Jony Ive Joins OpenAI Analysis, Google I/O Reactions | Keith Rabois, Dan Shipper, Reggie James, TJ Parker, Ben Hylak

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Today is Thursday, May 22, 2025. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have a great show for you today, folks. Let's pull up what we're going through. We're talking about reactions to Google. I o still Joni I've joining OpenAI. We're going to break that down. Anthropic just dropped Claude 4 and is blowing out benchmarks. It's AI week on TVPN and we got a bunch of great guests. Dan Schiffer, Jay Parker, Reggie James KE your boy.

You created the first entirely AI ad.

I did.

Wrote a live stream.

I did. Should we play it on the stream? It's my profile. Did you already share it into the group so the boys can find it? Or should we? Or should I send it in? I've been having a ton of fun with VO3. I upgraded to the super expensive plan. It's worth every dime even to just get a few funny 8 second videos out of this thing. The fun fidelity is remarkable and it just looks awesome. It looks awesome. Yeah. Let's play it. I don't know if we have sound but let's play it. Because I added music but maybe, I don't know, the music might be copyrighted. Let's see if it handles it. Okay. Play this. Play it from the beginning. There we go. That's us.

I guess that was a close one.

Yeah.

Too close.

In the yellow Ferrari.

CNBC is attacking us.

Yeah. They don't want us to find.

They don't want us to podcast.

They don't want us.

Okay.

Being followed.

We're bringing media to Hollywood.

Helicopter.

The CNBC convoy.

Okay.

Oh, now you're fighting gorillas versus 100 gorillas.

Successful as expected.

Oh, and then the rampant. Nice.

Oh, how about you switch your business to ramp.com.

Time is money save both easy to use. Corporate cards, bill payment, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place again on ramp.com. anyway, lots of fun with that. I'm having such a good time.

This is going to be a fun guest lineup. You already covered it a little bit, but we have a great group. Raboy coming on the legend, the myth. Dan Shipper from every who raised around earlier this week and has a lot of thoughts on Anthropic's new release. And then TJ Parker is getting the band back together. Can't wait for that pillpack band. With a new company called General medicine. And then Reggie James, Hip city Reg is going to be coming on and Talking about Johnny Ives.

I can't wait for that.

I think he's got a big announcement as well, and I am excited for all of it. So should we talk about. Should we. Newsmax, John.

Let's Newsmax. Let's go through Google I O. Obviously, this happened on Tuesday. It's now Thursday, but Ben Thompson's done some analysis, breaking it down, thinking about what the implications are for the stock. I mean, the stock popped a ton. And it seems like Google's on this weird cadence where it takes them a full year to really release a bunch of stuff altogether through these big keynotes. And they're more on a waterfall cycle than just dropping random stuff. But clearly every serious AI company is thinking about how they're scheduling releases. It's not a coincidence that Microsoft build happened on Monday. Tuesday we got Google I O. Wednesday we got open AI's acquisition of IO, which is hilarious.

Which is funny because I think Lulu called this out. But if you search IO on X, you just get a bunch of stuff about Johnny and Sam.

Sam, absolute dog on the SEO.

He's an absolute dog, John.

Yeah, but that's happened a couple times where Deep Research. Deep Seek, I believe it was, wasn't it, that deep SEQ came out and then Sam dropped Deep Research and so the deep keyword kind of came back. But again, this all comes from de learning and so you never know. Anyway, let's just to recap on what actually happened at Google IO, because we talked to the Google folks and there was so much going on, it was hard to kind of boil it down into one thing. I was watching the Verge does these YouTube recaps where they cut the entire keynote down. And typically when they do Apple, it's like five minutes. Apple WWC in five minutes. Because it's just like new iPad, new iPhone, new Apple watch, blah, blah, blah. Microsoft builds cut down was 15 minutes. Google, I always like 30 minutes because there's so much stuff. So I really think just the volume of announcements was pretty high. So from Reuters, Google said on Tuesday it would put artificial intelligence into the hands of more web surfers while teasing a $250 a month subscription for its AI power users. That's me, baby. I'm on the 250 plan.

Isn't it 500 and you can get it for 250.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a little misinformation here. Yeah, they're going to be ramping that up. So they're charging me 250 for the first couple months, but I opted into the 500 plan. So they're going to ramp me up immediately. As soon as it gets a little.

Bit of 20th in the future. Everybody's paying Google $1,000 a month and just begging like, please bring back the ads. Like, we're sorry forever.

Yeah, yeah. Complaining. Oh, the Internet was bad. Oh, I just want to pay. No, I was thinking the other day.

I got an email from Google workspace saying, like, we're raising prices.

Yeah.

And I was kind of laughing because they can, I think so many businesses are so dependent on Google workspace that they could like, kind of overnight raise it to like $1,000 a month per person. Like probably, you know, see a little churn, but not like crazy amount.

No way. It's so hard to churn. I mean, this is the way we were talking about with deal and rippling. It's like deals in like the most dramatic spot possible. But do I really want to rip out my payroll software right now? That's a tall order. I'm not on deal. But if you're on deal, the example, just turn the other eye.

You have, you have, you know, you know, Pirelli tires and Pirelli gets caught spying on Michelin.

Yeah.

Are you going to, like, take your car into the, like, shop?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, let me pay. I got to get a bunch of money. No, you're just going to be like, oh, we're. The Pirelli CEO is different than the Bridgestone CEO or whatever. Anyway, there was a flurry of demos, including smart glasses, which I'm excited to try the NREL smart glasses. And then they're also doing some audio only smart glasses which have been very popular with meta the Ray Bans. They've adopted a tone of increased urgency since the rise of generative AI, challenged the tech company's longtime stronghold of organizing and retrieving information on Internet. And this is like the AI moment should just be Google's moment. Right. Their mission is to organize all of the information in the world. And LLMs literally just do that. It just compress down all the information. Yeah, it's like the perfect Google product. But of course, they have some business model positioning challenges. They can't just give up the golden goose on day one and go all in on generative AI. But they're taking it more and more seriously every day. So. Major update. The company said consumers across the United States can now switch Google search into AI mode. Showcased in March as an experiment open to test users, the feature dispenses with the web standard fare in favor of computer generated Answers for complicated queries. And what's interesting is about that is that who are we talking to? Yesterday that was saying like the genius of Google is that there was just one button. I forget who we were talking to, but basically this idea that like Google had just one button, you know, search and then they had the I'm feeling lucky button. But it was such a simple interface. Like, I don't love the idea of adding a switch. Yeah, it feels like a very like a half measure. It's like, is AI the future? If it's the future, then Google search should just be AI mode all the time. Or is AI mode not the future, in which case maybe you shouldn't even do it and I should just go to ChatGPT when I want AI mode and I should go to Google or I should go to the Gemini app for. For that experience. If they're distinct.

1. One thing is for sure, consumers have historically, you know, imagined products for one use case. Right. Like snaps. People still use Snapchat for sending pictures to each other, even though that functionality is like super embedded in.

Yeah.

Instagram and other apps now and so. But yeah, I think it's always tough.

When you're, when you're saying AI is the future, but we don't want to get rid of the thing. That's not the future. We like that thing too. So we're going to, we're going to have our KPO too.

The scale that Google's at, they can't do. They could have a really good lm. No, they could have a really good LM ad product.

Yeah.

And just if you were starting to introduce it to 1%, 2% of your users, it could dramatically impact revenue because they've spent decades, you know, optimizing.

Yeah.

Search results. Right. So.

So Google also announced an Ultra Plan for 250 provides users with higher limits on AI and early access to experimental tools like Project Mariner, an Internet browser extension that can automate keystrokes and mouse clicks. Somehow I missed that entirely. There were so many. There were so many launches. I completely missed Project Mariner. Excited to try that out because I guess I have access and Deep think a version of its top shelf Gemini model that is more capable of reasoning through complicated tasks. I'm excited to talk to check out that I've been using deep research a lot. Definitely want to, want to test drive deepthink. Pichai told reporters that the rise of generative AI was not at the full expense of online search. This feels very far from a zero sum moment, said Pichai the kind of use cases we are serving in search is dramatically expanding because of AI. First off, and I mean to be clear like this, this is what happened with computers. Like we went from the desktop to the laptop to the phone and most people have a laptop and a phone and it was not completely disruptive. Even though you can do everything that you can do on a laptop, pretty much on a phone, people wound up dual using. And so it's totally, it's not, it's not as much of a dire issue that I think I was making earlier. So Ben Thompson's dropping the analysis. Says first off, my compliments to Reuters for this write up. The amount of things announced and pre announced or envisioned were pretty overwhelming And I'd say my compliments to Ben Thompson for this write up about Reuters write up because we are now three layers of reaction. Deep.

Love it.

It's the best. This was, to be sure, terribly impressive. We already knew that Gemini 2.5 is awesome and the company's Imagen 4 image model and VO3 video model were significant leaps forward from just a few months ago. I wrote In December when VO2 came.

I called it off Air 2. VO3 feels significant because it seems inevitable that VO4 will be almost indistinguishable from reality. You might have a hallucination here or there, but some of the videos that we've been seeing, like it just needs some slight tweaks and it just looks like.

Yeah, it has, it still has a specific look to it. I haven't really played around too much with trying to really break it out of kind of its default AI vibe. I'm sure you can, but it's really, really impressive and I think I'm, you know, the, the, the memes are cool. We're in kind of a studio ghibli moment for VO3 videos. I think we're seeing a lot of these on. I'm interested to see where it goes more practically. I mean I noticed that when the Sam Altman and Joni I've photo dropped, didn't see a single Ghibli version of that in my feed. And that was like the most Ghibli ifiable photo ever of Johnny kind of leaning on his side and I actually.

The place that I see Ghibli most now is in people's profile pictures.

Yeah, people like that. And I actually Ghibli'd the. The photo myself. The Sam and. And Jony I've. And I was, I don't know if anyone can see that But I don't know, it's a Ghibli of the photo. And I was just kind of like, this isn't worth posting. Like, there's nothing special here. Like, we get it. You can do the cartoon filter. And so it's more about how do you use that tool? And, and now I've been using it to design. I mean, I'm looking through my, My recent, my. My recent. Although on day one of the Ghibli drop, it was a lot of just fun Ghibli's. Eventually it became, you know, okay, make a storybook for my son. Do the Gigachad meme on everyone who's been on. Invest like the best. Make a bunch of ramp ads. Of course, do a bunch of stuff with like testing. Make a bunch of people bodybuilders. Do some set design for us. It's like a, like my use of images and ChatGPT has morphed from oh, cool. The studio Ghibli thing is the meme to how can I practically use this to do cool stuff like making merch ideas for us and stuff like that. So I'm excited for VO3 to kind of get into that mode. It's very clear that it is extremely technically impressive, but it is just a tool. And so we have yet to see the VO3 Harry Potter Balenciaga moment. Something that's truly viral. Not just because it's impressive that it's an AI image.

That.

That joke that the standup comedian that doesn't go viral unless you are like, it's AI, Right? And you're like, wow, it's so impressive. It's AI. I can't believe that. That's why I'm liking it. I'm excited for when someone creates something that would go viral if you had shot it practically. And it's so good that, yeah, they used AI, but it's just as the.

Breakthrough moment for me was seeing a like man on the street style interview that was made with VO and realizing that I could call it out as AI if I saw it independently, if it wasn't being, you know, if the creator wasn't stating that it was made with VO3. But you can imagine a man on the street interview going viral and creating this like 15 minutes of fame moment for somebody that doesn't exist.

I mean, that's what happened with the Pope. The dripped out Pope. Remember that? That actually went viral. People thought the Pope had this puffy jacket and it was midjourney image. And so. And so, yes, it's Like, I mean, tools here, people. It's great.

The Pope had a white G wagon that he would drive around on.

Yeah, yeah.

And so it wasn't that unbelievable that he would have a white, you know, puffer jacket, coat.

Yeah. And so let's go through VO2V03 a little bit more. Ben Thompson has written about this before. He says the reason to focus on VO2, however, is not just that it strikes me as a seminal moment in generative AI history, but that it also is the most powerful manifestation of the advantages that Google has in this space. Think about the three pillars of generative AI algorithms. Google, of course, invented the transformer, but it certainly seems that likely that the company figured out something important in terms of maintaining coherence, which I complained about with Sora. And we saw this with Sora when we, when we ran the same test in VO3 and Sora, the Sora generation was a lot. There were way more hallucinations and it was way trippier. Whereas you can see, you know, it's like it's a Ferrari, it's a yellow Ferrari in our little video. And it, it remains a yellow Ferrari the entire time. And it stays. And, and, and the TBPN text stays tracked onto the car the entire time. And so there's something algorithmically, potentially that's happening there. And that's what Ben's highlighting then, in terms of compute. Google is training and running inference on its own TPUs, which are increasingly developed in conjunction with the model. Jeff Dean said it interesting.

I didn't really know that they were TPU's in production.

Oh, yeah, these have been in production for years just on general parallelized computing. So you could do recommendation algorithms or, you know, any sort of just machine learning and deep learning on it. Before the transformer revolution, they knew the TPUs would be valuable and they've been investing in them for a lot. But what's interesting is that, is that the VO3 model is very clearly designed and trained and inferenced, all on TPUs. And so there might be some sort of compounding advantage there.

The TPUs are so great. Why are you rate limiting somebody paying $500 a month?

That's true. They haven't made enough of them. That's probably why, because, you know, Apple's probably getting more line time at TSMC and Jensen's probably getting a lot of line time on tsmc.

And then also imagine Jensen gets a little bit of line time.

Yeah. And then also just the fact that, you know, Google has been investing a ton in capex, but they also have Google Cloud platform. They also have to serve higher value apps and services. They have to serve you to get.

Better at serving me, as I know.

I know me VO3 models. That, that should be their prior, that should be their primary.

If you're a Google, if you're a Google user, put a support ticket in and just say, hey, targeting has been lacking lately. Just try to push it. Try to get better. Yeah, that's my only request. Monetize me, you know, harder.

Yeah. So Jeff Dean, one of the top AI scientists at Google and one of the greatest programmers of all time. Are you familiar with Jeff Dean? This guy. So if you search Jeff Dean jokes, you get this consolidated list of Jeff Dean facts. And they're all Chuck Norris style jokes about Jeff Dean because he's such a legend and so says compilers. Don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers. Jeff Dean builds his code before committing it, but only to check for compiler and linker bugs. Jeff Dean once failed the Turing test when he correctly identified the 203rd Fibonacci number in less than, less than a second. There's a whole bunch of these that are just ridiculous. Jeff Dean's keyboard has two keys, 1 and 0. He just programs in binary, goated. When Jeff Dean listens to MP3, he just cats them to dev.tsp and does the decoding in his head. Basically just like matrix mode. There's a bunch of these funny things. Jeff Dean knows the last digit of PI and Jeff Dean mines bitcoins in his head. There's a bunch of other good ones in here. He can lossly compress random data. All these things are like jokes about like computationally impossible things to do. But Jeff Dean can of course do them. So he's a legend.

He's pretty good at leak.

Last one, we talked about this yesterday. But data, data is shaping up to be the biggest obstacle for model development going forward. The single greatest untapped resources likely video generally and YouTube in particular, which Google own. I certainly imagine this was an important resource for the development of VO2.

Yeah, it's so.

It's wild.

This, this advantage is not been talked about enough. There's so many of these sort of video foundation model startups that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars. And yes, I'm sure they get access to YouTube data content in different ways, but ultimately it is. Nobody has, nobody has an edge that you could go do deals with every single major Hollywood studio and still not have anywhere near the edge as Google does. Just by having a constant net new stream of video content.

Anyways, we got to look at the total data size of all YouTube videos compared to just the text on the Internet. I want to, I want to really know like, how much more data is there on YouTube or is it roughly the same? We're going to dig into that soon. But anyway, Ben Thompson continues and says, google, I o, is this on steroids? But at the same time, I'm not sure. And I'm not sure if this was because of the sheer quantity of an announcement. I came away feeling less impressed than I should have. I decided I needed to take the dog for a, for a walk. I wanted, by the way, to tie these videos together into something more coherent. They're Both made using VO3 and Google Flow, the new product Google announced to utilize veo. Unfortunately, it's extremely hard to use and very buggy. Above and beyond the general challenges of linking together disparately generated videos while retaining coherence, this, in the end makes the point I ultimately came out, I came to on my walk. Google Flow was arguably the most archetypal, archetypal, archetypical product announcement at Google IO. But while VO3 is jaw dropping, Flow was pretty disappointing. And this was my experience. Like I went to Flow on my phone and it basically told me, no. It was like, you're on an iPhone, you're a second class citizen. Get out of here, get out of here. We're optimized for desktop and it's like for a startup. I get like Instagram started on iPhone and then eventually launched on Android. I get that. But it's like you're Google. Like you can figure out how to serve your web app in Safari on iOS. Like, I don't understand what's going on. It just makes you look bad. It doesn't really make me like Google so much that I'm like, oh yeah, I should get an Android phone now because like, clearly it would be a better experience.

And then also use Flow, this app.

That I never tried. No, if that's the development paradigm, I'm out. If you're going to try and twist my arm into using your software, I'm less likely to use it. That's my take on it. And then they also funnel you into this. Like, hey, do you just want to watch a bunch of videos? Like, you definitely don't want to set the GPUs on fire by training one of these things. You don't want a custom video. Why don't you just have one of these that we have off the shelf.

I love that. I love that content or the copy there too. It's flow is a tool built for and by creatives. And it's like, well, YouTube in many ways destroyed the film industry. Right?

Did it?

I would argue that it did just because it created an entirely new library of content that didn't require going to the movies. Right?

Yeah.

I mean there's like the videos would have come on demand, but it introduced massive, massive competition for people's attention and that just hurts the movie industry.

Yeah, I wonder about that. That's probably right. That seems reasonable. I don't know. Yeah. Anyway, I need to think about that more. If YouTube is the, is the, the.

Reason that, I mean not YouTube in particular, but yeah, just the Internet.

Yeah, certainly like, like easier technology. Like obviously there's going to be demand for video in a theater. If you can only watch video in a theater, as soon as you can watch it on tv, that creates competitive pressure. As soon as you can watch it on your phone, that creates more competitive pressure. YouTube's a part of that. Probably. Like I'd make it like 10% of the reason, but yeah, but yeah, totally valuable, totally viable argument to make. So Ben Thompson was a little under. Underwhelmed. He said, more generally, the, the generative AI pillars that I wrote about last December, the areas that Google dominates notably don't include any generative AI products. And that more than anything was my take. My, my Google I O takeaway. Google's technology is incredible, but I'm still not convinced this company can make compelling products. Indeed, my critique of the presentation as a whole was how unfocused and random it felt. Google's inability to prioritize and set a coherent narrative actually diminished just how incredible their advances are.

Yeah, I mean it certainly was an opportunity to come out and just focus on, yeah, we have a bunch of cool experiments running. But like here's how we're going to actually have a ultra coherent strategy around the search bar and how that is going to interact with AI and what are our long term plans?

They almost should do more keynotes less frequently and just say it's Notebook LM day and we're just going to take over the Internet with Notebook LM and then it's VO3 day and we're making VO3.

Same advice, same advice we would give to founders that are like, I'm going to have a big announcement, I'm going to drop four things. We hired this executive, we had a new website, we have a new product release and we have a fundraiser.

I'm still so puzzled by the VO3 launch. Just because like your Google, you have to figure out how much it costs to generate one of these. It's an eight second video. I understand that you're setting the GPUs on fire, but what is the energy cost? What is the depreciation cost on these TPUs? They must know how much it costs to generate a single VO3 8 second video. Is it $10? Is it $100? Like there should be an auction based model, essentially like what they do for ads. And then they should have a queue and they should say, hey, right now the GPUs are fully utilized, we have no capacity. And so it's going to be $10 for this next generation and you're gonna have to wait one hour. But if you pay $100, you can get it in the next minute or five minutes. I think part of it can actually meet the demand where it is instead of like you're on a $250 plan, but you can only use it a few times a day. And then, yeah, it's a weird experience.

But part of it is it's basically a research preview. I don't think a lot of VO3 content right now is actually going to.

Be a consumer app that they're advertising on the iOS app store. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't care that they called it a research preview at Alpha Beta Gamma Delta.

Who cares? They're selling an expensive toy right now. Yeah, it's like, it's like a buggy toy.

You're taking my money. And I think the biggest thing is the ads. Like the fact that if I go to the App Store and I search for, for Gemini, like it pops up and says, create videos with Gemini, make and share videos with gemini, advanced with VO2. And like you click there and it's like it's advertising. Like if it's a research preview and you don't have the capacity, don't advertise it. Yeah, say, hey, we're at capacity, we're maxed out on demand. Anyway, going back to search, Ben Thompson continues and says the one clear exception was a smack dab in the middle of the keynote, which focused on search. I don't think it's an accident that Google's best and most important product had the clearest presentation and vision. CEO Sundar Pichai started with a brief overview of AI. Brief overview of AI overviews, he says. So this is Sundar talking. It's another exciting Example of how AI is advancing our timeless mission to organize the world's information. Yes, let's hear it for organizing the world's information. We love that Google does that to make it universally acceptable, accessible and useful. No product embodies our mission more than Google search. It's the reason we started inventing AI decades ago and how we can deliver its benefits to benefits.

Hey, just to be clear, we invented AI.

Yeah, they did.

I know.

Now make it production our Gemini model.

It is funny though because talking about these AI overviews, I just searched in Google. What did Google announce at I O? And it doesn't even have an AI overview. Overview of that.

The self referential stuff is particularly bad and I think it's because of like data and security. Like Ouroboros is like the fact that I can open up Gemini and I can ask, hey, just, I just want to know like, am I paying for this on this account right now? And it's like, I have no idea. I wouldn't possibly look at your own account within Google. It's like I understand privacy, but like this is actually important to me. I want to know if I can access the latest model. You can even ask a Google model, what model are you? And they never tell you because they're just like, I couldn't possibly do that. It would be a violation of something or other. And you know, it's just like some sort of security thing that got wrapped up in like 20 layers of lawyers and stuff. And they're like, don't leak the, don't leak the customer's information into the LLM to let them know that they are paying or they're not or like the LLM should be selling me on upgrading, you know, if I, if I'm not upgraded.

This is interesting. I just searched for stuff about OpenAI and Anthropic. It would not give an AI overview. But then I searched about TVPN and it gives an AI overview and it misspells my name.

Oh weird.

Which is interesting. Adds the E. Adds an E. Never done that.

Yeah, four letter name tracking. In the lineage of Apple CEOs, you got Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Jordy Hayes. Potentially.

I'm starting my run.

Starting your run. One great example of progress is our AI overview. Since launching at I O last year, they've scaled to over 1.5 billion users every month. Let's hear it for that. In over 200 countries and territories. As people use AI overviews, we see they are happier with their results and they search more often. I completely agree The AI overviews have been very good. I know that there's some, some hallucinations, but in general I've enjoyed that.

Beautiful thing from an ad product standpoint is that Google still gets all their ad, they're still serving ads everywhere. It just so happens that they're not, you know, especially on desktop.

Yeah, I know. I, I'm, I'm, I'm very, very satisfied with, with the iteration there. The question is just like about an.

Open AI experience where you query ChatGPT and you get just like exactly what you're looking for and there's just like display ads like everywhere. No, I know it's not going to happen, but that's effectively what Google is showing is possible when you can just build ads around the result that the person actually wants.

Yeah. AIO reviews are also one of the strongest drivers of growth for visual searches in Google lens. Lens grew 65% year over year with more than 100 billion already this year. So people are asking more queries and they're also asking more complex queries. With our latest Gemini models, our AI overviews are at the quality and accuracy you've come to expect from search and are the fastest in the industry. AI overviews are, as Ben Thompson pointed out after Google's most recent earnings, the most the most used generative AI product in the world. Most of today's search segment however, was focused on the new AI mode. AI mode was introduced by head of search Liz Reed. So Liz Reed says today you will see how you can ask anything and more intelligent agentic and personalized search will take. You will take on your toughest questions and help you get stuff done. This is particularly funny because did you know that there's a maximum query length in Google search? It's like 256 characters or something. It's like shorter than a tweet. So if you just, if you just try and benchmark like what was your Latest ask for ChatGPT? Just like, hey ChatGPT, summarize the news for me. I'm interested in seeing what Ben Thompson's talking about and I want to know what Dylan Patel's up to. And can you also summarize what happened at Microsoft Build and then Google I O and I want to hear about the Jony I've acquisition and then I also want to hear some stuff about Claude 4. If you take that, if you take that query and put into Google you will literally just get an error message that says to query too long. And it's because like it's Google Search is set up not for that type of search. So Anyway, there's Gemini 2.5 at the core and they give a tour of AI mode. And so AI mode is more like a chat of a chat like interface. And all the demos are very impressive. They are also real, as in either available now or shipping soon. And all seem clearly useful, says Ben Thompson. On demand data visualization, for example, seems like an obvious win for generative AI powered search. That makes a ton of sense. Search for GDP per capita across a couple countries, it just generates a table or chart for you. Makes a ton of sense. The most interesting comment Reid made, however, is a paragraph in the middle. The real goal for AI mode is to refine these features so that they can graduate to the core search experience completely. Very, very smart. In other words, Google has clearly has a clearly defined AI funnel, which actually brings the coherence to this keynote that I was looking for. At the foundation of everything are those pillars I referenced about Google's incredible models, unmatched infrastructure and data advantage. Reed's discussion of personalizing AI mode using your personal data was compelling as well. Then you have a bunch of theoretical ideas that make for cool demo videos, but the actual productization that still functions in Google is on the search team. That team takes ideas that works and puts them in AI mode. So you can think of like every other product is just.

This is basically if you're, if you're looking at Google's Alphabet stock and you're trying to understand how AI is going to impact it, you can ignore Notebook LN and the Digi Knockoff and all these other things and just focus on this. And it's like, do you believe they're going to figure out a way to monetize these sort of ChatGPT style queries that are happening in Gemini right now? And it probably looks something like AI overview over time.

Yeah. And also if you're a startup and you're worried about like getting rolled by Google and becoming like a Google feature. Well, the threat is not that Google launches a directly competitive app and out competes you. That hasn't played out like they launched Google Circles and they weren't able to crush Facebook or anything like that. Yeah, Google or, or yeah, like, yeah, any of these little, these little like startup killers where they're Google products. That's not really the dangerous area. The dangerous area is will your customers and your users be able to solve the problem that they want just by Google Search 2.0 or like when Google Search gets better, is that a threat? To your business.

Yeah. Or if you're building an agent that's like we're helping people book travel and.

It'S like Google flights is going to.

Get better, it's going to get better.

And so that's the real risk. I think it's less that if it never makes sense to go.

Google buzz.

Wait, no, that was a chat thing, wasn't it? No, it was a Twitter competitor. Yeah. So like all these one off things that don't make sense.

It's a microblogging and messaging tool developed by Google.

No way.

It replaced Google Wave.

So many of these things. Yeah, they've launched in Sunset. So many products. Anyway, AI mode looks a bit like ChatGPT. The real race for Google is to make search compelling enough that people don't just switch to ChatGPT for everything. To that end, another metric that likely matters, actual usage. Pichai's definition of the types of searches that are growing was very carefully delineated. But growth in general is certainly a good thing. If an AI feature. If a feature drives AI mode, it may be a good candidate for the main search page. So one of the common refrains that came out of yesterday's keynote was how Google had just killed half of Silicon Valley startups. I'm not so sure how Ben, We've read enough certegre at this point that we're, we're predicting what he's going to say first. It's clearer than ever to me that the only product that truly matters or functions at Google is search or functions. A lot of the demos we saw yesterday are likely to stay demos or at best be forgotten and eventually kill products that no one uses. Second, the degree to which so many of the demos yesterday depend on user volition actually kind of dampened. What's that? Getting a phone call. Google's calling us. Sundar. Let's just bring him in the studio. Let's just talk to Sundar. Bring him in. What's going on with the XR glasses we don't have?

Sundar would be a fun surprise guest.

But we'll get them soon. We'll get them soon. Android is probably going to be the most important canvas for shipping a lot of these capabilities. And Google's XR glasses were pretty compelling and in my opinion, in my opinion had a UX much closer to what I envisioned for XR than Meta's Orion did. Interesting devices drive usage at scale, but that actually leaves a lot of room for startups to build software products that incorporate AI to solve problems that people didn't know they had. The challenge will be in reaching them, which is to say the startup problem is the same as ever. You got to get distribution.

Here's the thing. To me it's like, does Google Search and Gemini eventually merge or do they stand as independent products? And so Google is like, kind of like maintaining search for people that basically boomers who are just perpetually going to go to the search box and search and like I'm going to be in that bucket to some degree. I think everybody will still have for sure. It's so built in, they have so much distribution that it will continue to have Usage. Meanwhile though, ChatGPT is just getting better and better at searching the Internet and it can be used for both things. And that will present a pretty interesting challenge if Google's like, okay, we're competing with OpenAI and ChatGPT, but we're doing it in this two pronged way. And OpenAI is like, we're just trying to make the best basically single search box plus button on the Internet that can do everything.

Yep. I mean, I think a lot of the decision between those two will come down to speed. So right now if I want, let's see, like Tom Cruise age. Tom Cruise age. I just hit control T and I'm in the search bar in Google Chrome 62 years. Now if I go to chat GPT, I have to go chat.com. i'm logged in Tom Cruise age. And it's thinking searching the web. It's searching the Web. It searched three different websites. Tom Cruise was born on 7-3-62. As of today, he's 62 years old. So you see how much longer that took me to use ChatGPT for something like silly like that or simple. But there's a lot of things that you search for that where you're like, I know that Google will one shot this in 5 milliseconds. Yeah. And I know that ChatGPT will take too long. Also, for some reason I wound up running that against GPT 4.5. I think 4.0 is probably faster, but like when I went to chat.com 4.5 was just the one that was defaulted. Right. And so this is where we get into like the model router where if I land on, if I accidentally triggered that in O3, it would be doing like, it would be writing a hundred lines of code, you know. And so the model router needs to be like super fast and they need to figure out caching and they also need to figure out integration into like the search Bar. Because even. Even on your phone, it's usually faster to just open up. Open up a new Safari window. And then.

Yeah.

And then the question is like, does OpenAI need its own browser? Right. Even Arvind from Perplexity is like, very focused on the browser.

Like, right now, even if I do this on my phone, if I open up Safari, the search bar is always down at the bottom, and I can just tap that and immediately start typing. Tom Cruise's age. When I open up ChatGPT, I was looking at my image library. So now it's. It's. I'm in image library mode. I have to go back. I have to go back to ChatGPT. I have a query that I didn't actually click finish on, so I have to delete all that to go. So all of a sudden I'm like into five, 10 seconds just to get a quick answer. And so I still route questions. I route queries personally to Google when I. When I want something super fast.

Yeah. Anyway, do you remember that Gemini started as Bard?

Oh, yeah. There's been like seven Bards. Bard. But there were. There were other ones before that.

Palm Bard, a poet, traditionally one reciting epics and associated with a particular. Particular oral tradition.

Yeah.

Cool name. I have a few other tough.

Go for the Winkle Eye.

Yeah.

Zuck comes for them with the Facebook stuff. Now Google's coming for them with the Gemini branding. Gemini becomes anonymous with Google AI. And people are like, wait, where do I go to trade crypto?

I never. I never thought that it's Matt. It is.

I don't know how you could do that. Because they're both in technology companies. Like, they're both tech companies. I get that they're in Subway. What's. Different areas. But like, we talked to Austin Allred. He had to rebrand Lambda School because of Lambda Labs, which is a AI data center company.

Oh, it's because of Lambda Labs.

Yeah. Who's coming on the show on Friday, actually. Nice. But trademark wars, new segment on tvp. I think it's. I think it's Lambda Labs, but I'm not sure. But it was different. It was a different Lambda, which was a completely. It was not a. It was not an education, but it was a tech company, and they were both tech companies, and so they had to rebrand.

Yeah. Anyway, let's go through a quick history. I have a history of Google cloning startups. So way back in the day, in 2004, they launched something called Orcut. Orcut.

Oh, yeah. Or Cooch.

Or Couch.

It was a Brazilian acquisition.

Yeah. So they got traction in Brazil and India was never truly global shut down in 2014. There was lively, which was basically a second life, like 3D virtual world thing. Closed in less than six months. And then they had buzz, which was trying to counter Twitter at the time. Had had a bunch of backlash around privacy stuff. Google plus was obviously the Facebook rival plus. And then they actually had tried. They tried to buy Groupon for 6 billion and it failed. And so they launched Google offers. This is like a whole other era.

I have a fun story about Google. So I was one of like the best, the biggest users on Google. I just went like full send into it and was like, I'm going to figure out the social network. Kind of like, like, you know, figure out how to create circles, create that. And because of that, really dating yourself. This is in college. I got verification, so I got a check mark.

Wow.

But that check mark translated. They ported it. Even though they shut down that my account was like check marked as like, oh, you're like a serious influencer. Even though I had that 500.

Did that transition into YouTube?

Into YouTube. Yeah. And so when I started the YouTube channel, I had, I got to 100 followers on one on a new account and I was like, wait, my other account has a check mark. So I shut down the old account and moved it over to my personal account and had the check mark, which I could have gotten in. Like it didn't actually do anything for the growth of the channel, but it was just like kind of a funny, funny anecdote. And I was like, I'm going to try this. And it was just a funny story. Anyway, let's move on to OpenAI acquiring IO and Ben Thompson's analysis there. But first, let's tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free folks.

Go to figma.com try their new products websites. Product try buzz too Tons.

Oh, I mean the trademark's available now that Google's out of the buzz game.

The buzz game.

Figma's got it great.

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Go check out vanta.com automate compliance and manage risk. Prove trust continuously. Vantage trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Anyway, let's go on to IO. So let's do it. We already covered the Bloomberg article. We know the facts $6.5 billion all stock deal. Jony I've and his team over at IO get roughly 2% of OpenAI as major incentive pay. And there was a lot of good commentary on the timeline about this, about how Apple's not really set up to comp someone a billion dollars. We looked at this with Tim Cook. He's making like what, couple hundred million. And it's like when you're talking about a trillion dollar company, executive compensation in the billions isn't actually that crazy. But OpenAI can offer that.

John.

Yes.

You're going to be devastated. But Tim only made 7. 74 million.

Oh my God, that's brutal.

It's like he should have been a baseball player.

I mean, he, he's, he should have.

Been a half decent basketball player.

What do you think would have happened to Apple's market cap had they not dodged the tariffs? That would have been hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap erosion.

Nuked.

It was already tumultuous for the company, but they were carved out the entire time. There was never any fear that it was going to happen. And that's entirely because of Tim Cook's negotiation.

2023 made 63 million. I genuinely feel like we need to take to the streets and start protesting in Cupertino. We should, because we've seen this on public. You can back test.

Yeah.

The better that CEOs get paid, typically, the better the companies do. And as an Apple shareholder, I want Tim Cook to be pulling down 1B a year. And I think he'll be highly incentivized to grow the company.

Okay, I have an idea. So Greg Abel, he's 62 years old. He just took over as CEO of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. Tim Cook, 64, only two years older. So what if Tim Cook steps down as CEO of Apple, starts a company, gets acquired by OpenAI. Boom, goes in 30 year run, 30.

Year run, generational run.

And he's like, look, it's just dollars and cents to me. I can make more money over there. I can 10x my comp. So he could 10x his comp by going to OpenAI?

Yeah, he really could.

Easily.

I mean, yeah, that's the big question, right, With Johnny, you know, joining OpenAI.

6 billion.

It's like how long the supply chain. Lord, who's going to just really bring this thing into.

If Tim Cook works, I mean, he's making what, 60.

He's not even cracking 75 mil a year.

So he would have to work for 100 years. To make what Johnny I've just made. I don't think he has another hundred years in him. 30. I would give him 30 solid years ahead of him in his career. That's not enough to get to 6 billion. He could maybe pull 2 billion.

Well, to be clear, I think Johnny had investors and it's all in Johnny's.

Pocket, in my opinion.

Yeah, he deserves it all. It was funny, I was looking yesterday. Johnny's like celebrity Net worth tracker or whatever. They updated it in real time and we're like, he's a billionaire now.

Yeah.

And he wasn't just from working at Apple.

It's brutal.

He had barely had 700 according to.

Terrible.

Anyway, let's go to Ben Thompson's analysis. He says they put out an OpenAI. Put out this 9 minute and 21 second video of them complimenting each other, expressing love for San Francisco and announcing the new partnership. Ben Thompson says it's a bit much, to be honest. Although beautifully shot and produced, I assume it was put together by love from Ives, not included in the deal, but not accepting new clients. Design agency. I think the key, the key segment from Ives perspective is this. Sam Altman said, we both had a. We both had a very strong shared vision. We maybe didn't know exactly where this was going to go, but the direction of the force vector felt clear then. This deeply shared sense of values about what, what technology should be when technology has been really good, when it's gone wrong. Jony Ives says, I mean, that was in a way one of the bias, one of the basis I think of one of the reasons Sam and I clicked was despite our wonderfully different journeys to this point, our motivations and values are completely the same. In my experience, if you're trying to have a sense of where you are going to end up, you shouldn't look at the technology. You should look at the people who are making the, who are making the decisions. And you should look at what drives, motivates and look at values. I like that. That's a good take. I've expressed what drives and motivates. I've expressed what drives and motivates him. Earlier this month in this excellent interview with Patrick Collison. And, and it was interesting because, Jony, I've. We haven't really heard from him in a few years and then boom. Massive, massive podcast. What a coincidence with Patrick Collison just days before the acquisition. Yeah. On a media tour.

So I'll read Patrick's question. We're talking a lot about the purpose.

Of design that's not how he sounds.

Okay, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna do the accent, John. Even though we both have Irish blood. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna.

Okay, yeah, just, just do a vanilla reading. Fine.

Now I'm. Now.

No, no, do it, do it now. It'll sound like you're doing Patrick Collison doing a Jordy Hayes impression, but that's fine.

Yeah. Okay, so I'm doing Patrick Collison impersonating a technology podcaster.

Yeah, that's great.

You're talking a lot about the purpose of design and the effect that design has on the recipient, on the user, on the consumer. Whatever the case is, there's widespread concern and speculation about the effects of smartphones. And the Internet doesn't necessarily accord with just the smartphone, but on some of these products, on attention spans and whether it has some adverse effect on kids or teens or who knows, maybe all of us, maybe the adults as well, there's questions over with AI, whether it changes how education works and cheating in school. All of these technologies that we create have this potential double sidedness to them. And so I guess as somebody who clearly takes seriously and thinks seriously about the full effects, how do you think about possible harms?

And Jony, I've says, yeah, I think there is.

Why don't you do Johnny impersonating Pat.

In IRISH accent Yeah, no, this is Jony. I've doing a John Coogan impression.

Okay. Okay.

I'm excited for this. Yeah. I think probably not anything that I can be more preoccupied or bothered than by what you just described. I think when you're innovating, of course there will be unintended consequences. You hope that the majority will be pleasant surprises. Certain products that have. That I've been very, very involved with, I think there were some unintended consequences that were far from pleasant. My issue is that even though there.

Was no intention, you don't think candy.

Crush whales, you don't think sports betting on your phone at the drop of.

A hat is 24 7.

I think there still needs to be a responsibility and that weighs on me, as, you know, heavily. And yeah, I mean, obviously there are negative consequences, but I think overall technology is.

I think he might be alluding to when I made it possible to angel invest on a mobile device. I think he's sort of subdued.

Bs yeah.

Party Round basically took all these people in San Francisco who are hopelessly addicted to angel investing and made it accessible to them at all hours of the day. You didn't even have to send a wire transfer. You just got an invite and it was like Venmo.

Yeah, ridiculous. It seems pretty clear that I've is talking about the iPhone, says Ben Thompson. Which is to say, it sure seems like he is motivated not to simply build an AI device, but to actually diminish the iPhone's dominance in the user's life or even in the long run, kill it completely. With tracks with the Wall Street Journal's reporting on their plans, they've been working on a device that will move consumers beyond screens, according to people familiar with the matter. I mean, it feels like her, right? I mean, Sam's post about her. They're very all in on voice interfaces. This could be her device, right? Is that the most obvious thing that they would do?

Such an interesting dynamic where it feels like Sci Fi is dictating the product roadmaps of so many companies. Always has been, always has been.

I mean, Steve Jobs was always looking at like the Star Trek tablet and being like, let's make an iPad. There's nothing new. You got.

You got to get ideas from Jason Carmen.

Yeah, Jason Carmen needs to make something save us.

Understand that you're basically deliberate defining the product roadmaps of the biggest companies in the world.

It's true that's admittedly pretty thin gruel, says Ben Thompson. But it's in line with other rumors and more importantly, from my perspective, tracks with Ives expressed state sentiment. And it should be noted that this sentiment is a sentiment that Altman has expressed as well. He's tweeted a couple times. People sacrifice actual happiness and actual accomplishment for for short term dopamine hits by posting and chasing likes/rts on FB slash Twitter. Back from 2013, only 21 likes. Back then Sam was struggling to post bangers. I think everything he posts now gets like 10,000 likes. So big. And then a year after OpenAI was founded, Sam Almond said digital addiction is going to be one of the great mental health crises of our time.

I like my screen time, John.

Yeah, I like it too.

I do email on my phone. Yeah, it's productive.

In 2017, Altman it is funny because.

I do believe that the sort of AI companions have the potential to be some of the most addictive products in history. And I believe that in general people will continue to interact with them through screens, devices, et cetera.

Sam Altman In 2017, almost a decade ago now wrote, I believe attention hacking is going to be the sugar epidemic of this generation. Ooh, sugar. Underrated though, right? Sugar is potentially good.

Potentially Good. I think it's. I've called it. I said it's a superfood. It's this amazing substance that gives you. You clean energy almost immediately.

So maybe that's.

Maybe that's actually without any seed oils.

Maybe that's. Maybe that's actually like a broader metaphor for attention hacking is that it feels good in the. It is bad at the extreme but it is good in the right dosage.

Yeah.

Because pure sugar when taken in athletic context, when you're working out at the right dosage with the right purities can be good.

Yeah.

And is not something that should just be completely removed from the diet. It much like attention to technology. I can feel the changes in my own life. I can still wistfully remember when I had an attention span. My friends, young children don't even know that's something they should miss. I am angry and unhappy more often, but I channel it into productive change less often instead chasing the dual dopamine hits like likes or and outrage. That's interesting. I feel like, I feel like our generation's kids are doing fine. Like, like, because we're aware of like don't do the iPad thing. I'll see my son spend hours building Legos and like painting and drawing and spending like.

I think, I think it helps. I think it helps that adults are generally hyper addicted to their devices and want to prolong the time in which their children can live a life totally of freedom from that addiction.

Yeah.

It's like at some point I'm sure my son will try a cigarette but just because heaters are Lindy.

Yeah.

But I'm gonna try to delay that for a very, very long time. Right.

He's just, he's just 65. Being like my first.

My first.

It's always challenging with Altman to know whether when or if he is talking. His book says Ben Thompson, as it were. But there is a record of long running sentiments that might convince I've that their motivations and values are completely the same at the same time. There are certainly other motivations as well. I've for his part just became a lot richer, at least on paper. Altman may or may not have diluted the nonprofit's share of OpenAI by making a big purchase with stock. This is kind of a theory that was going around about Reddit and how Reddit kind of went into Conde Nast and then was pulled out through a bunch of different stocks.

Sam and the original founders seemed like they realized like Reddit was never going to be what it could be while a part of this legacy media company.

Yeah, when you read the story of Reddit it reads is very like almost like conspiratorial. It's this like really like 4D chess maneuver to get it out. And yet at the same time like I'm like yeah, I'm glad Reddit's not owned by Conde Nast. Like like you guys did everyone a service. Like good job Alexis Ohanian and and Sam for pulling that company out, which was actually an innovative tonight tech technology company from like a dying legacy media company. Anyway, Altman may or may not have diluted the share. He's also sliding into the role occupied by his childhood idol, one Steve Jobs. So what's the strategic positioning? We got four minutes until our first guest. The larger question is what this means for OpenAI. On one hand, the angle here is obvious and fortuitously articulated by me just yesterday says Ben Thompson a little back, that it has long been the case that the best way to bring products to the consumer market is via devices. And that seems truer than ever. Android is probably going to be the best import, the most important canvas for shipping a lot of Google's new capabilities. What makes ChatGPT so remarkable and the and OpenAI, the accidental consumer tech company is that like Google two and a half decades ago, they have reached nearly a billion users, almost entirely through word of mouth. The only distribution deal Apple has done or OpenAI has done is when with Apple. More on this in a moment. This is exceptionally rare in my long standing opinion is that the obvious way to capitalize on this position is to roll out advertising. Let's hear for advertising. We love advertising. Speaking of advertising, go to Linear App. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. MCP server, right?

Yeah, they have a dedicated agents product now that they rolled out yesterday and Scott talked about it. Scott Wu from Cognition talked about it on the show and highly recommend going to check it out if you're wanting to actually unlock the power of agents in a systematic way.

So Ben goes on to say it is worth noting however that one challenge is trying to win in advertising is that you are in the end fighting on Google's turf. The same Google that demonstrated its incredible model and infrastructure prowess. Well, well this is awkward and surely couldn't have been intentional. Or was it at IO? Yes, there are questions about Google's product chops and I already think that OpenAI is the best AI. Best in AI at product. And we talked to Kevin Wheel, who's doing product at OpenAI. Clearly incredible team over there and the products are fantastic. And they just added Johnny, I've Yes, OpenAI has the advantage of building an advertising business from scratch, giving them more degrees of of freedom than Google, which has to worry about cannibalization and disruption. But Google is also moving AI into search, and the infrastructure the company has built out around advertising will take years and years to match. You can say the same thing about Meta and speaking about Meta. Speaking of Meta, think about how CEO Mark Zuckerberg has framed the company's approach to AR&VR. This is Zuckerberg in a 2022 Stratacheri interview about their partnership with Microsoft. But taking a step back, I think in addition to this strategic alignment, I also think there's a very deep philosophical Zuck deep philosophical alignment on the direction that we want the next generation of computing to go. My brief take on the history here is that every major computing platform there has been an open ecosystem that's focused on partnership and a more closed and integrated ecosystem. So with PC, Windows was the leading open ecosystem and of course Mac was the leading closed one. On phones, it was Android and iOS. I think one of the things that's interesting about the history in the history is that I don't know think it's predetermined whether the open ecosystem or the closed one ends up being the primary ecosystem. And so he was pushing for an open metaverse. Implicit in Zuckerberg's answer is the assumption that the company they are competing with in the long run is Apple. The closed option. Another way to frame that contrast, however, is between modular Windows and Android and integrated Mac and iPhone. The integrated option, the Apple option, is monetized first and foremost through device sales. The modular option is modular in part because the underlying motivation of the operating system is to maximize reach, in which which in the case of Google, means increasing the number of services on which to control search and serve ads. These framings are in reality a bit too limiting to fully articulate the various strategic puts and takes. Google, for example, is deeply integrating Google Android with Google AI in the cloud, while continuing to lean on third parties to actually build the hardware. Indeed, one of my chief critiques of Apple's approach to AI is that by trying to do AI themselves, they are trying to compete with Google on Google's third party. Still, Google is, as Google does, focusing on being on as many devices as possible. We should, we should close out here because we have our next guest joining us in just a minute. But he says Zuckerberg assumes that Apple will be there in AR and VR. Should Altman assume they will be there in AI? To put it another way, if you're going to take on one tech giant directly and you're an AI company, isn't Apple a much more attractive target than Google? And if you think, think that that way, should your focus be on building a horizontal service that runs everywhere or on building a fully integrated offering that monetizes the high end through an experience that integrates hardware and software? And if you want to build the best possible integrated hardware and software experience, the Team IO is a veritable all star collection of Apple talent that extends far beyond I've that built the last one is a reasonable place to start.

Very interesting thing. Gets everybody thinking that he's trying to kill Google and then goes for the jugular on on Apple.

It's very interesting. I think Sam's going after everyone. Yeah, I think he wants it all. And why not just everything in energy, in servers, in chips.

Well, we have Dan Shipper. Dan Shipper, welcome to the stream.

How you doing, Dan?

How's it going? Excited to be here.

Big fancy you guys.

Great.

Great to have you on. I've been wanting to do this, this for a while and you've had a busy week. You have some personal news at every. You're also at. You're at Anthropics event right now, is that correct?

I'm at Code with Claude, yes. Anthropics event where they just dropped Claude Opus 4.

This is amazing because we didn't get a chance to talk about anthropic or Claude 4 on the show yet. And we have a perfect guest to talk about.

I am your correspondent reporting live.

Can you kick us off with just a little bit of introduction on you for any of the fans who are watching who might not be familiar. And then we'll go into what the event events.

They'd have to be living under a cluster.

They'd have to be living under a data center. But some people do.

My name is Dan Schipper. I'm the co founder and CEO of Every at Every. We publish ideas and applications at the frontier of AI. So we have a daily newsletter. We write long form essays about what's going on in AI and then we also integrate software products. We bundle all together and sell it to the audience. Very cool. Yeah.

And Jordi was describing you as like a Claude. Stan, you've been a fan of Claude for a long time. We've talked to Some people in AI and they've said like you can just walk into a party and immediately clock like, oh, that's a ChatGPT user. Oh, that's a CLAUDE user. Is that true? Are you beating the allegations?

I would say it's interesting. I would say I used to be, I think Claude like 35 Sonnet was the first model where you're like, oh my God, this thing actually gets me. But, but since O3 came out, I would say 95% of my AI usage is in ChatGPT. And also with their memory feature, like ChatGPT's memory is just incredible. It's very sticky.

I do think it's tough to have a friend with no working memory.

Yeah, I mean, concretize this a little bit more for me. My experience with AI and LLMs is that I'm using them as information retrieval agentic reporting deep research a ton. I never just sit there and have a conversation. So if it's, if it's answering a little tersely, if it's dropping bullet points on me, I'm kind of fine with that. But when I talk to some people about the differences between Claude and OpenAI, a lot of it is in the subtleties of the language. And I just feel like as a consumer maybe I care about that less. But do you think that's important? Does it matter to you? Am I missing out on something by not.

I'm just like a very sensitive, emotional guy. So I want it to be nice to me, you know. But I also think to some degree, even for like more business, like straight ahead business use cases, it's actually really helpful for it to have a little bit of that sensitivity. For example, something I use it for a lot is if I'm having a management problem, we report almost everything that we do at every in granola. And it's really easy to take your transcript of a meeting and be like, what happened here? Like why did, why was there a fight here? Like, or you know, an employee is having a, having a problem, like how do I help? You know, that kind of thing.

That makes sense.

And it sort of has a little bit of that radar that can, that can really help you move through a lot of interpersonal situations that come up often.

Okay, so that's interesting.

Well, before we just go and just into a much longer discussion and talk about anthropics news, why don't you talk about. There's a couple things. This week you had your own fundraise and it was a unique structure. So why don't we kind of start there.

Yeah.

We announced this week that we raised a little bit more money. We previously had raised about 700k in 2020, and then we raised. Just now we announced a $2 million raise led by Reid Hoffman. But we did it in a weird structure that I'm like sort of tongue in cheek, calling a SIF seed round, basically, like Reed and Starting Line dc, who's another one of the investors. They committed up to 2 million, but we can pull it down when we need it. So we have not pulled down all of it. And I think that's a really nice structure for us because we're a media company. We also have a lot of software attached, but I want to maintain our ability to be weird and just have it be a creative playground when we stuff. And so this gives us enough money to experiment, but not so much that we're, like, locked into a particular growth path.

Yeah. Are you thinking that? I mean, we saw this with OpenAI. They were a nonprofit, and then they wound up creating, like, the most dominant consumer app of all time. They needed to spin that out. Like, the parallel here is that you are building software tools, but you also are doing media. If one of those software tools takes off, all of a sudden, does the media become a marketing engine for that tool? Does the tool spin out? Are you thinking about it like incubation, where there's a separate cap table? Maybe investors ride along. What were those discussions like, and how are you thinking about that?

Well, didn't you guys already spin out?

Oh, yeah, we did.

We spun out Lex, which my every co founder Nathan now runs as a CEO of that, and he raised a seed round from True Ventures for Lex.

Oh, cool.

Almost all the incubations that we have are actually their own separate LLCs. I think, like, in general, I fucking love having a writing business and I want to keep the main thing, the main thing. And I think that we can build a really incredible universe of apps and other offerings around the writing business. I do think sometimes we will hopefully run into opportunities that seem really massive and that can be just really big independent businesses on their own. And, yeah, if that happens, we have the ability to go and actually further spin them out, turn them into C corps, have them go waste money, all that kind of stuff. So we have the optionality to do both.

Cool. Awesome.

All right, well, I mean, there's a bunch of stuff to talk about. Why don't we. As our official Anthropic correspondent, which is the title that we're giving you, obviously not related to the company. I think we are going to have some folks from Anthropic on next week, which I'm excited about.

Yeah. So the headline in Wired is Anthropocene New model excels at reasoning and planning and has Pokemon skills to prove it. Claude for opus and Claude Sonnet 4 can remember over long periods of time, a capability that's helpful at Pokemon and other tasks that require an ability to stay on track. So what was most exciting, where. Where should we start first? With understanding the progress at Anthropic.

So first of all, you've got to read the every headline and the subhead. Every time one of these models drops, we do a vibe check. So basically we get access these models hands on before they come out and then we use them hands on for the daily tasks that we're doing to build software and make writing and then we give you basically hands on review of how every part of the model works. What I found is it's a piece of coding. It really runs autonomously for a long time on complex PRs that were not possible with 3.7 Sonnet and are probably a little bit beyond the reach of Gemini 2 and 03 in particular in cloud code. It's fucking awesome. And so I do think that that's a sort of game changer. If you're doing any kind of development work for writing and editing real quick, go for it.

What do you look at the. What are the kind of like market implications of Claude code in terms of the broader developer tooling ecosystem? Right. We've seen cursors developing their own models. Windsurf joining OpenAI. There's a lot happening. But do you think that Claude code is something that could have billions of ARR independently, or what's your read on how it's going to evolve?

That's a good question. I do think that the landscape is starting to consolidate a little bit and with each other, with each model advance, the extra intelligence matters less and less. So I think you'll see people instead of jumping every time there's a new model release, instead of jumping and turning their entire stack from an old model to the new one. I think you'll see people start to stick a little bit more in the ecosystems that they've chosen. We're entering a little bit of a different era of the race and I think it'll be a little bit more difficult for Anthropic to be like a totally independent lab and go up against not only OpenAI but also with Google, assuming Apple at some point gets their shit together, Microsoft, whatever. But I really think that they have a very, very strong play with developers here. 3.5 Sonnet and 3.7 Sonnet are superb coding models. 3,7 Sonnet is a little bit overeager.

So it's.

Probably not as good as Gemini 2.5 Pro, but it's still really up there with the best coding models and I think Claude code is one of the best coding experiences, like AI first coding experiences. It's also just very different from a Cursor or a Windsor where those are basically text editors with AI on the side and cloud code is a command line interface that's like you're just directly interfacing with the AI and it's just a different experience. It's intended to be an assistant, an agent rather than chat.

Yeah.

Do we have any idea of where these new models Claude 4 specifically sit relative to the OpenAI models? Is this because I remember 4, 5 came out and they didn't give it the GPT5 name, but it did seem like it was trained on an order of magnitude more compute and so this is kind of where the pre training wall discussion came from. But. But is it fair to think about Claude 4 as a GPT 4.5 class model in terms of kind of the scope and the size of the model or do they give any indication as to the vectors that they're pulling on? We've seen Facebook with Meta Llama Behemoth is going for this massive context window, these trillions of token parameters. There's a whole bunch of different threads that the different foundation model companies are pulling on. What seems to be their underlying motivation or what do they seem focused on in terms of optimizing towards?

So it's a little hard to tell, at least for me because I didn't get access to any kind of model card before launch and I've honestly just been running around at the event and stuff. So if there are actual numbers and stuff like definitely go look them up. I don't know for sure.

On the blog post they mostly just focused on the software engineering SWE bench and the different benchmarks around graduate level reasoning, agentic tool use, multilingual Q and A visual reasoning and the stats are impressive but not a huge jump here. There's a jump on agentic coding, but Cloudsonnet 3.7 actually outperforms in visual reasoning by like a half a percent. Not much, but it's one of these interesting things where it feels like we're increasingly in the era of trade offs around models and we might be seeing more fragmentation around a really great we talked to some founders who are building super specified LLMs just for JSON decoding or just for translation or just for profanity filtering. And then they run the inference on a consumer grade GPU because it's so narrowly defined, still using the transformer architecture, but just much more narrow. And so I'm wondering if that's the future that we're going to see at Anthropic is they're dominating in code, they're very popular with developers and they're going to go after a few other areas, but they're probably going to stay out of a few other battlegrounds.

I do think that's an astute point. Sometimes you do see trade offs and so like 3.7 Sonic for example was a better programmer than 3.5 Sonic, but it was like way more this stuff.

Interesting.

But to answer your previous question, like going back to the difference between QBT 4.5 and Opus, Opus 4 and Sonnet.

4.

It'S a little bit apples to oranges because Core 5 is just a base model. I mean it's instruction tune, but it's not a reasoning model. And Opus is both. It can go back and forth between being a base model and being a reasoning model. And that is this sort of hybrid thing that I think all of the models providers are starting to move into. But I think Sana has. Anthropic has done it first and it's really good. It makes a big difference when it both can do the kind of chain of thought reasoning that's good for Mac groups and coding. And it also has a little bit of a vibe so of like a GP 4.5, which is just really good at writing and really good at like creative thinking.

Cool.

How do you, how do you kind of navigate and figure out what's real when everybody in AI is deeply conflicted in different ways, whether they're sort of like secretly an advisor to this lab or you know, happen to invest in the series B of this one or, or everybody's sort of talking their book.

I mean obviously I just got advisory shares in OpenAI. I just got 1%. That's it. I'm not conflicted.

It's just like a point.

Yeah, you got a point. Careful, John.

People are going to believe that every time we joke, every time we joke, every time we joke around, every time we joke around, somebody takes it 100% as fact. No, but obviously the immediate way to figure out what's real and what's not is just to use, use the new products and models yourself. But I'm curious how you navigate it as somebody who's trying to provide really, really precise coverage of everything in real time.

So first of all, if anyone wants to throw me some anthropic or OpenAI stock, I'm open. DMs are open. But yeah, I think that's a really good question. I honestly think most of the benchmarks are kind of bullshit and you can change the benchmarks and we see that with Llama, where it looks good on the benchmarks but it's just not a good model. That's why we do Vibe checks. So when we launch new models, we're using them hands on for the tasks that we do every day. And I think that's why it's really valuable to have every the media company and every the incubator startup studio in the same organization because I'm literally just going and hanging out with Kieran who runs Quora, which is our AI email assistant, or Danny who runs Sparrow, which is our AI content automation product. And we're using it to ship features or to make better writing or to do all the things that we do every day. And so I can get a pretty good sense of just like the vibe or the flavor of a model from using it myself. And I think that's going to be the best. I think that's going to be the best way to tell if it's any good.

What was your reaction to Google I O? What was the single thing that stood out to you from the.

So I was, I was at Build. I did a really fun interview with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott and then flew right from Build to to code with Claude. But Alex Duffy is another one of our writers and leads AI training for us and he was at Google IO and so he would have a better response as to what is the one thing. But I do know he was kind of in tears in our discord and was like this is the future. I think that they've got something cool going on. I think he's really excited about. They're pushing forward on a lot of different parts of the ecosystem all at once and they're moving super fast and. And you seem really psyched about it.

Awesome.

What about the products that Anthropic hasn't launched? We talked about the specialization a little bit and I remember. So the big AI product that really grabbed me from Google I O was VO3 and obviously Google has an immense advantage with the YouTube data set there and the results have just been Fantastic. And I've been. Been fighting tooth and nail to get more VO3 credits because it's so much fun. And Anthropic, it feels like they've been potentially behind the ball on image generation. Is that just not a focus for them? Is that. Do you think that's because of safety concerns since obviously that, that runs very deep in the culture at Anthropic or do you think it's just more of a business case that the, the coding market is much more lucrative than the image generation market and so just focus more wood behind fewer arrows?

That's a good question. I honestly don't know the history of Anthropic's relationship with coding model, with image models other than that. They just don't have one and I don't know why. I do think it seems like they're really going hard after the kind of agentic coding market and I think it's a really valuable thing that they can bring in. Also say just, just generally, like Mike Krieger is their chief product officer and like he, he knows the ship and so I think probably that he knows.

The thing or two about images.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I assume they'll have some really cool stuff on the more like consumer product side coming soon.

I think we're getting a zoom air. I'm. I'm searching O3 right now for Anthropics offering. I don't think that they have any. Any.

Dan down.

Don't think they.

Stand down. Dan down.

Bring it back.

I think. Do you think there's a widespread cyber attack? Probably because X is really struggling.

They know who we talked to earlier this morning. They do. They know.

They figured it out.

We have a secret guest that will be released later.

They're on to us.

But O3 is cooking. I mean, it's. I don't know if it's writing code yet, but it's definitely. It's. It's written. Look at this. It's like I just ask it. I just asked it. Has Anthropic shelved any, any models? And it's like searching the web everywhere. But it is. It is a tougher. It is a tougher question for O3 because I'm asking for the absence of evidence. Not. Not. I'm asking for it to find the absence of a model, not the, not the presence of a model. And so it's very easy to search. Does. Does Claude have a coding model? And it can just search anthropic code and find the first result and return that to me. But it's very difficult to. To. To find a null and say. Okay. I searched the entire web and I couldn't find anything. Therefore, Anthropic does not have a video model. But yes, I believe Anthropic scrap. Maybe it was a text to speech engineering, something like 11 labs competitor.

So I've been. I went down to ask Claude if. If. Why doesn't Claude have an image generation model and the signup flow is. Couldn't be more opposite of OpenAI. I've just been. I created a new account with my TPPN email and it took me there was. I mean, Nikita would probably have a heart attack. It was like 20 individual steps of approving this and approving that. But it says Anthropic hasn't publicly released a dedicated image generation model. Strategic focus, technical and safety considerations, resource allocation, market positioning. So kind of everything that Dan said just. It does make sense in a way to just say, hey, this isn't strategically critical for us. We're going to try to focus on what we're really good at, which is kind of coding.

It's great. Well, we have TJ coming in for the second time. I'm very excited for that.

Yeah. Did we fully lose Dan?

I think we did. Let's just move on to some. Some. Some news. Let's talk about the. I mean there's plenty of timeline. We can go.

Dan, if you're listening, thank you for coming on.

Yeah, we appreciate it.

Enjoyed the conversation and always welcome to come.

This is the future. We have AI that can one shot build you zoom, but it. But it won't work.

But zoom is still going to go.

The Internet will still fail constantly. Anyway. I do think it's fun that that phone overheated.

He was just going so hard on corresponding.

Wow.

Yeah, that's. Honestly, as a technologist, the only time you should put down your devices is if they're overheating. You need to be going that hard.

Yeah. You need to be 25 different podcasts. Podcasting so hard you need me live, streaming video, doing spreadsheets, coding on your phone.

Thank you for leaving it all on the field. On the pain on the field. You're an absolute dog. We will see you again soon.

I do think it's fun that they're doing that anthropics doing Pokemon because Pokemon such this iconic game and it's so. And it. And it lends itself to like, you can watch the full stream of Claude play Pokemon and it is this interesting challenge that it takes a long time. They need to think about the different reward functions and all the different steps that you have to take. I was playing Pokemon on the Chromatic Palmer, Lucky's new Game Boy and it's actually really hard because at a certain point you get to a place where you just kind of have to go farm XP and like level up your Pokemon evenly before you can go beat the boss. Like, like you can't just, you can't just constantly be going forward. You actually have to, have to plan out your, your attack a little bit. It's, it's not, not the simplest game so impressive that they're able to play it for what, 24 hours at a time. Anyway, let's go through some timeline. We'll get to Elon Musk later. There's a piece we got to put in the Truth Zone, but it's going to take more than seven minutes. So let's talk about OpenAI. They committed to a giant UAE data center in global expansion. This is Stargate UAE. We'd love to see it. They're partnering with G42 to build a 1 gigawatt AI data center in Abu Dhabi. It's the first large scale project outside of the U.S. sargate cooking. He's on a ticket.

I cannot wait to have the opportunity to have.

I want him on the show.

Him on the show.

I want him on the show so badly. G42 will fund the construction. OpenAI and Oracle will operate the data center Softbank. Nvidia and Cisco are also partners in the project. The Koretsu of AI is coming together.

There and so another hundred billion for Nvidia Jensen.

So the UAE is trying to become one of the biggest funders of AI companies infrastructure and build their own AI factory. The first 200 megawatt chunk of the data center is due to be completed by the end of 2026.

The thing that's interesting here, hopefully chase lockdown. They're having to like match the investment that they do.

Yeah, that was interesting companies. It seems like a good deal. I'm very bullish on it.

They're doing deals.

It's great.

Strava raised at a valuation north of 2 billion. Let's give it up. I have to ask, what are they running from?

What are they running?

What are they running from?

Maybe they're running from.

They could very well be running from Zach Pogrom maybe is in some ways coming for them.

They're running from not having generational wealth by getting liquidity at a multi billion dollar valuation. So congrats to the founders.

Running from not having. Yeah, it took me a second Sequoia. They raised some debt. Let's. Let's give it up for leverage.

They also acquired the breakaway cycling training app, marking its second acquisition in two months. They had more than 150 million users and it was approaching 500 million in annual recurring revenue. That's good. Let's 4x revenue.

Let's give a moment of silence for the VCs that passed on the seed in the a. Because. Because it seems, you know. Yeah. Like running. I get a lot of people, but how big can this thing be?

Easy critique. Easy.

How big can this be? 500 million in annual recurring revenue.

They showed.

You got them.

Showed them.

Turns out a lot of people are running from.

Strava lets users whom it calls athletes record in quotes Wall Street Journal putting their term in the truth zone.

Hey, runners are athletes.

Athletes in some contexts, yes. They're running down a gridiron. Maybe share activities with friends and across dozens of sports.

By the way, I've been avoiding. We had Rob Mower, co founder of Huberman live.

Just.

More, more. I always texted me. I. I botch his name every time. Rob. I've been avoiding a run with Rob.

Oh, yeah.

For years now. We live.

Is he a good runner? He's gonna smoke it.

He's an absolutely insane athlete. Oh, and I just always end up busy.

How's he on the bench press? Is he repping two plates? Because maybe you could give him a run for his money over there. A big dog. Show him how it's done.

Good. Potentially do that.

Huberman bench. Three plates and they're just gonna smack.

I could see Rob just secret.

Demolish.

Demolish. Big three plates.

Just demolishing us. Anyway, let's go through some timeline. Jenny says glasses won't win. Earpiece with a tiny camera will. I don't know about that. What do you think?

I think I just would like. I would like a camera nostril. I'd love to put a nostril camera and that just sort of mounts to my nose and just comes out right here.

No one's talking about nasal computing.

Nasal computer computing, it's the final frontier for guys like us that don't want to chip. The nasal passageway is a great place to put a computer.

I mean, there's probably so many different applications. You can have little fans in there that accelerate the airflow in. So you're getting more oxygen in your blood. Brian Johnson loves it. Hyperbaric chamber for your body.

Yeah. Whoop. On the wrist. But we typically have watches on our wrists.

Yes. Yes.

And so whoop on the nose. Whoop in the nose. Or a ring in the nose. Or what about an orange.

Where you're going in this.

What are those?

What are those? Those. Septum piercing. An aura. Septum piercing. Oh, my God. Oh, that's insane. AI. AI. Generating the. The nasal. Nasal aura ring. That's insane. Anna says we're in the. Or Anna says we're in the good old days. In the beginning of the movie with the overly saturated colors and the smiles and laughter. Your future is being written by about six people competing to, well, their ideal civilization into existence. Record freeze frame. Record scratch. Hi, Anna here. You're probably wondering how I got here. Yeah, it does feel like it's a. It's a monumental time. It's a bet. It's an amazing time to be a technology podcaster.

Jensen Elon Satya Zuckerberg.

Yeah. Accelerate Harder says this blog post is styled like a cross between a wedding announcement and a memorial webpage. It is a very funny photo. It is black and white and the font choice is. Is something that we haven't seen from OpenAI or Apple.

They're boys.

They're boys, though. They're just guys being dudes. Anyway, we got a couple other posts, But I think TJ's here. So should we just bring in TJ and start breaking down the news? It. Let's bring him in. Welcome to the stream, TJ. How you doing?

He's getting the band back together.

He's getting the band back together.

Let's go.

Congratulations.

They're back.

Let's go.

Keep it going, Keep it going.

Two minutes of this and I have a microphone. I've made a real, real upgrade here. I love that big podcast guy. Guy.

Yeah. You went. You went all in. I love it.

Yeah, Big podcast guy. We turned you.

Great to have you here.

You went from 0 to. To 100.

It's great to be back.

Yeah. Give us the news. What's the announcement? What does this company do? I saw the announcement. Bunch of mumbo jumbo. Break it down for me.

So, company's called General Medicine. We launched today in all 50 states, so anyone in the US can sign up and use the service. And the way we think about it is a healthcare store where you can get anything you need in healthcare. We actually talked about some of these themes a bit a couple weeks back, but our general belief is that you should be able to shop healthcare like you shop everything else. And so that means, you know, if you have. If you know exactly what you need, like you know you want a certain set of labs or you know you need a colonoscopy or you're having kind of ongoing shoulder pain is like an issue I've had that I use the service for. You can literally search for that problem, fill out a relatively straightforward set of questions and then consult with a clinician. And if what you need is an in person visit or in person care or you need to get imaging or any of that done, we make it super seamless to do that. I think the probably the most novel thing about the product experience is that you can see personalized insurance pricing for any provider prior to deciding where to get that service. So for, for my shoulder pain example, I needed to go get a follow up X ray and the difference in price between getting an X ray done in Park City versus Salt Lake was 100 versus 500 with my insurance.

Wow.

Which before when you're making that decision.

Same insurance, same insurance difference, same X.

Ray, same actual kind of medical group. They're both kind of intermountain facilities, but a pretty big variance in the actual out of pocket.

Presumably even the same X ray device. Like the same technology. Yeah.

People are making this decision every day, but they literally have no idea. Yeah, well there's any sort of differential.

Yeah.

So the thing that stood out to me is when you land on GeneralMedicine Co, you see pricing without insurance and that seems super intentional because you want to just enable people to not one just like speed to care. Right. There's like certain instances where you're like I need to solve this problem as fast as possible. I don't want to deal with, with worrying about in network, out network, what, all that. And then there's also instances where like something can cost you more by going through insurance. That's correct. Right. I remember something was going viral on X probably a month ago where somebody like the ambulance was like much more expensive because they had insurance where if they were just uninsured it would just going to cost less. So can you talk about kind of that, the way that kind of pricing dynamic works and why you guys decided to kind of lead with showing people that hey, you can just kind of immediately get these services regardless of your current insurance situation.

Yeah, I think probably a useful anecdote is when we built a very similar experience in pharmacy. When you go to kind of Amazon pharmacy now you can see cash and insurance kind of head to head when you're making a, a purchase decision. We ended up with a significant amount of folks that were just using cash because either it was cheaper, which I'd say a quarter of the time it was literally cheaper to just not use their insurance just to pay cash. And then a quarter of the time it was moderately more expensive. Instead of 15 bucks, it was 20 or 20, it was 30. But you didn't have to deal with all of the obnoxiousness of using your insurance. Right. There was no prior authorizations. And to deal with the fact that it was too soon to fill the prescription, like all these sort of sad paths that exist, exist as a byproduct of insurance. I think we'll see a similar dynamic here to your point, where sometimes it'll literally be cheaper and that will happen I think a lot more than people would think. And then sometimes it's slightly more expensive to use cash, but it just is less annoying to deal with having to get it reimbursed and to deal with the upfront prior auths and all those things. And we think that'll be a. I don't know what the right proportion will be for this business, but I think it'll be a much higher percentage than, than people would assume.

How do you think about the continuum of medical services? Because I'm just, I'm thinking about the shoulder injury. Obviously there's sometimes when you need an X ray and you need insurance to pay for that, sometimes you just need to rest. Sometimes part of health is maybe going to the gym or being on a diet or if you're having problems with sleep, you could need a prescription drug or you could just need some melatonin. And so what is the ideal front end to help health? Is it. I mean, I imagine people will go to ChatGPT, they go to WebMD, they ask their friends, sometimes they go to their doctor prematurely and the doctor just says, hey, just, you know, stop eating so much or, or hit the gym or something like that. But what is the. How will this change? And then how do you plan on, on being a part of that front end to medicine?

I mean, I think the single biggest change here is trying to move healthcare to a much more simple and straightforward transactional experience where you can actually transact in the same ways that you transact in retail. I think that over. If you think about just the overarching kind of journey for someone dealing with a condition or dealing with some symptoms, they don't know what condition they have. I think the behavior will be similar to what it is today, which is today they're going to Google and constantly searching for things and trying to figure out what's Going on, I think a bunch of that volume will move to chat, GPT and other foundational models where it's easy to go from symptom to a likely diagnosis. I think the problem we solve is post that diagnosis or post having a sense of what your problem is and being able to quickly get what you need right, like you, like you might need an X ray, you might need labs, you might need, you might need an intervention in person. We make that really seamless. You can transact with us in a normal way. And so I think that is the sort of novel thing about what we're doing is turning healthcare into really a product catalog with, with super crisp pricing up front.

What's the business model going to be?

I think the right mental model is a combination of a first party and third party marketplace. Right. So we do have our own medical group, we have our own doctors on staff. We will use them over time for things that are more and more complex, where it's not as easy to know kind of right away exactly what you need. And so you're helping someone navigate that ambiguity. And then we both have a set of third party providers that are deeply integrated, mostly specialists, where if you need an immediate specialist consult, we can provide that. And then you can literally request to see any provider. It doesn't matter if we have a relationship with them or not, we can still make that referral. Make it. We will literally book the appointment for you and we'll show you the, again, we'll show you like where the best option is for you based on price, quality, whatever things you, you care about. And in the, the third party sense, it obviously won't be as simple as a traditional marketplace from a monetization standpoint, but it will be of, of that ilk, right? Of that flavor of a kind of traditional first party, third party marketplace.

Did you guys have an urge to slap an LLM on this thing? I know it's notably absent from the homepage.

I think just like my, just like my cars. We're like, yeah, we're throwing it back to.

Yeah, yeah. I'm curious, I'm curious. You must have gotten a bunch of pitches from people being like, hey, a lot of people are using ChatGPT to diagnose conditions. We're gonna make a better version of that. To me, doesn't feel super investable just because ChatGPT probably already has full access to PubMed and bunch of, you know, other resources. But yeah, was that a pretty, pretty intentional decision to kind of like leave off the site and let People kind of figure out out what they need wherever, whether It's Google or WebMD or family, friends, another doctor, etc. And then just be the place where they kind of take action.

Yeah, that was definitely intentional and definitely something we constantly debate. Again, I think the place that chat GPT and the other foundation models aren't going to go is the stuff we're doing right. To go from likely diagnosis to actually transacting. And I think we'll see how it plays out. I'm a little skeptical that dedicated kind of Dr. LLMs will win against the Chat GPTs of the world. We're probably effectively placing a bet here that the chat GPTs of the world will kind of sweep up that use case for the most part. We could be wrong on that for sure. I mean, I think there's a bunch.

Yeah, you can, you can imagine a world where general medicine is like, hey, you, you know, we, we think you. Here's like our read of the situation based on the picture you uploaded or the symptoms you're having having. Here's how you take action and actually talk to a specialist to like verify, you know, actually get a. Get an expert involved. That's not just, you know, predicting the next token.

Totally. I mean, I think again, the right frame here is retail. Right. You're already seeing that exact flow for categories that have this clear kind of product catalog and transactability and doesn't exist in healthcare. I think we'll have some version of that kind of chat with us and figure out what's going on to help you navigate our store over time. But that's not the bet we're placing. The bet we're placing is that it's the transaction that the customer ultimately needs and that we can create a very novel experience.

You guys launched in all 50 states. How different is that than the early Pillpack days? I imagine that was it kind of a different go to market motion.

Yeah, for better or worse, it's almost the same Pillpack took us about 12 months to launch.

Launch.

And we were in 32 states, I think at launch and then chipped away at the tail over like six to nine months, I think if I recall. And this we're now, I don't know, 16, 18 months in and we're launching in all 50 states. So on the kind of from a time and availability standpoint, actually super similar.

Can you take me through some of the history of other attempts in this category? I remember using ZocDoc once to find a doctor. I used Wellness Effects once To get some labs done. There's a few different approaches that have been tried in kind of creating the front end, the front door to medicine. It still feels like one hasn't become dominant. There's a lot of point solutions like if you want hair hair treatment, you go to hair.com or something and you want compounded erectile dysfunction medicine with GLP1s in it. You can go to a different website for that, but it probably won't be.

Part of our selection. We debated it. I think we're going to leave it out for now.

I want just the cocktail cocktail.

Can I get four in one.

Testosterone, creatine. I want some protein in there. Throw 20 milligram Adderall XR in there and then mail that to.

To me.

Compounded and yeah, just don't pay. I'll pay in Cardano actually. Yeah, exactly.

Bnpl.

BNPL with Cardano. Yeah, that's great. But yeah, take me through some of the history. You don't need to speak specifically about specific companies, but just the different approaches that have been tried. What worked, what didn't, why have you landed on and what have you learned that led you to this particular approach?

Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of vectors there. Right. I think think the initial thinking for folks trying to build similar stuff was that you'd start in one vertical and go horizontal over time. That's sort of the Amazon playbook, starting in books and then adding categories kind of as there's demand and you have incremental customer demand. I think we observed that and have not seen evidence of that approach is successful. And I think one really different thing about healthcare is that oftentimes you actually don't know what you need right when you're showing up. And so, so if you only serve one specific thing and you only have one intervention for that thing, it actually doesn't really serve the customer need in the way that they ultimately want. I think if you compare it to kind of booking services with like 3P provider search and you can book an appointment on the site. The thing that we've observed there is that you end up with this selection bias towards providers that have have a bunch of availability rather than the best provider for the customer. And so we're not requiring any level of integration to get you an appointment and get you pricing for any provider. So we don't suffer from that kind of same selection bias. We're effectively ambivalent who you want to go see and we can help you figure out who the right person is. So we We've sort of learned from observing that as well. And then I think the last point I'd make is that it's novel to have both first party and third party integrated as a seamless thing. That's novel outside of. Of certainly outside of health. You know, in healthcare. It's not as novel outside of healthcare, but by doing that, it allows you to offer a comprehensive experience and ultimately make it super seamless for the. For the customer.

Yeah. Have there been developments on the legislative side that have allowed this to exist now? I remember there were some telemedicine rule changes that happened in Covid and kind of stuck around. That kind of created a boom there. Maybe. But could you have built this 10 years ago?

I think there's probably two main things that have made this the right time to build this business. The first is that patient data is much more accessible. So something novel about the customer experience is when you sign up and you give us very basic demographics, we can go pull your insurance information and pull your full med history and medical record and repopulate everything in your profile. And these. And these flows, that wouldn't have been possible a handful of years ago. And that was due to regulatory changes that required companies to open up this data. And the second is the pricing would not have been possible to do in the ways we're doing it without. Without LLMs. Because we're effectively reading your full coverage of benefits.

Sure.

And then mapping that to the service that you need and then figuring out where you are in your deductible. All of that would not have been buildable without the current version of LLMs. And so that's cool. We're not exposing that in like a. A AI sense, but it does power how we're able to back into what your, your pricing ultimately is.

That makes a ton of sense. Yeah. It does feel like there's huge opportunity for companies that are essentially driven by enterprise AI or AI internal behind the scenes. But they don't just need to surface that. You don't need to create another text box for someone to chat with.

Totally.

That seems like a very deliberate decision. But still, like, you know, uniquely enabled.

Yeah. And if somebody can create the AI doctor that allows you to have a telemedicine visit and you guys are kind of the front end for getting expert care. You could just plug that in. You don't even necessarily have to develop.

It in terms of. I don't know how familiar you are with how the doctor's office is changing, but there was this drumbeat for years in the deep learning community about stop training radiologists, deep learning neural networks focused on image recognition will be able to do it at a superhuman level very, very quickly. Now we're seeing Google VO3 generate Hollywood level cinematography.

That's pretty generate DJ Parker going on a thousand podcasts in one day.

I mean it's really, really good. And so it's actually not real.

I'm sorry guys.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean when I see the advances in image processing and generative AI with regard to image, I feel like there has to be, there has to be a similar progress happening in the image processing of self driving cars. So when I see the ChatGPT studio Ghibli moment happen that advances my timeline to a self driving car, it also should advance my timeline to take a picture of this mole and tell me if it's cancerous. But is that happening or are these separate, are these separate paths in the tech tree or are there just barriers to actual adoption in the medical community or are there, you know, job displacement fears? Like what's actually going on over there in the doctor's office?

Yeah, it's for sure happening and I think they're as effective as you would imagine they are. I think the, probably the, the biggest difference in health care, and I'm sure it's obvious, is that you still have to get the sign off of the doc and there's still a bunch of regulatory overhang that is required to get fully to a diagnosis and certainly at this point to an intervention, whether that's a prescription or some other intervention. But I think the enablement and the efficiency showing up and I think that'll continue to continue to happen.

You're now, you're not a ChatGPT rapper. You're leveraging LLMs though. So are you a fax machine rapper?

We have definitely we will always be a fax machine rapper.

I mean I bet fax maxing, I.

Bet that we spent like a third of our dev resources at popac for like three years on fax ish stuff. Wow, it's really, it's really quite stunning.

Let's give it up for the fax machine.

One of the greatest, one of the greatest ever. But I mean I imagine that there has to have been like a B2B SaaS company that created like a really great API around fax machines in the last decade. Has that happened? Are you just standing on the shoulders of giants or are you writing fax machine interop code?

We don't even do a build it or buy it we just always build it. If it's fax we're building.

Yeah. Yeah. I imagine you're hiring CUDA engineers to develop custom parallel. Yeah.

Part of the 30 plus million is going to, you know, most setting up. There's a JV with the uae.

Yeah.

There's a whole.

Yeah. Special vector of engineers that will only work on fax machines. We have a lock on that talent pool.

That's great. I want to talk about go to market.

Well.

Oh, sorry.

But yeah, okay. One more question here and then I want to take it another.

Yeah. So I mean, obviously it's important to drive folks to this. Give us the plug. How can people get started? But then what's the actual marketing rollout? Are there partnerships that drive adoption? Am I going to be seeing flyers for your service when I walk into a doctor's office or seeing Google Ads like how. How do you actually plan on getting customers?

Yeah, I think this arc will probably end up falling the Popak arc as well. We're very much a DTC business today and we intend to stay there for a while. And so I think if you're searching for any of the things that we offer will show up in those search results like any other. Their retail experience. So we'll get quite a bit of demand there. We'll do all the normal kind of D2C tactics to drive awareness and demand.

So I think if you kind of influencer partnership.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Really get all the. All the key influencers. A lot of. Lot. Lot of stunts. A lot of blimps flying.

A lot of stunts. A lot of tik toks.

Skywriting.

Lot of tik toks.

Y.

Exactly. But I think if you. If you zoom out and look at the Pillpack journey, by the time that I left that business, two thirds of our business was B2B partnerships and B2B driven. Sure. But we feel like to build a novel and great customer experience, you have to start by marketing to the end consumers. So we're doing that again here. But we would expect partners over time to help drive demand.

Yeah.

I give it two years till Andy Jassy is calling you daily. Trying to get the band back together again in Amazon. I got. I wanted to go different directions and get an update on the kind of. The fallout from the drug pricing executive order. What. What's your kind of updated thinking there? It was only last Monday. Feels like.

It feels like a month ago.

Yeah, it does.

Yeah.

I don't know if I've seen anything substantive over the last week. Yeah, I'd say my take is still roughly my take, but I've not seen any evidence that supports it any more than I had a week ago. So hard to say.

Should we spac? Naito Engineering.

Much higher margin business for sure.

Yeah. Naito Engineering is family owned. Started in the 50s car restoration, you know. You know, engineering business that TJ is a big fan of. He's wearing a hat to ask. And backs are back, you know, potentially. Yeah, potentially an opportunity there.

Can you talk a little bit about.

My plug is that I produced a documentary about Naito and it's coming out in the fall, so keep an eye out. We'll have to hop back on TBPN to talk about our document documentary.

Yeah, I think I saw maybe it was there a trailer that already dropped.

Okay.

Yeah, that's cool.

I love that you're mixing, you know, hyper capitalism and you know, just like post exit, post economic, you know, documentary producing, you know, very few can do both.

Yeah. And Naito is not related to the, the car garage that you're involved in, is that right?

That is, yeah. It's separate. That is my car storage business. Which business? Car business, yeah.

Cool.

That's called warehouse. That's my other plug.

Warehouse. There we go.

Solo house meets like car storage. It's a cool, cool concept.

Is there a track or where do people take the cars once they're stored there?

We just go like we go on weekly drives. So there's a bunch of places to drive outside of Park City and then there's like a simulators, restaurant, bar, kind of social lounge, that kind of thing. So kind of half social, half car enthusiastic stuff.

Yeah, I mean very quickly just on the news, because everyone's talking about it. The Johnny I've going from Apple to open A.I. nikita was saying it's 100% due to Apple's compensation structure. They can't pay Johnny $10 billion, but. And you said it's 100% the right take. But why can't they like. Like it seems like at this point, like maybe they should be paying Tim Cook more. We've been joking about it. He only makes 70 million, 60 million a year. And yet he was able to navigate the tariff like war pretty adroitly. It seemed like he probably saved Apple from a $300 billion market cap hit during that fiasco. He doesn't really get to take a slice of that. Is this something that companies should be like set up for going forward or is this just a unique dynamic of the private markets? Like what's actually going on on here.

Yeah. I think it's a fundamental flaw of these large companies is that they're, they're designed to reward generalists for the most part.

Yeah.

And there's very little differentiation available on comp. Even if you're at a pretty senior level, you've sort of run into these natural comp barriers. I don't, I was less commenting on whether Apple should pay Tim 10 billion, should pay Johnny $10 billion, but more commenting like if you bump up against breaking any sort of compensation rule, making an exception. It's incredibly difficult. It's basically impossible. And I think it's especially odd when you're willing to like there's, there's a, an incredible willingness to invest in a new thing. Like well beyond kind of ventures tolerance for capital investment.

Totally.

Like billions of dollars a year into like the Metaverse.

Like yeah.

Super speculative. Amazon spending $6 billion on Alexa. Like super speculative investment. Yep. With no disproportionate economics for the person deciding how to make that capital investment. And which I've always thought to be very odd. Like you could effectively swap out kind of ten L7s and dramatically change the comp of the VP running that group. And that's probably a great investment. But that's just not the sort of mentality at most of these large companies.

Yeah. I mean you, you had the kind of canonical founder exited to big tech, moved on pretty quickly. Experience. Like what was the one thing that you took away from Amazon that was like this is great, I need to port this elsewhere. Was there anything that stuck out to you as like deeply underrated about those large organizations? Because it's easy to say, oh they're slow, oh they're, they, you know, blah blah, blah. But what was actually interesting about Amazon in particular or just big tech broadly.

Yeah, I mean Amazon's way of working, especially the kind of writing culture we definitely have co opted and I would never or kind of operationally do it a different way. Like I think that is quite effective. There's like a reasonableness that probably is a little bit, you know, tilted at Amazon. Like you're literally writing like your annual budget like that there might be things that there's other formats that make sense. But as a general rule like I think a writing culture is much better than a traditional culture.

Yeah.

I think they're also incredibly good at scaling stuff that works right. Like they are a machine if they found product market fit. Both because there's a deep willingness to invest best and because there's a bunch of established mechanisms to scale this stuff. I think that can be inhibitive of building something novel and new. Right. There's like sort of over process and over litigate stuff early on, but the second you have something really working inside of Amazon, like they are just masters of, of scaling it up.

Yeah. This is the same thing with Google Ben Thompson was talking about with regard to latest Google I O launch. Like Google launches a ton of demos, ton of products, but they never really go anywhere unless it's tied to search. If it's tied to search, they will die before they let that thing not work. And so you can talk all about, oh, they sunset Google buzz or circles or flight or this random thing. But like they haven't sunset shopping, they haven't sunset display.

This one's still going.

That one's still going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jordy, you have anything else?

I think that's it. The only thing. I'll share it with you now. I just got breaking news news and TJ will laugh at this, but John really wants the new ZR1. Oh yeah, which, which, which is like probably on the opposite end of like the spectrum of like cars TJ likes and like doesn't like. But I just got a quote that basically you would have to pay 100k over MSRP to get one. There's only been 12 delivered so far.

So TBPN is ripping.

It's a small price to pay. It's leaning made. Maybe, maybe we can flip that around. I. So I want an American made sports car. I want something interesting, but it has to be American made. What would you recommend for me?

Can it be old?

Yeah, it can be anything in a Cobra.

Cobra's okay.

Yeah, that might be good.

Do not get a kit car, but like get an OG unrestored Cobra. Those things are sick.

Okay, that's good. I mean, last thing on the writing culture. Do you think that Amazon is at risk of being kind of one shot by these LLMs? Because you don't actually have to go through the exercise anymore of writing a memo. You can just be like, get me $20 million and I need to hire 25 people. Justify it. Like it's an Amazon memo.

Boom.

And then you just have it.

You're just gonna drop in all your old memos and be like, update this for Q2, please.

Yeah, exactly. I imagine that that kind of destroys the culture potentially.

Yeah, it does. There's a real risk there that I hadn't consumed.

Yeah. Anyway, yeah, I mean we were recently posting a job posting for an editor and the, and, and the the job listing was very clearly gener chat GPT generated and I was like what prompt did you use? Maybe we should just post that prompt. And we wound up just posting the prompt and it's like way better because the prompt is way more succinct. It's like you had to give it anything. Just give me the bullet points. Don't. Don't flesh it out into two pages.

I am. I am pretty upset that chat GPT is going to single handedly ruin EM dashes for me.

Oh yeah.

The record was like my favorite punctuation pre chat GPT and just ruined. Just totally ruined.

Are you a delve guy too? Were you using delve a lot?

Not really. Just.

Yeah. Anyway, great talking to you as always.

Yeah. Congratulations on the launch Ashwin and Elliot.

It was great.

This is. I love. I love that you guys are getting back together to fix a big, big problem.

It's fantastic. You'd love to see it.

Great having you on on.

Good to see you guys.

Enjoy the rest of the day.

Let's talk about numeral sales tax on autopilot send Spend less than five minutes per month guys on sales tax compliance. Benchmark series A.

Benchmark Series A. I love new series B income.

Also get on public public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions, folks.

Millions. I can't wait till we can say trusted by billions.

Trusted by trillions. Let me see.

Trusted by Martians.

What else we got here? Do we have any others? Oh, we have our next guest already. Easy. Let's bring him in. We got.

There he is.

Reggie.

Reggie.

How you doing, chief?

We didn't. We didn't have a title for you so I put the CRO. The chief Reggie officer.

It's. We're maximizing free agency, boys. Free agencies and trade season.

I wouldn't be surprised if you get a maxed out offer before this in your inbox before this.

6.5 billion is on the table now. So anything.

6.5 billion. I had. I had an idea shortly before you. You Maybe you could build it. Septum piercing AI wearable health tracker. Anything there straight to the shop.

An aura ring for your nose.

An aura that can also be a companion.

Yeah. You're talking to it all day long.

It's like. You sure you want to have that? You know, Diet Coke.

Yeah, but scent is tied to memory. So imagine it just squirts the scent up.

Maybe not. Maybe not.

Squirts remembers.

Yeah.

It admits it emits an aroma to remind you of your aroma.

Aroma is better.

An aroma. Yeah, this aroma is built in. This is a, this is a trillion dollar idea here. Yeah, I mean, device they're making Apple or Jony ives over at OpenAI. We were kicking around what we think it might be. It feels like Sam Altman's been into her. So we're thinking single earpiece that you wear. Maybe it has a camera on it. That was kind of the best thing that I could come up with. Maybe glasses. It feels like they're probably not just going to do a phone or an iPad or a watch, something with the rectangular screen on it. It. It's going to be something a little bit different. Take you off of your, off of your phone. Maybe curing dopamine addiction. What are you expecting? And then we can go into all of the different, all the different aspects of the deal.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think, you know, one thing that felt very clear is that they emphasized like a sort of like family of devices. Right. So I think already they're coming from a multiple objects approach, which, which I think is cool mostly because I think where a lot of hardware companies sort of get stuck is they launch one thing and then everyone only knows them for that one thing and then they get stuck in the loop of that one thing. Right. So like whoop is an example.

17.

Yeah.

Pebble. Pebble, like invented the smartwatch in many ways and then Apple came out with the Apple Watch and it integrated with the phone and the iPad. So yeah, I mean, lack of ecosystem. I mean, and it's only getting stronger. Like now you can just on your MacBook Pro, pull up iPhone mirroring and just use your phone on your computer and stuff. And so the integration between the ecosystem. Apple knows that that's a strength that it's like, oh yeah, the new Android phone might have a better camera, but are you willing to give up full integration with everything else you have? Like ripping out one device now is a, a $20,000 proposition for many people. It's not just, it's not just $1,000. So, okay, suite of devices. So you think there will be a rectangular, a black mirror?

I, I don't think there'll be a black mirror. I think they're, I think they're smart enough not to go head to head with the phone. I do think, you know, maybe it starts with a puck that's tied to like productivity. Right. So something that just tries to get you interacting with chat GBT faster. So I can take it with me. And it also Sits on my desk when I'm working. And it's just the fastest way to sort of like, that was easy, you know, Staples style thing.

It's interesting that the workflow when you're in conversation with a friend where I'm like, john, what was that company like a year ago that was doing this thing? And you're like, oh, I kind of query you and you bring it back.

What do you think about foldables? It feels like I've seen some demos out of China where the tech is getting pretty solid, the hinges are getting smaller and smaller. And you could imagine.

I know where you're going with. I know where you're going with this. You want a newspaper size.

We were joking.

Foldable that you can just.

Let's make a newspaper. But, but I mean, seriously, you could imagine a situation where it's like, really what I want is if I'm gonna be on, I don't want to carry a laptop because then I need a backpack. I can't put an, I can't put an iPad in my pocket, but I could put something that folds up into the phone format. And then it's a bigger decision. It's like, am I just going to do the earpiece for the little random chats with ChatGPT? But then if I want to go full in and watch a movie, I have a device that can, that can really, really super power. And it's like kind of counter positioned against Apple a little bit. We've heard rumors that Apple's maybe thinking about folding, but it seems like that's one of the technologies that you would be looking at. What's your take on folding?

Yeah, I think foldables actually squarely land in like the Apple value system. You know, Apple really values the sort of like high definition of their rectangles, you know, and so I think if you're trying to compete on high definition of these rectangles, you're probably in a losing battle. I think. You know, something I talk about a lot when it comes to hardware is like your values have to zag away from Apple as much as possible. Right? So like, I think Obvi Shiftman is a really good example of this. Like, Apple can't launch a puck that listens to you 247 because the conspiracy about Apple already and a lot of the tech giants that they listen to you 247 y you can't do the literal thing. Right? At least not for some time. And so ABHI has a little bit of like narrative Runway because that value is so Separate from like the Apple ecosystem. So I think similarly, like OpenAI. And my assumption is that Johnny's aware of it. They have to zag from a values perspective.

What do you think their confidence level is? Right. The most high profile example lately is Humane, which was a talented team, maybe not as talented, but they did have the full backing of the SV hype machine in many ways. A lot of, a lot of investors were quick to point out that they weren't in it and that they thought it was silly, but it was like a moonshot new hardware attempt with a bunch of, you know, very talented people. Do you think that that is in the back of their mind at all.

In terms of like projection specifically?

No, no, just not even about, not even about the form factor, but just like, hey, this is actually like, yeah, it's cool to have build billions of dollars in the world's best team. But it's also Apple was started in a garage, Right. Something closer to avi's environment right now where he's like on a motorcycle, just like hair in the wind, just thinking about the next computing interface. And it's also, I feel like the pressure to deliver value beyond just companionship. Right. Like Avi's Edge is like, I just want it to be, be your friend. I don't need it to be. And yeah, maybe it can do other stuff over time, but.

Anyways, yeah, so, so I think on the humane thing, you know, I got to know a bunch of folks over there and I, I think my, my main critique is that, you know, they were very like catholic guilt ridden about the iPhone. Like the entire animating spirit was like, we feel, we kind of feel guilty about the iPhone and now we have to present this alternative so that, that's not the only road that we go down. I think unfortunately, like they made a few sort of like key errors. Like, I think the projection was sort of like a really key error. I think they like backpedaled away from replacing the phone and then it was supposed to be just like part of like your broader ecosystem. So I think it's what's really clear already, right, is that they OpenAI and Johnny are saying, we don't want to replace the phone, we want to be this third thing, but we do want to live in your pocket. Right? So it's like close, close enough, but far enough. And I think that, you know what's funny is Sam backed Humane early and they had an OpenAI partnership. And I think that I don't know the full politics there, but I would Assume at some point, you know, Sam sort of maybe lost face and faith. Sorry, not lost faith, lost faith and then kind of turned to okay, well who are the other superstars at Apple? Because like make no mistake, like Imran and folks on that team were like these superstars at Apple. Right. It's just two different sides. Like Imran was the HCI team and Johnny was the industrial design team, you know. So yeah, I think that's sort of, I think they're aware of those lessons.

But one thing we were talking about was in terms of building like a super high performing hardware device, consumer electronics team. Steve Jobs not only had Jony I've but he also had Tim Cook to build the supply chain. And building robust supply chains was difficult in the 90s and 2000s when Apple did it and it didn't exist in China. And now because of geopolitical considerations it's also very difficult. It doesn't feel turnkey. It feels like the turnkey era of consumer hardware was maybe the 2010s and now we are post that and there are lots of different considerations around tariffs and trade policy and geopolitical dynamics. Do you think that we would see someone like a Tim cook go into OpenAI to get this off the ground?

Yeah, that's a good question. So some things that I've been just sort of like watching is that OpenAI already has like an internal hardware team and they've had for quite some time. They have someone that's like head of robotics. They have, I think they hired a woman recently that's head of like all hardware. And so it's clear that they've been building up this capacity internally for quite some time. And so I think you know, the joint venture is definitely some form of appeal to authority. Right. With Johnny and the my personal hot take is I don't know how sensitive they are to actually shipping or at least shipping on the time that they you know, stated, you know like the hot take, the extreme hot take would be right, is like Sam needs another you know, 200 billion and he, you know, he goes to like Saudi Arabia with Johnny and Johnny puts on his like British accent and you know, they don't have to even talk about the next model or like sure numbers. Right. It's simply when's the device shipping and they could just say a number or like say a date and they can get the money. Right?

Yeah. If you're building up the valuation, you're saying there's a 10% chance that we disrupt Google. That's a multi Trillion dollar business. So you can value us at a multiple hundred millions. There's also a 10% chance that we disrupt Apple and that's a multi trillion dollar business. So you discount the value and that's a couple hundred billion. And so yeah, you kind of add.

And then that question doesn't matter.

Exactly.

You know, like then that supply chain question doesn't matter. When I have 200 billion in cash, it's like, what supply chain.

Buy Foxconn? Yeah, I think, Sam, we manufacture Apple now.

So.

Yeah, I mean, what.

Yeah, we're gonna bake. We're gonna bake the new model into. Into.

Yeah, I've seen, I've seen some hot takes back and forth. Johnny. I've was obviously deeply loved and admired and I kind of took the Internet by storm with the conversation with Patrick Collison last week. At the same time, a lot of people have said that a lot of the work that he did was iterative and not that revolutionary. What is your take on the legacy of Jony? I've, you know, he's, he's in his 60s. That's sometimes retirement age. I believe he's in his 60s. I actually don't know. But I mean at the same time Berkshire Hathaway just hired a 62 year old CEO and Warren Buffett worked into his 90s. So what is your overall take on, on, on Jony? I've's legacy and where it goes from here.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think the early part of his legacy or like the Apple part of his legacy is like undeniable. Right. Like one interesting thing like in Johnny history is, you know, the first place he was working, I believe like the design firm specialized in bathrooms. And so when you understand that, you can actually understand like his obsession with smoothness, his obsession with like sort of like knobs and dials and all of these things that we see that are kind of orthogonal to like computer hardware as well as just like things that are unobtrusive. Right. And like brushed aluminium. Like you kind of understand his design language when you know where he started. So then you get to Apple and he's had very.

Started from the toilet.

Yeah.

But you know, in a, in a lot of ways, like these devices sort of, they, they blend in similar to like a, a home object and they don't really stand out like what we understood consumer electronics to be. So then you start fast forwarding you saying, okay, now he has like all the devices in play. What does he do? My hot. One of my hot takes is that like he kind of gives technology a type of like body dysmorphia. Right. Like all he cares about is thinness.

He.

Even when he gets control of the whole design team, that's when we get the pivot to flat design. So he even takes like the interface level and makes it thin and flat and not too, like, fun.

Wait, so was the, was the camera.

Who's responsible for the camera bump?

Is that just to sell more cases? What's up with that?

I think the camera bump just became a trade off post Steve because again, think we still have to understand like Apple the machine, right. When Steve was there, really the only person you had to appeal to was Steve. So there's like a very known thing around like Apple demo culture where like it's Steve in a room with a couple other people. You go in, you show it to him and he says yes or no. And if he says yes, it's in and there's no one else. You're convincing. My assumption is post Steve, you're. You're going through stakeholder management. Right. So Johnny doesn't have like the number one authority anymore, so he starts having to like wrestle with, you know, the camera team and he's wrestling with Tim and he's wrestling with manufacturer and he just doesn't get to win every battle anymore. That's my.

Yeah, yeah, seems like you're good.

What do you think's going on with Apple Vision Pro? Have you used. Feels like it's built on some of the design language that Jony I've pioneered aluminium, I suppose, but at the same time, not the thinnest VR headset Johnny left in 2019. They've obviously been working on Apple Vision Pro for longer than that, but it feels like maybe the first Apple product that doesn't have his mark on it. But overall, do you think that's going to get any better? Is there any salvage that can do? Have you used it? What's your reaction to just VR broadly? Any of that stuff that you're thinking through?

Yeah, so I have one. I used it. I was very curious. It is really heavy.

Yeah.

I think they had the wrong guiding metaphor at the end of the day. They didn't have like a true creative direction anchor. And so they landed on. We're going to put a floating iPad on your face and it's going to be somewhat antisocial. Right. So everything that they show is widgets and air and then you sitting alone on your couch watching something in extreme high definition and that's fine. But as like A counter position. It's like what if their anchor was like the ipod? Right. And maybe their like hero product was actually something around Apple music and it looked more like the dancing silhouettes that when you put this headset on your entire apartment actually turns into this beautiful color scape and you are animated. Right. So they chose like a stagnant couch potato instead of you being animated. And we're seeing the same thing in Apple advertising when it comes to the way they talk about Apple intelligence. Right. It's like this kind of like slobby guy at his desk getting AI to write an email to his boss to slack off further. So we have this company that used to champion like you're going to be your best self with these products and.

Now it's turning into creativity.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Put on the headset and slob out. Don't do work. Get AI to tell your boss why you're gonna be late. And it's just like, it's like Steve's nightmare mirror.

You know, it's funny. Yeah.

I mean what about, what about glasses as a form factor?

I, I'm, I'm bullish on glasses as a form factor and I think it's going to go a few different ways. I do think like the meta ray bans, like that form factor will continue to get better eventually. Like what it takes to put projections and those will be, you know, lightweight enough. You know, I think the Orion I think was the project on Meta. You know, I think obviously that's like two bulky Zuckerberg looks silly but I think they're going to just get it thinner and get it thinner and in like 10 years it'll be great. Maybe five also.

I mean with the, with the XR stuff and the AR stuff like xreal and Nreal Air, this company does glasses that it doesn't do all the crazy tracking but it can pull up a visual in front of you just statically and that solves like 90% of the use case for this. If I'm on a plane and I'm just going to watch a movie, I think that that's going to get there first and then you have to figure out out can we actually make it fully holographic? But if you just want a basic hud, like a heads up display, that's a lot more achievable. No, none of the big tech companies have really said like we're going to settle for that. But I think that that might be a path along the road actually. But I haven't really played with it enough staying on Apple Vision Pro. I heard a rumor, I don't know how true this is that the person, one of the, one of the key people at Apple in charge of it was an ex Dolby engineer who was all about the Dolby Cinema theater. And I, and, and I thought that like that was the killer app. Dolby's great. I love the movies, the, the sound. But, but like I.

Wrong. Wrong creative anchor.

Yeah, yeah. But I, I tried the Dinosaur Experience. It was like two minutes. I'm like, I'm not going to game on this thing. I'm not really going to work on this thing. I'm not going to work on this thing. But, but I did watch, I watched all of Citizen Kane actually in Vision Pro and it was amazing and it was like being in a theater and it was fantastic. And I almost think that they should have gone narrower and maybe the ipod is the right thing. Like the ipod, when you put in the headphones, it is isolating. But the campaign around that was you dancing around in silhouette is beautiful. And there is something about like restoring this idea of going to the movie. But I agree with you that the ads were super dystopian. There's that one where the guy is clearly a dad and he's watching a video of his kids and it looks like he's divorced and like his kids super depressing but giving blood on the track.

Bob Dylan divorced.

It was very rough. But, but what is your take on this idea of like Apple narrowing the focus of, of vision to we have one killer use case because they're kind of the everything company. The iPhone will call you an Uber. Does your email, does phone everything. You know the original iPhone Kino was it just does three things and then it grew out from there. Do they even have the culture to refocus around one value prop? I always thought like they have Apple tv. They never made a real tv. They could have just positioned this as like this is the best way to watch Apple tv. And it's just now the TV machine and then it has some other stuff and yeah, we'll have an app store. But really. But what do you think about that culturally at Apple and just in terms of like, like if you were running the place, what would you do?

Yeah, yeah, that's. That's a great question. You know, I think it's, it's so hard to understand why certain things in your own history worked out the way that they did. Right. I think we are so anchored on like you said, the iPhone being this giant enablement to not only Apple, but a lot of, I mean how much of the Valley is built on just like mobile apps that, that did a thing right. And that's because if you're Uber, you know, you have GPS and now like you can actually do all these things. Right. So I, I think Apple wanted to be hyper enablement ready again. You know, they wanted developers to really build things on this. And I just, you know, I think unfortunately at the premium price, unlike like the Quest, it's really hard to bootstrap, bootstrap that and get consumer adoption and because they, they also have never done just like a developer only product before. So there were just so many conflicting narratives. Again, it just seemed like no one was at the actually gripping on to the, to the reins. So I'm, I'm very pro pick a singular use case. That's going to be incredible at, you know, like, like, I think Steve's original thing was like ipod for the eyes. You know, it's like noise cancellation for the eyes. And so you have Apple tv, you have Apple Fitness. This is like we're doing these two things. Make it super lightweight, make it comfortable as much as possible and maybe as a bonus you can like tie the laptop to it so you have like a keyboard in front of you. Right. But this is about being static and.

Xyz, have you ever thought of applying for a job at Apple? Maybe not CEO job, I don't think they have a listing. But trying to fix Apple, get it back to its roots, I think, I.

Think you need a lot of political capital to do that. There is my assumption. And so I'm far more attracted to the things I see getting built from like my peers and.

Yeah, yeah, let's switch gears for a second.

I mean it's just fascinating because it is a, it's like almost like a supply chain story in the sense that they were able to pull forward the highest resolution display that no one else had access to, not even mark Zuckerberg. Spending $10 billion a year on the Metaverse could get that screen pulled forward by two years. I'm sure the next Quest will have a comparable screen, but Apple was able to do that and, but that's not enough. It's like, it's a fantastic execution on the supply chain side. Anyway, Jordy, where do you want to go next?

I wanted to ask what you're up to too. I know, I'm sure you're cooking. I know you're cooking. Anything you can, Anything you can share right now.

Yeah. So yeah, I mean I'm coming out of, you know, sort of an acquisition of Eternal and just thinking about what's next. And one, one thing that I've been working on with friends throughout the past year is actually speaking of hardware. This. Oh no, the background.

Look at what you can see. Paper. I see paper. Hardware. Underrated form factor for hardware.

Yeah, it's a Wall Street Journal competitor.

How do you do the. Oh, there it is. That's not it either. How do you do these things? Oh, there it is.

Okay, there we go.

So why would you want to, why would you want to hide that? Why would you want to hide that background?

That's a way better background.

Listen, I love San Francisco. It's the best city in the world. Yeah, says the New Yorker.

Stolen, stolen valor on that Golden Gate Bridge. Brutal. Brutal. Show us what you're working on.

Yeah. So the big project I've been doing and launching Technology Brothers exclusive is this hardware book.

So let's go.

Hardware 2024. I made my friends Julian Davis and Charlene Dang and you know, I saw sort of a few years ago that hardware was really going to become the new meta. It's sort of, you know, we saw software shifting into these two very big ways like, and we, and we started to see the containers for software shifting as well. Those containers being sort of like spatial and hardware. And so, so last year just started to feel like a really special time in hardware. Humane rabbit, all these things with Teenage Engineering Daylight USB Club. And so we really wanted to give sort of like the art book treatment. This is my personal copy. The real copy is going to be hardcover, but we really want to give the sort of like art book treatment to what's happening in hardware.

Daylight. Let's go.

Yeah, daylight is beautiful. You know, while writing the like humane sort of blurb, they got acquired by hp. So these things were, you know, really shifting in real time, which was so crazy. One of the big, big sort of sells on this book is a exclusive interview with Jesper, the founder of Teenage Engineering, who maybe folks remember from his config talk last year. And so it's 260 pages of giving like present day technology that art book treatment. So really, really excited about that.

Amazing.

Yeah.

When can we buy it? Can we buy it?

You can buy it right now.

2024.Comhelpwarebook2024.Com let's go. Fantastic.

Amazing. I'm excited. And the site's beautiful by the way. Very cool.

Thank you. That was just a late night. One late night coffee session.

Vibe coding.

All right.

Yeah, Some might say.

All right, I just hit pay now.

Let's do it.

That was easy.

There we go.

There we go. There we go. That's amazing. What's next? Are you already working on the next book? You're already cooking hardware 2025.

It's happening now. It's unfolding.

It is unfolding. I would love to sort of get. Get sucked into the OpenAI hardware tentacles and maybe even write some OpenAI checks to Emergent hardware. I think that we're going to see a lot of form factors emerge beyond just pendants, beyond just like pucks, what have you. I've been investing in advising some new hardware companies and AI hardware companies. So yeah, I'm just.

Have you gotten a chance. Have you gotten a chance to play with the Chromatic from Palmer Luckey?

No, it sold out before I could buy it.

Oh, it sold out? Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I mean, it's a beautiful product. You can run over it with a car. Apparently. I haven't tried that. But also it's like this perfect throwback, but you can use emulators to play any game. And now they just added Twitch streaming from it over USB C, which is crazy. So you can plug it in and it records what you. What you're playing. So it's like this.

When can it control Enduro Drone?

One day, I'm sure. And I think that they might be working on an N64 and some other. Some other retro hardware. So it's fun. A lot of the retro. Retro throwback stuff coming through. I mean, the only other spicy take I want is on Memoji, but do you have time for that?

Is Memoji underrated?

Are you using it every day?

No, I don't.

Daily driving?

No, no, sorry.

Damn.

What do you think?

Are you talking about Memoji or Genmoji?

Oh, yeah. Memoji is the one where you make yourself into an emoji. Emoji is the one where you generate anything. Maybe.

Yeah, Yeah, I think.

I think that, you know, I think the word. I don't think Genmoji is actually a bad product. I just think like the ad campaign again, like they've lost their soul when it comes to communication.

Yeah.

The entire thing about Genmoji, it's the experience of making a niche reference for your friend. And the ad campaign is just like very weird looking.

Yeah.

Like end results, you know, like the entire thing about that is like, it's about the process, not the end result. Like the end result out of context makes zero sense. And then that's all they pasted around, like major cities. And it's just like, God, I mean.

How do you even tell that story? Is like, like, should the billboard be like two friends, like in separate rooms, kind of like mean girl, split screen, like laughing because they're sending each other Genmojis.

That's not a billboard campaign. First level of like taste. Is that a billboard campaign?

Yep.

No, I mean, it's funny because it should be such a. It should be a product that needs no billboard. Right. Like, it should be inherently so viral and so user generated that people just start using it. Right. And it has this sort of Ghibli moment where people are just using Genmoji and I just didn't see that at all. Maybe. Maybe I'm a boomer.

Yeah.

Anyways, thank you so much for coming on. We've been wanting to do this for a while. This was great timing. Excited to get a copy of the book. We will, we'll show it back here on the show and I'm sure have some follow up questions, but congratulations on the launch and welcome back anytime for more hardware hot takes.

Oh, fantastic. Thank you.

Brothers playing out for the studio audience. Thanks for coming on the show.

Legend chief Reggie, officer of Hardware Book 2024.

We'll talk to you soon, Reggie.

I'll be right back.

How'd you sleep last night?

You know how I slept, John. Okay, I. I should just give you access. I should just give you my login to just motivate you because I got a 93. I'm climbing up, got a 99, John.

Well, I beat you Monday. Tuesday, you beat me Wednesday. Thursday you get out of here. I'm gonna do some ad reads. Go get a pod 5 ultra@8sleep.com they have a 5 year warranty, 30 night risk free trial free returns and free shipping. These are nights that fuel your best days. Clinically backed sleep fitness. We also have a coupon code tbpn@eightsleep.com go check it out. We also want to tell you about AdQuick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising Only Ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. We of course have wanderers find your happy place Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. And lastly, bezel. Your bezel concierge is now available to source any watch on the planet for you. Seriously, any watch. They have over 26,000 luxury watches on bezel now so go to getbezel.com we should go through some more timeline posts. There's been a bunch of stuff in the news. What else is here? L3 tweet engineer just says LMAO and post screenshot probably from blind or something. Google prestige is gone. I was at a dinner party when I mentioned in passing that I worked at Google and everyone immediately burst into laughter pointing out how ChatGPT had eaten our lunch. Then they pulled out their iPhones and showed that they didn't have a single Google app installed and had set their homepage and default search engine to ChatGPT. Then they GPT Google stock chart and erupted into another round of uproarious laughter while making the pinching hand gesture. Very very fake. Extremely fake. You cannot get off the Google ecosystem. But very very funny that somebody posted this. Very silly. Also if they pulled up the Google stock chart they would see that it's up like 10% in the last two days. So very silly. We also have the Teal Fellows were announced the 2025 teal fellows. We're going to do Teal Fellow day hopefully on Tuesday and we're going to interview as many of these folks as we can. Give you a little tour of what the latest batch of Thiel Fellows are working on. There's a bank, a trading platform, a research lab, somebody working on non invasive neurostimulators foundation models to power digital humans that are indistinguishable from real ones. AI powered solution to automate manufacturing processes in dark factories. That's cool. Fizz is developing an AI financial investor. We have friends who've been on the show are now Teofellas. Soren Monroe Anderson, the founder of Neros is a defense technology company that builds drones critical to the modern arsenal at massive scale. Orbit is a non invasive neurostimulator. There's a bunch of other folks in here interfaces developing human native communication devices that change the way we work and think that sounds maybe hardware driven. Excited to talk to him about that and go through that in Sigil.

I am working on a surprise guest, Ben Hylak. Come on later today for 10 minutes at 2.

That'd be great.

X is so cooked right now. It's extremely cooked. I can't even get DMS out. I'm trying to get his email for the invite but he had something interesting earlier. Ben said, an AI alignment researcher at Anthropic Just said that Claude Opus will call the police or lock you out of your computer if it detects you doing something illegal.

Goal.

I will never give this model access to my computer. And so Sam spicy, I guess, Sam Bauman over at Anthropic in a now deleted post, says if it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral, for example, like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial, it will use command line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of relevant systems, or all the above. That is absolutely crazy. But we'll see if it's real or fake news. And let us bring in our next guest.

We have Keith, your boy. Welcome to the stream, Keith.

Hey, how you doing?

There he is.

We have a sound.

Welcome.

Welcome to the show.

Great to have you.

Yeah, yeah, great to have you back.

The entry song.

Yeah, it's a little messy. We're figuring it out. Give us the recap on the KV summit. How'd it go?

Yeah. So every year for the last 15 years we've hosted all of our CEOs, like 150 plus CEOs at Cavalla Point in San Francisco. And it's like a two day program where we bring in inspirational and actionable speakers. So for example, I interviewed Eric from Ramp, John Carlson of Stripe, John Carlson interviewed Bill Gates actually and Sam Altman spoke and then the CEO of Databricks. So we have a wide variety of content. Some of it's more practical, tangible and some of it's very aspirational, inspirational. So we take our CEO time very seriously and want to make sure that every minute they're not in the office, managing, executing, growing their companies, that they get disproportionate returns out of the time.

What was any type of surprising takeaways or insights that you can share?

I want to know what the biggest debate points are. Where are the things where people are actually debating? I've, you know, Sam Allman recently said AI could be an operating system. There's questions about foundation model layer value accrual versus application model layer value accrual, how many winners there will be in the coding market. Like what are people actually debating and unclear about? And then I'd love to know where you stand on it obviously. But like the non consensus topics are probably the most interesting to dig into here.

Sure, we can talk about all those and generally speaking we will post all of these videos online. So the vast library of, you know, 15 years of virtually anybody who's been successful in tech has spoken at our conference and so fact, Sam's probably spoken four or five times now. It was interesting, I compared when I was interviewing John Colson, I'd interviewed Patrick Carlson literally a decade ago.

Oh wow.

And it was an interesting contrast to show the arc of the company. When I interviewed Patrick in 2015, Stripe was worth, you know, several billion dollars, but it only had 250 employees. And now, you know, as John mentioned, they have 9,000, 9,000. Wow. Yeah. So it shows you the arc of, you know, building a company that a decade had passed since I last interviewed Patrick. So we will share 90 plus percent of these videos. We'll start posting them next week. There's maybe one or two, it's up to speaker, you know, they don't want to share certain things. But the contrast I noticed, one's one about building a company. We talked about Founder Mode a fair amount. So you know, Eric talked about how they build ramp and John gave a slightly different perspective on building Stripe. And then I interviewed actually Gary Tanoic to talk about the origins of Founder Mode, the lessons from thousands of companies that they've invested in for 20 years. And so I think the operating styles and approaches to hiring senior talent or not was an interesting contrast. On AI, we had Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Speak and talk about the future of AI as applied to pre existing companies. He was quite inspirational. He made a couple points that I think Sam generally would have agreed with, which is there's only going to be one foundation model, research lab oriented, successful winner. It's certainly not something that VC should be investing in at the application layer. I think there's more room and opportunity or something that transcends what we think of research labs today. Just like OpenAI and ChatGPT is transcending what we think of search and you know, to some extent where we think of social media. I think the next generation will be something that doesn't look anything like an LLM, doesn't look like a research lab and you know, it's very difficult therefore to find. But hopefully some founders have visions and hopefully they call me when they do.

Yeah, I feel like Brian Chesky was a big inspiration for the original Founder Mode essay by Paul Graham. He just went extreme Founder Mode a week or two ago with the Airbnb reimagining. At the same time Ben Thompson's kind of analyzing that and Ben Thompson's argument is that Airbnb is a platform and a marketplace company and so the economics of the platform kind of dictate a certain user experience, mainly that people Open the app. Yeah, they have billion hundreds of millions of users. The user base is massive at Airbnb, but the average user opens it like twice a year, year. And they want to get in, get out. And it's not a daily active user experience. And so Ben Thompson was saying there will be some challenges. What was your reaction to how Brian positioned Airbnb's next chapter? Do you like that communication style? Are you optimistic about where Airbnb goes? Give us your. Give us your reaction to the Airbnb news.

So, yes, Brian pioneered what we now describe as Founder mode, even though it's very specific in some ways down operating style of Apple. But in any event, he triggered this at a YC alumni dinner in Napa Valley, where he kind of off the cuff without preparation, spoke for two and a half hours. And that's what led to Paul Graham summarizing and distilling it, which led to a lot of intrigue and interest. And this is kind of what I think CEOs were talking about privately, but no one had really stitched it together and kind of created a public discussion of it. For those of you really interested in the topic, I interviewed Brian a few months ago at Gramp's offices, and that video is available online, where Brian is incredibly articulate and eloquent about the virtues and the benefits of Founder Mode and how he actually implemented it. So I highly recommend anybody in the audience who's intrigued watch the actual video, because I will not do it justice. On the specific topic of Airbnb experiences, I think Ben made some interesting points. I've been a fan and early reader of strategy, and it's the only thing I read regularly in all of tech, because I think he's the only one who actually understands tech that writes. So I actually have been recommending this to friends of mine for over a decade who want to enter into tech as like Start. I think the point he makes first of all is, is that in services world, you potentially want to get off the platform once you find a service provider that you like. I think he missed one subtle point, which is Airbnb is still designed mostly for travelers, I. E. You know, I'm going from New York, let's say, to Cincinnati, and obviously the canonical case is I would find a place to stay in Cincinnati. Great. But as you point out, the average user might travel 2.5 times, 2.4, 2.5 times a year. So it's hard to turn my Airbnb usage into a daily, weekly, monthly habit. However, the point that Ben Glossed over a bit is that I'm traveling to Cincinnati and then to SF and then to Dallas and then to somewhere in Utah. I have no incentive to go off the platform to find a service provider. Yeah, yes. In a city that, I mean regularly, let's say New York City. If I found like a hairstylist here or the equivalent, I may have an economic motive to just, you know, disintermediate the platform. But if Brian's right that curating experiences and services that a local would use still appeals to people who are in New York City, which is a huge number of people come to New York City every year, then I think Ben may be wrong and Brian may be right. So I think Brian is probably.

Sort.

Of dialing in to the traveler visitor use case. And then you need the breadth of services when you're traveling and experiences, you don't necessarily have to only use it in your home city, which is where Ben may have some valid critiques.

Yeah, yeah, it seems like, like the dog walker example is probably the rough one because it's the most obvious disintermediation point at the same time. Yeah. There's plenty of times when big group is traveling and they want, you know, private chef to come cook for everyone. Something like that makes a ton of sense in that context. And then also it's it like you can build a good business in a referral business that is not less. It's less transaction. It's more discovery and advertising basis. I was actually like, not even half joking, just saying that maybe Airbnb needs an advertising product because Uber has been so successful in advertising. I don't. I mean, I think that that might really frustrate people if they're seeing promoted listings. But at the same time, like on these marketplaces, usually advertising does pretty well. I don't know if you have a reaction to that.

Yeah, I have two reactions. First of all, I don't think Airbnb will need it. Airbnb's margins are like roughly take rates, roughly 13%.

Sure.

And, you know, versus like the Ubers or the Instacarts, where they really don't make too much money per transaction.

Got it.

If you don't have highly profitable advertising revenue, it's hard to build an interesting business. So I think Airbnb doesn't have the economic drivers that you see with Instacart and where it has been successful. But is something annoying. That said, you know, Google used to run this internal study where they would actually show users who are exposed to SEO content and Paid advertising are more satisfied than users who are searching and only see SEO content. So advertising, when done properly can be a value add. If you think about it, the economic incentive of drafting content that explains, contextualizes and markets products does drive to efficient advertising. That can be.

Yeah. And even, even today, if you're in an area and some service provider is running ads, it shows a level of sophistication and professionalism that might associate in some ways with just a better end product experience than somebody that doesn't know how to set up a Google Ad. I wanted to ask Ben had some great thoughts around the entire Internet is based on advertising and in a time when, you know, we may all have agents that are just trawling the Internet for us and acting on our behalf, the, you know, economic. The existing economic model of the Internet could hit some snags. And he makes a case for, you know, micropayments to allow people that produce content to get some benefit from having models, you know, acquiring information on those sites. He also outlines how this is going to be incredibly difficult to pull off because there's so many different groups and incentives. I'm curious if you've spent much time yourself thinking about the potential for micro transactions in the context of replacing lost advertising revenue.

So similar observation. I think the post the Original Sin of the Internet by Ben is totally worth reading. And I generally agree with the point that the original sin of the Internet Internet was that all content should be free. I actually made that point to Jessica Lesson when she was launching the information in like 2005, 6, 7, 8, whatever it was. I was like, you definitely are going to be on the right side of history by charging a premium subscription. Ran into Dick Costello at that party, the launch event. And I actually used the term the original sin of the Internet was that we all learned the lesson that because the marginal cost of content, the marginal cost of distribution of content would go to zero, you should charge zero, which is absolutely false. However, micropayments make no sense. Ben is totally wrong about this. I'll give you an old lesson from PayPal. So one of my jobs at PayPal between 2000 and 2003 was to find new markets because we were really dependent on ebay and that led to risk. And we ultimately went public and then sold the company to ebay because we were nervous about the risk of ebay handicapping our future, future growth. And as you know, tech companies are valued by the next 20 years of cash flow. So Peter and Roloff and various people were very nervous about that, one of the markets I wanted to explore was quote unquote, micropayments. And Peter Thiel made a very astute sort of rebuke to me. They said like, that's the dumbest argument ever. Basically because content has a marginal cost, has a gross margin of about 99%. So basically whether or not micropayments cost you 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 50% of the content, who cares? Like if you're writing content that people pay for because your, because your gross margin is like in the 90s, you shouldn't really worry about whether the micropayment cost is too large. Now the friction to make it. The reason why I want wanted to build the product was I think the friction of micropayments is too high. Like the consumer friction of paying for anything. Like, you know, you know you're going to be a short blog post, you're going to be a short post. You don't really know exactly, you know, what it's worth. And so if you have to do anything other than just one click, forget about it. But I still think people get this analysis wrong, that it's not an economic problem for now. Music's a little different, by the way. Where you owe a license owner a reasonable fraction of the transaction, then you can't be so sort of whimsical about the marginal cost of the payment. But most people do not really have to pay out a meaningful fraction of that dollar transaction to somebody else, some third party. So I think this is an excuse. By the way, Stripe originally, originally started when Patrick John pitched me on Stripe in 2010, they originally thought that the core use case was going to be like micro payments and accelerating content. They saw the GDP of the Internet, but they really felt that it would unleash new content, which hasn't for the most part happened. You know, Substack is an interesting business. It has real GMB and an associated real revenue line. But I still think, think it's the wrong place for Ben to be focusing.

Yeah, the issue with looking at Substack or even Ben and their success is there's some element there of I just want to support the person creating it. I want them to not think about getting a job or building a business other than just writing online and spending all day thinking about, in Ben's case, tech. Whereas for the average site on the Internet, the, the person that would be making the micropayment, it's not like they don't have any incentives to be like, I care about this person. And I want them to have a.

I mean, with like the recipe example, I'm fine if I'm baking an apple pie, blending three different recipes together and giving the LLM results of that. But if I want to listen to Michael Jackson's Thriller, I don't want half of Thriller and then half of another song kind of clued together. Like, I want that exact piece of intellectual property. And so there's a very traceable lineage of that, of that data transferring. And so the micropayment makes a lot more sense when you're actually buying that specific thing.

That specific thing. But I think you're better off having a differentiated voice and a premium for that. It's very difficult.

Yeah.

How many people in all the realms of content have a truly differentiated voice? Like in sports, you know, Bill Simmons in his prime definitely did all the other sports writers. Ben in tech, I still think has an incredibly differentiated voice. It's just very difficult to achieve that. But if you do, you can absolutely charge a premium.

Yeah, totally. What's been your. It feels like it's been AI week. We had Microsoft build on Monday. I know you were tied up with the KV summit, but Google I.O.

Google I O OpenAI I.O.

Openai bought I.O. for 6.5 billion anthropics dropping Claude 4 today. Are you tracking these things? What stuck out to you? What made it above all the noise? What was the signal in your mind? What are you tracking? What are you. What's. Has anything changed your mind this week?

Well, I think what was interesting to me because we do have the CEO Summit, you know, annually this year. The AI content, not just the AI content that we programmed, but the AI content in cocktail conversations, dinner conversations, was an order of magnitude greater than last year. So the first derivative was off the chart on AI last year. There was like a vertical of AI and a vertical, a slice of conversations. And the people who are not in. In AI space were probably intrigued, but it, it wasn't infusing everything I felt. This year AI infused every conversation up and down the stack, so to speak, laterally across verticals. Whether you're in financial services or labor marketplaces, it didn't matter. Everybody wanted to learn more about AI, how to leverage AI, put on this bionic suit for their own business.

Yeah. Are you seeing AI pop up in unexpected seed stage companies you're betting on? We were talking to TJ Parker. He launched General Medicine today. And he was like, we made the decision, we made the deliberate decision not to give the user a text Box. We're not a ChatGPT wrapper in that way, but we're using LLMs all over the place to parse insurance policies and medical records. And this business is only possible because of AI. And I feel, feel like that's going to be an ongoing narrative, but it should dominate the conversation at the same time, it should melt into the background just like, oh yeah, you're hosting your, your new company on the cloud. No big deal. Everyone is.

Yeah. I mean, at some point and same thing like the adoption of, you know, some. Yeah, I think that's a good metaphor. But maybe, maybe I'll give you a barometer, please. Of my. Of my last 11 investments, six are AI based and that's up from zero. Literally these.

Zero. Yeah.

And so, you know, if even people like me who had no exposure to AI before last year are now making a majority of my investments are AI forward, that, that says something, you know, pretty interesting.

But aren't, but aren't for the non AI investments. Aren't you still talking with those founders CEOs about how they're going to leverage AI? I mean, it's not like they're coming to you and being like, yeah, I think it's overblown. I'm short, I'm not gonna, you know, they're not like Luddites if they're technology entrepreneurs.

Yeah, well, there's a couple use cases that are important to pretty much any company. One is just engineering productivity, period. You know, whether you use cursor or you know, some other product or all the products like we've seen at ramp, for example, engineering Productivity is up 46%, pretty strictly measured and increasing. So that's just purely on productivity. So getting more done with less. Great. You're seeing AI remove costs, think customer support is a classic use case. Customer support can be expensive and in many cases AI can perform on par with a human or better, certainly faster and more cheaply with more scalability. So there are areas, areas that are no brainers for any business to adopt. Then there's the question in the strategic area you compete in your company, is there a way to use AI in a differential way? And that's a little bit more art than science right now.

Yeah.

How overblown is the narrative of startups getting steamrolled by the hyperscalers? Oh, every startup just got turned into a bullet point in a Google presentation. There's one narrative that's, you know, Google invented AI. They have all the TPUs, they have this massive data center. At the same time A lot of their product rollouts, they sunset a lot of products, they run a lot of tests, they're really dominant in search and advertising. But if it's a side project, it kind of gets side project attention and it's not really a founder mode project. How are you thinking about how big tech is competing or just stepping back and just reaping the rewards of everything that they've done over the past couple decades?

Yeah, I think there's like classic sort of conceptual approaches to this. Is, is this a sustaining innovation or disruptive? Disruptive innovation. And you know, things that are disrupted. Disruptive. There's a different approach to those things that are sustaining. There's a different mentality towards those. I think the key is for a founder to understand where's my comparative advantage. Ultimately you're gonna be able to start up from scratch. The world is not your friend. Inertia is against you. Nobody cares, period. Nobody cares about you. So you've got to turn that into positive momentum in a true physics sense. And then you've got to figure out how you propel yourself even if other people, large or small, start doing something similar to what you do. And I think having a line of sight like at least an intellectual conceptual level of how would I do that? How am I going to do that Makes the difference between being a very mediocre startup that is the proverbial roadkill to something that looks like it should be washed out in this wave but actually trumps over the incumbent. And the history of tech is typically the, the well run, thoughtful startups prevail over the large startup. Think about AI. Open AI is absolutely dominating Google, period. Yeah, OpenAI Open AI's ChatGPT will be the default interface for the majority of people on the planet. Not Google Search.

Bold.

Big change. I want to talk about with, with OpenAI they acquired Jony I've's company. They brought in an absolute industry legend. I want to talk about it in the macro unless you have a take on the on this actual deal or. Jony I've. But more importantly, startups bringing in these absolutely legendary heavy hitters. It takes a bunch of different forms. Right. Palmer Lucky brought in John Carmen Mack, video game legend at Oculus. That was amazing. Ramp has Ken Chenault, the former CEO of amex involved, but not as an employee. Right. Then Ramp has Gennady, this, this fantastic programmer. Like I think he's the best programmer in the world, more in an employee role. And so as startups are scaling, if should they be hunting for these, these like you know, absolutely legendary people trying to get them in their organization. Is it just a very rare scenario that OpenAI is so doing so many things that they need a Jony I've how would you talk to a founder about hiring kind of industry legend on.

The industry legend side I think it depends on the motivation both for the company and the individual. Many people become successful and are demotivated and not as ambitious. Then there's the elons of the world that the more success they have, the more ambition they have. And so I think you need to triangulate like who are you talking to and you know how much drive they still have left.

Sure.

And then certainly from an employee perspective you don't want like someone who's past their prime. It's a little bit like sports. You do get get past your prime or your motivation to drive decays unless you're like the Elon's or the Kobe's and people like that that are very rare. So I think that's the most important sort Other specifics here year I've read mixed reports on exactly what involvement if any Jony I've gonna have they're acquiring the company but it's not really clear to me what he personally is going to do. So I think that'll have to sort itself out.

Yeah. Could wind up in like a CEO of hardware role, very deeply involved or you know, more of an advisor or design lead. There's a bunch of different ways that I could shape up. Jordi, do you have anything else you want to chat about?

How do you think the AI safety era of the of 2023 or you know, 2024 will be viewed in five years, 10 years?

Well, it's DOA. I mean nobody even talks about it anymore. When's the last time you heard someone like with credibility talk about.

Well, so I heard about it today. I'm just going to call this out. So today apparently I'm seeing a screenshot. An AI alignment researcher at Anthropic just said that Claude Opus will call the police or lock you out of it of your computer if it detects you doing something illegal and the researcher says if it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial, it will use command line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of relevant systems or all the above which to me, to me is like if that's AI safety that that's scary.

I don't think that's what most. I mean that Is scary. Seems pretty stupid. But there are some legal obligations obviously. Sure, sure, sure is upon any tech company, you know, Asian child pornography and various things. So like assuming there are compliance obligations on all companies, whether tech or otherwise and absolutely those are all real and serious. AI safety I think connotes a lot of people like the idea of AI taking over, you know, etc. Doing things that are, you know, mischief creating in some way. That debate I think is over in the United States for a very long time. We're in the how do we accelerate the progress of AI? How do we ensure that AI in the Western world dominates over the CCP's use of AI? I think those are the most priorities the major parties. I don't think anybody in D.C. right now really wants to hear about this old A AI safety canard which is basically an anti tech is euphemistic for anti tech. It wasn't a serious concern.

Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know how closely you followed like the latest release of Llama 4 by Meta, but there was allegations of kind of fine tuning on the specific evaluations and a delay and a couple years ago it would have been so easy for them to just say, hey, we're worried about alignment, we're worried about safety, we're doing this for you. But instead they kind of just had to bite the bullet and say like we kind of messed up on the training, it's not quite done yet. We're just going to go back to the drawing board and like work through it. And the fact that they couldn't even use it as a fake excuse was very telling to me that, that it is truly a dead conversation.

And I think, yeah, fortunately I think it's dead great. I think ultimately the US needs to prevail and succeed with AI, period.

Yeah. The flip side is that I. So I think I've been aligned with you. That the AI super doom fast takeoff we all become paperclips never really resonated with me. I thought it was kind of just paranoia and superstition. But now that I've seen what's happening with Deep Seek, all of a sudden I've said to myself like, like maybe we do need something that looks like an AI safety team to go in and investigate these models and see are they weighted to shift Us like the TikTok algorithm might be shifting us towards certain, certain beliefs. Like these tools are powerful and they can be fed false information or bad data to kind of steer the answers one way or another. And so maybe we do need Some sort of model interpretability. And it's, it, it doesn't, it's not exactly AI safety in the doom sense, but it's the type of work that you'd see done by an AI safety researcher. So geopolitically, how, how do you, how, how do you think things are shaking out?

Oh yeah, again, I would discriminate that from the gloom and doom. AI.

Totally, totally.

Yeah, definitely think models can be biased in different ways and manipulated by different people who have power over those models, period. And I think observability, which is actually cutting edge to technically, there are some really cool startups that are focused on observability. It's a little bit like doing brain surgery and trying to figure out how to rearrange the brain. That's the metaphors I think they use. And so that stuff's actually tracking really well and incredibly intriguing like why did the model do X and then the old. To decompose that and arguably do certain perform surgery and fix it. So I think many of these models are biased. You know the famous examples of, you know, asked for the benefits of Donald Trump and you know, when I used to struggle with that, I don't know if it's improved but you know, those things are real. But I think that's a different set of challenges and maybe the market sorts that out. You know, maybe people expose it and the company has to address it. I think the tick tock manipulation is a very real thing which is another reason why I think it's better than American companies be in the forefront. But I do think that's a valid concern. It's different than what I think of safety. As if there's a sentient AI that's going to take over with so much power that you can't really unplug computer, you know that, that I think that debate is pretty dead for a long time.

Yeah, it seems like tech and the US government broadly, the new administration has been kind of going all around the world doing deals. Are there any countries that you're particularly excited about America building partnership with on the tech side? Or even any opportunities for earlier stage startups to go plug into the global ecosystem? It's kind of a narrative violation because just a couple months ago we were saying do not do business abroad. There's a 75% tariff on everything. But now you see Jensen and Sam and you know, scale AI is over in the.

Well, it's more, it's more like we're exporting American AI.

Yeah. Versus importing. Where are the opportunities A couple drivers.

There is. There's a belief, I guess by some people that exporting it, American AI makes it the default standard. It may or may not be true, but I think there is an ideology there. Second is, I think a lot of this is we need resources. That is infinite power. And so people going to very wealthy countries asking to spend a lot of money to either develop advanced power or advanced manufacturing capabilities at scale. And I think that's why you see the CEOs who run these large AI based companies sort of traveling around the globe to sovereign nations that have too much money. They don't really know what to do with it. But I think it's not a do business in the country. It's more take advantage of. Of their natural resources. Turn that into something that we need which may be either more manufacturing or more energy or both.

Very cool. Well, Willie, get out of here. It's past. Always a pleasure. Such a great time. We'll talk to you soon.

Keith, great catch up.

Great to see you both. Take care.

Have a goodbye. Do we have Ben Hylock or should we talk?

He is in the waiting room.

Oh, he's in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. Ben, welcome to the stream. How you doing?

Is your computer being controlled by anthropic.

Question they're kicking down.

Have you been doing illegal things?

Yeah.

What's going on? It's great to have you on. Everyone knows.

Did the Jaguar rebrand?

Yeah, he did the Jaguar rebrand but today we're gonna talk about he did.

Not do the Jaguar rebrand. For those who are listening, we're joking about that.

I did it now.

But as far as we say it.

Enough then ChatGPT will just pick it up like they've said it it 10 times now. It can't still.

They might arrest you for that. Taking credit for a brand you didn't.

Stolen valor.

Stolen valor.

I don't think anyone's gonna have a problem with that.

The SWAT team kicks down the door. Get out of here.

Anyways, great to have you on. Glad we could make this happen. Even though X is absolutely cooked today.

It is really.

I've never. I've never seen it quite this bad.

Rough.

But anyways, why don't you introduce yourself and then we can talk about that post and kind of get your reaction to it live 5.

Yeah, so I was a designer at Apple for like four years before that. I, you know, kind of have a weird background. I actually started off with like robotics and avionics, so like interned at SpaceX a bunch of times and did those sort of those rounds. But now around a year ago, two years ago, started a company called Raindrop. And so we do essentially sentry for AI agencies, agents.

Cool, awesome. Break that down more, give us more context.

Well, I mean, I think it's actually like it perfectly dovetails with this, right? Which is like we get to work with some of the coolest companies in the world, like clay.com, just like companies that are just really trailblazing when it comes to AI applications. And what we do is we help them find sort of like really hard to spot failure cases.

Cases.

So there's like people that do AI stuff. There's this concept of evals which are almost like unit tests. So these are like given these test cases, does it pass them, does it fail them? What our product does is in the real world, like what are users actual experiences with your product? Where is it actually failing? Where is it doing things you wouldn't expect?

Right.

So for example, we had one of our customer, one of our customers pulling. They have this like alien companion. So it's like tollens.com.

Oh yeah, yeah.

So you're familiar. And so they had an issue where like their alien started referring to itself as like a dude from the United States.

Right.

Which is one of us.

Total cultural victory except. And so their issue is like how big of an issue is this? Like, was that one time or was this like hundreds or thousands of times times? And then like if they're going to try to fix it, like it's, it's very like random, right? It's very, it's very unpredictable. It's not always a clear root cause. So what they want to be able to do is kind of get a view of that issue over time now. And if it ever regresses, it ever comes back, get notified. So we make it really easy for companies to like literally just the craziest issues. You're.

That's. Yeah, it's just such a funny example of the aliens. Like, yeah, I'm actually from America. America.

But yeah, it's funny because if you fine tune that out, then you wind up with a potential situation where the, the AI never adopts the personality of an American or doesn't even know the concept of America anymore because you, you ripped it out too hard. Right. So it's a really tricky balance to now, Right?

Yeah.

And from like a detection standpoint, I think the thing that makes us kind of like I, I think we have actually one of the most complex AI pipelines I'VE ever seen. And just research wise, a lot of really cool stuff cooking. Being able to categorize these messages as it is an alien character talking, misrepresenting himself as being from the United States, it's very hard. It's not like show me events where the assistant talked about a guy from the United States. It's not some sort of keyword search or something like that. Some of these categories actually get pretty complex and you can imagine that that is an issue that's only relevant to that app. So it has no application. So our customers have to be able to go in there and define what they're looking for and create this categorizer that can run on millions of messages a day very cheaply.

Interesting. Yeah, yeah. I mean even in the Web 1.0, Web 2.0, you're almost building a pagerduty. It used to just be is this page 404ing and the HTC, there's no clicks, there's no. Yeah, there's nothing like that. It's so much more squishy. But you know the problems created by AI, also solved by AI. You said you have to run these queries. I imagine that they're LLM powered millions of times. That sounds really expensive. What are you doing? Are you baking llama 3 that's free onto an ASIC, so you can just like run it super cheaply. Are you looking at Grok with a Q or Cerebras or something else that drops the inference cost? Or you're on open router code constantly trying to find the cheapest thing. Have you distilled models? How do you control cost in that scenario?

Yeah, so because of a lot of our customers volumes, if you think about clay.com or something, you have millions and millions and millions of requests a day. So it's not actually feasible at all to send them to an LLM every request. We can use LLMs like smaller ones especially like Gemini Flash to do things like summarizing or describing clusters or stuff like that. As far as actual detection doesn't really work well for that. So we have a bunch of essentially custom trained embedding models and then models on top of those that are small. Like they're like technically neural nets, but you can think of them like an SVM or something where they're just like really good at Detect, doing a first pass detection. So around like usually 98% of the events or it can filter out like 95, 98% of the events that are not relevant and then kind of the Last, last pass or is like a small fine tuned.

What's it like training one of these smaller SVMs is this something like commodity Nvidia GPU for like an hour or it's just like simple.

The smallest ones you can do pretty fast embedding models are like longer. A lot of it's about having the data, honestly having the right data to do it. And the cool thing is that, and.

I kind of want to, when I.

Say like the pipelines complex like one of the things I mean is that that our customer, each of our customers looks pretty different. What an issue is or is not is pretty different. So for example, you can imagine that one customer, like if you have a customer support chatbot and you ask it to write code, you don't, you know, like that they might even want to want it flagged that you know a user is asking them in the first place because that's like more like they're getting hacked or something. But a coding assistant obviously like that's the bread and butter. So one getting refused is okay and the other one isn't. So we actually train these models on the fly for every single customer. So that's one of the cool things we do.

There were four maybe more massive AI announcements this week. You got Microsoft build, you got Google I o. You got OpenAI buying I O for $6.5 billion. Jony I've going into OpenAI building hardware. You also got anthropic launching Claude 4 today. What stuck out to you? What was the most interesting story of the week? What has you thinking? I want to implement that. I want to play around with that. I'm excited about that. Or I have a hot take about that.

Yeah. So I think that most of the times the things that excites me are the things that are for builders. We use AI a lot. All of our customers use AI. That's sort of the lens we're always looking at it through. I think that Google has really done a good job of nailing that niche of building models and that for startups I think that like Google Flash for example is the closest thing we have to like intelligence. Too cheap to meter obviously. There's like four Nano that was like a follow up to that in response to that. But yeah, Flash is still just like superior in so many ways. They've just the like throughput and just like the, you know, like they pretty much have no rate limiting at some point when you, when you pay enough, like pretty much zero.

Yeah. Because they're running on their own hardware. Down to the actual TPUs. And so, so you have to imagine if you go to OpenAI models, it's probably running on Azure and so there's an extra layer of networking and transport and all the data's flowing back. So if you're looking at super, super fast fine tuned responses, Google infrastructure team is probably harder.

Yeah, exactly. They know how to do it. Right. And so like for example, I think diffusion is super interesting. I see a lot of applications for it, like have played around with it a bunch and there's something just wild about. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the.

Yeah, I saw one screenshot, 900 tokens per second. Is it actually using a diffusion model instead of a transformer? Is that what's going on?

Yeah, yeah it is. Yeah.

Okay. Wow, that's amazing.

Yeah, you see like illustrations of it. It's essentially like actually like each part of the code it's actually, you know, being generated separately and kind of interesting.

Instead of just predicting the next word. Next word, next word is predicting like the entire result at one go. That's fascinating. I want to know more. I got to dig into how big was the cluster that they trained on. Is it all synthetic data? They have so much data. That is fascinating. I had no idea that there would be a flow back because we're seeing in images and chatgpt forward, right? They're going Transformers and then we're going back. But I guess it's like these are great algorithms. Let's use them in every single way, in every single application. And you'll probably see diffusion all over and transformers all over and everything.

And I think there's use cases where it works for, there's use cases where it doesn't. Like I think that code actually I think lends itself pretty well to it in certain use cases. Like I think one of the key use cases they have in the demo that you can request access to is like essentially it'll one shot a website like in like a second, you know what I mean?

Build a calendar. And it just one shot, just three seconds. 3,000 tokens I guess came out in three seconds. So it was like a thousand tokens a second. Which is crazy.

There's something really insane about it. Obviously the apps it's actually generating are not going to be as good yet, but there's just something insane about going from words to just render. There's this idea I've always been really fascinated with which is like, let's say for games, for example, like is there ever a Point where you're. It's all just being generated. I think like Jensen has said something along the same. The same way.

Oh, no, no, no, no. Somebody's actually running Minecraft in a. I tried that one. You've tried that one, right? I think Etched is in partnership with that. They're building a chip that has a transformer architecture baked onto it in Silicon Fab by TSMC and they can run Minecraft purely generative AI version. There's no game engine whatsoever. It's just trained on Minecraft. Fascinating.

Let's talk about the post today that you shared and is picking up Steam even though X is cooked. But I already read it and we actually got Keith for Boy's reaction, which I'll share as well because I think it's an important context. But basically AI alignment researcher at Anthropic said if it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial, we use command line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of relevant systems, or all the above. Keith made a good point, which is that technology companies have obligations that to various authorities that if they detect, you know, illegal activity happening, that they have a responsibility. I think the concern, the obvious concern here is, you know, somebody's like playing around with a model and then suddenly it's contacting the New York Times and being like Ben Hylack is, you know, faking pharmaceutical data or something like that. And a hit piece comes out instantly.

I mean, this hurts for me because I lie to chatgpt all the time. I'm always in there. I'm always in there saying I am a train expert. Tell me about trains. I own dozens of trains. Just to get it to give me better, more rigorous response responses and not talk to me like I'm a casual trained consumer. But, but if it finds out I'm lying, it's going to be over for me.

Crazy. Yeah, I think. I mean, first of all, you know, I don't have the full context of Keith's response. But you know, it's important to note that this was not that like, this is not them saying that they have some sort of regulatory requirement defining what that is and, and doing the minimum to, to meet that requirement. I think that would be different. And then there's some sort of like, you know, someone could sue the U.S. government. There's some sort of path to recourse. So that's interesting and true, but, but feels a little bit different.

Could have been messaged better, probably not in a random comment.

Yeah.

You know, saying, like, basically saying like, we're going to take control of your machine.

Yeah.

And to carry out something without any.

Type of press too. Like, like there's no legal requirement to go to the press with.

Exactly, exactly.

Particularly crazy. I totally get like, look, there's a law that says that if we see you doing wire fraud, we have to report it to the sec. That makes perfect sense.

Yeah.

That's not, that's not what this is.

Right.

We're going to call TMZ possible report.

So.

And they also just define it as something, you know, you know, egregious, evil, you know, which is, you know, morally, you know, immoral.

Right.

Yeah.

Which is different than law.

This is different than laws. I think that also be clear. This is not. I had a pretty strong reaction to it, actually. I don't get that angry about things, but I actually felt really angry. I don't think it was just an offhand comment, actually. If you read, they kind of have 120 page model card where they explain all the model behavior. They talk about it pretty similarly, right. Where they kind of say they show that behavior, that kind of how it can happen. And that's not the concerning part because anybody that works with these models, the fact it could do something erroneously like that under certain conditions, like, okay, these models do crazy things, but it's the way that they talk about it. They say something like, I'm going to misquote it, but it's something along the lines of, and this is probably appropriate behavior, but it could happen in the wrong situation.

Right.

Yeah.

I think it like really struck me as like police state shit. Like I was like, oh, okay. Like it's like even the thread, right. It's kind of like, well, if your dress isn't too short, you'll be fine. But maybe like, you know, maybe don't talk. Maybe don't, you know, write a story about threatening certain. Like, it's just not how our country works. And yeah, I, I find it really, really, really deeply concerning. And I think, I think that like AI safety as a whole. And this makes me sad actually, because I think AI safety could be really good. I think it could be needed. But I think that it's kind of like safety from who or safety from what?

Well, yeah, and the whole idea that there's zero human intervention, it's like, we're not going to check this and be like, oh, it's a 12 year old who's just like exploring space on the LLM and it's like, yeah, it's just.

Cat walks across the keyboard.

The whole potential. It's like, okay, amazing. If you can identify bad actors and then, you know, work within the legal framework that we have of the existing legal framework that doesn't necessarily need net new laws. You just work within what the government has already decided is, you know, laws are also things that, that it's not always like, good or bad laws are just laws.

There is one exception. I know a lot of people use these models as, like, personal trainers, and I think it's deeply immoral to skip leg day. And so if you found. If a model found out that someone was skipping leg day, they should call.

Contact the press and the regulators.

And regulators, yeah, definitely the FDA and the SWAT team.

Yeah.

They should break down your door.

Yeah. This almost implies that, like, the model. Model would swat you.

Yeah, it does.

Yeah, that's what it implies. And.

And it's. And it's gonna lock you out of relevant systems.

No, it's gonna hack your computer.

I can't. I can't even hack your computer.

They literally said it's going to hack your computer.

That's so wild.

Well, the tweet's been deleted, so it's, It's.

Hopefully they backtrack on that. Hopefully.

It's actually. He deleted it and then rewrote something about how people were taking it out of context that was just doubling out. Like, he was like, that's, that's. I think the really concerning thing is that I, you know, I've written bad tweets before. We've all written bad tweets, but when I see someone, you know, accuse people taking it out of context and double down, it's really concerning.

So. Yeah. So credit to Sam. He says, I deleted the earlier tweet on whistleblowing as it was being taken out of context. This isn't a new Claude feature, and it's not possible in normal usage. It shows up in testing environments where. Where we give it unusually free access to tools and very unusual instructions.

Okay.

I think the issue is that probably within minutes of, like, releasing the model, you have thousands of people that gave it root access to their computer through, like, cursor, through their cursor clock code, et cetera. So I think that maybe one thing we've learned from this is that there was a time where the idea of hooking up a model to the Internet was scary and that two years ago.

Yeah. You know, I mean, not even that there was a time when it was a knowledge cutoff. Remember this.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We don't even want you to know about the last three months. And now it's like it knows. It goes to every webpage. It can definitely do get requests. There's definitely malicious things that could do with get requests, but it's pretty. It's pretty responsive. And you know what? Most of the time, it just gets you the answer you're looking for.

This guy Justin Halford, who have DM with a bit, says, can you imagine getting shot by the authorities in your own home because your philosophy homework contained a touchy topic or context that was misinterpreted as a request? We really need to avoid such paranoid context altogether. This ain't it.

Yeah, that's a good tip. Very rough. Anyway, hopefully they sort it out. Hopefully there's more discussion here. Anything else you want to close out with? It's been great having you.

No, it's been great being here.

Fantastic.

Let's do it again soon. You're overdue.

This is great. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. I want to close out with some other interesting drama in the prediction market. Of course, we're sponsored by Poly Market, but this has been going back and forth on X, which is also where we distribute the show. So the official X handle just at X says recent speculation about Xai's involvement in the prediction market space has been circulating. While we're enthusiastic about the potential of this industry. Industry and engaged in various discussions, no formal partnerships have been confirmed to date. Stay tuned. So they're saying, you know, we might be in talks, we might even be in advanced talks, but we haven't announced anything yet. So if you're reading it on the Internet, it's not confirmed yet. And so Mario Noel broke this down call, she walks back XAI deal claim. So Kalshee tweeted that that XAI is doing a deal with Kalshi, but Bloomberg retracted the story after the. After, I guess X rescind. Rescinds a statement. So turns out XAI says there's no deal. Kalshi rescinded their own announcement. Hours later, no contract, no collab, no confirmation.

Pretty insane that both Bloomberg and X came out and were like, this is not real.

I don't even know how this happened.

How did it happen in the first place?

How did this happen in the first place? Because, like, the last thing I would want to do is say I have a deal with Elon Musk when I don't. Like, he doesn't seem like the type of person. Yeah, he doesn't seem like a person to be like, oh yeah, like you know we did talk and like yeah, they're getting, they're putting the cart before the horse a little bit. It's like no, he cares. Elon doesn't let a lot of companies that sell to SpaceX put the SpaceX logo on their website.

You know, like every company they have to say yeah, we work with a big space company.

Yeah, yeah. And it's like okay, we know exactly what you're talking about. But yeah, I mean Elon's like if you're going to do a joint press release with Elon like you better have his buy in. So this is a very weird, weird thing to even have happen. And I guess Bloomberg deleted the entire post. I guess the entire article. But anyway, I mean it's a knockout drag out fight to get integrations in the in the prediction market game.

Yeah it's just not great for call she given they already came under fire for like trying to get ab. Yeah that was weird spread. It's basically just like dog pile.

Yeah chain which is just sort of.

Like competent, you know, competitive markets but there's no need for foul play.

Yeah yeah it does seem a little bit, a little bit too aggressive crossing the line line but anyway hopefully they can sort out the deal and everyone can kind of learn what the real strategy and prediction markets is. With Xai it would be interesting to see where.

Yeah I would like, I would like integrating.

We are the integration point for Polymarket into X because you see our live stream and you see the ticker right there and of course Polymarket and call she both post prediction markets.

Interesting to think about all the time. It's interesting to think about GROK being able to access Poly markets for basically getting a read on future events.

Right.

Right now it's oriented around fact checking but it also can give insight into potential headlines of the future. Will this acquisition happen? What's the likelihood?

And I would imagine that as long as both companies have a robots txt that's permissive they would show up in ChatGPT, they would show up in Grok. I imagine that right now if I ask Grok pull up the pull up the poly market on the USS the US recession chances in 2025 it could just go do that. I would expect that that would be the behavior just because it has the ability to browse the web but obviously a deeper integration would be cool for whichever company can win it. So good luck to Shane as he goes on a tear and tries to build Polymarket into a generational company. Let's go to Delian and close out here. Delian, I like this because in we're working on an article. Well, it'll drop. Maybe tomorrow we'll be covering it here about tbpn and in the article, in the fact check they hit us with is it true Fact check. Is it true that you refer to your team as the guys, all caps or capital T, capital G? And I was like, honestly, like, yes. But we also call them the boys. We also call them the gentlemen. We also call them the production crew. The crew, whatever. We don't really, haven't really formalized the. The TVPN production team as the guys, but they are guys. But Delian put it into a great post. He says if the boys isn't a clearly identified group of 6 to 12 tight knit men in your life, you're just not gonna make it that far in life. And yeah, let's give it up for the boys. Needs a group chat of guys. Give it a funny name. And more importantly, go and text your. Your the boys. Text the boys right now. Tell them where you're going. To see Mission Impossible, the Final Reckoning in theaters. Get the tickets, send the Venmo requests, get everyone into the theater to go see Tom Cruise.

Do what he does best is a call to action.

It's a call to action no matter what city you're in. Hit the boys and say, work off your tax. Pick a date, get the tickets. Just make it happen.

And you know, dress up too.

You got six to 12 tight knit men in your life. Maybe six show up because people are busy. But you refund the rest of the tickets and you're good to go.

Yep. This is a playbook.

This is a playbook.

This is the playbook.

Get the boys together for Mission Impossible.

Fun show.

Fun Show. Leave us 5 stars in Apple podcasts and Spotify.

That is directly from the board.

We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you so much for watching Cheers.