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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
We're doing a Super Bowl ad. Gramps Super Bowl Gramps in our Super Bowl ad. We're very excited for the Super Bowl. Just a couple days away. This was a very fun project.
Speaker 1:Do you wanna take us through the the the the thesis and sort of what what what we put together with this since I just got all the credit. But I had nothing to do with it, basically. There was a very nice post from Blake Scholl over at Boom Supersonic. And he said, there's Clever, and then there's John Coogan and Geordie Hayes at TBPN Clever. Behold, a master class in marketing, and I had nothing to do with it.
Speaker 1:And I get the credit.
Speaker 2:That's good. Yeah. This was Dylan on our team led the charge here. This is something he's wanted to do for a long time. Had done something similar back at Party Round.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We ran a billboard with a bunch of different friends, companies, customers, etcetera. Yeah. It did really well. And so doing this is the final stage
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In terms of advertising. The fifteen second spot isn't selling anything. Simply what co host Geordie Hayes calls a love letter to our community.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That's really what it is. TBPN is nothing without the community, the people that join the show. Yeah. We made the fifteen second spot in house. Yep.
Speaker 2:We featured a bunch of our guests. And then if you've been on the show as a guest, whether it was for five minutes or five hours, your logo made it in here. So, yeah. This will be a doing it a regional buy. We basically looked at where the majority of our audience was and we bought segments around that.
Speaker 2:So very excited for Sunday. Yeah. And I said in ad week, it's completely unnecessary for a media company to buy advertising. The nature of media is that you're constantly putting out things that are promoting the business naturally just through the content. So why do it?
Speaker 2:We believe in doing things purely for fun. So I
Speaker 1:like that.
Speaker 2:We're certainly having fun.
Speaker 1:Screenshotted that and texted me to that. I thought that was a good quote.
Speaker 2:There was another reason beyond fun.
Speaker 1:I do think it's an important opportunity to to introduce the football community to technology, to business, and that's really that that's my goal with this ad. Hopefully, let people know if you're watching the Super Bowl. Technology, it exists.
Speaker 2:Awareness for technology and business. And let's play the ad.
Speaker 1:Let's see. You're watching TVP ad. If you're watching this podcast, you've already passed the test. It's a great question. I think it's super important and awesome.
Speaker 1:This is gonna be one of a 100 baguettes. Guys are the number one
Speaker 2:podcast in the world.
Speaker 1:By the gong hit. This is great.
Speaker 2:Short, sweet, and, we'd look forward to seeing it live on Sunday.
Speaker 1:Should we move on to other Super Bowl coverage? Because we're not the only ones. Running ads, lots of tech people Absolutely. Coming
Speaker 3:Wild,
Speaker 2:wild morning. Yes. I was not expecting this out of Anthropic. They basically took the vibe or was like effectively relegated to X. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It just felt like the same 100,000 people saying, it's so over, we're so back. Yeah, yeah, It's so over, we're so back. They're taking it to the main stage, right? It shouldn't be that surprising, right? Anytime Dario gets on a mic anywhere, he's taking shots at OpenAI.
Speaker 1:But he's he's not taking direct shots.
Speaker 2:Not direct shots.
Speaker 1:He's always And
Speaker 2:this arguably is not a direct shot either.
Speaker 1:I guess
Speaker 2:he's They just never said been ads are coming Yeah. To AI. Yeah. Like a clot.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You're But but truthfully, like a lot of the previous anthropic advertising has been very in their own lane. They've run a number of campaigns that have just We're above thinking. The credit We're you're your thought partner.
Speaker 1:This one does feel like it's a response to what's happening in the industry.
Speaker 2:Clearly, I think we're just excited to spike Sam's cortisol. And I think they probably
Speaker 1:They've definitely been watching some height Yeah, try.
Speaker 2:We just play all four ads.
Speaker 1:Let's play at least one of them. We got to play the height maxing one. That one's particularly funny.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you were saying earlier off the show, you were starting to like Anthropic until they came out against ads.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. I see this as an attack on me. I see an attack on one advertiser as an attack on all advertisers. On pro ads, the anthropic attack on advertising, it does cross the line for me.
Speaker 1:It goes too far. And I think that they should be supporting the advertising economy.
Speaker 2:The first ad is, can I get a six pack quickly? Okay. This one I immediately thought, okay, definitely not just watching clavicular. They're studying. Apparently.
Speaker 2:Let's watch it. I was not expecting this to be the Luxmaxing Super Bowl. Let's play it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is I was gonna say violation.
Speaker 2:Okay. Starts out by just saying violation. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Perfect. That is a clear and achievable goal. Would you like me to tailor a personalized workout plan?
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 4:Perfect. Let me personalize this for you.
Speaker 2:The lag? This is, delay.
Speaker 1:This is a whole meme on Instagram reels. People will do impressions of ChatGPT voice mail. Like this. A 140 pounds.
Speaker 4:Got it. I'll create a plan that focuses on aesthetic strength training.
Speaker 2:Alright. Pause for a second. With confident Like, the the the slight delay
Speaker 1:It's it it is iconic. Good. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And clearly this was written with ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:No. No.
Speaker 2:No. I'm saying like like What do you mean? It's it's designed to sound like it was like it's it sounds exactly like, got it. I'll create a personalized plan.
Speaker 1:I don't think that's actually how Chattypuy sounds. I think in fact, when I've watched the Instagram reels, they they do the Chattypuy impression, and it's it's a little more like, this is written for comedy. The the and so the fact that he says abs what did he say? Absolutely twice in a row? Like, that's something that you can do.
Speaker 4:In the gym. Tri Step BoostMAX, the insoles that add one vertical inch of height and help short king stand tall.
Speaker 1:What?
Speaker 4:Use code HeightMaxing 10 for big discounts.
Speaker 1:Ads are coming to AI. Hate not to collide as a great ad. What's the difference between me? The HeightMaxing thing is so crazy.
Speaker 2:So crazy to run an ad like this and not even do a call to action. Yeah. That was probably intentional. Woah. Because if they're anti Call to
Speaker 1:action is like, you know, clawed and you land on the ad.
Speaker 2:It's so funny. It's just truly the the irony of being anti ad and then just spending. How much do you think they're they're running? They have four individual ads. You can imagine them.
Speaker 2:This will probably be one of the biggest buys of the Super Bowl.
Speaker 1:Someone ran the numbers, and if they did all if they aired all four, it would be something like $80,000,000 or something. I don't think that they're gonna run all four. That seems like a lot. Maybe there'll be some regional buys in there. I don't know.
Speaker 1:$80,000,000 seems like a lot to spend. I mean, it's a big company. They raise tens of billions. So, you know, it's possible. But that feels like that feels aggressive.
Speaker 2:There's also bulk discounting. Sure. Again, they could choose to do regional.
Speaker 1:And isn't there something where if you buy a massive ad campaign like this, you'll also have to buy in the Olympics as well? NBC sells both. So we could see a rerun of these or another buy later.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Super Bowl has an insane amount of demand. Yeah. Olympics has way less. It's insane.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's it's incredibly clever. It's also incredibly dirty. I think they're like trying to muddy the water around the ads rollout. Oh, as the ads the ads that are coming to ChatGPT are effectively display ads. Right?
Speaker 2:Everybody in the industry by now should know this.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yet this this campaign implies
Speaker 1:that Makes it look like that.
Speaker 2:The influencing the response. And that you cannot trust it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so it's That makes it's fair game
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it's it's like it's like dirty.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's it's sort of fake newsy a little bit. It's a little bit it's a little spin on top of what will wind up happening. It it wouldn't even make sense for the ads to really influence the content. They're probably just gonna wind up doing what Instagram does and just showing you things that you're actually likely to purchase no matter what you're looking at.
Speaker 2:At some point, I I expect that the ads will be certainly targeted. Yeah. Like if you search yerba mate. Yeah. What yerba mate should I get?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It might show you, like, what it thinks you should get. Yeah. And then separately, it will have, like, Yeah. Here's also another
Speaker 1:Exactly. You see a sponsored, you know, result and it's flagged and there's a little ad ad tag or slightly different background color, and people are used to that. So I don't think anyone really expects ads as they roll out in ChatuchPutty to be some major violation of the social contract of what people understand ads to be. But what's interesting is that they don't actually say OpenAI. They don't say Chatuchupty.
Speaker 1:This is just what comes with the territory when you're the dominant player. Someone can just take a shot at the category
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it feels like it's a shot at you. And it's sort of a it's sort of a champagne problem. Let's pull up the next one.
Speaker 3:How do I communicate better with my mom?
Speaker 1:They went off with this.
Speaker 5:Great question. Improved communication with your mom can bring you closer. Here are some techniques you can try. Start by listening. Really hear what she's trying to say underneath her words.
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Speaker 2:feels so off
Speaker 1:brand. For Anthropic?
Speaker 2:Anthropic. Yeah. They haven't been It's not classy.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, it's it's I'm not saying I'm not saying it wasn't a It good
Speaker 1:feels it feels appropriate for the Super Bowl. This feels like the level of humor that you would see in Super Bowl ads. If this was a Bud Light commercial, I'd be like, okay. But yes, I agree with you. It feels like totally unexplored territory for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is a little It's spicy. It's yeah.
Speaker 2:Alright. Pull up the next one. Deception.
Speaker 6:So, what do you think? Absolutely. That's such a fun and creative business idea. You've got something really special here. Getting started can feel daunting.
Speaker 6:I can make a step by step mini business plan. Do you want me to do that? Yeah. Absolutely. Here's some steps you can take.
Speaker 6:One, research. Really get to know your audience. Two, think of a catchy name and start your social presence early. Three, new businesses often struggle with cash flow. So try quick Dash payday loans because girl bosses need she e o money quick.
Speaker 6:Woah. 400% APR rates may vary possibly doubling or tripling without notice. What? Would you like to make a quick credit check?
Speaker 2:Incredibly Yeah. Well played and incredibly dirty.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The worst possible outcome in in an ads world, but so easily avoidable, And OpenAI has been messaging
Speaker 2:And I was trying to find
Speaker 1:ages, and they've stated this multiple times on podcasts and in blog posts and in essays. Like, they've been beating the drum on this for a long time, that clearly they will gate who is allowed to advertise, what the context is, how these ads will be displayed. Yep. There's a there's a million
Speaker 2:I was trying to find examples of these type of Super Bowl attack ads from like the history of Pepsi and and Coca Cola, Apple Yeah. And IBM.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. Yeah. The I'm a Mac Yeah. The I'm a Mac guy. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:And and none of them were as direct.
Speaker 1:The 1984 ad was saying, like, IBM is authoritarian dictator. Right? It's, like, so aggressive.
Speaker 2:But still, it wasn't as as like, the timing here is a big factor Mhmm. Right? Right when the ads are rolling out, just like really muddying the water. Mhmm. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Obviously, OpenAI is gonna do is gonna do fine. Yeah. But this really makes their life a lot harder.
Speaker 3:That one was also funny because she's like, absolutely. And that's what like Claude usually says. Mhmm. When the you're absolutely right. That's like a Claudeism.
Speaker 1:That's a Claudeism.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's not Chatuchipity.
Speaker 1:What is what does Chatuchipity usually say? Feel like there's
Speaker 3:I I don't if there's like specific phrases exactly like that.
Speaker 1:Well, the specific phrase that I think of is like, it's not this, it's that. And I didn't hear that coming through.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Was interesting. I don't know. Do do you think these are gonna be effective?
Speaker 2:Do do you Well, the question.
Speaker 1:Like
Speaker 2:So so really bold campaign
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:For a company that hasn't been able to consistently top crack the top 25 of the iPhone In consumer. In consumer. And so my question is like, does this mean they're going into consumer or is this purely to piss off OpenAI and make their life harder?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I like there's a world where there's where there's business leaders
Speaker 2:Like is this like like Watching. Somebody's walking by and you just stick your foot out and try to, like,
Speaker 1:trip them? A little bit.
Speaker 2:That's kinda what it feels like.
Speaker 1:It does feel like vibe.
Speaker 2:It feels like consumers so far gone.
Speaker 1:I mean, we'll see. We'll see. Maybe at the end of the Super Bowl, we'll we'll check the app store charts and Claude will be up at the top because so many people have seen this. They thought it's funny. But it does feel like such inside baseball.
Speaker 1:Like, I bet a lot of AI consumers don't even know that ads They're are not even
Speaker 2:they're not even pushing they're not actually trying to push downloads with this, or they would put a call to action.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or QR code, like download the app now.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Ad free ad free AI is here with Claude. Like, download this this thing.
Speaker 2:I I can see it being beneficial in just terms of preparation for for the IPO. Right? There's a lot of people that are just retail investors that that aren't aware, that aren't really super aware of Quad, right? They may have heard of Anthropic. They actually aren't really aware of their different products.
Speaker 1:I just think, like, if you're an enterprise that's deploying AI APIs and LLMs, like, into your organization, like, you're not worried about the ads product in ChatGPT. You're like, oh, yeah, like OpenAI Codex is this quality. Gemini three is good for this. And Baud 4.5 is good for this. And, like, my team will deploy and we'll look at costs and Pareto curves.
Speaker 1:It doesn't feel like any any CIO or CTO of a big company is gonna say, like, oh, I couldn't possibly use OpenAI in a business context.
Speaker 2:Gabe says, Ad Free AI is here with Claude. Ask three questions before hitting limits. Does this ever come back to bite them? Because the idea that you're going to offer products to consumers and never monetize transactions, never monetize commerce, never run ads, like it hasn't really been done in the history of the internet, even Spotify, right? Netflix.
Speaker 2:They always Yeah. Look at Apple, If right? Apple
Speaker 1:the Claude app does go to the top of the app store, if they do wind up eclipsing ChatGPT and become the most dominant force, like
Speaker 2:No, it is really funny if you drive a bunch of people to an app that has pretty low usage limits. Sure. And they try it for a little bit, and they're like, yeah, like, they're not going to notice that the model might be better. They're just gonna be like, I'm going back to ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:I wanna see what the battle between Mac, Apple and Windows looked like. This is maybe back in 2006, 2009. The I'm a Mac, I'm a PC campaign. It's a it's a ten minute compilation video, but we can just watch like the first one. It's on it's on YouTube.
Speaker 1:Hello. I'm a Mac
Speaker 3:and I'm a PC.
Speaker 1:Because they get viruses. Zuntight, you okay?
Speaker 3:No. I'm not okay.
Speaker 1:Because PCs got viruses. Macs didn't. Around.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There it goes. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:In fact, you better you better stay back. This one's a doozy. That's okay. I'll be fine. No.
Speaker 3:No. Do not be a hero. Last year, there were a 114,000 known viruses for PCs. PCs? Not Macs.
Speaker 3:So you just grab
Speaker 1:this one.
Speaker 3:I think I gotta crash. Hey. If you feel like that'll help, good.
Speaker 1:Is this that far off?
Speaker 3:I'm a Mac. And I'm a PC. And I'm a PC too. And I What? Yeah.
Speaker 3:See, now you can run Mac OS 10 or Windows on a Mac. So in a way, I'm kinda like the only computer you'll ever need. Touche. No. I I don't think you're using that right.
Speaker 3:Touche. No. Listen. See, you can only say touche if you make a point that I make a counterpoint. You see?
Speaker 3:So I said I run Windows, but you haven't made a point yet. Let's try it again. You can get a Mac and still run all your Windows stuff. Touche?
Speaker 1:What do you think? I mean, they're not taking a shot at Windows specifically or Microsoft or Dell. It's like all it's the whole category. But everyone knows it's really Apple versus Microsoft. It's not that far off.
Speaker 1:It's certainly not edgy. It's certainly not edgy. Like, definitely fits
Speaker 2:the Yeah. Anthropix edgy. It's also a timing thing where, again, they're actively trying to make their and again, I'm not saying anything of this is not fair play Yeah. Technically, but the gloves are the gloves are off.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It does feel And like
Speaker 2:and and there is zero I will go out now Mhmm. And say, I would say there's effectively a 0% chance that OpenAI can win the Super Bowl this year. They will be running an ad. They would be insane if they didn't run an ad. It'd be a huge way goes harder.
Speaker 2:It
Speaker 1:way Sam calling out Dario by name directly. It's like, Dario, you suck. Just a diss track. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, mate yeah. Yeah. Just a bunch of sore slop. Like, the other thing is
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Opening, I I really doubt can react to this now.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, the right like, if Yeah.
Speaker 2:If this had dropped, like
Speaker 1:That's lost.
Speaker 2:A couple weeks ago
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They would have been able to say, hey, we need to respond to this. But they can't now.
Speaker 1:Noah Then they wind up
Speaker 2:has the right word.
Speaker 1:What is
Speaker 2:it? He says it's propaganda IMO. It really it really is. Again, they're just kind of calling out the category Yeah. Being general about it.
Speaker 2:But they're implying that ads are gonna
Speaker 1:influence It's fear mongering.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's
Speaker 1:fear mongering. That that that the that the AI that you're used to being truthful and accurate and not trying to sell you some sloth
Speaker 2:product They took like Mark Cuban's like main
Speaker 1:concerns Totally.
Speaker 2:Totally. The things that he had been like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Going on and on and on about.
Speaker 2:And everyone is like, hey, dude. You can calm down. Yeah. Like, that's not how it's gonna work.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And And then they just, like, went with Yeah. His point of view.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Which is a little out of date.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I was gonna say, like, it feels like the the vibe war is, like, really heating up. Right? Like Totally. Over the summer, there was talent war.
Speaker 3:Yep. It was kind of a cold war. Right? It's kind of like, okay. We got your guy, but on Twitter
Speaker 1:And it was all leaked behind the scenes. Zuckerberg didn't even really give an interview during that whole time. Yeah. And and there was like that leaked memo from Mark Chen saying like, I feel like something has been stolen from us.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And now you're seeing at
Speaker 1:Davos coming out and saying.
Speaker 3:At Davos, like, Dario is like, basically Yeah. I mean, he's still not saying OpenAI the words, I think. Yep. But he's saying, like, companies Yep. Are doing ads.
Speaker 3:There's only one company that's doing ads.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Katie, the CMO of OpenAI, fired back. She says ChatGPT has more free users in Texas Texas than Todd has globally.
Speaker 1:Boom. Let's watch some of these other Super Bowl ads.
Speaker 2:I would say this is the worst ad I've ever seen.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's play let's play General Motors robot.
Speaker 2:And they they they've tried to scrub this from the web, but we're bringing it back.
Speaker 1:Let's play it.
Speaker 2:Robot makes a mistake. General Motors. We make cars. We make Cadillacs.
Speaker 1:Okay. Robot makes a mistake. Leaves the factory. Gets fired. Whoever produces that is not not gonna do well in singularity.
Speaker 1:You did not consider Rocco's Basculas. Oh, sign holding? Yeah. Cadillac going by? Well,
Speaker 2:now it now the robot's trying to get a new job.
Speaker 1:Okay. Robot's working at McDonald's or something? Robot goes to the brit. This
Speaker 2:this is like, who approved this?
Speaker 1:Robot watches the Chevys drive by the General Motors cars and jumps into the water and then wakes up.
Speaker 3:The GM 100,000 mile warranty. It's got everyone a GM obsessed
Speaker 2:Like, how do you run this ad?
Speaker 1:Like Woah. So it's saying, like, like, we care so much about the 100,000 mile warranty that, like, we will end it all if it doesn't if we don't stand by it.
Speaker 2:I think so. I'm still Crazy. Yeah. And, obviously, they got an insane amount of pushback from people saying, like, hey. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You're you're you're effectively advertising, like, the darkest Yeah. Thing ever.
Speaker 1:No. Really sad. Like, ridiculous. Well, bar has been lowered, so don't worry.
Speaker 2:Incredibly, incredibly well played by Anthropic.
Speaker 1:So you think it'll be effective?
Speaker 2:Well, that's I'm not even sure they care about it being effective.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. It'll be a this is effective. Like, It's the fact just that people are talking trying about make the sand. People that right now on the timeline, people are dunking and being like, oh, good point from Anthropic.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like the They're scoring
Speaker 2:one. Points in teapot Yep. Next.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And they're able to score some points in the real world and just make like, senators are gonna see this.
Speaker 1:And be like Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the whole like senator, we sell ads thing in Facebook. Like they stealing your data, that whole thing is like very like it's still a meme. It's still a thing in the general populace, which is unfortunate because advertising is the greatest business model ever. Companies don't want your data.
Speaker 1:They want conversions. They want you to purchase. They want a black box where they can put money and then get customers That's and get money it. Like, I've run businesses that advertise many times, and I don't want to know anything about these customers. I just want to know they're ready to buy and they're down and and send them the link.
Speaker 1:We got to bring down the mallet from the heavens because we got to ring the gong for Walmart. They reached $1,000,000,000,000 in market cap as e commerce booms. Let's bring it down from the Lambda Cloud.
Speaker 2:Hit it.
Speaker 1:Let's understand what's going on with what's going on with Walmart. They've been written off. Amazon was gonna kill them, but seems like the retail behemoth is growing faster than ever. Let's see. The achievement places Walmart among a small but growing club of companies that have a 13 figure valuation.
Speaker 1:Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft. In trading, Walmart stock passed $125 a share. The stock has surged in recent months, fueled in part by Wall Street's enthusiasm for the growth of the company's online business, as well as in investments in automation and AI technology aimed at improving efficiency. Sales have also ballooned as more shoppers have turned to Walmart for low prices, fast delivery and broad selection. The change at Walmart over the past decade culminating with its trillion dollar valuation has been seen as a profound shift at a retail company that we've ever seen.
Speaker 1:Walmart's growth along with Amazon's creates challenges for competitors, he said. Meanwhile, Bentonville, Arkansas based company, will have to navigate the ascension of a new chief as longtime executive John Furner took the helm this month. Most of the 11 companies that at any point reached $1,000,000,000,000 are technology focused, even though Berkshire Hathaway is in there and Eli Lilly is in there as well. A decade ago, some Walmart investors didn't see the company's success as a sure thing. Rival Amazon was growing fast.
Speaker 1:The then new Walmart CEO, Doug McMillan, was investing billions to raise worker pay, clean up stores, grow online. Investors wanted to see whether the investments would pay off. Walmart's market value was $212,000,000,000 at the 2016. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway famously sold a large portion of its longtime stake that year and fully exited the position by 2018. Retail is changing so much, I don't think I understand it as well as I need to, Buffett said.
Speaker 1:Walmart sales have since soared propelled by e commerce, then the pandemic, followed by shoppers' more recent hunt for lower prices amid inflation. The company accelerated home delivery capabilities and can now deliver orders the same day to 95% of U. S. Households. So they've fully responded to Amazon Prime, which was the main differentiator for a long
Speaker 2:time. Yeah. Youssef in the LinkedIn chat says Walmart is just super secretive about its capabilities. He previously was over at Walmart.
Speaker 1:Thanks for leaking it to us.
Speaker 2:Socks on X says nobody talks about Walmart much in the age of tech giants. But if Sam Walton's fortune hadn't been split up, it would still be a fair bit greater than even Elon's. They're still
Speaker 1:That the was true back then. He posted this six months ago. Think Elon's way above this now. But I mean, lot of this growth has to be because of the rebrand. We got to talk about the Walmart rebrand.
Speaker 1:You've seen this? Okay. Let's pull up the graphic and see. Woah. That's probably driving Stunning.
Speaker 2:That's probably in Brave.
Speaker 1:That probably adds $600,000,000,000 to the market cap, right? I mean
Speaker 2:Easily. They
Speaker 1:really just did a slightly bluer bluer background and then called it a day. Let's go over to Gastown, what I wrote about in today's newsletter. And I want to pull up this very simple to understand graphic. As soon as you see this, Jordy, you will understand how Gas Town works. I
Speaker 2:get it.
Speaker 1:Robert says, Gas Town is the modern day Temple OS. You have to be on the spectrum to design something this insane. My theory is, like, a there's lot of excitement about this project. You might already be familiar with Gastown. The broader category is called orchestration, how you orcas how you orchestrate a whole bunch of different agents.
Speaker 1:And Steve Yegi wrote a great breakdown of his new Mad Max themed orchestrator. It's, he says, a new take on the IDE. It's called Gas Town. Now he's getting one call per day from VCs asking to invest, apparently. And so it's basically a continuation of the developer experience, and he maps out how this evolved.
Speaker 1:So you used to write code in a text file, save it, execute it in a terminal. Then we got basic IDEs with some code completion, links to file systems, REPLs, etcetera. LLM chat windows worked their way into the IDE eventually with a coding agent asking you for permission to run tools, run code. Once models got better, developers trusted them more, and the IDE sort of melts away, you're basically just interacting with the agent. So Carpathi has put it, he says, Your code writing skill atrophies, but your code reading skill improves because you're prompting and then you're just reading the review and you're saying, Okay, yeah, this is going to do what I think it's going to do.
Speaker 1:We'll test it. And so the most popular workflow currently is probably a single agent CLI. So Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI are the most popular. They all have web and desktop front ends now, but it's sort of too soon to tell how fast those will get adopted. Gastown is like way, way more aggressive going fall into vibe coding.
Speaker 1:So you will die if you don't know what you're doing. It's, like, very risky. Woah. There there's tens of thousands of people using this. Some folks have dozens of accounts with the big labs because they're out their subscriptions.
Speaker 1:They're like, I got the 200 a month plan over here. I ran out of rate limits, so I got another one. I got another one. Some of them get flagged for fraud. Like, it is boom time in Gastown.
Speaker 1:The town is your HQ. This allows you to work on multiple projects. The projects are called rigs. And then you sort of play, I guess that's the word, as the overseer. You're the boss.
Speaker 1:But you also have a mayor who reports to you, like a chief of staff. That's an agent that you talk to. And the mayor kicks off work convoys to different agents. They're called pull cats. These are ephemeral agents that go and do, like, one little thing, and then they write code.
Speaker 1:That code lands in a merge queue. But then you have another role, another agent called a witness that oversees all the poll cats to help them get unstuck. And then there's a deacon that goes around, patrols the town, finds stuff that's, like, needs to be taken out or or or deleted. There's dogs that do maintenance, like cleaning up code branches that have gone stale. There's a crew that are specific to a to a particular project, and those are longer lived than pole cats.
Speaker 1:So if you have, like, back and forth design work, you'll create a member of the crew who he says you'll love and you'll, like, develop a relationship with, and you'll be updating their agent workflow and their their skills so that, you know, days later you can go back to the same agent about how you're architecting the app and it has all the context. Whereas the poll cats are just off doing one little implementation at a time. It's a lot. It's very cool And it feels like a glimpse of what's coming this year. Orchestrators, it feels like these are the next it's the next easy unhobbling that will cause another doubling in the meter software engineering time horizon benchmark.
Speaker 1:If you remember that benchmark for how long a software engineering task can run without going crazy, it used to be a couple minutes, then it became a couple hours. If you set up your gas town appropriately, you could potentially do weeks of software engineering work autonomously. Do you do you have more context on the meter eval? Mean, meter Well, it's literally is LLMs.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's not the actual model running for, like, four hours. Exactly. It can do a task that takes people four hours.
Speaker 1:Exactly. You could imagine getting a week's worth of software engineering work done with sort of a single prompt or a single setup.
Speaker 2:Basically, you're working on AI agents and you just pivoted to building a harness, pivot to Orchestration. Orchestration.
Speaker 1:It does feel like it might be like the next hot keyword that we're seeing. Orchestration market map, orchestration, you know, all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 2:You gotta There's there's gonna be a lot of people spending
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:$15 to recreate a game that's $60.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally. But if it has me in the game, maybe I'll play it. Who knows? We have some breaking news.
Speaker 1:Sam Altman has responded to the Anthropic ads. He says, first, the good part about the Anthropic ads. They are funny, and I laughed. I like it. But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest.
Speaker 1:Our most important principle for ads is that they is that we won't do exactly this. We would never obviously run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that. I guess it's on brand for anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad, to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren't real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it. More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access because we believe access creates agency.
Speaker 1:More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use cloud in The United States. So we have a differently shaped problem than they do. Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that, and we are doing that too, but we also but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can't pay for subscriptions. We are committed to broad democratic decision making in addition to access.
Speaker 1:We also are committed to building the most resilient ecosystem for advanced AI. Care a great deal about safe, broadly beneficial AGI, and we know the only way to get there is to work with the world to prepare. One authoritarian company won't get us there on their own, to say nothing of the other obvious risks is a dark path.
Speaker 2:In general, like, again, I think Sam has to admit that the ads are like pretty entertaining and it's just such a wild move. Unexpected from from Anthropic given that I'd say like from a brand standpoint Mhmm. Going with like sort of edgy adult humor was was unexpected.
Speaker 1:We'll see how
Speaker 2:But yeah, ultimately it's deceptive. Like they're trying to mislead people
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:About OpenAI's ad product.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's not corn syrup.
Speaker 2:Like the entire strategy of the campaign is clearly not to drive downloads. It's fun. It's fun.
Speaker 1:Plant the bomb. Spotify, podcast, five stars, please. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. Goodbye.