Speaker 1: China. China. China. China is in the news. Top American execs are sounding alarms.
The White House is divided on how to respond to recent advances in Chinese AI, has weighed crackdown measures. We we talked about how this was coming. It is interesting. There's a there's there's a lot of, like, hurry up and pedal to the metal and then pull back and then ban the American model and then, you know, are we gonna ban the Chinese model in a similar way? And lots of contradictions, lots of insider baseball.
Everyone's critiquing everyone else. Lots of interesting takes. Also, just some interesting data about what's actually going on with these models. How advanced are they? Where do they come from?
How cheap are they to make? What are the economic impacts in America? But the Wall Street Journal has a nice little roundup here we can take you through. So Silicon Valley and Washington are debating a multibillion dollar question. Should American companies be able to use Chinese artificial artificial intelligence models?
They certainly have been able to. It hasn't been a problem for years, but now they're getting stronger. OpenAI and Anthropic executives are sounding the alarm about the rise of cheap AI, particularly powerful new models produced in China suggesting that they will lead to quote a dystopian AI future and present unacceptable security risks without regulation. And that is the point of debate. Are you on the side of dystopian open source or liberating open source, the George frame?
Right. Some analysis, some analysts who study the AI industry say the two companies which are preparing for public listings in the next year, they just want to eliminate the competition. The emergence of highly capable open autonomous AI systems including Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 model and Alibaba's Quen 3.8 Max. And Alibaba is actually a massive investor in Moonshot. They have their own anthropic Google over there going on.
Alibaba's like very much their the Google too, in the sense that they they have a large position there. Which were released in recent days and viewed favorably by investors and users has turned the AI race on its head once again. Kimi K3 was also competitive with US models on some benchmarks. The debate over the new models which are open weight, but not yet. They're about to open source them.
We'll see what happens next week. Allowing users to download and customize them with company data for specific tasks. Very, very good. Very useful. Coincides with division in the Trump administration about whether to take steps to limit the use of models in The United States.
Quote, One probable outcome of an open weight model dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes. Rather than a market product, AI is a public good which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of digital public infrastructure. Dean Ball, OpenAI's head of strategic futures said in an ex post Friday. Dean Ball made it to the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Now, the AI communism is just at the model level.
Like there would still be a bunch of like a lot of people who are long compute, long neo cloud, they say like this is where the value should accrue. The data centers will accrue a reasonable margin and they will still continue to make money. And so, it's not that this automatically leads to nationalization of compute in any way. People would still be paid, but the margin might be lower, at least the formulation here. So, Ball, a former Trump administration official, called such a scenario a dystopian hellscape and he said he expected the Trump administration to make moves toward reducing the use of open source models.
Ball later clarified that he wasn't advocating for the United States government to discourage Chinese AI. He also highlighted a central challenge with the AI race. Top tier AI companies raised billions of dollars to pay for the vast computing resources needed to continue improving AI systems. If everyone uses AI systems that people largely don't pay for, there would be no way to finance continued frontier AI development. Ball, who started at the company earlier this month and focuses on policy and strategy and OpenAI, have said his comments don't reflect the company's official positions.
He's just posting. The company has developed its own models own open models and Chief Executive Sam Altman had previously said that OpenAI's past approach of only developing closed tools was unwise. Other top AI executives have warned that open models present huge risks since developers and policymakers lack control over how they are used and modified. A lot of risk of cyber attacks. A lot of risk of annoying spam attacks.
The cyber thing is very concerning and annoying if that really ramps up. But the good news is that the closed source models have been available to cybersecurity firms and a lot of big major companies. The finance industry, for example, has had access to Mythos and GPT Cyber for almost six months. And then just today, Google announced a specific model, Flashlight Cyber, I think. So they're trying to offer a similar capability, but really go down the cost curve because a lot of the cyber tools there was incredible breakthroughs with Mythos, GPT Cyber, like great benchmarks on those but could be very expensive.
We heard I think wasn't it Nikesh Arora said, I think he spent like a million dollars to find some zero day bug and it was like totally worth it. But that's expensive for smaller companies that might just Yeah. Need It would be great to just be able to go to a cheap cyber tuned model, get approved by Google and say, hey, just go and read every line of code and just let me know if there's anything that's obvious. And that could be good. What do
Speaker 2: what do Yeah. And just to be clear, they released 3.5 Flashlight and 3.5 Flash Cyber. So it's not like Flashlight Cyber.
Speaker 1: Okay. But Flash is still cheaper than the big model.
Speaker 2: Right? There's like the pro and
Speaker 1: then there's And so I have to imagine that if you given the choice, if you're like a mid sized company and and your and your choice is like go beat down the door to get into Project Glasswing to spend $5,000,000 to have Mythos read every line of code or you're like, oh, well, I'm already a Google partner. I have a really solid business relationship with them because I've been buying ads and I have Google Webmaster tools set up and I just want to go set up Flash Cyber, not Flashlight Cyber, I imagine that the cost would be cheaper because they fine tuned this model for this specific thing. So Anthropic CEO Dario Amadeh for years has worry warned about the risks of powerful and open AI systems, saying in a recent Bloomberg interview that having AI models with advanced cybersecurity capabilities that are free to download could be harmful. He said it's a serious concern. Use of Chinese models, which are far cheaper than US counterparts, is surging at US companies, prompting some investors to question the staying power of top model makers such as Anthropic and OpenAx.
The current US open source frontier is starting to catch up with China's. On Wednesday, Thinking Machines Lab led by former technology chief Miriam Maradi, released its first AI model as open weight. NVIDIA's Nemotron three Ultra is starting to see traction. That's interesting to hear. I haven't heard nearly enough buzz around Nemotron.
I know Jensen has been investing in it. He's also investing in a lot of up and down the stack.
Speaker 3: I've been hearing buzz about the name, John.
Speaker 1: Nemotron's a good name.
Speaker 3: Nemotron. Why? Very cool name. About that. There people are you know, there's there's some talks bubbling.
People are saying it's it's it's one of the best names for for a family of models ever.
Speaker 1: What comes after Ultra? Isn't that what the the didn't Apple first do that with the the m four Pro, the m four Max, the m four Ultra? So we gotta come up with an even better word for what happens after Ultra. Giga, maybe. Hyper.
And then Exa. The market's faith in Anthropic and OpenAI continuing to build more cable models that push the frontier AI frontier frontier has been at the heart of the boom, helping justify trillions of dollars in spending on infrastructure in the coming years. The threat that new players will vastly undercut what they can charge for advanced AI pushed down some tech and AI company stocks prices last week. David Sachs, the venture capitalist and White House AI advisor, suggested that he read Ball's post as a confession to a regulatory capture strategy. Sachs and others have long seen calls for AI regulation by companies such as Anthropic as efforts to use new laws and policies to stymie competitors.
The weaponization of regulatory uncertainty as a competitive tool should be completely unacceptable, he said. Security focused administration officials in the past year have considered a slew of measures to crack down on Chinese AI companies developing open models. People familiar with the discussion said they've weighed adding the businesses to trade blacklists, security warnings on Chinese AI companies, a potential executive order targeting open models. So it does seem like even though Tyler Cowen, were going back and forth with him about this about like, can you even ban it? You can't really ban anything in the land of the free.
Like, the solution to piracy was not really to ban piracy. Like, you can still torrent things, but it's just so easy to use Apple TV and Spotify and Netflix that most people just wind up just paying $5, $2 for a song, or or $10 a month for something. That it effectively killed it just because the product experience was better.
Speaker 3: This morning
Speaker 1: But
Speaker 3: our treasury secretary Exactly. Besant was on Fox and said, this administration supports open source models, but what we do not support is IP theft. If we see, especially their overseas models are stealing from our great companies, we have the ability to sanction them because of this theft. So it will be if the admin does take serious action here, I would expect that to be the line of reasoning Yeah. Where they could just sanction
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The companies behind these models, which I imagine would create a real opportunity for American open source. You would ultimately see a lot of these neo clouds unable, I imagine, to serve the traditional Chinese open source models. I imagine that even OpenRouter would probably have to Yeah. Maybe. Stop supporting that.
Speaker 1: But again, with an open source model, like, how do you even define it? Because if there's a research paper and then you go and implement that and you train it or you take it, you fine tune it or you use the data to bootstrap your own model, like, you you just like where where in the supply chain? How many steps away do you need to be to, like, not count on there? Didn't Perplexity do like a seventeen seventy six deep seek very quickly? They did a fine tune.
Think you did a fine tune on deep seek as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Sparse auto encoders. Okay. I did it first.
Speaker 1: So But but and and and what what nationality was the model that you used as the base?
Speaker 2: Well, it was DeepSeek. It was China.
Speaker 1: Wow. Confession. You can go now.
Speaker 3: You can go. Yeah. People are are already angry at at at Besson's comments Yeah. And are and are saying funny that he's not mentioning that yesterday, US judge approved Anthropix $1,500,000,000 copyright lawsuit settlement for I don't think they they I think they settled that they were in possession of books that had been torrented or or basically acquired unlawfully. Yeah.
I don't believe that
Speaker 1: Unlawfully, they stole the book. I think they bought the books.
Speaker 3: No. No. No. No. No.
I think this was no. They they separately, they bought a bunch of books Okay. Trained on them and destroyed them.
Speaker 1: And that just made people upset because no one was the idea of books being destroyed, of course.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think those were rare, like, rare rare books.
Speaker 1: The Wilmenitis collection was destroyed. Rare PDFs.
Speaker 3: Judge William Alsop of the US District Court for the Northern District of California issued a preliminary approval of the settlement last year after ruling that Anthropic had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books, and the settlement was signed off on by a different judge yesterday. The payout will deliver $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works shared among the authors and publishers who hold rights to them.
Speaker 1: Anyway, there was some news about, like, whether or not Kimi k three is distilled. Tyler, can you take us through this Lisan Al Gayib post?
Speaker 2: Yeah. So he he didn't actually make this chart. It was from someone else. But basically, this shows a bunch of models compared to another, and it's like the kind of semantic similarities between them. Okay.
So it's like if you use similar kind of diction or Mhmm. Phrases, stuff like this Mhmm. Just, you like, pump the model a bunch of times and Mhmm. And you kind of can tell what's similar to each other. Yes.
And you can see in this version, looks like like Kimikki three is is very similar to Fable five.
Speaker 1: Fable five and then also Opus 4.7, 4.8, and Sonnet five. They might have gotten tokens from, like, all four of those models sort of
Speaker 2: mixed together. I think this exact example, like, only, like, a few prompts were used. It's not, like, super involved. It's also, like, this is very much just, correlation. This Sure.
Does not, like, prove that they distilled or anything. They they could have just used, like, similar, you know, post training techniques or something like this.
Speaker 1: Totally. But notably They distill. GPT 5.4, 5.5, 5.6 share very little similarity to the Anthropic models and vice versa. The Anthropic models don't seem to be correlated with the OpenAI models, although the OpenAI models are correlated with them with with each other. So 5.6 Luna looks pretty correlated with 5.4 because they probably were like, well, we're building on the shoulders of the work that we've been done.
And and it's the same thing with Anthropic where Fable has some of the same flavor as an Opus or a Haiku. That makes sense.
Speaker 2: That makes sense because people have, like, been saying, oh, maybe those models were actually distilled from the the big, like, Mythos pre trained. Right?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Or vice Or You vice have a bunch of users that are doing rollouts on Opus, trying to vibe code different things, and you take all that training data and then you feed that into Fable. And Fable sort of like picks up on a lot of that because that's what the the user said, wow, you really did a great job on this Opus or you did really poorly. It pulls that up, but it's still learning the the textual similarity. Well, people will go back and forth on this and and debate the level of distillation and also what the punishment for distillation should be.
Should it just be a slap on the wrist or should it be something bigger?
Speaker 3: The only thing I would say here is like distillation against against the terms of service. Yeah. And I think that suing Chinese companies
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It would be a complete and total waste of time. Ask anyone who's built a product that's been knocked.
Speaker 1: I disagree. Incredible aura farm.
Speaker 3: You Okay.
Speaker 1: If you personally serve Xi Jinping the next time he's Francisco meeting with a world leader. You show up
Speaker 3: You have been served.
Speaker 1: You show up to the UN. Serve the world leader. There's something about that that's, you know, extremely bold. But, no, I agree with you. Very difficult.
I don't even know if you went to your law firm and you said like, hey, we want to sue this Chinese company, like, how they would trace that down. Jim Kramer says, we must not let our companies use these Chinese models to save a few bucks. OpenAI and Anthropic are correct. This is vital national security. Please please read Bing West's just released Catch five.
I respect the Chinese people greatly, but these companies are run by the PLA. For heaven's sakes, George Hotz fires back under the tiny grad handle. He says, isn't this a joke? I'd be happy to use Anthropic if they put their weights on Hugging Face like the Chinese. American tech companies are rent extraction machines that have lost the plot.
No point continuing to defend them. They need to change if they want to win people back.
Speaker 3: Meanwhile Yeah. China is also thinking about export controls Oh. In the Financial Times.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: Apparently, Alibaba, ByteDance, and
Speaker 1: Keep going back and forth. MoffCom.
Speaker 3: MoffCom. Talk to AI companies including Alibaba, ByteDance, and Zepu on limiting the transfer of key data for the training of their models overseas
Speaker 1: Probably
Speaker 3: the as well as allowing their model weights to be downloaded
Speaker 1: commerce. Probably their department of commerce.
Speaker 3: That seems more like it. China would still let overseas customers access the models and services, but Mhmm. It sounds like they're leaning towards not making the weights open. We're gonna we're gonna see Interesting. With the new Kimi K three if they actually release the weights.
Yeah. Next week, Dean Ball says, wow. Two days in a row where things I said are likely to happen seem likelier to happen from two adversarial countries. Almost as though my analysis was right and as though people should not have deliberately misinterpret misinterpreted me as of making prescriptions.
Speaker 1: Dean Ball victory lap. You gotta take a victory lap for Dean Ball, if he called it. No. He I mean, he was saying like I I don't necessarily agree with this, but just from his experience, this is how things might play out. And people were very upset with him about
Speaker 3: Raj, here we are. Says Ministry of Commerce Commerce. People's Republic.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's their Department of Commerce.
Speaker 3: That would go hard on a business card.
Speaker 1: It would.
Speaker 3: The great slop wars Slop wars continue. Let's pull up this video from Substack. They say What? Today Substack is launching an AI detection feature via an integration with Pangram. Going forward, you'll be able to scan posts, replies, and comments on the Substack app to see an estimate of how much of it was written by a human or with AI assistance.
Mhmm. We care about this at Substack because it gets to the core of our mission to build an economic engine for culture.
Speaker 1: This is gonna be bad for Tyler since he's mastered the ability to write exactly like an AI. What was that sentence sentence you wrote by hand that was like, according to studies, you're absolutely right and you just threw in every possible AI ism and got flagged a 100% by Pangram. No. I think people will enjoy this. The the revealed preference is probably that people don't care if it's good and they enjoy the the content.
But we'll we'll we'll go back and forth and debate it with Chris Best today and see where all of that is going. Now, do you think that Substack writers should admit when they hire essentially ghost writers? Probably. Because sometimes you start a brand under a name. Like, not every post on bloomberg.com is from Michael Bloomberg.
In fact, none of them are. They're all from other people. But they disclose this is from, you know, some writer. This is from Yeah. Joe Weisenthal.
Right? But some new influencer brands have grown even in the pre AI era. I had a writer on my team when I was doing YouTube videos where I would write something, he would do a draft. We'd try to go back and forth. I'd put him in the credits.
But I wouldn't like kick it off with like, hey, just says
Speaker 3: book authors don't. That is certainly That's
Speaker 1: 100% true. Some book authors will put like this is written by this person and this person. It depends on like the aura of the ghost writer. Some ghost writers actually do get credits in the book. But yes, most book authors Like Tom Clancy, I think passed away and he's still producing books.
There's a number of writers where their their individual brand grew so big that they can you can have like new become a business. Yeah. They become their own brand and
Speaker 3: so Yeah. I would I would imagine that 30% of the books in like an airport bookstore Yeah. Are just a 100% ghost written and probably Yeah. Don't disclose it.
Speaker 1: I think I I I do think it should be it should be possible to get to the truth if you hunt hard enough. But I don't necessarily need you to put it front and center.
Speaker 3: For a Substack author or creator, just put it somewhere Yeah. That you have a team of people that help you create
Speaker 1: Yeah. Your work. Well, Dave Eggers took to the Financial Times saying that no one is gonna read AI books. He's of course the author of The Circle. He's an American writer, editor, publisher.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is his 2,000 memoir bestseller. Final finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He says, Gullible and ridiculous. No one will read AI novels. I think people are already reading AI novels.
So he maybe he means like no one who's cool or no one who he likes or something. Let's read through a little bit of this Financial Times article. Dave Eggers offers a hand so I can clamor aboard his 23 foot sailboat moored in the shadow of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. It's a grand setting with few frills as we sit on the stern a meter apart, fuel cans and fishing nets at our feet. There is no one around to disturb our conversation.
The nearest toilets are Port a loos, a short bike ride away. The birthing fees are negligible, making it one of the cheapest places to live in uber wealthy Silicon Valley. I hadn't thought of that. Sailboat, if you're at a tech company, this has gotta be the next big lock in trend.
Speaker 2: Antonio Garcia Martinez did this.
Speaker 1: He did.
Speaker 2: Talked about in his book, Chaos Monkeys.
Speaker 1: I'm not I won't be satisfied until I see LARPers posting images on Twitter being like, hey, I just moved to San Francisco. I'm building the next one person, $25,000,000,000
Speaker 3: I'm finding a houseboat in San Rafael.
Speaker 1: Yeah. How much?
Speaker 3: For 1,000 it it it actually works out to $1,483 a month, apparently, if you finance it through Boat Trader.
Speaker 1: Goodbye. It's only about
Speaker 3: $200,000 to live in a twenty twenty two houseboat.
Speaker 1: Twenty twenty two? That's a brand new houseboat.
Speaker 3: Yes. You have to think about the yeah. The slip fees but you could easily come in Yeah. Have your own house on the water No.
Speaker 1: The average one bedroom rent in San Francisco is like $2, $3 right now. Could have a whole
Speaker 3: house and a boat.
Speaker 1: And a boat. It's amazing. This is the hack. If you get a job in tech and you're printing, making 6 figures Wow. Move into a houseboat.
Speaker 3: Let's pull this up.
Speaker 1: I mean, is this an option in LA? Should members of the team be doing this? Should we should we recommend this
Speaker 3: to Look at this brand almost brand new. I feel like 2024 Le Mer modern 11. It's a 36 foot houseboat. We have a video here.
Speaker 1: Well, Dave Eggers says, they call it a $10 dock with a million dollar view.
Speaker 3: Look at this, John. This Yeah. Couple thousand bucks a month.
Speaker 1: This is where the next great startup will be born. Yeah.
Speaker 3: For sure. Garages are out. Garages Houseboats are in.
Speaker 1: And also, like, oh, take your shoes off. It's no way it's natural to take your shoes off when you're on a boat. You know? Right? Unless you got boat shoes.
Wear boat shoes to
Speaker 3: The Le Mare modern 11 offers reliable performance and strong power with two Yamaha 25 high thrust engines providing a total of 50 horsepower. It's two cabins and one head ensure overnight comfort for extended stays. How about year long stays? How about a decade long stay? The boat's design includes an upper deck terrace with Flex C Teak flooring enhancing its appeal for relaxation and entertainment and might I say locking in.
Standard features such as air conditioning. We have air conditioning on our houseboats.
Speaker 1: Mhmm.
Speaker 3: With reverse cycle heat heated floors This
Speaker 1: is sick.
Speaker 2: LED lighting. Heated floors. LED lighting.
Speaker 3: Yeah. The inclusion of foam filled composite floats and galvanized steel subframe ensures durability and stability.
Speaker 2: Did we just
Speaker 1: housing crisis? Send this to Sager and Jetty immediately. This is sea steading. This is the teal thesis. Living in houseboats justmoretrader.com
Speaker 3: is saying that this
Speaker 1: This is amazing.
Speaker 3: Modern houseboat would come out to just $2,259 with only $52,000 down. I promise that we have no financial relationship with boattrader.com. Yeah. Even though I'm making a pretty strong pitch here.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I love it. Should you recline your airplane seat? What do you think? People are going back and forth on this.
Speaker 3: Brandon Ducks He says he I don't remember subscribing to this channel, but I've been listening for ten minutes. I'm having a good time. Welcome. Last name Ducks comes on just for the half.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Make it make sense.
Speaker 3: Make make sense.
Speaker 1: It make sense. He's just like, I just happen to be here for the duck section of the of the show.
Speaker 3: Andrew says, I'm gonna need a double wide houseboat, l o l, bootlegging distilled anthropic models on the houseboat.
Speaker 1: There we go.
Speaker 3: Living the dream. This is crazy.
Speaker 1: Okay. So should you recline your airplane seat, There's a central investigating the central dilemma of our time. Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker wrote a piece. Imagine this scenario. After a long drive to the airport, you've just taken off for a fifteen hour flight.
Where are you going? Fifteen hours is so long. How long was the flight to Austria from LA?
Speaker 3: I think it's like twelve hours. So you're I think you're going to The Middle East.
Speaker 1: You're going to The Middle East, maybe. Okay. You're in coach and a family of three is sitting behind you, a man, a woman and a toddler. They seem nice. But as the flight continues, the kiddo grows restless.
He kicks your seat and pokes her toys into your shoulder. Stop that, you hear the father say. The toddler incredibly quiets down. The cabin lights dim. It's time to sleep.
Yet, just as rest closes in, you sense motion. The seat in front of you is reclining. You watch as it comes all the way back. Now, you feel cramped with someone else's seat in your face. You also notice some stiffness in your shoulders.
Your fingers caress your own recline button. Surely, the reclined upon are entitled to recline. Just as you start to lean back, you hear a clearing throat. You turn around to see the dad who fixes you with his gaze. Excuse me, he says.
Would you mind keeping your seat up? I think it's game on. They put the button there. They would just take it away.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think I've always expected everyone to just recline.
Speaker 1: Everyone reclines. And then Everyone has the same amount of space. Exactly. It's the conservation of space. And
Speaker 3: to make the argument that the the vertical seat is more comfortable than the reclined
Speaker 1: seat. Exactly.
Speaker 3: So I think everyone commit to comfort.
Speaker 1: Everyone commit
Speaker 3: to is sharing the real alpha. Stand up immediately when does this when the flight lands.
Speaker 1: Have you seen those meta Ray Ban
Speaker 3: videos where people sprint
Speaker 1: to the front? It's so rude. The guy is like like, you know, he's like, as soon as he goes beep, he just bolts and passes everybody and gets to the front. Very rude. I don't think you should do that.
Speaker 2: This is antisocial behavior. I don't think you should recline your because you're infringing on some Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should.
Speaker 1: But they put the button there.
Speaker 3: Horrible take. Horrible take.
Speaker 1: That that that's like don't use the bathroom on the on the
Speaker 3: life my even as a child, I was looking up waiting for for, you know Yeah. The the seat belt sign to to, you know, to be up in the air Yeah. The belt sign's off. Yeah. Recline your seat.
Yeah. Everyone reclines. Seats. All good.
Speaker 1: Yeah. What what what about what about ordering a diet coke on a plane? If I'm sitting next to you, will you order a diet coke or is that anti social behavior?
Speaker 2: That's completely different.
Speaker 1: Okay. What's your stance on JBL in the airplane?
Speaker 2: A little JBL, you know.
Speaker 1: I I I do think I do think that could be the next the next trend.
Speaker 3: The big question is Got are you bringing on your, you know, smart portable speaker Mhmm. Maybe from a
Speaker 1: From an open AI.
Speaker 3: From an open AI. Are you bringing that on the plane and talking to it the whole time? Is that offensive?
Speaker 1: I think that's deeply offensive.
Speaker 3: Have you seen when like a a band is traveling
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And they start playing on the plane?
Speaker 2: No. Have seen these videos? No.
Speaker 1: That sounds cool though.
Speaker 2: I'll send you one. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Hand me down. That would make me jump. So this all started because in 2014, FiveThirtyEight, we gotta have him on the show, Nate, obviously. FiveThirtyEight asked around a thousand flyers what they thought about reclining their seats. 41% of them said that reclining was rude, so they lost.
It's not rude.
Speaker 3: It's over.
Speaker 1: That number seems to have risen though. In 2020, Eric Jones, a math professor who writes about travel statistics on the website, The Vacationer conducted a similar survey and found that 77% of respondents objected to reclining. Wow. Sheep sheeple over here. We got sheeple
Speaker 2: in the building. I think you should be able to recline if you're, like, dressed nicely. If you're wearing sweatpants, then you don't get to
Speaker 1: recline.
Speaker 2: You gotta for an additional recline. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Should kids be able to kick the front the seat in front of them as much as they want?
Speaker 1: See, that's something I will pull I will totally put up with. I'm totally fine getting
Speaker 3: kicked in
Speaker 1: the back by a kid. Because it's so brutal as a parent, as a kid to be on a plane. They're locked up in the plane. That's miserable. And just just tough it up.
You're you're reclined. You have multiple inches of padding. Unless you got Ronaldo back, you're gonna be fine.
Speaker 3: Order that hot pizza pocket. Live life in the permanent underclass. Live a little, for God's sake.
Speaker 1: Ramp launched a model router. Brexton loves it. He says, Ramp launching a model router is god tier product expansion. The winds are blessing it. The market is exhausted with token maxing, proliferation of new models, sovereignty.
This is the first time I've looked at a launch and went, wow. This might be the start of a new core product. Yeah. There's been a bunch of speculation about this, but it makes a lot of sense. Ramp's promise is to save you time and money.
The CFOs are increasingly annoyed by token routing. We talked to Eric Lyman about this last week. Are you using the craziest frontier model burning millions of tokens to answer the weather? Maybe that should have an expense report attached. And so very, very exciting to see where this goes, how they roll it out.
I know it's in alpha with a number of customers. And I believe that the product's actually available to non ramp customers as well, so you can use their product exclusively.
Speaker 3: Yush says going after everything time and money touches.
Speaker 1: I love it. I love it. Anyway, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. And
Speaker 3: We love you.
Speaker 1: We love you. Throwing flash bang. Goodbye. Flash banging the horse.