Jun 7, 2025 · 1h 57m · tbpn
Weekly Recap - Elon Vs Trump, Ukraine's Drone Attack, Cluely Update & OpenAI CRO
John Coogan · 35m spoken Mark Chen · 16m spoken Jordi Hays · 13m spoken Sholto Douglas · 11m spoken Kian Sadeghi · 6m spoken Delian Asparouhov · 5m spoken Roy Lee · 5m spoken Soren Monroe-Anderson · 3m spoken Connor Lovett · 3m spoken Donald Trump · 1m spoken Erik Prince · 1m spoken
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
This TBPN weekly recap covers Ukraine's groundbreaking Operation Spiderweb drone offensive, the political and financial fallout of the Trump-Musk feud, and technical deep-dives into frontier AI reasoning models with OpenAI and Anthropic researchers.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 34.1% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 4.1 Guest teaching 4.4 Guest disagreement 0.6 The hosts pushing back 1.2
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 37:15 Roy Lee rejects product value in favor of pure viral attention
Roy Lee emphatically dismisses the premise of building traditional product value, arguing crudely that in 2025 product does not matter compared to sheer virality and eyeball capture.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 55:42 John Coogan challenges Nucleus on potential FDA regulationCoogan refuses to accept Sadeghi's dismissive framing that trait analysis doesn't belong in medical regulation, pointing out democratic oversight and the breadth of FDA jurisdiction.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 6:10 Soren Monroe-Anderson explains cellular radio control of FPV dronesMonroe-Anderson educates the hosts on how Ukrainian operatives ran short-range FPV drones 4000 km deep inside Russia using cellular networks instead of local RF.
The host holds their own ▶ 1:16:16 John Coogan contextualizes AlphaGo's Move 37 with modern LLMsCoogan showcases his deep understanding of AI history by contrasting genuine generative innovation against current viral LLM mimicry using the iconic Move 37 frame.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Operation Spiderweb: Soren Monroe-Anderson on Ukrainian Drone Warfare | 4 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Coogan and Hays ask knowledgeable introductory questions about the evolution of Ukrainian drone tactics and leapfrogging Predator drones. Guest Soren Monroe-Anderson details the specifics of Operation Spiderweb and cellular network usage, educating the hosts without conflict. | |
| Defense Tech Implications of Drone Warfare with Connor Lovett | 4 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Connor Lovett provides venture capital and defense tech insights on autonomous systems and multi-layered defense. Coogan and Hays facilitate the conversation collaboratively. | |
| Erik Prince on European Defense and Ukraine's Military Capabilities | 0 | 7 | 0 | 0 | This clip features Erik Prince monologuing on European defense and Ukrainian tactical superiority compared to NATO forces. Host activity is not present in direct dialogue during this clip, requiring zeroed host scores. | |
| Donald Trump Press Conference on Elon Musk and the Spending Bill | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | This segment is a news clip playback of Donald Trump answering press questions regarding Elon Musk and the spending bill. Neither host nor guest dynamic applies. | |
| Space and Business Fallout with Delian Asparouhov | 5 | 5 | 0 | 1 | Delian Asparouhov unpacks the policy and space industry fallout between Trump and Musk, explaining the SLS program and Dragon spacecraft implications. Coogan contributes historical analogies about Gilded Age power structures and discusses Boeing's stock movements. | |
| Cluely's Viral Growth Machine and Team Update with Roy Lee | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Roy Lee presents his ultra-aggressive viral marketing and compensation strategy for Cluely. Coogan and Hays lightly tease and question the product mechanics, asking if it resembles an MLM or if customers feel scammed. | |
| Launching Nucleus Embryo: Genetic Optimization with Kian Sadeghi | 6 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Coogan pushes Sadeghi on the regulatory classification, questioning where FDA oversight kicks in for embryo scoring and genetic predictions. Sadeghi defends the consumer agency model and demonstrates the website feature. | |
| The Frontier of AI Reasoning and Agents with OpenAI's Mark Chen | 7 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Coogan and Hays engage in a deeply technical discussion with Mark Chen regarding RL scaling, pre-training limits, and AI agent architectures. Coogan draws sharp distinctions between move 37 innovation, benchmarks like IOI/ARC-AGI, and deep research vs operator. | |
| Scaling Reinforcement Learning and Model Architectures with Sholto Douglas | 7 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Coogan drills into the engineering constraints of RL, memory bandwidth vs FLOPs in custom silicon, context windows, and physical energy bounds on scaling laws. Douglas provides detailed explanations of RL reward hacking and TPU architecture. |
Statements from this episode (23)
Monroe-Anderson: Ukraine Will Produce 4.5M FPV Drones in 2025
“It's estimated Ukraine is going to produce four and a half million FPV drones this year.”
Monroe-Anderson: Operation Spiderweb Drones Operated on Cellular Networks
“And the drones were actually operating on cellular. They were not operating on Local, like the normal low latency local radios you use for FPVs typically.”
Monroe-Anderson: US Has No Defenses Against Covert Drone Attacks
“I mean, being blatant, the US does not have any defenses in place that would stop this from happening. We already know we, there's already news stories about drones that are flying over our air force bases, and we can't do anything about it.”
Lovett: Shutting down cell networks impairs Russian military coordination on WhatsApp
“This is like a dirty little secret that nobody talks about. You know, yes, you have your military systems that are protected and all that, But a lot of coordination is happening through WhatsApp, a lot of coordination on, and so all of a sudden you turn off th…”
Prince: Ukraine possesses the most capable military in Europe
“The most capable military in Europe right now is the Ukrainian military.”
Prince: Ukraine's EW and close air support surpass US military
“Their ability to fight against and to even conduct electronic warfare and even close air support in this environment is is leaps and bounds ahead of even what the US military is.”
Prince: Blitzkrieg maneuver warfare impossible in Ukraine without new weapons
“You're not going to see any kind of blitzkrieg, Hans Guderian maneuver warfare there until some significantly different weapon systems come along.”
Trump: Musk Opposed Spending Bill Because EV Mandates Were Cut
“All of a sudden he had a problem, and he only developed the problem when he found out that we're going to have to cut the EV mandate, because that's billions and billions of dollars, and it really is unfair.”
Trump: Musk will criticize me personally next
“He hasn't said bad about me personally, but I'm sure that'll be next.”
Asparouhov: Senate Package Restores NASA Funding for SLS Rocket
“It was released that the Senate reconciliation package re-added budget back into NASA, largely for the SLS program, which was basically the program that, you know, sort of Jared and Elon We're, you know, sort of largely advocating to, you know, sort of complet…”
Asparouhov: Starlink Revenue Will Pass NASA's Budget Within Two Years
“Starlink's total top line revenue is going to be passing the NASA budget in the next year or two.”
Roy Lee: No Company Ever Dies From Founder Controversy
“There's no company that ever died from a founder being too controversial. You got deal fucking infiltrating with genuine spies. And they're still doing fine, bro. Worker, 17 guys. They're still kicking. Like, no company ever dies from being too controversial. …”
Sadeghi: Height has the best polygenic predictor in genomics today
“Even though the best predictor we have today, actually in the world, the best polygenic predictor is for height.”
Chen: 2025 will be the year of autonomous AI agents
“We see 25 as this year of agents, right? We think of it as a year where models are going to do a lot more autonomous work. You can let them Kind of be unsupervised for much longer periods of time.”
Chen: OpenAI reached 3 million paying business users
“We hit a big milestone. We got I think three million paying business users fairly recently.”
Chen: Frontier AI models consistently score over 90% on AIME
“I think one clear example here is the Amy, like probably the hardest auto gradable, like human math eval, at least in the US. And yeah, the models are consistently getting like 90 plus percent on these.”
Chen: AI reasoning only emerges at large scale requiring massive compute
“When you look at reasoning you just don't see that happen at small scale, right? There's like a certain scale at which it starts becoming signal bearing and that requires you to have resources, right?”
Chen: AI reasoning is the key mechanism to make agents reliable
“And I think the reason why we care so much about reasoning is because I think that's the path that we get reliable agents through.”
Mark Chen: Compute Can Scale Heavily into RL Given Right Levers
“I think, like, if you find the right levers, you can really pump a lot of compute into RL as well as pre-training.”
Douglas: 10x RL compute increases still deliver linear performance gains
“We're still seeing these huge gains where you go, you know, 10 X compute increase in RL. We still getting like very distinct linear gains for that.”
Douglas: Generalist models will obsolete specialized fine-tuned models
“I really do think that similar to how we saw with large pre-trained models before with small fine-tuned models made it like, had gains over the sort of GPT-II era, but then were obsoleted by GPT-IV being generally good at everything. I think, to be honest, you…”