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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
It was just like last year that Nvidia was like, we're going to layer CoreWeave, or we're gonna layer all the neo clouds. We're gonna be the front door to compute with DGX Cloud Leptin. I don't know if you remember any of this, but this started back in, like, 2023 post the Chateappity moment. Jensen comes out on stage at one of the keynotes he gives, he says, like, this is the iPhone moment, and we're going to aggregate all of the underlying compute. And you're gonna be able to come to us and deploy whatever resources you are, and we're gonna compete with, like, AWS and Azure and GCP.
Speaker 1:And we're gonna be a one stop shop for this stuff, and it's gonna be really important. And at the time, I feel like people were sort of like, woah. Okay. This is bold, but this could be really, really powerful because they have this odd tension between the the neo clouds where if you go in, you lose your connection to your customer effectively, and the margins could get compressed. You're in a much more competitive environment.
Speaker 1:And at the same time, if you don't go in, then Nvidia can just say, hey. Like, you know, all the DGX Cloud Leptin customers, well, we're gonna send them to the clouds that did sign up. And so you have this, like, tension. They really... It did really did...
Speaker 1:It really did feel like Nvidia had some leverage. Biggest company in the world very shortly after. And, obviously, a very aggressive business. Like, they're they're not just gonna be like, oh, that would be improper to compete. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it but it played out very differently, and Nvidia has become very friendly with CoreWeave, and they both found their places where there's still little competition here and there. But I was just reflecting on, like, how that journey came together, where that where that landed. And and the long story short is that, like, the the DGX product, it came out and the reviews weren't like, okay. Yeah. This is actually better than working with CoreWeave.
Speaker 1:And there were still so many benefits from going to a Neo Cloud or even a, you know, true cloud provider. There was just more to do. Nvidia made an acquisition. They bought Leptin, where the name came from, in April 2025, which sort of kicked most of that discourse off. The rumor was that they paid between 300 and $900,000,000 for that.
Speaker 1:And and and Jensen was, like, so gassed up on this. I loved his quote. He said, NVIDIA DGX Cloud Leptin connects our network of global GPU cloud providers with AI developers together with our NCPs, which is NVIDIA cloud providers. We're we're building planet... A planetary scale AI factory.
Speaker 1:That's what his tagline was, which makes sense. Like, there is a world where that would have played out. That's not what happened.
Speaker 2:Please. Talk about how we have failed so far to convince a lot of our friends not to call supercomputers AI factories. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1:If we continue to fail, they're gonna be like, it's a refinery. It's a... It's an AI offshore decker. It's an oil decker for AI.
Speaker 2:Gabe says it's a data ranch, brother.
Speaker 1:Data ranch. There we go.
Speaker 2:Putting a data ranch in your backyard.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, at at the time, there was a bunch of reporting sort of like people familiar with the matter. The information got a scoop from a bunch of the neo cloud compute providers saying lepton was a potential competitive threat. And, and if you refuse to participate, that creates a risk that Nvidia could direct workloads toward competitors. It was a bit of this tense time, but the end result was more balanced.
Speaker 1:So instead of layering their customers and trying to control aggregate demand, which would be really powerful if it happened. The product evolved into this unified AI platform, which is their their words. But, basically, it's it's between an actual, like, Expedia for GPUs and just a set of standards. So it's a bunch of proprietary software. It is sort of what makes up the CUDA moat.
Speaker 1:So everything from handling GPU node groups, interactive dev pods, distributed batch jobs, inference endpoints, storage, observability, reservations, more. So all the things that you need to actually schedule, manage GPUs, you can run that, but you can still use your own hardware, do whatever you need to have the relationship with the underlying owner of the GPUs. And so the rest of the Neo Clouds are generally, like, know, pretty safe. And so it was interesting because it was heralded as this like, Oh, okay. Things could get spicy.
Speaker 1:You could see all the Neo Clouds, like, really chirping at Jensen. Jensen really coming for the throat. Didn't really play out that way, but it does sort of go to show that Jensen is... Does not take lightly to to any whispers that the CUDA mode is going away anytime soon. Like, he...
Speaker 1:He's... Like, the ACE is still up the sleeve in my opinion. Like, they still have to do a lot of work because when somebody else has actually, like, demoed it, they were like, it's not working as well as some of the other systems. Like, if you were to put... I don't even know if Nvidia Cloud Leptin is on ClusterMax, but they would...
Speaker 1:They would... At at the time that they tested it, they were like, yeah, you're gonna have a better experience if you just go direct to Core Weave, Nubious, the other ones that are in the platinum tier.
Speaker 2:Overall overall, I think, in many ways, we've seen, it's been very strategic to work with fifty, hundred really, really, really smart teams Yeah. That are gonna have their own incentives to grow their businesses, grow their their buying of of Nvidia.
Speaker 1:And if you just use the if you just use the framework of, like, who was upset yesterday about CoreWeave launching their... What was the actual product called? CoreWeave Forge, which is their, like, AI cloud. Right? So they're just saying, hey.
Speaker 1:We we got CPUs now. We got storage. We got tools to manage all of that. Who's really mad? It's like, it's only their direct competitors, basically, who are like, ah, now we gotta catch up.
Speaker 1:If you're a CPU seller or you're a compute... A storage seller or something like that, you're like, great. I got a new customer. I'm happy. And then if you're a customer of CoreWeave, you're like, okay.
Speaker 1:I'm happy. I get more stuff. Yeah. And so it was... Yesterday's Core Weave move was not particularly a...
Speaker 1:Like a shot across the bow to anyone other than just like, hey. We know we're in a race with, 300 other new... Neo Clouds. You see them on cluster max. We're gonna do more to reach that diamond tier, which is what you propose.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, really, really remarkable margin expansion story. I mean, the depreciation the depreciation story, like, beat the depreciation allegations pretty quickly, but that that value of, like, dollar per watt is increasing really, really quickly. And so if they can get in line with with the Elon and Jensen 60,000,000,000 a gigawatt, it's it's gonna be a very, very exciting business. It already is an exciting business, but... And that's what my wheels were turning about yesterday.
Speaker 1:Let's go over to the timeline.
Speaker 2:You you... Anything going on yesterday?
Speaker 1:You said you wanted to get in the mud and wrestle with pigs even though the pig likes it and you get muddy? Yeah. Okay. Let's wrestle. What are we wrestling about today?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we we kinda caught some of this live at the beginning of the show yesterday, but the post kept flowing yesterday. Yes. What really got people up in arms was Vinod Mhmm. Coming in and saying, you are a struggling second tier competitor that is more unethical and lying just because you have no decency or sense of proper behavior and shows your desperation straight out lying about if Chris being fired, thought would be below even you.
Speaker 2:Just like the most the most crashing out on Matan's personal crash out. Sure. So crash out on crash out violence.
Speaker 1:What about three car pile?
Speaker 2:It only took about twenty seconds for people to put it together that Coastal Ventures is, of course, an investor, in Factory- and Cognition.
Speaker 1:And like a pretty big one. Right?
Speaker 2:But is funny enough an example that like venture firms can have firewalls Yep. And individual people
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:That have exposure to one company that might wanna get involved with another company can still behave in a way that is ultimately like ethical. Yeah. Right? I'm not saying that Fanode, you know, attacking his portco is, but...
Speaker 1:Yeah. Was Keith still at FF when Cognition... When they did Cognition? I think he might have already been at Coastal potentially. Exactly.
Speaker 1:And so I I think Keith might be the the the factory board member or something. I don't know. I I just saw Keith coming to Matan's defense. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1:Which is obviously the the the Coastal Ventures divide. But that's the nature of these of these these partnerships. Sort of clear that Vinoat's not using AI for these posts. Totally. Totally all all over the place dramatically.
Speaker 2:Straight out lying. Are a
Speaker 1:competitor that is more unethical and lying. That's not right.
Speaker 2:This was firing from
Speaker 1:the hip.
Speaker 2:He's
Speaker 1:Yeah. Here just But he's he's gotta lay it down. He's gotta lay it down. I mean, what what this really could say is that even though you have an economic incentive to align with this person, you need to distance yourself from them because you know that they are in the wrong. Like, that's...
Speaker 1:Like, the fact that Vinod has bags here and he's still posting this makes it more severe. Right? Like
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I I think there is a chance that Vinod kinda forgot that Yo. You think that's gonna happen? That exposure. I think I I got...
Speaker 2:You gotta put that at, like, 15%.
Speaker 1:Forgot. Is that possible? I don't know. I don't know. What...
Speaker 1:I mean, he's a multi billionaire. The the the economic...
Speaker 2:I mean, he was coming... He was coming... He came on the show last week last week to talk about Is he Foe Foe
Speaker 1:Foe. Foe. He's clearly working more closely with another
Speaker 2:Thank you, dad.
Speaker 1:Was it called Foe? I I like that. I would sign up for that. But, yeah, he's clearly, like, on the board of that company and not on the board of Factory because the the really crazy thing is, like, how did this not... How did this go straight on the timeline?
Speaker 1:Like, this should have been a text message, and maybe it was, but you're only talking about two and a half hours. I feel like if a portfolio founder is out of control, you would text them and say, hey. You are in the wrong. You're about to get smoked. You don't have the leverage here.
Speaker 1:Like, you would say, hey. Look. You're you're a second tier competitor, and you're being unethical, and you're lying. So I think you should take the post down and apologize. You know, you would say that behind closed doors.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You would text that. You would not just go straight to the truth nuke from outer space, which is what Vinod did. It's a truth. Right?
Speaker 2:Well well, I don't I don't even think it's necessarily... I wouldn't call it a a truth nuke because it's it's an ad hominem. Like, he just went directly Adam. He didn't even talk about Okay. Any of the facts.
Speaker 2:Well... So here's the So so Luke Metropane...
Speaker 1:If knows if he knows the facts are true and it's... We we don't we don't disagree that it's a nuke. Correct?
Speaker 2:Definitely a nuke.
Speaker 1:It's definitely a nuke. The question is, is it a truth nuke or is it an ad hominem nuke? And I think it might be a truth nuke because I think as an investor, you might actually know the truth of what happened. You might know because he could go into, like, the internal CoSLA Slack or something and say, like, who are the board members? Is this guy actually a board member?
Speaker 1:You know? Like like, what what files have been shared from Factory to our board? Oh, nothing relevant that would be useful to Cognition? You know, he could have made that decision.
Speaker 2:What are you what are you calling it, Tyler? Ad homunuk.
Speaker 1:Ad homunuk. Okay. It's an ad homunuk. We'll leave it there. I think we can close that out.
Speaker 2:Take through Luke Metro. Luke Metro said what I think everyone was thinking. Can we please not start cognition versus factory before we get a resolution to rippling versus deal? Great post. That being said, wildly different situation than rippling versus deal.
Speaker 2:When the Rippling Deal drama broke, there was immediately insane, seemingly insane smoking guns Yep. That are getting worked out through the court system. But it was like Rippling had basically tricked Deal in some ways. Right?
Speaker 1:Wait. Really?
Speaker 2:Oh, I don't remember that at all. I mean, it it... It's it's sort of fuzzy at this point.
Speaker 1:It was like a honey pot operation. Yeah. That is sort of a trick. That's sort of tricky.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. Honeypot is a better word.
Speaker 1:I I think that was like their their term. Right? They they put the honeypot and
Speaker 2:My that's why I went for my current read is that CRO, you know, the advisor goes to Matan and says, I'm getting poached. And Matan says, you can't get poached. You're being fired for unethical conduct. But the firing happened days after he was notified that he was leaving for a competitor.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Keith Keith said it is unethical per se to even interview at a competitor while attending board meetings and board dinners. And and I I I read this, and I was like, yeah. I I think that's right.
Speaker 1:I think I agree with that. But then I was thinking about, like, how would you do this? How would he have done this more responsibly if that's what happened? And I was like, so so the... Have to you have to resign because you think that you should go interview at a competitor and then reach out to them.
Speaker 1:And it doesn't it doesn't seem it doesn't seem like that's the way things happen that often. I don't know. People people... Like, even direct competitors will maintain, you know, somewhat jovial, you know, interactions. Oh, how's it going?
Speaker 1:Oh, it's going great. Yeah. Cool, man. Like... And both parties are kinda just saying nothing, but you are having, like, a conversation technically because you, like, bump into someone at a conference.
Speaker 1:You might both be on stage at the same park talking about agentic AI or something. I don't know. And then and then I was thinking about, like, how does this rank if he was... If the if the new Cognition CRO, I forget his name, was on the... Chris Dagnon.
Speaker 1:No. If Chris Dagnon was on the... He was a board observer or board adviser. What's the terminology?
Speaker 2:I think his only... From what I understand, his only technical title was adviser.
Speaker 1:Adviser. Okay. So I'm just thinking, like, back to your back to your original frame of, like, is this more or less hardcore than before? And I'm thinking about, like, the Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt interaction where, like, Eric Schmidt is on the board of Apple and being, like, we're buying Android over at Google. We're launching Android over at Google.
Speaker 1:And Steve Jobs gets pissed. Yeah. But it doesn't spell out on the timeline.
Speaker 2:Or or...
Speaker 1:That's where Steve Jobs...
Speaker 2:Another another comp is like Mike Krueger.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 2:yeah. His involvement with Figma. Yeah. And resigned from the board I think a couple days. A day before launching a competitor.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So again, this stuff has been happening but the funny thing is to see this like whole all this drama around companies that provide basically enterprise applications.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:When you look at what's happening on the research side where aggressive constant aggressive poaching around like truly like companies developing truly novel IP Mhmm. That basically have no protections where you can work at a company for five years, learn a bunch about what they do, get poached, and bring all of that know how over to a new company Mhmm. Within the same twenty four period. Right? Mhmm.
Speaker 2:This whole situation, like an advisor that gets poached Mhmm. Doesn't feel like a big deal at all to me in the context of everything else that's been happening.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's just...
Speaker 2:Like, and and and ultimately, I don't think... I think the story is like over. Like, I think it's it.
Speaker 1:No. No. I think you're right. It's... Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's different because, like, the researchers do post, but they don't they don't have, like, they don't have as many interactions with VCs. So, like, there's a... There's that back and forth about the three OpenAI researchers who were just fired according to The Wall Street Journal for sharing information. But, like, that doesn't reach the level of, like, board interaction. Right?
Speaker 1:So you're not gonna see board members, at least that I can tell, like, doing drama about it. And even when the talent wars happen between Meta and OpenAI, like, we were the ones that were posting the most, like, spicy stuff about it. Right? Because, like, the board members, they don't necessarily have the same level of interaction with the researchers as the other board advisers. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I think this... It just gets a lot more personal, I think. Anyway, you wanna close the book on this. Are you sure?
Speaker 2:Miles says Let's do it. Miles says, work with a company that's doing great by all definitions. Recently, one of its star executives was poached by an A plus company to lead a very popular product. Founders tried to retain him. They couldn't, so they wished him well and began the recruitment process to replace him.
Speaker 2:The investors sent him notes thanking him for all his work. No temper tantrums or ethics debate... Debates or Twitter name dragging. Just grown ups getting back to work. And Martin over at a sixteen c says, boring.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But that's kind of what Miles is advocating for. He's like, these these types of interactions should be boring. Right? Sean McGuire says, nice one from the cheap seats.
Speaker 1:You know 1% of the story. And Sean's really, like, teasing something. He's like, there's gonna be the files. There's gonna be some crazy drop. There's gonna be another truth nuke.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be truth World War three, something like that. But has he actually posted anything? Like, it feels like today is the day to, like, share the, like, the truth.
Speaker 2:I hope everyone can, sort it out behind the scenes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He said he has a nuclear weapon. Yeah. That's a truth nuke. He has a truth nuke.
Speaker 1:That's what he's saying. A nuclear weapon on the timeline.
Speaker 2:But... He did come out and say cognition is Infosys masquerading as anthropic, which is funny because Infosys does like technology IT transformation, which is in many ways what Cognition does. But the only thing I would disagree with Sean on is I I don't see Cognition, like, masquerading as anthropic.
Speaker 1:No. Not at all. You talked to Scott Wu and he's like, yeah, we're providing enterprise value.
Speaker 2:Automating node generation and business.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's not an anthropic library at all over there. I mean, like, they they they take their business seriously, but that's not an anthropic. That's not a uniquely anthropic thing.
Speaker 2:Well, and also also this would tell me that the two... That Factory and Cognition are going in very different directions. Maybe? He thinks the InfoCyst direction is bad. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And hopefully, they can go in different direction.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:And maybe they could even work together at some
Speaker 1:point. Oh. Okay. Yeah. And maybe you don't need the Snowflake CRO if you have discovered some fundamental thing.
Speaker 1:Right? Like like, the whole the whole tease was like, we did something on the research side. But, like, that doesn't matter if your CRO leaves. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, he didn't... Hopefully, he doesn't even understand it. He doesn't even understand what's going on in the research department. He's like, don't know. There's a bunch of mumbo jumbo.
Speaker 1:Just tell me who to call and sell it to. Moving on. What's next? Bunch of people got slop ads from Instinct. They're upset.
Speaker 2:I'm pulling up the Steelman
Speaker 1:helmet because I think it's good. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Get the Steelman helmet. I'm I'm gonna fight for it. I would clarify. I don't I don't think they're... I would be shocked if they're actually monetizing this already.
Speaker 2:Seems like it was just an experiment. Right?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Can we can we suggest products that people will wanna buy? Noah's been very explicit that they plan to do this. Right? They plan to get deals with different retailers and platforms and be able to monetize the purchases that they draw. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now, something I've always said, or at least said a lot in the last month or so is that if you wanna get to the point where you can have meaningful take rates, you need to be driving net new demand. Right? So if I go to my personal agent and say, buy me this thing, right? The demand was created elsewhere.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Like that that it was generated with like advertisement or or organic content or something caused me to wanna go and buy it. And brands are not gonna be standing up and lining up to pay big referral fees effectively when they already paid to create the demand elsewhere. Yep. And so this instinct test is is, hey, we understand this person. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Let's basically suggest some products that they maybe weren't thinking about
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But they would buy and...
Speaker 1:Like a phone charger.
Speaker 2:Like a power bank.
Speaker 1:Like a power bank.
Speaker 2:Or some sunscreen.
Speaker 1:I just like... I saw, like, 12 different screenshots that were all power banks. It's like... It is sort of universal. Like, if you were gonna...
Speaker 1:If you were in a blast, just blast that. I mean, yeah, I mean, we talked to the shot at the ridge, and he's like, yeah. They just move. Like, it's a good business. But I don't know.
Speaker 1:We gotta just figure out, like, are they actually monetizing this? Because Instinct is in a position where you could literally just go and set up an Amazon referral fee thing and start taking a cut. And websites have done that for a long time. Like, if you go to the wire cutter now owned by the New York Times, you will be able to click on checkout for a suitcase, for some sunglasses, for the best TV they have. And if you click on one of their partner sites, it puts a cookie there.
Speaker 1:And when you check out, they actually do make a referral commission. I would be surprised if Instinct wasn't monetizing that. But at the same time, I think they might not even need to because the scale of what they're trying to do is more just like understand the consumer and then have a net... Have an... Have the next proof point for the next race.
Speaker 1:Because, obviously, it's incredibly compute intensive. They're gonna be... They're growing very quickly. They're gonna be raising very quickly. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And being able to go back to the next round of ECs and say, hey. We've actually tested ecommerce, and it converts at seven times the rate of Instagram reel ads or whatever. And it's like, we have this this much surface area, and here's the response. And, yes, there was a lot of feedback that was like, oh, this is Slop. Who who who...
Speaker 1:Who's that? It's ShopSlop or whatever? ShopSlop. Dave Moran called it from OpenClaw.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Somewhat somewhat somewhat biased. Right? He's running the the opens... Like, he's running the foundation
Speaker 1:Oh, sure. For OpenClaw. Sure.
Speaker 2:Which, you know, is like basically own your compute, own your agent. Yeah. Don't get ads pushed to you. Have your agent be aligned to you. That that's
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's their stance. I think the... I I think this flop... Here's here's the thing. Please.
Speaker 1:Here's the thing. Please.
Speaker 2:If they can actually give you a 10 out of 10 recommendation, people will love it. When someone recommends you a product and you're just instantly like, yes, this is great. Yeah. That's a wonderful experience. The question is how quickly how quickly can they get there?
Speaker 2:It didn't really feel like they were nailing it, but we don't know. Like, maybe people are sharing screenshots. Like, one of these was pretty cool. It was, they found, like, some row loafers
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Which are generally... They generally sell out. They're kind of hard to find. Yeah. And so it's possible.
Speaker 2:This person didn't like it, but I think a lot of people would be like, cool. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Know you're like, this is this is the worst thing ever. And then you see one thing you're like, and you're okay.
Speaker 2:I'm so... No. The one that I saw that that I thought was funny was Instinct knew that this guy had a nine eleven target.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And because they had worked on some insurance stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But the issue is that Instinct was like, basically clock, like, okay, this guy's a car guy. I gotta hit him with a bunch of car stuff. Yeah. Then it recommends a trickle charger
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which nine elevens really don't need, especially modern nine elevens. And an indoor cover Yeah. To use inside your garage, which car guys I know would never use an indoor cover because I said this yesterday briefly at the end of the show but the cover against the paint can cause more damage than it just like sitting there. Right? So Yeah.
Speaker 2:You generally want it out of the sun Yeah. But but you're better off just like leaving it, especially because if there gets... If if there can be any debris between the cover and the paint But you could imagine how the model evolves. About the user, but it doesn't know about what car people actually want. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. The... With the shop slop screenshot here from Dave Moran, what sticks out
Speaker 2:to me
Speaker 1:is the the the fact that there's, like, five let's buy this buttons. I don't know. Like, this seems like a normal ecommerce site, but the the repetition there of all the calls to action is what's throwing me off and making this look sloppy. I don't know if that's what's triggering me. But the actual recommendations there of a couple things...
Speaker 2:Well, it's funny because this was this was always a historical concern with AI ads Mhmm. Is the AI that you trust for information and to help you do things suddenly is like, come on, let's like, I think we should buy this. Totally. Yeah. Let's buy this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What do think? Should we buy this? Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's like, it ends up feeling a little... This feels a little bit pushy. Yeah. The other thing that stands out is is they've taken a very UI light approach. Right?
Speaker 2:The Noah said you don't need new interfaces. You know, it has a computer. It has a phone number. It has a number that you can text. But I feel like they're gonna need to...
Speaker 2:They have to make interfaces. Right? And this is one, one of the first. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, and then, yeah, again, the challenge is like getting pushed products in text is just very, very, very, very person. It's just very, very personal.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:And I think that a lot of e commerce brands, you know, will use text marketing. I find that I'm like thousand times more likely to unsubscribe from text marketing than I am to from email marketing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. I mean, it can be dangerous to operate on the previous era of, like, text message conversion rates and open rates because we have moved into a regime where my iMessage, at least, probably yours as well, has a number of folders for unknown senders, promotions, spam, transactions. And if it starts flagging Instinct or your AI agent, not as a friend, but as a promotions vehicle, it goes in that bucket, and then the open rate goes way down. And this is what happened with, like, the newsletter apocalypse and Gmail where you got filtered off into a different section. You're not actually in the inbox anymore.
Speaker 1:And so that's that's pretty risky. I I was I was demoing Dot yesterday and just had a phone call with it on the way home and was shopping and said, like, go find this pair of pants that I bought in my Gmail. Go find another, pair in, like, a slightly different color. And it was hunting around, and it was just like, I... Nothing's in stock in your size, bro.
Speaker 1:And I was like, is there some, like, global pants outage or something? What's going on? And it was like, no. This isn't like a conspiracy or something. But I was actually, like, kinda laughing back and forth.
Speaker 2:You're like crazy. They're crazy.
Speaker 1:It was a pretty it was a pretty delightful experience, but but, like, my end result was like I was like, I don't want you just to send me random stuff, but I do actually want you to check on this. So go create a background task to check, like, every day for this pair of pants, and then just let me know if they come back and stop. And it's like, I'm expecting one notification sometime in the next few months for that particular pair of pants, and then I can just be like, get it.
Speaker 2:Anyways, closing this segment out, Instinct is, as of I think last week, was like 13 or 14 people. Right? Yeah. Like tiny. They're shipping super quickly
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. As a as a small team, experimenting. I think that's important. Yep. And they just hired our friend Ben from Kotu
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Who was at Snapchat for almost a decade Yeah. Leading like content and partnerships there.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:He joined as a chief business officer at Instinct and I think that that is gonna be a massive unlock for them. Yeah. There's so much that Ben can do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I do think that there is a...
Speaker 2:To improve this experience Totally. And make it more like an Amex style experience Yes. Right? Where it's very mass market and commercial, but they're trying to make it feel like elevated and and put the
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Put the user first.
Speaker 1:They might need to do a new pre trained specifically on car guy data to, to really nail that, really dial that in. No. I I think that there is a little bit of a gap between the ex Twitter community, the tech people, the insiders who are like, I don't want a bunch of ads. And, like, there's a lot of people who are like, yeah. Like, I actually enjoy going through all the newsletters and sales in my email.
Speaker 1:I like the email email, you know, promotional marketing materials, And I watch the ads on Instagram. I like them. I enjoy having products be shown to me in a
Speaker 2:set ways.... That, you know, they... Maybe they park their car on a on a public street, and then they go back to their car maybe after going to a restaurant. There's one of those, like, business card ads. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, I will buy your junk car.
Speaker 1:Ever got...
Speaker 2:You ever got you ever got those? No. In LA, there's people that, like, they put a... They'll put a business card, like, in your windows, like...
Speaker 1:I... I've gotten that business card, but for, like, like, gardening or, like, we'll trim your trees, like, type of I've never gotten an offer to buy my car.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I've got the multiple times in LA Okay. Like, we buy junk cars. We buy junk I'm like, wow. Shots fired.
Speaker 2:Wow. I thought I was thought I was doing alright.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was kind of a kind of a nag. But, yeah, I I think a lot of people will will will be excited to have the daily text of, like, the best product that they could bet... That they could possibly buy.
Speaker 2:John says, nobody on earth can do what Ben can. Change his instinct overnight. I agree.
Speaker 1:The folks over at dBind picked the best day to launch Gemini four Argon when everyone's talking about Factory-Cognition, of course, but, it did break through some really impressive benchmarks. Also, some controversy over how much Google employees are using it internally to code. Of course, we'll need to see. The meme is, we're launching Gemini IV Argon. And a group of people are talking about, did you see the factory guy calling out Cognition Guy?
Speaker 1:The Twitter share goes, cool, and then goes back to model agnostic, the enterprise model agnostic harnesses are fighting. And so it is certainly a tough day to launch when there's a lot of drama on the timeline that is more engaging than the Model Wars. The Model Wars used to be the most engaging thing, but now the interpersonal board dynamics are clearly taking a lead. But what's going on with the naming schemes here? So OpenAI's
Speaker 2:says What? All my tokens are gone.
Speaker 1:That's pretty funny. So the naming schemes. Opening eyes in the solar system. You got Luna for the moon, Terra for the Earth, Sol for the sun, Astra for the stars. Anthropic is doing haiku, a Japanese poem, a sonnet.
Speaker 1:It's a 14 line poem. Opus, major work. Fable, moral story. And then Google arrives with argon. Just look at the image.
Speaker 1:The word argon comes from the ancient Greek word argos, which means lazy or inactive. I think they're named after the element argon, and they're probably just gonna go down the list of elements, which is a cool place to pull from. But, yeah, tech leaders, you gotta dig into these words. I keep saying this. Too many too many hubristic tales.
Speaker 1:I don't need any more project titan project. Well, Pop Tarts has ended their buzz balls partnership. This is huge. But on the other side of things, there's more collabs happening because, Mr. Reese Feastables partnered with Liquid Death peanut butter cup soda flavored sparkling water.
Speaker 2:So Okay. So we kinda we kinda ended up, like, net new... We're net neutral.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. It's reincarnated in some ways.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It never really died. It never really died.
Speaker 1:This has been reincarnated as the mister Beasable's liquid... Mister Beas... Feastival's liquid death peanut butter cup soda flavored sparkling water.
Speaker 2:Tyler, this is this has got you written all over it.
Speaker 1:Chug it off. Chug it off.
Speaker 2:Friday challenge. Drink a six pack of peanut butter cup water.
Speaker 1:Would you rather drink the Mr. Beast Feastables Liquid Death Peanut Butter Cup soda flavored sparkling water or the Pop Tarts Buzzball frosted s'mores.
Speaker 2:We love you. Buzzball.
Speaker 1:Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts. Bye.
Speaker 2:See tomorrow.