Cambridge AI Safety Plan, Instinct CEO on Invest Like the Best, Zuck Hires MongoDB CEO | Diet TBPN

0:00John Coogan:The most viral video I saw over the weekend was the parody of Dario Amadei on SNL. That felt like it really took over the timeline. Martine Cassado said, honestly downplayed how ridiculous the rhetoric and broader situation is. It was a funny clip. There were a bunch of interesting nuance. I mean, first it's like, okay, clearly the AI rhetoric and the public discourse is getting to a new height, to the point where a lab leader of a private company can even be parodied on SNL, because the audience understands who that is. So it's interesting to see that, like, okay, yes, like, Dario's done enough on Oprah and CNN and NBC and ABC and all the major news networks to be relevant to the broader audience because it only really works.

0:47John Coogan:Like, they could never pair it. There's a lot of people in tech that we know that wouldn't work as, you know, SNL punching bags. But he's made it. He's made it. It says a lot that the sweater vest thing is iconic enough to be a part of a character. I wonder if he'll stick with that or switch it up. Because it's not his leather jacket yet. It's not his Hawaiian t-shirt yet. But there is such value into leaning into a consistent thing. But I don't know. We'll see. The interesting wrinkle here is that Dario is at the point where he is enough of a name that they can do this bit and make jokes. And it's relevant to the SNL audience.

1:25John Coogan:Obviously, it went way more viral on X than I think it probably did on YouTube. But when Michael Che is introducing the segment, he sort of stumbles over Dario's name a little bit. Like he's reading it from the cue cards and he says like, and this is Dario. And then he pauses. And it seems like maybe Dario Amadei is not fully a household name in the SNL writers room yet. In the sense that they're like, okay, who is this guy? Let's look him up. Okay, get him on the cue cards. I don't know. Maybe I'm reading into it too much. But it felt like this was certainly like a crossing the chasm moment. like the first time everyone gets to know Daria.

1:58John Coogan:But very, very funny, and it really illuminates a little bit of, like, the complexity of the discourse, the irony of saying, you know, somebody's got to save me from me, basically. But let's play a little bit of it and see what you think. You know, thanks for having me, Michael. I may have been alarming in my recent interviews, but I want to assure you that if we can pressure lawmakers to create guardrails, we will be able to stop me. Dario, can you just explain how your company isn't going to kill us? So, so, so, so, so, so... Not the most flattering depiction. That's a really hard question. It shouldn't be.

2:43So, you know... Come on, Dario. Come on, Dario. You can do this.

2:50John Coogan:Is that an explicit reference to, like, The Ring? That's reassuring. Like, Gollum? Like, where the voice is in your head? AI is the devil, and I, it's maker. What? It seems like it, right? No, well, so, look. Well, see, AI is the devil, and I, it's maker. So poetically written. We have talked about this extensively, and we are all on the same page here. We do not condone what we are doing. Shouldn't you be talking about the pros of AI? It's very, very tough to thread the needle on this messaging. Yeah, so, put it this way. In ten years, there's about a 10 % chance that cancer won't be a problem for anyone.

3:25For anyone. I don't like the way you're saying that, buddy. I mean, how is this a good thing? Look, um, so, Che, it's simple. If you could drink a milk that made your life easier, but there was a 10 % chance it killed you, would you drink the milk? No. Really? Yes! Well, what if there was a button that when you push it, everyone dies? Would you push the button? No! Really? Dario, are you okay? I'm sort of blacking out every time I talk. Um, I'd love to start this interview over, or better yet, uh, you know, my whole life.

4:01John Coogan:Brutal. All right, Dario, just tell us, what are the pros of AI? All right. Land of the plane, Dario. I can't. You can. We can hear you, Dario. No one can hear you, Dario. Say something reassuring. Like what? Try the milk thing. I already said that. Is milk a reference to something or is that just random? AI is not a weapon. It's a tool. A tool for building weapons. And I urge you to urge me to stop. Mario Amadei, everybody. Going pretty hard on him in some ways. That being said, he's always incredibly fascinating to listen to. And he has incredible clarity of thought. And he does, at times, he'll, like, pause, you know, in a way that would maybe scare normal people a little bit.

4:56But the thing that I think he can do that will have the biggest impact is to stop. I agree. No, I actually like the whatever kind of shawl sweater thing that is. Isn't it?

5:07John Coogan:Is it Brunella? Probably, yeah. I think someone talked it, right? It's Brunella. So, you know, it's nice. But it's quite luxury. And I feel like a power tie, some shoulder padding would go a long way. Anyway. The biggest thing he can do is to stop smiling when he's talking about really bad, devastating things. Yeah. Yeah. And so I'm sure that that's something he's constantly. Yeah, there's something he learned from the way Fed chairmen speak or the way the head of the FDA or the head of the military speaks. We've talked to some of these folks, and they're very austere, very serious. And our show is very lighthearted.

5:43John Coogan:and we just kind of have to like click into a different mode when you're talking to somebody like a Michael Kratzius or someone who's like dealing with the weight of something big and puts up a wall that is, it is a performance, but it serves a very valuable purpose, which is like, I take this very seriously. Or you can go the opposite way, the Mark Zuckerberg way and rip it and just be like, yeah, I'm having fun with AI, which is honestly like, it feels like people are like, yeah, I kind of want that energy a little bit. Just give me the white pill. But I don't know. Yeah, and again, I don't think that Zuck's approach is at all appealing to the people actually pushing the frontier.

6:21No, no. Like, no one's going to take, no researchers, like, take. There are some researchers. Dating back to basically Demis being, like, you know, that moment where he realizes Zuck is just as excited about VR as he is AI. Right.

6:37John Coogan:Anyways, I hope that. But maybe VR will be bigger than AI, Jordy. Maybe. Wouldn't you like that? I would love that. Wouldn't you like that, John? I would love that. But yeah. Anyway, so from SNL headed straight into dinner with the president. Sunday. I mean, he wasn't actually at SNL. But yeah, it's like you wake up to that on Sunday morning. And you have to imagine that Trump sees it. But Trump has been both. He's hosted SNL multiple times. and he's also been made fun of on SNL for years. Like when he gets elected, they basically hire an actor to come and be him for four years for the entire tenure because they're going to be doing the cold open with him like basically every other week.

7:24John Coogan:And so maybe there's a little bit of camaraderie. They're like, Hey, we've both been through this scenario. It's not so bad. It's actually kind of, kind of funny or, or maybe they're both like, yeah, the news really is fake. Like we got, we got, but yeah, as, as, As critical as it is at the same time, I think it's something that all founders should aspire to, right? When you're starting your company and investors say, well, where do you see yourself in the company? Getting absolutely skewered. Getting skewered on the biggest stage. Perhaps, perhaps. Andrew Curran says President Trump has personally invited Dario to a private dinner tonight.

7:59That was yesterday.

7:59John Coogan:So that happened on Sunday night. This will be the first time they've actually met one-on-one. big chance to patch things up or crash the plane into the mountain. They're actually running it back tomorrow night. Tuesday night, there's a dinner in D.C. for all the AI leaders with the White House again. So, I mean, the pace of this stuff is really, really, really picking up. There's meetings every week now, basically. And, yeah, I mean, there's lots to work through. And no one is going to get to put their head in the sand, not even the comedians at SNL. They will have to chime in as well as the politicians and the lab leaders.

8:34John Coogan:And so, yeah, despite Dario being excluded from, it seemed like he was excluded from that White House dinner with Xi Jinping and that basically every top tech leader was invited to, he was noticeably absent. President Trump, you know, followed up with a one-on-one dinner with Dario to hear his side of the story. And I wonder what type of leaks or reporting will come out of that. You would think that that would be going on today. Maybe there will be some news or maybe they'll put out a joint statement. Maybe everything went really well. But I mean, you could see Dario sign up for Truth Social. Or UFC courtside or ringside.

9:09John Coogan:Ringside. UFC would be pretty electric. UFC with the Don. I want to see Dana White, Dario, Trump just squatted up. You think he'd be doing slap boxing before too? Oh, yeah. For sure. You got to do the full suite if you go all in. Anyway, there's also interesting timing that I don't know how timed up this was, but every day there's another proposal for how to manage AI safety. This one feels like the most formal concepting exercise from a group of top AI researchers. It's published through the University of Cambridge. You know, Sam was talking to, it wasn't Axios, he was interviewed and he was saying that like, maybe we're going to sit down and get beers, basically.

9:53John Coogan:You remember this whole thing? Why don't you guys just sit down and have some beers? That was the proposal. And he was like, I don't want to leak anything that's going to happen, but we are thinking about it. And, you know, he's like, you can't just pre-enough these things. Our personal agents are talking about getting together for a beer. Yeah. But it was very funny framing. But this is like the start of that, the start of more collaboration between the labs, between the academic community. And what's interesting is like they go a little bit further. You know, Tyler over there, his criticism has been like, everyone comes out with an AI safety proposal, and it's basically always like, we got to talk about it.

10:29John Coogan:And this is a little bit more concrete. So the first one is they want to set in place the ability to monitor the level of AI-enabled R &D at labs. So what percentage of the code, what percentage of the dollars, what, like, give us firm metrics on how much of the AI R &D is being done by artificial intelligence, anthropic, open AI. They've all sort of, like, mentioned this in blog posts that it's happening. But there's also this, like, vague jockeying because it's better to be further along on the RSI curve for financial reasons. So there's not really an Apple staff. No one really feels like they have a strong handle on whether there's more RSI going on at OpenAI or Anthropic.

11:15John Coogan:It feels like they both have very different metrics. Like, OpenAI says, like, we have an intern level. And then Anthropic will say, like, we had Claude spin up a thousand ideas. And, like, you can't really apples to apples those. The proposal is like, let's get some metrics in place so we can actually monitor this thing. then they also have again it's sort of like we need to talk about it but they want the government to create firm plans for responses to potential theoretical bad scenarios so like if there's a big cyber attack and an agent goes rogue and brings down the internet and hacks into a bunch of stuff like what did what will the government do what's the equivalent like fema like we have a response for like there's a big hurricane it's town you bring in people there's food there's shelter there's like a plan, and we don't really have that for like the Internet went down because like an agent took it down.

12:08John Coogan:Same thing for biosecurity. They have a couple others, even like economic dislocation, that type of thing. So they want the government. They're not proposing the solutions to those yet, but they're saying like this is where the government should be prepared. So I don't know. It's a good read. Did you see that China has places you can go to simulate being in a disaster? No. Like super high winds and flash floods, things like that. Should we have like AI disaster simulations where you can be in a data center that's going rogue and kind of work to shut it down with friends? Yeah. Just a kind of like live action role play through it.

12:56I like that.

12:57John Coogan:I like that. I'm kind of treating Modern Warfare 4 like that. I feel like that's getting me enough cycles of the simulation of you're already playing against bots. You're already shooting AI, basically. So getting some drills in. Yeah, I know it's a joke, but I wouldn't actually be surprised that a future first-person shooter or one of these open-world games is centered around the Terminator scenario. There was a game. There was a game. I forget what it's called. but you drop in with three people and you're on this planet. There's one that's Starship Troopers themed, so it's like the bug planet.

13:32John Coogan:And then there's another planet that you can drop into that's like the Terminator planet. And you're going up against like, they basically ripped Terminator's intellectual property. They look exactly like T. RX says, why is Tyler not back in school? He's doing the longest internship in history. He turned it down. I turned it down. He actually turned it down just to grind for this. Yeah. Things will never be chill again. The doomers who shape the AI safety freak out. The Wall Street Journal has an article here about some early anthropic employees who are considering buying remote land in the United States to relocate to if AI goes seriously wrong.

14:07John Coogan:They're getting bunkies. They're going bunker mode. Employees also train doomsday scenarios and preparation plans in a private slack, while anthropic workers have their own office space inside Berkeley's Constellation AI safety community. The wider safety scene has discussed iodine pills, remote islands, and electromagnetically shielded desert bunkers. This is like an interesting example of like an actual answer to the Teller Cowan question, which is like, if you really care about Doom, why aren't you making financial decisions? This is a financial one. Yeah, you want to lever up, get a lot of debt, and buy a bunker, buy remote land with a massive mortgage.

14:40Yeah, because usually the answer to the Doomer thing is like, well, I'm not going to be able to get to my bunker because the, you know, bioterrorism will already have killed me or something. This is an instantiation of this. The thing that always just, like, breaks down with these scenarios is, like, you know, every guy has, like, sort of played out the scenario in their head, right? And where are you going to be best off? In some, like, remote area where you don't know any people that actually live there, right? Let's pick Wyoming, right? You really think that the world is like falling apart and you're just going to head over to Wyoming and set up shop in a community that knows you've been building your bunkie there.

15:22Yeah. Right. And they're just going to be like, oh, yeah, like there's a bunker over there. It has everything you need in it to survive. But, you know, they paid us to set it up years ago. And let's not we shouldn't we shouldn't just go occupy said bunker for ourselves.

15:37John Coogan:So the prepper community has a term for this. They say don't be a loot drop. Yeah, it's a loot drop. Yeah, you're a loot drop if you do this. If you go and set up a really luxurious bunker with a bunch of supplies, but you don't actually know the community, you're not integrated into like everyone else. The fabric of the... Yeah, the fabric. So ideally it's like you want your team and everyone else to all be in it together, and so there's no squabbling. But yeah, you can just set up a loot drop and then everyone's like, oh yeah, I installed a crazy safe over there. Let's go get that as soon as the crisis happens.

16:09John Coogan:Yeah, I mean there's a whole bunch of fun game theory you can play through there I would I would personally I think we need to regulate because I would personally I would hate to be in a self-defense situation with With a bunch of rogue agents and imagine if all the Waymo's went rogue And we were just forced because of self-defense reasons you and all your best friends Just drive around and just have to shoot them out of the windows of our cars like all day long like that would be Night is a nightmare you would never you've never even if I was in a self-defense situation, I would do it, but it would pain me.

16:41Totally. Totally. Let's talk about some personal agents.

16:45John Coogan:Okay. Noah Shin jumped on founder of instinct, broke his silence finally with none other than our friend and legend, Patrick O'Shaughnessy. Patrick pulled out the highlights. He said a list of surprising and mind boggling stats from this conversation. 1 billion a year in transaction volume, still invite only. I can't remember if that's total. I think that's actually total volume to date. I don't think that's like run rate volume. Growing 10 % a day. I read that as$1 billion of annualized, that they are at$1 billion of annualized transaction volume. But I guess it's maybe even higher. I don't know.

17:27John Coogan:Yeah. Interesting. Growing 10 % a day. Spent$0 on marketing. They have this, you know, pretty amazing flywheel where people post screenshots all the time. That's doing a lot of marketing. A lot of the screenshots are horrible accidents, but maybe those actually drive curiosity and people being like, well, I'm not going to make that same stupid mistake and the service is probably getting better. You think those actually help? I think those help. Yeah, they probably do. People are just curious. People are curious and they're like, oh, I want to see it. I'll be safe. I won't give it my login details, but I'll still.

18:01No, and it can't be said enough. Yeah. A lot of people within tech have experienced AI doing things for them, like making a product. Most people outside have not experienced that yet, and it's just a magical thing.

18:15John Coogan:Yeah, totally. 40 % of users shared a personal credit card with Instinct within three weeks. Compute demand is doubling roughly every week. At 5 % to 8 % daily growth over the months it takes to bring new compute online, Instinct would reach about 100 million users. On Instinct's own A-B test, it matches Opus 5 performance at a fraction of the cost. Noah spends about 40 % of his time on compute. Buying compute at the last minute costs 3 to 4x more. Makes sense. Background work runs on setups that are 3x, 5x, and 8x more efficient on the same compute. 50 % of Instinct's transaction volume is travel.

18:52John Coogan:That's a crazy stat. Instinct plans to take a cut of what users buy, take rates. Shopify is 2.5 to 3%. Amazon is 15%. Apple is 30%. Noah's personal goal is to keep instinct free for everyone for life. Some small businesses run their entire back office on instinct. That's interesting. Users who connect at least one piece of sensitive information retain at about 80%. Just give me one piece. Just one piece. Just give me one piece of sensitive information. Tell me your darkest secret. Some users send more than 90 % of their messages. What kind of skeletons do you have in your closet? To instinct by voice.

19:33Say an app makes 70 % of its money from ads and 30 % from actually selling you things. Agents could wipe out the 70%. But Noah thinks that 30 % gets much bigger because people buy more when buying takes zero effort. This is a big question for me, right? Because already buying something on a Shopify store takes close to zero effort. Like the checkout is actually down to if I land on the website and I know what I want, I can check out within. And again, Shopify doesn't have an ad business.

20:04John Coogan:There are things that are not fun to shop for, though. There's a lot of stuff, especially if it's like I was thinking about like cable management. I wanted to get some cable management stuff for my desk. And like I don't really care about the brand. I don't care about the flow. I just want like, you know, a suite. I needed some like command strips, maybe like a little tray, like whatever, like the modern solution is to like a couple of cables, a power brick, like just go and get something that's well reviewed. And like a suite that we'll figure out what kind of voice are you doing?

20:38Instinct launched to about 200 friends and family. Invites have sold on eBay for around$300. More than 50 % of Instinct's traffic doesn't run on iMessage. instinct has proactively called noah three times that's like when when it's doing something and it has like a deadline it's like noah gave the example of like hey you really have to sign this like within the next five minutes are you available it'll just call you okay which is cool um raised one on 10 yeah uh yeah less than a month after raising two and a half so no noah is 23 so very very good uh summary also same colleges that i went to he went to northeastern There you go.

21:17This is the whole instinct pitch deck, by the way. And it's Christian Kyle saying, my three-month-old son is now twice as big as when he was born. He's on track to weigh seven and a half trillion pounds by age 10. Very funny. Such a viral post.