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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
Top thing on my mind today is figuring out what's going on with interest rates, the high interest rate phenomenon. We had zero interest rate policy, ZERP. The ZERP era ended. Now we're in the HIRP. I don't think we should say that one.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:It's the war. You can see The US attacks Iran in the beginning of twenty twenty six. 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.
Speaker 1: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?
Speaker 1: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 get into that.
Speaker 1: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 health care, pensions, even funding the military. Like, if they're paying interest, they're not paying for other stuff.
Speaker 1:That's not good. Bad for the prospects of the American home buyer. Interest 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.
Speaker 1: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 any anyone. How do you get out of it?
Speaker 1:Maybe end the war. But there are other things at work. This war is unique. I mean, it's not that war causes interest rates to go up. It's causes energy shortages, which causes inflation.
Speaker 1:And inflation be 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.
Speaker 1:Why I am so against pacing the energy rollout. Every year, for the past, like, ten years, the the I I forget what it is, I IEA or something. The there's a there's a body that forecasts energy build out specifically in solar, and they've gotten it wrong every every year for ten years. They've underestimated the growth of solar. You've this chart.
Speaker 2:International Energy Agency.
Speaker 1:Is that it? Yeah. I I IEA. Yeah. So every year, they'll be like, okay.
Speaker 1: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 gonna build more solar. People are gonna get sick of this stuff.
Speaker 1: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 that we wanna 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 value of treasury bonds causing yields to spike.
Speaker 1: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?
Speaker 1:It makes sense. It's an expensive thing. It's a 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.
Speaker 1:But does that always happen? So during Gulf War I, which I 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 was a textbook oil shock. So Iraq invaded Kuwait on 08/02/1990.
Speaker 1:The US military buildup began basically immediately and the Desert Storm Offensive started 01/17/1991. So about six months between the initial conflict over there, The US gets involved. What happens when The US gets involved? Interest rates spiked and interest rates were already 8.29%. Already pretty high.
Speaker 1:But they spiked over 9%, nine point o 5% in less than a month because everyone's like, oh, well, there's gonna be less oil. Kuwait generates a lot of oil. Oil is gonna be knocked offline. That that's gonna flow through the economy the same way energy prices, inflation, etcetera, the usual playbook. But six months later, they were lower than the start of the war sitting at 8.03%.
Speaker 1: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 in invasion, the ten year was at 4.52. Yields fell to 4.22%.
Speaker 1: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 ten year hit 5.25, up significantly, up basically three quarters of a percent since the start of the offensive. The end result of that is that now, Warsh, the new Fed Chairman, is in a tough spot.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1: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 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.
Speaker 1:And even that's at 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.
Speaker 1: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 small impacts in many ways. Like, the total AI revenues are something like a quarter percent of GDP still. But in terms of headlines, it's like 75% of what we talked about.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, I mean, I guess you could see a couple orders of magnitude, get to 25% of the economy. I don't know. But today, the problem that's happening with rates specifically is that AI creates investment demand before any productivity benefits arrive. And so you we see this with like a trillion dollars of CapEx for like a couple $100,000,000,000 of actual revenues. And so data centers require financing, construction capacity, equipment, electricity.
Speaker 1: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, Dorcache have talked about this a little bit where, 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 centers.
Speaker 1:That just means that if NVIDIA is 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
Speaker 2:Let's see where you're going with this.
Speaker 1:What are you thinking?
Speaker 2:You think Jensen should should backstop the Fed?
Speaker 1:Potentially, he might be he might be the lender of last resort. I I was thinking you were gonna do a federal backstop for podcasting. A lot of podcasters are spending a lot of money building sets, trying to get big guests.
Speaker 2:Everyone knows my stance on that already.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:Obviously, everyone talks about like the San Francisco housing market liquidity from like lab employees, 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.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:Either AI succeeds or AI fails. I don't like that they're talking about AI failing. I don't like that at all. How do they go with that? But, of course, those are the two possible outcomes here.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1: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 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 cost by 50 percent, you're still gonna be paying $2 an hour.
Speaker 2:You saw Morgan and Morgan is is is setting up their own data center?
Speaker 1:No. Wait. Really?
Speaker 2:I think they're gonna spend about $1,000,000,000 over the next ten years.
Speaker 1:Wow. They're going vertical. Going vertically integrated.
Speaker 2:If if you're an AI researcher and you've ever wanted to work for a personal injury law firm
Speaker 1:Now is your opportunity.
Speaker 2:Check out Morgan and Morgan. Yeah. They have all those billboards. Yeah. Just call the number on the billboard.
Speaker 1: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 have famously have a billion dollars in cash?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. He says you're not a billionaire unless it's just sitting in a checking account.
Speaker 1:It's gotta 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.
Speaker 1: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 treasuries. So everyone's buying treasuries saying, I gotta get out of these crazy AI stocks. This stuff hit a wall. It's not any it's not gonna be useful. I gotta buy treasuries.
Speaker 1: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 gonna keep investing and and this and the data centers and the AI boom is gonna continue to suck at capital until there's, like, none left. Like, it will all and there will be, like, a sovereign debt crisis, which is the craziest outcome.
Speaker 1:Non zero, but, you know, this Apollo thing, they're they're certainly looking for what happens in the next six months and we'll and we'll know. We'll check-in in six months with this Apollo prediction.
Speaker 2:Hopefully, the war will be over by then.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, the war will be over. That would be the easiest thing to like resolve, I think. Yeah. Potentially easier than product
Speaker 2:Sovereign debt.
Speaker 1:Or yeah.
Speaker 2:Sovereign debt. Driver of world peace.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. So, yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I've been I've been excited about the potential for deflationary effects playing out. You know, I 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
Speaker 2:We get it, John. You worked out so hard that you ended up in the hospital. We know.
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 2:We know.
Speaker 1:But I'm fortunately doing much better. But while I was there, 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?
Speaker 1: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 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 diffusion question.
Speaker 1:It's the fact that somebody hasn't gotten in there and actually pitched them 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 work, and spending less time on the papers and the filing and the signatures. 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.
Speaker 1:So some cause for optimism amid 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 over the last couple weeks. So the technology risks came into focus last week. Is the political system prepared?
Speaker 1: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 onto 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.
Speaker 1: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, 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 Coxen 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 from aligned purposes. On Thursday, Anthropic released a 154 page report on the misuse of Claude with an especially chilling chapter on possible biological weapons research.
Speaker 1:There was another chilling chapter on what's going on in The Middle East. 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 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.
Speaker 1:And so full full employment for alignment researchers at at the labs. On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amade 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 plan will surprise you.
Speaker 1: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 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 deep sea employee?
Speaker 1:Do we know that? But it's a deep sea 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 a from a deep sea employee. But of course, it's like translated through seven layers of of abstractions.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know what you trust. Was real or Yeah.
Speaker 1:It could just be some SIOP. But did did you look into it at all, Tyler? Do you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I have no idea if he was really there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I mean, it
Speaker 2:it seemed like reasonably reputable people I follow were talking about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Mean, I don't It's it's really really hard to get a to get a feel on the the vibe in China. It's like, I think the I think the compute gap is 10 x. America has 10 times the compute of China.
Speaker 1: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 super intelligence and your enemy has a misaligned super intelligence, they get turned into paper clips, but the paper clipper can't come over into your territory because you have the paper clip defender, which is turning paper clips into useful stuff like cars and
Speaker 2:microphones.
Speaker 1:I've got microphones, I suppose. I don't know. It's all it's all very very sci fi, but
Speaker 2:I mean, one of the one of the wildest moments of the last twenty four hours Yeah. Since we wrapped the show was the Department of War was saying effective altruists in shambles. It's a very online president said, I am the hoax buster and right now I'm breaking another host that AI is gonna 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.
Speaker 2:Never expected to see the Department of War going to war with the EAs Yeah. The timeline, but here we are.
Speaker 1:Here we are. Extremely, extremely online, just time. Also, administration. AI developers face collective action problem that only an agreement to coordinate activities can overcome. There were some news around this where, OpenAI believes that they don't need a waiver to coordinate on safety policy with other companies.
Speaker 1:And I was trying to research how seat belts got put in cars because it's sort of analogy it's sort of analogous. It's like the seat belt 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.
Speaker 1:But it'd be really great if all the kind if all the cars had seat belts. And then the health care system and the hospital systems want people wearing seat belts so they don't have to deal with as many broken bones from car accidents. Right? So I think Volvo John Morgan would like it work. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Probably. So
Speaker 2:spending a billion dollars on AI so that people stop getting into car accidents.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Volvo put put seat belts in their cars first as an option. It wasn't selling that well. There was some lobbying to get seat belts in cars, but a lot of automakers actually fought it and were like, no. We don't wanna do this.
Speaker 1:And a lot of consumers were like, we don't want this. We don't wanna have to wear these.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. And yesterday Yes. We heard we heard Mitchell talking about like, it's outrageous that you can't get a four point harness in a car
Speaker 2:a street Street car. Car. In Europe, you can.
Speaker 1:You can. It's like he wants more say I'd say, I wanna be able to get a roll cage.
Speaker 2:No. But it's You should. 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.
Speaker 2:I don't wanna have to put this thing over my lap. Why do I wanna do that every time. I gotta put it on over every time.
Speaker 1:Well, do you remember the era of of automatic seat belts? Did you ever see cars that had those? No. 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 part of the seat belt was on a mechanical track that would the the the seat belt would be pushed forward.
Speaker 1:You would step in, and then the seat belt 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 that.
Speaker 2:Ferraris will hand you the seat belt.
Speaker 1:With the little with the little push out thing?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you don't have to reach back too far.
Speaker 1:That's that's such a half measure. Either put it on me entirely or don't, I guess. So what does the Wall Street Journal have to say about this? AI developers face a collective action problem that only an agreement to coordinate activities can overcome. The question is whether voluntary agreements can work without government The U.
Speaker 1:S. Government must assure AI companies that voluntary coordination wouldn't run afoul of antitrust laws and regulations. Mr. Amade 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.
Speaker 1: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. 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. Mister Amade said he agrees with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant 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.
Speaker 1: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. 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 the tech industry believes it can. The Trump administration says we can't.
Speaker 2:There's a new Time cover.
Speaker 1:What's that?
Speaker 2:It has Claude on the front Mhmm. With the question, how dangerous are you? Are you? Interesting. And yeah.
Speaker 2:So full full full full push. Yep. On this narrative. Yep. One of the most brilliant
Speaker 1:You're talking about the narrative to not give Jensen credit in Time Magazine for being influential in AI?
Speaker 2:Oh, well, that that's a whole other story.
Speaker 1:Because that was last month's was a 100 of the most influential voices in AI. Jensen didn't make the cut. But no.
Speaker 2:No. No. But I but I was talking about the campaign around this moment Yep. AI safety. It it is really coming from every possible angle.
Speaker 2:Yep. You know, you have everything from Time Magazine to Mhmm. Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson Yep. To every major publication to Kamala Harris to Barack Obama to Bill Gates. Is really Yep.
Speaker 2:Really really coming from every angle. Ends up in Time today. Two of the reporters on the byline for this cover are funded by the Tarbell Center, an AI doomer org. He says controlled by Dustin Dustin Moskowitz. Tarbell gives journalists large grants and and these are Jordan's words to insert AI doomer stories into prominent outlets.
Speaker 2:Time did not disclose the affiliation. So there's a lot bubbling up on the Tarbell Center recently. They've been very public about what they're doing for years now. Yep. They they give cash to journalists.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And these journalists are, you know, at Time Magazine, MIT, Bloomberg, The Guardian, a bunch of your favorite sub stacks have taken have taken money from from Dustin's organization. And, yeah, I expect to see a lot more coverage on Tarbell Mhmm. Over And it's funny. It's like who's gonna cover them?
Speaker 2:Because they've given money to people in pretty much every prominent newsroom. Sure. And so it's kind of an awkward thing to try to cover if you're like an editor and someone says, hey, wanna cover this story. Yep. And then and then they're like, wait, they gave money to this person in our newsroom.
Speaker 2:So I
Speaker 1:don't know 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 bus down. They got on their I see.
Speaker 2:No. But it's really, it's the verge, NPR, the information That's in. The Seattle Times, South China Morning Post, TechCrunch, The Guardian, Scientific American Mhmm. CBS News.
Speaker 1:Now, the
Speaker 2:LA Time.
Speaker 1:The steel man is that these grants don't come with strings attached that they're not coming with talking
Speaker 2:It's a free lunch. It's it's actually They say free lunches don't exist but there are exceptions. Yeah. In this case, it's your steel man is that the Tarbell Center gives a free lunch.
Speaker 1:Is that true?
Speaker 2:CNBC, Fortune, Time, USA Individuals. Newcomer. I know. But they say our partner newsrooms
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:On the website.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:San Francisco Standard, China Talk Yeah. Platformer, Bloomberg. Is there? No. Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:Most subscribed to such Street Factory.
Speaker 2:No. But it but it's basically every pretty much every newsroom.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:NBC. Theo Von? Not yet.
Speaker 1:Okay. It's
Speaker 2:the final holdout.
Speaker 1:Call her daddy? What about spitting chicklets? The Busting with the boys? Is Busting with the Boys on there? What about the new Jackass movie?
Speaker 1:Do they take Tarbell money?
Speaker 2:Probably.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, we'll have to get to the bottom.
Speaker 2:Now, who knows? Crazy, really, I think one of the most fascinating stories, emerging stories. I'm interested to see how these groups cover it.
Speaker 1:What's going on over at Ramp?
Speaker 2:New updates from the Ramp AI Index. The Economics Lab. Ara 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.
Speaker 2:Anthropic took a big risk in its recent call to Pace Frontier. Its frontier model has already fallen behind on adoption. OpenAI's growth is primarily coming from shifts from shifts from SOL 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.
Speaker 2:Astra is, you know, in many ways seemingly a bit more cost efficient and so that's probably Yeah. A factor. But also the data retention stuff that that Anthropic is working towards fixing by the fall.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The data retention thing yeah. I don't I don't know. Yeah. That's probably a bigger thing for enterprise AI.
Speaker 1:I would by default, 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. I don't really know how much 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 good results.
Speaker 2:John Turnis, the turninator. Was
Speaker 1:Sounds like Terminator.
Speaker 2:I know. Terminator. Was at the Emmys last
Speaker 1:Did Tim Cook do this exact bit like two years ago?
Speaker 2:Yeah. But did the phone fold?
Speaker 1:No. It didn't.
Speaker 2:Did
Speaker 1:it? 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.
Speaker 1:But this is it hits completely different because there is actually something novel about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I
Speaker 1:don't know. It's better. And he's smiling. He's all smiles at the at the Emmys. Very good.
Speaker 2:Max from Creative Strategies says, he seems so happy and proud showing off the iPhone duo. It's kinda nice and sweet to see.
Speaker 1:People were people were
Speaker 2:Guy likes to make hardware.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. This has been his life's work.
Speaker 2:He's been
Speaker 1:doing this for decades. People were 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 an iPhone Duo. It looks like a different foldable phone from a different company, not an iPhone Duo. They're barely in the wild.
Speaker 1:Just people getting a peek. Leave us five stars Apple Podcast
Speaker 2:I am.
Speaker 1:Website for a newsletter at tbpn.com.
Speaker 2:I'm so glad that we had the the CMO of Activision or COD Yeah. Come on the show and not tell us, hey, you guys gotta cut off the Oh, yeah. Very