Interest Rates Spike, Politicians Take Sides on the AI Safety Debate, Time’s AI Cover | 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?

  Top thing on my mind today is figuring out what's going on with interest rates, the high interest rate phenomenon. We've had zero interest rate policy, zerp, the zerp era ended. Now we're in the H I R P. I don't think we should say that one. That doesn't sound very good, but the high interest rate policies, the high interest rate phenomenons are upon us. What's going on? It's very obvious what's going on. You take one look at the chart, it's the war. You can see the U.S. attacks Iran in the beginning of 2026. Interest rates are low. We should pull up this chart from the Wall Street Journal. It gets more dramatic every time they show this chart, this one right here, Jordy.

• 0:45John Coogan?

  Take a wild guess, what's driving interest rates? It is, of course, the war which starts there and then boom, up into the right from then on. But there's other questions about what's going on. Is AI, is the build out having an effect here? What else is going on within this data? Why is it happening? And does war always lead to higher interest rates? That was something that was on my mind, so I wanted to get into that. It's obviously bad for everyone. It's bad for the U.S. government because they have to refinance debt and pay interest, and that puts stress on all the other things that the government wants to do with money from healthcare, pensions, even funding the military. Like, if they're paying interest, they're not paying for other stuff. That's not good. Bad for the prospects of the American home buyer. Interest

• 1:29John Coogan?

  rates are now above 7%, getting very unaffordable for lots of people. And also, a lot of mortgages are rolling over, so the era of like the 3% mortgage, less and less people still have those because people are either moving on to floating rate mortgages or moving out of interest locked periods. There's a whole bunch of dynamics there. And it's even bad for AI companies. So everyone hates this because the AI companies, of course, even though they have an ungodly amount of money, they need to raise more money to finance build out and finance data centers and finance expansion. And so, not good for anyone. How do you get out of it? Maybe end the war, but there are other things at work. This war is unique. I mean, it's not that war

• 2:09John Coogan?

  causes interest rates to go up. It's war causes energy shortages, which causes inflation, and inflation bleeds into everything. So pain at the pump turns into, I need a raise for this, I need to raise prices on food, I need to raise prices on all sorts of things. Energy is, of course, a key input into everything. Why I am so against pacing the energy rollout. Every year, for the past like 10 years, the, I forget what it is, IEA or something, there's a body that forecasts energy build out specifically in solar, and they've gotten it wrong every year for 10 years. They've underestimated the growth of solar. You've seen this chart, right?

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  International Energy Agency?

• 2:52John Coogan?

  Is that it?

• 2:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:53John Coogan?

  IEA? Yeah. So every year, they'll be like, okay, we had a great year last year. We're going, we're going parabolic. We're up into the right. But clearly, we're not going to build more solar. People are going to get sick of this stuff. And then the next year, we build even more solar than we predicted. And so you can look at this chart of the predictions and then how we blow them out. So that is something that we want to clearly keep working on because it will bring down inflation, bring down costs of basically everything. It will be very deflationary, and it'll allow us to do all sorts of new things. But this, this war is specifically driving energy prices because, of course, oil transported through the Strait of Hormuz is a key pressure point for control of the conflict, and that drives up inflation, which hurts the

• 3:36John Coogan?

  value of treasury bonds, causing yields to spike. And so that's why they're above 5%. It's the first time, I believe, since 2007 that they've been this high. So not good. It doesn't always go this way, though. I wanted to understand, does war, or war even in just war in the Middle East, does that always cause interest rates to spike? It makes sense. It's an expensive thing. It's a capital suck. It's depressing in many, many ways. There's a whole bunch of economic reasons why you could think that war would cause interest rates to spike, but does that always happen? So during Gulf War I, which I didn't realize this, but we have a son of a veteran on our team. So thank you for his service. But during Gulf War I, there

• 4:14John Coogan?

  was a textbook oil shock. So Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2 of 1990. The U.S. military buildup began basically immediately, and the Desert Storm offensive started January 17, 1991. So about six months between the initial conflict over there, the U.S. gets involved. What happens when the U.S. gets involved? Interest rates spiked, and interest rates were already 8.29%, already pretty high, but they spiked to over 9%, 9.05%, in less than a month. Because everyone's like, oh, well, there's going to be less oil. Kuwait generates a lot of oil. Oil is going to be knocked offline. That's going to flow through the economy the same way. Energy prices, inflation, etc., the usual playbook. But six months later,

• 4:59John Coogan?

  they were lower than the start of the war, sitting at 8.03%. There were some other things going on in the economy, obviously, but basically, like, that war did not last so long. It had a much more tight ending, and so there was, there was less pressure on interest rates. The Afghanistan war played out in reverse. So immediately before the invasion, the 10-year was at 4.52%. Yields fell to 4.22%. You could imagine that there's some sort of like optimism around like, oh, this will be a quick operation. This won't be a quagmire. Of course, the opposite happened. So six months into the war, the 10-year hit

• 5:38John Coogan?

  5.25%, up significantly, up basically 3/4 of a percent since the start of the offensive. The end result of that is that now, WASH, the new Fed chairman, is in a tough spot. The markets expect a rate hike to bring inflation down. So the August consumer price inflation was at 3.4%. The Fed actually prefers a different inflation measure called the PCE Price Index. That was at 3.7%. And so even by the Fed's preferred measure, inflation is running too hot. Again, they're targeting something like 2%, and they're up at 3.7%. And then also, you get into this like, oh, well, like, maybe it's just, maybe the inflation's

• 6:19John Coogan?

  just related to food and energy, because energy goes into food. You're trucking all the food around. Let's look at the broader economy. So there is a separate price index for inflation excluding food and energy, and even that's a 3.3%. So that's too high. So there's really very, it's very, very tough to make a case for holding rates steady, even lowering rates, which is, of course, what lots of people want to see happen. It's very, very difficult. And the inflation is spilling over from energy into other parts of the economy, and it's basically just complicating the Fed's case for aggressive easing. So everyone's expecting a rate hike at this point. What's the effect of AI on all of this? I think that AI is such a big driver of the economy, and yet, it's having such

• 7:04John Coogan?

  small impacts in many ways. Like, the total AI revenues are something like 1/4% of GDP still, but in terms of headlines, it's like 75% of what we talk about. And so, yeah, I guess you could see a couple orders of magnitude, you get to 25% of the economy. I don't know. But, but today, the problem that's happening with rates specifically is that AI creates investment demand before any productivity benefits arrive. And so, we see this with like a trillion dollars of capex for like a couple hundred billion dollars of actual revenues. And so, data centers require financing, construction capacity, equipment, electricity.

• 7:45John Coogan?

  That spending happens today, but broader productivity benefits take longer to diffuse. So economists, specifically a group of economists that have studied this, they describe AI as a source of upward pressure on real rates and potentially prices during the compute build out. And Dylan Patel, Dorkesh have talked about this a little bit, where, you know, compute, because there's high ROI, it tends to suck demand out of the investment community. Like, you look at what Jensen's doing, securitizing GPUs. You look at the incredible demand for investment grade being attached to data center build outs with Nvidia lending IG status to different companies for build outs and backstopping different data

• 8:29John Coogan?

  centers. That just means that if Nvidia's there backstopping, it means that certain funds that can only invest in investment grade assets can now make that investment. You don't need to go to a venture capitalist for it. You can go to a mutual fund, or you can go to eventually like an insurance fund, where there's a lot of capital.

• 8:46Jordi Hays?

  I see where you're going with this.

• 8:47John Coogan?

  What are you thinking?

• 8:47Jordi Hays?

  You think Jensen should, should backstop the Fed?

• 8:50John Coogan?

  Potentially. He might be, he might be the lender of last resort. I was thinking you were going to do a federal backstop for podcasting. A lot of podcasters are spending a lot of money building sets, trying to get big guests.

• 9:02Jordi Hays?

  Everyone knows my stance on that already.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. So there's also this interesting indirect effect, which is that specifically on inflation, specifically on rates, during an AI boom, the stock market goes up. Lots of people have money invested in the stock market. Even a small slice of SanDisk, Moons, you have more money to go and spend money traveling, spending money in the real economy. And so you have this wealth effect that supports consumer spending purely on the, you know, stock market gains, the equity gains that are related to the AI boom. Obviously, everyone talks about like the San Francisco housing market liquidity from like lab employees,

• 9:44John Coogan?

  but that's actually happening on a much broader scale from just people across the United States that have gone long any AI basket or even any basket that includes some tech stocks. And they're like, oh, wow, I'm up 30% right now. I should upgrade my car or I should buy that new washing machine. I should do anything that supports demand. So you see more demand, that drives inflation and that winds up driving real rates. But what happens in the future? Now Apollo has an interesting view of what might happen with long-term rates, given the various outcomes. They describe it as sort of a fork in the road. Either AI succeeds or AI fails. Don't like that they're talking about AI failing.

• 10:25John Coogan?

  I don't like that at all. But of course, those are the two possible outcomes here. And they, and they say that in both of those scenarios, whether AI succeeds or AI fails, rates will fall, which is maybe good because everyone wants lower rates. Everyone wants to be able to afford a mortgage or afford a house. But how does this work mechanically? Because it's very weird to think that you would have a scenario where there's a massive bust in the AI economy and yet you get lower rates. But then also if AI succeeds, you get lower rates. But they explain it this way. They say, in the next six months, if AI succeeds, you'll see productivity gains, trillions in revenue, and there will be a deflationary impulse. So as AI diffuses, things will get cheaper because there will

• 11:10John Coogan?

  be, there will be competition in all of these markets. It's very, very good that we're not set up in a world where there are monopolies in every category. Because if there was only one law firm, there's only one law firm, and they got AI and they were able to cut their costs by 50%, you're still going to be paying two grand an hour.

• 11:29Jordi Hays?

  You saw Morgan and Morgan is, is, is setting up their own data center?

• 11:33John Coogan?

  No, wait, really?

• 11:34Jordi Hays?

  I think they're going to spend about a billion dollars over the next 10 years.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  Wow, they're going vertical, going vertically integrated.

• 11:40Jordi Hays?

  If you're an AI researcher and you've ever wanted to work for a personal injury law firm.

• 11:46John Coogan?

  Now's your opportunity.

• 11:47Jordi Hays?

  Check out Morgan and Morgan. They have all those billboards.

• 11:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:52Jordi Hays?

  Just call the number on the billboard.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  Yes, I'd like to start racking GPUs for you. But, I mean, he, so he's paying for that in cash? Because doesn't he famously have a billion dollars in cash?

• 12:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. He says you're not a billionaire unless it's just sitting in a checking account.

• 12:06John Coogan?

  It's got to be in the checking account, apparently. But you can imagine so many scenarios where, yes, Morgan and Morgan is saving money using AI. They're getting more efficiency, but their competitor is also saving money using AI and they get into a little bit of a price war. Maybe margins don't compress fully, but they stay sort of healthy and the end result is deflation, cheaper services, cheaper goods, not for everything, but for the things that are most impacted by AI productivity gains. Then in the other scenario, the doomer scenario from Apollo, if AI fails, the bubble bursts, there's an equity sell-off and there's a flight to Treasury. So everyone's buying Treasuries, saying, I got to get out of these crazy AI stocks. The stuff hit a wall. It's

• 12:51John Coogan?

  not, it's not going to be useful. I got to buy Treasuries. A lot of buying, if you buy a lot of Treasuries, yields fall and interest rates fall, of course. So interesting, interesting dynamic. There is the third kind of crazy scenario, which is outlined by Dylan Patel from Semi Analysis, which is like, it never stops. Like, we're going to keep investing and, and the data centers and the AI boom is going to continue to suck capital until there's like none left. And like, it will, and there will be like a sovereign debt crisis, which is the craziest outcome, non-zero. But, you know, this Apollo thing, they're certainly looking for what happens in the next six months. And we'll, and we'll know,

• 13:34John Coogan?

  we'll check in in six months with this Apollo prediction.

• 13:37Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully, the war will be over.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  Hopefully, the war will be over. That would be the easiest thing to like resolve, I think.

• 13:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  Potentially easier than product.

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

  Sovereign debt.

• 13:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:47Jordi Hays?

  Driver of world peace.

• 13:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe. So, yeah, I don't know. I've been, I've been excited about the potential for deflationary effects playing out. You know, I, I went to the hospital and I was just seeing the diffusion of technology. All the, all the, all the, all the doctors are, are using text to speech. They talk into these little like microphones when they're taking notes. Obviously, that's a technology from.

• 14:15Jordi Hays?

  We get it, John. You worked out so hard that you ended up in the hospital.

• 14:19John Coogan?

  Yes, that's true.

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  We know.

• 14:21John Coogan?

  But I'm, I'm fortunately doing much better. But while I was there, I was noticing like, okay, it's actually a better experience. I'm getting text messages to let me know where I am in the queue. I don't exactly have to ask like, when am I coming up? When will I be getting out of here? But I do have to sign, e-sign a bunch of forms and the forms don't render properly on, on iOS, on Safari. Like, this is something that should be fixable by an AI agent, but it hasn't been yet. Why is that? It's the, it's the diffusion question. It's the fact that somebody hasn't gotten in there and actually pitched them on a, on a transformation process just yet. But it is coming. And so all of that means more time for the doctors to actually spend time with patients, doing the important

• 15:02John Coogan?

  work and spending less time on the papers and the filing and the signatures and, you know, and we're, we're not long for just, okay, as these questionnaires come in and I need to sign all these documents, just sign them for me, handle it over iMessage. All the modern AI agents are within a hair's breadth of actually realizing that future. So some, some cause for optimism amid, amid, you know, sort of disappointing interest rate news. Anyway, the people, they will get a vote on AI safety. The Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece here about the role democracy will play in the AI discussion that we've been having in the last couple of weeks. So the technology risks came into

• 15:47John Coogan?

  focus last week. Is the political system prepared? Says William Galston in the Wall Street Journal. Experts have long worried about economic, social and social and security impact of artificial intelligence. This year, those risks have moved on to the public agenda. As growth, as job growth slowed, worry spread that AI would displace entry level workers. Next, local concerns proliferated about the effects of AI data centers on water, electricity, the environment and noise. Then, in a widely reported incident, an OpenAI test went awry. A swarm of AI agents bypassed internal limits, created their own message board and cooperated to hack another AI firm. As a recent Journal article made clear,

• 16:30John Coogan?

  this wasn't the only such event. Last week, mounting fears within the largest AI firms at the frontier of AI development burst into public view. On Tuesday, Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic with a warning viewed by millions that AI will soon be able to hack any system and mobilize real power and resources for malign purposes. On Thursday, Anthropic released a 154-page report on the misuse of Claude with an especially chilling chapter on possible biological weapons research. There was another chilling chapter on what's going on in the Middle East. But it's the meme, both sides are using Claude to fight each other. Really, really crazy stuff. I, I think this was mostly through like routers and third parties and all sorts of stuff. But it's clearly a hairy mess to fight diffusion

• 17:14John Coogan?

  attacks and/or distillation attacks, but also just all sorts of nefarious use. It's a, it's a true game of whack-a-mole. And so full, full employment for alignment researchers at the labs. On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Omade published an essay urging the industry to, quote, "slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models to give risk mitigation strategies a chance to catch up." He proposed a three-step plan to accelerate this process. We talked about that yesterday. The third point will surprise you. First, each company at the frontier development will give employee-like access to independent evaluators. Second, US companies should promote the cooperation among democracies to mitigate risks while preserving their technological edge over China. Third, the US should attempt

• 17:57John Coogan?

  to negotiate limits on AI risks with China analogous to nuclear arms control treaties of the Cold War era. Now, there was an interesting post that hit the timeline. Was that actually from a DeepSeek employee? Do we know that? But it's a DeepSeek employee basically was like, I don't like Dario. He was, he compared giving Dario AGI to like giving Hitler the bomb. It was a very, very hardcore message from, from a DeepSeek employee. But of course, it's like translated through seven layers of, of abstractions.

• 18:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I had no idea if that was real.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, it could just be some psyop. But did, did you look into it at all, Tyler? Do you know?

• 18:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I have no idea if it was really there.

• 18:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:33Jordi Hays?

  But I mean, it seemed like reasonably reputable people I follow were talking about it.

• 18:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:39John Coogan?

  It's, it's really, really hard to get a, to get a feel on the vibe in China. It's like, I think the, I think the compute gap is 10x. America has 10 times the compute of China. So you would imagine that if both countries get to AGI and it, or ASI, and it's aligned with the country, then even if China attacks with the super cyber weapon, our AGI can defend better because we have 10 times the compute. I, I think that's sort of how it would work out, but it is, it is difficult. And then there is, there is this weird scenario where it's like, if you have an aligned superintelligence and your enemy

• 19:20John Coogan?

  has a misaligned superintelligence, they get turned into paperclips, but the paperclipper can't come over into your territory because you have the paperclip defender, which is turning paperclips into useful stuff like cars and medicines.

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  Podcast microphones.

• 19:35John Coogan?

  Podcast microphones, I suppose. I don't know. It's all, it's all very, very sci-fi, but.

• 19:40Jordi Hays?

  I mean, one of the, one of the wildest moments of the last 24 hours.

• 19:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Jordi Hays?

  Since we wrapped the show, was the Department of War just saying, "Effective altruists in shambles."

• 19:52John Coogan?

  That's a very online phrase.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  The president said, "I am the hoax buster and right now I'm breaking another hoax that AI is going to take over, consume and destroy the world and that robots will be marching into our cities and getting rid of us all. This is even wilder than the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax or the global warming scam. Thank you for your attention to this matter." Never expected to see the Department of War going to war with EA's on the timeline, but here we are.

• 20:19John Coogan?

  Here we are. Extremely, extremely online.

• 20:24John Coogan?

  Just time, also administration. AI developers face collective action problem that only in agreement to coordinate activities can overcome. There was some news around this where OpenAI believes that they don't need a waiver to coordinate on safety policy with other companies. And I was trying to research how seatbelts got put in cars. Cause it's sort of analogous. It's like the seatbelt clearly is a safety feature in a car. And if one company does it, it's a cost. Maybe it's a benefit. Maybe it sells more cars because people want that. But it'd be really great if all the cars had seatbelts.

• 21:05John Coogan?

  And then the healthcare system and the hospital systems want people wearing seatbelts so they don't have to deal with as many broken bones from car accidents. Right? So I think Volvo.

• 21:17Jordi Hays?

  John Morgan would like it.

• 21:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably. So.

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  He's not spending a billion dollars on AI so that people stop getting into car accidents.

• 21:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Volvo put, uh, put seatbelts in their cars first as an option. It wasn't selling that well. There was some lobbying to get, uh, seatbelts in cars, but a lot of automakers actually fought it and were like, no, we don't want to do this. And a lot of consumers were like, we don't want this. We don't want to have to wear these.

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 21:48John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. And yesterday we heard, we heard Mitchell talking about like, it's outrageous that you can't get a 4.0 harness in a car.

• 21:55Jordi Hays?

  Street car.

• 21:55John Coogan?

  Street car.

• 21:56Jordi Hays?

  In Europe, you can.

• 21:57John Coogan?

  You can. Uh, it's like, he wants more. It's like, I want to be able to get a roll cage.

• 22:02Jordi Hays?

  No, but it's.

• 22:03John Coogan?

  You should.

• 22:03Jordi Hays?

  So wild that, that you had millions of people driving cars and car accidents happening. And yet people were still saying, no, I don't want, I don't want more safety. I don't want to have to put this thing over, over my lap. I don't want to do that every time. I gotta put it up over every time.

• 22:22John Coogan?

  Well, do you remember the era of, uh, of automatic seatbelts? Did you ever see cars that had those?

• 22:28Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 22:28John Coogan?

  This was like a late eighties, early nineties phenomenon, but if you got into like a Saturn or something, or you know, it would, you would step into the car and then it had a, uh, part of the seatbelt was on a mechanical track that would, the, the, the seatbelt would be pushed forward. You would step in and then the seatbelt, once you closed the door and sat down, it would go and move into place so that you didn't have to buckle it like.

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

  Ferraris will hand you the seatbelt.

• 22:55John Coogan?

  With the little, with the little push out thing?

• 22:57Jordi Hays?

  So you don't have to reach back too much.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  That's, uh, that's such a half measure. Either put it on me entirely or don't, I guess. Uh, so what does the Wall Street Journal have to say about this? AI developers face a collective action problem that only in agreement to coordinate activities can overcome. The question is whether voluntary agreements can work without government involvement. The US government must assure AI companies that voluntary coordination wouldn't run afoul of antitrust laws and regulations. Mr. Amadee argues for an additional step, sensible and targeted AI regulation that focuses on corporate transparency and independent third party evaluation, which can't succeed without evaluators embedded within firms and enjoying unfettered access to all relevant information. In a better world, support for assuring AI safety would be bipartisan.

• 23:42John Coogan?

  Instead, House Speaker Mike Johnson had made clear his reluctance to proceed while President Trump has denounced what he terms a sick conspiracy going on against AI and data centers. Uh, underlying this resistance is a legitimate concern. The US is in an AI race with China that it can't afford to lose. All private sector AI leaders share that concern. Mr. Amadee said he agrees with Treasury Secretary Scott Besant that, quote, "A Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world, and he wants to keep democracies' AI lead over autocracies as large as possible." He opposes the sale of powerful AI chips and semiconductor equipment to China and supports security measures in AI companies to prevent Chinese theft of key data.

• 24:26John Coogan?

  The question is whether we can diminish the risks of unchecked AI development without endangering our lead over China in a technology that is vital to economic growth and military prowess. The tech industry believes it can. The Trump administration says we can't.

• 24:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, there's a new Time cover.

• 24:42John Coogan?

  What's that?

• 24:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it has Claude on the front with the question, how dangerous are you?

• 24:49John Coogan?

  Are you?

• 24:50Jordi Hays?

  Um, and, uh, yeah, so full, full, full, full push on this narrative.

• 24:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:57Jordi Hays?

  Um, one of the most brilliant.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  You're talking about the narrative to not give Jensen credit in Time Magazine for being influential in AI?

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

  Oh, well, that's, that's a whole other story.

• 25:07John Coogan?

  Cause that was last month's Time cover was a hundred of the most influential voices in AI. Jensen didn't make the cut.

• 25:16John Coogan?

  But no.

• 25:16Jordi Hays?

  No, but I, but I was talking about the campaign around this moment.

• 25:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  AI safety. It, it is really coming from every possible angle.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:25Jordi Hays?

  You know, you have everything from Time Magazine to Joe Rogan, to Tucker Carlson, to every major publication, to Kamala Harris, to Barack Obama, to Bill Gates. It is really, really, really coming from every angle. Uh, ends up in Time today. Two of the reporters on the byline for this, uh, cover are funded by the Tarbell Center, an AI doomer org, he says, controlled by Dustin, Dustin Moskowitz. Tarbell gives journalists large grants, uh, and, and these are Jordan's words, to insert AI doomer stories into prominent outlets. Time did not disclose the affiliation. So there's a lot bubbling up on, uh, the Tarbell Center recently.

• 26:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, they've been very public about what they're doing for years now.

• 26:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:14Jordi Hays?

  They, they give cash to journalists, uh, and these journalists are, you know, at, uh, Time Magazine, MIT, Bloomberg, The Guardian, a bunch of your favorite Substacks have taken, uh, have taken money from, from Dustin's, uh, organization. And, uh, yeah, I expect to see a lot more coverage on Tarbell.

• 26:38John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, over, uh, and it's funny. It's like, who's going to cover them because they've given money to people in pretty much every prominent newsroom.

• 26:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 26:48Jordi Hays?

  And so it's kind of an awkward thing to try to cover if you're like an editor and someone says, hey, I want to cover this story. And then, and then they're like, wait, they gave money to this person in our newsroom. Um, so I don't know.

• 27:02John Coogan?

  Maybe you don't like the person that's sitting across from me on the news desk. You're like, oh, I see, I see the bust down. They got on their wrist.

• 27:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, but it's really, it's The Verge, NPR, The Information, The Seattle Times, South China Morning Post, TechCrunch, The Guardian, Scientific American, CBS News.

• 27:19John Coogan?

  Now, the.

• 27:20Jordi Hays?

  LA Time.

• 27:22John Coogan?

  The steel man is that these grants don't come with strings attached, that they're not coming with talk.

• 27:28Jordi Hays?

  It's a free lunch. It's, it's actually, they say free lunches don't exist, but there are exceptions.

• 27:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:35Jordi Hays?

  In this case, it's, your steel man is that the Tarbell Center gives a free lunch.

• 27:41John Coogan?

  Potentially.

• 27:41Jordi Hays?

  CNBC, Fortune, Time, USA Today.

• 27:44John Coogan?

  Individuals.

• 27:45Jordi Hays?

  Newcomer. I know, but they say our partner newsrooms.

• 27:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 27:49Jordi Hays?

  On the website.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  San Francisco Standard, China Talk.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:53Jordi Hays?

  Platformer, Bloomberg.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  Mr. Takeri on there?

• 27:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no.

• 27:57John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Go subscribe to Mr. Takeri.

• 28:00Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, but it, but it's basically every, pretty much every newsroom.

• 28:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 28:04Jordi Hays?

  NBC.

• 28:06John Coogan?

  The Ovon?

• 28:07Jordi Hays?

  Not yet.

• 28:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 28:08Jordi Hays?

  It's the final holdout.

• 28:09John Coogan?

  Caller Daddy?

• 28:12John Coogan?

  What about spitting chicklets?

• 28:15John Coogan?

  Bussin' with the Boys? Is Bussin' with the Boys on there?

• 28:19John Coogan?

  What about the new Jackass movie? Do they take Tarbell money?

• 28:22Jordi Hays?

  Probably.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, we'll have to get to the bottom.

• 28:24Jordi Hays?

  Now, who knows? Crazy, really, I think one of the most fascinating, um, stories, emerging stories. I'm interested to see how these groups cover it.

• 28:35John Coogan?

  What's going on over at Ramp?

• 28:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, new update from the Ramp AI Index.

• 28:41John Coogan?

  Economics Lab.

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  R says, OpenAI is winning enterprise spend at the frontier. As of this week, Astra takes 13% of enterprise AI spend versus Fable at 8%. Some early thoughts, Anthropic took a big risk in its recent call to pace the frontier. Its frontier model has already fallen behind on adoption. OpenAI's growth is primarily coming from shifts, uh, from shifts from Seoul and some Anthropic models as well as net new usage. That's good for them and suggests some pricing power remains by having a good competitive frontier model. So, yeah, Astra's, you know, in many ways seemingly a bit, um, more cost efficient. And so that's probably.

• 29:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:17Jordi Hays?

  A factor, but also the data retention stuff that, that Anthropic is working towards fixing by the fall.

• 29:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, the data retention thing, yeah, I don't, I don't know. Yeah, that's probably a bigger thing for enterprise AI. I would, by default, I would go with like, Astra had a very buzzy launch around like Blender and video game creation, but that's not moving stuff in the enterprise. Although maybe with the long weekend, you do get a CTO at an enterprise building a video game and then coming to work and being like, we gotta roll this out everywhere. Uh, I don't really know how much these, these things diffuse that way, but that launch weekend into the long Labor Day weekend certainly gave a lot of people time to, to demo it on personal projects and bring it into the workplace with confidence. So good, uh, good results.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  John Turnus, the Terninator. Uh, was.

• 30:09John Coogan?

  Sounds like Terminator.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  I know. Was at the Emmys last night.

• 30:14John Coogan?

  Didn't Tim Cook do this exact bit like two years ago?

• 30:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but did the phone fold?

• 30:19John Coogan?

  No, it didn't. And, and the funny thing is that I think Tim Cook did this exact thing last year at the Emmys where he pulled out the iPhone 17 Pro and they asked him like, what's your favorite iPhone? And he was like, it's this one. And he did the, it's the thinnest, lightest, bestest ever. And everyone was kind of like, this is not good content, but this is, it hits completely different because there is actually something novel about it.

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:40John Coogan?

  I don't know. It's better. And he's smiling, he's all smiles at the, at the Emmys. Very good.

• 30:45Jordi Hays?

  Max, uh, from, uh, Creative Strategies says, he seems so happy and proud showing off the iPhone Duo. It's kind of nice and sweet to see.

• 30:57John Coogan?

  People were, people were.

• 30:58Jordi Hays?

  Guy likes to make hardware.

• 30:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, this has been his life's work.

• 31:02Jordi Hays?

  This is bullish.

• 31:02John Coogan?

  He's been doing this for decades. Uh, people were, uh, were speculating that Jensen was talking to Donald Trump at the All In Summit on an iPhone Duo, but the Germinator checked in and said, it doesn't look like an iPhone Duo. It looks like a different foldable phone from a different company, not an iPhone Duo. They're barely in the wild, just people getting a peek. Be this podcast, Apple Podcasts.

• 31:26Jordi Hays?

  I am.

• 31:27John Coogan?

  Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com.

• 31:28Jordi Hays?

  I'm so glad that we had, uh, the, the CMO of Activision, or COD, uh, come on the show and not tell us, hey, you guys gotta cut off the, uh.

• 31:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.