North Korea’s Secret US Workforce, Canceling the SaaSpocalypse, MSL’s Latest Exits | 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?

  We gotta take a victory lap. You wanna start taking a lap, Jordy? You wanna take a lap while I tell everyone about our SaaS Apocalypse victory lap?

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  I was just appreciating some various software as a service companies.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  There's some real wins.

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  Charts yesterday, a bunch of companies up like crazy.

• 0:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  And I was thinking, I texted John, I was like, when did we cancel the SaaS Apocalypse?

• 0:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  You pulled up.

• 0:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  Our original Substack that we sent back in February. We just decided at that time.

• 0:30John Coogan?

  It's not happening.

• 0:31Jordi Hays?

  It's not happening. We canceled it and uh.

• 0:36John Coogan?

  There was a lot of fear.

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  Maybe too early to take a victory lap, but in hindsight.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  But there was, there were some good arguments. There were some interesting arguments and there was a lot of fear. But there were a lot of companies that were getting thrown in the SaaS bucket as just like a pure pile of code. You could vibe code it. And while that thesis might play out over a few years, it was a little bit too soon. It seemed a little bit too aggressive. And so we wanted to revisit the SaaS Apocalypse and the cancellation of the SaaS Apocalypse. See where things are now. So just to set the stage, the SaaS Apocalypse is a rough, rough go. $2 trillion of market cap lost across the SaaS Apocalypse. The major sell off of technology, software companies broadly. $2 trillion wiped out, gone.

• 1:23Jordi Hays?

  Over.

• 1:24John Coogan?

  Moment of silence. But a lot of it's come back. It appeared only logical at the time that every company would be vibe coding their own CRM. And this would happen imminently and that any company built on a big pile of code would go to zero. Of course, the core thesis still holds over the long term, but it's a lot messier in reality. So yes, having a huge monolithic piece of software is less of a moat today than it was a decade ago. That's for sure. Competition is increasing, especially for point solutions. But many of those SaaS companies that were so beaten up in the SaaS Apocalypse were revealed to have sources of strength

• 2:04John Coogan?

  that didn't fit neatly into the lots of lines of code written bucket. So babies were thrown out.

• 2:10Jordi Hays?

  1,000 business development representatives.

• 2:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15Jordi Hays?

  Sources of strength.

• 2:16John Coogan?

  That's big. Also, just uh, what it, another thing that's very valuable is what percent of revenue are you claiming from your customers? So if you are going to a customer and you're saying, I'm taking 30% cut, you're probably at more risk than someone who's saying, I'm an IT solution and you're gonna spend one tenth of 1% of your revenue.

• 2:39Jordi Hays?

  Shopify is the best example, right?

• 2:41John Coogan?

  I talked to the losing team about this.

• 2:43Jordi Hays?

  A lot of e-commerce entrepreneurs, ask them like, what's your biggest expense?

• 2:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49Jordi Hays?

  None of them will say Shopify.

• 2:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51Jordi Hays?

  Even, even a brand that is like a deal.

• 2:53John Coogan?

  Shopify, Shopify Plus for a business that I know very intimately, I think is around $1,000 a month in cost. And the business is doing almost 100 million a year.

• 3:05Jordi Hays?

  And you would need, and even with.

• 3:07John Coogan?

  0.1%.

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  Even with how good the models are today, you would need multiple people basically vibe coding around the clock.

• 3:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  To have a product that was comparable.

• 3:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. A lot of babies were thrown out with the bath water. The, the, the most ridiculous one was, I think, DoorDash, but there were lots of people coming for Spotify and a whole bunch of different platforms that should be very enduring because their source of strength is a network effect or something like that. So six months ago, we, we identified six companies that we wanted to use as case studies for the SaaS Apocalypse. It was Google, Meta, your favorite company, Spotify, Shopify, Roblox and Salesforce as evidence that large scaled software companies.

• 3:49Jordi Hays?

  Talk about Meta?

• 3:51John Coogan?

  I mean, the business is doing great. And it always should have been.

• 3:55Jordi Hays?

  Don't get me started. Don't get me started.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  It never should have been beat up. Same with, same with Google. And then Spotify and Shopify were the interesting ones. Spotify, of course, there is a world where you're listening to AI music, but there's also a world where you're listening to AI music on Spotify. Same thing for Roblox. Yes, you'll be able to vibe code a game, but having all the Roblox network, infrastructure, distribution, that, that should be valuable in the, in the future. You know, now you have a long list of unslappable SaaS companies, companies that can't just be immediately spun up and replaced by an AI app. There are AI winners now and it's a lot of who you'd expect. Cybersecurity is more important than ever. You mentioned CrowdStrike, but Palo Alto Networks is also on a tear.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  Palo Alto Networks over the past year is up 121%. It's a $320 billion company. CrowdStrike's a $230 billion company, up 107% this year over the past 12 months. Palo Alto's CEO bought the dip five months later. He must've been reading us because a month after we canceled the SaaS Apocalypse, he was like, I, I think I like this Palo Alto Network stock. He of course is the CEO of Palo Alto Networks. So, but he put $10 million of his own money into the company. It's now worth $26 million. Nikesh Aurora invested as investors questioned whether AI could disrupt cybersecurity. Palo Alto has reached an all time high.

• 5:17Jordi Hays?

  We gotta give him, gotta give him some trouble next time we see him. Why only 10?

• 5:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:23Jordi Hays?

  Why only 10? Does that really move the needle?

• 5:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, he should have been 10x levered.

• 5:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:27John Coogan?

  If you really believed, come on. But you know, he has 16 million of basically play money now. I mean, it's boy math, you know, you make, you make 16 million trading your own stock when you're the CEO. You gotta spend that on something fun. There are SaaS Apocalypse victims that have not come back, are probably not coming back, need to completely reinvent the business because they have been made obsolete by just base level LLM capabilities. Chegg is the canonical example of SaaS Apocalypse victim that has not made a comeback. The stock is down 99% over the past five years. It was hot during COVID.

• 6:04John Coogan?

  And of course, when it comes to looking up answers to homework, the basic free edition of ChatGPT gets you there. Gemini, whatever you want to use is gonna answer those questions and hold your hand alongside your homework while you're doing it.

• 6:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they had 376 million of revenue in 2025, but that was a 39% decrease year over year from 617 in 2024.

• 6:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  It's now roughly an 80 or a $90 million market cap.

• 6:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. So very shrinking business, very difficult. You have to continue cutting every year to make any money, pull any profit out of that business. The newer company that is more in the headlines these days is the information is reporting that Canva is slipping into a similar situation because a lot of Canva designs can be one-shot by image models like ChatGPT images, Nana Banana Pro, Grok Imagine. I saw the new Grok image examples and, and a few of them were infographics. And then there's also tools companies like Twilio is doing incredibly well. I don't know if you've been tracking this. It's up 150% over the past year. Another story where huge boom during COVID.

• 7:17Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  Sell off.

• 7:18Jordi Hays?

  $38 billion company.

• 7:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:20Jordi Hays?

  I, if you asked me what Twilio was worth before I just checked this, I would've said, I don't know, five, six billion.

• 7:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, no.

• 7:28Jordi Hays?

  Something like that.

• 7:28John Coogan?

  And, and that's where it was a couple of years ago, but it's done really, really well. And I think a lot of that is that it is difficult to go and vibe code all of the interactions that you need to actually send text messages across the network.

• 7:42Jordi Hays?

  It's agentic infrastructure, John. If you historically were a SaaS company, pivot to just be calling yourself agentic infrastructure.

• 7:51John Coogan?

  It's, it's more like, yeah, I mean, it's funny. It's, it's more like it's, it's infrastructure that will be pulled off the shelf by the agent. And so, I mean, we use Twilio for our app where we want to be able to interface with an application via text message. And we use Twilio for that, even though we could go and vibe code that, all of a sudden you're dealing with the different mobile carriers and the cell networks and are they gonna flag you as spam? And Twilio has all the huge decades of relationships built out and a real network there that, that even though it's just a tool and it's just consumption software at the end of the day, it has this moat and so it's been doing really, really well.

• 8:32Jordi Hays?

  We have to talk about Jiahu Yu.

• 8:37John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, traded.

• 8:38Jordi Hays?

  He is, uh, this was, took us back in time as well. Let's try to pull up the original traded card that kicked it all off, August of last year.

• 8:51John Coogan?

  I sent it to.

• 8:52Jordi Hays?

  Jiahu Yu went from OpenAI to MSL, was one of the first high-profile exits in that whole saga. One year later, he just announced this morning, he said, I'm leaving Meta to start a new company, building the TBD lab alongside Mark. And Alex has been deeply inspiring and fulfilling. I'm proud of what our multimodal team accomplished across Muse Spark, Voice Mode, Muse Image and Muse Video, and even prouder of the team that made it possible. Over time, I've felt.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Increasingly drawn to a problem that will matter deeply to humanity's future, yet remains largely underexplored.

• 9:32Jordi Hays?

  I forget what day it was, maybe it was Monday or Tuesday when I was feeling a little spicy. But I was just saying that MSL is, is basically operating up against a clock, which is that they did this massive talent raid across all these companies about a year ago.

• 9:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of these are one of your stories.

• 9:53Jordi Hays?

  These people, nine figures, 10 figures, many of those people are gonna basically spend a year and hit a point where they're like, okay, I have $100 million in the bank.

• 10:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:05Jordi Hays?

  And I'm kinda good now.

• 10:07John Coogan?

  25% of a huge pile of gold is still a huge pile of gold sometimes.

• 10:12Jordi Hays?

  Exactly. And a lot of those people are just gonna basically see the number in their bank account and be like, am I happy doing what I'm doing? Is this filling or do I wanna go build a company? Maybe they've always wanted to build a company. And so in the case of Jiahu Yu, whatever package he had, clearly he's down to go take a risk.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:31Jordi Hays?

  I don't think this will be the last of the exits that we see out of MSL over the next even one or two months.

• 10:39John Coogan?

  What if he starts a social network? That would be risky. What if he's like, I'm coming for it all?

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  I mean, he says, I've felt increasingly drawn to a problem that will matter deeply to humanity's future. So maybe he's figured out how to make aligned social media, social media safety.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  I like that. Yeah. Well, we should let Tyler pat himself on the back for this call.

• 10:59Jordi Hays?

  Reels that make you go like this.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  This card was the first TBP on trading card and Tyler whipped it up by himself and it doesn't even have our brand on it. And it also has a literal baseball field in the background. But this video or this, this image went so viral, the original post got 30,000 likes on X was

• 11:26Jordi Hays?

  It did around 100K on Instagram, a random account that again wasn't ours.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  It was crazy. It actually broke containment.

• 11:32Jordi Hays?

  Thanks Tyler for not watermarking it.

• 11:34John Coogan?

  And it was the, it was the first, it was the first moment where we had been talking about a story that really broke through to the mainstream. Because of this trading card, we wound up covering

• 11:46Jordi Hays?

  On French television.

• 11:47John Coogan?

  French television. That's where I was going. That's where I was going. So, uh, but because of this trading card, we talked about this a whole, a whole, this whole, this story over a course of weeks. It was very interesting and dramatic. There were a whole bunch of scoops that came out around, uh, Mark Zuckerberg making people soup and stuff. It was, it was a lot of really entertaining stuff. We were featured in the New York Times Daily podcast, I think once or twice for talking about it. They clipped us and included our coverage in their telling of the story for their broader audience. And then French television sent out a bunch of reporters and cameras to come and interview us, which was very funny because they kept asking us like, exactly how much money does, does, did, did this guy make? And we're like, look, we don't know exactly how much he makes. And even if we did, we probably wouldn't want to share that. But, uh, it was a very funny.

• 12:30Jordi Hays?

  We did tell them there's, there's no salary caps.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  That's true. There are no salary caps.

• 12:37Jordi Hays?

  The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, just posted a new word mark after 10 years of leaving it unchanged. Adam says, "The word mark at the top of the app hasn't changed in 10 years, so it was time for a refresh cleaner and more modern with references to the original and the simplicity and craft that's always made it Instagram. People don't like it. I don't have necessarily super strong opinions on it personally immediately. I do think the original Instagram word mark here on the left had started to feel extremely dated, but it's still iconic. I feel like we're headed back to this sort of maximalism and branding, right? Like however, I don't know

• 13:22Jordi Hays?

  how many years ago it was, like five years ago, all the big fashion houses started going from their like historical word marks to updating them and making them like much more simple and

• 13:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Balenciaga.

• 13:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. And there, there's like 10, 10 different examples.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:37Jordi Hays?

  And so this, this move almost feels a little bit like lagging in some ways where I actually like that Instagram logo was like, it, it did feel dated, but it was so distinct.

• 13:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. I sent a different treatment that I thought they should go with.

• 13:51Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's not too late. So.

• 13:53John Coogan?

  I think that would speak to me personally, a little bit better. Uh, but, uh, you know, their, their, their treatment, it's a choice. It's clean. Louis Vuitton collaborated with Singer and created this insane Singer X Louis Vuitton collaboration for a nine 11 that looks like a handbag. They actually made two of these.

• 14:15Jordi Hays?

  They're calling it the most tacky car.

• 14:18John Coogan?

  I was, I didn't know where you were gonna go. I knew, I saw this all over the, all over the feed. I knew we were gonna be talking about it, but I didn't know where you'd sit.

• 14:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So.

• 14:28John Coogan?

  Why is it tacky? It looks pretty classy.

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's, let's play this video.

• 14:30John Coogan?

  This isn't that tacky. I like the color. You don't like the color? The blue wheels are tacky? That, this part looks nice.

• 14:41Jordi Hays?

  Well, okay.

• 14:42John Coogan?

  The bag around.

• 14:44Jordi Hays?

  The interior is just brutal.

• 14:45John Coogan?

  The stick is pretty cool.

• 14:47Jordi Hays?

  The hood with the straps, extremely tacky.

• 14:50John Coogan?

  This part's sort of crazy. Yeah, this part's sort of crazy.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  Helmets? I, I don't hate the helmet.

• 14:54John Coogan?

  There's another version that doesn't have blue wheels. It's a little more subdued, but.

• 14:59Jordi Hays?

  It, it feels like AI slop, IRL. This is like, to me, like a tacky unauthorized collab.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 15:07Jordi Hays?

  I know exactly the kind of person that would, would buy this. Yeah. People are saying, "Next level gluttony. Aspirated slop."

• 15:17John Coogan?

  People do not like it. New bombshell reporting from the Wall Street Journal reveals that North Korea has built a secret workforce inside American companies using stolen identities, AI and accomplices in the United States to cheat its way into remote jobs and funnel hundreds of millions of dollars back to Kim Jong Un's regime. Uh, it's a fascinating story. The Wall Street Journal article is posted. Uh, it's a 30 minute documentary. They spent over a year investigating this. The FBI says that there are thousands of North Korean IT workers applying for jobs across America. After a year-long investigation, the Journal obtained a trove of leaked browser histories, emails,

• 16:01John Coogan?

  calendars, and screen recordings from one cell of workers, providing a remarkable look at how the operation actually works. The North Koreans apply for jobs at enormous scale. One cell tracked by the Journal applied to more than a thousand companies over just three months, using AI in nearly every step. And in the documentary, they show a product that is basically clearly, they will leave a voice agent running while they're being interviewed in a technical interview, give the answer when asked about a particular technology, if they are proficient. They will simply have AI look up the answer, give the answer to the interviewer, get the, get the job. And in some cases, they're using real Americans as frontmen. Basically, they will do the interview

• 16:45John Coogan?

  and then they will ship a remote laptop to say, "Hey, you're a new, you're our new remote worker. You are qualified to work on our software engineering team at this small company. We'll send you a laptop and then you just collect a check, send half of it to the North Koreans and you don't have to do any work." So it's like passive income, free money for you, the Americans.

• 17:05Jordi Hays?

  So you said they're real Americans, but they're not patriots. That's what I'm hearing.

• 17:09John Coogan?

  Well, I, I, the, the documentary is pretty gut wrenching. Like the, the, the individual who they talked to, who, uh, who was participating in this obviously, uh, is probably going to see some, uh, some legal consequences for this, but, uh, it did seem like he had a very, very tough go and got into a very rough situation to be in that situation. The operation also relies on help from inside the United States. Uh, North Korean IT workers pay American facilitators, they're called facilitators, to host company laptops in the United States, allowing the actual workers overseas to remotely connect to them while appearing to be employees working domestically. Also, the North Korean workers, they go to non-extradition countries. So they'll go to China

• 17:52John Coogan?

  and Russia and a few other countries. And then from there, they will be remoting into an American laptop. So it just looks like, okay, they're like the web traffic is coming from, it's not coming from North Korea, but it's coming from a country where if the FBI says, "Hey, can you send us this person? They're a criminal." That country says, "No way. Uh, we're not, we're not sending them to you." So for one job paying $75,000 a year, he said, "He and the North Koreans split, split the salary 50/50." Uh, the workers, uh, also use stolen American identities to pass employment screenings, often juggling multiple identities simultaneously and holding down several jobs under each name. This all boomed during COVID and the remote work boom. Um, and the scale

• 18:33John Coogan?

  of the operation is enormous. Some North Korean IT workers earn as much as $300,000 a year. The Treasury Department says North Korean, says the North Korean government can seize as much as 90% of the wages earned by its overseas IT workers and recently estimated that these operations generated nearly $800 million in 2024 alone. Pretty, pretty big. So the Journal's 30 minute documentary titled "Infiltrated: North Korea's Secret US Workforce" follows the operation in detail. It's a fascinating watch and I highly recommend that you check it out. So go take a look. A new luxury hotel canceled a YouTuber's $4,663 stay. Then came the viral feud, reports the

• 19:17John Coogan?

  Wall Street Journal. "A dispute between Aman," which we've talked about a lot on the show, "and content creator Ryan Walker illustrates the growing tension between commercial enterprises and influencers." It's a fascinating story and somebody's gotta stand up for the Aman. Somebody has to.

• 19:35Jordi Hays?

  I'm ready. Uh, no, the story is actually crazy. Honestly, I don't, I don't think the Aman actually needs that much standing up for.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  No. The Wall Street Journal broke it down in great detail and it looks bad for this guy. Anyway, let's go through it. The Wall Street Journal reports that, uh, it was supposed to be the hottest hotel opening of the year. Let's play a little bit of his video.

• 19:56Jordi Hays?

  I'm a luxury hotel reviewer here on YouTube. I specialize in very honest reviews of the world's best properties. I'm not going to give away too much as to what happened. I want you to watch the footage.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  And this is a cool thesis, like he pays for the hotels himself. He doesn't get paid by the hotel for the review. The hotel doesn't pay for his stay and consequently he can be more independent. This was the Doug Demiro strategy.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Could me, Mr. Walker? Yeah. We don't have your reservation.

• 20:25Jordi Hays?

  Long story short, that video sparked a bunch of, you know,

• 20:29John Coogan?

  I think it has almost a million views.

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  There's thousands of comments on there, people trashing the properties, you know, basically fully taking his side.

• 20:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. He says, I'm honest and transparent. I'll tell you exactly what to expect and why. He had previously paid $26,000 for a Four Seasons yacht trip that he panned in May.

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  And sorry for the spoiler, he's not honest or transparent.

• 20:52John Coogan?

  You're so upset. Staff recognize him, inform him that he has no reservation. And according to Walker, eventually call the police to escort him away. Sounds terrible. As Walker drives off, he finds an email he says he missed, sent the day before and apologizes for canceling his stay due to scaled back capacity during opening week. Not looking closely at the timestamp, he tells viewers the email arrived late the previous night. When later pressed by the Journal, Walker revised his timeline, saying it arrived the previous morning. Walker did not amend the timeline in his video or in a subsequent livestream. The internet quickly took Walker's side. Viewers of his YouTube channel, including people who identified as Aman loyalists and travel industry professionals, expressed disbelief.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  Will never book another Aman property again, read one of the more than 5,000 comments, many of which expressed similar sentiments. Aman spokesperson said the company does not comment on bookings. The Aman spokesperson said Walker bypassed the main entrance and

• 21:50Jordi Hays?

  He was looking for trouble. My theory is he knows exactly what he was doing.

• 21:57John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 21:58Jordi Hays?

  So he comes during the first week, books one night, knows that he shouldn't be filming, still decides to film.

• 22:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:05Jordi Hays?

  And is effectively looking for trouble the entire time. And the crowd over on the Wall Street Journal loves it. The top rated comment, Aman, here I come. Any hotel that bans influencers is doing regular guests a great service.

• 22:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a big thing is that people go to certain places to not have cameras all over the place. And it's getting rarer and rarer. And if, if

• 22:30Jordi Hays?

  It's so, it's so, it's so actually fascinating to look at the difference. YouTube comments are like, wow, I'm never going to go to the Aman. And then Wall Street Journal is like,

• 22:38John Coogan?

  I'm booking now.

• 22:39Jordi Hays?

  Walker is a complete tool, says Ray.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  Oh my God, that's crazy.

• 22:43Jordi Hays?

  Edward says, Edward says, seems Mr. Walker struggles with the truth. Anthropic is apparently in talks to buy Descartes for $6 billion.

• 22:54John Coogan?

  Get image generation.

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  We've had a bunch of awesome conversations with, with Dean over at Descartes. He's always, he's very, very early, he was willing to do live demos of their product, like in interviews, completely on, you know, we didn't even test with him before the show. He was just ripping them live. So always had a ton of confidence in the product. And they've been just cooking.

• 23:19John Coogan?

  They were valued at $4 billion a quarter ago. Himanshu has some extra context here, says, Descartes could be one of the first AI labs focused on world video models to be acquired by a frontier AI lab. I think this also could mark an initial phase where frontier labs start treating world models as a major strategic capability alongside inference optimization as a major offering from Descartes. Yeah, interesting to imagine how this actually links to the core thesis of, you know, B2B and enterprise and coding, but certainly, certainly an amazing technology that feels like on the verge of, of a breakout.

• 24:02John Coogan?

  The demos are amazing, but we haven't had the like Ghibli moment for world models yet. Like it's very much a prototype demo video. Go and see what it's looks like. But we've talked to a lot of people, Oliver Cameron and Fei Fei Li about world models. There's a lot of optimism about how this all plugs into the AGI pursuits of the frontier labs. Are you a standard crying face emoji guy? A tilted crying face emoji guy? Or a tear streaming down your face emoji guy?

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  I'm normally, okay, I want to actually pull this up so I can see more closely.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  Which one are you? Joe Weisenthal has recently transitioned to a tilted crying face emoji.

• 24:51Jordi Hays?

  I've actually, I don't, I don't dabble in the tilted. I do, I do the tears.

• 24:55John Coogan?

  I do the tears.

• 24:56Jordi Hays?

  And the straight on.

• 24:57John Coogan?

  Do we, do you do the streaming down the face?

• 24:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:59John Coogan?

  Oh, I, I need to mix that one in. It's the most popular emoji of 2025.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I went through maybe a decade where I wouldn't, I wouldn't touch any of the crying.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  Oh, any of the crying ones. You do a smiley?

• 25:13Jordi Hays?

  But I've been, I've been laughing a lot.

• 25:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 25:15Jordi Hays?

  The last couple of years, mainly because we've been doing this show.

• 25:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 25:19Jordi Hays?

  You've been having a good time.

• 25:20John Coogan?

  Emoji. I like that in iMessage, you can do the ha ha, but then you can also throw the crying emoji. But I got to experiment with the tear streaming emoji.

• 25:28Jordi Hays?

  Do you ever go with the cat versions?

• 25:29John Coogan?

  No, I never larp as the cat.

• 25:32Jordi Hays?

  Never go, never go cat.

• 25:34John Coogan?

  But expect a cat emoji from me soon, Tyler, in our group message, in our group chat, because it might be underrated, there might be some alpha there.

• 25:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, John, I'm going to read a Buco Capital bloke post that I think applies to this exact moment right now. He says, I think we're very close to the point where caring about AI or talking about it a lot is a bit embarrassing. Move on already. Who cares?

• 25:57John Coogan?

  Move on already. I mean, there is a point where like, we don't talk about the internet anymore. We talk about what's happening on the internet. We talk about particular internet companies. This stuff does diffuse, if it diffuses fully, you stop talking about the, the underlying technology. But there's a horse race on Buco. There's a lot of money on the line, the entire global economy potentially, but

• 26:20Jordi Hays?

  That's right, he's just horsing around.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  Thank you for tuning in to TVPN. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.