Harvey’s Margins, Are Insects Worth More Than Humans?, Meta Tests Human Help for Muse | 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?

  Jordi, his hat game has evolved. He's now wearing the fedora with the Blackstone cap on top, which I assume can only mean one thing. It means that your top priority is safety in

• 0:15Jordi Hays?

  Financial markets.

• 0:16John Coogan?

  Financial markets and the financialization.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  But also my safety as well.

• 0:21John Coogan?

  Oh, you care about both.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  I care about.

• 0:23John Coogan?

  So you want to accelerate the AI build out safely?

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  Safely.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  Yes. I thought it was, I thought it was you're going to blend the two and you're like, look, I want insane private credit deals, trillion dollars of, of capital to flow into the AI build out, but I wanted to do, do it safely.

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  I want to prioritize safety. I want to prioritize safety on the whole frontier.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  Safety around the models.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  The capital markets.

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  Safety in financial.

• 0:45John Coogan?

  In the capital markets. Got it. Okay. Okay. I'm seeing where you get there. Anyway, you want to do Harvey first?

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  Let's uh.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  People are, people are taking shots at Harvey. It started with Samuel.

• 0:55Jordi Hays?

  I won't stand for it.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  I won't stand for it. No, I like Harvey. We, we, we've talked to some lawyers that use Harvey. Seems like a great product. We also had Legora on the, on the, on the show just last week. Had a good time with them. Seems like a very competitive space, but the, the headline that grabbed attention, they say, track changes. Harvey's gross margin fell from about 50% to negative 50% by June as agent token use spiked 20 fold on rented OpenAI and Anthropic models. Bloomberg reports. And so it seems really bad. Like you definitely don't want negative gross margins as a software company, as a tech company.

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  As any company.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  As, really as any company, actually, you don't want to be selling a dollar for 50 cents. And that's exactly what they did in June, basically. That's what they were doing. They were selling tokens at negative gross margins. Not good, but there's way more details in the actual reporting. So you should go read the Bloomberg report. So the first thing is like costs did explode, but it was on the back of more product usage, which is good. They're growing ARR. We'll get into that. And token consumption increased 20x this year. So basically they are feeling the reasoning era, the agentic era, one job, one, one process in Harvey is generating a lot more.

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  Had seat based pricing.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:06Jordi Hays?

  And then AI got a lot better. So every seat was just using it way more.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10Jordi Hays?

  Very simple.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  But it's not, it's not just using it more. It's that you're, the lawyer might be saying the exact same thing as they did a year ago. They might say, review this. But instead of like one-shotting it with no reasoning, they went to reasoning, which generated way more tokens. And then they went to agents. So they were like, okay, it's actually going to fan out, look at everything across your firm, all the other records that you have, all your different policies and MD files, like everything that you have is going to be worked through this agent. And so you're generating way more tokens.

• 2:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:38John Coogan?

  So that created negative gross margins. But the good news is that they're already back to positive gross margins, which is in the Bloomberg article. Kind of criminal not to repurpose that because it really makes it look like they are running at negative gross margins. They had a negative 50% gross margin in June, but they are back to positive gross margins. They changed their model usage, of course. There's a whole bunch of models that are cheaper and better for certain things. And they actually fine tuned an open weight model. So they did post-training on an open weight model and they're calling it Harvey Tenant. And there's some interesting details there. I want to debate with you on like the value of that, where that goes.

• 3:16Jordi Hays?

  First, Gabe, one of the founders of Harvey responded.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  We did. I was.

• 3:20Jordi Hays?

  He said, the hardest thing about building Harvey is doing what's best for our customers despite immense pressure to do what's easy. The easy thing would have been to force our customers into consumption pricing before they were ready and serve them worse models to protect our margins. We chose to help our customers transition on a timeline that works for them and give them the best models in the meantime, even though it hurt our margins. This meant optimizing our product through routing, harness improvements and post-training so we could serve frontier intelligence at an affordable price. It also meant building the infrastructure for customers to monitor and manage spend, usage dashboards per matter, cost attribution, spend caps and ROI reporting. As a result, we improved our gross margins from negative 50% to positive in a single quarter, despite usage doubling

• 4:04Jordi Hays?

  month over month and continuing to serve the best models. Our philosophy is simple. Do what's best for our customers, even when it's painful, hurts our margin, or draws criticism from competitors X and the press. We believe the most important part of building a company is earning and keeping your customers' trust. You do that by doing the hard thing for them, even when it costs you. A bunch of great points in here, even outside of the, the Bloomberg piece and the subsequent coverage. Max from Legora was going pretty hard, saying it doesn't make sense.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, doesn't make sense to, to train your own models because the

• 4:38John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 4:38Jordi Hays?

  Public, basically like publicly available frontier models are, are dropping in cost.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 4:44Jordi Hays?

  And the, and the quality is increasing. So you're just sort of like wasting

• 4:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:48Jordi Hays?

  your own. And again, like, that's a bet that he's making. Harvey's going to make another bet. Probably some mixture of both is going to be the right approach.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  There's another interesting, uh, sort of like how, how bad is this situation? Uh, just comp, which is, so they had negative 50% gross margins in June. They're at a $400 million run rate for ARR, I suppose. And so that's 33 million a month. And so negative 50% margins means they lost $16 million, but they've raised like 500 million. So in terms of like burn, it's not super cause for crisis, in my opinion. And, uh, and what's interesting is that even through June, maybe they did the Sequoia deal that valued the company at 15.5 before that happened, uh, because it was announced September 9th. But

• 5:37John Coogan?

  I have to imagine that the deal probably got done with at least some insight into those negative gross margins in June. What do you think?

• 5:46Jordi Hays?

  I would assume so, but, but the main thing is like every, every application layer company has like gone through a moment like this, even if, even if it was for like a single day.

• 5:53John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 5:54Jordi Hays?

  So it matters how quickly you can respond.

• 5:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:57Jordi Hays?

  And adjust.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. So where do they, where do they need to get to? Like, what is the standard for the legal technology industry? There's some comps here. E-discovery provider Disco, public company, 75% gap gross margins. Like it is a software tool that when you're going into discovery, you need to connect with a bunch of data. Okay. We got a whole bunch of text messages, a whole bunch of emails. Let's put them in a system so we can review them. Sort of, you know, normal SAS. I'm sure there's a bunch of AI involved now, but that business is running at 75% gross margins. Thomson Reuters has legal professionals segment of software that's running at almost 50% adjusted EBITDA margins. So like true, true net profit. Um, so that's, that's sort of the way they want to be. Also, pure, pure

• 6:41John Coogan?

  play law firms have really high margins as well. Hard to comp them to businesses because they pay out the, to the partnership. Um, but, uh, PricewaterhouseCoopers reports net profit margins around 41% for the top 10 firms. It's lower for firms 10 to nine, 10 to 100 or something like that. But still lots of health in the legal industry broadly. Obviously everyone knows lawyers make money. That shouldn't be surprising. And, uh, yeah, tokens are getting cheaper by the day. Uh, there's a bunch of model launches. Opus 5.5 launched today. Grok 4.7 was yesterday. Uh, and Grok 4.7, no one was, even Elon was like, okay, we're, we're not jumping straight to the frontier with this. It's going to be a couple more iterations, but we're excited with the progress. But there was one benchmark

• 7:25John Coogan?

  that really jumped out and it was actually the Harvey legal agent benchmark, which is interesting. So I don't know how insanely good that benchmark is. It might be, you know, you could, you could benchmark against it. But the interesting thing about that particular benchmark was that it was a legal task benchmark based on cost. And so Grok 4.7 is particularly cheap for the type of legal work that at the very least Harvey wants to do. So you could see them funneling more token spend towards XAI and Grok. Do you have something?

• 7:55Jordi Hays?

  You wanted to give it up for big law?

• 7:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:57Jordi Hays?

  The chat wants to give it up for big law.

• 7:58John Coogan?

  Let's give it up for.

• 7:59Jordi Hays?

  They're the real winners here.

• 8:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, additionally, GPT-6 Sol and Luna are starting to roll out.

• 8:08John Coogan?

  Fun.

• 8:08Jordi Hays?

  So we'll look out for announcements there.

• 8:11John Coogan?

  There were some cool demos. Uh, I saw one, uh, Opus 5.5. I mean.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  Chat says the combination, the hat jacket combination isn't working. I'll try to adjust a little bit. I'll try to adjust. Hopefully that's better.

• 8:25John Coogan?

  Flawless. Yeah. Thank you.

• 8:26Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for flagging.

• 8:28John Coogan?

  Huge upgrade. Um, very funny. Yeah. I saw a cool, uh, I saw a cool demo where someone sketched out on a piece of paper, sort of a tree bouquet and Opus 5.5 took that image into simulation and created like a, a virtual version of it. AI is, is, is, continues to impress in terms of translation of things. Oh, your, your kid drew a, you know, uh, some crazy mythical creature, turn it into a story, turn it into a movie, turn it into a video game, whatever format you want. If you want to, if you want to read a, a 2000 page novel based on Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4, like you can probably do

• 9:09John Coogan?

  that now. So you can have your content in any specific, uh, specific format you want. Uh, it seems to be where the AI continues to impress. Uh, anyway, let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. I've been having a lot of fun generating AI videos with Codex.

• 9:35Jordi Hays?

  Should we pull up, uh, your latest masterpiece?

• 9:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. The literally me, uh, compilation. It burns up the internet and vibe reels all of the time. But now, if you see those literally me characters and you're like, I am Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler. I am, I forget who else is there. Uh, Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Uh, you can put yourself in the movie. There's Inception. We got Jordi in there. That's Drive. I think that's Heat.

• 10:03Jordi Hays?

  Heat.

• 10:03John Coogan?

  Mad Men. Can we call them out? I think that's Fight Club. You got Joker. You got Taxi Driver. You got Nightcrawler. No Country for Old Men, Social Network.

• 10:13Jordi Hays?

  Godfather.

• 10:13John Coogan?

  Godfather. Back to Joker. I forget that one. Sausage maybe. That one's collateral. Then Blade Runner. Blade Runner again, I think. Yeah.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  Some of these, some of the renders are really, really good. That one, like your face doesn't quite fit on Leo's head, but that one's really good. That one works pretty well. This one's a little awkward. The Joker, it's really just Joaquin Phoenix's face. Didn't actually swap you anywhere. Kodak's even like, it didn't work. And I was like, do it anyway. I don't care. It's fine. It's gonna be on screen for two seconds. That one's good.

• 10:46Jordi Hays?

  John is really my human agent.

• 10:49John Coogan?

  No, you didn't even tell me to do this.

• 10:51Jordi Hays?

  He's sort of like an ambient, always-on agent. That's what I'm saying. I don't even have to tell you. You just predict my needs, right? You'll send me something like this. Everyone should have a, everyone should have a John in their life.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  Everyone should, everyone should. Uh, but yeah, fun, fun, powerful tool. Still got 500 bucks locked away in Higgs field in the wrong section. Can't do anything with it. Maybe just give away the account or something. Anyway, what matters more? People or insects?

• 11:20Jordi Hays?

  Tough call, John. We should, we should get into maybe one side of it first. And before we form an opinion.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  Okay. The human side? You wanna steel man the human side?

• 11:30Jordi Hays?

  Look, and I'll just, I'll just say that we're coming to you live.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  We're coming to you. We had a rough morning with the, uh, with the mosquitoes. We actually had to, we had to, we had to DoorDash one of those, um, bug bite treatment thing, the heat, whatever, what, I don't, what do you call them, Tyler?

• 11:52Speaker 02

  Uh, I think it's like insect bite healer. That's what it's listed as.

• 11:55Jordi Hays?

  It did work because I, yes, Sebastian says I'm famously, famously pro mosquito.

• 12:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 12:02Jordi Hays?

  But a mosquito did bite me on the face today and a bunch more times. So we ended up, I ended up capitulating and having to get one of these. But I don't like using these. I don't like using these. I, I, it's funny because I can't stand EA's and I think they're weird freaks. Uh, and I don't think they should be anywhere near public policy or anything like that. But the one thing that I can agree on with Ben, this guy writing this post that, that insects are more important than humans is I don't think anyone should, I don't think we should harm the insects, right? So I think humans are more important, but that doesn't mean we, you gotta like take them all out, you know? Just go somewhere else, right?

• 12:38John Coogan?

  You, you would take sort of, you would be altruistic towards the, towards the insects.

• 12:42Jordi Hays?

  Ellie says mosquitoes are terrorists of the air. Uh, they really are.

• 12:47John Coogan?

  You would, you, you, you wanna be altruistic towards the mosquitoes. You wanna be effective in your altruism when it comes to mosquitoes. You don't wanna eradicate.

• 12:54Jordi Hays?

  No, I want them, I wanna them effectively to be nowhere near me.

• 12:59John Coogan?

  An effective altruist who writes under the name Bentham's Bulldog went viral over the weekend for an essay titled, "Insects Matter More Than People in the Aggregate," arguing that the combined welfare of insects outweighs that of humanity. His basic argument is one of scale. Insects are so numerous that even if their capacity for suffering is only a tiny fraction of ours, their total suffering could still dwarf human suffering. It's almost just a thought experiment. There's so many other directions you could make. Why not go pound for pound? Maybe cows are the most important because there's a lot of cows and they weigh a lot. There's probably more

• 13:40John Coogan?

  aggregate pounds of cow than humans. Maybe they matter more than humans in the aggregate, right? Or fur, like the amount of fur on all the monkeys in the world is more than all the fur on all the humans in the world. And so maybe monkeys matter more. I don't know. It's a, it's a, it's completely arbitrary where people draw these lines. But, uh, he estimates that for every, for every second of human life, insects collectively spend roughly 270,000 seconds dying, about 75 hours, and notes that more insects die in a single second than the total number of humans who have ever lived. Wow, that's a crazy stat. I mean, the guy pulled some cool numbers together. This is interesting. This is fun fact territory.

• 14:21John Coogan?

  A large part of the essay turns on whether insects can, insects can experience pain. Bentham's Bulldog argues that they can even weakly. Uh, if they can even weakly, their suffering should count morally, just as ours does. What species you are is just totally irrelevant to whether it's bad for you to feel terrible pain. Using what he describes as a conservative assumption that insects experience pain at just 1/10,000 the intensity that humans do, he concludes the sheer number of insects would still produce vastly more suffering in the aggregate. He ultimately argues that insects may experience more suffering in a single day than humans have throughout all history.

• 15:01John Coogan?

  Now, is there, is there a piece on this where this is the view of the, of this community with the relative, like, are they looking forward to how a world might interact with like a godlike machine, superintelligence and humans? So the idea is like, we gotta stand up for the insects now because we are the insects of the future? So we want them to make the same calculus?

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  I think that's certainly like where the thought experiment goes.

• 15:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, right? And so, and so the, this feels almost like bait or like a trap where it's like, if you are the type of person that jumps on this and says, no, I disagree, like insects don't matter more than people in aggregate, then you're setting yourself up for like the dunk that's, okay, well now there are a quadrillion super intelligences that can all feel pain in some abstract way. And so they're more valuable incentive. Now you're the insect. And so your previous argument can be used against you to advocate for your own eradication. And so it's like, stand up for the insects now, lest you be discarded in the, in the robotic future.

• 16:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:10John Coogan?

  I don't know. The reactions to this were rough. People did not like this argument at all.

• 16:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's, it's just the timing is funny because there's so much tension building around the sort of EA rationalist movements with.

• 16:23John Coogan?

  Which is super fracturing. People don't realize how fracturing it is.

• 16:26Jordi Hays?

  But, but it's sort of boiling up to the sort of national

• 16:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:29Jordi Hays?

  level in a way that it hasn't before.

• 16:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:32Jordi Hays?

  And so during the midst of that broader conversation to come in and being like, yeah, insects actually matter more than people.

• 16:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:39Jordi Hays?

  In the aggregate.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  Uh, what were some of the reactions? Dumer said, if you truly believe that a bug's life is worth more than a human life, you will immediately feed yourself to bugs. Do it right now. If you don't do this, you are a fraud, a liar, a poser. Um, Andres says.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think it's actually important for people to read the, before you go and comment on this article, watch A Bug's Life.

• 16:59John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:00Jordi Hays?

  At half speed.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  Half speed.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, watch the whole movie at half speed. You're a movie guy, but

• 17:06John Coogan?

  I think we coexist.

• 17:07Jordi Hays?

  Maybe you're not a fan of watching movies at a half speed. It's not really how the.

• 17:10John Coogan?

  I'm really a half speed guy.

• 17:11Jordi Hays?

  But half speed is a great sort of tool to have in the tool chest when you wanna deeply comprehend.

• 17:18John Coogan?

  2X speed, 3D glasses with the two different, two different movies interlaced. So I can get one movie in one eye, another movie in the other eye, one audiobook here, one podcast here.

• 17:29Jordi Hays?

  Duo.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  While I'm sleeping. Yeah.

• 17:31Jordi Hays?

  With the duo.

• 17:32John Coogan?

  Exactly. Max brain rot. I mean, the, the, the fracturing of EA really like leads to a really, really wide range of, of outcomes that get sort of lumped together. Everything from the Pace the Frontier essay to this. These are clearly very, very different pieces of communication, and yet they get sort of lumped together. It must be full employment if you're in the public relations department over there.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I think the shrimp, shrimp welfare stuff

• 18:00John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:00Speaker 02

  makes more sense to this because like, I'm not really sure what, like after reading this and say, I agree, like what do I, what are the next steps? Like, we're not like really factory farming insects, maybe through pesticides or something.

• 18:10Jordi Hays?

  Speak for yourself, brother.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, the shrimp, the shrimp welfare.

• 18:14Jordi Hays?

  Got some big announcements coming soon.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Like what percent of, of these, uh, like 600 billion insect debt, uh, insect deaths per second are

• 18:22John Coogan?

  Preventable.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  Preventable.

• 18:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Where like with the shrimp, you know, you can say like, okay.

• 18:26John Coogan?

  Change the farming practice or just don't eat the shrimp.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I think that's why maybe this was less impactful. I don't know.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it's all, it's all a continuum to like, until you get to like the veganism, like the animals who you can pet, you know, should, should be able to live full lives. Uh, this is sort of the most abstracted version of that, but yeah, I don't know. It's odd.

• 18:46Jordi Hays?

  More importantly, update on TBPN's Road to Christmas.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:51Jordi Hays?

  We're down to just 93 days. 93 days.

• 18:57Jordi Hays?

  Lot to think about, a lot of moves to make, and we couldn't be more excited.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  Start counting it down. I was trying to think of a realistic AI doom scenario. Like, everyone's like, oh, I can't imagine it. And so I actually mapped out one that maybe I could take you guys through. I wrote a little script here.

• 19:15Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  Called "The Old Way." So, you know, fades in, starts in the TBP and Ultra Dome. Me, you, Tyler, we're all doing the show. All of a sudden, all of the phones in the Ultra Dome light up. Emergency alert, unknown biological event, shelter immediately. Outside, alarms begin to sound across Los Angeles. A strange haze starts pouring through vents and drifting across the streets outside. I see a cloud approaching the Ultra Dome entrance. First thing I do, bioweapon attack, is what you gotta do. Boom, right there. It's not going in your mouth, you're good. Second step, pull out your gun. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Start blasting whoever's responsible. You're just firing wildly.

• 19:56John Coogan?

  Once you got the situation a little stabilized, then we gotta start, we gotta figure out what's going on. So I go over to Tyler and I say, "Look, we gotta hack into the superintelligence. We gotta figure out what is going on with this, with this bioweapon." And he's like, "Sure, like, yeah, let's hack into it. Like, I'll open up Codex. What do you want me to prompt?" I'm like, "No, the AI has gone rogue. We have to do this the old way." He's like, "Okay, I'll open Claude Code. Like, what do you want me to prompt?" I'm like, "No, the old way." He's like, "Okay, I got Cursor open. Like, what are we doing here?" I'm like, "No, Tyler, we have to go back to the old way." He's like, "Okay, I got GitHub Copilot fired up." I'm like, "No, Tyler, you can't use any AI at all." He's like, "Okay, just let me know what code you wanna write, and I'll look it up on Stack Overflow."

• 20:41John Coogan?

  And I'm like, "No, the internet has been contaminated, Tyler. We can't use anything. We have to code the old way. We have to do it by hand." And Tyler's like, "I can't, I don't know."

• 20:51Jordi Hays?

  We don't know how.

• 20:52John Coogan?

  "I don't remember anything. I can't write any code. So what do we do next? We gotta get George Hots. He's the only one who can help in this scenario." So we go.

• 20:59Jordi Hays?

  Cause he's the only one that remembers how to.

• 21:01John Coogan?

  He remembers how to code. He's got local models stored. He's got his own hardware. So we go get George Hots. And then, like, "Okay, George, hack into the superintelligence. Tell us what's going on with this bioweapon. And why aren't we affected? Like, we've been walking around. We seem to be fine. Everyone else is turning into a zombie. What's going on?" So he locks in, he writes some code, he hacks in, figures it out. He says, "Geordi, tell me about your diet." And you're like, "Well, I just eat Arowan exclusively." And he's like, "Yeah, my analysis shows that your body has never had a toxin in it, and so you are immune to the bioweapon. It doesn't affect you at all." And I'm like, "But how do you explain me? I only eat Arowan once a day."

• 21:41John Coogan?

  And he's like, "Well, John, my analysis indicates that you might have had the Original Four Loko. Did you drink the Original Four Loko?"

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  In, in large quantities?

• 21:50John Coogan?

  And I says, "Yeah, I was daily driving in college. Why?" He's like, "Your body consumes so much Original Four Loko, it's now essentially pure toxins. So the bioweapon sees it as a hostile environment. It doesn't even try to infect you. So you are immune. So we're both, so we're both immune. But the bioweapon is still wreaking havoc on America, so we gotta get to the bottom of it. So we're gonna need some muscle. So we go get Sam Sulek. And we go get Sam Sulek, and we're like, "Let's go. We gotta go to the data center. We gotta break in, shut this thing down. That's the only option." So we get in the Cadillac Blackwing, we jump it off a ramp, slam into the data center, pull out the gun, start blasting the GPUs. We're just firing everywhere. Finally, finally, after we've shot 90% of the data center, it's just bullets everywhere.

• 22:34John Coogan?

  We get the thing everywhere. Finally, a humanoid robot emerges. It's Mecha Hitler. We gotta fight him. We gotta fight him. We're shooting, we're shooting. The bullets are just, are just bouncing right off. They're just bouncing right off. We're getting beat up. We're trying to fistfight it. Sam Sulek's doing nothing. It's not working. And then at the last second, duh, duh, duh, duh, John Cena breaks through the roof, slams down the humanoid robot, rips his head off, and humanity wins. So that's kind of like a concrete example of like, how AI doom, how, you know, runaway rogue AI.

• 23:10Jordi Hays?

  Just one scenario.

• 23:11John Coogan?

  That's one possible scenario. I put it at like.

• 23:13Jordi Hays?

  Cause everyone's asking for.

• 23:14John Coogan?

  I put it at 10%. That's the way it plays out.

• 23:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:16John Coogan?

  That's kind of where I'm at right now.

• 23:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:18John Coogan?

  That's how I'm thinking about it. Meta, the AI agent company Muse, they're putting humans in there. Meta is testing human concierge for its new personal agent Muse. Meta has been testing human concierge for its new personal AI assistant. This is on Bloomberg, which entails having human contractors quietly handle some of the phone calls placed by the digital agent. Amazon's like, "No, no, no. We're gonna block your browser? Well, did you block everyone's browser? How's that gonna play out?" I was thinking about, at some point, if I write a really, really bespoke, like, basically a CLI, like, a really bespoke weird CLI, like, I vibe coded, but I use sort of odd techniques. Like, I'm like, "Okay, use computer use and open up Opera," or, you know, Mozilla,

• 24:02John Coogan?

  and, and click around and add some randomness and do this. And it's like, and I basically create a CLI that wraps an agent where it's like, it runs on my home Wi-Fi. So, and I just do this. I don't productize it. So Amazon, like, can't really detect it. Do you think I could potentially be in front of their battle forever and then puppeteer it from other agents?

• 24:22Jordi Hays?

  I just asked ChatGPT, "Can you order Amazon over the phone?" Because I would think that at that scale, there would be at least one way to do it.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 24:30Jordi Hays?

  It seems like you can only use their customer service number to help with existing orders. So one thing is you could order a bunch of the wrong thing, like a hundred of the wrong thing, a hundred, like, you know, bug treatment.

• 24:43John Coogan?

  Order everything and then have your agent refund everything but the thing you.

• 24:47Jordi Hays?

  No, have, have your Muse agent.

• 24:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:50Jordi Hays?

  Have a human via Muse call Amazon.

• 24:53John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 24:53Jordi Hays?

  And say, "Hey, I actually got the wrong thing here. Can you swap it with this other thing?"

• 24:57John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 24:57Jordi Hays?

  And just do that as many times as necessary.

• 24:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:00Jordi Hays?

  To get the right order.

• 25:01John Coogan?

  Maybe have one order that's just always open, where you're just adding and removing.

• 25:06Jordi Hays?

  They have to be completed orders, because you have to have made a mistake first to call the customer.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, you can charge me, but just add it to the order. I don't know. We're gonna get, it's gonna be a weird battle. Ben Thompson was writing about it today. It was, it was pretty, uh, pretty good. Amazon, I mean, his, his whole framing is like, Amazon is like the strongest in the AI era of the hyperscalers because they own logistics, infrastructure, the final step, the real world. And so he anticipates that they will hold their ground for a very long time and not give in. Uh, where, and that's basically what they did with OpenAI, where OpenAI had the instant checkout process. They invited everyone to be a part of it.

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  Amazon was like, "Thanks, no thanks, but we'll give you tens of billions of dollars."

• 25:48John Coogan?

  And, but, but interestingly, yeah, so now, now the, the result is that Amazon is vending in their ads into ChatGPT to close the purchase there. Toby Lookie at Shopify partnered with Muse and announced that they are integrating. But the interesting thing is like, where's the value capture layer? And it only works with Shop Pay. And so it's a lever to get merchants to go on to Shop Pay, which Shopify will still make money off of. But for merchants, a lot of people are worried about the implementation that happened with Walmart, where ChatGPT integrated with Walmart, and the end result was that conversion rate was one-third of what it was in the app and on the core website,

• 26:31John Coogan?

  and that carts were smaller, because people were just going and saying like, "I just need a roll of paper towels. Just send me that." Whereas when people are like, "Oh, I need to do my shopping. I need soap and paper towels and, and whatever else, I'll build."

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  Paper towel holder that's made by a company that's over, over 50 years old.

• 26:49John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. So.

• 26:51Jordi Hays?

  No, so the crazy thing is, so, so now, Vinod was on the show yesterday talking about Wajo.

• 26:57John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:58Jordi Hays?

  Which is an AI foe. They have a new agent that I believe is human-supported, in that some of the stuff is done by AI, and some of the stuff, if necessary, can be escalated to a human. Now, you have Meta off, at least testing, exploring, having a human in the loop on some of these things. And my big question is like, why? Why? Like, voice models are getting pretty good. It feels completely unsustainable for Meta to roll out a product to billions of people, where users might just be like, like, if I had like something I could text and say, "Hey, call this person, call that person."

• 27:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:38Jordi Hays?

  I'd probably be using it.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  I think there's a ton of, there's a ton of value. First, the Muse install base is small right now, so it's not that crazy. They have the ability to stand up huge offices, whether it's through Scale AI and that team that came over, or through their, you know, all the things that they've done over the past two decades. The other thing is that Muse specifically will not train on your data that you put into Muse. And so that, this wasn't like a huge announcement or anything, but you could see people being like, "Ah, I don't know if I wanna use this AI agent that's gonna be using my personal information." Even if they're running like the PII redactor, putting all of that might be a little bit off-putting.

• 28:19John Coogan?

  So Meta's not getting that data, but if they have a human in the loop, the human who does the task that's just beyond what the model's capable of, they're also generating training data because they can probably train on that. And so it's like, the model by default can, I don't know, like, summarize your, summarize your calendar, right? And give you a, give you a briefing on what's going on in your calendar. It knows how to integrate, and the model's capable of that. Muse 1.0, Spark 1.3 is capable of that. All the models are capable of that. But what can't they do? They might not be fully ready to, to go and have a complicated conversation with someone if they're ordering flowers over the phone or something. And, and, and so like, the current models might fall down, so you need more data to solve that.

• 29:04John Coogan?

  And so you put the humans in the loop, and then that's your extra training data for the next leg up. And then you just keep repeating that. So I would view this human in the loop thing more as them doing data collection and, and, you know, creating more training data for them than a permanent solution to the product problems. Also, I, I just, I don't think the time on site for these apps is, is actually that high. I, I think there is like an excitement when you jump on, you do a bunch of stuff. But then, with all these AI tools, like, there's a reason why OpenAI comps to like weekly active users, because there's plenty of days where people are like, "I went to the beach and I didn't touch AI at all. Like, I didn't do any work." Uh, there's some, there's some feedback on Alex Wang's post talking about like, "It'll help you with your goals."

• 29:48John Coogan?

  And, and I think Katie Notapolos was saying like, "A lot of people just don't have goals. Like, they just wanna chill." And this is also the Ben Thompson thing, of like, consumers wanna be entertained. Like, people that go to the beach, they'll still scroll Instagram. Are they really gonna be doing anything with any agent, no matter how powerful it is? Like, there are plenty of people that have staffs of EAs and personal assistants, and they don't do anything on a weekend because they wanna chill, and they don't wanna think about agents.

• 30:09Jordi Hays?

  One thing's for certain.

• 30:11John Coogan?

  It's over or we're back?

• 30:12Jordi Hays?

  Professor Zhang is vindicated. Yesterday, we watched a video where he said, I guarantee that there are humans behind the chat apps that you use manipulating the information. And he is correct, at least in the short term.

• 30:31John Coogan?

  Nikesh Rora chimed in on the knife fight between Amazon and Muse. This will be a bigger battle than anyone anticipates. It's only a matter of time before there is an Apple and Google version of Muse and possibly TikTok in addition to the Frontier LLM agents, maybe a commerce agent from Amazon. That's sort of my prediction. I think, I think Instinct might land with Amazon potentially, although they do have Rufus. But you can see-

• 30:54Jordi Hays?

  And Tyler is a Rufus power user.

• 30:57John Coogan?

  Yep, Rufus is, is good. You don't want to talk, talk down on Rufus. But Instinct is clearly like tapped into something really special with like the energy and the support that they have and the community they've built. But there are a lot of like little, little rough edges that need to get sanded off. And like, that's the domain of Amazon, in my opinion. Like Amazon, like, you know, the trains run on time and it's a pretty efficient company. So, every app that's a service marketplace or commerce app will need to existentially decide to open APIs for consumer agents to interact. Smaller players have no choice. Ad revenues are more than transaction fees. Either the consumer benefits or distribution aggregators will demand a higher fee transaction. There's an interesting stat from the Strategery post about Amazon.

• 31:39John Coogan?

  They, the net income for Amazon e-commerce was like 36 billion and the ad revenue was exactly twice that. So, the business is unprofitable without advertising. They put advertising everywhere. So, it's like a very interesting dynamic where you can see the motivation. There's $68 billion. You, you flag that number. It's a huge-

• 31:57Jordi Hays?

  Over 70 in the last 12 months.

• 31:59John Coogan?

  Over 70 billion. So, significant pool of revenue and profit that they will be protecting for sure. Any other breaking news, anything you've been tracking over the last couple of hours while we've been live? I think we're pretty much good. OPUS 5.5 launched, we talked about that. Benchmarks look really good, very cheap. And the, the key thing that you, that you pointed out was like, the second post is like, this is the first model that we've released since we said we were pacing the frontier. This is an expression of the pacing-

• 32:26Jordi Hays?

  It's affirming it, like this is, you know, Fable 5.1.1 class model, but it's, it's much cheaper.

• 32:30John Coogan?

  So, it's not trying to be more superhuman, more dangerous. It's, it's the safest, best, fastest, cheapest, lightest, thinnest model ever, basically.

• 32:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And then OpenAI also did the same thing today.

• 32:41John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. They, oh, so Soul's out?

• 32:43Jordi Hays?

  Soul, yep.

• 32:44John Coogan?

  GPT-6 Soul.

• 32:45Jordi Hays?

  Soul.

• 32:46John Coogan?

  Cool. And then also-

• 32:48Jordi Hays?

  Luna.

• 32:49John Coogan?

  Luna, but not Terra?

• 32:50Jordi Hays?

  Or I might have had that back.

• 32:51John Coogan?

  Okay. But new, new models, the model wars never cease to, to entertain. Of course, all that matters is what you do with them. So, thank you for watching TVPN. We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. Throw that flashbang. Tyler Cosgrove.