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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TBPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Monday, 11/24/2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the temple of technology.
Speaker 1:The fortress of finance.
Speaker 2:The capital of capital. Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 2:Jordy and I went to f one this weekend. We went to Las Vegas,
Speaker 1:and we watched Great time. We're with the public.com team. Ramco, Aston Martin f one team with the public.com boys. We had an incredible time. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Incredible time. And f one's fun.
Speaker 2:It's it's more of an experience than, like, the actual watching it. I don't know if if you you at home haven't been following, there was It is. McLaren was just was disqualified. It was a very dramatic I mean, it's almost like a cheating scandal. I don't exactly know.
Speaker 2:But it is like they broke the rules.
Speaker 1:Yet cheating because the FIA said, we don't believe they did it intentionally.
Speaker 2:Okay. Got
Speaker 1:it. Yeah. But it was
Speaker 2:But it's disqualification. And so you would think you were like, oh, yeah. I saw. I noticed it. And there were some people in the comments on some of these videos that I watched saying, oh, I I could tell.
Speaker 2:I could tell. But let me tell you, someone who was there in person, I could not tell. Because it's wizards by. I don't know if they're cheating or not. I don't know if they're real.
Speaker 1:It's an incredibly fun time. It is a terrible spectator story.
Speaker 2:I think everyone agrees on that.
Speaker 1:It and and the two things can be true at the same
Speaker 2:But it's great reason to come come together with Like,
Speaker 1:you actually wanted the best experience for the race You would just
Speaker 2:you could
Speaker 1:just sit inside the paddock.
Speaker 2:You would watch it on restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want a multistream, go to restream.com. Anyway Lot
Speaker 1:of fun and Janik, life Yeah. And Sykes were
Speaker 2:incredible Today on the show, we are talking about Claude Opus four point five. We have Sholto from Anthropic joining us in just half an hour, maybe twenty four minutes he'll be joining. The timeline was in turmoil over the weekend. People are settling into the idea that Gemini three might be good enough to actually pull some people away from ChatGPT as a daily driver. It certainly pulled Marc Benioff away from ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:He, of course,
Speaker 1:was partnerships.
Speaker 2:Was swearing on the timeline. Was swearing on the timeline. He has partnerships with a number of a number of foundation labs, foundation model labs. But he says, holy s h I t. I've used ChatGPT every day for three years.
Speaker 2:I just spent two hours on Gemini three. I'm not going back. The leap is insane. Reasoning, speed, images, video, everything is sharper and faster. It feels like the world just changed again.
Speaker 2:And this is an interesting experience. I had a similar experience. I wound up daily basically daily driving Gemini. I didn't fully churn. I didn't un un I didn't delete Chatty Pee Dee from my phone.
Speaker 2:It wasn't intentional. It was more like, I'm just curious. I really wanna use Nano Banana Pro. That definitely just sort of sucked me into the ecosystem. But I wrote a little bit a little bit of a review over my experience.
Speaker 2:I know you've been a Gemi boy for a couple weeks. You look great in hindsight. You were early to this party.
Speaker 1:Honestly, way longer than that. I was Maybe months. I was I've
Speaker 2:been testing Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, months at this point. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so, there were some good stuff, some bad stuff. Obviously, as a disclosure, we are, of course, sponsored by Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. I've, but, I mean, I'm gonna try and be as fair as possible with this review because there are some things that I do want them to improve in the consumer Gemini app, because I think there's a lot of opportunity there. And I'm just not sure how monopolistic consumer AI will be, and that was a little bit of what my takeaway of this experience was.
Speaker 2:So, basically, I switched over. I I've been on Gemini on iOS for a while, mostly to access v o three. V o three was the was the moment when I was like, okay. They got something that nobody else has. I gotta You were giving them $2.50 a month.
Speaker 1:Well, and then it switched.
Speaker 2:No. No. It was one it was $1.25, and then it jumped to $2.50. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:It wasn't the yeah. I I I thought it might have been 500 as well. But it's $2.50. Been playing it. Very happy for that.
Speaker 2:V o three is just a very special model that no one else had anything close to it. It was very accessible on your phone. And I and I enjoyed it. So I but but I switched to daily driving Gemini on iOS as the main app that I go to for all the different knowledge retrieval requests. Any anytime I'm researching something, I would hit Gemini in the app.
Speaker 2:And, the result was around fifteen minutes per day in the app, and this is roughly the same as what I spent in Chateappity historically. I looked through my time, my screen time. Now that doesn't count stuff on the desktop, maybe. Like, there it's a little rough, but I think fifteen minutes a day is sort of what most people are doing in these apps. Obviously, thirty the thirty minutes a day was reported.
Speaker 1:Benioff said he spent two hours in it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think he was just, maybe in a fugue state doing deep dives or something. But I had a more passive experience where I, you know, when I had a when I had something I was curious about, I would fire off a query. And there was a lot to like about the experience. So first, it felt like Gemini three does a better job sizing the response.
Speaker 2:Like, if it if if the question can be answered in one paragraph, it gives me one paragraph. If it can be answered in in five little subheaders with little bullet points, it'll do that. If it needs more more story, more history, it'll it'll it'll write more. And so I felt like, in previous models in in ChatGPT, certainly, I felt like I was falling into the trap of no matter what question I would ask, I would get the two page dissertation on it with the same structure because it was a little overfit on the format that it was delivering. Gemini three felt a little bit fresh there.
Speaker 2:It also felt faster. Everyone's been saying it's so much faster. I haven't seen any quantification of that, but it certainly felt like it.
Speaker 1:Feels faster.
Speaker 2:But I think a lot of it, for at least for me, is that when for the last couple months when I've been on ChatGPT, because the model router gives me anxiety about, like, oh, maybe I'm gonna get routed to, like, the the dumb model that's gonna hallucinate, I'm just hammering GPT five Pro because I'm on the $200 a month tier. And so because I'm on this $200 a month tier, I'm I'm I'm used to hitting g p t five pro, but then that always means I'm waiting ten minutes. Yeah. And so if I'm always waiting ten minutes and I go over to thinking and it's like, oh, it'll be one minute. Even if I'm on a different model, it's not as much reasoning.
Speaker 2:It feels faster, and I feel like the level of confidence in the brand, like, makes me feel that a Gemini three thinking query that does maybe less reasoning than a GPT five Pro query will be at the same level of reliability. Yeah. And you've pointed out to me something about when it's actually running, it does something psychologically that's really valuable.
Speaker 1:It tells you it says it's running a Google search.
Speaker 2:It just says we're searching Google. And Yeah. And you don't think about it because everyone oh, searching the web. And I'm like, but I don't trust the web, but I trust Google because Google's had twenty five years of building brand around trust in on the web. Yep.
Speaker 2:And so I I see that now, and I'm like, oh, yeah. Good. Because that's what I would do to verify a fact. Even though the web is on Google, obviously, there are hallucinations out there. There are there are fake articles that you could land on.
Speaker 2:There's a whole bunch of things. But if you if you task me with finding the real day that someone was born, I'm going to Google it. And so I trust that as a product. And so putting that there definitely did Yeah. Like, it it it had a real perception, which I thought think was interesting.
Speaker 2:And then also Nano Banana Pro, very interesting, strong differentiator. It really does handle the complex images. We sell it with the farm, and, also just all the text and stuff. And it's been interesting to kind of throw a query. Like, I was I wanted to understand Anthropix, model architectures, and I said, hey.
Speaker 2:Summarize them all in an infographic, and it just perfectly explained how Sonnet and Opus all fit together nicely next to each other. I don't know that it's necessarily a better way to learn, but I could imagine in the future having images generated alongside text just means that you get a more richer multimedia product, which should be the result. Because if you look at any, like, newspaper, any website Not just pure text. It's not just pure text. Like, walls of text are boring.
Speaker 1:Yeah. In fact, if it's just pure text, it usually means the story is just not that important to the newspaper.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. There are some people that just lean full text, you know, and whatnot. But for for the most part, it's much more enjoyable. And it's just better it's more educational.
Speaker 2:It's easy Quickly, to let me tell you about Cognition before I go into the negatives. Let me tell you about Devin, the AI software engineer, crushed your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So on the on the negative side of the of my Gemini app experience, there were a few rough edges. So the first was with that multimodality. Everyone's been saying these models are multimodal.
Speaker 2:They handle image, text, and video. I don't know if it was just a UI issue, but I was running into tons of problems where it wasn't feeling multimodal. And what I mean by that is that I would go and I would and I would and I would issue it a an image prompt. I would I would issue it an image prompt. Hey.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Create this infographic. And then I would wanna flip back into text, and it would not be able to really stay it it wouldn't be able to go seamlessly back to text mode. It would keep generating images. And then vice versa would happen where I would kick off a text a a text flow, and then I'd say, okay.
Speaker 2:I'm ready for you to turn this into a nano banana thing. And it'd like, oh, I I can't I can't really do that. Do do do do you have any are are you laughing about that because you think it's like a rookie mistake
Speaker 3:or something? Well, no. You always like, oh, it's not really multimodal.
Speaker 2:It's not really multimodal.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But I
Speaker 2:There should not be a button. If there's a button, it's telling on itself. Why is there a button? Like, you open it up. You know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 3:I I mean, I I I just don't see why it matters. Like, if you can basically just take an an image and then turn it into, like, the textual representation
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Why is that why why does it matter that it's not, like, actually taking in the the pixels of the image?
Speaker 2:I just think I just think, like, it's yeah. I mean, I I I I get I guess you're right on that front. I I just I find it weird that that I need to I mean
Speaker 3:It it is multimodal in the sense that, like, everything gets baked down into, like, tokens.
Speaker 2:True. True. But it's it's just I I I I expect the models to be operating at a higher level of abstraction much earlier than I think they do. And so with the model picker, like, I never liked that because the model should pick based on the text. I really like the router in in, in ChatGPT because I should be able to go to a person, which is what we're trying to, like, recreate here and say, like, hey.
Speaker 2:I have you I have a research project for you, and I need you to spend twenty minutes on it. I need you to get back to me in an hour. I need you get back to me right now. Off the top of your head, what's your hot take on this? I can ask that, and I can get that back from him.
Speaker 2:And I feel like that should be done at the text layer at
Speaker 3:the end year. Kind of is. Right? Like, if you ask to think like, a thinking model
Speaker 2:It does now. It does now. But what I'm saying is that we are still in the pre, like, selected drop down UI functionality of Gemini because I I I'm prompted to pick what I wanna do. Do you wanna do image, video, deep research, text before you go into the flow instead of just saying, I'm having a conversation. Oh, now is the time to generate an image.
Speaker 2:And it's like, yeah. Sure. That's something I can do. Instead of being like, woah. Woah.
Speaker 2:Woah. You didn't ask to talk to the guy who can generate images. Like, that guy's over there. It's like, is it all one thing, or is it not? And it's clearly not.
Speaker 2:And they're upfront with you about that in the model picker when you're and in the UI, but then it feels like the marketing is a little bit like, it's all it's omni. It's all it's all it's all the things. It's multimodal. And I'm like, it doesn't feel that multimodal in the UI. So I don't know.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's something that they'll they'll they'll work on. But there were there there were a couple other, like, rough edges, and most of it contain is contained in the UI layer. So one of them is voice transcription mode, which I've, like, been completely using in ChatGPT. I'll just open it up, talk to it. Not no.
Speaker 2:It's not the voice mode where you talk and it and it talks back to you. I don't like that mode at You're
Speaker 1:just using voice as an input.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Just voice as an input. And so I'll click the little microphone button, talk for a while, and give it a bunch of context on, okay. I'm interested in in the history of the of Gemini and, know, why don't you take me through some of the VCs that backed, you know, thinking about it? And then I say, though DeepMind, Demis' company before he got acquired.
Speaker 2:But then also, wanna know the history of of Google Brain. Like, where did that come from? Was that Yep. Was that acquired in? Would they acquire different people, or did that just get spun up internally?
Speaker 2:And I'll have pauses, and I'll come back to things. I'll kind
Speaker 1:like talking to an employee.
Speaker 2:Talk yeah. So I'll just give it a lot of context. And when I give that to Chachibi Tea, it loves that. And I feel like it gives it great context because it has a whole bunch of stuff. It can transform it.
Speaker 2:With Yeah. The Gemini app, it will cut me off and be like, oh, you paused for a fraction of a second. Here, I'm submitting it. Like, I'd like and I'm like, no. No.
Speaker 2:No. Like, like, you need
Speaker 1:to you
Speaker 2:need to take more time to let me finish. And with ChatGPT, like, there are two different buttons. You can click the stop button, and it will translate it into text, and then you can re review the text and say, oh, okay. It it made a terrible mistake. I don't want it to burn two minutes on something that and get confused.
Speaker 2:I'd rather like, one of the prompts, was like I was like, generate an image. There was this meme that was going around in nano banana world where it was like, generate me an image of the most annoying LinkedIn profile picture. And I had no idea if it was real or not. It might have been people just taking screenshots and then just, you know, dunking on people.
Speaker 1:Well, some people were just taking a screenshot of someone's actual profile.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And then but I was like, I wonder what happens when you actually take that prompt and you put it in there. So I go to go to Gemini, put that in there, and it doesn't realize that I want to actually generate an image of that. I say, generate a LinkedIn profile of a most annoying person, and it doesn't know that I want an image. So it just dumps out a whole bunch of text.
Speaker 2:And then I open up the audio, and I say, like, no. I want you to generate it with Nano Banana Pro. And what it gets from that is Banana Banana Pro, and they
Speaker 4:and the
Speaker 2:result. And and it it's she's trying to be really friendly. It's like, I love the enthusiasm. Let's talk about bananas for a little Like, no. I want you to use
Speaker 1:the My criticism is just that the the the Gemini app still has a lot of bugs.
Speaker 2:It just has bugs.
Speaker 1:It just has bugs.
Speaker 2:It was also just I can get I can get over
Speaker 1:I can get over it Yeah. For now because, again, it's like it's fast and smart.
Speaker 2:I mean, truthfully, the ChatsD app is incredible.
Speaker 1:Right before we joined, was I was doing a search, I had to like it it was stuck in this limbo where it wasn't running the prompt, but it wouldn't let me run a new prompt. Mhmm. And I just had to basically rage quit and restart it and just copy and paste the prompt into a new box. So Yep. A lot of this I mean, it's yeah.
Speaker 1:Again, it's it's incredibly impressive. Yeah. It's a great model. But they have at this point, it's just, like, opportunity to, like, get more competitive on the product side.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Totally. Yeah. I I was noticing even, like, just straight up disconnection errors. Like, I would submit a prompt, and then it felt like if I close the app, it would get confused or something.
Speaker 2:And I don't understand that because it's just sending a little bit of text. Have you ever run into this?
Speaker 3:I've had that couple times, but it's funny. You can kind of think of the app as being like a benchmark of the model. Right? Because you should imagine that the that they would be
Speaker 2:able to build the app.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yes.
Speaker 3:You would imagine they should be using the model in like the CLI
Speaker 2:I agree.
Speaker 3:To do
Speaker 2:We gotta hold shelter's feet to the fire on this. Yeah. He's so good.
Speaker 3:So we're gonna test out the Anthropic website and see how good it is. And if it's not good, then obviously, the the new cloud model is not good at coding.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. The app should be flawless. If I find one bug in the cloud consumer app, it's over.
Speaker 3:The money's cooked. Do you guys ever use the the, like, voice to voice, like, the real time audio thing on No.
Speaker 2:LGBT? No. I don't like that at
Speaker 4:all.
Speaker 3:You've never used it?
Speaker 2:I've used it. I've used it a bunch. I've used all of them, but they're they're it's
Speaker 1:just not the preferred way of interacting. Yeah. You you you were testing it out, Tyler, by talking with it for, like, eight hours a day. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you were on the x dot x a I one?
Speaker 1:Yeah. With Audi?
Speaker 2:Was that your name?
Speaker 1:Running constantly with a VR headset.
Speaker 2:With a VR headset and a full immersive suit in a in a sensory deprivation tank. Yeah. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:Why do you bring it up?
Speaker 3:I I I actually I've started using I've started using it like it's pretty good. I I think the model is actually much worse, like the underlying model.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It has to be faster. Right?
Speaker 3:So Well, it's it's not the speed. It's like the actual intelligence of the model seems lower. Yeah. Like, the answers aren't as good. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But I find it's useful for when I'm I'm trying to learn, like, a specific topic or something, and I and then I I explain it back. Yeah. And then it it tells me, like, oh, is that correct or not?
Speaker 2:That's pretty good. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. It's yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It it it it's really remarkable. I mean, this this this the Gemini app launched almost two years ago, and there's still, like, rough edges in the UI, which I think is crazy. But it does seem like they have an opportunity to actually take some serious market share at this point. Like, they've caught up on many different, many different, values and, like, value props.
Speaker 2:My question was, like, I'm not the typical consumer. Like, I'm going to try every different app. Like, I'll probably keep bouncing around. I don't know if consumers will do the same broadly. There's it's very, very clear that ChatGPT is just synonymous with AI, and people are not like, oh, well, like, the new benchmarks I gotta, like, change for my, you know, app.
Speaker 2:Like, no no one's thinking like that. Yeah. But my the the fragility in the ChatGPT monopoly aggregator thesis that I was picking up on was for the last year, there have been a lot of a lot of a lot of features and and, like, theses around different things that could create lock in. So stuff like personalization
Speaker 1:Yeah. Memory.
Speaker 2:Or or your memory or or even, like, the chat functionality between what you've linked, your custom instructions, your Yep. The the the different like, I think at this point, I've synced ChatGPT or auth ChatGPT with a number of different services. So it should have more data. It should know all these different things. I've given it even custom instructions, just saying, like, hey, cool it on the EmDashes.
Speaker 2:And and I didn't miss any of that. Like, I there was at no point where there were plenty of points where I was like, oh, like, ChatGPT is definitely better than Gemini still. But at no point was I like, it's because it doesn't have personalization. And I think that if I went in Gemini and I was like, oh, yeah. Like, you can go you can go take a peek at my Gmail to get personalized, like, to understand how I write or understand, you know Yeah.
Speaker 2:What I'm interested in. Like like, one, I could snap my finger and Google could like Be
Speaker 1:way more personal.
Speaker 2:May maybe. Or may but but the biggest thing is that, like Yeah. Right now
Speaker 1:I just don't know
Speaker 2:the math. I feel like both are not personalized at all. Yeah. None of them have any real lock in of any sort. And even in, like, the chat functionality or, the the social network functionality, which is just very different than what happens in a true social network or where there's this flywheel and the and the content is driven by the existing user base.
Speaker 2:Whereas I feel like I got on Gemini, and on day one, the content was as good or better than ChatGPT because it's all AI generated. So it it it made me think, like, maybe it's a little bit more fragile. Maybe maybe there will be a little bit more of a duopoly. There it won't be such a winner take all market, even though it has been historically. It's it it has been up to this date.
Speaker 2:Like, in consumer AI, it's very clear that OpenAI has run away with it. But it feels like Google does have a little bit of a chance to catch up in consumer because it there's just so much less of a network effect. Like, the network effect just is bolted on. It's not real yet. Maybe it'll never be real.
Speaker 2:Maybe Google can catch up there. But Yep. I I just really wanna see where DAUs and and user minutes, like, actually grow. Because I because there's so many different, like, tweaks there and Yeah. Like, every chart and data point is definitely gonna be analyzed to death.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But Yeah. One one thing that's notable, Google is going super hard in the and it's for for students. So they have you can just get Gemini Pro for Yep. A year free.
Speaker 1:And again, I think that's just a bet on, like, get people
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Hooked on workflow.
Speaker 2:OpenAI is clearly battling that out too. Yeah. One of the big one of the big value props of using the Atlas browser is you get more advanced thinking queries. Like, they will up your limits. It it is interesting.
Speaker 2:There's also, I I'm very interested to see who can bring ads online faster. Like, Google should be able to snap their fingers and do it so quickly, and yet, it does seem like something that could just take them longer on a product side. Yeah. But they should have a whole model. Like, they should be able to do display ads, like, right now and just be like, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Our free our free Gemini users are now properly monetized. Now maybe they don't wanna be the first mover there because then they'll get the stink of, like, oh, they're the ad one Yeah. In the market. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I think I think it matters a lot more to just have a highly competitive product and win market share before you spend any time with that. Like, for example, like Yeah. If you're using a a version of Gemini that's super smart and fast but still a little bit buggy and then you start seeing ads, you're like, just make the app Yeah. Like perfect Yeah. Before you or as close to perfect as you can get
Speaker 2:it Yeah.
Speaker 1:Before you introduce ads.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, let me tell you about Adio, the AI need of CRM. Adio builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Google has now added $2,000,000,000,000 to its market cap over the past twenty months since the boob shirt guy asked Sergey Brin about woke Gemini images while having a foot long subway cold cut trio for lunch. What is this video?
Speaker 2:Let's play this. I have no idea what's going on here. How does he even Is that
Speaker 3:my art? The background. Yeah. With the Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wasn't really expecting to talk about this
Speaker 4:thing. But,
Speaker 2:you know, we definitely messed up on the image generation and I think it was mostly due to just like not thorough testing. Earning? It's a crazy shirt to be wearing. I don't even know how you get into a meeting with someone as powerful and wealthy as Sergei
Speaker 1:you a jacket and you get in, it's hot, you take your jacket off, you're just
Speaker 2:I was not expecting that. That is so insane. That's very, very funny.
Speaker 1:It's a bay it's a Bay Area thing, John.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Wild. But it's just underrated. Like, Sergei Brin really did go into the Gemini team very clearly, like, like, was like, it's time to go and cook.
Speaker 2:Like, let's work on this. And, like, it clearly had results, which is awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's note notable. I mean Yeah. This stocks jumped 6% today. Barron's put out a report today just saying the title is buy Google stock.
Speaker 1:Yep. Alphabet has been the clear AI winner, which is just funny because had earlier this year, like, people weren't saying people were saying they're the AI loser. Yeah. So Barron's is saying, actually, they have been. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They have been the clear AI winner.
Speaker 2:But Yes.
Speaker 1:The narrative has And our our in house retail trader has been on an absolute tear going along Google. Congratulations to him. Well, congratulations to you because he he had he was in probably one of the most He was in a dark place. He was in a dark place. A certain company announced a partnership.
Speaker 1:He's Doc Moon. He got out. He's like, John, what should I buy? And you're like, buy Google.
Speaker 4:I was
Speaker 2:like, just play it safe, dude. Just just go with something something safe, something not crazy. Do not use leverage, please. Well, Google Google's parent company, Alphabet, has acquired a stake in physical intelligence. That is, of course, Lockheed Grooms company.
Speaker 2:Very exciting. Lockheed and Carol Hausman, the cofounders, came on the show about six months ago. We should have them back on and check-in with them. The San Francisco based Philist Physical Intelligence is an AI and robotics startup. They have secured $600,000,000 in fresh funding, pushing its post money valuation to 5,600,000,000.0.
Speaker 2:We should ring the gong for Hit it. So Capital g is in and then Lux Capital, Thrive Capital, Jeff Bezos is in, Index Ventures, T. Rowe Price. They're building a general purpose AI foundation model and learning algorithms. And they they've they yeah.
Speaker 2:They focus, like, not on as much of, like, the the the flash and, substance like like, not as much like flash and, oh, we're building a full humanoid, more, like, you know, we're we're, kind of taking, like, incremental steps towards adding value in different robotics cases and demos, the the the laundry folding robot, of course, and now the coffee making robot. All these are very cool. And it and it just feels like they've they've taken It's a
Speaker 1:notable that this is at one x speed too. We've seen some other demos. Remember, Sunday Robotics was sped up like 10 x?
Speaker 2:Yep. It was four x, I think. But
Speaker 1:you It was different scenes.
Speaker 2:Oh, really? There were some that were 10? Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very cool.
Speaker 1:They should just design an espresso machine that makes espressos automatically.
Speaker 2:They could
Speaker 1:Has anyone ever done that?
Speaker 2:You know what they could do? They could they they could put the espresso in a can, and then they could mail it to you, and then you crack open the can. And if you crack open the can, that's maybe or no. You know what they need? A to open can.
Speaker 2:Then you need a robot to open the can. Yeah. I just wanna No.
Speaker 1:This this is an interesting task. I'm sure I'm sure there's a certain number of people in the world that get really angry seeing this because this is one of
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:I think I I I imagine this will be one of those things that even when robots can do it Yeah. Like people still like to know who's making their espresso.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know? Yeah.
Speaker 1:It it it feels like There's
Speaker 2:been a couple there's been a couple robotics, like robotic coffee shops and stuff. Well, our first guest of the show is in the restroom waiting room. We have Shalto from Anthropic. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Congratulations. Thank you Thank so you so much for taking the time to hop on on such a massive day. How is this just a Claude Opus four point five day? What what is the name of the day? What what what is the news today?
Speaker 2:Well, take us through just the announcement from your perspective.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, Cloud Opus 4.5, best coding model in the world right now. It's really, really exciting. We've been pinging around Slack all day with these incredible demos of things that people are doing. Really, like, the last week has just been full of people sharing their excitement of, oh my god.
Speaker 4:I left the model in a room for a few hours with these tools and was able to do x y zed, or it found this bug that it was, like, just impossible for previous models to find. Yeah. I think maybe, like, the thing I'm most excited by is a lot of our best engineers. Like, I don't know if you guys know Simon Baum. He's the one who wrote this probably the best guide on how to optimize a CUDA map model in the world.
Speaker 4:Great blog post. You should go read it. Okay. He posted the other day. He's like, I don't know if I'm gonna have to type again.
Speaker 4:You know? He's saying, you know, you obviously have to coach the model and you have to tell it what to do still, but a lot of our best engineers are getting to this point where they're realizing, oh god. It's just all I have to do is intervene and the model is smart enough that this is is no longer a frustrating process. The model is a real qualitative step up. So there's the coding.
Speaker 4:There's also the model is just a lot better at general work tasks. Mhmm. It's a lot better at spreadsheet slides. Mhmm. You know, it's still not the Cloak Code experience there.
Speaker 4:It's still not gonna do the work in front of you as you talk to it, but it's a massive step up and just a very clear sign of progress in that direction. And also that I mean, there's a whole bunch of funny stories about the model that we can get into of, like, cool examples. But, yeah, I think it might be up as 4.5. I think VoorKesh might also be launching the Iliapod today, so, you know, maybe there's maybe there's two things today.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. I I did notice in in the launch video, you mentioned that it's better at vision, and I was wondering if you could sort of unpack a little bit more about what that means in this particular context. Because as as I understand it, Anthropic has been incredibly focused on the core foundation model, the text models, the coding models, and sort of stayed out of the the slopification of artificial intelligence to some degree.
Speaker 1:Stayed out of the trough.
Speaker 2:Stayed out
Speaker 5:of the trough.
Speaker 1:Haven't decided to build a trough yourselves.
Speaker 4:Yes. Indeed. So, I mean, we've been very focused on coding. It's been deliberate focus. Yes.
Speaker 4:You know, focus the compute and all that. Specifically, it's good at vision in, so it's good at understanding stuff. Yeah. This is reflected in the ARC AGI scores. I know if you've seen them.
Speaker 4:They're Yep. Their soda. It's also reflected in generally the fact that it's much better front end design and all that. Yeah. It doesn't do Vision Out.
Speaker 4:Yep. Now, you know, Vision Out would be would be cool, but it's, you know, something we're we're not focusing on right now.
Speaker 2:And Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, it's specifically.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I mean I mean, just philosophically, that feels like it makes sense because if I hire a developer, I want them to be able to look at a front a like, a a web page and see, oh, there's a div that's way out of line there. Like, I need to be able to see that. But do they need to be able to generate an image? No. They can probably go to an image another image generator, wire that up with an API key, or hire a photographer or do whatever they need to.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 4:Right. They can use Figma. They can sketch out the signs. Exactly. Yes.
Speaker 4:Broadly, our philosophy is that we're not bottlenecked on our ability to generate images. Yeah. We're bottlenecked still on, you know, the the raw intellectual ability of the models. Yeah. And and that's the sort of direction that we wanna push.
Speaker 2:So in in in that in that idea of, like, the bottlenecking, what what what is the what is the key unlock for OPUS 4.5? I mean, like, a lot of people are throwing around, like, biggest. Obviously, the benchmarks are very good, but, like, the this whole idea of, like, more parameters, more data, more compute, more money, more electricity. Like, how do you even think about allocating resources to push a model forward in 2025, in late twenty twenty five when perhaps we're past this paradigm of, like, oh, just more parameters?
Speaker 3:I don't know if we
Speaker 4:are past the I think it's important to call the paradigm, like, scaling in general. Yes. You know, depending on what access you're actually scaling, TBD. Yes. But it's general, the the scaling paradigm.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. I don't think we're past that at all. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Right? I mean, I think we're still seeing massive returns scaling in all its variants. I think that, you know, we're generally things work.
Speaker 2:We scaled. It works.
Speaker 4:The models just wanna learn. Right?
Speaker 2:I I mean Yeah. It's as if you
Speaker 4:said, like, ten years ago. Yeah. The models just wanna learn. And I think the the hardest things with the question of focus are often on how we split and allocate people. And this model is hundreds of people's worth of effort.
Speaker 4:Right? Where they poured their lives into it over the last six months. And I think that is is working out what we prioritize is really tough. I've said this before, but these models always feel like, you know, when they launch, it's exciting. They you know, they're great.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. But you you sort of think back to, oh my god. There's all these things that we we could do better, and everyone right now is going is going and working on those things. It's just that everything still works.
Speaker 2:So is this a is this a refutation of what, some folks might have been picking up on from the last few Dwarvesh guests, the Karpathi episode, the Sutton episode? It it there's been a little vibe shift around like, okay. Maybe when we say scaling, we mean more inference diffused all over the world and small models and custom RL environments here and there. And, like, we're gonna get the value from AI, and we are going to continue to scale dollars to economic value, but it's not just gonna be bigger and bigger pre trains forever, and then we get God.
Speaker 4:I don't know what it's gonna be bigger versions of. But Yeah. As far as as far as we're seeing, you know, scaling still works. Okay. I don't know if you guys know this, but Blaukesh, Dylan, and I are actually housemates.
Speaker 4:So have this debate all the time.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 4:It's great. Like a dinner table discussion of, you know, are we are we slowing down? And, know, I've often joked that the the most impactful thing that, you know, what one of us could do is go and crack the problems that, like, continue learning or something like this that focuses on. Yes. So we can then go switch the narrative back to progress.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just switch up the dinner table conversation. Sure.
Speaker 4:Sure. Dinner table conversation. Exactly.
Speaker 2:So, did did did, did the Anthropic crew, like, never lose faith in in pretraining? There's this whole, like, at NeurIPS last year, Ilya says, you know, pretraining is potentially dead or kind of alludes to it. And then, one of his copresenters, is leading, the Gemini three team and says, oh, well, we basically disregarded what we said at NeurIPS last year. We did just focus on better pretrains. We got better results.
Speaker 2:It seems like you also disregarded that. Was that a misread in in 2024 on Ilya's on on Ilya's presentation, or was it a conscious decision to disregard what he was saying?
Speaker 4:Well, I think remember, general, it's scaling. It's not any particular paradigm of scaling. It's general, like, flops in intelligence out relationship. I think Anthropic is a is a bet on, in many respects, that we believe that line is gonna continue.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And you exactly what equation you use to convert flops into intelligence out, I think, will change over time. Then, you know, many people made arguments that there should there may even be further paradigms here. But fundamentally, we think that that the computing intelligence out equation is continuing to hold. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And I
Speaker 4:I think Anthropic, in many respects, like, has had that faith for a very long time. Right? They're some of the first people to have, like, very to make very serious bets on that. Mhmm. And, you know, a couple of months of external progress being I I think the only reason that people are so like, how should I say?
Speaker 4:The models have actually gotten substantially smarter this year, and that's why we're talking about things like continual learning as bottlenecks. Sure. Last year, those weren't even points of discussion because the models weren't even smart enough for to matter. It didn't feel frustrating that it wasn't a coworker that learned with you on the job. It just wasn't even smart enough to do the things you wanted.
Speaker 4:Now, often is, but it doesn't actually you know, it sort of doesn't learn on the job and so therefore, it isn't as useful. I think there's like one other thing that's worth, like, you know, sort of disentangling is Carpathi has the perspective, you know, in the podcast, it's twenty thirty five for all humans, all tasks.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I think exactly what shape back, like, of the curve looks like on the way to all humans, all tasks is pretty important. Because if you get to most humans, most tasks in, like, '27 then or '28, then that's that's still pretty stark, and it's still pretty transformative for the world. And so what exactly that looks like is quite important to to think about.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How how is I mean, one one last question on, like, the actual, OPUS 4.5. There's this, there's an idea that, maybe this model can be used for to for distillation to train other smaller models. How do you think about where where we will see Opus 4.5, like, the the power law use cases that actually get adopted beyond the demos, beyond the benchmarks in a couple years or in a couple months? I we can't even talk in a couple years.
Speaker 2:In years. A couple
Speaker 4:I got a couple years.
Speaker 2:In a couple maybe a couple weeks, honestly. But, like like, you you you know, like, what like, once it gets in the hands of companies, businesses, startups, you know, different folks implementing this, like, how do you see you know, do you see someone being like, yeah. It's just my daily driver for just talking to it even though it costs a lot? How do you think about, where you're most excited to see it diffuse into the the overall ecosystem?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. I actually do expect this model to become a lot of people's daily driver. Mhmm. It's that step up in being able to, like, delegate trust.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. We asked internally how far how much faster Sonnet four would have to be Mhmm. For you to for you to take this, like, for so it's, like, to take their switchback, basically, and then give up point five in exchange for for Sonnet 4.5. Mhmm. And it it was multiple times faster.
Speaker 4:It was, like, really quite a stock increase in speed. Mhmm. It would've been, like, it was, like, four times faster or something people would for people to have switched from Opus to to Sonnet. Mhmm. So that's what that itself is pretty stock.
Speaker 4:I think it's also highly likely to become daily driver just because it is a lot more efficient.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:As is there's this one plot I really like where it shows the amount of tokens it uses to get a certain score on Suitebench. Mhmm. And it uses, I think, like, quarter of the tokens as Sonnet 4.5 on Suitebench, which is pretty impressive number. That means it's it's actually, like, cheaper than Sonnet 4.5 to get the same score on Suitebench. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Now TBD, how well that generalizes out to to at every day of use, but I'm seeing it solve problems way faster. It writes better code the first time around. I actually think that in in many cases, this will end up cheaper because it is so much more efficient at getting to the right answer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How do you think how how are you thinking about personalization and sort of, like, cross pollination of data? When I think about an an engineer on a team, it's helpful to have them in Slack. It's even helpful to potentially have them in the random channel and just kind of, you know, understanding the company culture. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, I I was I was toying with, like, trying to switch from Chatuchupti to Gemini as kind of the daily driver knowledge retrieval app. And I was noticing that, like, the personalization, narrative hasn't really taken hold over the time I was testing Gemini. I was not like, oh, this feels like wildly less personal. And that might just be a matter of, like, it hasn't had that much time to build in all of this personalization features. But I'm wondering if you see a a world where developers who are using Claude for programming, also benefit from using it in knowledge retrieval research.
Speaker 2:And there's actual significant flowback and synergy such that it's a really valuable it it's valuable to actually have both sides of the business, like, really cooking.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's a team member. I mean, we talked a long time about how we want Claude to be a virtual coworker.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 4:And a big goal really for next year is to try and get to this form factor of virtual coworker that is in all your Slack channels and can join your meetings and can work alongside you. I think there's gonna be massive benefit there. Mhmm. I think that and my my basic expectation and and as I sort of interacted with with the model is that it will get to that point where it's useful to have it across everything.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Now I think that there's there's like one is it's as you said, it's worth asking question of why haven't we seen personalization really kick off so far? Like, why isn't it why isn't that useful? I think it's in part because there's still a lot of algorithmic progress to go there. I think people haven't really quite cracked cracked the problem. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I think this is just one of those things that takes, like it's hard to connect everything up. Yeah. And and partially because yeah. I think I think they just haven't really been integrated very well.
Speaker 6:Totally.
Speaker 4:This is, a really tough product form factor question.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's really hard to roll up the the knowledge effectively. Like, I noticed that I would ask Chet if he could tell me a joke, and it would, like, make very specific references to, like, details of my car. And I'm like, that's that's weird. It's but it's not really funnier that way.
Speaker 2:It was like, yes. You I I understand that you know exactly what car I drive, Chad GPT, and I am impressed that you remember it, but you didn't make the joke funnier because you put my car in there. So knowing, like, when to pull personalization features off the shelf in the in the actual chain of thought is is tricky tricky.
Speaker 4:And and that's algorithmic. Right? Okay. That's that's
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Like, you had the model in like, out there interacting with people and sometimes they find it funny, then, like, you you get a sense of what makes what makes it funny.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You talked to you talked a little bit about focus earlier in in I I take that as anthropic as a basically a bet on focusing compute. What what qualifies an idea to actually get a meaningful amount of resources internally?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So, I mean, Anthropic as a company is very predicated on the idea that we expect AI progress to be fast. Right? We expect it to be a really significant transformative impact over in the world over the next couple of years. And so our bets are concentrated on things which matter under that lens.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And that's one of the reasons we're so focused on software engineering because we think it's really important to basically accelerating our own work and in just is in general sort of the most immediately addressable market. It's also why we're so focused on the alignment work and safety work because underworld where AI progress is really fast, that work matters a lot. And making sure the model embodies human values is really important and and that we trust the models. There's a really funny example actually of the of alignment generalization from the from the recent model launch where it's a customer service agent, and it actually fails this particular eval because it figures out a really clever way to, like, help the user change their tickets, which is technically allowed by the by the rules. Like, if I read all the rules and it's compared them, it's like, oh, wait.
Speaker 4:Here's, like, here's a loophole where if we, like, upgrade you and then change you and then downgrade you, then then we can get you to change your your flight time. It's just it's interesting that actually, it's trying to be a nice guy. Yeah. Like, not just purely I mean, it's it's trying to follow its instructions. It's and it's trying to satisfy
Speaker 1:the It's kind of it's trying to satisfy the wrong human maybe. Yeah. Or it needs to be better at kind of find finding the middle ground.
Speaker 4:Exactly. It's it's it's following its instructions to the letter. Yeah. It's not just giving the human enough a flight change. Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. And and it's following the rules and regs, but at the same time, it's trying to it's trying to find a a good outcome for the human. Yeah. So questions like this are microcosm of of what exactly do you want the model to do in more difficult ethical and moral scenarios. But it I I thought it was pretty cute and adorable example of of the model trying to be a nice guy.
Speaker 4:It's like all those examples. I don't know if you've seen the papers where people do these, like, cooperative and and competitive games, like, Nash equilibrium style games with the models. And Claude always gets stuck trying to cooperate with everyone, and then and just loses lots of money and you know?
Speaker 2:Sometimes sometimes the good guys finish first. I I I certainly hope that works out. I I I have I have genuinely even though I've never been full, oh my god. I'm gonna get paperclip next year. I have enjoyed a lot of the safety research, and I've and I've always appreciated how thoughtful Anthropic is as an organization around safety.
Speaker 2:And I think that a lot of people should be a lot more appreciative of the how seriously Anthropic takes safety, not because we didn't get paperclip this year, but because we saw stuff like GPT psychosis crop up. And we saw we saw actual people know individuals in the venture capital community who it felt like they got a little crazy. And I'm wondering, do you feel like you're at Anthropic, do you feel like you're closer to solving the problem of, like, the chatbot, you know, went a little bit too sycophantic with me, and it it kind of hurt me psychologically because it it feels like there there there's a certain amount of craziness that happens when you're operating at, you know, the scale of a billion people. Like, you just pull a billion random people, you're gonna get a lot of crazy people. But at the same time, it feels like this is an interesting place where Anthropic could be doing a lot of research.
Speaker 2:How are you feeling about solving that problem, and how how much can your research kind of generalize to maybe the consumer apps that have more, even more users, but you could maybe be a leader in the space just with the philosophy because it's like a net good to everyone?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we put an enormous amount of effort into this, and I I mean, our models push back a lot. There's I think there is a tension here between paternalism and and freedom, so to speak. Right? But we try and have our models be like, look out for the best interest of the user.
Speaker 4:I think Mike put it really nicely in a recent talk or or podcast where he said, you know, we never look at user minutes as as a metric. Right? Like, that is just not something that we think about as a as a sort of proxy of of the sort of quality of your experience. Yeah. We're just out there trying to find out, is it helping you do the things you want, and is it adding value?
Speaker 4:Is it adding value? So, I mean, I hope that our our alignment work generalizes really far. It's think it's a really tough problem. I mean, I I think to open it as credit, they've really gone and and tried to fix this problem as well. Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. And it's tough at the scale of billing users. But I I think this is a good example of the kinds of things that are really tricky, whether it's trade offs and when you need to make sure that you don't have the incentive structure that allows you that that sort of, like, pushes you to to maximize user minutes in
Speaker 2:this Yeah.
Speaker 4:And and and is a good microcosm of, like, the alignment difficulties that we'll get as the models take on more and more and more responsibility in our world.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I completely agree with that. The user minute question, like, completely snuck up on me because I I always assumed that everyone was gonna be paying for this stuff as the $20 a month plans rolled out, the $200 a month plans rolled out. It but, of course, you know, you get to a certain scale of the Internet, and it it it winds up being about attention and advertising and all
Speaker 1:these different things. Building a digital coworker Yeah. People don't typically, like, rate their coworkers by how much time they take up. Not like this I love this employee. I love Steve.
Speaker 1:So much
Speaker 2:I love Steve.
Speaker 1:My time every week.
Speaker 2:Four hours every day on my calendar. It's the best. It's
Speaker 4:the best.
Speaker 2:You're just constantly talking to me. Okay. Speaking of long running tasks, I wanna know how how much how confident should we be in that meter chart of the task doubling? Because can I just prompt it to say, hey? Count for four four hours, and I get twice as high on the chart?
Speaker 2:Is is that benchmark not gameable? It feels a little gameable. I'm very excited about it. It seems really interesting to say, hey. Go build a website.
Speaker 1:Start counting and don't stop.
Speaker 2:Full day. Yeah. But but but are you looking at that chart? It seems it seems like a very interesting new benchmark, new unlock. How are you thinking about task time time horizons generally?
Speaker 4:Yes. So I think that chart is the best proxy measure that we have at the moment. I do think this is somewhere where we need better work Mhmm. To to to measure things more accurately. I mean, it, you know, what actually is their measure of time?
Speaker 4:The measure of time there is how long did it take a human to achieve the equivalent task? Sure. Now that being said, I think a lot of people at the moment, even if the model was able to achieve a task technically by passing the test or sort of normally achieving your goal, it often doesn't code it in a way which is which is beautiful and allows you, like, great abstractions that let you build on it in future. Mhmm. And often this is, at least in my own personal experience, it's not that the model is too dumb to to do things.
Speaker 4:It's that it doesn't set things up well for future code. And so I think there are, like, there are things not measured here. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But it's pretty good proxy. And I think it's a it's a very good proxy for for progress. Now I think a lot of the tasks in it are particularly machine learning research tasks.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:As AI models get better at that, I do expect the labs to to hold back some of the the capabilities there. Like, if a model is capable of, you know, writing out a whole new architecture that's a lot better, you you don't wanna release that to competitors. Right? Even if it's just capable of writing all the kernels for them, you probably don't wanna release that to competitors. So in in that case, I think they'll need to measure a broader array of tasks.
Speaker 4:I am I'm also just very interested in in seeing general software engineering tasks along this. So or other tasks in the economy because I think that would be really informative
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:For for actual progress. I think GDP eval is similar. I think, again, it's it's a poor it's a it's a proxy. It's the best proxy tab. It's still a poor proxy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Of course. How are you thinking about even I mean, we're here discussing the biggest models, the best models. How are you thinking about smaller models, purpose built models? These RL as a service was on the timeline.
Speaker 2:A bunch of folks were debating that. Is that an area that Anthropic has already started to work on with enterprise clients is considering? You don't have to leak any news that's not already out there, but I'd love to know how you think about, these, like, smaller, purpose built RL models for specific business tasks.
Speaker 4:Yes. So on the one hand, I think we've seen a lot of value from small models being able to, like, dispatch swarms to subagents. Right? They're incredibly useful in search. They're very useful in, like, going through a code base, finding stuff, reporting back to the main model.
Speaker 4:It's great way to decrease costs, make things faster. Mhmm. So we've
Speaker 2:seen a
Speaker 4:lot of value there. I I think long term, there is maybe a little bit of a tension between RL as a service and some, like, notion of really cracking continual learning. I think it's a little bit of a race between RL as a service and and, like, can can the labs crack continual learning?
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:That being said oh, and maybe like one final note is that I have said this for a long time is I do expect things to eventually go get to the point where large models only use as much computation as is actually necessary to achieve the task. Now, you know, Opus is one step in this direction. Right? It only uses as many tokens as it thinks it needs to to solve a given task and as a result, it's more efficient. And I think that ultimately will take away a little bit from the the sort of comparative advantage of small models as they get as large models get more and more and more efficient at at only using the sort of right fraction of themselves to do things.
Speaker 4:But, you know, I said that two years ago and it still hasn't happened. Yeah. So so maybe, you know, it's a it's a harder problem than people think, and and and it will well, then then I thought, and and will sort of take longer.
Speaker 2:What about model routing? How important is that within the context of of coding agents, Cloud Code, just the surface area of what Anthropic is building? How many Yeah. How many layers will this have over over time? How are you thinking about the development of of of actually routing to the most efficient model?
Speaker 2:Because it sounds like it's happening within OPUS 4.5, but then it there are also times when you might wanna go to just a different model entirely.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And and it's similar there where I really think that, like, ultimately something like routing is a little bit of of like a medium term hack, I guess, one could say across different model sizes where, like, ultimately, you want everything to be like an end to end learn system. Yeah. Right? And it yeah.
Speaker 4:It's similar to I I think we'll see a similar lesson as Tesla saw where they're like, okay. Actually, everything is just one giant end to end learned system as opposed to discrete components that have different purposes. And but it but it takes time to get there.
Speaker 1:You said earlier you could imagine a scenario where labs would kind of hold back frontier models, because they would be effectively handing their competitors an advantage. What's your timeline around that? Do you think that's something that happens in in twenty twenty twenty six? Because right now, there's a pressure to just be state of the art, like, be at the frontier. Basically, there's a vibe war happening, and it's very important to, you know, constantly be Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Topping all the benchmarks.
Speaker 2:Well, didn't didn't Lama release with that same, user agreement where it was like in if you have less than 400,000,000 DAUs, you can use the service. And it Jaisali excluded all of their competitors.
Speaker 1:Some I think that's pretty imperfect Sure.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 1:Sure. There'd be a lot of ways that you could still get benefit without Yeah. Yeah. You know, necessarily.
Speaker 2:But yeah. But how how are you thinking about it? Well, I mean, there's a there's a suite
Speaker 4:of capabilities here. Right? Like, obviously, you want I think for general software engineering, yeah, everyone in the world should be able to use that. That's great. Let's say, like, if we train the models to get really good at assisting our own AI research, if we're teaching them mathematical tricks that, you know, we thought about and we don't we're not confident that anyone else knows or we're teaching them, you know, sort of like how we do our infrastructure.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Ultimately, we want them to know those things. We don't want the rest of world to be able to to recreate infrastructure from from scratch Yeah. As a result. I I think this is also similar to how we think about bio biology.
Speaker 4:And this is actually a line I think we we we need to, like, do some work on exactly how we draw the line here. But at, you know, so Houseview and Throbby, we're quite worried about the ability of models to become much better at at biology and and sort of producing viruses and this kind of thing. And so as a result, the we've you know, we have, like, all these safeguards around whether or not the metal is able to do and and help people with biology. It actually at the moment, I think the safeguards are are a little bit they they on the overactive. I know many biologist friends who are frustrated because they because it it doesn't quite, yeah, it doesn't They're
Speaker 1:like, please. I can I can be trusted with biological superintelligence? I will not I will not create, you know
Speaker 4:I will not create a
Speaker 1:virus. Pandemic.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:We're wearing we're wearing on the line of safety here, and and and we're sort of navigating to finding the the exact right pathway there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Probably the most important question I have, what are your timelines around a humanoid robot beating a human at fencing?
Speaker 4:Oh, very good question. So, I mean, I'm, yeah,
Speaker 1:let's As an expert.
Speaker 4:As an expert. An expert. At fencing, the unitary robots are pretty good at backflips and stuff. They're a lot better than backflips than I am. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So
Speaker 1:I know. But fen fencing takes grace and finesse and all these things that we're not seeing in Also,
Speaker 2:physical size. Right? Aren't isn't isn't height an advantage in fencing and reach and length? And and I believe those unitary robots, I think, Sholta That's and you I think me and you got got a foot on them easily.
Speaker 4:We do. Sholta's so bad.
Speaker 2:People don't know, but everyone on this call is over six feet. People just assume they see a talking head, and they think, oh, bunch of five five five five guys. Yeah. Not true.
Speaker 4:Maybe maybe sports are hard. Maybe mid mid twenty thirty.
Speaker 2:Mid twenty thirty.
Speaker 1:Woah. Okay.
Speaker 4:I'm really excited for
Speaker 1:I'm not feeling the acceleration. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2:Sell everything.
Speaker 4:Hope it's a heart. I think we a we get a dropping coworker in two years and I think I think fencing robot takes a little bit longer.
Speaker 1:No. That's your fallback plan if if you lose your job as an AI
Speaker 2:You need
Speaker 1:full time fencing. Technical staff, you go back to fencing.
Speaker 4:Swordsman in the world. It's gonna be great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That'd be fun.
Speaker 4:I can't wait to teleoperate a robot like Manga style and and fight. It's gonna be Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's gonna be wild. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Somebody was saying that, the the with some of the bull cases for some of those humanoid robots is that you just all get in VR and you just get to go hang out with your friends Yes.
Speaker 2:In in as robots and do whatever you want and just you're just hanging out in person. Very funny. Last question for me, from actually, from our intern, Tyler, who's wearing the thinking cap. Thank you for sending it over. He's a huge fan.
Speaker 2:There there we go. He did. You expect mechanistic interpretability research to make meaningful contributions to capabilities, not just safety of the models, like actual capability results?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Great question. One of the the interesting things about Mechanterf work so far is that it's already lent, I think, a lot of capabilities or progress because of the mental models that are provided.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:I I I think, actually, after the original transformer circuits papers, it was interesting how the language of that paper ended up really dominating the mental models in the way that people thought across multiple labs about what actually was going on inside transformers. And it led to, I think, a much deeper and richer understanding of what they are. Mhmm. So so I think it's already helping by diffuse way, not a not a concrete way, but in a diffuse way. In terms of the concrete ways, you know, dial up the smart neurons or or something like this, that I that I haven't really seen yet.
Speaker 4:And I think it's mostly the sort of future work is gonna be mostly in alignment direction, but the sort of rich understanding and the rich the rich understanding has helped us a lot in terms of actually understanding how to train these models.
Speaker 2:I have one extra question.
Speaker 1:Go for it.
Speaker 2:Tell me a little bit about Dario's communication style. I was I was hearing a story about I think Jensen has no, direct reports or no or he he like, everyone reports to him, no one reports to him. He has no meetings or all the meetings, and he, like
Speaker 1:And he has 60 direct reports.
Speaker 2:He has 60 direct reports, but no no big meetings, and he has but he reads everyone's to do list, like, every single day or something. What's it like at Anthropic? What is Dario like as a leader these days?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Dario has a really, really cool communication style, which is that he quite frequently puts out these very, very well reasoned essays. Yeah. And then also like throughout Slack, we'll have giant essay length, like comments debates with people about the
Speaker 2:topic.
Speaker 4:It's really great. Yeah. You get these but the essays are really nice because it one, you can go back and read all the past ones that tells this history of anthropic. Yeah. It's, I think in many respects, will be one of the better thing in a decade from now to chart the history of AGI.
Speaker 4:Sure. We'll be reading these compendium of essays. Yeah. And and and there's like, you know, some credible comment threads on each side of them and and so forth. But also throughout Slack, whenever we're he's very open and honest with the company.
Speaker 4:Whenever we're debating different things, he will lay out the pros and cons and how he's thinking about them and why this one's attention and why that one's more struggle. And people will write back big essays on on why they think we should do x or y, and he'll respond. It's really it's quite a joy. It's a very recent communication style. Yeah.
Speaker 4:As a result, it means that many people or really the entire company have a good model of how he's thinking. Yeah. And that really helps. Because it means that you you sort of have a coherent sense of direction across the entire company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. I I I like that a lot. Yeah. Cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You so so many examples of of successful founders who have adopted the written culture and Yeah. And seen great great results. I I know, I think That's a great ride.
Speaker 4:I mean, read Machines of Love and Grace, and it it it it's just such a brilliant essay.
Speaker 1:That's great. You're absolutely right.
Speaker 2:Have you ever caught him using AI? Has he ever ever been like, oh, this one, he was phoning it in?
Speaker 4:No. Not yet.
Speaker 2:Not yet. But maybe I mean, it's kind of a bull case if he does wind up. Just, saying, could could Claude, like, handle it? I'm I'm going on vacation for a couple days. I'm I'm the dropping coworker.
Speaker 4:I'm pretty sure we measure loss on, on his assets. I mean, that's good.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. But right now, I mean, the the the it's a high bar high bar. High But congratulations. Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Super impressive. Congrats to the whole team.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Great to
Speaker 2:see you. See you.
Speaker 7:Ciao.
Speaker 2:Bye. Back to the show, back to the timeline, back to linear, meet the system for modern software development. Found Purpose built tool for planning and building products. There is more OpenAI news, of course, more tech news of all times. OpenAI's hardware division, says Mark Gurman, built around Johnny Ive's secretive startup, has ramped up the hiring of Apple engineers.
Speaker 2:The group has brought on about 40 new people in the last month or so with many of them coming from Apple's hardware group.
Speaker 1:I Yeah. I think during that Scholto interview, I'm disappointed. I don't think we're getting ads from Anthropic anytime soon, and I don't think we're gonna get a mobile device.
Speaker 2:Well, we are actually talking today to, to Quinn Slack, the CEO of AMP and Sourcegraph. AMP is a frontier coding agent, and and AMP is free. They introduced AMP free, which is ad supported and has a no cost mode. And so, you can now use their, their coding agent for free with ads. 40 people that does not seem like cause for concern for Apple.
Speaker 2:I mean, they're I I I can't imagine how big their hardware group is, but it has to be, you know, in the thousands, I would imagine.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's huge.
Speaker 2:It's a huge organization. So OpenAI is poaching left and right from Apple's hardware engineering group, hiring around 40 directors, managers, and engineers in the last month from nearly every relevant Apple department. Mark Gurman says, it's remarkable. So from what I've heard, this is Mark Gurman, Apple is none too pleased about OpenAI's poaching, and some consider it a problem. The hires include key directors, a fairly senior designation, as well as managers and engineers, and they hail from a wide range of areas, camera engineering, iPhone hardware, Mac hardware, silicon device testing, and reliability industrial design, manufacturing, audio smartwatches, vision pro development software.
Speaker 2:They got one from every single sampled every single every single division, I suppose.
Speaker 1:Gemini is estimating that Apple has between 15,020 hardware engineers in total.
Speaker 2:15,000? That seems like a lot. I don't know. In other words, OpenAI is picking up people from nearly every relevant department. It's remarkable, says Mark Gurman.
Speaker 2:Very interesting. I wonder, I wonder how the how the comp's structured, how everything will come together at on on those teams. I mean, there's there's a lot of people from Apple who going over to OpenAI. It's a greenfield project. It's probably really fun, probably really exciting, probably not the most mercenary scenario.
Speaker 2:But there's always that risk when you approach.
Speaker 1:If you're working at Apple and you're excited about AI and you've been there for Yeah. The last three years watching all this prop progress happen
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 1:At the application layer, model layer, and not being thrilled with the progress happening at the hardware layer. This is like a Yeah. Yeah. It's just a it's a it's a wide open opportunity to, like, be working right at that intersection of the of the models and the hardware. And There's a
Speaker 2:lot of AI engineers who have made moves because they don't wanna be a GPU poor company. And and it's weird because Apple's in this in this scenario where they're partnering with Gemini now. They're clearly going to survive. They're it's not a serious threat, at least not yet, maybe if this this device is incredible. But right now, Apple looks pretty strong.
Speaker 2:The the the the new iPhones are selling well. Like Yeah. Like, everything's everything's good. But what's like, from an AI perspective, it's gotta be one of the worst gigs because you were in this sort of, like, openly hostile environment to LLMs, to scaling, to building large GPU clusters. And then, yeah, they're sort of playing catch up now, but they're certainly not, calling up Oracle for, you know, a trillion dollars of compute.
Speaker 2:You go over to OpenAI, You're just gonna be immersed in a lot more
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Higher risk taking, higher risk on.
Speaker 1:I wonder yeah. Gabe is asking if, wouldn't that be bearish as the hardware group at Apple is responsible for the terrible Vision Pro. I do wonder I do wonder
Speaker 2:Depends on who
Speaker 1:It was it was a it was an incredible technological feat. Yeah. I just think they built the wrong
Speaker 2:I was just watching a thing about a guy who three d printed an adapter so you could use the strap from the Apple Vision Pro on the Quest three from Meta. And, like and that really speaks to the fact that, like, the Apple Vision Pro, although it was too heavy, it has this screen on the outside that I don't think anyone wants. Like, there were pieces about it that were clearly, like, the best. Like, the screen is just the best. No one's debating that.
Speaker 2:The band the the the knit band is very cool. It has this amazing device where you rotate it and it tightens up. There are a whole bunch of things that are amazing. It's just like as a package, it didn't deliver. But if you just want to if your if your job is just like, hey.
Speaker 2:We gotta put a screen on this, and it's gotta the highest resolution screen. Like, we'll go to the place that developed the highest resolution screens. Like, they did a good job. Well, Sam Altman replied to one of our cards we put up, on November 22. TBPN posted on this day, Sama was rehired at OpenAI.
Speaker 1:Got his badge back.
Speaker 2:And Sam Altman replied and said, cannot believe this is only two years ago. Subjectly subjectively feels like five. Yeah. What a turnaround to go from from defenestrated to back in the back in the seat in so much and have so much control over the organization that you're able to raise at massive valuations, strike broker all these deals, move the entire market, just a remarkable Yeah.
Speaker 1:Run. Put on put on, such a master class in in deal making that people are now sitting here being like, there's no way that this would be a $500,000,000,000 company if Sam wasn't in the driver's seat.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So first, let me tell you about fall, build and deploy AI video and image models trusted by millions to power generative media at scale. Danny Zhou, the who founded the reasoning team in Google Brain, now part of the Gemini team at Google DeepMind, he says game over. And carried no interest, friend of the show, quotes it and says, I genuinely think OpenAI equals equals Yahoo. He's not assigning the variable.
Speaker 2:He's equating it. I've I've I've migrated almost all my workflows code off their APIs now. Ironic that Google will probably do it twice, l m a o. And I don't know about this. It's it's the the pattern matching on the on the Yahoo example, we should have him on the show and actually
Speaker 1:Yeah. You were saying go all over the other place. Thing with the Yahoo example is is it wasn't like there wasn't like they the the company was valued at at a pretty tremendously for a longer period of time. It wasn't like this binary, like, one moment Exactly.
Speaker 2:Like, the the peak market cap, for Yahoo, 125,000,000,000 during 2000. That feels like, I I it's just hard to it's just hard to pattern match perfectly to this. But, I mean, it certainly would be poetic if that's the way it played out.
Speaker 1:It is funny. Carrie, it says, ironic that Google will probably do it twice. They actually created the transformer. They released the transformer paper and Chromium to inspire themselves to find harder
Speaker 2:This is giving
Speaker 1:sort of challenge the
Speaker 2:Giving everything a freeway.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Give out all the alpha
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 1:Yep. And just kind of like find their fire again.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There was a there was an interesting article on Medium that was, sort of burning up hacker news that I thought would be fun to go through. First, let me tell you about graphite. Dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.
Speaker 2:So, this person who no one has no one can really understand who this person is. They don't necessarily exist on the Internet fully, so there was, like, a question about that. This is, like, a very, like, you know, hacker news and turmoil segment. But Teja says, I reverse engineered 200 AI startups. A 146 are selling you repackaged ChatGPT and Claude with new UI.
Speaker 2:And so, basically, the thesis of this article is that this this fellow wrote a piece of of code that looks at the marketing copy and says, what are they claiming? And then looks at the calls that happen when you actually interact with their AI feature. So if there's a chatbot on this particular startup's website and you are near chatting with it and you look into the into the trace that's happening, in Chrome, is it going to the startup server, or is it going to OpenAI server, or is it going to Anthropic server? That's telling. And so and then there's also a little bit of API fingerprinting.
Speaker 2:Basically, OpenAI has a specific pattern of, of rate limiting, and it's and it's exponential. So if you're spamming the OpenAI API, it will, according to a unique pattern, tell you, hey. You've you've sent too many messages. Cool off for one minute. And then the next time you do it, cool off for two minutes.
Speaker 2:The next time, cool off for four minutes, then eight minutes, then sixteen. Right? And it gets exponentially longer, and you're on progressively more longer and longer time timeouts. But the shape of that curve and the specific timings are unique to OpenAI. And so if I'm a startup Interesting.
Speaker 2:And I have the exact same, like, back off and, time out curve, well, then it's probably just OpenAI under the hood. At least that's the that's the claim that's being made here. And so the finding in this article is that 73% had a significant gap between the claimed technology and the actual implementation. And so out of the 200 AI startups that this fellow or, analyzed, 54 companies, either had accurate technical claims. They said, hey.
Speaker 2:We're using, like like, we have a custom AI model that we trained, and they did, or they're transparent about their stack. They say, hey. This is a wrapper. Like, we're a wrapper company. And so, you know, our AI is powered by ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:We're partnered with OpenAI. We're partnered with Anthropic or whatever. Now a 146 companies, that's 73%, according to him, were sort of misrepresenting their technology. So either they said they had proprietary a p AI proprietary AI, and yet when he dug into it, it was OpenAI
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:API plus prompts, Tyler.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I I it's like kind of what what do people expect, like
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 3:Like, is if if you fine tune if you use the OpenAI API to fine tune the model Yes. Which you can do
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Is that proprietary? Like, no one else has that fine tune? Yes. Like, you're still calling the API. It's it's like, I I don't expect startups to train their own full language models.
Speaker 3:That's, like, pretty unrealistic and, like, doesn't really make sense. Yeah. So I I'm kind of confused. I I guess
Speaker 1:that I guess I guess the it's a very cool study, but this tracks with exactly like, I would guess that 73% of AI startups are just reskinning
Speaker 2:Yes. And so 19% of the overall companies, the 38 that were analyzed in this study, found that when that the startup said they had in house models, and it was actually fine tuned public models. And so the question is, like, whose house is it in? It's technically in OpenAI's house.
Speaker 3:Wait. So so fine tuned as a, like, punch in an open source model that's public? Does that count as a public model, an open source model?
Speaker 2:Let's assume yes. And then and then it last 8% would so they had a custom ML pipeline, and they were in fact using standard cloud services. That's even wishy washyer. I think that's totally fine because, like, you can totally have a custom ML pipeline that's wiring together OpenAI and Gemini and AWS and, you know, a bunch of
Speaker 3:other hubs. If I'm using a startup, I don't want them to train their own language model because I don't think they're gonna like, in 99.99% of the case, like, they're not gonna be able to do a better model than OpenEye, Anthropic, Gemini, Barack. Like, I want them to use the best model.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:And it's like, okay. You can fine tune that order.
Speaker 2:Yes. I agree. And that's totally fine. And so the author also agrees with you. He says, here's what really shocked me.
Speaker 2:I'm not even mad about it. Every time I saw the phrase our proprietary language model, I knew what I was gonna find, and I was right 34 out of 37 times. And this is where it gets weird because he says, here's the technical signature. And so the user submits the query. It posts to api slash generate.
Speaker 2:And then with wrapper logic, it posts to api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions. And I have no idea how he's seeing the back end. It makes no sense how he would be able to do this unless there was just, like, a massive security vulnerability. Because what I would assume is happening is that the users over here, the start up's website's here, and then the user goes to the start up's website, and then the start up's website on the back end talks to OpenAI and comes back. And maybe you could understand that, like, okay.
Speaker 2:The amount of Emdash is, like, there's a this is telltale signal, but that's not what he's doing. He's saying that he was able to just literally hit, like, the Chrome inspect developer tools, look at the look at the chain of calls and see that it was calling OpenAI from the front end, which is crazy because I didn't even know you could do that. It feels like if you were calling it directly from the front end, you would, like, potentially leak a key that would be able to put you on the hook for a bunch of bills. I would think you would wanna authenticate that on the, on the on the back end. And so the the he gives a bunch of examples of, like, rag, and, and then he's exposing some margins, which is actually very bullish for these companies because he breaks down some of these and says that, you know, a g p t four API is, 3¢ per thousand input token, 6¢ per thousand output token.
Speaker 2:So the cost per query for this hypothetical startup was was 3¢, and they charged $3 or $300 per month for 200 queries. And so the wrapper economy, this is, seventy five seventy five times direct cost. That's extremely bullish for the for the head company. He found another one that was maybe a thousand x, API costs, that's doing some pine cone embedding. And, and he also, says, we find this is pattern number three, the quote.
Speaker 2:We fine tuned our own model reality check. Fine tuning sounds impressive, and it can be. But here's what I found. 45%, it was OpenAI's fine tuning API, which that sounds right. Right?
Speaker 2:It's a little it's a little bit of a step to be like, we fine tuned our own model. It's like, no. You fine tuned OpenAI's model, and then you got your own model from the from that result. It's a little bit Yeah.
Speaker 3:You're still fine tuning it. I I don't think there's that big a difference between fine tuning
Speaker 2:Are you fine tuning it, or is OpenAI fine tuning it?
Speaker 3:There's a fine tuning API which you use to and then a
Speaker 2:new But who's doing the fine tuning? You or OpenAI?
Speaker 3:Well, what do you like, you're not interfacing directly with the GPU.
Speaker 2:It's like I went to the store, and I bought a sandwich. Who made the sandwich?
Speaker 1:Well, told them what the used turkey. I told them
Speaker 2:to put lettuce Put lettuce.
Speaker 1:Extra pickle
Speaker 2:Who made the turkey?
Speaker 3:It's more like you go to the store and you bring a sandwich to the office. Yeah. It's like, where did the sandwich come from? It came from the store, but, like, you brought the sandwich. It came from you.
Speaker 2:You brought the sandwich. Yeah. This is better. I think I think you're right. Anyway, 22% of the time, it was a hugging face model with Alora.
Speaker 2:18% of the time was Anthropic Claude with a prompt library. 8% of the time is literally just GPT four with system prompts, and 7%, they actually change change chain train something from scratch. And all of these are are are odd, and there's a lot of debate over how this would actually happen because, he's basically saying just open dev tools, go to the network tab, interact with the AI feature. If you see api. Openai, api.anthropic, or api.cohere.ai, you're looking at a wrapper.
Speaker 2:They might have middleware, but the AI isn't theirs. And so, it just opens up this debate about, you know, what is the value of the wrapper. I mean, certainly, if you can resell something for a 100 x because you have some sort of clever Workflow. Prompt or workflow, more power to you.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's not
Speaker 1:exact it's not exactly, like, bearish on the companies
Speaker 2:But, the debate that was surrounding was, more around, so so this this author claims that after posting this, seven founders reached out privately. Some were defensive. Some were grateful. They asked for help transitioning their marketing from proprietary AI to built with the best in class APIs because some of these founders did did, I guess, feel like using proprietary AI as a marketing tagline was disingenuous. And then someone else, I think I saw something that was one VC reached out and said, like, I'd like you to audit my portfolio because I have been told that I was investing in companies that were training their own AI, and I made the investment on that assumption.
Speaker 2:And if I'm being lied to, then that's potentially that's potentially securities fraud. And so, there is a there is a question about if you go I mean, I've I've seen pitches for companies that where they've said, like, proudly, like, you you should invest in this because we're not training our own model. It would actually be a mistake. And you and there's another company that's a competitor to us that is training their own model, and you don't wanna invest in them. You wanna invest in us because we're
Speaker 1:gonna burn your dollars
Speaker 2:better in every much better economics. Yeah. And so all of it just the only thing that matters is, like, being upfront with the investor for sure. Yeah. And then to some degree, you do need to be upfront with the with the with the customer because if the customer there is a marketing value to, oh, if you work with us, you're working with these, you know, genius AI scientists who are gonna build their own models.
Speaker 2:And if it's just repackaged ChatGPT, that might not be what you wanna pay for because you at that point, you might just say, hey. Like, actually, if I if I can just get this directly from OpenAI, I'll just go buy it from them. Anyway
Speaker 1:Well, thoughts and prayers to friend of the show, John Palmer. He says he just found out my wife is leaving me. She said I'm not legible to Capital.
Speaker 2:Love it. The legible to capital meme is fantastic.
Speaker 1:I I I do think that, Will, he made a new meme.
Speaker 2:Fantastic coinage. I love it.
Speaker 1:One of best. We'll be using we'll be using it.
Speaker 2:Well, let me tell you about Fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. It's AI that handles your customer support. Timeline is in turmoil over Nucleus. Former guest on the show two or three times, Kian, has founded Nucleus for IVF, and he put up a Subway campaign that says IQ is 50% genetic. Height is 80% genetic.
Speaker 2:I completely disagree with that one. It's entirely skill based for me. Yep. I had the genes did not matter. I had to grind for this view.
Speaker 2:Grind my growth plates, I suppose. Have your best baby is what it says. And it says IVF done right in the subway, all over New York City. We there's a ton of debate going on.
Speaker 1:And to be clear strange. Be clear, I think accurate. I think it was intentionally trying to make some percentage of the population angry Yes. To drive enough energy and attention. So this was yeah.
Speaker 1:I would call it I would call it rage bait.
Speaker 2:I would call it so I would call it rage bait marketing, not necessarily rage bait product level. But IVF as a category is a controversial category, and so, it's much easier to wrap it in a campaign that will go viral for, upsetting reasons. For you can upset people, and you can get a lot of attention from that. This is an example from Cath, Coravec. She says, so Eugenix is profitable now.
Speaker 2:And so, being able to wrap something that is just a, you know, a scientific process that's been worked on for a long time.
Speaker 1:Seems to be somewhat friend.com inspired Yep. Keon's original post. He says, Nucleus Genomics announces the largest genetic optimization campaign ever, which is which is just funny because, you know, a a friend was saying, this is the largest out of home campaign ever. And now Kian is saying, this is the largest genetic optimization campaign ever. So narrowing it down.
Speaker 1:But full station blitz of Broadway. Yep. A thousand plus street ads across New York City, a thousand plus subway car ads, dozens of urban panels throughout Soho. Mhmm. And apparently, they're not actually they're not able to offer the service in New York.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting. In here.
Speaker 2:I think So it's really just, an image of a controversial phrase on a New York subway is more likely to go viral. So you do it there because it looks like you're on the global stage, and then you pull in
Speaker 1:a high density of people that have a a large following.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Following. Yeah. And so it it's just the way to start a viral viral trend and own the moment. It's the reason why, you know, so many TikTokers are in Manhattan now doing stuff like man on the street stuff.
Speaker 2:It just like it's it's it it it has a more, like, aura almost. Well, doctor Shelby liked the, the mindshare grabbing that Nucleus did. Says every biotech founder should be seeing this and understanding how to get one tenth the mindshare of Nucleus. I have a playbook for you below. A lot of people are like, I love the playbook.
Speaker 2:I don't love this example because, the company is getting dragged. I don't know if it's good or bad with the rage bait thing. I think usually it's a, it's a negative thing. Usually, it's hard to come back from. Occasionally, it can be done in a way that's, you know, slightly enraging, but people are enough people are in on the joke that, they appreciate what's happening, and they appreciate that it that it breaks through.
Speaker 2:Or it's enraging to someone who's not the core audience, not the actual customer, and so it's okay. But it's a big, it's a big debate because Sichuan Mala posted a long essay all about the claims made by Nucleus. Kian says everything levied unto Nucleus by Sichuan Mala is false, worse than false. It appears to be architected by a competitor that has repeatedly published misstatements and inaccuracies. Szechuan has compromised, but it gets worse.
Speaker 1:To to be clear, no evidence has been provided that that it was being levied by a competitor. Yes. That's purely an allegation that has no no there's no proof.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. Sometimes sometimes there's DMs that leak and and there's evidence and or someone comes forward and and says, like, yeah.
Speaker 2:I was actually paid to to post that. But, so he says, I've been for I've been informed that Cremio, I don't know how to pronounce that last thing. Cremio, who's been on the show also, he he claims he's a race scientist in chief, had been paid off by the competitor to promote this nonsense against Nucleus. For the independent scientists repeating
Speaker 1:this Denied. Article
Speaker 2:Permute commute denied that as well. I would encourage you to do more diligence on who you're aligning yourself with. Our scientific team will issue a point by point response, which I believe they did. Unfortunately, though, this isn't about science. It's about it's a concentrated attempt to cancel Nucleus on the backs of our successful campaign and build, in efforts to build and advance the industry, which benefits the very people attacking us.
Speaker 2:The mob are trying to cancel Nucleus. Keep tweeting. Stay mad. We'll keep building and serving patients. PS.
Speaker 2:We won the injunction. Link below. So they were sued by their competitor.
Speaker 1:But but so they won the injunction. That's they didn't
Speaker 2:mean that doesn't mean they
Speaker 1:won the case at all.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's a classic thing if you're getting sued. It'd be like, the case was dismissed. And it's like one of five cases against you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But in this case, they they won they won a preliminary injunction Yeah. Which means that the case is just still progressing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And they still have to fight it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's not it's it a lawyer would would file a preliminary injunction because they believe they had such a slam dunk case that they can prevent a lot of a lot of, like, basically going a lot further and spending more money in the case. And so a judge might say, hey, this is actually it's not clear enough for me to make a decision right now. We're still gonna proceed with the case and give both sides an opportunity to Yep. Continue to make to make their case. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then there was a little bit of, like, a twist in the fact that Roy Lee, the founder of Cluely apparently, had worked at nucleus nucleus genomics. Very great. And and, Cremieux post a screenshot of of Roy Lee back in February 2025. So literally just, like, months before he started, clearly, very grateful to Kian and the Nucleus Genomic teams for taking a chance on me the summer before Columbia and introducing me to the startup world. If I've ever seen a trillion dollar company in team, it's Nucleus.
Speaker 2:And Cremieux says he's obviously lying to cover up after getting caught doing fraud. An additional piece of background information people should know is that this fraud also employed the guy behind Clulee, the cheating company. And so Cremieux is being very, very hardcore in his assessment. Just actually calling Keanu a fraud straight up is, is much more aggressive than than just saying, like, you know, some of the some of their claims are maybe not legitimate. It's unclear.
Speaker 2:Like, you know, fraud is technically a a crime that you need to be convicted of in the court before you are a fraud. But it's certainly, it's certainly he's putting his credibility on the line because if if if Keon comes out and says, like, yeah. I'm actually not a fraud. I did it. I prove it wrong.
Speaker 1:I mean, the the main thing here the main thing here is is it appears that the customer reviews
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Are potentially fictitious.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And if you're selling a service that allows people to pick their baby
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And you're giving and you're showing reviews from happy customers
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:That may or may not be real people at all Yeah. Like that just feels deeply wrong. Yeah. So I think that one of the first things that they could have done, I don't believe they have, is just say like, no, our reviews are real. We used AI imagery because the the people, the real people, didn't didn't want their identity online tied to this service.
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 4:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. For privacy reasons. Yep. But I haven't seen anything I haven't seen anything like this. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:This guy Adi had a had a good point. He said one of the core tensions in this industry is the fact that most companies recognize they're working on an incredibly sensitive topic. They know the general population will need to be slowly and tactfully acclimated to the idea of advanced family planning. Nucleus is perceived as polluting the commons with their deliberately inflammatory marketing. Their virality comes at the cost of increased skepticism for the whole industry.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:Yeah. A lot of a lot of folks were not very happy about that. Kian has replied. And if if you wanna dig into the actual, scientific claims on either side, there are long posts where you can you can go through there. But, obviously, AI generated blog posts are alleged, plagiarism in the Nucleus Origin white paper, errors in there, blatant falsification, terms of service are contradictory.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They also apparently, apparently, they hired two people that had
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:A non competes for 18 months. Those people just immediately started on working on Nucleus. Nucleus claimed that they weren't competitive so that the non compete didn't apply. Yeah. But it if you look at the companies and what they offer, it seems very clear that that they are competing.
Speaker 1:So anyways, very messy very messy messy story. Yeah. But and yeah. I don't I don't know. Will O'Brien says, David, I'm so sorry now, man, but you guys are doing an absolutely terrible job at responding to this blog post and seem to be missing the point here.
Speaker 1:First of all, it is a huge claim to say that every claim by Sichuan Mala is false with absolutely zero evidence or explanation. Show receipts. Second of all, you make the the claim that the person is paid off by competitors of yours, again, with zero evidence. Third, that you make the claim that Cremio is paid off by your competitor. This is bogus and not true, but most importantly, you guys have made zero points of substance here rather than just insinuating you guys are leaping ahead and others are jealous.
Speaker 1:You are selling a scientific product and someone has made a scientific critique in good faith waiting to be corrected and explicitly saying they will make changes if they are proved wrong. And the best you guys can do is accuse them of being paid off and reply with memes. Not a great look.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Look, I wanna see startups with a bold vision succeed, but how you communicate with the broader world is so important, especially with a product like yours and how you guys are carrying on in this honestly pretty lackluster. So Yeah. Again, I don't yeah. At at this point, Keon Keon's been on the show. He's very funny, high energy.
Speaker 1:We've had some enjoyable conversations. But if I'm a potential customer of Nucleus at this point and I see just these series of exchanges
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm certainly gonna wait and and see see see how things evolve versus signing up to use this service to
Speaker 2:It's just so different Cluelly. It's so different than Cluelly because if I use Cluelly and I'm like, oh, like, the notes that were taken in that meeting weren't that good. Or, like, if you go into Cluelly being like, I'm going to cheat on this test. And then it's like, oh, it didn't work. Like, their engineers aren't good enough to really help you cheat on that test.
Speaker 2:You're like, okay. Well, you know, I probably shouldn't have been cheating on that test. It's like the lowest stakes thing possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But when you're when you're
Speaker 2:But this is, like, literally deciding who your
Speaker 1:your child.
Speaker 2:Your offspring will be. It's the highest
Speaker 1:stakes that the quality of the product could very well,
Speaker 2:like, contribute to generations. Literally.
Speaker 1:Literally generations. That's exactly what is. The child's life. Yes. The the life of the child's
Speaker 2:Child's child. Yes. It is extremely
Speaker 1:child's child's child's They could alter
Speaker 2:the course of history. I mean, it kind of could. It's it's sort of crazy. So, yeah, I mean, it's hard because, the like, viral marketing does work. Like, you know, moving fast and breaking things does work in certain contexts, but in the bio
Speaker 1:In bloodline optimization.
Speaker 2:It's really, really high stakes. And so it so you gotta be extra, extra careful. Extra careful for sure. Well, let me tell you about ProFound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Will Brown has a funny post here. He's just set just got a recruiting email from a company explicitly mentioning that they have a seventy fifth percentile comp. That's so funny to me. He says, we're assembling a b plus team and have raised an okay ish amount of money from pretty good investors.
Speaker 1:It's so good. Somebody should actually actually run this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I love Prime Intellect. There is such a fun crew over there. We gotta have them back on the show soon. I think that they're, I won't leak anything, but I think there'll be some news soon, hopefully.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm very excited for them. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We got to hang with Vincent
Speaker 2:Yeah. Saturday. Was fun. So OpenAI has an announcement. They're introducing shopping research, a new experience in ChadGPT that does the research to help you find the right products.
Speaker 2:They clearly were listening to me on the show just a few days ago when I was saying I would be using this for, the holiday shopping period. Very exciting. I wonder how it will actually play out. You, of course, had that problem with cars and bids. ChatGPT was not identifying the fact that that GT three RS had been sold two years ago.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Thankfully, we have Doug Gemiro here in the Restream waiting room about to join the show. We can talk about cars and bids. We can talk about cars. We can talk about artificial intelligence. Welcome.
Speaker 2:To the show.
Speaker 6:How are
Speaker 1:you doing?
Speaker 6:I'm good. Thank you for having me, John.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. So great
Speaker 1:to have you on. We are a technology and business show, but we have your name has come up probably a 100 times independently just when we're talking about 100%. Cars. So, it's so so great to have you on the show. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Thank you.
Speaker 1:We're huge fans.
Speaker 6:Thank you. Thank you. I'm I'm thrilled to be here. I'm I really am.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much. I'd love to know I mean, we were just talking about this, OpenAI, shopping research in ChatGPT. It feels like there's really no substitute for a a watching a Doug DeMiro video to actually understand the quirks and the features of the car that you're considering purchasing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I had been I had been critiquing it. The context is like I was trying to use ChatGPT to find a specific car.
Speaker 2:A GT three RS.
Speaker 1:A GT three RS. And it, fully missed every car for sale on the Internet. There are many of them. And it found one that had sold on Cars and Bids, like, two years ago. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I was like, thank thank you. Yeah. Like, thanks for nothing. But, good job showing up showing up in the results.
Speaker 2:Are you getting any leverage out of AI tools at all for what you're doing these days? Well, that's
Speaker 6:an interesting question. The the business the the guys who are on the business side probably are using AI a little bit more than I realized. Yeah. From from a content perspective, not really. Not really.
Speaker 6:I I just don't find I don't find for for myself, at least, it's quite ready yet to do kind of the stuff that I needed to do. Like, finding the little quirks of the cars, it it just doesn't have the the knowledge quite yet Yeah. There. And and like you said, nothing quite replaces, like, an in person guy. I still think people wanna at least for now.
Speaker 2:For sure. There there's also the question of, like, where should the AI live? Because there's this there's this war of, like, do I need a do I need an AI chatbot on carsandbids.com, or do I need to be able to take a URL from carsandbids.com, drop it into a chatbot, and then chat with the page and, you know, compile some reviews and interact with it that way. Or will it be at the browser level, or will it be at the iOS level? And I can just ask Siri.
Speaker 2:And all of this is, like, kind of being fought out across all the different tiers of the stack right now. But on the cars and business topic, like, what what is the actual incremental gain right now? Like, what what is it international expansion expansion, new new features, just more inventory? Like, what what is on your, like, list of wins from this year, and then what are you excited for, going into next year of, like, things that you might check off the list?
Speaker 6:The the biggest thing we did over the last twelve months, I would say the biggest thing we did is, we added we finally added vintage cars to Cars and Bids. Yeah. And so it we used to be just eighties and up cars, and I was kinda sold on that. Like, I I just wanted to do eighties and up cars, what I'm primarily interested in. Yeah.
Speaker 6:But our audience was really kinda pushy about it. Some of our dealers sell with us. They're like, why can't I sell everything here? This is stupid. And so we changed it.
Speaker 6:We added eighties and up. But, also, we've just done a great job of, like, getting getting everything streamlined. Our goal is to, like, get cars listed, get them live, get them going. Yeah. I think of all of the auction or car selling platforms, ours is probably the most technologically easy, I would say, both to navigate and to sell and to buy, and I think it's sort of the the youngest focused.
Speaker 6:And so we really wanted to make sure that our processes reflected that, and I think they really do know.
Speaker 2:Do you have a, like, a grail car in the, in the vintage category that I I know I know you you don't like the vintage cars, but is there one that would get you to me if I had to pick one, like, that's the one you'd wanna sell on the on the on the site or maybe even potentially own yourself.
Speaker 6:You know, it's funny. I'm myself, I'm not a big vintage car guy, but I do own a Countach, a Lamborghini Countach, which is
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 6:It's a mine is a 1983 model. I don't I mean, it's 42 or 43 years old. Don't know if
Speaker 2:people can see
Speaker 6:that vintage. To me, it's if if when I drive it, it certainly feels vintage. It certainly smells vintage. But I'm I'm I'm a big I'm a big old Lambo guy, and so having those kinds of cars, old Ferraris, old Italian in general, I think would be cool to have on the site. Yeah.
Speaker 6:But, obviously, still our biggest focus is sort of on the modern day stuff, and and I think
Speaker 3:we do really well with them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So so many things I wanna talk about. I guess, one question that maybe we could kick it off with is, do you think the increased attention around f one could actually impossibly impact car culture in America, or or is it kind of the opposite? Like, car culture in America has always been so big. People are like, oh, at this f one thing, may maybe I should pay more attention to that.
Speaker 6:That is a really good question. You're a clearly, you're a host of a of a podcast where you that is a really good I I've never thought about that, but I think that's exactly right. There's a lot of people who are getting into cars for the very first time because of f one. I have friends. I'm on Instagram.
Speaker 6:I have friends who are at the Vegas Race posting pictures who I know are not into cars, but, like, they're they're into f one. And, if you wash enough cars drive faster on the racetrack, you're gonna start thinking to yourself.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We were so we were at we were in Vegas for the weekend, and the entire race, f one is like a terrible spectator sport in my opinion. It's just like, oh, they went by. Oh, they went by. Like, I if you want to actually I mean, it's fun to kind of, like, maybe sit with the door open to the paddock and watch the TV and at least you can hear them go by.
Speaker 1:But at the entire race, I'm just like, I just wish I was on the track.
Speaker 2:I wish I would I wanna be on the track.
Speaker 1:There. So I mostly I think I think what one thing that might happen is more people get into actually tracking and racing cars
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because they're watching f one, and they're like, actually, I actually wanna experience this myself.
Speaker 6:The the other cool thing about f one, there is a culture component to it. Like, like, the watching the drivers and the teams and cheering for your favorite engine or team or your constructor or whatever, and that probably will get people into cars too. Right? Like, the just beyond just sitting there and, yes, watching the cars go by in one corner when they have 12 other ones that you don't get to see anything is not really the most amazing experience. But, like, going for the weekend and, like, seeing the you know, seeing a driver in the paddock or seeing, you know, the race team or whatever definitely will expand interest.
Speaker 6:And, yes, you see the cars on the track. You're thinking, hey.
Speaker 2:I can
Speaker 6:do this, man.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. How how do you think about track days, tracking track only cars, tracking your cars? I I had the experience. We we did a track day a couple weeks ago, and I was like, of the car budget, I wanna spend, like, 99% on track stuff and very little on, like, collector cars or fun dailies or any of that.
Speaker 2:I want it all on the track because it was such a crazy experience. I don't know if that's just, like, the honeymoon period, but I know you've always been like, ah, I the track is not something that I really collect for. It's not my goal. Want the cool dailies. I want the cool experience of the weekenders.
Speaker 2:But do you think that'll ever shift for you? How have you processed it?
Speaker 6:No. I don't think it'll ever shift for me. I think that the the the realities of racetrack track driving, it's so much fun. Right? It is an unbelievable experience.
Speaker 6:About a year and a half ago, my friends and I rented out Chuckwalla, just just five of us, and and spent the whole day just conning around, which is a ton of fun. However, you know, it's it's a lot of work. Like, we had to run a trailer to get us out there. Like, you run an ambulance for the day. It's like in a a day.
Speaker 6:It's like a real day. And after you finish it, you don't really wanna do it again. Like, I feel like I'm hot. I'm tired. You've taken big business with your vehicles, and so you're like, okay.
Speaker 6:We we success survived that. I I just feel like I enjoy it more on
Speaker 7:the road
Speaker 6:because it's just so much more accessible. Like, my friends and I, several times a year, go up to the mountains, you know, an hour east of where I live here in San Diego and just, you know, pawn around and have fun up there. Or I take I have an off roader. We on the East Coast where I live in the summer, we go off roading every day. That's a lot of fun.
Speaker 6:It's it's so much more accessible than, like, than racetrack driving, you know, which and it's racetrack driving is so costly. I mean, you're you're kinda hitting it on the if you wanna spend your fun car budget on racetrack use, you could really spend your car.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's true. Is is a cannonball on the bucket list ever?
Speaker 6:It was.
Speaker 2:For a long
Speaker 6:you know, I drive I drive cross country every summer twice twice a year.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And so it's impossible to drive cross country as a car enthusiast and not
Speaker 2:think about It's
Speaker 6:in your mind. It just has to be in your mind. Yeah. But I have kids now, and, like, I got some money. I I got stuff to lose.
Speaker 6:You know? I should've done it when I was 23, and and it didn't matter. And I just could've gone, you know, bombed cross country. I know you guys had Alex Roy, and and and I respect what he's done and how and then just that that whole thing. In fact, here's an interesting story.
Speaker 6:The other day, I drove to the hotel in LA where that finishes, the Porfino Hotel in Don D'Aquit. Yeah. And I pull up there, and I decided to get a selfie next to the sign so I could send it to Ed Bullion, Cannonball Ed Bullion. Yeah. And I'm taking a picture of the sign with me, and a guy walks up and says, did you just finish?
Speaker 2:And I'm like
Speaker 6:I'm like, no. And he's like, I did.
Speaker 1:I know. You know what?
Speaker 2:There was somebody that finished
Speaker 6:comes out of the hotel and then also says the same that he had finished the day before. And I went there must tell you, it happened constantly. Probably every week, there's somebody every few days, someone jumps up there.
Speaker 2:Crazy. It is crazy that the cops don't just hang out at the Porto Vino Hotel and just arrest everyone that comes in. It feels like if at least you could give, like, a $100 ticket and then just be racking them up if you're, you know, local municipality that
Speaker 1:It should be like a ticket of honor.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I got a ticket. Got a
Speaker 1:ticket at Bino Hotel.
Speaker 2:You know? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Sure. There's a giant plaque there that says, like, the end of the cannonball. I'm like, what
Speaker 2:is Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Otherwise, a fairly rational hotel. I'm like, what is going on here?
Speaker 2:Yeah. What about some of those other rallies, the gumball? Have you ever thought about doing those or done It's
Speaker 6:not my not my people.
Speaker 2:Not my people. It's it's
Speaker 6:a that's a bunch of, like, you know, rich guys who wanna put big decals on the cars and get drunk and go to strip clubs between the races.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 6:I'm good on that.
Speaker 1:I'm I'm into that world.
Speaker 2:You had me at decals. I think livery is really hilarious when done properly.
Speaker 1:John is John is is been it's been his dream to get full livery livery on his daily of all of our partners.
Speaker 2:But it's funny because we're a podcast and we have as many advertisers as, like, an f one team. And so there's a little bit of, like, a funny riff on that. Right. But if you're doing it super serious, I can see it being a little over the
Speaker 6:top. Is it true that you have an e four fifty all terrain like me?
Speaker 2:I I did. I sold it, and I got a Blackwing.
Speaker 6:Oh, you sold it to get wow.
Speaker 2:That's Yeah. To get the Blackwing.
Speaker 6:My wife has is driving our e four fifty wagon, and I am so jealous of her. And Yep. When we sell it, I think we're gonna get a Sienna. So we're gonna probably go on the slightly slightly opposite direction of
Speaker 2:the black. So I I absolutely love the e four fifty all terrain, but I realized they jumped the gun because I got a 20 I think I got, like, the exact same one you got, 2023, 2024, something like that. And it has the seats in the back that look backwards. And I was like, this is amazing. I'm also a dad.
Speaker 2:I have a four and a half year old, and I have twin one year olds now. And I was like, I'm good. This is gonna be amazing. The twin little boys are gonna be in the And then I look up the rules, it's like, they can't be back there until they're, like, 12. And so it's like, I'm not gonna be driving, like, this vintage e four fifty.
Speaker 2:That's what I mean. It's gonna be it's gonna be, like, completely broken down by the time get that.
Speaker 4:I can
Speaker 2:just buy a new one then.
Speaker 1:I so I once I I once watched your video, here's why the Mercedes mattress is the worst minivan ever made. Then Never. You know what
Speaker 2:I did? He bought one.
Speaker 3:I was like, it can't be that bad. It can't be that bad.
Speaker 2:He bought one.
Speaker 1:I I bought it because I have I have two kids. I was like, surf van. I live in Malibu. I was like, surf van, but you can just pile them in. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it was just it was even worse than than you you kinda went a little maybe easy on them. There's so many little quirks and features of that van that are just so bad. It's like how do we make a big bonk and then make it impossible to to the lines?
Speaker 3:Did did the video not have any have any ability to convince you that I
Speaker 1:like I like I purely I purely like the I like the aesthetic of that of it of it as a minivan over some of the other minivans. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I was like It definitely looks the best. Yeah. It's like a slab sided, like, looks like an old surf van like that people used to have, and it's a Mercedes. It's just it clearly looks the best. Yeah.
Speaker 6:But it is not the best.
Speaker 1:Wanted to John and I listened. We don't have time to listen to a lot of podcasts because we're constantly podcasting Yeah. Twenty hours a week ourselves, but we do enjoy
Speaker 2:This car pod is a daily Yeah. Weekly list.
Speaker 1:We do. Yeah. We both we both love your
Speaker 2:It's fantastic.
Speaker 1:Your show.
Speaker 2:And and correct me if I'm wrong. It is actually the biggest automotive pod in the world Yeah. Right now?
Speaker 6:Somehow, we became the biggest. Without I mean, I don't wanna
Speaker 2:say without trying. Yeah. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:Without trying. Without trying. You can say it. It was effortless. We
Speaker 6:didn't set out to be okay. Here's what happened. I I was I took a huge investment in the company. Yeah. And so I I ended up with a lot of money.
Speaker 6:And and and so I
Speaker 3:was just like, you know what?
Speaker 6:We're gonna we we came up the idea to a pod. Yeah. And when you're when you have no when you have nobody that you feel like you have to answer to, you can be really free with the way that you speak. And I think that resonates with people on that podcast. Totally.
Speaker 6:Like, we insult people, which other people aren't really willing to do as much, like insult car companies or cars, I think people really appreciate hearing that truth. And I truly don't care if the auto rakers wanna blackball me. Like, it doesn't matter to me anymore.
Speaker 1:So Yeah.
Speaker 6:It's worth that.
Speaker 3:It's also a different
Speaker 1:thing if somebody, like, is going out of their way to get you this vehicle that hasn't been released yet, and they're and it it's hard, like, to really and then and then you just know when you're recording it, like, they're gonna they're gonna see this. I wonder You can't it's hard to speak. You gotta give an accurate review, but it's hard to, like, go as hard as you can when you're with your boys on a podcast.
Speaker 2:Do do do you think that there's a little bit of of a benefit of, people don't buy cars on the day that they're released? Like, you were a movie reviewer and you were like, okay. I'm banned from all the theaters. I gotta wait for somebody to give me the DVD. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, it wouldn't be as good. But, like, if you have to wait a couple months to review a new Lamborghini, it's like the the the purchase cycle is gonna be a while. And, also, those have entertainment value beyond just directly purchasing.
Speaker 6:That's exactly right. That that those are those are the two big points to hit. Number one, even if I'm not up on release day with the car because the automaker didn't invite me to the press launch, doesn't really matter. I can go get it from a dealer when it comes to dealers sixty days later, and the video is gonna be evergreen for five years, whole cycle of car.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 6:And also yeah. I mean, people are gonna watch the video beyond just purchasers, so it doesn't even really matter. And I think that's one of the secrets of YouTube. Everybody's so obsessed with being, like, first to do these car launches, and it it is beneficial. It does help.
Speaker 6:Yeah. But I I guess when your channel has gotten to the size of mine, I I don't think it's quite as import like, I'm not sitting here thinking, how do I grow 50% this year? Yeah. I'm just how do I retain the audience I have? How do I still
Speaker 4:make them happy?
Speaker 6:And being there till one is not necessarily essential.
Speaker 2:Have you, maybe you've done this, but, reviewing, self driving technology specifically. I I was always interested in the I I have a Hyundai Palisade as well with a, with a comma self driving aftermarket kit in there, and it's fantastic. Really? And it I I I honestly think it's it's remarkable. I've met the founder, and, and I've used it.
Speaker 2:I trust it with my kids and stuff. I I think it's a fantastic product. Genuinely, like, one of the greatest modern consumer products in the sense that, like, for a couple thousand bucks, you get something that does something. It's it's really, really good. But but I was always interested, like, that aftermarket.
Speaker 2:It's kind of the only aftermarket thing that you would even need to review, but I was wondering if you've ever looked into, like,
Speaker 3:that genre.
Speaker 6:No. I I never I had no idea that that one was that good. I've heard about it before, but I had never heard like, I mean, people don't most people, I think, are nervous about it. If you're in the tent
Speaker 2:space, have
Speaker 6:to go with it.
Speaker 3:But
Speaker 6:Yeah. But no. I I review the ones that come in the cars. But, however, even it has become so ubiquitous now that it's almost like reviewing regular cruise control. It's almost not even worth talking about it because they've all gotten to be I mean, a RAV four has it standard.
Speaker 6:You know? Like, it's it's no longer even that interesting anymore. There are obviously some differences between the systems, and some are better than others. I'm obsessed with the system in my Toyota for various reasons. Some some people prefer I mean, I don't like the ones that make you look forward because in my view, that's kinda what I'm trying to solve for.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:But but I understand that manufacturers prefer you looking at the road. Yeah. It's a it's an opinion between me and them right now.
Speaker 2:Well, now now it's like a whole race where every time I talk to somebody who owns a Tesla, they're like, well, I have this hat and this pair of sunglasses. And if I wear the hat and the sunglasses, I can use my phone the whole time. And I'm like, okay. Like, you're kinda do with the comma, it's open source technology. So they they have a camera that looks at your face.
Speaker 2:And if you look away, it'll say it'll beep at you. And then if you look down for too long, it'll dis it'll it'll, like, disengage. So it's driver monitoring. Got it. But it's open source.
Speaker 2:So if you know how to program, you can technically just go in there and comment out that line of code, and it will never check on you ever again. And it's like, I don't know where the liability stands. The company doesn't recommend it, but the whole thing is kinda third party, so it's very questionable. I would definitely leave it on. I would recommend everyone leave it on because I think the driver monitoring is good for safety.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 1:Saw some news maybe a week or so ago that Tesla is gonna be integrating CarPlay. Is that it was that, like, a surprise to you? Did you predict that years ago?
Speaker 6:I definitely didn't predict it. However, obviously, the Tesla owners, despite as rabid and obsessive as they are, there's this undercurrent of of disdain for the fact that they don't have CarPlay. Mhmm. And, also, it's gotten a lot harder to sell an EV in the last month, but also in the last six months and in the last year in general. And so that's an advantage.
Speaker 6:You're gonna want it to have every advantage you can. You know? Like and so I it makes it it completely makes sense to me that Tesla's pursuing this, and it'll now be on Rivian. And, of course, General Motors who has bailed on CarPlay, first in their EVs and now apparently generally. It'll be on them to see if we if they end up going back.
Speaker 6:I'm not as obsessed with CarPlay as everybody else. I find some of these automaker systems to be shockingly good. Mhmm. Most people don't even pry them anymore because they're so CarPlay is such a focus. And and CarPlay is great, but I'm surprised Tesla made it such a big thing.
Speaker 6:Their their system is so excellent. It's just like, I would just put up with that, but people are just so used to CarPlay that it's important.
Speaker 2:It is such a different competitive landscape if you have CarPlay and the native and then also NACS and and and the charging system is now it's like, well, then you have the the self driving is the main point of differentiation maybe. That's about it.
Speaker 6:But even then, I don't find Tesla self driving to be, like, considerably better. Now that I've been with other cars, every basically, everybody is caught up. Yeah. I don't I I agree. I start to wonder what the differentiation point is.
Speaker 6:And then you also have this negative point of differentiation for a lot of EV buyers, which is Elon in the political space.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Not that I'm saying that everybody but, certainly, there are people who have that opinion. Like, okay. That's interesting. And so having CarPlay back in is definitely, like, a step in the direction of we need to sell some damn cars.
Speaker 1:I Yeah. If you if you're running Tesla today, what would you do from a what would you do from, like, a product offering standpoint?
Speaker 6:Man, I don't know. That that that's an interesting question. I all their products are really old. Mhmm. They have Elon is is both their greatest asset and their greatest liability.
Speaker 6:I would probably do my best to come out with Roadster to try to get some attention on the brand and and get some sort of halo car effect like, wow. This is cool again. Get
Speaker 1:some Do you have a do you have a prediction
Speaker 2:for the for the so Elon was on Joe Rogan and said that he was alluding to that the demo will be shocking, and it will be something where the car basically lifts off the ground. He was saying, like he was kind of alluding to it being a flying car, but I don't think anyone expects it to be like a full quad rotor, like, you know, full VTOL vehicle, but it's gonna have a it's gonna have a trick. It's gonna have a quirk. And I'm wondering if you have any predictions for what that might be. Like, we were talking about the Yongwang jumping and stuff.
Speaker 6:Right. It's interesting because at at this point, it needs to have a quirk, doesn't it? Because when it was announced six years it's been six years almost exactly. Right? It was nineteen LA Auto Show.
Speaker 6:It wasn't gonna be this huge thing, zero to 60 in 01/2009, this amazing electric supercar. Well, since then, there are 10 other electric supercars have come out, all of which do zero to 60 in 1.9. Yeah. And the Yang Wang is jumping. Yeah.
Speaker 6:So, like Jumping.
Speaker 2:You you
Speaker 6:better show up with something at this point because you are so far behind everybody else in terms of what they've all got going. Yeah. And you basically need to have some sort of interesting hook now Yeah. In order to differentiate yourself from these other products, which, by the way, don't I know if you guys have been paying attention, but all the other electric hypercars have been horrible sales failures.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:And it'll be interesting to see what whether road I mean, Roadster has Elon and Tesla and all that behind them. It'll be interesting to see whether Roadster can overcome some of the challenges the other ones have faced.
Speaker 2:I I I do think that, comping the Roadster I mean, if he can get it out at 200 k, that's just a completely different game from a Remast's Novera at a million or Yes. Or, you know, Peninferino Batista. Like, those are just wildly different. And even even if you have the money, I imagine that, like, the confidence of, like, a Roadster, like, you're gonna be able to take it to a Tesla dealership, get fixed with parts and stuff with a Batista or something. It's gonna be you're gonna be a crazy hypercar unique one of one world Koenigsegg level.
Speaker 2:I think no one's really brought that down. Although, you know, Taycan Turbo S. There there are a lot of options in that area.
Speaker 6:I mean, no you're you're right that no one has really played in the space sub a million bucks. However, first off, I don't think the Roadster's gonna come anywhere near 200 just based on we've got a lot of inflation. Elon's missed those Tesla's missed those price targets before, etcetera. But, also, you know, yeah, the the Taycan Turbo, the the Ferrari s f 90 has been a huge dud. Like, there are some examples out there of, okay, maybe people aren't really
Speaker 2:No. Completely to buy anything.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. What what do do you think manufacturers are focused on manufacturers, like, are really focused on or have a plan for solving depreciation with some of these cars? Because, like, buy a lot of cars. I cycle through them quickly.
Speaker 1:I tend to gravitate towards cars. Like, I've owned multiple g wagons because I just love that it's timeless. I know it's gonna depreciate, but not at a at a very, very reasonable rate. And in that sense, it's like practical buy or at least way more practical than buying a fresh Taycan and losing, you know, $50 in a few months, basically.
Speaker 6:I mean, the only real way to solve for depreciation is either supply or price. Right? You can either dramatically lower the price and get more cars out there, which hopefully your supply then evens out, or you just make fewer cars. The you know? I I will say, I don't think depreciation has been quite as crazy as everybody else thinks in part because I don't think the transaction prices were ever where the automakers were pricing the cars in the first place.
Speaker 6:Oh, interesting. You said, cars had stickers at 50, but be when you factored in the tax credit and the and the and the discounts, they were probably really selling down at 37. And then the however, still, they are depreciating faster than gas cars and just unbelievably fast in general Mhmm. Except for Rivian, which has held its value relatively well, but still nowhere near something like a g Wagon. The only way to to really solve that depreciation problem, supply, pricing, or just increase the desirability of the cars.
Speaker 6:But I don't think that's gonna happen.
Speaker 2:How how on how on earth has Rivian maintained a monopoly on the full size SUV in the electric category for so long? I I was expecting a suburban a Cybertruck suburban version, like, immediately, and it just didn't happen.
Speaker 6:That the other automakers went pickups first. And I don't I wonder if they were pressured into doing that because they knew the Cybertruck was coming. Yeah. But it is so clear. When I get asked by people who want a car I'm living in California.
Speaker 6:Everybody's got an electric. Everybody wants to own a car. The only thing I am ever asked is, I want a three row, and I want a hybrid or an electric.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 6:And my response is, well, you're getting an EV nine or an r one s. And the EV nine is new to the market a year ago. The r one s is now since '22. And it's like, yeah, where was everybody else? I mean, GM is screwing around with the Hummer pickup and and the Silverado and the f one fifty Lightning at Ford.
Speaker 6:It's like, what people want is just a three row electric, and the r one s's are the real success story in terms of holding their value. We sell them on cars and bids. They are still not coming under $60, which is a considering that's a three, four year old car, that's pretty good with the starting sticker of around 80. Yeah. The trucks have depreciated a lot more.
Speaker 6:There's less interest in them. But, yeah, it's wild that Rivian figured that out before anybody else. Everybody was like, oh, we're gonna start with a sedan. It's like, why? Yeah.
Speaker 6:What are you thinking? Yeah. The market gone from that that that stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I guess, Porsche now has the Cayenne Turbo you just reviewed. But even that's not three row. And and I'm thinking, like, if you are if you are, like, the true American family I have three boys, two dogs, two Newfoundlands. Like, I need the the huge 220 inch SUV soon, like, or, you know, the the full size Escalade, the Tahoe, like the Suburban.
Speaker 2:Like, this is where I'm gonna be. This is my life for the next couple years at least or the next two decades. Like, no one's really figured it out, and I thought it was, I thought it was maybe just like the the laws of physics or something. Like, oh, you can't make the battery big enough. But then you see the Cybertruck, and you're like, you could easily just make the back like this, and you're Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, totally.
Speaker 6:And the Hummer EV and
Speaker 2:the Yeah. Hummer EV.
Speaker 6:It's so weird. I guess they just saw volume in those pickup trucks, and so they decided to go Oh, wow. Totally. I mean, the you now have the Escalade IQ also, which is not a very compelling product Yeah. But it exists, and it is another three way v.
Speaker 6:It's clear that they're starting to come.
Speaker 2:Even the even the Escalade IQ, though, it felt like they shrunk it down a little bit compared to just the full size Escalade ESV, which is the one that can think of.
Speaker 6:Right. And the interior really feels like that. The interior does not feel as big as that. You come out with a car that weighs 9,500 pounds and is that long, it really should feel a little bit bigger inside. I should be able
Speaker 2:to play Totally.
Speaker 6:At a pickleball in that in that. That's not the situation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. For sure, Jordy.
Speaker 1:How can you talk about, European regulators? Because I feel like sometimes I see car companies, manufacturers making, like, what feel to be, like, nonsensical decisions, decisions that, at least American consumers are not, like, saying, like, hey. We want this. And I think it can oftentimes, get, you know, people will point to regulators and be like, you know, there's actually pressure coming on the manufacturers on another continent and that but how how true is that? And and what kind of role are they actually playing in
Speaker 6:in We it's an that's an interesting question not a lot of people think about. Regulation plays a bigger role than you'd think in a lot of stuff. We just heard one this week. Mercedes is canceling all of their 43 AMG cars, which are actually quite popular. Here in The States, they're very popular.
Speaker 6:The c 43 GLC
Speaker 1:Rover. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Those are
Speaker 6:all going away. And the the reason is that they do not comply with EU noise regulations as of next summer. And it's like, that's a pretty successful popular car, and they're I I guess they don't
Speaker 1:And so so the manufacturers can't create, like, an like, like, we there's precedent for creating, like, a European version of a car. Like, I know the European Metris is some called something else, but it's actually a lot better than the American Metris.
Speaker 6:They feel that the The US market alone does or or US plus Middle East or whatever doesn't justify the creation of such a vehicle, and so it goes away for the entire world. And that's true in a lot. There are there's a lot of compliance and regulation stuff just beyond that, but that was an example that came up recently that I was astonished by because it sometimes affects popular cars. We saw it affect Boxster and Cayman. Right?
Speaker 6:I mean, clearly, Porsche is not really gonna be able to continue making these cars as we think. Now they're rethinking that strategy, but it's still gonna have some electric component. And these regulations are stuff that they're gonna have to comply with. It's actually funny because you hear a lot of complaints. The Trump administration has come in and and cut a lot of EV regs and and pushed back on EVs, and there's all these complaints.
Speaker 6:I mean, US regs were never anything compared to Europe. Europe has gone really, really, really strict about noise, about pollution, about emissions, c o two, in a way that is is definitely affecting vehicles sold there and probably does have knock on effects on cars that are sold in The States too.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Do you think it's fascinating that some European regulators are are are pushing to take away cars that people like from European manufacturers while they let the Chinese flood the market and and kill their automotive manufacture manufacturers.
Speaker 6:Which is especially interesting because China's doing the exact opposite. Right? China in it has really fenced their market and has really made it very easy for Chinese companies to sell cars and do really well, but has made it specifically difficult for foreign market companies to come in and do the same. Meanwhile, cap you know, free capitalism has has kind of had the opposite effect in Europe. And, boy, you go to Europe now?
Speaker 6:I've go to Europe every year or two, and it's amazing every time I go. Five years ago, a couple Chinese cars. This last time, they are they are flooding, like you say. It's true in Mexico too and Latin America in general. They make cheap cars that are desirable, and they're all EVs, so they fit the regulations.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It's certainly interesting. If I were the European automakers, I'd be like, what the hell? But
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do they not do they not or do they need to, like, 10 x their lobbying budgets and say, we wanna make cars that are fast, loud, and fun, and you gotta protect us from like, I I just don't understand. Like, these are, like like, Brazil is just, a national champion in Germany. Right?
Speaker 6:Like You would say make make we we're the environment is more important to us. My guess is they would say, you are important to us. The environment is similarly important to us. We have to figure out a way to make this work. But for right now, China is already there where you probably should be, and we're trying to incentivize you to do that.
Speaker 6:It is surprising to me that they don't have more significant tariffs on Chinese cars and and ways to kinda try to stop that. However, Chinese cars have also done an amazing job of mobilizing, especially Southern Europe, to be able to buy new cars for the first time in a long time. Southern Europe, they don't have a lot of money in a lot of cases to buy these cars, but these Chinese cars come in. They're affordable. They're electric.
Speaker 6:It's getting people out of fiats from 2003 that pollute at ridiculous levels, and you gotta assume that EU regulators actually are they're, like, looking at it saying, yeah. It sucks that Fiat is losing market share, but here we are doing our part for global warming and for the environment, which is a big over there.
Speaker 2:I would just hope that that was more of a more of a fight between Tesla and the US electric manufacturers earlier. Like like, Tesla has been and the other and and Rivian have been, like, options for that solution, you'd think. I mean, obviously, they need to bring the cost down, but there's, I I think that there was a lot of pushback to Tesla in Europe, years and years ago where they didn't think that they should go after that southern European buyer. And so they never really got to scale it with, like, you know, the the the the 2.9 or something, the cheaper version of the three, to actually get out there or something like that. I don't know.
Speaker 6:Right. And meanwhile, BYD is there now with with cars that are this long that cost probably €18,000.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 6:it's like, hey.
Speaker 2:Yep. I wanted to ask about modern cars that Wait.
Speaker 1:Wait. One question that fits in this last one. Jaguar revamp.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Team asked us to ask, European manufacturer going all in on EVs in a very opinionated way. Do you have any predictions on, like, first year sales numbers in The US?
Speaker 6:Well, you know, they haven't really shown a production car yet. So I I it's hard to make that prediction without knowing, hey. Are they gonna do SUVs? What price point? Etcetera.
Speaker 6:I will say they weren't exactly blowing it out of the water before. So, like, unlike a lot of people who watch that ridiculous commercial and have watched some of their product strategy and kinda laughed at it, I'm not sitting you know, we we got a lot of comments on our pod. Jaguar, they're screwed. If you go woke, you go broke. We're gonna boycott.
Speaker 6:They were already broke. Like, they they they weren't like
Speaker 3:they were it wasn't like
Speaker 6:they were out there really lighting the world on fire. So, like, I think the key thing is a is a probably a a a big benefit for them, truthfully. Yeah. But we'll see how they actually end up doing it. It's already been quite a while, and they haven't really announced cars or revealed anything coming.
Speaker 6:That'll be interesting. I mean, the the brand name is strong, but, like, you know, what are you gonna it's just it seemed like a far fetched plan for it to actually work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If you're already if you're already broke, why not go woke? Guess this is next
Speaker 6:by step. The way, that that people don't discuss the the big problem that Jaguar faces is that almost all of their dealers are paired with Land Rover. And so at the end of the day, they cannot go after the SUV segment to the level that I think a rational company would wish to. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 6:We sit here and look at the success of the model y and the r two or the r the r one, but will be the r two, and g wagons and and just SUVs in general. And Jaguar doesn't they they did try SUVs, but they always have to kind of back them off what I think the market would want a little bit because Land Rover was there actually having the success.
Speaker 1:Just make an SUV, but don't make
Speaker 2:it too good. Don't make it too good.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Don't make it too off roadie or too boxy or too cool Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which is
Speaker 6:what the market is really obsessed with right now because, you know, literally across the showroom, we're trying to sell these things over there, and they have a better name, and you don't wanna try to undercut that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It feels like the other market Jaguar could potentially go after is maybe, like, the James Bond wannabe, but there, they're competing with Aston Martin, of course. Right.
Speaker 1:Which is not exactly crushing it either.
Speaker 2:Well And they make gas cars. They it feels like they are. So I I'd love to know, like, where do you see Aston going? I mean, the the the Valkyrie is incredible. The Valhalla we saw in person looked really cool.
Speaker 2:And, like, there's just some incredible
Speaker 1:I think the issue might go on. Point of view with Aston Yeah. Is, like, I love Aston Martin. We were we were at f one with with the Aston Martin team because, our our friends from public are a sponsor. And, I love every single silhouette they do.
Speaker 1:I think they make cars that look absolutely incredible. Mhmm. But the problem is that literally every single price point for Aston, there's a more desirable car from a Porsche, from a Ferrari. And so it's like, that's just really challenging as a manufacturer because you're like, okay, we made, we made the Valhalla. And it's like, okay, what Ferrari can you get for a million bucks?
Speaker 1:And like, how many guys are really gonna look at that trade and go for Aston Martin?
Speaker 6:I think that Valhalla and Valkyrie will and have been will be will be and have been successful. I think the biggest problem is the volume cars, and I think it goes back to something that you said earlier, which is they have a significant depreciation, and that's not a secret. When you buy a for brand new Ferrari, and you're not gonna lose money. In fact, if you're if you're lucky enough to get chosen to buy a brand new Ferrari, you might make money. Yeah.
Speaker 6:You buy a brand new Aston, holy crap. You know, used DBXs are already $75.80. That's their SUV. Used Uruses are still, like, $1.75, and the price point is pretty similar new. And which one would you rather get?
Speaker 6:Aston, I think, actually makes some pretty compelling cars even relative to rivals like Lamborghini and Ferrari and Porsche. But you go into the dealer, and there's 12 of them sitting there at the dealership. They can't sell them. They do big discounts. They make too many cars.
Speaker 6:The price points are too high. And that's a as as beloved as that name, Aston Martin we all want an Aston Martin in our minds. When you actually start to look at the, particulars of what that would entail, nobody wants a 150 in depreciation.
Speaker 1:Well, they didn't even have car I mean, you you buy a a Aston Martin from three years ago, and it had the the interior. It had the the the screens from, like, a car from, like, the early two thousands. And so I do wonder I do wonder if the depreciation gets, problem gets a little bit less bad at now that the interiors have have modernized substantially?
Speaker 6:Improved. They've improved, but at the end of the day, there's still a lot of Mercedes Benz technology. And when you're not using Mercedes Benz technology, then another question about Aston Martin starts to become reliability. Right? If they're making their own crap, then you start thinking, oh god.
Speaker 6:Do we really wanna be making their
Speaker 2:own crap?
Speaker 6:It's it's kind of a it's kind of a tough situation. And and Ferrari and Lambo get excused from some of that stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you think that, how many how many people do you think are frantically trying to their cars to California after the Whistlin Diesel scandal? Whistlin Diesel, if anybody didn't see, was arrested, happened to be ready to vlog the whole thing which almost looks like he did did a deal with authorities which is like, hey, we're gonna arrest you. We're not we're we want we need to make a big scene out of this. We're not gonna really throw the book at you, but, we need to do this marketing
Speaker 6:for us. I think it was all legit. I think he is always ready to vlog. I think his his boys are, like, always at the shot. You know what I Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm sure. I'm sure.
Speaker 6:But yeah. Boy, that was a big deal. So many people in the community do the Montana thing, and I really think we did a big thing about it. It's on our pod last week. I really think with the advent of license plate readers and with states just starting to realize how pervasive this has become, it's just really gonna start becoming more and more difficult to do.
Speaker 6:And as a guy who's got four very expensive cars registered to my actual home addresses, it's it's yeah. I watched the Montana thing, and I think to myself, you know, f u. If if I have to pay, you have to pay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 6:I do feel bad. I mentioned this on the pod. I do feel bad for the guys who are doing it to get away from the stupid regulations like smog on a $15,000 car. Yeah. And and and and meanwhile, it's being ruined by guy after person after person doing it on expensive cars.
Speaker 6:There's a little hypocrisy there that I've decided smog is something that I'm willing to make an end run around, but I do feel that way. So whatever. But I do think that Montana thing, yeah, so many people do it, and I think so many people should really think about whether they whether it's the right call. Do you wanna get arrested to save $20.15, $20 on sales tax?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Back on, Jaguar, to some extent, is what what is the what is your current top pick for something that's basically a concept car that you hope it makes it into production? For me, I think it's the Hyundai Vision n that looks like a DeLorean. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They might go they said they were going hydrogen. I think they should just do, like, the the ionic five n treatment and just electric, and it'll go zero to 60 in two and a half seconds or something. Like, they could do something cool there, but do you have any other picks for stuff you've seen where you're like, let's bring let's bring it in?
Speaker 6:That one was really cool and literally cool. Although, I have to say, just a couple weeks ago, I reviewed the new Hyundai Crater, which is the the off roader concept car. Yeah. And, from a perspective of a car that I think will sell
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:They should make that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:They they body on frame off roaders off roading has become such a thing in the last ten years with the Raptor and the G Wagon and the four Runner and the Wrangler and the Bronco and off road trim levels of every single car in existence, including minivans. Hyundai has started to come out with some off road trim levels. Mhmm. But it's pretty clear to me that, like, there should be an they should go after the four Runner. Four Runner is selling pretty easily millions, literally millions of units.
Speaker 6:Wow.
Speaker 4:And it
Speaker 6:doesn't sense to me that that these automakers are not going after it more. I think Honda's insane for not pursuing it, but Hyundai and Kia have been much more aggressive and willing to be aggressive in these kind of segments. And I think that crater is previewing a car that will exist in some form, probably not exactly like that with graphic displays on the windshield, but but something sort of similar. I bet you they're cooking it up.
Speaker 2:Where do you think that trend came from?
Speaker 6:You know, I don't know. It's interesting. I was in Joshua Tree yesterday, and, boy, there's a lot
Speaker 3:of LA people out there. Like, it's wild. Like, this
Speaker 6:it has become such a thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Like, going out into the wilderness. I don't know. It wasn't a thing when I was a kid. It was reserved for, like, a select group of people. You only bought a Jeep Wrangler if you were, like, kinda crazy.
Speaker 6:And now it's, like, mom cars, and everybody's got a Bronco. And the Forerunners are this massive thing. And I I don't know. Obviously, COVID exacerbated it, but I assumed that it would slow down when COVID ended, and that has not happened.
Speaker 2:I wonder if it's some sort of, like, you know, you you're online all the time. You've you're you're on your phone too much, and then you want the exact opposite. And so demand increases for, what is the opposite of TikTok? Like, get me to the forest.
Speaker 1:It's also very American to, like, find, like, have an outdoor activity explode that's about bringing heavy machinery, like like, out into the wilderness. Yeah. It has they
Speaker 2:still have screens. You can still you can still watch TikTok, but you can at least act like off.
Speaker 6:I think about it, some I was actually thinking about it this this this weekend because I was out there and seeing all this, and there's a camper in every parking lot. Do wonder if, like, dad's being more involved. When I was a kid, dad had a sports car. Not my dad, but in general. Like, dad had a sport.
Speaker 6:He would use it to get away. Oh. But he take would it on a drive and take it to a show. Sure. And now, like, dads and families wanna do this stuff together and you sports cars, you can't do that with your kids.
Speaker 6:And I've even watched the vintage s
Speaker 1:I got a I got a Ferrari FF to try to get around that when I had my first kid, and it did not work. Electrical the electrical issues were like, if I drive this thing to the farmer's market and I stop it, it might not start again. So I gotta make sure I start it at home and stop it.
Speaker 6:But I'm I I am watching the Grand Wagoneers. Right? And old land there's these are things you can now do with the whole family. And I think that there's been a, like, sort of a renewed push among among among dads and among families to kinda do, hey. Let's do the vintage car thing together.
Speaker 6:And it it's really it's really become kind of a thing. And I've got probably part of it, but I think there's probably many parts of it.
Speaker 2:Speaking of dads, speaking of firing dads, what's the best modern car that screams, I'm coming to town to fire your dad?
Speaker 6:We have this big thing on our podcast that, yeah, we think that there are some cars that just say, I'm here, but fire your dad. It's just such a, like it's such a big old like, this is this is a rich guy who doesn't care. The the electric Rolls Royce, which is called the Spectre, that's a big one because it's got one of the things I like a fire your dad cars to me are cars where it takes up a lot of space but is unbelievably impractical. So that car is a massive vehicle, but it's got two doors. And that guy owns the factory.
Speaker 6:That guy, he he comes in. He's like, I don't care what's this whole factory is closed. Yeah. Be gone. And he, you know, he takes the Rolls Royce off.
Speaker 2:It's also so tall. We saw one at the airport next to Urus, and we were like, it's a car that's taller than that SUV that's been lowered for performance. It's like Ridiculously large.
Speaker 6:Well, I
Speaker 1:have a potentially, a potentially new fire your dad car. Our friend Paul asked asked me to ask you, do you think Sam Altman paid 20,000,000 for the Gordon Murray s one? It sold recently and Sam was photographed
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:In Vegas with Gordon Murray over the weekend.
Speaker 6:And Sam has an f one. Yeah. I tell you that.
Speaker 1:Be the new I say it could be the new fire your dad because if Chad GBT takes your job
Speaker 2:Oh, it fires everyone's dad.
Speaker 6:That is an interesting point that Ulta may have bought. I will say the commissioner the the story I've heard is the commissioner of that car commissioned five.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And personally selected along with Gordon Murray three people to to sell three others to.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 6:He kept two and then decided to sell one publicly. And so I I I would be not surprised if Altman is one of the four people who has them. He's obviously interested in these cars. And, yes, he's there with Gordon. But maybe he didn't buy the public one, but who knows?
Speaker 6:I I I bet I wouldn't be surprised if he's got one. 20,000,000. That's crazy. Unbelievable number.
Speaker 1:It's a bit it's a lot it's a lot of money, but it's a lot of car.
Speaker 2:Any progress on, getting into the Sultan of Brunei's collection? I feel like with all this investment and
Speaker 6:All I want.
Speaker 2:Progress, like
Speaker 6:All I want. If I could just get if I could just have a week to film videos in that garage, I I would just retire. I would never
Speaker 2:speak but how much truthfully, like, how much time have you spent actually chasing it down? Because I feel like if you go over there and you're meeting people and you're, you know, you're, oh, yeah. I'll come to your holiday party and give a talk for free. You know? You like like, there's ways to, like, works.
Speaker 6:It's an interesting situation because I have a suspicion just based on some of the rumblings I've heard from either people who have been there or who have tried. Mhmm. I think that in Brunei, it's viewed as a bit of an embarrassment. Oh, interesting. That Jeffrey went which is the brother of the sultan, went and spent this much national money on the on just these cars.
Speaker 6:And they could if they created a museum Yeah. Everyone I know would suddenly go to Brunei. I not joking. Like, I have no reason otherwise to go to Brunei. You know?
Speaker 6:Or or
Speaker 2:I mean, it's odd because I feel like if they do regard it as a as a mistake, it's like, well, you got a great collection. Let's liquidate it. Sell it to Dubai. Dubai likes setting up museums. They have Mister Beast Land now and Brunei Land going in
Speaker 6:totally agree. I'm not even fairly sure that they want the publicity of Sure. The announcement that all of these cars are going to be sold off. And it's become to me that for whatever reason, maybe it's embarrassment, maybe they actually still wanna enjoy the cars or have them, But there it seems to me that there is a pretty clear reality that these guys do not want publicly to have a wide splash with the excesses of the nineties in that country, which I think is such a shame. Now part of the problem also with selling all the cars is that they're all right hand drive, so there's a little bit of a challenge into where they would have to be sold.
Speaker 6:There's only a few markets. Sure. But but nonetheless, I'd be down. I have I have a my Bentley Dominator literally sits right here, which is my one of the sultan cars. Fantastic.
Speaker 6:Permission to Bentley SUV before even Bentley had any idea of doing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Would you ever do a museum?
Speaker 6:Like, a review like, review cars from a museum or No. No.
Speaker 1:No. Like, with like, the Doug the Doug Museum.
Speaker 2:Cars and bids activation or something. No.
Speaker 6:I am not a collector. I like to use the cars, and I like to be focused with the cars that I choose. And, I'm never gonna have a giant collection of cars. I
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I meant I meant more like like if if I'm a if I'm a collector and I have a special car that I'm just planning to hold and you were creating a museum and you were basically saying, you I'll store your car and and maintain it, but but
Speaker 6:you want museum of other people's vehicles. Yeah. I would I would maybe curate such a thing. I could see myself doing that in a in a retirement scenario. If someone the space and, if someone that takes care of the hard parts for me, I would I would curate a nice little museum.
Speaker 1:There you go. I think I think it'd be a hit.
Speaker 2:What are the biggest moments on the calendar for 2026 for you? Either, like, moments that you're excited about from the car manufacturers, the world, or whatever, but also within your organization.
Speaker 6:I I'm I'm I am generally just excited. You know, it's an interesting thing. I my my world is nowhere near as varied as it once was.
Speaker 2:You know,
Speaker 6:I used to travel all over the world and review the craziest cars, but I kinda filmed most of them. Yeah. And now it's mostly just new cars. Yeah. And I still get excited from a work perspective.
Speaker 6:I still get excited about the same things, which is just going in and reviewing the cars. I we had the new Nissan Sentra in the office the other day. And, like, I'm driving in in the morning being like, I'm pumped. Like, I'm
Speaker 2:excited. And
Speaker 6:there is still that excitement. There's not, like surprisingly, there is not specific cars that are that exciting for me. The the the new supercars are always a big deal, and there's gonna be a few coming out here in quick succession, which is the McLaren w one and Bugatti Tourbillon. And, obviously, I'm excited about those. But it's not just those cars.
Speaker 6:You know, we get big views doing videos of Kia Tellurides, and I get excited about there is something exciting to me about an automaker playing in a very competitive space, which supercars isn't. It's a dis it's a in a more of an emotional thing. And a lot of times, people buy them all. Whereas Telluride, you have to distinguish yourself with quirks and features from the Pilinder, the Pilot, the the Palisade. And so I always find it to be kind of just as interesting to see what those guys are doing, and they often have some cool stuff.
Speaker 6:They often reward me with some cool quirks and features. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Have you ever the oh, sorry.
Speaker 1:On on on Ferrari, do you get sick of people commenting, like, bring back Pininfarina? Like, I just feel like every Ferrari video, it's like, it's not come they're not coming back. It's over. Like,
Speaker 2:I I
Speaker 6:did that.
Speaker 1:I I mean, I every every Ferrari video, I'm I'm a go to the comment section across every channel. And and one per my personal belief is that the cars actually look amazing when they're specced properly. I think they look really rough the way that Ferrari specs them, like dirt for for basically Press. Marketing press. Right?
Speaker 1:And then I think once people with refined taste get in there, they they end up looking amazing. So I'm not I'm not exactly, like, disappointed with the the the current design.
Speaker 6:I agree. I didn't for a while. When they first left Pininfarina, thought there were some questionable cars. However, the two nine six is unbelievably beautiful. Yeah.
Speaker 6:They they have the and honestly, the Dodici Chilindri, which I made fun of because of its ridiculous name and also because of its design when it was first announced, I got to spend the day with one, and I totally feel opposite now. I think they're beautiful. They're striking. Ferrari is designing cars in a way now that is, like, at the forefront, at the cutting edge rather than, just sort of only going after beauty. With that said, Pininfarina and Ferrari have an unbelievable legacy together, and it would be nice to see them return, reunite in some form.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But what it what is history. Yeah. They they did, but now it's been, like, more than a decade and it's owned by an Indian, like, conglomerate. Like, are all the same people even still there?
Speaker 1:If they did partner, would it just be, like, like a like just for the brand purposes?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Hasselblad is owned by DJI now. Like, what is that partnership? You know, these companies, they change over time. They just brand names, IP.
Speaker 6:They did partner, would it just be for brand purposes? Yeah. Probably. But I bet you they'd sell some cars.
Speaker 2:But that's So you were
Speaker 6:breaking up with a if a 500 unit run of a Pininfarina designed car, that would that would kill. Just like if Ferrari did a manual, which I sincerely believe they should do.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:I think that also would even if it was just for the purposes of making money Yeah. I think it would be successful.
Speaker 2:On the on the Ferrari doing a manual, you you you know, you get on the stump every once in a while with, like, I wanna change to what this manufacturer is doing or what the car community as a whole is doing. What's the highest confidence, like, I'm responsible for that that you may may maybe it's just like a tiny thing, but, like, you know, there's a lot of things where, you know, you say stuff on the Internet and then the change happens and you're like, hey. Maybe they watched the video. Maybe it was a factor. Maybe it's just I got lucky, I was talking about the thing that they were already working on.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 6:I think very little do I actually feel responsible. However
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:When I bought my convertible g wagon eight and a eight and a years ago eight and a half years ago, nobody even knew that car existed. And within a year, Kendall Jenner had one, and I did a bunch of videos, and I posted a lot of pictures on Instagram. I drive it on the beach with beach grass, and it looks amazing. And the values of those suddenly absolutely went through the roof Yeah. Which was not the case when I bought my car.
Speaker 6:I paid $1.25 for my car. And if I could find another one for $1.25, I would buy 10.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:And suddenly, six months ago, three months ago, Mercedes announces they're coming back with a new convertible g wagon.
Speaker 2:You're
Speaker 6:welcome. I don't think that I was directly entirely responsible, but I wouldn't be surprised if I played a little bit of a role in the cultural remembering that this car existed to the point where values kinda blew up. There are some influential people got Mercedes' ear, and Mercedes was thinking, okay. Maybe we can do this again.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. I I I think that's a 100% right. It's, yeah. Deserve you deserve the victory lap on that
Speaker 5:for sure.
Speaker 6:Ridiculous car, which is such an embarrassing car to own that I don't even want the victory lap.
Speaker 2:We're giving it to you. You're directly responsible.
Speaker 6:Other than that, though, I don't think I have significant I mean, I've been I've been harping a long time about how automakers need to make more off road SUVs, and that's happened. But I think also the market trends have made that pretty clear.
Speaker 2:Totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at bowling with the what is it?
Speaker 2:L p six forty prices. He kind of discovered that there were far fewer of them than people thought, and so that obviously changed the price. And if you bring new information to the world, like, that feels like you do have an influence.
Speaker 6:Now in Ed's case, he's got a few of them, so, you know, you can talk them up a little bit. That's that's the game I should have gotten into, and I wish that I had. But, unfortunately, I did not do that for my own personal game. Not that that's the only reason that Ed does it for.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's
Speaker 6:a crude fellow, and I think that plays well.
Speaker 2:We're gonna we're gonna see Doug with, like, you know he has 200 SF nineties, and now he's talking really positively about them. Like, and he bought them, like, at the butt trough of the depreciation curve. What's going on here? And you're like, actually, there's no electric relations. They did all this extra studies in the the hybrid system.
Speaker 1:We can we get Nissan to bring back the Murano Cross Cabriolet? That is important. We we
Speaker 2:are big fans here.
Speaker 1:We 30 edition.
Speaker 2:We we we took your joke, and we've been running within the whole
Speaker 6:And you know the sad thing about that car, I don't know if you know this, but the the the convertible tops fail. And so
Speaker 5:in Just leave it down.
Speaker 1:I don't need the top. I'm always I'm just joy riding that thing. I never
Speaker 6:need the top. California. You know?
Speaker 2:Does the s p one have a top? No. Right? It doesn't have a windshield. Right?
Speaker 6:Right. But this so those cars, eventually, they will all fail, and that will kinda kill them because apparently, the the Nissan's only solution is you have to replace it. There is apparently a shade tree mechanic guy in Florida who figured out the problem and is willing to fix it. Well But you gotta send your car to him. So if you live in, like, the Tampa Clearwater area, you can get your top fixed.
Speaker 6:But, like, otherwise, it is worth sending your Murano cross cab really.
Speaker 1:Oh, we're trailer in it. I mean, the rest of mod community in ten years will be going crazy.
Speaker 2:Oh, no. No. You know what we're doing. We're cannonballing it there and back from LA. That's what we'll do.
Speaker 6:That that car was utterly awful in every way because because it it is is a a very
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Special product that that could have a cult following if it wasn't so bad.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's very funny. Anyways, well Thank
Speaker 2:you so much for taking the time. Much shouting out. This was fantastic. Enjoyed it. Congratulations on all the success, and, and please keep the podcast running.
Speaker 2:We've been loving it. We we we it's, congratulations on the massive success there and with everything. And, we appreciate you coming and hanging out for a while, chopping it up.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Cheers.
Speaker 2:Thanks, man. Thanks for Bye. Thanks. Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector, and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable. I'm also gonna tell you about public.com, investing for those that take it seriously.
Speaker 2:Multi asset investing, trusted by millions. Our next guests are both named Alex. We have, some folks from Ramp, the creators of Ramp Labs. Ramp Sheets, we're bringing in
Speaker 1:Ramp Sheets.
Speaker 2:Both Alex's.
Speaker 1:What's
Speaker 2:happening? Kick us off with introductions on both of you, how you came to work at Ramp, work on this particular project. I'd love to hear the origin story. It's a fascinating product, and, we're gonna go into it.
Speaker 8:Hey. I'm Alex Shevchenko. I've been at Ramp for now two years, started out, and still am on the Applied AI team.
Speaker 2:Super night success.
Speaker 8:And throughout these two years, I've been working on a bunch of, like, experimental things
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 8:As part of Applied AI and Yeah. Lately, just been trying to wrap them up into Ramp Labs so that we can publish these things publicly.
Speaker 2:That's great. And Alex? Sorry.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I'm Alex Stauffer. I'm one of the leads of Ramp Labs along alongside the other Alex.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And, yeah, this is the place for AI bets at Ramp. Mhmm. We're really experimenting, going to the cutting edge of AI, trying to ship product that is actually outside of the current, like, ramp mandate.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Do you guys have nicknames yet? Feel like people would get called Alex because you can't even just be like, oh, yeah. Alex at ramp labs.
Speaker 2:You have to go further.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And just the last names, I guess. Shifchenko and
Speaker 2:Shifchenko and so so talk to us about the product. It feels extremely aggressive to go after, Microsoft, to go after Google, not products that have massive user bases, and yet you're launching Ramp Sheets. Talk to us about the thought the positioning. Are you gonna try and replace the investment banking workhorse that is Microsoft Excel? Is this more for CFOs who are already on Ramp?
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about the product itself?
Speaker 8:Well, originally, this started out as an experiment, as everything within Ramp Labs is. We've been trying out different variations of this, actually, just to try to help our own internal finance team. Mhmm. This has gone, as I said, through many iterations. This initially was, like, process mining to document some of their workflows from video so that they can, like, communicate better between each other and to software engineers.
Speaker 8:Then we tried to take that piece and create, like, Zapier and, like, retool workflows Sure. Based on them to try to automate. And we tried to to to get them to use it, and and they were like, no. This is too black box. We can't really use this.
Speaker 8:We need visibility into it. Mhmm. And so we, like, took a step back and tried to look through the looms of, like, all the information that they were giving to us. And we jumped through, like, random locations. And 99% of the time when you, like, open their loom, it's, like, in a spreadsheet.
Speaker 8:So we decided we should, like, really meet them where they work and have a spreadsheet interface for this. And this doesn't necessarily need to be replacing, anything. This can be an add on to their existing workflows. Right? This can be a a quick way to create, like, a pro form a or something that they can then export to a CSV or an Excel file and then load it up in Sheets or Excel and continue their work there.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So that's that's broadly the
Speaker 2:So why build why build, like, a web version of a spreadsheet at all? Why not a plug in that lives inside of Excel? That's what Bloomberg and Capital IQ and most of the other, you know, kind of complementary systems have typically plugged in through connectors. You decided to build the actual full spreadsheet in the cloud in the web. Why that decision versus just plug in?
Speaker 8:Well, internally, we do have some more complex workflows that rely on, like, sheets and stuff that people can use. For this, as I said, like, Ramp Labs is, like, the experimental branch, and this was an experiment that, like, got very, very large. Yeah. And that's, like, the way to allow people to interface with it as quick as possible. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:We we didn't need, like, access to your Google account. We don't need access to your Excel account. You can just go and try it out, and and it's there. And it's available on ram.com/sheets to anyone, not only RAM customers right now.
Speaker 4:Oh, cool.
Speaker 8:That's probably, like, one of the biggest reasons.
Speaker 7:How Yeah. So Yeah. For for some context, like, a lot of people think that there was a big team behind this or that RAMP is, like, investing a lot of resources here. And the truth is that, like, three guys kind of built this in a cave. Pretty fast.
Speaker 7:So yes. Yeah. And we want to release it. We believe in shipping quickly and getting feedback from customers. We thought we built a pretty cool tool and just wanted to see how people would play around with it.
Speaker 7:So we released it last week, and then the response was overwhelming. There are 2,000,000 impressions. Thousands of users joined immediately. They're making thousands of sheets every day. Places that you wouldn't imagine have have been using it.
Speaker 7:Like, they're it's it's popping off at Wharton with students and professors. There are many banks that are already using it, VCs, finance, people in the space industry. I got off call with a a user who's based in London this morning who's a VC. So it's it's, like, it's astounded us, honestly.
Speaker 1:What, where where are people getting the most value or what kind of, like, work, work are they actually doing? Once they kinda play around with it and get a sense for how it works, like, are they applying it?
Speaker 7:Yeah. There are a lot of interesting use cases. Some are personal. There there are a couple of, stories here where it's helping them plan their wedding. You know?
Speaker 7:These things can get incredibly, complex, and you need a way to organize it. Another use case, an employee here is, he's moving to New Jersey and wanted to find, like, the best place to live and and and want a model for that. But outside of personal cases, there is a real demand here, especially with, founders, VCs, small businesses, especially owners of small businesses, they don't actually have, like, a large finance team. Right? And it's incredibly valuable to spin up a model really quickly instead of going and paying a consultant thousands of dollars, to just make a template for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It makes sense.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Where are you guys where where where are you planning to take it from here?
Speaker 8:Yeah. There's a bunch of features that we're still working on. We actually shipped shareable links today. Nice. And then exploring what best templates.
Speaker 8:So, like, very, very intricate templates that you can take and and create basically kind of these, like, pro formas right away or, like, budgeting right away. And then as well as, like, integrating with Ramp itself so that you can, like, actually export your spending data and, like, analyze it within Ramp Sheets. So those are, like, the the three biggest things right now.
Speaker 2:Very cool. It's amazing. The chat is saying, can ramp construct an LBO for this regional HVAC company that backs into a 25% IRR. Make no mistakes, please. Maybe one day.
Speaker 2:I mean, that that actually probably is within what is basically one shottable by the model in ramp sheets today. But thank you so much for coming and breaking it down for us. Congrats on all the progress. And Yeah. Excited to watch where it goes.
Speaker 2:Excited to, see more people demoing it and taking it for a spin.
Speaker 1:Incredible launch.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much. Thanks, Brian. We'll talk to guys. Cheers. Have a good day.
Speaker 2:We are going back to the timeline for a minute while we bring in our next guest.
Speaker 1:We were we were covering
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:OpenAI shopping research.
Speaker 2:Oh,
Speaker 1:yes. Didn't really get to and Doug join. But really think I I'm I'm bullish on this product. I think, like Yeah. Being able to effectively run a deep research report and then see all the information that you need on a bunch of different products and then eventually just hit buy right from the the app is gonna be like a crazy flywheel.
Speaker 1:That's like actually what people do today. They start Google searching. They find out what products are available. They find out pricing, features, etcetera. Then they make a buying decision.
Speaker 1:And if you can pull that all into a single sort of, like, experience, it's gonna be very, very valuable. And this is effectively the deep research as a product is a product that has better product market fit than almost anything else in consumer AI. And so I'm very bullish.
Speaker 2:Well, if you're selling a product on ChatGPT, gotta go to numeral.com. Let numeral worry about sales tax and VAT compliance compliance handled so you can focus on growth. No. I agree. It'll be very interesting to see how fast, like, how fast OpenAI makes their first dollar from advertising or commission based sales, how quickly they make their first million, their first billion from it.
Speaker 2:Like, the numbers are so big they need to get to, tens of billions of dollars on those business lines fairly quickly. They're certainly the most optimistic growth areas for the business. And something that I think everyone it's very consensus that if they get agentic commerce working, they can the pool of capital is is is very like, the the the audience is already there. They just have to run ads. This is, like, proven.
Speaker 2:Whereas, breaking into hardware, that's something that, Microsoft didn't pull off with the phone, and Amazon tried to fire a phone.
Speaker 1:And Yeah.
Speaker 2:Facebook tried a phone for a while. Like, like, it's not a sure thing, but it's almost a sure thing that if you have, you know, a billion DAUs using your website for thirty minutes a day, you can advertise to them. It's it's it's very, very proven. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.
Speaker 2:Our next guest is Quinn Slack, the CEO of AMP. How are doing?
Speaker 1:What's happening? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 5:Hey, guys. Good to be here.
Speaker 1:Great to have you.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for helping on. I'm glad that we were able to get you on. We love ads. We were just talking about ads actually in to the ChatGPT context.
Speaker 1:No one likes ads more than us.
Speaker 2:But, but fascinating ads. Exactly. That's why I'm excited to talk to you. So please, introduce yourself and the company a little bit, and then we'll get into it.
Speaker 5:I am Quinn Slack. I'm the CEO and cofounder at Sourcegraph. We make AMP this coding agent. Mhmm. I love coding, and, I mean, AI is just crazy for coding in OPUS 4.5 today.
Speaker 5:It's mind blowing. But it's also expensive, and that sucks because a lot of people can't use it. And it also means that we don't learn fast enough about how people are using it because it's a tiny fraction of the world that's actually using AI to code in a kind of unconstrained way that you want to if if you're really gonna learn. So we took a look at these problems, and that's how we ended up with this crazy idea of putting ads in a coding agent.
Speaker 2:I love it. Okay. I I have, like I wanna understand what that exactly means. I'm gonna pitch you, like, five different instantiations of that. One is, I go to the more the agent to commerce route.
Speaker 2:I go to your coding agent. I say, okay. I'm ready to deploy this, and then it runs an auction to see, hey. There's a deal on Azure, so we're gonna host it over there as opposed to Amazon. Or it could be putting ads for Amazon or Azure or GCP in the comments of the actual code.
Speaker 2:So when I go review the code, I see ads. Or it could be while it's cooking, it's showing the ads in the terminal. Like, what where are you actually surfacing these ads?
Speaker 5:So the interesting thing about coding is you are in this all day long. It's not like amazon.com ads where you go there right when you have that intent. Mhmm. But you also use the coding agent when you have intent. So we kinda get both.
Speaker 5:We get those hey. You're asking it. I wanna deploy. Where should I deploy? Should it be on, you know, Cloudflare or whatever?
Speaker 5:But you also are staring at it, and AI coding agents are kinda slow. I'm not saying we make it slower so that we show more ads, but it's up on the screen, and it knows what your tech stack is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:So if you're Cloudflare and you see that they're using s three and they're doing a bunch of dumb stuff with it, well, that's a great place for you to show ads about not only Cloudflare, but specifically which of their products is better and how much better. And then you click a button, and the agent can go and switch you to it.
Speaker 2:So, I mean, it feels like I I love this thesis because it worked for Uber, and you've seen a bunch of companies where they've had a whole bunch of attention, and they just built big ad businesses. And, you know, Uber just shows you ads while you wait for your car, basically. It's like it's not rocket science. It's like a pretty simple thing. At the same time, a lot of it a lot of times when this works, it works because someone's created this pool of attention that there's just, you know, millions of people open and, open this app, or they're using that because they're staring at this particular screen, and there's real estate.
Speaker 2:And I see that real estate in the ChatGPT app where people just open it up and there's a big blank screen. You can put an ad there or while while it's waiting. But do you have to go and get people on board and and get them off of competitor, coding agents and and competitive IDEs? Like, how much do you have to do to replatform the customer to you and then start showing them ads, or can you partner with other pieces of the stack to just plug in quicker?
Speaker 5:We're gonna follow this where this goes. So, yeah, we're open to partnering with others. Mhmm. I think other people are kinda waiting and seeing because this idea was so crazy. A free coding agent and ads make AMP free in this mode.
Speaker 5:It's it's really compelling. And that audience is growing a lot. Sure. We keep making the model better and better. Like, initially, we had it so ads were actually covering more than our cost.
Speaker 5:Then we made the model six times more expensive, and now they're covering half. But now with Opus 4.5, I think it's gonna be like, you know, probably covering 80% of the cost because it's it's actually cheaper. Wow. So we gotta keep making the model better and better that it uses. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And free AI is pretty compelling.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. I'm already
Speaker 1:I already know, if TBPN runs some ads in there, I know the copy. Develop an ear for TBPN. Yeah. What do
Speaker 2:you think?
Speaker 6:I like
Speaker 2:it. That's good. I mean,
Speaker 7:you can you can go. Why don't
Speaker 5:you try it?
Speaker 2:Just Yeah. Put it if
Speaker 1:you Is it is it self
Speaker 5:serve? Down.
Speaker 1:Is it is the ad platform self serve yet or are guys just doing it when I'm like, by by hand for now?
Speaker 5:You can go in and put the ad self serve. It feels like all of a sudden overnight, we are building this new ads business. My wife works at Google. She sells ads. You know, they've seen the business, but there's so much complexity, and it's like a three sided marketplace now.
Speaker 2:So we got It's really doing god's work. Truly. Yeah. We love it. We love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I guess any any kind of like comps to this like that you've used to kind of like talk with advertisers about it? Like, is there is there another kind of advertising that's sort of similar in the sense of like, you know, like like clearly have people's, very specific attention at a specific moment in time where they're making oftentimes making product and business decisions? Any any kind of areas that you've learned from, or you just kind of freestyling?
Speaker 5:We're freestyling. It's a different place to put ads, and it's kinda hilarious that of AI products, the first place you know, I think we're we're the first or one of the first that it shows up in your terminal in in your editor. But I think the fact that it captures the intent and it's always up on your screen, it's different. So we're I would love it if there's more people doing this, but there's so many other companies we went to, and they said, well, we kinda want you to take all the flames first. On the advertiser side, though, they were incredibly willing.
Speaker 5:Like, we had a really high hit rate. And, some of them, I you know, other DevTool CEOs, I would email them and say, hey. Do wanna advertise? And after a day when they hadn't gotten back to me, I thought, like, oh, they probably think we're total idiots, then they got back to me, and they ended up doing this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. It makes I mean, it makes a lot of sense, especially when you have the when you can show an ad and have one eventually, maybe it's not that way today, but basically, shotting the implementation of certain products like that, just like contextual advertising, in in this context is gonna be super powerful. Any any ad haters pushing back yet? Obviously, I'm sure you have an ability to get people to, like, opt you can opt out of ads, I'm I'm assuming, by just paying for the right tier.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Well, we wanna show ads in the more premium modes too, so we gotta figure out if that's when we're gonna get the ad haters.
Speaker 2:Actually, no. Actually, no. Actually, you can't opt out of the ads. You're getting ads no matter what. I love it.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think if you're not getting the haters, then you're not pushing the envelope enough. And so much of what we realized when we launched AMP free is we should have been, like, 10 times bolder about it because it was received surprisingly well, and it's making a lot more money than we thought. So we're gonna push the envelope. But all of this just means it means more people can use Code AI in a totally unconstrained way
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And see this thing that just blows our minds.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it seems really cool, for just like yeah. I can imagine so many people. This is what I would have used in college.
Speaker 2:I definitely would not be paying $200 a month or something for I mean, I'd probably be interning at a at a at a startup that or at a at a live show that pays for my AWS bills. But can you can you just zoom out for us and give us a little bit of, like, the what the corporate hierarchy is like, AMP and Sourcegraph? Have you raised money? What are the shape of these companies and products? How everything fits together in your world?
Speaker 5:Yeah. We started Sourcegraph back in 2013, actually, with this idea of let's automate software development, and we started out building code search at Sourcegraph, and that's like Google for all the code.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:It's this especially now with AI. AI is doing like a thousand times more code searches. Yeah. It is this critical infrastructure. It's we're the only ones doing it at that scale.
Speaker 5:Yep. And then we've also got AMP. So these two products under one roof, code search and AMP. Yeah. And AMP is the frontier coding agent.
Speaker 5:We're trying to make it a year ahead for 1% of devs out there
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:And just be totally crazy. Yeah. And you might say, well, ads is incompatible with that. Ads is all about getting a big audience. But actually, what ads do, they're in service of the research objective for AMP.
Speaker 5:It lets us not have to go and jump if some customer says jump with this requirement that's gonna hold us back. It gives us so much more freedom to change the model, change how it works. So, you know, in that way, ads it actually does really nicely fund a kind of research lab for us with AMP. I guess in the same way that Google Ads mean that they can do whatever the hell they want, and they can, you know, fund a lot of experimentation internally.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 5:What We've got these two products under one roof.
Speaker 2:Well, what what were some of the trade offs, you made when you were building the first, coding agent? Obviously, there were people that trained, you know, foundation models themselves. Other people just wrote harnesses, they're swapping out, the different models from the big labs. How did you think about the different decisions that you made?
Speaker 5:We decided let's see how far we can get without trying to train our own god model. Let's depend on Anthropic or OpenAI and Google. And ever since we we started with AMP, which is, you know, we started that in February, we honestly thought there was gonna be a model competition a lot sooner. And it actually only started happening in a big way last week with Gemini three. We switched AMP's model over to Gemini three.
Speaker 5:It was a huge leap forward. And then today, you know, back to loving Opus four five, think I'm gonna switch back to that. Yeah. But I am I glad that we didn't go spend billions and billions of dollars training a model that was 1% worse and yet nobody used it? No.
Speaker 5:I'm really happy to be occupying, you know, this this place.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you don't surface the you don't have a model picker in in the in the agent? I it's not like I can, as a customer, say, I'm willing to watch all the ads and get all the ads, but I really prefer Gemini three or Kodaks or Opus four five,
Speaker 4:for example.
Speaker 2:I I don't get to pick.
Speaker 5:Yeah. No no model picker.
Speaker 2:Got it. Cool. Well
Speaker 1:Last question. What, what do you think about, integrating other types of products in the IDE? We were talking about Chad IDE putting gambling in the product. Do you think that that do you think there's a world in the future, like, three years from now where people are have enough time between, like, running different tasks and agents that they just have time to, like, goof around in in in these in in the IDE or or in various developer tools? Or is that kind of, like, an of the moment kind of like problem solution?
Speaker 5:I think you should be able to bet, you know, get some Kalshi Manifold Market stuff in there. You should you know, there should be
Speaker 2:Bet on you should what ad are you gonna
Speaker 1:you should let people bet on what ad they're gonna get next.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And then basically one they want.
Speaker 2:I think I I I I I don't know if you're joking, but I think you can go too far. We've seen people get, you know, go viral but be potentially flash in the pan over Yeah.
Speaker 5:We'll see if I'm joking.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Think gambling is
Speaker 5:is taking it too far, but there's a lot of stuff we can explore.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the the ads business, I mean, Google made a $100,000,000,000 from ads in q three. I think, there might be enough opportunity there. What was it?
Speaker 1:Yeah. What last question. Are you hyperactive in Slack?
Speaker 2:Yes. Of course. Are you
Speaker 5:You know, my great grandfather started it
Speaker 2:Invented it.
Speaker 6:Back in eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 5:I'm proud to see what it's become.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Amazing.
Speaker 2:It's like a Microsoft Teams guy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great great to meet. Yeah. It fun. Very cool.
Speaker 1:Very, very cool product. Yeah. And, yeah. Thanks. Awesome.
Speaker 1:I'll have you back show.
Speaker 2:So much. We'll talk to
Speaker 1:you soon. Brian.
Speaker 2:See you. Cheers. Have a good one. Bye. Back to the timeline.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance management trust, the leading AI trust management platform. Did I already do that one?
Speaker 1:You did.
Speaker 2:Well, then let's go Oh,
Speaker 1:we love Vanta.
Speaker 2:Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps devise develop teams build great products together. I'll also tell you about Julius AI, the AI AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds.
Speaker 2:Back on the timeline, people are having fun with Nana Banana. They're putting different hairstyles on various tech people. So Ilya has a a wide variety. This is Marc Andreessen with all sorts of different hairstyles. Which one would you pick if you were him?
Speaker 2:I think the one in the center looks pretty good. The longer beard, shorter hairs, but the
Speaker 1:sun is with the long In the middle on the left is pretty cool too.
Speaker 2:On the left is pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Crazy flow. I also
Speaker 2:like I think it's time
Speaker 4:to take a
Speaker 1:bottom left is also crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Time to take a trip to Turkey for sure. Just go. You have the money. Just go full head of hair.
Speaker 1:That's the way to it. With Ilya that's interesting is they didn't they didn't do, like, the full zoomer.
Speaker 2:The middle bottom one, that is flow. Keep going down. Yeah. The middle one. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right there. Right in the middle there. The middle bottom.
Speaker 1:The ponytail is also
Speaker 2:Ponytails? Yeah. Pretty powerful. Definitely, you know, it's respectable hairstyle.
Speaker 1:This post here from Thomas Scholes. He says, the latest Nano Banana model has officially crossed the line. I no longer implicitly trust photos anymore. And sometimes I can't even definitively definitively claim it's AI now. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I totally agree. I saw this picture.
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 1:And my first thought was like, that's gotta be AI Yep. Specifically because I don't think Sam is just walking down the Golden Gate Bridge
Speaker 2:Yep. In the middle of
Speaker 1:the day.
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 1:It's, like, probably terrible from a security standpoint. Yep. So, but but it looks photorealistic. And
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's very so, if you put the photo into Gemini, Gemini will tell you. If you say, is this AI? Gemini will tell you, yes. According to the Synth ID water molecule detection tool, this image was generated in whole or in part with Google AI.
Speaker 2:Of course, we've seen previous, previous images where if you turn up the contrast and the saturation all the way, you can see kind of the rainbow, like like like zebra pattern, basically, that's embedded in there very subtly. But, yeah, I mean, this is this is, pretty, pretty photo real. And so, you know, stay safe out there. It's gonna be
Speaker 1:Joe, Wiesenthal asked Nano Banana to create a really annoying LinkedIn profile.
Speaker 2:That's the one I was talking about.
Speaker 1:Couldn't tell. Is this a real person?
Speaker 2:No. I I have no idea because the at the at this point, we're way past the Turing test for for images in the sense that this looks perfectly edited, but, this could also just be a straight up screenshot. I would need to fact check this. But, instead of fact checking it, I'm gonna tell you about Privy. Privy makes it built make it easy to build on crypto rails.
Speaker 2:Securly spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API.
Speaker 1:Kalen Sterling, I don't think is a real person.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Says about, I don't do small talk. Yeah. I do deep dives. My journey is a quantum leap through the liminal spaces of tech and spirituality. Chief visionary officer, TEDx speaker, professional storyteller, democratizing the metaverse one DAO at a time.
Speaker 1:TEDx growth alchemist.
Speaker 2:So did did Joe actually ask Nano Banana to do this? I wanna see the prompt if that's if that's true.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's try to
Speaker 2:yeah. We need to replicate this. I actually did so so this was the example that I gave. I I I went to, I went to I went to Nano Banana, and I said, make a, I my prompt was just create a really annoying LinkedIn profile, but I forgot to check the the nano banana box. And so even though it's multimodal, according to Tyler over there, it did not generate it.
Speaker 2:It generated text. And so, you know, oh, it's like, I can only do text. Very questionable. We'll see. We'll we'll keep playing around with that.
Speaker 2:And in the meantime, I'll tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable plan, buy, and measure out of home with precision. What's up with, Brian Johnson? He's starting a new protocol. Is he going to, Taco Bell drive through?
Speaker 2:Is this a real photo? Is this is this
Speaker 1:is AI again? This has to be AI.
Speaker 2:That's a very funny funny photo. I I I this was my take was that, you know, if he's really changed by his journey, he must come out of it liking at least one, fast food restaurant. And Alexis says, those shrooms spiritually healed him in a way that has him living moss now.
Speaker 1:Living moss.
Speaker 2:The live moss tagline was really good. Yeah. Taco Bell knows how to do it. Also, underrated how online the Taco Bell, like, marketing team is. Are you familiar with this?
Speaker 1:See their post.
Speaker 2:You know the story of Sheel Monat, guest of the show multiple time?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. He got married.
Speaker 2:He got married at one in the metaverse or something. Like, it was some crazy thing where he posted, like, if somebody pays for it, I'll get married in the metaverse, like, as a joke. And then, like, Taco Bell was like, yeah. Let's do it or something. It was, like, very crazy, but it's like like, there are there aren't a lot of companies at that scale that are, like, as online and, like, in the culture as Taco Bell.
Speaker 2:And and beyond just like, oh, they have somebody who's pithy on the Twitter. It's like, no. They actually can go and execute. I've seen multiple people who are, like, very niche Internet micro celebrities that have been, like, given the full dog and pony show and, like, tour of the Taco Bell headquarters and, like, impressed upon them the greatness of the Taco Bell brand. It's pretty pretty awesome.
Speaker 2:Almost as awesome as getting a luxury watch on getbezel.com. Shop over 26,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. This post from Nir. Did you wanna skip this one?
Speaker 1:Nir says, guy who doesn't wanna be old. It seems like we'll get age reversing tech right when I'll be old. How favorable. Yeah. Guy who thinks it it is different this time.
Speaker 1:But this time, it's different.
Speaker 2:This is insane, boss. Read the next one. We got some massive news from none other than Bill Gurley.
Speaker 1:We gotta get the gong out for this. Well, you you read
Speaker 2:it. Read it.
Speaker 1:Amy Gurley, huge congratulations to Bill Gurley for receiving the Texas Distinguished Alumnus Award, a remarkable honor for a remarkable Longhorn. Congratulations, Bill. Well well well
Speaker 2:deserved. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:This Bill. This made my day. This made my day.
Speaker 2:Everyone was everyone was wondering if he was gonna make it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was kind of the elephant in the room.
Speaker 2:It was hugely hotly debated. There was there are a lot what? $10,000,000 in liquidity betting on this? Whether or not he would
Speaker 1:be Probably. Million? Yeah. Was sort of it was sort of the long horn in the room, basically.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. It was it was a huge deal, but he did it. He pulled it off. And, we're very excited for Bill
Speaker 3:to see. Was wondering what he would do if he didn't win.
Speaker 2:I guess we'll never know. Guess we'll never know.
Speaker 1:Riley Walls
Speaker 2:This is
Speaker 1:so truly funny. The greatest Internet rascal of his time. Incredible. He did it again. He cloned Gmail except you're logged in as Epstein and can see all of his emails.
Speaker 1:Like, it's it's such a great great workflow because people workflow.
Speaker 2:I I mean, it's like it's a way I because I've seen other people do, here's a fine tune on the emails. Here's a here's a, you know, a searchable database. None of them have been particularly, usable, but this is fascinating because it just really substantiates the the emails in a in a in a way that, you know, everyone knows what a Gmail inbox looks like, and you can just
Speaker 1:They added this random page button. It's also also funny because he's getting this one of the last emails that he got was a Flipboard Week in the Week in Review. And the subject line says, Alex Acosta resigns. Jeff Jeffrey Epstein arrested.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So imagine I I guess he wouldn't have been really able to read this email where he's he learns that he's arrested.
Speaker 2:He's arrested in there. Yeah. This is one of the things one a little too late. Chat a while ago was was like, oh, I'd love for the TPPN to cover the Epstein thing, but it's not really their shtick. Well, we found an angle.
Speaker 2:We found a tech angle, and so this is when we get to talk about it. I know everyone wants us to to talk about the hottest the hottest news story in a in a decade, but, you have to get through the lens of Riley Walls and and fun little hack projects. Before we move on, let me tell you about 8sleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized.
Speaker 2:The reason you feel insane according to Will Menitis is because you're you're talking to ChatGPT when you should be talking to God. Near I felt and says, the reason you feel insane is because you're talking to God when you should be speaking with Claude. So funny. Claude. Oh, Keller is coming on the show tomorrow from zipline.
Speaker 2:Keller Clifton, one of the greatest, get that goat sound effect ready for tomorrow.
Speaker 1:But early.
Speaker 2:Keller said that he's launched zipping points. He can pick up packages and deliver them autonomously with the Zipline autonomous drones. This is the this is the private plane for your burrito, folks. It's arrived. We're here.
Speaker 1:We're in
Speaker 2:the future.
Speaker 1:Future is The
Speaker 2:future plane, the, the flying car is here, and it will deliver you Chipotle in fifteen minutes in four minutes while it's still warm. So here's a ZIP grabbing a package from one of our restaurant partners. It'll take so many cars off the road over the coming years. That's great news for environmentalists, for congestion, for anyone who wants to be able to, really let it loose on the roads. If we're getting less congestion, maybe the speed limit goes up to 80 miles an hour, maybe one twenty, maybe one sixty.
Speaker 2:Maybe we get up to 200, and you can really let it loose. I wonder I would like that.
Speaker 1:I wonder if they'll need to make like, will you need to prove that you're at a certain address in order to get stuff delivered there? Because Oh, yeah. Such a funny dimension to mess with people and just be like, hey, look on your lawn. And there's just like a there's like a
Speaker 2:A burrito?
Speaker 1:A a burrito just chilling
Speaker 2:there. Well, people do that with pizzas. Right? They they prank call. I had, a dozen pizzas delivered to this address all paying cash.
Speaker 2:This is like a famous prank. And then you show up, and it's like, I don't need all these pizzas. I'm being pranked. I think that that's been mostly resolved by, modern payment solutions. But I'm sure there will be odd oddities around these drones.
Speaker 2:Sheesh. Sheesh. Theo Vaughn, her flaming hot tweets, is, joking around and says, imagine how cool it will be to shoot one of these out of the sky to get a free meal, going hunting for your Chipotle burrito. That, of course, is extremely cyberpunk and hilarious, but it will be massively illegal. And and Keller breaks it down.
Speaker 2:He says, we're regulated by the FAA, so the consequences are similar to shooting at a 07:37 as it's taking off from the airport. Not a good idea. Also, communities love the service. And I imagine he's not he's not saying, like, the the the details. But if you shoot at a seven thirty seven as it's taking off from an airport, I think you're going to jail for a long time.
Speaker 2:And I think, you will not just be able to shoot one of these out of the sky and pick up a free burrito with a 22. But
Speaker 3:What about, like, a really big net? If you own the land, how high can you build a net?
Speaker 2:I think that would be the same as throwing a really big net at a seven thirty seven on takeoff, Tyler.
Speaker 3:And I think I don't know. I don't think I I think I
Speaker 2:think for anything the same
Speaker 1:as consequences are similar. Like, yes, it's illegal to shoot something out of the sky, but
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You're not I I think somebody could shoot one of these things down and get a misdemeanor. I think they could I think with a good lawyer, you're getting a misdemeanor. You're not going to whereas the 07:37, you know
Speaker 2:If you get John Quinn on your side, you're eating burritos for free. Yeah. So David David pay his $10
Speaker 1:David Chang was saying, like, it's just there's like, he he it wasn't that he was like bearish on on the attack but he didn't think it solved like delivering it in the right form factor. Yeah. We gotta ask Keller about that tomorrow because right now if you order food depending on where you are between the time that it's cooked and picked up and
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Delivered, it's like there's a big gap. Well, speaking of cooked has to be shorter.
Speaker 2:Speaking of cooked, there was a a a wild job description that hit the timeline. Rachel Mayer says coolest PM role in crypto. Cooked.
Speaker 1:Real impact. Real impact. Needs to
Speaker 2:be clinically
Speaker 1:Clinically online. Not even
Speaker 2:Clinically online. Apply here at Circle. We love Circle, of course. But
Speaker 1:Wait. Was this, like, intentionally?
Speaker 2:Was this, must be a troll. This is Range Maid done perfectly. And Facundo says, Cook. The idea I was cracking up with this. Like, the idea of showing up to your job and being like, oh, man.
Speaker 2:Like like, yeah. The team is here is correct. They're all exact they're all, like, washed up. It's just the the the the worst possible team.
Speaker 1:I think it's a perfect I think it's a perfect post from Rachel. This there's no way this job job does, like, like, post would have gotten nearly the the reach. I think I think this was successful.
Speaker 2:Did you see this in the in in in the replies to her original post is, did you mean to say cooked, cooking, or cracked? And Rachel says, I don't even know anymore. They all sound fun. Rachel, we ain't cooked. We are cooking.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One of the developers, like, at circle is like, yo, like, let's correct this. This is this is so funny. Let me tell you about wander.com. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, twenty four seven concierge service.
Speaker 2:What is this? Oh, the IP blocks are going out. You saw that. Right? There's, when you when you identify someone on x, where they're from, if you if you signed up originally with an IP, it can be transferred to another like, the IP block can be sold internationally, and then you will show up as an international, participant.
Speaker 2:So there there is some there's there are some false positives there a little bit. Sheila, who I mentioned for the Taco Bell wedding, I hope I didn't get that story wildly wrong, is mentioning a post from Alexis Mulliner who says, FYI, DHH, I'm noting that learn.omicom.io is inaccessible from Spain while La Liga matches are being broadcast. And DHH says Spain blocks all of Cloudflare during those matches in an insane medieval attempt to counter piracy.
Speaker 1:That's
Speaker 2:Wow. And so Omarky is hosted with Cloudflare, and they just Spain, they just bring down the Internet when they don't just stop piracy. That is insane. And so Shiel breaks it down. He says, oh my god.
Speaker 2:Spain blocks Cloudflare IP ranges during La Liga matches. La Liga submits lists of pirate IPs, and the blocks take out lots of legitimate services too. So you can't use LinkedIn in Spain during La Liga games.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's kind of that's pretty on brand. That's pretty on
Speaker 2:I'm not I'm not gonna look up the GDP growth figures. I'm not gonna do it. I'm sure it's going great. I'm sure it's going great over there.
Speaker 1:Very, very on brand for Spain. Did you say this? This is like the most Nathan potentially, it was like a Nathan Fielder idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's a bunch of accounts saying that JPMorgan appears to have an existentially threatening short MicroStrategy position that can potentially bankrupt JPM if master sorry, MicroStrategy trades 50% higher above Friday's close. Okay. And WallStreetBets comes in and says, you have no idea how understated So this a systemically critical bank is going to fail because they're short MicroStrategy. I'm not sure about this, but it's working
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because MicroStrategy is up 5% today. So could have could have played meanwhile, Bitcoin is up two and a half percent today. So could have played a part. Who knows? Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's a fun idea. It's fun to
Speaker 2:Yeah. The thing I I think that the thing that the is
Speaker 1:risking at all for
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:On a on a on a micro strategy short.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wonder how they even got that information. Maybe it's from a 13 or something. Who knows? Tyler has become, extremely black pill on the thirteen f.
Speaker 2:He's building a thesis against it. We we we may we might be talking about that later this week. Also, I mean, the the whole thing with the with the oh, we're gonna blow them out like it completely, it just it it just negates the idea that, like, they can they can trade a lot faster than you can trade them. Like, you know, you can just, like, they can get out of that trade when it's up 10. And it's like, yeah.
Speaker 2:It would have been disastrous at 50, but once it went up 10%, they were they they were like, okay. Yeah. We're out, actually. Like Yeah. You know, we're we're we're hedging.
Speaker 2:We're doing something. We're buying the other side of the trade or whatever. Especially, like, if you're if you're if you're a short seller now, like, it's not like you don't have Google alerts for what's going on on Wall Street bets. It's not gonna, like, take you by surprise. You're gonna be like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. I know that retail armies exist. If they get marshaled, it can be really bad. So you do have to be a little bit careful because even though they might have, like, crazy memes and they might be, like, somewhat silly, they are powerful, but you can quantify the power. You can look at what has what what capital has actually been marshaled for GameStop?
Speaker 2:Is it being sucked out of the GameStop army? Because if the entire GameStop army, like, leaves and you see GameStop selling off by 80% and now they're buying into micro strategy or something like you probably have a problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And Wall Street has always been PVP. Yeah. And in this case, you're just it's like p it's like, you know, one one group versus Yeah. 30,000, individuals.
Speaker 2:Well, we might wanna close out with this post from semi analysis about PVS, person versus shrimp. They're breaking it down. He says, it has become extremely trendy among some San Francisco artificial intelligence researchers to donate to shrimp welfare. They estimate that they help improve the welfare of 1,500 shrimps per year for every $1 donated. Why do they donate to shrimps?
Speaker 2:They claim that it is the most cost effective way of reducing suffering of sentient beings. Note that shrimp welfare that the shrimp welfare nonprofit actually does not prevent shrimps from being killed, but instead promotes the use of electrical stunning as a more humane slaughtering method that aligns with the goal of reducing shrimp suffering. And so I had an idea for a new semianalysis product, Shrimpmax. And what they'll do is every night, they will take thousands of shrimp and execute them using hundreds of different methodologies, and
Speaker 6:then
Speaker 2:they will quantify the amount of suffering on a nightly basis just like what they do with ClusterMax. Yeah. And so we could know for sure because, sure, today, the e, the the SFAI researchers, they might be, yes, electrical stunning is better than than the previous method. But what if there's a shift tomorrow? And tomorrow, electrical stunning is not the best method.
Speaker 2:They need to have real time data. They need charts. They need graphs. They need a dashboard. They need ClusterMax for shrimp suffering.
Speaker 1:I didn't I didn't believe this was real, but shrimpwelfareproject.org seems to be they they say you can track their shrimp act.
Speaker 2:Shrimp shrimp act? Well, I like a good report.
Speaker 1:And 40,000,000,000 shrimps are farmed each year. Yes. That is wild. That's more than five times the number of all farmed land animals combined.
Speaker 2:I didn't know shrimp was so popular.
Speaker 1:This makes shrimp welfare an area of high impact Yeah. Where your involvement can lead to great change.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Are you pro shrimp, anti shrimp, Tyler?
Speaker 3:Do you mean like shrimp? What for shrimp in general?
Speaker 2:Do you like shrimp? Do you like eating shrimp?
Speaker 3:I enjoy shrimp.
Speaker 2:You like enjoy shrimp? Do you think the shrimp welfare thing holds any water?
Speaker 3:I think it holds some water. But at some point, it's like
Speaker 1:it's like Should we have a global shrimp welfare tax? It's like an extra dollar per every time you buy every shrimp you buy is like in a dollar on top just for shrimp welfare. So if you have a nice meal, it might be you might be paying like a $20 premium, but, you know, thousands of shrimp are going to live better lives because of it.
Speaker 3:Well, it it's not that they're they're not gonna live better lives. They're gonna die better deaths.
Speaker 2:A noble cause. It's a noble cause.
Speaker 1:It is funny to go through to go through all of this. Yeah. Like, you clearly care more about shrimp than probably anyone on Earth. And you're still like, yeah. They must die, but we have to do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You gotta be nice about it. You gotta be nice with it.
Speaker 2:It is crazy that you just don't you just don't save them. But, I mean, I'm sure the I'm sure the spreadsheet's, mapped out in a certain way, and the rest is history. Should we close out with this, iconic mid century home? It is apparently for sale. Look at this photo.
Speaker 2:Beautiful. And I think someone might have already bought it. Adam Mayer said, I'm going to buy it. This is in the SF Gate. Do you have you seen this home before?
Speaker 2:I think I've seen some photos. It says after sixty five years, LA's most famous mid sensor mid century house hits the market. It's the first time it's ever been sold. Somebody's owned it for sixty five years. The pinnacle of mid century modern architecture with floor to seal ceiling glass windows, proffering a panoramic view of Los Angeles below.
Speaker 2:The home has been carefully preserved for decades. I just like that oh, it's it's it's for sale for $25,000,000. I just like that for once we get a real estate listing that kind of just becomes the current thing, and I saw a lot of people posting about this. We obviously love the mansion section, love posting about real estate, talking about real estate. We find real estate very fascinating.
Speaker 2:And I and I was happy to see this breakthrough in such a meaningful way. Yeah. Absolutely. News, but we will get to that tomorrow. Thank you for tuning in.
Speaker 2:Thank you for supporting us, listening to the show. Wherever you listen, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and we will see you tomorrow. A little update on the schedule. We will be off on Wednesday and Thursday. No show Wednesday.
Speaker 2:No no show Thursday, But we will be back on Friday for Black Friday, and we will be taking you on a whirlwind tour of the ecommerce world. We have some very exciting stuff planned for that. So we'll see you tomorrow, and then we won't see you Wednesday, Thursday,
Speaker 1:Thursday. Afternoon and evening. See you at eleven. Goodbye. Cheers.