TBPN Live - Meta Settles Addiction Suits, Tim Cook Signs Off After 15 Years, OpenAI’s Jalapeño Chip | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after.Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comPublic - https://public.comCisco - https://www.cisco.comConsole - https://www.console.comCrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.comFigma - https://www.figma.comMongoDB - https://www.mongodb.comNYSE - https://www.nyse.comRailway - https://railway.comShopify - https://www.shopify.com/Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

We are back. We missed you. Two weeks is a crazy amount of time to be away. I don't understand how children do this for weeks, for months at a time. It's wild. It's wild. It's crazy. There's a lot of video games.

I was sitting there. I had somebody this morning say, it feels like it must have gone by so fast. Oh. And I was thinking, no, it absolutely didn't go by fast at all. It felt like two months. Yeah, I do feel like two months. We manipulated time. Yeah.

But thank you to the Microsoft team, the Activision team. team they sent us codes for Modern Warfare 4. My review is in. It's fantastic. I love it. It's a really good game. Really polished. And the kill block. Did you revert back at all to? No. Didn't really have the opportunity. I was joking about full relapse just gaming from dusk till dawn. But that is in fact, I had a relapse on pizza. Pizza. I was eating pizza like twice a day at times eating a lot of pizza, surfing a lot. That's good. Do you think pizza is potentially addictive?

I do. You think that there could be a settlement? I do think, I don't think there could. I think there should be. I do wonder, like, because cigarettes, it was very, this, cigarettes were very scientifically proven to be addictive. Like you can give nicotine to a mouse and it will like go and try and get more nicotine. Like it's the most cut and dry.

You can run the experiment with, you know, any animal. And I would assume that in the blood, based on my own personal experience, pizza and surfing would fall into that same box. Oh, you give a mouse pizza? Yeah. If you give a mouse a cookie. If you give a mouse a barrel. Barrel. He's going to want a lot more.

With a lime. Yeah. For sure. But it will be interesting to see where the addiction stuff goes because when all this came up, you know, the meta social media addiction, I was kind of like... Give a mouse to scroll. Like, I understand that people were trying to get a little. understand that people were trying to me. I don't know.

Can you get mice or monkeys addicted to reels? Maybe. I'm sure. Almost certainly. You think you could get a monkey addicted to Instagram reels? I think 100%. We got to try. We're going to find out.

We can't get any monkeys because they're sold out. No, no. You can get a monkey. You just have to pay top dollar. Okay. They're expensive. But you can buy one. It did seem like it was a tougher sell because it was not

chemically addictive product. It was more of a psychological thing. There's a benefit to it. There's a free speech element. All very complicated. I was not expecting to see a big settlement when this first came up years ago. I thought it was going to be more nickel and diming little case-by-case things. But in fact, there has been a huge settlement by META. Two days ago, or this was when this was written, this was August 26th, META announced settlements with attorneys general representing 48 states and the District of Colorado. and three U.S. territories, so there were only two states that held back, I believe it's Texas and New Mexico. Over allegations that Facebook and Instagram harmed children and teens.

So this has been boiling up for a while. There were smaller settlements. This is the big one. And so the high level numbers here, META will pay the states $12.7 billion over 10 years, and it could go up to $18 billion if other platforms join the settlement. It is a big number. It is a big number. And honestly, if you are a state legislator or you care about having your state funded for

a variety of things, this is good news. This is a size gong moment for the states because they will be getting this money distributed to them. And they can use that to do whatever states do from education to healthcare. There's a lot of different things that states can do. I know Tyler's piss because he isn't like the government getting a dime, but it is a size gong moment for them. I did find a video of a chimpanzee hitting real. If we can pull this up.

Let's pull this up. This is a key. This is important. This is very important than... Okay, yeah, this looks... Okay, yeah, this looks... Okay, maybe, maybe social media is addictive. Now that I'm seeing this, this is...

Yeah, it might be universal. If it crosses, wow. Using it so intuitively? Yep, yep. I mean, that's just good UI design. Come on. You gotta give the UX engineers some credit here. make it so easy to use that even a monkey could use it.

That was the prompt. If it crosses species barriers, I'm much more likely to agree that something could be addictive. Well, and here especially, you know, he's looking at other monkeys. Oh, okay. That's a little, I don't know. Yeah. No, I know, but an alga feed, it's going to naturally start serving a lot of those videos. Yeah, yeah, makes sense.

Anyway, everyone has been drawing, uh, analogies to the tobacco industry's master settlement agreement around this because that's the last time there was a huge multi-billion tens of billions of dollar settlement between a large organization around addiction and a bunch of states that's what's happened when cigarette companies signed the master settlement agreement all the companies agreeing to pay all the states but the structure was a little bit different and there's some nuance there and so eric sufort over at mobile dev memo friend of the show he said meta settlement is no big tobacco moment that was his takeaway in mobile debt memo, you should go subscribe because this post is a paid post. But I'll take you through some of the interesting analysis that he put together. I was debating with a lawyer friend of mine about this over the weekend and have some interesting details here.

So the headline here is that what meta is going to pay as a percentage of revenue or what the social media industry will pay as a percentage of revenue relative to what the tobacco industry paid as a percentage of revenue is off by almost an order of magnitude. So let's put them in context here. So he says meta settlement is comparatively paltry. A white paper from the USDA using BLS data estimates that the total U.S. consumer expenditure on tobacco products in 1998 when the master settlement agreement was signed was roughly $57 billion a year. Annualizing the roughly 250 billion in combined tobacco settlement payments over 25 years produces an average of $10 billion per 10 billion. billion per year, is what they've been paying. And so that was equivalent to 17.5% in 1998

domestic expenditure. So you can think about it as like, when tobacco got hit with like, you're addictive, what did the government say you got to pay? They asked for 17.5%. Very, very meaningful. Very, very meaningful. And that's off the top. Yes, yes. This is revenue. It's not like, hey, you got to give us a percentage of your profits. Yes. And so it's calculated in a more complicated way. It's not exactly a percentage. It's on a per pack sold, but it is inflation adjusted. And so there's a whole bunch of other mechanics that really have allowed the master settlement agreement to deliver tens of billions of dollars on an ongoing basis, even while now tobacco sales are slumping, cigarette sales are declining, and so that does

create more complex dynamics for the states. But still, it's 17.5% of the industry's revenue coming to states as effectively an extra tax on top, which I think a lot of people would agree is good because cigarettes are bad, right? But what's going on with meta and social media? So given meta's full year 2025, U.S. revenue of 75 billion roughly per the company's 10K, its average annual payment, if they pay the full 18 billion, because they're paying that over 10 years, it's 1.8 billion. So what is 1.8 billion of 75 billion? It's 2.4%. So instead of of 17 and a half percent. Sorry, where are you getting the 75 billion?

75 billion was their U.S. revenue last year. Oh, U.S. U.S. Globally, it was like a couple hundred. Yeah, bigger, bigger. But you have to comp it to domestic because that's where this is taking effect, right? It would be even lower if you look at overall revenue, which is a good point.

But you can think about it as tobacco had to pay 17. And a half percent of domestic revenue. Social media, two and a half percent of domestic revenue. So not quite no order of magnitude, but a significant gap, significant. significant gap there. And so it's important to reiterate here, says Eric Suford over at mobile that memo, that the MSA payment, the master settlement agreement,

payment schedule is inflation adjusted and tracks unit sales. Meta statement settlement has no such mechanism. So let's say that meta doubles revenue, their percentage they'll pay is lower, and then let's say inflation kicks in, they're still going to be paying this $1.8 billion a year, 10 years from now, could be,

to be pennies if hyperinflation happens. Yeah. The only reason it felt somewhat significant from a dollar standpoint is because Meda is just spending so much money on AI, right? Oh, interesting. You can just imagine Zach being like, I really wish I could have given that to Jensen.

So I had the opposite, I had the opposite read, which was I saw 18 billion and I was like, ah, that's like a month of AI spend for them. And I was like, this is not that much money. And then, of course, it's over 10 years. And so when you think about it as it's $1.8 billion a year, so that's 100 mil a month. That's their token budget right now? I don't know, maybe less.

Overall, it's insignificant. But when they are spending more money than they are making, it hurts a little bit more. My guys, it's been reporting on this. He says meta is going full bore. And with pushing other companies to add the same restrictions, it will add to its apps as part of the settlement. Meta plans to run this copy as a full-page print advertisement in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times. And the New York Times tomorrow morning. Wow, a little back, a little circular deal for Mike promoting the New York Times.

He works there. Man, undisclosed. What's going on? Yeah. Yeah. And it is just a wonderful spin to get. to be forced to pay $17 billion settlement for getting children addicted to your product

and then tell other other addictive social media companies to join us in supporting teens. It's just chef's kiss from. You think it should be like join us in apologizing as well, basically? Well, I just think it's a good spin. That's all. Okay, well, here's what they said. Through this agreement, they've set out a path

toward industry-wide commitments to further empower parents by introducing a two-hour daily time limit, turning off access to our apps at night as a default, no notifications during school hours, clear prompts and notifications to teens every 15 minutes of continuous screen time, new parental supervision control, so parents can decide how their teens use their apps.

I think all this makes sense, defaults are powerful, so even if a parent wants to go in and allow their kid because they've got a night owl who's cooking up an incredible, credible new IG account and this printing or something. I don't know. I mean, there are plenty of good reasons to use social media even while you're young.

But defaults are powerful and I think this is a good thing. I don't think it affects the business that much. I don't think they make that much money from young people because kids don't buy cars on Instagram, like expensive things. Whereas a lot of millennials and even Gen Xers and boomers are on there shopping all the time. So the immediate revenue impact of any of these is minimal. You just don't want to wind up

a situation where you lose ground to TikTok and YouTube because they become the kid friendly one that the kids are like oh well TikTok doesn't have any of these stupid restrictions so I'm going to use that and then they remain a user for their entire life and you lose an entire yeah I mean that the main yeah I mean if if somebody is primarily addicted to Instagram and they get their two out two hour budget yep and historically they would have used the product for three four hours you have that spillover attention so it will potentially help less addictive addictive social media platforms, get more user minutes.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And this was the original Instagram threat was that a younger generation was using Instagram, and Facebook was going to become like the, what do they call it, the blue app or the old book or something? I don't know. It was going to only maintain the older cohort. And that's sort of what happened,

but it didn't matter because MetaBot Instagram. Then Snapchat was even like the younger crowd. They tried to buy it, they couldn't, they wound up cloning it, they were successful. And so the company maintained, but they can't let a new social media app come up and dominate kids. Not for the short-term monetization. It's for the long-term monetization. They don't mention SNAP in the open letter.

Is that a, is that a shots fired? It's a dig. It's a dig. I think so. I don't know. Tim Cook sent a final memo to Apple employees on his last day as CEO. He said, I will miss this work in ways. I can only begin to imagine.

Even as I remain completely at peace with my decision. Just reading the entire memo. I'm not regretting it. But I will miss it. He's a workaholic. He doesn't want to retire. I was really hoping he would have another 30-year run in him. You know?

Like if Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger can work till they're in their 90s, why can't Tim Cook? Like fundamentally, how is the job of the- I think he was unhappy with the pay. Yeah. I mean, when you have MLB players making as much money as you while you're running one of the largest companies in history, when you're one of the greatest CEOs in history, period. Yeah. And you can barely.

75. 74.3. They couldn't even get them over 75. Yeah. And no, and not enough people were willing to march on Cooper Tino in protest. Yeah. And so I think at some point he's like, look, if people, if, you know, shareholders. Yeah.

Yeah, he's got, I'm voting with my feet. I'm voting with my feet. I'm out, I'm out. In the news today in the Wall Street Journal, booming corporate earnings, fuel lofty outlooks, the economy is doing very well. A lot of that's driven by tariff-refunds. Tim Cook, I mean, people lament like the lack

of like an entirely new form factor, the Vision Pro wasn't a breakout success. Like a lot of the great devices still came from the Steve Jobs era, and Tim Cook merely managed and carried everything along. He did so much on the services side that no one really gives him credit for with advertising in the App Store and just money printing machine working flawlessly. But he also negotiated like a very tumultuous political environment for a decade or more,

essentially flawlessly. Like the fact that Donald Trump has never called Tim Cook, Tim Crook, is a huge, huge feather in his cap. I agree. Because it was sitting right there as a as a Trump-style dig, never had to go for it. He never had to go for it.

And so he was able to negotiate Washington and all of the different, you know, quagmires that are there not get his supply chain nuked, keep the products flowing. There were little hiccups here and there, but overall the company has been firing on all cylinders. So what a great send-off. You can go read the full letter.

Applevision pros layoffs went beyond video and gaming. It included employees across the company, including people working on device security, audio engineering, Syria integration, testing, and the products operating system. They are focused on AI devices. And people are really optimistic about the new Mac M6 chip, like just being really good for AI and being something that continues to drive value for the company and creates, like, an AI winner narrative in the face of not really spending any money on AI in the traditional sense, not buying a NeoLab, not buying a biolab, not buying a biome.

bunch of data centers staying out of the weeds, but still benefiting because these powerful computers get only more powerful when you have computer use. It still is so crazy they haven't pulled the trigger on a Neo Lab. I don't think they need to. Like, I don't think they will. I think they're just going to be a hardware company. That's what they do. Like, NeoLab is software.

They don't need software. Now I think the strategy is working. Yeah. But if you asked me a year ago, will Apple make a $500 to $1 billion acquisition of a Neo Lab, just talent acquisition. Is that a neolab for ants? What are you talking about? Yeah, what neolab can you buy for $500 million?

$500 million? I'm not going to name names, but there's been some neolabs that would raise $100 on $500. Isn't there a neolab that you were just on the phone with that they could baby pick up? Oh yeah, Charleston AI. Do we have a video of Charleston? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, let's pull up Charleston AI. Cupertino, Charleston, I think there's something there potentially.

I actually think that you could rapidly scale a frame. franchise business that takes the Charleston AI concept, give somebody all the programming and all the different product offerings, and then helps local entrepreneurs set up their own. I think that's what Charleston AI does. No, I know, but I think Charleston AI needs to go global. Ooh, okay. I'm one of the co-founders of Charleston AI. We're local to Charleston, and we're here to help humans, help humans with AI. And here is our lab.

This is where AI comes alive. What used to take months to get accomplished we can do in hours for you. Here we have an empty office available with somebody that wants to make Charleston AI their home. Charleston AI's conference room where our clients come in, individuals and small businesses come in and we discuss what it is they'd like to do with AI in their business or personally. We listen very carefully, take notes and make sure we get it right and then we offer them a way to make it work. AI is not... Now you called Charleston AI, correct? Correct.

Who answered the phone? So, yeah, one of the founders answered the phone, but it was an AI version of him. And it sounded exactly like his voice. That's pretty impressive. Yeah. It's a very funny video, but I think it's actually... A good business. A good business.

And I think it should exist. Like some people, they're curious about AI. Maybe they're running a small business. Maybe they're a freelancer. Maybe they're a teacher or whatever. it's nice to just drive by something and go in somewhere and talk to real people that are in your community to learn about something that's complicated and sometimes scary. So very in favor of it. Didn't Best Buy build a whole geek squad team for exactly four this?

They acquired Geeks Squad, didn't they? Was it over or under 500 million? Let's find out. Anyway, there's an interesting story. Yes, acquired. Wow. That would be cool. Yeah. New Charleston AI on wheels.

On wheels. Vands, they come to you. Mobile data centers that can come to. So the geeks want to get local computer was only three million. What? Three million. Three million. Two thousand two.

That's not bad for back then. That's like 400 million in today's dollars, Tyler. I know it was before you were born, but I was a lot of money back then. Yeah. Open AI has reportedly bought tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac studios for reinforcement learning and training computer use agents while Anthropic rents Mac minis through AWS. You can rent Mac minis through ADWS. That's interesting.

I didn't know that. The information reported this. I was playing around with computer use over the break, had a lot of fun. I had Codex try and beat Bellotro, this poker style game that I like to play on PC. It did okay. It wasn't, it was a little slow still, and I don't think it, I don't think it actually won the full game, but it's fun watching it like. play a new game. I saw that demo of beating Slay the Spire, which is pretty impressive

because it's a hard game. I like the codex or chat GPT playing the game. I want to see the latency come down. I want to see it play modern warfare because I want to play against it and I want to see who's better, me or the AI. In somewhat related news to the speed of inference, open AI's hallopeno is spicy, says Dylan Patel. Dylan Patel says Open AI's jalapeno is spicy. Usually first generation chips aren't competitive, but Open AI is beating Nvidia Blackwell and even Rubin. This is huge news.

We got to go into Open AI's lab to dissect their new chip and dive into the software architecture and performance. Incredible work. There's a bunch of interesting details about this chip. Open AI put a whole blog post, but to clarify some of some important points is an LLM inference chip, not designed for training, but the results are really good. So roughly 1.5 to 1.9x, more useful inference throughput

per watt than Nvidia GB 200 GB 300 systems, while simultaneously cutting end-to-end latency, 1.7 to 3.6x. So faster inference, less latency, but also just your dollars and your energy, your watts are gonna go a lot further, which is very, very good. It's a data center, rack scale system.

I would love to get this in the consumer device, shrink it down, do something there. But it's going in the data center. And they're going to do a lot of them. Did you know the size of the Broadcom deal? 10 gigawatts of this chip. It might not be exactly this chip. It could be the Gen 2, the Gen 3.

But the pre-existing Broadcom Open AI. Put it into context, that's roughly five times more compute than the whole company currently has something like that. Operational. Yeah, but this is through 2029, but that's aggressive. That's like three years, three months away, I guess you can do the end of the year. Yeah, 10 gigawatts.

Open AI designed accelerator systems manufactured by Broadcom or in partnership with Broadcom deployed from the second half of 2026. And the crazy thing is that like they're on track for the second half of 2026. Like it is going into production and it's a lot faster than most people thought. The previous industry knowledge was, yeah, any new chip is going to take years. And this happened very, very quickly. So good to stretch that energy further. You need less data centers to do more inference.

That's good. Good for gross margins. And also just good for the narrative of speeding things up. C-W-K-O-N-E says, please tell me y'all are going to touch address on instinct and the $350 million raise a $2.5 billion. Yeah, super impressive. how much attention and traction instinct has received after just they've been building the company for like four or five months it seems. It's like very recent. I haven't used the product yet just because giving that level of access to this new startup.

I looked at, I looked, I mean, their terms and conditions were floating around and it kind of seemed like you're giving away the. I mean, everything you get is, all of your data is going to be. saved like pretty much in like a clear text database. It'll be secure but like they will have yeah. So I wasn't ready to to try it yet even though it seems like it seems like a lot of people what's cool is it seems like people are quickly having like a magical moment right whether it's like getting a reservation for a restaurant or movie tickets or things like that and I think that's super super important for like a consumer product to have that sort of like short timeline. I was reflecting on the instinct round, and my immediate thought was, well, back in my day,

when a hot consumer tech company, like, caught a little bit of attention, they would get, like, a 25 on 150 from benchmark, and that was seen as like, oh, wow, this is, this is, this company has some meaningful traction and potential, but it's just crazy to see this quickly a company get the $2.5 billion round. And I think there's some, I think that there's reasons to be a little bit wary. I want to see, I want to see them break out of like the VC hype cycle with this product. So when historically when we've seen consumer products or pro-sumer products, you know, I'm thinking of clubhouse or superhuman when there's somewhat of a question of like,

The more a VC likes something, potentially the less viable it is at a massive, massive scale. Sure. So it's possible that it can, but again, if they can solve the always on digital assistant, it is a massive, massive opportunity. But I'm just saying they're pricing a lot of that in right now when this company is four months old and valued at like a third of what Snapchat is, right? Sure, sure, sure. The other interesting question I had was like going back to Sam's post, about the merge, Sam Altman wrote the merge about how like in the future you might merge with AI. And I'm wondering about like at least in the short term, is it better to have a product

like instinct where it has your email, it has your I message, or is it actually going to be more receptive for many people to have a degree of separation there and say, okay, I effectively have an assistant that has its own phone and its own email. And if I want to share an email, I'll forward my email there. And maybe it has read-only access to my email. But then if it's going to go book me a reservation, I want it to call from its phone number and identify itself as someone else. Because it's like, there's a little bit of distance there. I'm still in control of sharing certain things. Maybe I share more stuff over time. And I'm wondering if there's, there's more of like, should your AI agent be Jordy or should it be like John Doe and it's embodied?

I don't know. It gets to the question of morphosization. That's the idea of the Gwern Guardian Angels like company. Oh, I didn't know that. Basically you have like it's not John's agent. It's like a copy of John. Okay. And then it's like it's still a separate being, but it acts.

It has like your preferences, whatever. But it's still like a separate thing. It's not using all of your emails, text messages, stuff like that. Very, very interesting. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I can see why the value is high. We've got to talk about the world humanoid robot games.

Let's do it. They set a world record, right? They broke the speed record or something like that. This is the Kigi X1 Dax AI Robotics. This is the one. Rydable horse dog. Its legs use self-developed high-torch electric joint motors, powered by a high-voltage battery. This, we've seen so many AI videos of this.

So this opportunity to not use like, you know, Hollywood, you know, fake flesh to make this look like Clydesdale. Okay. Be a little low to the ground. Well, make the legs. Make the legs a little bit bigger. Okay. Anyways, I'm very excited to the, about, you know, this form factor. I expect to be, you know, riding autonomously to work.

Yeah. I expect this to be a commuter product, at least a land. David's in the in the X is a land yet ski is calling it here's another video of one crashing and burning at high speed oh wow I didn't see this I thought it only broke the record but what that's really sparking yeah absolutely chaos Rune had a good like take about the robotics thing which is where like all the Chinese robots the demos are all these like kinetic displays of like doing these like crazy dance moves or fighting or running really fast and all the US ones are

basically manipulating like small things that you do in a factory. Interesting. So it's like it seems opposite. It seems like America prides like the hundred meter dash more than the fine motor skill manufacturing of things. Yeah. So I mean it's like it's like we're so far behind the Chinese and robotics but like maybe on the actual things that they really matter for manufacturing whatever I think it's unclear. Yeah. That's good cope. That's good I like that cope. Let's lean in there and cope harder. AI, MNA is in full effect. We were asking questions about this maybe a year ago.

Samir Khagi says, I don't think we're close to done. Cursor, $60 billion, open router, $8 billion, hugging face, $13 billion, Descartes, $6 to $7 billion, along with SPX, SpaceX, Anderol, Anthropic, Ramp, Open AI, data bricks and others on the IPO path, and the next few years will bring historic amounts of liquidity, although a lot of those deals have to be for stock. Of course, if you're getting bought by a public company, it's different. But for some of those deals, like the open router is probably not that much liquidity in the short term rate. But still, it's a lot. And so he says, this also likely prolongs the level of froth, I imagine he's saying.

We are seeing today, but after a long stretch of nothing, this is seriously incredible. There's been a ton of M&A. And the appetite for M&A in the unicorn decicorn category has been remarkably resilient and significant. But it makes sense with so many trillion-dollar companies paying 1% of your market cap for something that could be an entirely new business line sort of lines up.

But it does change the venture capital underwriting pretty significantly. I mean, it justifies a seed at a billion dollars. If there's 10 comps that sold for 10, billion your 10x is still there intact today so I don't know also I mean Kevin Durant is doing well he was a seed investor in Hugging Face he made an estimated 467x return on that investment as the company required by Lydia he invested a hundred K check that would equate to 46.7 million dollars and really really wild investing is better than going to de club he said in 2010 wow

That is right. What a good. And he was posting back in 2017. Excited for the new release of hashtag hugging face. And here's a durant. Dot L.L. Link. Proud investor, durant. Dot L.Y.

We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you for watching the show. Great to be back. We missed you guys. We missed everyone here. We will see you tomorrow. We have a very special show for you. And many more throughout the fall.

It's been an honor and a privilege. We'll see you. Goodbye.