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

Episode Date: July 30, 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

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, but. Very controversial based on, we got to get General Catalyst to weigh in on this, because aren't they anti-robot dog? Wasn't that the whole thing in the video? 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 another layer to the debate. 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 humanoid 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. Yes. I just want the truth. The move comes as Chinese companies have established a commanding lead in humanoid robotics. of the roughly 15,000 humanoid robots shipped worldwide in 2025, China's Unitary and Agibot, AGIBot, I'm not sure how you pronounce that, each delivered. Okay, we have the video of the robot kicking the child.

Oh, brutal. There's another one we're spinning around and gives them sort of like a spinning back fist. But that is a crazy. And seeing that, you're kind of like, yeah, I'm up for some protection. Gross negligence. If it's going to, if it's going to protect children. I think it's maybe in the best interest. 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% 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. 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 to cut my inference cost by 80% if I can. And you have all the various cloud businesses that are already making money. Making money from them. Exactly. Yeah, I'm, I saw a bunch of people that were sort of saying that they didn't like this, that it was, you know, protectionist, and that there must have been some American humanoid or robotics companies that were pushing, 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. I wonder where people would like to draw the line generally on technology. Like, is it okay if the Wi-Fi router is made Internet? Or we drew the line on Huawei. Yeah, on Huawei, on the 5G tower specifically. but most, you can still get a router that, you know, 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, cattle 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 Waymo's from China, but they are building them, I believe, in the United States, and all of the software is from Google or Alphabet. Ben-Ruemo. 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 humanoid. 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. I think that's a bigger problem. I think if you, it does feel inevitable in 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 unitary robot on Walmart. 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, you know, Tesla gets to the frontier of humanoid robots with Optimus, and then they're going up against a unitary for a deployment in Germany, like BYD, right? BYD and Tesla compete internationally, even though Tesla's 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. Yeah. So far, everything Unitri 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 are probably Spike if they hit cars and bids or bring a trailer. I think you throw a Unitary G1 last edition, final edition, band. Can't buy it anymore.

He's making bots and bids. Bots and bids. That might be hit. 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 very small section of what was actually. 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 like he obviously has a very strong philosophy around XAI and GROC and you saw it in the SpaceX X1 where the market for enterprise software was like

$22 trillion or something like that 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. Like, yeah, GM had the EV-1. 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. But if GROC stopped training and there were no more XAI LLMs, like there would still be a massive competition between OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, like there's plenty of really well-funded hyperscalers and leading labs that are going to provide that service of like 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. 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? Can you see if we can possibly get him on the show? What if she was just like, yeah, I'm meeting with the president, but I'm all. 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 him to see him on Hot Ones. Joe Rogan. Rogan, of course. I mean, that should be kind of the last show. But NELC would be like the obvious choice. Yeah. A lot of world leaders have a history of world leaders have been on there. That's true.

Controversial world leaders. That's true. Why not to see Xi Jinping? Dean Ball's going back and forth with Will Minaitis. 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 Minitis 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. 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 Paul says, so wait, if the U.S. 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, 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. OneX 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? 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. Yeah, yeah. Mark Zuckerberg is in the Wall Street Journal.

Paywald, 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 restricted. He says the AI future is for everyone. There's some interesting quotes in here. He's taking shots. He's taking shots of 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. 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 loving 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. He's abundance-pilled. And so I think it's good to sort of reset, you know, where he is. He's been, he's been, he's talked about AI a bunch, but it's never been, like, right on the cusp, but he's just like throwing his hat firmly in this camp of, you know, He's obviously playing an 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. Let me work on it. Let me cook. I don't know. But not too much, like, chatter around this. It did stand in opposition. 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. 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 Open AI 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-federal year.

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. I think a Chinese TBPN would actually be electric. I think that would 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. You're sitting down with a stack of 200 posts and just chit-chatting. I don't know. Maybe it does exist. But when Dwar Keshe 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. 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 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 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, 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 described

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. 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 the AI to be able to find a needle in the biggest haystack of all time. Yeah.

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. 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 across a lot of different accounts. 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. Yeah. And also seems like it's not that big of a percentage of their revenue. I'd be surprised if, like, distillation attacks accounted for a large amount of, like... Yeah, I don't think it... 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. And if you're getting hit in a bunch of different, you're blending all of that together, 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, you know, 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 Chetton's point is that if Anthropic takes Chetton'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. 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 this, the whole idea of like if the, if an 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, it is tricky. We'll see where it goes. We'll see where it goes. Anyway. Apparently over on Facebook marketplace, people are adding as 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. And 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 like a woman to it

as like 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. Have you ever seen these? Ryan Trehan. 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. So basically you have to look for the most unoptimized listings that are undervalued and then try and then once you buy them, give them the ultimate glow up on, uh, on, uh, on. with AI images, put them back up for a higher price, increase your margins, start printing. This is a very Gary V.S. Custle, for sure. Pretty incredible story. eBay pays a couple $56 million for its role in cockroach harassment campaign. That is a crazy headline.

A couple received threatening deliveries, including funeral wreaths, after criticizing the e-commerce retailer in a blog. So this couple, David and Ena 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. So they had an online e-commerce blog called E-commerce Bytes, and they criticized eBay 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 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? eBay leadership apparently mailed a series of threatening deliveries to the Steiner's home in 2019. That's crazy. Including a box of live cockroaches, a bloody pig's head mask. I don't even know what that is. Is this a real pig? 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 Steiner's 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, yeah. Like, I'm sorry. It takes it this personally that you're going to try to ruin the lives of two people that are already in your, in your industry. Was the impact of e-commerce bites, blogs showing up in your quarterly reports?

Like, was it actually that day? eBay pleaded guilty in 2023 in a criminal case over harassment and paid a $3 million penalty. Following criminal charges in 2027, employees of the companies were sentenced to prison terms ranging from one to five years. That'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 Wenig to text another executive that it was time to crush the Steiner's and take her down, referring to Ena. That summer harassment against the Steiner's escalated from threatening messages to delivering items to their home, which also included a book about surviving spousal. bereavement. So that's like sort of a death ride, I guess. Yeah. Right. What's, also sending adult magazines to neighbors' homes in the husband's name. So just like completely trying to destroy this couple's life and, and marriage. eBay employees also traveled to Massachusetts to vandalize the Steiner's home and stock them around their hometown.

All the employees involved in the harassment were fired in September, EBA 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. eBay will also pay $6 million to charitable organizations. And Wenig will pay $1 million to a free speech charity in Einsteiner's name.

This is the ultimate strife hand effect. never would have heard about e-commerce bites or their criticism of eBay if they hadn't done all this. What a mess. E-commerce bites. I'm looking up exactly what they said because eBay is, in my opinion, just the most said it and forget-it company that's just had the same service for 20 years, basically. But now we're going to get to the bottom of it. Big news out of the Fed. The Fed holds rate steady, but three officials voted for a rate increase. The rate has been unchanged. And this July meeting. The split shows pressure building inside the central bank to act on inflation

two months after Chairman Kevin Warsh took over and the Dow skids 1,100 points as investors worry about Fed next steps. They're thinking that there might be a rate hike in the, in reaction to inflation, of course, somewhat driven by energy prices, oil prices, oil is spiking again. And so lots of tricky news for the global economy. But fortunately, the economy chugs on and the economy is strong. I believe in it. I believe in it, too. Never black pill.

Dorcasch Patel certainly not blackpilling. Gavin Baker quote tweeted Dworkesh's post that predicted lab revenues and the trillions very shortly. Gavin Baker says, I see a series of fairly wild thoughts from Dwar cash. I thought I was bullish, but even I am not assuming that the price to rent compute continues to go up. I will say that I am in Silicon Valley this week, and Dorcasch is capturing the zeitgeist. Net net public markets would probably be trading differently if they saw the OpenAI, Anthropic, Grock cursor, and open source numbers over the last six weeks, because everything is growing. Even there's so much horse race around, oh, open source is going to come and grow.

And it's like, well, sometimes open source comes and grows and everything else grows too. And that's what we've seen throughout the whole deep seek saga when the lab revenues grew a ton, even though open source was big. Yeah, there's a comment here that I think is on the nose. Jay Capital says, timeline is very interesting. All private AI companies have their best six weeks while retail AI slash semis have their worst six weeks. Very, very interesting. Disconnect there. Yeah.

I mean, one of them, SKHinex, $64 billion in quarterly profit. It was a disappointment for chip investors in SKK. Kainix fell 10%, despite record results powered by the AI boom. The profit increase was incredible. I think they grew profit over 500%, something like that, and still the stock traded down because expectations are so high, everything's priced to perfection. In other news, HBO Max is launching HBO Max shorts

for those who don't have the attention span to watch an episode of TV. It's a mobile feature designed for users to watch iconic and memorial scenes from the HBO library in a vertical and scrollable feed. This is already happening on Instagram and TikTok. You see a lot of movie clips, just great moments. And it actually is great content. So I can understand why they're trying to own a piece of that. You've got to get the Jeffrey Katzenberg apology form. Oh, for sure.

Yeah, for sure. But yeah, high-yield Harry captures it pretty well. Watching society become too cooked, even to watch TV episode. And this is from Idiocracy. Mike Judge is one of his best works, the creator of HBO Silicon Valley, actually, who will now be available in short form because you will be able to watch short clips

from HBO Silicon Valley on HBO Max Shorts. And sign off for our newsletter at tbPN.com. We'll see you tomorrow. We love you. Goodbye. That's the outro. Goodbye.