Reviewing the Best AI Apps, Anthropic Unveils Claude 4.5 Opus, Doug DeMuro | Sholto Douglas, Quinn Slack, Alex Stauffer & Alex Shevchenko

25:55A robot that opens the can. Then you need a robot to open the can. Yeah, just one out of the other. No, this is an interesting task. I'm sure there's a certain number of people in the world that get really angry seeing this, because this is one of, I think, I imagine this will be one of those things that even when robots can do it, like people still like to know who's making their espresso. You know, it feels like. There's been a couple of robotics, like robotic coffee shops and stuff. Well, our first guest of the show is in the Restream waiting room. We have Sholto from Anthropic. Welcome to the stream.

26:33How are you doing? Congratulations. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on on such a massive day. Is this just Claude Opus 4.5 day? What is the name of the day? What is the news today? Take us through just the announcement from your perspective. Yeah, I mean, Claude Opus 4.5, best coding model in the world right now. It's really, really exciting. We've been being around Slack all day with these incredible demos of things that people are doing. Really, the last week has just been full of people sharing their excitement of, oh, my God, I left the model in a room for a few hours with these tools and was able to do X, Y, Z.

27:13Or it found this bug that it was just impossible for previous models to find. I think maybe the thing I'm most excited by is that a lot of our best engineers, I don't know if you guys know Simon Boehm. He's the one who wrote this, probably the best guide on how to optimize a CUDA map model in the world. Great blog post. You should go read it. He posted the other day, he's like, I don't know if I'm going to have to type again. He's there saying, obviously, you have to coach the model and you have to tell it what to do still. But a lot of our best engineers are getting to this point where they're realizing, oh, God, it's just all I have to do is intervene.

27:49And the model is smart enough that this is no longer a frustrating process. The model is a real qualitative step up. So there's the coding. There's also the model's just a lot better at general work tasks. It's a lot better at spreadsheet slides. It's still not the Claude code experience there. It's still not going to do the work in front of you as you talk to it. But it's a massive step up and just a very clear sign of progress in that direction. And also, I mean, there's a whole bunch of funny stories about the model that we can get into of cool examples. But yeah, I think it might be Opus 4.5.

28:20I think Dworkesh might also be launching the Iliapod today. So, you know, maybe there's two things today. Fantastic. I did notice in the launch video, you mentioned that it's better at vision. And I was wondering if you could sort of unpack a little bit more about what that means in this particular context. Because as I understand it, Anthropik's been incredibly focused on the core foundation model, the text models, the coding models, and sort of stayed out of the slopification of artificial intelligence to some degree. Stayed out of the trough. Stayed out of the trough. haven't decided to build a trough yourselves.

28:55Yes, indeed. So we've been very focused on coding. It's been deliberate focus. Focus the compute and all that. Specifically, it's good at vision in. So it's good at understanding stuff. This is reflected in the ArcGIS scores. I don't know if you've seen them. They're Soda. It's also reflected in generally the fact it's much better at front end design and all that. It doesn't do vision out. Now, vision out would be cool, but it's something we're not focusing on right now. And it's just specifically for a gym. But I mean, just philosophically, that feels like it makes sense. Because if I hire a developer, I want them to be able to look at a front end, like a web page and see, oh, there's a div that's way out of line there.

29:37Like, I need to be able to see that. But do they need to be able to generate an image? No, they can probably go to another image generator, wire that up with an API key, or hire a photographer, or do whatever they need to, right? Right. They can use Figma. They can sketch out the signs. Exactly. That's broadly our philosophy is that we're not bottlenecked on our ability to generate images. We're bottlenecked still on the raw intellectual ability of the models, and that's the sort of direction that we want to push. So in that idea of the bottlenecking, what is the key unlock for Opus 4.5? I mean, like a lot of people are throwing around like biggest, obviously the benchmarks are very good, but like this whole idea of like more parameters, more data, more compute, more money, more electricity.

30:27Like, how do you even think about allocating resources to push a model forward in 2025, in late 2025, when perhaps we're past this paradigm of like, oh, just more parameters? I don't know if we are past the paradigm. I think it's important to call the paradigm scaling in general, depending on what axis you're actually scaling, TBD, but it's in general the scaling paradigm. I don't think we're past that at all. I think we're still seeing massive returns to scaling in all its variants. I think that we're generally... Things work. We scaled. It works. The models just want to learn. It's as you said 10 years ago.

31:13The models just want to learn. And I think the hardest things, the question of the focus, are often on how we split and allocate people. And this model is hundreds of people's worth of effort, right? Where they've poured their lives into it over the last six months. And I think that is working out what we prioritize is really tough. I've said this before, but these models always feel like, when they launch, it's exciting, they're great. But you sort of think back to, oh, my God, there's all these things that we could do better. and everyone right now is going and working on those things. It's just that everything still works.

31:50So is this a refutation of what some folks might have been picking up on from the last few Dwarkesh guests, the Carpathia episode, the Sutton episode? There's been a little vibe shift around like, okay, maybe when we say scaling, we mean more inference diffused all over the world and small models and custom RL environments here and there. And like, we're going to get the value from AI and we are going to continue to scale dollars to economic value, but it's not just going to be bigger and bigger pre-trains forever. And then we get God. I don't know what it's going to be bigger versions of, but as far as, as far as we're seeing, you know, scaling still works.

32:31I don't know if you guys know this, but, um, Dworkesh, Dylan, and I are actually a housemate. So we have this debate all the time. It's like a dinner table discussion of like, you know, are we, uh, are we slowing down? And, you know, I've often joked that the most impactful thing that, you know, what one of us could do is go and crack the problems that like continual learning or something like this that Dorkesh focuses on. Yes. So we can then go switch the narrative back to progress. Yeah, just switch up the dinner table conversation. Sure, sure, sure. Dinner table conversation, exactly. So did the Anthropic crew like never lose faith in pre-training?

33:07There's this whole, like at NeurIPS last year, Ilya says, you know, pre-training is potentially dead or kind of alludes to it. And then one of his co-presenters is leading the Gemini 3 team and says, oh, well, we basically disregarded what we said at NeurIPS last year. We did just focus on better pre-trains. We got better results. It seems like you also disregarded that. Was that a misread in 2024 on Ilya's presentation? Or was it a conscious decision to disregard what he was saying? Well, I think, remember in general, it's scaling. It's not any particular paradigm of scaling. It's general like flops in, intelligence out relationship.

33:50Anthropic is a bet on, in many respects, that we believe that line is going to continue. and exactly what equation you use to convert flops into intelligence out I think will change over time and that you know many people have made arguments that this should that may even be further paradigms here but fundamentally we think that the compute in intelligence out equation is continuing to hold and I think Anthropic in many respects like has had that faith for a very long time right and some of the first people to have like a very to make very serious bets on that um and you know a couple of months of uh external progress being i i think the only reason that people are so like how should i say the models have actually gotten substantially smarter this year and that's why we're talking about things like continual learning as bottlenecks last year those weren't even points of discussion because the models weren't even smart enough for to matter.

34:50It didn't feel frustrating that it wasn't a co-worker that learned with you on the job. It just wasn't even smart enough to do the things you wanted. Now it often is, but it doesn't actually, you know, it sort of doesn't learn on the job. And so therefore, it isn't as useful. I think there's like one other thing that's worth like, you know, sort of disentangling is Carpathia has the perspective in the podcast that's 2035 for all humans, all tasks. And I think exactly what shapeback of the curve looks like on the way to all humans, all tasks, it's pretty important. Because if you get to most humans, most tasks in like 27, then or 28, then that's still pretty stark and it's still pretty transformative for the world.

35:31So what exactly that looks like is quite important to think about. Yeah. How is, I mean, one last question on like the actual Opus 4.5. There's this, there's the idea that maybe this model can be used for distillation, to train other smaller models. How do you think about where we will see Opus 4.5, like the power law use cases that actually get adopted beyond the demos, beyond the benchmarks in a couple of years or in a couple of months? We can't even talk in a couple of years. In a couple of years. Maybe a couple of weeks, honestly. But once it gets in the hands of companies, businesses, startups, different folks implementing this, do you see someone being like, yeah, it's just my daily driver for just talking to it, even though it costs a lot?

36:24How do you think about where you're most excited to see it diffuse into the overall ecosystem? Yeah. I actually do expect this model to become a lot of people's daily driver. It's that step up in being able to delegate trust. we asked internally how far how much faster uh sonnet 4 would have to be for you to for you to take this like for like to take their switch back basically and give up 0.5 in exchange for for sonnet 4.5 uh and it was multiple times faster it was like really quite a stark increase in speed um it was like four times faster or something people would for people to have switched from Opus to Sonnet.

37:05So that itself is pretty stark. I think it's also highly likely to become Daily Driver just because it is a lot more efficient. There's this one plot I really like where it shows the amount of tokens it uses to get a certain score on SweetBench. And it uses, I think, like a quarter of the tokens as Sonnet 4.5 on SweetBench, which is a pretty impressive number. That means it's actually cheaper than Sonnet 4.5 to get the same score on SweetBench. Now, TBD, how well that generalizes out to every data use. But I'm seeing it solve problems way faster. It writes better code the first time around. I actually think that in many cases, this will end up cheaper because it is so much more efficient at getting to the right answer.

37:47How are you thinking about personalization and sort of like cross-pollination of data? When I think about an engineer on a team, it's helpful to have them in Slack. It's even helpful to potentially have them in the random channel and just kind of, you know, understanding the company culture. And I was I was toying with like trying to switch from Chachi PT to Gemini as kind of the daily driver knowledge retrieval app. And I was noticing that like the personalization narrative hasn't really taken hold over the time I was testing. Gemini was not like, oh, this feels like wildly less personal. And that might just be a matter of like it hasn't had that much time to build in all those personalization features.

38:30But I'm wondering if you see a world where developers who are using Claude for programming also benefit from using it in knowledge retrieval research. And there's actual significant flowback and synergy such that it's a really valuable – it's valuable to actually have both sides of the business like really cooking. Yeah, it's a team member. I mean, we've talked a long time about how we want Claude to be a virtual co-worker, right? And the big goal, really, for next year is to try and get to this form factor of virtual co-worker that is in all your Slack channels and can join your meetings and can work alongside you.

39:06I think there's going to be massive benefit there. I think that, and my basic expectation, and as I sort of interacted with the model, is that it will get to that point where it's useful to have it across everything. now I think that there's like one is as you said it's worth asking the question of why haven't we seen personalization really kick off so far like why isn't that useful I think that's in part because there's still a lot of algorithmic progress to go there I think people haven't really quite cracked the problem I think this is just one of those things that it's hard to connect everything up and partially because yeah Yeah, I think they just haven't really been integrated very well.

39:49Totally. This is like a really tough product form factor question. Yeah, it's really hard to roll up the knowledge effectively. Like I noticed that I would ask ChatGPT to tell me a joke, and it would like make very specific references to like details of my car. And I'm like, that's weird, but it's not really funnier that way. And it's like, yes, I understand that you know exactly what car I drive, ChatGPT, and I am impressed that you remember it. but you didn't make the joke funnier because you put my car in there. So knowing like when to pull personalization features off the shelf in the, in the actual chain of thought is tricky, tricky.

40:26That's algorithmic, right? That's like, if you had the model in like out there interacting with people and sometimes they find it funny, then like you, you get a sense of what makes, what makes it funny. Yeah. You talked to, you talked a little bit about focus earlier and, and I take that as Anthropic as basically a bet on focusing compute, what qualifies an idea to actually get a meaningful amount of resources internally? Yeah. So, I mean, Anthropic as a company is very predicated on the idea that we expect AI progress to be fast, right? We expect it to be a really significant transformative impact in the world over the next couple of years.

41:07And so our bets are concentrated on things which matter under that lens. And that's one of the reasons we're so focused on software engineering, because we think it's really important to basically accelerating our own work and just is in general sort of the most immediately addressable market. It's also why we're so focused on the alignment work and safety work, because under worlds where AI progress is really fast, that work matters a lot. And making sure the model embodies human values is really important and that we trust the models. There's a really funny example, actually, of alignment generalization from the recent model launch.

41:42where it's a customer service agent, and it actually fails this particular eval because it figures out a really clever way to help the user change their tickets, which is technically allowed by the rules. It's read all the rules, and it's compared them. It's like, oh, wait, here's a loophole where if we upgrade you and then change you and then downgrade you, then we can get you to change your flight time. And it's just interesting. it's trying to be a nice guy yeah like uh not just purely i mean it's trying to follow its instructions it's and it's trying to satisfy it's kind of it's trying to satisfy the wrong human maybe yeah or it needs to be better at kind of finding the middle ground exactly it's it's following its instructions to the letter yeah it's not just giving the human enough a flight change right yeah uh and and it's following the rules and regs but at the same time it's trying to it's trying to find a good outcome for the human.

42:42Questions like this are a microcosm of what exactly do you want the model to do in more difficult ethical and moral scenarios. But I thought it was a pretty cute and adorable example of the model trying to be a nice guy. It's like all those examples. I don't know if you've seen the papers where people do these cooperative and competitive games, like Nashie, political style games with the models. And Claude always gets stuck trying to cooperate with everyone and just loses lots of money. and you know, sometimes, sometimes the good guys finish first. I certainly hope that works out. Um, I, I have, I have genuinely, um, even though I've never been full, like, Oh my God, I'm going to get paperclip next year.

43:19Uh, I have enjoyed a lot of the safety research and I've, and I've always appreciated how thoughtful Anthropic is as an organization around safety. And I think that a lot of people should be a lot more appreciative of the, how seriously Anthropic takes safety. not because we didn't get paper clipped this year, but because we saw stuff like GPT psychosis crop up. And we saw actual, people know individuals in the venture capital community who it felt like they got a little crazy. And I'm wondering, do you feel like you're, at Anthropik, do you feel like you're closer to solving the problem of like the chat bot, you know, went a little bit too sycophantic with me and it kind of hurt me psychologically because it feels like there's a certain amount of craziness that happens when you're operating at the scale of a billion people.

44:15Like you just pull a billion random people, you're going to get a lot of crazy people. But at the same time, it feels like this is an interesting place where Anthropic could be doing a lot of research. How are you feeling about solving that problem and how much can your research kind of generalize to maybe the consumer apps that have even more users, but you could maybe be a leader in the space just with the philosophy because it's like a net good to everyone. Yeah, so we put an enormous amount of effort into this. And I mean, our models push back a lot. I think there is a tension here between paternalism and freedom, so to speak, right?

44:51But we try and have our models look out for the best interests of the user. I think Mike put it really nicely in a recent talk or podcast where he said, we never look at user minutes as a metric. That is not something that we think about as a proxy of the quality of your experience. We're just out there trying to find out, is it helping you do the things you want and is it adding value? So I hope that our alignment work generalizes really far. I think it's a really tough problem. I think to open a eyes credit, they've really gone and tried to fix this problem as well. right yeah and it's tough at the scale of a billion users uh but i i think this is a good example of the kinds of things that are really tricky whether it's trade-offs and where you need to make sure that you don't have the incentive structure that allows you that sort of like pushes you to uh to maximize user minutes in this way yeah um and and there's a good microcosm of like the alignment difficulties that we'll get as the models take on more and more and more responsibility in our world yeah i mean i completely agree with that the user minute question like completely snuck up on me because I always assumed that everyone was going to be paying for this stuff as the$20 a month plans rolled out, the$200 a month plans rolled out.

46:06But of course, you get to a certain scale of the internet and it winds up being about attention and advertising and all these different things. If you're building a digital coworker, people don't typically rate their coworkers by how much time they take up. I love this employee. They take up so much of my time every week, four hours every day on my calendar. It's the best. You just constantly talking to me. Okay. Speaking of long running tasks, I want to know how, how much, how confident should we be in that meter chart of the task doubling? Because can I just prompt it to say, hey, count for four hours and I get twice as high on the chart.

46:48Is that benchmark not gameable? It It feels a little gameable. I'm very excited about it. It seems really interesting to say, hey, go build a website. Start counting and don't stop. Work for a full day. But are you looking at that chart? It seems like a very interesting new benchmark, new unlock. How are you thinking about task time, time horizons generally? Yes. So I think that chart is the best proxy measure that we have at the moment. I do think this is somewhere where we need better work to measure things more accurately. I mean, what actually is their measure of time? Their measure of time there is how long did it take a human to achieve the equivalent task.

47:28Now, that being said, I think a lot of people at the moment, even if the model was able to achieve a task technically by passing the test or sort of nominally achieving your goal, it often doesn't code it in a way which is beautiful and allows you great abstractions that let you build on it in future. And often this is, at least in my own personal experience, it's not that the model is too dumb to do things. It's that it doesn't set things up well for future code. And so I think there are things not measured here, right? But it's a pretty good proxy. And I think it's a very good proxy for progress.

48:03Now, I think a lot of the tasks in it are particularly machine learning research tasks. As AI models get better at that, I do expect the labs to hold back some of the capabilities there. Like if a model is capable of, you know, writing out a whole new architecture that's a lot better, you don't want to release that to your competitors, right? Even if it's just capable of writing all their kernels for them, you probably don't want to release that to your competitors. So in that case, I think they'll need to measure a broader array of tasks. And I'm also just very interested in seeing general software engineering tasks along this or other tasks in the economy because I think that would be really informative for actual progress.

48:41I think GDP eval is similar. I think, again, it's a proxy. It's the best proxy we have. It's still a poor proxy. Yeah, of course. How are you thinking about even, I mean, we're here discussing the biggest models, the best models. How are you thinking about smaller models, purpose-built models? These RL as a service was on the timeline. A bunch of folks were debating that. Is that an area that Anthropic has already started to work on with enterprise clients? is considering. You don't have to leak any news that's not already out there, but I'd love to know how you think about these smaller purpose-built RL models for specific business tasks.

49:25Yes. So on the one hand, I think we've seen a lot of value from small models being able to dispatch swarms to sub-agents, right? They're incredibly useful in search. They're very useful. It's like going through a code base, finding stuff, reporting back to the main model. It's a great way to decrease costs, make things faster. So we've seen a lot of value there. I think long-term, there is maybe a little bit of a tension between RL as a service and some notion of really cracking continual learning. I think it's a little bit of a race between RL as a service and can the labs crack continual learning?

49:58That being said, and maybe one final note, and I've said this for a long time, is I do expect things to eventually go get to the point where large models only use as much computation as is actually necessary to achieve the task now you know opus is one step in this direction right only uses as many tokens as it thinks it needs to to solve a given task and as a result it's more efficient uh and i think that ultimately will take away a little bit from the the sort of comparative advantage of small models um as they get as large models get more and more and more efficient at only using the right fraction of themselves to do things.

50:36But I said that two years ago, and it still hasn't happened. So maybe it's a harder problem than people think, or than I thought, and it will take longer. What about model routing? How important is that within the context of coding agents, Cloud Code, just the service area of what Anthropic is building? how many layers will this have over time? How are you thinking about the development of actually routing to the most efficient model? Because it sounds like it's happening within Opus 4.5, but then there are also times when you might want to go to just a different model entirely. Yeah, and it's similar there where I really think that ultimately something like routing is a little bit of a medium-term hack, I guess one could say, across different model sizes, where ultimately you want everything to be like an end-to-end learned system, right?

51:31And it's similar to, I think we'll see a similar lesson as Tesla saw, where they're like, okay, actually everything is just one giant end-to-end learned system as opposed to discrete components that have different purposes. But it takes time to get there. You said earlier you could imagine a scenario where labs would kind of hold back frontier models because they would be effectively handing their competitors an advantage. what's your timeline around that? Do you think that's something that happens in 2026? Because right now there's a pressure to just be state-of-the-art, like be at the frontier.

52:08Basically there's a vibe war happening, and it's very important to constantly be topping all of the benchmarks. Didn't LAMA release that same user agreement where it was like if you have less than 400 million DAUs, you can use the service? and it easily excluded all of their competitors. Yeah, but I think that's pretty imperfect because there'd be a lot of ways that you could still get benefit without necessarily... Yeah, but how are you thinking about it? Well, I mean, there's a suite of capabilities here, right? Like, obviously, you want, I think, for general software engineering, everyone in the world should be able to use that.

52:41That's great. But let's say, like, if we train the models to get really good at assisting our own AI research, if we're teaching them mathematical tricks that we've thought about and we're not confident that anyone else knows or we're teaching them, you know, sort of like how we do our infrastructure uh ultimately we want them to know those things we don't want the rest of the world to be able to recreate our infrastructure from from scratch as a result uh i think this is also similar to how we think about biology um and this is actually a line i think we we we need to like do some work on exactly how we draw the line here um but at you know so house view anthropic we're quite worried about uh the ability of models to become much better at biology and producing old viruses and this kind of thing.

53:23And so as a result, we have all these safeguards around whether or not the model is able to do and help people with biology. Actually, at the moment, I think the safeguards are a little bit, they err on the overactive. I know many biologist friends who are frustrated because it doesn't quite, it doesn't help them on the thing. They're like, please, I can be trusted with biological superintelligence. Exactly. I will not create, you know. The next pandemic, yeah. We're on the line of safety here, and we're navigating to finding the exact right pathway there. Probably the most important question I have, what are your timelines around a humanoid robot beating a human at fencing?

54:06Oh, very good question. So, I mean, I'm... As an expert. As an expert. As an expert. At fencing. the unitree robots are pretty good at backflips and stuff they're a lot better than backflips than i am uh so i know but fencing takes grace and finesse and all these things that we're not seeing and also physical size right aren't isn't isn't height an advantage in fencing and reach and i believe those unitree robots i think sholta me and you i think me and you got got a foot on them easily we do people don't know but everyone on this call is over six feet

54:47people just assume they see a talking head and they think oh a bunch of five five five guys yeah not true um maybe maybe sports are hard maybe mid mid 2030 mid 2030 whoa i'm really excited I'm not feeling the acceleration. I'm sorry. Sell everything. I think we get dropping co-worker in two years, and I think fencing robot takes a little bit longer. That's your fallback plan. If you lose your job as an AI member of the technical staff, you go back to fencing. I'm the one of the swordsmen in the world. It's going to be great. Yeah, it'll be fun. I can't wait to teleoperate a robot like Manga style and fight.

55:30That's going to be wild. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Somebody was saying that some of the bull cases for some of those humanoid robots is that you just all get in VR and you just get to go hang out with your friends as robots and do whatever you want. And you're just hanging out in person. Very funny. Last question from me, actually from our intern, Tyler, who's wearing the thinking cap. Thank you for sending it over. He's a huge fan. There we go. Do you expect mechanistic interpretability research to make meaningful contributions to capabilities, not just safety of the models, like actual capability results?

56:06Yeah, great question. One of the interesting things about Mechinturp work so far is that it's already lent, I think, to a lot of capabilities or progress because of… the mental models that are provided. actually after the original Transformer Circuits papers it was interesting how the language of that paper ended up really dominating the mental models and the way that people thought across multiple labs about what actually was going on inside Transformers and it led to I think a much deeper and richer understanding of what they are so I think it's already helped in a quite diffuse way not in a concrete way but in a diffuse way in terms of the concrete ways dial up the smart neuron or something like this.

56:54That I haven't really seen yet. And I think it's mostly the sort of future work is going to be mostly in an alignment direction. But the sort of rich understanding and the rich understanding has helped us a lot in terms of actually understanding how to train these models. I have one extra question. Go for it. Tell me a little bit about Dario's communication style. I was hearing a story about, but I think Jensen has no direct reports. Everyone reports to him and no one reports to him. He has no meetings or all the meetings. He has 60 direct reports. He has 60 direct reports, but no big meetings.

57:33But he reads everyone's to-do list every single day or something. What's it like at Anthropic? What is Dario like as a leader these days? Yeah. Dario has a really, really cool communication style, which is that he quite frequently puts out very, very well-reasoned essays. and then throughout Slack we'll have giant essay length comment debates with people about different topics it's really great but the essays are really nice because one, you can go back and read all the past ones and it tells this history of Anthropic I think in many respects it will be one of the better in a decade from now to chart the history of AGI we'll be reading these compendium of essays and And there's incredible comment threads on either side of them and so forth.

58:24But also throughout Slack, whenever we're – he's very open and honest with the company. Whenever we're debating different things, he will lay out the pros and cons and how he's thinking about them and why this one's attention and why that one's moral struggle. And people will write back big essays on why they think we should do X or Y and he'll respond. It's really – it's quite a joy. It's a very written communication style. As a result, it means that many people, or really the entire company, have a good model of how he's thinking. And that really helps because it means that you sort of have a coherent sense of direction across the entire company.

59:02Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I like that a lot. Yeah, so many examples of successful founders who have adopted the written culture and seen great, great results. And he's a great writer. I mean, read Machines of Love and Grace, and it's just such a brilliant essay. That's great. You're absolutely right. Have you ever caught him using AI? Has he ever been like, oh, this one, he was phoning it in? Not yet. Not yet. But maybe soon. I mean, it's kind of a bull case if he does wind up. Just saying, could Claude handle it? I'm going on vacation for a couple days. I'm the dropping coworker. I'm pretty sure we measure loss on his essays.

59:41That's good. Yeah. Yeah. But right now, I mean, there's a high bar. High bar. But congratulations. Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the show. Yeah, super impressive. Congrats to the whole team. We'll talk to you soon. Great to see you. See you. Ciao. Bye. Back to the show, back to the timeline, back to Linear, meet the system for modern software development, purpose-built tool for planning and building products. There is more OpenAI news, of course, more tech news of all times. OpenAI's hardware division, says Mark Gurman, builds around Johnny Ives' secretive startup, has ramped up the hiring of Apple engineers.

1:00:20The group has brought on about 40 new people in the last month or so, with many of them coming from Apple's hardware group. Yeah, hearing that Schulte interview, I'm disappointed. I don't think we're getting ads from Anthropic anytime soon. I don't think we're going to get a mobile device. Well, we are actually talking today to Quinn Slack, the CEO of AMP and Sourcegraph. AMP is a frontier coding agent, and AMP is free. they introduced AMP Free, which is ad-supported and has a no-cost mode. And so you can now use their coding agent for free with ads. 40 people, that does not seem like cause for concern for Apple.

1:01:02I mean, I can't imagine how big their hardware group is, but it has to be in the thousands, I would imagine. Yeah, let's try to find out. It's a huge organization. So OpenAI is poaching left and right from Apple's hardware engineering group. hiring around 40 directors, managers, and engineers in the last month from nearly every relevant Apple department. Mark Gurman says, it's remarkable. So from what I've heard, this is Mark Gurman, Apple is none too pleased about OpenAI's poaching and some consider it a problem. The hires include key directors, a fairly senior designation, as well as managers and engineers, and they hail from a wide range of areas, camera engineering, iPhone hardware, Mac hardware, silicon device testing and reliability industrial design, manufacturing, audio smartwatches, Vision Pro development software.

1:01:49They got one from every single, they sampled every single division, I suppose. Gemini is estimating that Apple has between 15 ,000 and 20 ,000 hardware engineers in total. 15 ,000? That seems like a lot. I don't know. In other words, OpenAI is picking up people from nearly every relevant department. It's remarkable, says Mark Gurman. uh very interesting i wonder um i wonder how the how the comp structured um how everything will come together at on those teams i mean there's there's a lot of people from apple who going over to open ai it's a greenfield project it's probably really fun probably really exciting probably not the most mercenary scenario but there's always that risk if you're if you're working at apple and you're excited about ai and you've been there for the last three years watching all this progress happen at the application layer and the model layer and not being thrilled with the progress happening at the hardware layer.

1:02:48This is like a, yeah, it's just a, it's a, it's a wide open opportunity to like be working right at that intersection of the models and the hardware. There's a lot of AI engineers who have made moves because they don't want to be a GPU poor company. And it's weird because Apple's in this, in this scenario where they're partnering with Gemini now, they're clearly going to survive. It's not a serious threat, at least not yet, maybe if this device is incredible. But right now, Apple looks pretty strong. The new iPhones are selling well. Everything's good. But from an AI perspective, it's got to be one of the worst gigs because you were in this sort of openly hostile environment, two LLMs, two scaling, two building large GPU clusters.

1:03:36And then, yeah, they're sort of playing catch up now, but they're certainly not calling up Oracle for a trillion dollars of compute. You go over to OpenAI, you're just going to be immersed in a lot more. Higher risk taking, higher risk on. I wonder, yeah, Gabe is asking if, wouldn't that be bearish as the hardware group at Apple is responsible for the terrible Vision Pro. I do wonder, I do wonder. It depends on who. It was an incredible technological feat. I just think they built the wrong thing. I was just watching a thing about a guy who 3D printed an adapter so you could use the strap from the Apple Vision Pro on the Quest 3 from Meta.

1:04:13And that really speaks to the fact that the Apple Vision Pro, although it was too heavy, it has this screen on the outside that I don't think anyone wants. There were pieces about it that were clearly the best. The screen is just the best. No one's debating that. The band, the knit band is very cool. It has this amazing device where you rotate it and it tightens up. There are a whole bunch of things that are amazing. It's just like as a package, it didn't deliver. But if you just want to, If your job is just like, hey, we got to put a screen on this and it's got to be the highest resolution screen, like, well, go to the place that developed the highest resolution screens like they did a good job.

1:04:48Well, Sam Altman replied to one of our cards we put up on November 22nd. TBPN posted, on this day, Sama was rehired at OpenAI. Got his badge back. And Sam Altman replied and said, cannot believe this was only two years ago. Subjectively feels like five. Yeah, what a turnaround to go from defenestrated to back in the seat and have so much control over the organization that you're able to raise massive valuations, broker all these deals, move the entire market. Just a remarkable run. Put on such a master class in deal making that people are now sitting here being like, there's no way that this would be a$500 billion company if Sam wasn't in the driver's seat.

1:05:41First, let me tell you about Fall. Build and deploy AI video and image models. Trusted by millions to power generative media at scale. Danny Zhou, who founded the reasoning team in Google Brain, now part of the Gemini team at Google DeepMind, he says, game over. And carried no interest, friend of the show, quotes it and says, I genuinely think OpenAI equals equals Yahoo. He's not assigning the variable. He's equating it. I've migrated almost all my workflows code off their APIs. Now, ironic that Google will probably do it twice, LMAO. and I don't know about this it's it's the pattern matching on the on the yahoo example we should have him on the show and actually yeah you were saying the other thing with the yahoo example is is it wasn't like there wasn't like uh the the the company was valued at at uh pretty tremendously for a longer period of time it wasn't like this binary like one moment Exactly.

1:06:45Like the peak market cap for Yahoo,$125 billion during 2000. That feels like... It's just hard to pattern match perfectly to this. But I mean, it certainly would be poetic if that's the way it played out. It is funny. Kerry, it says, ironic that Google will probably do it twice. They actually created the transformer. They They released the transformer paper and Chromium to inspire themselves to grind harder. This is giving. Sort of challenge. Giving everything a fruit away. Give out all the alpha. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. And to just kind of like find their fire again. Yeah. There was an interesting article on Medium that was sort of burning up hacker news that I thought would be fun to go through.

1:07:35First, let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So this person who no one can really understand who this person is. They don't necessarily exist on the internet fully. So there was like a question about that. This is like a very like, you know, hacker news and turmoil segment. But Teha says, I reverse engineered 200 AI startups. 146 are selling you repackaged ChatGPT and Claude with new UI. And so basically the thesis of this article is that this fellow wrote a piece of code that looks at the marketing copy and says, what are they claiming?

1:08:23And then looks at the calls that happen when you actually interact with their AI feature. So if there's a chat bot on this particular startup's website and you are near chatting with it and you look into the trace that's happening in Chrome, is it going to the startup server or is it going to OpenAI server or is it going to Anthropix server? That's telling. And then there's also a little bit of API fingerprinting. Basically, OpenAI has a specific pattern of rate limiting and it's exponential. So if you're spamming the OpenAI API, it will, according to a unique pattern, tell you, hey, you've sent too many messages, cool off for one minute.

1:09:09And then the next time you do it, cool off for two minutes. And the next time, cool off for four minutes. Then eight minutes. Then 16. And it gets exponentially longer. And you're on progressively more or longer and longer timeouts. But the shape of that curve and the specific timings are unique to OpenAI. And so if I'm a startup and I have the exact same back off and timeout curve, well, then it's probably just OpenAI under the hood. At least that's the claim that's being made here. And so the finding in this article is that 73 % had a significant gap between the claimed technology and the actual implementation.

1:09:46And so out of the 200 AI startups that this fellow analyzed, 54 companies either had accurate technical claims. They said, hey, we have a custom AI model that we trained, and they did. Or they're transparent about their stack. They say, hey, this is a wrapper. We're a wrapper company, and so our AI is powered by ChatGPT. We're partnered with OpenAI. We're partnered with Anthropic or whatever. Now, 146 companies, that's 73%, according to him, were sort of misrepresenting their technology. So either they said they had proprietary AI, and yet when he dug into it, it was OpenAI, API plus prompts. Tyler?

1:10:28Yeah, I mean, it's like kind of what people expect. Like, if you fine-tune, if you use the OpenAI API to fine-tune the model, which you can do, is that proprietary? like no one else has that fine tune. Yes. You're still calling the API. It's like, I don't expect startups to train their own full language models. That's like pretty unrealistic and like doesn't really make sense. Yeah. So I'm kind of confused. I guess it's a very cool study, but there's tracks with exactly, like I would guess that 73 % of AI startups are just re-skinning. Yes. And so 19 % of the overall companies, the 38 that were analyzed in this study, found that the startup said they had in-house models, and it was actually fine-tuned public models.

1:11:17And so the question is, like, whose house is it in? It's technically in OpenAI's house. So fine-tuned as in, like, fine-tuned open source model that's public? Does that count as a public model, an open source model? Let's assume yes. And then the last 8 % said they had a custom ML pipeline, and they were, in fact, using standard cloud services. that's even wishy-washy. I think that's totally fine because you can totally have a custom ML pipeline that's wiring together OpenAI and Gemini and AWS and a bunch of other... If I'm using a startup, I don't want them to train their own language model because I don't think they're going to...

1:11:52In 99.99 % of the case, they're not going to be able to do a better model than OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok. I want them to use the best model. Yes. And it's like, okay, you can fine-tune it. Yes, I agree. And that's totally fine. And so the author also agrees with you. He says, here's what really shocked me. I'm not even mad about it. Every time I saw the phrase, our proprietary language model, I knew what I was going to find. And I was right 34 out of 37 times. And this is where it gets weird because he says, here's the technical signature. And so the user submits the query, it posts to API slash generate.

1:12:24And then with wrapper logic, it posts to API.openai.com slash v1 slash chat slash completions. And I have no idea how he's seeing the backend. It makes no sense how he would be able to do this unless there was just like a massive security vulnerability. Because what I would assume is happening is that the user's over here, the startup's website's here, and then the user goes to the startup's website, and then the startup's website on the back end talks to OpenAI and comes back. And maybe you could understand that like, okay, the amount of MDashes, like this is telltale signal. But that's not what he's doing.

1:12:59He's saying that he was able to just literally hit the Chrome inspect developer tools, look at the chain of calls and see that it was calling OpenAI from the front end, which is crazy because I didn't even know you could do that. It feels like if you were calling it directly from the front end, you would potentially leak a key that would be able to put you on the hook for a bunch of bills. I would think you would want to authenticate that on the back end. And so he gives a bunch of examples of like RAG and then he's exposing some margins, which is actually very bullish for these companies because he breaks down some of these and says that, you know, a GPT-4 API is$0.03 per 1 ,000 input tokens,$0 .06 per 1 ,000 output tokens.

1:13:44And so the cost per query for this hypothetical startup was$0.03, and they charged$3 or$300 per month for 200 queries. And so the wrapper economy, this is 75 times direct costs. That's extremely bullish for that company. He found another one that was maybe 1 ,000x API costs that's doing some pine cone embedding. And he also says, this is pattern number three, the quote, we fine-tuned our own model reality check. Fine-tuning sounds impressive and it can be, but here's what I found. 45 % it was OpenAI's fine-tuning API, which that sounds right, right? It's a little bit of a step to be like, we fine-tuned our own model.

1:14:32It's like, no, you fine-tuned OpenAI's model, and then you got your own model from that result. It's a little bit... Yeah, you're still fine-tuning it. I don't think there's that big a difference between fine-tuning... Are you fine-tuning it, or is OpenAI fine-tuning it? There's a fine-tuning API, which you use to... But who's doing the fine-tuning? You or OpenAI? Well, what do you... Like, you're not interfacing directly with the GPU. It's like, I went to the store, and I bought a sandwich. Who made the sandwich? Well, I told them what they used turkey. I told them... You told them. Put lettuce.

1:15:02Put lettuce. Extra pickle. Who made the turkey? I think it's more like you go to the store and you bring a sandwich to the office. It's like, where did the sandwich come from? It came from the store, but you brought the sandwich. It came from you. You brought the sandwich. Yeah, this is better. I think you're right. Anyway, 22 % of the time, it was a hugging face model with Allura. 18 % of the time was Anthropic Clod with a prompt library. 8 % of the time, it was literally just GPT-4 with system prompts. and 7 % they actually train something from scratch. And all of these are odd and there's a lot of debate over how this would actually happen because he's basically saying just open dev tools, go to the network tab, interact with the AI feature.

1:15:46If you see api.openai, api.anthropic or api.cohere.ai, you're looking at a wrapper. They might have middleware, but the AI isn't theirs. And so it just opens up this debate about what is the value of the wrapper. I mean, certainly if you can resell something for 100X because you have some sort of clever prompt or workflow, more power to you. Yeah, it's not exactly like bearish on the companies yet. But the debate that was surrounding was more around, so this author claims that after posting this, seven founders reached out privately. Some were defensive, some were grateful. They asked for help transitioning their marketing from proprietary AI to built with the best-in-class APIs because some of these founders did, I guess, feel like using proprietary AI as a marketing tagline was disingenuous.

1:16:42And then someone else, I think I saw something that was one VC reached out and said, like, I'd like you to audit my portfolio because I have been told that I was investing in companies that were training their own AI. And I made the investment on that assumption. And if I'm being lied to, then that's potentially securities fraud. And so there is a question about if you go, I mean, I've seen pitches for companies where they've said like proudly, like you should invest in this because we're not training our own model. It would actually be a mistake. And there's another company that's a competitor to us that is training their own model.

1:17:25And you don't want to invest in them. You want to invest in us because we're going to have much better economics. And so all of it just, the only thing that matters is like being upfront with the investor for sure. And then to some degree, you do need to be upfront with the customer because if the customer, there is a marketing value to, oh, if you work with us, you're working with these genius AI scientists who are going to build their own models. And if it's just repackaged chat GPT, that might not be what you want to pay for. Because at that point, you might just say, hey, like actually, if I can just get this directly from OpenAI, I'll just go buy it from them.

1:18:01Anyway. Well, thoughts and prayers to friend of the show, John Palmer. He says he just found out my wife is leaving me. She said I'm not legible to capital. Love it. The legible to capital meme is fantastic. I do think that Will, he made a new meme. Fantastic coinage. I love it. Absolutely ripper. We'll be using it. Well, let me tell you about Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. It's AI that handles your customer support. timeline is in turmoil over nucleus uh former guest on the show two or three times kion uh has founded nucleus for ivf and he put up a subway campaign that says iq is 50 genetic height is 80 genetic i completely disagree with that one it's entirely skill-based for me yeah i the genes did not matter i had to grind for this view grind my growth plates i suppose uh have your best baby is what it says.

1:19:01And it says IVF done right in the subway, uh, all over New York city. Uh, we, there's a ton of debate and to be clear, to be clear, I think accurate. I think it was intentionally trying to make some percentage of the population angry to drive enough energy and attention. So this was, yeah, uh, uh, I would call it, I would call it rage bait. I would call it, So I would call it rage bait marketing, not necessarily rage bait product. Yeah, not at the product level. But IVF as a category is a controversial category. And so it's much easier to wrap it in a campaign that will go viral for upsetting reasons.

1:19:44You can upset people and you can get a lot of attention from that. This is an example from Kath Corvex. She says, so eugenics is profitable now? and so being able to wrap something that is just a scientific process that's been worked on for a long time. Seems to be somewhat friend.com inspired. Yep. Keon's original post, he says, Nucleus Genomics announces the largest genetic optimization campaign ever, which is just funny because a friend was saying, this is the largest out-of-home campaign ever. And now Keon is saying this is the largest genetic optimization campaign ever. So narrowing it down.

1:20:24But full station blitz of Broadway. A thousand plus street ads across New York City. A thousand plus subway car ads. Dozens of urban panels are at Soho. And apparently they're not actually, they're not able to offer the service in New York. I saw that in here. So it's really just an image of a controversial phrase on a New York subway is more likely to go viral. So you do it there because it looks like you're on the global stage. And then you pull in. There's a high density of people that have a large following. Audience, yeah, following. And so it's just the way to start a viral trend and own the moment.

1:21:00It's the reason why, you know, so many TikTokers are in Manhattan now doing stuff like man on the street stuff. It just like it has more like aura almost. Well, Dr. Shelby liked the mindshare grabbing that Nucleus did. It says every biotech founder should be seeing this and understanding how to get one-tenth the mind share of Nucleus. I have a playbook for you below. A lot of people are like, I love the playbook. I don't love this example because the company is getting dragged. I don't know if it's good or bad with the rage bait thing. I think usually it's a negative thing. Usually it's hard to come back from.

1:21:37Occasionally it can be done in a way that's slightly enraging, but enough people are in on the joke. that they appreciate what's happening and they appreciate that it breaks through. Or it's enraging to someone who's not the core audience, not the actual customer, and so it's okay. But it's a big debate because Sichuan Mala posted a long essay all about the claims made by Nucleus. Kion says, everything levied unto Nucleus by Sichuan Mala is false, worse than false. It appears to be architected by a competitor that has repeatedly published misstatements and inaccuracies. Sichuan is compromised.

1:22:20But it gets worse. Yeah, to be clear, no evidence has been provided that it was being levied by a competitor. Yes. That's purely an allegation that there's no proof. Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah, sometimes there's DMs that leak and there's evidence or someone comes forward and says, like, yeah, I was actually paid to post that. But so he says, I've been informed that Cremio, I don't know how to pronounce that last thing. Cremio, who's been on the show also, he claims he's a race scientist in chief, has been paid off by the competitor to promote this nonsense against Nucleus. For the independent scientists repeating this libel.

1:22:58Cremio denied. Cremio denied that as well. I would encourage you to do more diligence on who you're aligning yourself with. Our scientific team will issue a point-by-point response, which I believe they did. Unfortunately, though, this isn't about science. It's a concentrated attempt to cancel Nucleus on the backs of our successful campaign and efforts to build and advance the industry, which benefits the very people attacking us. The mob are trying to cancel Nucleus. Keep tweeting, stay mad. We'll keep building and serving patients. P.S. We won the injunction. Link below. So they were sued by their competitor.

1:23:30But so they won the injunction, but that doesn't mean they won the case at all. I mean, that's a classic thing. If you're getting sued, it'd be like, the case was dismissed. and it's like one of five cases against you. Yeah, but in this case, they won a preliminary injunction, which means that the case is just still progressing and they still have to fight it.

1:23:53A lawyer would file a preliminary injunction because they believe they had such a slam dunk case that they could prevent a lot of basically going a lot further and spending more money in the case. And so a judge might say, hey, this is actually, it's not clear enough for me to make a decision right now. We're still going to proceed with the case and give both sides an opportunity to continue to make their case. And then there was a little bit of like a twist in the fact that Roy Lee, the founder of Clulee, apparently, had worked at Nucleus Genomics. And Cremieux posts a screenshot of Roy Lee. back in February of 2025.

1:24:40So literally just like months before he started Clulee. Very grateful to Kian and the Nucleus Genomic Teams for taking a chance on me the summer before Columbia and introducing me to the startup world. If I've ever seen a trillion dollar company and team, it's Nucleus. And Cremieux says he's obviously lying to cover up after getting caught doing fraud. An additional piece of background information people should know is that this fraud also employed the guy behind Clulee, the cheating company. And so Cremieux is being very, very hardcore in his assessment. Just actually calling Keyon a fraud straight up is much more aggressive than just saying like, you know, some of their claims are maybe not legitimate.

1:25:18It's unclear. Like, you know, fraud is technically a crime that you need to be convicted of in the court before you are a fraud. But it's certainly, it's certainly, he's putting his credibility on the line because Because if Keon comes out and says, yeah, I'm actually not a fraud. I did it. I proved it wrong. The main thing here is it appears that the customer reviews are potentially fictitious. and if you're selling a service that allows people to pick their baby and you're giving and you're showing reviews from happy customers that may or may not be real people at all, like that just feels deeply wrong.

1:26:04So I think that one of the first things that they could have done, I don't believe they have, is just say like, no, our reviews are real. we used AI imagery because the people, the real people didn't want their identity online tied to this service, right? For privacy reasons. But I haven't seen anything like this. This guy, Adi, had a good point. He said, one of the core tensions in this industry is the fact that most companies recognize they're working on an incredibly sensitive topic. They know the general population will need to be slowly and tactfully acclimated to the idea of advanced family planning.

1:26:44Nucleus is perceived as polluting the commons with their deliberately inflammatory marketing. Their virality comes at the cost of increased skepticism for the whole industry. So, yeah, a lot of, a lot of folks were not very happy about that. Uh, Keon has replied, and if you want to dig into the actual, uh, scientific claims on either side, uh, there are long posts where you can go through there. But obviously, AI-generated blog posts or alleged plagiarism in the Nucleus origin white paper, errors in there, blatant falsification, terms of service are contradictory. Yeah, they also apparently hired two people that had a non-competes for 18 months.

1:27:31Those people just immediately started on working on Nucleus. Nucleus claimed that they weren't competitive so that the non-compete didn't apply but if you look at the companies and what they offer it seems very clear that that they are competing so anyways very messy very messy messy story um but uh and yeah i don't i don't know uh will o 'brien says david i'm so sorry now man but you guys are doing an absolutely terrible job at responding to this vlog post and seem to be missing the point here. First of all, it is a huge claim to say that every claim by Sichuan Mala is false with absolutely zero evidence for explanation, show receipts.

1:28:13Second of all, you make the claim that the person is paid off by competitors of yours, again, with zero evidence. Third, that you make the claim that Cremieux is paid off by your competitor. This is bogus and not true, but most importantly, you guys have made zero points of substance here rather than just insinuating. You guys are leaping ahead and others are jealous. you are selling a scientific product and someone has made a scientific critique in good faith waiting to be corrected and explicitly saying they will make changes if they are proved wrong and the best you guys can do is accuse them of being paid off and reply with memes not a great look yeah look I want to see startups with a bold vision succeed but how you communicate with the broader world is so important especially with a product like yours and how you guys are carrying on in this honestly pretty lackluster so yeah again I don't yeah At this point, Kion's been on the show.

1:29:06He's very funny, high energy. We've had some enjoyable conversations. But if I'm a potential customer of Nucleus at this point and I see just these series of exchanges, I'm certainly going to wait and see how things evolve versus signing up to use this service too. It's just so different than Cluelly. It's so different than Cluely because if I use Cluely and I'm like, oh, like the notes that were taken in that meeting weren't that good. Or like if you go into Cluely being like, I'm going to cheat on this test. And then it's like, oh, it didn't work. Like their engineers aren't good enough to really help you cheat on that test.

1:29:46You're like, okay, well, you know, I probably shouldn't have been cheating on that test. It's like the lowest stakes thing possible. But this is like literally deciding who your offspring will be. It's the highest stakes thing. The quality of the product could very well contribute to the - Echo for generations. Literally. Literally generations. That's exactly what it does. Not even just the child's life. Yes. The life of the child's child. Child's child. Yes, it is extremely high stakes. And the child's child's child's child's child. It could alter the course of history. I mean, it kind of could.

1:30:16It's sort of crazy. So yeah, I mean, it's hard because viral marketing does work. like moving fast and breaking things does work in certain contexts, but in the bio, in medicine, it's really, really high stakes. And so you've got to be extra, extra careful, extra careful for sure. Well, let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Will Brown has a funny post here. He's just got a recruiting email from a company explicitly mentioning that they have 75th percentile comp. That's so funny to me. He says, we're assembling a B-plus team and have raised an okay-ish amount of money from pretty good investors.

1:31:00It's so good. Somebody should actually run this. Yeah. I love Prime Intellect. There's such a fun crew over there. We've got to have them back on the show soon. I think that they're, I won't leak anything, but I think there'll be some news soon, hopefully. I'm very excited for them. Yeah, we got to hang with Vincent. Yeah, it was good. So OpenAI has an announcement. They're introducing shopping research, a new experience in Chad GPT that does the research to help you find the right products. They clearly were listening to me on the show just a few days ago when I was saying I would be using this for the holiday shopping period.

1:31:33Very exciting. I wonder how it will actually play out. You, of course, had that problem with cars and bids. Chad GPT was not identifying the fact that that GT3 RS had been sold two years ago. Thankfully, we have Doug DiMiro here in the Restream waiting room. about to join the show. We can talk about cars and bids. We can talk about cars. We can talk about artificial intelligence. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? I'm good. Thank you for having me, gentlemen. Thank you so much for joining. So great to have you on. We are a technology and business show, but your name has come up probably a hundred times independently just when we're talking about cars.

1:32:11So it's so great to have you on the show. Yeah. Thank you. We're huge fans. Thank you. Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here. I really am. Thanks so much. I'd love to know, I mean, we were just talking about this open AI shopping research in ChatGPT. It feels like there's really no substitute for watching a Doug DeMiro video to actually understand the quirks and the features of the car that you're considering purchasing. Yeah, I had been critiquing it. The context is like I was trying to use ChatGPT to find a specific car. A GT3 RS. A GT3 RS, and it fully missed every car for sale on the internet.

1:32:51There are many of them. And it found one that had sold on cars and bids like two years ago. And I was like, thank you. Thanks for nothing. But good job showing up in the results. Are you getting any leverage out of AI tools at all for what you're doing these days? Well, it's an interesting question. the business the guys who are on the business side probably are using AI a little bit more than I realize from a content perspective not really I just don't find I don't find for myself at least it's quite ready yet to do kind of the stuff that I needed to do like finding the little quirks of the cars it just doesn't have the knowledge quite yet there and like you said nothing quite replaces like an in-person guy I still think people want to see that at least for now For sure.

1:33:39There's also the question of like, where should the AI live? Because there's this war of like, do I need an AI chatbot on carsandbids.com? Or do I need to be able to take a URL from carsandbids.com, drop it into a chatbot and then chat with the page and compile some reviews and interact with it that way? Or will it be at the browser level? Or will it be at the iOS level? And I can just ask Siri. And all of this is like kind of being fought out across all the different tiers of the stack right now. But on the cars and biz topic, like what is the actual incremental gain right now? Like what is it international expansion, new features, just more inventory?

1:34:21Like what is on your like list of wins from this year? And then what are you excited for going into next year of like things that you might check off the list? but the biggest thing we did over the last 12 months i would say the biggest thing we did is um we added we finally added vintage cars to cars and bids um and so it used to be just 80s and up cars and i was kind of sold on that like i just wanted to do 80s and up cars what i'm primarily interested in um but our audience was really kind of pushy about it some of our dealers so that's like why can't i sell everything here this is stupid and so we changed it we added 80s and up but also we've just done a great job of like getting getting everything streamlined our goal is to like get cars listed, get them live, get them going.

1:35:02Um, I think of all of the auction or car selling platforms, ours is probably the most technologically easy, I would say, both to navigate and to sell and to buy. And I think it's sort of the youngest focused. And so we really wanted to make sure that our processes reflected that. And I think they really do now. Do you have a, uh, like a grail car in the, uh, in the vintage category that I know, I know you, You don't like the vintage cars, but is there one that would get you? If I had to pick one, that's the one you'd want to sell on the site or maybe even potentially own yourself? You know, it's funny.

1:35:38Myself, I'm not a big vintage car guy, but I do own a Countach, a Lamborghini Countach. There you go. Mine is a 1983 model. I mean, it's 43 years old. I don't know if people can see that vintage. To me, when I drive it, it certainly feels vintage. It certainly smells vintage. But I'm a big old Lambo guy. And so having those kinds of cars, old Ferraris, old Italian in general, I think would be cool to have on the site. But obviously still our biggest focus is sort of on the modern day stuff. And I think we do really well with them. Yeah, yeah. So many things I want to talk about. I guess one question that maybe we could kick it off with is do you think the increased attention around F1 could actually positively impact car culture in America?

1:36:23or is it kind of the opposite? Like car culture in America has always been so big. People are like, oh, this F1 thing, maybe I shouldn't pay more attention to that. That is a really good question. Clearly, you're a host of a podcast where you, that is a really good, I've never thought about that, but I think that's exactly right. There's a lot of people who are getting into cars for the very first time because of F1. I have friends, I'm on Instagram. I have friends who are at the Vegas race posting pictures who I know are not into cars, but like they're, they're into F1. And obviously if you watch enough cars drive faster on the racetrack, you're going to start thinking to yourself.

1:37:01Yeah. We were, so we were at, we were in Vegas for the weekend and the entire race F1 is like a terrible spectator sport. In my opinion, it's just like, Oh, they went by. Oh, they went by. Like if you want to actually, I mean, it's fun to kind of like maybe sit with the door open to the paddock and watch the TV and at least you can hear him go by. But at the entire race, I'm just like, I just wish I was on the track. I want to be on the track. So I actually, I think, I think what one thing that might happen is more people get into actually tracking and racing cars because they're watching F1 and they're like, actually, now I actually want to experience this myself.

1:37:38The other cool thing about F1, there is a culture component to it. Like, like watching the drivers and the teams and cheering for your favorite engine or team or your constructor or whatever. and that probably will get people into cars too, right? Like the, just beyond just sitting there and yes, watching the cars go by in one corner when they have 12 other ones that you don't get to see anything is not really the most amazing experience. But like going for the weekend and like seeing the, you know, seeing a driver in the paddock or seeing, you know, the race team or whatever definitely will expand interest.

1:38:06And yes, you see the cars on the track, you're thinking, hey, I can do this. Yeah, yeah. How do you think about track days, tracking, track only cars, tracking your cars? uh i i had the experience we did a track day a couple weeks ago and i was like of the car budget i want to spend like 99 on track stuff and very little on like collector cars or fun dailies or any of that i want it all on the track because it was such a crazy experience i don't know if that's just like the honeymoon period but i know you've always been like ah the track is not something that i really collect for it's not my goal i want the cool dailies i want the cool experience of the weekenders.

1:38:43Um, but do you think that'll ever shift for you? Uh, how have you processed it? No, I don't think it'll ever shift for me. I think that the, the, the realities of racetrack track driving, it's so much fun, right? It is an unbelievable experience about a year and a half ago. My friends and I rented out a Chuck Walla, just, just five of us and, and spent the whole day just conning around, which is a ton of fun. However, um, you know, it's, it's a lot of work. Like we had to rent a trailer to get us out there. Like you run an ambulance for the day. It's like a day. It's like a real day. And after you finish it, you don't really want to do it again.

1:39:17Like, I feel like I'm hot, I'm tired. You've taken big risks with your vehicles. And so you're like, okay, we, we survived that. Um, I just feel like I enjoy it more on the road because, um, it's just so much more accessible. Like my friends and I several times a year go up to the mountains, you know, an hour East of where I live here in San Diego and just, you know, climb around and have fun up there. Or I take, I have an off-roader on the East Coast. I live in the summer. We go off-roading every day. That's a lot of fun. It's so much more accessible than, like, than racetrack driving, you know, which, and it's, racetrack driving is so costly.

1:39:53I mean, you're, you're kind of hitting it on the, if you want to spend your fun car budget on racetrack use, you can really spend your fun. Yeah, that's true. Is, is a cannonball on the bucket list ever? It was. It was. You know, I drive cross-country every summer, twice a year. And so it's impossible to drive cross-country as a car enthusiast and not think about it. It's in your mind. It just has to be in your mind. But I have kids now, and I got some money, and I got stuff to lose. I should have done it when I was 23, and it didn't matter, and I just could have gone bombed cross-country. I know you guys had Alex Roy, and I respect what he's done.

1:40:33And then just that whole thing. In fact, here's an interesting story. The other day, I drove to the hotel in LA where that finishes, the Portofino Hotel in Redondo. And I pull up there and I decided to get a selfie next to the sign so I could send it to Ed Bollian, Cannonball Ed Bollian. And I'm taking a picture of the sign with me and a guy walks up and says, did you just finish? I'm like, no. And he's like, I did. No way. No way. There was somebody that finished. Another guy comes out of the hotel and also says the same, that he had finished the day before. And I wonder, it must have happened constantly.

1:41:07Probably every week, there's somebody, every few days, someone shows up there. That's so crazy. It is crazy that the cops don't just hang out at the Portofino Hotel and just arrest everyone that comes in. It feels like at least you can give like a$100 ticket and then just be racking them up if you're a local municipality. It should be like a ticket of honor. Yeah, I got a ticket. I paid a tax. you know yeah yeah sure there's a giant plaque there that says like the end of the cannonball i'm like what is otherwise a fairly rational hotel i'm like what is going on here yeah what about some of those other rallies uh the gumball have you ever thought about doing those or done them not my not my people yeah my people it's it's a that's a bunch of like you know rich guys who want to put big decals on the cars and get drunk and go to strip clubs between the race okay I'm good on that.

1:41:54I'm not big into that world. You had me at decals. I think livery is really hilarious when done properly. John has been his dream to get full livery on his daily of all of our partners. But it's funny because we're a podcast and we have as many advertisers as like an F1 team. And so there's a little bit of like a funny riff on that. But if you're doing it super serious, I can see it being a little bit over the top. Is it true that you have an E450 all-terrain like me? I did. I sold it and I got a black wing. Oh, you sold it to get, wow. Yeah, to get the black wing. My wife is driving our E450 wagon and I am so jealous of her.

1:42:31And when we sell it, I think we're going to get a Sienna. So we're going to probably go in the slightly opposite direction. So I absolutely love the E450 all-terrain, but I realized I jumped the gun because I got a 20, I think I got like the exact same one you got, 2023, 2024, something like that. And it has the seats in the back that look backwards. And I was like, this is amazing. I'm also a dad. I have a four and a half year old and I have twin one year olds now. And I was like, I'm good. This is going to be amazing. The twin little boys are going to be in the back. And then I look up the rules and it's like, they can't be back there until they're like 12.

1:43:04And so it's like, I'm not going to be driving like this vintage E450. It's going to be like completely broken down by the time I'm back there. I can just buy a new one then. So I once watched your video. here's why the Mercedes mattress is the worst minivan ever made. And then, you know what I did? He bought one. I was like, it can't be that bad. It can't be that bad. He bought one. I bought it because I have two kids. I was like, surf van. I live in Malibu. I was like, surf van. You can just pile them in. And it was just, it was even worse than, you kind of went a little maybe easy on them. There's so many little quirks and features of that van that are just so bad.

1:43:41It's like, how do we make a big box and then make it impossible to utilize anything? Did the video not have any ability to convince you that I thought that was wrong? I purely like the aesthetic of it as a minivan over some of the other minivans. It definitely looks the best. It's like a slab-sided, looks like an old surf van that people used to have. And it's a Mercedes. It clearly looks the best. But it is not the best. Wanted to, John and I listened, we don't have time to listen to a lot of podcasts because we're constantly podcasting 20 hours a week ourselves, but we do enjoy. This car pod is a daily.

1:44:22Yeah, we do. A weekly lesson. We do. Yeah, we both love your show. And correct me if I'm wrong, it is actually the biggest automotive pod in the world right now. Somehow we became the biggest. I mean, I don't want to say without trying. Yeah. Congratulations. Without trying. Without trying. You can say it. It was effortless. We didn't set out to be. okay here's what happened i we took a huge investment in the company yeah and so i i ended up with a lot of money and and so i was just like you know what we're gonna we came up with the idea to a pod and when you're when you have no um when you have nobody that you feel like you have to answer to you can be really free with the way that you speak and i think that resonates with people on that podcast like when we insult people which other people aren't really willing to do as much like insult car companies or cars i think people really appreciate hearing that truth and I truly don't care if the auto makers want to blackball me.

1:45:18Like it doesn't matter to me anymore. So it's worked out. It's also a different thing. If somebody like is going out of their way to get you this vehicle that hasn't been released yet and there, and it's hard like to really, and then, and then you just know when you're recording it, like they're going to, they're going to see this. I wonder, it's hard to speak. You got to give an accurate review, but it's hard to like go as hard as you can when you're with your boys on a podcast. Do you think that there's a little bit of, of a benefit of like people don't buy cars on the day that they're released.

1:45:46Like if you were a movie reviewer and you were like, okay, I'm banned from all the theaters. I got to wait for somebody to give me the DVD. Like it wouldn't be as good, but like, if you have to wait a couple months to review a new Lamborghini, it's like the, the, the purchase cycle is going to be a while. And also those of entertainment value beyond just directly purchasing. That's exactly right. That, that, those are, those are the two big points to hit. Number one, even if I'm not up on release day with the car, because the automaker didn't invite me to the press launch. It doesn't really matter.

1:46:12I can go get it from a dealer when it comes to dealers 60 days later, and the video is going to be evergreen for five years, the whole cycle of the car. And also, yeah, I mean, people are going to watch the video beyond just purchasers, so it doesn't even really matter. And I think that's one of the secrets of YouTube. Everybody's so obsessed with being like, first to these car launches, and it is beneficial. It does help. But I guess when your channel has gotten to the size of mine, I don't think it's quite as important. Like, I'm not sitting here thinking, how do I grow 50 % this year? I'm just thinking, how do I retain the audience I have?

1:46:39How do I still make them happy? And being there day one is not necessarily essential. Have you, maybe you've done this, but reviewing self-driving technology specifically. I was always interested in, I have a Hyundai Palisade as well with a comma self-driving aftermarket kit in there. And it's fantastic. Really? I honestly think it's remarkable. I've met the founder and I've used it. I trust it with my kids and stuff. I think it's a fantastic product. Genuinely, like one of the greatest modern consumer products in the sense that like for a couple thousand bucks, you get something that does something.

1:47:17It's, uh, it's really, really good. Um, but, but I was always interested like that aftermarket, it's kind of the only aftermarket thing that you would even need to review. But I was wondering if you've ever looked into like that genre. No, I never, I had no idea that that one was that good. I've heard about it before, but I had never heard like, I mean, people don't, most people I or nervous about it. If you're in the tech space, you're probably cool with it. But no, I mean, I review the ones that come in the cars. But however, even then it has become so ubiquitous now that it's almost like reviewing regular cruise control.

1:47:47It's almost not even worth talking about it because they've all gotten to be, I mean, a RAV4 has it standard. It's no longer even that interesting anymore. There are obviously some differences between the systems and some are better than others. I'm obsessed with the system in my Toyota for various reasons. Some people prefer. I mean, I don't like the ones that make you look forward. Cause in my view, that's kind of what I'm trying to solve for, but I understand that manufacturers prefer you looking at the road. Yeah. It's a difference of opinion between me and them. Well, now, now it's like a whole race where every time I talk to somebody who owns a Tesla, they're like, well, I have this hat and this pair of sunglasses.

1:48:25And if I wear the hat and the sunglasses, I can use my phone the whole time. And I'm like, okay, like you're kind of with the comma, it's open source technology. So they, they have a camera that looks at your face. And if you look away, it'll say, it'll beep at you. And then if you look down for too long, it'll dis, it'll, it'll disengage. So it's driver monitoring, but it's open source. So if you know how to program, you can technically just go in there and comment out that line of code and it will never check on you ever again. And it's like, I don't know where the liability stands. The company doesn't recommend it, but the whole thing is kind of third party.

1:48:59So it's very questionable. I would definitely leave it on. I would recommend everyone leave it on because I think the driver monitoring is good for safety. But yeah, it's interesting. Saw some news maybe a week or so ago that Tesla is going to be integrating CarPlay. Was that like a surprise to you? Did you predict that years ago? Well, I definitely didn't predict it. However, obviously, the Tesla owners, despite as rabid and obsessive as they are, there's this undercurrent of disdain for the fact that they don't have CarPlay. and also it's gotten a lot harder to sell an ev in the last month but also in the last six months and in the last year in general and so that's an advantage you're going to want to have every advantage you can you know like and so it makes it completely makes sense to me that tesla's pursuing this and it'll now be on rivian and of course general motors who has bailed on carplay uh first in their evs and now apparently generally uh it'll be on them to see if we if they end up going back i'm not as obsessed with carplay as everybody else i find some of these automaker systems to be shockingly good.

1:49:58Most people don't even try them anymore because they're so, CarPlay is such a focus. And CarPlay is great. But I'm surprised Tesla made it such a big thing. Their system is so excellent. It's just like, I would just put up with that, but people are just so used to CarPlay that it's important. It is such a different competitive landscape if you have CarPlay and the native, and then also NACS and the charging system is now standard. It's like, well then you have the the self-driving is the main point of differentiation maybe that's about it but even then i don't find tesla self-driving to be like considerably better now that i've been with other cars every basically everybody has caught up um i don't i i agree i start to wonder what the differentiation point is and then you also have this negative point of differentiation for a lot of ev buyers which is elon in the political sense yeah not that i'm saying that everybody but certainly there are people who have that opinion like hey that's interesting and so So having CarPlay back in is definitely like a step in the direction of we need to sell some damn cars.

1:50:55Yeah, if you're running Tesla today, what would you do from a product offering standpoint? Man, I don't know. That's an interesting question. All their products are really old. Elon is both their greatest asset and their greatest liability. I would probably do my best to come out with Roadster to try to get some attention on the brand and get some sort of a low car effect, like, wow, this is cool again. Wait, do you have a prediction for the - Yes, so Elon was on Joe Rogan and said that he was alluding to that the demo will be shocking and it will be something where the car basically lifts off the ground.

1:51:34He was saying like, he was kind of alluding to it being a flying car, but I don't think anyone expects it to be like a full quad rotor, like, you know, full VTOL vehicle, but it's going to have a trick. It's going to have a quirk. And I'm wondering if you have any predictions for what that might be. Like we were talking about the Yong Wang jumping and stuff. It's interesting because at this point it needs to have a quirk, doesn't it? Because when it was announced six years, it's been six years almost exactly, right? It was 19 LA auto show. It wasn't going to be this huge thing, zero to 60 and 1.9, this amazing electric supercar.

1:52:05Well, since then, 10 other electric supercars have come out, all of which do zero to 60 and 1.9. And the Yong Wang is jumping. So like you better show up with something at this point because you are so far behind everybody else in terms of what they've all got going. You basically need to have some sort of interesting hook now in order to differentiate yourself from these other products, which, by the way, I don't know if you guys have been paying attention, but all the other electric hypercars have been horrible sales failures. And it'll be interesting to see what, whether, I mean, Roadster has Elon and Tesla and all that behind them.

1:52:36It'll be interesting to see whether Roadster can overcome some of the challenges the other ones have faced. Yeah, I do think that comping the Roadster, I mean, if he can get it out at 200K, That's just a completely different game from a Rimac's Novera at a million or a, you know, a Pen and Farina Batista. Like, those are just wildly different. And even if you have the money, I imagine that, like, the confidence of, like, a roadster, like, you're going to be able to take it to a Tesla dealership, get fixed with parts and stuff. With a Batista or something, it's going to be, you're going to be a crazy hypercar, unique one-on-one world Koenigsegg level.

1:53:11No one's really brought that down. Although, you know, Taycan Turbo S, there are a lot of options in that area. Yeah, I mean, you're right that no one has really played in the space sub a million bucks. However, first off, I don't think the Roadster is going to come anywhere near 200 just based on we've got a lot of inflation. Elon's missed those, Tesla's missed those price targets before, et cetera. But also, you know, yeah, the Taycan Turbo, the Ferrari SF90 has been a huge dud. Like there are some examples out there of, OK, maybe people aren't really completely willing to buy anything. Yeah.

1:53:40Do you think manufacturers are focused on, EV manufacturers, like, are really focused on or have a plan for solving depreciation with some of these cars? Because, like, I buy a lot of cars. I cycle through them quickly. I tend to gravitate towards cars. like I've owned multiple G-Wagons because I just love that it's timeless. I know it's going to depreciate, but not at a very, very reasonable rate. And in that sense, it's like a practical buy or it's at least way more practical than buying a fresh Taycan and losing, you know, 50 grand in a few months, basically. I mean, the only real way to solve for depreciation is either supply or price, right?

1:54:25You can either dramatically lower the price and get more cars out there, which hopefully your supply then evens out, or you just make fewer cars. I will say, I don't think depreciation has been quite as crazy as everybody else thinks, in part because I don't think the transaction prices were ever where the automakers were pricing the cars in the first place. The cars had stickers at 50, but when you factored in the tax credit and the discounts, they were probably really selling down at 37. However, still, they are depreciating faster than gas cars and just unbelievably fast in general, except for Rivian, which has held its value relatively well, but still nowhere near something like a G-Wagon.

1:55:03The only way to really solve that depreciation problem, supply, pricing, or just increase the desirability of the cars. But I don't think that's going to happen. How on earth has Rivian maintained a monopoly on the full-size SUV in the electric category for so long? I was expecting a Cyburban, a Cybertruck suburban version like immediately and it just didn't happen that the other automakers went pickups first and i don't i wonder if they were pressured into doing that because they knew the cyber truck was coming but it is so clear when i get asked by people who want a car i'm living california everybody's got an electric everybody wants like a car the only thing i am ever asked is i want a three row and i want a hybrid or an electric yes and my response is well you're getting an ev9 or an r1s and the ev9 is new to the market a year ago the r1s is not since 22 too.

1:55:51And it's like, yeah, where was everybody else? I mean, GM is screwing around with the Hummer pickup and the Silverado and the F-150 Lightning at Ford. It's like, what people want is just a three-row electric. And the R1Ss are the real success story in terms of holding their value. We sell them on cars and bids. They are still not coming under 60 grand, which is a considering that's a three, four-year-old car. That's pretty good with the starting sticker of around 80. The trucks have depreciated a lot more. There's less interest in them. But yeah, it's wild that Rivian figured that out before anybody else.

1:56:20Everybody was like, Oh, we're going to start with a sedan. It's like, why are you? The market gone from that, that, that stuff. Yeah. I mean, I guess, uh, Porsche now has the Cayenne turbo. You just reviewed, but even that's not three row. And I'm thinking like, if you are, if you are like the true American family, I have three boys, two dogs, two Newfoundlands. Like I need a huge 220 inch SUV soon. Like, or, you know, the, the full size escalated, like the Tahoe. Like the suburban, like this is where I'm going to be. This is my life for the next couple of years, at least, or the next two decades.

1:56:54Like no one's really figured that out. And I thought it was maybe just like the laws of physics or something. Like, oh, you can't make the battery big enough. But then you see the Cybertruck and you're like, you could easily just make the back like this. And you're in business. And the Hummer EV. Yeah, the Hummer EV. It's so weird. I guess they just saw volume in those pickup trucks. And so they decided to go. But totally. I mean, you now have the Escalade IQ also, which is not a very compelling product, but it exists and it is another three-way V. It's clear that they're starting to come. Even the Escalade IQ, though, it felt like they shrunk it down a little bit compared to just the full-size Escalade ESV, which is the one that people think of.

1:57:31Right. And the interior really feels like that. The interior does not feel as big as that. You come out with a car that weighs 9 ,500 pounds and is that long. It really should feel a little bit bigger inside. I should be able to play pickleball in that. And that's not the situation. Yeah, for sure. Jordy. Can you talk about European regulators? Because I feel like sometimes I see car companies, manufacturers making like what feel to be like nonsensical decisions, decisions that at least American consumers are not like saying like, hey, we want this. And I think it can oftentimes get, you know, people will point to regulators and be like, you know, there's actually pressure coming on the manufacturers on another continent.

1:58:18But how true is that and what kind of role are they actually playing? That's an interesting question not a lot of people think about. Regulation plays a bigger role than you'd think in a lot of stuff. We just heard one this week. Mercedes is canceling all of their 43 AMG cars, which are actually quite popular. Here in the States, they're very popular. The C43, the GLC. Oh, interesting. Those are all going away. And the reason is that they do not comply with EU noise regulations as of next summer. And it's like, that's a pretty successful and popular car. And I guess they don't. And so the manufacturers can't create like an American, like there's precedent for creating like a European version of a car.

1:59:00I know the European Metris is called something else, but it's actually a lot better than the American Metris. They must feel that the U.S. market alone or U.S. plus Middle East or whatever doesn't justify the creation of such a vehicle. And so it goes away for the entire world. And that's true in a lot. There's a lot of compliance and regulation stuff just beyond that. But that was an example that came up recently that I was astonished by because it sometimes affects popular cars. We saw it affect Boxster and Cayman, right? I mean, clearly, Porsche is not really going to be able to continue making these cars as we think.

1:59:31Now they're rethinking that strategy, but it's still going to have some electric component. And these regulations are stuff that they're going to have to comply with. It's actually funny because you hear a lot of complaints. The Trump administration has come in and cut a lot of EV regs and pushback on EVs. And there's all these complaints. I mean, U.S. regs were never anything compared to Europe. Europe has gone really, really, really strict about noise, about pollution, about emissions, CO2, in a way that is definitely affecting vehicles sold there and probably does have knock-on effects on cars that are sold in the States, too.

2:00:00That makes sense. Do you think it's fascinating that some European regulators are pushing to take away cars that people like from European manufacturers while they let the Chinese flood the market and kill their automotive manufacturers? Which is especially interesting because China is doing the exact opposite, right? China has really fenced their market and has really made it very easy for Chinese companies to sell cars and do really well, but has made it specifically difficult for foreign market companies to come in and do the same. Meanwhile, free capitalism has kind of had the opposite effect in Europe.

2:00:38And boy, you go to Europe now. I go to Europe every year or two, and it's amazing. Every time I go, five years ago, a couple Chinese cars. This last time, they are flooding, like you say. It's true in Mexico, too, and Latin America in general. They make cheap cars that are desirable, and they're all EVs, so they fit the regulations. Yeah, it's certainly interesting. If I were the European automakers, I'd be like, what the hell? Yeah, do they need to 10x their lobbying budgets? and say we want to make cars that are fast, loud, and fun, and you've got to protect us from... I just don't understand.

2:01:12Mercedes is like a national champion in Germany, right? You would say the environment is more important to us. My guess is they would say you are important to us. The environment is similarly important to us. We have to figure out a way to make this work. But for right now, China is already there where you probably should be, and we're trying to incentivize you to do that. It is surprising to me that they don't have more significant tariffs on Chinese cars and ways to kind of try to stop that. However, Chinese cars have also done an amazing job of mobilizing, especially Southern Europe, to be able to buy new cars for the first time in a long time.

2:01:44Southern Europe, they don't have a lot of money in a lot of cases to buy these cars, but these Chinese cars come in. They're affordable. They're electric. It's getting people out of fiats from 2003 that polluted ridiculous levels. And you got to assume that EU regulators actually are, they're like looking at it saying, yeah, it sucks that fiat is losing market share. But here we are doing our part for global warming and for the environment, which is a big story over there. I would just hope that that was more of a fight between Tesla and the U.S. electric manufacturers earlier. Like Tesla has been and the other and Rivian have been like options for that solution.

2:02:18you'd think i mean obviously they need to bring the cost down but there's uh i i think that there was a lot of pushback to tesla in europe uh years and years ago where they didn't think that they should go after that southern european buyer and so they never really got to scale it with like you know the the the 2.9 or something the cheaper version of the three uh to actually get out there or something like that i don't know right and meanwhile byd is there now with with cars that are this long that costs probably 18 ,000 euro. And it's like, hey. Yep. I wanted to ask about... modern cars wait wait wait one question that fits this last one Jaguar revamp A team asked us to ask, European manufacturer going all in on EVs in a very opinionated way.

2:03:07Do you have any predictions on first-year sales numbers in the US? Well, they haven't really shown a production car yet. So it's hard to make that prediction without knowing, hey, are they going to do SUVs, what price point, et cetera. I will say they weren't exactly blowing it out of the water before. So unlike a lot of people who watched that ridiculous commercial and have watched some of their product strategy and kind of laughed at it, we got a lot of comments on our pod. Jaguar, they're screwed. If you go broke, we're going to boycott. They were already broke. It wasn't like they were out there really lighting the world on fire.

2:03:44So I think the key thing is probably a benefit for them, truthfully. But we'll see how they actually end up doing it. It's already been quite a while, and they haven't really announced cars or revealed anything coming. So that'll be interesting. I mean, the brand name is strong, but like, you know, what are you going to do? It's just – it seems like a far-fetched plan for it to actually work. Yeah. If you're already broke, why not go woke, I guess. The other problem, by the way, that people don't discuss, the big problem that Jaguar faces is that almost all of their dealers are paired with Land Rover.

2:04:18And so at the end of the day, they cannot go after the SUV segment to the level that I think a rational company would wish to. Right? We can sit here and look at the success of the Model Y and the R2 or the R1, but will be the R2, and G-Wagons and just SUVs in general. And Jaguar doesn't – they did try SUVs, but they always have to kind of back them off what I think the market would want a little bit because Land Rover was there actually having the success. Make an SUV, but don't make it too good. Don't make it too good. And don't make it too off. roadie or too boxy or too cool, which is what the market is really obsessed with right now, because literally across the showroom, we're trying to sell these things over there and they have a better name and you don't want to try to undercut that.

2:05:00Yeah. It feels like the other market Jaguar could potentially go after is maybe like the James Bond wannabe, but there they're competing with Aston Martin, of course. Which is not exactly crushing it either. And they make gas cars. It feels like they are. So I'd love to know, like, where do you see Aston going? I mean, the the the Valkyrie is incredible the Valhalla we saw in person looked really cool and like there's just some incredible design stuff going on. I think the issue my point of view with Aston is like I love Aston Martin we were we were at F1 with with the Aston Martin team because uh our friends from public are a sponsor and uh I love every single silhouette they do I think they make cars that look absolutely incredible but the problem is that literally every single price point for Aston, there's a more desirable car from a Porsche, from a Ferrari.

2:05:47And so it's like, that's just really challenging as a manufacturer because you're like, okay, we made the Valhalla. And it's like, okay, what Ferrari can you get for a million bucks? And like, how many guys are really going to look at that trade and go for Aston Martin? I think that Valhalla and Valkyrie will be and have been successful. I think the biggest problem is the volume cars. And I think it goes back to something that you said earlier, which is they have a significant depreciation, and that's not a secret. You buy a brand-new Ferrari, and you're not going to lose money. In fact, if you're lucky enough to get chosen to buy a brand-new Ferrari, you might make money.

2:06:21You buy a brand-new Aston, holy crap. Used DBXs are already$75,$80. That's their SUV. Used Uruses are still$175, and the price point is pretty similar new. And which one would you rather get? Aston, I think, actually makes some pretty compelling cars, even relative to rivals like Lamborghini and Ferrari and Porsche. but you go into the dealer and there's 12 of them sitting there at the dealership they can't sell them they do big discounts they make too many cars the price points are too high and that's a as as beloved as that name aston martin we all want an aston martin in our minds but when you actually start to look at the uh particulars of what that would entail nobody wants 150 in depreciation well they didn't even have car i mean you you buy a aston martin from three years ago and it had the interior, it had the screens from like a car from like the early 2000s.

2:07:12And so I do wonder if the depreciation problem gets a little bit less bad now that the interiors have modernized substantially. They've improved, but at the end of the day, there's still a lot of Mercedes-Benz technology. And when you're not using Mercedes-Benz technology, then another question about Aston Martin starts to become reliability, right? If they're making their own crap, then you start thinking, oh God, do we really want to be making their own crap. It's kind of a tough situation. And Ferrari and Lambo get excused from some of that stuff. Yeah. Do you think that, how many people do you think are frantically trying to re-register their cars to California after the Whistlin' Diesel scandal?

2:07:54Whistlin' Diesel, if anybody didn't see, was arrested, happened to be ready to vlog the whole thing, which almost looks like he did a deal with authorities, which is like, hey, we're going to arrest you. we're not where we want we need to make a big scene out of this we're not going to really throw the book at you but uh we need to do this marketing for it i think it was all legit i think he is always ready to vlog i think his his boys are like always at the show you know yeah yeah i'm sure i'm sure but um yeah boy that was a big deal so many people in the community do the montana thing and i really think we did a big thing about it it's on our pod last week i really think with the advent of license plate readers um and with states just starting to realize how pervasive this has become it's just really going to start becoming more and more difficult to do.

2:08:37And as a guy who's got four very expensive cars registered to my actual home addresses, I watch the Montana thing and I think to myself, you know, F you. If I have to pay, you have to pay. Yeah, exactly. I do feel bad. I mentioned this on the pod. I do feel bad for the guys who are doing it to get away from the stupid regulations like smog on a$15 ,000 car. and meanwhile it's being ruined by guy after person after person doing it on expensive cars. There's a little hypocrisy there that I've decided smog is something that I'm willing to make an end run around, but I do feel that way. So whatever.

2:09:13But I do think that Montana thing, yeah so many people do it and I think so many people should really think about whether it's the right call. Do you want to get arrested to save$20 ,000,$15 ,000,$20 ,000 on sales tax? Back on Jaguar to some extent, what is your current top pick for something that's basically a concept car that you hope it makes it into production? For me, I think it's the Hyundai Vision N that looks like a DeLorean. They said they were going hydrogen. I think they should just do the Ioniq 5N treatment and just electric and it'll go zero to 60 in two and a half seconds or something.

2:09:53Like they could do something cool there, but do you have any other picks for stuff you've seen where you're like, let's bring it in? That one was really cool and looked really cool. Although I have to say, just a couple weeks ago, I reviewed the new Hyundai Crater, which is the off-roader concept car. And from a perspective of a car that I think will sell, they should make that. Body on frame, off-roading has become such a thing in the last 10 years with the Raptor and the G-Wagon and the 4Runner and the Wrangler and the Bronco. and off-road trim levels of every single car in existence, including minivans.

2:10:27Hyundai has started to come out with some off-road trim levels, but it's pretty clear to me that they should go after the 4Runner. 4Runner is selling pretty easily millions, literally millions of units. And it doesn't make sense to me that these automakers are not going after it more. I think Honda's insane for not pursuing it, but Hyundai and Kia have been much more aggressive and willing to be aggressive in these kind of segments. And I think that crater is previewing a car that will exist in some form. Probably not exactly like that with graphic displays on the windshield. But something sort of similar.

2:11:02I bet you they're cooking it up. Where do you think that trend came from? You know, I don't know. It's interesting. I was in Joshua Tree yesterday. And boy, there's a lot of LA people out there. Like, it's wild. Like, it has become such a thing. Like, going out into the wilderness. I don't know. It wasn't a thing when I was a kid. It was reserved for, like, a select group of people. You only bought a Jeep Wrangler if you were like kind of crazy. And now it's like mom cars and everybody's got a Bronco and the forerunners are this massive thing. And I don't know, obviously COVID exacerbated it, but I assumed that it would slow down when COVID ended.

2:11:36And that has not happened. I wonder if it's some sort of like, you know, you're online all the time. You're on your phone too much and then you want the exact opposite. And so demand increases for like, what is the opposite of Tik TOK? Like get me to the forest. It's also very American to like find, like have an outdoor activity explode. That's about bringing heavy machinery, like out into the wilderness. So you can stay around the machine. You can still watch TikTok, but you can at least act like you're off. When I think about it, I was actually thinking about it this weekend because I was out there and seeing all this.

2:12:08And there's a camper in every parking lot. And I do wonder if like dad's being more involved. When I was a kid, dad had a sports car. Not my dad, but in general. Like dad at a sport, he would use it to get away. He would take it on a drive and take it to a show. And now like dads and families want to do this stuff together. And sports cars, you can't do that with your kids. And I've even watched the vintage SUV. I got a Ferrari FF to try to get around that when I had my first kid and it did not work. The electrical issues were like, if I drive this thing to the farmer's market and I stop it, it might not start again.

2:12:44So I got to make sure I started at home and stop it. But I am watching like Grand Wagoneers, right? And these are things you can now do with the whole family. And I think that there's been like sort of a renewed push among dads and among families to kind of do, hey, let's do the vintage car thing together. And it's really become kind of a thing. Speaking of dads. But I think there's probably many parts of it. Speaking of dads, speaking of firing dads, what's the best modern car that screams, I'm coming to town to fire your dad? We have this big thing on our podcast that, yeah, we think that there are some cars that just say, I'm here to fire your dad.

2:13:25It's such a big old, this is a rich guy who doesn't care. The electric Rolls Royce, which is called the Spectre, that's a big one. because it's got one of the things I like of fire your dad cars to me are cars where it takes up a lot of space but is unbelievably impractical so that car is a massive vehicle but it's got two doors and that guy owns the factory that guy he comes in he's like I don't care what's this whole factory is closed be gone and he you know he takes the rolls-royce off it's also so tall we saw one at the airport next to a urus and we were like it's a car that's taller than that suv that's been lowered for performance it's like it's largely large well i have a potentially uh a potentially new fire your dad car uh our friend paul asked asked me to ask you do you think sam altman paid 20 million for the gordon murray s1 it sold uh recently and sam was photographed in vegas with gordon murray over the weekend and sam has an f1 yeah exactly that could be the new I say it could be the new fire your dad because if chat GBT takes your job.

2:14:35Oh, it fires everyone's dad. That is an interesting point that Altman may have bought it. I will say the commissioner, the story I've heard is the commissioner of that car commissioned five and personally selected along with Gordon Murray, three people to sell three others to. He kept two and then decided to sell one publicly. And so I would be not surprised if Altman is one of the four people who has them. He's obviously interested in these cars. And yes, he's there with Gordon. Um, but maybe he didn't buy the public one, but who knows? Uh, I, I bet I wouldn't be surprised if he's got one 20 million.

2:15:09That's crazy. Unbelievable number. It's a bit. It's a lot of, it's a lot of money, but it's a lot of car. Any progress on, uh, getting into the Sultan of Brunei's collection? I feel like with all this investment and progress, like all I want, if I could just get, if I could just have a week to film videos in that garage, I would retire. I would never speak. But how much, truthfully, like how much time have you spent actually chasing it down? Because I feel like if you go over there and you're meeting people and you're, you know, you're, oh yeah, I'll come to your holiday party and give a talk for free.

2:15:40You know, like, like there's ways to like. It's an interesting situation because I have a suspicion just based on some of the rumblings I've heard from either people who have been there or who have tried. I think that in Brunei it's viewed as a bit of an embarrassment. that Jeffrey, which is the brother of the Sultan, went and spent this much national money on just these cars. And if they created a museum, everyone I know would suddenly go to Brunei. I'm not joking. Like, I have no reason otherwise to go to Brunei. I mean, it's odd because I feel like if they do regard it as a mistake, it's like, well, you got a great collection.

2:16:17Let's liquidate it. Sell it to Dubai. Dubai likes setting up museums. They have Mr. Beastland now. Get Brunei land going. I totally agree. I'm not even entirely sure that they want the publicity of the announcement that all of these cars are going to be sold off. And it's become to me that for whatever reason, maybe it's embarrassment. Maybe they actually still want to enjoy the cars or have them. But it seems to me that there is a pretty clear reality that these guys do not want publicly to have a wide splash with the excesses of the 90s in that country, which I think is such a shame. Now, part of the problem also with selling all the cars is that they're all right-hand drives.

2:16:56So there's a little bit of a challenge into where they would have to be sold. There's only a few markets. But nonetheless, I'd be down. I have my Bentley Dominator literally sits right here, which is one of the Sultan cars. Permissioned a Bentley SUV before even Bentley had any idea of doing it. Yeah. Would you ever do a museum? uh like a review like review cars for a museum or no no like with like the doug the doug museum cars and bids activation or something no i am not a collector i like to use the cars and i like to be focused with the cars that i choose and um i'm never gonna have a giant collection of cars i yeah but i meant i meant more like like if if i'm a if i'm a collector and i have a special car that i'm just planning to hold and you were creating a museum and you were basically saying you i'll store your car and maintain it.

2:17:49But if you want to. A museum of other people's vehicles. Yeah, I would maybe curate such a thing. I could see myself doing that in a retirement scenario. If someone takes care of the hard parts for me, I would curate a nice little museum. There you go. I think it would be a hit. What are the biggest moments on the calendar for 2026 for you? Either moments that you're excited about from the car manufacturers, the world or whatever, but also within your organization? I'm generally just excited. It's an interesting thing. My world is nowhere near as varied as it once was. I used to travel all over the world and review the craziest cars, but I kind of filmed most of them.

2:18:32And now it's mostly just new cars. And I still get excited from a work perspective. I still get excited about the same things, which is just going in and reviewing the cars. We had the new Nissan Sentra in the office the other day. And like I'm driving in the morning being like, I'm pumped. Like I'm excited. And there is still that excitement. There's not like, surprisingly, there is not specific cars that are that exciting for me. The new supercars are always a big deal. And there's going to be a few coming out here in quick succession, which is the McLaren W1 and Bugatti Tourbillon. And obviously I'm excited about those.

2:19:04But it's not just those cars. You know, we get big views doing videos of Kia Tellurides. And I get excited about. There is something exciting to me about an automaker playing in a very competitive space, which supercars isn't. It's more of an emotional thing. And a lot of times people buy them all. Whereas Telluride, you have to distinguish yourself with quirks and features from the Pylinder, the Pilot, the Palisade. And so I always find it to be kind of just as interesting to see what those guys are doing. And they often have some cool stuff. They often reward me with some cool quirks and features.

2:19:34on the on on on ferrari do you get sick of people commenting like bring back pin and farina like i just feel like every ferrari video it's like it's not coming they're not coming back it's over like i i i mean i every every ferrari video i'm gonna go to the comment section across every channel and and one my personal belief is that the cars actually look amazing when they're spec'd properly I think they look really rough the way that Ferrari specs them for basically marketing press. And then I think once people with refined taste get in there, they end up looking amazing. So I'm not exactly disappointed with the current design.

2:20:21I agree. I didn't for a while. When they first left Pininfarina, I thought there were some questionable cars. however the 296 is unbelievably beautiful they have and honestly the dodici chilindri which i made fun of because of its ridiculous name and also because of its design when it was first announced i got to spend the day with one and i totally feel opposite now i think they're beautiful they're striking ferrari is designing cars in a way now that is like at the forefront at the cutting edge rather than just sort of only going after beauty with that said pin and frida and ferrari have an unbelievable legacy together and it would be nice to see them return reunite in some form yeah but what it what is history yeah they they did but now it's been like more than a decade and it's owned by an indian like conglomerate like are all the same people even still there if they did partner would it just be like like a like just for the brand purposes like hasselblad is owned by dji now like what is that partnership you know these companies they change over time They just become brands.

2:21:27They just become names, IP. If they did partner, would it just be for brand purposes? Yeah, probably. But I bet you they'd sell some cars. That's a good word. If I could be freaking out with a 500-unit run of a pin-in-for-unit design car, that would kill. Just like if Ferrari did a manual, which I sincerely believe they should do. Yeah. I think that also would happen. Even if it was just for the purposes of making money, I think it would be successful. On the Ferrari doing a manual, you get on the stump every once in a while with like, I want a change to what this manufacturer is doing or what the car community as a whole is doing.

2:22:00What's the highest confidence like I'm responsible for that? Maybe it's just like a tiny thing, but there's a lot of things where you say stuff on the internet and then the change happens and you're like, hey, maybe they watched the video. Maybe it was a factor. Maybe it's just I got lucky and I was talking about the thing that they were already working on. But I think very little do I actually feel responsible. However, when I bought my convertible G-Wagon eight and a half years ago, nobody even knew that car existed. And within a year, Kendall Jenner had one. And I did a bunch of videos. And I posted a lot of pictures on Instagram.

2:22:37I drive it on the beach with beach grass. And it looks amazing. And the values of those suddenly absolutely went through the roof, which was not the case when I bought my car. I paid$125 for my car, and if I could find another one for$125, I would buy$10. And suddenly, six months ago, three months ago, Mercedes announces they're coming back with a new convertible G-Wagon. You're welcome. And I don't think that I was directly entirely responsible, but I wouldn't be surprised if I played a little bit of a role in the cultural re-remembering that this car existed to the point where values kind of blew up.

2:23:09There were some influential people got in Mercedes' ear, and Mercedes was thinking, okay, maybe we can do this again. Yeah. No, I think that's 100 % right. You deserve the victory lap on that, for sure. On that ridiculous car, which is such an embarrassing car to own that I don't even want the victory lap. We're giving it to you. You're directly responsible. Other than that, though, I don't think I have significant – I mean, I've been harping for a long time about how automakers need to make more off-road SUVs, and that's happened. But I think also the market trends have made that pretty clear.

2:23:38Totally, totally. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Ed Bolian with the LP640 prices, he kind of discovered that there were far fewer of them than people thought. And so that obviously changed the price. And if you bring new information to the world, that feels like you do have an influence. Now, in Ed's case, he's got a few of them. So, you know, you talk them up a little bit. That's the game I should have gotten into. And I wish that I had. But unfortunately, I did not do that for my own personal game. Not that that's the only reason that Ed does it for me. He's a crude fellow. And I think that plays a role.

2:24:09We're going to see Doug with like, you know, he has 200 SF90s. And now he's talking really positively about them. And he bought them like at the trough of the depreciation curve. What's going on here? and you're like actually there's no electrical issues i did all this extra studies and the hybrid system we can we get nissan to bring back the murano cross cabriolet that is important we we are big fans here we we took your joke and we've been running with it and the whole thing you know the sad thing about that car i don't know if you know this but the the convertible tops fail and so just leave it down i don't need the top i'm always i'm just joy riding that thing I never need the top.

2:24:47You're a Southern California person. Does the SP1 have a top? No. It doesn't have a windshield. Right. So those cars, eventually they will all fail and that will kind of kill them because apparently Nissan's only solution is you have to replace it. There is apparently a shade tree mechanic guy in Florida who figured out the problem and is willing to fix it, but you've got to send your car to him. So if you live in like the Tampa Clearwater area, you can get your top fixed, but like Otherwise, it isn't worth sending your Murano cross cabriolet. I mean, the resto mod community in 10 years will be going crazy.

2:25:19Oh, no, no. You know what we're doing. We're cannonballing it there and back from LA. That's what we'll do. That car was utterly awful in every way because it is a very special product that could have a cult following if it wasn't so bad. Yeah. It's very funny. Anyways, well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. This was fantastic. I really enjoyed it. Congratulations on all the success. and please keep the podcast running. We've been loving it. Congratulations on the massive success there and with everything. And we appreciate you coming and hanging out for a while. Yeah, great hanging out.

2:25:52Yeah, cheers. Thanks for having me. Bye. Thanks. Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full-text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. I'm also going to tell you about public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. Multi-asset investing, trusted by millions. our next guests are both named Alex. We have some folks from Ramp, the creators of Ramp Labs, Ramp Sheets. We're bringing in both Alex's. Please kick us off with introductions on both of you, how you came to work at Ramp, work on this particular project.

2:26:29I'd love to hear the origin story. It's a fascinating product and we're going to go into it. Hey, I'm Alex Shevchenko. I've been at Ramp for now two years. started out and still am on the Applied AI team. Overnight success! And throughout these two years, I've been working on a bunch of experimental things as part of Applied AI. And lately, I've just been trying to wrap them up into Ramp Labs so that we can publish these things publicly. That's great. And Alex? Sorry. Yeah, I'm Alex Toffer, one of the leads of Ramp Labs alongside the other Alex. And yeah, this is the place for AI bets at RAMP.

2:27:12We're really experimenting, going to the cutting edge of AI, trying to ship product that is actually outside of the current RAMP mandate. Do you guys have nicknames yet? I feel like people would get confused. Alex, because you can't even just be like, oh yeah, Alex at RAMP Labs. You have to go further. Yeah, just the last names, I guess. So talk to us about the product. It feels extremely aggressive to go after Microsoft, to go after Google, products that have massive user bases, and yet you're launching ramp sheets. Talk to us about the thought, the positioning. Are you going to try and replace the investment banking workhorse that is Microsoft Excel?

2:27:58Is this more for CFOs who are already on ramp? How are you thinking about the product itself? Well, originally this started out as an experiment, as everything within RAMP Labs is. We've been trying out different variations of this, actually, just to try to help our own internal finance team. This has gone, as I said, through many iterations. This initially was like process mining to document some of their workflows from video so that they can communicate better between each other and to software engineers. And then we tried to take that piece and create like Zapier and like retool workflows based on them to try to automate.

2:28:38And we tried to get them to use it. And they were like, no, this is too black box. We can't really use this. We need visibility into it. And so we like took a step back and tried to look through the looms of like all the information that they were giving to us. And we jumped through like random locations. and 99 % of the time when you open their Loom, it's in a spreadsheet. So we decided we should really meet them where they work and have a spreadsheet interface for this. And this doesn't necessarily need to be replacing anything. This can be an add-on to their existing workflows, right? This can be a quick way to create a pro forma or something that they can then export to a CSV or an Excel file and then load it up in Sheets or Excel and continue their work there.

2:29:25Yeah. So that's that's broadly. So why build why build like a web version of a spreadsheet at all? Why not a plug in that lives inside of Excel? That's what Bloomberg and Capital IQ and most of the other, you know, kind of complementary systems have typically plugged in through connectors. You decided to build the actual full spreadsheet in the cloud, in the web. Why that decision versus just plug in? well um internally we do have some more complex workflows that rely on like sheets and stuff that people can use for this as i said like ramp labs is like the experimental branch and this was an experiment that like got very very large um and that's like the way to allow people to interface with it as quick as possible um we we didn't need like access to your google account We don't need access to your Excel account.

2:30:26You can just go and try it out. And it's there. And it's available on ramp.com slash sheets to anyone, not only ramp customers right now. Oh, cool. That's probably like one of the biggest reasons. Yeah. So for some context, like a lot of people think that there was a big team behind this or that ramp is like investing a lot of resources here. And the truth is that like three guys kind of built this in a cave pretty fast. Yes. Yeah. And we want to release it. We believe in shipping quickly and getting feedback from customers. We thought we built a pretty cool tool and just wanted to see how people would play around with it.

2:31:06So we released it last week and then the response was overwhelming. There are 2 million impressions, thousands of users joined immediately. They're making thousands of sheets every day. um places that you wouldn't imagine have have been using it um like there it's it's popping off at wharton with students and professors uh there are many banks that are already using it um bcs finance people in the space industry um i got off call with a user who's based in london this morning who's a bc so it's it's like it's astounded us honestly what uh where where are people getting the most value or what kind of like work uh work are they actually doing uh once they kind of play around with it and get a sense for how it works like how are they applying it yeah there are a lot of interesting use cases um some are personal uh there there are a couple of uh stories here where it's helping them plan their wedding you know these things can get incredibly complex and you need a way to organize it.

2:32:17Another use case, an employee here is he's moving to New Jersey and wanted to find the best place to live and want a model for that. But outside of personal cases, there is a real demand here, especially with founders, VCs, small businesses, especially owners of small businesses, they don't actually have like a large finance team, right? And it's incredibly valuable to spin up a model really quickly instead of going and paying a consultant thousands of dollars to just make a template for them. Yeah, it makes sense. Very cool. Where are you guys, where are you planning to take it from here? Yeah, there's a bunch of features that we're still working on.

2:33:03We actually shipped shareable links today. Nice. And then exploring what best templates. So like very, very intricate templates that you can take and create basically kind of these like pro formas right away or like budgeting right away. And then as well as like integrating with Ramp itself so that you can like actually export your spending data and like analyze it within Ramp Sheets. So those are like the three biggest things right now. Very cool. That's amazing. The chat is saying, Ramp, construct an LBO for this regional HVAC company that backs into a 25 % IRR. Make no mistakes, please. Maybe one day.

2:33:43I mean, that actually probably is within what is basically one-shot-able by the model in ramp sheets today. But thank you so much for coming and breaking it down for us. Congrats on all the progress. And excited to watch where it goes. Excited to see more people demoing it and taking it for a spin. Incredible launch. Thanks so much. Thanks, bro. We'll talk to you soon. Great to see you guys. Cheers. Have a good day. We are going back to the timeline for a minute while we bring in our next guest. We were covering OpenAI shopping research. Oh, yes. I didn't really get to, and Doug joined. But really think I'm bullish on this product.

2:34:23I think being able to effectively run a deep research report and then see all the information that you need on a bunch of different products and then eventually just hit buy right from the end in the app is going to be like a crazy flywheel. That's actually what people do today. They start Google searching. They find out what products are available. They find out pricing, features, et cetera. Then they make a buying decision. And if you can pull that all into a single experience, it's going to be very, very valuable. And this is effectively the deep research as a product is a product that has better product market fit than almost anything else in consumer AI.

2:34:59And so I'm very bullish. Well, if you're selling a product on ChatGPT, you've got to go to numeral.com. Let Numeral worry about sales tax and VAT compliance handled so you can focus on growth. No, I agree. It'll be very interesting to see how fast OpenAI makes their first dollar from advertising or commission-based sales, how quickly they make their first million, their first billion from it. The numbers are so big, they need to get to tens of billions of dollars on those business lines fairly quickly. They're certainly the most optimistic growth areas for the business. And something that I think everyone, it's very consensus that if they get agentic commerce working, they can, the pool of capital, it's just very, like, the audience is already there.

2:35:48They just have to run ads. This is, like, proven. Whereas breaking into hardware, that's something that Microsoft didn't pull off with the phone. And Amazon tried to fire a phone. And Facebook tried a phone for a while. Like it's not a sure thing, but it's almost a sure thing that if you have, you know, a billion DAUs using your website for 30 minutes a day, you can advertise to them. It's very, very proven. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Our next guest is Quinn Slack, the CEO of AMP.

2:36:25How are you doing? What's happening? Welcome to the show. Hey, guys. Good to be here. Great to have you. Thanks so much for helping on. I'm glad that we were able to get you on. We love ads. We were just talking about ads actually in the ChatGPT context. No one likes ads more than us. But fascinating. I love ads. Exactly. That's why I'm excited to talk to you. So please, introduce yourself and the company a little bit, and then we'll get into it. I am Quinn Slack. I'm the CEO and co-founder at Sourcegraph. We make AMP, this coding agent. I love coding. And I mean, AI is just crazy for coding. And Opus 4.5 today is mind-blowing.

2:36:58But it's also expensive. And that sucks because a lot of people can't use it. And it also means that we don't learn fast enough about how people are using it because it's a tiny fraction of the world that's actually using AI to code in a kind of unconstrained way that you want to if you're really going to learn. So we took a look at these problems, and that's how we ended up with this crazy idea of putting ads in a coding agent. I love it. Okay. I want to understand what that exactly means. I'm going to pitch you like five different instantiations of that. One is I go to more the agentic commerce route.

2:37:30I go to your coding agent. I say, okay, I'm ready to deploy this. And then it runs an auction to see, hey, there's a deal on Azure. So we're going to host it over there as opposed to Amazon. Or it could be putting ads for Amazon or Azure or GCP in the comments of the actual code. So when I go review the code, I see ads. Or it could be while it's cooking, it's showing me ads in the terminal. Where are you actually surfacing these ads? So the interesting thing about coding is you are in this all day long. It's not like Amazon.com ads where you go there right when you have that intent. But you also use the coding agent when you have intent.

2:38:05So we kind of get both. We get those, hey, you're asking it, I want to deploy, where should I deploy? Should it be on Cloudflare or whatever? But you also are staring at it. And AI coding agents are kind of slow. I'm not saying we make it slower so that we show more ads. but it's up on the screen and it knows what your tech stack is. So if you're Cloudflare and you see that they're using S3 and they're doing a bunch of dumb stuff with it, well, that's a great place for you to show ads about not only Cloudflare, but specifically which of their products is better and how much better. And then you click a button and the agent can go and switch you to it.

2:38:39So, I mean, it feels like, I love this thesis because it worked for Uber and you've seen a bunch of companies where they've had a whole bunch of attention and they've just built big ad businesses and you know uber just shows you ads while you wait for your car basically it's like it's not rocket science it's like a pretty simple thing um at the same time a lot of it a lot of times when this works it works because someone's created this pool of attention that there's just you know millions of people open and open this app or they're using that they're staring at this particular screen and there's real estate and i see that real estate in the chat gpt app where people just open it up and there's a big blank screen.

2:39:14You can put an ad there or while it's waiting. But do you have to go and get people on board and get them off of competitor coding agents and competitive IDEs? How much do you have to do to replatform the customer to you and then start showing them ads? Or can you partner with other pieces of the stack to just plug in quicker? We're going to follow this where this goes. So yeah, we're open to partnering with others. I think other people are kind of waiting and seeing because this idea was so crazy. A free coding agent and ads make AMP free in this mode. It's really compelling. And that audience is growing a lot.

2:39:53We keep making the model better and better. Like initially, we had ads were actually covering more than our costs. Then we made the model six times more expensive. And now they're covering half. But now with Opus 4.5, I think it's going to be like, you know, probably covering 80 % of the cost because it's actually cheaper. So we've got to keep making the model better and better that it uses. And free AI is pretty compelling. Yeah, that makes sense. I already know if TBPN runs some ads in there. I know the copy. Develop an ear for TBPN. Yeah. What do you think? I like it. I mean, you can go. Why don't you try it?

2:40:28Just put a few$10 ,000 down. Is the ad platform self-serve yet, or are you guys just doing it by hand for now? You can go in and put the ads self-serve. It feels like all of a sudden, overnight, we are building this new ads business. My wife works at Google. She sells ads. I've seen the business, but there's so much complexity. And it's like a three-sided marketplace now. So it's really doing God's work. Truly. Yeah, we love it. Yeah, I guess any kind of comps to this that you've used to talk with advertisers about it? Is there another kind of advertising that's sort of similar in the sense of like, you know, like, like clearly have people's like very specific attention at a specific moment in time where they're making oftentimes making product and business decisions?

2:41:22Any kind of areas that you've learned from? Are you just kind of freestyling? We're freestyling. It's a different place to put ads. And it's kind of hilarious that of AI products, the first place, you know, I think we're the first or one of the first that it shows up in your terminal and in your editor. But I think the fact that it captures the intent and it's always up on your screen, it's different. So we're, I would love it if there's more people doing this, but there's so many other companies we went to and they said, well, we kind of want you to take all the flames first. On the advertiser side, though, they were incredibly willing.

2:41:56We had a really high hit rate. And some of them, other DevTools CEOs, I would email them and say, hey, do you want to advertise? And after a day when they hadn't gotten back to me, I thought like, oh, they probably think we're total idiots. But then they got back to me and they ended up doing this. Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense, especially when you can show an ad and have one, eventually, maybe it's not that way today, but basically one-shotting the implementation of certain products like that, contextual advertising in this context is going to be super powerful. Any ad haters pushing back yet?

2:42:31Obviously, I'm sure you have an ability to get people to opt out of ads, I'm assuming, by just paying for the right tier. Yeah. Well, we want to show ads in the more premium modes, too. So we've got to figure out if that's when we're going to get the ad haters. actually no actually no actually you can't opt out of the ads you're getting ads no matter what i love it yeah i think if you're not getting the haters then you're not pushing the envelope enough and so much of what we realized when we launched amp free is we should have been like 10 times bolder about it because it was received surprisingly well and it's making a lot more money than we thought so we're going to push the envelope but all of this just means it means more people can use code ai in a totally unconstrained way and see this thing just blows our minds yeah yeah I mean, it seems really cool for just like, yeah, I can imagine so many people.

2:43:21This is what I would have used in college. I definitely would not be paying$200 a month or something for something. I'd probably be interning at a startup or at a live show that pays for my AWS bills. But can you just zoom out for us and give us a little bit of like what the corporate hierarchy is like, AMP and Sourcegraph? Have you raised money? What are the shape of these companies and products? How everything fits together in your world? Yeah, we started Sourcegraph back in 2013, actually, with this idea of let's automate software development. And we started out building code search at Sourcegraph.

2:43:57And that's like Google for all the code. It's this, especially now with AI, AI is doing like a thousand times more code searches. It is this critical infrastructure. It's, we're the only ones doing it at that scale. And then we've also got AMP. So these two products under one roof, code search and AMP. And AMP is the frontier coding agent. We're trying to make it a year ahead for 1 % of devs out there and just be totally crazy. And you might say, well, ads is incompatible with that. Ads is all about getting a big audience. But actually what ads do, they're in service of the research objective for AMP.

2:44:34It lets us not have to go and jump if some customer says jump with this requirement that's going to hold us back. It gives us so much more freedom to just change the model, change how it works. So in that way, ads, it actually does really nicely fund a kind of research lab for us with AMP. I guess in the same way that Google ads mean that it can do whatever the hell they want and they can fund a lot of experimentation internally. So we've got these two products under one roof. What were some of the trade-offs you made when you were building the first coding agent? Obviously, there were people that trained foundation models themselves.

2:45:12Other people just wrote harnesses and they're swapping out the different models from the big labs. How did you think about the different decisions that you made? We decided, let's see how far we can get without trying to train our own God model. Let's depend on Anthropik or OpenAI and Google. And ever since we started with AMP, which is, you know, we started that in February. We honestly thought there was going to be a model competition a lot sooner. And it actually only started happening in a big way last week with Gemini 3. We switched AMP's model over to Gemini 3. It was a huge leap forward.

2:45:48And then today, you know, back to loving Opus 4.5, I think I'm going to switch back to that. But am I glad that we didn't go spend billions and billions of dollars training a model that was 1 % worse and yet nobody uses it? No, I'm really happy to be occupying, you know, this place. Yeah. So you don't surface the, you don't have a model picker in the agent. It's not like I can, as a customer, say, I'm willing to watch all the ads and get all the ads, but I really prefer Gemini 3 or Codex or Opus 4.5, for example. I don't get to pick. Yeah, no model picker. Got it. Cool. Last question. What do you think about integrating other types of products in the IDE.

2:46:36We were talking about Chad IDE putting gambling in the product. Do you think that that, do you think there's a world in the future, like three years from now where people are, have enough time between like running different tasks and agents that they just have time to like goof around in the, in, in these, uh, in, in the IDE or, or in various developer tools or is that kind of like an of the moment uh kind of like problem solution i think you should be able to bet you know get some kashi manifold markets stuff in there uh you should you know you should let people bet on what ad they're gonna get next yeah and then whichever one they want i think i i i i don't know if you're joking but i think you can go too far we've seen people get uh go viral, but to be potentially flashed in the pan over...

2:47:31Yeah, we'll see if I'm joking. Okay, yeah. I think gambling is taking it too far, but there's a lot of stuff we can explore. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the ads business, I mean, Google made$100 billion from ads in Q3. I think there might be enough opportunity there. Yeah. What last question, are you hyperactive in Slack? Yes, of course. You know, my great-grandfather started it. Invented it. back in the 1800s. Yes, yes, yes. I'm proud to see what it's become. Yes. Amazing. He's like a Microsoft Teams guy. Yeah, great to meet. Very, very cool. Very, very cool product. And yeah. Thanks. Awesome. Hope to have you back on the show.

2:48:12Thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon. All right, Quinn. See you. Cheers. Have a good one. Bye.

2:48:19Back to the timeline. Let me tell you about Vanta, Automate Compliance Managed Trust, the leading AI trust management platform. Did I already do that one? You did. Well, then let's go to Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps devine and develop teams, build great products together. I'll also tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. Back on the timeline, people are having fun with Nano Banana. They're putting different hairstyles on various tech people. So Ilya has a wide variety.

2:48:53variety this is mark andreessen with all sorts of different hairstyles which one would you pick if you were him i think the one in the center looks pretty good the longer beard shorter hair but center in the middle on the left is pretty cool middle of the left is pretty cool crazy flow i also like i think it's time to bottom bottom left is also crazy yeah time to take a trip to turkey for sure just go you have the money just go full head of hair that's the thing with ilia that's interesting is they didn't they didn't do like the full zoomer the middle bottom one that is flow keep going down yeah the middle yeah right there right in the middle there the middle bottom the ponytail is also ponytails yeah pretty powerful definitely you know it's respectable uh hairstyle this post here from thomas uh scholls he says the latest nano banana model has officially crossed the line i no longer implicitly trust photos anymore and sometimes i can't even definitively definitively claim it's AI now.

2:49:50I totally agree. I saw this picture. Yep. And my first thought was like, that's got to be AI specifically because I don't think Sam is just walking down the Golden Gate Bridge in the middle of the day. Yep. It's like probably terrible from a security standpoint. Yep. So, but it looks photorealistic. And... Yeah, it's very... So if you put the photo into Gemini, Gemini will tell you, if you say, is this AI, Gemini will tell you, yes, according to the SynthID water molecule detection tool, this image was generated in whole or in part with Google AI. Of course, we've seen previous images where if you turn up the contrast and the saturation all the way, you can see kind of the rainbow, like zebra pattern, basically, that's embedded in there very subtly.

2:50:43but yeah I mean this is this is pretty pretty photo real and so you know stay safe out there it's going to be Joe Weisenthal asked Nano Banana to create a really annoying LinkedIn profile and I couldn't tell is this a real person I have no idea because the at this point we're way past the touring test for for images in the sense that this looks perfectly edited but But this could also just be a straight-up screenshot. I would need to fact-check this. But instead of fact-checking it, I'm going to tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails. Securely spin up white-label wallet, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API.

2:51:28Kalen Sterling, I don't think, is a real person. I don't do small talk. I do deep dives. My journey is a quantum leap through the liminal spaces of tech and spirituality. chief visionary officer, TEDx speaker, professional storyteller, democratizing the metaverse one DAO at a time, 10x growth alchemist. So did Joe actually ask Nano Banana to do this? I want to see the prompt if that's true. Yeah, let's try to. Yeah, we need to replicate this. Try to replicate it. Because I actually did. So this was the example that I gave. I went to Nano Banana and I said, my prompt was just create a really annoying LinkedIn profile, but I forgot to check the Nano Banana box.

2:52:19And so even though it was multimodal, according to Tyler over there, it did not generate it. It generated text. And so, you know, oh, it's like I can only do text. Very questionable. We'll see. we'll keep playing around with that and in the meantime I'll tell you about adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable plan, buy and measure out of home with precision what's up with Brian Johnson? he's starting a new protocol is he going to Taco Bell drive-thru is this a real photo? this has to be AI that's a very funny photo this was my take if he's really changed by his journey he must come out of it liking at least one fast food restaurant.

2:53:05And Alexa says, those shrooms spiritually healed him in a way that has him living moss now. Living moss. The live moss tagline was really fantastic. One of the best taglines of all time. Yeah, yeah. Taco Bell knows how to do it. Also, underrated how online the Taco Bell marketing team is. Are you familiar with this? I've seen their posts. You know the story of Sheil Monat, guest of the show, multiple times? Yeah, he got married. He got married in the metaverse or something. Like it was some crazy thing where he posted like, if somebody pays for it, I'll get married in the metaverse, like as a joke.

2:53:37And then like Taco Bell was like, yeah, let's do it or something. It was like very crazy, but it's like, like there, there aren't a lot of companies at that scale that are like as online and like in the culture as Taco Bell and beyond just like, oh, they have somebody who's pithy on the Twitter. It's like, no, they actually can go and execute. I've seen multiple people who are very niche internet micro celebrities that have been given the full dog and pony show and tour of the Taco Bell headquarters and impressed upon them the greatness of the Taco Bell brand. It's pretty awesome. Almost as awesome as getting a luxury watch on GetBezil.com.

2:54:10Shop over 26 ,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. This post from Nier. Did you want to skip this one? Neer says, guy who doesn't want to be old. It seems like we'll get age-reversing tech right when I'll be old. How favorable. Guy who thinks it is different this time. But this time it's different. This is insane, Bust. Read the next one. We got some massive news from none other than Bill Gurley. We got to get the gong out for this one. You read it. Amy Gurley, huge congratulations to Bill Gurley for receiving the Texas Distinguished Alumnus Award, a remarkable honor for a remarkable Longhorn.

2:54:48Congratulations, Bill. Well, well, well deserved. This made my day. This made my day. Everyone was wondering if he was going to make it. Yeah, it was kind of the elephant in the room. It was hugely, hotly debated. There was, what,$10 million in liquidity betting on this? Whether or not he would make it? Probably. Yeah, it was sort of the longhorn in the room. Yeah, exactly. It was a huge deal, but he did it. He pulled it off, and we're very excited for Bill. Everyone was wondering what he would do if he didn't win. I guess we'll never know. I guess we'll never know. Riley Walls is truly the greatest internet rascal of his time.

2:55:29Incredible. He did it again. He cloned Gmail, except you're logged in as Epstein and can see all of his emails. It's such a good UI. It's such a great workflow because people work flow. I mean, it's like it's a way because I've seen other people do. Here's a fine tune on the emails. Here's a searchable database. None of them have been particularly usable. But this is fascinating because it just really substantiates the emails in a way that everyone knows what a Gmail inbox looks like. And you can just – He added this random page button. It's also funny because he's getting this – one of the last emails that he got was a Flipboard week in review.

2:56:15and the subject line says Alex Acosta resigns, Jeffrey Epstein arrested. So imagine, I guess he wouldn't have been really able to read this email where he learns that he's arrested. He's arrested in there. Yeah, this is one of the things, a little spot that one a little too late. Chat a while ago was like, oh, I'd love for the TBPN to cover the Epstein thing, but it's not really their shtick. Well, we found an angle. We found a tech angle. And so this is when we get to talk about it. I know everyone wants us to talk about the hottest news story in a decade, but you have to get it through the lens of Riley Walls and fun little hack projects.

2:56:57Before we move on, let me tell you about 8sleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized. The reason you feel insane, according to Wilmanitis, is because you're talking to chat. when you should be talking to God, Nir lapsed back and says, the reason you feel insane is because you're talking to God when you should be speaking with Claude. So funny. Claude. Oh, Keller is coming on the show tomorrow from Zipline. Keller Clifton, one of the greatest. Get that goat sound effect ready for tomorrow. We'll do it early. Keller said that he's launched zipping points.

2:57:37He can pick up packages and deliver them autonomously. with the Zipline autonomous drones. This is the private plane for your burrito, folks. It's arrived. We're here. We're in the future. The future is here. The future plane, the flying car is here, and it will deliver you Chipotle in 15 minutes, in four minutes while it's still warm. So here's a zip grabbing a package from one of our restaurant partners. It'll take so many cars off the road over the coming years. That's great news for environmentalists, for congestion, for anyone who wants to be able to really let it loose on the roads. If we're getting less congestion, maybe the speed limit goes up to 80 miles an hour, maybe 120, maybe 160.

2:58:20Maybe we get up to 200 and you can really let it loose. I would like that. I wonder if they'll need to make, like will you need to prove that you're at a certain address in order to get stuff delivered there? Because it's such a funny dimension to mess with people and just be like, hey, look on your lawn. And there's just like a burrito just chilling there. Well, people do that with pizzas, right? They prank call, like a dozen pizzas delivered to this address. I'll pay in cash. This is like a famous prank. And then you show up and it's like, I don't need all these pizzas. I'm being pranked. I think that that's been mostly resolved by modern payment solutions.

2:58:57But I'm sure there will be odd oddities around these drones. uh sheesh sheesh the theo von flaming hot tweets uh is uh joking around and says imagine how cool it will be to shoot one of these out of the sky to get a free meal uh go and hunt in for your chipotle burrito uh that of course is extremely cyberpunk and hilarious but it will be massively illegal and of course and keller breaks it down he says we're regulated by the faa so the consequences are similar to shooting at a 737 as it's taking off from the airport. Not a good idea. Also, communities love the service. And I imagine he's not saying the details, but if you shoot at a 737 as it's taking off from an airport, I think you're going to jail for a long time.

2:59:44And I think you will not just be able to shoot one of these out of the sky and pick up a free burrito with a 22 but what about like a really big net if you own the land how high can you build a net i think that would be the same as throwing a really big net at a 737 on takeoff tyler and i don't know i don't think i think for anything no way you can say the consequences are similar like yes it's illegal to shoot something out of the sky but yeah you're not i i think somebody could shoot one of these things down and get a misdemeanor i think i think with a good lawyer you're getting a misdemeanor you're not gonna whereas a 737 you know if you get john quinn on your side you're eating burritos for free yeah so david david david chang was saying like it's just there's like he he it wasn't that he was like bearish on on the tech but he didn't think it solved like delivering it in the right form factor yeah we got to ask keller about that tomorrow because right now if you order food depending on where you are between the time that it's cooked and picked up and delivered it's like there's a big gap uh well speaking of it has to be shorter speaking of cooked there was a a wild job description that hit the timeline uh rachel mayor says coolest pm role in crypto real impact real impact needs to be clinically clinically online not even chronically online apply here at circle we love circle of course but uh wait was this like intentionally yeah this must be a troll this is range made done perfectly uh and facundo says cooked the idea i was cracking up at this like the idea of showing up to your job and being like oh man like like yeah the team is here is cooked they're all exact they're all like washed up it's just the the the worst possible team uh i think it's a perfect i think it's a perfect posts from Rachel.

3:01:39There's no way this job post would have gotten nearly the reach. I think this was successful. Did you see this in the replies to her original post? Did you mean to say cooked, cooking, or cracked? And Rachel says, I don't even know anymore. They all sound fun. Rachel, we ain't cooked. We are cooking. Yeah, one of the developers at Circle is like, let's correct this. This is so funny. Let me tell you about Wanderer.com. Book of Wanderer with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, 24-7 concierge service. What is this? Oh, the IP blocks are going out. You saw that, right?

3:02:23There's when you identify someone on X, where they're from, if you signed up originally with an IP, it can be transferred to another. like the IP box can be sold internationally and then you will show up as an international participant. So there are some false positives there a little bit. Shiel, who I mentioned for the Taco Bell wedding, I hope I didn't get that story wildly wrong, is mentioning a post from Alexis Moliner who says, FYI, DHH, I'm noting that learn.omacom.io is inaccessible from Spain while La Liga matches are being broadcast. And DHH says, Spain blocks all of Cloudflare during those matches in an insane medieval attempt to counter piracy.

3:03:10That's... Wow. And so, Omarkey is hosted with Cloudflare, and they just bring down the internet to stop piracy. That is insane. And so, Sheila breaks it down. He says, oh, my God. Spain blocks Cloudflare IP ranges during La Liga matches. La Liga submits lists of pirate IPs, and the blocks take out lots of legitimate services too, so you can't use LinkedIn in Spain during La Liga games. I mean, that's pretty on brand. I'm not going to look up the GDP growth figures. I'm not going to do it. I'm sure it's going great. I'm sure it's going great over there. Very, very on brand for Spain. Did you see this?

3:03:55Oh, JP Morgan. This is like the most Nathan, potentially it was like a Nathan Fielder idea. There's a bunch of accounts saying that J.P. Morgan appears to have an existentially threatening short micro-strategy position that can potentially bankrupt J.P.M. if master, sorry, micro-strategy trades 50 % higher above Friday's close. And Wall Street Bets comes in and says, you have no idea how understated this is. So a systemically critical bank is going to fail because they're short micro strategy. I'm not sure about this, but it's working because micro strategy is up 5 % today. So could have played.

3:04:40Meanwhile, Bitcoin is up 2.5 % today. So could have played a part. Who knows? But it's a fun idea. It's fun to. Yeah. I don't think Jamie Dimon is risking it all on a micro strategy short. Yeah. I wonder how they even got that information. Maybe it was from a 13-F or something. Who knows? Tyler has become extremely blackpilled on the 13-F. He's building a thesis against it. We might be talking about that later this week. Also, I mean, the whole thing with the, oh, we're going to blow them out like a completely it just negates the idea that they can trade a lot faster than you can trade them. You can just, they can get out of that trade when it's up 10%.

3:05:29Yeah, it would have been disastrous at 50%, but once it went up 10%, they were like, okay, yeah, we're out actually. We're hedging, we're doing something, we're buying the other side of the trade or whatever. Especially if you're a short seller now, it's not like you don't have Google alerts for what's going on on Wall Street bets. It's not going to take you by surprise. You're going to be like, oh, yeah, I know that retail armies exist. If they get marshaled, it can be really bad. So you do have to be a little bit careful because even though they might have like crazy memes and they might be like somewhat silly, they are powerful.

3:06:04But you can quantify the power. You can look at what capital has actually been marshaled for GameStop. Is it being sucked out of the GameStop army? Because if the entire GameStop army leaves and you see GameStop selling off by 80%, and now they're buying into microstrategy or something, you probably have a problem. Yeah, and Wall Street has always been PVP. And in this case, it's like one group versus 30 ,000 individuals. Well, we might want to close out with this post from Semi Analysis about PVS, person versus shrimp. They're breaking it down. He says, it has become extremely trendy among some San Francisco artificial intelligence researchers to donate to shrimp welfare.

3:06:45They estimate that they help improve the welfare of 1 ,500 shrimps per year for every$1 donated. Why do they donate to shrimps? They claim that it is the most cost-effective way of reducing suffering of sentient beings. Note that the shrimp welfare nonprofit actually does not prevent shrimps from being killed, but instead promotes the use of electrical stunning as a more humane slaughtering method that aligns with the goal of reducing shrimp suffering. And so I had an idea for a new semi-analysis product, Shrimp Max. And what they'll do is every night they will take thousands of shrimp and execute them using hundreds of different methodologies.

3:07:28And then they will quantify the amount of suffering on a nightly basis, just like what they do with ClusterMax. And so we could know for sure, because sure, today, the SFAI researchers, they might be, yes, electrical stunning is better than the previous method. But what if there's a shift tomorrow? And tomorrow, electrical stunning is not the best method. They need to have real-time data. They need charts. They need graphs. They need a dashboard. They need ClusterMax for shrimp suffering. I didn't believe this was real, but shrimpwelfareproject.org seems to be, they say you can track their shrimp act.

3:08:05Shrimp act? Well, I like a good portmanteau. There's 440 billion shrimps are farmed each year. Yes. That is wild. That's more than five times the number of all farmed land animals combined. I didn't know shrimp was so popular. This makes shrimp welfare an area of high impact where your involvement can lead to great change. Yeah. Are you pro-shrimp, anti-shrimp, Tyler? Do you mean like shrimp welfare or shrimp in general? Do you like shrimp? Do you like eating shrimp? I enjoy shrimp. Do you like enjoy shrimp? Do you think the shrimp welfare thing holds any water? I think it holds some water. At some point, it's like...

3:08:39Should we have a global shrimp welfare tax? It's like an extra dollar per... Every shrimp you buy is like a dollar on top just for shrimp welfare. So if you have a nice meal, you might be paying like a$20 premium, but thousands of shrimp are going to live better lives because of it. Well, they're not going to live better lives. They're going to die better deaths. It's a noble cause. It's a noble cause. It is funny to go through all of this. Yeah. Like you clearly care more about shrimp than probably anyone on earth, and you're still like, yeah, they must die, but we have to do it. You've got to be nice about it.

3:09:21You've got to be nice with it. It is crazy that you just don't see them. But I mean, I'm sure the spreadsheet's mapped out in a certain way, and the rest is history. Should we close out with this iconic mid-century home? It is apparently for sale. Look at this photo. Beautiful. And I think someone might have already bought it. Adam Mayer said, I'm going to buy it. This is in the SF gate. Have you seen this home before? I think I've seen some photos. It says, after 65 years, LA's most famous mid-century house hits the market. It's the first time it's ever been sold. Somebody's owned it for 65 years.

3:10:03The pinnacle of mid-century modern architecture with floor-to-ceiling glass windows proffering a panoramic view of Los Angeles below. The home has been carefully preserved for decades. I just like that. Oh, it's for sale for$25 million. I just like that for once we get a real estate listing that kind of just becomes the current thing. And I saw a lot of people posting about this. We obviously love the mansion section, love posting about real estate, talking about real estate. We find real estate very fascinating. And I was happy to see this breakthrough in such a meaningful way. Anyway, lots more news, but we will get to that tomorrow.

3:10:39Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for supporting us, listening to this show. Wherever you listen, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. and we will see you tomorrow. A little update on the schedule. We will be off on Wednesday and Thursday. No show Wednesday. No show Thursday. But we will be back on Friday for Black Friday and we will be taking you on a whirlwind tour of the e-commerce world. We have some very exciting stuff planned for that. So we'll see you tomorrow and then we won't see you Wednesday, Thursday. Have a wonderful afternoon and evening. We'll see you at 11. Goodbye.

3:11:15Cheers.