The Next Wave: Anthropic Said No to the Pentagon. Now It’s Blacklisted

Hey, welcome to the Next Wave podcast. As with pretty much every week, we had another insane week in the world of AI. We have an AI company going to war against the US government, essentially. We have a brand new image model which we're going to fully demo and test and play with and really put it through the motions. And we've got AI agents everywhere this week, just tons of new AI agents. We're going to break down some of the new AI agents that came out and we'll talk about Burger King at the end because Joe used to work at Burger King, so why not talk about Burger King? Anyway, let's get into it. Joe, thanks for joining us again. What do you got for us today?

Thank you for having me. Yes, this has been a wild week, man, and obviously you know that. But I think the big glaring topic of them all, which has gone pretty public now, I feel like people are finally waking up to what's happening with this whole like Pentagon standoff with Anthropic, you know, the maker of Claude, I guess. Matt, where. How would you kick this off? Because this is, it's kind of shocking to be honest. It's kind of freaking me out.

Yeah, no, this one is a pretty crazy story, I would say, because it has such big sort of global consequences. Right? Like to me it's a big deal and I don't feel like enough people are talking about it. I actually made a video about this like almost over two weeks ago by the time this, this podcast is live. I made a video about this two weeks ago. Nobody was talking about this. It was still, still flying under the radar and I was like making a video trying to go, hey, everybody needs me to pay attention to this. Like screw your productivity apps and stuff. Like this is what's important right now. But here's, here's the sort of TLDR for people that aren't totally looped in on what's going on right now. So you've got Anthropic. Anthropic is the only company up until recently was the only company that had access to classified information within the US government. They were the only model that the US government trusted enough with their own classified information. Now when Anthropic also recently signed a 200 million dollar deal that had tie ins with the Pentagon and Palantir, who, you know, famously makes military equipment and things like that. They had this $200 million deal. And what really sort of set things off was remember when the US went into Venezuela and basically pulled out Maduro, their president, and brought him back to the US well, it turns out that Anthropic AI was used as part of that mission. Somebody at Anthropic contacted the Pentagon or, you know, some US Official and said, hey, is it true that you used our model to do this raid on Maduro? And the US government, the Pentagon, whoever they were talking to, was very unhappy with the fact that Anthropic was even asking how you're using our AI. That was the sort of like, thing that set off this chain of events is why is Anthropic asking how we used this stuff? Right? And so that's when the Pentagon started speaking up and saying things like, oh, Anthropics AI is woke and we need to have AI that will do anything we need it to do with no restrictions. If we want it to do something, it needs to be able to do that. And it just sort of blew up into this. This whole thing. Right. Well, Anthropic then went and said, look, we'll actually ease up our restrictions for military use. You can use it for pretty much anything you want to use it for, except for two things. There's two things that we're drawing a line on that you cannot use our AI for. Number one, you can't use it for any sort of mass surveillance of U.S. citizens. We will not allow it to be used for that. Number two, we will not allow it to be used for autonomous weapons with no human in the loop. You can use it for semi autonomous weapons, but there needs to be a human making the decision of when the trigger gets pulled or not. Right? Those are the only two things that Anthropic said that we are going to hold the line on US Surveillance and you must have a human in the loop for autonomous weapons. And the Pentagon, basically, Pete headseth over at the Department of War said, no, you don't get to tell us what we can and can't use it for. It's kind of crazy that when you think about it, that those are the two things that Anthropic is holding the line on and the US government is saying, that's unacceptable to us. Like that to me, is a little bit scary that the US government is willing to say, like, no, if we want to use it for surveillance of US Citizens, we can do that. If we want to use it for fully autonomous weapons, we can do that. That's our choice, not yours. Hey, if you take a look at my web presence online, it's safe to say that I'm a bit AI obsessed. I even have a podcast all about AI that you're watching right now. I've gone down multiple rabbit holes with AI and done countless hours of research on the newest AI tools. And every single week, well, I've done it again and I just dropped my list of my favorite AI tools. I've done all the research on what's been working for me, my favorite use cases and more. So if you want to steal my favorite tools and use them for yourself now, you can. You can get it at the link in the description below. Now back to the show. And so there's a big debate going on right now of who should make the decisions when it comes to military operations. Should we be letting the CEOs of Silicon Valley decide when their technology should be used in military operations, or should we be letting the government and the military themselves be. Be deciding when to use this technology for military operations and what military operations it can be used for? And there's a pretty big debate. Like Palmer Luckey, the, the CEO of Anduril and I can't remember the guy's name, but the CEO of Palantir have both spoken up and said, like, CEOs need to, like, take a backseat. You need to stop telling the government how you can use technology. Right. But then there's also like a whole public uprising right now of people saying what we don't want our government to be using it to surveil us. We don't want our government to be using it for fully autonomous weapons. Like, that's just scary to us. Like, why would, like, I'm so glad Anthropic is holding the line here. We don't want that to happen. So there's this whole, like, back and forth going on right now between the two.

And the deadline is. Yeah, it's basically looming at the time of, you know, when we're talking about some of these details.

The deadline's today to pull back the curtain. We're recording this on Friday. The deadline is Friday. The, the deadline is the day that we're recording this video.

501pm I think is what. Yeah, Pete Heath said. And after that, wasn't it, like, if Anthropic doesn't agree, they're going to be placed on. I think it's the, the Defense Production act, essentially. Like.

Yeah, so, no, what, what it is, is there's an act called, Let me see, the Supply Chain Risk. Right. So like, the Pentagon has threatened to declare Anthropic a supply chain risk not only for voiding his contracts, but forcing other companies that work with the Pentagon to certify they aren't using Claude. So if they become a supply chain risk, this is something that's never been done to a US Based company ever in history. Right. So this would be the first time ever that an American company would be classified as a supply chain risk. It's something that's usually only for foreign adversaries, right. Like Chinese companies and Russian companies that they worry might be used to like spy on American citizens or whatever. So this would be the first time that would ever happen. And what it means to Anthropic is not only will the government not use Anthropic, but any companies that directly work with the government have to certify that they're also not working with Anthropic.

Right.

And so there was this thing that came out that basically said the US Government is already starting that process. They are already contacted Boeing, they already contacted Lockheed Martin and said like, hey, are you using Anthropic? What's your exposure to Anthropic? Because if you are, you need to start backing off because this is probably going to happen. So the government is already in the process of starting to blacklist Anthropic because they're, they're, they're about to potentially designate them as a supply chain risk.

And you know, they're not going to skip a beat because the deadline's looming Friday at like we said today for us. And yeah, they're already reaching out to companies. Blacklisting is probably going to start right away, I would imagine. Yeah, yeah. And Dario. Yeah. The CEO of Anthropic has already basically said they're not going to back down to this.

So, yeah, they put out a statement yesterday, Thursday. So even before the Friday deadline, they put out a statement. And you know, he reiterated like, these are the two things we're trying to lie on. Mass domestic surveillance, fully autonomous weapons. And down here we can see he plainly says, regardless, these threats do not change our position. We cannot in good conscious cede to their request. So, so they basically have already come out and said, look, we're not going to pull away on this. Like, we've already made our decision. We're not going to allow you to do those two things. So this, this is what I think you were, you were sort of alluding to here was so they would be designated as a supply chain risk, but they've also been threatened to invoke the Defense Production act, which would basically force Anthropic, like eminent domain kind of thing, force Anthropic to remove those safeguards. So you can tell us you're not going to remove them, but if we invoke this act, well then you're going to remove them and there's nothing you can do about it.

That's right.

Right. So, but then, you know, Anthropic goes on right here that says these latter, latter two threats are inherently contradictory. One labels us as a security risk, the other labels Claude as essential to national security. So it's like you're getting mixed signals here. You either need Claude or you're going to make it a supply chain risk. Saying that like it's a security risk for anybody to use Claude. So they're just kind of like throwing all the threats at the wall to hopefully one of them sticks and Anthropic gets on board.

Yeah. And. Well, and what I've read somewhere, I don't know if it's in this article that you're showing or not, is that the other AI, you know, LLMs all the labs out there, you know, open AI, Google, X. I have already started to talk to the government and it sounds like they're open and willing from what I understand. Is that what you.

Yeah, that's, you know, that, that's, I think more rumor than actual fact right now. So OpenAI and Google already work with the US government. They are like, they're already sort of baked into some of their systems. However, they do not have access to the same classified information that Anthropic has. So Anthropic was the only company that basically was able to work with any sort of classified government information that, you know, know, dealt with military strikes and things like that that obviously could not preemptively get out to the nations they were about to do the strikes on. Right. Like had, had, you know, an Anthropic insider somehow leaked to Maduro that this raid was about to happen. Well, the raid would have probably been a failure, right? So like they can't have leaks coming from some of these AI companies. So these AI companies are already working with the government. But Anthropic was the only one that was getting access to classified information because it was the only one they trusted enough. Saying that there has been confirmation that Elon Musk went, oh, you want to like spy on civilians and use autonomous weapons? You could use ours for that. We don't care. Like, yeah, come, come use us.

I did say, I saw that. Yeah. And I mean if you go, if you go on X right now, you just see all this is everything that Elon's posting right now is basically Regarding this, you know. Yeah. And it makes sense. But yeah, it sounds like Grok is already into all the classified documents. I don't know. I'm probably not all.

I don't know if they're in there yet. But they did sign a deal. XAI has signed an agreement to allow the military to use its model Grok in classified systems. Defense official confirmed with Axios. So they did sign a deal allowing Grok to do, to work with the classified stuff. Right. So that is, you know, in the process. So it sounds like what could end up happening is they're trying to off board Anthropic. Onboard Grok saying all that, like, Grok, Anthropic's the superior model and the government knows that. The government has flat out said multiple times, like, we want to use anthropic. It's going to be more of a pain in the ass to not use Anthropic than it would be to like stick with Anthropic. So we want to figure out how to like keep using Anthropic. I almost feel like what they'll do first is almost invoke that act that forces them to remove the guardrails. Anthropic will continue to hold their ground. It might go to court, it might turn into this long, like, legal battle, and then maybe that whole supply chain risk thing will come into play. I don't know how it's going to play out. In fact, by the time this episode's live, it might have even played out even more. But what we do know right now is the Pentagon does really want to use Anthropic's model. And I think they're a little less excited about Grok's model because it's not quite as powerful.

Is that. And that's why I'm like, maybe I'm just naive here, but I'm curious of your take of what makes. Since like we've been chatting in the previous weeks of how the, the benchmarking is getting pretty close across the board. But like, is there a clear reason why Claude over something like Grok or even Open AI or Google makes more sense for the government?

Know? I, I don't know, like, the government might have their own internal benchmarks that they're working off of that we don't see. That's probably a very likely probability. What I can tell you is that Opus 4.6, the. The publicly available model is pretty much considered like one of the best coding models. You do have GPT 5.3 codecs, which is probably on Par. Most people are kind of using those interchangeably now because they're both as good as each other it comes to coding specifically. But when it comes to like military use cases, I'm sure the military sort of tested different models and decided anthropic gives us the outcome that we're looking for more often than these other models. But I don't know. Like, the. However they decided the models is probably fairly classified information, honestly. Otherwise, like, what stops OpenAI from going and sort of training on that specific, specific information that they know that the government is looking for to sort of win favor with the government? Like, so that I would imagine would be kind of not something that they would openly be reporting of. Like, this is what we're looking for in our models.

Man, it's just wild because, yeah, like you said back to what Dario from Anthropic was saying, it's like the two things human in the loop and straight up surveillance, essentially.

And, and, and he actually, you know, there's, he gives very specific reasons why these are the two. Right. So when it comes to mass domestic surveillance, he says under current laws, the government can purchase detailed records of Americans movements, web browsing and associations from public resources without obtaining a warrant. A practice the intelligence community has acknowledged raises privacy concerns. And that has generated bipartisan opposition in Congress. Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person's life automatically and at massive scale. So he's saying, if you, like, right now the government is already allowed to sort of collect publicly available data from social media and browsing history and whatever they want. Right? However, that information is kind of pointless, kind of useless for the government to have because it's just like this massive corpus of data that they can't make any sense of. Well, when you're able to take all of that massive corpus of data and put it into an AI model, now all of a sudden the AI can make sense of that data for you. It can find connections, it can find who. People who potentially posted things anonymously online and connect them to real people. And this is a big concern for people right now because we saw what was happening with like ICE and all of that kind of stuff where they are. The US Government, you know, depending on your take, is sort of infringing on people's civil liberties right now. Um, so you do have like a lot of fear of like, okay, now they can like pinpoint almost any comment online to anybody in the world, even when that comment was meant to be anonymous. And like, hey, anthropic doesn't want to be a part of that. Like, look, if you're going to go and do that, if the government's going to go and do that, like, okay, go and do that, but we don't want you to use our technology to do that.

Yeah.

And then the fully autonomous weapons, they say so they actually, they actually admit that, like, partially autonomous weapons like those used today in Ukraine are vital, Are vital to defense of democracy. Even fully autonomous weapons, those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate, selecting and engaging targets may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America's warfighters and civilians at risk. We have offered to work directly with Department of War on R and D to improve the reliability of those systems.

And.

But they have not accepted this offer. So they're. I mean, the Department of War, Department of Defense, Homeland Security, whatever you want to call them, they basically are saying, when we are using our AI systems, we need to know they're going to work. You can't tell us, like, there can't be guardrails when there's a life and death moment that needs to be decided at the blink of an eye and we need our AI to work right then. Right. That's kind of their argument. What Dario's argument is, is we agree with you. We don't want our systems to F up when you need them the most. So, like, they're both kind of saying the same thing, but they're coming at it from different angles.

My brain just goes to, like, hallucinations. Like, you know, it hallucinates on the simplest things for the longest time. I don't know if it's already solved the whole Strawberry spelling predicament, you know, at the number of Rs in Strawberry.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's. I think that's a. A pretty solved problem at this point. It wasn't that long ago, but there is. There is this.

So this is what happens when guardrails become, I guess, non existent. Like. Yeah, yeah. What are we looking at? Because this, when I saw this, this was essentially what war game scenarios that, that were done at, what was it, King's College in London. And they did something like 21 different war game simulations with 329 different turns. And basically, yeah, you're looking at it right now on the screen. That, that mushroom cloud, it did not end up. Well, 95% of the time, the leading

AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95% of cases that was across.

Yeah. Multiple models, what, three or four different models that they, that they played these scenarios through.

Yeah, they always end up going to nuclear war as the best option at some point in these simulations. So, like, point being, Anthropic is saying these models are not ready to be put in fully autonomous, like, battle scenarios yet. And I feel like this right here, what we're looking at, is probably good sort of evidence of that.

Yeah, yeah, it's very timely with this article coming out or this study. I don't know when it was actually. I mean, it was just released. I know this, this, the article. So, yeah, hallucinations, no guardrails, or at least a lack of guardrails, and no humans in the middle. That one hurt. That's. That's a hard pill to swallow there.

Yeah.

Yep.

So I, I mean, that. That's pretty much the story there.

Yeah.

Like, it is still unfolding and it has probably unfolded a little bit more by the time this episode is even live. But as of right now, the. The. Where it stands is the Pentagon is giving them till the end of the day today, Friday, the day we're recording this, to basically get on board with their demands. Otherwise they risk being labeled as either a supply chain risk or basically having the government force them to remove the guardrails. Right. Like, but it's still. There's still a pretty heavy debate, you would think. I don't know. In my mind, I feel like this is pretty obvious. Like, in my mind, just, you know, sharing my own opinion on this. I think Anthropic is right. Like, hey, if you don't feel your models are good enough yet for these use cases, let's not put them in these use cases yet, because that is a scary scenario. I feel like it's fairly black and white, but I am seeing a lot of counter arguments online right now. I am seeing a lot of those counter arguments from people saying, Look, Silicon Valley CEOs should not be in charge of the decisions that our military makes. Put those decisions in the hands of military officials.

Right. Man, it's. It's tricky. I'm trying to find. I don't know, what if there are some solid counter arguments? Because, I mean, overwhelmingly, I've seen a lot of people be like, yeah, I stand with Anthropic or Dario.

So one of the other counter arguments too, though, is that, like, okay, so anthropic is not saying yes to doing this. So what are we going to end up with? An. An inferior model that will say yes to this, that hallucinates even more often, that screws these things up even more often. Like, wouldn't you want the absolute best model that is available in the moment at making these decisions to be the one that's making these decisions? Because if they say no, then we're getting grok and grok is not nearly as good at actually making these decisions.

Right, right. I don't know where this goes, Matt. It's like I feel like the pressure of, you know, obviously world events, we're already seeing stuff play out. So, you know, the government's going to want to make a solution and make it happen quickly. Yeah, definitely a lot of legal battles this is going to be happening. It's not going to be over today, guarantee. So I don't want the doom and gloom the whole time on this episode.

But yeah, yeah, I think we needed to lead with probably the most consequential one. That's basically setting a precedent right now.

Right.

This is like, however this plays out is setting a precedent for how AI companies and the government interacts with each other.

Right.

So it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. But I definitely think we should move on to some more light hearted, fun stuff.

Should we. Should we talk about maybe designing the coolest looking cat? You know, let's make cats do silly goofy things that will just make us smile at this point. On that note, so I'll kick it out basically. Nano Banana. If you haven't used Nano Banana yet with, you know, Google and Gemini, where you been, it's so fun. And the new model just dropped this week, Nano Banana 2 and believe it's starting to get integrated in a whole bunch of other areas or at least it will very soon. And it could do a lot of cool things. I know there's been some tests, Matt, that you've been running that will. I think we should do some prompts and stuff and test it out here too. But yeah, yeah, speed tests, accuracy tests, all that stuff.

So full disclosure, Google did give me early access to Nanobanana 2, so I was using it not too far in advance of launch, but they did give me like, I don't know, 72 hours advanced usage of it so I can play with it and make a video about it. So here's the gist of it. Nanobanana 2 is about double the speed as Nano Banana Pro. So nanobanana Pro was the state of the art image model out of Google DeepMind and Nanobanana 2 is pretty much just as state of the art. It's pretty much as good as nanobanana Pro, except it generates the images in half the time. It takes roughly 15 seconds to generate an image instead of about 30 seconds to generate an image. It's actually got better text generation than even Nano Banana Pro did. So it tends to screw up the text even less and put typos in the image even less. It's got the sort of search grounding. So if you say, hey, make me an infographic about how quantum physics works, it will actually go out and do research on quantum physics and then come back with the information that it found and then generate an image based on what it found. That was something that was unique to Nanobanana Pro, but. But you get it in Nanobanana 2 now. Nanobanana 2 is also a cheaper model to use and Google has essentially just made it available for free inside of Gemini. I do think there are usage limits. I don't know exactly when you hit those usage limits, but you can essentially just go to your Gemini account in Google and for free generate Images with Nano Banana 2 up to a certain point. And I don't know where that point is because they didn't announce where that point was in their press releases. And also I'm on a paid plan, so like, yeah, I have more usage, so I haven't been able to find that limit myself either.

It's really cool though. I mean like the fact that you just said it's. It's almost like you can use it as your research partner and it will do it quickly. As we've been demonstrating all these other coding apps and things. Like everything's just like lightning fast speed now, but it's actually super accurate. Like the tests have done as well that you look at the words and it's doing the research infographics, it's doing it really well. I know the quality is slightly. It's pretty dang close. We'll just say that.

Yeah, I would say I have a hard time telling the difference in quality. Like if you're looking for realism, I felt like Nano Banana Pro might get you slightly more realistic, but it's like nitpicky, right? Like it's really close. So you can use nanobanana2 by going to google gemini. Just go to gemini.google.com and you can see you've got the little created image link with a banana on it right here. And then also under your tools Dropdown, you'll also have it there. But if you create, if you click Created Image, you'll notice you're on the new one because this style picker thing is brand new that they just launched with this new model here, which is actually pretty cool too. I don't know if you've played this with it at all, but it basically has like, these style references. So you can give it a prompt and then select one of these style references and it'll make an image that's in that same kind of style.

Yeah, yeah. No, I dig it. It's. I mean, it's kind of blurring the lines now between other photo apps or, you know, all these, all the image generation apps. But it's cool. It gives you ideas, like immediately. And. Yeah, you can click one of those. And I know what I was doing is uploading my own headshot, you know, and trying the Technicolor or things like that just to play around. And I don't know if we want to try some of that yet or are there any other things we should know about? Pretty straightforward, I'd say.

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty straightforward. You use it pretty much the same way you used to use any other Nano Banana. You have to make sure you're on the Create an Image tab to, to basically force it to use Nano Banana. Now, if you don't click Create an Image, you can say create an image of X, Y and Z and it will usually switch it to nano Banana just automatically. However, I have had it, like, not switch to nano Banana and for whatever reason, give me like a written prompt back, like explaining what a wolf howling at the moon looks like instead of making the image. So, like, for the best results, click the button to create an image.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's easier, but I mean, it's, it's lightning quick. I just did one on my side as well. But let's, let's test it out. Maybe just like basic. Well, you probably have your headshot or something like that and you can click one of these.

Yeah. So if I hit go, it should make a sketch version of my headshot. And yeah, it should take about 15ish seconds. I did a video and I actually put a little stopwatch on my screen and was testing it and it was taking on the slow or on the fast end, like 12 seconds on the slow end, 17, 18 seconds. Yeah, there we go.

Look at coffee.

Even put a nice little coffee stain there. Oh, I guess the, the example has a coffee stain too.

Yeah.

So could you Modify. Pretty impressive.

Like. Like, could we change the direction of the sketch like we wanted to say? I don't know, like, can we rotate it?

Yeah, let's say rotate the napkin 90 degrees.

The really detailed picture on a napkin. I'm impressed.

Somebody was really sitting there for a while sketching that one out.

There we go, 90 degrees.

Draw it in colored pencils.

Have you seen it work better in the AI studio? Know the Google, what's it called? Yeah, AI studio@google.com.

i haven't really messed with it in AI studio.

Cool.

There we go. Hold on. I know, I know. Made my beard a little bit redder than it actually is in real life instead of grayer. Because in real life it's a little gray.

Welcome to the club, Matt. But yeah, dude, I mean, that, that's great quality. I mean, I'm not seeing it like full screen, but I think you can get pretty high res too, right?

Yeah. Well, they claim 4K. I haven't been able to get a 4K image out of it. I can basically get it to be almost 3,000 pixels wide, but I haven't gotten it to like, like, I think the biggest sort of width dimension I've gotten it to do is like 2700 wide. I don't know how to actually get it. 4k, maybe that's only available via the API. So if we wanted to try it like in AI studio, we might actually be able to get a 4k out of it.

I was curious about.

So let me switch models up here. So if you're using AI Studio, you can come up to the model selection, go to Images, and then you've got Nanobanana 2 here and you can select this one. And then you can only use it on the paid tiers inside of Google AI Studio. So if you want to use it for free, I guess you got to use it inside of Gemini or Flow or one of their other platforms. Okay, so let's do output images only. Okay. So down here we do have resolution options.

There we go.

So I can set the resolution as 4K, create a detailed infographic showing Petco park and all the surrounding landmarks.

We always have to have a Padre reference in every.

Yeah, absolutely. My. My goal is to get the Padres to like invite us to throw out the first pitch or something because we talk about them so much.

It's possible. Put it out there, Matt. All right, what do we got? I'm curious if the speed's different on this. You said typically about 15 seconds.

Well, maybe, maybe 4K takes a long Longer time. I did put thinking level minimums too, so maybe. Yeah, this definitely feels slower. All right, let's see. Is it actually 4k? Is my question. I'll have to download it to find out.

That's pretty cool looking.

So. One sec here, one sec. Get info. Yeah, it's actually bigger than 4K. 5632 by 3. 3. 3072.

So that's the way to do it then. All right.

Yeah. So in AI Studio, you can get it to generate 4K. Now, how accurate is it? That's the question.

I got to zoom in your. Your. Your thing here. Hold on.

Yeah, not super accurate because Balboa Theater is definitely not right next door to Petco Park.

True.

The Western Meadow building is definitely not on the sort of west ocean side of Petco Park.

No.

In fact, it's got the actual western metal building in the image right here.

Yeah, it's got it twice there and

then it's got it here as well.

Nor Petco Park. Well, I mean, we do. We.

We tend to be there a lot.

Yeah. Actually, I noticed in your video yesterday, it did have like, the arrangement of San Diego in general completely, like, backwards. Yeah.

And I'm wondering if it's because I did it on thinking fast instead of thinking high.

Okay.

But I mean, it did get Gallagher Square. That's fairly accurate.

Yeah. The statue of Tony in there.

Yeah. Apparently we have two Balboa feeders because there's one over here too.

They look different.

And the gas lamp quarter archway is definitely not where it's showing it on this image.

It's not perfect. Okay, well, maybe. Yeah.

And then apparently Chicano park is literally across the street from Petco Park.

It's very simplified.

I didn't know Barrio Logan was so close to Petco Park. That's new to me. So, yeah, not quite so super accurate with the details there.

So don't trust it out of the box. Maybe the thinking mode would help, though. I don't know. Maybe. I mean, it's worth it. Can we rerun it with that and just see?

Yeah, let's throw it on thinking high instead of minimal.

I mean, it'd be nice to know. It's like, hey, we want to be able to trust this thing for its research too. This is a maybe newbie question. I know some workarounds, but for to get the Gemini watermark off this thing is this like using an API like you're doing now?

The only way, if you're doing it in. In Gemini, there's going to Be a Gemini watermark if you're doing it directly through the API. I think you have to be on the ultra plan, actually. And I'm on the ultra plan, but I'm not 100% sure. All right, so let me make sure all my settings are the same 4k high thinking level. And I'm going to give it the same exact prompt again. And let's see if it spends a little bit more time. All right, so we can actually see the timer there.

Oh, cool. Nice. There we go.

I know it's taking longer because we put thinking level high. And also my guess is that setting it to 4K is also something that makes it take a little bit longer. All right, so let's see how close we got on this higher thinking mode. I can already tell. Still not great. Like this archway is definitely not right there. I mean, the convention center's in a little bit better positioned slightly. Very slightly.

Not quite right. But it has way more detail the world.

Yeah, a lot more detail. A lot more information in each little heading here.

Like I noted. What? Right. Your cursors are the world's largest climbable bat.

Actually, that one is true, but it's not where it's pointing.

Not at all. No. So this still isn't perfect. Yeah, but it's cool. I mean, it brought in dimensions, capacity, the state. I mean, the fact that it's doing all this work. But it did do that in Nana Banana Pro. So I don't know, I'm just curious how much.

Yeah, it's not great at like drawing super accurate representation of what this would look like. That's for sure. Yeah, you know, like these things are around the park. Like the midway is fairly close to the park. It's not parked right next door to it, but it is fairly close. Yeah. This is definitely not where the Coronado Bridge is.

Butts up right on the park. Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, like, it's fun. It knows what landmarks are around it. It's just not putting them in the right places.

Yeah. Well, here I'm thinking of like, what are other use cases that, you know, Nana Banana. I'm just thinking like thumbnails. Like YouTube thumbnails. I generated one on the side actually on my screen. But like, do you find. Let's see it, let's see it, let's see it. Here, let me share screen.

I've never had amazing luck getting Nano banana to generate YouTube thumbnails that I'm like really impressed with.

Oh yeah.

But what I do use nanobanana for a Lot is to generate items that I'll put into a thumbnail. So I'll get it to generate an image of me surrounded by bananas or something, and then I'll like, take that and put it into something else.

I got you.

Yeah. So like, this thumbnail. It's.

It's not.

It looks like something an amateur would make in Canva. Let's be real.

It's true. It's true. But you can see what I did, you know, is I used its little tri color setting from the top. I plugged in my own headshot. It was already doctored up from a different designer, not AI. And then it came up with this. And then that's. I took this little. I don't know, I found a prompt elsewhere, and this was it. What was it? YouTube thumbnail, bold text. AI versus human creativity. Surprise face, split screen robot, Bright colors. And then that's what we got.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, just for something super fast, I guess, if you're split testing something to do more creatives. But, like, how would you like. Okay, Matt, come on. Let's see. Let's. Let's stretch. Stress your thumbnail. Genius youtubeness. Like, what would you do? What's your process here?

So I still sort of assemble the thumbnails in Canva, but what I would probably do is. Here, let me. Let me steal the screen back here. Yeah, so what I would probably do, put it into create image. Pull in like a headshot. Let me find my headshot again because I closed out of that. And then I'll say, like, make this guy surrounded by bananas.

Is this how you made your thumbnail the other day?

Maybe.

Yeah, Here we go. I like it. Yeah.

Dude. On my little inside baseball here on my YouTube channel, I basically got rid of all of my editors and my thumbnail designers and, like, everybody I was working with and just went back to doing it all myself again because I like. So here's an image of me surrounded by bananas.

Right.

So what I would do is I would download this image at full size.

You look so happy too. Look, it's like you have a banana.

Why wouldn't you be happy? If you have that many bananas, you

would never go hungry, that's for sure. They're perfectly ripe, too.

And then I would go into someplace like Canva. And by someplace like Canva, I would use Canva. I'm also an investor in Canva, so full disclosure, I guess. Okay, so here's my image with me surrounded by bananas inside of Canva. Stretch it out. So let me Let me zoom out on this thing a little bit. Like so stretch it out like this. Right. So now I've got a thumbnail that looks like that. And then I, you know, pull in some text and say like Nano Banana is here, you know, something like that. Put it down at the bottom, Stretch it out so it fills out the whole area.

That's true.

And then a lot of times what I'll do is let me make it slightly smaller and then I'll. Because that doesn't really stand out very well. I'll go up to effects and outline. And then I'd put like a, probably a thick black border outline around it like that, just so it stands out a little bit more and boom. That's how I would do a thumbnail.

I love it.

So compare that thumbnail to the one that you made. I don't know. Like I, I. So I like to use Nano Banana to like get the assets that go into my thumbnail, but I like to sort of compose the thumbnail myself.

That makes sense. Yeah, yeah. And I guess for any like split testing, you know, I've known other creators will take something like what you just generated there, maybe throw that in a Nano banana, spit out a whole bunch of other versions. So you're doing the A B testing, you know, and then.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

That's cool.

All right.

What other. I'm just thinking of other use cases for Nana Banana that seem to be, it would be kind of fun.

Yeah, let's see. Create an infographic. Let me make it an image here. Create an infographic that breaks down the emerging story of anthropic versus the Pentagon.

So this will test how real time its research is as well.

Yeah, let's see if it can actually, you know what else we should test? We should see if it'll actually. I didn't test this in my video, surprisingly. And I normally test this is is it going to reject any sort of trademarks, Right. Like Generate, Mario Generate, you know, Mickey Mouse or whatever.

Look at how fast that was.

That was super fast. So breaking down the anthropic respending story, balancing AI and national defense, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Safety first, rapid adoption. I don't really feel like this is an accurate representation of what's really going on.

I mean, it's bringing in a lot of the aspects of.

Yeah, but it doesn't have any details, really.

Like, not the new. Yeah.

AI safety research. Defining, establishing guardrails for advanced AI defense contracts. Dual use technology. Like you would think there would be something in the image about like these are the two things Anthropic doesn't want. Autonomous weapons. Spying on US citizens doesn't have that. You'd think it would have something about possibly being designated as a supply chain risk. Nothing about that.

Sure.

Right. So I feel like it's not quite there.

We drill it for more like even real time updates. Like I'm just thinking as really is today.

All right, so let me go ahead and try this again here. Make sure you include the most upto date information as of today.

Stress how how far this thing researches. But already like this. Using it in Gemini as opposed to Google Studio seems completely definitely faster.

But again we were trying to generate 4k on that other one. So maybe that was also part of what slowed it down. Yeah, this one I don't think defaults to 4k. Even if I put in the prompt generate in 4k, it won't. All right, so the two non negotiable red lines. No mass surveillance of Americans. No fully autonomous weapons. CEO Dario Amadai Statement. Cannot in good conscience accede to unrestricted use. Concessions offered Missile defense and Cyber defense only. July 2020 this is, this is accurate. Now like this. Nailed it. Breaking news. Ultimatum Unrestricted access or contract termination. Friday deadline expired.

There you go.

The Pentagon U.S. department of Defense Unrestricted all lawful uses. That's their actual wording rationale for demands. National security, threat detection, full range of war fighting. We will not let any company dictate the terms. DoD spokesperson, whatever. So yeah, it, it pulled in the most recent news and created an image about it.

I like that timeline on the bottom. It did as well all the stuff from the past which the past wasn't like last year basically until now. Claude.

Yeah, so we've got. Yeah. July 2025 $200 million contract. July 2025 $200 million. So it sort of duplicated things. May 31st denial contract. Not super familiar with that one. February 2026 Claude used in Maduro raid February 2026 anthropic redirects ultimatum. I mean the raid wasn't in February of 2026 but yeah, that's not accurate. So some of. There's definitely some inaccuracies here. Widespread. They did a pretty good job. I kind of like you're gonna have to fact check it if you're gonna use this any sort of like production work, you'll definitely need to fact check it. Yeah, but it's pretty close.

But can't you go back and edit images as well with the model? Like if we did Call out some of these things on the bottom. Like hey, you gotta duplicate on the bottom. Revise, revise your work.

Yeah, try harder. The dates on the bottom aren't accurate and there is duplicate information down there. Do better.

There you go. Now Jim and I might make a bad image of its representation of you or itself.

I wanted to say I'm sorry, sir.

Never do this again. Ever.

How does this look instead?

Overlord.

All right. May 2025 initial contract award December 2025 proposal submission. January 2026 DoD dead buyers February 2026 chronology of standoff February 26, 2026 anthropic rejects ultimatum. February 27 Pentagon confirms blacklisting.

Is that news that we don't know?

Is that news that we haven't seen yet? Is this, is this breaking news we're finding out on the show? Let me look this up real quick.

Gemini or Nana Banana?

Oh wait, hold on. This is what I found from 19 minutes ago. Trump moves to blacklist anthropic AI from all government work. President Trump announced the US government would blacklist Anthropic in the most consequential and controversial policy decision to date at the intersection of artificial intelligence and national security. The department plans to sever its contract with Anthropic, valued at up to 200 million and require companies it works with to certify they don't use Claude in those workflows. Anthropic will also be barred from all other government work. There will be a six month wind down period to allow the Pentagon, its customers and other government agencies to onboard alternatives to Claude. I am directing every federal agency in the United States government to immediately cease all use of anthropics technology. Trump wrote on Truth Social. So yeah, I guess it's happening dude.

Nano Banana broke the news for us.

Never allow a radical left woke company to dictate how our great military fights and wins wars. But is that really what is happening? Because they're saying no spying on US citizens and also. Okay, anyway, yeah, so we just found that out because an image on Nano Banana was even more up to date than we were.

Yeah, this is blowing my mind, Matt. We just had Nano Banana create an infographic, we pressed it for more research data and it freaking breaking news into

an infographic that is hugely consequential to Anthropic like crazy.

So let's talk about that I guess. I mean this is like evolving our whole plan show but so it said like a six month wind down so obviously there's that I guess makes sense.

But that's going to be pretty consequential to Anthropic if a whole bunch of big enterprise level companies are forced to stop using them because those companies would rather have their government contracts than continue to work with Anthropic.

All right, well, we. We broke the news, even though this is.

Yeah, Gemini broke the news for us because we told it to get more up to date info and it found info from literally 19 minutes ago.

I thought we were trying to go more light hearted with this show. This episode.

It took a turn.

It just brought us right back. Dang it.

Oh, man.

Well, there's some application too, if you're ever breaking news or. Yeah, well, this is one use case of. Of Nano Banana and that's so crazy.

For sure. For sure. So do we want to keep on experimenting? I did. I did tease something with Nano Banana and I feel like we got to close that loop.

Oh, yeah.

I want to see if I could make Super Mario versus Trolls versus Trolls while at Disneyland.

There we go. Let's put all the copyright infringement. I feel like Google's got this covered, but I could be wrong.

We'll see.

Let's see.

I've had it reject stuff a lot of times. It rejects, like, people, right? Like, if you say, like, hey, make an image of Donald Trump shaking hands with Elon, it won't. They look, there you go. I mean, that's not like trolls. Trolls dolls. Those are like trolls that look like they'd be in like Dungeons and Dragons or something.

But we did specify it. I'll give him a break.

But we got Mario and we got Disneyland in the background, so no problems there.

Look at. Everybody's watching. They're like, look at this epic battle. I mean, that looks pretty cool. That's.

But I bet you if I do, like, Donald Trump shakes hands with Dario Amodai.

I knew you were going there.

It's not going to do it. Like, I can almost guarantee it.

Oh, hey.

I don't. I mean that. I don't think that looks like Dario. I like the sign in the background Trouble. Like, like they're running together, running partners.

Now they solve their differences.

I'm actually surprised that it didn't just flat out say, like, no, I can't do that. Honestly.

Would the previous Nano Banana do that?

Yeah, I feel like it would have. I. I've tried to get it to generate, like, images of, like, Sam Altman hugging Elon Musk and it wouldn't used to do it.

Oh, okay.

But what. What you tend to find with a lot of these models too is they'll release them and they have like way less guardrails and then they start to see what people use them for and then they start to like bake the guardrails back in.

It's like seed dance all over again. Right?

Yeah. And I mean you saw that with Sora too, right? Well, there you go. There's Sam and Elon hugging it out.

They look pretty happy. There's. Oh gosh, this is funny. This is, this is diff. Oh shoot. Yeah, I've been noticing on X this week this is not Nano Banana related, but just a lot more these. Of these. Longer. Not longer, but like one was up to 14 minutes. Like a feature film but all generated with AI and you probably saw it. If it's going around, I could pull it up.

Probably. The Door Brothers.

Yeah, that's them. The Door Brothers. Yeah. Yeah.

I used to, I have some, some chats going with them in my DMs. Those guys, I mean it's. I say those guys, but it's one dude who calls himself the Door Brothers.

Oh yeah. That's why I was confused. I'm like, I only see one name here. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the, the brand is called the Door Brothers, but there's like one main guy whose last name is Door.

Right.

But yeah, they make like really crazy AI generated videos and you can't really call them AI Slop because you can tell they put a lot of time and work into making them look really good even though they used AI to. To get the generation out of it.

Dude, I was blown away. I was like, I just watched a 15 minute AI generated video that had a full on storyline, consistent characters. What the Logan? Yeah, the Paul Brothers, we'll call them.

Yeah, were.

Were made appearance had to like sponsorships in. I don't know if we're allowed to share that or what, but I mean, I don't know.

Yeah, well, technically anything that was generated with AI is not copyrightable. So you could show whatever you want.

Good points. Yes, yes. But I just thought I was like man, the level of detail and also just generation in with video and how this is now becoming like a full on almost like a feature film if you wanted it to be. It's like right there and it's just, it's. It's pretty cool.

Yeah, no, those, those videos are definitely crazy. I saw there was one where there was like something they called like the phenomenon or something and like there was some giant weather event and the lady was like rushing out of the Building and, like, trying to get back to her kid. And it said to be continued. Is that what the. And, like, she drove a cyber truck down the road and then crashed her cyber truck and then got picked up by Cash Patel. Like, that was one that was, like, really crazy. It went so viral that Joe Rogan shared it on the. Joe Rogan on an episode of Joe Rogan. And then there was also the one that they did in collaboration with Logan Paul. Logan Paul actually posted it on his YouTube channel.

The. The Door Brothers one. Yeah, yeah. I think he did the voiceover is what they said at the end of it. And, yeah, like, featured himself. Like, this is pretty cool. This is like the collab of. Of. Yeah, these new producers edited prompters. I don't know what you call the, like, the Door Brothers. I'm like, this is opening up a whole genre. I feel like that's. It's going to keep developing, you know, people with their workflows and stuff.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, like, there's a difference between AI Slop and people who used AI to make something really, really impressive looking.

Yeah.

And I find that Door Brothers, they tend to be less on that AI Slop side and more on the like. All right, they used AI and I can tell it's AI, but holy crap, they probably put a ton of time into this. Right? That wasn't just like a couple prompts and slap them together. And look, here's a video. It's like they. They worked on this for a while.

I mean, should we show just like glimmers of this just so we have some visuals?

Yeah, if you want to pull one up.

Yeah, I got it right here. All right, so, yeah, Door Brothers talking about these guys and actually starring Logan Paul in there as well. We will not watch this full thing, but almost 15 minutes long.

Hey, watch it.

Oh, I'm so screwed. No, please, I'm not.

One of you.

It. Do your face. Show your face.

Thank you for saving me.

Who.

Who are you? The good guy.

Okay, great. Yeah. Goes on for a while.

Yeah, that's hilarious. Superhero Logan Paul. It's time to squash him.

Do you want me to get him for you, sir?

Not you, you fool.

Get me my coffee instead. Oh, yeah, that's pretty fun. We'll link that. Hilarious. Yeah, it's pretty cool. But yeah. And then you have these guys are. And they're at the end.

Jake Paul with his broken jaw.

Yeah. I won't spoil the ending because it has a storyline. So. Yeah, the other thing, I thought that was kind of Funny. And was it this one here?

Oh, yeah, yeah. By 2030, almost 80% of people

had lost their jobs.

They had no money, no purpose, but they had a lot of time on their hands. The less people actually did physical work, the more they wanted to appear as if they did. What if we could use the energy of humans to power the machines that took away their jobs? ENERGEM solved our need for energy. And your need for purpose, man, where

are we going in the world? I'm a little. After I watched that, I was like, oh, my God, no, this is.

This is reality. This is where it's all going. And I like how all of the actual tech CEOs are all fat and old.

Well, yeah, all the billionaires are, because

they're not working out well.

They don't need to produce the energy. It's us. Look at. That's the energy.

Yeah.

Oh, boy. Yeah, I saw that. And I'm just like, oh, my God. Laughing but also frightened at the same time.

Oh, man. No.

Yeah.

Anyway, like. Yeah, no, I feel like there's. There's some reality that. I mean, we talked in a previous episode. I don't think you were on the episode yet with us, but we talked in a previous episode about how, like, there's a site where your Clodbot can go and hire humans to do work for them.

Yeah, that's. I have seen that. Yeah.

So, you know, like, it's not too far outside of reality, honestly, this.

Is there anything else on the Nano Banana side of things? Because I was just blown away with. Yeah, seeing Nano Banana, seeing these videos starting to get published, and they're like, picking up steam, like millions of views for each of those. I'm like, I just see. We're just going to see more of this developing. Like, people getting super creative. What Google Flow. We don't need to show it off, but people want to explore. Right. Like, that's a Google platform that Nano Banana 2 is baked into.

Yeah, yeah. So that's the video platform. Right. Where you can use VO and stuff as well. But the starting images now can use Nanobanana 2 and it uses zero credits. So essentially your starting image could be free. Yeah. So inside of Flow, you can use Nano Banana for free instead of Gemini, you can use it for free. If you're using it over on AI Studio, you do have to connect an API key and pay, but pretty much anywhere else you can use it for free, it seems like.

Got it. All right, so moving on. What? Last week we were talking about agents, and now this year it seems like the year of agents becoming useful and now they're being baked into almost every application that we're natively using. And let's just show off some of these. I think this would be kind of a rapid fire thing where there's just been so many different releases, some are on different paid tiers that might not want to pay for, but it feels like it's all going to come down. Obviously everything comes down in price in this whole AI world and becomes more available.

Yeah. So I think the most interesting one that came out this week is Perplexity Computer. This one is like Perplexity's version of an Open claw. Right. It runs in the cloud, it can like use any of the tools that you want it to use. So it can access your email, your notion, your Slack, pretty much any tool you needed to access it seems like they're giving access to. But because it's Perplexity and it's not one of the foundation model makers, it can actually use different large language models based on what you need it to use it for. Right. So I think it's using Claude Sonnet as like its core model, but it also can use GPT 5.2, it can also use Grok, it can also use Gemini, it can use VO 3.1, it can use Nano Banana, it can actually go and access any of the tools. It's model agnostic and so if it needs a long context window, I think it goes and uses Gemini. If it needs to do some like math or something, it'll go and use GPT. I'm getting the exact uses wrong, but depending on what you ask it to do, it is going to decide the model that's best at doing that thing and go use that model for you. And why this one is interesting is this one's all in the cloud and one of the things we're seeing with OpenClaw is it's a big sort of security risk. Right. There's people have had issues with, you know, their, their things getting hacked and their API keys stolen. And you know, in one story here we've got Summer Yu, who is works at Safety and Alignment at Meta's Super Intelligence. Well, she put out this tweet. Nothing humbles you like telling your Open Claw confirm before acting and watching it speedrun. Deleting your inbox. I couldn't stop it from my phone. I had to run to my Mac Mini like I was defusing a bomb and we could see that it's like it just goes through and is Checking how many. How many emails are left. More old stuff. Get the remaining. It's basically going through and deleting. And she's saying, don't do that. Stop doing that. Don't do anything. Stop Open Claw. Like, basically yelling it. And it's funny because Peter Steinberger, the guy who created OpenClaw, says if you just do slash stop, it'll stop it. But she basically had to run to her computer and get it to stop doing that. Well, that's, you know, exhibit number one of why more managed agents are probably a better idea if you don't totally know how to use this stuff, because something like openclaw relies on you kind of knowing what you're doing a little bit. Like, you kind of got to understand how to use your terminal a little bit. You kind of got to understand how a lot of the API keys and things like that are working in the background. And if you don't understand that stuff, you should probably avoid tools like OpenClaw.

Yeah.

Perplexity Computer, on the other hand, is like, look, we'll handle all of the complicated stuff. You just tell us what you need done, we'll pick the right model, we'll tell it what tool to use, and we'll just make sure it gets done.

Yeah, that's. I mean, I know you've done Open Claw or Claude Bot, whatever it was called in the very beginning, but, like, I have. Like, I was so close to jumping. I'm like, you know what? Hold on. Like, I'm still actively learning all the little details because the last thing I want to do, because I've seen too many of these things now where you give it access to too much stuff or it just starts doing things and I'm like, the last thing I want to do is just start. Yeah, just. Just get myself in some trouble. However, that looks like I don't even know. It could be anything. So I like the idea of Perplexity. When I saw this go live the other day, I was like, yeah, all right. Yeah.

Well, the, the downside of Perplexity Computer is that right now it is only available on their Max Plan. Let's see. Yeah. So available on web for Max subscribers today. Coming soon to Pro and Enterprise. Right. The max plan costs 200amonth or $2,000 a year to use. So you got to be on like, their higher end more plan to actually use it. But it. You could pretty much tell it to go do anything and it'll go and just run in the background and build whatever you ask it to Go build and handle the actions you want it to go handle. Notion rolled out a new AI agent this week. Haven't had a chance to play with that one yet either. We also have Manus, which is an AI agent platform that recently got acquired by Meta, also trying to do something very similar. Cursor rolled out an agent this week as well, where you can tell it what you want it to go develop for you and you can set it to go and work for like 10 hours and it will just go like while you sleep and build something for you. And the whole time. The cool thing that I like about Cursor is the whole time it records what it's doing. Like it actually opens up a virtual machine, uses a computer behind the scenes and it actually records video of everything it does. So when you wake up the next morning, let's say it worked for 10 hours, you can go back and watch the video of everything it did on that virtual computer for you to see if like maybe you can spot it making mistakes or doing something you didn't want it to do, which is really, really interesting. Yeah, but yeah, lots and lots and lots of like agents actually becoming useful.

Yeah, useful. And just honorable mentions that I think Microsoft Copilot Task Drop something cowork from Claude was adding some more features to automate things and I think.

Yeah, yeah. So the Microsoft Tasks thing, they sort of teased it, they announced that it's coming, but they haven't really given access yet. The Microsoft or sorry, the anthropic Cowork thing, they basically added the ability to do like scheduled tasks so you can tell it like Every day at 2pm Check my email and write up draft replies, but don't send them. I'll go through and decide what to send or not. Or, you know, every Monday morning at 9am Do a scan of all the AI news that came out this week and send me a message in Slack to tell me that, you know, tell me what news came out. Right. So you could do like scheduled actions. That's kind of a new feature to the Cowork in Anthropic. But yeah, I mean like everything is kind of turning into like useful agents now. And I was talking about this a couple years ago of like prompt engineering being this very sort of transient concept of like you're not really going to need to know how to do prompt engineering. Eventually you're just going to tell your computer what you want and it's going to go do the prompt engineering behind the scenes and go figure out what needs to be Done. And then go and do the things and use the tools and even possibly make the tools that it needs to accomplish the tasks. And we're kind of there.

I think we're there. Yeah. Like, I don't think I've overthought a prompt in a long time. It's just like if you give it enough context, especially just like something basic like chatting through Claude, have it create the prompt from whatever the heck you just did, and then that can become a recurring thing. Plug it into a coworker elsewhere.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's getting to a point now where you can kind of treat like your AI agents and your AI chats the way you would treat an employee. Like you give them instructions of. Here's what I want from you. Here's my expected outcome. Here's the tools you have access to. Go do it. Let me know when you're done. Right. And it can just go do the thing.

Yeah, it's cool. It's just has you thinking and then speaking and creating and closing the gap as much as possible. Well, cool. I'm sure we're gonna get more agent stuff coming up next week and beyond. So let's move to the final thingamajigger

and your alma matter. This is your work. Alma matter. Alma matter.

Yeah. It was my first official real job. I had some other gigs before that. The good old Burger King, the Burger Lounge, the BK Lounge. BK Lounge. That is. Thank you, Dane Cook. Breaking it. It's. This is bringing back bad memories. Just gonna say that. But I. With this technology, I probably would have been fired very quickly because now Burger King is surveilling all their own. No, it's not really surveillance. It's like an over. Basically, they have this thing called Patty that is in the ear of. I don't know if it's every employee, but it's this little headset that's demonstrated. I just want to show you that the video. Cause I think it's interesting. Oh, here it is. Here it is. So I'm going to pull this up. It's only like a few minutes, but this is an official Burger King video. And I'm sure this will roll out or maybe already has in some other. Some other places. Let me make sure.

Cool.

Yeah, Here it goes.

Hi there. Good morning, Patty. Looks like we had a great breakfast shift today. Is there anything that needs my immediate attention? The team's friendliness scores this morning were the highest this week. We are running low on Diet Coke in the freestyle machine. Thank you, Patty. I'll Take care of it right away.

Freestyle machine.

Looks like the women's restroom needs cleaning. That's very helpful, Patty. I'll get to it right away.

Hey, Patty, can you remind me how

to build an ultimate steakhouse Whopper?

Of course. The ultimate steakhouse whopper includes one 100% flame grill beef patty on a toasted sesame seed bun, three rings of creamy peppercorn aioli, two slices of Swiss cheese, three half slices of bacon, one scoop of mushrooms, and is topped with six onion rings.

Make me hungry.

Great job so far today, team. We're one order away from hitting our upsell goal.

What can I get for you today?

Hi, yes, I'd like a Whopper meal with large fries and a Coke, please.

Sounds good. So I have one classic Whopper meal with a large fry and a large Coke. Would you like to add a cinnamon apple pie to that?

Yeah, I'd love that. Upsell Target reached Upsell.

Hey, Patty, I'm about to clean the shake machine.

Awesome.

Would you like me to remove shakes from our digital channels until you are done cleaning?

Yes, thank you.

Shakes have been removed from our menu boards, third party delivery kiosks, and the BK app. I will add them back as soon as you are done cleaning the machine.

Thanks, Patty.

And while I have you, can you remind me of the procedures to clean the shake machine?

Of course.

Hi, Patty. We just sold our last cinnamon apple pie.

Thanks for letting me know. Would you like me to remove them from our menu until tomorrow's shipment arrives?

Yes, please.

Okay. Apple pies have been removed from our menu boards, third party delivery kiosks and BK app. I will add them back as soon as tomorrow's shipment arrives.

Thank you, Patty.

Hey, Patty, Raul just called in sick for his ship tomorrow morning. Sorry to hear Raul is sick. Looks like Maria is available for that shift. Okay, thank you. I'll call her right now.

Patti, why don't you call her for me?

I thought the same thing. I'm like, well, BK's that good, Patti. Then just do it. Just get Rahul in the door.

Patty's hungover and doesn't want to come in. What do I do?

So look at this thing. Yeah, AI drive throughs just yet. So it's building chatbots into employee headsets. But it doesn't seem like the brand's ready to widely launch AI drive thrus just yet. Something like chains like McDonald's, Wendy's and Taco Bell have a template did.

We're tinkering with it with pretty hilarious results. Oftentimes, if you've Ever seen those clips?

I have seen a little bit of those. Yeah. Obviously, you know, it seemed. I don't know if I was working there, I guess training could probably be cut down really quickly, I would imagine. Yeah. Yeah. Really walking you through how to do your job while you're.

Yeah. The hilarious thing and the thing that I think most people are kind of honing in on is the fact that it's counting how many times you say please and thank you, and then it's giving you, like, a sort of like a score on, like, how pleasant you are. So, I mean, it's like, to me, it feels like only a matter of time before, like, Patty is making the firing decisions. Like, hey, last week we wanted you to say we noticed you talked to 30 people but only said thank you to 15 of them. That's unacceptable to us. Like, I see that as, like, the future of where this all goes. Like, come on. Like, the people who own the franchises want the actual employees in bk, no offense, Joe, to be as brainless as possible and know exactly what they're supposed to do or, like, they want the AI to make the decisions for them and they don't want anybody there to actually have to think.

I didn't spend a lot of time there, Matt. I did have fun. It still looks roughly the same, unfortunately. So that's. Yeah.

Not the one you worked at, though, because that's a habit Burger.

That's true. It's upgraded tremendously, I guess. Yeah. I read here that Patty the AI assistant is powered by OpenAI ads and 500 restaurants already and rolling out to all 7,000 by the end of this year. Oh, yeah.

It's a good thing they didn't use anthropics because they'd probably have to cut ties because I bet people in the military buy Burger King.

They're probably on base.

It all comes back to this anthropic story. Right? There's so. It's so consequential across the board, I'm telling you.

All right, well, I don't know where this goes, Matt. I think next week is going to be just as busy and. And we'll learn way more.

So if you are listening in and you want to know where the world. If. I mean, if the world still exists next week by the episode goes live, you know, we'll. We'll have all the updates for you, but if you like stuff like this, make sure you like and subscribe to this channel and we'll make sure this kind of stuff keeps showing up for you. Thanks again. For tuning in, everybody. Really, really appreciate you hanging out with us. And yeah, it's been a blast talking about what's going on and what is scaring the crap out of us right now. But yeah, thanks again for more. Hopefully we'll see you in the next one.

Bye. Bye, Sam.