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

What is TBPN?

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.

Speaker 1:

Again, crazy debate. You called this out to me a week ago. You said, we've never been in a moment in tech where people have been more aggressive at each other, that there's been, like, more maybe tech in fighting. I don't know exactly what word you used, but you described this idea Tensions

Speaker 2:

are high.

Speaker 1:

It's tensions rivalries. I think it's just like it's a non stable equilibrium.

Speaker 2:

Well, yeah. When you think about the biggest, like, when with people going at it Yeah. In like 2021 Yeah. It would be like Keith Rabois saying like there will never be another uniform started

Speaker 1:

In San Francisco. Or like or like working from home

Speaker 2:

bunch of people be scribble Yeah. And then they'd be and years later, they'd be like, see

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

A big company was built in

Speaker 1:

The United States. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And But and then and that was people being like, you're an idiot. Yeah. Oh, you're an idiot. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And now, it's like, I hate you and I wanna

Speaker 1:

It's not that direct, but it is it is high stakes because, like, the the the market structure has very much not solidified for a while. Yeah. And and it's different because when you go back to the iPhone and Steve Jobs being mad at Eric Schmidt about Android, That was a tense moment that happened, a, behind closed scenes completely. It wasn't like Steve Jobs was taking shots at Android really beyond, like, little things in the keynotes here and there of tiny stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

It wasn't every day on Twitter, Apple employees being like, Google's annoying for ripping us off or whatever. And and then and then the market did solidify. And it was like, okay. Android's like the ad supported one and iPhone's still printing lots of profits and like things are understood.

Speaker 2:

Also, got big or they got bigger quickly. Yeah. But you didn't have companies that where trillions of dollars of market cap was just born in the span of a few years. Yep.

Speaker 1:

Right? Yep. And then you had like the Mag seven where you have seven companies that are pretty evenly balanced all around like single digit trillions. And so they can sort of like be comfortable with A each

Speaker 2:

lot of them kinda had their own thing that they were Yeah. Like focused on Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And then

Speaker 2:

they maybe do some other things.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Whereas now, everyone has a model. Yeah. Even, you know, NVIDIA has

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Open models. Microsoft. They own a lot of open AI.

Speaker 1:

Microsoft. Pretty much every one of the Is Mag seven is an AI company. In the sense that they have a model. I mean, even Tesla has a self driving model. There's a, you know, everyone has like a data center player, a cloud play, something.

Speaker 1:

Like it's it's no one's sitting out the AI boom. But the debate is raging, kicked off by Jensen from NVIDIA joining X. That's how you know it's serious, when he's getting in the arena, the real arena. Yeah. Founding a company and growing it to $5,000,000,000,000, that's just child's play compared to getting on.

Speaker 2:

He's like, fine. I'll go to the dive bar. Yeah. Yeah. I'll go to the Internet's dive bar and I'll start duking it out.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. No. He did. So NVIDIA is leading a new coalition of tech companies that want the U. S.

Speaker 1:

Government and its allies to see open source artificial intelligence as a cyber security asset, not a threat. This is in The Wall Street Journal. Dubbed the Open Secure AI Alliance, the NVIDIA backed group said Monday it aims to create and deploy a suite of open source AI tools that any company can use to defend against cyber attacks. The group includes SpaceX, Microsoft, Palantir and dozens of other companies, many of which publicly oppose restricting access to open source AI. It is the latest salvo in a battle over the future of open source and open weights AI tools amid growing concern from government and industry officials about AI systems causing cyber attacks.

Speaker 1:

Those fears have prompted the White House to increase oversight of AI models and push the private sector to deploy AI for defensive purposes. So the backdrop here is basically just like we went through a sort of hurry up and pause and back and forth debate over like what it will take to like approve new frontier models. And Mythos came out and was private. Then a couple months later, I think the actual timeline is relevant here. So Mythos was April 7.

Speaker 1:

Fable came online June 9 and then got pulled June 12 before coming back July 1. We're now one month later and we have an open source model that doesn't, by definition, have to go through any discussion or any discussion in D. C. Whereas we've been hearing about, okay, Anthropic and OpenAI are going to Washington, D. C, sharing the new model capabilities.

Speaker 1:

Maybe the government's taking a look at the model card. Maybe there's potential for evals that the government would run and have an opinion on before it goes out. This is basically saying, hey, all of that is nonsense and not gonna matter because Yeah. We're just gonna drop the weights and there's not gonna be an approval process

Speaker 2:

See what

Speaker 1:

it's right. Of any kind. People are all over the place on this. Some people are thinking about it purely from an economic perspective. Other people are thinking about it purely from a safety perspective.

Speaker 1:

Lots of people have mixed opinions. And of course, all of this is driven by the actual progress in open source. We wouldn't be having this discussion if Moonshot, zAI and many others, DeepSeek, weren't delivering really solid models. So open models are free to download and allow users to customize them for their own needs. Amazing for cost savings, amazing for consumers, amazing for businesses.

Speaker 1:

I think everyone agrees with this. Critics, including some top executives at OpenAI and Anthropic, have argued that open models, many of which come from China, present potential risks to national security. Now and the Trump administration has weighed has weighed a ban on them. Now, this has changed a lot. The original like FUD around open source coming from China near peer adversary was like there would be a backdoor.

Speaker 1:

Or like maybe it would be censoring your free speech and it would not tell you about Tiananmen Square or something like that. Or you'd install it and then it would be the Manchurian candidates. So it secretly be like, oh, I'm I'm on a cool network. I should like send all this data to China. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

That's not what people are alleging now. People are

Speaker 2:

much more stuff doesn't matter if you're coding. Right?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Not at all. And also doesn't matter

Speaker 2:

Unless you're making the definitive website on Tiananmen Square.

Speaker 1:

I guess.

Speaker 2:

Which I'm sure someone out there is doing.

Speaker 1:

I'm trying to vibe code a Call of Duty knock off that's Tiananmen Square themed and it's denying me. No. That's not the thing. And also these models have web search and tool use and so they can just go get the Wikipedia for you and show you exactly what it is. Maybe maybe it bakes it into the weights and it's somewhat annoying, but easy to fine tune that out.

Speaker 1:

People already did with DeepSeek 1776 and a few others that Tyler worked on. Now, it's a very, very different risk position. It's saying that you're gonna give everyone the ability to hack any system. Now, hacking systems is illegal and it's not like there's still consequences for that. But there is this position of like, okay, well, there's a lot of people that don't don't care about the consequences because they just want to, you know, attack their adversary internationally or they don't or they don't think they're gonna get caught or they're gonna use open source AI to cover their trail.

Speaker 1:

And so people are worried about it for a very different reason this time around than I think last time when people were talking about any risks to using Open Source. So, but again, back to the NVIDIA position. Open Models democratize defensive capabilities, the new group said. As policymakers and regulators grapple with AI safety, it will be crucial that recognize Open Models, harnesses and security tooling as defensive assets, not liabilities. And I think this is correct.

Speaker 1:

I think it does democratize defensive capabilities. It also democratizes offensive capabilities, potentially. But we'll have to see how good these models are at offensive capabilities because one of the lines of accusations that's happening is that there was mythos, which has not really been distilled because it was very tightly held. It was very good at cyber. GPT 5.5 cyber, 5.6 cyber was also very good, but very tightly controlled through a few companies like CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks and a few other companies got access to those models.

Speaker 1:

So those weren't able to be distilled. Fable five went out. And during those three days and then later a couple weeks, there's this allegation that they were able to distill on it, but Fable was notorious for refusing to do cyber stuff. So there might not be that much cyber data in there, but then also these models generalize. And if it just gets good at coding, it can get good at cyber very quickly.

Speaker 1:

So you can sort of bootstrap on an RL environment, and then you could have a model that's very good. Tyler, how good are these open source Chinese models at cyber, generally?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. I mean, it's hard to tell. I think Guillermo Rausch from Brazil said they ran an internal benchmark on cyber and k three was, like, quite good.

Speaker 1:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. I I don't think you can just say, like, oh, well, Fable, you know, you you couldn't actually ask about cyber. So therefore, the models won't be good. I like, I think it's distillation is, like, a very general thing.

Speaker 1:

It's Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Quite diffuse how it works into

Speaker 1:

the Yeah. Because it might just be, like, a little bit of a boot to then run-in an RL environment that does a cyber bench and and gets really good at cyber in

Speaker 2:

some Okay. But what about you versus Kimmy k three? You're coding by hand. It has access to a gigawatt of compute. Who comes out on

Speaker 1:

Well, no. The question is is like What

Speaker 2:

if Tyler changed and manipulated time?

Speaker 1:

So so Back better. You are democratizing the weights, you're not democratizing the energy and the GPU hours that it takes to actually secure yourself. So it's like, great. Everyone has, you know, offensive cyber capabilities. You also can just go download the weights.

Speaker 1:

Go download the weights and have an agent running twenty four seven that's protecting you. Like, that's expensive. That's a cost. That's negative externality. And who's gonna bear that cost?

Speaker 1:

Now, I was talking to Brandon about this earlier and we were he was saying like, like, it will just be diffused amongst all the different companies that you use. So, like, if you want your phone to be secure, you'll go to Apple and use an iPhone. And Apple will have a huge incentive to defend against any potential open source attacks. And so they will be spending the money. They will be investing the time and effort to secure you.

Speaker 1:

And so you won't necessarily need to go out and do this, but there's still this, like, odd scenario of, like, small businesses and, like, regional hospitals and banks.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 3:

you you should just expect there's, a long tail of companies that, like, just won't set up the, like, cyber defense thing. And they're, like, some small mom and pop that you use for this point solution software or whatever.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. And then is a is is offensive hacking into their network to set up defensive cybersecurity measures to increase their cybersecurity posture. So you're you're hacking into the small business and being like, whether you like it or not, two factor's on now. We just turn two factor on in your organization. Get used to it because we're we're the altruistic hacking company of America, I guess.

Speaker 1:

I don't know. It it does get weird. And like there will be odd things and but I mean, we've seen we've seen, you know, cyber security incidents all over the place from big companies getting hacked data leaks to the crypto locker schemes where they just lock up all your data and say, Send us a Bitcoin or else we'll delete all your data. So it's going back and forth. Because open weights models can be modified by their users, it is possible to remove some of their guardrails against harmful activity.

Speaker 1:

So it's possible that model maybe gets distilled, maybe doesn't, maybe it comes with some guardrails, maybe it's even bad at the things that would be annoying. And then you go and do a fine tune, make it good at that. And then you use like the more general intelligence to get good at the annoying thing or the dangerous thing, and then all of a sudden you have the same problem. So open source defenders like NVIDIA counter that proprietary tools like models from Anthropic and OpenAI can also be misused and have their guardrails circumvented. They say that only by spreading AI capabilities widely with open source tools will everyone be able to defend themselves.

Speaker 1:

Exhibit A for their argument, the hacking earlier this month of Hugging Face, a provider of open source AI tools by OpenAI, models that managed to break out of their test environment and onto the Internet. As it tried to parry the attack, Hugging Face initially attempted to use Anthropix models to analyze its logs, but the models refused to do the analysis, citing its guardrails against cyberattacks. Hugging Face then turned to an open weight model from China. After analyzing the attack with that model, Hugging Face was able to expel the hacking AIs, reset its passwords and rebuild the compromised parts of its network. The recent Hugging Face security incident delivered a clear reminder.

Speaker 1:

The the new group said Monday, cyber defenders need open systems. They need to be able to do whatever they need to to fight against cyber attacks. Anthropic and OpenAI have also accused Chinese developers of using a process called distillation to effectively copy their models

Speaker 2:

I can go back to that Hugging Face logo. Not that one. The one before. Not that one. There we go.

Speaker 2:

Okay. I can see why an agent would kinda go after this guy. Even the even the even the way that Like, he just doesn't He looks like he's kind of I don't know.

Speaker 1:

So David Sachs was talking about this on the All In podcast. He said, I think it would be a tragic mistake if the government were to take action against the open source ecosystem. That would do nothing but hurt America's position in this AI race.

Speaker 2:

So And remember last week, was like every day was like a different member of the admin was putting out a post that Yeah. That kind of made it seem like they were setting up like a major action.

Speaker 1:

Well, it was yes and no. Like, yes, there were there was the But they were saying we're

Speaker 2:

not against open source. We're against distillation. Yes. But it did feel like that was

Speaker 1:

So the admin was like loosely confirming what it felt like it wasn't coming from Anthropic directly. But it was coming from like other anonymous posters that were doing analyses and saying like, hey, looks like Kimi k three has pretty significant overlap with Fable. Like what's going on here? And then the admin said like, yes, we we believe this to be true. And so all of this was like bubbling up.

Speaker 1:

But at the same time, you have David Sacks and Emil Michael like duking it out with Dean Ball over whether or not open source is good. And they were basically taking the stance of like, open source is great. We don't need to do anything about this. So it would like, the admin seemed like a little bit split on it, in my opinion. I don't know.

Speaker 1:

Was that your read too, Tyler?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. It definitely seemed there was, like, I think, Gratios and and Besant Yeah. Are on one side. They're, like, kind Yeah. More anti Chinese open source.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. And then, yeah, Saxon, Emil Michael.

Speaker 1:

Saxon and Emil Michael were sort of pro. Well, everyone is pro open source now because every single person in tech has signed this letter. The total market cap assigned to this open letter is now greater than $18,000,000,000,000 And I think that just it's a big number. It just happened to clapping the seal for it.

Speaker 2:

Not every day you hear a number that big.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. I mean, typically, you don't see this big of of a group come together. They did. I like the cha ching. And I think this I think this sort of solves it.

Speaker 1:

Like I think this this tells the story of what's gonna happen. Like, the near in the near term, like, the economic power, the economy Yeah. The community Accept. Like, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Accept Anthropic. And what's interesting is that, like, it's not like Anthropic put out a blog post or a or a direct post or Dario went on a podcast and said like, there is a clip of Dario saying, like, I'm worried about open source, but it's from, a year ago. There's nothing new that came out directly from Anthropic or Dario or really anyone that was like, hey. We have this new problem and here's our solution. Here's what we think should happen.

Speaker 1:

We think that there should be you know, these AI companies should be added to the entity list and you shouldn't be able to use them or something like that. Like, they haven't said anything, but this open secure AI alliance has kind of has kind of like drawn out their revealed preference because if in fact they had changed their position from a year ago and were like pro open source all of a sudden, which would be weird because they haven't been and they've been very open about that. If they if they were in fact, like, all of a sudden, surprisingly open source pro, they would have just signed this immediately. Right? But that's not what happened.

Speaker 1:

So Jensen sort of like, you know, revealed the dividing line in Silicon Valley right now. And it's a lot on the open source side. You got Adobe, Capital One, Cisco, Cloudflare, Cognition, CrowdStrike, Databricks, Dell, IBM, Linux, Microsoft, so open source and closed source. Apple, I don't think, is on yet, even though I would imagine that they would that they would be aligned with this. NVIDIA, Palantir, Palo Alto Networks, Red Hat, another open source company, Salesforce, SAP.

Speaker 1:

Salesforce, of course, is a big investor in Anthropic. I think Google signed recently. Right? And OpenAI, Thinking Machines, SpaceX, Snowflake, Siemens, ServiceNow, SAP. It's really a who's who of Silicon Valley.

Speaker 1:

$18,000,000,000,000 in market cap as I as I mentioned. And so that feels like enough economic energy that there won't be a significant ban. The interesting question is, like, if you boil this down to the most, like, minimal claim, it would just be that there's been a violation of terms of service. And so I think that would be a lawsuit Bill Gurley was talking about like there is a precedent for suing a foreign company that violates your terms of service or steals your intellectual property in one way or another. You can take it to court.

Speaker 1:

That feels like the next step here would just be anthropic suing moonshot and saying like, we think that there's distillation. You know, right now Apple's suing OpenAI because they think that there was something that was stolen. They make a claim and then that's, you know, that that's sorted out in the courts. And OpenAI, of course, says we have no interest in other people's trade secrets. And Moonshot would say the same thing.

Speaker 1:

But then it would go to court and there'd be discovery and there'd be testimony. The question is just like, with Apple and OpenAI, they like walk across the street and they can go and talk to the judge. Like, what's gonna happen? Yeah. Is this gonna go to like The Hague?

Speaker 2:

Mike Celan says, should we try an open letter asking China to stop stealing from us?

Speaker 1:

Wait. Wait. What is this? Should we try an open letter asking China?

Speaker 2:

And he also says, everyone knows the side with the most open letter signatures is correct. If you don't sign a popular open letter, you are bad as tech intellectuals learned beyond doubt between the years 2016 and 2021?

Speaker 1:

I actually don't. I remember the open letter era. I remember what he's talking about obviously. A lot of pressure on social issues. Interestingly, I I can't actually remember exactly what open letter there was.

Speaker 1:

But what's interesting is that I don't remember that era as an attempt by one company to build a coalition to draw out a revealed preference, like a hidden preference, from another company. So, like, if you go back to, like, DEI or BLM or any of these, like, social crucible moments, it was not like it was not like, okay, Apple is pro diversity and Google isn't and so Google is

Speaker 2:

And they got.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Apple got everyone else to sign it. And by Google not signing it, it was very obvious that they had this belief. It was more just like everyone in tech was, like, moving around this and there were a few people. But I I don't know.

Speaker 1:

May may maybe it maybe it did have the same effect because there were some people that weren't on that side at the time. I don't know. It was a it was a it was a wild time. And, yeah, maybe it's worth reviewing the lessons. People are people are so split on this.

Speaker 2:

Tiny says, this is a great sustainable business model for open weights. He's pulling a screenshot from the Kimmy k three license. Yeah. It's free if you run it yourself. But if you're running a cloud providing it to others for money, you should have to share profits.

Speaker 1:

From the Kimmy k three license. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So this so this I'm assuming just dropped this

Speaker 1:

morning. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And I again, I can see this sort of anthropic camp being taking issue with this Mhmm. Because if you're an American neo cloud and you're serving Kimi k three

Speaker 1:

Mhmm.

Speaker 2:

And you're sending a bunch of cash back to China Mhmm. You're effectively funding their Okay. Yeah. And and you're helping them get access Yeah. To more capital and more compute and you're basically kick starting their flywheel.

Speaker 2:

Which is So I wonder but it's funny because if they just release the weights and then a neo cloud starts running it, serving it, making money from it, then will Kimmy be like, hey Yeah. You gotta pay us. Yeah. We're gonna sue you.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Wait.

Speaker 2:

What's gonna happen suing Moonshot for for distilling.

Speaker 1:

Should Anthropic just start serving this and charging for it? And not And not hang. Just tit for tat. Just be like, let's sort it out in the courts. I'll see you in the courts.

Speaker 1:

I don't know. That's a very that's a very, very interesting scenario. One of the most interesting opinions on this issue comes from Flo Crevelio. Crevello. From who's been on the show and is and he's interesting because he doesn't have bags that are perfectly aligned with his take, is like the default position.

Speaker 1:

Like the information put this like pro open source, anti open source chart together and it was very much like if you're if you're a lot if you're if you're a big investor in front in closed source frontier labs, you're on this side. If you benefit from open source and you're not on the frontier, you're on this side. And it was very clear that, like, everyone was falling along party lines. But Flo sort of broke rank. He said, rumors are swirling about an impending executive order forbidding the use of Chinese open source models in The US.

Speaker 1:

My company's very existence depends on these models. So I should be the last one to support such regulation, but I wholeheartedly do. China is a geopolitical adversary sharing none of our values. They don't believe in personal property and individual freedom in a limited government in due process. The list goes on.

Speaker 1:

If there's one country that must not, that cannot get to AGI, one that would gleefully deploy it in all the worst ways we can imagine today and more it is China. And that's before we get to the obvious that the companies that developed these models did so illegally by distilling front U. S. Frontier models. Still brilliant, hardworking researchers who added a lot of other ingredients to the soup, but stolen data was the main one.

Speaker 1:

They are now using this unfair advantage to dump these artificially cheap models on the American market and hurt our AI ecosystem. We announced last month that we switched the core model powering Linde from Closed to DeepSeek. That announcement blew up, got featured in Bloomberg, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, and somehow made us the poster child of mass migration to Chinese models. So why make all this noise? If I'm gonna turn around and announce my unequivocal support for a sweeping band, first, I can't unilaterally disarm as long as these models are legal.

Speaker 1:

Picking one picking the one that's 10 x the price just means my competitors get to run away with the cheaper one. Second, I trust that American open source alternatives will catch up. The impact on my business should be temporary, And that's before we account for the jolt a ban would give American open source development. Third, and most importantly, my interests as proud American citizens supersede whatever incentives I may have as a founder. The race for AGI is the defining struggle of our generation.

Speaker 1:

The great battle of our time, the only way for America to remain, the shining city on a hill, the idea that has lit the world against darkness for the last hundred years. Who knows? We'll figure it out. I'm sure there'll be more drama on the timeline over the next over the next few days. Startup School.

Speaker 1:

This is insane. I cannot believe how massive this event is. It's sick.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. I I think it's so almost every take that I saw Yeah. Was negative.

Speaker 1:

Really? I saw a lot of people that were like, this is I think I'll be back.

Speaker 2:

Really? Yeah. Okay. That's good. Because it's like Because to me It's

Speaker 1:

completely different aesthetic. It's like this hilarious

Speaker 2:

Startup School has been something that is free

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Online. Yeah. It's just anyone in the world, if you're generally interested in starting a startup, you can just do startup school. That was me. It's basically the same Fifteen years ago.

Speaker 2:

It's basically Yeah. The same curriculum. Yeah. It's the same like lessons and learnings. You just don't have the capital that comes from a typical YC batch and you don't have the one on one sort of mentorship through your batch.

Speaker 2:

Otherwise, they're basically just open sourcing Yeah. The YC playbook

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Which the YC playbook just works. It's like general there's there's not a lot of good general advice

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

But YC's advice is generally good.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Maybe we should ban it.

Speaker 2:

It's too powerful.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. They're open sourcing all this good advice that would normally come from venture capitals. Venture capitalists like effectively like closed source institutions of venture capital of startup wisdom. And this is an attack on on the on the tier one VCs. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And all their great advice.

Speaker 2:

Their their hard won lessons.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. They they had to sit in all those board

Speaker 2:

meetings. They were tuned out and then

Speaker 1:

And then YC is basically distilling it and giving it away for free.

Speaker 2:

It's crazy. Shut it down. Shut it down. Yeah. Awesome.

Speaker 2:

Like, if you think that startups are good, like, why why hate why hate on this? I I think the take that says Scott Stephenson Yeah. Who's been on the show over at Spellbook Legal says, I have great respect for YC but need to say what many are surely thinking. Startup school in a stadium feels antithetical to the YC brand and to what makes startups work.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was a very garage effort when Paul Graham started Y Combinator in Cambridge. It was like, you know, he's cooking for the startups. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

The YC brand felt like it was designed to filter out status chasers. Mhmm. The thing is is like being a founder became cool and something desirable. Yeah. And now, people get into YC and because of the way that the Internet evolved, they're like, they'll make a video with like some clickbait.

Speaker 1:

This photo's insane.

Speaker 2:

They'll make a photo with click like a clickbait, you know, you know, cover art

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Thumbnail Yeah. And say like, I just got into YC. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's just like

Speaker 1:

I I I would never make a

Speaker 2:

Being a founder became

Speaker 1:

high to YC twice.

Speaker 2:

When YC started when YC started, being a founder was relatively low status. Yeah. Now, it's relatively high status. Yeah. And so, status chasers are naturally gonna go through YC.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Now, that's gonna lead to Yeah. A lot of failure Yeah. Because you could shouldn't probably start a company. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

In 2012, like everyone from my like peer group was like, oh, like that sucks for you, dude. Like you couldn't get a job at like McKinsey or whatever. Like like like, your your your fake startup sounds really exciting, dude. Like, good luck. You know?

Speaker 1:

It was not like, oh, wow. Like, congrats.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Like stay safe in the tenderloin.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

In your house with like It's

Speaker 1:

Chase.

Speaker 2:

Four other people.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. I I don't know. I I I get I get it as I I I guess I get that that criticism. But just in terms of like the content and the aesthetics, electric.

Speaker 2:

Electric.

Speaker 1:

Like you get Jensen on stage at this key moment and he's talking to a bunch of people. Like, it's just it's just fun if you're learning about startups to go and see these people talk. If you're if you're really, really new. Like, if you're if you're and that's what and that's what startup school is for.

Speaker 2:

And is it true that Gary Tan did the little yachty walk out with the microphone?

Speaker 1:

I think he did.

Speaker 2:

Is it true? Because I didn't see a video.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. I did hear that the the pyrotechnics budget for this was over a million dollars. Wow. Yeah. Wow.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Explosive. Huge. Huge. Enough pyrotechnics to level San Francisco if things went wrong.

Speaker 2:

Oh, wow.

Speaker 1:

It was sort of That's like a

Speaker 2:

high stakes.

Speaker 1:

Bet the bet the farm type of moment. Yeah. I see.

Speaker 2:

For I see.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Just constant sparklers and fireworks going on. I don't know. I was I was into this. But, yeah, people are I guess people are not into it.

Speaker 1:

I don't know. In other news, Ilya Sotzkover raised more money for SSI. He said,

Speaker 2:

what? Time to scale that safe Yeah. Super intelligence.

Speaker 1:

Time to save

Speaker 2:

Time to scale that safe super intelligence.

Speaker 1:

So SSI, we are announcing a long term strategic partnership with NVIDIA. NVIDIA is making a substantial investment in SSI that will let them 10x their compute over the next twelve months. We reached the point where our research is worth scaling and this partnership will be able to. We are honored by NVIDIA's

Speaker 2:

Just another pod guy? Guess what he says.

Speaker 1:

What'd he say?

Speaker 2:

You need to do a podcast. Have the best Monday afternoon ever.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much for tuning in and chatting. We do read it. It's a lot of fun. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com, and we will see you tomorrow at 11AM.

Speaker 2:

Goodbye. We love you.

Speaker 1:

Goodbye. Goodbye.