Astra Ends Math, 1 Person $1M Companies, Hank Green Is Absolutely Right | John Gruber, Shaun Maguire & Isaiah Taylor, Justin Lopas, Beau Gaston, Ron Arel

**John Coogan** (0:00)
You're watching TBPN. Today's Monday, August 3rd, 2026 We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital.
Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place. How was your weekend, Jordi?

**Jordi Hays** (0:20)
My weekend was good, my weekend was fantastic.

**John Coogan** (0:22)
A little hot here in Southern California, but a little more reason to get to the beach, enjoy the nice weather.

**Jordi Hays** (0:29)
It's been a good summer. On a boat. What more can you ask for? That's nice.
We got a great show today.

**John Coogan** (0:35)
We do.

**Jordi Hays** (0:36)
Unfortunately, only one venture capitalist, and I think that's because it's August. You're going to see us really struggling.

**John Coogan** (0:42)
It's going to be hard to get those VCs to hop on the podcast.

**Jordi Hays** (0:46)
Every other month, they're happy to jump on same day, moments notice.

**John Coogan** (0:50)
You know it's important.

**Jordi Hays** (0:51)
We got one today. Yeah, we got one. Shaun Maguire coming out with Isaiah Taylor announcing a $1 billion Series B led by Sequoia. Very excited for that conversation. We got Justin, co-founder of Base Power, another $1 billion round Series D. Then we have the founder of the Demon Robot. Yes. That you may have seen last week. It's a centaur with horns. Beau Gaston. We're very excited to talk with Beau and get a sense for what went through his head.
When he made the robot like that.

**John Coogan** (1:27)
Can you stop? Can you not?

**Jordi Hays** (1:30)
Can we pull up a picture of the robot? I want to, there it is. There it is. This is the friendly robot that Beau was excited to get into disaster zones to help rescue people.

**John Coogan** (1:42)
And apparently the horns are critical because there are cameras on the end of each horn and that allows to see the ground, which couldn't put those cameras anywhere else, I guess. It will be a lot of fun.

**Jordi Hays** (1:55)
And then closing out with Ron over at Intology. But let's get into the show. What happened over the weekend? Did anything happen over the weekend, John?

**John Coogan** (2:03)
There were a couple of things.
The big debate that I was tracking sort of outside of tech, but tech adjacent was the cancellation of Hank Green, the YouTube creator. Not quite a cancellation, more just some backlash, hard to always put a proper sizing on a mob when a mob comes after a creator. But Hank Green, the YouTuber and really media entrepreneur, he's grown a huge business, which we can sort of go into, is getting pilloried on social media over using ChatGPT for research. Very controversial these days. Only a billion people do it, but it's the number one app in the app store. He's getting a lot of backlash from certain members of his audience. I don't want to characterize the whole audience as being part of this, but it's a very silly situation.

**Jordi Hays** (2:55)
There's at least thousands of people that are really mad about it.

**John Coogan** (2:58)
It's always hard to tell. Thousands of people that are liking a post about it. There's maybe dozens of posts. I don't really know how to put a scale on these things, but Hank Green is definitely going through it, having to sort of apologize or qualify or state that he will adjust things in the future. It's just sort of interesting to hear how he went through this process, what he says is going to change and where the backlash is coming from, because there's a lot of misunderstandings about it.
What's interesting is that he is a science and education creator, and science and education are potentially the most affected by AI right now, and so it's a real challenge to simultaneously say, I'm going to cover math. I'm going to cover science, but I'm not going to touch AI. That AI stuff's bad, because as we also saw over the weekend, AI is making a bunch of advancements on math. We've been seeing this for a while, but the latest version of the story comes from Noam Brown, polynomial over at OpenAI. He says, an internal version of Astra, OpenAI's next major model family solved 10 major open problems in mathematics, quantum complexity, and theoretical computer science. The achievements are so extreme at this point that I don't even think it's worth us trying to break them down. We did that with the Unidistant problem.