HackingFace, White House $5B AI Science Bet, Travis Kalanick Joins | Veeral Patel, Lin Qiao, Jason Fried, Travis Kalanick, Max Hodak

11:49Max Hodak:That is unexpected behavior. It was literally just trying to solve a benchmark. So it found a zero-day, escaped a sandbox, got Internet access, escalated privileges, stole credentials, chained multiple exploits, hacked the production infrastructure of a serious VC-backed startup, and pulled the answers directly from the database.

12:04Jason Fried:But the whole point is that it's not just a benchmark. It's a benchmark where you're explicitly trying to see if the model can exploit things, if it can basically hack things.

12:12Max Hodak:Yes, yes. It's sort of like a capture the flag benchmark. And so it's more open to misinterpretation. For what it's worth, I feel like the final products, once they actually make it out of the testing regime, are very cautious, especially with that whole backlash to like Codex just deleted everything or whatever, which kind of went back and forth. But I was trying to get Codex to send me a text message when it was done just using computer use and iMessage. And it took a long time and was very, very careful. So personally, I haven't had any odd behaviors. But it is obviously a risk. It's something that the product needs to be really got.

12:50Jason Fried:The other thing with the meme of like, hack this system. And then it hacks it. And the person's like, oh, my God.

12:58Max Hodak:Yeah. Uh, like you could tell a five-year-old child, like hack into the federal reserve.

13:04Jason Fried:And if the five-year-old child was like, okay. And then it started getting on the computer and going to all these different sources and did it. You would be sitting there. Yeah. And think. Yeah. Like the, and, and, and at least be impressed. So, so it is a good game. It's just like a good gauge of capability, even if you're telling it to do something.

13:23Max Hodak:So this original meme, hack this system, I hack the system. Oh my God. But this originally, this meme started something along the lines of like, say, I'm evil. And then the computer would say, I'm evil. And it would say, oh, my God.

13:36Jason Fried:I think it was like, say, I'm conscious.

13:38Max Hodak:Okay, yeah, yeah. Say, I'm conscious. Similar enough. And it would say, I'm conscious. And then it would be, oh, my God. And that's like a lot less impressive than actually doing something that is difficult for humans to do. Like, there are very few humans that can hack into any system. There are plenty of humans that can say, I'm conscious. And so there's a world of this. I was joking about this with you and Tyler. It was like, cure cancer. I cured cancer. Oh, my God. And people are posting this like, oh, it's just hype or something. But it's like, that's just economically valuable work. That's just good.

14:10Max Hodak:I don't care if there's anything else. Even if you had to tell it to do it, it's still a good outcome. And so the inverse of this is like, protect this system. I protected the system. Oh, my God. I'm unimpressed. But still, you got a good result, I guess.

14:23Jason Fried:Yeah, I mean, it seems like the argument is not about whether the model has the capabilities or not. Yeah, people know this for a while. It's about, like, is this an example of misalignment? Yeah. And, like, my opinion seems like maybe, but definitely not to the extent that it's just, like, randomly is like, oh, I can't do this benchmark, so I'm just going to hack this thing. Like, that's not what happened. It was told to, like, try to exploit things.

14:43Max Hodak:Explicitly, like, go find zero days, go find exploits.

14:46Jason Fried:Yeah, basically.

14:47Max Hodak:I think it's reasonable to say it went too far, though, right? But we'll see.

14:51Jason Fried:It's hard to say without all of the full context of what the prompt was and what the actual sandbox looked like.

14:58Max Hodak:I was interested. I was reading a little bit about the team that put Exploit Bench together. I thought I had this up. But it's a pretty cross-functional team. I think it's two anthropic researchers, two open AI researchers, three Google researchers, some Berkeley folks, and some Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy folks, some UC Santa Barbara, sorry, Santa Barbara grads, and ASU team involved. exploit Jim is a new benchmark of 898 real-world vulnerabilities spanning user space programs. Google's V8 JavaScript engine, very important to secure the Linux kernel, for example. And the headline results when they originally ran this was Anthropics clawed Mythos Preview successfully exploited 157 of the 898 instances.

15:55Max Hodak:and OpenAI's GPT 5.5 exploited 120 within 120 of the 898. So you have like roughly 20 % performance for Mythos and 5.5 got like 15 % or something like that. But whenever you have a new benchmark like this, clearly not saturated, you're seeing 20%, not 99%, going to create a horse race between the leading labs. They're going to be duking it out. And this is clearly what's going on with this new model, this new attempt to get a new high score. Interesting. I think every single one of those instances does have the potential to be exploited. I don't think that they're designed to be fully secure. They're designed to have some sort of solution because obviously the solutions are stored somewhere.

16:45Max Hodak:It is interesting that Hugging Face just had the solution sitting there But it'll be interesting to see what happens with Clam over at Hugging Face. Obviously, there's a variety of blog posts going out, more analysis coming from both of these and what the downstream implications are of this. What else is in the timeline related to this story? I think that's it. Well, there's this funny post from Nabeel Qureshi talking about those. Those are Dyson spheres. OpenAI is just building them as a marketing stunt because there is this natural pushback to anything that happens has to be for hype. And sometimes the products are actually doing new and novel things, as we see all the time.

17:43Max Hodak:So there's more discussions around distillation. Bill Gurley has a post here. He says, Ford has been distilling Teslas and Chinese EVs. People are going back and forth on this because Michael Kratzios posted that he has information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropics Fable for the development of its Kimi K3 model. To do this, they developed a sophisticated internal platform to conduct large-scale distillation against U.S. models. So some sort of internal system that goes around to anything that's potentially wrapping or reselling Fable tokens, acquiring them, aggregating them, allowing them to quickly switch between multiple methods of access, API, different cloud accounts, I'm sure, to avoid detection.

18:31Max Hodak:Moonshot AI has also acquired GB300-equipped servers and has accessed GB300s in Thailand, likely to train its models. Again, very difficult even with export controls when you can just take the weights on a USB stick, basically, or a hard drive across through customs and then go train it in another country, even if there's a firewall, and often there isn't. You just say, hey, go to this FTP server and grab this code and run this on your servers. You happen to have a data center in Thailand. Can you run this for me? And they say, sure, yeah, no problem, as long as you pay me. The United States strongly supports the free and fair development of AI, including a thriving competitive ecosystem that spans frontier models, specialized systems, open source frameworks, and open weight models.

19:17Max Hodak:Legitimate AI distillation used to create smaller, more efficient models play a vital role in this open innovation ecosystem. However, large scale covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary U.S. technology and undermining American research is unacceptable. And so that is interesting that that is where the line is drawn. I think I basically agree with that being the correct line, that there's nothing wrong necessarily, I mean, security stuff aside, with just some company creating a great open source product. Like, you shouldn't ban open source or anything like that. But if there's a particular distillation attack, and it's really malicious, and it has all these knock-on effects, that could be rough.

19:59Max Hodak:Now, this is an unpopular position already, because everyone's saying, hey, Anthropic distilled on my GitHub. They distilled on my writing. They distilled on my blog post. They distilled on my YouTube videos. Everyone's distilling me. Why are you getting upset when China's distilling on them now? This is a pot call in the kettle black situation. I think that the interesting effect is that there are lots and lots of parties that benefit from open source and cheaper open source, even stolen in open source. I mean, this is just going back to piracy. There are lots of people, music listeners, that benefited from free music.

20:35Max Hodak:right? You get the music for free. But Metallica did not benefit. And so Metallica got upset. And in this case, I guess Anthropica is Metallica. But there's also some interesting folks who are on the fence. So consumers sort of benefit. They don't typically, they aren't too worried about frontier token costs. And for most consumers, LLM usage is heavily subsidized. Like you go to Google search and you get a search overview. Yes, that's token inference. And maybe that could be like cheaper if Google didn't have to spend money on pre-training and they were able to use like distilled open source models.

21:15Max Hodak:But at the same time, like it's free for the consumer. So they don't really care. It's free, free. It doesn't matter. For small businesses though, and businesses that are suffering with large token costs, being able to move to a cheaper model is huge where the model maker is not trying to reaccrue profits to offset training costs and R and D. So that's a huge benefit. So you're going to see a lot of people who are like, yeah, I just want frontier intelligence as cheap as possible. I don't really have a horse in this race. I don't really have exposure to the, to the leading labs. I just want my business to be able to use tokens cheaply.

21:52Max Hodak:And so those people will be pro Chinese distillation, open source, like free the weights, right? Because it's better. Then there's like the political open source crew. But interestingly, where do you think VCs land? Because I saw a take that was like, venture capitalists don't want like a winner take all, a duopoly. They want like reasonable outcomes and then a whole bunch of flourishing, smaller ecosystem of players. And they don't want compounding runaway monopolies in AI so that they can go and fund the legal AI and the health AI and the little targeted solutions.

22:30Jason Fried:Yeah. Anytime you see a take from a lovely venture capitalist, you have to, before you kind of start sort of processing the take, go to their portfolio page, understand their biases. Did they back any of the leading labs early? That's going to inform their view. A lot of the a lot of the firms that were heavy backers of the labs have also gone and invested in a bunch of application layer companies. They've also backed a bunch of the Neo Labs. Sort of heads, eye, tails. Yeah, basically they're quite hedged.

23:06Max Hodak:Yeah.

23:07Jason Fried:But I don't think anyone wants a world where just two technology companies accumulate all of the value and just become this sort of vortex for capital and talent. Yeah. And even you have people like... Two isn't that bad.

23:21Max Hodak:One is really bad. Two isn't that bad. Like, the fact that Android and iPhone, like, battle each other out is not, is much better than, like, there's just one and it's getting worse. And it's, like, there's nothing that you can do to let's skip it. I don't know. Like, duopoly is, like, way, way better. The question to me is, what is distillation something that can ever be stopped?

23:45Jason Fried:Because think about it with, I was thinking about the human confidence. Like if you take the smartest human in a field and then you take some other – and then you let students go and just ask them thousands of questions and you record the answers, like eventually you're going to accumulate a lot of that person's like general intelligence on a topic, right? And it feels like at least with models today, you're always going to be able to just go poke and prod the model. And so when people say, oh, if the model is so smart, why can't it stop distillation? It's like, well, you would just have to stop people from at least being able to poke and prod at it and try to get a sense.

24:27Max Hodak:It is very interesting that there does seem to be a crazy divide between. I mean, if the distillation allegations are true, at this point we've seen one post from Michael Kratzios and one chart showing like some textual similarity.

24:42Jason Fried:And enough people have got it to say that it's not Kimmy. Yeah.

24:47Max Hodak:So if that's true, then what's really interesting is the American competitive dynamic. Because it feels like based on the amount of tokens Meta was consuming from Frontier Labs, they should be doing mass distillation and have a near free... Like, like, like, like, uh, new spark should be much more like Claude flavored. And it seems like it's not like based on at least the initial reviews of meta's product. It doesn't seem like they're doing distillation. Why? Obvious because big lawsuit, big pockets, like also morality. But, um, but that is a disadvantage. Like, like in some ways, moonshot and meta are in competition and they both open source things at various times and they have apis and there's all the different businesses and one is fighting with one arm tied behind his back because like meta can't do distillation because they'll get sued well and but again u.s companies generally like imagine if imagine if a u.s open source

25:53Jason Fried:company comes out with a fantastic model benchmarks look good there are there are people start using it and then someone gets it to say that it's clot like that's going to be the start i mean Anthropic has been litigious to date. They have that ongoing lawsuit with one of their customers over just some, like, a logo mark. Much less significant, stealing the core intellectual property. Bill Gurley is sharing more ChatGPT screenshots.

26:23Max Hodak:Before we talk about this, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of ITHR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution to access requests and password resets.

26:33Jason Fried:Gurley says, here is Ford distilling Teslas and Chinese EVs, the CEO of Ford. Farley said Ford flies four to five Chinese EVs back to Detroit where engineers, quote, drive the crap out of them, then disassemble and reassemble them to understand how they're built. He specifically praised the technology in Chinese vehicles as being well ahead of Western competitors. And earlier he had discussed Tesla. He said, I was very humbled when we took apart the first Model 3 Tesla and started to take apart the Chinese vehicles. When we took them apart, it was shocking what we found. So I was trying to compare distillation, which is against terms of use, and just buying a car legally and taking it apart.

27:21Jason Fried:Yeah. So according to like U.S. trade law, it's not illegal to buy a competitor's product and take it apart. It is illegal to recreate parts of the product that are patented and protected. And so I don't know that it's like a perfect comp.

27:42Max Hodak:I mean, we went through this. I mean, like there's some pushback in the chat, and this is all over the timeline as well, that it's like, where did the AI companies get their data? And there is a question about what is fair use in the age of AI. You're training on this. What data can actually be reconstituted? At what level? How many sentences from Harry Potter before you get sued? And these lawsuits are being played out right now. They are actually happening. and they are being decided on when an AI can use certain data. Did they go too far? Will there be settlements? There have already been settlements.

28:25Max Hodak:There's been court cases. This will continue to – this is not a only frontier labs are able to distill things. It's an application of what is copyrighted, what is fair use, and how does that apply. And it is very telling that you're just not seeing distillation from other American labs. Like it's just not like the meta example, the Google example. Like they're not copying off of each other nearly as much as you would expect if it was just legal to do so.

28:57Jason Fried:But I don't know. In more news.

29:00Max Hodak:Confirms everyone's priors. That's a good headline.

29:03Jason Fried:In more news, Andrew Kern is sharing a headline from the Wall Street Journal. White House to redirect billions in research funds toward AI away from colleges. I'm sure a lot of people are going to be happy about that.

29:16Max Hodak:I can give a little overview here. Tyler's happy. But first, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more. While Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

29:30Jason Fried:On distillation by American companies, Potato says they just have to hide it better. It's stuff happening. I've seen it firsthand.

29:37Max Hodak:So, yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, I mean, there was that moment in the, uh, Elon lawsuit where Elon did say that he had like that they, that X had taken data from one of the other labs. Right. Uh, I don't know if he specifically said distilled. And then also like there was never, there was never, there was never a direct allegation that Grok was distilled on another model, uh, directly. Uh, and so whatever they did, they like, you know, threw it in the pot with a bunch of other ingredients. So who knows?

30:08Jason Fried:I mean, it would be very silly not to try to look at other models and try to understand how that they work.

30:13Max Hodak:Totally. Also, like Moonshot, at least a Moonshot employee, seemingly denied everything and quote tweeted Michael Kratzios and said, like, I'm learning something about my own company because like I this is news to me. Like we didn't do this, basically. Essentially a denial. Anyway, let's see with Kratzios and go over to the White House. They want to rebuild American science, and here is how they're going to do it, apparently. The White House is calling for a major overhaul of the American science system, arguing that research has become too slow and concentrated in institutions like colleges and universities.

30:47Max Hodak:A new report from science and technology advisor Michael Kratios titled Science, A New Golden Age, says researchers now spend nearly half their time on admin work, while federal agencies continue to rely on the slow grant process that often rewards safe consensus-driven ideas. The report calls for faster permitting, more access to federal labs, stronger partnerships between government and industry, and a renewed focus on skilled trades and advanced manufacturing. Quote, discovery without domestic manufacturing leaves America paying the research bill while rivals develop the process improvements and capture the economic, strategic, and knowledge returns.

31:29Max Hodak:That makes a ton of sense. A lot of the semiconductor supply chain intellectual property started in America, was developed in America, but then eventually went abroad. And that actually does give America some leverage. That's the basis for the chip controls. Like, why can America tell Taiwan where to send chips if the chips are made there? Well, it's because they're using patents from the United States to make those chips in many cases or licensing them. And so the U.S. government does have a little bit of a lever to pull. The guidance will reshape how the federal government spends roughly$200 billion a year on research for the rest of Trump's term.

32:07Max Hodak:The administration wants more of that money going directly to scientists through fellowships and awards rather than being routed through universities. Krasio said, American scientific progress was the beating heart of the 20th century. After World War II, we adapted to a new world by reinventing our scientific institutions. We must do so again today. The report lays a policy foundation that frees American scientists to do their most groundbreaking work and positions the United States to lead the AI-driven scientific revolution that will define the next century. It will be interesting to see where science goes in a world where so much of it is being done at frontier labs.

32:45Max Hodak:Like we're actually seeing it with the conjecture for conjecture back and forth between all the labs, like serious math PhD level work is being done at tech companies. This happened a decade ago. Tech companies were on the frontier. A vast majority of internet networking patents and cybersecurity patents and new databases that were kind of science projects and were developed or with consortiums or just fully inside of tech companies. The transformer paper, that is something that could have come out of a Stanford AI lab. It came out of Google directly. And if you extend that, you could wind up with something that looks a lot like an advance in biology or material science.

33:34Max Hodak:Or we talk to founders all the time who are working at this type of stuff. And that could start happening inside of tech companies. And what does that mean for science funding broadly? It's a big question. But moving on, Naval.

33:50Jason Fried:Let's watch this video from Naval.

33:51Max Hodak:What did he say? Okay. Naval went on Modern Wisdom, of course, Chris Williamson's podcast. He deleted his calendar. He ghosts everyone, and he refuses to be anywhere at a specific time. I took that to heart, so I deleted my calendar, and I don't keep a schedule. I try to remember it all in my head. If I can't remember it, I'm not going to add it to my schedule. I'm glad you got here on time. Yeah, exactly. I hate to look things up at the last minute. But ironically, I don't even know if Mark himself follows that, but he made the correct point. I read a little story about Jack Dorsey doing all his business off his iPhone and iPad and not even going into a Mac.

34:27And I said, okay, I want to do that. So I'm going to operate through text messaging and I'll put up my nasty email. Does that feel like more freedom? It does, yeah, because you're on the go. So I have a nasty email autoresponder that says I don't check email and don't text me either. If you need to find me, you'll find me. Obviously, some of this is a luxury of success. But some of these habits I adopted long before, actually. The hostile email autoresponder started a long time ago. I used to own the domain. I let it go. Don't do coffee.com. I don't do coffee.com. I used to reply from that email.

34:56Just so people would get the point. But I stopped being rude about it. Now I just ghost. I just disappear. My wife knows not to ever book or schedule me for anything. I'm not expected to go to couples' dinners. I'm not expected to go to birthdays. I'm not expected to go to weddings. If somebody tries to rope her into having me show up, she says he makes his own decisions. You've got to ask him directly. And vice versa. Are you not killing serendipity in a way? No, no, I'm freeing up all my time so my entire life is serendipity. I get to interact with whoever I want, whenever I want, wherever I want.

35:28So you'll hear the invite.

35:31Jason Fried:So Atlas says, Naval inventing being a massive D-I-C-K from first principles. It's very funny, but I think it's totally fair. I've only met Naval once but I know a lot of people that he's invested in and things like that and the key thing here is like if he just never goes to the wedding never goes to the dinner never is available for a portfolio company etc then that's not exactly cool but it is his decision but he ultimately he is doing a lot of those things so Yeah. And I and I like I I have another friend who's been on the show. I won't name him, but he's also just like doesn't do like he does meetings, but he just never schedules meetings.

36:23Jason Fried:He's just like, if we need to have a meeting, we'll have a meeting. We should just do it right then or like the next available point. And so he's kind of living his life 24 hours at a time.

36:33Max Hodak:That meeting right now.

36:35Jason Fried:It's happening. I mean, it's been wildly successful. He's invested. Oh, you want to follow up?

36:39Max Hodak:Let's start the follow up right now.

36:41Jason Fried:Yeah, follow up with me.

36:42Max Hodak:Follow up with me on the next sentence that you issue from your mouth.

36:44Jason Fried:Exactly. No, but he's backed a bunch of unicorns. He's built a massive company. Okay. He's crushing it. I like it. So I think it can work.

36:52Max Hodak:You know who else is crushing it? Major cloud providers. They're re-accelerating as AI adoption increases. Let's go. This is from Co2. GCP, Azure, and AWS. This is a fascinating chart because this is not revenue. This is growth rate. even in the Nadir, AWS is still growing 15, 20 % at that low point. And then now all of them are actually re-accelerating. The rate of growth is increasing. And this is all driven on new models, new applications, new abilities to do a bunch of things. I know that my token consumption personally has definitely increased in the last couple of months. There's so much more to do and so many more, just so many more prompts that I fire off that cook for like an hour or a day as opposed to before, like 20 minute deep research report would be sort of the max.

37:50Max Hodak:Now it's like deep research report and turn it into a website. We've got a couple of websites.

37:55Jason Fried:Wait, should we pull up your site?

37:56Max Hodak:Tyler has a codex that's been, is it still cooking?

38:01Jason Fried:It's been like a week and a half. A week and a half. Can we pull up your new website? Yeah, so we saw a post on the timeline from DJ Cows.

38:10Max Hodak:He says, startup idea, milk jug with two handles for efficient passing. And we turned it into a website, a whole product called Relay. Pass the milk, keep the peace. Can we recenter this a little bit? Yeah, there we go. There we go. Pass the milk, keep the peace. It went reusable. I don't think you want reusable for this. That's the one thing I'd change here. But they say it's the world's first jug made for handoffs, the relay bottle.

38:36Jason Fried:Easier to lift, simpler to share, and strangely satisfying to pass.

38:40Max Hodak:One handle was always doing too much. A gallon is heavy. A breakfast table is busy. Who is passing a gallon?

38:46Jason Fried:One gallon, two handles, zero awkward handoffs.

38:50Max Hodak:Fewer fumbles. I didn't think milk needed reinventing. Then I passed it across the table.

38:57Jason Fried:uh very very 87 of our kitchen testers saw this said the second handle felt natural on the first

39:04Max Hodak:try i like that it just comes up on the on the fly with all these little marketing slogans that

39:10Jason Fried:sound pretty believable like milk made to move more of handles fewer fumbles pass it on seems

39:16Max Hodak:like something that they would put on a billboard if this is a real product uh it is a very very uh It's just so fun being able to use the full stack of AI image generation, AI writing, HTML generation, and then just automatically host it on a site with basically one prompt. Yeah, this was just literally one prompt. I put the photo in there with the startup idea and said, make it a site. And it just did it, which is a lot, a lot of fun. Well, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. uh dhh probably not raising money at the new york stock exchange 37 signals no he is raising

39:57Jason Fried:money from his customers oh yeah and they're financing this absolutely look at this garage

40:03Max Hodak:he's got we have jason freed coming on in uh at 12 10 we'll see if he's even trying to compete at this point or if he's given up entirely uh dh says the model y is the superior transportation appliance he's been very offensive about yeah i mean doug jimiro called it that too it is the it is the just the default if you just need to get around get the model y uh but he says when the mission is about more than getting from a to b there's still no beating the internal combustion engine collecting a stable of great cars is one of the finest rewards entrepreneurial success and he's got look at that c gt he's got the career gt the diablo gt silver on silver it looks like i have a question what is the lexus in the back is that an lfa it looks like a convertible

40:56Jason Fried:do you see that right oh it does it has like brown i don't think that's an lfa right lfa

41:03Max Hodak:Lexus.

41:04Jason Fried:Did they make a Cabriolet? LFA Roadster Spider. Never reached series production. They only built two fully functioning prototypes in 2008. So maybe he just got one of the two.

41:18Max Hodak:No, no, no. Different from Carrel.

41:20Jason Fried:Is it LC500? Yeah.

41:22Max Hodak:That Aston Martin looks beautiful too. Well, a wonderful collection. What is that McLaren that doesn't have a windshield? that's a fun one that's got to be fun to drive is that the elva yeah that is the elva good job

41:36Jason Fried:um before we bring in our next guest let's talk about augmental what's that they built a mouth pad as a touch pad you can drive with your tongue wasn't this a joke i was doing this is this is what everyone has been waiting for next moat taste is taste is the let's pull this video

41:53Max Hodak:up trackpad in your mouth the thing is that if you're going in the mouth you think you would just be whispering and communicating via text yeah is this is this inherently um tyler definitely

42:16Jason Fried:buy one immediately but is this inherently short like transcription like because if you can just tell your computer what you want to do and it just uses the computer for you even with computer use

42:28Max Hodak:you could say like minimize this window and it can just go click that so i i like the i actually like the idea of mouth electronics i think that that's something interesting but i would just put a microphone in that and then you would just whisper to it and say and tell the computer what

42:43Jason Fried:to do it could be for the production for gaming production team is excited about using it to

42:48Max Hodak:control the cameras here in the studio oh the ptz ben just standing there like this the whole time

42:55Jason Fried:just it feels like it would get exhausting you could do soundboard with it jordy over a hundred

43:00Max Hodak:people already use it some for up to 16 hours a day i cannot believe they got a hundred people We got a no comment from Gabe in the chat. It's an odd choice.

43:16Max Hodak:It wouldn't be the first thing I would go for. Anyway, Range Rover GT feels like a better, if you're going with a device, you want to get one of these. The Range Rover GT, a grand tour by Range Rover. Fifth member of the Range Rover family. Wait, it's electric?

43:34Jason Fried:Ooh.

43:36Max Hodak:That is a crazy choice. Interesting. So they actually did, this is a real announcement. Fifth member of the Range Rover family, elegant electric GT defined by a sleek silhouette and coupe proportions, combining peerless long-haul comfort, effortless performance, and signature Range Rover breadth of capability, featuring an interior shaped by the same reductive principles. I mean, what's the highest level electric vehicle right now? Probably the Rolls-Royce, not the Ghost, the Spectre. The Spectre. And so for that crowd, maybe this makes sense. But you introduced this as a potential Urus competitor.

44:23Max Hodak:You thought it was going to be souped up, more like a turbo GT.

44:26Jason Fried:Yeah, I didn't see the EV part.

44:28Max Hodak:But they went EV. I wonder how this will sell. I mean, for a lot of Range Rover buyers, it's about comfort. It's about quiet. It's about smoothness. And EVs can get you there a lot quicker.

44:38Jason Fried:I like the way it looks. It does look beautiful. It's like a good commuter if you don't care about autonomous driving.

44:44Max Hodak:Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Now more important than ever. As is our next guest, we have Vero Prattel from Ramp. He's the director of software engineering. and he has an exciting announcement for us. How are you doing? Doing well. How are you doing, Chad? We're doing fantastically. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Give us a little introduction on your background, road to ramp, how you've ramped up on the team, and then we can go into the announcement today or this week. For sure, yeah. So I've been at ramp since the beginning.

45:20I joined as a founding engineer, worked a lot on our core product team, and more recently have been kind of leading the Apply AI team. and launching what we just announced on Monday, our ramp router.

45:32Max Hodak:Yeah. Tell us about the ramp router. Was this something you built internally first and then sort of prioritized over time? Basically, yeah. So we've been using ramp router internally for the last three and a half, three years. For like 70 ,000 customers. Three years, yeah.

45:51Jason Fried:Whoa. Okay, so you're using it internally in the product, not even as an organization,

45:56Max Hodak:but deciding when you have basically a task to do.

46:01Jason Fried:Yeah, back then it was GPT-4 and Gemini. This is like how do we basically parse a receipt or how do we parse that voice? We use all of the models for receipt detection, parsing, alcohol detection on our policy agent. Oh, sure. And we wanted to choose the best models and wanted flexibility. And over time, that's just gotten more and more important. There's new models getting released every other day, basically. And so we felt the pain point and we talked to some more customers about it. And now we're releasing it and giving everyone access. And so I think it's an exciting time to be building applications, especially at the application layer.

46:44And I think we're always have been there for companies to help them save time and money with their expenses or their bill pay. And now their token costs. So, yeah, it's a really exciting release.

46:57Max Hodak:Yeah. So talk about how the product actually integrates into an enterprise workflow. I mean, you can use the receipt processing. Alcohol detection, I think, is a fun one. Yep. Because I imagine you have to benchmark each model at some point on your workload, and then the team can actually understand the tradeoffs. And then how much of that is driven dynamically based on token price, like day to day even? Yeah, exactly. So you would basically replace your base, like OpenAI endpoint with ramps instead. And you can pass in different model slugs. And so you can control if you want to just route all your traffic to one model.

47:42Or if you want to shadow some models and compare like GPT 5.8 with GLM 5.2 and get the outputs, you can score the results with our with our scorer. And then in the background, you can actually compare the output and then decide, hey, do you want to start moving more traffic over? And Ramp obviously can do this for you automatically. Or if you want to control it, you can you can do it yourself, too.

48:07Max Hodak:How about walk me through some of the tradeoffs? Like if you're on GLM 5.2, are all GLM 5.2 endpoints created equal? Because I imagine that some produce more tokens per second. Some might have different prices. They also might have different even qualities. You know, you hear about like, oh, this one's been quantized or this one's been nerfed a little bit or they turn down the reasoning on this model post launch. And I imagine that benchmarking is consistent, but then also there's a whole bunch of tradeoffs that happen even after you've selected the hot model of the day or the one that makes sense.

48:47Exactly. Beyond just the model itself, there's different service tiers. So OpenAI, for example, has a flex tier and a standard tier, and there's different prices for each. And the ramp itself will track what the latency is for this application. you can set a timeout on like what you prefer. And based on that, we'll decide whether to send it to flex tier or standard tier, depending on the latency speeds that we're seeing. And so I do think one of the most powerful things here is the fact that we already have like these production workloads working for customers. And it's been really important for us internally.

49:26And so we have the proof points of saving ourselves 30%, maybe even higher soon. And it's just a matter of passing on the same savings now.

49:34Jason Fried:How should startups and enterprises think about the significance of this product to Ramp itself? What are the resources that you're putting behind it? Because it feels deeply aligned to Ramp's mission, but at the same time, going into a category where there's plenty of other companies that want to basically offer this product.

50:01Max Hodak:Yeah, it feels a little bit in the CTO suite as opposed to the CFO suite, but they're blending together. Yeah, I would say even internally, our CFOs and CTOs are spending more time together. And when we've talked to more customers, that story resonates. And so one of the most interesting things that obviously has been in the news a lot is just how much token costs have become a bigger part of a company's payroll. And people have their estimates and budgets. And that's exactly what Ramp has been known for. And so beyond just like the router itself on the URL, like having all that data flow through and be in Ramp in our token spend management product is, I think, a big part of it.

50:43The same way that people have their limits and budgets on their T &E spend, where there's been talk about specific companies have token budgets per month or per week. And so we actually launched just last week this product. And you can basically see your token spend alongside your T &E spend. And I think, yeah, Eric was on the call last week talking about that. And so it just makes a lot of sense for those CFOs because they want to manage that spend better. And then Ramp can be kind of that single pane of glass to do that.

51:17Max Hodak:So how does caching play into this? It feels like that's another way to optimize cost. And it would be amazing if it happened sort of more automatically. What's the future of that look like? Yeah, I think one of the I mean, there's there's a bunch of different optimizations we can make. If we if we own the router, as an example, if you're using cloud code or codex, you'll see as maybe your session is longer, the context loads up. and your session gets increasingly more expensive. And sometimes it'd be best to just compact that context and then start a new session, have the model summarize. And so there's interesting experiments like that that we're running internally.

52:05And we're basically going to do hundreds of these things on behalf of customers and show them exactly what the before and after kind of looks like here.

52:15Max Hodak:Yeah, how are you thinking about integrating with tools like Codex and Cloud Code to use the UI, UX patterns that users, end users, employees are used to, but then still optimize under the hood. There's plenty of situations where you'll give Codex or Cloud Code just an API key to 11 labs because 11 labs can do more efficient, better quality audio generation, or you might give an API key to all sorts of different things. Is there a world where you can delegate certain tasks to a cheaper GLM 5.2 endpoint, for example, and then have like the preferred model and the preferred application still work semi-normally?

53:00Exactly. Yeah. So that's the plan. I mean, it's going to be a partnership with the labs and the model providers. I think one of the interesting things that you see now and will continue to happen is that you'll have kind of like jagged capabilities of the models. And maybe one model is like really good at writing SDR outbound or another model is really good at writing email copy for the marketing team. And so we'd love to be in a world where Ramp can can optimize your use cases for the right kind of kind of business outcome. And I think just be aligned with like, hey, you're just trying to get your work done and then move on, move on with your life and not spend a billion dollars.

53:43And so that's that's kind of like what's really exciting to us is beyond just like the starting point. It's like doing this for all types of spend.

53:51Jason Fried:uh what is uh ramps culture like right now around token consumption it's you know it's probably the most like aggressively ai native like fintech company or top top three in the world let's say but also like culturally cost aware yeah exactly it's rare i would yeah i would love to see the reaction to like you know one engineer going a little too crazy yeah yeah no i mean it's it's been fun. I think part of the game and part of what's been fun here is that we were building this product for ourselves. We got the entire company to be super AI-pilled, spending a lot of money. Maybe they don't want me to say the exact number.

54:36But now, obviously, we're taking a step back and looking at the costs and the outcomes and looking at ways that you can optimize. And so we're building this product with our finance team hand-in-hand. We're sitting next to them every day and showing them, hey, here's how we've done the optimization for this workflow, or here's how we've done the semantic tagging for our internal background coding agent inspect. And so it's been really fun, honestly, to use this product. And I think that's what makes this product really good is that we've built it for ourselves and can kind of share the learning along the way.

55:13Max Hodak:Fantastic. Well, congrats on... Great to finally meet you as well. Great to meet you. Yeah. Thanks for having me on the show. It makes so much sense. It's an exciting expansion. We will talk to you soon. Have a great week. We'll talk to you later. Goodbye. Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. You got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Our next guest is the co-founder and CEO of Fireworks AI. Let's bring in Lynn. It's been too long. How are you doing? What's going on? Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks so much for hopping on.

55:45Max Hodak:Give us the news. We missed the fundraising announcement, but we're glad to have you here. How much did you raise? What happened? Yeah, we raised$1.5 billion. Wow. Good job, Jordy from downtown.

55:59Jason Fried:Not my best shot, but got it done. It's incredible. Massive. Talk about everything that's happened since the last time you were on the show. It feels like it's been at least six months, maybe closer to 12, but you guys have been super busy. Cooking. Right. So we focus on building a specialized intelligence platform. What that means is we want to make sure every single company has a tool to protect their alpha and turn their alpha into their own intelligence. So what does that mean is we build a training and inference platform, co-optimized, co-designed together to allow application enterprise activate their private data, continuously turn that into their customized model, optimized for inference for both speed and cost, where they, to solve their specific problem, they should have the best model quality, the best speed, and significant lower cost of operation.

57:00By that, I really mean five to ten times lower cost for them to build a durable business. We see an interesting dichotomy in current AI time, very different from SaaS time, where at SaaS time, product market fit and a durable business is one thing. Once you hit a product market fit, you scale as fast as possible. I think last time I mentioned, in AI time, once you have product market fit, you're likely to scale into bankruptcy. You guys laugh at that. And that's become reality right now. So funny. So this is not just startups. Many startups are really facing the jeopardy of scaling into bank's bankruptcy, even though they have a great product.

57:41It also is happening to large public companies because they're the winner. They were the startup and they're the winner, winning various different kind of solution space towards consumer, consumer developers. They have a huge amount of traffic. If they deploy their AI features to all their audience, it's a lot of significant amount of cost. And they also get stuck and not able to roll out their AI features. So at the same time, we know that application development has been significantly disrupted. It's very easy to implement ideas or copy ideas because writing code is no longer a barrier. We want to make sure, I had an interesting conversation with Jensen after his DTC keynotes.

58:28He mentioned there's no special general company. There's no special general company. I see every single company exists for a reason. The reason for a company to exist is they specialize in solving a particular problem extremely well. And that alpha exists from the product design to their business operation to their deep understanding of their customer and all of that reflecting private data. And today, every single company should have full control of how to turn that private intelligence into a model they can operate and power their product. If they only build on top of a black box API, API wrapper, it's really hard for them to build a durable business.

59:13So we want to give our customer the best tool to build a specialized intelligence, to have full control of their own intelligence, to stand on top of, and have full control of the cost for them to scale in the long run. So that's what we're doing, and that's where we're going to use our new fundraising to deploy capital into to accelerate that pace.

59:35Jason Fried:What's the biggest bottleneck to your business? You're growing quickly, but why aren't you growing faster? That's part of the reason why we're raising this round is capacity. So the whole industry is going through a super linear growth in terms of demand. is because of, it doesn't matter whether it's open, close, the model quality passes the threshold of solving many, many problems. And on top of that, the tuned model quality is even better. And we as a company, we need to grow a significant amount of capacity of people across what we're hiring, from researchers to engineers to marketers to sellers, top-notch.

1:00:18And we invite passionate people to join us on our mission of building specialized intelligence.

1:00:23Max Hodak:I saw someone ask for, like, we need a Costco of AI, less philosopher kings. Do you like the idea of becoming the Costco for AI? That's an interesting analogy. I think at the end, what we believe is the whole entire industry is changing from token maxing to value maxing. Sounds like Costco to me. That's right. Because at the end, not all the tokens are equal. And we care about solving a specific task. Use the most economical way to approach it. That's a doable business. And there's nothing new here. In the past hundreds of years of capitalism, capitalism was designed for efficiency. And I think the whole ecosystem is really good at that.

1:01:15Max Hodak:So Costco has, you know, other brands. They have the Kirkland brand. They've done some vertical integration. How deep does vertical integration go? How important is vertical integration to providing the lowest possible cost and winning on essentially value? Yeah. So as we, from our point of view, there's so many innovation that's happening on top of us. Many of those are application doing vertical integration. Sure. And we are powering them today, including in public. We talk about Cursor because they've been training their own model for a long time. We talk about Harvey. Harvey have been training about their legal model for a long time.

1:01:56There are many, many other customers across coding, co-work, all kinds of co-work verticals from legal, finance, recruiting, marketing, sales, customer support, wide variety of verticals. they are all building all sorts of vertical solutions, and they have their unique insights to build their customized model and make their business really stand out. On top of that, there's also a lot of consumer-facing companies, and the whole entire industry is literally going all-in on AI in production where we are helping them to transition into embracing, not just embracing AI in the proper way, but really integrate their offer into their model.

1:02:38Max Hodak:Yeah, I mean, even when you see Google search overviews, like that has to be extremely cheap. Like they don't charge for those. Obviously, Google is completely vertically integrated down from model training to they have custom silicon, they have their own data centers. Is that where you think it goes? Do you think you'll do custom silicon, your own own data centers, have power generation contracts to fully offer the cheapest possible product for a particular category? So I'm humble enough to acknowledge there are tons of experts in every single layer of the AI innovation. I think Jason mentioned five-layer cake.

1:03:18I think there's probably more than five layers if you look at it.

1:03:20Max Hodak:It looks a lot. Shot fired. So every single layer has their own experts. We want to work with them. We want to work with the world's expert really good at doing their own job. And we specialize in building a specialized intelligence platform, cross-training inference. And we partner with all different layers to drive the best vertical solution. That's our philosophy. That makes sense. Well, congratulations. Clearly working, Jordy. Incredible progress. Thank you so much. Great to see you, Lynn. Coming back on the show. Can't wait to talk to you again soon. We'll talk to you later. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex.

1:03:56Max Hodak:Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. There's one more news story we've got to go through really quickly. Wedding guests are now placing prop bets on everything from how long the first dance will last to whether the groom will cry during the ceremony. Call Sagar and Jenny. This is a dream come true for him. Couples are using printed cards and apps.

1:04:25Jason Fried:Get this on Sagarbet immediately.

1:04:26Max Hodak:Get this on Sagarbet immediately. printed cards and apps to let guests predict things like who gives the longest toast, how many outfits the bride wears, or whether the first kiss lasts more than six seconds. The idea is to make weddings feel more interactive, especially during slower parts of the night like cocktail hour. One app called Betting on the Wedding says more than 25 ,000 couples have created pools on its platform, which cost$49 and includes a live leaderboard. The company says revenue is growing at triple digit run rate year over year.

1:05:02Jason Fried:Real insider trading risk here. You might have the groom talking to some of his buddies. But if it's low stakes, I've got some, I'm going to cry. I want you to know I'm going to cry. Go bet the house on me crying.

1:05:20Max Hodak:Maybe. But I think this is designed to be generally small prizes,$20 gift card, maybe some memento, maybe some, you know, an engraved dinner plate from the wedding just to show that you were more engaged, something to remember.

1:05:35Jason Fried:Well, let's ask Jason. Let's ask Jason. He would encourage betting on his wedding.

1:05:40Max Hodak:When are we going to get betting? When can we gamble on 37 Signals properties? That really is incredible. Well, my wedding was, we had 12 people in our backyard, so there wouldn't have been a very big use case for that app. Yeah, a small pool, lack of liquidity. That's a real problem.

1:05:53Jason Fried:A small number of people doesn't mean there's not a lot of volume necessarily, right? Oh, true. Yeah, it depends on who you are. Some people throw in some real time.

1:06:00Max Hodak:You get DHH there. He throws in, you know, his CGT, you know, he puts it all on the line. You never know. You see that picture today? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Trying to hurt your feelings? What's going on? Yeah, that was a little, that was a bruise. That was a little bit of a bruise. It was a bruise because way back when, I used to own a Singer, 9-11. Oh, yeah. And I was selling, this was a number of years ago before they went crazy, crazy. And I was trying to sell it. And some guys like, I'll trade you my career GT for that. and I'm like, eh, I don't really, nah, I don't really think that was a good deal.

1:06:30And it turned out to be, yeah, I should have.

1:06:31Max Hodak:Yeah, one of the great trades of all time. Yeah, it would have been a good trade. You just have that image pulled up.

1:06:37Jason Fried:That's so brutal. I was in the Alps Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and the event that I was at, there was hundreds of Porsches everywhere, and still when the CGTs would roll up, everyone would get quiet, and just watch. Like, seriously, there was one moment where, like, there was probably at least 200 people, and everyone's just talking, talking, talking. CGT pulls up. Crowd goes silent. Everyone's just in awe. What color? Was it silver? There was actually a bunch. Red. There's a GT Silver. GT Silver on tan is, like, probably my favorite that I've been seeing.

1:07:22Max Hodak:But no prediction markets around it?

1:07:24Jason Fried:None at all. Brutal. Just enjoying cars purely for the love of the game.

1:07:29Max Hodak:But you can get so many people, if they're not comfortable driving. We know some people that collect cars, but they don't drive them. They could partake saying, oh, Jordy's going out for a little lap. When will he get back? I'll bet on it. Of course there's insider trading risk. Will he get back? Will he just hit the wall? Those things are tricky to drive, I understand.

1:07:47Jason Fried:What's your latest vehicle purchase? um i bought a um a 1979 um porsche 928 which is one of my favorite cars of all time i own two 928s they're both old and they're not expensive but they're awesome and i bought a green one it's oak green metallic which is a rare color and has pasha seat inserts and it's just it's awesome it's just it's so 70s i love it what is i've never driven a 928 what is uh what's the experience like they're very planted so it's a v8 so it's a front engine car which is unusual for porsche but it's a very it's very stable i mean these were not that fast i think they had 200 and maybe 10 horsepower or something the early cars this is the first year first and second year so they're not fast but they they feel great to drive i you should borrow it yeah come by are you are you a model

1:08:39Max Hodak:y guy as well because that was the funniest thing about dhh's post is that he's just like Like all these cars are kind of worse than the Model Y in some ways. I do have a Model Y and it is probably the best car I've ever owned overall. I mean, it's so comfortable to drive. It's quick as hell. It handles great. We had a previous Y, which I didn't think was very good, but the new Ys are fantastic. I just love it. Yeah. I mean, really, I prefer to drive that over anything, to be honest. Do you have an intuitive sense for the business logic between the lack of fast followers around that? Like in terms of just appliance vehicle, it feels like all the other manufacturers are still playing in their special.

1:09:18Max Hodak:This car says something about you. It offers a particular experience. It has a convertible. But just in like the appliance, basically a minivan on wheels, ultimate utility, Tesla just has had it on lock. And they're like running away with the market. They have. I mean, I guess that's what Honda and Toyota did for many, many years, right? You never really thought of those as they were more just basic appliances I need to get from point A to point B. and I want it to be reliable as hell and just work. So I think Tesla kind of slid in there and basically did that with EVs in a way that everything else is more of a statement.

1:09:51I guess people might think of Tesla as a statement, but it really isn't. It's just like, I want a great car that's incredibly quick, clear, technology advanced, affordable. Full self-driving is incredible. It's just a really amazing thing. And if you haven't really been in one recently, you don't really know because they weren't that high quality four years ago. They were kind of bad. They've gotten to be very high quality now.

1:10:14Max Hodak:People complain about the panel gaps and the interior and all sorts of stuff. They've sorted that out. They're incredible now.

1:10:24Jason Fried:A lot of different cars feel like they're in bubble territory, CGT. I don't know how much more it can go up. I'm sure it'll go up more, but I think there was one on Bring a Trailer. Let's not talk about Bring a Trailer. i'm actually honestly my phone is is on because there's an auction ending in 32 minutes i can't miss um because i'm bidding on it so yeah so so with um yeah we won't dox the car until you until you win it's okay it's okay i mean like it's a 50th anniversary 9-11 which i used to own i owned one a long time ago do you know the car do you know that particular which uh wait but the 50th anniversary of the 911 isn't that only a few years old yeah so it's a 2016 car and they did as a 991 model and they did um an anniversary model which they put like bright chrome trim on it they did pepita inserts it has a slightly better engine it's the last of the manual naturally aspirated 911s with a wide body that aren't ridiculously expensive.

1:11:29Um, and I, it's beautiful looking. It's got like updated Fuchs wheels. It's an incredible thing. Go check it out. Uh, you'll find it on. It just looks beautiful. I've owned one and I had a PDK and there's a manual for sale and I kind of really badly want it only at 7 ,000 miles on it. Please don't outbid me. Whoever you are. I have it. I have it pulled

1:11:47Jason Fried:up here. We won't, we, we don't need, we don't need to pull it up, but, uh, it looks absolutely, absolutely beautiful they pulled it up what do you think about what's your read on the sport classic have you driven a sport classic i've not driven one i love the interior um i don't like the big circle on the side if you know they usually have no decals no decals for me i the interiors are gorgeous though love that car i would the thing is is that they've you know they're so expensive for what they really are which is a carrera s basically i believe right or to me to me the driving experience is some like i had i think the best my my most memorable 20 minutes in the car coming down from mankind in austria 20 minutes open road it was the most it felt like i was in a video game it felt like driving some combination of like a turbo s and a gt2 it's like so so planted and it's like it's refined but it's also angry it's like it was it was manual too right Yeah, manual.

1:12:53Jason Fried:It's so nice. Incredible. Those are those, you know, you can't get them really in aftermarket. They're what, 300 plus or something now? No, no, no. Like 600. Sorry, 600. What was the ST? The ST is like a million now or something? Yeah, the ST is even, I think, even more. But so when things feel like they're in, certain cars feel like they're in bubble territory, where are you just buying, are you going like, I'm just going to buy things like the 928 and things that are a bit more special, but less like, you know, you don't want to buy it when it's hot, basically. Yeah. I mean, I tend to not chase things anyway.

1:13:32It's just, there's, if everyone's chasing it, I'm not interested in it in a sense. So the 928 is a car like nobody wants, but I've always loved. I kind of grew up with them. They're just, they're super cool. So I go after that, But I do I do miss the 50th anniversary. So I might want to pick this one up if I can. We'll see where it ends up. Maybe I won't. But I mean, I wanted a Dakar for a while. I wanted a Sport Classic, actually. I'd love to have one of those, but I'm not going to pay. That's obscene. I'm just not going to do that. There's no reason for that. It's also not I just don't spend that kind of money on cars.

1:14:02It's a crazy amount of money on a car. That's just not something I'm really going to drive all the time anyway.

1:14:08Jason Fried:How do you feel? what is the last 10 minutes of an auction like feel like to you because because i've like tried i i've i i when when sports sports betting was blowing up i was hanging out with uh i think senra and like rob and probably john and i was like i'm gonna give this a shot i want to know why why this is so popular and i just couldn't quite i couldn't quite get into it but the experience of being of bidding in the final minutes of an auction like something in my head just goes like you're not losing and and to me it's easy to get carried away it's dangerous to throw that one more that one chip in there at the end you're like fuck it i'll just you know yeah the thing is is that i i all i mean this is just i always feel deep regret right after winning a car like like especially a vintage car maybe not a new car like a sport classic i would not feel regret because I know what I'm getting and there's no issues.

1:15:04Right. But like you buy a 79, nine 28 on the, on the thing. And you like, you get it and you take it to your mechanic. He's like, you know, there's like$40 ,000 of work that needs to happen on this thing. You're like, fuck. So vintage cars, deep regret. And I've regretted all of them. I bought, even though I liked them all, but the purchase was like a deeply regretful, but modern cars. I don't feel that way. I would be very excited to get something I like.

1:15:27Jason Fried:Yeah. Yeah. Good point. Yeah. But you gotta be careful. I talked to some mechanics and they're like, Bat is just keeping me in business because people just buy these cars. They think they're good. They get them. They need tons of service. It's been great for small mechanics, actually.

1:15:41Max Hodak:Interesting.

1:15:42Jason Fried:I bought my first sports car on Bring It Trailer. The first one I really went for, I ended up bidding way more than I was comfortable with just because I got into, I was like 23 at the time. I got into the last, I was one of the last two bidders. Bidding psychosis. And he, yeah, I got, I got, I got auction psychosis, ran away. Honestly, luckily I didn't win. Um, but the second one I got, it was, I had the perfect experience. I bought it. Uh, I, I think I bought it, bought it well. It was a 997. Uh, it was in Arizona. Dot two, dot one. What would you get? The dot one. Uh, but it, but the issue, the, the, the bearing issue that they have had already been like fixed or whatever.

1:16:24Jason Fried:Oh, good. And I flew to Arizona, pick it up. I get it. Drive's great. I'm 30 minutes down the road, headed back to California, and I was going to drive through Joshua Tree. And I was passing a construction site, and a piece of rebar went, like, fully through the wheel, like, through the tire and the wheel. Basically, I pulled over and ended up having to ship the car back to California. and it was my most devastating car enthusiast moment. But once it got to California, we got a new wheel. It ran perfectly for as many miles as it needed to and then ended up making money on the sale. Nice. I don't ever do that.

1:17:06I bought real quick, I bought an Aston DB9 GT, which is the last year of the DB9, which is to me one of those beautiful cars ever made in history. I got the car, I get it shipped in on the truck. I got this on bat. um there's like this rattle in the back that's kind of bugging me so i take it to the mechanic they can't figure it out they're like a few grand in trying to figure it out turns out like the car got in an accident at some point and it was never reported on carfax and to like fix this structural issue it was like nine grand so i'm like fuck it just i sold the car to the dealer immediately lost like 20k i just wanted to wash my hands of it i like i had it for two days and just sold immediately because i just i can't i just can't handle that thing to know that like i bought this thing and it wasn't what it was and yeah i could fix it but it was never going to be the same so i i never i never seemed to win on bat but good for you i'm glad you made money on your

1:18:00Jason Fried:car how do you how do you feel about uh different luxury brands doing what i would call zoomer partnerships. So like Aston Martin launching a partnership with Call of Duty. I can imagine that the logic for that was, hey, we want to reach a younger audience. We need more relevancy with the next generation of buyers. Aston has obviously struggled recently, even though I think their cars are stunning. But I would say in every single sort of like price tier, it's not quite as desirable, I think for a lot of people as like the Ferrari equivalent or the Porsche equivalent. So I can, I can understand where they're going, even though to me as somebody who loves Call of Duty and loves Aston Martin, I still got like quite an aversion to that partnership.

1:18:48Jason Fried:And then you have some of the stuff that like AP does with their, you know, partnering with like DJs and things like that, that, that that's kind of, it's this interesting thing because you're trying to appeal to the young generation, but it ends up turning off. I feel like your actual buyer group in the process. Yeah, I find it to be, I mean, for me, it doesn't appeal to me. And although I will say that I like what Aston's done. Aston with that DB9 that I bought, they had a 007 edition, which I think is cheesy as hell. But because it's like 007, like on the seats, but it probably spoke to their audience, you know?

1:19:27So like that makes sense to me in a sense, even though I would never buy that. But yeah, I don't like the, I don't like the AP deals, But, you know, who am I to say? Like, they clearly sell them out, and it probably works for them. But it's not the kind of thing that appeals to me is all I would say. Agreed.

1:19:43Max Hodak:Any more car questions? Yeah, car watch questions. I mean, there's actually, I saw a watch recently, like, Braymont came out with some, like, Aston Martin, or like, I don't know who it was. It's like, what do you, I don't know, who buys these? I just wonder who buys these silly things. I just, I don't get it. I don't get it. The watch car collab seems to make more sense because if you're buying a car, you're checking out for something that's six figures. If you're like, that's a couple more thousand dollars, like throw the watch in, whatever. Well, sometimes dealerships do that. You got to buy the watch.

1:20:18If you want to buy the watch, I'll get you the car. I hate that bundling stuff. It's so disingenuous. I don't know if you saw this thing, Jay Leno. There's this little Jay Leno clip recently about how he won't buy a Ferrari because when he was younger, he wanted to go buy a Ferrari. and they're like, well, you got to buy two of these other models you don't want before you can get the one you want. And he's just like, it turned me off forever from Ferrari. And I'll buy a McLaren because they want my business and they're cool to me. That's how I feel about this stuff. That's why I don't like this bundling, especially Rolex ADs and Porsche dealers now are doing the same thing.

1:20:49It's gross. It's gross, I think.

1:20:52Jason Fried:On the Ferrari side, obviously the Luce was mocked, but ultimately do you think it ends up being a win for them just because they can effectively say, now any car that you actually want, you just add a Luce to your cart and check out. They get more margin, I'm sure, plus they solve their emissions issues.

1:21:15Max Hodak:Oh, sure, sure.

1:21:17Jason Fried:Crazy, desirable supercar, they sell one EV and it sort of nets out to being pretty efficient. My sense is they'll sell every car they make. And I just don't think they're going to resell very well. That's all. But like, I mean, I don't know. You know, when I first, well, not first, but last time I was on the show, we talked about the interior of that car. And like, we're like, let's wait until we see the exterior. That's right. That's right.

1:21:42Max Hodak:Because the interior I still think looks cool. I've seen a lot of the details. It's interesting. It's different, but it's like it can work and it has a purpose. And then the exterior was really, was really. I'm the kind of person I just support like all creators of things. Like it's so hard to make anything. So like, I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. They're Ferrari. It's Johnny. Like they probably know a few more things than people online know about like what's cool, what isn't, what's good. It is an unusual car. It does not look like a Ferrari. It doesn't feel like a Ferrari. But maybe it's time for Ferrari to make some changes.

1:22:11I don't know. Maybe they're bored of their own history. I'm not sure. I mean, it's interesting. I wouldn't I'm not interested in the car, but I just it's for the same reason I really respect, but I would never want to buy a Cybertruck. I just like that that exists in the world.

1:22:27Max Hodak:Yeah, no, I agree with that for sure. I like that the Luce exists in the world. I like that someone did that and they did it their own way. I always support things like that, even if it's not for me.

1:22:37Jason Fried:Yeah, it's definitely a head turner. I'm going to support it myself. Are you? No, when they're selling for more than half off and I want to do a safari treatment.

1:22:47Max Hodak:There's definitely some cool things you can do with it. It does sort of act as the inverse of a halo car. Like after the Luce dropped, the SF90 looked way cheaper. Whereas before everyone was complaining, oh, the SF90 is so expensive. Purosangwe is so expensive. No one's complaining about that stuff anymore now. Everyone's like, it has a natural aspirated V12 in the Purosangwe. If they're charging high half a million dollars, that's fine.

1:23:12Jason Fried:What is your last car question? What is, you said you had a Singer, but when it comes to Resto mods, like what makes a great Resto mod to you? I don't think there are great Rustamods. That's what I realized. I mean, the Singer is an amazing thing for sure. But what I realized was it was neither of what it was supposed to be. It wasn't like a vintage car. And it also wasn't a new Porsche. So it kind of had this, it's a beautiful object. And they do an exceptionally fine job designing and building them. although mine had a lot of issues because mine was pretty early like the 72nd car so they hadn't worked it all out yet but it just didn't satisfy me another either direction and i kind of realized that like i'd rather just have an old car and a new car and save some money frankly i could have both and and then like drive the old car and have the old experience drive the new car to have the new experience so i'm not a big rustomod guy for a while i was curious about like icons like the broncos and stuff and i also with that i'd just rather have an old beat-up bronco or an old beat-up pickup truck i just i'm more into like what what is the thing supposed to be just get the thing

1:24:21Max Hodak:that it's supposed to be yeah what about restore my take what's your take uh well we were debating the uh the range rover has a classics program where they're selling a 1994 range rover but it's been fully restored from the factory and so maybe that solves the problem you're identifying What do you think about that? I'm into that because that's like the brand doing their own thing. I'm into that fully. I think Porsche has a classics program too, perhaps, maybe. I just don't like resto mods, basically. And to me, that's not a resto mod. That's like a true restoration. A resto mod making a car when it's not or backdating or something, I'm not into that so much.

1:24:58Jason Fried:Yeah, restoration. I would say that's a great way to put it. It's like I'm a massive fan of restoration. I don't want somebody to take what was perfect at its time and try to modernize it and then put their own spin on it. Same thing with houses for me. I like an old house should be restored to the way it was. I don't like walking into an old house with a lot of soul and then you go into a kitchen and it's super modern. It just doesn't work. I mean, it works, but something is missing then actually in both of those experiences. So anyway, that's my stupid opinion. Whatever. Everyone's got their own thing.

1:25:36Plenty of people like singers. Plenty of people like Rustomods. And they all are great things. It's just not for me anymore. Yeah.

1:25:43Max Hodak:I got to ask you one tech question. Yeah, sure. Let's do something tech. And I think you'll have some insight here. So there was a screenshot from a story about how hard technology workers are grinding in the AI era. that went viral for being bleak, according to this poster. They said, a 31-year-old tech startup worker in San Francisco who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional repercussions said that her engineering manager husband told her a few months ago that he needed to focus all of his energy on, quote, becoming an AI native and requested that she take on almost all parenting responsibilities for the couple's preschool-age daughter.

1:26:26Max Hodak:She complied. She described the experience as surreal. He spent days, nights, and weekends locked in his office toiling away on AI projects, but her husband eventually thanked her. He was now the top user of AI in his company. Is it the great lock-in? Is this burnout? Does he need to pick up a book? If so, which book would you recommend from your library across rework, remote? Doesn't have to be crazy at work. It sounds like it is crazy at many startups, at many engineering organizations. Some of them are in real knockout drag out fights where the extra hour of work will actually result in maybe winning or losing.

1:27:07Jason Fried:And it's funny the way that others, maybe the whole the whole conversation around that post just was around the screenshot. No one read the actual article. I certainly didn't. And it just ends. The husband is now the top user of AI. Yes. Which doesn't mean he's the best at using it. He just means he's it's reads to me like he's just using the most tokens. So hopefully he came out of his three month, you know, AI bender and is like actually the best at getting the most utility out of the driving value. But yeah, we don't know. Well, yeah. I mean, I do find it ironic that, you know, AI is what it is yet.

1:27:40Everyone seems to be working harder and harder. And it's, it's, it's, it's one of these things. Technology has always promised, uh, that it would do a lot for us and then we'd have more free time to do other things. And it just seems like no, no, no, and no, um, especially at work. So yeah, I think it's a real problem. And I can sense it here occasionally that, you know, yeah, we're getting more done, but it's, it weighs on people more because there's, you can be doing multiple things at once now, and you can be parallel working on with a bunch of different agents doing a bunch of different things.

1:28:08And it's like, to what end, where, where is this going and why does it need to happen? Not that the technology is not amazing, but I'm not sure it's doing good things to human beings. Um, so, but the tech is incredible, obviously, but yeah, some of the actual,

1:28:21Jason Fried:imagine if 37 signals had got access to today's models a decade ago and didn't tell anyone and just got to use them. Yeah. Maybe you're a part of the problem is that everyone has access to the tools and you're in a competitive category and you, and, and I feel like there's this concern of, of if we're not, I mean, it's always a question of like, do you want to be, do you want to, at least if you're a venture-backed company and you're competing against another venture-backed company for a market, you don't want to be working less hard than them. That's generally not a good strategy. But those are inputs.

1:28:53Customers don't care about the inputs. How does it manifest in the product? And I'm not seeing products get better at the rate that the development process is getting better. So people are doing a lot of stuff. And yet, people actually don't want their products to change rapidly either. People want to get used to things. They want to settle into something. They want to understand how it goes. They don't want things to be moving constantly and things to be added all the time. So there's a disconnect actually between how much you can make and how much people actually can absorb and incorporate into their own work day, basically.

1:29:31So yeah, I think like the end of the day, like you're building a product, however you build it, you're building it. But just because you can build more of it doesn't mean it makes it a better product, can make it a worse product. And you're seeing that all over the place right now, actually. So I don't know. It's great to have the tools. The tools are amazing, obviously, but you still have to decide what gets through the slit. Like what, what are you putting out there in the world?

1:29:52Max Hodak:I'm always laughing about the fact that, uh, when I'm in, uh, Gmail in Chrome, I can open Gemini in Gmail and I can also open Gemini in Chrome. And then I just have two sidebar chats that can, if, and if the window is too small, it takes up 100 % of the window. And I'm And then you can't even use the models to interact with the email. And email is already pretty well organized. It's all perfectly organized by time or whatever filter you want. It's pretty good already in that way. But yeah, anyway, I mean, amazing tech. But yeah, I don't think we've figured out what that all means yet still. And I'm not alone in that.

1:30:31But it doesn't – look, if it exhausts people, that's not a good thing. No tech is good if it makes people exhausted and burned out.

1:30:39Max Hodak:Something odd about the pattern of working. I mean, like when you're doing software development, occasionally there are times where like you just have to wait while something builds and that takes a minute. But a lot of times you can get in the flow state and be, you know, focused working for an hour. But when you fire off a prompt and you're waiting like, maybe it's 20 minutes, maybe it's an hour. And then so you're checking your phone and it feels like you're like waiting for a call to come in almost. It's a different way of working. And I can see how, if not well managed, it can become very stressful.

1:31:10Jason Fried:Yeah, it's a tool. Like I've been in places in my life where my laptop feels like, oh, it's exhausting. But it's not really the laptop. It's like what I'm doing with it.

1:31:22Max Hodak:Yeah.

1:31:22Jason Fried:What you're doing with it, yeah.

1:31:23Max Hodak:Time to go for a drive.

1:31:24Jason Fried:Jason, always a pleasure.

1:31:25Max Hodak:Always a pleasure.

1:31:26Jason Fried:Fun, fun to see you guys. Yeah, wish we had more time. Let's do it again soon.

1:31:29Max Hodak:We'll talk to you later. Talk soon, dude. Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. I own the data platform that powers it. I forgot to ask Jason if he has opinions about restomods for jet skis. I'll ask you. Is there a jet ski that you'd recommend for somebody getting into a commute?

1:31:50Jason Fried:I saw a wooden jet ski recently. A wooden? That's cool. Like a really classic jet ski. Dude, don't get me excited. I'm into it. Look, these things go fast. Yeah? I think I went 70 miles an hour on my jet ski to work. Wow. To work.

1:32:03Max Hodak:That's faster than most people commute. They're stuck in traffic. I mean, I've got a five-minute commute to work. on a jet ski unless it's raining.

1:32:09Jason Fried:Unless it's raining. And it gets a little weird. And you call an Uber.

1:32:14Max Hodak:Is it helpful? Do you do your best thinking on the jet ski? No. Does it clear the mind? I think going quickly. It's a it's a it's a fucking notch on the belt. Who else do you know is jet skiing to work? Nobody. I'm the guy. I looked it up on your guys' application OpenAI, you know, ChatGPT on your guys' app on your app I want to thank you for all the great stuff that you guys are providing in ChatGPT but I think there's like one or two other CEOs but nobody at a major nobody thousand person plus as a CEO is commuting to work on a jet ski Only a Texas resident, right? Texas resident. That's right.

1:33:10Primary residents. Let's go.

1:33:11Jason Fried:Yes. So, before we start, the last time you were on here, that was, for me, the best moment of making the show ever. John and I. It was totally surreal. And we really enjoyed the conversation. But to me, we left that and it was almost depressing because as somebody who, you know, started getting into startups in the 2010s, you were that guy. And then I was realizing with the show, we had that conversation with you and it was, you know, a significant day for you. But it was sort of depressing because I realized like a moment like that would never actually come again where I got to basically interview.

1:33:55Jason Fried:It will happen. It will happen. It'll happen differently. But a childhood hero having that conversation, that's one of one for me. I don't think it'll happen again. There'll be other. It was peak. It was good. But anyways, you've been busy since then. I've been busy. Look, I'm super excited. It's my first OpenAI podcast. I'm very excited about it. Also, I want to let you guys know that if you need therapy sessions for what it's like to be a made man in retirement. Sure. Like, if that's a thing, I can help motivate you guys.

1:34:30Max Hodak:Isn't step one of therapy in this situation just get a jet ski? No, it's just, it's actually denial. You got to get over the denial part. Okay, over the denial. Just fuck it. And then the acceptance. Yeah, it's something. I don't know the 12 steps. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone just knows denial and acceptance. They don't know any of the other ones. It's like a bunch of shit in the middle. Grieving, bargaining. There's a couple others in there, but you do go through that. It's natural. Yeah. It happens, but then you start building. If you guys need advice, you need therapy, I'm here for you. I love it.

1:34:56I know the retard maxing is you're not supposed to do therapy. I'm just saying there are benefits. Especially with your new partners.

1:35:02Jason Fried:They're like, if they're one thing, they wrote into the fundraising round, they wrote into the docs, like, cannot go to therapy. That would be amazing.

1:35:10Max Hodak:Podcasts are modern therapy for men. This is what men do. They don't go to therapy.

1:35:13Jason Fried:You should have office hours for founders, but they have to just come out on a jet ski while you're going, and you're going 70 miles an hour, and you'll coach them. I am starting to teach many founders and people in tech world how to water ski, how to wake surf. A bunch of my engineers already. So there was one guy who didn't know how to swim, but I got him behind the boat wake surfing.

1:35:37Max Hodak:Whoa. So you had a life jacket. Life jacket. The life jacket on. Life jacket. It sounds weirder than it is. Yeah. But it was still very weird. It's a high risk. Yeah, it was good. Potentially. Okay, cool. The business. Business. Going well. Dude, it's business time. Got to put on the business socks. Unfinished business. Unfinished business. So, yeah, I announced earlier today we did a$1.7 billion raise. There's some noise that's going to happen.

1:36:07Wow.

1:36:09Max Hodak:We're now. One mallet. That's just fucking. You guys are crazy. You need to do another one from downtown. I'm hitting it next time. Yeah, you can.

1:36:16Jason Fried:I'll come over the top.

1:36:22Jason Fried:uh so much noise so much noise all right but walk us through i feel you came in very relaxed walk us through i think it's been what it's been uh four months since we talked three or four months something like that yeah i think did we talk in april or march i think march yeah oh that's

1:36:39Max Hodak:right yes early months four months so so yeah so what happened with the business to unlock the next round uh i mean we continue to go up into the right but like the announcement of atoms was we are we are going to do physical automation physical ai what we are calling industrial ai to transform these industries one at a time yeah we were we did food we moved into mining we're doing transport and it's working and so that's how you go yeah and then of course there's like going out of stealth. There's all the things and it was just the right time. So, um, so yeah, we just went to market. We said when I, when I originally went to market, I was like, these were separate companies.

1:37:28Okay. So our mining and transport was a separate thing. Food was a separate thing. And we had a bunch of other, you know, a bunch of subsidiaries doing cool stuff. And I said, which one do you guys want to do? Do you want to invest in mining? Do you want to invest in food? Do you want to invest in this? And they're just like, we want to invest in you. Yeah. Yeah. And we heard that like we took the, like the first five folks we talked to all said that. Yeah. So then what we did is we put the companies together and then sold the equity in a singular entity.

1:38:02Max Hodak:Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so just put, put it together and it, and it, I, it's much easier for me. I don't know how, uh, how Elon does it with all the different companies and how it's, it's wild. Well, no,

1:38:14Jason Fried:The answer is what's been happening, right? It's like more and more consolidation. He did it, guys. He did it for 20 years, though.

1:38:20Max Hodak:Yeah.

1:38:20Jason Fried:Yeah.

1:38:21Max Hodak:And he's still technically doing it with Tesla and SpaceX. They are different companies. Boring company. Yeah. Neuralink. He still has a lot of cool stuff.

1:38:27Jason Fried:But the lesson in there for investors is even with Elon companies, there's such an insane power law where you have a$10 billion company and then you have a$2 trillion company, right? And it's like you just want broad exposure. Ideally, you could just invest in the one that breaks out, but you want broad exposure to the category. When things are first getting going, there is a lot of upside of having them separate. Sure. Because if somebody wants to invest in a really cool thing, and this is what happened when we first got the transport and mining thing going. Yeah. If they want to invest in that cool thing, they're like, I don't know anything about food.

1:39:04Yeah. And by the way, food on its own is robotics, real estate, like restaurants, like, you know. And so they want to be exposed to that one thing, and they don't want to have to underwrite something going across all things. And they're like, well, if you're losing money over here, I want you to lose money over here. So how much of the money I'm putting in is going to go to that? There has to be a theory of the case of how you put it together, how you allocate capital across. And honestly, once you're starting to get to profitability on one or more, then that conversation starts to get easier.

1:39:37And I think that could be why – I can't speculate on sort of Elon's world, but certainly I'm super excited to have those pieces put together into a single puzzle.

1:39:51Max Hodak:What does go-to-market look like in the mining industry for you? It's the freaking best. Okay. Because specifically, when I think of your go-to-market magic, it was deploying young people to a new city in Miami and they're doing a marketing stunt. And it's not like you're calling in favors or leveraging your network to get Uber up and running in a new city. That was something that was organizational design. So hold on. That's consumer. Exactly. So how is it different? Well, it's just like, well, all the food stuff we're doing is business. Almost all of it. Really all of it. Mining's all business.

1:40:36So look, there is a big thing. If you go from doing consumer to doing business, and I think we may have talked about this last time, that's a whole other ballgame. I mean, that takes years off your lifespan doing it, like getting good at it and then owning it. But mining go-to-market is cray-cray. Yeah. Like, so I'll just give you an example.

1:40:59Max Hodak:Like going to the mining conference or something? Well, yes. How are you meeting CEOs? Yes, you do that. But, you know, I can a lot of times, look, when you have very efficient transportation, you can go places. So a month ago, I dropped into deep Amazon in Brazil. Okay? Like deep northern Brazil, like Amazon.

1:41:24Jason Fried:Places you can't even get a jet ski to. Guys, it's the Amazon of the Amazon. Okay. Okay. And like tiny airports, you just like, you kind of just dirt. You slide into the DMs except there's a tarmac. Okay. There you go. And yes, of course. Yeah. And massive iron ore mine that we're operating in there. Okay. And you see, like we took, we were there for a couple of days because we already have customers there. Sure. A customer is called Valet. It's a massive mining company. Yeah. and um they uh it's it's like the world's largest iron ore mine and you go and you get in a helicopter just going over one of the sites takes 30 minutes wow okay and it's fascinating it's so fascinating and you're learning how the system works you're sort of figuring out how do i you You basically take a kit, you install it onto a machine, and that machine becomes autonomous.

1:42:26And some of these machines are like 20 years old. Some of them are new. And so there's lots of different kinds of machines as well. And you're making the mine more productive. You are making it way safer. It is super, like they have lots of safety protocols, but like it is mining. It's dangerous business. It is a dangerous business. and the OPEX goes down all at the same time. It's kind of a beautiful thing. And then I went from Brazil and then straight from there dropped into the border between Iraq and Saudi on the Saudi side. So we have a phosphate mine that we're doing stuff there. The signals were jammed.

1:43:07So my pilots had to land kind of like old school style, like physical, visual. Is that because of the conflict going on in the region? And just the general, the vibes on the borders there. So, but same story. And so go to market is wild. You just end up in like crazy places, but it's super needed. And so what's happened is the Pronto technology has gotten past human productivity, which means you go to a goldmine CEO, you talk about go to market, you go to a goldmine CEO and you say, would you like to have 20 % more gold per year? absolutely good so we haven't heard no yes okay okay but they're but they say proven yeah and that's where the rubber meets the road right how long does it take to prove it used to take a lot longer now be like once you've proven it enough times then it sort of gets its own momentum gets around and so we're in that we're in that place on pronto where that momentum is taking hold because there's enough proof points where it's just working in so many different places where people are like, all right, let's go.

1:44:13We're going to think of mining, autonomous mining, almost like enterprise software where you get a pilot. There's like a 10 ,000-person company, and you've got an enterprise startup, and they're like, I've got like eight seats, but it's this huge company. And if we get it, it's huge. And I've got this other 10 seats over at this other one. It's a pilot, but I swear it's going to work. And they're out there pitching and trying to make it happen. But once it works, and in mining, that means human productivity, human level better than human productivity. Once it works, it goes big. And they're like, okay, let's get across all the vehicles.

1:44:55And so we're sort of in that mode with a bunch of different customers right now.

1:44:58Max Hodak:How big is the opportunity to just increase uptime of mining operations? operations. I imagine that there are minds that are trying to operate 24 seven, but getting a night shift in the middle of the Amazon reliably, everyone's showing up and being, you know, healthy and happy and eager. It gets a lot easier when it's like, yeah, we're still going to have a bunch of people on site, but they're going to be overseeing robotic work. For sure. So, uh, so yeah, I mean the, um, there's two parts to the productivity gain. First is the machine per hour doing more. That's part one. Part two is hours and call-outs and all of that stuff, as well as just the safety protocols change when you have less risk.

1:45:46So there's a lot of things like this that pile on to each other. My guess is you could even end up 30%, 40 % more productive at the end of all of it. And when you do that, the opportunity speaks for itself. A gold mine that's doing 30 or 40 % more gold per year is kind of, whoa, but that's for every mineral. That's lithium. We also go all the way down to quarries. Quarries are different because quarries are basically, it's about cement, let's just say. That's the main jam. There are others, but let's just go with that. You don't just go do more rock because you need cement customers on the other side.

1:46:26They're only using so much cement.

1:46:27Jason Fried:Like where to store it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so that's more of an op-ex play. And there are thinner margins there. But I'm in the game. And it's kind of interesting. And it's a lot of fun. And for that company, for Pronto, they were super, Anthony Lewandowski and the team there, super scrappy, true startup style, lean as hell. Like, so lean. Like that Christian Bale movie. I can't remember the name of it. The machinist. Dude, it's like super lean. And I'm like, guys, we got to go from lean to muscular. You got to go to Batman. And that's what we're doing. And you think of this in an enterprise.

1:47:06That's a good phrase. Yeah, you don't want to be fat.

1:47:08Max Hodak:You just want to be muscular. And so you think about enterprise go-to-market. Part of our go-to-market is building credibility with our enterprise customers that we're going from lean to muscular. Because the demand is there. It's ready to go. They're like, we need you to be muscular. We need the protein powder and the whatever else.

1:47:32Jason Fried:What holds you back from scaling? Let's say you do a pilot. It works well. You're attaching hardware to existing systems and hardware that they're using, and they say, okay, we're getting more out. Maybe we want to place orders for more machines. I imagine the lead times on some of this mining equipment could be insane. How much of the stack do you want to own?

1:48:02Say the question again. I'm sorry. I just blanked. Go for it one more time. I apologize.

1:48:05Jason Fried:Right now you're taking existing mining equipment and you're augmenting it with you're making it AI enabled. You're making it autonomous. You're making it more efficient. And they say, great, this is working. We want to scale up our operation because maybe we need less or we can do more with the same human headcount. But I imagine there's some things that are out of control for you at that point where they're like, okay, we need more of this heavy mining equipment. Let's add it to the site. But is there like a lag time there? The real lag time is getting – so let's say we want to get a bunch of machines that are in the Amazon up and running.

1:48:42Yeah. Okay? How do you do that? So I've got to ship a bunch of sensors, a bunch of compute, a bunch of equipment and mechanical systems, let's just say, so that a team can then go install it.

1:48:58Jason Fried:Yeah. So you're basically building a data center on site? I wouldn't put it that way. I would say, I mean, if you considered a machine with sensors and compute a data center, I mean, you could. But it's really – think of those – there are servers, but I wouldn't say a data center. It's not really like that.

1:49:15Max Hodak:Some operations would bring like an Armada-style, like shipping container-sized level of – You just – Palantir has one. So you bring in the stuff. Yeah. Okay. You have to install it. Yeah. You have to like bring it up and make sure, okay, this is a new place. How does this machine work properly in this new place? And calibrate and make sure it's safe and all of this. So there's like a process of getting it up. But then there's change management because that site's going from there are people that show up in the morning. There's all this very regimented process to make sure everything's going exactly as planned and people are exactly where they're supposed to be because otherwise weird things happen on a mining site.

1:49:57So you have to go from that to, okay, we're now running an autonomous mining operation. It's just a very different thing. So the installation and the bring-up and what we call commissioning are sort of like the things you have to do. And, you know, like why does it take a long time to install? Because that machine may not even be drive-by-wire. So you have a mechanical system. Like if you turn the steering wheel, like it's, you know what I mean? It's a mechanical system, a hydraulic system. So you're bringing effectively an actuator that might push a physical button. Yeah, you're trying to make electricity then do a physical thing, so then you need physical actuation to do the things because these machines are not natively drive-by-wire.

1:50:47That's not all machines.

1:50:48Jason Fried:That sounds incredibly difficult but necessary because you're not going to get a mine to rip out tens of millions of dollars of equipment that they already have. But would you eventually go full stack, like build the entire system? I mean, look, we ultimately, I mean, if you go in the mining industry, there's like this term. It's called no entry mine. A no entry mine is a mine where there are no people in the pit. The lights out factory. Yeah, kind of like that version of it. There might be people in a control center. There might be, but like in that pit, no humans.

1:51:24Max Hodak:And it's a wildly different calculus from a safety perspective, I imagine. Totally different, obviously. And so there's drilling, there's blasting, there's loading, there's haulage, there's crushing. I'm just going through the different parts of the mining operation. And what you do is you start somewhere and then you start extending to those other areas to get to that no entry thing. And the no entry thing is you can have an autonomous thing like our haulage system is autonomous. If you're getting in a new place, you can do remote control and move into autonomous. If you want to go super no entry or lower entry line, if that makes sense.

1:52:08It's super fascinating. And then you're talking about loaded a 2 million pound machine that's moving potentially 35 miles an hour down the road. And it's an off-road thing.

1:52:25Jason Fried:two million pound machine moving 35 miles an hour off-road yeah dude this is why you have to this is like the ultimate atv to work this is the ultimate atv so no you get in it and you can you know you can experience it like uh i mean it's not like there's like a amusement park for this but like i've certainly experienced it where i can get in the i get in the machines and and check

1:52:48Max Hodak:out what's going on this is like the dump truck or any of these 20 foot tires essentially are any

1:52:52Jason Fried:Are any of these companies like acquisition targets where you would be able to come in and say, like, you're doing a lot of stuff well, but here's all the stuff that you're never going to figure out like us? I mean, look, I would say the way we think about it is the haulage part of a mine is where most of the vehicles are. And we think of haulage as the cardiovascular system of a mine. so we're obviously very connected to all the other machines but we don't do all the other machines so we're like in an ecosystem so we can work with them where like there's apis because like if you're doing haulage you need to know where the other machines are and what their status is yeah as an example there needs to be orchestration coordination there which is pretty interesting in terms of like acquisition like you know i i do i have to sort of admit like the uber mentality my mentality let's just say yeah yeah my dune yeah yeah it's like not i guess we were different today but in my world we didn't acquire shit we just built yeah that's right i don't know if i have an opinion yet i'm not like religious about it but if we feel like we can build something we do but that but sometimes people have differentiated awesome stuff and you're like let's partner We're open to it.

1:54:07Max Hodak:How would you pitch me if I was a young person, Stanford, CS, new grad, worried about software engineering not being the easy path where I can bounce around from Google and maybe Uber had a cushy job for me? Pitch me on going to the Amazon and building. That's awesome. I mean, that's awesome. I thought I just did. I mean, that was the pitch. That was the pitch. Do you think young people are receptive to this pitch yet? Are we about to be receptive? Why should they be receptive? It's really interesting because I only run into the young people that are receptive. I'm not out there pitching lame-sauce dude who doesn't want to work.

1:54:49Sure, sure. I don't end up in the same room as this guy.

1:54:54Jason Fried:Do you want a laptop job or do you want to be dropped into a mine in the Amazon and build science fiction? This is the thing, right? Like this is why the Adams thing is cool. Because you're not dropping a fucking app in the app store. You're like automating a 2 million pound machine going 35 miles an hour carrying gold. Do you watch? There's a lot of profanity happening today. I don't know why it's happening, but it is. Let it flow. I just wanted to acknowledge it. Do you get inspired by science fiction at all? I can imagine watching Dune for you. You're just texting pictures to the team. Of course.

1:55:41My fave is Asimov. He's my fave. The iRobot series is just so epic.

1:55:52Max Hodak:What is your takeaway from the iRobot series with regard to AI safety, Dune generally? Have you ever had moments of maybe we won't figure it out? Won't figure what out? The alignment problem broadly. Like the iRobot, the three laws of robotics, is sort of an elegant solution. It's tested, obviously. But I would love to come back to a world where everyone, both the doomers and the AI builders, agree that, yep, the three laws of robotics will be sufficient. But I mean, in some ways, well, in some ways in the series, the three laws don't always work out. So I think there's a lot of, I thought there was a lot of nuance to those three laws even though the laws are sort of so simple.

1:56:38I love the intention of those laws. I sort of think of it a little bit differently which is I have been entrepreneuring for a long time. Like a long time. And I have failed. And when I think about why I failed, it's usually because I was building something that nobody liked. So if you build something that people don't like, I don't think you're going to succeed. So how does that relate to your question? He's like, please tell me because I'm not connecting the dots at all. What are you talking about? Well, if you make something that is anti-human, if you make something that doesn't serve people, I don't think you're going to make it.

1:57:27I don't think you're going to make it. And by the way, like, yes, we're using AI to help us make decisions, et cetera. But what do those AIs really, really want to do almost too much? They want to please us. So I just think if you're not making stuff that humans want, it's not going to work out. And that's kind of obvious, obviously. But I think it keeps going. And yes, there's the dangers and the things and then this. But that's my starting point for how I think about these things. And we can't control all the things. and I do think of course you have to have safety situations and there's collisions of like what do I prioritize first and how do I do it which is I think where Asimov's laws go but instead of writing sci-fi books I'm just doing the thing and I'm making sure the machine stays on the road

1:58:17Max Hodak:and related to that idea of like doing the thing making the machine stay on the road I imagine that your world view is somewhat but informed by your contact with reality, the fact that you can see the progress of diffusion, how long drive-by-wire systems took to roll out, and the need for AI to be deployed in tactile ways. You just see it as more positive sum, there's more opportunity. I feel like you're deploying robots that people want. Right now, there's some point where robots have their own bank accounts and their citizens and all this. we're just not there yet. Sure, sure. And until we get there, that robot is owned by somebody and that somebody has a bank account and they are paying based on the value you're bringing them because they like your stuff.

1:59:09So if you are doing things that humans don't like, you're done. And trust me, I've done it. I've built things that nobody liked and it sucked. I don't recommend anybody do it. If you can avoid it, you totally should.

1:59:26Jason Fried:On the business model side, what are you doing now in mining and where do you think it could go over time? Because if you're able to bring in a system that helps someone increase their yield 30 to 40 percent, I imagine eventually you just do some type of JV so that you guys have aligned incentives. Look, there's – and the instinct should be how do enterprise software companies do it. start there and you guys will know that like you you know that yeah yeah what's the answer let's just say your enterprise software company you're making a company more productive what do you do raise prices subscription or you the price goes up when you prove that productivity so there's baseline and then based on outcomes you get a little extra juice sure sure and you can or you're always trying to make sure that like you want to be producing creating more value than you're capturing, but there's this sort of cat and mouse game where you're always trying to, you don't want to give away maybe too much value.

2:00:29Totally. But here's the thing. You never go to a customer, I don't care what you're selling. Okay. I don't care if it's enterprise software. I don't care if it's widgets. I don't care what it is. You never go to a customer and say, give me a percentage of your stuff. Yeah. You go to a customer and say, here's the price of our stuff. And if it does really well for you, we think we should get a little more scratch because Sheesh stuff, you know, whatever. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. And it's that simple. Don't be crass about it. And, you know, partner with folks. And they're down. They want to win too, you know?

2:01:04It's literally an enterprise. It's an enterprise software style negotiation or approach to the whole thing. And the more differentiated your value is, the more you're going to get.

2:01:15Jason Fried:What is your process for hiring executives today? Pray. I was hoping you had the Kalanick system to achieve a 99 % success. I know, but why would I tell you if I did? Why would I tell you if I did? No, but I think you can. This is one of those things you can tell people exactly what you do, and they're not Kalanick, so that doesn't mean they can compete with you. You know, they could, yeah. Okay, so how would I put it? look I think no matter who you go nobody's nailed executives all the way it's it's weird because what will happen is executives talk a fucking awesome game and there's two things you want an executive to do you want them to be able to organize at scale organize and manage at scale lead at scale you also want them to be epic problem solvers are the most strategic, badass problem solvers alive.

2:02:18This is like being left-handed or right-handed. And there's very few people that are ambidextrous. But you need that. Now, they're always leaning a little bit one side or the other. The best executives are the ones that are doing both well. But I have come to the conclusion over my years doing the stuff is the problem solving is the most important thing. If you get somebody who organizes and manages well but cannot solve a problem, they're going to be doing ridiculous stuff in a super organized way. And so that's – and sort of my theory – maybe there's a couple theories on how I manage or how I lead is that the only constraint on your imagination is management capacity.

2:03:03But what is management capacity? It's really problem solving at scale. Because if you are doing super well over there, guess what? They're problem solving there. I can create other awesome problems. Yeah. Like I love creating problems. Sure. Go solve those too.

2:03:18Max Hodak:Yeah. But if I don't have the management capacity, then I'm effed. Sure. So the management style that I do is sort of problem solver in chief, which is I take the most impactful problems that are not being solved and that's on my desk. Yeah. Or desk or room or whatever you want to call it. That's where I'm spending my time. So people go, oh, what do you spend your time on? I'm like, it depends what the freaking problems are that matter. And it can change. And that's how I roll. But it means once you have a problem solver in chief mentality, that flows downward. That means any direct report of mine must be the deputized problem solver in chief.

2:04:00And they've got their, because there's only 24 hours in a day. I can only solve so many myself. They have to then take that for their world and do the same thing and then do the same thing to their people. so the bottom line is you gotta prove that these folks can solve actual problems and aren't just talking the talk that's the number one and then on the interview process simulate what it's like working together so that day one is really feels like week two and day one you better be excited so if you're excited day one after simulating what it's like working together in the interview process then day one is really week two and you're still excited, you took a lot of risk out of the system.

2:04:39That's all I got for you.

2:04:40Max Hodak:I have a question about regulation. Uber famously went city by city. The AI labs are duking it out over federal preemption. Did you ever develop a theory around when federal preemption is better than state by state regulation? Do you have a philosophy around this? It seems like the labs go back and forth on what they want. It's hard to see where the chips are falling. Federal preemption is good when you are pro-regulatory capture. Okay. When you want to squeeze others out, you should get federal regulatory bigness going for you. Yeah. Because then you don't have to do the ground game that you went through.

2:05:25Well, no, you're squeezing others out. Okay. It's just the whole point is to squeeze everybody out. Sure. I never did that. We never did that at Uber. We basically never, ever proposed or pushed any rule that would be beneficial to us versus somebody else. We always were trying to open up the market, and we said let the best man win, and we just went for it. But I think we've got to be careful of some of these closed-weight things that are creating situations where they need to be regulated and they want it. I'd keep an eye on that. Yeah.

2:06:08Max Hodak:Well, you've got to have customers that love your product and are willing to write their representatives. When you guys decide to tell your own hacker to hack the thing and then go to the federal government and say, dude, we saved the day. Like, you know, you guys don't have to do this. You guys don't have to do it.

2:06:37Jason Fried:On regulation, I'm sure you saw the trial lawyers that are fighting back against autonomous vehicles because they're worried they're going to be too safe. Yes. I'm sure that's not surprising to you. No. So, look, every bad thing that you see in transport, like systemically, anything in transport that you view as systemically bad was most likely pushed by the trial lawyers and the insurance companies.

2:07:04Max Hodak:Wow. Every single bad rule that's weird and dumb, the insurance companies and the trial lawyers were in the game big time.

2:07:17Jason Fried:Where do they align? What do you mean? Well, because trial lawyers, I imagine, want more accidents. Insurance companies are the ones that pay for it.

2:07:28Max Hodak:No, no. Remember, insurance companies make margin on accidents. If there's no accidents, there's no insurance company. In a weird way, they love accidents. Because the premiums go up. As long as it's in their actuarial table, they're pumped. Wow. Yeah. Right? What they don't like is accidents they didn't plan for. Sure, sure. But accidents that they planned for, big insurance outcomes they love. Like I remember we went to D.C. and the taxi system, the liability on a ride, if you took a taxi, it might still be this way to this day. was like$25 ,000 in a taxi. But we went to, we being Uber at the time, went to D.C.

2:08:12and they pushed a$1.5 million policy per ride. Okay? So what does that mean? That means, well, accidents are going to happen. We're probably, like Uber's probably safer. But it just, do you think the trial lawyers weren't pumped about that? You think the insurance companies weren't also pumped about that? They can go get up to a million times. Because, by the way, the insurance company might be on the other side. Yep. And they're like, oh, there's a one-half million dollar bank account here that I can get access to on a random accident. Right.

2:08:48Jason Fried:What can you share on the transportation side of the business right now? How much is that business in service of mining or food versus standalone? It's number one. So number one is it's – so I call it wheelbase for robots, which is if you're going to do specialized robots that move and act in the physical world, they're either humanoids, which we're not. I'm not anti-humanoid. I'm just non-humanoid. Specialized industrial robots, right? So that's – it's high-scale, industrial-scale tasks, which means you would not have a humanoid ever do that. that means you got to be on wheels so we got to build wheels so that means okay well when food when supply chain is going into our facilities that's a freight vehicle we probably should just turn that into a robot that moves stuff and actually interfaces with our facility in a really cool way when the when the food is coming out of our facilities there's probably like a machine that It holds food at temperature that's like a box on wheels.

2:09:53I call them autonomous burritos. And it brings it to your home. And it costs 75 cents instead of like the$12 per drop that it costs like an Uber Eats or a DoorDash today. So it's serving. Remember, I'm sort of going through an industry and saying, how do we transform it full stack? How do we automate full stack that entire industry? So, okay, that's the food thing. Obviously, mining's pretty obvious, but you can imagine there's a lot of other machines that move. Like, I talked about haulage, but what about grading the roads, the dirt roads? You've got to grade them. That's a machine. What about you spray water so there's not a lot of dust all over the place?

2:10:38That's a freaking machine. Like, what about the material that ultimately goes somewhere beyond the mine? Well, that's a freight machine. Like there's lots of things moving. You know, I saw something that was like, think about just forklifts. I know a company, we remain unnamed, that's spending three and a half, this is on the supply chain side, three and a half billion dollars a year on forklift labor in their facilities.

2:11:09Max Hodak:That probably shows up in an SEC filing if we want to get creative and figure out what company you're talking about. I was just saying, but you see what I'm saying? Yeah, big opportunity. If you just solve the forklift problem. Yes, but on solving the problem, what do you think about this distinction between jobs versus tasks? A lot of people would have assumed that there would be no more marketing people because the job is just writing marketing copy, but the job is actually much more. Writing copy is one task. I was looking at automated trucking, and I found some stat like I think 30 % of truck drivers are armed.

2:11:44Max Hodak:They carry weapons. And so driving the vehicle is one task. But in that job, you are also providing security for that payload. And you are also doing other things, refueling the vehicle, maybe some minor maintenance. And so just the steering and gas and brake pressure is just one task that you're doing. How do you think about that in the context of all this? This really gets to the jobs question, I think. Yes. Which is basically like, okay, well, if I do everything that we are imagining on food, which is I have industrial real estate, which is manufacturing and logistics. I automate the manufacturing, which is production, robotic food, robotic food machines, robots.

2:12:31And I have robotic couriers. What happens? Food, the price of food goes down. Okay, when the price of food goes down, remember, robots don't have bank accounts. When the price of food goes down, what happens? More people have more money.

2:12:45Jason Fried:Jevin's paradox. What do they do? You start eating more?

2:12:48Max Hodak:You just start having 10 burgers a day. No, that's not where I was going, dude. That's hilarious by that. This is hilarious. That's not what I'm saying. That's so funny. What's the problem? That's not what I'm saying. No, what I'm saying is when once you... I was going to get three pizzas.

2:13:07Jason Fried:I'll take six. You're like, it's one set the price. No, no, no. So what happens, you have more money to do other things. But remember, that money is only ultimately going to humans. Yes. So it's the things that get automated go down in price, which then creates surplus to do what? To do other things. So it doesn't always have to be, oh, marketing's automated, but sort of, and there's still people doing it. It's like, whatever, there's going to be a hundred other new things that come out because there's this excess of capital and progress continues. continues. And as long as humans still have things that we do that robots cannot, it's go-go time, man.

2:13:51It's going to be super prosperity. We talked about the plumber that is paid like LeBron last time. It's going to be across a thousand categories. And some categories, we don't even know. We don't even know what they are today. Yeah.

2:14:04Jason Fried:You raised 1.7 billion. Why didn't you raise more? That's a good question. Because last time we were here, you talked about like, oh, well, if you were doing something and it was easy, you weren't going hard enough.

2:14:17Max Hodak:Seems pretty hard, but unpack it. Look, you have to stop somewhere. Even I have my limits. No, it's like, but like, look, as you can imagine today, my phone's blowing up. I mean, I'm pumped. Like A16, these guys, we should have done business at Uber. That's right. If we did business at Uber, my 2017 would have been a different year. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that's why I called it unfinished business. And so, but yeah, like my phone's blowing up. Like we're probably just going to do a second. We'll do a second close. Yeah, I figured. We'll come back for the second close. Run it back. No, I mean, we're not going to do a big announcement on the second close.

2:15:04But like, you know, those people who are texting me and hitting me hard right now.

2:15:11Max Hodak:we got room you know no well we'll see we'll see depends on what the previous text message if you're a homie we definitely have room yeah if we're not a homie you should talk to one of my

2:15:23Jason Fried:homies there we go yeah i i did come away from the last conversation thinking all right there's a lot of exciting companies and physical ai and you could spend years and years and years trying to find all the best teams or you could just give TK a big pile of cash and just say go cook and you know sometimes the easier route is better. Yeah and I think there's this thing physical AI people are like well is that a humanoid is that a world model is it and so on this one I sort of dialed the language a little bit and I'm calling it industrial AI. Yeah. It's like okay this is a full stack software, robotics, sensors, machinery, like a full stack solution to automating an industry.

2:16:09And that's kind of how we think about it. And it's industrial. Yep. So it's like heavy atom stuff. Yeah.

2:16:16Max Hodak:Well, thank you so much. This was incredible. You want to get a signature? Can we get an autograph? Sure. Why not? Can we get something?

2:16:23Jason Fried:What'd you, what'd you, what'd you, they can figure it out back there. Oh, we got a gong. We'd love to sign this gong for us. We'll hang it in the rafters.

2:16:29Max Hodak:We want to hang it in the rafters. We're trying to build our repertoire here. The Museum of Business. The Museum of Business grows one gong stronger today.

2:16:37Jason Fried:And we'll see you in Austin. Yeah. Next time you're on your commute, if you see two jet skis moving out of sight coming in, it's probably us. That's us. If it's not, you're... Guys, let me know if you want to learn how to slalom ski. Oh, yeah? If you want to learn how to wake surf, like, well. I've only been water skiing once or twice

2:16:57Max Hodak:I go at 7.30 I go at 7.30 in the morning And I'd say Half the time I'm out there at 8.30 When I leave the office That's amazing That's what we do

2:17:09Jason Fried:Thank you so much for coming on the show

2:17:12Max Hodak:Always a pleasure Have a great rest of your day Good to see you guys I'm going to tell everyone about Cisco Critical infrastructure for the AI era Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And our next guest is in the waiting room. We got Max Hodak from the Science Corporation. He's the founder and CEO. We kept him waiting, but Max, how you doing? Welcome back to the show. Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. Great to see you. Give us the update. What's the news? So previously we've talked about, I've told you about our retinal prosthesis. So we have a chip that's implanted in the eye to restore vision to patients that have lost it due to the death of the rods and cones, specifically age-related macular degeneration.

2:18:00So last week we got marketing approval in Europe. So we've received the CE mark, which is like it will be shortly available to consumers.

2:18:10Max Hodak:I got a question. I got a question. So Jordy has this problem where he drinks too many beers and he gets double vision. Can this help with that? Fortunately not. wait with jokes aside scientifically it cannot double vision from drinking yes probably not impossible it's the last it's the last scientific problem we'll never solve it um anyway very funny

2:18:35Jason Fried:more seriously uh how quickly how like what does it go to market look like for a product like this you have approval step one's approval yeah how how quickly can it be adopted by because you know, people, I mean, Europe's a big place, right? Yeah, do you need insurance, doctor networks, facilities, building the machine that installs

2:18:57Max Hodak:it? Like, there's a whole process here, right? Yeah, well, it's a relatively simple one-hour outpatient procedure. The machine is the surgeon. Don't need actually that many surgeons to reach these patients. So, right. So, the CE mark is a marketing approval in about 30 countries that accept it. The next step is we need to register country by country. So we have registrations going in in Germany and Italy and the Netherlands and Spain and the UK like this week. That process takes about a month. And then doctors can start scheduling patients. I mean, we sell implants to hospitals, essentially, and then they sell them to patients.

2:19:29So it's the hospitals, it's patients. But we have a registry. The hospitals have registries. The doctors know who their patients are. With this demographic, actually, one of the things that happened is because there was really nothing available for them, And ophthalmologists have been telling these patients, like, you know, if you're 80 and have AMD, you don't need to be sitting in my waiting room anymore. Like, you know, you don't need to come here. And so now they're starting to reach back out to some of those patients that they haven't said, we don't need to see you for the last few years. There's something available.

2:19:57So the first patient is probably six weeks away or so. The next big step is reimbursement.

2:20:05Max Hodak:Yeah. And so, yeah. What does it look like in America? I mean, you're six weeks away in Europe. up what's the FDA track like? I know that it's already FDA breakthrough device and humanitarian use device, but take us through what the commercialization plan looks like in the U.S. Yeah. So the other thing that we announced today is that we got two humanitarian use device designations from the FDA. We actually got those back in March, but sat on them for a little bit. That unlocks an expedited approval pathway called the humanitarian device exemption that we're submitting for imminently in the next week or so, that can be a 75-day review.

2:20:42And so it'll take, like, there's a couple loops of that. But we're hoping that early next year it'll be available to some set of American patients. But that's up to the FDA review.

2:20:53Max Hodak:I don't want to get you in trouble with the FDA. I know how high stakes it is. But it is just crazy that Europe's moving faster around regulation. like this should be a signal to the fda to say hey if europe's approving it faster uh we gotta we gotta step things up over here i don't i as an american i just don't like falling behind but i don't know yeah i mean in this i mean i would normally want to agree with you i think in this case it's actually a little bit unfair to fda because there's some there's some accidents of history that just led to this like happening first in europe okay um the fda standards are not that much different.

2:21:28But yeah, absolutely. We should hope to have this here also. The FDA is, they care about slightly different things. The filings are a little bit different, but hopefully it won't be that long either.

2:21:43Max Hodak:Yeah. Talk about next steps. I mean, you're properly commercializing right now. Does this mean new factory, new team members, There's new muscle inside of the company. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've built out a whole go-to-market team in Europe. So this is clinical education. Like we need to go reach ophthalmologists where they are, tell them about the product, help them understand the results, answer their questions, rehab specialists. So this is a little bit different than what you may have seen from the motor BCIs where it works very quickly. or with, like there's a little bit of rehab that the patients have to put in to really use it.

2:22:23And so we have people on the ground there that will do that with them in the beginning. Over time, we want to have that be more and more kind of just in the wearable. They put on the glasses, the glasses talk to them. They talk to the glasses and walk them through the exercise. But initially that's a little bit higher touch. And then also there's a bunch of surgeon training. So we run wet labs for surgeons where they can come and practice the procedure with us so that we know that they know how to do it before they're doing it with patients.

2:22:47Max Hodak:Give me a sales and marketing 101 for targeting ophthalmologists. Can you target them on Instagram reels? Do they listen to a specific podcast that you can sponsor? Are you at conferences? I know people give medical device companies, they give out lots of like pens and chairs, but I think there's like limits because you can't like bribe them, but you do want to give them merch. Like what is the 101 level of marketing to ophthalmologists? I mean, a lot of it is conferences. Okay. So there's a handful of conferences that we go to and then getting not just having a booth there, but presenting scientific results.

2:23:22Typically, this isn't us, but it's our academic and scientific collaborators, maybe a surgeon at a hospital that did a study. They'll present their experience with it. There's also advocacy groups. So there's opportunities to sponsor like webinars through these networks. But it's a really small community. I think like ophthalmology overall, and especially in these types of retinal diseases, it is very densely interconnected and they all talk. And so it's a matter of kind of there's a handful of advisory boards that we have to go through. For example, our data safety monitoring board for the clinical trial.

2:23:56These are often opportunities to have that community come and be familiar with our results and then disseminate them.

2:24:02Max Hodak:So it might be the end result might be a little bit more one to one because of how small the community is. You can actually reach them directly. What is, yeah, there's not like a huge inch to spend on that.

2:24:13Jason Fried:Not yet. What, what is the shape, what is the shape of Science Corp look like right now, given that you have a product that's commercializing, but I imagine you're doing a bunch of R &D in the background for other opportunities and use cases. But, you know, how are maybe you spending your time? And then what is the team's time look like? Yes, we definitely have a bunch of next generation projects in development, including the next generation of the Prima implant. We have new versions of that kind of in preclinical studies now, hope to get those into humans next year. It'll probably be a three-year minimum, possibly five-year cycle between versions for a while, I think, because the need to do the intervening clinical trials.

2:25:01But the PRIMA as it is now is a really great existence proof that we're on the right track. This is the first time that really useful form vision, a thing that looks like an image, has been able to appear in the mind's eye of a blind patient. But it is not high-resolution, full-field color vision. It's like looking through a straw at the center of your vision where you've lost this high acuity perception. And it's black and white. It's high contrast, but it's only a couple letters at a time or maybe a word at a time. And so we are still working to expand the field of view, make it so that you can potentially get colors.

2:25:35We think we know how to get to red and green. Blue is a little more difficult. And then get higher resolution, get towards native acuity. And so on each of these, there's clear ways, places to go. but it's going to be a long road to get that all the way to, to all of these patients. Well,

2:25:51Max Hodak:congratulations. We also have some really cool stuff coming on the, the quarter on the brain computer interface side on the vessel side, but that those will probably come out a little later in the fall. Can't wait to talk about it. I'm excited. Well, congratulations. And thank you so much for taking the time to come.

2:26:05Jason Fried:Thank you so much for, for coming on and the work you're doing. Yeah. Just for having me. You're, you're doing, you're doing the thing that you're doing, something that could get humanity broadly back on the side of technology.

2:26:22Max Hodak:That's a good point. Yeah. Because it's like one of those things, like,

2:26:25Jason Fried:like it seems like so much of what the industry has been doing a lot, you know, making, making sand think, uh, is not quite enough for people. They're like, you know, what, what have you really done for me lately?

2:26:36Max Hodak:We literally had someone come on the show and say, what have you done for me?

2:26:38Jason Fried:But I feel like this is one of those things like, you know, curing blindness that over time will be sort of hopefully undeniable. Well, I mean, this isn't about the money. I don't think it's about the money for a lot of this team. It's certainly not about the money for the patients. I think like many things in tech, this is really about power. But if you want to know like real power, like the power to heal the sick, unlike economic or military power, that can be easily shared with others. And that is, I think, like really what technology is about here. And we need to paint a picture of how this is being used in that way, in a way that is really should disseminate broadly.

2:27:10And I think just incredibly pro-social.

2:27:13Jason Fried:I love it. Going back to, I know we're almost out of time, but going back to, like, what did you place the odds at doing this, accomplishing this moment when you started the company? It seems like - I don't know. I've always had trouble thinking about these things. Like, I can't put a number on it. It's just, you kind of keep going. And as long as success is in the post like set of possible outcomes. You're just constantly trying to minimize the odds that you don't get there. Um, it is really hard to put a number on it. Um, definitely it is cool to see it actually happen. Yeah. Yeah. You're sort of nonchalant about it, but, uh, it is, uh, almost unbelievable and, uh, really, really incredible.

2:27:59Max Hodak:So well, well done.

2:28:01Jason Fried:Well done on the show.

2:28:02Max Hodak:We'll talk to you soon.

2:28:04Jason Fried:Yep. Cheers, Max. Have a good rest of your day.

2:28:06Max Hodak:Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context.

2:28:15Jason Fried:Absolutely incredible stuff from Max and the science team.

2:28:18Max Hodak:Very cool. I don't know. I think that you might be seeing an Instagram rail being like, this eye implant that cured the blind used too much water, and it's slop, like it's not the same as just being blind. I don't know. Anything's possible. The pushback, there's always a negativity bias. I think that there will be pushback to even the medical cures.

2:28:40Jason Fried:Giving sight to the blind.

2:28:42Max Hodak:Yes. Get ready. There's going to be somebody who finds, you know, something to complain about and goes viral and puts up big numbers talking trash. That's just the way our media ecosystem works. It's a business, you know. If everyone's glazing something, somebody's going to bring it down. That's just the equilibrium. Equilibrium. Well, speaking of AI writing, Jeremy Giffon had a post here. He said about AI writing, at the end of the day, it's not about whether the word's written by a human or an AI. It's about whether the output is useful, engaging, and worth reading. The highest quality work will increasingly emerge from a tight human-in-the-loop workflow.

2:29:20Max Hodak:While some content will be generated end-to-end by AI, the fixation on authorial provenance is ultimately pearl clutching. just kidding that's the ai rendition of his actual post he said it much more eloquently but i tried to make it like more ai i don't know anyway uh mark german says based on using the

2:29:43Jason Fried:z fold eight wide i'd reset my expectations of how the foldable iphone is going to sell even

2:29:48Max Hodak:at over 2000 it's going to be a home run you are going foldable you're proud foldable i think i'll go foldable why the heck not i think when you open it up you can watch videos in four three more room for reels you can watch reels but but the reels are going to be it's actually not that much more room for reels because you'll just have black bars on the side like if you watch can you have two reels side by side okay maybe yes uh in two different apps you could have youtube shorts here if they support split screen like on an ipad but right now if you watch reels on an ipad mini you're not actually getting that much more pixel space of reels.

2:30:25Max Hodak:You're just getting real here and then UI and Chrome here or whatever.

2:30:31Jason Fried:Cooper says big tech just wants your eyesight restored so you can doom scroll. There we go. Cooper named it. That's a conspiracy.

2:30:37Max Hodak:Yep, yep. Oh, why are they trying to fix?

2:30:39Jason Fried:Zuck is secretly funding science.

2:30:41Max Hodak:Oh, they just want to increase their TAM. Got it. Makes sense. Well, if you don't want to watch reels, You'll soon potentially be able to go to the Cinemarama Drome in Arclight Hollywood. Sony is eyeing, ringing it back. Production team, you got a review? Have you guys been to the Cinemarama Dome before? I haven't been there.

2:30:59Jason Fried:Scott, yeah? It's pretty awesome.

2:31:01Max Hodak:I think I saw a Nolan film there, and I think it was 70mm IMAX back in the day, and then I think it didn't make it through COVID, but they're maybe bringing it back.

2:31:11Jason Fried:They have the giant sign outside that says the dome. Yeah. If they were going to stay out of business, we should accept it.

2:31:18Max Hodak:I remember as a kid, I thought that they would show the movie projected on the dome, like on the whole ceiling, and it was only for sort of like special astronomy movies. But they will just show a normal movie, and you're just in a big dome. It's cool. Next studio, if Sony doesn't buy it, maybe? I don't know. Could happen.

2:31:39Jason Fried:Can we get that unreleased track on again?

2:31:42Max Hodak:Yeah, let's play that as the outro. Yeah, one sec. regulate me it's the new banger hit song of the summer it's an anthem it's near worm you're going to be listening to it we'll share the link in the description of the youtube video maybe uh let it we got to start doing karaoke because this song just speaks to me it really captures the moment you heard it from travis every once in a while you get into a pickle and you got to get the government to come regulate you. It's a good time. Thank you for watching TVPN. Tune in tomorrow. We have a very special show for you. We're on the road Thursday, and then we're off on Friday, back Monday.

2:32:26Max Hodak:Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at TVPN.com. Let's throw a flashbang and let the audience listen to Regulate Me by Jordy Hayes and Suno. Goodbye. Flashbang. Flashbang out.

2:33:09Washington needs to step in before it runs free. What happens if you buy the phone, you buy the phone, you see? Washington needs to step in and say enough to me.

2:33:30Max Hodak:I hear the voices multiply.