China Blocks Meta’s $2B Manus Deal, Meta Bets on Space-Based Solar | Diet TBPN

0:00John Coogan:We'll take you through some quick headlines of what's going on in the news today. Of course, the Elon Musk OpenAI. Let's take a moment for the production team background update. We have a new screen in the background, much better contrast, much brighter. We're excited to explore this. The production team is stoked. There's four key stories going on in the news today. The first is Elon Musk's$134 billion lawsuit against Sam Altman goes to court today in Oakland. Musk is alleging that OpenAI abandoned its original nonprofit mission and became a for-profit entity focused on maximizing profit for Microsoft.

0:32John Coogan:Jury selection is going on today. There are a number of reporters on the ground and we'll be checking in on the progress there. Already there was some reporting that said certain people were saying it would be difficult for me to be unbiased here because of my general dislike for basically everything going on. Sam and Greg were spotted on scene. Elon has not been spotted yet. There's also other Microsoft OpenAI news. They changed their partnership. OpenAI can now serve all of its products to customers across any cloud provider. Andy Jassy had a post about it saying it was a very interesting update.

1:12John Coogan:Obviously, he's excited to vend OpenAI technology through AWS, which they also have a partnership. And so, in other words, OpenAI can potentially use Google TPUs, Amazon Tranium, other chips are on the table now. Now, there's a lot more flexibility that comes from that. Over in Meta World, China has blocked Meta's$2 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence platform Manus after regulators reviewed whether the deal violated Beijing's investment rules. This was something that went back and forth. Did they get enough of the company to Singapore in order to clear the hurdles that require the acquisition to go through?

1:45John Coogan:Then some members of the Manus team were detained briefly in China on business. There were some issues there. And one of the challenges is going to be clearly the Manus team wanted to do this deal. They wouldn't have signed up for it. It was a great outcome for the team. They were excited to build with Meta. But one of the challenges is you have all these different team members, many of which were born and raised in China. And they still have family members and people back in China that they care a lot about. So that's going to be, I would assume that's going to be a leverage point from the CCP.

2:18John Coogan:And the last story also from Meta is that they are planning to use solar power from space at night, beamed from space. They're partnering with Overview Energy, a different company than the other solar space company we talked about. The other space beam company. They've been in stealth for about four years. They're planning to beam up to one gigawatt of space solar power from orbit to Earth for around-the-clock power production. They're also deploying one gigawatt of ultra long duration storage batteries with noon energy. So some exciting deals coming out of Menlo Park. We got to start with these Diet Coke videos because I fell down a rabbit hole of Diet Coke Instagram reels.

2:58John Coogan:I'm surprised you weren't in this. Yeah, it took them a long time to figure out that I drink three Diet Cokes a day and I love Diet Coke. but these videos have brought me a lot of joy. So we can play one. There's been a new study about Diet Coke versus Coke Zero and we can pull it up in just a minute. It just came out with this new study that compared people that drink Diet Coke versus people that drink Coke Zero. And what it actually found was that people that drink Coke Zero are idiots and then people that drink Diet Coke are actually Sigma Chats that are way better than everyone else. Thank you.

3:34John Coogan:Thank you. We needed that. Wait, play the restock video. There's a restock video that is, it claims to be$4 ,000 of Diet Coke stored all over this person's massive house. I think it's about$200. Let's count it up. Let's count it up. Let's pull up the restock video. And you tell me, is this$4 ,000 worth of Diet Coke? Okay. That's maybe$20 of Diet Coke. This is maybe$10 of Diet Coke. Here's another 10. We're what? Under$100 still of Diet Coke, I would imagine. I'm just so curious, when do they opt for the plastic bottle versus the can? It is odd. Some people have preferences. I saw again on Instagram in my Diet Coke deep dive.

4:16John Coogan:Someone who insists that the 16 ounce aluminum can of Diet Coke tastes better than the 12 ounce aluminum can. That's the level of Diet Coke. Also, check out the organizational inefficiency here in this fridge. What's going on here? She's not... You're just putting up in the front. Yeah. Frauding. Frauding. Yeah, because you could stack the Diet Coke much deeper, but once you're that far in the real, you call it quits. Instagram is just the Diet Coke app for you now yes well i'm getting i'm so deep that i'm getting diet coke vibe reels let's pull this one up because this one is electric this is like peak content there we go this one this is like john just the fact that somebody took so long to edit this together is that looks like something you could one shot I mean it's like in CapCut and you'd need to like choose the words and place them and add the features like you should be able to puppeteer that with an agent but I don't know of any agents that are really there on the video editing front certainly like the next the next chip to fall the next opportunity Rise says Chad might mog but when the jester performs even the king sits to listen and this is incredibly true we have a friend of the show that is 100 a jester and the closest thing we have to kings in this industry will pick up his call and listen to whatever he has to say even if he's jester maxing it's true based 16c gotta be honest bro uh oh i think deleted but said gotta be honest bro i have no idea what a semiconductor is do you know why they call them semiconductors?

6:06That made me laugh so hard.

6:09John Coogan:Do you know why they call them semiconductors? I do not. So full-on conductors like copper. Electricity flows through it constantly. A semiconductor is like geranium or silicon. The current can be turned on and off, so it's semi-conductive. And that started the computing boom because you can effectively store ones and zeros in it. A little more complicated than that, but that's like the very high-level version for why they are semiconductors. That's not why they call it semi-analysis. It's because Dylan just says he doesn't want to do full-on analysis. He only wants to do semi-analysis. I think his analysis is totally full-on analysis, but he decided to go with semi-analysis.

6:46John Coogan:Anyway, imagine genuinely believing that the entire human race was going to be wiped out in the next year, and then you just kind of aimlessly argue about it on Twitter. That is a weird, weird phenomenon on that's going on. Oh, Phil is looking for a large gong in the Bay Area. If you are in possession of a gong that is over 30 inches, give him a call. He's in the market. He's looking for a 30 inch gong, a large gong though. How big is our gong? I think it's 42. 42. We're around there. We're around there. Anyway, do you know where we got this gong? Gongsunlimited.com. Gongsunlimited.com, Phil, you have your answer.

7:23John Coogan:I couldn't reply to this on X, but I chose to save it to Monday and tell it to you in person. Why did we get the biggest gong? Why is there a limit on gong size? We've seen bigger gongs online. They do exist, but they get very expensive. Sort of an exponential relationship between gong size and price, unfortunately. Okay, we have to talk about the study that went viral over the weekend. It is placebo sleep affects cognitive functioning. And the takeaway is that literally just having a delusional golden retriever mindset measurably changes outcomes and physiology. Sleep badly, convince yourself you're well-rested.

8:08Stressful day, convince yourself it's fuel. Failed, convince yourself it's useful data. So in this study, it says the placebo effect is any outcome that is not attributed to a specific treatment, but rather to an individual's mindset. This phenomenon can extend beyond its typical use in pharmaceutical drugs to involve aspects of everyday life, such as the effect of sleep on cognitive functioning. In two studies examining whether perceived sleep quality affects cognitive functioning, 164 participants reported their previous night's sleep quality. They were then randomly assigned one of two sleep quality conditions or two control conditions.

8:41Those in the above average sleep quality condition were informed that they had spent 28 % of their total sleep time in REM, whereas those in the below average sleep quality condition were informed that they had only spent 16.2 % of their time in REM sleep. Assigned sleep quality, but not self-reported sleep quality, significantly predicted participants' scores on the PACE auditory serial addition test and controlled oral word association task. Assigned sleep quality did not predict participants' scores on the digit span test as expected, nor did it predict scores on the symbol-digit modalities test when it was unexpected.

9:18The control conditions show that the findings were not due to demand characteristics from the environmental protocol. Those findings supported the hypothesis that mindset can influence cognitive states in both positive and negative directions, suggesting a means of controlling one's health and cognition. Takeaway, golden retriever mode, golden retriever mindset.

9:39John Coogan:They made a movie about the golden retriever mindset years ago. I know you haven't seen it. Have you seen it? It's called Yes Man. I was thinking Air Bud.

9:52John Coogan:Air Bud is a great answer to that. No, that's about a literal golden retriever. Yes Man with Jim Carrey is effectively about the golden retriever mindset. Basically, he's a bank loan officer. He's become withdrawn. He's going through a divorce. He's having an increasingly negative look, outlook on life. he then goes to this seminar with an inspirational guru who has him enter a covenant with the universe and say yes to everything asked of him and so he just has to say yes to everything and hijinks ensue but he has a fantastic time and it's it's a it's a very like interesting like silver linings story bradley cooper's in it zoe de chanel and jim carrey star uh highly recommended if you're looking for a good uh a good uplifting movie this week should we talk more about Meta's Space Solar Project.

10:44John Coogan:Absolutely. What's going on there? So they announced this morning two new partnerships to bring innovative energy generation and storage to our data centers. We mentioned this earlier. Space Solar, partnering with Overview Energy to beam up to one gigawatt of space solar power from orbit to Earth for around-the-clock power production. What is the company? I think they're in El Segundo. Reflect Orbital. We talked about that. I think Sean McGuire did the deal. And then they're also doing And also, who is it, co-founder of Robin Hood, Baju, is that his name? Yeah, but I thought that was more of a compute player.

11:21John Coogan:He has done more compute, but at least at one point, a piece of the business was collect energy on solar panels in space and beam it down via laser. And so that was all of these projects are incredibly difficult to math out and require a lot of different things to go well. They're very exciting, but this company, we've clearly been working for a long time. But if it's working for them and it winds up working for Meta, you can imagine that there are going to be lots and lots of buyers because energy, of course, is in short supply. The mirror in space is such an interesting solution to what I'd heard before, which was collected on a solar panel and then beam it down on a laser.

12:03John Coogan:A mirror is such a simple solution to that. So we'll have to see. It feels like the step one is just getting more solar panels down on the ground. You know, you see these data center projects and a lot of natural gas turbines, not a lot of nuclear. Well, the question is, like, if you have this capability to bring basically 24-7 sun, can you bring a lot more solar projects online? Because the economics just make more sense because you can power things like data centers, especially if you have batteries. The batteries that they are doing in tandem with this apparently have 100 hours of capacity.

12:41So presumably even if you had a few days of cloudy weather, you could still keep energy coming through the system.

12:49John Coogan:Yeah, yeah. It feels tough because a data center wants to run 24-7, needs to run 24-7. The math on depreciation and the cost of the chips completely changes if you have intermittent electricity. And in some cases, if you lose power, you can actually damage the data center. And so there's a whole bunch of other things that you need to work through. Did you see this post from Benjamin Todd? This was a very interesting post. We found this a little bit. You were the first person that kind of brought this up. I had looked at... That I'm aware of. So the question is AI's impact on jobs and employment broadly.

13:28John Coogan:I'd looked at overall employment in India, overall employment in the Philippines, and how it was tracking this year. Because, of course, there's a lot of outsourcing. There's a lot of lower skilled, white collar style work, call centers, BPOs, outsourced processing centers, like small atomic tasks that get done abroad. And so I expected that if there was going to be an uptick in unemployment, it would show up in potentially India and the Philippines first. Of course, we heard that somewhat hilarious quote that 90 % of the Philippines economy is call centers. Of course, it's not. It's closer to 5 % or something, maybe 6%.

14:13John Coogan:But everyone sort of agrees, at least on the surface level, that it's, as Benjamin Todd put it, it's hard to think of a more AI-exposed job than Filipino call centers. But oddly, in 2025, employment was up 4%. And so, of course, people will say, well, maybe it's earlier, the technology is getting better, you know, all these different things. But there has been a process of automation around call centers. I mean, I was trying to get on the phone with the company just earlier. I had to go through a whole phone tree. It was even hard to find the phone number. There's a whole bunch of steps that companies take to try and reduce the amount of call center operators that are in the flow.

14:53John Coogan:And so this was not necessarily a new trend. And U.S. call center worker employment is in decline. But that started before ChatGPT and is probably mainly about outsourcing. So the outsourcing boom, you would think it would have started with like the dawn of the Internet. I would have expected the trend to start in 2005, you know, like internationalization, globalization was well underway. In fact, U.S. call center business support services, all employees for the United States. The peak happened in 2016 and then declined sort of during COVID and then has been declining ever since, probably as things move offshore.

15:32John Coogan:So there is a world where, you know, these technologies, they take time to diffuse. And so AI might play the similar role in the sense that, like, there is some sort of onboarding cost to moving from a U.S. base to a Filipino call center. that's taken a decade to actually decline by not even half. It went from 900 ,000 people to 650 ,000 people over the past decade. Certainly not good if you're in that industry in America. But interesting, nonetheless. Also, Poland is having a breakout year. Income in Poland is on track to overtake income in the United Kingdom. This is based on a forecast for advanced economies.

16:19John Coogan:UK is growing now slower than Poland. So everyone who's a fan of Poland will be excited to hear the news that Poland really is going through a fast takeoff over there in Poland. They are doing some great stuff. Poland was once a communist third world country. Now it's overtaking Britain. This is in the Telegraph. European superpower is luring a record number of UK immigrants with its restored economy and robust patriotism. Interesting. Three months ago, the British businessman Johnny Mercer advertised a marketing role in his construction firm, Polstraud, based in Poland. Not long ago, people weren't interested in moving here as he sits down at a trendy French bistro.

16:57John Coogan:This time, however, Mercer was inundated with Britons, eager to work in Poland. 35 applicants for the job were British and happy to relocate permanently, including one without any British links who got the job. People are excited. Noam Brown shared some interesting details about the different constraints on AI progress. us. He says, Noam Brown, suggesting that model weights become relatively less important as inference becomes more important, which means securing weights still matters, but securing inference capacity becomes a strategic advantage. This is from a slide for a talk he gave, which is very, very interesting just from an AI safety perspective.

17:36John Coogan:The idea of sneaking the weights out on a hard drive that you've smuggled in your, you know, suitcase and that being equivalent to, you know, a suitcase bomb is, or a refined uranium. Yeah. Yeah. It's not quite the same. Maybe the, the, the chips are the, are the refined uranium more than the actual weights and the weights are merely one piece of the puzzle. Do you have any? Yeah. It's interesting. Cause I think like recently the past few months, we've seen this big fuss over like distillation, but like, you know, maybe there's an angle where like distillation is actually gets less important because, you know, even if the, you know, the Chinese can, can distill our models, they actually can't serve them.

18:17So it's like, you know, is that even important?

18:19John Coogan:Yeah. And even if the models are exactly the same, if I'm able to put 10 agents securing my bank account against your one agent trying to break into it, I will have 10 times the amount of solutions. And so I should win that battle almost all the time. And you, you, it does, it does seem like we're shifting towards this, the incredible value of inference and capacity, which of course makes the whole data center slow down ban so much more complicated because once you get into like the geopolitical considerations and what happens when large inference clusters start coming online elsewhere. And you go back to the Dworkesh, what was it, probability density curve, where he says like if AGI comes soon, Soon America wins if it comes over.

19:04John Coogan:Long-term China wins because he's worried about China ramping up their capacity over time. But they're behind currently. Semaphore posted an article. It said, meet the man who's outsourcing almost everything in his life to his AI assistant. He listens to every conversation, reads every message, emails, and schedules meeting for him, all while pretending to be him. I didn't ask it to help me. I asked it to be me. And Taylor says, I think this will be normal in five years. She has an excerpt here. so he's made a small fortune selling multiple companies to Apple multiple companies to Apple that's always I love stories like that and recently launched a voice recognition startup called Olive said his personal AI has all but taken over his life now when he wakes up most mornings he consults the agenda his AI assistant has crafted for him and then spends his days following its directions the AI has permission to email people on his behalf and sometimes sets up in-person meetings with people he has never met It listens to conversations he has with his three kids and then suggests parenting advice, which he says has improved his relationship with them.

20:05It's a portrait of an emerging class of token maxers, power users who are plunging tens of thousands of dollars in MacGyver level AI assistance, not by waiting for the next big model release, but by orchestrating today's models and loops with more computing power, more passes and more automated checking and a massive dose of risk tolerance. the idea is to give the system an unlimited amount of tokens and access to every conceivable piece of relevant data. I didn't ask it to help me. I asked it to be me.

20:32John Coogan:So some of this is extremely weird. Some of this is maybe very normal. I'm trying to think of like how many of my interactions in my daily life are like mediated by technology already. Like my alarm clock comes from my phone. It decides when I wake up more than anything else. In fact, I have the eighth sleep will decide like the optimal time that I wake up within a few minutes, right? Because it's like an adaptive alarm. And then I get in the car, I select maps, it sort of tells me what streets to go on. I'm merely like the embodiment of the AI to get where I need to go. And then I have a calendar that tells me what I'm doing when.

21:11John Coogan:There are some level of like intermediation, but I don't know there's still incredible value in Touching Grass and I think that we will be I just think we're going to be in this barbell world for potentially forever where you have Larry Ellison is buying Oracle data centers and going super long on AGI and also CBS and Foghorn Leghorn and you gotta own Bugs Bunny and you gotta own Superman and Batman, right? And then on the flip side, you have Josh Kushner, investor in OpenAI, a ton of different artificial intelligence companies. And then on the other side, SF Giants. And it's like, are these diametrically opposed or are they actually both true visions of the future of the world?

22:06John Coogan:It seems like something that is going to continue. We should go back to Manus. Do you want to read through the Financial Times with Tyler? And I'm going to take a quick break. Let's do it. Can we do a two-up with Tyler in place of me? And you can read through the Financial Times and sort of some of the reactions because - Yeah, so regulators reviewed the deal, reviewed whether a deal violated Beijing's investment rules. China has ordered Meta to unwind its$2 billion acquisition of AI app Manus as Washington and Beijing vie for dominance over the emerging technology. The decision marks an extraordinary late-stage intervention by Beijing involving two non-Chinese companies.

22:45Meta had already begun to integrate software from Manus, which was founded in China but relocated to Singapore last year. It was unclear how the acquisition could be unwound at such a late stage. A person briefed on Beijing's decision said the announcement could be intended primarily as a warning for similar deals in the future. The person said the gesture was pretty harsh and it carries a strong intention and to stop follow-on deals like Manus. In reality, it's hard to unwind a done deal. Manus has been live, I believe, in the Facebook ads manager. It has obviously been heavily branded as a meta platforms company for some time now.

23:27The meta team has been investing in scaling it. And so, yeah, very much feels like a done. It had been a done deal. I don't I don't I don't think there's been any reporting on it, but I would assume that full cap table had been paid out in large part already. So it's very unclear how you undo something like this. I'm not it's not super surprising, given that we obviously forced the sale of TikTok. And this feels like somewhat of a response. Yeah, it is interesting. Is this the moment when like China wakes up? right people they're super like agi pill they're like okay at some point china's gonna like wake up this seems like directionally towards that but it is interesting because like you have this and then you have uh you know china approving the sale of of nvidia chips there so it's like okay how much do they really want to disentangle from the u.s regarding ai interesting yeah ai 2027 had

24:21John Coogan:china wakes up in mid 2026 yeah it feels like i don't know manis is i mean it's a it's not like a cash flow acquisition. Like it's not a highly profitable thing that you're trading on earnings. It's a team. And it's a, it's a wrapper and it's a technology, but the technology is somewhat commoditized. There, there's been code leaks from cloud code. It's a super talented product team with a demonstrated track record of like getting real paying users. And so the question was always, you know, how much does Zuck care about keeping this as a standalone product, an AI assistant for business that can...

25:00John Coogan:But why even buy the whole company then? Why not do one of those zombie acquisitions where you get the talent and then you get a license and then there's a ghost ship and you leave a ghost ship because that's got to be harder to approve. I'm assuming that that's kind of what happens. I don't know. It seems like it's too late. They already bought the company, right? Like they already did like the proper acquisition, like, you know, as you said, like paid out the cap table. I don't know. I don't know the exact terms of the deal, but it would have been, it probably would have been easier to do something like what Grok and NVIDIA did or like the Windsurf Google thing where like you're bringing people over with this contract and then like yes China blocks it but it's like what are they even blocking it's just people getting a new job and a licensing deal that the money flows through and then maybe they try and claw that back I don't know it is uh it is a tricky tricky situation yeah I'm not familiar with an acquisition that actually closed in venture that was then later fully unwound.