Tech World Debates Jensen’s Exit | Diet TBPN

John Coogan (0:00)

Let's check in on the road to Christmas.

Jordi Hays (0:01)

Perfect.

John Coogan (0:02)

How many days until Christmas? We need to count it down. That's what you come to TBPN for. We have you covered on the road to Christmas. 41 days until Christmas. Sam Altman, 41 years old.

Not his birthday today.

Jordi Hays (0:16)

Not today.

John Coogan (0:17)

Just generally, he's 41

Jordi Hays (0:19)

Random number association.

John Coogan (0:22)

Fun fact. Anyway, we are through most of the NVIDIA news. It feels like the week is winding down. It really crescendoed in the middle of the week.

Yesterday was crazy. The most fallout, I think, of everything as Jensen resigned as CEO and doesn't even hold a board position anymore.

So there's a few lingering stories that we should catch people up on, but we do want to move on from this story because there's so much else to talk about.

Jordi Hays (0:52)

Is there?

John Coogan (0:53)

Yes, there is. There is. The mansion section.

Jordi Hays (0:58)

Yeah, that was funny. I saw a comment from somebody, I think, this morning saying, all right, guys, you've been talking about the Jensen story for nine days. We get it.

John Coogan (1:08)

Nine days?

Jordi Hays (1:09)

I don't think it's been nine. I know you want to talk to us to talk about other stuff, but I think it's ultimately the biggest story in technology, in my lifetime, in many ways. It has the most potential downstream impacts on like the entire, everything happening in the private markets, public markets. We're not done. We're going to keep talking about it.

John Coogan (1:33)

The other thing is that when one of these big, all-encompassing timeline takeover, current thing stories happens, like people do pull back on creating more news. So on Monday, we were sort of like, whoa, weird timing for Anthropic to drop Fable 5.2. It's going to be hard for them to break through with that model. Whereas if it's a really slow news week, a bunch of people are going to be sharing, here's what I built with it, here are the benchmarks, let's debate, AGI timelines, safety, blah, blah, blah. It was just like, here's the release card, go for it, and it didn't break through nearly as much. That's something that they clearly had planned in preparation for the IPO next week. They weren't going to cancel that, but many other companies are pushing back releases right now because of the Jensen story. Because if you have a funding announcement or some product launch, you know that it's going to be harder to break through. So that also gives us a little bit less to talk about. But fortunately, the good folks at the Wall Street Journal, they're still publishing the Mansion section. And so we will have plenty to talk about. But first we should do a little review of last night. Jordi, how did you enjoy GQ Man of the Year?

Jordi Hays (2:38)

Really fun.

John Coogan (2:39)

Great party.

Jordi Hays (2:39)

Really fun.

First red carpet ever? Yes.

John Coogan (2:44)

We should get a red carpet in here, I feel like, for the guests to enter. Don't you think that's underrated? We have a couple of black carpets, but...

Jordi Hays (2:50)

But it was really fun. Honestly, we spent the entire time going around hanging out with all the media people.

John Coogan (2:57)

Yeah, the business and media people.

Jordi Hays (2:58)

It's not really our scene, but we had a really, really great time. Louis Vuitton was kind enough to dress us for the event.

John Coogan (3:05)

Yes, thank you, Louis Vuitton.

Jordi Hays (3:08)

We felt incredible out there.

John Coogan (3:09)

Yeah, it was remarkable. It was a movie.

Jordi Hays (3:11)

Yeah, the chat is saying we need a green carpet.

John Coogan (3:13)

Green carpet? Okay. Yeah, maybe we do a green carpet. Yeah, Dylan was there with us. We had a lot of fun.

Anyway, not much. Oh, the one interesting takeaway was hearing from folks in Hollywood about their take on the Jensen story. So the Jensen story has broken through. I mean, we've discussed it as breaking through in the sense that I will see Instagram creators and Reels creators who normally their domain is just impressions or day in the life or doing something non-tech related. They're all taking the Jensen story and doing their version of content around it. But it's also broken through to Hollywood media broadly. It's not a pure tech story by any means. We know this. But what was interesting was that we were talking to one individual who was saying that this signaled the end of AI in some way. And that it was this ironic, beautiful story that something so human, an affair, would bring down the techno machine, the relentless march of techno-capitalism.