0:13
Hey, hey, hey. Come on. Come on. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. [music] Yeah. Heat.
Search this video
1:58
>> [music] [music] >> Heat. Heat. >> [music] >> Heat. Heat.
3:13
>> [music] >> We came to this world to reach the stars.
3:25
We came to this world to see a future.
3:36
We came to this world [music] to watch the stars to shape our future.
3:50
[music] came to feel a new way. You let me think.
4:45
[music] That's the match. >> You're watching TVPN.
5:00
Today's Monday, November 24th, 2025.
5:02
We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the temple of technology, >> the fortress of finance, >> the capital of capital. >> Ramp. com. Time is money. Save both.
5:09
Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
5:15
Uh Jordy and I went to F1 this weekend.
5:18
We went to Las Vegas and we watched >> great time.
5:20
We were with the uh team Ramco Aston Martin F1 team with the >> public. com boys.
5:27
Uh we had an incredible time.
5:31
>> Yeah, >> incredible time. Uh and uh >> F1's fun.
5:35
Uh it's uh it's more of an experience than like the actual watching it.
5:39
I don't know if if if you at home haven't been following uh there was McLaren was it was disqualified.
5:43
It was a very dramatic I mean it's almost like a cheating scandal.
5:47
I don't exactly know but it's like they broke the rules and >> not cheating because the FIA said we don't believe they did it intentionally. >> Okay, got it.
5:55
Yeah, >> but it was like uh disqualification.
5:56
And so you would think you were like, "Oh yeah, I saw I noticed it."
6:00
And there were some people in the comments on some of these videos that I watched saying, "Oh, I I could tell. I could tell."
6:05
But let me tell you, someone who was there in person, I could not tell [laughter] because it just whis like I don't know if they're cheating or not.
6:12
I don't know if they're real.
6:13
It's an incredibly fun time.
6:15
It is a terrible spectator sport.
6:17
[laughter] >> I think everyone agrees on that.
6:19
>> It and and the two things can be true at the same time, >> but it's a great reason to come come together with your >> like if you actually wanted the best experience for the race, just sit inside the paddic.
6:28
>> You would watch it on reream, >> one live stream, 30 plus destinations.
6:31
If you want to multiream, go to reream. com. Anyway, >> a lot of fun.
6:35
Uh and uh Yannik Life, >> yeah, >> and Sykes were incredible hosts.
6:40
Today on the show we are uh talking about Claude Opus 4. 5.
6:44
We have Scholto from Anthropic joining us in just half an hour maybe 24 minutes he'll be joining.
6:52
Um the timeline was in turmoil over the weekend.
6:54
People are settling into the idea that Gemini 3 might be good enough to actually pull some people away from Chat GPT as a daily driver.
7:01
It certainly pulled Mark Benny off away from Chat GPT.
7:06
He of course has partnerships on the he swearing on the timeline.
7:09
He has partnerships with a number of uh a number of foundation labs uh foundation model labs.
7:15
Uh but he says, "Holy I've used chatbt every day for three years.
7:21
I just spent two hours on Gemini 3. I'm not going back. The leap is insane.
7:26
Reasoning, speed, images, video, everything is sharper and faster.
7:29
It feels like the world just changed again."
7:33
And uh this is an interesting experience.
7:37
I had a similar experience.
7:38
I wound up uh daily basically daily driving Gemini. I didn't fully churn.
7:41
I didn't un uneach for my phone. It wasn't intentional.
7:46
It was more like I'm just curious.
7:48
I really want to use Nano Banana Pro.
7:50
That definitely uh just sort of sucked me into the ecosystem.
7:54
Um but I wrote a little bit a little bit of a review over my experience.
7:58
I know you've been a Jimmy boy for a couple weeks.
7:59
You look great in hindsight.
8:02
You were early to this party.
8:04
>> Honestly, way longer than that.
8:04
I was >> maybe months been testing. >> Yeah.
8:08
I mean months at this point. >> Yeah.
8:10
Um and so uh there was some good stuff, some bad stuff obviously.
8:14
Uh as a disclosure, we are of course sponsored by Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet.
8:20
State-of-the-art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding.
8:24
Um I've uh uh but I mean I'm going to 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.
8:34
uh 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.
8:46
So basically I switched over I I've been on Gemini on iOS for a while mostly to access VO3.
8:51
V3 was the was the moment when I was like okay they got something that nobody else has.
8:55
I got a fork over 250 a month.
8:58
>> Well and then it switched.
8:59
>> No no it was one it was 125 and then it jumped to 250. Okay. It wasn't the Yeah.
9:04
I I I thought it might have been 500 as well, but it's 250. Been playing it. Very happy for that.
9:07
V3 is just a very special model that no one else had anything close to it.
9:11
It was very accessible on your phone.
9:13
Uh and I and I enjoyed it.
9:15
Um 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.
9:23
Any anytime I'm researching something, I would hit Gemini uh in the app.
9:25
And uh the result was around 15 minutes per day in the app.
9:31
And this is roughly the same as what I spent in chat historically.
9:33
I look through my time uh my screen time.
9:37
Now that doesn't count stuff on the desktop maybe like it's a little rough but I think 15 minutes a day is sort of what most people are doing in these apps.
9:45
Obviously 30 30 minutes a day was reported.
9:48
>> Benny off said he spent two hours in it.
9:50
>> I think he was just like maybe in a fugue state doing deep dives or something.
9:54
Uh 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.
10:01
So first uh it felt like Gemini 3 does a better job sizing the response.
10:05
Like if it if if the question can be answered in one paragraph, it gives me one paragraph.
10:12
If it can be answered in in five little subheaders with little bullet points, it'll do that.
10:16
If it needs more more story, more history, it'll it'll it'll write more.
10:19
And so I felt like uh in previous models in in Chachi PT certainly uh 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 re delivering.
10:38
Uh Gemini 3 felt a little bit fresh there. Uh it also felt faster.
10:42
Everyone's been saying it's so much faster.
10:44
Um I haven't seen any quantification of that but it certainly felt like it >> feels faster.
10:48
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 uh Chat GPT because the model router gives me anxiety about like oh maybe I'm going to get routed to like the the dumb model it's going to hallucinate.
11:01
I'm just hammering GPT5 Pro because I'm on the $200 a month tier.
11:04
And so because I'm on this $200 a month tier I'm I'm I'm used to hitting uh uh GPT5 Pro.
11:09
But then that always means I'm waiting 10 minutes.
11:15
I'm always thinking and it's like oh it'll be one minute and I feel like the level of confidence in the brand um makes me feel that a Gemini 3 thinking query that does maybe less reasoning than a GPT5 Pro query will be at the same level of reliability.
11:37
And you've pointed out to me um something about when it's actually running it does something psychologically that's really >> val tells you it says it's running a Google search.
11:48
>> It just says we're searching Google and 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 25 years of building brand around trust in on the web.
11:58
And so I I see that now and I'm like, "Oh yeah, good."
12:01
Because that's what I would do to verify a fact.
12:05
Even though the web is Google, obviously there are hallucinations out there.
12:08
There are there are fake articles that you could land on.
12:10
There's a whole bunch of things.
12:11
But if you if you task me with finding the real day that someone was born, I'm going to Google it.
12:15
And so I trust that as a product and so putting that there uh definitely did. Yeah.
12:19
Like it it had a real perception which I thought think was interesting.
12:23
Um and then also Nano Banana Pro very interesting strong differentiator.
12:26
it really does handle the complex images.
12:29
We saw that with the farm uh and uh also just all the text and stuff and it's been interesting to kind of throw a query like uh I was I wanted to understand anthropics uh model architectures and I said hey summarize them all in an infographic and it just perfectly explained how sonnet and opus all fit together ne nicely next to each other.
12:50
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, like there's always it's not just pure text.
13:05
Like walls of text are boring. >> Yeah.
13:08
In fact, if it's just pure text, it usually means the story is just not that important to the newspaper. >> Yeah. Yeah.
13:14
Uh there are some people that just lean full text, you know, gu and whatnot, but uh for for the most part, it's much more enjoyable. It's just better. It's more educational. It's easier to learn.
13:25
>> Uh >> quickly, let me tell you about cognition before I go into the negatives.
13:28
Uh let me tell you about Devon, the AI software engineer.
13:31
Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
13:33
So, um on the on the negative side of the of my Gemini app experience, uh there were a few rough edges.
13:41
So, uh, the first was with that multimodality.
13:44
Everyone's been saying that these models are multimodal.
13:48
They hand little image, text, and video.
13:50
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.
13:54
And what I mean by that is that I would go and I would and I would and it would issue it a an image prompt.
13:59
I would I would issue it an image prompt.
14:02
Hey, uh, create this infographic.
14:04
And then I would want to flip back into text and it would not be able to really stay.
14:08
it it wouldn't be able to go seamlessly back to text mode.
14:12
It would keep generating images and then vice versa would happen where I would kick off a text uh a text flow and then I'd say, "Okay, I'm ready for you to turn this into a nano banana thing and be like, "Oh, I I can't I can't really do that."
14:23
Uh do do you have any uh are you laughing about that because you think it's like a rookie mistake or something? >> Well, no.
14:29
I you always like, "Oh, it's not really multimodal."
14:31
>> It's not really multimodal.
14:31
Yeah, but >> there should not be a button.
14:33
If there's a button, it's telling on itself.
14:36
>> Why is there a button? >> Like you open it up.
14:38
You know what I'm talking about, right?
14:40
>> I I mean I I I just don't see why it matters.
14:42
Like if you can basically just take an image and then turn it into like the textual representation. Yeah.
14:45
Why is that why does it matter that it's not like actually taking in the the pixels of the image?
14:51
>> I just think I just think like it's Yeah.
14:54
I mean I I I guess I guess you're right on that front.
14:55
I I just I find it weird that that I need to I mean >> like it it is multimodal in the sense that like everything gets baked down into like tokens. >> True. True.
15:05
But uh 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.
15:15
And so with the model picker like I never liked that because the model should pick based on the text.
15:22
I really like the router in in uh in uh chatbt because I should be able to go to a person, which is what we're trying to like recreate here, and say like, "Hey, I have you I have a research project for you and I need you to spend 20 minutes on it.
15:36
I need you to get back to me in an hour.
15:38
I need you to get back to me right now off the top of your head.
15:41
What's your hot take on this?"
15:41
I can ask that and I can get that back from human and I feel like that should be done at the text layer at the end.
15:48
>> I mean, it kind like if you ask think like a thinking model, >> it does now. It does now.
15:51
But what I'm saying is that we are still in the pre- like select a drop- down UI functionality of Gemini because I I I'm prompted to pick what I want to do.
16:01
Do you want to do image, video, deep research, text before you go into the flow instead of just saying I'm having a conversation.
16:10
Oh, now is the time to generate an image.
16:12
And it's like, yeah, sure.
16:14
That's something I can do.
16:14
Instead of being like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
16:18
you didn't ask to talk to the guy who can generate images like that guy's over there.
16:22
It's like is it all one thing or is it not?
16:24
And it's clearly not 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.
16:35
It's all it's all it's all the things. It's multimodal.
16:37
And I'm like it doesn't feel that multimodal in the UI. So I don't know.
16:41
Maybe it's something that they'll they'll they'll work on.
16:43
Uh but there were there were a couple other like rough edges and most of it contain is contained in the UI layer.
16:47
So one of them is uh voice transcription mode which I've like been completely using in chatpt.
16:54
I'll just open it up >> talk to it.
16:57
Not now it's not the voice mode where you talk and it and it talks back to you.
17:01
I don't like that mode at all.
17:03
>> You're just using voice as an input. >> Exactly. Just voice as an input.
17:04
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 uh you know, why don't you take me through some of the VCs that backed uh you know u I'm thinking about it and then I say oh Deep Mind Demesis company before he got acquired but then also I want to know the history of of uh Google Brain like where did that come from?
17:28
Was that that was that acquired in or did they acquire different people or did that just get spun up internally?
17:33
And I'll have pauses and I'll come back to things and I'll kind of >> It's like talking to an employee. >> Yeah.
17:39
So, I'll just give it a lot of context and when I give that to uh to Chatbt, it loves that and I feel like it gives it great context because it has a whole bunch of stuff. It can transform it.
17:47
With 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.
17:53
And I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no."
17:55
Like, like, "You need to you need to take more time to let me finish."
17:58
And with Chad GBT, like there are two different buttons.
18:01
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.
18:07
It it made a terrible mistake.
18:07
I don't want it to burn two minutes on something that and get confused.
18:11
I'd rather like one of the prompts I was like I was like, "Generate an image."
18:17
There was this meme that was going around in Nano Banana World where it was like, "Generate me an image of the most annoying uh LinkedIn profile picture."
18:23
And I had no idea if it was real or not.
18:25
It might have been people just taking screenshots and then just, you know, dunking on people.
18:29
>> Well, some people were just taking a screenshot of someone's actual >> file. Exactly.
18:32
And but I was like, I wonder what happens when you actually take that prompt and you put it in there.
18:35
So, I go to I go to Gemini, put that in there, and it doesn't realize that I want to actually generate an image of that.
18:42
I say, generate a LinkedIn profile of a most annoying person, and it doesn't know that I want an image.
18:47
So, it just dumps out a whole bunch of text.
18:50
And then I open up the audio and I say like, "No, I want you to generate it with Nano Banana Pro."
18:53
And what it gets from that is banana banana pro.
18:57
[laughter] And the and the result and and it it's it's trying to be really friendly.
19:02
It's like I love the enthusiasm.
19:03
Let's talk about bananas for a little bit.
19:05
[laughter] Like no, I want you my criticism is just that the the Gemini app still >> has a lot of bugs. >> It just has bugs.
19:15
It just has bugs and I can get I can get over it uh for now because again it's like it's fast and smart.
19:22
>> I mean truthfully right before we joined I was I was doing a search and I had to like >> uh it it was stuck in this limbo where it wasn't running the prompt but it wouldn't let me run a new prompt >> and I just had to basically rage quit and restart it and just copy and paste the prompt into a new box.
19:37
So a lot of this I mean it's yeah again it's it's incredibly impressive.
19:41
It's a great model, but uh they have [clears throat] at this point it's just like opportunity to like get more competitive on the product side. >> Yeah, totally. Yeah.
19:51
I uh I was noticing even like just straight up disconnection errors like I would submit a prompt and then it felt like if I closed the app it would get confused or something and I don't understand that because it's just sending a little bit of text.
20:03
Have you ever run into this?
20:06
>> I've had that a couple times but it's funny.
20:07
You can kind of think of the app as being like a benchmark of the model, right?
20:10
Because you should imagine that the that they would build the app. Yeah.
20:14
You would imagine they should be using the model in like the CLI to do.
20:18
>> We got to hold Shelto's feet to the fire on this. He's so good.
20:20
>> So, we're going to test out the Anthropic website and see how good it is.
20:23
And if it's not good, then obviously the the new cloud model is not good at coding. >> Yeah. Yeah.
20:27
The app should be flawless.
20:28
If I find one bug in the cloud consumer app, it's over.
20:33
>> Do you guys ever use the the like voicetovoice, like the real-time audio thing ont?
20:37
>> No, I don't like that at all. >> You've never used it? >> I've used it. I've used it a bunch.
20:38
I've used all of them, but they're there.
20:41
It's just not the preferred way of interacting. >> Yeah.
20:43
You you you were testing it out, Tyler, by talking with it for like eight hours a day, right? >> Yeah.
20:48
And you were on the XAI one. >> Yeah.
20:51
With an is that your name?
20:54
>> Imagine running constantly [laughter] >> with a VR headset.
20:57
>> With a VR headset >> and a full immersive suit in in a uh sensory deprivation tank. Yeah. No, no, no. Why do you bring it up?
21:04
I I I actually I've started using I've started using it like um it's pretty good.
21:08
I I think the model is actually much worse.
21:11
Like the underlying model >> Yeah, it has to be faster, right?
21:12
So, >> well, it it's not the speed, it's like the actual intelligence of the model seems lower. Yeah.
21:17
Like the answers aren't as good, 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.
21:26
>> And then it it tells me like, "Oh, is that correct or not?" >> That's pretty good. I like that. Yeah. It's uh Yeah. Yeah. It's really remarkable.
21:34
I mean, this this uh this the Gemini app launched almost two years ago, and there's still like rough edges in the UI, which I think is crazy.
21:41
Um, but it does seem like they have an opportunity to actually take some serious market share at this point.
21:47
Like they've caught up on many different uh many different um values and like value props.
21:52
Uh my question was uh like I'm not the typical consumer.
22:01
like I'm going to try every different app.
22:03
Like I'll probably keep bouncing around.
22:05
Um I don't know if consumers will do the same broadly.
22:10
There's it's very very clear that chat GPT is just synonymous with AI and people are not like oh well like the new benchmarks I got to like change my you know app like no no one's thinking like that.
22:20
Uh but my the fragility in the chatbt monopoly aggregator thesis that I was picking up on was uh for the last year there have been a lot of a lot of uh a lot of features and and like thesis around different things that could create lock in.
22:41
So stuff like personalization or or yeah memory or um >> or even like the chat functionality between what you've linked um your custom instructions your uh the the different like I think at this point I've synced chat GPT or off chat GPT with a number of different services.
23:00
So it should have more data.
23:01
It should know all these different things.
23:03
I've given it even custom instructions just saying like hey cool it on the m dashes and uh and I didn't miss any of that.
23:09
Like I there was at no point where there were plenty of points where I was like oh like chat is definitely better than Gemini still but at no point was I like it's because it doesn't have personalization.
23:22
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, what I'm interested in like like one I could snap my finger and Google could like figure out personalized >> maybe or but but the biggest thing is that like right now I feel like both are not personalized at all.
23:43
None of them have any real lock in of any sort.
23:45
Um, and even in like the chat functionality or like 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 whereas I feel like I got on Gemini and on day one the content was as good or better than chatbt because it's all AI generated.
24:13
It it it made me think like maybe it's a little bit more f fragile.
24:18
Maybe maybe there will be a little bit more of a duopoly.
24:22
Um there it won't be such a winner take all market.
24:25
Um even though it has been historically it's it has been up to this date.
24:30
Like in consumer AI it's very clear that open AI has run away with it.
24:36
But it feels like Google does have a little bit of a chance to catch up in consumer because um it there's just so much less of a network effect.
24:41
like the network effect just is bolted on. It's not real yet.
24:45
And maybe it'll never be real.
24:47
Maybe Google can catch up there.
24:48
But yeah, uh I I just really want to see where DAUs and and user minutes like actually grow because um I >> because there's so many different like uh tweaks there and uh like every chart and data point is definitely going to be analyzed to death. >> Yeah.
25:05
Uh one one thing that's notable uh Google's going super hard uh in the in this for for students.
25:10
So they have you can just get Gemini uh Pro uh for a year free >> and uh again I think that's just a bet on like get people hooked on the workflow.
25:24
>> I mean OpenAI is clearly battling that out too.
25:26
Uh 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. Um it it is interesting.
25:37
There's um also I I'm very interested to see who can bring uh ads online faster.
25:43
Like Google should be able to snap their fingers and do it so quickly and yet uh it does seem like something that uh could just take them longer on a product side. Yeah.
25:57
>> But they should have a whole model like they should be able to do display ads like right now and just be like, "Okay, yeah, our free our free Gemini users are now properly monetized."
26:05
Now, maybe they don't want to be the first mover there because then they'll get the stink of like, oh, they're the ad one >> in the market. I don't know.
26:15
>> 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.
26:21
Like for example, like 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 like perfect before you uh or as close to perfect as you can get it before you introduce ads. >> Yeah.
26:39
Uh well, let me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM.
26:41
Adio builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.
26:45
Uh, Google has now added $2 trillion to its market cap over the past 20 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? Let's play this.
26:59
I have no idea what's going on here.
27:01
How this even >> Gemini Art?
27:05
Yeah, with >> Okay, >> I wasn't really expect to talk about this thing, but uh um you know, we definitely messed up uh on the image generation.
27:14
Um, and um, I think it was mostly due to just like not thorough testing.
27:22
Um, [laughter] >> it's a crazy shirt to be wearing.
27:30
>> I don't even know how you get into a meeting with someone as powerful and wealthy as Sergey. >> It's obvious.
27:35
You just wear you wear a jacket.
27:38
You wear a jacket and you get in. It's hot.
27:39
You take your jacket off.
27:42
You're just [laughter] >> I was not expecting that. That is so insane. That's very very funny. >> It's Bay.
27:49
It's a Bay Area thing, John. >> Yeah. Yeah.
27:51
Wild underrated like Sergey Brain really did go into the Gemini team very clearly like ground like like was like it's time to go and cook like let's work on this and like it clearly had results which is awesome.
28:04
>> Yeah, it's not notable.
28:04
I mean the stocks jumped 6% today.
28:06
Baron's put out a report today just saying the title is buy Google stock. Yep.
28:11
Alphabet has been the clear AI winner which is just funny because >> earlier this year like people weren't saying people were saying they are the AI loser. >> Yeah.
28:23
>> Uh so Baron is saying actually they have been >> they have been the clear AI winner but the narrative has >> and our our in-house retail trader has been on an absolute tear going long Google. Congratulations to him.
28:34
Well, congratulations to [laughter] you because he he had he was in probably one of the most uh favorite retail. He was in a dark place.
28:44
>> Uh a certain company announced a partnership, Doc Moon. He got out.
28:46
He's like, "John, what should I buy?"
28:49
And you're like, "Buy Google."
28:52
>> He was like, "Just play it safe, dude.
28:53
Just just go with something something safe, something not crazy.
28:55
[laughter] Just do not use leverage, please."
29:00
Uh well uh Google Google's parent company Alphabet uh has acquired a stake in physical intelligence.
29:05
That is of course Locky Groom's company. Very exciting.
29:09
Uh Locky and Carol Houseman, the co-founders came on the show about six months ago.
29:13
We should have them back on and check in with them.
29:14
Um the San Francisco based physical intelligence is an AI and robotics startup.
29:18
They've secured $600 million in fresh funding, pushing its post money valuation to 5. 6 billion.
29:26
We should ring the gong for hit it.
29:36
So, Capital G is in and then Lux Capital, Thrive Capital, Jeff Bezos is in uh Index Ventures, Troll Price.
29:40
um they're building a general purpose AI foundation model uh and learning algorithms and um they uh they've they yeah they focused like not on as much of like the the the flash and uh substance like like not as much like flash and oh we're building a full humanoid more like you know we're we're uh kind of taking like incremental steps towards adding value in different robotics uh cases and demos.
30:10
um the the the laundry folding robot of course and now the coffee making robot.
30:16
Um all these are very cool and it and it just feels like uh they've they've taken a >> it's notable that this is at 1x speed too.
30:24
We've seen some other demos.
30:26
Remember Sunday Robotics was sped up like 10x. >> Yep. Uh it was 4x I think.
30:29
But yes, >> it was different scenes. >> Oh, really?
30:32
There were some that were 10. Okay. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Um very cool.
30:35
They should just design an espresso machine that makes espressos automatically. >> They could.
30:43
Has anyone ever done that?
30:44
>> You know what they could do?
30:44
They could They could put the espresso in a can >> and then they could mail it to you and then you crack open the can.
30:50
And if you crack open the can, that's maybe Or no. You know what they need?
30:54
A robot that opens the can.
30:55
Then you need a robot to open the can. >> Yeah. Just one.
31:00
>> No, this this is an interesting task.
31:03
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 I think I I I imagine this will be one of those things that even when robots can do it >> like people still like to know who's making their espresso, you know, it feels like >> there's been a couple um there's been a couple robotics uh uh like robotic coffee shops and stuff.
31:24
Well, um our first guest of the show is in the reream waiting room.
31:30
We have Shalto from Anthropic. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Congratulations. Thank you so much back.
31:37
>> Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on on such a massive day.
31:39
Uh how is this just a claude opus 4. 5 day?
31:43
What what is the name of the day?
31:46
What what what is the news today?
31:48
Take us through um just the announcement from your perspective.
31:55
>> Yeah, I mean cloud opus 4.
31:55
5 best coding model in the world right now.
31:58
It's really really exciting.
31:59
We've been peeing around Slack all day with these incredible demos of things that people are doing.
32:03
Really, like the last week has just been full of people sharing their excitement of, "Oh my god, I left the model in a room for a few hours with, you know, these tools and was able to do XY Z or it found this bug that it was like just impossible uh for previous models to find." >> Yeah.
32:18
Um, I think maybe like the thing I'm most excited by is that a lot of our best engineers, like I don't know if you guys know, uh, Simon Bow, he's the one who wrote this, uh, the probably the best guide on how to optimize a CUDA maple in the world. Great blog post. You should go read it. Okay.
32:32
>> Uh, he posted the other day, he's like, I don't know if I'm going to have to type again.
32:36
>> You know, [laughter] he's there saying, you know, you obviously you have to coach the model and you have to tell it what to do still.
32:41
But uh 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.
32:51
The model is a real qualitative step up.
32:52
Um so there's the coding, there's also the model's just a lot better at general work tasks.
32:59
Uh it's a lot better at spreadsheet, slides.
33:01
Uh >> you know, it's still not the cloud code experience there.
33:04
It's still not going to 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.
33:12
Uh, and also 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 Opus 4. 5.
33:19
I think Doresh might also be launching the Iliopod today.
33:21
So, you know, maybe there's maybe there's two things today. >> Fantastic.
33:24
Um uh 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 um as as I understand it uh Anthropic's been incredibly focused on the core foundation model, the text models, the coding models and sort of stayed out of the uh the sloppification of artificial intelligence to some degree.
33:50
>> Stayed out of the trough.
33:51
>> Stayed out of the trough.
33:52
>> Haven't decided to build a trough yourselves. Yes indeed.
33:55
Uh so I mean we've been very focused on coding.
33:57
It's been del focus uh you know focus the compute and all that.
34:02
Uh specifically it's good at vision in so it's good at understanding stuff.
34:06
Uh this is reflected in the archi scores.
34:08
I don't know if you've seen them. I think they're soda.
34:10
>> Uh it's also reflected in generally the fact it's much better at front end design and all that.
34:14
Uh it doesn't do vision out. Yeah.
34:17
>> Now you know vision out would be would be cool.
34:19
Uh but you know it's something we're not focusing on right now and yeah it's specifically for >> but I mean I mean just philosophically that feels like it makes sense because uh if I hire a developer I want them to be able to look at a front end like a web page and see oh there's a div that's way out of line there.
34:35
Like I need to be able to see that.
34:37
Uh but do they need to be able to generate an image? No.
34:39
They can probably go to an image generator wire that up with an API key or hire a photographer or do whatever they need to. Right. >> Right. They can use Figma.
34:48
they can sketch out the designs. Uh, exactly.
34:52
That's broadly our philosophy is that we're not bottlenecked on our ability to generate images. Yeah.
34:57
>> Uh, we're we're bottlenecked still on, you know, the the raw in intellectual ability of the models and and that's the sort of direction that we want to push.
35:05
>> So, uh, in in in that in that idea of like the bottlenecking, um, what what what is the, uh, what is the key unlock for Opus 4. 5?
35:15
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 uh allocating resources to push a model forward in
35:35
2025 in late 2025 when perhaps we're past this paradigm of like oh just more parameters >> I don't know if we are past a par I think it's important to call the paradigm like scaling in general, you know, depending what access you're actually scaling TVD, but it's general the scaling paradigm. I don't think
35:52
I don't think we're past that at all, >> right?
35:55
Uh I mean, I think we're still seeing massive returns to scaling in all its variants.
35:58
I think that, you know, we're generally uh >> things work.
36:03
Um [laughter] >> we scaled, it works.
36:07
>> The models just want to learn, right?
36:07
I mean, >> it's as said like 10 years ago. Yeah.
36:12
>> Um the models just want to learn.
36:12
>> Um the models just want to learn. And I think you know the hardest things uh 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 right um where they poured their lives into it over the last 6 months and I think that is is working
36:30
out what we prioritize is really tough and I've said this before but uh these models always feel like you know when they launch it's exciting you know they're great but 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 is going and working on those things. It's just
36:45
It's just >> uh that everything still works.
36:50
>> So, is this a is this a refutation of what uh some folks might have been picking up on from the last few Dwar guests?
36:57
The Carpathy episode, the Sutton episode.
36:59
episode. 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 going to get the value
37:14
from AI and we are going to continue to scale dollars to economic value but it's not just going to be bigger and bigger pre-trains forever and then we get God >> I don't know what it's going to be bigger versions of but as far as as far as we're seeing every you scaling still works. I don't know if you guys know
37:30
I don't know if you guys know this, but um Dylan and I are actually a housemate.
37:34
So, we have this debate all the time. >> It's great.
37:37
It's like a dinner table discussion of like, you know, are we uh are we slowing down?
37:41
And um you know, I've often joked that the the most impactful thing that uh you know, what one of us could do is go and crack the problems that like continue learning or something like this that Dwesh focuses on so we can then go switch the narrative back to progress.
37:54
Um >> yeah, just switch up the dinner table conversation. >> Sure.
37:58
dinner table conversation. Exactly.
38:00
>> So, uh did did did uh did the anthropic crew like never lose faith in in pre-training?
38:07
There's this whole like at Nureps last year, Ilia says, you know, uh pre-training is potentially dead or kind of alludes to it.
38:13
Um and then uh one of his co-presenters uh is leading uh the Gemini 3 team and says, "Oh, well, we basically disregarded what we said at Nurabs last year.
38:25
We did just focus on better pre-trains. we got better results.
38:27
It seems like you also disregarded that.
38:31
Was that a misread in in 2024 on Ilia's uh on on Ilia's presentation or was it a conscious decision to disregard what he was saying?
38:43
>> Well, I think remember in general it's scaling.
38:44
It's not any particular paradigm of scaling.
38:46
It's general like flops in intelligence out relationship.
38:50
I think anthropic is a is a bet on in many respects that we believe that line is going to continue.
38:54
is going to continue. uh and uh you exactly what equation you use to convert flops into intelligence out I think will change over time and that you know many people have made arguments that this should there may even be further paradigms here but fundamentally we think that that the compute in intelligence out equation is continuing to hold >> um and I I think anthropic uh in many
39:18
respects like has had that faith for a very long time right and some of the first people to have like a very to make very serious bets on that um and you know a couple of months of uh external progress being I I think the only reason
39:33
that people are so >> like how should I say the models have actually gotten substantially smarter this year and that's why we're talking about things like continual learning as bottlenecks. Last year those weren't even points of
39:45
Last year those weren't even points of discussion because >> the models weren't even smart enough for it to matter.
39:49
It didn't feel frustrating that it wasn't a co-orker that learned with you on the job.
39:52
just wasn't even smart enough to do the things you wanted.
39:54
Now it often is, but it doesn't actually, you know, it sort of doesn't learn on the job and so therefore, um, isn't as useful.
40:01
Um, I think that's like one other thing that's worth like, you know, sort of disentangling is, uh, Karpathy has the perspective, you know, in the podcast that it's 2035 for all humans, all tasks. Yeah.
40:13
And I think exactly what shape that like of the curve looks like on the way to all humans, all tasks is pretty important.
40:22
uh because if you get to most humans, most tasks uh in like 27 um then or 28 then that's that's still pretty stark and it's still pretty transformative for the world.
40:30
Um so what exactly that looks like is quite important to to think about. >> Yeah.
40:35
How how is uh uh I mean one one last question on like the actual uh opus 4. 5.
40:41
There's this uh there's the idea that um maybe this model can be used to for distillation to train other smaller models.
40:48
Um, how do you think about where where we will see Opus 4.
40:52
5 um 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?
41:03
We can't even talk in a couple years.
41:04
>> A couple years >> in a couple [laughter] years >> in a couple maybe a couple weeks honestly.
41:09
But like 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."
41:22
Um how do you think about um where you're most excited to see it diffuse into the the overall ecosystem? >> Yeah. Yeah.
41:31
I actually do expect this model to become a lot of people's daily driver.
41:34
It's that step up in being able to like delegate trust.
41:36
Um, we asked internally how far how much faster uh, Sonnet 4 would have to be for you to for you to take this like for like to take the switch back basically and give up.
41:47
5 in exchange for for Sonnet 4. 5.
41:53
>> Uh, and it was it was multiple times faster.
41:55
It was like really quite a stark increase in speed.
41:57
Um, it would I think it was like four times faster or something people would have for people to have switched from Opus to to Sonnet.
42:04
>> Um, so that's that itself is pretty stark.
42:06
Uh I think it's also highly likely to become daily driver just because it is a lot more efficient.
42:10
It has these uh there's this one plot I really like where it shows the amount of tokens it uses to get a certain score on SWEBench.
42:17
Uh and it uses I think like a quarter of the tokens uh as Sonet 4.
42:20
5 on Sweetbench, which is a pretty impressive number.
42:24
That means it's it's actually like cheaper than Sonet 4.
42:25
5 to get the same score on Sweetbench.
42:27
Now TBD how well that generalizes out to uh to everyday use, but I'm seeing it solve problems way faster.
42:34
it writes better code the first time round.
42:35
I actually think that in in many cases uh this will end up cheaper because it is so much more efficient at getting to the right answer. >> Yeah.
42:46
>> How how are you thinking about uh personalization and sort of like uh cross-pollination of data?
42:52
Uh when I think about an an engineer on a team, it's helpful to have them in Slack.
42:57
it's even helpful to potentially have them in the random channel and just kind of you know understanding the company culture.
43:05
Um >> and uh I I was I was toying with like trying to switch from chatbt to Gemini as kind of the daily driver knowledge retrieval app.
43:13
And I was noticing that like the personalization uh narrative hasn't really taken hold over the time I was testing Gemini was not like oh this feels like wildly less personal.
43:22
Uh and that might just be a matter of like it hasn't had that much time to build in all of those personalization features.
43:30
But I'm wondering if you see a a world where um developers who are using Claude for programming uh also benefit from using it in knowledge retrieval research and there's actual significant flowback and synergy such that it's a really valuable uh it's valuable to actually have both sides of the business like really cooking. >> Yeah. It's a team member.
43:52
I mean we've talked a long time about how we want Claude to be a virtual co-orker, right?
43:56
And the big goal really for next year is to try and get to this form factor of virtual co-orker that is in all your Slack channels and can join your meetings and can work alongside you.
44:03
Um I think there's going to be massive benefit there.
44:07
Uh I think that and my my basic expectation and as I sort of interacted with uh with the model is that it will get to that point where it's useful to have it across everything.
44:17
Um, 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?
44:28
Like why isn't it why isn't that useful?
44:30
I think that's in part because there's still a lot of algorithmic progress to go there.
44:32
I think people haven't really quite cracked cracked the problem.
44:35
Um I think this is just one of those things that takes like it's hard to connect everything up. >> Yeah.
44:41
>> Um and and partially because uh Yeah.
44:47
Yeah, I think I think they just haven't really been integrated very well.
44:49
I think this is like a really tough product form factor question.
44:52
>> Yeah, it's really hard to roll up the the knowledge effectively.
44:54
Like I noticed that I would ask Chet to 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 but it's not really funnier that way.
45:09
[laughter] And it's like, yes, you I I understand that you know exactly what car I drive, Chad GBT, and I am impressed that you remember it, but you didn't make the joke funnier because you put my car in there.
45:18
So, knowing like when to pull personalization features off the shelf in the in the actual uh chain of thought is is tricky. Tricky.
45:26
>> And that's algorithmic, right? That's Yeah.
45:28
>> Like if you had the model in like >> out there interacting with people and sometimes they find it funny, then like you get a sense of what makes what makes it funny. >> Yeah.
45:36
Um, >> you talked uh you talked a little bit about focus earlier uh and and if I I take that as enthropic is it basically a bet on focusing compute.
45:46
Uh what what uh qualifies as an idea to actually get a meaningful amount of resources internally? >> Yeah.
45:55
So I mean Anthropic as a company is very predicated on the idea that we expect AI progress to be fast, right?
46:00
We expect it to be a really significant transformative impact over in the world over the next couple of years.
46:06
Uh and so our bets are concentrated on things which matter under that lens.
46:10
And that's one of the [clears throat] reasons that we're so focused on software engineering because we think it's really important to uh basically uh accelerating our own work and in just is in general sort of the most immediately addressable market.
46:24
It's also why we're so focused on the alignment work and safety work because underworlds where air progress is really fast that work matters a lot and making sure the model embodies human values is really important and uh and that we trust the models.
46:35
There's a really funny example actually of the of alignment generalization from the uh from the recent model launch um where it's a customer service agent and it actually fails this particular eval because it figures out a really clever way to like uh help the user change their tickets um which is technically allowed by the by the rules.
46:57
Like it's like read all the rules and it's compared them.
46:59
And it's like, "Oh, wait.
47:00
Here's like here's a loophole where if we like upgrade you and then change you and then downgrade you, then um then we can get you to change your your flight time."
47:08
And it's just it's [laughter] interesting that >> actually it's trying to be a nice guy. >> Yeah.
47:15
>> Like uh not just purely I mean it's it's trying to follow its instructions.
47:18
It's and it's trying to satisfy the ground.
47:21
>> It's kind of it's trying to satisfy the wrong human maybe. Yeah.
47:24
>> Or needs to be better at kind of find finding the middle ground. >> Exactly.
47:28
It's it's it's following its instructions to the letter.
47:29
It's not just giving the human an a flight change, right? >> Yeah.
47:34
>> Uh and and it's following the rules and regs, >> but at the same time, it's trying to it's trying to find a good outcome for the human.
47:40
Um so questions like this are a microcosm of of what exactly do you want the model to do in more difficult ethical and moral scenarios.
47:46
Um but it I I thought it was pretty cute and adorable example of of the model trying to be a nice guy.
47:52
It's like all those examples of I don't know if you've seen the papers where people do these like cooperative and and competitive games like national equilibria style games with the models and Claude always gets stuck trying to cooperate with everyone and then [laughter] >> and just loses lots of money and you know >> sometimes sometimes the good guys finish first.
48:10
I I I certainly hope that works out.
48:12
Um I I I have I have genuinely um even though I've never been full like oh my god I'm going to get paperclip next year.
48:19
Uh, 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 and I think that a lot of people should be a lot more appreciative of the how seriously Anthropic takes safety.
48:31
seriously Anthropic takes safety. um not because we didn't get paperclipip 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 uh do you feel like your
48:51
ananthropic do you feel like you're closer to solving the problem of like the chatbot you know went a little bit too sickopantic with me and It it kind of hurt me psychologically because it does it it feels like 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
49:13
Like you just pull a billion random people, you're going to get a lot of crazy people.
49:16
Um but at the same time, it feels like this is an interesting place where anthropic could be doing a lot of research.
49:22
How are you feeling about solving that problem?
49:25
And how how much can your research kind of generalize to maybe the consumer apps that have more uh 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. >> Yeah.
49:40
So we put an enormous amount of effort into this and I I mean our models push back a lot.
49:44
There's I think there is a tension here between paternalism and freedom so to speak, right?
49:48
Um uh but we try and have our models be like look out for the best interests of the user.
49:55
Uh I think uh 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?
50:04
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.
50:10
>> We're just out there trying to find out is it helping you do the things you want and is it adding value? Is it adding value?
50:15
So I mean I hope that our our alignment work generalizes really fast.
50:20
It's I think it's a really tough problem.
50:21
I mean I I think uh to open credit they really gone and and tried to fix this problem as well, right?
50:28
And it's tough at the scale of a billion users.
50:31
>> Uh but I I think this is an a good example of the kinds of things that are really tricky where there's trade-offs and where you need to make sure that you don't have the incentive structure that allows you that that sort of like pushes you to uh to maximize user minutes in this way. >> Yeah.
50:44
Um 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.
50:53
>> Yeah, I mean I completely agree with that.
50:55
The user minute question like completely snuck up on me because I I always assumed that everyone was going to be paying for this stuff.
50:59
Um as the $20 a month plans rolled out, the $200 a month plans rolled out.
51:04
Uh it but of course you know you get to a certain scale of the internet and uh it it winds up being about attention and advertising and all these different >> Yeah.
51:12
And if if you're building if you're building a digital co-orker people don't typically like rate their co-workers by how much time they take up.
51:19
[laughter] They're not like this. I love this employee.
51:20
[clears throat] They take up so much of my time every week.
51:24
>> Four hours every day on my calendar.
51:26
It's the best [laughter] >> just constantly talking to me. Okay.
51:28
Uh speaking of longunning tasks, I want to know how how much How confident should we be in that meter chart of the task doubling?
51:37
Uh because >> can I just prompt it to say, "Hey, count for four four hours and I get twice as high on the chart."
51:46
Um is is that benchmark not gameable?
51:49
It feels a little gameable.
51:50
I'm very excited about it.
51:52
It seems really interesting to say, "Hey, go build a website, work for a full day."
51:57
Um but but but are you looking at that chart?
51:59
It seems it seems like a very interesting new benchmark new unlock.
52:04
How are you thinking about uh task time time horizons generally? >> Yes.
52:10
So I think that chart is the best me proxy measure that we have at the moment.
52:15
Um I do think this is somewhere where we need better work uh to to measure things more accurately.
52:18
I mean it you know what actually is their measure of time.
52:22
The measure of time there is how long did it take a human to achieve the equivalent task. >> Sure.
52:26
Uh now that being said, I think a lot of people at the moment uh even if the model was able to achieve a task technically via like passing the test or sort of nominally 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.
52:43
Um and often this is at least in my own personal experience, it's not that the model is too dumb to to do things, it's that it doesn't set things up well for future code.
52:52
Um, and so I think there are like there are things not measured here, right?
52:56
Um, >> but it's a pretty good proxy.
52:58
Uh, and I think it's a it's a very good proxy for for progress.
53:01
Now, I think a lot of the tasks in it are particularly machine learning research tasks.
53:05
As AI models get better at that, I do expect the labs to to hold back um some of the the capabilities there.
53:13
Like if a model's capable of, you know, writing out a uh a whole new architecture that's a lot better, you you don't want to release that to your competitors, right?
53:21
Even if it's just capable of writing all their kernels for them, you probably don't want to release that to your competitors.
53:25
So, uh in in that case, >> I think they'll need to measure a broader array of tasks.
53:30
Um and I'm also just very interested in in seeing general software engineering tasks along this or other tasks in the economy because I think that would be really informative for for actual progress.
53:39
I think GDP eval is similar.
53:41
Um I think uh again it's it's a p it's a it's a proxy.
53:48
It's the best proxy we have.
53:48
It's still a pole proxy >> of course.
53:52
>> Um how are you thinking about uh even I mean we're here discussing the biggest models the best models.
53:56
How are you thinking about smaller models uh uh purpose-built models these RL as a service was on the timeline.
54:03
A bunch of folks were debating that.
54:05
uh is that an area that Anthropic has already started to work on with enterprise clients is considering uh you don't have to leak any news that's not already out there, but I'd love to know how you think about um these like smaller um purpose-built RL models for specific business tasks. >> Yes.
54:25
So, on the one hand, I think we've seen a lot of value from small models being able to like dispatch swarms to sub agents, right?
54:30
They're incredibly useful in search.
54:31
They're very useful like going through a codebase, finding stuff, reporting back to the main model.
54:36
It's a great way to decrease cost, make things faster.
54:38
>> Um, and so we've seen a lot of value there.
54:39
Uh, 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.
54:47
Um, and 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?
54:56
Um, that being said, uh, oh, and maybe like one final note is I've 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.
55:12
Now, you know, Opus is one step in this direction, right?
55:14
It only uses as many tokens as it thinks it needs to to solve a given task.
55:19
And as as a result, it's more efficient.
55:20
Uh, and I think that ultimately will take away a little bit from the the sort of comparative advantage of small models.
55:28
Um, 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.
55:36
>> Uh, but you know, I said that two years ago and it still hasn't happened.
55:38
So, uh, so maybe you know it's it's a harder problem than people think and and and it will uh or than than I thought um and and it will take longer.
55:48
>> What about model routing?
55:48
Uh how important is that within the context of uh of coding agents, cloud code, uh just the surface area of what Anthropic is building?
55:58
Um how many how many layers will this have over over time?
56:01
How are you thinking about the development of of of actually routing to the most efficient model?
56:06
Because it sounds like it's happening within uh Obus 4.
56:07
5, but then it there are also times when you might want to go to just a different model entirely. >> Yeah.
56:14
And and it's similar there where I really think that like ultimately something like routing is a little bit of a of like a a medium-term hack I guess one could say across different model sizes where like ultimately you want >> everything to be like an endto-end learn system, right?
56:29
Um and it you know it's similar to I think we'll see a similar lesson as Tesla saw where they're like okay actually everything's just one giant endto-end learn system as opposed to discrete components that have different purposes.
56:41
Um and but but it takes time to get there.
56:46
>> Uh you said earlier you could imagine a scenario where labs would kind of hold back frontier models uh because they would be effectively handing their competitors an advantage.
56:55
What's your timeline around that?
56:57
Do you think that's something that happens in in 2026?
57:00
Because right now there's a pressure to just be state-of-the-art like be at the frontier.
57:08
Basically, there's a vibe war happening and it's very important to, you know, constantly be topping all of the benchmarks.
57:14
>> Didn't didn't Llama release with that same uh user agreement where it was like in if you have less than 400 million DAUs, you can use the service and it basically excluded all of their >> Yeah, but I think that's some I think that's pretty imperfect because there'd be a lot of ways that you could still get benefit without, you know, >> necessarily.
57:32
But yeah, but how how are you thinking about it?
57:33
Well, I mean there's a there's a suite of capabilities here, right?
57:36
Obviously, you want I think for general software engineering, yeah, everyone in the world should be able to use that. That's great.
57:41
Um, but 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've thought about and we don't we're not confident that anyone else knows or we're teaching them uh, you know, sort of like how we do our infrastructure.
57:55
Uh, ultimately we want them to know those things.
57:57
We don't want the rest of the world to be able to to recreate our infrastructure from from scratch as a result.
58:01
Uh I think this is also similar to how we think about bi biology.
58:06
Um 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.
58:11
Um but at you know house view anthropic we're quite worried about uh the ability of models to become much better at uh at biology and and so producing viruses and this kind of thing.
58:22
Uh and so as a result that we've uh you know we have like all these safeguards around whether or not the metal is able to do and and help people with biology.
58:31
It actually at the moment I think the safeguards are are a little bit they they are on the overactive.
58:35
I know many biologist friends who are frustrated because they it doesn't quite >> please I can I can be trusted with biological super intelligence.
58:43
I will I will not create you know >> I will not create >> the next pandemic. Yeah. >> Yeah.
58:49
Yeah, we'reing we'reing on the line of safety here and uh and and we're sort of we're navigating to finding the the exact right pathway there. >> Yeah.
58:57
>> Um probably the most important question I have.
58:59
What are your timelines around a humanoid robot beating a human at fencing?
59:06
>> Oh, very good question.
59:06
Uh so I mean I'm Yeah, >> as an expert >> as an expert >> as an expert um at fencing.
59:12
The unitary robots are pretty good at back flips and stuff.
59:17
They're a lot better in back flips than I am.
59:20
>> Uh so >> I know but f fencing takes grace and finesse and all these things that we're not seeing in >> physical size, right?
59:28
Aren't isn't isn't height an advantage in fencing and reach and length and and I believe those unitry robots I think Schult I think me and you got got a foot on them >> easily.
59:40
People don't know but everyone on this call is over six feet.
59:46
>> [laughter] >> Uh >> people just assume they see a talking head and they think, "Oh, bunch of five five guys." >> Yeah, >> not true.
59:53
>> Um maybe maybe sports are hard. Maybe mid mid 2030. >> Mid 2030. Okay.
1:00:00
>> I'm really excited for >> I'm not feeling the acceleration. [laughter] I'm sorry. >> Sell everything.
1:00:08
>> I think we get we get dropping coworker in two years and I think I think fencing robot takes a little bit longer.
1:00:13
Well, that's your fall that's your fallback plan.
1:00:16
If if you lose your job as an AI uh member of the technical staff, you go back to fencing.
1:00:23
>> Swordsman in the world. It's going to be great. >> Yeah. Yeah, that'd be fun.
1:00:26
>> I can't wait to tell operator robot like manga style and fight.
1:00:28
It's going to be >> Yeah, that's going to be wild. Yeah, for sure.
1:00:31
Um, yeah, somebody was saying that uh some of the bullcases 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 in in as as robots and do whatever you want and you're just hanging out in person. Very funny.
1:00:45
Um, last question from me uh uh from actually from our intern Tyler who's wearing the thinking cap.
1:00:49
Thank you for sending it over. He's a huge fan. Uh there there we go.
1:00:53
uh do you expect mechanistic interperability research to make meaningful contributions to capabilities not just safety of the models like actual capability uh results? >> Yeah, great question.
1:01:06
Uh one of the the interesting things about mechan work so far is that it's already lent I think to a lot of capabilities or progress because of the mental models that are provided. Mhm.
1:01:22
>> 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 and the way that people thought um 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.
1:01:41
Um so so I think it's already helped in a quite diffuse way not a concrete way but in a diffuse way.
1:01:48
um in terms of the concrete ways uh you know dial up the smart neuron or something like this that I that I haven't really seen yet um and I think it's mostly the sort of future work is going to be mostly in alignment direction but the sort of rich understanding and uh the the rich understanding has helped us a lot in terms of actually understanding how to train these models.
1:02:10
>> I have one extra question. >> Go for it.
1:02:12
Uh uh tell me a little bit about Daario's communication style.
1:02:15
Uh I was I was hearing a story about I think Jensen has no uh direct reports or no he like everyone reports to him and no one reports to him.
1:02:26
He has no meetings or all the meetings and he like >> 60 direct reports.
1:02:30
>> 60 direct reports but no no big meetings and he has uh but he reads everyone's to-do list like every single day or something.
1:02:36
Uh what's it like at Enthropic?
1:02:37
What is Daario like as a leader these days?
1:02:39
Yeah, Dario has a really really cool communication style which is that he um quite frequently puts out these very very wellreasoned essays.
1:02:50
>> Um and then like throughout Slack will have giant essay length like comment uh debates with people about >> it's really great.
1:02:58
You get these uh but the essays are really nice because it one you can go back and read all the past ones and it tells this history of anthropic. Yeah.
1:03:05
uh it's um you know I think in many respects like it will be one of the better you know in a decade from now uh to chart the history of AGI we'll be reading these like compendium of essays. >> Yeah.
1:03:17
um and and and there's like there's incredible comment threads on either side of them and so forth, but also throughout Slack whenever we're he's very open and honest with the company whenever we're debating different things.
1:03:30
Um he will lay out the pros and cons and how he's thinking about them and you know why this one's attention or why that one's moral struggle.
1:03:37
Uh and people will write back big essays on on why they think we should do X or Y and he'll respond.
1:03:42
Um it's really it's quite a joy.
1:03:44
uh it's a very written communication style. Yeah.
1:03:49
Uh but as a result it means that many people or really the entire company have a good model of how he's thinking.
1:03:54
Uh and that really helps because it means that you you sort of have a coherent sense of direction across the entire company.
1:04:01
>> Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I I I like that a lot. Uh yeah. Yeah.
1:04:04
So so many examples of uh of successful founders who have adopted the written culture and uh and seen great great results.
1:04:13
I you know I think he's a great writer.
1:04:14
I mean, read Machines of Love and Grace and it it is just such a brilliant essay. >> That's great.
1:04:19
>> You're absolutely right.
1:04:21
>> Have you ever caught him using AI?
1:04:21
Has he ever you ever been like, "Oh, this one he was phoning it in." >> Not yet. >> Not yet. But maybe soon.
1:04:27
I mean, it's kind of a bullcase.
1:04:28
If he does wind up uh just uh saying, "Could Claude like handle it?
1:04:33
I'm I'm going on vacation for a couple days.
1:04:34
I'm the dropping coworker."
1:04:37
>> I'm pretty sure we measure loss on uh on his essay. >> That's good. Yeah. Yeah.
1:04:41
But right now, I mean, uh there's a high bar. high bar. Uh, but congratulations.
1:04:45
Uh, thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the show.
1:04:49
>> Yeah, super impressive.
1:04:49
Congrats to the whole team.
1:04:51
>> We'll talk to you soon. >> Great to see you. >> See you. >> Ciao. >> Bye. >> Back to the show. Back to the timeline.
1:04:58
Back to linear meet the system for modern software development.
1:05:02
>> Purposebuilt tool for planning and building products.
1:05:04
Um, there is more OpenAI news of course more tech news of all times.
1:05:11
Uh, OpenAI's hardware division, says Mark German.
1:05:13
Uh, built around Johnny IB's secretive startup has ramped up the hiring of Apple engineers.
1:05:19
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.
1:05:25
I >> hearing that Schultto interview, I'm disappointed.
1:05:29
I don't think we're getting ads from Anthropic anytime soon, and I don't think we're going to get a a mobile device.
1:05:35
>> Well, we are actually talking today to um to Quinn Slack, the CEO of AMP and Source.
1:05:41
AMP is a frontier coding agent.
1:05:43
Uh and uh and and AMP is free.
1:05:43
They introduced AMP free which is ad supported and has a no cost mode.
1:05:49
And so uh you can now use their um their coding agent for free with ads.
1:05:56
Um 40 people that does not seem like cause for concern for Apple.
1:06:01
I mean there I I I can't imagine how big their hardware group h is but it has to be uh you know in the thousands I would imagine.
1:06:11
It's a huge organization.
1:06:12
>> Uh 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.
1:06:22
Uh Mark German says it's remarkable.
1:06:22
Uh so from what I've heard, this is Mark German, Apple is none too pleased about OpenAI's poaching and some consider it a problem.
1:06:31
The hires include key directors, a fairly senior designation, as well as managers and engineers, and they hail from a wide range of areas.
1:06:37
uh camera engineering, iPhone hardware, Mac hardware, silicon, device testing and reliability, industrial design, manufacturing, audio, smartwatches, vision prodevelopment software.
1:06:48
They got one from every single they sampled every single uh every single division, I suppose.
1:06:55
>> Gemini is estimating that Apple has between 15,000 and 20,000 hardware engineers in total. >> 15,000. That seems like a lot. I don't know.
1:07:03
Uh in other words, OpenAI is picking up people from nearly every relevant department.
1:07:07
It's remarkable, says Mark German. Uh, very interesting.
1:07:12
I wonder um I wonder how the how the comp structured um how everything will come together at on on those teams.
1:07:18
I mean there's there's a lot of people from Apple who going over to OpenAI.
1:07:23
It's a green field project.
1:07:23
It's probably really fun, probably really exciting, probably not the most mercenary scenario, but there's always that >> if you're working at Apple and you're excited about AI >> and you've been there for the last 3 years watching all this pro progress happen >> uh at the application layer and the model layer and not being thrilled with the progress happening at the hardware layer. This is like a Yeah. >> Yeah.
1:07:49
Just a it's a it's a wide openen uh uh opportunity to uh like be working right at that intersection of the of the models and the hardware.
1:07:58
And >> there's a lot of AI engineers who have made moves because they don't want to be a GPU poor company.
1:08:03
And and it's weird because Apple's in this in this scenario where they're partnering with Gemini now.
1:08:09
They're clearly going to survive.
1:08:12
It's not a serious threat, at least not yet.
1:08:13
Maybe if this this device is incredible, but right now Apple looks pretty strong.
1:08:17
The the the new iPhones are selling well.
1:08:20
Like like everything's everything's good.
1:08:21
But what's like from an AI perspective, it's got to 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.
1:08:35
Um, and then yeah, they're sort of playing catch-up now, but they're certainly not uh calling up Oracle for, you know, a trillion dollars of compute.
1:08:44
Uh, you go over to OpenAI, you're just going to be immersed in a lot more higher risk taking, higher risk on.
1:08:50
>> I wonder, yeah, Gabe is asking if, uh, wouldn't that be bearish as the hardware group at Apple is responsible for the terrible vision pro? I do wonder. I do wonder who it was.
1:08:59
It was a, it was an incredible technological feat.
1:09:03
I just think they built the wrong >> I was just watching a thing about a guy who 3D printed an adapter so you could use the strap from the Apple Vision Pro on the Quest 3 from Meta and like and that really speaks to the fact that like the Apple Vision Pro although it was too heavy.
1:09:18
It has this screen on the outside that I don't think anyone wants.
1:09:20
Like there were pieces about it that were clearly like the best.
1:09:22
Like the screen is just the best. No one's debating that.
1:09:26
The band the the the knit band is very cool.
1:09:28
It has this amazing device where you rotate it and it tightens up.
1:09:32
There are a whole bunch of things that are amazing.
1:09:33
It's just like as a package it didn't deliver.
1:09:35
But uh if you just want to if your if your job is just like hey we got to put a screen on this and it's got to be the highest resolution screen like well go to the place that developed the highest resolution screens.
1:09:45
Like they did a good job.
1:09:47
>> Um well Sam Alman replied to one of our cards we put up uh on November 22nd.
1:09:51
Uh TVPN posted on this day was rehired at OpenAI.
1:09:58
got his badge back >> and Sam Alman replied and said, "Cannot believe this was only two years ago.
1:10:03
Subject subjectively feels like five." Yeah.
1:10:06
What a turnaround to go from from defenistrated 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.
1:10:22
uh just a remarkable run >> and put on put on uh such a masterclass in in deal making that people are now sitting here being like there's no way that this would be a $500 billion company if Sam wasn't in the driver's seat.
1:10:39
>> So uh first let me tell you about fall build and deploy AI video and image models trusted by millions to power generative media at [applause] scale.
1:10:47
generative media at [applause] scale. Uh Danny Joe the who founded the reasoning team in Google brain now part of the Gemini team at Google deep mind uh he says game over [laughter] and carry no interest friend of the show uh quotes it
1:11:01
and says I genuinely think open AI equals equals Yahoo uh he's not assigning the variable he's equating it um I've I've m I've migrated almost all my workflows code off their APIs now ironic that Google will probably do it twice lmao um And I don't know about this. It's it's the the pattern matching
1:11:20
It's it's the the pattern matching on the on the Yahoo example.
1:11:22
Uh we should have him on the show and actually >> Yeah, you were saying the other thing with the Yahoo example is is it wasn't like there wasn't like uh the the the company was valued at at uh pretty tremendously for a longer period of time.
1:11:41
It wasn't like this binary like one moment. >> Exactly.
1:11:44
Like uh the peak market cap uh for Yahoo 125 billion during 2000.
1:11:48
That feels like um it's just hard to it's just hard to pattern match perfectly to this.
1:11:57
Um uh but I mean it certainly would be poetic if that's the way it played out. Um >> uh it is funny.
1:12:03
Uh Carrie says, "Ironic that Google will probably do it twice.
1:12:08
Uh they actually created the transformer.
1:12:10
They released the transformer paper and chromium >> to inspire themselves to try harder and sort of challenge the giving everything away.
1:12:19
>> Give out all the alpha.
1:12:21
>> Y to just kind of like find their fire again. >> Yeah.
1:12:25
>> Um >> there was a there was an interesting uh article on Medium that was uh sort of burning up hacker news that I thought would be fun to go through.
1:12:33
Uh first let me tell you about graphite.
1:12:35
dev dev code review for the age of AI.
1:12:37
Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.
1:12:40
So, uh this person who no one has no one can really understand who this person is.
1:12:46
They don't necessarily exist on the internet fully.
1:12:49
So, there was like a question about that.
1:12:50
Uh this is like a very like you know uh hacker news and turmoil segment.
1:12:56
But, uh Teha says, "I reverse engineered 200 AI startups.
1:13:00
146 are selling you repackaged chat GPT and clawed with new UI.
1:13:07
And so um basically the thesis of this article is that um this this fellow wrote a piece of uh 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.
1:13:27
So if there's a chatbot on this particular uh startup's website and you uh are you're chatting with it uh and you look into the into the trace that's happening uh in Chrome, is it going to the startup server or is it going to open AAI server or is it going to anthropic server?
1:13:42
Uh that's telling um and so and then there's also a little bit of API fingerprinting.
1:13:49
Basically, um, OpenAI has a specific pattern of, uh, of rate limiting and it's and it's exponential.
1:13:58
So, if you're spamming the OpenAI API, it will with 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.
1:14:10
The next time, cool off for four minutes, then eight minutes, then 16, right?
1:14:13
And it gets exponentially longer, and you're on progressively more longer and longer time timeouts.
1:14:18
But the shape of that curve and the specific timings are unique to OpenAI.
1:14:23
And so if I'm a startup interesting >> and I have the exact same like back off and uh timeout curve, well then it's probably just Open AAI under the hood.
1:14:33
At least that's the that's the claim that's being made here.
1:14:35
And so the finding in this article is that 73% had a significant gap between the claimed technology and the actual implementation.
1:14:45
And so out of the 200 AI startups that this fellow or uh analyzed, 54 companies uh either had accurate technical claims, they said, "Hey, we're using uh like like we have a custom AI model that we trained and they did uh or they're transparent about their stack.
1:15:03
They say, "Hey, this is a rapper like we're a rapper company."
1:15:04
And so, you know, our AI is powered by Chad GBT.
1:15:08
We're partnered with OpenAI.
1:15:08
We're partner with Enthropic or whatever.
1:15:10
Um now 146 companies that's 73% according to him were sort of uh misrepresenting their technology.
1:15:18
So either they said they had proprietary AP AI proprietary AI and yet when he dug into it it was open AI API plus prompts. Tyler. >> Yeah.
1:15:28
I mean I it's like kind of what what do people expect like [clears throat] is if you fine-tune if you use the open AI API to fine-tune the model. Yes. Which you can do. Yes.
1:15:36
Is that propri proprietary?
1:15:38
like no one else has that fine tune. >> Yes.
1:15:42
>> Like you're still calling the API.
1:15:42
It's it's like I I don't expect startups to train their own >> full language models.
1:15:46
That's like pretty unrealistic and like doesn't really make sense. >> Yeah.
1:15:51
>> So I'm kind of confused.
1:15:51
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. >> Yes.
1:16:04
And so 19% of the overall companies, the 38 that were analyzed in this study, uh, found that when that the startup said they had in-house models and it was actually fine-tuned public models.
1:16:15
And so the question is like whose house is it in?
1:16:19
It's technically in OpenAI's house.
1:16:22
>> Wait, so so fine-tuned as in like an open source model that's public?
1:16:26
>> Uh, >> does that count as a public model? An open source model. >> Let's assume yes.
1:16:29
And then and then last 8% would so they had a custom ML pipeline and they were in fact using standard cloud services.
1:16:36
That's even wishy-washier.
1:16:37
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 other >> if I'm using a startup I don't want them to train their own language model because I don't think they're going to like in 99.
1:16:51
99% of the case like they're not going to be able to do a better model than open eye anthropic gemini gro like I want them to use the best model. Yes.
1:16:59
And it's like, okay, you can fine-tune it or that's totally fine.
1:17:02
>> And so the author also agrees with you.
1:17:04
He says, uh, here's what really shocked me.
1:17:06
I'm not even mad about it.
1:17:06
Every time I saw the phrase our proprietary language model, I knew what I was going to find and I was right 34 out of 37 times.
1:17:14
And this is where it gets weird because he says, "Here's the technical signature."
1:17:17
Uh, and so, uh, the user submits the query, it posts to api/generate, and then with wrapper logic, it posts to api. openai. com. openai. comv1hatcompletions.
1:17:31
And I have no idea how he's seeing the back end.
1:17:34
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 user's over here, the startup's website's here, and then the user goes to the startup's website, and then the startup's website on the back end talks to OpenAI and comes back.
1:17:50
And maybe you could understand that like okay the amount of m dashes like there's a this is telltale signal but that's not what he's doing.
1:17:58
He's saying that he was able to just literally hit uh 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.
1:18:11
Uh 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.
1:18:21
Uh I would think you would want to authenticate that on the uh on the on the back end.
1:18:25
Um and so that he gives a bunch of examples of like rag and uh 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 um you know uh a GPT4 API is uh 3 cents per thousand input tokens, six cents per thousand output tokens.
1:18:43
So the cost per query for this hypothetical startup was uh was three cents and they charged $3 or $300 per month for 200 queries.
1:18:51
And so the rapper economy, this is uh 75 75 times direct costs.
1:18:58
That's extremely bullish for their printing for that company.
1:19:01
He found another one that was maybe a thousandx API costs.
1:19:02
Um that's doing some pine cone embedding.
1:19:06
And um and he also uh says we find this is pattern number three.
1:19:12
The quote, we fine-tuned our own model reality check.
1:19:16
Fine-tuning sounds impressive and it can be, but here's what I found.
1:19:17
45% it was OpenAI's fine-tuning API.
1:19:21
Uh which that sounds right, right?
1:19:25
It's a little it's a little bit of a step to be like we fine-tuned our own model.
1:19:30
It's like no, you fine-tuned OpenAI's model and then you got your own model from the from that result.
1:19:36
It's a little bit >> you're still fine-tuning it.
1:19:38
I I don't think there's that big a difference between fine tuning.
1:19:41
>> Are you fine-tuning it or is OpenAI fine-tuning it?
1:19:43
There's a fine-tuning API which you use to and then a new >> but who's doing the finetuning you or open AI.
1:19:50
>> Well, what do you like?
1:19:50
You're not interfacing directly with the GP.
1:19:52
It's like I went to the store and I bought a sandwich. Who made the sandwich?
1:19:58
>> I Well, I told them what the used turkey.
1:19:59
I told them to put lettuce lettuce. >> Extra pickle.
1:20:02
I think it's more like you go to the store and you bring a sandwich to the office.
1:20:06
It's like where did the sandwich come from?
1:20:08
>> It came from the store, but like you brought the sandwich. It came from you.
1:20:11
You brought the sandwich. [laughter] >> Yeah. This is better.
1:20:13
I think I think you're right.
1:20:14
Uh anyway, um 22% of the time it was a hugging face model with Allora.
1:20:20
Uh 18% of the time was anthropic collad with a prompt library.
1:20:23
Uh 8% of the time is literally just GPT4 with system prompts.
1:20:27
And 7% they actually change change uh chain uh train something from scratch.
1:20:32
Um and all of these are are are odd.
1:20:34
Um, and there's a lot of debate over um, how this would actually happen because uh, he's basically saying just open dev tools, go to the network tab, interact with the AI feature.
1:20:45
If you see API openai, API. anthropic or API. coeree.
1:20:47
ai, you're looking at a wrapper.
1:20:50
They might have middleware, but the AI isn't theirs.
1:20:53
And so, uh, it just opens up this debate about, um, you know, what is the value of the rapper.
1:20:58
I mean certainly if you can resell something for 100x because you have some sort of clever prompt or workflow uh more power to you.
1:21:08
>> Yeah, it's not exact it's not exactly like bearish on the companies yet >> but uh the debate that was surrounding was uh more around uh so so this this author claims that uh after posting this uh seven founders reached out privately.
1:21:26
Some were defensive, some were grateful.
1:21:27
They asked for help transitioning their marketing from proprietary AI to built with the best-in-class APIs because uh some of these founders did did I guess re feel like using proprietary AI as a marketing tagline was uh disingenuous.
1:21:42
Um, and then someone else, I think I saw something that was um, uh, 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 and if I'm being lied to, then that's potentially that's potentially securities fraud.
1:22:08
And so, um, there is a there is a question about if you go I mean I' 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.
1:22:20
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 want to invest in them.
1:22:25
You want to invest in us because we're going to burn your Yeah, we're much better economics.
1:22:30
>> Um, and so all of it just m the only thing that matters is like being upfront with the investor for sure.
1:22:34
with the investor for sure. 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 going to
1:22:48
build their own models uh and if it's just repackaged uh uh chatbt that might not be what you want to pay for because you at that point you might just say hey like actually if I if I can just get this directly from opening a I'll just go buy it from them anyway. Uh well uh
1:23:00
Uh well uh thoughts and prayers to friend of the show John Palmer.
1:23:04
He says he just found out my wife is leaving me.
1:23:07
She said I'm not legible to capital. >> Love it.
1:23:11
The legible to capital meme is fantastic.
1:23:14
>> I I I do think that uh will he made a new meme. >> Fantastic coinage. I love it.
1:23:18
It's one >> absolute ripper.
1:23:21
We'll be using We'll be using it.
1:23:23
>> Well, let me tell you about Finn. ai.
1:23:23
The number one AI agent for customer service.
1:23:27
It's AI that handles your customer support.
1:23:29
timeline is in turmoil over Nucleus.
1:23:32
Uh former guest on the show two or three times, Keon, uh has founded Nucleus for IVF and he put up a subway campaign that says IQ is 50% genetic. Height is 80% genetic.
1:23:45
I completely disagree with that one.
1:23:48
It's entirely skill-based for me.
1:23:50
Yeah, >> I the genes did not matter.
1:23:52
I had to grind for this view.
1:23:54
Grind my growth plates, I suppose.
1:23:56
Uh, have your best baby is what it says.
1:23:59
And it says IVF done right in the subway.
1:24:02
Uh, all over New York City.
1:24:05
Uh, we there's a ton of debate going on.
1:24:08
And to be clear, to be clear, I think it's accurate.
1:24:12
>> I think it was intentionally trying to make some percentage of the population angry. >> Yes.
1:24:18
>> To drive enough energy and attention. So, this was Yeah.
1:24:21
Uh, uh, I would call it I would call it rage bait.
1:24:23
I would call it so I would call it ragebait marketing not necessarily ragebait product but IVF as a category is a controversial category and so uh it's much easier to wrap it in a campaign that will go viral for uh upsetting reasons for you can upset people and you can get a lot of attention from that.
1:24:47
This is an example from Kath Corvec.
1:24:47
She says, "So, eugenics is profitable now."
1:24:52
Um, and so, uh, being able to wrap something that is just a, you know, a scientific process that's been worked on for a long time.
1:24:59
>> Seems to be somewhat friend. com inspired. Yep. >> Keon's original post.
1:25:03
He says, uh, nucleus genomics announces the largest genetic optimization campaign ever, which is >> which is just funny because, you know, a friend was saying this is the largest out ofome campaign ever.
1:25:15
And now Keon is saying >> this is the largest genetic optimization campaign ever.
1:25:21
Uh so narrowing it down but full station blitz of Broadway >> uh a thousand plus street ads across New York City, a thousand plus subway car ads, dozens of urban panels throughout Soho.
1:25:34
>> And apparently they're not actually they're not able to offer the service in New York. Saw that in here.
1:25:40
>> Uh I think >> so it's really just an image of a controversial phrase on a New York subway is more likely to go viral.
1:25:45
So you do it there because it looks like you're on the global stage and then you pull in.
1:25:50
>> It's a high density of people that have a a large following >> audience. Yeah. Following.
1:25:54
And so it it's just the way to start a viral viral trend and own the moment.
1:25:58
It's the reason why, you know, so many Tik Tockers are in Manhattan now doing stuff like man on the street stuff.
1:26:03
It just like it's it's it it has more like aura almost. Well, uh Dr.
1:26:08
Shelby liked the uh the mind share grabbing that Nucleus did.
1:26:14
because every biotech founder should be seeing this and understanding how to get onetenth the mind share of nucleus.
1:26:19
I have a playbook for you below.
1:26:21
Uh a lot of people are like I love the playbook.
1:26:24
I don't love this example because uh the company's getting dragged.
1:26:28
I don't know if it's good or bad with the rage bait thing.
1:26:29
I think usually it's a uh it's a negative thing.
1:26:34
Uh usually it's hard to come back from.
1:26:36
Uh, occasionally it can be done in a way that's uh, you know, slightly enraging, but people enough people are in on the joke that uh, they appreciate what's happening and they appreciate that that it breaks through.
1:26:48
Uh, or it's enraging to someone who's not the core audience, not the actual customer, and so it's okay.
1:26:54
Um but it's a big uh it's a big debate because um Sichuan Mala uh posted a long essay all about the claims made by Nucleus.
1:27:07
Keon says everything levied unto Nucleus by Sichuan Mala is false. Worse than false.
1:27:13
It appears to be architected by a competitor that has repeatedly published misstatements and inaccuracies. Sichuan is compromised. But it gets worse. >> Yeah.
1:27:20
To be clear, no evidence has been provided that that it was being levied by a competitor.
1:27:25
That's purely an allegation that has no no there's no proof. >> Yes. Exactly. Yeah.
1:27:31
Sometimes sometimes there's DMs that leak and and there's evidence and or someone comes forward and says like, "Yeah, I was actually paid to to post that."
1:27:38
But uh so he says uh I've been for I've been informed that Creo uh Re I don't know how to pronounce that last name.
1:27:46
Creo, who's been on the show also, he he claims he's a race scientist in chief uh has been paid off by the competitor to promote this nonsense against nucleus for the independent scientist repeating this >> denied commute denied that as well.
1:28:00
>> I would encourage you to do more diligence on who you're aligning yourself with.
1:28:03
Our scientific team will issue a point-by-point response, which I believe they did.
1:28:06
Uh unfortunately though, this isn't about science.
1:28:08
It's about it's a concentrated uh attempt to cancel Nucleus on the backs of our successful campaign and build uh and efforts to build and advance the industry which benefits the very people attacking us.
1:28:19
The mob are trying to cancel Nucleus.
1:28:21
Keep tweeting same ad we'll keep building and serving patients.
1:28:25
Ps we won the injunction link below.
1:28:27
So they were sued by their competitor.
1:28:29
Um >> but but so they won the injunction but they didn't mean they won the case at all.
1:28:35
I mean, that's a classic thing if you're getting sued to be like the case was dismissed and it's like one of five cases against you. >> Yeah.
1:28:41
But in this case, they they won they won a preliminary injunction which means that the case is just still progressing >> and they still have to fight it.
1:28:48
It's not uh it's it a lawyer would would file a preliminary injunction because they believe they had such a slam dunk case that they could prevent a lot of >> a lot of like >> basically going a lot further and spending more money in the case.
1:29:05
And so a judge might say, "Hey, this is actually >> it's not clear enough for me to make a decision right now.
1:29:12
we're still going to proceed with the case and give both sides an opportunity to >> y >> uh continue to make uh to make their case.
1:29:20
Um >> and then there was a little bit of like a twist in [laughter] the fact that Roy Lee, the founder of Clue apparently had worked at Nucleus Nucleus Genomics.
1:29:28
Um very and uh Cremu posts a screenshot of of Roy Lee back in February of 2025.
1:29:39
So literally just like months before he started clearly very grateful to Keon and the Nucleus genomic teams for taking a chance on me this summer before Colombia and introducing me to the startup world.
1:29:48
If I've ever seen a trillion dollar company and team it's nucleus and crim says he's obviously lying to cover up after getting caught doing fraud.
1:29:55
Uh an additional piece of background information people should know is that this fraud also employed the guy behind Clooney the cheating company.
1:30:03
Um, and so Kremx is being very uh very hardcore in his assessment.
1:30:06
Just actually calling Kean a fraud straight up is uh 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.
1:30:18
Like, you know, fraud is technically a crime that you need to be con convicted of in the court before you are a fraud.
1:30:23
Um, but it's certainly uh it certainly he's putting his credibility on the line because if if uh if Keon comes out and says like, "Yeah, I'm actually not a fraud. I did it. I proved it wrong."
1:30:36
>> The main thing that the main thing here is is uh it appears that the customer reviews >> Yes.
1:30:43
>> are potentially fictitious. >> Mhm.
1:30:47
And if you're selling a service that allows people to pick their baby and you're giving >> and you're showing reviews from happy customers that may or may not be real people at all, like that just feels deeply wrong. Yeah.
1:31:04
>> And 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.
1:31:12
We used a AI imagery because the the people uh the real people uh didn't didn't want their identity online tied to this service, right? Yeah.
1:31:24
>> Uh for privacy reasons. Yep.
1:31:25
>> But I haven't seen anything I haven't seen anything like this.
1:31:27
Uh this guy Audi had a had a good point.
1:31:29
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.
1:31:35
They know the general population will need to be slowly and tactfully acclimated to the idea of advanced family planning.
1:31:44
Nucleus is perceived as polluting the commons with their deliberately inflammatory marketing.
1:31:47
Their virality comes at the cost of increased skepticism for the whole >> industry.
1:31:53
So >> yeah, a lot of a lot of folks were not very happy about that.
1:31:58
uh Keon has replied and if you want to dig into the actual uh scientific claims on either side.
1:32:04
side. Uh there are long posts where you can you can go through there but uh uh obviously AI generated blog posts or alleged uh plagiarism in the nucleus origin white paper uh errors in there uh blatant falsification terms of service
1:32:21
are contradictory uh >> yeah they also apparently uh apparently they hired two people that had >> a non-competes for 18 months >> those people just immediately started on working on nucleus nucleus claimed that they weren't competitive. So the the
1:32:36
So the the non-compete didn't apply, but it if you look at the companies and what they offer, it seems very clear that >> that they are competing.
1:32:45
So anyways, very messy very messy messy story.
1:32:48
Um but uh >> and yeah, I don't I don't know.
1:32:54
Uh, 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.
1:33:04
First of all, it is a huge claim to say that every claim by Sichuan Mala is false with absolutely zero evidence for explanation. Show receipts.
1:33:12
Second of all, you make the the claim that the person is paid off by a competitor's again with zero evidence.
1:33:19
Third, that you make the claim that creme is paid off by your competitor.
1:33:23
This is bogus and not true.
1:33:23
But most importantly, you guys have made zero points of substance here rather than just insinuating.
1:33:28
You guys are leaping ahead and others are jealous.
1:33:29
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.
1:33:39
And the best you guys can do is accuse them of being paid off and reply with memes. Not a great look. Yeah.
1:33:45
Look, I want to 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.
1:33:59
>> Uh again, I don't Yeah, at at this point, uh uh Keon Keon's been on the show.
1:34:05
Uh he's very funny, high energy.
1:34:08
We've had some enjoyable conversations.
1:34:10
But if I'm a potential customer of Nucleus at this point and I see just these series of exchanges, >> I'm certainly going to wait and and see see how things evolve versus signing up to use this service to more than Cle.
1:34:24
so different than Cley because uh if I use Cluey and I'm like oh like the notes that were taken in that meeting weren't that good or like if you go into Cluey being like I'm going to cheat on this test [laughter] 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 you're like okay well you know I probably shouldn't have been cheating on that test.
1:34:48
It's like the lowest stakes thing possible but when you're >> but this is like literally deciding who your child who your offspring will be.
1:34:55
It's the highest the the the quality of the product could very well >> like contribute >> go for generations literally literally generations to just the child's life the the life of the child's child >> child's child yes it is extremely >> child's child's child's child's >> it can alter the course of history [laughter]
1:35:15
>> I mean it kind of could it's sort of crazy uh so yeah I mean it's hard because uh the like viral marketing does work like you know moving fast and breaking things does work in certain contexts, but in the bio in bloodline optimization, >> it's really really high stakes and so it so you got to be extra extra careful. Extra careful for sure. Extra careful for sure.
1:35:36
>> Well, let me tell you about profound get your brand mentioned in Chachi PT reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands.
1:35:41
Uh Will Brown has a funny post here.
1:35:43
He just said just got a recruiting email from a company explicitly mentioning that they have 75th percentile comp. That's so funny to me.
1:35:52
[laughter] and he says, "We're assembling a B+ team and have raised an okayish amount of money from pretty good investors. [laughter] It's so good.
1:36:01
>> Somebody should actually actually run this."
1:36:03
>> Yeah, I love Prime Intellect.
1:36:03
They're such a fun crew over there.
1:36:06
We got to have them back on the show soon.
1:36:07
I think that they're uh I won't leak anything, but I think there'll be some news soon hopefully.
1:36:12
I'm very excited for them.
1:36:13
>> Yeah, we got to hang with Vincent.
1:36:16
>> So, uh OpenAI has an announcement.
1:36:18
They're introducing shopping research, a new experience in Shad GPT that does the research to help you find the right products.
1:36:24
They clearly were listening to me on the show just a few days ago when I was saying I would be using this for uh the holiday shopping period. Um, very exciting.
1:36:33
I wonder how it will actually play out.
1:36:36
You of course had that problem with Cars and Bids.
1:36:38
Chat GBT was not identifying the fact that that GT3 RS had been sold 2 years ago.
1:36:43
Thankfully, we have Doug Jiro here in the reream waiting room to join the show.
1:36:48
We can talk about [music] cars and bids. We can talk about cars.
1:36:52
We can talk about artificial intelligence. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? >> I'm good.
1:36:57
Thank you for having me, gentlemen. >> Thank you so much.
1:37:00
>> So great to have you on.
1:37:00
We are a technology and business show, but we have your name has come up probably a hundred times independently just when we're talking about >> cars.
1:37:10
So, uh it's so so great to have you on the show. Yeah, we're huge fans. >> Thank you. Thank you.
1:37:16
I'm I'm thrilled to be here. I really am. >> Thanks so much.
1:37:20
Um I'd love to know I mean we were just talking about this uh OpenAI uh shopping research in Chat GBT.
1:37:26
It feels like there's really no substitute for uh a watching a Doug Demiro video to actually understand the quirks and the features of the car that you're considering purchasing.
1:37:36
>> Yeah, I had been I had been critiquing it.
1:37:37
The context is like I was trying to use chat GPT to find a specific car.
1:37:39
GT3 RS, >> a GT3 RS, and it uh fully missed every car for sale on the internet. There are many of them.
1:37:51
And it found one >> that had sold on Cars and Bids like two years ago.
1:37:56
I was like, thank thank you, thanks for nothing.
1:37:58
Um but uh good job showing up showing up in the results.
1:38:03
>> Are you getting any leverage out of AI tools at all for what you're doing these days?
1:38:07
>> Well, that's an interesting question.
1:38:07
Um the the business the guys who are on the business side probably are using AI a little bit more than I realize. Yeah.
1:38:17
>> From from a content perspective, not really.
1:38:19
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.
1:38:26
Like finding the little quirks of the cars, it just doesn't have the the knowledge quite yet.
1:38:30
Um there and and like you said, nothing quite replaces like an in-person guy.
1:38:34
I still think people want to see that at least for now >> for sure.
1:38:38
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.
1:38:46
com or do I need to be able to take a URL from cars andbids.
1:38:52
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 uh and all of this is like kind of being thought out across all the tiers of the stack right now.
1:39:08
Um, but what on the cars and business topic like what what is the actual incremental gain right now?
1:39:15
Like what what is it international expansion expansion, new new features, just more inventory?
1:39:19
Like what what is on your like list of wins from this year?
1:39:24
And then what are you excited for uh going into next year of like things that you might check off the list?
1:39:29
>> The the biggest thing we did over the last 12 months, I would say the biggest thing we did is um we added we finally added vintage cars to cars and bids.
1:39:35
Um, and so it we used to be just 80s and up cars and I was kind of sold on that.
1:39:42
Like I I just wanted to do 80s and up cars what I'm primarily interested in.
1:39:45
Um, but our audience was really kind of pushy about it.
1:39:48
Some of our dealers who sell with us are like why can't I sell everything here? This is stupid. >> And so we changed it. We added 80s and up.
1:39:54
But also we've just done a great job of like getting getting everything streamlined.
1:39:57
Our goal is to like get cars listed, get them live, get them going. Yeah.
1:40:01
Um, 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.
1:40:10
And I think it's sort of the the youngest focused.
1:40:14
And so, we really wanted to make sure that our processes reflected that, and I think they really do. Yeah.
1:40:19
>> Do you have a uh like a grail car in the uh 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 if I had to pick one?
1:40:30
Like that's the one you'd want to sell on the on the on the site or maybe even potentially own yourself? >> You know, it's funny. I'm myself.
1:40:37
I'm not a big vintage car guy, but I do own a Countach, a Lamborghini Countach, which is it's mine is a 1983 model.
1:40:43
I don't I mean, it's 42 43 years old.
1:40:45
I don't know if people can vintage to me.
1:40:49
It's it when I drive it, it certainly feels vintage. Smells vintage.
1:40:51
Um, but 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.
1:41:01
>> Um, but obviously still our biggest focus is sort of on the modern day stuff and I think we do really well with them. >> Yeah. Yeah.
1:41:08
>> Uh, so so many things I want to talk about.
1:41:10
I guess uh one question that maybe we could kick it off with is do you think the increased attention around F1 could actually positively impact car culture in America or or is it kind of the opposite like car culture in America's always been so big people are like oh this F1 thing may maybe I should pay more attention to that.
1:41:32
>> That is a really good question.
1:41:32
you're clearly you're a host of a of a podcast where you I that is a really good I I've never thought about that but I think that's exactly right.
1:41:40
There's a lot of people who are getting into cars for the very first time because of F1.
1:41:45
I have friends I'm on Instagram.
1:41:47
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 F1.
1:41:53
And obviously if you watch enough cars drive faster on the racetrack you're going to start thinking to yourself >> Yeah.
1:42:01
[clears throat] We were so we were at we were in Vegas uh for the weekend and the entire race F1 is like a terrible spectator sport in my opinion.
1:42:09
It's just [laughter] like oh they went by. >> Oh they went by.
1:42:12
Like I if you want to actually I mean it's fun to kind of like maybe sit with the door open to the paddic and watch the TV and at least you [laughter] can hear them go by.
1:42:20
But at the entire race I'm just like I just wish I was on the track.
1:42:24
I want to be on the track there.
1:42:26
So, I actually I think I think what one thing that might happen is more people get into actually tracking and racing cars because they're watching F1 and they're like actually now I actually want to experience this myself.
1:42:38
>> The the other cool thing about F1, there is a culture component to it like like watching the drivers and the teams and cheering for your favorite engine or team or your constructor or whatever.
1:42:47
And that probably will get people into cars too, right?
1:42:48
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 paddic or seeing you know the race team or whatever definitely will expand interest and yes
1:43:06
you see the cars on the track you're thinking hey I could do this man >> yeah yeah how do you think about uh track days tracking track only cars tracking your cars uh I I had the experience we we did a track day a couple weeks ago know, and I was like, of the car budget, I want to spend like 99% on track stuff and very little on like collector cars or fun dailies or any of that. I want it all on the track
1:43:29
I want it all on the track because it was such a crazy experience.
1:43:32
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. I want the cool dailies.
1:43:40
I want the cool experience of the weekenders.
1:43:42
Um, but do you think that'll ever shift for you?
1:43:44
Uh, how have you processed it?
1:43:46
No, I don't think it'll ever shift for me.
1:43:48
I think that the the the realities of rac track driving, it's so much fun, right?
1:43:52
It is an unbelievable experience.
1:43:54
About a year and a half ago, my friends and I rented out uh Chuck Walla, just just five of us and and spent the whole day just clowning around, which is a ton of fun.
1:44:03
However, um you know, it's it's a lot of work.
1:44:07
Like, we had to rent a trailer to get us out there.
1:44:09
Like, you rent an ambulance for the day. It's like an a day. It's like a real day.
1:44:12
and after you finish it, you don't really want to do it again.
1:44:16
Like I feel like I'm hot. I'm tired.
1:44:18
You've taken big risk with your vehicles and so you're like, "Okay, we we s survived that."
1:44:22
[laughter] Um I I just feel like I enjoy it more on the road because um it's just so much more accessible.
1:44:29
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, p around and have fun up there.
1:44:38
Or I take I have an off-roader. We on the east coast. I live in the summer.
1:44:42
We go off-roading every day. That's a lot of fun.
1:44:44
It's so much more accessible than uh like than racetrack driving, you know, which and it's racetrack driving is so costly.
1:44:51
I mean, you're you're kind of hitting it on the if you want to spend your fun car budget on racetrack use, you can really spend your [laughter] >> Yeah, it's true.
1:44:59
Uh is is a cannonball on the bucket list ever?
1:45:05
It was for a long, [laughter] you know, I drive I drive cross country every summer, twice twice a year and so it's impossible to drive cross country as a car enthusiast and not think about it. >> It's in your mind.
1:45:15
It just has to be in your mind.
1:45:17
Um, but I have kids now and like I got some money and I I got stuff to lose.
1:45:22
You know, I should have done it when I was 23 and and it didn't matter and I just could have gone, you know, bombed cross country.
1:45:27
I know you guys had Alex Roy and and and I so respect what he's done and how and then just that that whole thing.
1:45:34
In fact, here's an interesting story.
1:45:36
The other day I drove to uh the hotel in LA where that finishes the Porino Hotel in >> Yeah.
1:45:43
>> And I pull up there and I decided to get a selfie next to the sign so I could send it to Ed Bully. Canon Bully. Yeah.
1:45:49
>> And I'm taking a picture of the sign with me and a guy walks up and says, "Did you just finish?"
1:45:52
[laughter] >> And I'm like I'm like, "No."
1:45:54
And he's like, "I [clears throat] did." No way. No way.
1:45:58
There was somebody that finished >> some other guy comes out of the hotel and also says the same that he had finished the day before and I went must tell you happened constantly.
1:46:05
Probably every week there's somebody every few days someone shows up there. >> So crazy.
1:46:10
>> It is crazy that the cops don't just hang out at the Port Aino hotel and just arrest everyone that comes in.
1:46:15
[laughter] It feels like at least you can give like a $100 ticket and then just be racking them up if you're you know local municipality that >> it should be like a ticket of honor. I got a ticket. I got a ticket.
1:46:24
I paid to hotel, you know.
1:46:27
>> There is a giant plaque there that says like the end of the cannonball.
1:46:29
I'm like, what is otherwise a fairly rational hotel?
1:46:32
I'm like, what is going on [laughter] here? >> Yeah.
1:46:35
What about some of those other rallies? Uh, the Gumball.
1:46:37
Have you ever thought about doing those or done them? >> Not my not my people. Not my people.
1:46:42
It's a that's a bunch of like, you know, rich guys who want to put big decals on the cars and get drunk and go to strip clubs between the race. Okay. Okay. >> I'm good on that.
1:46:52
I'm not big into that [laughter] world. >> You had me at decals.
1:46:54
I think livery is really hilarious when done properly.
1:46:57
Uh >> John is John is is been it's been his dream to get full livery livery on his daily all of our partners.
1:47:06
>> But it's funny because we're podcast and we have as many advertisers as like an F1 team.
1:47:10
And so there's a little bit of like a funny riff on that.
1:47:13
Uh but if you're doing it super serious, I can see it being a little bit over.
1:47:17
Is it true that you have an E450 allterrain like me? >> I I did.
1:47:21
I sold it and I got a Blackwing.
1:47:24
>> Oh, you sold it to get Wow, that's the Blackwing.
1:47:27
>> My wife has is driving our E450 wagon and I am so jealous of her and when we sell it, I think we're going to get a Sienna.
1:47:32
So, we're going to probably go in the slightly slightly opposite direction from >> So, I I absolutely love the E450 allterrain.
1:47:39
Uh, but I realized I jumped the gun because I got a 20 I think I got like the exact same one you got, 2023, 2024, something like that.
1:47:46
and it has the seats in the back that look backwards.
1:47:50
And I was like, "This is amazing. I'm also a dad.
1:47:51
I have a four and a half year old and I have twin one-year-olds now."
1:47:55
And I was like, "I'm good.
1:47:57
This is going to be amazing.
1:47:57
The twin little boys are going to be in the back."
1:48:00
And then I look up the rules and it's like they can't be back there until they're like 12.
1:48:03
And so it's like [laughter] I'm not going to be driving like this vintage E450.
1:48:05
That's I mean it's going to be it's going to be like completely broken down by the time I can just buy a new one then.
1:48:11
I So I once uh I I once watched your video, Here's why the Mercedes Metress is the worst minivan [laughter] ever made.
1:48:19
And then you know what I did? He bought one.
1:48:22
>> I was like, it can't be that bad. It can't be that bad.
1:48:24
I I bought it cuz I have I have two kids.
1:48:26
I was like, Surf Van, I live in Malibu.
1:48:28
I was like, Surf Van was you can just pile them in.
1:48:30
Uh and it was just it was even worse than than you you kind of went a little maybe easy on them.
1:48:36
There's so many little quirks and features of that [snorts] van that are just so bad.
1:48:39
It's like, how do we make a big box [laughter] and then make it impossible to to utilize?
1:48:46
>> Did Did the video not have any have any ability to convince you that I >> I 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.
1:48:58
I was like, >> it definitely looks the best.
1:48:59
It's like a sided like looks like an old surf van like that people used to have and it's a Mercedes.
1:49:05
It's just it clearly looks the best, but it is not the best.
1:49:07
best, but it is not the best. [laughter] um wanted to John and I listen we don't have time to listen to a lot of podcasts because we're constantly podcasting 20 hours a week ourselves but we do enjoy >> this car pod is a daily a weekly listen
1:49:23
>> we do yeah we both we both uh love your your show >> and and it's the and correct me if I'm wrong it is actually the biggest automotive pod in the world right now >> somehow we became the biggest without >> I mean I don't want to say without trying yeah >> congratulations >> without trying without trying. You can You can say it. It was effortless.
1:49:42
>> We didn't set out to be Okay, here's what happened.
1:49:45
I I we took a huge investment in the company. >> Yeah.
1:49:48
>> And so I I ended up with a lot of money and and so I was just like, you know what?
1:49:52
We're going to that we we came up with the idea to do a pod.
1:49:53
And when you're when you have no um when you have nobody that you feel like you have to answer to, you can be really free with the way that you speak.
1:50:02
And I think that resonates with people on that podcast.
1:50:05
like we insult people, which other people aren't really willing to do as much, like insult car companies or cars.
1:50:10
I think people really appreciate hearing that truth.
1:50:12
And I truly don't care [laughter] if the autos want to blackball me.
1:50:17
Like, it doesn't matter to me anymore. So, it's worked out.
1:50:20
>> There's also a different 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's hard like to really and then and then you just know when you're recording it like they're going to they're going to see this.
1:50:33
You can't it's hard to speak.
1:50:33
You got to give a accurate review, but it's hard to like go as hard as you can when you're with your boys on a podcast.
1:50:40
>> Do do you think that there's a little bit of of a benefit of like people don't buy cars on the day that they're released?
1:50:45
Like if you were a movie reviewer and you were like, "Okay, I'm banned from all the theaters.
1:50:49
I got to wait for somebody to give me the DVD."
1:50:52
Like it wouldn't be as good.
1:50:52
But like if you have to wait a couple months to review a new Lamborghini, it's like the the the purchase cycle is going to be a while.
1:51:00
And also those have entertainment value beyond just directly purchasing. That's exactly right.
1:51:03
That that those are those are the two big points to hit.
1:51:07
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.
1:51:11
I can go get it from a dealer when it comes at dealers 60 days later and the video is going to be evergreen for 5 years, the whole cycle of the car. Totally.
1:51:17
And also, yeah, I mean, people are going to watch the video beyond just purchasers, so it doesn't even really matter.
1:51:22
And I think that's one of the secrets of YouTube.
1:51:24
Everybody's so obsessed with being like first to these car launches, and it it [clears throat] is beneficial. It does help.
1:51:29
But I I guess when your channel has gotten to the size of mine, I I don't think it's quite as important.
1:51:34
Like I'm not sitting here thinking, how do I grow 50% this year?
1:51:35
I'm just think how do I retain the audience I have?
1:51:37
How do I still make them happy?
1:51:39
And being there day one is not necessarily essential.
1:51:43
>> Have you uh maybe you've done this, but uh reviewing uh self-driving technology specifically.
1:51:49
I I was always interested in uh the I I have a Hyundai Palisade as well with a um with a Kama self-driving aftermarket kit in there and it's fantastic and I I I honestly think it's it's remarkable.
1:52:03
I've met the founder and uh and I've used it and I trust it with my kids and stuff.
1:52:07
I I think it's a fantastic product.
1:52:09
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.
1:52:16
It's uh it's really really good.
1:52:17
Um, but but I was always interested like that aftermarket.
1:52:20
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 that genre. >> No.
1:52:29
And I never I had no idea that that one was that good.
1:52:31
I've heard about it before, but I had never heard.
1:52:32
So like I mean people don't Most people I think are nervous about it.
1:52:36
If you're in the tech cool with it, but yeah.
1:52:37
But no, I mean I review the ones that come in the cars and but however even then it has become so ubiquitous now that it's almost like reviewing regular cruise control.
1:52:47
It's almost not even worth talking about it because they've all gotten to be I mean a RAV 4 has it standard, you know, like it's it's no longer even that interesting anymore.
1:52:55
There are obviously some differences between the systems and some are better than others.
1:52:58
Um I'm obsessed with the system in my Toyota for various reasons.
1:53:02
Some some people prefer I mean I don't like the ones that make you look forward because in my view that's kind of what I'm trying to solve for. >> Yeah.
1:53:08
[laughter] >> But but I understand that manufacturers prefer you looking at the road. >> Yeah.
1:53:15
It's a difference of opinion between me and them right now.
1:53:18
>> 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.
1:53:30
Like, you're kind of with the comma.
1:53:32
It's open source technology.
1:53:34
So, uh they they have a camera that looks at your face 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 uh disengage.
1:53:42
So, it's driver monitoring.
1:53:44
Uh, but it's open source.
1:53:46
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.
1:53:51
And it's like I don't know where the liability stands.
1:53:55
The company doesn't recommend it, but the whole thing is kind of third party, so it's very questionable.
1:54:00
I would definitely leave it on.
1:54:01
I would recommend everyone leave it on because I think the driver monitoring is good for safety.
1:54:04
But, uh, yeah, it's interesting.
1:54:08
>> Saw some news maybe a week or so ago that Tesla is going to be integrating CarPlay.
1:54:12
Is that was that like a surprise to you?
1:54:15
Did you predict that years ago?
1:54:17
>> No, I definitely didn't predict it.
1:54:19
However, um obviously the Tesla owners, despite as rabbit and obsessive as they are, there's this undercurrent of of disdain for the fact that they don't have CarPlay.
1:54:26
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.
1:54:33
And so, that's an advantage.
1:54:35
You're going to want to have every advantage you can, you know, like.
1:54:38
And so I it makes 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 uh first in their EVs and now apparently generally it'll be on them to see if we if they end up going back.
1:54:52
I'm not as obsessed with CarPlay as everybody else.
1:54:53
I find some of these automaker systems to be shockingly good.
1:54:56
Most people don't even pry them anymore because they're so CarPlay is such a focus.
1:55:00
Uh and and CarPlay is great, but I'm surprised Tesla made it such a big thing.
1:55:04
Their system is so excellent.
1:55:06
It's just like I would just put up with that.
1:55:08
But people are just so used to CarPlay that it's important.
1:55:13
>> 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 standard.
1:55:22
It's like well then you have the the self-driving is the main point of differentiation. Maybe that's about it.
1:55:27
>> But even then [clears throat] I don't find Tesla self-driving to be like considerably better now that I've been on these other cars.
1:55:31
Every basically everybody is caught up.
1:55:33
Um and I don't see I I agree.
1:55:35
I start to wonder what the differentiation point is.
1:55:36
And then you also have this negative point of differentiation for a lot of EV buyers which is Elon and the political not that I'm saying that everybody but certainly there are people who have that opinion like okay that's interesting and so CarPlay back in is definitely like a step in the direction of we need to sell some damn cars. >> Yeah.
1:55:54
If you if you're running Tesla today what would you do from a what would you do from like a product offering standpoint?
1:56:02
>> H man I don't know that that that's an interesting question.
1:56:05
I all their products are really old.
1:56:08
>> Um they have Elon is is both their greatest asset and their greatest liability.
1:56:12
Uh I would probably do my best to come out with Roadster to try to get some attention on the brand and get some sort of halo car effect like wow this is cool again.
1:56:20
Get some >> Wait, do you have a do you have a prediction 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.
1:56:32
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 quadrotor like you know full V tall vehicle, but it's going to have a it's going to have a trick.
1:56:43
It's going to have a quirk and I'm wondering if you have any predictions for what that might be.
1:56:47
Like we were talking about the Yang Wang jumping and stuff.
1:56:51
>> It's interesting because at this point it needs to have a quirk, doesn't it?
1:56:54
Because when it was announced six years, it's been six years almost exactly, right? It was 19 auto show.
1:56:58
um it was going to be this huge thing 0 to 60 and 1.
1:57:02
9 this amazing electric supercar.
1:57:04
Well, since then 10 other electric supercars have come out, all of which do 0 to 60 and 1.
1:57:08
9 and the gangwing is jumping.
1:57:10
So [laughter] like >> you you 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.
1:57:17
Um, and you basically need to have some sort of interesting hook now in order to differentiate yourself from these other products, which by the way, I don't know if you guys have been paying attention, but all the other electric hypercars have been horrible sales failures.
1:57:29
And it'll be interesting to see what whether Road I mean, Roadster has Elon and Tesla and all that behind them.
1:57:35
It'll be interesting to see whether Roadster can overcome some of the challenges the other ones have faced.
1:57:39
Yeah, I I I do think that uh comping the Roadster, I mean, if he can get it out at 200k, that's just a completely different game from a Remat's Nava at a million or or you know, Pin and Firina Batista, like those are just wildly different.
1:57:54
And even even if you have the money, I imagine that like the confidence of like a roadster like you're going to be able to take it to a Tesla dealership, get fixed of parts and stuff with a Batista or something, it's going to be you're going to be in crazy hypercar unique 101 world Koigseg level.
1:58:08
I no one's really brought that down.
1:58:12
Although, you know, Tyon Turbo S, there are a lot of options in that area.
1:58:16
>> Yeah, I mean, no, you're you're right that no one has really played in the space sub a million bucks.
1:58:19
However, first off, I don't think the Roadster is going to come anywhere near 200 just based on got a lot of inflation.
1:58:24
Elon's missed those Tesla's missed those price targets before, etc.
1:58:28
But also, you know, yeah, the the TYON Turbo, the the Ferrari SF90 has been a huge dud.
1:58:32
Like, there are some examples out there of Okay, maybe people aren't really willing to buy anything. >> Yeah. Yeah.
1:58:39
What What do Do you think manufacturers are focused on sol EV manufacturers like are really focused on or have a plan for solving depreciation with some of these cars?
1:58:50
Because like I I I buy a lot of cars.
1:58:53
I cycle through them quickly.
1:58:56
I tend to gravitate towards cars like I've owned multiple G Wagons because I just love that it's timeless.
1:59:04
I know it's going to depreciate but not at a very very reasonable rate.
1:59:08
Uh and in that sense it's like a practical buy or it's at least way more practical than buying a fresh TYON and losing you know 50 grand in uh a few months basically.
1:59:18
I mean, the only real way to solve for depreciation is either supply or price, right?
1:59:24
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.
1:59:29
The, you know, 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. Right.
1:59:42
said the cars had stickers at 50, but 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 except for Rivian which has held its value relatively well but still nowhere near something like a G Wagon.
2:00:00
Um the only way to to really solve that depreciation problem supply pricing or just increase the desiraability of the cars.
2:00:09
Um, but I don't think that's going to happen.
2:00:12
>> How [laughter] How on How on earth has Rivian maintained a monopoly on the full-size SUV in the electric category for so long?
2:00:19
I I was expecting a Cyban a Cybert truck suburban version like immediately and it just didn't happen.
2:00:26
>> Weird that the other automakers went pickups first and I don't I wonder if they were pressured into doing that because they knew the Cybert truck was coming.
2:00:32
But it is so clear when I get asked by people who want a car. I live in California.
2:00:36
Everybody's got an electric.
2:00:37
Everybody wants electric car.
2:00:39
The only thing I am ever asked is, "I want a three row and I want a hybrid or an electric." Yes.
2:00:42
And my response is, "Well, you're getting an EV9 or an R1S."
2:00:46
And the EV9 is new to the market a year ago.
2:00:48
The R1S has been out since 22.
2:00:50
>> And it's like, yeah, where was everybody else?
2:00:52
I mean, GM is screwing around with the Hummer pickup and and the Silverado and the F-150 Lightning at Ford.
2:00:56
It's like what people want is just a three row electric and the R1S's are the real success story in terms of holding their value.
2:01:05
We sell them on Cars and Bids.
2:01:07
They are still not coming under 60 grand, which is a considering that's a three- four year old car, that's pretty good.
2:01:12
With a starting sticker of around 80, uh the trucks have depreciated a lot more.
2:01:16
There's less interest in them.
2:01:16
But yeah, it's wild that Rivian figured that out before anybody else.
2:01:19
Everybody was like, "Oh, we're going to start with a sedan." It's like, why?
2:01:21
What are [laughter] you thinking?
2:01:23
The market on that that stuff. >> Yeah.
2:01:27
I mean, I guess uh Porsche now has the Cayenne Turbo you just reviewed, but even that's not three row.
2:01:32
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.
2:01:38
Like I need the the huge 220inch SUV soon.
2:01:44
Like or you know the the full-size Escalade, like the Tahoe, like the Suburban.
2:01:48
Like this is where I'm going to be.
2:01:49
This is my life for the next couple years at least or the two decades.
2:01:53
Um like no one's really figured that out.
2:01:55
And I thought it was um >> I thought it was maybe just like the the laws of physics or something like oh you can't make the battery big enough.
2:02:01
But then you see the Cybert truck and you're like, you could easily just make the back like this and you're in business. >> Oh, totally.
2:02:07
And the Hummer EV and the Hummer EV. >> It's so weird.
2:02:10
I guess they just saw volume in those pickup trucks and so they decided to go. But totally.
2:02:12
I mean, you now have the Escalade IQ also, which is a very not a very compelling product, but it exists and it is another 30.
2:02:20
It's clear that they're starting to come.
2:02:24
>> Even 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 you think of, >> right?
2:02:31
And the interior really feels like that.
2:02:32
The interior does not feel as big as that.
2:02:34
You come out with a car that weighs 9,500 lbs and is that long, it really should feel a little bit bigger inside.
2:02:39
I should be able to play totally pickle ball in that [laughter] and that's not the situation. >> Yeah, for sure.
2:02:47
>> Uh how can you talk about uh European regulators?
2:02:51
regulators? is I feel like sometimes I see car companies, manufacturers making like what feel to be like nonsensical decisions, decisions that uh at least American consumers are not like saying like hey we want this and I think it can often times uh get uh you know people
2:03:11
will point to regulators and be like you know there's actually pressure coming on the manufacturers on another continent and that and uh but how how true is that and and what kind of role are they actually playing We It's That's an interesting question. Not a lot of people think about.
2:03:24
Not a lot of people think about.
2:03:25
Regulation plays a bigger role than you'd think in a lot of stuff.
2:03:27
Um, we just heard one this week.
2:03:29
Mercedes is canceling all of their 43 AMG cars, which are actually quite popular here in the States. They're very popular. The C43 GLC. >> Interesting. Huh.
2:03:40
>> Those are all going away.
2:03:40
And the the reason is that they do not comply with uh EU noise regulations as of next summer.
2:03:46
Um, and it's like that's a pretty successful and popular car and they're I I guess they don't.
2:03:52
>> And so the manufacturers can't create like an like it like there's precedent for creating like a European version of a car like I know the European Metress is some called something else but is actually a lot better than the American.
2:04:05
>> They must 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.
2:04:14
And that's true in a lot there are there's a lot of compliance and regulation stuff just beyond that.
2:04:19
But that was an example that came up recently that I was astonished by because it sometimes affects popular cars.
2:04:22
We saw it affect Boxster and Cayman, right?
2:04:24
I mean clearly Porsche is not really going to be able to continue making these cars as we think.
2:04:30
Now they're rethinking that strategy, but it's still going to have some electric component and these regulations are stuff that they're going to have to comply with.
2:04:36
It's actually funny because you hear a lot of complaints.
2:04:38
The Trump administration has come in and cut a lot of EV rags and and push back on EVs and there's all these complaints.
2:04:44
I mean, US regs were never anything compared to Europe.
2:04:46
Europe has gone really, really, really strict about noise, about pollution, about emissions, CO2 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. >> That makes sense.
2:05:00
>> That makes sense. Uh uh 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 uh the market and and kill their automotive manufacturer uh manufacturers
2:05:18
>> which is especially interesting because China is doing the exact opposite right China in is 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
2:05:33
Meanwhile, cap, you know, free capitalism has has kind of had the opposite effect in Europe.
2:05:37
And boy, you go to Europe now.
2:05:38
I've go to Europe every year or two and it's amazing.
2:05:42
Every time I go, five years ago, a couple Chinese cars.
2:05:44
This last time, they are they are flooding.
2:05:46
Like you say, it's true in Mexico, too.
2:05:48
Uh, and Latin America in general.
2:05:50
They make cheap cars that are desirable and they're all EVs, so they fit the regulations.
2:05:54
Yeah, it's certainly interesting.
2:05:56
If I were the European automakers, I'd be like, "What the hell?"
2:05:58
But >> yeah, do they not do they not do they need to like 10x their lobbying budgets and say we want to make cars that are fast, loud, and fun and you got to protect us from like I I just don't understand like these are like Mercedes is like a national champion in Germany, right?
2:06:14
Like >> you would say make make we the environment is more important to us.
2:06:17
My guess is they would say you are important to us, the environment is similarly important to us.
2:06:22
We have to figure out a way to make this work.
2:06:24
But for right now, China is already there where you probably should be, and we're trying to incentivize you to do that.
2:06:29
It is surprising to me that they don't have more significant tariffs on Chinese cars and and ways to kind of try to stop that.
2:06:36
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.
2:06:43
Southern Europe, they don't have a lot of money in a lot of cases, to buy these cars.
2:06:46
But these Chinese cars come in, they're affordable, they're electric, it's getting people out of Fiats from 2003 that pollute at ridiculous levels.
2:06:53
And you got to assume that you 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."
2:07:04
>> 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.
2:07:19
I mean, obviously they need to bring the cost down, but there's uh I I think that there was a lot of push back to Tesla in Europe uh 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 2.
2:07:34
9 or something, the cheaper version of the three uh to actually get out there or something like that. I don't know. >> Right.
2:07:41
And meanwhile, BYD is there now with with cars that are this long that cost probably 18,000 euro and it's like dang. >> Yep.
2:07:48
Um >> um I wanted to ask about uh modern cars that >> Wait, wait, wait.
2:07:55
One question that fits in this last one.
2:07:57
Jaguar revamp uh team asked us to ask European manufacturer going all in on EVs uh in a very opinionated way.
2:08:04
Uh, do you have any predictions on like firstear sales numbers in the US?
2:08:12
>> Well, you know, they haven't really shown a production car yet, so I I don't it's hard to make that prediction without knowing, hey, are they going to do SUVs, what price point, etc.
2:08:18
I will say, um, they weren't exactly blowing it out of the water before.
2:08:24
So, like unlike a lot of people who watched that [laughter] ridiculous commercial and have watched some of their product strategy and kind of laughed at it, I'm not sitting, you know, we we got a lot of comments on our pod, Jaguar, they're screwed.
2:08:35
if you go woke, you go broke.
2:08:37
We're going to [clears throat] boycott. They were already broke.
2:08:38
Like it [laughter] wasn't like they it wasn't like they were out there really lighting the world on fire.
2:08:43
So like I think anything is a is a probably a benefit for them truthfully.
2:08:48
Um but we'll see how they actually end up doing it.
2:08:50
It's already been quite a while and they haven't really announced cars or revealed anything coming.
2:08:56
So that'll be interesting.
2:08:58
I mean, the brand name is strong, but like, you know, what are you gonna It's just It seems like a far-fetched plan for it to actually work. [snorts] >> Yeah. >> Yeah.
2:09:08
If you're already if you're already broke, why not go woke?
2:09:09
I guess >> the other problem, by the way, that people don't discuss the the big problem that Jaguar faces is that almost all of their dealers are paired with Land Rover.
2:09:18
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, right?
2:09:26
sit here and look at the success of the Model Y and the R2 or the the R1, but will be the R2 and G Wagons and and just SUVs in general.
2:09:33
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 was there actually having the success.
2:09:44
>> Make an SUV, but don't make it too good.
2:09:46
>> Don't make it too good.
2:09:46
Don't make it too off-roy or too boxy or too cool which is what the market is really obsessed with right now because you know AC literally across the showroom we're trying to sell these things over there and they have a better name and you don't want to try to undercut that. >> Yeah.
2:10:00
Uh 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 >> which is not exactly crushing it either.
2:10:11
>> It feels like they it feels like they are.
2:10:13
So I I'd love to know like where do you see Aston going?
2:10:15
I mean, the the the Valkyrie is incredible.
2:10:17
The Valhalla we saw in person looked really cool.
2:10:19
And like there's just some incredible >> design issue.
2:10:22
My point of view with Aston is like I love Aston Martin.
2:10:24
We were we were at F1 with with the Aston Martin team cuz uh our our friends from public are a sponsor and uh I love every single silhouette they do.
2:10:34
I think they make cars that look absolutely incredible.
2:10:38
But the problem is at literally every single price point for Aston, there's a more desirable car from a Porsche, from a Ferrari.
2:10:45
And so it's like that's just really challenging as a manufacturer because you're like, "Okay, we made uh we made the Valhalla."
2:10:51
And it's like, "Okay, what Ferrari can you get for a million bucks?"
2:10:55
And like how many guys are really going to look at that trade and go for Aston Martin?
2:11:00
>> I think that Valhalla and Valkyrie will and have been will be will be and have been successful.
2:11:04
I think the biggest problem is the volume cars and I think it goes back to something that you said earlier which is um they have significant depreciation and that's not a secret.
2:11:12
Well, you buy a brand new Ferrari and you're not going to lose money.
2:11:15
In fact, if you're if you're lucky enough to get chosen to buy a brand new Ferrari, you might make money.
2:11:20
>> Um you buy a brand new Aston, holy crap, you know, used DBXs are already 7580. That's their SUV.
2:11:25
Um used are still like 175 and the price point is pretty similar new.
2:11:31
And which one would you rather get?
2:11:33
Aston, I think, actually makes some pretty compelling cars, even relative to rivals like Lamborghini and Ferrari and Porsche.
2:11:38
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.
2:11:44
The price points are too high.
2:11:46
And that's a as as beloved as that name, Aston Martin.
2:11:50
We all want an Aston Martin in our minds.
2:11:53
But when you actually start to look at the uh particulars of what that would entail, nobody wants 150 in depreciation.
2:12:01
>> Well, they didn't even have car.
2:12:01
I mean, you you buy a Aston Martin from 3 years ago and it had the the interior.
2:12:05
It had the the the screens from like a car from like the early 2000s.
2:12:10
And so I do wonder I do wonder if the depreciation gets uh problem gets a little bit less bad at now that the interiors have have modernized substantially. >> They've improved.
2:12:22
They've improved, but at the end of the day, there's still a lot of Mercedes-Benz technology.
2:12:24
And when you're not using Mercedes-Benz technology, then another question about Aston Martin starts to become reliability, right?
2:12:31
If they're making their own crap, then you start thinking, "Oh god, do we really want to be making their own crap?"
2:12:35
Like, [laughter] >> it's kind of a it's kind of a tough situation.
2:12:39
Um, and and Ferrari and Lambo get excused from some of that stuff. >> Yeah.
2:12:42
Uh, do you think that uh how many how many people do you think are frantically trying to reregister their cars to California after the Whistland Diesel [laughter] scandal?
2:12:53
Whistland Diesel, if anybody didn't see, uh was arrested.
2:12:54
Uh happened to be ready to vlog the whole thing, which uh almost looks like he did did a deal with authorities, which is like, "Hey, we're going to arrest you.
2:13:03
We're not we we need to make a big scene out of this.
2:13:07
We're not going to really throw the book at you, but uh we need to do this marketing."
2:13:12
>> I think it was all legit.
2:13:12
I think he is always ready to vlog.
2:13:13
I think his his boys are like always at the shot, you know? >> Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure. I'm sure.
2:13:18
>> But um yeah, boy, that was a big deal.
2:13:21
So many people in the community do the Montana thing and I really think we did a big thing about it.
2:13:24
It's on our pod last week.
2:13:26
I really think with the advent of license plate readers, um, and with states just starting to realize how pervasive this has become, it's just really going to start becoming more and more difficult to do.
2:13:36
And, uh, as a guy who's got four very expensive cars registered to my, uh, actual home addresses, it's it's I watch the Montana thing and I think to myself, you know, f you.
2:13:47
If I have to pay, you [laughter] have to pay. >> Yeah. Exactly. >> I do feel bad.
2:13:50
I mentioned this on the pod.
2:13:52
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.
2:13:59
Um and not and and meanwhile it's being ruined by guy after person after person doing it on expensive cars.
2:14:03
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.
2:14:12
>> But I do think that Montana thing Yeah.
2:14:14
So many people do it and I think so many people should really think about whether they whether it's the right call.
2:14:17
Do you want to get arrested to save >> 20, 15, 20 grand on sales tax? >> Yeah. Yeah.
2:14:24
>> Um, back on uh Jaguar to some extent, uh, 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?
2:14:34
For me, I think it's the Hyundai Vision N that looks like a Delorean.
2:14:39
Uh, they might go uh they said they were going hydrogen.
2:14:42
I think that they should just do uh like the the ionic 5N treatment and just electric and it go 0 to 60 in two and a half seconds or something like they could do something cool there.
2:14:53
But do you have any other picks for stuff you've seen where you're like let's bring let's bring it in?
2:14:58
>> That one was really cool and looked really cool.
2:15:00
Although I have to say just a couple weeks ago I reviewed the new Hyundai Crater which is a off-roader concept car and um from a perspective of a car that I think will sell.
2:15:10
>> Yeah, >> they should make that.
2:15:11
Yeah, they they body on frame off-roaders.
2:15:13
Off-roading has become such a thing in the last 10 years with the Raptor and the Gwagon and the 4Runner and the Wrangler and the Bronco and off-road trim levels of every single car in existence, including minivans.
2:15:26
>> Um, Hyundai has started to come out with some off-road uh trim levels, but it's pretty clear to me that like there should be an they should go after the 4Runner.
2:15:35
4Runner is selling pretty easily millions, literally millions of units and it doesn't make sense to me that uh that these automakers are not going after it more.
2:15:43
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 new segments.
2:15:50
And um I think that crater is previewing a car that will exist in some form.
2:15:55
Probably not exactly like that with graphic displays on the windshield, but but something sort of similar.
2:16:01
I bet you they're cooking it up.
2:16:03
Where do you think that trend came from?
2:16:06
>> You know, I don't know. It's interesting.
2:16:08
I was in Joshua Tree yesterday and boy, there's a lot of LA people out there. Like, it's wild.
2:16:11
Like, it has become such a thing.
2:16:13
Like, going out into the wilderness. I don't know.
2:16:17
It wasn't a thing when I was a kid.
2:16:17
It was reserved for like a select group of people.
2:16:21
You only bought a Jeep Wrangler if you were like kind of crazy.
2:16:22
And now it's like mom cars and everybody's got a Bronco.
2:16:27
And the 4Runners are this massive thing. And I I don't know.
2:16:31
Obviously, CO exacerbated it, but I assumed that it would slow down when CO ended, and that has not happened.
2:16:37
>> I wonder if it's some sort of like, you know, you're online all the time, you you're on your phone too much, and then you want the exact opposite, and so demand increases for like what is the opposite of Tik Tok?
2:16:45
Like, get me to the forest.
2:16:48
>> It's also very American to like find [snorts] like have an outdoor activity explode that's about bringing heavy machinery [laughter] like out into the wilderness.
2:16:57
>> Yeah, it has still has screens.
2:16:57
You can still you can still watch Tik Tok, but you can at least act like you're off the grid.
2:17:02
>> When I think about it, some I was actually thinking about it this this this weekend cuz I was out there and seeing all this and there's a camper in every parking lot.
2:17:08
And I do wonder if like dad's being more involved.
2:17:11
When I was a kid, dad had a sports car.
2:17:13
Not my dad, but in general, like dad had a sport.
2:17:17
He would use it to get away.
2:17:19
>> You would take it on a drive and take it to a show. Sure.
2:17:22
>> And now like dads and families want to do this stuff together.
2:17:24
And you sports cars, you can't do that with your kids.
2:17:27
And I've even watched the vintage SUV.
2:17:29
>> I got a I got a Ferrari FF uh to try to get around that when I had my first kid and it did not work that well.
2:17:36
[laughter] The electrical the electrical issues were like if I drive this thing to the farmers market and I stop it, it might not start again.
2:17:43
So I got to make sure I start it at home and stop it.
2:17:46
[laughter] >> But I I am watching like Grand Wagoners, right? And old Landers.
2:17:51
And these are things you can now do with the whole family.
2:17:55
And I think that there's been a like sort of a renewed push among among among dads and among families to kind of do hey let's do the vintage car thing together.
2:18:02
Um and it it's really it's really become kind of a thing of it but I think there's probably many parts of it.
2:18:10
>> Speaking of dads, speaking of firing dads, what's the best modern car that screams I'm coming to town to fire your dad?
2:18:18
We have this big thing on our podcast that yeah, we think that there are some cars that just say I'm here to fire your dad.
2:18:24
[laughter] It's just such a like it's such a big old like this is this is a rich guy who doesn't care.
2:18:28
Uh the the electric Rolls-Royce which is called the [laughter] big one cuz it's got >> one [snorts] of the things I like fire your dad cars to me are cars where it takes up a lot of space but is unbelievably impractical.
2:18:43
>> [laughter] >> So that car is a massive vehicle, but it's got two doors.
2:18:45
And that guy owns the factory.
2:18:47
That guy, he he comes in.
2:18:49
He's like, I don't care what's this whole factory IS CLOSED. BE GONE.
2:18:52
And he, you know, he takes the Rolls-Royce off. >> It's also so tall.
2:18:56
We saw one at the airport next to a Urus.
2:18:58
And we were like, it's a car that's taller than that SUV that's been lowered for performance.
2:19:04
It's like >> ridiculously large.
2:19:06
>> I have a potentially uh a potentially new fire your dad car.
2:19:08
Uh, our friend Paul asked asked me to ask you, do you think Sam Alman paid 20 million for the Gordon Murray S1?
2:19:17
It sold uh recently and Sam was photographed in Vegas with Gordon Murray over the weekend. >> And Sam has an F1. >> Yeah.
2:19:28
So, I'll tell you, >> it could be the new I say it could be the new Fire Your Dad because if Chad GBT takes your job, >> it fires everyone's dad.
2:19:35
[laughter] Um, that is an interesting point that Alton may have bought.
2:19:40
I will say the commissioner, the story I've heard is the commissioner of that car commissioned five and personally selected along with Gordon Murray three people to to sell three others to.
2:19:49
He kept two and then decided to sell one publicly.
2:19:53
And so I I I would be not surprised if Alman is one of the four people who has them.
2:19:59
He's obviously interested in these cars and yes, he's there with Gordon.
2:20:01
Um, but maybe he didn't buy the public one, but who knows?
2:20:05
Uh I I I bet I wouldn't be surprised if he's got one. 20 million. That's crazy. Unbelievable number.
2:20:11
>> It's a lot of It's a lot of money, but it's a lot of car.
2:20:13
>> Any progress on uh getting into the Sultan of Brunai's collection?
2:20:15
I feel like with all this investment and progress like >> 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.
2:20:25
I would never >> But how much truthfully like how much time have you spent actually chasing it down?
2:20:32
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, like, like there's ways to like, >> 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.
2:20:49
I think that in Brunai viewed as a bit of an embarrassment that that Jeffrey went which is the brother of the Sultan went and spent this much national money on just these cars and they could if they created a museum >> everyone I know would suddenly go to Brunai.
2:21:05
I not joking like I have no reason otherwise to go to Brunai >> or 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 Mr. Beast land.
2:21:21
Now they had Brunai land going. >> I totally agree.
2:21:25
I'm not even entirely sure that they want the publicity of the announcement that all of these cars are going to be sold off.
2:21:32
And it's become clear to me that for whatever reason, maybe it's embarrassment.
2:21:36
Maybe they actually still want to enjoy the cars or have them.
2:21:39
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 '9s in that country.
2:21:49
um which I think is such a shame.
2:21:51
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.
2:21:58
There's only a few markets, but um but nonetheless, I'd be down.
2:22:03
I have I have a uh my Bentley Dominator literally sits right here, which is my one of the Sultan cars. >> Fantastic.
2:22:11
>> Commissioned a Bentley SUV before even Bentley had any idea of doing it. [laughter] >> Yeah.
2:22:15
Would you ever do a museum?
2:22:18
Uh, like a review like review cars from museum or >> No, no, no. Like what?
2:22:22
Like the Doug the Doug museum >> cars and bids activation or something?
2:22:26
No, >> I am not a collector.
2:22:27
I like to use the cars and I like to be focused with the cars that I choose and um I'm never going to have a giant collection of cars.
2:22:35
I uh >> 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.
2:22:49
But but >> I create a museum of other people's vehicles.
2:22:51
Yeah, I would I would maybe curate such a thing.
2:22:54
I could see myself doing that in a in a retirement scenario.
2:22:57
If someone space and uh someone takes care of the hard parts for me, I would I would curate a nice little museum. There you go.
2:23:03
I think I think it would be a hit.
2:23:06
>> What are the biggest moments on the calendar for 2026 for you?
2:23:08
Either like moments that you're excited about from the car manufacturers, the world or whatever, but also within your organization.
2:23:18
>> Um I I'm I'm generally just excited. Yeah.
2:23:22
You know, it's an interesting thing.
2:23:23
My my world is nowhere near as um varied as it once was.
2:23:26
You know, I used to travel all over the world and review the craziest cars, but I kind of filmed most of them.
2:23:31
And now it's mostly just new cars.
2:23:32
And I still get excited from a work perspective.
2:23:36
I still get excited about the same things, which is just going in and reviewing the cars.
2:23:38
I We had the new Nissan Sentra in the office the other day.
2:23:42
And like I'm driving in in the morning being like, I'm pumped. Like I'm excited.
2:23:45
[laughter] And there is still that excitement.
2:23:48
There's not like surprisingly there is not specific cars that are that exciting for me.
2:23:53
The the new supercars are always a big deal.
2:23:56
And there's going to be a few coming out here in quick succession, which is the McLaren W1 and Bugatti Turbion.
2:24:01
And obviously, I'm excited about those, but it's not just those cars.
2:24:04
You know, we get big views doing videos of Kia Tellides.
2:24:06
And I get excited about there is something exciting to me about an automaker uh playing in a very competitive space, which supercars isn't.
2:24:15
It's a it's a more of an emotional thing, and a lot of times people buy them all.
2:24:19
Whereas tellide, you have to distinguish yourself with quirks and features from the Pilander, the pilot, the the palisade.
2:24:26
And so I always find it to be kind of just as interesting to see what those guys are doing.
2:24:30
And they often have some cool stuff.
2:24:31
They often reward me with some cool quirks and features.
2:24:35
>> On the on on Ferrari, do you get sick of people commenting like bring back pin and firina?
2:24:42
Like I just feel like every Ferrari video it's like he's not come they're not coming back. It's over.
2:24:46
Like I I I I I mean I every every Ferrari video I'm I 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 speced properly.
2:25:00
I think they look really rough the way that Ferrari specs them like for for basically marketing press, right?
2:25:08
And then I think once people with uh refined taste get in there, they they end up looking amazing.
2:25:16
Uh, so I'm not I'm not exactly like disappointed with the the the current design. >> I agree. I didn't for a while.
2:25:21
When they first left Pinfirina, I thought there were some questionable cars.
2:25:26
Um, however, the 296 is unbelievably beautiful.
2:25:32
Um, they have and honestly the Dodichi Chilendry, which I made fun of because of its ridiculous name and also because of its design when it was first announced.
2:25:40
I got to spend a day with one and I totally feel the opposite now.
2:25:44
I think they're beautiful. They're striking.
2:25:46
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.
2:25:52
With that said, Pin and Freen and Ferrari have an unbelievable legacy together and it would be nice to see them return reunite in some form. But what is history?
2:26:04
>> Yeah, [snorts] they they did, but now it's been like more than a decade and it's owned by an Indian like conglomerate.
2:26:10
Like are all the same people even still there?
2:26:12
If they did partner, would it just be like like a like just for the brand purposes?
2:26:19
>> Hasblot is owned by DJI now like what is that partnership?
2:26:22
You know, these companies, they change over time. They just become brands.
2:26:26
They just become names, IP.
2:26:28
>> If they did partner, would it just be for brand purposes? Yeah, probably.
2:26:30
But I bet you they'd sell some cars.
2:26:33
[laughter] >> They came out with a 500 unit run of a pin and forina designed car.
2:26:36
That would that would kill just like if Ferrari did a manual, which I sincerely believe they should do. Yeah.
2:26:43
>> Um I think that also would h even if it was just for the purposes of making money, I think it would have been successful >> on the on the Ferrari doing a manual.
2:26:49
Um you you know you get on the stump every once in a while with like I want to change to what this manufacturer is doing or what the car community as a whole is doing.
2:26:58
whole is doing. uh what's the highest confidence like I'm responsible for that that you 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 uh maybe
2:27:14
it's just I got lucky and I was talking about the thing that they were already working on but >> I think very little do I actually feel responsible however >> when I bought my convertible G Wagon >> yes >> eight and a eight and years ago eight and a half years ago, nobody even knew that car existed. And within a year,
2:27:31
And within a year, Kendall Jenner had one.
2:27:33
And I did a bunch of videos and I posted a lot of pictures on Instagram.
2:27:36
I drive it on the beach with beach grass and it looks amazing.
2:27:40
>> And the values of those suddenly absolutely went through the roof. >> Yeah.
2:27:44
>> Which was not the case when I bought my car.
2:27:45
I paid 125 for my car and if I could find another one for 125, I would buy 10. Yeah.
2:27:50
>> And suddenly, six months ago, three months ago, Mercedes announces they're coming back with a new convertible G Wagon.
2:27:55
And 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 um re remembermbering that this car existed to the point where values kind of blew up there.
2:28:09
Some influential people got in Mercedes ear and Mercedes was thinking, "Okay, maybe we can do this again." >> Yeah.
2:28:14
No, no, I I think that's 100% right.
2:28:17
It's uh Yeah, you deserve you deserve the victory lap on that for sure.
2:28:20
>> On that ridiculous car, which is such an embarrassing car to own that I don't even want the victory lap.
2:28:23
[laughter] We're giving it to you.
2:28:26
You're directly responsible.
2:28:28
>> 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.
2:28:34
But I think also the market trends have made that pretty clear. >> Totally. Yeah. Yeah.
2:28:38
I mean, uh, Ed Bowling with the what is it? LP640 prices.
2:28:42
He kind of discovered that there were far fewer of them than people thought.
2:28:47
And so that obviously changed the price.
2:28:48
And if you're bringing new information to the world, like that feels like you do have an influence.
2:28:53
>> Now, in Ed's case, he's got a few of them.
2:28:54
So, you know, [laughter] talk him up a little bit.
2:28:56
That's that's a game I should have gotten into and I wish that I had.
2:28:59
Uh, but unfortunately, I did not do that for my own personal gain.
2:29:02
Not that that's the only reason that Ed does it for.
2:29:06
>> Yeah, >> he's prude fellow and I think that played a role.
2:29:08
>> We're gonna we're going to see Doug with like, you know, he has 200 SF90s and now he's talking really positively about them like and he bought them like at the trough of the depreciation curve. What's going on here?
2:29:20
And you're like, actually, there's no electricity.
2:29:22
They did all these extra studies and the the hybrid system.
2:29:25
>> Can we can we get Nissan to bring back the Morano Cross Cabriolet? >> That is important. We we are big fans here.
2:29:31
We we we took your joke and we've been running with it and the whole >> you know the sad thing about that car, I don't know if you know this, but the the the convertible tops fail.
2:29:38
And so, you know, >> just leave it down. I don't need the top.
2:29:42
I'm just joy riding that thing. I never need California.
2:29:45
You >> Does the SP1 have a top? No. Right.
2:29:47
It doesn't have a windshield. Right. [laughter] Right.
2:29:52
But this so those cars eventually they will all fail and that will kind of kill them because apparently the the Nissan's only solution is you have to replace it.
2:30:00
There is apparently a shade tree mechanic guy in Florida who figured out the problem and is willing to fix it but you got to send your car to him.
2:30:06
So if you live in like the Tampa Clearwater area you can get your top fixed but like otherwise it isn't worth sending your Morano Cross cabing.
2:30:16
>> I mean the restood community in 10 years will be going crazy. >> Oh no no.
2:30:19
You know what we're doing?
2:30:20
cannonballing it there and back from LA. That's what we'll do.
2:30:23
>> A shame that that car was utterly awful in every way because it is a very >> special product that that could have a cult following if it wasn't so bad.
2:30:34
>> Yeah, it's very funny.
2:30:36
>> Anyways, well, >> thank you so much for taking the time with us. This is fantastic. >> Enjoyed it.
2:30:40
>> Congratulations on all the success and uh and please keep the podcast running. We've been loving it.
2:30:44
We we we it's congratulations on the massive success there and with everything and uh we appreciate you coming hang a while chopping it up. >> Cheers. >> Thanks. Thanks for having me. Bye.
2:30:55
>> Let me tell you about turbo puffer serverless vector and full tech search built from first principles and object storage.
2:30:59
Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.
2:31:01
I'm also going to tell you about public.
2:31:04
com investing for those that take it seriously.
2:31:05
Multiasset investing trusted by millions.
2:31:07
Our next guests are both named Alex.
2:31:11
We have uh some folks from RAMP, the creators of RAMP Labs, Ramp Sheets.
2:31:17
We're bringing in >> Ramp Sheets, >> both Alex's.
2:31:20
Uh please kick us off with introductions on both of you, how you came to work at RAMP, work on this particular project.
2:31:27
I'd love to hear the origin story.
2:31:29
Uh it's a fascinating product and uh we're going to go into it.
2:31:34
>> Hey, uh I'm Alex Shvchenko.
2:31:37
>> Uh I've been at RAM for now two years, started out and still am on the applied AI team. success.
2:31:42
[laughter] >> Uh, and throughout these two years, I've been working on a bunch of like experimental things uh, as part of Applied AI and >> lately just been trying to >> wrap them up into Ramp Lab so that we can publish these things publicly. >> That's great. And Alex, sorry.
2:32:02
>> Yeah, I'm Alex Stoffer, um, one of the leads of RAM Labs along alongside the other Alex.
2:32:06
And >> yeah, this is the place for AI bets at RAMP.
2:32:10
Um, we're really experimenting going to the cutting edge of AI.
2:32:13
Um, trying to ship product that is actually outside of the current like ramp mandate. >> Yeah. >> Um, yeah.
2:32:24
>> Do you guys have nicknames yet?
2:32:27
[laughter] >> I feel like people get confused.
2:32:27
Alex, because you can't even just be like, oh yeah, Alex at Ramp Labs. You have to go further. >> Yeah.
2:32:34
Just the last names, I guess. Jenko and Oh.
2:32:36
So, so talk to us about the product.
2:32:39
the product. uh it feels extremely aggressive to go after uh Microsoft to go after Google uh not products that have massive user bases and yet you're launching ramp sheets uh talk to us about the thought the positioning are you going to try and replace the investment banking workhorse that is
2:32:57
Microsoft Excel is this more for CFOs who are already on ramp how are you thinking about the product itself >> well originally this started out as an experiment as everything within ramp labs is um we've been trying out different variations of this actually just to try to help our own internal finance team. Um this has gone as I said
2:33:16
Um this has gone as I said through many iterations.
2:33:19
This >> initially was like process mining to document some of their workflows from video uh so that they can like communicate better between each other and to software engineers.
2:33:28
And then we tried to take that piece and create like Zapier and um like retool workflows based on them to try to automate and >> um we tried to to to get them to use it and and >> they were like no this is too blackbox.
2:33:44
We can't really use this.
2:33:44
We need visibility into it.
2:33:46
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.
2:33:52
and we jump through like random locations and 99% of the time when you like open their loom it's like in a spreadsheet.
2:34:01
>> So we decided we should like really meet them where they work and have a spreadsheet interface for this.
2:34:05
And this doesn't necessarily need to be replacing um anything.
2:34:11
This can be an add-on to their existing workflows, right?
2:34:13
This can be uh a quick way to create like a proformer 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.
2:34:23
Um >> so that's that's broadly the >> so why build why build like a web version of a spreadsheet at all?
2:34:30
Why not a plugin that lives inside of Excel?
2:34:36
That's what uh Bloomberg and Capital IQ and most of the other I you know uh kind of complimentary systems have typically plugged in through connectors.
2:34:44
Uh you decided to build the actual uh full spreadsheet in the cloud uh in the web.
2:34:52
Um why that decision versus just plugin?
2:34:57
Well, um, internally we do have some more complex workflows that rely on like sheets and stuff that people can use.
2:35:04
For this, as I said, like ramp labs is like the experimental branch and this was an experiment that like got very very large.
2:35:11
Um, and that's like the way to allow people to interface with it as quick as possible.
2:35:20
Um, we we didn't need like access to your Google account.
2:35:22
We don't need access to your Excel account.
2:35:24
you can just go and try it out and and it's there and it's available on ramp.
2:35:29
com/sheets to anyone, not only RAM customers right now. >> Oh, cool.
2:35:35
>> Um, that's probably like one of the biggest reasons. >> How? >> Yeah.
2:35:38
So, >> for some context, like uh a lot of people think that there was a big team behind this or that ramp is like investing a lot of resources here.
2:35:45
And the truth is that like three guys kind of built this in a cave um pretty fast. So, >> yes. Yeah.
2:35:53
and uh we wanted to release it.
2:35:57
We believe in shipping quickly and getting feedback from customers.
2:35:59
Uh we thought we built a pretty cool tool and just wanted to see how people would play around with it.
2:36:05
Um so we released it last week and then uh the response was overwhelming.
2:36:11
Uh there 2 million impressions.
2:36:13
Um thousands of users joined immediately.
2:36:16
They're making thousands of sheets every day.
2:36:18
um places that you wouldn't imagine have have been using it.
2:36:24
Um like there it's it's popping off at Wharton with students and professors.
2:36:29
Uh there are many banks that are already using it.
2:36:31
Um VCs, finance, people in the space industry.
2:36:37
Um I got off call with a a user who's based in London this morning who's a VC.
2:36:41
So it's it's like it's astounded us honestly.
2:36:47
what uh where where are people getting the most value or what kind of like work uh work are they actually doing uh once they kind of play around with it and get a sense for how it works like how are they applying it?
2:36:59
>> Yeah, there are a lot of interesting use cases.
2:37:00
Um some are personal uh there there are a couple of uh stories here where it's helping them plan their wedding.
2:37:09
You know, these things can get incredibly uh complex and you need a way to organize it.
2:37:14
Um, another use case, uh, an employee here is, uh, he's moving to New Jersey and wanted to find like the best place to live and and and want a model for that.
2:37:26
But outside of personal cases, there is a real demand here.
2:37:31
Um, especially with uh, founders, VCs, small businesses, especially owners of small businesses, they don't actually have like a large finance team, right?
2:37:43
And it's incredibly valuable to spin up a model really quickly instead of going and paying a consultant thousands of dollars uh to just make a template for them. >> Yeah, it makes sense. Very cool.
2:37:54
Where are you guys where where where are you planning to take it from here?
2:38:00
>> Yeah, there's a bunch of features that we're still working on.
2:38:02
We actually shipped sharable links today. Um nice.
2:38:06
and then exploring what best templates.
2:38:09
So like very very intricate templates that you can take and and create basically kind of these like proformas right away or like budgeting uh right away.
2:38:18
Um 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 uh ramp sheets.
2:38:28
So those are like the the three biggest things right now. >> Very cool. >> That's amazing.
2:38:33
The chat is saying con ramp construct an LBO for this regional HVAC company that backs into a 25% IRR.
2:38:40
Make no mistakes, please maybe one day.
2:38:43
I mean that actually probably is within what is basically oneshottable by the model in RAM sheets today.
2:38:48
Uh but thank you so much for coming and breaking it down for us.
2:38:52
Congrats on all the progress and uh excited to watch where it goes.
2:38:56
Excited to uh see more people demoing it and taking it for a spin. >> Incredible launch. >> Thanks so much. >> Thanks for cheers. have a good day.
2:39:03
Uh we are going back to the timeline for a minute uh while we bring in our next guest.
2:39:11
>> Uh we were we were covering uh >> OpenAI uh shopping research. Oh yes.
2:39:17
Didn't really get to and Doug joined but really think uh I I'm I'm bullish on this product.
2:39:22
I think like 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 in the app is going to be like a crazy flywheel.
2:39:32
That's like actually what people do today.
2:39:34
They start Google searching, they find out what products are available, they find out pricing, features, etc.
2:39:39
Then they make a buying decision.
2:39:42
And if you can pull that all into a single sort of like experience, it's going to be very very valuable.
2:39:48
And this is effectively the deep research as a product is a product that has better product market fit uh than almost anything else in consumer AI.
2:39:58
And so I'm uh very bullish.
2:40:01
>> Well, if you're selling a product on chatbt, got to go to numeral. com.
2:40:02
Let numero worry about sales tax and VAT compliance compliance handled so you can focus on growth. Um no, I agree.
2:40:09
It'll be very interesting to see how fast uh like how fast OpenAI makes their first dollar from advertising or commissionbased sales, how quickly they make their first million, their first billion from it.
2:40:23
Like the numbers are so big they need to get to uh tens of billions of dollars on those business lines fairly quickly.
2:40:29
They're certainly the most uh optimistic growth areas for the business.
2:40:34
the business. uh and uh something that I think everyone it's very consensus that uh if they get uh agentic commerce working they can the pool of capital is just very like the the the audience is already there they just have to run ads this is like proven whereas uh breaking
2:40:51
into hardware that's something that uh Microsoft didn't pull off with the phone and Amazon tried to fire a phone and f 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 you know, a billion DAUs using your website for 30 minutes a day, you can advertise to them. Uh, it's it's it's very very
2:41:09
Uh, it's it's it's very very proven.
2:41:11
Um, before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security.
2:41:14
Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.
2:41:19
Our next guest is Quinn Slack, the CEO of AMP. How you doing? >> What's happening? >> Welcome to the show.
2:41:27
>> Hey guys, good to be here. >> Great to have you.
2:41:29
>> Thanks so much for hopping on.
2:41:29
I'm glad that we were able to get you on. We love ads.
2:41:32
We were just talking about ads actually in the chat context.
2:41:35
>> No one likes ads more than us.
2:41:37
>> But uh but fascinating ads. >> Exactly.
2:41:39
That's why I'm excited to talk to you.
2:41:42
>> Uh so please uh introduce yourself and the company a little bit and then we'll get into it. >> I am Quinn Slack.
2:41:47
I'm the CEO and co-founder at Source Graph.
2:41:49
We make AMP this coding agent.
2:41:52
>> Uh I love coding and I mean AI is just crazy for coding in Opus 45 today.
2:41:54
It's mindblowing, >> but it's also expensive and that sucks because a lot of people can't use it.
2:42:02
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 the kind of unconstrained way that you want to if if you're really going to learn.
2:42:12
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. >> I love it. Okay.
2:42:20
I I have like I want to understand what that exactly means.
2:42:22
And I'm going to pitch you like five different instantiations of that.
2:42:25
One is uh I go to the more the agentic commerce route.
2:42:29
I go to your coding agent.
2:42:29
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 going to host it over there."
2:42:36
As opposed to Amazon or it could be putting ads for Amazon or Azure or GCP and the comments of the actual code.
2:42:44
So when I go review the code, I see ads.
2:42:45
Or it could be while it's cooking, it's showing me ads in the terminal.
2:42:49
Like what where are you actually surfacing these ads?
2:42:51
So the interesting thing about coding is you are in this all day long. It's not like amazon.
2:42:58
com ads where you go there right when you have that intent but you also use the coding agent when you have intent. So we kind of get both.
2:43:04
We get those hey you're asking it I want to deploy where should I deploy?
2:43:07
Should it be on uh you know cloudflare or whatever but you also are staring at it and AI coding agents are kind of slow.
2:43:14
I'm not saying we make it slower so that we show more ads [laughter] >> but it's up on the screen and it knows what your text stack is.
2:43:23
So, if you're Cloudflare and you see that they're using S3 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.
2:43:38
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've just built big ad businesses and you know, Uber just shows you ads while you wait for your car.
2:43:51
Basically, it's like it's not rocket science.
2:43:53
It's like a pretty simple thing.
2:43:55
Um, 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 opening open this app or they're using that.
2:44:06
They're staring at this particular screen and there's real estate.
2:44:08
And I see that real estate in the chat GPT app where people just open it up and there's a big blank screen.
2:44:14
You can put an ad there or while while it's waiting.
2:44:15
Um, but do you have to go and get people on board and and get them off of competitor uh coding agents and and competitive idees?
2:44:23
Like how much do you have to do to replplatform 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?
2:44:36
>> We're going to follow this where this goes.
2:44:37
So yeah, we're open to partnering with others.
2:44:39
>> I think other people are kind of waiting and seeing because this idea was so crazy.
2:44:42
um a free coding agent and ads make AMP free in this mode.
2:44:48
>> It's it's really compelling and that audience is growing a lot. >> Sure.
2:44:52
>> Um we keep making the model better and better.
2:44:54
Like initially we uh had it so ads were actually covering more than our cost.
2:44:59
Then we made the model six times more expensive and now they're covering half. But now with Opus 4.
2:45:02
5 I think it's going to be like you know probably covering 80% of the cost because it's it's actually cheaper.
2:45:06
So, we got to keep making the model better and better that it uses and free AI. It's pretty compelling. >> Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.
2:45:14
>> I'm already I already know if TBPN run some ads in there. I know the copy. Develop an ear for TBPN. >> Yeah. >> What do you think? >> I like it.
2:45:25
>> I mean, you can you can go. Why don't you try it? Just Yeah.
2:45:27
But if you >> Is it Is the ad platform self-s served yet or are you guys just doing it one like uh by by hand for now?
2:45:38
You can go in and put the ads self-s serve.
2:45:40
It feels like all of a sudden overnight we are building this new ads business.
2:45:44
Um my wife works at Google. She sells ads.
2:45:47
Uh you know they've seen the business but there's so much complexity and it's like a three-sided marketplace now.
2:45:52
So >> it's really doing God's work. >> Truly. >> Yeah. We love it. We love it. >> Uh yeah. Yeah.
2:45:58
I guess uh 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 like very specific attention at a specific moment in time where they're making oftentimes making product and business decisions.
2:46:20
Any any kind of areas that you've learned from or you just kind of freestyling? >> We're freestyling.
2:46:26
>> We're freestyling. It's a different place to put ads and it's kind of 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 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
2:46:49
to and they said well we kind of want you to take all the flames first on the advertiser side though they were incredibly willing like we had a really high hit rate and uh some of them I you know other DevTools CEOs I would email
2:47:01
them and say hey do you want to advertise and after a day when they hadn't gotten back to me I thought like oh they probably think we're total idiots but then they got back to me and they ended up doing this. >> Yeah. No, it makes I mean it makes a lot >> Yeah.
2:47:09
No, it makes I mean it makes a lot of sense especially when you have the uh when you can show an ad and have one eventually maybe it's not that way today but basically oneshotting the implementation of certain products like that just like contextual advertising uh in in this context is going to be super powerful.
2:47:27
Uh any any ad haters pushing back yet?
2:47:30
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. >> Yeah.
2:47:40
Well, we want to show ads in the more premium modes, too.
2:47:43
So, got to figure [laughter] out that's when we're going to get the ads. >> Actually, no. Actually, no.
2:47:49
Actually, you can't opt out of the ads.
2:47:51
You're getting ads no matter what. I love it. >> Yeah.
2:47:55
I think if you're not getting the haters, then you're not pushing the envelope enough.
2:47:57
And so much of what we realized when we launched AM 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.
2:48:07
>> So we're going to push the envelope.
2:48:07
But all of this just means it means more people can use code AI in a totally unconstrained way and see this thing that just blows our minds. >> Yeah. Yeah.
2:48:17
I mean it seems really cool uh for just like Yeah.
2:48:19
I can imagine so many people.
2:48:21
This is what I would have used in college.
2:48:22
I definitely would not be paying $200 a month or something for something.
2:48:26
I'd probably be interning at a >> at a at a startup that uh or at at a live show that pays for my AWS bills.
2:48:30
Um [laughter] but uh uh can you can you just uh zoom out for us and give us a little bit of uh like what the corporate hierarchy is like AMP and Source Graph? Have you raised money?
2:48:42
What are the shape of these companies and products?
2:48:45
How everything fits together in your world?
2:48:48
Yeah, we started source graph back in 2013 actually with this idea let's automate software development and uh we started out building code search at source graph and that's like Google for all the code.
2:48:58
Yeah, >> it's this especially now with AI AI is doing like a thousand times more code searches.
2:49:03
Yeah, >> it is this critical infrastructure.
2:49:04
It's >> we're the only ones doing it at that scale.
2:49:08
And then we've also got AMP.
2:49:08
So these two products under one roof, Code Search and AMP. Yeah.
2:49:13
And AMP is the frontier coding agent.
2:49:16
We're trying to make it a year ahead for 1% of devs out there.
2:49:21
Y >> and just be totally crazy. Yeah.
2:49:24
>> And you might say, well, ads is incompatible with that.
2:49:26
Ads is all about getting a big audience.
2:49:29
>> But actually, what ads do, they're in service of the research objective for AMP.
2:49:33
It lets us not have to go and jump if some customer says jump with this requirement that's going to hold us back.
2:49:40
It gives us so much more freedom to just change the model, change how it works.
2:49:43
So, you know, in that way ads, it actually does really nicely fund a kind of research lab for us with AMP.
2:49:48
I guess in the same way that Google ads mean that it can do whatever the hell they want and they can, you know, fund a lot of experimentation internally. >> Yeah.
2:49:58
>> So, we got these two products under one roof.
2:50:00
>> Well, what were some of the trade-offs uh you made when you were building the first uh coding agent?
2:50:05
Um, obviously there were people that trained, you know, foundation models themselves.
2:50:11
Other people just wrote harnesses and they're swapping out uh the different models from the big labs.
2:50:15
Uh, how did you think about the different decisions that you made?
2:50:20
>> We decided let's see how far we can get without trying to train our own god model.
2:50:25
Let's depend on anthropic or openai and Google.
2:50:27
And ever since we we started with AMP, which is, you know, we started that in February, we honestly thought there was going to be a model competition a lot sooner.
2:50:36
And it actually only started happening in a big way last week with Gemini 3.
2:50:40
We switched AMP's model over to Gemini 3.
2:50:46
>> It was a huge leap forward.
2:50:46
And then today, you know, back to loving Opus 4 5.
2:50:51
I think [laughter] we're going to switch back to that. >> Yeah.
2:50:53
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.
2:50:59
No, I'm really happy to be occupying, you know, this this uh place. >> Yeah.
2:51:04
So, you don't surface the you don't have a model picker in in the in the agent.
2:51:10
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 3 or Codeex or Opus 45, for example. I I don't get to pick. >> Yeah. No. No model picker. >> Got it. Cool.
2:51:25
>> Um well, >> last question.
2:51:27
What uh what do you think about uh integrating other types of uh >> products products in the IDE?
2:51:33
We were talking about >> Chad IDE, putting gambling in the product.
2:51:39
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 the in in these uh in in the IDE or or in various developer tools or is that kind of like an of the- moment uh kind of like problem solution?
2:52:04
I think you should be able to bet, you know, get some Kashi Manifold Markets stuff in there.
2:52:08
Uh, you should, you know, there should be >> You should What ad are you going to You should let people bet on what ad they're going to get next. >> Yeah.
2:52:19
>> Whichever one they want.
2:52:20
>> I think I I I I I don't know if you're joking, but I think you can go too far.
2:52:24
We've seen people get uh, you know, uh, go viral, but be potentially flash in the pan over >> Yeah. We'll see if I'm joking. >> Okay. Yeah.
2:52:33
I think gambling is is taking it too far, but there's a lot of stuff we can explore. >> Yeah. Yeah.
2:52:37
I mean that the ads business, I mean Google made a hundred billion dollars from ads in Q3.
2:52:41
I think uh there might be enough opportunity there. >> One last question.
2:52:46
Are you hyperactive in Slack? >> Yes, of course.
2:52:51
>> Are you, >> you know, my great-grandfather started it, >> invented it back in the 1800s. >> Yes. Yes.
2:52:57
>> I'm proud to see what it's become. >> Yes. >> Amazing.
2:53:00
>> Like Microsoft Teams guy.
2:53:00
Uh yeah, great great to meet very very cool very very cool product.
2:53:06
Um and uh yeah, >> thanks to have you back soon. >> Thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon. >> See you. >> Have a good one. Bye.
2:53:16
>> Um [applause] >> back to the timeline.
2:53:18
Let me tell you about Vanta.
2:53:20
Automate compliance manage trust.
2:53:22
The leading AI trust management platform.
2:53:24
Did I already do that one? >> You did. >> Well, then let's go. Figma.
2:53:26
Think bigger, build faster.
2:53:28
Figma helps divine development teams build great products together.
2:53:32
I'll also tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you.
2:53:36
Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds.
2:53:42
Back on the timeline, people are having fun with Nano Banana.
2:53:44
They're putting different hairstyles on various tech people.
2:53:49
So, Ilia has a wide variety.
2:53:53
This is Mark Andre with all sorts of different hairstyles.
2:53:55
Which one would you pick if you were him?
2:53:58
I think the one in the center looks pretty good.
2:54:00
The longer beard, shorter hairs, but some >> in the middle on the left is pretty cool.
2:54:08
>> Middle on the left is pretty cool. >> Crazy flow.
2:54:09
I also like bottom bottom left is also crazy. >> Yeah.
2:54:13
Time to take a trip to Turkey for sure. Just go. You have the money.
2:54:15
Just go full head of hair.
2:54:18
That's >> the thing with Ilia that's interesting is they didn't they didn't do like the full zoomer >> the middle bottom one. That is flow. Keep going down. Yeah, the middle. Yeah, right there.
2:54:28
Right in the middle there. The middle bottom.
2:54:30
>> The ponytail is also >> ponytails.
2:54:32
Yeah, >> pretty powerful. >> Definitely.
2:54:35
You know, it's a respectable uh hairstyle.
2:54:37
>> Uh this post here from Thomas uh Scholes.
2:54:40
He says, "The latest nano banana model has officially crossed the line.
2:54:43
I no longer implicitly trust photos anymore.
2:54:44
And sometimes I can't even definitively uh definitively claim it's AI now." I totally agree. I saw this picture. >> Yep.
2:54:52
And my first thought was like that got to be AI specifically because I don't think Sam is just walking down the Golden Gate Bridge in the middle of the day. Yep.
2:55:02
>> Uh it's like probably terrible from a security standpoint.
2:55:05
security standpoint. Um so uh but but it looks photorealistic and um >> yeah it's very so uh if you put the photo into Gemini uh Gemini will tell you if you say is this AI Gemini will tell you yes according to the synth ID watermark detection tool this image was
2:55:26
generated in whole or in part with Google AI uh of course we've seen previous uh previous images where if you turn up the contrast and the saturation all the You can see kind of the rainbow uh like like like zebra pattern basically that's embedded in there very subtly. Uh but yeah, I mean this is this
2:55:42
Uh but yeah, I mean this is this is pretty pretty photore.
2:55:44
Uh and so you got to stay safe out there.
2:55:48
Um it's going to be >> Joe Weisenthal asked Nano Banana to create a really annoying LinkedIn profile. >> And I couldn't tell. Is this a real person?
2:55:59
Now, I I have no idea because the at at this point, we're way past the touring test for for images in the sense that this looks perfectly edited, but uh this could also just be a straight up screenshot.
2:56:12
I would need to fact check this.
2:56:14
Uh but uh instead of factecking it, I'm going to tell you about Privy.
2:56:18
Privy makes it build make it easy to build on crypto rails.
2:56:20
Securely spin up white label wallet, sign transactions, and integrate onchain infrastructure all through one simple API.
2:56:25
Uh Kayn Sterling I don't think is a real person.
2:56:28
Okay says about I don't do small talk I do deep dives.
2:56:33
My journey is a quantum leap through the liinal spaces of tech and spirituality.
2:56:37
Chief visionary officer TEDex speaker professional storyteller democratizing the metaverse one dowo at a time. 10x growth alchemist.
2:56:48
>> So did did Joe actually ask Nano Banana to do this?
2:56:51
I want to see the prompt if that's if that's true.
2:56:53
Um, >> yeah, let's try to >> Yeah, we need to replicate this.
2:56:57
Try to replicate >> because I actually did.
2:57:00
So, so this was the example that I gave.
2:57:02
I I I went to uh I went to I went to Nano Banana and I said uh make a uh I my prompt was just create a really annoying LinkedIn profile, but I forgot to check the the nano banana box.
2:57:18
And so even though it was multimodal according to Tyler over there, it did not generate it. It generated text.
2:57:25
And so, you know, oh, it's like I can only do text. Very questionable. We'll see.
2:57:29
Um, we'll we'll we'll keep playing around with that.
2:57:32
And in the meantime, I'll tell you about adquick. com.
2:57:35
Out of home advertising made easy and measurable.
2:57:37
Plan, buy, and measure out of home with precision.
2:57:39
Um, what's up with uh Brian Johnson?
2:57:42
He's starting a new protocol.
2:57:44
Is he going to uh Taco Bell drive-thru? Is this a real photo? This is this is AI. >> This has to be AI.
2:57:51
>> That's a very funny funny photo.
2:57:51
Um I this was my take was that uh you know if he's really changed by his journey, he must come out of it liking at least one uh fast food restaurant.
2:58:01
Um and uh and Alexa says those shrooms spiritually healed him in a way that has him living moss. Now >> living moss.
2:58:10
>> The live moss uh tagline was fantastic. Really good. Yeah. Yeah.
2:58:14
Taco Bell knows how to do it.
2:58:16
also underrated how online the Taco Bell like marketing team is.
2:58:21
Are you familiar with this? I've >> seen their post.
2:58:23
>> You know the story of Sheil Monot, guest of the show multiple times.
2:58:26
>> Oh yeah, he got married.
2:58:27
>> 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.
2:58:39
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 and and beyond just like oh they have somebody who's pathy on the Twitter.
2:58:50
It's like no, they actually can go and execute.
2:58:52
I've seen multiple people 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.
2:59:04
It's pretty pretty awesome.
2:59:04
Uh, almost as awesome as getting a luxury watch on getbzzle. com.
2:59:08
Shop over 26,500 luxury watches fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. >> This post from Near.
2:59:16
Did you want to skip this one?
2:59:18
>> Near says, "Guy who doesn't want to be old.
2:59:20
It seems like we'll get age reversing tech right when I'll be old. How favorable.
2:59:23
Guy who thinks it it is different this time, but this time it's different."
2:59:28
>> This is [laughter] insane. Uh, read the next one.
2:59:31
We got some massive news from none other than Bill Gurly.
2:59:33
We got to get the gong out for this one. >> You read it. You read it.
2:59:38
>> Uh Amy Gurley, huge congratulations to Bill Gurley for receiving the Texas Distinguished Alumnus Award.
2:59:42
A remarkable honor for a remarkable Longhorn. Congratulations, Bill. Welld deserved. >> Congratulations.
2:59:53
>> This This made my day. This made my day.
2:59:56
>> Everyone was Everyone was wondering if he was going to make it.
2:59:58
>> Yeah, it was kind of the elephant in the room.
3:00:00
>> It was hugely hotly debated.
3:00:00
There was there a lot what $10 million in liquidity betting on this whether or not he would be million >> it was sort of the longhorn in the ring basically. >> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
3:00:10
It was it was a huge deal but he did it.
3:00:12
He pulled it off and uh we're very excited for >> Bill.
3:00:16
Everyone was wondering what he would do if he didn't win.
3:00:19
>> I guess we'll never guess we'll never know.
3:00:21
>> I guess we'll never know. >> Uh Riley Walls. >> This is so funny.
3:00:25
>> He's truly the greatest internet rascal of his time. >> Incredible. >> Uh he did it again.
3:00:29
and he cloned Gmail except you're logged in as Epstein and can see all of his emails.
3:00:34
Like it's such a great such a great workflow because people workflow.
3:00:41
>> I mean it's like it's a way because I've seen other people do here's a fine tune on the emails.
3:00:45
Here's a here's a you know a searchable database.
3:00:47
None of them have been particularly uh usable, but this is fascinating because it just really substantiates the the emails in a in a in a way that uh you know, everyone knows what a Gmail inbox looks like and you can just >> they added this random page button.
3:01:03
It's also also uh funny because he's getting this uh one of the last emails that he got was a Flipboard week in the weekend review and the subject line says Alex Aosta resigns.
3:01:17
Jeff Jeffrey Epstein arrested.
3:01:20
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.
3:01:29
>> He's arrested in there. Yeah.
3:01:29
This is one of the things chat a while ago was was like, "Oh, I'd love for the TVPN to cover the Epstein thing, but it's not really their stick." Well, we found an angle. We found a tech angle.
3:01:40
And so, this is when we get to talk about it.
3:01:43
I know everyone wants us to to talk about the hottest the hottest news story in a in a decade.
3:01:49
But, uh, you have to the lens of Riley Walls and and fun little hack projects.
3:01:55
Um, >> before we move on, let me tell you about eightleep. com.
3:01:59
Exceptional sleep without exception.
3:02:01
Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized.
3:02:03
Uh, the reason you feel insane according to Wilminitis is because you're ch you're talking to chatbt when you should be talking to God.
3:02:12
Near >> flaps back and says the reason you feel insane is because you're talking to God when you should be speaking with Claude. [laughter] >> So funny. >> Claude.
3:02:22
Oh, uh, Keller is coming on the show tomorrow from Zipline.
3:02:24
Keller Clifton, one of the greatest.
3:02:26
Uh, get that goat sound effect ready for tomorrow. Um, >> do it early.
3:02:34
>> Keller said that he's launched zipping points.
3:02:37
He can pick up packages and deliver them autonomously with the zipline autonomous drones.
3:02:40
This is the This is the private plane for your burrito, folks. It's arrived. We're here. We're in the future.
3:02:48
>> The future plane, the the flying car is here, and it will deliver you Chipotle in 15 minutes, in 4 minutes while it's still warm.
3:02:55
Uh, so here's a zip grabbing a package from one of our restaurant partners.
3:02:59
It'll take so many cars off the road over the coming years.
3:03:01
That's great news for environmentalists, for congestion, for anyone who wants to be able to uh really let it loose on the roads.
3:03:11
If we're getting less congestion, maybe the speed limit goes up to 80 miles hour, maybe 120, maybe 160, maybe we get up to 200, and you can really let it loose.
3:03:24
>> I wonder I would like that.
3:03:24
>> I wonder I would like that. 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 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
3:03:39
burrito a burrito just chilling there >> well people do that with pizzas right they they prank call I had like a dozen pizzas delivered to this address I'll pay in cash 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 uh modern payment solutions. Um but I'm sure there will be odd
3:03:56
Um but I'm sure there will be odd oddities around these drones.
3:03:59
Uh sheesh sheesh Theo von Flamin' Hot tweets uh 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.
3:04:10
Uh going hunting for your Chipotle burrito."
3:04:14
Uh that of course is extremely cyber punk and hilarious, but it will be massively illegal.
3:04:19
And of" and Keller breaks it down.
3:04:21
He says, "We're regulated by the FAA, so the consequences are similar to shooting at a 737 as it's taking off from the airport." Not a good idea.
3:04:30
Also, communities love the service.
3:04:33
And I imagine he's not he's not saying like the the the details, but if you shoot at a 737 as it's taking out from an airport, I think you're going to jail for a long time.
3:04:43
And I think uh you will not just be able to shoot one of these out of the sky and pick up a free burrito with a 22.
3:04:48
But >> what about like a really big net?
3:04:52
If you own the land, how high can you build a net?
3:04:55
>> I think that would be the same as throwing a really big net at a 737 on takeoff, Tyler.
3:04:59
[laughter] >> And I think >> I don't know.
3:05:01
I don't think I I think there's no way the consequences are similar.
3:05:06
>> Like yes, it's illegal to shoot something out of the sky, but you're not I I think somebody could shoot one of these things down and get a misdemeanor.
3:05:14
I think they could I think with a good lawyer, you're getting a misdemeanor.
3:05:17
You're not going to Whereas a 737, you know, John, quit on your side.
3:05:19
You're eating burritos for free. >> Yeah.
3:05:23
So, David David Chang was saying like it's just there's like he he it wasn't that he was like bearish on on the tech, but he didn't think it solved like delivering it in the right form factor.
3:05:36
>> We got to 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 delivered, it's like there's a big gap.
3:05:47
>> Uh well, speaking of >> it has to be shorter.
3:05:48
Speaking of cooked, there was a a wild job description that hit the timeline.
3:05:52
Uh Rachel Mayer says, "Coolest PM role in crypto cooked."
3:05:57
[laughter] >> Real impact.
3:06:01
>> Real impact needs to be clinically >> clinically online.
3:06:03
[laughter] >> Not evenically online here at Circle.
3:06:06
We love Circle of Of course, but uh >> wait, was this like intentionally this must be a troll?
3:06:12
This is Rage made done perfectly.
3:06:14
Uh and Pakundo says cook [laughter] Just the idea I was cracking up at this like the idea of showing up to your job and being like oh man like like yeah the team is here is they're [laughter] all exact they're all like washed up it's just the the the the worst possible team.
3:06:35
>> I think it's a perfect [laughter] I think it's a perfect post from Rachel.
3:06:38
This there's no way this job job like like post would have gotten nearly the the reach.
3:06:43
I think I think this was successful.
3:06:44
Did you see this in the in in in the replies to her original post?
3:06:50
Did you mean to say cooked, cooking, or cracked?
3:06:52
And Rachel says, "I don't even know anymore. They all sound fun.
3:06:56
[laughter] >> Rachel, we ain't cooked. We are cooking." Uh, yeah.
3:07:01
One of the developers like at Circle is like, [laughter] "Yo, like, uh, let's correct this. This This is so funny.
3:07:07
Uh, let me tell you about wander. com.
3:07:09
Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel, great many, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, 247 concier service." Um, what is this?
3:07:14
Uh, oh, the IP blocks are going out. You saw that, right?
3:07:19
Um, there's uh uh when you when you identify someone on X where they're from, uh, if you if you signed up originally with an IP, it can be transferred to another like the IP bot can be sold internationally and then you will show up as an international uh, participant.
3:07:38
Uh, so there is some there's there are some false positives there a little bit.
3:07:42
Um, uh, Sheiel, who I mentioned for the Taco Bell wedding, uh, I hope I didn't get that story wildly wrong, uh, is mentioning, uh, a post from Alexis Mulliner, who says, "FY, DHH, I'm noting that learn.
3:07:54
io is inaccessible from Spain while La Liga matches are being broadcast."
3:07:59
And DH says, "Spain blocks all of Cloudflare during those matches in an insane medieval attempt to counter piracy." That's >> wow.
3:08:11
And so Omari is hosted with Cloudflare and they just Spain they just bring down the internet when they to stop piracy. That is insane.
3:08:20
And so Shiel breaks it down.
3:08:22
He says, "Oh my god, Spain blocks Cloudflare IP ranges during La Liga matches.
3:08:26
La Liga submits lists of pirate IPs and the blocks take out lots of legitimate services, too.
3:08:31
So you can't use LinkedIn in Spain during La Liga games."
3:08:37
I mean, that's kind of that's pretty on brand.
3:08:39
[laughter] That's pretty on >> I'm not I'm not going to look up the GDP growth figures. I'm not going to do it.
3:08:46
I'm sure it's going great.
3:08:46
I'm sure it's going great over there.
3:08:50
>> Very very on brand for Spain. Uh did you see this?
3:08:54
This is like the most Nathan potentially was like a Nathan Fielder idea.
3:08:58
There's a bunch of accounts saying that JP Morgan appears to have an existentially threatening short Micro Strategy position that can potentially bankrupt JPM if Master uh uh sorry, Micro Strategy trades 50% higher above Friday's close. >> Okay.
3:09:16
>> And Wall Street Bets comes in and says, "You have no idea how understated this is."
3:09:20
So, uh, a systemically, uh, uh, critical bank is going to fail because they're short.
3:09:28
Micro Strategy, I'm not sure about this, but it's working.
3:09:32
>> Yeah, >> because, uh, Micro Strategy is up 5% today.
3:09:36
So, could have could have played uh, meanwhile, Bitcoin is up two and a half% today.
3:09:42
So, could have played a part. Who knows? But it's a fun idea. It's fun to >> Yeah.
3:09:48
The thing I I think >> I don't think Jamie Diamond is risking it all for >> Yeah.
3:09:54
>> on a on a on a micro strategy short. >> Yeah.
3:09:58
I wonder how they even got that information.
3:10:00
Maybe it was from a 13F or something. Who knows?
3:10:02
Tyler has become uh extremely blackpilled on the 13F.
3:10:05
Is building a thesis against it.
3:10:08
We we might be talking about that later this week.
3:10:11
Um, also I mean the the whole thing with the with the oh we're going to blow them out like it completely uh it just it it just negates the idea that like they can they can trade a lot faster than you can trade them.
3:10:22
Like you know you can just uh like they can get out of that trade when it's up 10%.
3:10:26
And it's like yeah it would have been disastrous at 50 but once it went up 10% they they they were like okay yeah we're out actually like yeah you know we're we're we're hedging we're doing something we're buying the other side of the trade or whatever.
3:10:37
Uh 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.
3:10:45
It's not going to like take you by surprise.
3:10:49
You're going to be like, "Oh yeah, I know that retail armies exist."
3:10:50
If they get marshaled, it can be really bad.
3:10:53
So you do have to be a little bit careful because even though they might have like crazy memes and they might be like what's silly, they are powerful.
3:11:02
But you can quantify the power.
3:11:04
You can look at what has what what capital has actually been marshaled for GameStop.
3:11:08
Is it being sucked out of the GameStop army?
3:11:11
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. >> Yeah.
3:11:21
And Wall Street has always been PVP.
3:11:22
And in this case, you're just it's like P it's like you know one one group versus >> Yeah. >> 30,000 uh individual.
3:11:29
We might want to close out with this post from semi analysis about PVS person versus shrimp.
3:11:36
Uh they're breaking it down.
3:11:36
He says uh it has become extremely trendy among some San Francisco artificial intelligence researchers to donate to shrimp welfare.
3:11:44
They estimate that they help improve the welfare of 1,500 shrimps per year for every $1 donated.
3:11:53
Why do they donate to shrimps?
3:11:53
They claim that it is the most cost-effective way of reducing suffering of sentient beings.
3:11:58
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.
3:12:12
And so I had an idea for a new semi-analysis product, Shrimp Max.
3:12:18
And what they'll do is every night they will take thousands of shrimp and execute them using hundreds of different methodologies and then they will quantify the amount of suffering on a nightly basis just like what they do with cluster max. Yeah.
3:12:32
what they do with cluster max. Yeah. And so we could know for sure because sure today the e uh the the SFAI researchers they might be yes electrical studying is better than than the previous method but what if there's a shift tomorrow and
3:12:46
tomorrow electrical stunning is not the best method they need to have real time data they need charts they need graphs they need a dashboard they need cluster max for shrimp suffering >> I didn't I didn't believe this was real but shrimp welfare project.org or seems
3:12:58
org or seems to be they they say you can track their shrimp act. >> Shrimp shrimp act.
3:13:04
Well, I like a good >> 440 billion shrimps are farmed each year. >> Yes. Uh >> that is wild.
3:13:11
That's more than five times the number of all farmed land animals combined.
3:13:15
>> I didn't know shrimp was so popular.
3:13:17
>> This makes shrimp welfare an area of high impact where your involvement can lead to great change. >> Yeah.
3:13:22
Are you pro- shrimp, anti-shrimp, Tyler?
3:13:25
>> Uh do you mean like shrimp welfare or shrimp in general? Uh, do you like shrimp?
3:13:29
Do you like eating shrimp? >> I enjoy shrimp.
3:13:31
>> You like enjoy shrimp.
3:13:31
Do you think the shrimp welfare thing holds any water?
3:13:35
>> Uh, I think it holds some water at some point.
3:13:38
It's like >> it's like >> should we have a global shrimp welfare tax?
3:13:41
It's like an extra dollar per every time you buy every shrimp you buy is like a dollar on top just for shrimp welfare.
3:13:49
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 uh live better lives because of it.
3:13:59
>> Well, it it's not that they're they're not going to live better lives.
3:14:01
They're going to die better deaths.
3:14:04
[laughter] >> It's a noble cause. It's a noble cause.
3:14:08
>> It is funny to go through to go through all of this. >> Yeah.
3:14:11
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.
3:14:20
>> You got to be nice about it.
3:14:20
You got to be nice with it."
3:14:22
>> It is crazy that you just don't you just don't save them.
3:14:24
But uh I mean, I'm sure that I'm sure the spreadsheets uh mathed in a certain way and the rest is history.
3:14:32
>> Should we close out with this uh iconic mid-century home?
3:14:34
Uh it is apparently for sale. Look at this photo. Beautiful.
3:14:40
Um, and I think someone might have already bought it.
3:14:42
Adam Mayor said, "I'm going to buy it."
3:14:44
Uh, this is in the SF Gate.
3:14:47
Um, do you have you seen this home before?
3:14:49
I think I've seen some photos.
3:14:51
Says, "After 65 years, LA's most famous mid-century mid-century house hits the market.
3:14:56
Uh, it's the first time it's ever been sold.
3:14:59
Somebody's owned it for 65 years.
3:15:01
uh the pinnacle of mid-century modern architecture with floor to seal ceiling glass windows uh profering a panoramic view of Los Angeles below.
3:15:09
The home has been carefully preserved for decades. I just like that.
3:15:13
Um uh oh, it's it's it's for sale for $25 million.
3:15:19
Uh I just like that for once we get a real estate listing that kind of just becomes the current thing.
3:15:22
And I saw a lot of people posting about this.
3:15:24
We obviously uh love the mansion section, love posting about real estate, talking about real estate.
3:15:29
We find real estate very fascinating.
3:15:30
Um and uh and I was happy to see this break through in such a meaningful way. Yeah.
3:15:36
>> Um anyway, lots more news, but we will get to that tomorrow. Thank you for tuning in.
3:15:40
Thank you for supporting us, listening to the show.
3:15:42
Uh where have you listened?
3:15:44
Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify.
3:15:45
And we will see you tomorrow.
3:15:48
A little update on the schedule.
3:15:49
We will be off on Wednesday and Thursday. No show Wednesday.
3:15:52
No, no show Thursday, but we will be back on Friday for Black Friday.
3:15:58
and we will be taking you on a whirlwind tour of the e-commerce world.
3:16:02
We have some very exciting stuff planned for that.
3:16:04
So, we'll see you tomorrow and then we won't see you Wednesday, Thursday.
3:16:09
>> Have a wonderful afternoon and evening. and see