Jensen’s Ezra Interview, EV News, Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes Doc | Diet TBPN

0:00John Coogan:That's right. Get ready. TBPN Road to Christmas continues. 92 more days. Get ready. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang went toe to toe with Ezra Klein on the New York Times podcast, The Ezra Klein Show. That's actually a crazy environment to go in. Why? As Jensen. I just think he's brave. Ezra is a real journalist.

0:26John Coogan:He's brave. He engaged with a real journalist. No, it's like you have to imagine he was a bit traumatized after Dwarkech, who isn't – I don't think of him as a journalist by any means, but he obviously has very strong beliefs. And gets to the root question for a particular audience. Now, Dorkesh, although he was going super hard on the open source question, on selling ships to China, on sort of AI safety and rollout and like how the model, how the AI race should go. Dorkesh is not the person to push Jensen on like politics specifically, right? Like that's going to happen somewhere else. But yeah, it is a hot seat.

1:08John Coogan:But I think he did well, two hours almost, hanging out with Ezra Klein. There's some clips and I have some reactions. And it's sort of interesting to dig into the mind of Jensen because he's simultaneously the biggest force in AI, the central bank of artificial intelligence, according to The Economist. He's the backstop of all backstops. He's backstopping everything from, you know, the biggest data centers in the world, lending investment grade designation to the debt and the credit lines, to like sort of acting as a soft landing for startups that get acquired at the application layer or anywhere in the stack.

1:40John Coogan:He's been an acquirer that's sort of underwriting. If you're a VC and you did a deal at a billion dollars. And you're kind of in trouble on it. There's a chance that you could get out because Jensen is willing to do a$10 billion,$15 billion acquisition. Whereas in the prior era, Apple had the money, wouldn't do it. Google really didn't do that many deals that huge. Facebook would do one big one every five, ten years. But Jensen's been quick on it. And then he's also been investing directly in basically every lab and basically every AI project. So he's been an incredibly important force, and yet he's now starting to stand alone in his sort of PDoom equals zero take, which was very much the consensus in the technology community.

2:23John Coogan:Sock would like a word. True, true. Yeah. I think it still is the consensus in the business community and the finance community. Basically, anyone at the application layer is PDM-0. Anyone deeper in the stack on the semiconductor side or the energy side, the build-out side, the NeoCloud side, they're all pretty much PDM-0. But the labs and Jensen's been playing there. He's at that level. He's as important as a voice as Dario, Sam, Elon. And so to hear him not jump on the bandwagon when Elon, Sam, and Dario all agreed on pacing the frontier, he's saying, no, we don't really need to pace the frontier.

2:57John Coogan:It's interesting to hear him say this. There's a couple clips. Let's play one. And then I have sort of an allegory for where I think his position is. But let's play this. So what I've been hearing from the labs, what they've been saying publicly, is that they are facing a hard problem. Yeah. Partially an engineering problem, partially an alignment problem, partially an operational excellence problem in Daryl Amadei's framing. and what they are worried about is that in competition with each other, in national competition with China, that they are being pushed to move too fast, that they all feel they're in a collective action dilemma.

3:32Now watch you on the All In podcast stage. Donald Trump, President Trump gave you a call there. Oh, no. This is not planned, but we know who it is. Oh, no. Mr. President? Oh, yes, sir. And you and the president and the other members on stage were very resistant to the idea any kind of regulation or collective action was needed. And they're just playing right into the hands of a lot of people that don't want to see it happen. And that could be political people. It could also be China. And we're not going to let that happen. It's a hoax. You're right. It should come out as pro-regulation.

4:14John Coogan:It's illegal to slow down. That's a form of regulation. I think AI regulation is incredibly important. We need accelerationist regulation. Really frustrate everyone. Yeah, it's interesting. Didn't Jensen also do Jolene Kent on CBS just recently? I saw a clip from that, but very different clips going out. The one from Ezra Klein is talking about maybe we need to shut the labs down, a very in-the-weeds hot take about the current thing in the AI debate. I think the clip that I saw from CBS was talking about his leather jackets. I imagine that that interview will be more substantive when it gets clipped properly, but it's funny that that's the one that made it out.

4:56John Coogan:Let's play the other clip from the Midas project. That's just a simple answer. If you're going to build a car, a self-driving car, and let's say it's a robo-taxi, and there's a really difficult condition, and it just as an engineer we just have no idea how to solve this problem because these cars are not programmed they're trained and so we have no idea how to train these cars and we have no idea how to align them to the safety standards uh that are expected on the road and so what's the answer don't ship it these products weren't released what's that these products weren't released ah so now it's coming back to engineering problem again and so the one is one you have to real cause it.

5:35Second, you have to think about what you could have done, what's the solution for it. And then in the future, just improve your process so that you could avoid this from happening again. I am fairly certain. I am fairly certain. They will say, yes, they know how to solve this problem. And if that's the case, then that's the problem. It's as simple as engineering. And now the alternative is that if they say the alternative, which is there is no way to contain our experiments, there's just no way. When we test our AI models, it will get out and it will damage the world. Then I think the answer is we have to shut the labs down.

6:16John Coogan:Yeah. I mean, that is kind of what happened with self-driving cars. You know, like they do before they ship them, they do test them on roads and they don't test them on open roads. They test them on closed courses before they move to open roads. They sort of have their own sandboxes, their own environments to test these in. I do wonder if there's a sort of a legislation or liability gap between the liability incurred by a self-driving car company who causes property damage from a car running into another car autonomously and an AI agent that hacks and defaces or causes some economic damage. I don't think there will be.

6:56John Coogan:I think the courts, if there was true economic harm, like one model accidentally took down a payment system for an e-commerce website, I think it would be pretty easy to sue that company and say, you caused me to lose this much revenue. you owe me and the courts would say sure and even if the lab argued hey we didn't tell it to take down your your e-commerce system your your payment rails the judge and the courts would say doesn't matter even if you expressed a duty of care like you still have to pay in this in this scenario but it is possible that there's a gap there and that's where regulation could fit in it's interesting he spent the first like 20 minutes sort of steel manning the the jobs question and talking about jobs because I think that's I think that's throwing a lot of people off like we we sort of moved past the job apocalypse sas apocalypse narrative which was predicted from somewhat of the same community into actual apocalypse and people are like whoa like you were wrong about the sas apocalypse like salesforce is still doing fine like slack still exists and And you were wrong about the job apocalypse.

8:06John Coogan:Like the unemployment rate is like 3 % for American white-collar workers. You were predicting like 50 % or 30%, something like 10 % overall. And even in the Philippines, I mean, I remember seeing, I think it was Tristan Harris on Modern Wisdom. Like he's now sounding the alarm bells about existential risk. But he was saying something like the Philippines would see like 90 % of their economy go away because they're heavily dependent on call centers. Call centers are actually only like 3.5 % of the Philippines job market. They do, in fact, make things and have agriculture and all sorts of other economic endeavors going on in the country.

8:45John Coogan:But even in the Philippines, like the unemployment rate is right now in the Philippines, it's 4.9 % in June of 2026. Now, it went up to 6 % in August, but it still feels like the AI effect is pretty minimal. and most people were predicting that like the offshore call centers would be affected first and that one seems like like maybe we're there but it's just taking so much longer that everyone feels very vindicated in saying like hey let's watch that play out first before we move on to the the ex-risk discourse potentially i think that's a lot of what well now with with muse floating the idea of having human in the loop on personal agents you can imagine those people would be former like oh they could just move over yeah yeah potentially um but yeah i mean it's all the same uh you know in the limit in the exponential add add five orders of magnitude maybe things look very different uh but jensen just rejects that i mean he's an is he an ai is a normal technology guy i saw i saw joe weisenthal posting about this he said that he had to he had to uh disaggregate Where is it?

9:53John Coogan:He posts a lot, so I got to dig it up. Man, he posts a lot. Okay. He said, the splintering around AI discourse is really a sight to behold. Was in a conversation yesterday with some folks during which it became necessary to distinguish the people who see AI as normal technology from the AI as normal technology people. Because there is a group of people that have rallied around a particular thesis, which is AI as normal technology. And that's That's different than people that are just like casually into that idea because it's actually like a different ecosystem. Anyway, it does feel like Jensen is AI as normal technology.

10:31John Coogan:I mean, he's certainly seen plenty of technology revolutions come and go. And he's been in this industry for, what, 30 odd years. I think of the jobs on the job discussion. We were talking to Joe Weisenthal about this when he was in the studio. Like, where is the where is the economic impact of the Internet? Like, why can't you see, you know, a kink in the graph of really any economic data when, like, the Internet takes off? It's not like productivity went way up. There's nothing really to grab onto. You actually go back to 1970 if you want to see, like, the real trends shift. And there are other, you know, trade and globalization moves that have had bigger economic impacts on the Internet, which is crazy to think because so much wealth was created, so many companies were created.

11:14John Coogan:And it did change the world and, like, the day-to-day experience, but it didn't actually show up that much in the economic data. And that's what we're seeing now, where jobs are sort of changing, tasks are changing, but we're not seeing dramatically different economic statistics, like the 10 years at all-time highs, or not all-time highs, but 19-year highs, you said, over 5%. And yet everyone sort of consensus agrees that that's because of the war. Are you rooting for people that are buying the bonds and getting higher yields now? I guess. Okay. I don't know. Sometimes a record-breaking number.

11:49John Coogan:It's just exciting to you. Just general. Just real golden retriever mind. You understand the implications. You don't even think about the implications, potentially. You're just cheering for a bigger number. It's like, now it begins with a five. Great. I like that. It's a higher number. There's an interesting allegory around the effect that technology has on the labor market, at least historically. Now, things might change, but Stephen Covey highlighted this in First Things First, his book on time management. He said, I attended a seminar once where the instructor was lecturing on time. At one point, he said, okay, it's time for a quiz.

12:19John Coogan:He reached under the table and pulled out a wide-mouthed gallon jar. He set it on the table next to a platter with some fist-sized rocks. How many of these rocks do you think I can get in the jar, he asked. After everyone made their guesses, he said, okay, let's find out. He set one rock in the jar, then another, then another. I don't remember how many he got in, but he got the jar full. Then he asked, is that jar full? Everyone looked at the rocks and said yes. Then he said, ah, he reached under the table and pulled out a bucket of gravel. He dumped some gravel in and shook the jar, and the gravel went in all the little spaces left by the big rocks.

12:49John Coogan:Then he grinned and said once more, is the jar full? By this time, people were in on him. They said, probably not. There's something else coming. Good, he said, and he reached under the table and brought out a bucket of sand. He started dumping the sand in, and it went in all the little spaces left by the rocks and the gravel. Once more, he said, is the jar full? No, everyone roars. He said, good, and he grabbed a pitcher of water and began to pour, and the water went in between the rocks and the sand and filled up, And somebody said, well, there are gaps, and if you really work at it, you can always fit more into your life.

13:17John Coogan:He said, no, that's not the point. The point is this. If you hadn't put these big rocks in first, would you have ever gotten any of them in? And so the effect that Jensen's describing is that, like, at one point in human history, there were maybe only two jobs, hunting and gathering, something along those lines. Then we invent agriculture, industrialization. At one point, everyone's farming. Now very few people are farming, but we still have more food than ever. There might have been a third job singing. I can see Tyler while everyone else was hunting and gathering, just kind of jester bag thing and just singing for all the hunters and all the gatherers, kind of like providing ambient entertainment.

13:54John Coogan:But it does feel like that was the effect that the internet had. It didn't dramatically reshape the labor force, but obviously lawyers use the internet to communicate. And now you see the AI agents thing. It's like every little document will go through an AI pass. Every little interaction in the economy gets this small effect, at least right now. And that's what Jensen's living in. He's like, I have a real business to run in the real world today. So he says he's worried about the future. Or he says he thinks about the future. But really, he's clearly very much living in the present. It's interesting to think about how much technology-driven efficiency gains just get effectively wasted.

14:38so i would imagine today it's faster to close to to like close a venture round post term sheet than it was in like the 90s right you would think so with the with the internet and yep and ai and all these different things but i bet you that it's not as maybe as fast as efficient as you might think if we can now generate docs on the fly and you can easily go back and forth on red lines yeah right Like maybe it went from six weeks to four weeks, but theoretically it could have gone from six weeks down to five days. Yeah. You know, and I think you're just seeing that even with AI now people can do their jobs faster.

15:17And you've seen some management teams tell their employees, hey, I know you're getting a lot more efficiency. That doesn't mean you should just do the same. I want you to do more work in the same amount of time. Don't do the same amount of work with less time, but you're just sort of like wasting a bunch of time.

15:32John Coogan:Yeah, it seems like no one's really saving time. Everyone's just doing more stuff. There is an interesting corollary of that, which is potentially these technologies, they don't necessarily change the growth curve, but they are responsible for the growth. If you don't have the internet speeding up commerce from a week to get an item to two days, that is actually the source of the 2 % growth. And without the technology, you have no growth. And so there is another side of an argument. And, of course, there's population growth and a whole bunch of other things that are affecting economic growth broadly.

16:06John Coogan:But there is a world where, yes, if you're compressing the timeline on everything, you're building the house faster. You're deciding to buy the house faster. You're exchanging everything faster. As things move quicker, even if you're not doing entirely net new jobs, just the fact that you're doing them faster, you do more of them. And that's what actually creates the economic growth. I don't know. We'll figure it out. We'll get to the bottom of it tomorrow. Claude Opus 5.5 drew every frame in this animation in JavaScript. They went all in on LLMs, on the big model, on the great model. And now it can do basically video generation, but do it in JavaScript, do it in Blender, do it in Python, do it in SVG.

16:46John Coogan:And you can just hill climb on SVG. And people are sharing a bunch of cool demos and good for launch. People are sick of benchmarks. People want to see visual stuff, entertain me, make a song. and yeah. Yeah, really cool style. Yeah. I'm already sort of mourning it just because this is probably going to be everywhere on the internet like by next week. But for now, a good format, I would, you know, if you see maybe a co-worker doom scrolling, send them a custom animation like this saying, hey, stop doom scrolling. Yeah. Do some work. You could maybe send this to the, I think, the president of Syria.

17:25Oh, yeah. He was doom scrolling. caught caught using instagram reels at the un so uh naughty naughty as they say um anyway very very very cool yeah mike bird says total cultural victory man has yet to create an

17:42John Coogan:ideology that can compete with short-form video-based social media scrolling ahmed al-shara spotted scrolling and sending instagram reels during un general assembly with the translator headphone on he's scrolling hey you know you got to keep those you got to keep those group chats going you got to keep the content flowing you don't want to be falling off he might be sending to other world leaders he might be recontextualizing what's happening at the un with a funny reel the person might be talking about some peace plan and he might be sharing some hilarious instagram reel that makes fun of that to let his friends know that he's not buying it something like that he also could be just his feed could be so dialed into just local political content he could be mainlining public opinion and trying to understand what's important to voters heading into the next election yeah you know yeah yeah uh there's one more there's one more claude post i want to i want to show the gif animated in python and rendered in blender and at this point you know uh i posted that ai video of you and people were asking like what was the workflow and i was like it's you just ask it to do exactly what you want it to do and you don't you actually don't even need to know the word blender like you can just you can even misspell every word and it will still you just open up the voice mode and i just talk and i'm like you can even do multiple things now so i was like i have this uh children's story that i made up for my five-year-old.

19:13John Coogan:And I was like, in one shot, I was like, take this story, turn it into a series of stories, then a series of children's books, go find a place that can print the children's books, illustrate it, turn it into short form video and also make a video game. And it did it all. It was just like spawning sub agents to do it. And you can just do it all in one prompt. And I didn't need to be like, well, I want you to use JavaScript for this and Blender for that. you can just ask for what you want and basically get it from all the models right now. You have an interesting thesis. You're blackpilling on the application layer now.

19:50John Coogan:You think the models are getting so good that people are just going to use the AI tools. Does this change anything for you? Because I see this and I still feel like these are great. There's probably a couple of revisions. When I do the prompts, I still sort of filter and review. I'll usually get like 20 outputs, pick the best one. I actually talked to an AI video founder yesterday who's doing like AI movie production and whatnot. And he was absolutely printing using all the latest models. The business is doing fantastically. He's hiring four video editors like a week or a day or something. Like he's hiring lots of people because there still is a lot of, it's not even prompt engineering.

20:32John Coogan:it's more like processing the output, curatorial work, understanding what is the right thing to fit together. And I think that that mainly comes into picture when you're looking at something that's a bigger project. You want to go from a one-minute thing that might have some consistency, but when you go to two hours, the consistency becomes much more important. The style, the pacing, matching everything matters more. I don't know. I think we might be gearing up for another application layer versus model layer debate. We saw this with the Harvey discourse, but then all the models got cheaper since that released.

21:08John Coogan:And so you'd think - Better and cheaper. Yeah, but of course, if the models can do it at a base level, there is a world where every company just has, you know, a relationship with a foundation lab. So I don't know, we'll see. What else? EV News. EV News. From Dave over on X, he flagged this. We are one week out from the Roadster reveal. Yeah. And I'm quite excited. Did you listen to the end of the show when you bounced? We went deep on the Roadster. We got a scoop. We got a scoop from our guest who was next to a Tesla employee on a plane and was like pulling facts about him just to go leak it on TVPN.

21:48John Coogan:Yeah. Crazy. No, no. I mean, I don't know how real this was because the guy could have been messing with them. I don't know. It's all rumor mill stuff. But the guy was basically like, yeah, I was next to a Tesla employee. and he was saying that the jets are not to make it fly. It's actually for downforce. It's going to suck it to the ground and it's going to go 0-60 in one second. Very cool prediction. Very different from what we were saying. So who had the lowest number? Yeah, the only thing is it doesn't track. You had the lowest number, so you're closer to win if that's what happened. Well, it doesn't track with what Elon was saying on Rogan, which is that he was implying it was going to fly.

22:19John Coogan:And that's what I was getting at. I was like, if you can have a fan or a jet that sucks you to the ground for one purpose, You can probably reverse those and boost up at least for a little bit, for a little jump. But we'll see. We're counting it down. Well, in other EV news. Less important is the road to Christmas, road to Roadster, but we're still keeping an eye on it. Saudi Arabia is aiming to disrupt the auto industry with these radical EVs. They have a brand called CER Exobot. It's coming as a sedan and an SUV. It looks like sort of a futuristic Lamborghini. Yeah, there's a little bit of Huracan wedge in there, a little Cybertruck in there.

22:59John Coogan:Is that... This is Saudi Arabia's first true production car brand. So they're going to be making these. There's such a hard trade-off between the wedge looks great, but it's a terrible use of space. The optimal use of space is like the new Waymo vehicle, which is basically just a box or like a bus. Oh, so you just care about utility now? I'm just saying it's a trade-off. Like, the more wedgie you get, the less utilitarian the vehicle space is. Of course, you need to have... This one looks like somebody broke up with the new generation of Prius. Yeah. Now they've leveled up again. Ooh. That was the original, like, read on the Prius is, like, who hurt you, you know?

23:40Yeah, yeah. Because the new Prius is looking pretty stanced. Yeah, it is. It is. It's a level up.

23:46John Coogan:Yeah. But this is a level up. Is it the Prime? Prius Prime looks pretty good. Yeah, they've done a good job. Anyways. 850 horsepower, tri-motor, electric powertrain. This thing looks insane. It does look insane. I wonder where they'll hit in terms of price. That'll be interesting to see. Should we watch the trailer, the official trailer? Let's do it. For You Can See Everything. We watched the preview clip. Now we get the full trailer. And I want you to pay attention to the quotes because the reviewers were floored by this movie. I feel you did nothing wrong. I did not. So where did things get lost?

24:23Like, how are you where you are right now? I wish I knew. I don't know. I don't feel like I understand that.

24:38So I know you guys invited me to stay here. Does any part of you worry about me being here 24-7? I don't think so. Okay, so pause. 24-7. He's actually, I think, living with Elizabeth Holmes. And it's crazy because only Nathan Fielder would even think to throw out an idea of, hey, would you mind if I moved into your house before you go to prison and documented the entire process? Because you would think that there would be no circumstances where that would be a good idea.