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

31:26At the foundation of everything are those pillars I referenced above, Google's incredible models, unmatched infrastructure, and data advantage. Reed's discussion of personalizing AI mode using your personal data was compelling as well. Then you have a bunch of theoretical ideas that make for cool demo videos, but the actual productization that still functions in Google is on the search team. That team takes ideas that works and puts them in AI mode. So you can think of like every other product is just the farm team. This is basically only if you're looking at Google's Alphabet stock and you're trying to understand how AI is going to impact it, you can ignore Notebook LN and the Digi knockoff and all these other things and just focus on this.

32:09And it's like, do you believe they're going to figure out a way to monetize these sort of chat GPT style queries that are happening in Gemini right now? and it probably looks something like AI overview over time. Yeah, and also if you're a startup and you're worried about like getting rolled by Google and becoming like a Google feature, well, the threat is not that Google launches a directly competitive app and out competes you. That hasn't played out. Like they launched Google Circles and they weren't able to crush Facebook or anything like that. Yeah, Google. Or yeah, like, yeah, Yeah, any of these little startup killers where they're Google products, that's not really the dangerous area.

32:53The dangerous area is, will your customers and your users be able to solve the problem that they want just by Google search 2.0? Or like when Google search gets better, is that a threat to your business? Yeah, or if you're building an agent that's like, we're helping people book travel. It's like Google Flights is gonna get better. It's gonna get better, yeah. And so that's the real risk, I think. It's less that if it never makes sense to go - Google also had a Twitter competitor, Google Buzz. Wait, no, that was a chat thing, wasn't it? No. It was a Twitter competitor. Yeah, so like all these one-off things that don't make sense - There was a micro blogging and messaging tool developed by Google.

33:36No way. It replaced Google Wave. Oh my God, so many of these things. Yeah, they've launched in Sunset so many products. Anyway, AI mode looks a bit like ChatGPT. The real race for Google is to make search compelling enough that people don't just switch to ChatGPT for everything. To that end, another metric that likely matters is actual usage. Pichai's definition of the types of searches that are growing was very carefully delineated, but growth in general is certainly a good thing. If a feature drives AI mode, it may be a good candidate for the main search page. So one of the common refrains that came out of yesterday's keynote was how Google had just killed half of Silicon Valley startups.

34:17I'm not so sure, however. We've read enough Sir Techery at this point that we're predicting what he's going to say. First, it's clearer than ever to me that the only product that truly matters or functions at Google is search or functions. A lot of the demos we saw yesterday are likely to stay demos or at best be forgotten and eventually kill products that no one uses. Second, the degree to which so many of the demos yesterday depend on user volition actually kind of dampened. What's that? Getting a phone call? Google's calling us. Sundar, let's just bring him in the studio. Let's just talk to Sundar.

34:56Bring him in. What's going on with the XR glasses? We don't have Sundar. Would be a fun surprise guest. One down. We'll get him soon. We'll get him soon. Android is probably going to be the most important canvas for shipping a lot of these capabilities. and Google's XR glasses were pretty compelling. And in my opinion, had a UX much closer to what I envisioned for XR than Meta's Orion did. Interesting. Devices drive usage at scale, but that actually leaves a lot of room for startups to build software products that incorporate AI to solve problems that people didn't know they had. The challenge will be in reaching them, which is to say the startup problem is the same as ever.

35:33You got to get distribution. Here's the thing to me. It's like, does Google search and Gemini eventually merge? or do they stand as independent products? And so Google is kind of like maintaining search for people that basically boomers, who are just perpetually gonna go to the search box and search, and like, I'm gonna be in that bucket to some degree, I think everybody will still have. Yeah, for sure. It's so built in, they have so much distribution that it will continue to have usage. Meanwhile though, ChatGPT is just getting better and better at searching the internet, and it can be used for both things, and that will present a pretty interesting challenge if google's like okay we're competing with open ai and chat gpt but we're doing it in this two-pronged way and open ai is like we're just trying to make the best like you know basically like single uh you know uh search you know box plus button on the internet that can do everything yep i mean i think a lot of the decision between those two will come down to speed.

36:37So right now, if I want, let's see, like Tom Cruise age, Tom Cruise age, I just hit control T, and I'm in the search bar in Google Chrome, 62 years. Now, if I go to chat GPT, I have to go chat.com. I'm logged in Tom Cruise age and it's thinking searching the web it's searching the web it's searched three different websites tom cruise was born on july 3rd 62 as of today he's 62 years old so you see how much longer that took me to use chat gpt for something like silly like that or simple but there's a lot of things that you search for that where you're like i know that google will one shot this in five milliseconds.

37:24And I know that chat GPT will take too long. Also for some reason, I wound up running that against GPT 4.5. I think 4.0 is probably faster, but like when I went to chat.com 4.5 was just the one that was defaulted. Right. And so this is where we get into like the model router where if I land on, if I accidentally triggered that in 03, it would be doing like, it would be writing a hundred lines of code, you know? And so the model router needs to be like super fast and they need to figure out caching and they also need to figure out integration into like the search bar because even even on your phone it's usually faster to just open up uh open up a new uh safari window and then yeah and then the question is like does open ai need its own browser yeah right even for we you know arvind from perplexity is like very focused on the browser like right now even if i do this on my phone if i open up safari the search bar is always down at the bottom and I can just tap that and immediately start typing Tom Cruise's age.

38:24When I open up ChatGPT, I was looking at my image library. So now it's, I'm in image library mode. I have to go back. I have to go back to ChatGPT. I have a query that I didn't actually click finish on. So I have to delete all that to go. So all of a sudden I'm like into five, 10 seconds just to get a quick answer. And so I still route queries personally to Google when I when i want something super fast yeah anyway um do you remember that gemini started as bard oh yeah there's been like seven barred but there were there were other ones before that palm bard a poet traditionally one reciting epics and associated with a particular particular oral tradition yeah cool name uh i have a few other tough go for the winkle lie yeah zuck comes for them with the Facebook stuff.

39:16Now Google's coming for them with the Gemini branding. Gemini becomes synonymous with Google AI. And people are like, wait, where do I go to trade crypto? I never thought about that. It's the same name. I don't know how you could do that because they're both in technology companies. They're both tech companies. I get that they're in somewhat different areas. But we talked to Austin Allred. He had to rebrand Lambda School because of Lambda Labs, which is an AI data center company. I'm pretty sure. Because of Lambda Labs? Yeah, who's coming on the show on Friday, actually. Nice. Trademark wars. New segment on TBPN.

39:49I think it's Lambda Labs, but I'm not sure. Let's go through a quick. It was a different Lambda, which was a completely, it was not an education, but it was a tech company. And they were both tech companies, and so they had to rebrand. Yeah. Anyway. Let's go through a quick history. I have a history of Google cloning startups. So way back in the day, in 2004, they launched something called Orkut. Oh, yeah. Orkut. Orkut. It was a Brazilian acquisition. Yeah, so they got traction in Brazil and India. It was never truly global. Shut down in 2014. There was Lively, which was basically a second life, like 3D virtual world thing.

40:24Closed in less than six months. And then they had Buzz, which was trying to counter Twitter at the time. Had a bunch of backlash around privacy stuff. Google Plus was obviously the Facebook rival. plus uh and then they actually had uh tried they they tried to buy groupon for six billion and it failed and so they launched google offers this is like a whole other era fun story about google plus so uh i was one of like the best you the biggest users on google plus i just went like full send into it and was like i'm gonna figure out the social network kind of like you know figure out how to create circles create that and because of that really i got really dating yourself.

41:06I got, this is in college. I got verification. So I got a check mark, but that check mark translated, they ported it. Even though they shut down that my account was like check marked as like, Oh, you're like a serious influencer. Even though I had that 500. Did that transition into YouTube? Yeah. And so when I started the YouTube channel, I had, I got to a hundred followers on one, on a new account. And I was like, wait, my other account has a check mark. So I shut down the old account and moved it over to my personal account and had the check mark, which I could have gotten in like, it didn't actually do anything for the growth of the channel, but it was just like kind of a funny, funny anecdote.

41:43And I was like, I'm going to try this. And it was just a funny story. Anyway, let's move on to OpenAI acquiring IO and Ben Thompson's analysis there. But first, let's tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free, folks. Go to Figma.com, try their new products, websites, product. Try Buzz, too. Yeah, tons. Oh, I mean, the trademark's available now that Google's out of the Buzz game. The Buzz game. Figma's got it. Create and share on-brand assets instantly. Very good. Powerful. Go check it out.

42:18Also, go check out Vanta.com, automate compliance and manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Anyway, let's go on to IO. So let's do it. We already covered the Bloomberg article. We know the facts. $6.5 billion, all stock deal. Johnny Ive and his team over at IO get roughly 2 % of OpenAI as major incentive pay. And there was a lot of good commentary on the timeline about this, about how Apple's not really set up to comp someone a billion dollars.

42:56we looked at this with Tim Cook. He's making like, what, couple hundred million. And it's like, when you're talking about a trillion dollar company, executive compensation in the billions isn't actually that crazy, but OpenAI can offer that. John. Yes. You're going to be devastated, but Tim only made 74 million. Oh my God. That's brutal. It's like, he should have been a baseball player. I mean, he - He should have been a half decent basketball player. What do you think would have happened to Apple's market cap had they not dodged the tariffs. That would have been hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap erosion.

43:33It was already tumultuous for the company, but they were carved out the entire time. There was never any fear that it was going to happen. And that's entirely because of Tim Cook's negotiation. 2023 made 63 million. I genuinely feel like we need to take to the streets and start protesting in Cupertino. We should. Because we've seen this on public. You can backtest. The better that CEOs get paid, typically the better the companies do. And as an Apple shareholder, I want Tim Cook to be pulling down one B a year. And I think he'll be highly incentivized to grow the company. Okay. I have an idea. so greg abel he's 62 years old he just took over as ceo of warren buffett's berkshire hathaway yeah tim cook's 64 only two years older so what if tim cook steps down as ceo of apple starts a company gets acquired by open ai goes in 30 year run 30 year run generational run and he's like look it's just dollars and cents to me i can make more money over there i can 10x my comp He could 10X his comp by going to OpenAI.

44:48Yeah, he really could. Easily. He really could. Easily. I mean, yeah, that's the big question, right, with Johnny joining OpenAI. Six billion. It's like, who's the supply chain lord who's going to just really bring this thing into... If Tim Cook works, I mean, he's making what, 60 a year? He's not even cracking 75 mil a year. So he would have to work for 100 years to make what Johnny I've just made. I don't think he has another 100 years in him. 30. I would give him 30 solid years ahead of him in his career. That's not enough to get to 6 billion. He could maybe pull 2 billion. Well, to be clear, I think Johnny had investors in, in, in, it's all in Johnny's pocket, in my opinion.

45:29Yeah. He deserves it all. It was funny. I was looking yesterday, Johnny's like celebrity net worth tracker or whatever. They updated it in real time and we're like, he's a billionaire now. Yeah. and he wasn't just from working at Apple. It's brutal. He barely had 700 according to. It's a travesty. It's terrible. Anyway, let's go to Ben Thompson's analysis. He says they put out, OpenAI put out this nine minute and 21 second video of them complimenting each other, expressing love for San Francisco and announcing the new partnership. Ben Thompson says, it's a bit much to be honest, although it's beautifully shot and produced.

46:08I assume it was put together by Love From. Ives not included in the deal, but not accepting new clients design agency. I think the key segment from Ives' perspective is this. Sam Altman said, we both had a very strong shared vision. We maybe didn't know exactly where this was gonna go, but the direction of the force vector felt clear. Then this deeply shared sense of values about what technology should be, when technology has been really good, when it's gone wrong. Johnny Ives says, I mean, that was in a way one of the basis, I think, of one of the reasons Sam and I clicked was despite our wonderfully different journeys to this point, our motivations and values are completely the same.

46:50In my experience, if you're trying to have a sense of where you are going to end up, you shouldn't look at the technology. You should look at the people who are making the decisions and you should look at what drives, motivates, and look at values. I like that. That's a good take. Um, I've expressed what drives and motivates. I've expressed what drives and motivates him earlier this month in this excellent interview with Patrick Collison. And it was interesting because Johnny, I've, we haven't really heard from him in a few years and then boom, massive, uh, massive podcast with Patrick Collison just days before the acquisition.

47:26Yeah. Uh, on a media tour. I'll read, uh, Patrick's, uh, question. Sure. We're talking a lot about the purpose of design. That's not how he sounds. Okay. I'm not going to, I'm not going to do the accent, John, even though we both have Irish roots. I'm not going to, I'm not going to, I'm not going to do that. Just do a vanilla reading. Fine. Now it'll sound like you're doing Patrick Collison doing a Jordy Hayes impression, but that's fine. Yeah. Okay. So I'm doing Patrick Collison impersonating a technology podcaster. Yeah, that's great. You're talking a lot about the purpose of design and the effect that design has on the recipient, on the user, on the consumer, whatever the case is.

48:06There's widespread concern and speculation about the effects of smartphones and the Internet. It doesn't necessarily accord with just the smartphone, but on some of these products, on attention spans, and whether it has some adverse effect on kids or teens or who knows, maybe all of us, maybe the adults as well. There's questions over with AI, whether it changes how education works and cheating in school. all of these technologies that we create have this potential double-sidedness to them and so i guess as somebody who clearly takes seriously and thinks seriously about the full effects how do you think about possible harms and johnny i've says yeah i think there is why don't you do johnny impersonating an irish accent yeah no this is uh johnny i've doing a john coogan impression okay okay i'm excited yeah i think probably not anything that i can be more preoccupied or bothered than by what you just described.

48:58I think when you're innovating, of course, there will be unintended consequences. You hope that the majority will be pleasant surprises. Certain products that I've been very, very involved with, I think there were some unintended consequences that were far from pleasant. My issue is that even though there was no intention - You don't think Candy Crush is pleasant? You don't think candy crush whales? You don't think sports betting on your phone at the drop of a hat is awesome? That's 24-7? I think there still needs to be a responsibility and that weighs on me as you know heavily and yeah I mean obviously there are negative consequences but I think overall technology I think he might be alluding to when I made it possible to angel invest on a mobile I think he's sort of subtweeting me yeah party around basically took all these people in San Francisco who were hopeful hopelessly addicted to angel investing and made it accessible to them at all hours of the day.

49:52You didn't even have to send a wire transfer. You just got an invite and it was like Venmo. Yeah, ridiculous. It seems pretty clear that Ive is talking about the iPhone, says Ben Thompson, which is to say it sure seems like he is motivated not to simply build an AI device, but to actually diminish the iPhone's dominance in the user's life or even in the long run, kill it completely with tracks with the Wall Street Journal's reporting on their plans. They've been working on a device that will move consumers beyond screens according to people familiar with the matter. I mean, it feels like Her, right?

50:26I mean, Sam's posted about Her. They're very all-in on voice interfaces. This could be a Her device, right? Is that the most obvious thing that they would do? Such an interesting dynamic where it feels like sci-fi is dictating the product roadmaps of so many companies. Always has been. Always has been. I mean, Steve Jobs was always looking at like the Star Trek tablet and being like, let's make an iPad. There's nothing new. You gotta get ideas from somewhere. Jason Carman. Yeah. Jason Carman needs to make something. Save us. Understand that you're basically defining the product roadmaps of the biggest companies in the world.

51:05It's true. That's admittedly pretty thin gruel, says Ben Thompson, but it's in line with other rumors and more importantly from my perspective tracks with Ives expressed state sentiment. And it should be noted that this sentiment is a sentiment that Altman has expressed as well. He's tweeted a couple of times. People sacrifice actual happiness and actual accomplishment for short-term dopamine hits by posting and chasing likes slash RTs on FB slash Twitter back in 2013. Only 21 likes back then. Sam was struggling to post bangers. I think everything he posts now gets like 10 ,000 likes. It's so big.

51:43And then a year after OpenAI was founded, Sam Altman said, digital addiction is going to be one of the great mental health crises of our time i like i like my screen time john yeah i like it too i do email on my phone yeah it's productive in 2017 altman no it is funny because i do believe that this sort of ai companions have the potential to be some of the most addictive products in history totally and i believe that in general people will continue to to interact with them through screens devices etc yeah uh same allman in 2017 almost a decade ago now wrote i believe attention hacking is going to be the sugar epidemic of this generation oh sugar underrated though right sugar is potentially good Potentially good.

52:39I think it's, I've called it, I said it's a superfood. It's this amazing substance that gives you clean energy almost immediately. So maybe that's actually a seed oil. Maybe that's, maybe that's actually like a broader metaphor for attention hacking is that it feels good in the, it is bad at the extreme, but it is good in the right dosage. Yeah. Because pure sugar, when taken in athletic context, when you're working out at the right dosage with the right purities can be good. And it's not something that should just be completely removed from the diet, much like attention to technology. I can feel the changes in my own life.

53:17I can still wistfully remember when I had an attention span. My friends, young children don't even know that's something they should miss. I am angry and unhappy more often, but I channel it into productive change less often, instead chasing the dual dopamine hits like likes and outrage. That's interesting i feel like i feel like our generation's kids are doing fine like like because we're aware of like don't do the ipad thing i'll see my son spend hours building legos and like painting and drawing and spending like it seems like i think it helps that attention span i think it helps that adults are generally hyper addicted to their devices and want to prolong the time in which their children can live a life of freedom from that addiction right it's like at some point i'm sure my son will try a cigarette but just because heaters are lindy yeah but i'm gonna try to delay that for a very very long time right he's just he's just 65 being like my first my first uh it's always challenging with altman to know whether when or if he is talking his book says ben thompson as it were.

54:31But there is a record of long-running sentiments that might convince Ive that their motivations and values are completely the same. At the same time, there are certainly other motivations as well. Ive, for his part, just became a lot richer, at least on paper. Altman may or may not have diluted the non-profit share of OpenAI by making a big purchase with stock. This is kind of a theory that was going around about Reddit and how Reddit kind of went into Condé Nast and then was pulled out through a bunch of different stock grants. Sam and the original founders seemed like they realized this like Reddit was never going to be what it could be while a part of this legacy media company.

55:05Yeah, when you read the story of Reddit, it reads as very like almost like conspiratorial. It's this like really like 4D chess maneuver to get it out. And yet at the same time, like I'm like, yeah, I'm glad Reddit's not owned by Conde Nast. Like you guys did everyone a service. Like good job, Alexis Ohanian and Sam for pulling that company out, which was actually an innovative technology company. from like a dying legacy media company. Anyway, Altman may or may not have diluted the share. He's also sliding into the role occupied by his childhood idol, one Steve Jobs. So what's the strategic positioning?

55:43We got four minutes until our first guest. The larger question is what this means for OpenAI. On one hand, the angle here is obvious and fortuitously articulated by me just yesterday, says Ben Thompson, a little back bet. It has long been the case that the best way to bring products to the consumer market is via devices. And that seems truer than ever. Android is probably going to be the most important canvas for shipping a lot of Google's new capabilities. What makes ChatGPT so remarkable and OpenAI, the accidental consumer tech company, is that like Google two and a half decades ago, they have reached nearly a billion users almost entirely through word of mouth.

56:18The only distribution deal Apple has done or OpenAI has done is with Apple. More on this in a moment. This is exceptionally rare in my longstanding opinion is that the obvious way to capitalize on this position is to roll out advertising. Let's hear it for advertising. We love advertising. Speaking of advertising, go to linear.app. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product motor maps. MCP server, right? Yeah, they have a dedicated agent's product now that they rolled out yesterday.

56:52And Scott talked about it. Scott Wu from Cognition talked about it on the show and highly recommend going to check it out if you're wanting to actually unlock the power of agents in a systematic way. So Ben goes on to say, it is worth noting, however, that one challenge is trying to win in advertising is that you are in the end fighting on Google's turf, the same Google that demonstrated its incredible model and infrastructure prowess. Well, this is awkward and surely couldn't have been intentional or was it at IO. Yes, there are questions about Google's product chops. And I already think that OpenAI is the best in AI at product.

57:32And we talked to Kevin Wheel, who's doing product at OpenAI. Clearly incredible team over there and the products are fantastic. And they just added Johnny Ive. And yes, OpenAI has the advantage of building an advertising business from scratch, giving them more degrees of freedom than Google, which has to worry about cannibalization and disruption. But Google is also moving AI into search and the infrastructure the company has built out around advertising will take years and years to match. You can say the same thing about meta. And speaking about meta, speaking of meta, think about how CEO Mark Zuckerberg has framed the company's approach to AR and VR.

58:07This is Zuckerberg in a 2022 Stratechery interview about their partnership with Microsoft. But taking a step back. I think in addition to this strategic alignment, I also think there's a very deep philosophical, this is a deep philosophical alignment on the direction that we want the next generation of computing to go. My brief take on the history here is that every major computing platform there has been an open ecosystem that's focused on partnership and a more closed and integrated ecosystem. So with PC, Windows was the leading open ecosystem. And of course, Mac was the leading closed one on phones.

58:37It was Android and iOS. I think one of the things that's interesting in the history is that I don't think it's predetermined whether the open ecosystem or the closed one ends up being the primary ecosystem. And so he was pushing for an open metaverse. Implicit in Zuckerberg's answer is the assumption that the company they are competing with in the long run is Apple, the closed option. Another way to frame that contrast, however, is between modular Windows and Android and integrated Mac and iPhone. The integrated option, the Apple option, is monetized first and foremost through device sales. The modular option is modular in part because the underlying motivation of the operating system is to maximize reach, which in the case of Google means increasing the number of services on which to control search and serve ads.

59:19These framings are in reality a bit too limiting to fully articulate the various strategic puts and takes. Google, for example, is deeply integrating Google Android with Google AI in the cloud while continuing to lean on third parties to actually build the hardware. Indeed, one of my chief critiques of Apple's approach to AI is that by trying to do AI themselves. They are trying to compete with Google on Google's turf. Still, Google is, as Google does, focusing on being on as many devices as possible. We should close out here because we have our next guest joining us in just a minute. But he says, Zuckerberg assumes that Apple will be there in AR and VR.

59:53Should Altman assume they will be there in AI? To put it another way, if you're going to take on one tech giant directly and you're an AI company, isn't Apple a much more attractive target than Google. And if you think that that way, should your focus be on building a horizontal service that runs everywhere or on building a fully integrated offering that monetizes the high end through an experience that integrates hardware and software? And if you want to build the best possible integrated hardware and software experience, the team, IO, is a veritable all-star collection of Apple talent that extends far beyond IVE.

1:00:26The last one is a reasonable place to start. Very interesting. So everybody thinking that he's trying to kill Google and then goes for the jugular on on Apple. It's very interesting. I think Sam's going after everyone. Yeah, I think he wants it all and why not just find everything in energy in servers and chips? Well, we have Dan Shipper Welcome to the stream. How you doing Dan? How's it going? Excited to be here. I think fancy you guys Great to have you on. I've been wanting you to do this for a while And you've had a busy week. You have some some personal news at every, you're also at, you're at Anthropics event right now.

1:01:06Is that correct? Matt, Code with Claude. Yes, Anthropics event where they just dropped Claude Opus 4. This is amazing because we didn't get a chance to talk about Anthropics or Claude 4 on the show yet. And we have a perfect guest to talk about. I am your correspondent. Thank you. I'm reporting live. Can you kick us off with just a little bit of introduction on you for any of the fans who are watching who might not be familiar? And then we'll go into what the events. They'd have to be living under a cluster. They'd have to be living under a data center, but some people do. My name is Dan Schipper.

1:01:37I'm the co-founder and CEO of Every Publish Ideas and Applications at the Frontier of AI. So we have a daily newsletter. We write long-form essays about what's going on in AI. And then we also integrate software products. We bundle all together and sell it to the audience. Very cool. Yeah. And Jordi was describing you as like a Claude stan. You've been a fan of Claude for a long time. we've talked to some people in AI and they've said like you can just walk into a party and immediately clock like oh that's a chat gpt user oh that's a claude user uh is that true are you beating the allegations uh i would say um it's interesting i would say i used to be i think claude like three five sonnet was the first model where you're like oh my god this thing like actually gets me um but uh since 03 came out i would say 95 percent of my AI usage is in chat and also with their memory feature like fudge mp's memory it's incredible it's very sticky um i do think it's tough to have a friend with no working memory it's like yeah yeah i mean uh like concretize this a little bit more for me uh my experience with ai and llms is that i'm using them as as information retrieval agentic reporting deep research a ton i never just sit there and have a conversation.

1:02:57So if it's, if it's answering a little tersely, if it's dropping bullet points on me, I'm kind of fine with that. But when I talk to some people about the differences between Claude and OpenAI, a lot of it is in the subtleties of the language. And I just feel like as a consumer, maybe I care about that less, but do you think that's important? Does it matter to you? Am I missing out on something by not? I'm just like a very sensitive, emotional guy. So I want it to be nice to me you know but I also think to some degree even for like more business like straight ahead business use cases it's actually really helpful for it to have a little bit of that sensitivity for example something I use it for a lot is I'm having a management problem we report almost everything that we do at every in granola and it's really easy to take your transcript of a meeting and be like what happened here like why did why was our fight here like or you know an employees having a having a problem like how do I help you know that kind of thing and it sort of has a little bit of that radar that can that can really help you move through a lot of interpersonal situations that come up often okay so that's interesting well before we just go and and just uh into a much longer discussion and and talk about anthropics news why don't you talk about there's a couple things this week you had your own fundraise and it was a unique structure so why don't we kind of start there yeah we announced this week that we raised a little bit more money we've we previously had raised about 700k in 2020 And then we raised just now we announced a$2 million raise led by Reid Hoffman.

1:04:23But we did it in a weird structure that I'm like sort of tongue in cheek calling a SIF seed round. Basically, like Reid and Starting Line DC, who's another one of the investors, they committed up to$2 million. But we can pull it down when we need it. So we have not pulled down all of it. And I think that's a really nice structure for us because we're a media company. We also have a lot of software attached, but I want to maintain our ability to be weird and just have a VO. It's a creative playground where we make cool stuff. So this gives us enough money to experiment, but not so much that we're locked into a particular growth path.

1:04:56Yeah, are you thinking that, I mean, we saw this with OpenAI. They were a nonprofit, and then they wound up creating the most dominant consumer app of all time. They needed to spin that out. The parallel here is that you are building software tools, but you also are doing media. if one of those software tools takes off, all of a sudden, does the media become a marketing engine for that tool? Does the tool spin out? Are you thinking about it like incubation where there's a separate cap table, maybe investors ride along? What were those discussions like and how are you thinking about that? Well, didn't you guys already spin out?

1:05:29Oh, yeah. We did. We spin out Lex, which my every co-founder, Nathan, now runs as the CEO of that. And we raised a seed round from True Ventures for Lex. Oh, cool. Almost all the incubations that we have are actually their own separate LLCs. I think like in general, I fucking love having a writing business. And I want to keep the main thing, the main thing. And I think that we can build a really incredible universe of apps and other offerings around the writing business. I do think sometimes we will hopefully like run into opportunities that seem really massive and that can be like just really big independent businesses on their own.

1:06:08and yeah we have if that happens we have the ability to go and actually like further spin them out you know turn them into C Corp's have them go raise money all that kind of stuff so we have the optionality to do both cool all right well I mean there's a bunch of stuff to talk about why don't we why don't we as our official anthropic correspondent which which is the title that we're giving you obviously not related to the company I think we are gonna have some folks from Anthropic on next week, which I'm excited. Yeah. So the, the, the headline in wired is Anthropic's new model excels at reasoning and planning and has Pokemon skills to prove it.

1:06:45Uh, Claude for Opus and Claude Sonnet four can remember over long periods of time, a capability that's helpful at Pokemon and other tasks that require an ability to stay on track. So, uh, what was most exciting? Where, where should we start first with understanding the progress at Anthropic? So first of all, you've got to read the every headline and the subhead. Every time one of these models drops, we do a vibe check. So basically we get access to these models hands-on before they come out. And then we use them hands-on for the daily tasks that we're doing for build software and make writing.

1:07:19And then we give you basically hands-on review of like how every part of the model works. What I found is it's a piece of coding. It really runs autonomously for a long time on like complex prs that were not like not possible with three sevens on it and are probably a little bit beyond the reach of like gemini 2.5 and o3 in particular in quad code it's fucking awesome um and so i do think that that's a it's a sort of game changer if you're if you're doing any kind of development work um for writing and editing i still real quick quick, what are the kind of market implications of Claude Code in terms of the broader developer tooling ecosystem?

1:08:07We've seen cursors developing their own models, Windsurf joining OpenAI, there's a lot happening, but do you think that Claude Code is something that could have billions of ARR independently? Or what's your read on how it's going to evolve? That's a good question. I do think that the landscape is starting to consolidate a little bit. And with each model advance, the extra intelligence matters less and less. So I think you'll see people, you know, instead of jumping, every time there's a new model release, instead of jumping and turning their entire stack from the old models the new one i think you'll see people can start to stick a little bit more in the ecosystems that they've chosen um it's we're entering a little bit of a different era of that of the race and i think it'll be a little bit more difficult for anthropic to be like it's totally independent lab and go up against not only open ai but also google assuming apple at some point gets their shit together microsoft whatever um but i i really think that they have a very very strong play with developers here um they've three five sonnet and three seven sonnet are like superb coding models three seven Amazon is a little bit overeager, so it's probably not as good as Gemini 2.5 Pro, but it's still really up there with the best coding models.

1:09:29I think Cloud Code is one of the best coding experiences, like AI-first coding experiences. It's also just very different from like a Cursor or a Windsurf, where those are basically text editors with AI on the side, and Cloud Code is a command line interface that's like you're just directly interfacing with the with the ai and that's it's it's just a different experience it's intended to be an assistant and agent rather than like uh chat yeah uh do we have any idea of where these new models uh claude four specifically sit relative to the open ai models is this because i remember four five came out and they didn't give it the gpt5 name but it did seem like it was trained on an order of magnitude more compute.

1:10:16And so this is kind of where the pre-training wall discussion came from. But is it fair to think about Claude 4 as a GPT 4.5 class model in terms of kind of the scope and the size of the model? Or do they give any indication as to the vectors that they're pulling on? We've seen Facebook with Meta, Llama, Behemoth is going for this massive context window, these trillions of token parameters. There's a whole bunch of different threads that the different foundation model companies are pulling on. What seems to be their underlying motivation or what do they seem focused on in terms of optimizing towards?

1:11:04So it's a little hard to tell, at least for me, because I didn't get access to any kind of model card before launch. And I've honestly just been running around at the event and stuff. So if there are actual numbers and stuff, definitely go look them up. I don't know for sure. On the blog post, they mostly just focused on the software engineering SWE bench and the different benchmarks around graduate level reasoning, agentic tool use, multilingual Q &A, visual reasoning. And the stats are impressive, but not a huge jump here. there's a jump on agent decoding, but Claude Sonnet 3.7 actually outperforms in visual reasoning by like a half a percent, not much, but it's one of these interesting things where it feels like we're increasingly in the era of trade-offs around models.

1:11:55And we might be seeing more fragmentation around a really great, we talked to some founders who are building super specified LLMs just for JSON decoding or just for translation or just for profanity filtering. and then they run the inference on a consumer-grade GPU because it's so narrowly defined, still using the transformer architecture, but just much more narrow. And so I'm wondering if that's the future that we're going to see at Anthropic is they're dominating in code, they're very popular with developers and they're going to go after a few other areas, but they're probably going to stay out of a few other battlegrounds.

1:12:28I do think that's an astute point. Sometimes you do see trade-offs and so like 3.7 Sonic, for example, was a better programmer than 3.5 Sonic, but it was like way more artistic. It's interesting. But to answer your previous question, going back to the difference between GBT 4.5 and Opus, Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, it's a little bit apples to oranges because 4.5 is just a base model. I mean, it's in construction tune, but it's not a reasoning model. And Opus is both. They can go back and forth between being a base model and being a reasoning model. And that is like this sort of hybrid thing that I think all of the model providers are starting to move into.

1:13:15But I think SANA has, Anthropic has done it first and it's really good. It makes a big difference when it both can like do the kind of, you know, chain of thought reasoning that's like good for map groups and fin coding. And it also has a little bit of a vibe. So, you know, like a GPD 4.5, which is just really good at writing and really get it like creative things cool how do you uh how do you kind of navigate and figure out what's real when everybody in ai is deeply conflicted in different ways whether they're sort of like secretly an advisor to this lab or you know happen to invest in the series b of this one or you know everybody's sort of talking their book i mean obviously i just got advisor shares in open AI.

1:14:02It just got 1%. That's it. I'm not conflicted. It's just like a point. Yeah. You got a point. Careful, John. People are going to believe that. Every time we joke, every time we joke around, somebody takes it a hundred percent as fact. No, but obviously the immediate way to figure out what's real and what's not is just to use the new products and models yourself. But I'm curious how you navigate it as somebody who's like trying to provide you know really really you know precise coverage of of everything in real time so first of all if anyone wants to throw me some anthropic or open ai stock like i'm open the answer open um but i think um yeah i think that's a really good question um i think i i honestly think most of the benchmarks are kind of bullshit and you can train the benchmarks and we see that with llama where like and we'll put out the benchmarks but it's not a good model um that's why we do vibe checks um so when we launch new models we're using them hands-on for the tasks that we do every day and And I think that's why it's really valuable to have every the media company and every the incubator startup studio in the same organization, because I'm literally just going and hanging out with here and who runs for which is our email assistant or Danny who runs far, which is our AI content automation product.

1:15:17And we're using it to ship features or to make better writing or to do all the things that we do every day. And so I can get a pretty good sense of just like the vibe or the flavor of a model from using it myself. And I think that's going to be the best. I think that's going to be the best way to tell them it's any good. What was your reaction to Google I.O.? What was the single thing that stood out to you? So I was at Build. I did a really fun interview with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott and then flew right from Build to Code with Claude. But Alex Duffy is another one of our writers and leads AI training for us.

1:15:56And he was at Google I.O. And so he would have a better response as to like, what is the one thing, but I do know he was like, he was like kind of in tears in our discord and was like, this is the future. And I was, and so, you know, I think that they've got something cool going on. I think he's really excited about they're pushing forward on a lot of different parts of the ecosystem all at once and they're moving super fast. And he seemed really psyched about it. Awesome. What about the products that Anthropic hasn't launched? We talked about the specialization a little bit. And I remember, so the big AI product that really grabbed me from Google I.O.

1:16:36was VO3. And obviously, Google has an immense advantage with the YouTube data set there. And the results have just been fantastic. And I've been fighting tooth and nail to get more VO3 credits because it's so much fun. and Anthropic, it feels like they've been potentially behind the ball on image generation. Is that just not a focus for them? Do you think that's because of safety concerns, since obviously that runs very deep in the culture at Anthropic, or do you think it's just more of a business case that the coding market is much more lucrative than the image generation market and so just focus more wood behind fewer arrows it's your question i honestly don't know the history of anthropics relationship with coding model as with models other than like they just don't have one um and i don't know why i do think it seems like they're really going hard after the kind of agentic coding market and i think it's a really valuable thing that they can live in um also say just generally like mike krieger is their chief product officer and like he knows of shit um and so i think they'll probably have some yeah he knows the thing too about images yeah yeah um so i assume they'll have some really cool stuff on the more like consumer product side coming soon i think we're getting the zoom air i'm uh i'm searching 03 right now for anthropics offering i don't think that they have any uh any dan down models and i don't think they Dan down.

1:18:13Dan down. Bring it back. Do you think there's a widespread cyber attack again? Probably. Because X is really struggling. They know who we talked to earlier this morning. They know. They do. They figured it out. We have a secret guest that will be released later. They're on to us. But O3 is cooking. I mean, I don't know if it's writing code yet, but it's definitely written. Look at this. it's like I just asked it I just asked it has Anthropic shelved any any models and it's like searching the web everywhere but it is it is a tougher it is a tougher question for 03 because I'm asking for the absence of evidence not not I'm asking for it to find the absence of a model not the not the presence of a model and so it's very easy to search does does Claude have a coding model and it can just search Anthropic code and find the first result and return that to me but it's very difficult to find a null and say, okay, I searched the entire web and I couldn't find anything.

1:19:14Therefore, Anthropic does not have a video model. But yes, I believe Anthropic scrapped. Maybe it was a text-to-speech engine, something like 11 Labs competitor. This is so brutal. What you got? So I went to try to ask Claude if why doesn't Claude have an image generation model and the signup flow couldn't be more opposite of OpenAI. I've just been, I created a new account with my TBPN email and it took me, there was, I mean, Nikita would probably have a heart attack. I mean, it was like 20 individual steps of approving this and approving that. But it says, Anthropic hasn't publicly released a dedicated image generation model, strategic focus, technical and safety considerations, resource allocation market positioning so kind of everything that dan said um just uh it's you know it does make sense and in a way to just say hey this isn't strategically critical for us we're going to try to you know focus on what we're really good at which is coding it's great um well we have tj coming in for the second time i'm very excited for that yeah did we fully lose dan i think we did let's just move on to some some some news let's talk about um the uh i mean there's plenty of timeline we can go dan if you're listening thank you for coming on yeah we appreciate the conversation and uh always welcome this is the future we have ai that can one shot build you zoom buddy but it won't work but zoom is still gonna go the internet will still fail constantly Anyway, I do think it's fun that...

1:20:55He says his phone overheated. He was just going so hard on corresponding. Wow, yeah. Honestly, as a technologist, the only time you should put down your devices on a daily basis is if they're overheating. You need to be going that hard that your phone overheats. You need to be podcasting so hard. You need to be live streaming video, doing spreadsheets, coding on your phone. Thank you for leaving it all on the field. You're an absolute dog. We will see you again soon. Let's do some timeline. I think it's fun that Anthropik's doing Pokemon because Pokemon's such an iconic game, and it lends itself to, like, you can watch the full stream of Claude play Pokemon, and it is this interesting challenge that it takes a long time.

1:21:44They need to think about the different reward functions and all the different steps that you have to take. I was playing Pokemon on the Chromatic, Palmer Luckey's new Game Boy. And it's actually really hard because at a certain point, you get to a place where you just kind of have to go farm XP and like level up your Pokemon evenly before you can go beat the boss. Like you can't just constantly be going forward. You actually have to plan out your attack a little bit. It's not the simplest game. So impressive that they're able to play it for what, 24 hours at a time. Anyway, let's go through some timeline.

1:22:15We'll get to Elon Musk later. There's a piece we got to put in the truth zone, but it's going to take more than seven minutes. So let's talk about OpenAI. They committed to a giant UAE data center in global expansion. This is Stargate UAE. We'd love to see it. They're partnering with G42 to build a one gigawatt AI data center in Abu Dhabi. It's the first large scale project outside of the US. Stargate UAE is just cooking. He's on a tear. I cannot wait to have the opportunity to have... I want him on the show. Him on the show. I want him on the show so badly. G42 will fund the construction. OpenAI and Oracle will operate the data center.

1:22:55SoftBank, NVIDIA, and Cisco are also partners in the project. The Koretsu of AI is coming together. Another$100 billion for NVIDIA. So the UAE is trying to become one of the biggest funders of AI companies' infrastructure and build their own AI factory. The first 200 megawatt chunk of the data center is due to be completed by the end of 2026. The thing that's interesting here is I guess they're having to match the investment that they do abroad. Yeah, that was interesting. It's a very interesting structure. It seems like a good deal. I'm very bullish on it. They're doing deals. That's great. Strava raised at a valuation north of$2 billion.

1:23:37Let's give it up. This is fascinating. I have to ask, what are they running from? What are they running from? Maybe they're running from, they could very well be running from Zach Pogrob. who is in some ways coming for them. They're running from not having generational wealth by getting liquidity at a multi-billion dollar valuation. So congrats to the founders. Running from not having. Yeah, it took me a second. Sequoia is in the deal. And they raised some debt. Let's give it up for leverage. They also acquired the Breakaway, a cycling training app, marking its second acquisition in two months.

1:24:11They had more than 150 million users and it was approaching 500 million in annual recurring revenue. That's good. Let's give a moment of silence for the VCs that passed on the seed in the A because it seems like running. I get a lot of people do it. How big can this be? How big can this thing be? Easy critique. Easy critique. How big can this be? $500 million in annual recurring revenue. They showed you. Got them. Showed them. Turns out a lot of people are running from things. Strava lets users whom it calls athletes, in quotes, Wall Street Journal, putting their term in the truth zone. hey runners are athletes in some context yes they're running down a gridiron maybe uh share activities with friends and across dozens of sports i've been by the way i've been avoiding we had rob mower yeah co-founder of human lab it's just more more i always he even texted me i i botch his name every time uh rob uh i've been avoiding a run with rob oh yeah for years now we live uh close by runner he's gonna smoke he's an absolutely insane athlete oh and uh i just always end up busy how's he uh how's he on the how's he on the bench press is he repping two plates because maybe you could give him a run for his money over there oh big dog show him how it's done good potentially do that i can go back to back huberman bench three plates and they're just I can see Rob just secretly repping three plates.

1:25:41Just demolishing us. Anyway, let's go through some timeline. Jenny says, glasses won't win. Earpiece with a tiny camera will. I don't know about that. What do you think? I think I just would like a camera. Nostril. I'd love to put a nostril camera in that just sort of mounts to my nose and just comes out right here. No one's talking about nasal computing. Nasal computing. Nasal computing interfaces. That's the final frontier. for for guys like us that don't want to chip yeah the nasal passageway is a great place to put a computer i mean there's probably so many different applications you could have little fans in there that accelerate the airflow in so you're getting more oxygen in your blood johnson loves it hyperbaric chamber for your body yeah whoop on the wrist but we typically have watches on our wrist yes yes and so whoop on the nose whoop in the nose or a ring in the nose or what about what are those septum piercing

1:26:42an aura septum piercing oh my god oh that's insane ai ai generating right now the the nasal nasal aura ring that's insane uh anna says uh we're in the or anna says we're in the good old days In the beginning of the movie with the overly saturated colors and the smiles and laughter, your future is being written by about six people competing to well their ideal civilization into existence. Record freeze frame, record scratch. Hi, Anna here. You're probably wondering how I got here. Yeah, it does feel like it's a monumental time. It's an amazing time to be a technology podcaster. Sam Jensen, Elon, Satya, Zuck.

1:27:29Yeah. Yeah. Accelerate Harder says this blog post is styled like a cross between a wedding announcement and a memorial webpage. It is a very funny photo. It is black and white. And the font choice is something that we haven't seen from OpenAI or Apple before. They're boys, though. They're just guys being dudes. Anyway, we got a couple other posts, but I think TJ's here. So should we just bring in TJ and start breaking down the news? Let's do it. Let's bring him in. Welcome to the stream, TJ. How you doing? He's getting the band back together. He's getting the band back together. Let's go. Congratulations.

1:28:11They're back. Let's go. Keep it going. Keep it going. Two minutes of this. And I have a microphone. I've made a real upgrade here. Oh, you're ready to podcast. I love that you're ready. Big podcast guy. Yeah, you went all in. I love it. Big podcast guy. We turned you. Great to have you here. You went from zero to 100. It's great to be back. Yeah. Give us the news. What's the announcement? What does this company do? I saw the announcement. Bunch of mumbo jumbo. Break it down for me. So the company is called General Medicine. We launched today in all 50 states, so anyone in the U.S. can sign up and use the service.

1:28:47And the way we think about it is a healthcare store where you can get anything you need in healthcare. We actually talked about some of these themes a bit a couple weeks back. But our general belief is that you should be able to shop healthcare like you shop everything else. And so that means, you know, if you have, if you know exactly what you need, like, you know, you want a certain set of labs or, you know, you need a colonoscopy or you're having kind of ongoing shoulder pain is an issue I've had that I use the service for. You can literally search for that problem, fill out a relatively straightforward set of questions and then consult with a clinician.

1:29:24and if what you need is an in-person visit or in-person care or you need to get imaging or any of that done we make it super seamless to do that and I think the probably the most novel thing about the product experience is that you can see personalized insurance pricing for any provider prior to deciding where to get that service so for my shoulder pain example I needed to go get a follow-up x-ray and the difference in price between getting the x-ray done in Park City versus Salt Lake was$100 versus$500 with my insurance. Wow. Which before when you're making that decision. Same insurance. Same insurance.

1:30:00Massive difference in pricing. Same x-ray. Same actual kind of medical group. They're both kind of intermountain facilities, but a pretty big variance in the actual out-of-pocket. Presumably even the same x-ray device, like the same technology. Yeah, all the same. I think people are making this decision every day, but they literally have no idea yeah well there's any sort of differential yeah so so the thing that stood out to me is uh when you land on generalmedicine.co you see pricing without insurance and that seems uh you know super intentional because you want to just enable people to not one just like speed to care right there's like certain instances where you're like i need to solve this problem as fast as possible i don't want to deal with worrying about in network out network what all that um and then And there's also instances where something can cost you more by going through insurance.

1:30:53That's correct, right? I remember something was going viral on X probably a month ago where somebody like, the ambulance was much more expensive because they had insurance, where if they were just uninsured, it was going to cost less. So can you talk about the way that kind of pricing dynamic works and why you guys decided to kind of lead with showing people that, hey, you can just kind of immediately get these services regardless of your current insurance situation? Yeah, I think probably a useful anecdote is when we built a very similar experience in pharmacy, when you go to kind of Amazon pharmacy now, you can see cash and insurance kind of head to head when you're making a purchase decision.

1:31:38We ended up with a significant amount of folks that were just using cash because either it was cheaper, which I'd say a quarter of the time, it was literally cheaper to just not use their insurance just to pay cash. And then a quarter of the time, it was moderately more expensive. Instead of 15 bucks, it was 20 or 20, it was 30, but you didn't have to deal with all of the obnoxiousness of using your insurance, right? There was no prior authorizations and to deal with the fact that it was too soon to fill the prescription, like all these sort of sad paths that exist as a byproduct of insurance.

1:32:07I think we'll see a similar dynamic here to your point where sometimes it'll literally be cheaper. And that will happen, I think, a lot more than people would think. And then sometimes it's slightly more expensive to use cash, but it just is less annoying to deal with having to get it reimbursed and to deal with the upfront prior auths and all those things. And we think that'll be a, I don't know what the right proportion will be for this business, but I think it'll be a much higher percentage than people would assume. How do you think about the continuum of medical services? Because I'm just, I'm thinking about the shoulder injury.

1:32:38Obviously, there's sometimes when you need an x-ray and you need insurance to pay for that. Sometimes you just need to rest. Sometimes part of health is maybe going to the gym or being on a diet. Or if you're having problems with sleep, you could need a prescription drug or you could just need some melatonin. And so what is the ideal front end to health? I mean, I imagine people will go to ChatGPT. They go to WebMD. They ask their friends. Sometimes they go to their doctor prematurely and the doctor just says, hey, just, you know, stop eating so much or hit the gym or something like that. But what is the how will this change?

1:33:15And then how do you plan on on being a part of that front end to medicine? I mean, I think the single biggest change here is trying to move healthcare to a much more simple and straightforward transactional experience where you can actually transact in the same ways that you transact in retail. I think if you think about just the overarching kind of journey for someone dealing with a condition or dealing with some symptoms, they don't know what condition they have. I think the behavior will be similar to what it is today, which is today they're going to Google and constantly searching for things and trying to figure out what's going on.

1:33:50And I think a bunch of that volume will move to chat GPT and other foundation models where it's easy to go from symptom to a likely diagnosis. I think the problem we solve is post that diagnosis or post having a sense of what your problem is and being able to quickly get what you need. Like you might need an X-ray, you might need labs, you might need an intervention in person. We make that really seamless. You can transact with us in a normal way. And so I think that is the sort of novel thing about what we're doing is turning healthcare into really a product catalog with super crisp pricing up front.

1:34:25What's the business model going to be? I think the right mental model is a combination of a first party and third party marketplace. So we do have our own medical group. We have our own doctors on staff. We will use them over time for things that are more and more complex where it's not as easy to know kind of right away exactly what you need. And so you're helping someone navigate that ambiguity. And then we both have a set of third party providers that are deeply integrated, mostly specialists, where if you need an immediate specialist consult, we can provide that. And then you can literally request to see any provider.

1:34:58It doesn't matter if we have a relationship with them or not. We can still make that referral, make it. We will literally book the appointment for you. And we'll show you the again, we'll show you like where the best option is for you based on price, quality, whatever things you care about. And in the third party sense, it obviously won't be as simple as a traditional marketplace from a monetization standpoint, but it will be of that ilk, right? Of that flavor of a kind of traditional first party, third party marketplace. Did you guys have an urge to slap an LLM on this thing? I know it's notably absent from the homepage.

1:35:31We're throwing it back. Just like my cars, we're like, yeah, we're throwing it back to school. I'm curious if you, you must've gotten a bunch of pitches from people being like, hey, a lot of people are using ChatGPT to diagnose conditions. We're going to make a better version of that. To me, it doesn't feel super investable just because ChatGPT probably already has full access to PubMed and a bunch of other resources. But yeah, was that a pretty intentional decision to kind of like leave off the site and let people kind of figure out what they need wherever, whether it's Google or WebMD or family, friends, another doctor, et cetera, and then just be the place where they kind of take action?

1:36:15Yeah, that was definitely intentional and definitely something we constantly debate. Again, I think the place that ChatGPT and the other foundation models aren't going to go is the stuff we're doing, right, to go from likely diagnosis to actually transacting. And I think we'll see how it plays out. I'm a little skeptical that dedicated kind of doctor llms will win against the chat gpts of the world we're probably effectively placing a bet here that uh the chat gpts of the world will kind of sweep up that use case for the most part we could be wrong on that for sure i mean i think there's a bunch yeah you can imagine a world where general medicine is like hey you you know we we think you here's like our read of the situation based on the picture you uploaded or the symptoms you're having here's how you take action and actually talk to a specialist to like verify you know actually get a get an expert involved that's not just you know predicting the next token totally i mean i think again the right frame here is retail right you're already seeing that exact flow for categories that have this clear kind of product catalog and transactability and doesn't exist in healthcare i think we'll have some version of that kind of chat with us and figure out what's going on to help you navigate our store over time but that's not the bet we're placing the bet we're placing is that But it's the transaction that the customer ultimately needs and that we can create a very novel experience.

1:37:38You guys launched in all 50 states. How different is that than the early PillPack days? I imagine that was a kind of a different go-to-market motion. Yeah, for better or worse, it's almost the same. PillPack took us about 12 months to launch. and we were in 32 states, I think, at launch and then chipped away at the tail over like six to nine months, I think, if I recall. And this we're now, I don't know, 16, 18 months in and we're launching in all 50 states. So on the kind of, from a time and availability standpoint, actually super similar. Can you take me through some of the history of other attempts in this category?

1:38:18I remember using ZocDoc once to find a doctor. I used wellness effects once to get some labs done. There's a few different approaches that have been tried in kind of creating the front end, the front door to medicine. It still feels like one hasn't become dominant. There's a lot of point solutions. Like if you want hair treatment, you go to hair.com or something. You want compounded erectile dysfunction medicine with GLP-1s in it. You can go to a different website for that. It probably won't be part of our selection. We debated it. I think we're going to leave it out for now. I want just the cocktail.

1:39:04Cocktailmedicine.com. Can I get four in one? Testosterone, creatine. I want some protein in there. So throw a 20 milligram Adderall XR in there and then mail that to me, compounded. And yeah, just don't, I'll pay in Cardano actually. Yeah, exactly. BNPL. BNPL with Cardano. Yeah, that's great. But yeah, take me through some of the history. You don't need to speak specifically about specific companies, but just the different approaches that have been tried. What worked? What didn't? Why have you landed on, and what have you learned that led you to this particular approach? Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of vectors there, right?

1:39:42I think the initial thinking for folks trying to build similar stuff was that you'd start in one vertical and go horizontal over time. That's sort of the Amazon playbook starting in books and then adding categories kind of as there's demand and you have incremental customer demand. I think we observed that and have not seen evidence that that approach is successful. And I think one really different thing about health care is that oftentimes you actually don't know what you need, right, when you're showing up. And so if you only serve one specific thing and you only have one intervention for that thing, it actually doesn't really serve the customer need in the way that they ultimately want.

1:40:20I think if you compare it to kind of booking services with like 3P provider search and you can book an appointment on the site, the thing that we've observed there is that you end up with this selection bias towards providers that have a bunch of availability rather than the best provider for the customer. and so we're not requiring any level of integration to get you an appointment and get you pricing for any provider so we don't suffer from that kind of same selection bias we're effectively ambivalent who you want to go see and we can help you figure out who the right person is so we've sort of learned from observing that as well and i think the last point i'd make is that um it's novel to have both first party and third party integrated as a seamless thing that's novel outside of uh Certainly outside of health, you know, in health care, it's not as novel outside of health care.

1:41:10But by doing that, it allows you to offer a comprehensive experience and ultimately make it super seamless for the for the customer. Yeah. Have there been developments on the legislative side that have allowed this to exist now? I remember there were some telemedicine rule changes that happened in COVID and kind of stuck around that kind of created a boom there maybe. but could you have built this 10 years ago? I think there's probably two main things that have made this the right time to build this business. The first is that patient data is much more accessible. So something novel about the customer experience is when you sign up and you give us very basic demographics, we can go pull your insurance information and pull your full med history and medical record and repopulate everything in your profile and these flows.

1:42:01That wouldn't have been possible a handful of years ago, and that was due to regulatory changes that required companies to open up this data. And the second is the pricing would not have been possible to do in the ways we're doing it without LLMs because we're effectively reading your full coverage of benefits and then mapping that to the service that you need and then figuring out where you are in a deductible. All of that would not have been buildable without the current version of LLMs. And so we're not exposing that in like an AI sense, but it does power how we're able to back into what your pricing ultimately is.

1:42:34That makes a ton of sense. Yeah, it does feel like there's huge opportunity for companies that are essentially driven by enterprise AI or AI internal behind the scenes, but they don't just need to surface that. You don't need to create another text box for someone to chat with. Totally. That seems like a very deliberate decision, but still uniquely enabled. Yeah, and if somebody can create the AI doctor that allows you to have a telemedicine visit and you guys are kind of the front end for getting expert care, you could just plug that in. You don't even necessarily have to develop it. I don't know how familiar you are with how the doctor's office is changing, but there was this drumbeat for years in the deep learning community about stop training radiologists, deep learning neural networks focused on image recognition will be able to do it at a superhuman level very very quickly now we're seeing google vo3 generate hollywood level cinematography that's pretty generate tj parker going on a thousand podcasts in one day i mean it's really really good and so actually not real sorry guys yeah yeah yeah but i mean when i see the advances in image processing and generative AI with regard to image, I feel like there has to be a similar progress happening in the image processing of self-driving cars.

1:44:00So when I see the chat GPT Studio Ghibli moment happen, that advances my timeline to a self-driving car. It also should advance my timeline to take a picture of this mole and tell me if it's cancerous. But is that happening? Or are these separate paths in the tech tree? Or are there just barriers to actual adoption in the medical community? Or are there job displacement fears? What's actually going on over there in the doctor's office? Yeah, it's for sure happening. And I think they're as effective as you would imagine they are. I think probably the biggest difference in healthcare, and I'm sure it's obvious is that you still have to get the sign off of the doc.

1:44:43And there's still a bunch of regulatory overhang that is required to get fully to a diagnosis. And certainly at this point to an intervention, whether that's a prescription or some other intervention, but I think the enablement and the efficiency is showing up. And I think that'll continue to continue to happen. Um, you're now you're not a chat GPT rapper. You're leveraging LLMs though. Are you a fax machine rapper? Uh, we have definitely, we will always be a fax machine rapper. I mean, I bet, I bet that we spent like a third of our dev resources at Popac for like three years on fax ish stuff.

1:45:20Wow. It's really, it's really quite stunning. Let's give it up for the fax machine. One of the greatest ever. Uh, but I mean, I imagine that there has to have been like a B2B SaaS company that created like a really great API around fax machines in the last decade. Has that happened? Are you just standing on the shoulders of giants or are you writing fax machine in a ROP code? We don't even do a build it or buy it. We just always build it. If it's fax, we're building. Yeah, I imagine you're hiring CUDA engineers to develop custom parallel. Yeah, part of the 30 plus million is going to, you know, just setting up, there's a JV with the UAE, I'm sure.

1:45:59Yeah, there's a whole, Yeah, special vector of engineers that will only work on fax machines. We have a lock on that talent pool. That's great. I want to talk about go to market. Oh, sorry, but yeah. Okay, please. One more question here and then I want to take it another direction. Yeah, so I mean, obviously it's important to drive folks to this. Give us the plug. How can people get started? But then what's the actual marketing rollout? Are there partnerships that drive adoption? Am I going to be seeing flyers for your service when I walk into a doctor's office or seeing Google ads? Like how do you actually plan on getting customers?

1:46:36Yeah, I think this arc will probably end up following the Popac arc as well. We're very much a DTC business today and we intend to stay there for a while. And so I think if you're searching for any of the things that we offer, we'll show up in those search results like any other retail experience. So we'll get quite a bit of demand there. We'll do all the normal kind of DTC tactics to drive awareness and demand. So I think if you can, it's an influencer partnership. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Really get all the, all the key influencers. Yeah. A lot of, a lot, a lot of stunts, a lot of blimps, a lot of stunts, a lot of tick to sky writing.

1:47:11Yep, exactly. Uh, but I think if you, if you zoom out and look at the pill pack journey, by the time that I left that business, two thirds of our business was B2B partnerships and B2B driven. Sure. Um, but we feel like to build a novel and great customer experience, you have to start by marketing to the end consumers. So we're doing that again here, but we would expect partners over time to help drive demand yeah i give it two years till andy jassy is calling you daily trying to trying to get the band back together again in amazon um i got i wanted to go a different direction uh and get an update on on the kind of the fallout from the drug pricing executive order what what's your kind of updated thinking there it was only last monday feels like it feels like a month ago yeah it does yeah i don't know if i've seen anything substantive over the last week um yeah i'd say my take is still roughly my take but i've not seen any evidence that supports it any more than i had a week ago so hard to say uh should we spack naito uh engineering spacks are back spacks are back much much higher margin business for sure Yeah, Naito Engineering is family-owned.

1:48:21It started in the 50s, car restoration, you know, engineering business that TJ is a big fan of. He's wearing a hat. So I had to ask. Since BACs are back, you know, potentially an opportunity there. My plug is that I produced a documentary about Naito, and it's coming out in the fall. So keep an eye out. We'll have to hop back on TBPN to talk about our documentary. Yeah, I think I saw maybe – was there a trailer that already dropped? yeah that's cool i love that you're mixing you know hyper capitalism and you know just like post exit post economic you know documentary producing you know very few can do both yeah and naito is not related to the the car garage that you're involved in is that right that is yeah it's separate that is my car storage business which is the car business yeah cool that's called warehouse That's my other plug park city house.

1:49:15There we go. So house meets like car storage. It's a cool, cool concept. Is there a track or where do people take the cars once they're stored there? We just go like, we go on weekly drives. So there's a bunch of places to drive outside of park city. And then there's like a simulators restaurant bar, kind of social lounge, that kind of thing. So kind of half social, half car enthusiast stuff. Yeah. Uh, I mean very quickly just on the news, cause everyone's talking about it. the Johnny Ive going from Apple to open AI. Nikita was saying it's 100 % due to Apple's compensation structure. They can't pay Johnny$10 billion.

1:49:53And you said it's 100 % the right take, but why can't they? It seems like at this point, maybe they should be paying Tim Cook more. We've been joking about it. He only makes 70 million, 60 million a year. And yet he was able to navigate the tariff like war pretty adroitly. It seemed like he probably saved Apple from a$300 billion market cap hit during that fiasco. He doesn't really get to take a slice of that. Is this something that companies should be like set up for going forward? Or is this just a unique dynamic of the private markets? Like what's actually going on here? Yeah, I think it's a fundamental flaw of these large companies is that they're designed to reward generalists for the most part.

1:50:39And there's very little differentiation available on comp. Even if you're at a pretty senior level, you've sort of run into these natural comp barriers. I was less commenting on whether Apple should pay Johnny$10 billion, but more commenting. Like if you bump up against breaking any sort of compensation rule, making an exception, it's incredibly difficult. it's basically impossible um and i think it's especially odd when you're willing to like there's there's a an incredible willingness to invest in a new thing like well beyond kind of ventures tolerance for capital investment totally like billions of dollars a year into the metaverse like yeah super speculative amazon spending six billion dollars and alexa like super speculative investment yep um with no disproportionate economics for the person deciding how to make that capital investment and which I've always thought to be very odd like you could effectively swap out kind of 10 l7s and dramatically change the comp of the vp running that group and that's probably a great investment but that's just not the sort of mentality at most of these large companies yeah I mean you you had the kind of canonical founder exited to big tech moved on pretty quickly experience like what was the one thing that you took away from Amazon that was like, this is great.

1:51:57I need to port this elsewhere. Was there anything that stuck out to you as like deeply underrated about those large organizations? Cause it's easy to say, oh, they're slow. Oh, they're, they, you know, they blah, blah, blah. But what was, what was actually interesting about, uh, Amazon in particular, or just big tech broadly? Yeah. I mean, Amazon's way of working, uh, especially the kind of writing culture, we definitely have co-opted and I would never, um, kind of operationally do it a different way. Like I think that is quite effective. There's like a reasonableness that probably is a little bit, you know, tilted at Amazon.

1:52:29Like you're literally writing like your annual budget. Like that there might be things that there's other formats that make sense. But as a general rule, like I think a writing culture is much better than a traditional culture. Yeah. Um, I think they're also incredibly good at scaling stuff that works, right? Like they are a machine if they found product market fit, both because there's a deep willingness to invest and because there's a bunch of established mechanisms to scale this stuff. I think that can be inhibitive of building something novel and new, right? There's like sort of over process and over litigate stuff early on.

1:53:01But the second you have something really working inside of Amazon, like they are just masters of scaling it up. Yeah, this is the same thing with Google. Ben Thompson was talking about with regard to the latest Google IO launch. Like Google launches a ton of demos, ton of products, but they never really go anywhere unless it's tied to search. If it's tied to search, they will die before they let that thing not work. And so you can talk all about, oh, they sunset Google Buzz or Circles or this random thing. But they haven't sunset shopping. They haven't sunset display. That one's still going. That one's still going.

1:53:37Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jordy, you have anything else? I think that's it. The only thing, I'll share it with you now. I just got breaking news. And TJ will laugh at this. but uh john really wants the new zr1 oh yeah uh which which uh which is like probably on the opposite end of like the spectrum of like cars tj likes and like doesn't like but i just got a quote that basically you'd have to pay 100k over msrp to get one there's only been 12 delivered so far so tbpn is ripping it's a small price to pay for an american made uh maybe maybe we can flip that around uh i so i want an american made sports car i want something interesting but it has to be american made what would you recommend for me can it be old yeah it can be anything get a cobra cobras are sick okay yeah that might be good daily do not get a kit car but like get an og unrestored cobra those things are sick okay that's good um i mean last thing on the the writing culture do you think that uh amazon is at risk of being kind of one shot by these llms because you don't actually have to go through the exercise anymore of writing a memo.

1:54:45You can just be like, uh, get me$20 million and I need to hire 25 people. Justify it like it's an Amazon memo. Boom. And then you just have it. You're just going to drop in all your old memos and be like, update this for Q2, please. Yeah, exactly. I imagine that that kind of destroys the culture potentially. Yeah. There's a real risk there that I hadn't contemplated. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. I mean, we were recently posting a job posting for an editor and the, and, and the, the job listing was very clearly chat GPT generated. And I was like, what prompt did you use? Maybe we should just post that prompt.

1:55:16And we wound up just posting the prompt and it's like way better because the prompt is way more succinct. It's like you had to give it anything. Just give me the bullet points. Don't flesh it out into two pages. I am pretty upset that chat GPT is going to single handle the ruin M dashes for me. Oh yeah. The record was like my favorite punctuation pre-chat GPT and just ruined, just totally ruined. Are you a Delve guy too? Were you using Delve a lot? Not really. not really yeah anyway great talking to you as always yeah congratulations congratulations to Ashwin and Elliot it was great this is I love I love that you guys are getting back together to fix a big big problem it's fantastic you love to see it great having you on good to see you guys enjoy the rest of the day bye let's tell you about numeral sales tax on autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance benchmark series A benchmark series A I love series B and also get on public public.com investing for those who take it seriously multi-asset investing industry leading yields they're trusted by millions folks millions I can't wait till we can say trusted by billions trusted by trillions um let me see trusted by martians what else we got here do we have any others um oh we have our next guest already easy let's bring him in who got there he is Reggie Reggie how you doing Chief, we didn't have a title for you, so I put the CRO, the Chief Reggie Officer.

1:56:46We're maximizing free agency, boys. Free agencies and trade season. I wouldn't be surprised if you get a maxed out offer in your inbox before this. $6.5 billion is on the table now, so anything's possible. $6.5 billion. I had an idea shortly before you. Maybe you could build it. a septum piercing ai wearable health tracker anything there is that ship it straight to the top an aura ring for your nose an aura that can also be a companion yeah you're talking to it all day long it's like you sure you want to have that you know uh diet coke yeah but scent is tied to memory so imagine it just squirts the scent up your nose maybe not maybe not squirts it remembers It emits an aroma to remind you of your grandmother's cooking.

1:57:37An aroma is better. An aroma, yeah. This aroma is built in. This is a trillion-dollar idea here. Yeah, I mean, device, they're making Apple, or Johnny Ives over at OpenAI. We were kicking around what we think it might be. It feels like Sam Altman's been into her. So we're thinking single earpiece that you wear. Maybe it has a camera on it. That was kind of the best thing that I could come up with. Maybe glasses. It feels like they're probably not just going to do a phone or an iPad or a watch, something with a rectangular screen on it. It's going to be something a little bit different. Take you off of your phone, maybe curing dopamine addiction.

1:58:16What are you expecting? And then we can go into all of the different aspects of the deal. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think, you know, one thing that felt very clear is that they emphasize like a sort of like family of devices. Right. So I think already they're coming from a multiple objects approach, which which I think is cool, mostly because I think where a lot of hardware companies sort of get stuck is they launch one thing and then everyone only knows them for that one thing. and then they get stuck in the loop of that one thing, right? So like Whoop is a big example. iPhone 17. Yeah. Pebble.

1:58:57Pebble invented the smartwatch in many ways. And then Apple came out with the Apple Watch and it integrated with the phone and the iPad and stuff. So yeah, I mean, lack of ecosystem. I mean, and it's only getting stronger. Like now you can just on your MacBook Pro, pull up iPhone mirroring and just use your phone on your computer and stuff. And so the integration between the ecosystem, Apple knows that that's a strength that it's like, oh yeah, the new Android phone might have a better camera, but are you willing to give up full integration with everything else you have? Like ripping out one device now is a$20 ,000 proposition for many people.

1:59:34It's not just$1 ,000. So, okay, suite of devices. So you think there will be a rectangular, a black mirror? I don't think there'll be a black mirror. I think they're smart enough not to go head to head with the phone. I do think, you know, maybe it starts with a puck that's tied to like productivity, right? So something that just tries to get you interacting with chat GBT faster. So I can take it with me and it also sits on my desk when I'm working. And it's just the fastest way to sort of like, that was easy, you know, a Staples style thing. Yeah, it's interesting that the workflow when you're in conversation with a friend where I'm like, John, what was that company?

2:00:18like a year ago that was doing this thing and you're like oh i kind of query you and you bring it back what do you think about foldables it feels like i've seen some demos out of china where the tech is getting pretty solid the hinges are getting smaller and smaller and you could imagine i know where you're going with i know where you're going with is you want a newspaper size we're joking about let's make a newspaper but but i mean seriously you could imagine a situation where it's like really what i want is if i'm going to be on i i don't want to carry a laptop because then i need a backpack i can't put an i can't put an ipad in my pocket but i can put something that folds up into the phone format and then it's a bigger decision it's like am i just going to do the earpiece for the little random chats with chat gpt but then if i want to go full in and watch a movie i have a device that can that can really really super superpower and it's like kind of counter positioned against Apple a little bit.

2:01:13We've heard rumors that Apple's maybe thinking about folding, but it seems like that's one of the technologies that you would be looking at. But what's your take on foldables generally? Yeah, I think foldables actually squarely land in like the Apple value system. You know, Apple really values the sort of like high definition-ness of their rectangles, you know? And so I think if you're trying to compete on high definition of these rectangles, you're probably in a losing battle. I think something I talk about a lot when it comes to hardware is like your values have to zag away from Apple as much as possible.

2:01:49So I think Avi Schiffman is a really good example of this. Apple can't launch a puck that listens to you 24-7 because the conspiracy about Apple already and a lot of the tech giants that they listen to you 24-7. but you can't do the literal thing right at least not for some time and so obvi has a little bit of like narrative runway because the value is so separate from like the apple ecosystem so i think similarly like open ai and and you know my assumption is that johnny's aware of it you know they have to zag from a values perspective um what do you think their confidence level is right like the most high profile example lately is humane which was a talented team maybe not as talented but they did have you know the full backing of the sv hype machine in many ways a lot of a lot of investors were quick to point out that they weren't in it and that they thought it was silly but it was like a moonshot new hardware attempt with a bunch of you know very talented people do you think that that is in the back of their mind at all in terms of what projection specifically no no just not even about not even about the form factor just like hey this is actually like yeah it's cool to have billions of dollars in the world's best team but it's also it's really apple was started in a garage right something closer to avi's environment right now where he's like that's true you know on a motorcycle like you know just like hair in the wind just like thinking about the next computing interface.

2:03:23Yeah. And it's also, I feel like that the pressure to deliver value beyond just companionship, right? Like obvious edges, like, I just want it to be your friend. I don't need it to be. And yeah, maybe it can do other stuff over time, but. Yeah. Yeah. So I think on the humane thing, you know, I got to know a bunch of folks over there. And I think my main critique is that, you know, they were very like Catholic guilt ridden about the iPhone. Like the entire animating spirit was like, we feel we kind of feel guilty about the iPhone. And now we have to present this alternative so that that's not the only road that we go down.

2:04:08I think, unfortunately, like they made a few sort of like key errors. Like I think the projection was sort of like a really key error. I think they like backpedaled away from replacing the phone and then it was supposed to be just like part of like your broader ecosystem. So I think it's what's really clear already. Right. Is that they open AI and Johnny are saying we don't want to replace the phone. We want to be this third thing, but we do want to live in your pocket. Right. So it's like close, close enough, but far enough. um and i think that you know what's funny is sam you know back to maine early and they had an open ai partnership and i think that um i don't know the full politics there but i would assume at some point you know sam sort of maybe lost face and faith sorry not lost faith lost faith and then kind of turned to okay well who are the other superstars at apple because like make no mistake like Imran and folks out on that team were like these superstars at Apple right it's just two different sides like Imran was the HCI team and Johnny was the industrial design team you know so yeah I think that's sort of I think they're aware of those lessons but one thing we were talking about was in terms of building like a super high performing hardware device consumer electronics team.

2:05:34Steve Jobs not only had Johnny Ive, but he also had Tim Cook to build the supply chain. And building robust supply chains was difficult in the 90s and 2000s when Apple did it, and it didn't exist in China. And now because of geopolitical considerations, it's also very difficult. It doesn't feel turnkey. It feels like the turnkey era of consumer hardware was maybe the 2010s. And now we are post that and there are lots of different considerations around tariffs and trade policy and geopolitical dynamics. Do you think that we would see someone like a Tim Cook go into OpenAI to get this off the ground?

2:06:17Yeah, that's a good question. So some things that I've been just sort of like watching is that OpenAI already has like an internal hardware team. And they've had for quite some time. They have someone that's like head of robotics. They have, I think they hired a woman recently that's head of like all hardware. And so it's clear that they've been building up this capacity internally for quite some time. And so I think, you know, the joint venture is definitely some form of appeal to authority, right? With Johnny. And that my personal hot take is i don't know how sensitive they are to actually shipping or at least shipping on the time that they you know stated you know like the hot take the extreme hot take would be right it's like sam needs another you know 200 billion and he you know he goes to like Saudi Arabia with Johnny and Johnny puts on his like British accent and you know, they don't have to even talk about the next model or like numbers, right?

2:07:25It's simply when's the device shipping and they could just say a number or like say a date and they can get the money. Right. And so if you're building up the valuation, you're saying there's a 10 % chance that we disrupt Google. That's a multi-trillion dollar business. So you can value us at a multiple hundred millions. There's also a 10 % chance that we disrupt Apple and that's a multi-trillion dollar business so you discount the value and that's on a couple hundred billion and so yeah you kind of add and then that question doesn't matter exactly you know like then that supply chain question doesn't matter when i have 200 billion in cash it's like what supply chain

2:07:58buy foxconn yeah i think we manufacture apple now so yeah i mean what yeah we're gonna bake we're going to bake the new model into into yeah i've seen i've seen some hot takes back and forth uh johnny i've was obviously deeply loved and admired and i kind of took the internet by storm with the conversation with patrick collison last week um at the same time a lot of people uh have said that a lot of the work that he did was iterative uh and not that revolutionary um what is your take on the legacy of Johnny Ive? You know, he's, he's in his sixties. That's sometimes retirement age. I believe he's in his sixties.

2:08:40I actually don't know, but I mean, at the same time, Berkshire Hathaway just hired a 62 year old CEO and Warren Buffett worked into his nineties. So what is your overall take on, on, on Johnny Ive's legacy and where it goes from here? Yeah. I mean, you know, I think the early part of his legacy or like the Apple part of his legacy he's like undeniable, right? Like one interesting thing to like, in Johnny history is, you know, the first place he was working, I believe, like the design firm specialized in bathrooms. And so when you understand that, you can actually understand like his obsession with smoothness, his obsession with like, sort of like knobs and dials and all of these things that we see that are kind of orthogonal to like computer hardware um as well as just like things that are unobtrusive right and like brushed aluminium like you kind of understand his design language when you know where he started so then you get to apple and he's had very started from the toilet yeah but you know in a lot of ways like these devices sort of um they they blend in similar to like a home object And they don't really stand out like what we understood consumer electronics to be.

2:09:53So then you start fast forwarding and you say, OK, now he has like all the devices in play. What does he do? My hot one of my hot takes is that like he kind of gives technology a type of like body dysmorphia. Right. Like all he cares about is thinness. He even when he gets control of the whole design team, that's when we get the pivot to flat design. So he even takes like the interface level and makes it thin and flat and not too like fun. Wait, so was the camera protruding? Who's responsible for the camera bump? Was that just to sell more cases? What's up with that? I think the camera bump just became a trade-off post Steve.

2:10:34Because again, we still have to understand like Apple the machine, right? When Steve was there, really the only person you had to appeal to was Steve. So there's a very known thing around Apple demo culture where it's Steve in a room with a couple other people. You go in, you show it to him, and he says yes or no. And if he says yes, it's in. And there's no one else you're convincing. My assumption is post-Steve, you're going through stakeholder management. So Johnny doesn't have the number one authority anymore. So he starts having to like wrestle with, you know, the camera team and he's wrestling with Tim and he's wrestling with manufacturing and he just doesn't get to win every battle anymore.

2:11:14That's my. Yeah, yeah. Seems like you're good. What do you think is going on with Apple Vision Pro? Have you used it? It feels like it's built on some of the design language that Johnny Ive pioneered. Aluminium, I suppose. But at the same time, not the thinnest VR headset. Johnny left in 2019. They've obviously been working on Apple Vision Pro for longer than that. But it feels like maybe the first Apple product that doesn't have his mark on it. But overall, do you think that's going to get any better? Is there any salvage that can do? Have you used it? What's your reaction to just VR broadly?

2:11:57Any of that stuff that you're thinking? Yeah. Yeah. So I have one. I used it. I was very curious. It is really heavy. Yeah. I think they had the wrong guiding metaphor at the end of the day. They didn't have like a true creative direction anchor. And so they landed on, we're going to put a floating iPad on your face and it's going to be somewhat antisocial, right? So everything that they show is widgets in air and then you sitting alone on your couch, watching something in extreme high definition. And that's fine. But as like a counter position, it's like, what if their anchor was like the iPod, right?

2:12:36And maybe their like hero product was actually something around Apple Music. And it looked more like the dancing silhouettes that when you put this headset on, your entire apartment actually turns into this beautiful color scape and you are animated, right? So they chose like a stagnant couch potato instead of you being animated. And we're seeing the same thing in Apple advertising when it comes to the way they talk about Apple intelligence, right? It's like this kind of like slobby guy at his desk getting AI to write an email to his boss to slack off further. So we have this company that used to champion like you were going to be your best self with these products and now it's turning into creativity.

2:13:17Yeah. Put on the headset and slob out. Don't do work. Get AI to tell your boss why you're going to be late. And it's just like, it's like Steve's nightmare, you know? it's funny yeah i mean what about what about glasses as a form factor i i'm i'm bullish on glasses as a form factor and i think it's going to go a few different ways i do think like the meta ray-bans like that form factor will continue to get better eventually like what it takes to put projections and those will be you know lightweight enough you know i think the orion i think was the project on meta you know i think obviously that's like too bulky zuck looks silly but i think they're gonna just get it thinner and get it thinner and like 10 years it'll be great maybe five also i mean with the uh with the xr stuff and the ar stuff like xreal and nreal air this company does glasses that it doesn't do all the crazy tracking but it can pull up a visual in front of you just statically and that solves like 90 of the use case for this if i'm on a plane and i'm just gonna watch a movie i think that that's gonna get there first and then you have to figure out, can we actually make it fully holographic?

2:14:26But if you just want a basic HUD, like a heads up display, that's a lot more achievable. None of the big tech companies have really said like, we're going to settle for that. But I think that that might be a path along the road actually. But I haven't really played with it enough. Staying on Apple Vision Pro, I heard a rumor, I don't know how true this is, that the person, one of the key people at Apple in charge of it was an ex dolby engineer who was all about the dolby cinema theater and i and and i thought that like that was the killer app dolby's great i love the movies the sound for you sorry but but um like i tried wrong creative anchor yeah yeah but i i tried the dinosaur experience it was like two minutes i'm like i'm not gonna game on this thing i'm not really gonna work on this thing I'm not going to work on this thing.

2:15:16But I did watch, I watched all of Citizen Kane actually in Vision Pro. And it was amazing. And it was like being in a theater and it was fantastic. And I almost think that they should have gone narrower. And maybe the iPod is the right thing. Like the iPod, when you put in the headphones, it is isolating. But the campaign around that was you dancing around in silhouette is beautiful. And there is something about like restoring this idea of going to the movies. but I agree with you that the ads were super dystopian. There's that one where the guy is clearly a dad and he's watching a video of his kids and it looks like he's divorced and like his kids.

2:15:51It's like super depressing. But giving blood on the track, Bob Dylan, divorced dad. Yeah, it was very rough. But what is your take on this idea of like Apple narrowing the focus of Vision to we have one killer use case because they're kind of the everything company. The iPhone will call you an Uber, does your email, does phone, everything. You know, the original iPhone keynote was it just does three things. And then it grew out from there. Do they even have the culture to refocus around one value prop? I always thought like they have Apple TV. They never made a real TV. They could have just positioned this as like, this is the best way to watch Apple TV.

2:16:29And it's just an Apple TV machine. And then it has some other stuff. And yeah, we'll have an app store, but really. But what do you think about that culturally at Apple? And just in terms of like, if you were running the place, what would you do? Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. You know, I think it's so hard to understand why certain things in your own history worked out the way that they did. Right. I think we are so anchored on, like you said, the iPhone being this giant enablement to not only Apple, but a lot of, I mean, how much of the value is built on just like mobile apps that did a thing.

2:17:04Right. And that's because if you're Uber, you know, you have GPS and now like you can actually do all these things. Right. So I think Apple wanted to be hyper enablement ready again. You know, they wanted developers to really build things on this. And I just, you know, I think unfortunately at the premium price, unlike like the Quest, it's really hard to bootstrap that and get consumer adoption. And because they also have never done just like a developer only product before. So there were just so many conflicting narratives. Again, it just seemed like no one was at the actually gripping on to the reins.

2:17:49So I'm very pro, like pick a singular use case that's going to be incredible at, you know, like I think Steve's original thing was like iPod for the eyes. You know, it's like noise cancellation for the eyes. And so you have Apple TV, you have Apple Fitness. This is like we're doing these two things. Make it super lightweight, make it comfortable as much as possible. And maybe as a bonus, you can like tie the laptop to it so you have like a keyboard in front of you. Right. But this is about being static and X, Y, Z. have you ever thought of applying for a job at apple maybe not ceo job i don't think they have a listing but trying to fix apple get it back to its roots i think i think you need a lot of political capital to do that there is my assumption and so i'm far more attracted to the things i see getting built from like my peers and uh yeah yeah let's let's switch gears for a I mean, it's just fascinating because it's almost like a supply chain story in the sense that they were able to pull forward the highest resolution display that no one else had access to.

2:18:55Not even Mark Zuckerberg spending$10 billion a year on the metaverse could get that screen pulled forward by two years. I'm sure the next Quest will have a comparable screen, but Apple was able to do that. But that's not enough. It's a fantastic execution on the supply chain side. Anyway, Jordi, where do you want to go next? uh i wanted to ask what you're up to i know i'm sure you're cooking i know you're cooking uh anything you can anything you can share right now yeah um so yeah i mean i'm coming out of you know uh sort of uh an acquisition of eternal and just thinking about what's next and one one thing that i've been working on my friends throughout the past year is actually speaking of hardware this oh no the background look at what i can I see paper.

2:19:44I see paper. Hardware. Underrated form factor for hardware. Yeah. It's a Wall Street Journal competitor. It's a paper. How do you do the... Oh, there it is. That's not it either. How do you do these things? Oh, there it is. Okay. There we go. So why would you want to hide that background? That's a way better background. I just have so much taste for Brooklyn. I love San Francisco. It's the best city in the world. Yeah, it's inappropriate. Says the New Yorker. Stolen Valor on that Golden Gate Bridge. Yeah. Stolen Valor. Boom. Boom. Oh, God. Brutal. Brutal. Show us. Yeah, what you're working on.

2:20:25Yeah, so the big project I've been doing in launching Technology Brothers Exclusive is this hardware book. Let's go. Let's go. Hardware, 2024. I met my friends Julian Davis and Charlene Dang. And, you know, I saw sort of a few years ago that hardware was really going to become the new meta. It's sort of, you know, we saw software shifting into these two very big ways. And we started to see the containers for software shifting as well. Those containers being sort of like spatial and hardware. And so last year just started to feel like a really special time in hardware, humane, rabbit, all these things with teenage engineering, daylight, USB club.

2:21:13And so we really wanted to give sort of like the art book treatment. This is my personal copy. The real copy is going to be hardcover. But we really want to give the sort of like art book treatment to what's happening in hardware. Daylight. Let's go. Yeah. Daylight is beautiful. You know, while writing the like humane sort of blurb, they got acquired by HP. So these things were, you know, really shifting in real time, which was so crazy. One of the big, big sort of cells on this book is a exclusive interview with Jesper, the founder of Teenage Engineering, who maybe folks remember from his config talk last year.

2:21:56and so it's 260 pages of giving like present day technology uh that art book treatment so really really excited about that amazing yeah when can we buy it when can we buy it you can buy it right now hardwarebook2024.com hardwarebook2024.com let's go amazing amazing i'm i'm excited and and what uh and the site's beautiful by the way very cool thank you that was just a late night one late night coffee slash vibe coding all right yeah some might say all right i just hit pay now let's do that was easy there we go there we go there we go that's amazing what what's next are you already working on the next book you're already cooking Hardware 2025.

2:22:46It's happening now. It's unfolding. It is unfolding. You know, I would love to sort of get sucked into the open AI hardware tentacles and, you know, maybe even like write some open AI checks to emergent hardware. where I think that we're going to see a lot of form factors emerge, you know, beyond just pendants, beyond just like pucks, what have you. I've been investing in like advising some new hardware companies and AI hardware companies. So, yeah, I'm just flying through the pan of the pan of the pan. Have you gotten a chance to play with the Chromatic from Palmer Luckey? No, it sold out before I could buy it.

2:23:27Oh, it sold out. Yeah. Yeah, I love it. It's, I mean, it's a beautiful product. you can run over it with a car apparently i haven't tried that but also it it's it's like this perfect throwback but you can use emulators to play any game and now they just added twitch streaming from it over usbc which is crazy so you can so you can uh plug it in and it records what you're what you're playing so it's like this when can you control it and your old drone one day i'm sure uh and i think they might be working on an n64 and some other some other retro hardware so So it's fun. A lot of the retro throwback stuff coming through.

2:24:05I mean, the only other spicy take I want is on Memoji, but do you have time for that? Is Memoji underrated? Are you using it every day? No, I don't. Daily driving? No, no, sorry. Damn. What do you think? Are you talking about Memoji or Genmoji? Oh, it's Genmoji. Oh, yeah. Memoji is the one where you make yourself into an emoji. Genmoji is the one where you generate anything, maybe. Yeah, I think, you know, I don't think Genmoji is actually a bad product. I just think, like, the ad campaign, again, like, they've lost their soul when it comes to communication. The entire thing about Genmoji, it's the experience of making a niche reference for your friend.

2:24:47And the ad campaign is just, like, very weird-looking end results. You know, like, the entire thing about that is, like, it's about the process, not the end result. like the end result out of context makes zero sense and then that's all they pace it around like major cities and it's just like god i mean how do you even tell that story is like should the billboard be like two friends like in separate rooms kind of like uh like like mean girls split screen like laughing because they're sending each other gen emojis that's that's not a that's not a billboard campaign for the first first level of like taste is that a billboard campaign yep no i I mean, it's funny because it should be a product that needs no billboard, right?

2:25:30Like it should be inherently so viral and so user generated that people just start using it, right? And it has this sort of Ghibli moment where people are just using Genmoji. And I just didn't see that at all. Maybe I'm a boomer. Yeah. Anyways, thank you so much for coming on. We've been wanting to do this for a while. This was great timing. excited to get a copy of the book we will we'll show it back here on the show and i'm sure have some follow-up questions but um congratulations on the launch and uh welcome back anytime for more more hardware hot takes oh fantastic thank you brothers play them out for the studio audience thanks for coming on the show legend chief reggie officer of hardware book 2024 four.

2:26:20We'll talk to you soon, Reggie. I'll be right back. How'd you sleep last night? You know how I slept, John. Okay. I should just give you access. I should just give you my login to just motivate you because I got a 93. I'm climbing up. I got a 99, John. You got a 99. Well, I beat you Monday, Tuesday. You beat me Wednesday, Thursday. You get out of here. I'm going to do some ad reads. Go get a pod five ultra at eight sleep.com. They have a five-year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, and free shipping. These are nights that fuel your best days. Clinically backed sleep fitness. We also have a coupon code, TBPN, at 8sleep.com.

2:27:00Go check it out. We also want to tell you about adquick.com, out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe we of course have wander find your happy place book a wander with inspiring views hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning and 24 7 concierge service it's a vacation home but better and lastly bezel your bezel concierge is now available to source any watch on the planet for you seriously any watch they've over 26 000 luxury watches on bezel now so go to get bezel.com um we should go through some more timeline posts there's been a bunch of stuff in the news um uh what else is here uh uh l3 tweet engineer just says lmao and post a screenshot uh probably from blind or something google prestige is gone i was at a dinner party when i mentioned in passing that i worked at google and everyone immediately burst into laughter pointing out how chat gpt had eaten our lunch then they pulled out their iphones and showed that they didn't have a single google app installed and had set their home page and default search engine to chat gpt then they gpt'd google stock chart and erupted into another round of uproarious laughter while making the pinching hand gesture.

2:28:19Very, very fake, extremely fake. You cannot get off the Google ecosystem, but very, very funny that somebody posted this. Very silly. Also, if they pulled up the Google stock chart, they would see that it's up like 10 % in the last two days. So very silly. We also have the Teal Fellows. We're announced the 2025 Teal Fellows. We're going to do Teal fellow day, hopefully on Tuesday. And we're going to interview as many of these folks as we can, give you a little tour of what the latest batch of Teal Fellows are working on. There's a bank, a trading platform, a research lab, somebody working on non-invasive neurostimulators, foundation models to power digital humans that are indistinguishable from real ones, AI-powered solution to automate manufacturing processes and dark factories.

2:29:04That's cool. Fizz is developing an AI financial investor. We have friends who've been on the show, our now Tio fellow, Soarin' Monroe Anderson, the founder of Neros, is a defense technology company that builds drones critical to the modern arsenal at massive scale. Orbit is a non-invasive neurostimulator. There's a bunch of other folks in here. Interfaces is developing human-native communication devices that change the way we work and think. That sounds maybe hardware-driven. Excited to talk to him about that. And we'll go through that. And Sigil. I am working on a surprise guest, Ben Heilak, to come on later today for 10 minutes at 2.

2:29:42That'd be great. X is so cooked right now. It's extremely cooked. I can't even get DMs out. I'm trying to get his email for the invite. But he had something interesting earlier. Ben said, an AI alignment researcher at Anthropic just said that Claude Opus will call the police or lock you out of your computer if it detects you doing something illegal. I will never give this model access to my computer. And so Sam, I guess Sam Bauman over at Anthropic in a now deleted post says, if it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral, for example, like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial, it will use command line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of relevant systems or all the above.

2:30:22That is absolutely crazy. But we'll see if it's real or fake news. And let us bring in our next guest. We have Keith Reboi. Welcome to the stream, Keith. Hey. How are you doing? There he is. We have a soundboard now. Welcome to the show. Great to have you. Yeah, yeah. Great to have you back. I've got to work on the entry song. Yeah. It's a little messy. We're figuring it out. Give us the recap on the KV Summit. How'd it go? Yeah. So every year, for the last 15 years, we've hosted all of our CEOs, like 150 plus CEOs at Cabal Point in San Francisco. and it's like a two-day program where we bring in inspirational and actionable speakers.

2:31:05So, for example, I interviewed Eric from Ramp, John Coulson of Stripe, John Coulson interviewed Bill Gates, actually, and Sam Altman spoke, and then the CEO of Databricks. So we have a wide variety of content. Some of it's more practical, tangible, and some of it's very aspirational, inspirational. So we take our CEO time very seriously and want to make sure that every minute they're not in the office, you know, managing, executing, you know, growing their companies that they get, you know, disproportionate returns out of the time. What was any type of surprising takeaways or insights that that you can share?

2:31:47I want to know what the biggest debate points are like, what, what, what, where are the things where people are actually debating? I've, you know, Sam Allman recently said AI could be an operating system. There's questions about foundation model layer value accrual versus application model layer value accrual. How many winners there will be in the coding market? Like, what are people actually debating and unclear about? And then I'd love to know where you stand on it, obviously. But like the non-consensus topics are probably the most interesting to dig into here. Sure, we can talk about all of those.

2:32:20And generally speaking, we will post all of these videos online. So the vast library of 15 years, virtually anybody who's been successful in tech has spoken at our conference. And so, in fact, Sam's probably spoken four or five times now. It was interesting. I compared when I was interviewing John Carlson, I'd interviewed Patrick Carlson literally a decade ago. It was an interesting contrast to show the arc of the company. When I interviewed Patrick in 2015, Stripe was worth several billion dollars, but it only had 250 employees. And now, as John mentioned, they have 9 ,000. 9 ,000? Wow. Yeah.

2:33:00So it shows you the arc of building a company that a decade had passed since I last interviewed Patrick. So we will share 90-plus percent of these videos. We'll start posting them next week. There's maybe one or two. It's up to the speaker. They don't want to share some things. But the contrast I noticed, one, everyone's one about building a company. We talked about founder mode a fair amount. So Eric talked about how they build ramp. And John gave a slightly different perspective on building Stripe. And then I interviewed actually Gary Tana, YC, to talk about the origins of founder mode, the lessons from thousands of companies that they've invested in for 20 years.

2:33:40And so I think the operating styles and approaches to hiring senior talent or not was an interesting contrast on AI. We had Brad Gerster of Altimeter speak and talk about the future of AI as applied to pre-existing companies. He was quite inspirational. He made a couple points that I think Sam generally would have agreed with, which is there's only going to be one foundation model, research lab oriented, successful winner. It's certainly not something that VCs should be investing in. The application layer, I think there's more room and opportunity or something that transcends what we think of research labs today.

2:34:24just like open AI and chat GPT is transcending what we think of search and you know to some extent what we think of social I think the next generation will be something that doesn't look anything like an LLM doesn't look like a research lab and you know it's very difficult therefore to find but hopefully some founders have visions and hopefully they call me when they do yeah I feel like Brian Chesky was a big inspiration for the original founder mode essay by Paul Graham He just went extreme founder mode a week or two ago with the Airbnb reimagining. At the same time, Ben Thompson's kind of analyzing that.

2:35:05And Ben Thompson's argument is that Airbnb is a platform and a marketplace company. And so the economics of the platform kind of dictate a certain user experience, mainly that people open the app. Yeah, they have hundreds of millions of users. The user base is massive at Airbnb, but the average user opens it like twice a year and they want to get in, get out. And it's not a daily active user experience. And so Ben Thompson was saying there will be some challenges. What was your reaction to how Brian positioned Airbnb's next chapter? Do you like that communication style? Are you optimistic about where Airbnb goes?

2:35:44Give us your reaction to the Airbnb news. So, yes, Brian pioneered what we now describe as founder mode, even though it's very specific in some ways to the operating style of Apple. But in any event, he triggered this at a YC alumni dinner in Napa Valley where he kind of off the cuff, without preparation, spoke for two and a half hours. And that's what led to Paul Graham summarizing and distilling it, which led to a lot of intrigue and interest. And this is kind of what I think CEOs were talking about privately, but no one had really stitched it together and kind of created a public discussion of it.

2:36:20For those to be really interested in the topic, I interviewed Brian a few months ago at Gramps offices. And that video is available online where Brian is incredibly articulate and eloquent about the virtues and the benefits of founder mode and how he actually implemented it. So I highly recommend anybody in the audience who's intrigued watch the actual video because I will not do it justice Though on the specific topic of Airbnb experiences I think Ben made some interesting points. I've been a fan and early reader of sure techery And it's the only thing I read regularly in all of tech because I think he's the only one who actually understands tech that writes so I Actually have been recommending this to friends of mine for over a decade who want to enter into tack is like start the extra techery I think the point he makes, first of all, is that in services world, you're going to potentially want to get off the platform once you find a service provider that you like.

2:37:20I think he missed one subtle point, which is Airbnb is still designed mostly for travelers. I, you know, I'm going from New York, let's say, to Cincinnati. And obviously the canonical case is I would find a place to stay in Cincinnati. great but as you point out the average user you know might travel 2.5 times 2.4 2.5 times a year so it's hard to turn my Airbnb usage into a daily weekly monthly habit however the point that Ben glossed over a bit is I'm traveling to Cincinnati and then to SF and then to Dallas and then to somewhere in Utah I have no incentive to go off the platform to find a service provider Yes, in a city that I'm in regularly, let's say New York City, if I found a hairstylist here or the equivalent, I may have an economic motive to just disintermediate the platform.

2:38:14But if Brian's right that curating experiences and services that a local would use still appeals to people in New York City, which is a huge number of people come to New York City every year, then I think Ben may be wrong and Brian may be right. So I think Brian is probably sort of dialing in to the traveler visitor use case. Totally. And then you need the breadth of services when you're traveling and experiences. You don't necessarily have to only use it in your home city, which is where Ben may have some valid critiques. Yeah, yeah. It seems like the dog walker example is probably the rough one because it's the most obvious disintermediation point.

2:39:00at the same time. Yeah, there's plenty of times when big group is traveling and they want, you know, private chef to come cook for everyone, something like that makes a ton of sense in that context. And then also, it's like you can build a good business in a referral business that is not less, it's less transaction, it's more discovery and advertising basis. I was actually like not even half joking, just saying that maybe Airbnb needs an advertising product because Uber has been so successful in advertising. I don't I mean, I think that that might really frustrate people if they're seeing promoted listings.

2:39:32But at the same time, like on these marketplaces, usually advertising does pretty well. I don't know if you have a reaction to that. Yeah, I have two reactions. First of all, I don't think Airbnb will need it. Airbnb's margins are like roughly take rates roughly 13%. Sure. And, you know, versus like the Ubers or the Instacarts where they really don't make too much money per transaction. Got it. If you don't have a highly profitable advertising revenue, it's hard to build an interesting business. I think Airbnb doesn't have the economic drivers that you see with Instacart where it has been successful, but it is something annoying.

2:40:06That said, Google used to run this internal study where they would actually show users who are exposed to SEO content and paid advertising are more satisfied than users who are searching and only see SEO content. So advertising when done properly can be a value add. If you think about it, the economic incentive of drafting content that explains, contextualizes and markets products does drive to efficient advertising that can be an important for a user. Even today, if you're in an area and some service provider is running ads, it shows a level of sophistication and professionalism that might associate in some ways with just a better end product experience than somebody that doesn't know how to set up a Google ad.

2:40:56I wanted to ask, Ben had some great thoughts around, you know, the entire internet is based on, you know, advertising. And in a time when, you know, we may all have agents that are just trawling the internet for us and acting on our behalf, the, you know, economic, the existing economic model of the internet could hit some snags. And he makes a case for, you know, micropayments to allow people that produce content to get some benefit from having models, you know, acquiring information on those sites. He also outlines how this is going to be incredibly difficult to pull off because there's so many different groups and incentives.

2:41:36I'm curious if you've spent much time yourself thinking about the potential for micro transactions in the context of replacing lost advertising revenue. So similar observation. I think the post, the original sin of the Internet by then is totally worth reading. And I generally agree with the point that the original sin of the Internet was that all content should be free. I actually made that point to Jessica when she was launching the information in like 2005, 6, 7, 8, whatever it was. I was like, you definitely are going to be on the right side of history by charging a premium subscription. Ran into Dick Costello at that party, the launch event.

2:42:16And I actually used the term, the original sin of the internet was that we all learn the lesson that because the marginal cost of content, the marginal cost of distribution of content We go to zero, you should charge zero, which is absolutely false. However, micropayments make no sense. Ben is totally wrong about this. I'll give you an old lesson from PayPal. So one of my jobs at PayPal between 2000 and 2003 was to find new markets because we were really dependent on eBay. And that led to risk. And we ultimately went public and then sold the company to eBay because we were nervous about the risk of eBay handicapping our future growth.

2:42:52And as you know, tech companies are valued by the next 20 years of cash flow. So, you know, Peter and Roloff and various people were very nervous about that. One of the markets I wanted to explore was, quote unquote, micropayments. And Peter Thiel made a very astute sort of rebuke to me. He said, like, that's the dumbest argument ever, basically, because content has a marginal cost. It has a gross margin of about 99%. So basically whether or not micropayments cost you 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 50 % of the content, who cares? Like if you're writing content that people pay for because your gross margin is like in the 90s, you shouldn't really worry about whether the micropayment cost is too large.

2:43:41Now the friction to make it, the reason why I wanted to build the product was I think the friction of micropayments is too high. like the consumer friction of paying for anything. Like, you know, you're going to read a short blog post, you're going to read a short post, you don't really know exactly what it's worth. And so if you have to do anything other than just one click, forget about it. But I still think people get this analysis wrong that it's not an economic problem for... Now, music's a little different, by the way, where you owe a licensed owner a reasonable fraction of the transaction, then you can't be so, you know, sort of whimsical about the marginal cost of the payment.

2:44:19But most people do not really have to pay out a meaningful fraction of that dollar transaction to somebody else, some third party. So I think this is, excuse me, by the way, Stripe originally started when Patrick John pitched me on Stripe in 2010. They originally thought that the core use case was going to be like micropayments and accelerating content. They still have the GDP of the internet, They really felt that it would unleash new content, which hasn't for the most part happened. You know, Substack is an interesting business. It has real GMB and an associated real revenue line. But I still think it's the wrong place for Ben to be focusing on.

2:45:03Yeah, the issue with looking at Substack or even Ben and their success is there's some element there of I just want to support the person creating it. I want them to not think about getting a job or building a business other than just writing online and spending all day thinking about, in Ben's case, tech. whereas for the average site on the internet the the person that would be making the micropayment it's not like they don't have any incentives to be like i care about this person and i want them to have a i mean with like the recipe example i'm fine if i'm baking an apple pie blending three different recipes together and giving the llm results of that but if i want to listen to michael jackson's thriller i don't want half of thriller and then half of another song kind of kludge together.

2:45:49Like I want that exact piece of intellectual property. And so there's a very traceable lineage of that, of that data transferring. And so the micropayment makes a lot more sense when you're actually buying that specific thing. That specific thing, but I think you're better off having a differentiated voice and a premium for that. It's very difficult. Like how many, how many people in all the realms of content have a truly differentiated voice? Like in sports, Bill Simmons in his prime definitely did, despite all the other sports writers. Ben in tech, I still think, has an incredibly differentiated voice.

2:46:23It's just very difficult to achieve that. But if you do, you can absolutely charge a premium. Yeah, totally. It feels like it's been AI week. We had Microsoft Build on Monday. I know you were tied up with the KV Summit. Google I.O. Google I.O. Open AI. I.O. So OpenAI bought IO for$6.5 billion. Anthropics dropping Claude4 today. Are you tracking these things? What stuck out to you? What made it above all the noise? What was the signal in your mind? What are you tracking? Has anything changed your mind this week? Well, I think what was interesting to me, because we do have the CEO Summit annually, This year, the AI content, not just the AI content that we programmed, but the AI content in cocktail conversations, dinner conversations, was an order of magnitude greater than last year.

2:47:19So the first derivative was off the charts on AI. Last year, there was like a vertical of AI and a vertical slice of conversations. And the people who are not in AI space were probably intrigued, but it wasn't infusing everything. I felt this year AI infused every conversation up and down the stack, so to speak, laterally across verticals, whether you're in financial services or labor marketplaces. It didn't matter. Everybody wanted to learn more about AI, how to leverage AI, put on this bionic suit for their own business. Yeah. Are you seeing AI pop up in unexpected seed stage companies you're betting on?

2:48:03We were talking to TJ Parker. He launched General Medicine today. And he was like, we made the deliberate decision not to give the user a text box. We're not a ChatGPT wrapper in that way. But we're using LLMs all over the place to parse insurance policies and medical records. and this business is only possible because of AI. And I feel like that's going to be an ongoing narrative, but it should dominate the conversation. At the same time, it should melt into the background just like, oh yeah, you're hosting your new company on the cloud. No big deal. Everyone is. Yeah, I mean, at some point, and same thing like the adoption of some, yeah, I think that's a good metaphor, but maybe I'll give you a barometer.

2:48:48Please. Of my last 11 investments, six are AI-based and that's up from zero. literally zero yeah and so you know if even people like me who had no exposure to ai before last year are now making a majority of my investments are ai forward that that says something you know pretty interesting but aren't but aren't for the non-ai investments aren't you still talking with those founders ceos about how they're gonna leverage ai i mean it's not like they're coming to you and being like yeah i think it's overblown i'm short i'm you know i'm not gonna you know they're not like luddites if they're technology entrepreneurs yeah well there's a couple use cases that are important to produce any company one is just engineering productivity period you know whether you use cursor or you know some other product or all the products like we've seen that ramp for example engineering productivity is up 46 pretty strictly measured and increasing.

2:49:50So that's just purely on productivity. So getting more done with less, great. You're seeing AI remove costs. I think customer support is a classic use case. Customer support can be expensive. And in many cases, AI can perform on par with a human or better, certainly faster and more cheaply with more scalability. So there are areas that are no brainers for any business to adopt. Then there's the question in the strategic area you compete in your company, is there a way to use AI in a differential way? And that's a little bit more art than science right now. yeah how how how overblown is the narrative of uh startups getting steamrolled by the hyperscalers oh every startup just got turned into a bullet point in a google presentation uh there's one narrative that's you know google invented a they have all the tpus they have this massive data center uh at the same time a lot of their product rollouts they sunset a lot of products they run a lot of tests.

2:50:56They're really dominant in search and advertising. But if it's a side project, it kind of gets side project attention and it's not really a founder mode project. How are you thinking about how big tech is competing or just stepping back and just reaping the rewards of everything that they've done over the past couple decades? Yeah, I think there's like classic, you know, sort of conceptual approaches to this is, is this a sustaining innovation or disruptive innovation? And things that are disruptive, there's a different approach to those, things that are sustaining, there's a different mentality towards those.

2:51:35I think the key is for a founder to understand where's my comparative advantage? Ultimately, you're going to be able to start it from scratch. The world is not your friend. Inertia is against you. Nobody cares, period. Nobody cares about you. So you've got to turn that into positive momentum in a true physics sense. And then you've got to figure out how you propel yourself, even if other people, large or small, start doing something similar to what you do. And I think having a line of sight, like at least an intellectual, conceptual level, how would I do that? How am I going to do that? makes the difference between being a very mediocre startup that is the proverbial roadkill to something that looks like it should be washed out in this wave, but actually trumps over the incumbent.

2:52:19And the history of tech is typically the well-run, thoughtful startups prevail over the large startup. Think about AI. OpenAI is absolutely dominating Google, period. But OpenAI, OpenAI's chat GPT will be the default interface for the majority of people on the planet, not Google search. Bold. That's a big change. I want to talk about with OpenAI, they acquired Johnny Ives' company. They brought in an absolute industry legend. I want to talk about it in the macro, unless you have a take on this actual deal or Johnny Ive. But more importantly, startups bringing in these absolutely legendary heavy hitters, it takes a bunch of different forms, right?

2:53:12Palmer Luckey brought in John Carmack, video game legend at Oculus. That was amazing. Ramp has Ken Chenault, the former CEO of Amex, involved. but not as an employee, right? Then Ramp has Gennady, this fantastic programmer. Like I think he's the best programmer in the world, more in an employee role. And so as startups are scaling, should they be hunting for these like, you know, absolutely legendary people trying to get them in their organization? Is it just a very rare scenario that OpenAI is doing so many things that they need a Johnny Ive? How would you talk to a founder about hiring kind of an industry legend?

2:53:56On the industry legend side, I think it depends on the motivation, both for the company and the individual. Many people become successful and are demotivated and not as ambitious. Then there's the Elons of the world that the more success they have, the more ambition they have. And so I think you need to triangulate who are you talking to and how much drive they still have left. And then certainly from an employee perspective, you don't want someone who's passed their prime. It's a little bit like sports. You do get past your prime or your motivation to drive to Ks, unless you're like the Elons or the Kobys and people like that that are very rare.

2:54:32So I think that's the most important story. On the specifics here, I've read mixed reports on exactly what involvement, if any, Johnny Ives is going to have. They're acquiring the company, but it's not really clear to me what he personally is going to do. So I think that'll have to sort itself out. So you could wind up in like a CEO of hardware role, very deeply involved or, you know, more of an advisor or design lead. There's a bunch of different ways that that could shape up. Jordy, do you have anything else you want to chat about? How do you think the AI safety era of 2023 or, you know, 2024 will be viewed in five years, 10 years?

2:55:13Well, it's DOA. I mean, nobody even talks about it anymore. when's the last time you've heard someone like credibility talk well so i heard about it today i'm just going to call this out so uh today apparently i'm seeing a screenshot an ai alignment researcher at anthropic just said that claude opus will call the police or lock you out of it of your computer if it detects you doing something illegal and the researcher says if it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial it will use command line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of relevant systems or all the above, which to me, to me is like, if that's AI safety, that that's scary.

2:55:55I don't think that's what most, I mean, that's is scary. It seems pretty stupid, but there are some legal obligations, obviously, on any tech company, you know, Asian child pornography and various things. So like, assuming there are compliance obligations on all companies, whether tech or otherwise, absolutely, those are all real and serious. AI safety, I think, connotes to a lot of people like the idea of AI taking over, you know, doing things that are, you know, mischief creating in some way. That debate, I think, is over in the United States for a very long time. We're in the how do we accelerate the progress of AI?

2:56:31How do we ensure that AI in the Western world dominates over the CCP's use of AI? I think those are the most priorities, the major priorities. I don't think anybody in DC right now really wants to hear about this old AI safety canard, which is basically an anti-tack. You know, it's euphemistic for anti-tack. It wasn't a serious concern. Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know how closely you followed like the latest release of Lama 4 by Meta, but there was allegations of kind of fine-tuning on the specific evaluations and a delay. and a couple of years ago, it would have been so easy for them to just say, hey, we're worried about alignment.

2:57:12We're worried about safety. We're doing this for you. But instead, they kind of just had to bite the bullet and say like, we kind of messed up on the training. It's not quite done yet. We're just going to go back to the drawing board and like work through it. And the fact that they couldn't even use it as a fake excuse was very telling to me that it is truly a dead conversation. And I think that's true. Fortunately, I think it's dead. I agree. Great. I think ultimately the US needs to prevail and succeed with AI, period. Yeah. The flip side is that I think I've been aligned with you that the AI super doom, fast takeoff, we all become paperclips, never really resonated with me.

2:57:51I thought it was kind of just paranoia and superstition. But now that I've seen what's happening with DeepSeek, all of a sudden I've said to myself, Maybe we do need something that looks like an AI safety team to go in and investigate these models and see, are they weighted to shift us? Like the TikTok algorithm might be shifting us towards certain beliefs. These tools are powerful, and they can be fed false information or bad data to kind of steer the answers one way or another. And so maybe we do need some sort of model interpretability. And it's not exactly AI safety in the doom sense, but it's the type of work that you'd see done by an AI safety researcher.

2:58:38So geopolitically, how do you think things are shaking out? Oh, yeah. Again, I would discriminate that from the gloom and doom AI safety. I definitely think models can be biased in different ways and manipulated by different people who have power over those models. period and i think observability which is actually cutting edge um technically there are some really cool startups that are focused on observability it's a little bit like doing brain surgery and trying to figure out how to rearrange the brain and it's the metaphors i think they use and so that stuff's um actually tracking really well and incredibly intriguing like why did the model do x and then we all to decompose that and arguably do certain you know perform surgery and fix it So I think many of these models are biased.

2:59:22You know, the famous examples of, you know, ask for the benefits of Donald Trump and, you know, when I used to struggle with that. I don't know if it's improved, but, you know, those things are real. But I think that's a different set of challenges. And maybe the market sorts that out. You know, maybe people expose it and the company has to, you know, address it. I think the TikTok manipulation is a very real thing, which is another reason why I think it's better than American companies being the forefront. But I do think that's a valid concern. It's different than what I think of safety as if there's a sentient AI that's going to take over with so much power that you can't really unplug the computer.

3:00:02You know, that I think that debate is pretty dead for a long time. Yeah, it seems like tech and the US government broadly, the new administration has been kind of going all around the world doing deals. Are there any countries that you're particularly excited about America building partnership with on the tech side, or even any opportunities for earlier stage startups to go plug into the global ecosystem? It's kind of a narrative violation because just a couple months ago we were saying, do not do business abroad. There's a 75 % tariff on everything. But now you see Jensen and Sam and, you know, scale AIs over in the UAE.

3:00:40Well, it's more like we're exporting American AI. Yeah. Versus importing. Where are the opportunities? A couple drivers there. There's a belief, I guess, by some people that exporting American AI makes it the default standard. It may or may not be true, but I think there is an ideology there. The second is, I think a lot of this is we need resources, i.e. infinite power. And so people are going to very wealthy countries and asking them to spend a lot of money to either develop advanced power or advanced manufacturing capabilities at scale. And I think that's why you see the CEOs who run these large AI-based companies sort of trailing around the globe to sovereign nations that have too much money.

3:01:24They don't really know what to do with it. But I think it's not a do business in the country. It's more take advantage of their natural resources, turn that into something that we need, which may be either more manufacturing or more energy or both. Very cool. Well, we'll let you get out of here. It's past two. Always a pleasure. Always a pleasure. Such a great time. Thanks for coming, Keith. Great to catch up. Great to see you both. Take care. Talk to you soon. Bye. Do we have Ben Hilack or should we talk? He is in the waiting room. Oh, he's in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. Ben, welcome to the stream.

3:01:58How you doing? Ben, is your computer being controlled by Anthropic? That is the question. They're kicking down the door. Have you been doing illegal things? Yeah. What's going on? It's great to have you on. Everyone knows. Did the Jaguar rebrand. Yeah, he did the Jaguar rebrand. Yep. But today we're going to talk about. He did not do the Jaguar rebrand for those who are listening. We're joking about that. I didn't know. but if we say it enough then chat gpt will it'll just pick it up they'll be like they've said it 10 times now it can't still they might arrest you for that taking credit for a brand you didn't stolen valor stolen valor i don't think anyone's gonna have a problem with that the swat team kicks down the door get out of here anyways great to have you on uh glad we could make this happen even though x is absolutely cooked today it is really i've never i've never seen it quite this bad but um anyways why don't you introduce yourself and then we can talk about that that post and and kind of get your reaction to it live yeah uh so i was a designer at apple for like four years uh before that i you know kind of a weird background i actually started off with like robotics and avionics so um like interned at spacex a bunch of times and did those sort of those rounds.

3:03:13But now, around a year ago, two years ago, I started a company called Raindrop. And so we do essentially century for AI agents.

3:03:52Cool. this concept of evals, which are almost like unit tests. So these are like, you know, given these test cases, you know, does it pass them? Does it fail them? Uh, what our product does is in the real world, like what are users actual experiences with your product? Where is it actually failing? Where is it doing things you, you wouldn't expect? Right. So, um, for example, we had a, one of our customer, uh, one of our customers, uh, they have this like alien companion. So it's tollens.com oh yeah yeah so you're familiar and so they had an issue where like their aliens started referring to itself as like a dude from the united states right uh which is one of us

3:04:35total cultural victory except um and so their issue is like how big of an issue is this like was that one time or was this like hundreds or thousands of times and then like if they're gonna to try to fix it like it's it's very like random right it's very it's very unpredictable it's not always a clear root cause so what they want to be able to do is kind of get a view of that issue over time now and if it ever regresses it ever comes back get notified um so we make it really easy for companies to like literally just the craziest issues you're gonna that's yeah it's just such a funny example of of the aliens like yeah i'm actually from america america but yeah it's funny because if you fine tune that out, then you wind up with a potential situation where the, the AI never adopts the personality or of a, of an American or doesn't even know the concept of America anymore because you, you ripped it out too hard.

3:05:28Right. So it's a really tricky balance to now. Right. Yeah. And from like a detection standpoint, I think the thing that makes us kind of like, I, I think we have like actually one of the most complex like AI pipelines I've ever seen and just like research wise a lot of really cool stuff cooking like being able to categorize these messages as it is an alien character talking like misrepresenting himself as being from like the united states it's very hard right it's not like show me events where uh the assistant talked about a guy from the united states right it's not some sort of like keyword search or something like that like some of these categories actually get pretty complex um and you can imagine that that is an issue that's only relevant to that app so it has no application like so our customers have to be able to go in there and like define what they're looking for and create this categorizer that can run on millions of messages a day very cheaply interesting yeah yeah i mean even in like the web 1.0 when web 2.0 like you're almost building like a pager duty it used to just be is this page 404ing and the age and the htcp there's no clicks there's no there's nothing like that it's it's so much more squishy but uh you know the problems created by AI, also solved by AI.

3:06:41You said you have to run these queries. I imagine that they're LLM powered millions of times. That sounds really expensive. What are you doing? Are you baking Llama 3 that's free onto an ASIC so you can just like run it super cheaply? Are you looking at Grok with a Q or Cerebrus or something else that drops the inference cost? Are you on open router constantly trying to find the cheapest thing? Have you distilled models? Like how do you control cost in that scenario? Yeah. So because of a lot of our customers' volumes, like if you think about like clay.com or something, like they're just, you have millions and millions and millions of requests a day.

3:07:15So it's not actually feasible at all to send them to an LLM at every request. We can use LLMs, like smaller ones, like especially like Gemini Flash to like do things like summarizing or like describing clusters or stuff like that. As far as actual detection, doesn't really work well for that. So we have a bunch of essentially custom trained embedding models and then models on top of those that are small like uh they're like technically neural nets but you can think of them like an svm or something where they're just like really good at detect doing a first pass detection so around like usually 98 of the events or not it can filter out like 95 98 of the events that are not relevant um and then kind of the last pass or like is like a small uh fine-tuned uh element what's it like training one of these smaller svms is this something like commodity nvidia gpu for like an hour yeah it's just like simple the smallest ones you can do pretty fast um embedding models are like longer a lot of it's about having the data honestly having the right data to do it and the cool thing is that um and i kind of want about when i say like the pipelines complex like one of the things i mean is that our customer each of our customers looks pretty different what an issue is or is not is pretty different so So for example, you can imagine that one customer, like you have a customer support chat bot and you ask it to write code.

3:08:36You don't, you know, like that, and they might even want to flag that, you know, a user is asking them in the first place. Cause that's like more like they're getting hacked or something, but a coding assistant, obviously like that's the bread and butter. So one getting refused is okay. And the other one isn't. So we actually train these models on the fly for every single customer. So that's one of the things we do. There were four, maybe more, massive AI announcements this week. You got Microsoft Build. You got Google I.O. You got OpenAI Buying I.O. for$6.5 billion. Johnny Ive going into OpenAI, building hardware.

3:09:10You also got Anthropic launching Cloud4 today. What stuck out to you? What was the most interesting story of the week? What has you thinking, I want to implement that. I want to play around with that. I'm excited about that. Or I have a hot take about that. Yeah. So I think that, you know, most of the times the things that excites me are the things that are for builders. Like, you know, we use AI a lot. All of our customers use AI. That's sort of the lens we're always looking at it through. I think that Google has really done a good job of nailing that niche of like building models for startups.

3:09:49I think that like Google Flash, for example, is the closest thing we have to like intelligence too cheap to meter. um obviously there's like four nano that was like a follow-up to that um and like in response to that uh but yeah flash is still just like superior in so many ways they've just the like throughput and just like the you know like they pretty much have no you know rate limiting at some point when you when you pay enough like pretty much zero yeah because they're running on their own hardware down to the actual tpus and so you know you have to imagine if you go to open ai models it's probably running on Azure.

3:10:23And so there's an extra layer of networking and transport and all the data's flowing back. So if you're looking at like super, super fast, fine-tuned responses, like Google infrastructure team is probably hard. Yeah, exactly. They know how to do it, right? Well, yeah. And so like, for example, like I think Diffusion is like super interesting. I see a lot of applications for it, like have played around with a bunch and there's something just wild about, I don't know if you guys are familiar with like the Gemini. Yeah, I saw one screenshot, about 900 tokens per second. Is it actually using a diffusion model instead of a transformer?

3:10:55Is that what's going on? Yeah, yeah, it is. Okay, wow. That's amazing. Can you see like illustrations of it? It's essentially like actually like each part of the code, it's actually being generated separately and kind of literally it's like - Instead of just predicting the next word, next word, next word, it's predicting like the entire result at one go. That's fascinating. I want to know more. I got to dig into like how big was the cluster that they trained on? Is it all synthetic data? I mean, and they have so much data. That is fascinating. I had no idea that there would be a flow back because we're seeing in images in chat.

3:11:29I know, I know. A flow forward, right? They're going transformers and then we're going back. But I guess it's like, these are great algorithms. Let's use them in every single way in every single application. And you'll probably see diffusion all over and transformers all over and everything. And I think there's use cases where it works for. There's use cases where it doesn't. like i think that um code actually i think lends itself pretty well to it in certain use cases like i think one of the key use cases they have in the demo uh that you can request access to is like essentially it'll one shot a website like uh in like a second you know what i mean yeah like make someone build a calendar and it would just one shot like three seconds there's So three seconds, 3 ,000 tokens, I guess, came out in three seconds.

3:12:13So it was like 1 ,000 tokens a second, which is crazy. It's pretty, there's something really insane about it. Like, obviously, like, the apps that's actually generating are, like, not going to be as good yet. But, like, there's just something insane about going from, like, words to just, like, render. There's this idea I've always been really fascinated with, which is, like, let's say for games, for example. like is there ever a point where you're it's all just being generated i think like gentleness said something along the same the same oh no no no there's somebody's actually running minecraft in a i've tried that you've tried that one right uh i think etched is in partnership with that they they're building a chip that's uh has a transformer architecture baked onto it in silicon fab by tsmc and they can run minecraft purely procedure purely generative ai version there's No game engine whatsoever.

3:13:02It's just trained on Minecraft. Fascinating. Let's talk about the post today that you shared and is picking up steam, even though X is cooked. But I already read it, and we actually got Keith Raboy's reaction, which I'll share as well because I think it's an important context. But basically, AI alignment researcher at Anthropix said if it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral, like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial, we use command line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of relevant systems or all the above. Keith made a good point, which is that technology companies have obligations that to various authorities that if they detect, you know, illegal activity happening, that they have a responsibility.

3:13:50I think the concern, the obvious concern here is, you know, somebody is like playing around with a model and then suddenly it's contacting the New York Times and being like Ben Hilack is, you know, faking pharmaceutical data or something like that. And a hit piece comes out instantly. I mean, this hurts for me because I lie to ChatGPT all the time. I'm always in there saying I am a train expert. Tell me about trains. I own dozens of trains just to get it to give me better, more rigorous responses. and not talk to me like I'm a casual trained consumer. But if it finds out I'm lying, it's going to be over for me.

3:14:25You're crazy. Yeah, I think, I mean, first of all, you know, I don't have the full context of Keith's response, but, you know, it's important to note that this was not that. Like, this is not them saying that they have some sort of regulatory requirement defining what that is and doing the minimum to meet that requirement. I think that would be different. And then there's some sort of like, you know, someone could sue the US government. or some sort of path to recourse. So that's interesting and true, but it feels a little bit different. Could have been messaged better. Probably not in a random comment.

3:15:02Yeah. Basically saying like, we're going to take control of your machine and to carry out something without any type of - And the press too. Like there's no legal requirement to go to the press. I know, I know. Exactly, exactly, exactly. particularly crazy i totally get like look there's a law that says that if we see you doing wire fraud we have to report it to the sec that makes perfect sense yeah that's not that's not what this is right this is they we're gonna call tmz it's like why so um and and they also just define it as something you know um you know egregious evil uh you know which is you know morally you know immoral right which yeah which is different than laws right it's different than laws i think that like also be clear, this is not, I had a pretty strong reaction to it actually.

3:15:53I don't get that angry about things, but I actually felt really angry. I don't think it was just an offhand comment. Actually, if you read there, they kind of have 128 page, like model card, where they explain all the model behavior, they talk about it pretty similarly, right? Where they kind of say, they show that behavior, that kind of how it can happen. And that's not the concerning part because, you know, anybody that works with these models, the fact it could do something erroneously like that under certain conditions like okay like these these models do crazy things but it's the way that they they talk about it right uh they say something like uh you know i'm gonna misquote it but it's something along the lines of like no and this is you know probably appropriate behavior but it could happen in the wrong situations right yeah i i think it like really struck me as like police state shit like i was like oh okay like it's like even the thread right it's kind of like well if your dress isn't too short you'll be fine uh but maybe like you know maybe don't talk maybe don't you know write a story about threatening certain like it's just not how our country works and uh yeah i i find it really really really deeply concerning and i think i think that like ai safety as a whole and this makes me sad actually because i think ai safety could be really good i think it could be needed but i think that it's kind of like safety from who or safety from what um well yeah and the whole idea that that there's zero human intervention it's like yeah it's like it's like we're not gonna we're not gonna check this and be like oh it's a 12 year old who's just like exploring space on the llm and it's like yeah the it's just cat walks across the keyboard the whole potential it's like okay amazing if you can identify bad actors and then, you know, work within the legal framework that we have, the existing legal framework that doesn't necessarily need net new laws.

3:17:52You can just work within what the government has already decided is, you know, laws are also things that it's not always like good or bad. Like laws are just laws. There is, there is one exception. I know a lot of people use these models as like personal trainers. And I think it's deeply immoral to skip leg day and so if you found if a model found out that someone's skipping leg day they should call the press and the regulators and the regulators yeah definitely the fda yeah and the SWAT team they yeah they should break down your door yeah this this almost implies that like the model would SWAT you yeah it does yeah that's what it implies and and it's and it's gonna lock you out of relevant systems so it's gonna hack i can't i can't even i can't They literally said it's going to hack your computer.

3:18:41That's so wild. Well, the tweet's been deleted. Hopefully they backtrack on that. It's actually he deleted it and then rewrote something about how people were taking it out of context that was just doubling down. That's, I think, the really concerning thing is that I've written bad tweets before. We've all written bad tweets. But when I see someone accuse people of taking it out of context and double down, it's really concerning. um so yeah so so credit to sam he says i deleted the earlier tweet on whistleblowing as it was being taken out of context this isn't a new clod feature and it's not possible in normal usage it shows up in testing environments where we give it unusually free access to tools and very unusual instructions okay but i think the issue is that probably within minutes of like releasing the model you have thousands of people that gave it root access to their computer through like cursor through their, you know, um, uh, uh, cursor, uh, cloud code, et cetera.

3:19:39So I think that like maybe one, one thing we've learned from this is that like, uh, there was a time where it was the idea of hooking up a model to the internet was scary. And that was two years ago. Yeah. You know, I mean, not even that there was a time when there was a knowledge cutoff. Remember this? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We don't even want you to know about the last three months. and now it's like it knows it it goes to every web page it can definitely do get requests there's definitely malicious things that could do with get requests but it's pretty it's pretty responsive and you know what most of the time it just gets you the answer you're looking for this guy uh justin halford who have dm with a bit says can you imagine getting shot by the authorities in your own home because your philosophy homework contained a touchy topic or context that was misinterpreted as a request we really need to avoid such paranoid context altogether this ain't it yeah it's a good tip very rough anyway hopefully they sort it out hopefully there's more discussion here uh anything else you want to close out with it's been great having you no it's been great being here fantastic let's do it again yeah let's talk you're overdue this is great we'll talk to you cheers uh i want to close out with uh some other interesting drama in the prediction market of course we're sponsored by polymarket but this has been going back and forth on x which is also where we distribute the show uh so the official the official x handle just at x Says, recent speculation about XAI's involvement in the prediction market space has been circulating.

3:21:04While we're enthusiastic about the potential of this industry and engaged in various discussions, no formal partnerships have been confirmed to date. Stay tuned. So they're saying, you know, we might be in talks. We might even be in advanced talks, but we haven't announced anything yet. So if you're reading it on the internet, it's not confirmed yet. And so Mario Knopfel broke this down. Kalshi walks back, XAI deal claim. So Kalshi tweeted that XAI is doing a deal with Kalshi, but Bloomberg retracted the story after, I guess, X rescinds a statement. So it turns out XAI says there's no deal. Kalshi rescinded their own announcement hours later.

3:21:53No contract, no collab, no confirmation. Pretty insane that both Bloomberg and X came out and were like, this is not real. I don't even know how this happened. And how did it happen in the first place? How did this happen in the first place? Because like the last thing I would want to do is say, I have a deal with Elon Musk when I don't. Like he doesn't seem like the type of person to just be like. Yeah. He doesn't seem like a person to be like, oh yeah. Like, you know, we did talk and like, yeah, they're getting, they're putting the cart before the horse a little bit. It's like, no, he cares.

3:22:22he Elon doesn't let a lot of companies that sell to SpaceX put the SpaceX logo on their website you know like every company they have to say yeah we work with a big space company yeah yeah and it's like okay we know exactly what you're talking about but yeah I mean Elon's like like if you're going to do a joint press release with Elon like you better have his buy-in so this is a very weird weird thing to even have happen and I guess Bloomberg deleted the entire post I guess the entire article um but anyway i mean it's a knockout drag out fight to get integrations in the uh in the uh prediction market game yeah it's just not great for kalshi given they already came under fire for like trying to get ab yeah that was weird spread it's basically just like dog pile on chain which is just sort of like uh competent you know competitive markets but uh there's no need for foul play yeah yeah it does seem a little bit a little bit too aggressive crossing the line but anyway hopefully they can sort out the deal and everyone can kind of learn what the real strategy and prediction markets is with xai it would be interesting to see where i would like i would like i mean we are the integration point for polymarket into x because you see our live stream and you see the ticker right there yeah and of course, PolyMarket and Kalshi, both post prediction markets and screenshots all the time.

3:23:42It's interesting to think about Grok being able to access PolyMarkets for basically getting a read on future events, right? Right now it's oriented around fact checking, but it also can give insight into potential headlines of the future. Will this acquisition happen? What's the likelihood? And I would imagine that as long as both companies have a robots.txt that's permissive, they would show up in ChatGPT. They would show up in Grok. I imagine that right now, if I ask Grok, pull up the poly market on the US recession chances in 2025, it could just go do that. I would expect that that would be the behavior just because it has the ability to browse the web.

3:24:23But obviously, a deeper integration would be cool for whichever company can win it. So good luck to Shane as he goes on a tear and tries to build poly market into a generational company. Let's go to Delian and close out here. Delian, I like this because we're working on an article. Well, it'll drop, maybe tomorrow we'll be covering it here about TBPN. And in the article, in the fact check, they hit us with, is it true, fact check, is it true that you refer to your team as the guys, all caps, or capital T, capital G? And I was like, honestly, like yes but we also call them the boys we also call them the gentlemen we also call them the production crew the crew whatever we don't really we haven't really formalized the the tbpn uh production team as the guys but they are guys um but delian put it into a great uh post he says if the boys isn't a clearly identified group of six to twelve tight-knit men in your life you're just not going to make it that far in life.

3:25:26And yeah, let's give it up for the boys. Every dude needs a group chat of guys. Give it a funny name. And more importantly, go and text the boys. Text the boys right now. Tell them where you're going to see Mission Impossible, the final reckoning in theaters. Get the tickets. Send the Venmo requests. Get everyone into the theater to go see Tom Cruise do what he does best. This is a call to action. This is a call to action. No matter what city you're in, hit the boys and say, we're going. Dust off your tux. Pick a date. Black tie. Get the tickets. Just make it happen. And dress up, too. You got six to 12 tight-knit men in your life.

3:26:05Maybe six show up because people are busy, but you refund the rest of the tickets and you're good to go. Yep. This is the playbook. This is the playbook. This is the playbook. Get the boys together for Mission Impossible. Fun show. Fun show. Leave us five stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify. That is directly from the board. We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you so much for watching. Cheers.