U.S. Bans New Chinese Humanoids, Zuck’s Op-Ed, eBay's $56M Lawsuit | Diet TBPN

0:01John Coogan:The U.S. government has banned Chinese humanoid robots. The U.S. is banning new imports of foreign-made humanoid robots, quadruped robots, robot dogs. You might know them by. Very controversial based on we've got to get General Catalyst to weigh in on this because aren't they anti-robot dog? Wasn't that the whole thing on the video? That's right. Maybe I'm misremembering it. That's right. So they must be celebrating. Some platform VCs are very pro-robot dogs. Everyone should be pro-robot dog. Anyway, there's nothing wrong with a robot dog, unless it's a geopolitical discussion, and then there's another layer to the debate.

0:37John Coogan:So the Federal Communication Commission's FCC today announced some restrictions, and these apply to new versions of those products. FCC Chair Brendan Carr said the move is intended to, quote, secure America's critical supply chains. China, meanwhile, has condemned the decision as protectionism. is that because they're protecting the small children from getting smacked in the face by the human robots? It is protecting. I know. I know. That video, I think that you're referring to. Yeah, brutal. Absolutely brutal. We should try to pull it up. Try to find the humanoid kicking a child, please. Sounds wrong, but I just want to get at the truth.

1:17John Coogan:Yes. I just want the truth. The move comes as Chinese companies have established a commanding lead in humanoid robotics. robotics of the roughly 15 000 humanoid robots shipped worldwide in 2025 china's unitry and uh agibot agi bot i'm not sure how you pronounce that each delivery okay we have the video of the robot kicking the child oh brutal there's another one we're spinning around and gives him sort of like a spinning back fist but that is a crazy and that is seeing that you're kind of like yeah i'm up for some protection. Gross negligence. If it's going to protect children, I think it's maybe in the best interest.

1:56John Coogan:No, that's not why this is happening, of course. Deeply wrong. So 5 ,000 units were delivered from each unitary and adjubot. By comparison, U.S. companies, including Tesla and Figure, shipped only a few hundred robots each, if that. China is also estimated to control about 85 percent of the global humanoid robotics market and also a ton of the deep supply chain, obviously. According to the Associated Press, the restrictions are expected to add new tension to U.S.-China relations ahead of a planned September meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump. The FCC argues the measures are necessary to reduce potential risks posed by connected foreign-made devices that could become part of critical American infrastructure.

2:43John Coogan:What's interesting here is that we're seeing a ban on a Chinese technology that is so nascent that you don't have a coalition of companies that are saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, I've deployed, my business is built on top of Unitary. I know there's geopolitical considerations, but I can't make the cars that I make without them. I can't run my business without them. And so this is going to hurt me. No one's really stepping up in the same way that they are with Chinese LLMs, which a lot of companies are like, no, I'm actually going I'm going to cut my inference costs by 80 % if I can make it happen. And you have all of the various cloud businesses that are already making money.

3:22John Coogan:Making money from these models. Exactly. Yeah, I saw a bunch of people that were sort of saying that they didn't like this, that it was protectionist, and that there must have been some American humanoid or robotics companies that were lobbying for this in D.C. Maybe there were, but I personally don't want 100 million humanoid robots in this country running around that are not made by a U.S. company or at least a Western ally. Yeah. Where, because there's been the DJI ban, there's been various surveillance tools that are banned, but there's still so many different pieces of technology that come from all over the world.

4:07John Coogan:I wonder where people would like to draw the line generally on technology. Like, is it okay if the Wi-Fi router is made internationally? Or we drew the line on Huawei. Yeah, on Huawei, on the 5G tower specifically. But you can still get a router, a Wi-Fi router for your house that comes from China. And you have to imagine that many of the actuators, the motors, the batteries, CATL, that company, ships batteries for all sorts of stuff. The Google Waymo approach, I think, is probably the correct, like, finding the line. So Waymo is sourcing, like, almost all the parts for the new Waymos from China.

4:45John Coogan:But they are building them, I believe, in the United States. And all of the software is from Google or Alphabet or Waymo. And so you have to imagine that they're able to tear all these pieces down and sort of maintain their own cybersecurity posture, which is really what this is all about. But it is interesting. Do you think this actually accelerates the American humanoid market? I mean, these companies have already raised a lot of money. Elon's putting billions into it. Figures managed to raise billions. I think that the first thing that we need is profitable use cases for humanoids. And so I think there's a lot of work that the industry needs to do to make these products genuinely valuable in the home, in workplaces, in factory settings, all these things.

5:32I think that's a bigger problem. I think if you, it does feel inevitable at this point, just because there's so much money going into it. So many smart people dedicating all their time to it. It feels inevitable. Maybe it speeds it up a little bit. It just felt like we were going to end up in a situation where they would just continue to dump humanoids onto our, you know, you could buy, you probably still can buy a Unitree robot on Walmart.

5:57John Coogan:I was asking Tyler about this because you used to be able to buy a Unitary G1, I believe, one of their robots on Walmart, which was sort of crazy. And the price was accessible. I mean, it was still tens of thousands of dollars, but it was something that a research lab could buy pretty easily. I wonder if there will be other ways for companies to get access to these products, at least for benchmarking, because they will be competing internationally. Even in a world where Tesla gets to the frontier of humanoid robots with Optimus, and then they're going up against a unitry for a deployment in Germany, like BYD.

6:36John Coogan:BYD and Tesla compete internationally, even though Teslas can still be sold in China, but not vice versa. But internationally, there needs to be a lot of like, what are the capabilities so you can actually sell against your competitor? So far, everything Unitree I'm seeing on Walmart is out of stock. So I don't know if they just marked it out of stock when this went live or they had just sold out. These will probably spike if they hit cars and bids or bring a trailer. I think you throw a Unitree G1 last edition, final edition, banned, can't buy them anymore. Who's making bots and bids? Bots and bids.

7:11John Coogan:That might be it. I was listening to Elon Musk on The Economist. He sat down with The Economist for a long-form interview. There was a clip that went sort of viral for some sharp jabs back and forth about the media and how the public perceives the media. But the much more interesting substance was about his vision. You're describing the crash out? Yes, it was described as a crash out. But that seemed like a very small section of what was actually interesting about the more than an hour they talked. one was I mean he talks about humanoid robots and he paints a very clear vision for the Optimist program and it made me really hope that there's a lot of focus there because that feels like an industry where he obviously has a very strong philosophy around XAI and Grok and you saw it in the SpaceX S1 where the market for enterprise software was like 22 trillion or something like that.

8:11John Coogan:And so there is some value there. It might make sense from a business perspective. But it was less inspiring than rockets, less inspiring than self-driving electric cars. Because as you go back, you think about SpaceX, and you think if he hadn't worked on that, probably wouldn't have a rocket company in America. And same thing with the electric cars. Yeah, GM had the EV1. There were a couple other companies that were sort of like testing things. but we'd probably be 10 years behind if he hadn't sort of like sheer force of will that into existence. And it feels the same for humanoid robots, where if he can really go and push that extremely hard and marshal all the capital and do all the difficult things to build the supply chain, make it happen, make it work, you can get to a place where there is a national champion in America.

9:02John Coogan:But if Grok stopped training and there were no more XAI LLMs, There would still be a massive competition between OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google. There's plenty of really well-funded hyperscalers and leading labs that are going to provide that service of ask a question and get an answer or fire off a prompt and get some code back. that the American humanoid robotics industry feels much more fragile in the sense that if you don't have this massive hammer of capital and will coming to bear, you could just wind up with it never happening, which I worry about. Yeah, and America needs to figure out how to make billions of robots itself.

9:48John Coogan:I do wonder how this is going to play into all the other discussions that are going to happen at that U.S. visit by Chinese leader Xi Jinping. He's scheduled to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump in September. I'm interested to see, are they going to be treating this? Nick, can you see if we can possibly get him on the show? What if Xi was just like, yeah, I'm meeting with the president, but I'm also going on a 50-podcast tour while I'm here? Get him on. Yeah, there's a bunch of good shows he could do. He should do Modern Wisdom. I want to understand his mindset. Hot Ones would be great. I'd love to see him on Hot Ones.

10:28Joe Rogan, of course. He's a no-brainer. That should be kind of the last show.

10:33John Coogan:But Nelk would be the obvious choice. Well, they have a history of controversial world leaders. That's true. Why not Xi Jinping? Dean Ball is going back and forth with Will Manitis. Dean says, do we think the Silicon Valley leaders who were so up in arms about using Chinese LLMs last week, will be similarly outraged about the U.S. government's decision to ban import of all advanced robotics from all foreign countries. Is Manitis going to write an essay about how the U.S. robot companies need to be nationalized in exchange for this policy favor? Will says, you're welcome to tag me if you want a take.

11:11John Coogan:What's your take? He does ask him for it. And Will says, Dean seems to not understand that the FCC is issuing the published rule under statutory authority with a waiver process and judicial review is different than a thinly veiled suggestion that regulators carry out an extra legal whisper campaign to protect the interests of his employer. The robotics companies need not be nationalized until they also ask for public infrastructure preemption, federal backstop of their debt, and a swept market just so they can call themselves national institutions. When they do, send them my essay. And Dean Ball says, so wait if the U.S.

11:44John Coogan:straight up banned Chinese LLMs using explicit statutory authorities, e.g. supply chain risk. That wouldn't necessitate lab nationalization, but doing it through soft law would. What? Your instance that my analytic prediction was a thinly veiled suggestion continues to be bad faith. I do wonder if we'll just see more. You know, figure shows up in those secondary demand tables. I wonder if this is bullish for that. I don't know. One X just seems to be on a good path. Sunday Robotics just seems to be on a good path. We've talked to a lot of other companies where the regulatory and competitive landscape has always, it hasn't seemed like it's a driver of financing, right?

12:25John Coogan:It's not like, oh, you're waiting for approval or you're waiting for some rule to break. It's like, yeah, at some point in the future, America is going to want an indigenous, like, you know, robotic supply chain. Yeah, the compelling teams have raised anywhere from$100 million to billions of dollars. And now they need to effectively deploy that and get commercial use cases starting to ramp. And then I expect them to be able to raise an order of magnitude more capital each, right? So I don't, again, I don't think capital is really a constraint here. But I think they've raised their sort of like, they've raised their like five rounds, let's say.

13:01John Coogan:Yeah, yeah. Mark Zuckerberg is in the Wall Street Journal. Paywalled, you got to pay to read what Mark has to say. But he penned an op-ed and he says the U.S. should accelerate AI development, not restrict it. He says the AI future is for everyone. There's some interesting quotes in here. He's taking shots. He's taking shots at doom, fear-based marketing. He says, it is surprising that the discourse from many of those who are developing artificial intelligence is so filled with doom. I don't understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future.

13:43John Coogan:The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems dangerous. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened. Is he talking about machines of love and grace? I think so. Something like that. It hasn't led to safer, positive outcomes. Humanity has witnessed many transformative advances. Each time there is fear that people will be left behind, but each time humanity has come out with more people sharing greater prosperity, health, and freedom. We believe this will be true with AI as well, and the abundance of the future can be shared by everyone.

14:23John Coogan:He's abundance-pilled. And so I think it's good to sort of reset where he is. He's talked about AI a bunch, but it's never been right on the cusp. But he's just throwing his hat firmly in this camp of, you know, he's obviously playing in AI, but has a particularly positive vision. And he's sort of throwing down the gauntlet. If you think AI is so bad, then stop working and let me work on it. Let me cook. I don't know. But not too much chatter around this. It did stand in opposition. You know, he's saying the United States should accelerate AI development. At the same time, there's this open letter from a bunch of lab employees saying, like, hey, maybe we should do a mutual pause.

15:09John Coogan:Maybe we should all slow down. And I think even some meta researchers signed that as well. But there's, like, a wide group from OpenAI, Anthropic, a bunch of other firms, Google, that all signed. John Palmer, of course, ever the TBPN promoter, says TBPN must publish an open letter against distillation after their model was distilled by every competitor in the industry. And I said, I'm advocating for a complete and total podcast ban, multi-year federal approval process for new RSS feeds to get issued. He says, better hurry up and write that open letter before Chinese technology network launches.

15:48John Coogan:I think a Chinese TBPN would actually be electric. I think that'd be amazing. I would love to watch. I would love that. You know, just wildly different. They just don't do the going direct thing over there the same way. You know, there was like the deep seek investor meeting four hours that was like leaked. That's not the same as actually sitting down with someone that has a particular point of view. Down with a stack of 200 posts and just chit chatting. I don't know. Maybe it does exist. But when Dwarkesh went to China, it was such a funny observation. a bunch of observations, but the one that really stuck out to me was he was like, I asked everyone, and it is clear, China does not have a Joe Rogan.

16:29John Coogan:Like, they don't have someone who is like a larger than life yapper political commentator, just like a guy who talks about everything, including politics. And there's a political reasons for that, but it's also maybe cultural, and it's just interesting because the demand for that would be electric. I feel like you have to imagine that like Joe Rogan clips make their way around the world and are sort of like a barometer for where the American psyche is at in a certain way, like a certain group of Americans feel that way. There's this other post that's sort of interesting to see where the Anthropic back and forth on the open letter goes.

17:07John Coogan:Obviously, Anthropic clarified their stance on open source, not advocating for a complete and total ban, but they're very worried about distillation. They're very worried about cybersecurity and they're very worried about authoritarian uses of AI. All good points. Chetton over at Benchmark says, Anthropic very publicly claiming there needs to be a crackdown on distillation is puzzling. It's a$1 trillion company with incredible resources and the distillation attacks at the scale they describe would seem easy to detect. I don't know how easy they are to detect. I think the people, you know, harness up a whole bunch of different VPNs and stuff.

17:43John Coogan:But at the same time, it's like, it's an AI company, put AI on the job, maybe you should be able to detect it. So we'll take his point. He's asking AI to be able to find a needle in the biggest haystack of all time. The world's largest haystack. The final benchmark. But he says the only cost would be giving up the associated API revenue. So you should have a very aggressive, a very aggressive internal policy around if you're suspected of a distillation attack, you're kicked off the API. Of course, in a very short amount of time, you can fire off a lot of prompts and get a lot of tokens. And you can do that a lot of around across a lot of different accounts.

18:19John Coogan:What do you think about this? Yeah, I mean, detecting distillation seems like a very hard problem. I think if it was trivial, they would have just done it. And also seems like it's not that big of a percentage of their revenue. I'd be surprised if distillation attacks accounted for a large amount of like, yeah, I don't think it's meaningful. Also, so it does feel like it's hard because a lot of it doesn't actually go through the direct API necessarily. Like it goes through a company that is vending a service and then someone is prompting that service. And so you're further obfuscating it. Like there are a number of different sort of wrappers that effectively wrap various frontier APIs.

19:00And if you're getting hit in a bunch of different, you're blending all of that together.

19:05John Coogan:you're looking at open source stuff. There's also just people that will, like this just happened with, was it Matt Schumer? He basically uploaded to GitHub a game that he made with Opus 5 along with the prompt. And so you can sort of distill on that, like it's only one data point or a small bag of tokens, but there's a lot of people that will share a prompt and the actual output. And so you can train on that, and there's no way to detect that you found that. What's interesting here is that the knock-on effect of Chetan's point is that if Anthropic takes Chetan's advice, you wind up giving out the model less frequently and being more closed about it, which is something three months ago, everyone in the ecosystem was like, this is annoying.

19:49John Coogan:Like, I'm a small startup. I can't get into the mythos tier. I can't get access to Project Glasswing. I'm not an enterprise level, you know, customer. But I still, so I just don't get frontier intelligence and I just get steamrolled by, you know, Microsoft who has access to it or Apple who has access to it or whatever. And so the whole idea of if amazing intelligence and amazing model is made, should it be widely available? That's actually at odds with distillation because you have to hunt those bad actors down and you play this whack-a-mole. So I don't know. It is tricky. We'll see where it goes.

20:25John Coogan:We'll see where it goes. Anyway. Apparently over on Facebook Marketplace, people are adding a sort of gold aura to their listing. Would this make you more likely to buy John? Oh, it does look like a rare drop. Yes. For only$25, picking up this table with that level of aura, it's certainly tempting. It does make me like it more. I think it actually works. I've seen people do this where they'll add a woman to it as the salesperson, basically, with AI. And that draws more attention on Facebook Marketplace. I don't know if I've ever bought anything on Facebook Marketplace. But maybe we should try and have Tyler do like a trade a paperclip into a car challenge.

21:11John Coogan:Have you ever seen these? Yeah. Ryan Trahan. Tyler would be exceptional at that kind of thing. You think you could trade up from something on your desk? I think this would definitely help it. Yeah. Giving it some kind of. So basically you have to look for the most unoptimized listings that are undervalued. And then once you buy them, give them the ultimate glow up with AI images, put them back up for a higher price, increase your margin, start printing. This is a very Gary Vee-esque hustle for sure. Pretty incredible story. eBay pays a couple$56 million for its role in cockroach harassment campaign.

21:53John Coogan:That is a crazy headline. The couple received threatening deliveries, including funeral wreaths, after criticizing the e-commerce retailer in a blog. So this couple, David and Ina Steiner, were harassed, it sounds like, for years for criticizing eBay. Who knew that criticizing eBay could get you in this much trouble? Of course, it's eBay that ended up getting in trouble. um but uh so they had an online e-commerce blog called e-commerce bites and they criticized ebay uh on that and then back in 2019 so this has been going on for like seven years there's a whole new executive team in in in place now but there were actually criminal charges in 2020 seven employees of the company were sentenced to prison terms ranging between one and five years and so what were they doing uh ebay leadership apparently mailed a series of threatening deliveries to the Steiners' home in 2019.

22:51That's crazy. Including a box of live cockroaches, a bloody pig's head mask. I don't even know what that is. Head mask? Is this a real pig head that's been turned into a mask, or is it hopefully just a sort of a Hollywood remake of that? And a funeral wreath. The Steiners also accused executives of online harassment, including online posts inviting strangers to their house for sex. also absolutely insane who like in what in what world is is a company is a public company like ebay just getting some criticism which all companies do yeah like i'm sorry it takes it this personally like that you're going to try to ruin the lives of two people that are already in

23:39John Coogan:your in your industry it was the impact of e-commerce bites blogs showing up in your quarterly reports like was it actually ebay pleaded guilty in 2023 in a criminal case over harassment and paid a three million dollar penalty following criminal charges in 2027 employees of the companies were sentenced to prison terms ranging from one to five years it's absolutely brutal according to court documents ebay executives grew increasingly upset by the steiner's critical coverage of the company in early 2019 leading then executive devin wenning to test to text another executive that it was time to crush the Steiners and take her down.

24:19Wow. Referring to, uh, you know, that summer harassment against the Steiners escalated from threatening messages to delivering items to their home, which also included a book about surviving spousal bereavement.

24:31John Coogan:That's like sort of a death threat, I guess. Yeah. Right. What's, uh, also sending, uh, adult magazines to neighbors homes in the husband's name. So just like completely trying to destroy this couple's life and marriage. eBay employees also traveled to Massachusetts to vandalize the Steiner's home and stalk them around their hometown. All the employees involved in the harassment were fired in September 2019, eBay said. The lawsuit was actually started in 2021 under the settlement. So we have a good ending here. I think it's a fair ending. Under the settlement, the couple will receive$48 million in compensation from eBay and former employees.

25:18eBay will also pay$6 million to charitable organizations. And Wennig will pay$1 million to a free speech charity in Ina Steiner's name.