this stuff actually working, or is it more like kind of a video game, effectively?

• 25:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  That people just enjoy, like, watching the machine hum, but there's not really much happening?

• 25:10John Coogan?

  I mean, that was the thing for Midjourney and Suno, I think, in many ways. Like, Midjourney, when it launched, people were like...

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  Totally. I mean, no?

• 25:20John Coogan?

  Okay, hear me out.

• 25:22Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I'll hear you.

• 25:23John Coogan?

  Okay, when Midjourney launched...

• 25:24Jordi Hays?

  Get the steel man.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  When Midjourney launched, people were like, this is going to take artists' jobs. And it was like, okay, so if that plays out, then I'm going to go to the MoMA, and there's going to be a show for someone that just prompted Midjourney, and the highest auction at Christie's is going to be some Midjourney artist. And that's not really what happened. Like, people aren't using Midjourney to make fine art, but people love Midjourney. Like, they love the activity of going on Midjourney and generating and prompting and getting an image back, and then, and then maybe they send it to their friends, maybe they use it a little bit. But it's not exactly the same of like, the process of becoming a fine artist. It's more like they're enjoying the process of just making. It's more like

• 26:10John Coogan?

  just having a guitar that you just like to practice and noodle on versus like actually being a touring artist. And so, like, that's certainly my experience with Suno, is it's fun to try and make a song and then listen to it and then be like wrestling with the thing. And it's possible that that could be the same activity for, like, okay, I'm going to go build an online business, see if I can get something out. But it's not really like a job. It's more of like an entertainment product. I don't know. What do you think?

• 26:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, you could easily see it turning into like Ender's Game scenario, where it's like a game, and then it's like, oh, that was actually a real business you were starting, Ender, you know?

• 26:44John Coogan?

  You offshored the last job. You sent off labor overseas. You rolled up the entire HVAC industry. That wasn't a simulation. Mark Zuckerberg was answering questions about his AI strategy on the latest Meta earnings call, and Ben Thompson wrote about what Meta's position is in AI, how they're grappling with a few things. There were a bunch of interesting points in this Strategery update. One I wanted to call out was what Ben Thompson thought, the best moment on the call, was when an analyst asked him why the company can't just use other models. Like, why can't you just do the Apple thing? Do nothing, win. Like, partner with one of the labs, do some license agreement. If you need an image model,

• 27:29John Coogan?

  you get an image model. If you need a text model, you get a text model. If you need to speed up your programmers or your engineers, hire the best coding agent and negotiate with them, right? And here's how Mark Zuckerberg answered it. He said, "I can take the open source question. Let's see." So basically, the question is, do we think that because there are some open weight models, that we can just rely on those? I mean, right now, the open source models are not as strong as the frontier models. Good point. So no is the basic answer. Meta needs to be on the frontier with their intelligence that they use, so they have to be there. There's also just always the perpetual, both policy debate and question around other companies' actions and whether that's a thing a company

• 28:14John Coogan?

  like Meta can rely on. So if you're using Chinese open source and there's some regulatory risk, it seems like that's sort of what he's getting at, is these things might not rely, they might not be available all the time. And then also, some of these companies, they might be open source for a few years and then go closed source and then start charging you an arm and a leg. So you don't want to be in a place where you become super dependent and then all of a sudden get, you know, hurt once you're, you know, super dependent on a particular product. So, he says, "And I think that's very tricky. So on both fronts, we believe we're going to be able to do better work, and we think that there's some risk in that reliance. I don't believe that's the right thing to do." So, that...

• 28:55John Coogan?

  Felt like not a great answer to me in the sense that the the Apple approach seems to be working so well. Then he goes on to explain some of the history of Meta and it's very, very interesting. He says, I think that we're a company that if you look at Meta from take a step back on this, a lot of people view the surface layer of we build some social media apps and we have an ad business. We are really a full stack technology company. We we build our own data centers, our own infrastructure, our own chips, our own low level software. When we get when we got started, he says, my background in engineering, I wrote a lot of the systems code. A lot of the reason why Facebook worked was because it actually it just worked, which is a crazy thing to say based on the history. But he

• 29:39John Coogan?

  but he makes a really good point. He said, like, it literally worked when other social networks did not work fast and efficiently. And I think we just have the ability to build things that can be more personalized, more optimized, more efficient. Some qualitative experiences are just not even possible for others to build because we go all the way down the stack. And it just seems to me pretty clear that having kind of sovereignty over building your own models is going to be an important part of that stack going forward, which is why it's important for Meta. And so that that was very interesting that that was a differentiator in the early days that certain other competitor sites would just be slower. They wouldn't be able to launch new features quickly. And by vertically integrating all up and down the tech stack, they were able to do things very aggressively. This

• 30:24John Coogan?

  is the the reels thing. They built two extra data centers to be able to do the reels algorithm. Because if they didn't have that compute capacity, they could not have launched a competitor to TikTok on any normal timeframe, because it was actually a compute intensive project, not just a design. People see, oh, they just put a new button there and there's some videos. But it's like behind those videos is a massive recommender system that is very computationally intensive and stores a lot of data. And you can't just spin that up for 3 billion users or however many billions of users they have on a on a dime if you don't have the infrastructure, if you're not actually vertically integrated. So there's a whole bunch of other things

• 31:03John Coogan?

  where in terms of personalization, understanding the user, delivering a really first class experience, they sort of do need to bring it in house. But investors are very upset about this. They're not very happy because Ben Thompson calls it the financial tail wagging the dog and says that they have to sort of double spend right now. He makes a good point about this. They're double paying. The company right now is basically double paying for infrastructure without a clear path to monetization. And to make matters worse, its improving monetization story lost a bit of its luster. So they're both renting AI compute, paying a bunch of money for new researchers, and then also spending all the CapEx for the next data center.

• 31:44John Coogan?

  So all of that needs to come together in this in this moment to actually deliver. And the investors are starting to ask all these questions about what the what the strategy is. But Zuck's sticking with it. He's not he's not backing down. But we'll see.

• 31:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, tough position to be in when capital markets don't have a ton of faith. And you just see that in in the stock price, the the company broadly, right? There's a lot of infighting frustration around just how MSL is treated versus the rest of the company just paying for MSL. So Zuck is is at war with fighting a war with multiple fronts.

• 32:23John Coogan?

  It is. It's a big war. Let's go to this Paul Graham post. He had such a wild experiences. He bought a book. It was awful. Didn't want it on my shelves, but I couldn't throw it away. So it sat on a table near the door.

• 32:39Jordi Hays?

  I know someone that will rip it apart, feed it to a machine and burn it. I know someone. I don't know them personally, but I know they they would they would love to to take this off your hands.

• 32:55John Coogan?

  Rushing to an appointment this morning, I grabbed it to read it, first mistake, then went to breakfast and had nothing else. So I spent the morning reading the worst book I have known. It's such a funny, such a funny, like, just like, I don't know, it feels like a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode or something like that. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning into TVP on today. We'll see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific.

• 33:20Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 33:21John Coogan?

  Apple Podcasts on Spotify.

• 33:23Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor.

• 33:23John Coogan?

  Sign up for our newsletter, tvp.com. Goodbye.