Tesla’s Roadster, Car Week Takes, Unwell Beverages Shuts Down | Diet TBPN

0:00John Coogan:We gotta play the see you again goodbye like you passed away. This is the saying goodbye to our intern Ben Macklin. Yeah, we need an AI video of me and him in sports cars driving along the Pacific Coast Highway and then we reach a fork in the road and he goes off to Canada and Jordi goes to Malibu or something. But every time this song hits, it's a good one. It's a good one. Anyway, we're very, very sad to say goodbye to them. End of an era, but the story's not over. So the weatherman, Ben Macklin, one of the greatest to ever do it. Yeah, the story's not over. Anyway, there are a ton of stories that are not over.

0:42John Coogan:We're going to take you through a bunch of them. I want the production team to tell me if this video, which is not AI Slap, slaps because it is an adaptation of obsession uh from jerry jang over at lemma yc f 25 what does f stand for fall fall 25 oh because they do quarterly now anyway let's play this yeah f can we not talk about that right now okay sorry it's the second time they texted me that I'll be right back. What is it, dude? I'm busy. Okay, so... What is it? I looked into your out-of-office emails, and she sent out replies to all 30 ,000 emails in her inbox. Now, you haven't seen Obsession.

1:28John Coogan:I told her to only reply to emails when I'm out of the office. But the production team has? Look, you know it's my job. I've seen it. I've seen it. Yeah, I think it's in the same restaurant, too. She sent 30 ,000 emails. Looks very similar. It's either a lack of guardrails or... Yeah, same location. or I don't know, man. I'm going to pull the traces and look into it for you.

1:58John Coogan:They nailed the production. Like, the lighting, cinematography, identical. I don't care about how much do you have. So, so, so, so, so much. I don't think I could function without your prompts.

2:14Calling tools on my behalf without any human oversight?

2:21John Coogan:Yes, without any human oversight. Mika? Yeah? This is a little slow, so I'm going to tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. It definitely has the pacing of a Hollywood film. Maybe we need to go back to the live real era. What's the product? It basically monitors agents made by other companies. Jerry says agents are taking on real economic work as runs get longer. Mistakes become expensive at best, catastrophic at worst.

2:57John Coogan:Today, teams find out from user complaints or never. Monitoring tools only catch what you told them to watch for. So you set up the judges. You trace the issues yourself, but agents will always fail in ways you didn't predict. That's why we built Lema. Lemma understands what your agent is supposed to do. So it surfaces failures you never define automatically. So Lemma sits there, watches everything that goes on. Oh, there's something that seems really odd because it's basically taking the whole context of everything that's happening in the organization and saying, okay, well, you just sent out 100 ,000 emails.

3:29John Coogan:Like, is that the right thing? You should probably flag this. This seems like an uptake in, like you would see if you start seeing an insane amount of traffic on a specific product detail page on your e-commerce site. It might be that something's going viral on this particular SKU. Maybe you need to buy more inventory. In the best case, maybe you're being spammed or scammed in some way. Or maybe you accidentally priced your product at one cent instead of$1 or$100. So people are buying it and you need to fix that. This will do that across the entire organization in theory. Production team, what do you think about the Obsession knockoff as startup launch video?

4:05I thought it was pretty good.

4:07John Coogan:Rave review. Yeah. looks like the movie mike mike disagreed maybe oh mike disagreed shot fired wrong lens what we got i don't know take some shot he said colors off oh the colors off okay okay well the experts have waited so anyway no i mean i can see a new meta of startups just recreating uh iconic movie scenes yeah to promote their products yeah uh but i don't know like if you're growing human tissue you recreate Michael Bay as the island to show, just recreate the dystopian scenario that you're creating. And then be like, it's exactly like that. No, there is something to that where Obsession is a horror film.

4:49John Coogan:It's very scary. And so the enemy of the product is shown. Like the Lemma is the guy on the phone. In Obsession, basically there's this curse and the woman becomes obsessed with the man and the guy's friend calls him and says like, hey, your girlfriend is acting very, very weird. Something's going on. You need to break up with her. You need to rethink this. And so Lemma is the friend in this scenario, but it is a horror shot after all. So it does leave. And the woman is the agent. The woman is the agent. Going off the rails. Yeah. The agent that has gone off the rails. And so there is a little bit of like, you leave with the feeling of a horror film, which is so just on a generic brand experience side, I'm like, but that's kind of the emotion that they wanted to deliver, right?

5:36John Coogan:Was like imagine an agent doing something really bad in your organization. So not an unreasonable scenario. Anyway, there is an article in the journal. The information has been reporting on even Claude is in the dark about Dario Amadei's wife and her influence at Anthropic. Cammie Clark, who started what she called a revolutionary porn company where she sought investment from Jeffrey Epstein, keeps a low profile, but is a key advisor to the AI chief. It's coming IPO could top trillions. And so the actual lineage here was Dario mentioned that he was married, I believe, to on a Bloomberg podcast, I believe.

6:17John Coogan:That was recently? The Circuit, I think. That was recently. But it was never public who this person was. And then I believe Corey Weinberg over at The Information included Cammie Clark's name in a Dario profile that he published last week. And people were sort of like, oh, this is new information. We haven't seen this. And, of course, there's all the debates over is this necessary? Is this like in the public interest? At what level of power does it make sense to report on someone's life? Obviously, a lot of people are like, yeah, keep my name out of your mouth. Like, don't, just don't report on, don't report on my personal life.

6:57John Coogan:We can talk about my business, but my personal life, it's just annoying because now you need more security. Now you need more, all sorts of different things that can come up from these things. But lots of people are debating this on the timeline. Like, is Anthropix systemically important at this point? Is it such an important company that it does merit this? And certainly it met the editorial criteria for the Wall Street Journal and the information who take this stuff pretty seriously. So Clark doesn't work at Anthropic, but she is often seen sitting front row while Dario Amadei talks at events such as Davos or can be found chatting up investors at gatherings like Allen & Company Conference in Sun Valley.

7:34John Coogan:She acts as a sounding board and strategic advisor for Amadei, according to people close to the company. She also brought Anthropic, a key early investor, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whom she had dated as it was getting off the ground in early 2021, some of the people said. Despite her influence, there are scant details about Clark online. There's one YouTube video of her pitching an earlier startup that's still up. She's on stage for about five or ten minutes and sort of gives a, it's like a health company that she pitches. And it's a pretty good pitch. She has a couple of note cards and sort of goes through it.

8:05John Coogan:But that's the only thing that's really online anymore. The pair married in 2022, apparently in Italy. But Amadei's Wikipedia page didn't say he was married until this summer and doesn't say to whom. searches for Dario Amadei's wife on Google often turn up a photograph of his sister, Daniela Amadei, who helps run the company. Even Claude Anthropics AI chatbot responds to queries by saying Dario Amadei's marital status doesn't seem to be clearly confirmed. That is extremely good because there's always this fear that when you're using an AI chatbot, whatever you say will be baked into the next training run and that the personal details will get leaked into the model.

8:44John Coogan:and so like if i'm saying something about geordie like you could look up something about you and and it would just show up and leak in the model so good like i think that this is like there's the whole like you should you be more transparent question but uh just in terms of actual like removing personally identifiable information from data that goes into training runs obviously if you work for the company as ceo you probably have fully private don't train on anything i say ever but just good that it didn't leak through the actual model. So the Wall Street Journal writes, as anthropic hurdles towards an IPO that could top two trillion as soon as this fall, Clark is one of the most influential voices shaping the decisions of the CEO at the forefront of the AI industry, a revolution remaking all aspects of work and life that simultaneously thrills and terrifies most of the public.

9:35John Coogan:Yes, that is 100 % accurate. It's a remarkable rise for a woman who didn't graduate from college, had a previous brief marriage at age 20 to a man more than 40 years older and once declared bankruptcy. Her career included co-founding a women-focused, quote, free luxury porn company that she unsuccessfully tried to persuade convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to invest in and started a women's social dieting app that morphed into a women's healthcare AI company. That was the video that I saw on YouTube. She made connections with powerful people, including Schmidt, whom she brought into Amadei's orbit.

10:10John Coogan:The billionaire left his roles at Google and Parent Alphabet in 2020. Oh, I didn't realize he was out in 2020. And transitioned into investing in tech startups, among other things. She also tried to persuade Schmidt to back a venture fund she would run with him to invest in Anthropik and other AI companies, although that didn't move forward. Claude, the company's chatbot, is now the chief... Interesting differentiated name for a fund. I think it was the mother of AGI. Mother of AGI. Extremely AGI-pilled name for raising a fund in 2020. Not many people were taking that term seriously. It is a good name, mother of AGI fund.

10:49John Coogan:The goal was, quote, to be an elegant solution to formalize Kami's involvement in Anthropic, Dario's company, and manage Eric's investment and invest in the AGI ecosystem. But I don't think it ever went through. Others at Anthropic, including Daniela Almadé and other co-founders, didn't support the plan, according to people familiar with the matter, and it didn't move forward by the end of the year. Associates said they recall seeing what looked like an engagement ring in Clark's hand, and not long after, the couple wed in Italy. Clark, known for being social and outgoing, has interacted with politicians and investors on behalf of Almadé, chatting with them and bringing them over to meet her bookish husband at conferences and events.

11:28John Coogan:There's also Some interesting details in here about her relationship with Ivanka Trump at the Sun Valley Conference in July, where she spent much of the week by her husband's side. She had lunch with Ivanka Trump, a friend, and chatted with Jared Kushner, whom Amadei had approached earlier in the year to invest. People familiar with the matter said. So a little bit of more nuance around the relationship between Anthropoc and the administration. Obviously, the Department of War dust-up was a big drama cycle earlier this year. there's already communication between the two or the two entities to sort of maybe smooth things over.

12:00John Coogan:The interesting post that this made me think of, this whole conversation was from Patrick Collison back in March 11th. And I don't remember what was going on March 11th, but I imagine it was some open-eyed drama. But he said, there's a lot of unevenness in how much attention internal drama and palace intrigue gets across different organizations. And we were joking that it was like, why is no one writing hit pieces about Stripe? Because he's like, because it's just like me and my brother running a really clean ship and no one really complains. And there's never been a, there's never been a coup.

12:35John Coogan:And we just refuse to take the company public and just grow the business. Building payment rails. Yeah. We're, yeah. We put the payment rails in the bag, sir. Honestly, if, if Stripe is as successful in the fullness of time, as I think it will be, There will be probably insane online conspiracies about the Collison. Who are these two brothers? Yeah, sort of a Hibernian conspiracy. They're Irish. Barack Obama, part Irish, right? Goes pretty deep. Wow. Deeper than I thought. Yeah. That's when the company got started. Is that a coincidence? Who knows? Dig in. Patrick Collison went on to say, As far as I can tell, this is substantially a matter of path dependency.

13:19John Coogan:We know the characters in the sitcom of certain organizations, but not at others. And this creates self-reinforcing lock-in effects. How much does one hear about the power struggles at Chevron or the Department of Agriculture? I would love to read about the power struggles at Chevron or the Department of Agriculture. We need a banned PDF or a tell-all book. We'll have to dig into it. There is even significant heterogeneity between ostensibly similar companies within sectors. And so I took this at the time and sort of wrote a piece about this, calling it like tall poppy syndrome coming to America.

13:58John Coogan:Just this idea that the intention of the public is intensely focused on the hottest company at the time. And then all the arrows get directed at that. I think that's something that's happening at this point. I said at the time years ago, I was talking to an American venture capitalist about New Zealand and asked him about the startup community there. The country is beautiful, highly developed, democratic. It consistently ranks among the world's most stable, wealthy, well-governed societies. But could New Zealand produce a power law company one day? Like, are we going to hear like we've seen with Spotify?

14:33John Coogan:And there's been a number of other companies, certainly in China. They have a number of, you know, Decacorns and Centacorns over there. Huge companies. Will we ever see one out of New Zealand? It seems to have the recipe. And he said, his assessment distilled down to something along the lines of, they are suffering from a bad case of tall poppy syndrome. Put simply, individuals who achieve visible success are criticized, attacked, or socially cut down because they stand above the others. The metaphor should be obvious, but when you cut the tallest flowers in the field, the surface appears even.

15:03John Coogan:Anthropologists even call this leveling behavior in hunter-gatherer societies. Good hunters might be mocked, discouraged from bragging. sharing would be encouraged to prevent resource concentration. There's nothing all that bad about a preference for humility. America has long been suspicious of Lamborghini driving self-promotional Instagram course hustlers, and for good reason, they're usually selling overpriced junk food. But the strong form of tall poppy syndrome leads to slower startup formation, fewer truly scaled companies, and ultimately a talent exodus or brain drain. America has never had this problem, and I don't think we're particularly close to developing a crippling case of tall poppy syndrome anytime soon.

15:39John Coogan:But it's worth understanding how these leveling behaviors shape the narrative in tech. And I think that's a little bit of what's happening right now. Will this affect the IPO? Will this affect the stock price? Probably not. But John Stokes was sort of laying out why he thinks this piece was worth writing. He says, counterpoint, it's vital and overdue. Anthropic itself laid out the stakes very publicly as follows, quote, Our product is a god. And this is not an actual quote. But I guess this is like the vibe that he in particular picked up on. A pretty effective summary. He says our product's talking about Anthropic is a godlike intelligence that will rule over you.

16:21John Coogan:See how our staff endows it with morality. We even deigned to consult the pope. Okay, so let's look at your morals, he says. This crowd can screech around the object level. Like is the company making money? What are the margins? the more important details about risk as opposed to the morals. But John Stokes says, by their own terms, they made morals and virtuous behavior the object level in the AI debate. That's literally Anthropik's whole frame. So why are the morals of the people who are giving AI its morals not fair game? Yeah, if anything, it feels like it disrupts some of the brand positioning around morality, makes that maybe less effective.

17:02It is fascinating in my view that this kind of coverage didn't happen like a long time ago.

17:09John Coogan:Yeah, but that's normal for the mainstream media. Anthropic was not an interesting company to write about at the Wall Street Journal or the information even like last year. It was like a, I mean, it was a great company. Yeah, but even like the images that are in the Wall Street Journal piece are from February, right, where they're together. and you would think that somebody would have asked, who's this person that Dario's holding hands with? And then tried to get a little information and the internet was mostly scrubbed, but you could just look up her name in the Epstein files, public federal database.

17:44John Coogan:It actually did hit the timeline. Someone was just digging through the Epstein files in February and posted it, but didn't make the actual connection, which is very, very, very interesting. They were just like, here are all the crazy interactions that I found while digging through the files. And this was one of them, the actual interaction. But they didn't piece it together fully. Obviously, the context of being in the journal is a very, very different thing. Yeah. Anyway. Anyways, probably overall, mostly just bad for the AI industry overall. Yeah. Yeah, Nick Carter sort of summed it up here.

18:21John Coogan:He said, remember, if Anthropic wins and Close Source wins, these are the people that will get to write the morality rules for the entire planet. And so it maybe is worth interrogating the morality, seeing if you agree with this stuff or not. This is the beauty of America. You get to read the information, the freedom of the press, and then decide where you sit on all of this. In terms of how bad this is for the AI industry, it still feels like it ranks below data centers and below ripping up old books. I don't think this will get that much traction online, but I don't know. like the like there is a whole class of like political commentators that are hyper fixated on like the Epstein class and so like this could grow but it feels like it's arm's distance enough it's it's not Dario it's his wife and it's not it's not her you know going to the island it's her emailing him for fundraising that they didn't actually do a deal together and so there's like a number of steps removed as opposed to with the other stories it's much more like this data center came to town and is dirty and I don't like it.

19:23John Coogan:And so you post a video of that and that's like much more direct. So of the pushback, this feels like it will rank lower, but I don't know. Anyway. Tesla nears unveiling a radical new flying Roadster. So if you remember, probably around six months ago, whenever Elon did his last appearance on Joe Rogan, he was alluding to the idea that the Roadster might be able to get a little bit of airtime. Yeah. Anybody that is done driving in the backcountry knows that all cars can get airtime. But I don't think that's what he was alluding to. I don't think that's what he's alluding to. I think he was alluding to some set of features that allow it to fly.

20:06Fly. And I don't know what flying is, right, is flying an inch off the ground. If you're moving it at 100 miles an hour, maybe. Maybe.

20:16John Coogan:So there is a Chinese car that can jump over a pothole, extremely relevant for Los Angeles. We got to get this car here to change all the tariff rules. But some sort of, I think it's a BYD, can actually change the suspension so aggressively that it can jump while traveling. And we said like, okay, the gauntlet has thrown down. Jumping is not enough to go viral. Jumping will not satisfy the criteria of flying. So it has to be able to, you know, probably go more than six inches off the ground, maybe a full foot off the ground. It has to be able to stay off the ground for, I don't know, a few seconds, 10 seconds.

20:56John Coogan:My speculation was that it would be able to use the thrusters to lift off the ground and parallel park directly in. That was my prediction for something that would satisfy flying without actually being just, oh, you can just fly it from Malibu to L.A. Yeah. I think that that's probably not in the cards. But I think that it has to have a crazy demo. It has to look crazy. It has to have crazy stats. But it also has to have a crazy viral video demo where you show it and you're like, wow, no other car can do that. Not even close. But the information has the exclusivity. The crazy thing is that even as far back as eight years ago, there were patents that Tesla filed related to using effectively rocket-style thrusters in a vehicle.

21:45And people were already kind of chattering around then. Is Tesla going to make some type of car?

21:50John Coogan:The collab. The SpaceX collab. They have the rockets. Yeah, if Tesla comes out with a Roadster that has a SpaceX, it's like basically some type of SpaceX engine. There's probably 10 ,000 buyers for that car. You can imagine a lot of people. It's 20 times the Audi new Volari. You know, the other thing that they could do is they could go out to the salt flats and they could set the world speed record, the high speed record. because a rocket engine on the back of a Tesla going in a straight line, they could probably break the speed of sound, and that would be amazing. It wouldn't necessarily fit the flying criteria, but it'd be flying across the salt flats, so I'd give it credit.

22:32John Coogan:But it needs a crazy twist, I think. Between Elon's promises of super nimble robots and interstellar colonization, the billionaire has spent plenty of time over the last decade hyping up another ambitious effort, the next version of the Roadster, the sporty electric vehicle that first put Tesla on the map. At first, he said he wanted the vehicle to be the fastest production car in the world. Then he said he wanted it to be crazier than every fictional James Bond car combined. And he wanted the car to be able to fly. Don't the James Bond cars have guns and missiles on them? Yes, they do. Like in order to buy the Tesla, you have to have an FFL.