Harvey's Margin Whiplash, Human Powered Agents, McLaren Rebrand, Insects > Humans? | Ben Thompson, Gagan Biyani, Alex Ratner, Peter Kalogiannis, Daniel Petkevich

27:07You've got to use this to order Amazon. Amazon's like no no no we're going to block your browser well did you block everyone's browser how's that going to play out I was thinking about like at some point if I write a really really bespoke like a like basically a CLI like a really bespoke weird CLI like I vibe coded but I use like sort of odd techniques like I'm like okay use computer use and open up Opera or you know Mozilla and click around and add some randomness and do this. And I basically create a CLI that wraps an agent where it runs on my home Wi-Fi. And I just do this. I don't productize it.

27:51So Amazon can't really detect it. Do you think I could potentially stay in front of their battle forever and then puppeteer it from other agents? Well, I just asked Chachupetee, can you order Amazon over the phone? because I would think that at that scale, there would be at least one way to do it. It seems like you can only use their customer service number to help with existing orders. So one thing is you could order a bunch of the wrong thing, like a hundred of the wrong thing, a hundred like, you know, bug treatment. Order everything and then have your agent refund everything but the thing you want.

28:27No, have your Muse agent, have a human via Muse call Amazon and say, hey, I actually got the wrong thing here. Can you swap it with this other thing? Interesting. And just do that as many times as necessary to get the right order. Maybe have one order that's just always open where you're just adding and removing. They have to be completed orders because you have to have made a mistake to call the customer service. Oh yeah, you can charge me, but just add it to the order. I don't know. It's going to be a weird battle. Ben Thompson was writing about it today. It was pretty good. Amazon, I mean, his whole framing is like Amazon is like the strongest in the AI era of the hyperscalers because they own logistics, infrastructure, the final step, the real world.

29:09And so he anticipates that they will hold their ground for a very long time and not give in. And that's basically what they did with OpenAI, where OpenAI had the instant checkout process. They invited everyone to be a part of it. Amazon was like, no, thanks. But we'll give you tens of billions of dollars. But interestingly, yeah, so now the result is that Amazon is vending in their ads into ChatGPT to close the purchase there. Toby Lookie at Shopify partnered with Muse and announced that they are integrating. But the interesting thing is, like, where is the value capture layer? And it only works with ShopPay.

29:51And so it's a lever to get merchants to go on to ShopPay, which Shopify will still make money off of. But for merchants, a lot of people are worried about the implementation that happened with Walmart, where ChatGPT integrated with Walmart. And the end result was that conversion rate was one third of what it was in the app and on the core website. and that carts were smaller because people were just going and saying, like, I just need a roll of paper towels. Just send me that. Whereas when people are like, oh, I need to do my shopping. I need soap and paper towels and whatever else. I'll build a paper towel holder that's made by a company that's over 50 years old.

30:34Yes, yes, yes. So the crazy thing is, so now Vinod was on the show yesterday talking about Wajo, which is an AI. Oh, yeah, and we launched one. They have a new agent that I believe is human-supported. Yeah. In that some of the stuff is done by AI, and some of the stuff, if necessary, can be escalated to a human. Now you have meta at least testing, exploring, having a human in the loop on some of these things. And my big question is like, why? Voice models are getting pretty good. It feels completely unsustainable for meta to roll out a product to billions of people where users might just be like, like if I had something I could text and say, hey, call this person, call that person, I'd probably be using it.

31:35I think there's a ton of value. you. First, the Muse install base is small right now, so it's not that crazy. They have the ability to stand up huge offices, whether it's through Scale.ai and that team that came over or through all the things that they've done over the past two decades. The other thing is that Muse specifically will not train on your data that you put into Muse. And so this wasn't a huge announcement or anything, but you could see people being like, ah, I don't know if I want to use this AI agent that's going to be using my personal information. Even if they're running like the PII redactor, putting all of that might be a little bit off-putting.

32:20So Meta's not getting that data, but if they have a human in the loop, the human who does the task that's just beyond what the model's capable of, they're also generating training data because they can probably train on that. And so it's like the model, the model by default can, I don't know, like summarize your, summarize your calendar, right? And give you a, give you a briefing on what's going on in your calendar. It knows how to integrate. And the model's capable of that. Muse 1.0, Spark 1.3 is capable of that. All the models are capable of that. But what can't they do? They might not be fully ready to, to go and have a complicated conversation with someone if they're ordering flowers over the phone or something.

33:01And, uh, and, and so like the current models might fall down. So you need more data to solve that. And so you put the humans in the loop and then that's your extra training data for the next leg up. And then you just keep repeating that. So I would view this human in the loop thing more as them doing data collection and, and, you know, creating more training data for them than a permanent solution to the product problems. Also, I, I just, I don't think the time on site for these apps is actually that high. I think there is an excitement when you jump on and you do a bunch of stuff. But then with all these AI tools, there's a reason why OpenAI comps to weekly active users because there's plenty of days where people are like, I went to the beach and I didn't touch AI at all.

33:46I didn't do any work. There's some feedback on Alex Wang's post talking about it'll help you with your goals. And I think Katie Notopoulos was saying like a lot of people just don't have goals. Like they just want to chill. And this is also the Ben Thompson thing of like consumers want to be entertained. Like people that go to the beach, they'll still scroll Instagram. Are they really going to be doing anything with any agent? No matter how, no matter how powerful it is. Like there are plenty of people that have all staffs of EAs and personal assistants and they don't do anything on a weekend cause they want to chill and they don't want to think about anything.

34:17one thing's for certain. Uh, it's over or we're back. Professor Zhang is vindicated yesterday. We watched, Oh yeah. We watched a video where he said, I guarantee that there are humans behind the chat apps that you use, manipulating the information. And he is correct, at least in the short term. For today. Saturini is thinking about the knock-on effects of all these personal agents. He says,

35:15that don't react in a timely enough manner. Today, you might realize just how many flight credits, loyalty points, or promotional offers you've never used that will end up utilized by agents. What impact will that have? Tomorrow, you might see something that makes you ask, how much money health insurers make simply because people won't sit on the phone for five hours trying to get coverage approved unless it's a massive expense or life or death matter? What about your savings account? The money could be in a money market fund. You haven't bothered to move it. how much in net interest income is made because of that friction.

35:46Yeah. People have money like locked away in Venmo, like a couple of bucks here. And if it's frictionless and actually free to move stuff around, you get a lot different. Yeah. This was like the David Deutsch anecdote about how he fixed his dishwasher. He was like about to buy a new one. And then it just told him that he could. Yeah. It's like ghost GDP. Yeah. So it doesn't like show up anywhere, but there is like new metric. No, but I mean, so I don't see very many adjusted GDP. That's how we get to 10 % GDP growth. GDP plus AI. E equals MC squared plus AI. Yeah, this was all kicked off because flight was delayed seven hours.

36:24Someone asked Muse to file a compensation. Five minutes later, they had a$250 credit in their Delta account. That's something that you'd normally have to hop on the phone for. It was a lot of cumbersomeness. So, like, people on that team were clearly modeling, like, well, 1 % of people will ask for it. And 50 % of people will be able to be like, no, we can't really do it. And so we think this will only be like a dollar per flight. Well, now it might be$10 per flight. But, of course, the end result is that they will put AI on the other side. And the two AI agents will just negotiate and find out a resolution, I imagine.

36:59Anyway, oh, Citrini has a little prediction here. Look at the follow-up to this post. They put a, what is that, an RSA hash or something? That's cool. So they made some prediction there that they will see. Anyway. That's one of the greatest hacks when you want to take a victory lap in the future, but you're not willing to actually. Post both. You post like, I think the stock market will go up by 100 % in the next 10 years. And then I think the stock market will go down in the next 10 years. And then you just delete the one that wasn't accurate. And then you're good. Nikesh Arora chimed in on the knife fight between Amazon and Muse.

37:36There will be a bigger battle. This will be a bigger battle than anyone anticipates. It's only a matter of time before there is an Apple and Google version of Muse and possibly TikTok in addition to the Frontier LLM agents, maybe a commerce agent from Amazon. That's sort of my prediction. I think Instinct might land with Amazon potentially, although they do have Rufus. And Tyler is a Rufus power user. Yep. Rufus is good. You don't want to talk down on Rufus. But Instinct is clearly tapped into something really special with the energy and the support that they have and the community they've built.

38:09But there are a lot of little rough edges that need to get sanded off. And that's the domain of Amazon, in my opinion. Amazon is like the trains run on time. And it's a pretty efficient company. So every app that's a service marketplace or commerce app will need to existentially decide to open APIs for consumer agents to interact. smaller players have no choice ad revenues are more than transaction fees either the consumer benefits or distribution aggregators will demand a higher fee transaction there's an interesting stat from the strategic post about amazon uh they the net income for amazon e-commerce was like 36 billion and the ad revenue was uh exactly twice that so the business is unprofitable without advertising they put advertising everywhere so it's like a very interesting dynamic where you You can see the motivation.

38:58There's$68 billion. You flagged that number. It's a huge. Over 70 in the last 12 months. Over 70 billion. So a significant pool of revenue and profit that they will be protecting for sure. I know I don't want an agent for each app, which does sound very annoying. Super agent, go and use all the other agents. Maybe that's the future. I don't know. Yeah. This goes back to roll your own agent that then puppeteers your Muse, which has good integration to Facebook, and then your Amazon Rufus. Yeah, I wonder if you could order via Rufus because you'd probably reverse that API, but you'd still get banned.

39:41You're just chatting with – it's just Muse's chatting with Rufus to order you paper towels. No, I said over 50 years old, basically. Uh, you had an idea yesterday, a potential monetization channel, uh, for, or strategy for agents, which is like sponsored agentic flows, which I thought was really good. Like imagine you and your friends, you all have agents. And then, uh, example with Spider-Man. Yeah. It's basically like it drops in and it says like, Hey, I got five tickets to Spider-Man. It says, I know from your Instagram history that you're a Tom Holland fan or you like the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

40:21Spider-Man Brand New Day is coming out in two weeks. I can get you tickets Friday night. There's nothing on your calendar. I can get a Saturday matinee. I know you've been sending reels to these five friends. Do you want to plan a trip to the movies? and I will book it and message everyone, set up the calendar invite, text everyone and say thumbs up if you want in, thumbs down if you're busy, and I will put together a group outing. And that does feel like something where Spider-Man would, the Brand New Day marketing team would put dollars behind advertising that to get people in. The question is how much, will consumers tolerate that at all?

41:03Remember how pissed off people were about the BMW, Spider-Man ad flow? I think they will if it's good. And I think the long tail small business advertising will work. Especially if it's like, it's a little bit tricky to figure out how, like, when you're in these agentic workflows, there's often like multiple beneficiaries. So Spider-Man benefits, but also Fandango might benefit, but also like a particular theater might benefit if you go to, you know, Lowe's versus AMC or I don't know, they might be the same company now. So it's interesting to see where the sponsorship would break down. But you could totally imagine you have a wedding coming up.

41:46You've been seeing ads for this tie company. You've also been seeing ads for this sock company. Do you want me to put together a whole new outfit for the welcome dinner that might look really good? And those companies pay. Unclear where all that goes. But the scale of the platform, I think, is what unlocks it. because you know Sean Frank at Ridge Wallet is going to be like, I'm going to test that. And there's going to be millions of other small businesses that are going to test something or other. Anyway, let's see. Products like Muse and Instinct are going to saturate customer service teams. Again, we talked about that.

42:25Not a huge problem because you flip it around and the customer service team is using AI. So I think the equilibrium is just a lot more AI on both sides. Hopefully smoother transactions. signal is uh is talking about walmart here if only walmart was actually confident enough to realize the agentic commerce opportunity ahead of them and it's interesting with the backdrop of the vibe acquisition um walmart seems to be going after the same pool of revenue that amazon went after with the ad market scale up and the ad business when in fact if they didn't have that they would be sort of counter-positioned to lean a little bit more into agentic commerce because they'd say, look, we don't have an ads business to lose, so let's be the default option for agents that buy anything.

43:15There's also an interesting knockout effect, which is like with Shopify going so deep into Muse and agentic commerce and agent checkout, I wonder if we will wind up seeing a different type of Shopify merchant emerge. because Shopify merchants, it's been a lot of clothing. It's been a lot of like D to C single product, like a single shoe company. But I wonder if you will see someone who's like, yeah, I sell a lot of stuff on Amazon. I have a factory that makes paper towel holders, but I also got paper towels. I also got socks, t-shirts. I got sort of basics. And I wonder if someone will go and try and win on Shopify and set up the actual economic structure to be able to provide the experience because consumers will clearly want to be able to go to agents and say, order me a new pair of socks and just have it done.

44:06Right. And so if they say, sorry, can't do it on Amazon, they're going to figure out another place to do it. The water will flow into the cracks. Yeah. And so. No, it's a big, big opportunity for Shopify to be able to lean in here. Yeah. And I, but I wonder if, but the issue is still the real world physical fulfillment, having a bunch of different products in a single place. Yeah, but the individual Shopify merchants solve that on a diffuse basis. So in theory, if it's like, okay, I want next day shipping, there's five Amazon merchants that sell socks, or there's five Shopify merchants that sell socks, you want socks tomorrow, there's only one of them that has a distribution center in your town and can actually get them to you tomorrow, we'll just go with that one.

44:49So you could maybe piecemeal together an Amazon-like experience, but that's the bet. That's the knife fight. That's what we're going to figure out. Either Amazon wins and their moat remains a moat, or the war for the open web continues to battle it out. That's what Alex Wang is hoping for. He says, once more unto the breach, dear friends, the new open web, Meta, Stripe, and Shopify. The hilarious thing here, of course, is like Meta is like solely responsible for like sort of killing the open web in the former era. Like it's why like all the news sites are not, you know, initially why everything went closed.

45:31Like you can't just Google search for stuff on Instagram. Everything's closed off. It's not truly open. But it's like it's like the meta flags in the front because we'll be the aggregate. Open web for the but not for me. Everything below the fold will be the open web. But at the same time, it is just fun to watch the battleships go off to war and see how it pencils out. Because there is a scenario where the equilibrium solution is actually a more open web. We will see. We will see. What is going on with McLaren? We got to talk about McLaren before we get any further. Because they rebranded. So brutal.

46:11And there's a new logo. They went from an angled M that looked very fast, very bold logo, and now it looks like Miss Laren. Yeah, it's interesting. They seem to be trying to reposition as a luxury brand versus a motorsports brand. When I think of McLaren, I think of fast, sporty cars, period. I think of racing. Racing F1. I love the old logo. It's a cool lineage, too. I love the old. They've never made like a mass market car, really. I love the old mark.

46:52It's one of those things. You hate to be the guy that when a company rebrands, you're like, oh, it's brutal. Because oftentimes you revisit it in six months and you're like, okay, it wasn't that bad. Yeah, it was good. But this feels like bad. But the business has not been performing, right? The business has been in a rough spot. They don't have the Cayenne that they can sell. They're doing an SUV. That's coming. But I'm saying to date, they don't have a mid-market car. No. I'm sure their URUS competitor will do well. But still, part of what enables the URUS is the Q5 and the Q3. And the core selling economy.

47:37Yeah. Can't forget about that. Which is still growing. So anyways, pretty brutal rebrand. But again, yeah, it's a tough one just because it was always, like I always just thought the brand, their brand was awesome. The steel man here is that they are taking a number of bets that seem to speak to interesting, potentially valuable pieces of the market. So you have the SUV. The Urus is incredibly well-selling. So that could just be a cash cow business for them. Then you have the MCL, their manual supercar. And that could speak more to the enthusiast, right? Because enthusiasts want manuals. Porsche has been delivering manuals.

48:30Ferrari is starting to put them back in. and other brands are starting to get that memo that it's not enough to compete on speed. EVs have you beat there. They haven't gone full EV. I haven't seen a lot of McLaren signaling that they're going to remove the combustion engine. So that seems like they are positioned for the future. That's certainly a trend is don't go full EV. Don't kill all the gas cars. And then they also have the W1. So they're staying in the hypercar world. And the W1 lineage, I think it clarifies what McLaren's been doing, because when they were doing the Senna and the Speedtail, there were just like too many special cars.

49:15And the problem was that you were like, OK, Senna, Speedtail, where do we sit? But F1, P1, W1, very clear lineage. You know it's the best. You know if it's that, it's going to be the craziest thing they have. And so if they can create some differentiation between the true hypercars that they create, the supercars that now come in manual, the SUV for the more everyday daily driver, you have the trappings of at least satisfying the demand that exists in the market. You do have to go create more demand. You've got to win in F1. And the new mark's not coming out of nowhere on the website. They say before McLaren became a mark recognized around the world, it was a family name painted above a service station in Ramura, New Zealand.

50:03Those original letter forms inspired our new word mark reimagined for a new era. So they're going back in time. McLaren was started by a guy from New Zealand, but it was started in the UK. But the founder had been born in New Zealand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyways. Well, on a related note, there's some data that might be bullish for the supercar, hypercar market here. Toy sales among adult-only households have outpaced households with children for toy sales, growing 16 % through June. So when I think of adults buying toys, I think about Myers-Manks. I think about dune buggies. I think about dirt bikes.

50:45I think about supercars, boats, yachts, wakeboarding. These are the toys that adults buy. and it's not surprising to me that there is a trend among adults buying toys. I mean, these are just fun toys, and so the fact that it grew 16 % in June is a sign that adults are having fun, they're buying toys, and bullish for the supercar community, right? Don't you think? Judging by the picture here, you might be incorrect. Wait, they're talking about like children's toys. Interesting. Yeah. I think that's a little bit more nuanced. I would go for, you know, gaming rigs, racing simulators. These are the toys that adults should be buying, I think.

51:36I was a teenager when I realized that the Lego Ferrari that I had built years, you know, probably when I was like 10, had a market value. Like I was shocked. Oh, the Lego did. Yeah, because I had some really complicated Lego Ferrari that I probably built when I was around 10. And then as a teenager, cash-strapped teenager, I was like, wait, someone will give me$100 for this? That's crazy. Sold it, of course. I'm not super sentimental about that kind of thing. But I think that trend has just been building. And now there's people that just buy every new Lego that's released and just sit on it.

52:18I was looking with my son on an old Lego set that I played with as a kid. And I was like, I can actually go and buy the exact same Lego set and share that with him because I thought that one was really cool. But it has gone way up in value. I was like, I should have just held on to it because it's like$100 now. So I built a Ferrari Lego as well when I was younger. Probably not as complicated. probably less complicated but um but i uh but i remember being like oh this is like a sick ferrari like maybe one day i'll get a real one and then and then i like finally got older learned more about it i was like it's an f40 so i was like i'm probably never getting these but maybe maybe i don't know what f40 you never know derrick thompson says today's adults increasingly behave like the children they never have feels like a rude thing to say about people and yet toy sales among adult only households have now outpaced households with children for toy sales.

53:15That is so crazy. Uh, and, and, uh, black, black pilling and sad and it's over. It is so over. Uh, I don't know. You know, you're literally me. You're doing the literally me thing. I think, I think one, I think one factor here is like children in my experience don't care about the cost of a toy. And so a$5 toy will bring just as much joy to a child as the$500 toy. And so the adults are like, I have to get the$500. So I think that's, I think it's like for every toy that a parent buys their child, it could be like a dollar,$5,$10,$5,$1. So I went, I went toy shopping with my son and, and, uh, and we, and he finds this like hot wheels thing.

54:06And it's like a book that has like some hot wheels inside and stuff and it has like the craziest most electric look at this look at this comment from winsome i never had a quote-unquote lego set i just had assorted lego yes i used to fill the bath with water and make oil rigs which used to annoy my mom this guy was in the oil rig hit the oil rig hit the oil rig fantastic no on that point i so i I went to the store. My son finds this Hot Wheels thing that's kind of structured like a book, and it has some Hot Wheels cars in there. But on the cover of this box is the craziest, most elaborate loop-de-loop thing.

54:46And so he gets super excited about it. And I'm like, okay, I've got to check this out. And it turns out that what you're actually buying is a book with some stories and then just a big sheet of paper, like a poster that has that illustrated on it. and you can imagine the loop-de-loop and the actual track and i was like dude like let me clue you in this this isn't the real thing like we can go get the real thing with the actual loop-de-loops and stuff like let's find the real toy and he's like no this is the one i want this is what i want and i'm like the power of my own imagination but like but like i'm like i'm like this is gonna end poorly because he's gonna be dissatisfied when he actually opens it up opens it up he's like this is the greatest thing ever it's like my imagination is running wild i would never want the alternative and so your point is 100 accurate um toys the best toy company in the world period yeah is this company play forever okay have you seen any of these things no no no they're the most well built kids toys in the world so well built yeah we should let's get the founder on um where's nick uh they are play forever they are absolutely incredible guest okay okay yeah let's bring it as much as i want to keep talking about toys as an adult i would rather have a surprise guest shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business lets you sell in seconds online in store on mobile on social on marketplaces and now with ai agents we have a surprise guest.

56:14Surprise guest. Our favorite guest, Ben Thompson. Oh, wow. I didn't know that. We actually were able to fully...

56:21Ben Thompson:How many people do say your favorite guest? We were able to fully surprise... It's a very, very short list. We were able to fully surprise John. It was me coordinating with Ben, so this is like... This is a surprise. This is a wonderful surprise. Anyway. Well, I mean, you were going on and on about toys, and I was sitting here trying to decide who has the most ridiculous jacket on today. I think it's down to a tie. Hey. I sit on the ramp side i gotta wear the ramp suit right this is my suit i've been wearing this as we're trying to get to the bottom of this whole ai safety debate i'm trying to embody the the movement in the mind how cold is it there i just i don't know i thought you know you guys are in la yeah we're in la it's warm um well we don't have any windows great insight into the booking process uh nick's been doing great work trying to get me on i kind of was committed oh you can do it then do it then he's like oh about friday and i'm like i i don't know what's going on on friday so i'm like, can I just go on now?

57:14Ben Thompson:And then I will stop feeling guilty about it. And somehow here I am. So there you go. We can just give you the link and just crash in whenever you want. Yeah. I don't care. That's fine. What is top of mind? What is the number one story to talk about right now? Why today? I could talk about toys for sure. I mean, I think the adult version of toys is we are sort of back. I was actually kind of annoyed. Toby Luki posted a picture of his server. I was talking about my rack on Sharp Tech. Lots of compliments. Many people told me nice rack. It was great. Although I didn't actually post any pictures of it.

57:47Ben Thompson:Okay. Yeah, how did they know? On that home organization. Oh, because I could ask you up about it. Home organization. Should I be doing this? I don't think I've ever organized my home. I don't know how many nails and hammers I have. What are you doing? Oh, it's out of control. No, so one of the insights that, so I've had a nontraditional career, fairly nontraditional life. And so there's lots of things that I've experienced that I'm never quite sure how relevant is to most people. So one of them, for example, was like working from home. I worked for Automatic way back when, when I moved to Taiwan.

58:23Ben Thompson:And they were always sort of distributed and developed lots of processes and ways to work around that that were really interesting. I wrote about it when the COVID thing hit because all these companies had processes around assuming people were in the office. And then they tried to retrofit it with Zoom. And it was a total disaster. It kind of still is a total disaster as far as I can see. But there's also like personal things about working from home. Like working from home is a significant upheaval or can be to a marriage. Just as an example. Like when I'm writing, I need to be in the zone. No interruptions.

59:01Ben Thompson:Nothing bothering me. And that just doesn't compute when you're like within your house. Like you're in the house. Why cannot things be done? And so the importance of either establishing that or getting an outside office for writing or whatever it might be. That was an example where I actually lived what everyone experienced like a decade later. There's other stuff like – Wait, what's the solution there? Because my issue with working from home, at least with young kids, is that kids are going to run into the office all hours of the day when you're working. and how you can't explain to a two-year-old like hey like my computer is more important than than you right now right no the answer the answer if you can swing it the interview swing it is to get out of the house like like it's just and because it's kind of like you're uh you're exporting externalizing your problem onto your family and it's not their job and so it's almost like you owe it to your family to get out of the house if you need to not be bothered that's your problem so figure it out like it otherwise they're like they're not getting paid to not bother me on this zoom call they're their expectation of i'm their dad i'm around i can ask him questions so obviously that's not always viable probably a locked door i imagine would go a long way but that ultimately was you know i had to figure that out sort of the hard way and i'm like oh everyone had to figure this out eventually in other words like just being like living online like i was i lived abroad for so long, a lot of my friends' connections were online.

1:00:36Ben Thompson:That was very weird at one time. Now it's very normal. But another thing is this whole personal assistant sort of area. And I'm hesitant to write about this one because it sounds kind of douchey. Let me tell you about my experience with my personal assistant. But the reality is that most people have no idea how to use a personal assistant. It took me years to figure out how to use a personal assistant even though I needed one just to run like, like the first few years of checkery, I was doing all the writing, all the taxes, all the customer support, doing everything and basically dying. And so I had to get someone on sort of out of desperation, just help me do all the sort of back office stuff, even just to respond to email.

1:01:19Ben Thompson:But the email one is a great example. You talk to people about like Muse or whatever, and they're like, you put your email in there? And it's like, Thank you. So how can you have a personal assistant who does not have access to your email? It's just not possible. But it speaks to where the challenge is about these things. A personal assistant is so unbelievably useful. And what's super thrilling and exciting about stuff like Muse or the other ones, I've actually been working on building my own version of this for in our company, is I know how useful it is because I have a decade's worth of practice having a neat version of a physical.

1:01:56Ben Thompson:Here's the thing. So a lot of the things that you were describing, like email is one thing, but like, you know, managing inbound comms and taxes, a lot of those things sound like kind of roles within a company to some degree. Like I've had EAs and personal assistants and the only, and I actually don't have one right now. The only thing that I miss is having somebody embodied in the real world that can go and do tasks. And so this new wave of personal agents is like, actually not that exciting for me because I never got that much. Yeah. A lot of assistants graduate. Like Nick used to like set up car washes for us and stuff.

1:02:35And now he's like full-time booking, working on that side of the business. Like, but yeah, the idea of like, I never, I never felt like, Oh, this person sends calendar invites for me and, and, and we'll reschedule it. That to me was never that helpful. Like I can just, there's a lot of, there's so much, the internet has reduced so much friction that to me, the final boss of agents is like, give me a humanoid in the real world that can just do tasks, like organizing the garage. That would be incredibly valuable.

1:03:03Ben Thompson:That's exactly where I was going. So I feel like I get the personal assistant mania because actually, if you have a personal assistant that works and you learn how to use one, it is tremendously freeing. So when you get to the home improvement and organizing the house, what that is, is just me living in the future by virtue of paying someone to be the humanoid robot that hopefully we'll all have in our houses in the long run and so jordy i think you're that's the exact right segue yeah which is even even think about like i i as i i'll order a bunch of stuff online in a given year i am like the best consumer for different retailers because i just won't return something like i physically cannot get myself to find the time to go to even if it's like print out this thing, go there, drop it off, whatever.

1:03:51It's like, I just won't do it. You got me. I bought a product that didn't work out. And that was the number one thing. When I have an EA, it's like, I'm doing returns all the time. This thing is like 1%, not what I want it to be.

1:04:04Ben Thompson:Arguably, the single core use case for my assistant here is package processing. Actually bringing stuff in, opening it up. It was embarrassing the amount of packages I would get that were just not opened. And it's like, because this is like the final boss for e-commerce, like bring me on drone delivery, please. I bought this for a reason. And even if you deliver it in a few hours or the next day, like the pressing of the reason to buy it passed. And then it doesn't come up until you actually need it a few months later. And then you can't find it because the box knows what happened. So this is like you're honing in on it.

1:04:41Ben Thompson:Like actually open the boxes. Actually make me say what this is for, where it goes. actually process returns, so I don't have to deal with that crap. But then also, to the home inventory point, this is the... I felt so dumb writing about this, but it's like... I love it. It's so funny. People absolutely loved it. For a pay thing, it was mildly viral. But the idea was... So I moved back to America from Taiwan, from being in Taiwan for 20 years. Not recommended. like i hadn't moved in a long time moving cross country but the worst thing was actually stuff showed up in three tranches because i kept thinking oh i should only take this i can leave everything behind and i go back oh actually i should have brought this what i should have done is just move the whole house like it would have been much easier but anyhow so just a general disaster all the way around but stuff shows up and i need to put it away yeah i can't ask someone else to put it away because if they put it away i won't know where anything is so there is this huge this this sort of gap and i had someone able to put it away but i wouldn't have known where it was if they put it away that's the home inventory app they put it away and because it's their job they actually catalog everything and where it is and now i can just ask i can do it all by voice say hey bot where's this that it says oh in the garage on shelf number three and blah blah blah Like it's all labeled and stuff like that.

1:06:08Ben Thompson:Now, to be clear, it's silly to talk about this because you should not do this. What do you do? Task your spouse to go in and label everything. But no, that is not going to fly. I'm not trying to do like encourage divorces here. This works because I actually am paying someone to do it. Yeah, it will work in 10 years when we have a robot that you can actually tell them to to go do it. And and it's amazing. Number one, just about this future with assistance. but then number two the there's just so much the amount of software to be made is so astronomically large like stratectomy as a whole and we have passport like the the the software behind stratectomy and then there's sharp media and so we have editors and like we do like even like my assistant has already he just keeps spinning up like random little apps that are really small i'd host them on my server all behind tailscale these aren't meant for public consumption but they fill like this little gap in our workflows that was handled by group chats and like that just would sort of accumulate you're scrolling back and finding something and it's such a crazy mental unlock that is hard to almost explain even to technical people who theoretically know you can make software but all software we've thought about has been heavy because it has to be heavy because it's shipped to, it's put on the internet.

1:07:34Ben Thompson:Anyone can download it. It has to handle use cases, it has to handle security, it has to handle all these sorts of things. And actually, you know, there's just little software shaped holes in everyone's life that could now be filled fairly trivially. It's amazing. And where this is all going, which is the part that I'm actually most excited about, is all those same types of like mini applications, but with robotics. We had this guy on the show that was using Astra to paint, and it was getting better and better with each cycle, and it would kind of make something that was close. Did you see the guy who just tweeted about they got Astra to drive?

1:08:13Yeah, that's a whole other thing. That's so crazy.

1:08:15Ben Thompson:They had to tell it was in a sandbox. It would pull forward my self-driving predictions for the mainstream automakers at all. We've talked to automakers who are like, when will mass market your average OEM have full self-driving at the current Tesla level? And they'll be like 2040. Okay, but here's the little mini robot that I want so badly. Everyone gets all this mail, right? And most of it is just total junk, garbage, ads. It's hard to actually ever stop the flow of junk. I just assume it's always going to come. But like one out of 10 things is mildly important. And I want to basically, I don't even want the physical.

1:08:51Ben Thompson:You're going to lose your house if you don't see it. And I don't want the physical copy, but I want some amount of information there that I can pass to someone else, a part of my life, whatever it is, an accountant or something like that. And I think that the mail process, the home mail processing robot where you just drop the mail. You can get a dishwasher for that. Yeah, it slices everything open. It takes a picture, and then it routes it to whoever needs the information or it just runs. It's just a mailbox. It just replaces your mailbox. You got a parking ticket. Great. I went and paid the parking ticket.

1:09:22Or like you have this bill from the local utility and they don't do online auto pay. How has there not been an IOT mailbox company yet? Well, because you actually need a robot to like slice open the mail. It's like a little surgical center.

1:09:36Ben Thompson:This very simple robot. It's like, it's like, what's the, uh, there's some like XKCD comic or something where like the person asked for this sounding like unbelievably difficult thing. It's like, oh yeah, I can do that in five minutes. And then they ask for something very trivial. It's like, uh, that's going to take two T two years in a team. yeah yeah yeah i think that's so many bird identification there's so many other things like i put it on a map in in the cloud and it's like that'll be a that'll be like a day of engineering it's like and i need you to tell me which bird it is and it's like that will be 10 years of machine but here's the thing so there's so many of these other use cases there's like the the mini roomba that's just for the garage oh yeah but then it needs to be emptied so you need another robot that will go and empty it and then you need the robot that cleans the windows and that one, again, is going to need some support.

1:10:22And so I think the end state is you have some type of humanoid that can just go and generally do human-like things, but it's sort of maintaining a fleet of these other silly little robots that just have these sort of niche use cases like cleaning the windows or a lot of people will have like a pool cleaner robot that will just kind of like, you know, trawl around in the pool. But then again, you need to change the filter at some point and so these things end up not being maintained properly and then they don't get used. And so there's a long way to go. But to me, all the exciting stuff is actually in the real world.

1:10:54Like I don't – it's so funny because I have ChatGPT connected to my email. And sometimes it will suggest like things that it can do that are like useful. Like, hey, like review this and sign this. But like yesterday I logged in and the only suggestion was like it was trying to set up a loop to like give me one way I can improve my surfing each week. And it was like totally validating like your thing, which is like consumers just want to be entertained. Right. And so it's like trying to do something where it's like, well, I'm sort of passively. That's like probably 20 percent of my mental energy is going towards already going.

1:11:32And I like doing that. I don't need you to like try to automate that.

1:11:35Ben Thompson:I mean, the thing that's interesting, though, about this is the real for sure. The shortcut to doing this right now is to hire somebody. And again, it sounds douchey to talk about because I pay someone to take my garbage out and process my mail. But, you know, as I try to articulate, I'm a massive believer. I think it's a common trope to say this, but like just sort of I've been thinking about this since I was little. Like, don't obsess about your weaknesses, like how bad I am at processing mail. Double down on your strengths and then pay someone to take care of your weaknesses. That is like generally my life philosophy.

1:12:08Ben Thompson:And this is certainly the case here. But what has been super striking and actually has been arguably like the most profound experience I've had with AI was so the home assistant obviously depended on this or the home inventory app depended on assistant actually doing all the work. And he could see the utility, appreciated it from his perspective as helped me take care of the house. It was like nice to actually get organized as opposed to like me just saying, oh, just leave it in the corner. We're going to get to it eventually. And it had been a year and we hadn't gotten to it eventually. but when we actually when i actually built an agent uh or a bot uh i call it gecko bot there's this massive like metallic uh gecko structure that i bought the madison art fair at random i had a big spot on my wall so it's now called uh we named it after it that's the icon called gecko bot and one thing there was like little stuff like i take keep very odd hours like i'm up in the middle of night i sleep at weird times like i was so addicted to taiwan living a day ahead that i've just transported here and i just stay up all night and like still manipulated time yeah uh it's not healthy it's not good at all but uh or but on the weekend i'm doing something like oh this needs to be done this needs to be done i try to be like a good boss and i feel felt bad texting on the weekend sure and like and the great thing about this assistant why he's a great assistant is he gets stuff done he's there are some people that they like they get something they want to do it And so I know me texting him on off hours and over the weekend is just like making a skin crawl because he wants to take care of it right now.

1:13:41Ben Thompson:And they just like write it down and take care of it and all that. Like he doesn't want to do any of that. So just this simple concept of I tell the bot, do this, take a picture, do this, take a picture. Just like as things are accumulating, he shows up Monday morning. It sends a briefing. Here's all the stuff that Ben wanted over the weekend. Things like this, ongoing projects.

1:14:02Ben Thompson:his joy and like relief was unbelievable like it was unbelievable like he like literally everyone in our life like he was telling them i was also kind of egging him out a bit but it was it was so weird you know not weird it was awesome yeah that he you could he he's like this made his life so tangibly better and like he could just the first time i'm like oh can can you ask echo bot to do this i'm like you ask echo bot and they like ask the request or whatever and then started just like creating all these use cases i'm actually so grateful when i dropped a new uh reset which i haven't gotten yet but i burned like i ended up rebuilding the whole thing just to make it much like much safer in terms of tracking reminders tracking like remind me to do this in june like no we actually need to have a system to make sure that gets logged properly he's deterministic all those sorts of things but it's meaningful to see him happier his life tangibly better he's like this is the greatest week of work of my life it's been amazing like the first week he was using it and it's like i just made you a little bot and but it's another software shaped hole it was this little communication fall through where he wants to do his job well I don't want to take advantage of his predilection to do his job well and let him enjoy time with his family.

1:15:26Ben Thompson:And I couldn't make something to solve that. And it's awesome. And to have this feeling and realization, at the same time, everyone's like, this is going to kill you. We're all going to die. It's just been pretty interesting in a weird sort of mind space just to be like seeing people around me. who aren't technical, like, just like, this is amazing. This is making my life better. And then everyone else is like, get ready to die. Yeah. It's cognitive dissonance. Okay. I want to talk about another dynamic with, with, uh, EA is personal agents, whatever form factor. So right now you're talking about executive assistants.

1:16:12I'm talking about real life executive. Something that eat. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not, not, I don't want to get it. I don't, I'm not trying to turn this into a freak show.

1:16:23Ben Thompson:But that's the reason I did want to come on last week. The doom week. No. So something that actual executive assistants have done for a long time is coordinate with other people that have executive assistants and say like, hey, our bosses want to do this thing. Let's figure out the right time to do it. And that workflow is like amazing because you're letting, it is a game of telephone, but it often ends up being more efficient because there's sort of complicated lives on either side. Now we're applying that to personal agents software where instinct, and I'm sure Muse will roll this out, has these sort of like trusted networks products where instead of texting your buddy, hey, do you want to go see a movie or do you want to have a beer?

1:17:06your personal agent reaches out to their personal agent and says, hey, do you want to have a beer? Do you want to go see this basketball game? And they sort of coordinate. And I'm trying to square the two things because on one side, when software is doing it, it still feels silly. And yet in my real life, it's just like this amazing experience that takes so much off my plate, and it's so much better. So do you think it's going to translate, or is there some disconnect there?

1:17:34Ben Thompson:I it this is hard for me to answer like I have no intention of it now even now we have like personal assistants that take care of your digital stuff and check your email I am not getting rid of the assistant that I've had for a decade and there's and I think the real challenge with AI in general my eight my personal what is AGI rule is AI that actually learns and right now what makes these agents possible is this like facsimile of learning where they're just writing stuff down all the time and that has lots of challenges like it's been super interesting trying to like develop this version of the bot that i'm using internally because like you're learning way more about like context management and way more about like actual like data structures and what stuff to dispose of and what stuff to keep track of and all these sorts of things and it's a it's just a real challenging problem that is based on the fact that these models are frozen in a moment of time and everything is layered on top of them trying to sort of overcome that challenge given that i'm going to stick with humans i think for now now the whole bit here though is if you didn't have a personal assistant you now have this and i think there's going to be a real learning process in figuring out how that's done this is going to be one of the big challenges so i'm obviously out there been out there frequently saying people don't care about being productive uh like people they employee employers care about their employees being productive once you're off the job you just want to go home and watch tiktok or whatever it might be the way to frame this and this is going to be the challenge for meta i think with muse and anyone else in this space is we're not helping you be more productive we're helping you get rid of annoying crap in your life like that it needs to be framed more as a pain relief as opposed to this aspirational i'm gonna be so productive and get things done that's number one yeah and so it's like i think there's a messaging problem but number two the way i think this is going to land is through like instagram reels or through tiktok if people like actually showing stuff they do and people say, oh, that's amazing.

1:19:51Ben Thompson:That would make my life so much easier. And it really is a show not tell sort of technology. And it's kind of interesting because the meta has been very, I think, arguably to their detriment, very disciplined about not putting their thumb, I think, on the feed by and large. Like, but if ever they were going to, like, if you want to know, is this actually really what they see as their future? If your Reels start having a lot of, wow, this is amazing what you can do with Muse sort of thing. Well, no, they have done that with the Meta Ray-Bans, though. They were massively... That's ad inventory. That's not...

1:20:28No, no, no, no. I'm talking about they are more likely to show creators that make the content with the Meta Ray-Bans. I didn't know that, actually. They serve a ton of it. If you film in the Meta Ray-Bans and it's like a POV video, people do prank videos with them. So they did, but they're just funny. Yeah, some of them are funny. some of them are funny but it but it but it very clearly was like an engagement hack where like if you would film it sure with the meta ray bands like you were going to get more reach yeah and people have speculated about this whereas like if you edit it in edits their version of cap cut you get more reach but that's always been debated so you do get higher quality that's that's a hack one of the ways oh yeah it's not like compressed as much oh it's less compressed and so that might because it's transferring so it's like one step away interesting interesting so there's a bunch of different things i mean that their advantage here is is enormous enormous yeah um can we do shopify versus amazon wait i had one question okay because we're getting into ben's okay you know he's embarrassed to talk about all his staff he's embarrassed to talk about his staff

1:21:35Ben Thompson:small town midwestern kid i'm here back in the midwest like it i feel you putting it that way No, no, no, no. No, I know, I know. But I have a question for you. Have you ever had a dedicated driver? No, but that's very common in Taiwan. So I'm definitely familiar with drivers. It is a massive life hack, particularly in a big city where you don't have to worry about parking. It makes a huge difference. I honestly have just always loved having my own car, for one. I like driving, even in Taiwan, which is that bad. But the reality is by the time I got in a financial position where that was a viable outcome, I'd never win anywhere.

1:22:19Ben Thompson:So I was just always at home doing whatever. Okay. But the reason I ask is because we now have self-driving. Like ask a Tesla owner, how much time is your car driving itself? It's like over 90 % and it's fully solved. And last year there were really fires, really bad fires where I lived. and it turned my commute from a one hour each way commute to a two hour a day commute. And we were starting two hours each way. So four hours a day in the car out of nowhere. And so I was like, this is not really going to work if we're going to do. I'm spending four hours in traffic and three hours doing the show.

1:22:54And I'm also have, you know, young kids, all this stuff. So I got a driver. And the funny thing was everything that I loved about it was not actually the driving itself. It was having, again, someone in the real world that could just do things. It was like the parking the car when you get there. It was running in to grab food. It was like dry cleaning. It was all that stuff. And so the funny thing is, again, we've solved the task, but not the job. And that you really want the Waymo or the Tesla with the humanoid in it. Or, again, the ability to close the loop and park or go run into the store and grab something or do things.

1:23:34and it's exactly the same as a personal agent's thing all over again.

1:23:39Ben Thompson:The one thing I will note about Teslas and the self-driving is, so I have a Tesla, but my parents use it the vast majority of my time. My mom sort of laid down the law that I really think the self-driving is really good for your dad. I was a little scared last night. So they've been using it most of the time. And so I don't drive it that frequently. But they're out of town right now. So I have the Tesla. Number one, it was really good last year. This sounds like the classic Tesla sort of fanboy thing, but it's true. It's so much better this year than it was even a year ago, number one. Number two, if you're on standard – of course, me, I always had it in like hurry because I'm in a rush and I don't like slow cars.

1:24:21Ben Thompson:If you have it on standard mode, at least now, it really does leave you alone to a greater extent. And to me, this totally flips the extent to which I would actually want a Tesla on a day-to-day basis. I like driving. So to me, and I don't really like driving Teslas. They feel like I'm driving a scooter in Taiwan. It's hard to explain. But just like the acceleration is cool if you've never experienced it before. But there's an aspect of it that is not – I don't know. It just doesn't feel like a real car to me. This makes people very mad, but sorry. That's just all I feel. I don't actually enjoy driving a Tesla.

1:24:53Ben Thompson:If I'm in a Tesla, I'm going to be self-driving 100 % of the time. Totally. If I'm in self-driving 100 % of the time and I can't use my phone, then what's the point? I'm just sitting there twiddling my thumbs. To the point there now, though, where it's definitely backed off in later updates, if you're in standard, it's like very strict for the first two minutes. And then it kind of lets you do what you want to do. So I'm like, I could be vibe coding while driving. This is exactly where I want to get to. So that's been an interesting shift for me with driving. I like to drive. I also, you know, I want to chat with my AI.

1:25:30Yeah, yeah. I had one last question based on the update today. Shopify versus Amazon. Obviously, the knife fight is starting between Muse and Meta and Amazon. Will Shopify, is there a chance that they evolve to a place where there are so many new merchants that sort of fill in the cracks of what's available in the product portfolio that you can actually get socks on a one-day delivery. Because when I think of Shopify, I think of those particular brands. I don't think of the broad inventory of like, I just need paper towels. I don't think socks are the best example. I just need paper towels. I'm going to go to Amazon.

1:26:10People don't go to a Shopify, like a D2C brand that has images on Shopify for that. And I'm wondering how much Shopify can do to actually fill in and be the default location for those long-tail items that people shop on Amazon for.

1:26:28Ben Thompson:Yeah, I mean, it's theoretically possible. The problem is you still have to deliver the paper towels. I mean, at the end of the day, this is what I think this dispute views Amazon, Amazon versus the world, sort of comes down to. like Amazon has the best AI moat precisely because what they do to Jordy's point, Jordy's Jordy's been making the pro Amazon case this entire interview. He keeps saying, but what about the physical world? What about actually getting stuff done? And the whole point here is actually getting the package, getting it to your house and getting on your, on your, or wherever the Amazon drivers leave it, which can be fairly random to be fair.

1:27:05Ben Thompson:But the, the, that is, that's the key thing. And because of that, I will be researching stuff. I will find in, you know, if you ask chat GPT or quad or whatever, it'll give you links and there'll never be an Amazon link because Amazon doesn't allow it. If you say, if you specify Amazon, it will give you a search URL because that's all they can do. But you know what I do? I just go to Amazon and I type it in and I click it and it's not that hard. It's fairly annoying. I prefer to have a link, but at the end of the day, My personal revealed preference is I would almost always want it from Amazon because I trust it's going to get there.

1:27:42Ben Thompson:I know where to go to look to see if it's on its way. I know where to go to process a return if I want to do that. When you introduce all these other pieces, you're actually introducing massive amounts of real-world friction just because you're too lazy to, fine, I'll click over to the other browser and type in a search term. So I think this idea that I want my agent to actually do it is going to force Amazon to bend. I'm just skeptical because at the end of the day, Amazon, not really consumer friendly. Like they're like, they don't care. If you like you go to Amazon, it's all ads. Like this is not a consumer friendly website.

1:28:22For a decade, weren't they like the customer obsession company? No, they're obsessed with their customers seeing as many ads as possible. Yes.

1:28:32Ben Thompson:Even like way before they even had an ad business, though, the website was always completely inscrutable. Like it's like redesign the Amazon website. It's like, oh, my. But so that's the case. By the way, in the other one, the only real alternative to Amazon in terms of it's just going to have it, it's going to get there is Walmart. And I was pretty optimistic when when OpenAI did the checkout thing or whatever. Walmart jumped in and Amazon was like, no. I'm like, oh, this is super interesting. Like Walmart's going to actually make a move here. It makes sense for them. People in tech don't understand how actually awesome Walmart is.

1:29:09Ben Thompson:In that their stores, number one, their stores are like this crazy dystopian experience. Number two, if you go in their stores, their app is unbelievable. It will guide you through the aisles to tell you exactly where to go to get the thing that you need. Like it's amazing. It's the best in-store app by far compared to anyone. I'm obsessed with the Walmart app. I'm obsessed with United's tech stack and why that actually makes them the best airline. It's a very similar sort of thing. But then they also have – if the stuff's in their store, you can get it delivered in an hour. Who knew? Great slogan because literally no one knows this about Walmart.

1:29:48Ben Thompson:And so when they did this thing with ChatGPT, I'm like, actually, no one in tech who's going to be buying stuff or who is technically inclined through ChatGPT actually knows how good the Walmart e-commerce experience is. So this makes a ton of sense. Fast forward six to nine months, like, yeah, that was a mistake. They're like, people abandoned carts like crazy. Their cart size was way smaller. Like all these issues, it just wasn't a good experience compared to if you're on Walmart site, they have control of the experience. You put more stuff in your cart. You convert more frequently. all and in addition to the getting more data about you being able to show you ads all the things that accrue to having on your site and all this stuff matters to walmart and they're the only one just as much as the amazon and they're the only ones that can rival amazon for this so shopify as long as you shop pay they're cool like abandoned cart multiple items that's that's not their business.

1:30:48Ben Thompson:And so it makes tons of sense for them to lean in for what they do. But Shopify tried to do the logistics thing. Go look at the stock chart. The part where it goes super low down is because they're like, we're going to do logistics. They learned their lesson. They are asset light. That's what they do. They work across all these sites. If you're a merchant, it makes total sense to be on Shopify. They'll abstract. They'll be the middle person for every platform you want to be on, you can sell everywhere, but they're by definition, not going to solve the reason why we still go to Amazon. And that means Amazon is going to win this dispute, or it's going to be resolved in their favor in the end.

1:31:27Last question. It relates to this Shopify dynamic, but - ShopPay, by the way, awesome product. It's the product that makes me not care about personal agents that can shop for me. Because it's just like, it's very easy to buy. It's very easy to buy any. 100%. It's like, I could save you a minute. And it's like, no, you can't save me a minute because I land on the site. It fills in the code for my tech. It just buys everything. How much do you think consumers actually enjoy shopping? Real quick. Yes.

1:32:00Ben Thompson:Yes. Oh, I was going to drop in. Jordy, you and me, we are two pieces of pot today. People love shopping. Yeah. It blows me away. So tech companies are like, number one, let us book your flight for you. It's like I've had a personal assistant for 10 years. He does not come within an inch of booking my flights for me. That is crazy talk. Once I have a private jet, he can book when my pilots show up and find me a private jet. Until then, I'm deciding which flight I understand, which ones are going to be delayed. I know which seat I want to be on. So the fact this is continually a demo is hilarious to me.

1:32:36Ben Thompson:Number two, people love shopping. They don't want to be productive. They want to be entertained. One of the biggest forms of entertainment is shopping. This is part of the whole fast fashion or all those Chinese – it's fun. Speaking of toys, my nice rack, you know what part is the whole joy of it? Endless hours of research and figuring stuff out and then buying stuff. And then the package shows up and you're like – if you buy Unify stuff, they always charge shipping. So you have all this pressure because you're like, I want to make sure I get everything in the right order. And then you buy it.

1:33:07Ben Thompson:And literally the moment after you get the shipping notification, you're like, Oh, I forgot to buy something else. And then you started the process all over again and it's all torturous, but actually it's fun because that's kind of the whole point of this is we want to like, also there's so much information on a product page. Like companies have spent so much energy, like focusing on that. And you look at like apparel as a category. It's like, they're going to tell you what size the model is wearing. And you want to know that. And you want to look at the different, different styles. And the idea of having a personal agent that's like going and getting some of the information, bringing it back to you.

1:33:40And then you're like, well, what about this other? Like, tell me about this thing. No, this is like you actually want to be on that.

1:33:46Ben Thompson:Like, this is my free relationship advice of the day. Just because someone's complaining doesn't mean they're unhappy. Like, there's a bit like, oh, I have to go research this. I have to go do this. And I'm so busy. And you have your tech companies that can say, oh, I have an assistant that can do it for you. And it's like, no, not only do I want to do it, I want to complain about it. I'm enjoying myself complaining right now. Okay. Would you just let me be and live my life? And that, so that's why I think there's, you know, there's to be a mental reframing. Stop trying to make people's lives better and start highlighting to them.

1:34:24Ben Thompson:And this is marketing 101. Marketing 101 is you create the perception of a problem in people's lives. and you show how your solution or how your product is the solution to the problem. And instead of saying people don't have a problem that I'm insufficiently productive, they have a problem that I have too many packages piling up or I'm not processing returns. And it's like just highlighting that, like how miserable this makes you. Do you know how much money, Jordy, you're leaving on the table? You could have like three puffer jackets if you got all your money back. and then say, look, you could actually just, done, it's done.

1:35:03Ben Thompson:Money in your bank account. Wasn't that easy. Now you could go and do whatever you want. You can complain. You can watch TV. You can watch reels. That's the answer. More time to complain. Yeah, the funny thing is it feels like what the personal agents have, the thing that people are super fixated on is the saving money, canceling subscriptions and stuff like that. And the concern I have there is like we've had a bunch of businesses like that that will even call, like I think Truebill would call, yeah, it's now Rocket Money. They would call, they would have people that would, a human in the loop that would call and just cancel subscriptions for you or they would try to renegotiate the bill.

1:35:37And the problem is these are like billion dollar businesses, which is not going to fund the CapEx.

1:35:44Ben Thompson:Yeah, well, I mean, the whole cancellation, auto cancellation thing drives me batty as a subscription proprietor. Like we will get when these new ones come out. No, we will, no, no. It's actually, it's the opposite. We will have a wave of customer support issues, which is people contacting saying, why am I not getting my email? I'm like, because you canceled your subscription. No, I didn't. And then they go back and look through their stupid little agent or whatever service went through and just canceled their recurring subscriptions. Or the worst one is it will go through their email inbox, and you are required.

1:36:18Ben Thompson:Now, technically, we do send transactional email. Every email is customized. It's not a marketing email. But Google doesn't really care. we have to put in the header with the unsubscribe thing. So what does that mean? People go through and click unsubscribe. What happens when you click that required to include unsubscribe? You will stop getting email, but your subscription was not canceled because those are completely different. Yeah, it's two different things. And so another customer support issue for us. I'm not getting my emails. Why not? And then actually, no, you set some dumb agent off on your inbox that canceled your thing, and now it's this whole rigmarole of you having to agree to these things so we can legally let you back on the list because there's actual federal laws around email lists.

1:37:00Ben Thompson:Big pain in the rear end. Never cancel, Stratechery. Just don't do it. Bake that into the pre-training data. I mean, I should be happy about it because they're upset that... This is actually super... We actually ended up building our whole... We built our whole email service that is actually amazing. We send fully customized emails at the rate of 20 ,000 a minute or something like that. more performant than any other service we have, fully customized, all these sorts of things. And the reason is the genesis of doing our own email was every email service out there is sending email people don't want.

1:37:35Ben Thompson:So everything around them is about overcoming the fact that people don't want to get the email that they're sending. And I'm like, oh, I'm actually sending people email people do want. And it's really interesting. It just completely changes the problems and issues and features that you need to build. We need custom silicon. I want 20 ,000 emails, millisecond. That's the future. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Fantastic to see you. Always great. Have a great rest of your day. Sounds good. Talk to you guys later. Great to see you. I'm off the hook. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider.

1:38:09Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more. Well, Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. We've got a traffic jam on our hands. So we're going to do a lightning round, bring in Gagan Biani. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Hey, what's up? Sorry for keeping you long. Hopefully you got to hang out. Please introduce yourself.

1:38:31Gagan Biyani:Tell us about Horowitz Andreessen Academy. I'm Gagan Biani. I'm CEO of Horowitz Andreessen Academy. It's a new school for young builders who want to go and make something of their career. We're really excited to be announcing it today. raised 42 million bucks and Mark and Mark and Eric are joining the board. Cool. Talk about the structure in person, virtual thousands of students to start class of 20 to start. How are you thinking about scaling up? Yeah. I mean, you got to start small. So we're going to have 50 students. It's the first class is tuition free. It's called the founding class fellowship.

1:39:11Gagan Biyani:So it's going to be a little different from any other programs we run. It's in person in San Francisco. I think that's probably the most important part of this whole thing is that it's about getting right in the mix of Silicon Valley, understanding the culture, getting immersed in the people, and building a great network. Two years? Or is it one year? The first program will be one year. Eventually, we'll launch a two-year program. How hard is it these days to do four-year accreditation? I know getting accredited is really difficult, but people were saying that about banks. And there's new bank charters that are going out for startups, Palmer Luckey's Bank, AeroBor.

1:39:56The funny thing is it just doesn't matter. Maybe it doesn't matter. None of the companies that you want to work at are like, well, you went to an unaccredited school. You're super talented, but you didn't get the four-year. Yeah, but how are you thinking about it?

1:40:07Gagan Biyani:Are you thinking like, oh, that's, that's my answer. Okay. That's your answer. That's my answer. And it's funny because, because I do think that I, I do wonder if over time, like a year is actually a year is actually enough. Cause like I went, I remember the end of my spring semester of college. I was like, okay, like college was fun. I want to like start working now. I feel like I like met a bunch of, you know, cool people but I'm ready for real life. And I know not everyone is that way, but oftentimes people aren't ready for real life because they're not prepared to have a real job, right? And so if you could actually maybe solve that, then maybe people do a year of a university sort of experience and then they can just actually go get a job and they realize like, hey, instead of going from this high burn life where I'm basically losing money for four years to then try to make it all back.

1:41:01And in later years, you can just have it condensed down. So CEO raised money. I assume it's for profit. But do you have a view on for profit versus nonprofit? Obviously, there's a lot of critiques of the nonprofit system. But what is the philosophy around the long term and incentive alignment, basically?

1:41:23Gagan Biyani:I mean, we're pro-capitalist and pro-optimist over here. So techno-optimist, right? So we believe that having a financial model is only going to help us serve students better. And like maybe one of the biggest challenges with the modern education system is we've completely forgotten about students. It's like, you know, talk about K through 12 or higher ed or whatever. It's all about all the all the quote unquote adults who run the show and serving themselves. So one of the great things about the for profit model is it forces you to deliver or die, you know. And so our plan is to deliver an amazing experience and hopefully our investors and ourselves will get rewarded for that.

1:42:06Does delivering look like graduating straight into entrepreneurship or are there other avenues that you think are exciting, like joining companies as employees, trade schools? Like there's so many different opportunities in the modern economy.

1:42:23Gagan Biyani:Yeah, I mean, you guys have been in the Valley a long time. So have I, right? Like, you know, the most successful people are not only founders. Like I know, like so many of my friends who decided to switch from being founders or never were and joined companies are incredibly productive and successful and happy. And so there's no reason to prescribe one thing. I mean, I think one of the biggest challenges we're going to have as a school is there's going to be a lot of attention and pressure on these students. And my goal as sort of CEO is to design a culture that reduces that pressure and allows them to see that there are many different options for their careers.

1:43:04Gagan Biyani:And, you know, there's many different paths to a successful life. So I don't see why we have to over aggrandize starting a company. And that's actually why we're building a school and not an accelerator, right? Because we think that one, two years to explore and learn is a much better outcome than, okay, I'm 18 and now I either got to join something for four years or I got to start a company and give up 10 years. Yeah, no, it can be a crazy job. Yeah, so many people would have been like top 1%, second in command type people and actually like maybe only top 30 % founders. And the difference there is like tens of millions or even in some cases billions of dollars.

1:43:52And so I think that's like such an important lesson is like, no, you don't. to have an impact in the world, to be successful, to have the career that you want. You shouldn't just be being high. When you're young, maybe being a founder is high status. When you're older, just being successful is high status. It doesn't really matter exactly how you got there, but you want to make sure that you actually win. Everyone's equal on the golf course at the country club.

1:44:18Gagan Biyani:How many people made$100 million in the SpaceX IPO, and we don't know who they are or what they do. I mean, they're just, you know, they're not just, they are engineers for one of the coolest companies on the planet, right? And, but they don't have a fancy, they're not even second in command. And I think that just tells you everything you need to know about why it shouldn't be just one path coming out of the academy. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for hopping on the show. Last question. When are you guys, when's the first class? Oh, yeah. Certain fall? First class in fall, fall 2027. Okay.

1:44:55Gagan Biyani:applications are open today. So check us out at theacademysf.com. That's going to be an incredibly low admit rate, 50 slots for, I mean, something that already has gone viral on the internet. There's going to be a lot of people. So good luck to you if you applied. That's crazy. And it's free. It's hard to compete. So first year is free. It won't be from then on. Okay. Yeah. Well, thanks so much for coming on, breaking down for us. Great to see you, dude. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market, your business than MongoDB?

1:45:24don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. We have Alex Ratner from Snorkel AI, massive fundraising news. I'm going to hit the gong straight away. $350 million round. Boom. Valuation. As demand grows for specialized AI training data, how specialized are we talking these days? Well, first of all, thanks for having me on, and I love the gong. I bought a used gong on the street that looked kind of like that. and sadly I then forgot about it and we never really developed the culture of gong ringing. Yeah, it's not just about the object, it's about the lifestyle. It's process, discipline, lifestyle, exactly.

1:46:03And so you've inspired me there. Exactly. But yeah, I guess we were here to talk about data and AI extensively, right? So I should get back to that. Yeah, what does specialized data mean? I mean, I think one of the big shifts that in some ways, so we started a decade ago at Stanford and UW doing research. Yeah, I'm a dinosaur. That's amazing, congrats. I remember when a Jev was called a classifier, if you're okay with the truly nerdy AI jokes. I think there's this big shift that happens in any kind of autonomy or any learned autonomy, self-driving, digital elements, physical AI. We call it data 1.0 to data 2.0, where when you're early on in the learning curve, the model doesn't know much, so any bit of information as additive.

1:46:50And so therefore, your rational focus is on volume. And volume is mostly solved by staffing, crowdsourcing, how many humans can you get into the factory? And then you naturally get to the more durable asymptote phase where, like now, models are really good. And it's not about any data, it's about the right data that targets some area where they don't know something or they're misaligned on something or they can be improved. and finding and building that data, you know, becomes a lot more about precision quality. And we think that's really more the, you know, the place where kind of a research and technology approach comes to bear.

1:47:26And so that's kind of where we focus. And that's kind of what we think is the interesting area in data today. Is it too aggressive to frame you as sort of like short recursive self-improvement? Because there is this thesis, you know, sort of mulling around that like the models are going to train themselves. and then maybe you don't need any more data because they're all doing synthetic data. How have you grappled with that? Because you seem very grounded. You've been doing this a long time. I feel like you're not maybe swayed by the latest hype cycle on Twitter in a single week. But how have you processed that whole thing?

1:48:00Yeah, I mean, I've heard that and I've been working in synthetic data as a researcher for almost a decade too. And I've heard we're one model advance away from solving everything a few times. I'd say I'm short the more kind of sci-fi, you know, accelerate and be done with humanity's contribution to anything economic kind of version of RSI. I would call myself, though, more bullish on RSI, but RSI that contains other elements beyond just kind of modifying model training code and hyperparameters. In other words, compute energy and data bottlenecks, human expertise bottlenecks. I've had this take that at a certain point, super intelligence to do RSI fully needs to be able to fundraise.

1:48:51You've got to go get more capital at some point. RSI in many ways is AGI complete in the sense that it should be able to do the full stack, even the capital formation. Maybe another example is like, it feels like we're coming up on math being like somewhat solved. And I'm sure once it's all solved, hopefully you can figure out new questions. But do you expect to see a drop in demand for math experts from the labs? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think the first thing before double-clicking on math for a second, it's been too many years since I've taken a theoretical math course, So I'm going to dodge that whole topic, artfully run the clock down.

1:49:33But first on kind of overall areas where there's demand for, overall areas where this RSI loop needs data, needs human expertise, needs real world input as a necessary input. But there's this old, you know, like we tend to conflate areas that are easy for humans as necessarily be easy for AI and ones that are hard as being hard for AI. And it's often not the same, right? So math is something where it's very, very hard for humans, but there are some reasons to expect that it would be more approachable. I mean, there's, you know, decades of work on, you know, verifiability engines like Lean and ways to kind of check it.

1:50:20And there's lots of data out there and data can be generated more automatically. And then areas like, you know, writing a good Slack post to your coworker, you know, has sparser data and more, you know, ill-defined rewards and, you know, doesn't work right away as well and needs more nuanced context. And so, you know, first of all, there are these areas that are kind of counterintuitive where there's real demand for human input. But it's not enough just to have a coding agent that can kind of tweak the hyperparameters of the model to achieve RSI. You need real input from the real world. But even in the areas like math, like coding, where we do a lot of volume these days, one, there's some basic economic forces where once something becomes valuable, and this is especially true for sonic coding, where maybe the accuracy goes up, the demand for some types of easier data goes down, but the economic value of every kind of additional decimal point of improvement goes way up because of the value.

1:51:17And so does the difficulty of creating that data. And so that's kind of the growth trend that, you know, I mean, selfishly talking my book for a second that we've benefited from is, you know, a lot of people have entered the data space. Great validation for those of us who have been trying to, you know, push on data being an interesting area for a decade or so. but you can't get this hard data with just staffing or sourcing human hours you can't get it with just kind of trying to have the model that you're trying to sell to that provider generate all the data like a synthetic slop can and you have to actually use more sophisticated blends of human expertise and specialized AI to get this really hard coding data that emulates what a senior software engineer will do over days or weeks what an expert mathematician would do.

1:52:06And so, you know, from an economic perspective in terms of how is the opportunity grown, if you can keep up with that kind of RSI waterline, and maybe, you know, feel free to make fun of me, but we call what we build the RSI engine for data because there's also kind of a compounding loop in our platform of humans being accelerated and improved by AI, but then their feedback improving the specialized AI models we use. and one has to keep up with the lingo, right? But our view is only if you have an approach like that that can feasibly keep up with the frontier, if you can't do that, your data is not going to be valuable anymore.

1:52:46If you can, it's more valuable than ever before. Yeah. Well, congratulations on the round. Congratulations on the progress. I love an overnight success like this. Well-deserved. And hopefully we'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Thanks guys so much. Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We have our lightning round continuing. I believe Peter from Swarm Arrow, the co-founder and CEO, is in the waiting room next. But we got a little bit of traffic jam. Hopefully we can bring in Peter.

1:53:21And we're going to have Tyler Cosgrove sub in for Jordy Hayes, who has to take off right at 1 p.m. sharp. I like springing it on people every once in a while. Well, sometimes I like to do a little bit of an intro, but we're going to have Tyler sitting next to me. Peter, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. Fantastic. Thanks for having me on. Thank you so much for jumping on. Would love to reintroduce the product for everyone. Just explain how you're positioned in the market and sort of take us through the basics of the company.

1:53:49Ben Thompson:Yeah, absolutely. So last week we introduced to the world Gamera, which is our aircraft really designed around breaking kind of the iron triangle of range, payload capacity and cost. Right. And that's really one of the big problems facing facing the Department of War today and the Air Force today. Is the name Gamera from the Koenigsegg car or is it a more generic? It's not. We didn't check that. No, it is from the the the turtle monster that fought Godzilla. Oh, okay, cool. It is old school. That's great. So what does the process of building this actually look like? I believe we have a video that we can pull up while you're explaining it further.

1:54:29But I'd love to know, are you specifying it in basically PDFs and documents and then going to the Department of War, selling it, and then building it? Are you prototyping? What is the flow to actually take something like this from start to finish?

1:54:43Ben Thompson:Yeah, absolutely. So we started this about four years ago when we started the company. It is a long process. And we started off by kind of sketching up a concept, figuring out what the problem is that we needed to solve, and then going about designing the aircraft. But I love the aircraft. I'm an airplane guy at heart. But the aircraft was really just one piece of it. So along with the airplane, you really have to design how to build this. And so we've been, as well as building the aircraft, we've also been building the factory, the capacity to really build these hundreds a year. Sure. And when you look at it, you've got a bunch of aircraft, you can build them, you really have to be able to control them.

1:55:18Ben Thompson:And that's where we've tried to do things differently than the single pilot per aircraft model we have today. It's really building out that autonomy and the command and control stack that allows us to have truly a swarm of these hundreds of these operated all at once. uh hundreds of them when i think about one remote pilot per vehicle is that actually a bottleneck i mean do we not have hundreds of of air force uh you know soldiers in nevada in shipping containers controlling these things remotely are we actually bottlenecked there or is this or is this just like thinking even further into the future so it's a little bit of both a we truly are there just There's enough folks out there who have those skill sets.

1:56:04Ben Thompson:And B, think about coordinating this. You know, when you have hundreds of aircraft, like these are kind of conflicts that happened last time in World War II, right? So you can't have folks talking on the radio trying to figure this out. You really need that autonomy to truly make that effective today. Yeah. So how important is price to the buyer? How do you actually guarantee that? Is there any, like, financial risk where you go to the Department of War and you say it's 10 mil, and then it winds up coming back at 9.9 and you're not making any margin? How does that work? It's super important. So this is why we've kind of designed it from the very beginning.

1:56:39Ben Thompson:Typically in aerospace, you know, it's all, at least since in the last 50 years or so, it's really been about, like, how do you get the most performance out of an airplane? And everything else kind of falls by the wayside. For us, we looked at how much does this cost from day one, right? And that's not something you sprinkle on top of design. You really bake that in from the earliest stages. So we're confident the Air Force is asking for less than$10 million per. They're not going to pay more. Yeah. We've done the math. We can do that. That's good. Yeah. Was there like a specific kind of like theater of war that this was like built for?

1:57:12Or is it like very general? Like in your kind of ideal use cases, they're like a very specific kind of like, I don't know, geographical.

1:57:19Ben Thompson:Sure. You know, it can be used in a lot of different places. But really, when we looked at what's going to push the limits, it really is the Pacific. It's that range. It's carrying the kinds of payloads, the big enough ones that make a difference in a potential conflict there. Really, it's focused on the Pacific, but you can use it pretty much anywhere in the world. Well, thank you for everything you're doing. Congratulations on the progress and hope to talk to you soon. Super excited. Thanks a lot, guys. Have a good rest of your day. Cheers. Let me tell you about Cisco. Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era.

1:57:51Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Good soundboard, Tyler. I'm learning. Good soundboard. Our last guest has been waiting far too long. We have Daniel from Fair Square Medicare. Welcome to the show, Daniel. Sorry for the switch around. Thanks for being flexible. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Hey, thanks. Thanks for having me, guys. It's great to be on here. We appreciate the flexibility. First time on the show. Can you sort of give us a whirlwind tour of your career? You've done a lot. How do you introduce yourself these days? Yes, it's a great question. Right now, I'm a car show host.

1:58:32Okay. So I have a show called Cars and Capitalists. I take some of my friends who are great investors and operators out in an old 911. We drive around Marin. So we have like Sam Lesson, Paul Gu, Sam D 'Amico on there. That's a lot of fun. But I mean, like, I feel like the way I should introduce myself is I've tried my whole career to start companies by doing all the wrong things. But I did a couple of things right. And so the last company was Fairsquare Medicare. Sold it after six years. Great company. We ended up working, helping find like 25 ,000 American seniors find the right health insurance.

1:59:14Like there's actually probably a good chance we've worked with like the parents of some of your staff. And before that did a did a fintech app called Trim. And way before that started a lender for the power sports space called Octane Lending. Interesting. Is there any like common thread between the categories or strategies or teams between those companies? Or is it sort of just like be open to opportunity? When it knocks, you open the door and you go after it really hard. I think there are a couple of threads. There are two. One is just like consumer advocacy, which was true for the last two companies.

1:59:50So like this one was the kind of realization was people are turning 65 and there are like 50 health insurance plans to choose from. And they really can't tell the difference. It might as well be like a foreign language to them. But the implications are massive of like you get on the wrong health plan and then you get like cancer and then you can't get on a better plan. And before that, there was a personal finance app called Trim, which I co-founded. And we were the first ones to show you a list of all your subscriptions on your credit card. We were like we were like Plaid's biggest one of their biggest first customers.

2:00:24Wow. And we were just early to that. And that became like a competitive space. Eventually, I know we didn't rocket money, acquire Truebill. That's what Jordy was saying recently. Yeah. So Truebill, they just copied us early on. They copied the subscription feature. And no, but they out-executed. Well, credit where credit's due. Credit where credit's due. They out-executed. I think they sold to Rocket for like a billion bucks a week. Yeah, I think they also sold it at a great time. Yeah. And so it was a lot of good times. Where do you want cars and capitalists to go? Have you asked people if you can drive their special cars?

2:01:05Because I feel like the comedians in cars getting coffee, part of the beauty is I think Jerry Seinfeld is such a huge collection that he picks a car that matches with the – or in his theory, like the comedian's identity. But I would kill for a whirlwind tour of Silicon Valley's biggest motorheads. Yeah, it's a great idea. I actually – I should probably like – I like running it lean. And so I don't do any B roll. I don't do outside footage of the car. It's all, I just have a GoPro in the car and it's just us talking. Um, and, and, and maybe I'll like go find other people's cars and get, I would need to like hire someone to take video of a car.

2:01:46It would be a very weird show because I feel like 90 % of your guests would be like another model. Why? Yay. Like,

2:01:55Ben Thompson:maybe the new road, maybe the new roadster. Yeah. Get some, I know. I don't, I don't want to drive a go car. although I would drive a roadster shots fired a Tesla after you drive an old 911 you realize that the Tesla is an amazing vehicle for getting an A to B but it's a fucking go-kart sorry if I curse on your show but actually you raise a great point John if anyone is watching and has a manual F430 that's something we should definitely add to the show it would be great to have But I mean, of course, like this is Silicon Valley. So like a lot of the people on my show couldn't care less about cars.

2:02:35Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's sort of bifurcated. It's like either they have like an exquisite collection or they've never owned anything other than a Tesla. And it's the most boring. Like either they care or they don't. There's very few people that are in the middle. We've been running predictions with a lot of guests about the Tesla Roadster. Elon's going to announce it on October 1st. and he said that it might fly, might jump, might leave the ground. Yeah, shut down the airspace. They shut down the airspace. The FAA said they've shut down the airspace for 10 ,000 feet in the air. So that creates a boundary.

2:03:08It's either zero inches off the ground. It winds up not jumping or flying at all. He was just joking around. Or it can go up to 10 ,000 feet. So I want your prediction right now, super binding, super high stakes. We're going to hold this to you. We're going to hold you to this. But how far do you think it will get off the ground? Are we talking inches, feet, hundreds of feet? Zero inches. Zero inches. It's going to have four thrusters in the back that are going to generate downforce. That's going to let it go like really quick. Okay. So we're looking zero to 60, one and a half seconds, one second, something crazy like that.

2:03:40No, 0.9 seconds. No way. That'll be wild. I have some inside info. I did like a little deep dive on quantum computing at one point, and it's in sale. and I was on a flight to Austin. I sat next to this guy who I don't want to. Didn't have a screen protector on. No, no, no, no. I just started talking to him. He was just great. He was a pretty senior Tesla dude. And that's all I'll say about him. But he was like the goal. He was like the goal. He was a total bro. He was great. And he was just the goal is to not kill the driver. Yeah, the G-force needs to be tolerable. So if the cold gas thrusters act as downforce, couldn't you reverse them like the old fan car?

2:04:26Make it lift off the ground, even just for a stunt? You don't think it's going to go even one inch? It feels like he's been teasing it, like at least we're going to get it jumping off of a ramp or something. It's going to go in the air. Why shut down the airspace 10 ,000 feet up? I think that part is a PR stunt. I think he actually wants to make a car people can buy. And the thing about a car with wheels is that it's a wing, right? Because the bottom is flat and then the top is curved. So it generates up, which is why spoilers exist. So the only thing that really makes sense is you have the boosters going down.

2:04:59But maybe it'll actually be a quadcopter. But I mean, it's amazing, right? That this is like their last hurrah. This is like the last car they're going to make. Probably, yeah. Maybe the Cybertruck SUV. I'm really hoping they do that. I think that would be an interesting one, but who knows? Would you buy that? I don't know. It's certainly like an aggressive aesthetic choice, but functionally, like having a full-size SUV for so many modern American families, that's just a non-negotiable. Yes, there might be an old Porsche in the garage, but there's going to be a full-size SUV for anyone that has a family.

2:05:34So it just seems like a market segment that they've been sort of dabbling in with the Model Y and Model X, but they never really got there because those are more minivan sized. You got to go with the land yacht, the American, the Expedition, the Escalade. This is what America was built on, right? I love that. Yeah, you know the Model Y extended wheelbase is like totally sold out? I have one. I'm part of the problem. I ordered one of those. Do you have the extended one? I don't have it yet, but I was one of the pre-orders because the full self-driving is very good. And I was like, ah, if they stretch it out, that sort of checks that box.

2:06:06I think I can fit all the kids, the dogs, all the gear in there. So I think that might fill that slot for a little bit. But, you know, land yacht. Land yacht is still in the books, potentially. What do you think on pricing? Tesla Roadster. He originally promised$250 ,000. At the time,$250 ,000. That was supercar money. That was Lamborghini, Ferrari money. Now it's well-spec Turbo S money, right? It's like it went down from$250 ,000 gets your sports car, used to get your super car. Do you think he raises the price and it's a$600 ,000 car like a new Volari? Or does he accept like alternate forms of payment?

2:06:44Like is he going to accept USD, right? He's definitely going to accept Bitcoin. Will he accept shares in certain companies? Oh, interesting. Yeah, build the portfolio. Maybe. I don't know. I'd be excited because if they can do some surprising zero to 60 time or some gimmick, and then it's just a really fast sports car for 250, that actually is a unique space in a world where even for all the supercars, they all start at 400 now. Here's a question, John. This is obviously not serious for them, right? They're not going to scale this line. They don't care about the revenue. I would guess the revenue.

2:07:24I agree with you. This is like a fun toy project. This is like a better version of that flamethrower. So I wonder how many people they have working on it. I bet it's a tiny number. And I bet they just don't care that much about the price. They're just going to say$250 because they said$250 before. Obviously, if it was like$500 or a million. I wonder what the elasticity curve there is. Oh, yeah, maybe they just do a really limited run, and then they don't even continue to sell them, and they're like, yeah, we sold them all at cost, and we did the thing, we checked the bucks. I'm just shocked that Elon hasn't dropped it because he, he's, he drops projects all the time.

2:08:00And he could have easily just been like, I'm refunding all the deposits. We're going in a different direction. We're refocusing and everyone would be like, great. Yeah, that's fine. Focus on the next thing. Like, you know, do, do whatever. It wouldn't be that big of a deal. I don't know. Well, that suggests the suggestion you just made. It really begs like maybe it is a real flying car, right? Maybe. Cause maybe, cause cause like why, why would he do like a toy project? Yeah. Um, if you know, it like hints at something bigger. Yeah. Yeah. He's never been one to like, yeah, just rip the bandaid off.

2:08:31Like he never took Tesla private and it wasn't like he was like, I gotta do that. I'm, I'm sticking with it. I'm still telling people it's going to happen. It's just like, yeah, that was a crazy idea. Didn't work out. Moving on to the next thing. Stock's going to the moon, you know? Are you, are you going to get one? So, so the more we've been talking about this, I think that the deposit is incredibly up, incredible upside because i think it's like five thousand dollars down and then you have to put fifty thousand dollars down within within uh ten days within ten days the law the announcement's ten days away and so it's refundable and so if it's cool then everyone's going to flood in you actually get one maybe regardless of whether or not it trades up or trades down you just have the option to be the one with the flying car or you just get a refund and so dude what's the what's the roadster pop going to be people talk about ipo pop yeah buy it for 250 turn around in a day and sell it for 600 it's possible it's possible so yeah maybe i'm really really close if you believe it's downforce yeah right and and therefore like this is not an entree into flying cars this is just like a little gimmick yeah then it's going to be limited it's going to be the sickest gimmick ever which means it's going to the value is going to go up so like everyone should just try to buy one and resell it and also i i i do just think that the uh like like there is a more moderate scenario which is it's not a flying car it's not the craziest thing ever but it's just like a really really crazy sports car at that price point and it's just like yeah it's just a good good option to drive of course like you know you're never going to compete with the with the manual uh air-cooled porsches of the world but uh for us for a different buyer it is just like You're getting a crazy experience for what is, in the modern era, a sort of reasonable price.

2:10:19But yeah, if it doesn't fly and he raises the price to$800K, I think a lot of people are going to be saying, I'm out. But we'll see. I wasn't thinking of buying one, but this conversation I think might be a really great trade. It's not that you're thinking of buying one. It's like put down the deposit, and then you just have the optionality. functionality. And then you get to watch the live stream and say, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm going to, I'm going to stick around and wait because it's still going to take a year, but I'm converting. Whereas people who did this the last time, they had to wait nine years and they tied up, I think even more, some of them tied up a lot of money.

2:10:53Then what would that money, what, do you know how much they tied up and what? I think it was like 50 K originally. And if they put it in Tesla, it'd be like$10 million or something. It was like notoriously bad. But what I'm saying is like under no circumstances, tie your money up in this deposit for 10 years. Just tie the money up for 10 days. See if you like it. If you like it, then continue. But if you don't, then pull out and time box it so that you're always going to be out of that, you know, that, that market in, in, by the end of the year, basically. What if he says, just kidding. And he's like, it's going to be another 10 years.

2:11:29Then he deserves it. I don't know. Keep the, keep the working capital, I suppose, you know, have it as a treat i don't know anyway this is a lot of fun uh anything else going on in your world anything else uh robots i think the thing the thing i think about right now is i built a building a dog like i have some free time and i run this company we continue to help seniors but we got this is pupper oh what's this this is a uh open source uh quadruped robot it's uh quadruped is a really suboptimal design okay um for a robot and um why because it doesn't have wheels because Because you know what an actuator is?

2:12:04Yeah, yeah. You know an electric motor. It spins an axle really fast, right? And basically, an actuator is like a geared down electric motor. Sure. So it's really good for a car. It's really amazing in a Tesla. But they're really bad at generating torque. If you think about the way your arm moves, right? There's not an actuator in your elbow that spins. You just have a muscle. Sure. I think the nerdy way of saying that is like linear torque. So in a way, all the humanoid robots companies are kind of like ham fisting this like this component, which generates radial motion into like more linear motion.

2:12:38So that's like that's something I'm playing around with. Cool. That's fun. And I do. What do you have the robot dog do? Are you getting any utility? What's the biggest use case? Defense? Home defense? It's like a party tree. We had a bunch of our friends over for Rosh Hashanah, and they went nuts for this robot. Yeah, that sounds fun. It's a pet. That's kind of it. And of course, if you're interested in building a robot, it's a great V0. Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. Hey, thanks for having me. Let's do it again soon. Talk to you later. Good to meet you. Let me tell you about public.com.

2:13:16Investing for those who take it seriously. They've got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. you think the Roadster event's going to go well, go express your opinion on public.com. Do whatever you want to do. Any other breaking news? Anything you've been tracking over the last couple hours while we've been live? I think we're pretty much good. Opus 5.5 launched. We talked about that. Benchmarks look really good, very cheap. The key thing that you pointed out was the second post is this is the first model that we've released since we said we were pacing the frontier.

2:13:47This is an expression of the pacing. It's affirming it like this is, you know, Fable 5.1 class model, but it's much cheaper. So it's not trying to be more superhuman, more dangerous. It's the safest, best, fastest, cheapest, lightest, thinnest model ever, basically. And then OpenAI also did the same thing today. Okay, yeah. Oh, so Sol's out? Sol, yep. GPT-6, Sol. Sol. Sol. Cool. And then also Luna, but not Terra? Or I might have had that back. Okay. But new models. The model wars never cease to entertain. of course all that matters is what you do with them so uh send us some send us whatever you build send us whatever you play around with send us the hallucinations the good the bad i want to see it all thank you for watching tbpn we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m pacific leave us five stars on apple podcast and spotify sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com throw that flashbang tyler cosgro