TBPN: John Coogan on agents, app interfaces, and advertising

You're watching TBPN. Is Tuesday, 09/22/2026. We are live from the TBPN ultra down the technology, the forks of finance. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Teaser.

That's foreshadowing. You see me wear the yellow suit, I tell you about ramp time. Now you say both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay accounting, a whole lot more, all in one place. Jordy, his hat game has evolved. He's now wearing the fedora with the Blackstone cap on top, which I assume can only mean one thing. It means that your top priority is safety in

Financial markets.

Financial markets and the financialization No.

But also safety as well.

Oh, you care about both?

I care about

both.

So you

want to accelerate the AI build out safely?

Safely.

Yes. I I thought it was I thought it was you're going to blend the two and you're like, look, I want I want insane private credit deals, trillion dollars of of capital to flow into the AI build out, but I wanted to do do it safely.

I want every want contract to prioritize safety on the whole frontier.

Okay.

Safety around the models.

The capital markets

safety and financial

In the capital markets. Got it. Okay.

I'm I'm

I'm seeing where you get there. Well, there's no safer place to participate in the capital markets than on the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it.

Stop making excuses. Ridiculous. Anyway, I got some I I I got some Harvey takes. Should we run through those? You wanna do Harvey first?

Let's

Okay. People are people are taking shots at Harvey.

So it starts for it.

I won't stand for it. No. I like Harvey. We we we we've talked to some lawyers that use Harvey. Seems like very proud.

We also had on the on the on the show just last week. Had a good time with them. Seems like a very competitive space. But the the headline that grabbed attention actually came from Bloomberg reporting. But then this company called the Red Line HQ actually did a poll quote on that, got the reporting, repurposed it. So you don't even have to go to Bloomberg. We'll talk about that later too. No one's going to news websites anymore. But they say track changes. Harvey's gross margin fell from about 50% to negative 50% by June as agent token use spiked 20 fold on rented OpenAI and anthropic models Bloomberg reports. And so it seems really bad. Like you definitely don't want negative gross margins as a software company, as a tech company.

As any company.

As really as any company actually. You don't want to be selling a dollar for 50¢. And that's exactly what they did in June, basically. That's what they were doing. They were selling tokens at negative gross margins.

Not good. But there's way more details in the actual reporting. So you should go read the Bloomberg report, subscribe and actually read it because there's way more details. So the first thing is like cost did explode. They but it was on the back of more product usage, which is good. They're growing ARR. We'll get into that. And token consumption increased 20x this year. So basically, they are feeling the reasoning era, the agentic era. One one job, one process in Harvey is generating a lot more

token. Had seat based pricing. Yep. And then AI got a lot better. So every seat was just using it way more.

Yeah. Very simple.

But it's not it's not just using it more. It's that your the lawyer might be saying the exact same thing as they did a year ago. They might say, review this. But instead of like one shotting it with no reasoning, they went to reasoning which generated way more tokens and then they went to agents. So they're like, okay, it's actually gonna fan out, look at everything across your firm, all the other records that you have, all your different policies and MD files, like everything that you have is gonna be worked through this agent and so you're generating way more time.

Yeah. So that created negative gross margins. But the good news is that they're already back to positive gross margins, is in the Bloomberg article. Kind of criminal not to repurpose that because it really makes it look like they are running at negative gross margins. They had a negative 50% gross margin in June, but they are back to positive gross margins. They changed their model usage. Of course, there's a whole bunch of models that are cheaper and better for certain things. And they actually fine tuned an open weight model. So they did post training on an open weight model and they're calling it Harvey Tenet. And there's some interesting details there. I want to debate with you on like the value of that where that goes.

But first Gabe, one of the founders of Harvey responded.

Oh, did. I was He said

the hardest thing about building Harvey is doing what's best for our customers despite immense pressure to do what's easy. The easy thing would have been to force our customers into consumption pricing before they were ready and serve them worse models to protect our margins. We chose to help our customers transition on a timeline that works for them and give them the best models in the meantime even though it hurt our margins. This meant optimizing our product through routing, harness improvements, and post training so we could serve Frontier Intelligence at an affordable price. It also meant building the infrastructure for customers to monitor and manage spend, usage dashboards per matter cost attribution, spend caps and ROI reporting.

As a result, we improved our gross margins from negative 50% to positive in a single quarter despite usage doubling month over month and continuing to serve the best models. Our philosophy is simple. Do what's best for our customers even when it's painful, hurts our margin, or draws criticism from competitors x and the press. We believe the most important part of building a company is earning and keeping your customers' trust. You do that by doing the hard thing for them even when it costs you. Bunch of great points in here. Even even outside of the the Bloomberg piece and the subsequent coverage, Max from Ligora was going pretty hard saying it doesn't make sense. Oh. Doesn't make sense to to train your own models because the Oh. Public basically like publicly available frontier models are are dropping in cost Sure.

And and the quality is increasing, so you're just sort of like wasting Yeah. Your own. And and again, that's a bet that he's making. Harvey's gonna make another bet. Yeah. So probably some mixture of both is gonna be the right approach.

There's another interesting sort of like how how bad is this situation just comp, which is so they had negative 50% gross margins in June. They're at a $400,000,000 run rate for ARR, I suppose. And so that's 33,000,000 a month. And so negative 50% margins means they lost $16,000,000, but they've raised like 500,000,000. So in terms of like burn, it's not super cause for crisis in my opinion.

And and what's interesting is that even through June maybe they did the Sequoia deal that valued the company at 15.5 before that happened because it was announced September 9. But I have to imagine that that the deal probably got done with at least some insight into those negative gross margins in June. What do you think?

I would assume so. But but the main thing is like every every every application layer company has like gone through a moment like this even if even if it was for like a single day. Totally. Totally. It matters how quickly you can respond

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And adjust.

Yeah. So where do they where where do they need to get to? Like what is the standard for the legal technology industry? There are some comps here. E discovery provider disco public company, 75% GAAP gross margins.

Like, it is a software tool that when you're going into discovery, you need to connect with a bunch of data. Okay. We got a whole bunch of text messages, a whole bunch of emails. Let's put them in a system so we can review them, sort of, you know, SaaS. I'm sure there's bunch of AI involved now, but that business is running at 75% gross margins. Thompson Reuters has legal professionals segment of software. That's running at almost 50% adjusted EBITDA margins. So like true true net profit. So that's that's sort of where they want to be. Also, pure pure play law firms have really high margins as well. Hard to comp them to businesses because they pay out the to the partnership. But PricewaterhouseCoopers reports net profit margins around 41% for the top 10 firms. It's lower for firms 10 to nine 10 to a 100 or something like that. But still, lots of health in the legal industry broadly. Obviously, everyone knows lawyers make money.

That's that shouldn't be surprising. And, yeah, tokens are getting cheaper by the day. There's a bunch of model launches. Opus 5.5 launched today. Grok 4.7 was yesterday. And Grok 4.7, no one was even Elon was like, okay, we're not jumping straight to the frontier with this. It's going to be a couple more iterations, but we're excited with the progress. But there was one benchmark that really jumped out and it was actually the Harvey legal agent benchmark which is interesting. So I don't know how insanely good that benchmark is. It might be, you know, you could you could bench max against it. But the interesting thing about that particular benchmark was that it was a legal task benchmark based on cost. And so, Grok 4.7 is particularly cheap for the type of legal work that, at the very least, Harvey wants to do. So you could see them funneling more token spend towards x AI and Grok. Do you have something?

You wanted to give it up for Big Law? Yeah. The chat wants to give it up for Big Law.

Let's give it up for

Big They're the real winners here. Additionally, GPT six Soul and Luna are starting to roll out. Fun. So we'll look out for announcements there soon.

Cool demos. I saw one Opus five five.

Mean Chad says the combination the hat jacket combination isn't working. I'll try to adjust a little bit. I'll try to adjust. Hopefully that's better.

Flawless. Yeah. Thank you.

Thank you for flagging.

Huge upgrade. Very funny. Yeah. I saw a cool I saw a cool demo where someone sketched out on a piece of paper sort of a trebuchet in Opus five five, took that image into simulation and created like a virtual version of it. The AI is is is in is continues to impress in terms of translation of things.

Oh, your your kid drew a, you know, some crazy mythical creature, turn it into a story, turn it into a movie, turn it into a video game, whatever whatever format you want. If you wanna if you wanna read a a 2,000 page novel based on Call of Duty Modern Warfare four, like, you can probably do that now. So you can have your content in any specific specific format you want. That seems to be where where the AI continues to impress. Anyway, let me tell you about Codecs. Codecs is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content or automating business workflows. Codecs helps you move projects forward from start to finish. I've been having a lot of fun generating AI videos with Codecs.

Should we pull up your latest Yeah.

The Literally Me compilation. It burns up the internet and vibe reels all of the time. But now, if you see those Literally Me characters and you're like, I am Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler. I am I forget who else is there. Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.

You can put yourself in the movie. There's Inception. We got Geordie in there. That's Drive. I think that's Heat Heat. Mad Men. Can we call him out? I think that's bike club. You got Joker. You got taxi driver. You got Nightcrawler. No Country for Old Men. Social Network. Network. Godfather. Back to Joker. I forget that one. Maybe. That one's collateral. Then Blade Runner Blade Runner again, I think. Yeah. Some of these some of the renders are really, really good. That one, like, face doesn't quite fit on Leo's head, but that one's really good. That one works pretty well. This one's a little awkward. The Joker, it's really just Joaquin Phoenix's face didn't actually swap you in.

It's just Todak

is even like

Do the Joker.

I was like, do it anyway. I don't care. It's fine. It's gonna be on screen for two seconds. That one's good.

John is really my human agent.

He just You didn't even tell me

He's sort of like an ambient always on agent. That's what I'm saying. I don't even have to tell you. You just predict my needs. Right?

You'll send me something like this. Everyone should have a John Everyone in their

should. Everyone should. But yeah. Fun fun powerful tool. Still got $500 locked away in Higgs Field in the wrong section.

Can't do anything with it. So maybe just give away the account or something. I don't know. Anyway, what matters more? People or insects?

Tough call, John. We should we should get into maybe one side of it

first. Yeah.

Steal man.

Before we form an opinion.

Okay. The human side. You want to steal man the human side?

Look. And I'll just I'll just say that we're coming to you live. Yeah. We're coming to you. We had a rough morning with the We've been sobering.

Mosquitoes. We actually had to we had to we had to DoorDash one of those bug bite treatment thing, the heat. What do you call them, Tyler? I think it's like insect bite healer. That's what it's

listed as.

It did work because I yes. Sebastian says I'm famously famously pro mosquito.

Yes.

But a mosquito did bite me on the face today and a bunch more times, so we ended up capitulating and having to get one of these. But I don't like using these. I don't like using these. It's funny because I I can't stand EAs and I think they're weird freaks and I don't think they should be anywhere near public policy or anything But like the one thing that I can agree on with Ben, this guy writing this post that that insects are more important than humans is I don't think anyone should I don't think we should harm the insects.

Oh, okay.

So I

think humans are more important but that doesn't mean we we you gotta like take them all out. Yeah. Just go somewhere

else. Right? You would take sort of you would be altruistic towards the towards the inside.

Ellie says mosquitoes are terrorists of the air. They really are.

You would you you would you wanna be altruistic towards the mosquitoes. Want You to be effective in your altruism when it comes to mosquitoes. You don't want to

No. I want them I want them effectively to be nowhere near me.

Okay.

But I don't want to harm them.

Okay. Okay.

Well But but let's get into this

Let's get into the Bentham's bulldog post. First, let me tell you about Figma. Agents need the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify their Figma files with design system context. So an effective altruist who writes under the name Bentham's Bulldog went viral over the weekend for an essay titled Insects Matter More Than People in the Aggregate arguing that the combined welfare of insects outweighs that of humanity.

Mhmm. His basic argument is one of scale. Insects are so numerous that even if their capacity for suffering is only a tiny fraction of ours, their total suffering could still dwarf human suffering. It's almost just a thought experiment. There's so many other directions you could make. Why not go pound for pound? Maybe cows are the most important because there's a lot of cows and they weigh a lot. There's probably more aggregate pounds of cow than humans. Maybe they matter more than humans in the aggregate. Right? Or fur, like the amount of fur on all the monkeys in the world is more than all the fur on all the humans in the world. And so, maybe monkeys matter more. I don't know. It's completely arbitrary where people draw these lines. But he estimates that for every for every second of human life, insects collectively spend roughly two hundred and seventy thousand seconds dying, about seventy five hours, and notes that more insects die in a single second than the total number of humans who have ever lived.

Wow. That's a crazy stat. I mean the guy pulled some cool numbers together. This is interesting. This is fun fact territory. A large part of the essay turns on whether insects can insects can experience pain. Bentham's bulldog argues that they can even weekly. If they can even weekly their suffering should count morally just as ours does. What species you are is just totally irrelevant to whether it's bad for you to feel terrible pain. Using what he describes as a conservative assumption that insects experience pain at just one ten thousandth the intensity that humans do, he concludes the sheer number of insects would still produce vastly more suffering in the aggregate. He ultimately argues that insects may experience more suffering in a single day than humans have throughout all history. Now is there is there a piece on this where this is the view of the of this community with the relative like, are they looking forward to how a world might interact with, like, a a godlike machine super intelligence and humans? So the idea is like we got to stand up for the insects now because we are the insects of the future. So we want them to make the same

I think that's meticulous. I think that's certainly like where the thought experiment goes.

Yeah. Right? And so and so the the this feels almost like bait or like a trap where it's like if you are the type of person that jumps on this and says and says, no, disagree. Like insects don't matter more than people in aggregate, then you're setting yourself up for like the dunk that's okay, well now there are a quadrillion super intelligences that can all feel pain in some abstract way and so they're more valuable and now you're the insect and so your previous argument can be used against you to advocate for your own eradication. And so it's like stand up for the insects now lest you be discarded in the in the robotic future.

Yeah. I don't know. The the reactions to this were rough. People did not like this argument at all.

Well, it's it's just the timing is funny because there's so much tension building around Yeah. The sort of EA rationalist movements

with Which is super fractured. People don't realize how fractured

Yeah. It But but it's sort of boiling up to the sort of national Yeah. Level in a way that it hasn't before. Yeah. And so during the midst of that broader conversation to come in and being like, yeah, insects actually matter more than people.

Yeah. In the aggregate.

What were some of the reactions? Doomer said, if you truly believe that a bug's life is worth more than a human life, you will immediately feed yourself to bugs. Do it right now. If you don't do this, you are a fraud, a liar, a poser.

Andre important for people to read the before you go and comment on this article, watch A Bug's Life

Oh, yeah.

At half speed. Half speed. Yeah. Watch the whole movie at half speed. Yeah.

You're a movie guy, but I think we coexist. Maybe you're not a fan of watching movies at a half speed. It's not really how the

I'm really a half speed guy.

But half speed is a great is a great sort of tool to have in the tool chest

I like

when you wanna deeply comprehend.

X speed, three d glasses with the two different movies interlaced so I can get one movie in one eye, another movie in the other eye, one audiobook here, one podcast here

Duo.

While I'm sleeping.

Yeah. With the duo.

Exactly. Max brain rot. No. I I I think this is an odd I mean, the fracturing of EA really like leads to a really, really wide range of outcomes that get sort of lumped together. Everything from the PACE, the Frontier essay to this.

These are clearly very, very different pieces of communication and yet they get sort of lumped together. And it must be full employment if you're in the public relations department over there.

Yeah. Was gonna say I I think the shrimp shrimp welfare stuff makes more sense to this because like I'm not really sure what like after reading this and say I agree like what do I what are the next steps like we're not like really factory farming insects through pesticides or Speak for yourself, brother.

Yeah. Yeah. The shrimp the shrimp welfare.

Got some big announcements coming soon. Like what percent of of these like 600,000,000,000 insect death insect deaths per second are Preventable. Preventable. Yeah. Where like with the shrimp, you know, you can say like, okay.

Change the farming practice or just don't eat the shrimp.

Yeah. So I think that's why maybe this was less impactful. Don't know.

Yeah. I mean, it's all continuum to like until you get to like the veganism, like the animals who you can pet, you know, should should be able to live full lives. This is sort of the most abstracted version of that. But yeah. I don't know.

It's odd. Yeah. Very, very but I mean, I guess it's a good good opportunity to go viral if you're looking for some

More importantly, on TBPN's Road to Christmas. Oh, yeah. We're down to just ninety three days. Ninety three A to think about, a lot of moves to make, and we couldn't be more excited.

Start counting it down. Yeah. I was trying to think of a a realistic AI doom scenario. Like, everyone's like, oh, I can't imagine it. And so I I actually mapped out one that maybe I could take you guys through.

I wrote a little script here

Okay.

Called The Old Way. So, you know, fades in, starts in the TBPN UltraDome. Me, you, Tyler, we're all doing the show. All of a sudden, all the phones in the UltraDome light up. Emergency alert, unknown biological event, shelter immediately.

Outside, alarms begin to sound across Los Angeles. A strange strange haze starts pouring through vents and drifting across the streets outside. I see a cloud approaching the ultra dome entrance. First thing I do, bioweapon attack, this is what you gotta do. Boom. Right there. It's not going in your mouth. You're good. Good. Second step, pull out your gun. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Start blasting whoever's responsible. You're just firing wildly.

Woah.

Once you've got the situation a little stabilized, then we gotta start we gotta figure out what's going on. So I go over to Tyler and I say, look, we gotta hack into the super intelligence. We gotta figure out what is going on with this with this bioweapon. And he's like, sure. Like, yeah, let's hack into it.

Like, what I'll open up Codex. What do you want me to prompt? I'm like, no. The AI has gone rogue. We have to do this the old way. He's like, okay. I'll I'll I'll open Cloud Code. Like, what do you want me to prompt? And I'm like, no. The old way. He's like, okay. I got cursor open. Like, what are we doing here? I'm like, no. Tyler, like, have to go back to the old way. So okay, got GitHub Copilot fired up. I'm like, no. Tyler, you can't use any AI at all. He's like, okay. Just let me know what code you want to write and I'll look it up on Stack Overflow. And I'm like, no. The Internet has been contaminated, Tyler. We can't use anything. We have to code the old way. We have to do it by hand. And Tyler's like, I can't. I I don't know. You don't know how. Okay. I I don't remember anything.

I can't write any code. So so what do we do next? We gotta get George Hots. He's the only one who can help in this scenario. So we go

because he's the only one that remembers how to

He remembers how to code. He's got local model stored. He's got his own hardware. So we go get George Hots. And then we're like, okay, George, hack into the super intelligence.

Tell us what's going on with this bioweapon. And why aren't we affected? Like, we we we've been walking around. We seem to be fine. Everyone else is turning into a zombie. What's going on? So he he locks in. He writes some code. He hacks in. Figures it out. This is, Jordy, tell me about your diet. And you're like, well, I I just eat an heroin exclusively. And he's like, yeah, my analysis shows that your body has never had a toxin in it, and so you are immune to the bioweapon. It doesn't affect you at all. Right. And I'm like, but how do you explain me? I only eat Air One once a day. And he's like, well, John, my analysis indicates that you might have had the original Four Loco. Drink the original Four Loco?

In in large quantities?

Yeah. Was daily driving in college. Why? I was like, your body consumed so much original Four Loco, it's now essentially pure toxins. So the bioweapon sees it as a hostile environment.

It doesn't even try to infect you. So you are immune. So we're both so we're both immune. But the bioweapon is still wreaking havoc on America, so we got to get to the bottom of it. So we're going to need some muscle. So we go get Sam Sulik. And we go get Sam Sulik, and we're like, let's go. We gotta go to the data center. We gotta break in and shut this thing down. That's the only option. So we get in the Cadillac Blackwing. We jump it off of ramp, slam into the data center, pull out the gun, start blasting the GPUs. We're just firing everywhere. Finally, finally, after we've shot 90% of the data center, it's just bullets everywhere. We get the k everywhere. Finally, a humanoid robot emerges. It's Mecca Hitler. We gotta fight him. We gotta fight him. We're shooting we're shooting.

The bullets are just are just bouncing right off. They're just bouncing right off. They're we're we're getting beat up. We're trying to fist fight it. Sam Sulik's doing nothing. It's not working. And then at the last second, John Cena breaks through the roof, slams down the humanoid robot, rips his head off, and humanity wins. So that's kind of like a concrete example of like how AI doom, how, you know, a runaway rogue

Just one scenario.

That's one possible scenario.

I put it because everyone's asking I

put it at 10%. That's the way it plays out. Yeah. That that that's kind of where I'm at right now. Yeah.

That's how I'm thinking about it.

Yeah. 10% if we don't do anything

Yeah.

Around safety.

Well, well, that's what we'd have to do. We'd have to

Well, that's

Like this. If the bioweapon comes, like this. Yeah. Cover up and eat a lot of heroin drink a lot of original four Loco.

Round of applause. I didn't know that was coming and I didn't know where it was going.

I'm just trying to like think more concretely about about how these things will play out and be prepared. You gotta you gotta be prepared for what for what happens. You also have to get on console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Let's let's see what's next.

Meta, the AI agent company, Muse, they're putting humans in there. Meta is Finally. Concierge for its new personal agent, Muse. Meta has been testing human concierge for its new personal AI assistant. This is in Bloomberg, which entails having human contractors quietly handle some of the phone calls placed by the digital agent. You gotta use this to order Amazon. Like Amazon's like, no, no, no. We're gonna block your browser. Well, did you block everyone's browser? How's that gonna play out? I was thinking about like at some point if I write a really really bespoke like a like basically a CLI, like a really bespoke weird CLI, like a vibe code it but I use like sort of odd techniques. Like I'm like, okay, use computer use and open up Opera or, you know, Mozilla and and click around and add some randomness and do this and it's like and I basically create a CLI that wraps an agent where it's like it runs on my home WiFi, so Amazon. And I'm like and I just do this. I I don't productize it. So Amazon like can't really detect it.

Do you think I could potentially stay in front of their in front of their battle forever and then puppeteer it from other agents.

Well, just asked Chad GPT, can you order Amazon over the phone? Because I would think that at that scale there would be Yeah. At least one way to do it. Totally. It seems like you can only use their customer service number to help with existing orders.

Mhmm. So one thing is you could order a bunch of the wrong thing, like a 100 of the wrong thing, a 100 like, you know, bug treatment

Order everything and then have your agent refund everything but the thing you No.

Have have your muse agent

Yeah.

Have a human via muse call Amazon Oh. And say, hey, I actually got the wrong thing here. Can you swap it with this other thing? Interesting. And just do that as many times as necessary Yeah.

Yeah. To get the right order.

Maybe have one order that's just always open where you're just adding and and removing

completed orders because you have to have made a mistake for Okay. To call the customer

Oh, yeah. You can charge me, but just add it to the order. I don't know. We're gonna get and so it's gonna be a weird battle. Ben Thompson was writing about it today.

Was it was pretty pretty good. Amazon I mean, his his whole framing is like Amazon is like the strongest in the AI era of the hyperscalers because they own logistics infrastructure, the final step, the real world. And so he anticipates that they will hold their ground for a very long time and not give in where and and that's basically what they did with OpenAI where OpenAI had the instant checkout process. They invited everyone to be a pit part of it.

Amazon was like, no. No. But we'll give you tens of billions of dollars.

And but but interestingly, yeah. So now now the the result is that Amazon is vending in their ads into ChatGPT to to close the purchase there. Toby Lookie at Shopify partnered with Muse and announced that they are integrating. But the interesting thing is, like, where is the value capture layer? And it only works with Shop Pet.

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

Paper towel holder that's made by company that's over over 50 years old. Yes. Yes. So No. So the the crazy thing is so so now Vinod was on the show yesterday talking about WaitWajo Oh, which is an AI

We launched one.

Foe. They have a new agent that I believe is human supported. Yeah. In that some of the stuff is done by AI Mhmm. And some of the stuff, if necessary, can be escalated to a human.

Mhmm.

Now, you have meta off at least testing, exploring, having Yeah. A human in the loop on some of these things. Yep. And my big question is like, why? Why?

Why? Like, voice models are getting pretty good. It feels completely unsustainable for meta to roll out a product to billions of people where users might just be like like if I had like something I could text and say, hey, call this person, call that person Yeah. I'd probably be using it.

I think there's a ton of there's a ton of value. First, the Muse install base is small right now. So it's not that crazy. They have the ability to stand up huge offices, whether it's through Scale AI and that team that came over or through their, you know, all the things they've done over the past two decades. The other thing is that Muse specifically will not train on your data that you put into Muse.

And so that this wasn't like a huge announcement or anything, but you could see people being like, I don't know if I wanna use this AI agent that's gonna be that's gonna be using my personal information. Even if they're running like the PII redactor, putting all of that might be a little bit off putting. So Meta's not getting that data. But if they have a human in the loop, the human who does the task that's just beyond what the model's capable of, they're also generating training data because they can probably train on that. And so it's like the model the model by default can, I don't know, like summarize your summarize your calendar?

Right? And give you a give you a briefing on what's going on in your calendar. It knows how to integrate. And the model's capable of that. Muse one point Spark 1.3 is capable of that. All the models are capable of that. But what can't they do? They might not be fully ready to to go and have a complicated conversation with someone if they're ordering flowers over the phone or something. And and and so, like, the current models might fall down. So you need more data to solve that. And so you put the humans in the loop and then that's your extra training data for the next leg up. And then you just keep repeating that. So I would view this human in the loop thing more as them doing data collection Yeah. And and, you know, creating more training data for them than a permanent solution to the product problems. Also, I I I just I don't think the time on-site for these apps is actually that high.

I I think there is like an excitement when you jump on, you do a bunch of stuff. But then with all these AI tools, like, there's a reason why OpenAI comps to like weekly active users because there's plenty of days where people are like, I went to the beach and I didn't touch AI at all. Like, I didn't do any work. There's some there's some feedback on on Alex Wang's post talking about like, it'll help you with your goals. And and I think Katie was saying like, a lot of people just don't have goals. Like, they just wanna chill. And this is also the Ben Thompson thing. Consumers wanna be entertained. Like people that go to the beach, they'll still scroll Instagram. Are they really gonna be doing anything with any agent no matter how no matter how powerful it is? Like there are plenty of people that have all staffs of EAs and personal assistants and they don't do anything on a weekend because they wanna chill and they don't wanna Well,

One thing's for certain. It's over or we're back? Professor Zhang is vindicated. Yesterday, we watched Oh, yeah. We watched a video where he said, I guarantee that there are humans In blue?

Behind the chat apps that you use manipulating the information.

Mhmm.

And he is correct, at least in the short term.

For today. Sattrin is thinking about the knock on effects of all these personal agents. He says there's no way any of us can predict the impact AI will have on companies, sectors of consumer behavior, which has been for history for all of history until now human behavior. But to claim that it won't have an impact and simply brush it off lacks both humility and creativity, Tactics that worked when consumer behavior was dictated by human psychology will fall by the wayside, and those that fail to adapt will be left behind. Every day from now on, we will see new examples of areas where friction was profitable, becoming cost centers for companies that don't react in a timely enough manner.

Today, you might realize just how many flight credits, loyalty points, or promotional offers you've never used that will end up utilized by agents. What impact will that have? Tomorrow, might see something that makes you ask how much money health insurers make simply because people won't sit on the phone for five hours trying to get coverage approved unless it's a massive expense or life or death matter. And what about your savings account? The money could be in a money market fund. You haven't bothered to move it. How much in net interest income is made because of that friction? Yeah. People have money, like, locked away in Venmo, like, couple bucks here. And if it's frictionless and actually free to move stuff around, it'd be a lot different. What what

do have in past? This was like the David Deutsch anecdote about how he fixed his dishwasher. He was

like about to buy a

new one then it just told him that he could

Yeah. It's like ghost GDP. Yeah. We'll need new metrics. So it

doesn't like show up anywhere but

New is like metric. No. But but I mean, so I don't see very many of

these adjust the GDP. That's how we get to 10% GDP growth.

Plus AI. E equals MC squared plus AI. Yeah. This all this was all kicked off because flight was delayed seven hours. Someone asked Muse to file a compensation.

Five minutes later, they had a $250 credit in their Delta account. That's something that you'd normally have to hop on the phone for. It was a lot of cumbersomeness. So, like, people on that team were clearly model modeling, like, well, 1% of people will ask for it and 50% of people will be able to be like, no. We can't really do it. And so we we think this will only be like a dollar per flight. Well, now it might be $10 per flight. But, of course, the end result is that they will put AI on the other side and the two AI agents will just negotiate and find out a a resolution, I imagine. Anyway oh, has a little prediction here. Look at the look at the follow-up to this post. They put a what what is that? An RSA hash or something? That's cool. So they made some prediction there that they will see. Anyway

That's one of the greatest hacks. When you wanna take a victory lap in the future, but you're not willing to actually

Post both. You post like, I think the stock market will go up by a 100% in the next ten years. And then, I think the stock market will go down in the next ten years. And then you just delete the one that wasn't accurate. And then you're and you're good.

Nikesh Arora chimed in on the knife fight between Amazon and Muse. There will be a bigger battle. This will be a bigger battle than anyone anticipates. It's only a matter of time before there is an Apple and Google version of Muse and possibly TikTok in addition to the Frontier LLM agents, maybe a commerce agent from Amazon. Sort of my prediction. Think I think Instinct might land with Amazon potentially. Although they do have Rufus, but

can And

Tyler is a a Rufus power user.

Yep. Rufus is is good. You don't wanna talk talk down on Rufus. But Instinct is clearly like tapped into something really special with like the energy and the support that they have and the community they've built. But there are a lot of like little little rough edges that need to get sanded off and like that's the domain of Amazon in my opinion.

Like Amazon like is like the, you know, the trains run on time and and it's a pretty efficient company. So every app that's a service marketplace or commerce app will need to existentially decide to open APIs for consumer agents to interact. Smaller players have no choice. Ad revenues are more than transaction fees. Either the consumer benefits or distribution aggregators will demand a higher fee transaction. There's an interesting stat from the Strictory post about Amazon. They the net income for Amazon e commerce was like 36,000,000,000 and the ad revenue was exactly twice that. So the business is unprofitable without advertising. They put advertising everywhere. So it's like a very interesting dynamic where you can see the motivation.

There's $68,000,000,000. You you you flagged that number. It's a huge

Over 70 in the last twelve months.

Over 70,000,000,000. So significant pool of revenue and profit that they will be protecting for sure. I don't I know I don't want an agent for each app, which does sound very annoying. Super agent go and use all the other agents. Maybe that's the future.

I don't know. Yeah. How this is this goes back to, like, roll your own agent that then puppeteers your your muse, which has good integration to to Facebook, and then your your Amazon Rufus. Yeah. I wonder if you could order via Rufus because you'd probably reverse that API, but you'd still get banned. You're just chatting with it just muses chatting with Rufus to order your paper towels. No. I said over 50 years old, basically.

You had an idea yesterday, a potential monetization channel for or strategy for agents, which is like sponsored agentic flows which I thought was really good. Like imagine you and your friends, you all have agents and then

An example is Spider Man.

Yeah. It's basically like it drops in and it says like, hey, I got five tickets. Yeah. Spider Man.

It says, I know from your Instagram history that you're a Tom Holland fan or you like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Spider Man Brand New Day is coming out in two weeks. I can get you tickets Friday night. There's nothing on your calendar. I can get a Saturday matinee.

I know you've been sending reels to these five friends. Do you want to plan a trip to the movies? And I will book it and message everyone, set up a calendar invite, text everyone and say thumbs up if you want in, thumbs down if you're busy. And I will put together a group outing. And that does feel like something where Spider Man would the Brand New Day marketing team would put dollars behind advertising that to get

people The question is how much will consumers tolerate that at all? Remember how pissed off people were about the BMW Spider Man ad I think

they will if it's good. And I think the long tail small business advertising will will work. Like, especially if it's like I I it's a little bit tricky to figure out how, like, when you're in these agentic workflows, there's often, like, multiple beneficiaries. So Spider Man benefits, but also Fandango might benefit, but also, like, a particular theater might benefit if you go to, know, Lowe's versus AMC or I don't know. They might be the same company now.

But so so it's interesting to see, like, where the sponsorship would break down. But but you could totally imagine, like, you have a wedding coming up. You've been seeing ads for this Thai company. You've also been seeing ads for this sock company. Do you want me to put together, like, a whole new outfit for the welcome dinner that might look really good? And those companies pay on unclear, like, the well, like, where all that goes. But the scale of the platform I think is what unlocks it because you know Sean Frank at at Ridge Wallet is gonna be like, I'm gonna test that. And there's gonna be millions of other small businesses that are gonna test something or other. Anyway, let's see. Products like Muse and Instinct are gonna saturate customer service teams.

Again, we talked about that. Not a huge problem because you flip it around and the customer service team is using AI. So I think the equilibrium is just a lot more AI on both sides. Hopefully, smoother transactions. Signal is is talking about Walmart here. If only Walmart was actually competent enough to realize the Agents commerce opportunity ahead of them. And it's interesting with the backdrop of the Vibe acquisition. Walmart seems to be going after the same pool of revenue that Amazon went after with the ad market scale up and the ad business. When in fact, if they didn't have that, they would be sort of counter positioned to lean a little bit more into agent ecommerce because they say, look, we don't have an ads business to lose, so let's be the default option for agents that buy anything. There's also an interesting knock on effect, which is like, with with with Shopify going so deep into Muse and Agent Commerce and agent checkout, I wonder if we will wind up seeing a different type of Shopify merchant emerge.

Because Shopify merchants, it's been a lot of clothing. It's been a lot of, like, d to c single product, like, a shoe single shoe company. But I wonder if you will see someone who's like, yeah, I sell a lot of stuff on Amazon. I have a factory that makes paper towel holders, but I also got paper towels. I also got socks, t shirts. I got sort of basics. And I wonder if someone will go and try and win on Shopify and set up the actual the actual economic structure to be able to provide the experience because consumers will clearly want to be able to go to agents and say, order me a new pair of socks and just have it done. Right? And so if they say, sorry, can't do it on Amazon, they're gonna figure out another place to do it. The water will flow into the cracks.

Yeah. And so

No. It's a big big opportunity for Shopify to be able to lean in here.

Yeah. And I but

I wonder if But the issue is still the the real world physical fulfillment having a bunch of different products in in a

single place. But the the individual Shopify merchants, like, solve that on a on a diffused basis. So in theory, if it's like, okay, I want next day shipping, there's five Amazon merchants that sell or there's five Shopify merchants that sell socks. You want socks tomorrow. There's only one of them that has a distribution center in your town and can actually get them to you tomorrow.

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

Everything's closed off. It's not truly open. But it's like it's like the meta flags in the front because Yeah. We'll be the aggregate.

Open open web for thee but not for me.

Everything below the fold will be the open web. But at the same time, it is just fun to watch the battleships go off to to war and see how it see how it pencils up. Because there is there is a scenario where the where the equilibrium solution is actually a more open web. We will see. We will see.

What is going on with McLaren? I I we gotta talk about McLaren before we get any further because they brutal. There's a new logo. They went from an an angled m that looked very fast, very bold logo and now it looks like Miss Laren.

Yeah. It's it's interesting. They they seem to be trying to reposition as as a luxury brand Yeah. Versus a motorsports brand. Okay.

Like the when when when I think of McLaren, I think of like fast, sporty cars. Period. I think of racing. Racing f one. I love I love the old logo.

Oh, this lineage too?

Love the old

They've never made like a mass market car.

I love the old mark. I I it's one of those things. You hate to be the guy that when a brand when a company rebrands, you're like, oh, it's brutal. Because oftentimes, you revisit it Yeah. In six months and you're like, okay, it wasn't that bad.

Yeah, was good.

But this feels like bad. And But the business has not been performing. Right? The business has been in a in a rough spot. They don't have the they don't have like the Cayenne that they can sell.

They're doing an SUV.

That's Well

yeah. It's common But I'm

but I'm saying like They're an Urus competitor. To date, they don't have like a mid market car. No. I'm sure their Urus competitor will do well. But still, part of what enables the Eurus is like the q five and the q three.

Right?

And the core selling economy.

Yeah. Can't forget about that.

It's still growing. So

So anyways, pretty pretty brutal rebrand. But but again, it's a yeah. It's a tough one just because it was always like, I always just thought the brand The steel man Their brand was off.

The steel man here is that is that they are taking a number of bets that seem to speak to interesting, potentially valuable pieces of the market. So you have the SUV. The Urus is incredibly incredibly well selling. So that could just be a cash cow business for them. Then you have the MCL, their manual supercar, and that could speak more to the enthusiast.

Right? Because enthusiasts want manuals. Porsche's been delivering manuals. Ferrari is starting to put them back in. And other brands are starting to, like, get that memo that it's not enough to compete on speed. EVs have you beat there. Don't they haven't gone full EV. I I haven't seen a lot of McLaren signaling that they're gonna remove the combustion engine. So that seems like they are positioned for the future. That's certainly a trend is is don't go full EV. Don't kill all the gas cars. And then they also have the W1. So they're staying in the hypercar world. And the W1 lineage, I think it clarifies what McLaren has been doing because when they were doing the Senna and the Speedtail, there were just like too many special cars. And the problem was that you you were like, okay, Senna, Speedtail, where do we sit?

But f one, p 1, w one, very clear lineage. You know it's the best. You know if it's that. It's it's gonna be the the craziest thing they have. And so if they can create some differentiation between the true hypercars that they create, the supercars that now come in manual, the SUV for the more everyday daily driver, You have you have the trappings of of at least satisfying the demand that exists in the market. Yep. You do have to go create more more demand. You gotta win in f one. But

And the and the new Mark's not coming out of nowhere on the website. They say before McLaren became a mark recognized around the world, it was a family name painted above a service station in Rimura, New Zealand. Those original letter forms inspired our new word mark, reimagined for a new era. So they're going back Yeah. In time.

McLaren was started by a guy from New Zealand. Yeah. But it was started in The UK. Yeah. But the the founder was had been born in in New Zealand. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Anyways

Well, on a related note, there's some data that might be bullish for the supercar, hypercar market here. Toy sales among adult only households have outpaced households with children for toy sales, growing 16% through June. So when I think of adults buying toys, I think about Myers Manx. I think about dune buggies. I think about dirt bikes.

I think about super cars, boats, yachts, wakeboarding. These are the toys that adults buy. And and it's not surprising to me that that there is a trend among adults buying buying toys. I mean, are these are just fun toys. And so it's the fact that it grew 16% in June sign that, you know, adults are having fun. They're buying toys and and bullish for the super curt community. Right? Don't you think?

Judging by the picture here, you might be you might be

incorrect. Oh. Wait. They're talking about, like, children's toys. Interesting.

Yeah. I I think that's a little bit more nuanced. I would go for, you know, gaming rigs, racing simulators. These are the toys that adults should be buying, I think. I think that's

I did I did I was a teenager when I realized that the Lego Ferrari that I had built years, you know, probably when I was like 10 had a market value. Shocked.

Oh, the Lego did.

Yeah. Because I I I had some Lego like really complicated Lego Ferrari Yeah. Yeah. That I probably built when I was around 10. Yeah.

Then as a teenager, you know, cash strapped teenager, was like, wait, someone will give me a $100

for That's crazy.

Sold it, of I'm not super sentimental Yeah. About that kind of thing. But I think that trend has just been building. Yeah. And now there's people that just buy every new LEGO that's released and just sit on it.

Yeah. And it's

I I saw a I I was looking with my son on an old LEGO set that I played with as a kid. And I was like, I can actually go and buy the exact same LEGO set and share that with him because I thought that one was really cool. But it has gone way up in value. Was like, I should've just held on to it because it's like a $100 now.

The Yeah. The other people are

So I built a Ferrari Lego as well when I was younger.

Probably not as complicated.

Probably less complicated. But but I but I remember being like, oh, this is like a sick Ferrari. Like, maybe one day I'll get a real one. And then and then I like finally got older, learned more about it. Was like, it's an f 40.

So I was like, I'm probably never getting these. But maybe. Maybe. I don't know what f 40 You

never know.

Are doing it.

Says, today's adults increasingly behave like the children they never have. Feels like a rude thing to say about people and yet toy sales among adult only households have now outpaced households with children for toy sales. That is so crazy and and black black pilling and sad and it's over. It is so over. I don't know.

You're you're literally me.

You're doing the literally me thing.

I think I think one I think one factor here is like children, in my experience, don't care about the cost of a toy. Yeah. And so a $5 toy will bring just as much joy to a child Yeah. As the 5 Totally. $100 toy.

Adults are like, I have to get the percent. So I that it's like for every toy that a parent buys their child, it could be like a dollar Yeah. $5

Yeah.

$10 Yeah. $5

I went I went toy shopping with my son and and and we and he finds this like Hot Wheels thing and it's like a book that has like some Hot Wheels inside and stuff and it has like the craziest most electric

Look at this look at this comment from Winsome. I never had a quote unquote Lego set. I just had assorted Lego bricks. Yes. I used to fill the bath with water and make oil rigs, which used to annoy my mom.

This guy was in the oil rig.

Hit the oil rig.

Hit the oil rig.

Fantastic. No. On that point, I so I I I went to the store. My son finds this this this Hot Wheels thing that's, like, kinda structured like a book, and it has some Hot Wheels cars in there. But on the cover of this, like, box is, like, the craziest, most elaborate, like, loop de loop thing.

And so he gets super excited about it. And I'm like, okay. I gotta, like, check this out. And it and it turns out that what you're actually buying is, like, a book with some stories and then just, like, a big sheet of, like, paper, like, a poster that has that illustrated on it. And you can imagine the loop de loop in the actual track. And I was like, dude, like, let me keep clue you in this. This isn't the real thing. Like, we can go get the real thing with the actual loop de loops and stuff. Like, let's find the real toy. And he's like, no. This is the one I want. This is what I want I want. And I'm like It's the power of my own imagination. Like but like I'm like I'm like this is gonna end poorly because he's gonna be dissatisfied when he actually opens it up. Opens it up, he's like, this is the greatest thing ever. He's like, my imagination is running wild. I would never want the alternative. And so your point is 100% accurate. Toys

the the best toy company in the world, period. Yeah. Is this company Play Forever. Okay. Have you seen any of these things?

No. No. No.

They're the most well built kids toys in the world. So well built. Yeah, we should. Let's get the founder on.

Where's Nick? Are Play forever.

They are absolutely Nick, what think?

Guest? Okay. Okay. Yeah. Let's bring our

As much as I wanna keep talking about toys as an adult, I would rather have a surprise guest.

Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business. Lets you sell Insects online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces,

and now with AI agents. We have a surprise guest. Surprise guest. Our favorite guest,

Ben Thompson. Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

We actually were able to fully

What's your favorite guest?

We were able to fully surprise

It's a very, very short list.

We were able to fully surprise John. Yeah. It was it was me coordinating with Ben. So this is like This

is a surprise.

This is a wonderful surprise.

Anyway. Well, mean, were going on and on about toys and I was sitting here trying to decide who has the most ridiculous jacket on today. I think it's down to a tie.

Hey. I gotta wear the ramp suit. Right. This is

my first suit.

Been wearing this as we're trying to get to the bottom of this whole AI safety debate. I'm trying to embody the the movie.

In the mind.

How cold is it there? Just have don't know. I thought, you you guys are in LA.

Yeah. We're in LA.

It's warm.

Well, we don't have any windows.

Great insight of the booking process. Nick's been doing great work trying to get me on. I kinda was committed, oh, you can do it then, do it then. He's like, oh, about Friday. And I'm like, I I don't know what's going on on Friday.

So I'm like, can I just go on now? Yeah. And then I will stop feeling guilty about it. And somehow, here I am. So this There

you You just crash in whenever you want.

Yeah. I don't care.

That's fine. What what is what is top of mind? What is the number one story to talk about right now? Why today?

Oh, I I could talk about toys for sure. I mean, I think the adult version of toys is we are sort of back in I was actually kind of annoyed. Toby Wuki posted a picture of his of his server. I was talking about my rack Yeah. On Sharp Tech.

Lots of compliments. Many people told me nice rack. It was great. Yes. Although I didn't actually post any pictures of Okay. But

Yeah. How do they know?

On on on that home Oh, we're not sure about it.

Home organization? Should I be doing this? I don't think I've ever organized my home. I've never I don't know how many nails

and handers

I have. What are you doing?

Oh, no. It's out of control. No. So the one of the insights that so I've had a nontraditional career, fairly nontraditional life. And so there's lots of things that I've experienced that I'm never quite sure how relevant is to most people.

Mhmm.

So one of them, for example, was like working from home. Mhmm. I worked for Automatic way back when when I moved to Taiwan, and it was they've always they were always sort of distributed and developed lots of processes and ways to work around that that were really interesting. I wrote about it when, like, the COVID thing hit because Yeah. All these companies had processes around assuming people were in the office, and then they tried to retrofit it with Zoom, and it was a total disaster.

It kinda still is a total disaster as as far as I can see. But there's also like personal things about working from home. Like, they're working from home is a significant upheaval or can be to a marriage. Yeah. Just as an example. Like, when I'm writing, I need to be in the zone, no interruptions, nothing bothering me, and that just doesn't compute when you're like within your house. Like, you're in the house, why cannot things be done? And so the importance of like either establishing that or getting an outside office for writing or whatever it might be. That that was an example where I actually lived what everyone experienced like a decade later.

Mhmm.

There's other stuff like

Wait. What's the solution there? Because my issue with with working from home, at least with with young kids, is that kids are gonna run into the office all hours of the day Yeah. When you're You working did a and how long you can't explain to a two year old like, hey, like, my computer's more important than than you right now.

Right? No. The answer if you can swing it. The answer if you can swing it is to get out the house. Like like it's just and it because it's kinda like you're you're exporting, externalizing your problem onto your family, and it's not their job.

Yeah.

And so it's almost like you owe it to your family to get out of the house. If you need to not be bothered, that's your problem. Yeah. So figure it out. Like, it otherwise, they're like, they're not getting paid to not bother me on this Zoom call.

Their their expectation of I'm their dad. I'm around. I can ask them questions. Yeah. So obviously, that's not always viable. Probably a locked door, I imagine would go a long way, but that ultimately was, you know, I had to figure that out Yeah. Sort of the hard way. And I'm like, oh. Everyone had to figure this out eventually. Another one is like just being like living online. Like, was I lived abroad for so long. A lot of my friends connections were online. That was very weird at one time. Now, it's very normal. But another thing is this whole like personal assistant sort of area. Right. Yeah. And I'm hesitant to write about this one because it sounds kind of kinda douchey. Like, let me tell you about my experience with my personal assistant. Yeah.

Yeah. But the reality is that it's most people have no idea how to use a personal assistant. It took me years to figure out how to use a personal assistant even though I needed one just to run like like the first few years of checkery, was doing all the writing, all the taxes, all the customer support, doing everything, and basically dying. And so I had to get someone on sort of out of desperation to just help me do all the the sort of back office stuff even just to respond to email. But the email one is a great example. You talk to people about like Muse or whatever, and they're like, you put your email in there? And it's like, how can you have a personal assistant who does not have access to your email? It's just not it's not possible. But it speaks to the where the challenge is about these things. A personal assistant is so unbelievably useful.

And what's super thrilling and exciting about stuff like Muse or the other ones, I've actually like been working on building my own version of this for for in our company, is I know how useful it is because I have a decade's worth of practice having Okay.

But here's here's the thing.

Neat version of a physical.

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

assistance graduate. Like Nick used to like set up car washes for us and stuff and now he's like full time booking working on that side of the business like

But yeah, the idea like I I never felt like, oh, this person sends calendar invites for me and and and will reschedule. That to me was never that helpful. Like, I can just there's a lot of there's so much the Internet has reduced so much friction that to me the final boss of of agents is like, give me a humanoid in the real world that could just do tasks, like organizing the garage. Like that would be No. Incredible value.

That's exactly where I was going. So like I feel like I would I I under like I get the personal assistant mania because actually if you have a personal assistant that works and you learn how to use one, it is tremendously freeing. Yeah. So when you get to the home improvement and organizing the house, what that is is just me living in the future by virtue of paying someone to be the humanoid robot that hopefully we'll all have in our houses in the long run. Okay.

And so Jordy, I think you're that's the exact right segue.

Yeah. Even think about like I I as I I'll order a bunch of stuff online in a given year. I am like the best consumer for different retailers because I just won't return something. Like I physically cannot get myself to find the time to go to even if it's like print out this thing, go there, drop it off, whatever, it's like I just won't do it. Right?

It's just like you got me. I bought a product, it didn't work out. No. That was like the number one thing when I have when I have an EA, it's like I'm doing returns all the time. It's like this thing is like 1% not not what I wanted

to Arguably, the single core use case for my assistant here is package processing. Like actually bringing stuff in, opening it up, like the it was embarrassing the amount of packages I would get that were just not opened. It's like Yeah. There because this is like the final boss for ecommerce. Like, bring me on drone delivery, please.

I bought this for a reason. And even if you deliver it in a few hours or the next day, like the pressing of the reason to buy it passed, and then it doesn't come up until you actually needed it a few months later, and then you can't find it because it it the bug who knows what happened. So this is like you're you're honing in on it. Like, actually open the boxes. Actually make me say what this is for, where it goes. Actually process returns so I don't have to deal with that crap. But the but then also to the home inventory point, like, this is the I felt so dumb writing about this. But it's like

I loved it.

Yeah. Well, people it people absolutely loved it. Like, you would like, for a pay thing, like, would would like mildly viral.

Yeah.

But the idea was so I moved back to America from Taiwan. I've been in Taiwan for twenty years. It not recommended. Like, I hadn't moved in a long time moving across country, but the worst thing was actually stuff showed up in three tranches because I kept thinking, oh, I should only take this. I can leave everything behind.

And I go back, oh, actually, I should have brought this. What I should have done is just move the whole house. Like, it would have been much easier. But anyhow, so just a general disaster all the way around. But stuff shows up and I need to put it away. Yeah. I can't ask someone else to put it away because if they put it away, I won't know where anything is. Mhmm. So there is this huge this this sort of gap and I had someone able to put it away, but I wouldn't have known where it was if they put it away. Mhmm. That's the home inventory app. They put it away and because it's their job, they actually catalog everything and where it is and now I can just ask, I can do it all by voice say, hey bot, where's this? Then it says, in the garage on shelf number three and blah blah blah. Like, it's all all labeled and stuff like that. Now, to be clear, it's silly to talk about this because you should not do this.

What do you do? Task your spouse to go in and label everything, but no. That is not gonna fly. I'm not trying to do, like, encourage divorces here. This works because I actually am paying someone to do

it. Yeah. Yeah.

It will work in ten years when we have a robot that you can actually tell them to to go do it. And it's amazing. Number one, just about this future with assistance. But then number two, the there's just so much the amount of software to be made is so astronomically large. Like Strathecari as a whole and we have Passport like the the the the software behind Strathecari and then there's Sharp Media and so we have editors and like we do like even like my assistant has already he just keeps spinning up like random little apps Yeah.

That are really small. I'd host them on my server. I'll be on Tailscale. These aren't meant for public consumption, but they fill like this little gap in our workflows that was handled by group chats and like that just would sort of accumulate. You're scrolling back and finding something. And it's such a crazy mental unlock that is hard to almost explain even the technical people who theoretically know you can make software, but all software we've thought about has been heavy. Mhmm. Because it has to be heavy because it's shipped to it's put on the Internet. Anyone can download it. It has to handle use cases. It has handle security. Has to handle all these sorts of things. And actually, you know, there's just little software shaped holes in everyone's life that could now be filled fairly trivially. It's it's amazing.

And where this is all going, which is the part that I'm act I'm actually most excited about is all those same types of like mini applications but with robotics. Like we had this this this guy on the show that was using Astra to paint and it was like getting better and better with each cycle and it would kind of make like something that was

Oh, did you see the guy who just tweeted about they got Astra to drive?

Oh. Yeah. That's a whole other thing.

So crazy. They had can tell it was in a sandbox. Any deal

with pulling over myself driving predictions for the mainstream automakers at all. We've talked to automakers who are who are like, when when will when will like mass market your average OEM have full self driving at like the current test level and they'll be like twenty forty.

Okay. But here's the little mini robot that I want so badly.

Okay.

I get everyone gets all this mail. Right? Most of it is just total junk, garbage, ads. It's hard to actually ever stop the flow of junk. I just assume it's always gonna come.

Mhmm. But like one out of 10 things is mildly important and I want to basically

And what I don't even want is like gonna lose your house if you don't see it.

Yeah. And I don't want the physical copy but I want like some amount of information there that I can pass to someone else, you know, a part of a part of my life, whatever it is, an accountant or something like that. And and I think that the mail process, the home mail processing robot where you just drop the mail

and do like like slices dishwasher for that? Yeah.

Yeah. It like slices everything open, it takes a picture, and then it routes it to whoever needs the information or it just runs. It's like replaces your mailbox. You got a parking ticket. Great.

I went and paid the parking ticket. Or like, you have this bill from the local utility and they don't do online auto pay.

How has they not been an IOT mailbox company yet? I feel

like Well, because you actually need a robot to like slice open the mail. It's like a little surgical center.

This very simple robot, it's like it's like what's the there's some like xkcd comic or something where you're like the person asked for this sounding like unbelievably difficult thing. It's like, oh yeah, I can do that in five minutes. And then they ask for something very trivial. It's like, oh, that's gonna take two t two years in a team.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Identification. There's

so many other things like I

want map in in the cloud and it's like that'll be a that'll be like a day of engineering. It's like and I need you to tell me which bird it is and it's like that will be ten years machine.

But here's the thing. So there's so many of these other use cases. There's like the the mini Roomba that's just for the garage Oh, but then it needs to be emptied, so you need another robot that will go and empty it. And then you need the robot that cleans the windows and that one, again, is gonna need some support. And so I think that I think the the end state is you have some type of humanoid that can just go and and generally do human like things, but it's sort of maintaining a fleet of these other silly little robots that just have these sort of niche use cases like cleaning the windows or a lot of people will have a pool cleaner robot that'll just kind of like, you know, troll around in the pool.

But then again, you need to change the filter at some point and so these things end up not being maintained properly and then they don't get get used. And so there's a long way to go, but to me, all the exciting stuff is actually in the real world. Like I don't Mhmm. There's It's so funny because I have I have ChatGPT connected to my email And sometimes it will suggest like things that it can do that are like useful. Like, hey, like review this and sign this. But like yesterday, I logged in and and the only suggestion was like it was trying to set up a loop to to like give me one way I can improve my surfing each week. And it was like totally validating like your thing, is like consumers just want to be entertained. Right? And so it's like trying trying to do something where it's like, well, I'm sort of passively, that's like probably 20% of my mental energy is going towards already going to And I like doing that. I don't need you to like try to automate that.

Yeah. I mean, the thing that's interesting though about this is the real to for sure, the the shortcut to doing this right now is to hire somebody. And to do again, it sounds douchey to talk about because I pay someone to take my garbage out and process my mail. Mhmm. But, you know, as I tried to articulate, I'm a massive believer.

I think it's a common trope to say this, but like just sort of I've been thinking of this since I was little. Like, don't obsess about your weaknesses, like how bad I am at processing mail. Double down on your strengths and then pay someone to take care of your weaknesses. That is like generally my life philosophy. And this is certainly the case here. But what has been super striking, and actually has been arguably like the most profound experience I've had with AI, was so the home assistant obviously depended on this, the or the home inventory app depended on the assistant actually doing all the work. And he could see the utility, appreciated it. From his perspective as help me take care of the house, it was like nice to actually get organized as opposed to like me just saying, oh, just leave it at the corner. We're gonna get to it eventually. And it'd been a year and we hadn't gotten to it eventually.

But when we actually when I actually built an agent or a bot, I call it Geckobot. There's this massive, like, metallic gecko structure that I bought the Madison Art Fair at random. I had a big spot on my wall. So it is now called we named it after it. That's the icon called Geckobot. And one thing there's, like, little stuff. Like, I take keep very odd hours. Like, I'm up in the middle of the night. I sleep at weird times. Like, I was so addicted to Taiwan living a day ahead that I've just transported here and I just stay up all night. Time. Yeah. Deadline. Yeah. It's not healthy. It's not good at all. But or but on the weekend, I'm doing something like, this needs to be done. This needs to be done. I try to be like a good boss and I feel felt bad texting on the weekend. Sure.

And like and the great thing about this assistant, why he's a great assistant, is he gets stuff done. He's the there are some people that they like they get something they wanna do it. And so I know me texting him on off hours and over the weekend is just like making his skin crawl because he wants to take care of it right now. And then it's like write it down and take care of it and all that. Like, doesn't wanna do any of that. So just this simple concept of I tell the bot, do this. Take a picture. Do this. Take a picture. Just like as things are accumulating, he shows up Monday morning. It sends a briefing. Here's all the stuff that Ben wanted know over the weekend, things like this, ongoing projects. His joy and, like, relief was Yeah. Unbelieve it was unbelievable. Like, he like, literally, everyone in our life, like, was telling them all I was also kind of egging him out a bit.

But it was it was so we you know, not weird. It was awesome Yeah. That he you could he he's like, this made his life so tangibly better.

Yeah.

And like, he could just, the first time I'm like, oh, can can you ask Echo bot to do this? I'm like, you ask Echo bot. And they like, ask the request or whatever. And then started just like creating all these use cases. I'm actually so grateful.

Opening, I dropped a new reset, which I haven't gotten yet, but I burnt like, I ended up rebuilding the whole thing just to make it much, like, much safer in terms of tracking reminders.

Mhmm.

Tracking, like, remind me to do this in June. Like, no. We actually need to have a system to make sure that gets logged properly, is deterministic, all those sorts of things. But it's meaningful to see him happier, his life tangibly better. He's like, this is the greatest week of work of my life.

It's been amazing. Like, the first week he was using it, and it's like, I just made you a little bot. And but it's another software shaped hole. It was this little communication fall through where he wants to do his job well. I don't want to take advantage of his predilection to do his job well and let him enjoy time with his family. Yeah. And I couldn't make something to solve that. And it's it's awesome.

Yeah.

And it's to have this feeling and realization, at the same time, everyone's like, this is gonna kill you. We're all gonna die. It's just been it's been pretty interesting in like a weird sort of like mind space just to like be like seeing people around me who aren't technical like just like this is amazing. This is making my life better. And then everyone else is like, get ready to die.

Yeah. It's cognitive dissonance.

Okay. I wanna talk about another dynamic with with EAs, personal agents, whatever form factor. So right

now You mean you're talking about executive assistants?

I'm talking about real life executive Okay.

Not executive altsu.

Something that e yeah yeah yeah. Not not I don't wanna get in I'm not trying to turn this into a freak show.

Yeah.

But That's the reason I didn't want to come on last week.

Last week was the The Doom Week.

No. So so something that actual executive assistants have done for a long time is coordinate with other people that have executive assistants and say, like, hey, our our our bosses wanna do this thing. Let's figure out the right time to do it. And that workflow is like amazing because

Mhmm.

You're letting it is a game of telephone, but it often ends up being more efficient because there's sort of complicated lives on either side. Now, we're applying that to personal agent software

Mhmm.

Where Insects, and I'm sure Muse will roll this out, has these sort of like trusted networks products where instead of texting your buddy, hey, do you wanna go see a movie or do you wanna have a beer, your your personal agent reaches out to their personal agent and says, hey, do wanna have a beer or do you wanna go see this basketball game? And they sort of like coordinate. And I'm trying to square the two things because on one side when it's when software is doing it, it still feel it feels like silly and yet in my real life, it's just like this amazing experience. It takes so much off my plate and it's so much better. Yeah.

So do you think it's gonna translate or is there some like disconnect there?

I this is hard for me to answer. Like, I have no intention of now even now we have like personal assistants that take care of your digital stuff and check your email. I am not getting rid of the assistant that I've had for a decade. And and there's and I think the real challenge with AI in general. My a my personal what is AGI rule is AI that actually learns.

And right now, what makes these agents possible is this like facsimile of learning where they're just writing stuff down all the time. And that has lots of challenges. Like, it's been super interesting trying to like develop this version of the bot that I'm using internally because like you're learning way more about like context management and way more about like actual like data structures and what stuff to dispose of and what stuff to keep track of and all these sorts of things. And it's a it's just a real challenging problem that is based on the fact that these models are frozen in a moment of time and everything that is layered on top of them trying to sort of overcome that challenge. Given that, I'm gonna stick with humans, I think, for now.

Now, the whole bit here though is if you didn't have a personal assistant, you now have this. And I think there's gonna be a real learning process in figuring out how that's done. This is gonna be one of the big challenges. So I've obviously out there, been out there frequently saying people don't care about being productive. Like, people they employee employers care about their employees being productive. Yep. Once you're off the job, you just wanna go home and watch TikTok or whatever it might be. The way to frame this, and this is gonna be the challenge for Meta, I think, with Muse and anyone else in this space, is we're not helping you be more productive. We're helping you get rid of annoying crap in your life.

Yeah.

Like that it's it needs to be framed more as a pain relief as opposed to this aspirational, I'm gonna be so productive and get things done. That's number one. Yeah. And so it's like the I think there's a messaging problem. Yeah.

But number two, the way I think this is going to land is through like Instagram reels or through TikTok. If people like actually showing stuff they do and people say, oh, that's amazing. That would make my life so much easier. And it really is a show not tell sort of technology. And it's kind of interesting because the meta's been very, I think, arguably to their detriment, very disciplined about not putting their thumb, I think, on the feed by and large. Mhmm. Like but if ever they were going to like, you ought to know, is this actually really what they see as their future? If you're real, start having a lot of wow, this is amazing what you could do with views sort of thing.

Well, they've no. They they have done that with the Metairie bands though. They were massively

That's ad inventory. That's not

No. No. No. No. I'm talking about Oh.

Creators? To show creators that say that make the content with the meta don't

know that actually.

They they serve they serve Yeah.

Yeah. If if you film in the meta Ray bands and it's like a POV video, people do like prank videos with them. Those They did but they're just funny.

Yeah. Some of them are funny.

Own keep.

Some of them are funny but it but it very clearly was like an engagement hack where like if you would film it Sure. With the Metairie bands you were gonna get more reach.

Yeah. And people have speculated about this whereas like if you edit it in edits, their version of CapCut, you get more reach but that's always been debated

higher quality. That's that's a hack. Really? One of the ways Oh.

Oh. It's like compressed as

much or Oh, it's less

compressed and so that might Because it's transferring it's like one step away. Interesting. Interesting.

So there's a bunch of different things. Mean, that

Yeah.

Their advantage here is is Enormous. Enormous.

Yeah. Can

we do Shopify versus Amazon?

Wait. I had one question Okay. Because we're getting into Ben's. Okay. You know, he's embarrassed to talk about all his staff.

He's embarrassed to talk about his staff. His in

King in the castle. King the castle.

King in I grew up a

small town Midwestern kid. I'm here back in the Midwest. Like, it it it I feel you you putting it that Just

No. No. No. I know. But but but I have a question for Have you ever have you ever hire had a like a dedicated driver?

No. But I very that's very common in Taiwan. Yeah. So the so I'm definitely familiar with drivers. It is a massive life hack, particularly in in, like, a big city where you don't have worry about parking.

It makes a huge difference. I honestly have just always loved having my own car for one. I like driving even in Taiwan, which isn't that bad. But the reality is by the time I got in a financial position where that was a viable outcome, I'd never win anywhere. So I was just always at home doing whatever.

Okay. So the But the reason the reason I ask is because we now we we now have self driving. Like ask a Tesla owner, how much time is your car driving itself? It's like over over 90% fully solved. Yep.

And last year, were really fires, really bad fires where I lived, and it turned my commute from a one hour each way commute to a two hour a day commute and we were starting or it's two hours each way. So four hours a day in the car out of nowhere. And so I was like, this is not really gonna work if we're gonna do I'm spending four hours in traffic and three hours doing the show and I'm also have, you know, young kids, all this stuff. So I got a driver and the funny thing was everything that I loved about it was not actually the driving itself, it was having again someone in the real world that could just do things. It was like the parking the car when you get there. It was Yep. Running in to grab food. Running to

pick this up.

It was like dry cleaning. It was like it was all that stuff and so the funny thing is like again, we've solved the Task. We've solved like the task Enough but not the job. Right?

Enough. Yep.

And that like you really want the Waymo or the Tesla with the humanoid in it. So or or again, the the ability to close the loop and like park or go run into the store and grab something, you know, or do things and and it's exactly the same as a personal

Yeah.

Agent's thing all over again.

Yeah.

You're The one thing I will note about Teslas and and the self driving is so I have a Tesla, but my parents use it the vast majority of my time. My like the my mom sort of weighed down the law that I really think the self driving is really good for your dad. Was a little scared last night. So they they've been using it most of the time. And so I don't drive it that frequently.

And but they're out of town right now, so I have so I have the Tesla. Number one, it was really good last year. This is sounds like the classic Tesla sort of fanboy thing, but it's true. It's so much better this year than it was even a year ago, number one. Number two, if you're on standard of course, me, I always had it in, like, hurry, like, because I'm in a rush, and I don't like slow cars. If you have it on standard mode, at least now, it really does leave you alone to a greater extent. And to me, this totally flips the extent to which I would actually want a Tesla on a day to day basis. I like driving. So Yeah. Like, to me and I don't really like driving Teslas. I they feel like I'm driving a scooter in Taiwan. I I it's hard to explain. Just like the sort of the like, the acceleration is cool if you've never experienced it before, but there's an aspect of it that is not I don't know. It just doesn't feel like a real car to me. This makes people very mad, but sorry.

That's just how I feel. I don't actually enjoy driving a Tesla. If I'm in a Tesla, I'm gonna be in self driving 100% of the time. Totally. If I'm in self driving a 100% of time and I can't use my phone, then what's the point? I'm just sitting there twiddling my thumbs. Mhmm. To the point there now though, where it's definitely backed off in later updates if you're in standard, it's like very strict with first two minutes and then it kinda lets you do what you wanna do. Mhmm. Suddenly, I'm like, I could be vibe coding while driving. This would be this would be like this is this is this is exactly where where I wanna get to. So that's been an interesting shift for me with with the with the driving. I like to drive. I also, you know, chat with my AI.

Yeah. Yeah. I had one last question based on the the update today. Shopify versus Amazon, obviously, knife fight is starting between Muse and Meta and Amazon. Will Shopify, is there a chance that they evolve to a place where there are so many new merchants that sort of fill in the cracks of what's available in the product portfolio that you can actually get socks on, you know, a one day delivery.

Because I when I think of Shopify, think of, like, those particular brands. I don't think of, like, the broad inventory of like No socks are

best example.

I just need paper towels. I'm going to go to Amazon. People don't go to a Shopify like a d to c brand that has like, you know, images for on Shopify for that. And I'm wondering how much Shopify can do to actually fill in and be the default location for those like long tail items that people shop on on Amazon for.

Yeah. I mean, it's theoretically possible. The problem is you still have to deliver the paper towels. I mean, at the end of the day, this is what I think this dispute, muse Amazon Amazon versus the world Mhmm. Sort of comes down to.

Like, Amazon has the best AI moat precisely because what they do to Jordy's point. Jordy's Jordy's been making the pro Amazon case

Oh, yeah.

This entire interview. Yeah. He keeps saying, but what about the physical world? What about actually getting stuff done?

Yeah.

And the whole point here is actually getting the package, getting it to your house, and getting it on your on your or wherever the Amazon drivers leave it, which can be fairly random, to be fair. But the the that is that's the key thing. And because of that, I will be researching stuff. I will find and, you know, if you ask chat GPT or quad or whatever, it'll give you links, and there will never be an Amazon link because Amazon doesn't allow it. If you say if you specify Amazon, it'll give you a search URL because that's all they can do.

But you know what I do? I just go to Amazon and I type it in and I click it. And it's not that hard. It's fairly annoying. I prefer to have a link. But at the end of the day, my personal revealed preference is I would almost always want it from Amazon because I trust it's going to get there. I know where to go to look to see if it's on its way. I know where to go to process a return if I want to do that. And when you introduce all these other pieces, you're actually introducing massive amounts of real world friction just because you're too lazy to find a click over to the other browser and type in a search term. So I think this idea that I want my agent to actually do it is going to force Amazon to bend.

I'm just skeptical because at the end of the day, Amazon, not really consumer friendly. Like, they're like, they don't care. And you like, you go to Amazon, it's all ads. Like, this is not a consumer friendly website.

For example Weren't they like the customer obsession company?

No. Their customers seeing as many ads as possible. Yes.

They do. It it be I remember what even like way before they even had an ad business though, the website was always completely inscrutable. Like it's it's it's like redesigning the Amazon website. It's like, oh my but the so that's the case. By the way, the in the other one, the only real alternative to Amazon in terms of it's just gonna have it and it's gonna get there Mhmm.

Is Walmart. Mhmm. And I was pretty optimistic when when OpenAI did the checkout thing or whatever. Walmart jumped in and Amazon was like, no. I'm like, oh, this is super interesting. Like, Walmart's gonna actually make a move here. It makes sense for them. People in tech don't understand how actually awesome Walmart is. Yeah. In that, their stores well, number one, their stores are like this crazy dystopian experience. Number two, if you go in their stores, their app is unbelievable. It will guide you through the aisles to tell you exactly where to go to get the thing that you need. Like, it's amazing. It's the best in store app you like, by far compared to anyone. Like, I'm obsessed with the Walmart app.

Like, I'm obsessed with, like, United's tech stack and why that actually makes them the best airline. It's a it's a very similar sort of thing. But then they also have, like, if the stuff's in their store, you can get it delivered in an hour. Like, who knew? Great slogan because, like, literally no one knows this about Walmart. And so when they did this thing with I'm like, actually, no one in tech who's gonna be buying stuff or who's technically inclined through ChatGPT actually knows how good the Walmart e commerce experience is. So this makes a ton of sense. Fast forward six to nine months, like, yeah, that was a mistake. And they're like Yeah. People abandoned carts like crazy. Yep. Their their cart size was way smaller. Like, all these issues, it just wasn't a good experience compared to if you're on Walmart site, they have control of the experience, you put more stuff in your cart, you convert more frequently, all and in addition to the getting more data about you, being able to show you ads, all the things that accrue to having on your site. And all this stuff matters to Walmart and they're the only one just as much as does the Amazon, and they're the only ones that can rival Amazon for this. So Shopify, as long as you shop pay, they're cool.

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

end. Mhmm. Last question. Relates to this shop page Shopify dynamic but but by the way, awesome product.

Like one of

the It's the product that makes me not care about personal agents that can shop for me because it's like it's very easy That's right. It's very easy to buy any 100%. It's like I could save you I could save you a minute and it's like no you can't save me a minute because I land on the site. It in the code for my tech you know and buys everything. How much do you think consumers actually enjoy shopping?

Yes. Yes. Oh, that's I was gonna drop in. Jordy, you and

me, we're we are we are two

pieces of pie today.

That's

good. People love shopping. Yeah. The the the the blows me away. So tech companies are like, number one, let us book your flight for you.

It's like, I've had a personal assistant for ten years. He does not come within an inch of booking my flights for me. That is crazy talk. Once I have a private jet, he can book when my pilots show up and fly me on a private jet. Until then, I'm deciding which flight I understand, which ones are gonna be delayed. I know which seat I wanna be be on. Like, that so the fact this is continually a demo is hilarious to me. Mhmm. Number two, people love shopping. They don't wanna be productive. They wanna be entertained. One of the biggest forms of entertainment is shopping. This is part of the whole like fast fashion or like or all those Chinese bread. Like, it's fun. Like, speaking of toys, my nice rack. You know what's part part is the whole joy of it? Endless hours of research and figuring stuff out and buying stuff, and then the package shows up and you're like and you like, if you buy Unify stuff, they always charge shipping. So you have all this pressure because you're like, I I wanna make sure I get everything in the right order, and then you buy it. And literally, the moment after you get the shipping notification, you're like, oh, I forgot to buy something else. And then you start the whole process all over again.

And it's all torturous, but actually it's fun because that's kind of the whole point of this is we want to like

so much information on a product page. Like companies have spent so much energy like focusing on that and and you look at like apparel as a category, it's like they're gonna tell you what size the model is wearing and you wanna know that and you wanna look at at the different different styles and the idea of having a personal agent that's like going and getting some of the information, bringing it back to you and then you're like, well what about this other like tell me about this thing. No. This is like Like

like, this is this is my free relationship advice of the day. Just because someone's complaining doesn't mean they're unhappy. Like like, it it there's a bit like, oh, I have to go research this. I have to go do this, I'm so busy. And then and you have your eager tech companies that can just say, oh, I have an assistant that can do it for you.

And it's like, no. Not only do I want to do it, I want to complain about it. I'm enjoying myself complaining right now. Okay? Would you just let me be and live my life? And that so that's why I think there's just a there's just a mental reframing.

Yeah.

Stop trying to make people's lives better and start highlighting to them. And this is marketing one zero one. Mhmm. Marketing one zero one is you create the perception of a problem in people's lives and you show how your solution or how your product answer is the solution to the problem.

Yeah.

And instead of saying people don't have a problem that I'm insufficiently productive. Mhmm. They have a problem that I have too many packages piling up or I'm not processing returns. Yeah. And it's like it like just highlight that.

Like how miserable this makes you. Do you know how much money, Jordy, you're leaving on the table? You could have like three puffer jackets if you got all your money back. And then and then say, look, you could actually just done. It's done. Money in your bank account. Wasn't that easy. Now you could go and do whatever you want. You can complain, you can watch TV, you can watch reels.

Complain.

That's the answer.

More time to complain.

Yeah. The the the funny thing is is it feels like what the personal agents have real the thing that people are super fixated on is the saving money, cancelling subscriptions and stuff like that. And the concern I have there is like we've had a bunch of businesses like that that will even call like I think Truebill

Rocket Money.

Would call Yeah. It's not Rocket Money. They would call They would have people that would A human in the loop that would call and just cancel subscriptions for you. Or they would try to renegotiate the bill. And the problem is these are like these are like billion dollar businesses which which is not gonna fund the CapEx.

Yeah.

Well, the I mean, the whole cancellation auto cancellation thing drives me batty as a subscription proprietor.

Sure.

Like, we will get when these new ones come out no. We will no. No. It's actually it's the opposite. We will have a wave of customer support issues, which is people contacting saying, why am I not getting my email?

I'm like, because you canceled your subscription. No. I didn't. And then they go back and look through their stupid little agent or whatever service went through and just cancelled their recurring subscriptions. Or the worst one is it'll go through their email inbox and you you you are required now technically, we do send transactional email. Every email is customized. It's not a marketing email. Mhmm. But Google doesn't really care. We have to put in the header with the unsubscribe thing.

Mhmm.

So what does that mean? People go through and click unsubscribe. Mhmm. What if you what happens when you click that required to include unsubscribe? You will stop getting email, but your subscription was not canceled because those are completely yeah.

It's two different things. Yeah. And so another customer support issue for us. I'm not getting my emails. Why not? And then they actually know You set some dumb agent off on your inbox that canceled your thing and now it's this whole rigmarole of you having to agree to these things to so we can legally let you back on the list because like there's actual federal laws around email lists. Big pain in rear end.

Never cancel, sir Techery. Just don't do it. Bake that into the pre training.

I mean, I should be happy about it because they're like upset that like the this is actually it's super we actually end up building our whole we built our whole email service that is actually amazing. We send like fully customized emails at like the rate of like 20,000 like a a minute or something like that. They're like more performant than any other service we have. Fully customized. All these sorts of things.

And the reason is all the the genesis of doing our own email was every email service out there is sending email people don't want. Mhmm. Like that's and so everything around them is about overcoming the fact that people don't want to get the email that they're sending. Yeah. And I'm like, oh, I'm actually sending people email people do want, and it's really interesting. It just completely changes the problems and issues and features that you need to you need to build.

We need custom silicon. I want 20,000 emails in a millisecond. Yes. That's the future. You so much for coming on the show.

Fantastic to see you. Always great. Have a great Nice to Dave.

To you guys later.

Great

to Let off the me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. We got a traffic jam on our hands, so we're That's right. Lightning round, bring in Gagan Biyani.

Welcome to the show. How are doing?

Hey. What's up?

How are you? Sorry for keeping you long.

Hopefully, you got to hang out.

Please introduce yourself. Tell us about Horowitz Andreessen Academy.

I'm Gagan Biyani. I'm CEO of Horowitz Andreessen Academy. It's a new school for young builders who wanna go and make something of their career. We're really excited to be announcing it today. Raised $42,000,000, and Mark and Mark and Eric are joining the board.

Cool.

Talk about the structure in person virtual. Thousands of students to start, class of '20 to start. How are you thinking about scaling up?

Yeah. I mean, you got to start small. So we're going to have 50 students. The first class is tuition free. It's called the Founding Class Fellowship, so it's going be a little different from any other programs we run.

It's in person in San Francisco. I think that's probably the most important part of this whole thing is that it's about getting right in the mix of Silicon Valley, understanding the culture, getting immersed in in the people, and building a a great network.

Two years? Did I have a or is it one year? So I

It's the the first program will be one year. Eventually, we'll we'll launch a two year program.

Yeah. How how hard is it these days to do, like, four year accreditation? I know, like, getting accredited is really difficult, but people were saying that about banks and there's new bank charters that are going out for startups, Palmer Lucky's Bank, Arabore.

But if anything is, it just doesn't matter. None that of the you want to work at are like, well, you went to an unaccredited school. You're super talented but you didn't the four years.

Yeah. But how are you thinking about it? Are you thinking like No.

That's that's my answer. Okay.

That's your answer.

Yeah. That's my answer.

Just skip it entirely.

It's funny because because I do think that I I I do wonder if over time like a year is actually a year is actually enough. Because like I went I I I remember the end of my spring semester of college. I was like, okay, like college was fun. I wanna like start working now. I feel like I like met a bunch of, you know, cool people and but I'm ready for like real life.

And I know not not everyone is that way but oftentimes people aren't ready for real life because they're not prepared to have a real job. Right? And so if you could actually maybe solve that, then maybe people do a year of of a university sort of experience Condense

it down. And then

they can just actually go get a job and and they realize like, hey, instead of going from this like high burn life where I'm I'm basically losing money for four years to then try to make it all back in in later years, you can just have it condensed down.

So CEO raised money. I assume it's for profit, but do you have a on for profit versus nonprofit? Obviously, there's a lot of critiques of the nonprofit system, But what is the philosophy around the long term incentive alignment, basically?

I mean, we're pro capitalists and pro optimists over here, so techno optimists. Right? So we believe that having a financial model is only gonna help us serve students better. And like maybe one of the biggest challenges with the modern education system is we've completely forgotten about students. It's like like, you know, talk about k through 12 or higher ed or whatever.

It's all about all the all the quote unquote adults who run the show and serving themselves. So one of the great things about the for profit model is it forces you to deliver or die, you know? And so our our plan is to is to deliver an amazing experience, and hopefully, investors and ourselves will get rewarded for that.

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

Yeah. I mean, you guys have been in The Valley a long time, so have I, right? Like, the most successful people are not only founders. Like, I know so many of my friends who decided to switch from being founders or never were and join companies are incredibly productive and successful and happy. And so there's no reason to prescribe one thing.

I mean, think one of the biggest challenges we're going to have as a school is there's going to be a lot of attention and pressure on these students.

And

my goal as sort of CEO is to design a culture that reduces that pressure and allows them to see that there are many different options for their careers. And there's many different paths to a successful life. So I don't see why we have to over aggrandize starting a company. And that's actually why we're building a school and not an accelerator. Right?

Because we think that one, two years to explore and learn is a much better outcome than, okay, I'm 18 and now I either gotta join something for four years or I gotta start a company and give up ten years.

Yeah. No. It can be a crazy turnaround.

Yeah. So many so many people would have been like top one percent second and first, you know, second in command type people and actually like, you know, maybe only top 30% founders. And the difference there is like tens of millions or even, you know, in some cases billions of dollars. Yeah. And so I think that's like such an important lesson is like, no, you don't to have an impact in the world, to be successful, to have the career that you want, you shouldn't just be being high, you know.

When when you're young, maybe being a founder is high status. When you're older, just like being successful is high status.

It doesn't really matter Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly how you got there. Yeah. But like you wanna make sure that you actually win.

Everyone's equal on the golf course,

the country How many people made a $100,000,000 in the SpaceX IPO, and we don't know who they are or what they do? I mean, they're you know, they're not just. They are engineers for one of the coolest companies on the planet. Right? But they don't have a fancy they're not even second in command.

And I think that just tells you everything you need to know about why it shouldn't be just one path coming out of the academy.

Very cool. Well, thank you so much for hopping on the show.

When last last question. When when are you guys when's the first

Oh, class? So in fall?

First class in fall fall twenty twenty seven. Okay. Applications are open today. So check us out at theacademysf.com.

That's gonna be an incredibly low admit rate. 50 slots for I mean, something that already has gone viral on the Internet. There's gonna be a lot of people. So good luck to you if you applied.

That's crazy.

Yeah. It's a good steal.

So first year is free. Well, won't be from then on.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks so much

for coming on. Great. Great. Proceeded.

Have a good rest

of your day.

Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business than MongoDB. Don't just build AI.

Own the data platform that powers it. We have Alex Ratner from Snorkel AI. Massive fundraising news. I'm gonna hit the gong straight away. $350,000,000 round. Valuation. As demand grows for specialized AI training data, how specialized are we talking these days?

Well, first of all, thanks for having me on, and I love the Gong. I bought a a used Gong on the street that looked kinda like that. And sadly, I I then forgot about it, we never really developed the culture of Gong ringing. And

Yeah. It's not just about the object. It's about the lifestyle.

It's process it's process discipline lifestyle. Exactly. And so you've you've inspired me there.

Exactly.

But, yeah, I guess we were here to talk about data Yeah. And AI extensively. Right? So I should get back to that. Yeah.

What does specialized data mean? I mean, I think one of the big shifts that in some ways you know, so we started a decade ago at Stanford and UW doing research Overnights? Yeah. I'm a dinosaur.

That's amazing. Congrats.

Well

deserved. I remember when a when a when a JEV was called a classifier, if you're if you're okay with the the the truly nerdy AI jokes. But, you know, I think there's this big shift that happens in, you know, any kind of autonomy where or any learned autonomy, you know, self driving digital LMs, physical AI where you we call it like data one point o to data two point o where when you're early on in the the the learning curve, you know, the model doesn't know much. So kind of any bit of information is additive. And so therefore, your, you know, rational focus is on volume.

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

that's Mhmm.

That's kind of we think is the is the the interesting area in data today.

Is it too aggressive to frame you as sort of like short recursive self improvement? Because there is this thesis, you know, sort of mulling around that, like, the models are gonna train themselves, and then maybe you don't need any more data because they're all doing synthetic data. Like, how have you grappled with that? Because you seem very grounded. You've been doing this a long time.

I feel like you're not maybe swayed by the latest hype cycle on on Twitter in a single week. But how have you processed that whole thing?

Yeah. I mean, I've I've heard the and I've been working in synthetic data as a researcher for, yeah, almost a decade too, and I've heard the we're we're one model advance away from, you know, solving everything thing a few times. I I I'd say I'm I'm short the more kind of sci fi, you know Sure. Accelerate and be done with humanity's contribution to anything Mhmm. Economic kind of version of RSI.

I'm actually I I would call myself though more bullish on RSI, but RSI that contains other elements beyond just kind of modifying model training code and hyper parameters. In other words, you know, compute energy and and data bottlenecks, expertise bottlenecks. Right? Yeah. So, you know, we

do had I've had this take that it's at a certain point like super intelligence to do RSI fully needs to be able to fundraise. Like, you got to go get more capital at some point. And so and so RSI in many ways is like AGI complete in the sense that it should be able to do full stack even the capital for

Maybe another example another example is like we it feels like we're coming up on math being like somewhat solved. And I'm sure once it's all solved, they're they're, you know, hopefully you know, you can figure out new questions. But, like, do do you expect to see a drop in demand for math experts from the labs?

Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, I think the the first thing before double clicking on math for a second, been too many years since I've taken a theoretical math course, I'm gonna I'm gonna dodge that whole topic, artfully, run the clock down. But, first on kind of overall, you know, areas where there's demand for, you know, overall areas where, you know, this RSI loop needs data, needs human expertise, needs real world input as an as, you know, as an a necessary input. There's this old, you know, it's like we tend to conflate areas that are easy for humans as necessarily being easy for AI, and ones that are that are hard as being hard for AI, and it's often not the same.

Right? So math is something where it's very, very hard for humans, but there are some reasons to expect that it would be more approachable. I mean, there's, you know, decades of work on, you know, verifiability engines like Lean and ways to kind of check it, and and there's lots of data out there, and data can be generated more more automatically. And then areas like, you know, writing a good Slack post to your coworker, you know, has sparser data and more, you know, ill defined rewards and, you know, doesn't work right away as well and and needs more nuanced context. And so, you know, first of all, there are these areas that are kind of counterintuitive where there's real demand for human input. You know, it's not enough just to have a coding agent that can kind of tweak the hyper parameters of the model to achieve RSI. You need real input from the real world. But even in the areas like math, like coding, where we do a lot of volume these days, you know, one, there's some basic economic, you know, forces where once something becomes valuable, and this is especially true for sonic coding, where maybe the the, you know, the accuracy goes up, the demand for some types of easier data goes down, but the economic value of every kind of additional decimal point of improvement goes way up Mhmm. Because of the value. Yeah.

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

Yeah.

And maybe maybe, you know, feel free to make fun of me, but we we call what we build the RSI engine for data because there's also kind of a compounding loop in our platform of humans being accelerated and proven by AI, but then their feedback improving the specialized AI models we use. And, you know, one has to keep up with the lingo. Right? But but, you know, our view is only if you have that an approach like that that can feasibly keep up with the frontier. You know, if you can't do that, your data is not gonna be valuable anymore.

If you can, it's more valuable than ever before.

Yeah. Well, congratulations on the round. Congratulations on the progress. Ten year overnight success. Love an overnight success like this.

Well deserved. Hopefully, we'll talk to you soon.

Yeah. Great

to be honest. Awesome. We'll talk to

you so much.

Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

We have our lightning round continuing. I believe Peter from Swarm Arrow, the cofounder and CEO, is in the waiting room next. But we got a little bit of traffic jam. Hopefully, can bring in Peter. And we're gonna have Tyler Cosgrove sub in for Jordy Hayes, who has to take off right at 1PM sharp. I don't I I like springing it on people every once in while. Sometimes I like to do a little bit of an intro, but we're going have Tyler sitting next to me. Peter, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

Fantastic. Thanks for having me on.

Thank you so much for jumping on. Would love to reintroduce the product for everyone. Just explain how you're positioned in the market and sort of take us through the basics of the company.

Yeah. Absolutely. So last week, we introduced to the world Gamera, which is our our aircraft really designed around breaking kind of the iron triangle of range, payload capacity, and cost. Right? And that's really one of the big problems facing, facing the department of war today and the air force today.

What is the name Gemara from the Koenigsegg car, or is it a more generic car?

We we we did track that. No. It is from the the turtle monster that fought Godzilla.

Oh, okay. Cool. Yeah. It is old school. That's great.

So what does the process of building this actually look like? I I believe we have a video that we can pull up while while you're explaining it further, but I'd love to know, like, are you are you specifying it in in basically, like, PDFs and documents and then going to the Department of War, selling it, and then building it? Are you prototyping? Like, what is the flow to actually take something like this from start to finish?

Yeah. Absolutely. So we started this about four years ago when we started the company. It is a long process. And we started off by kind of sketching up a concept, figuring out what the problem is that we needed to solve Mhmm.

And then going about, like, designing the aircraft. Mhmm. But I love the aircraft. I'm an airplane guy at heart, but the aircraft is really just one piece of it. Mhmm. Along with the airplane, you really have to design how to build this. Yeah. And so we've been in it as well as building the aircraft, we've also been building the factory, the the capacity to to really build these out hundreds a year.

Sure.

And when you look at it, you you've got a bunch of aircraft, you can build them, you really have to be able to control them. And that's where we've tried to do things differently than the the single pilot per aircraft model we have today. It's really building out that autonomy and that command and control stack that allows us to to have truly a swarm of these, hundreds of these operated all at once.

Hundreds of them. When I think about one remote pilot per vehicle, is that actually a bottleneck? I mean, do we not have hundreds of of air force, you know, soldiers in Nevada in shipping containers, controlling these things remotely? Are we actually bottlenecked there or is this or is this just like thinking even further into the future?

So it's a little bit of both. A, we we truly are. There just aren't enough folks out there who have those skill sets. Interesting. And b, think about coordinating this.

Yeah. You know, when you have hundreds of aircraft, like these are kind of conflicts that happened last time in World War two. Right? So you can't have, folks talking on the radio trying to figure this out. You really need that autonomy to to truly make that make that effective today.

Yeah. So how important is price to the buyer? How do you actually guarantee that? Is there any, like, financial risk where you go to the Department of War and you say it's 10 mil and then it winds up coming back at 9.9 and you're not making any margin? How does that work?

It's super important. So this is why we've kind of designed it from the very beginning. Typically in aerospace, you know, it's all at least since, in the last fifty years or so, it's really been about how do you get the most performance out of an airplane. And everything else, you kinda, you know, kinda falls by the wayside. For us, we looked at how much does this cost from day one.

Right? And and that's not something you sprinkle on top of design. You really bake that in from the from the earliest stages. We we're confident the the Air Force is asking for less than 10,000,000 per and

They're not gonna pay more. Yeah. Do have question?

We've done the math and show we can do that.

That's good.

Yeah. Was there like a specific kind of like theater of war that this was like, built for, or is it, like, very general? Like, in your kind of ideal use case, is there, like, a very specific kind of, like, I don't know, geographical Sure.

You you know, it it can

be used in a lot of different places, but really when we looked at what what's gonna push the limits, it really is the Pacific. It's that range Mhmm. Is carrying the kinds of payloads that the the big enough ones that that make a difference in in a potential conflict there.

Mhmm.

Really, it's it's it's focused on the on the Pacific, but use you can use it pretty much anywhere in the world.

Well, thank you for everything you're doing. Congratulations on the progress and hope to talk to you soon.

Super excited. Thanks a lot, guys.

Have a good rest of your day. Cheers. Let me tell you about Cisco. Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco.

Good soundboard. I'm learning. Soundboard. Our last guest has been waiting far too long. We have Daniel from Fair Square Medicare. Welcome to the show, Daniel. Sorry for the switch around. Thanks for being flexible. Welcome to the show. How are doing?

Hey. Thanks. Thanks for having me guys. It's great to be on here.

We appreciate the flexibility. First time on the show, can you sort of give us a whirlwind tour of your career? You've done a lot. How do you introduce yourself these days?

Yes. It's a great question. Right right now, I'm a I'm a car show host.

Okay. So I have

a show called Cars and Capitalists. Yeah. I take take some of my friends who are great investors and operators out in an old nine eleven and we drive around Marin. So we have like Sam Lesson, Paul Goo, Sam Damico on there. That's a lot of fun.

But but I mean, like, I feel like the the way I should introduce myself is I've tried my whole career to start companies by doing all the wrong things, but I did a couple of things right. Sure. And so so I've last company was Faresquare Medicare. Sure. Sold it after six years. Great company. We ended up working, helping find like 25,000 American seniors.

Oh,

wow. Find the right health insurance. Like there's actually probably a good chance we've worked with like the parents of some of your staff. And before that did a did a fintech app called Trim and way before that, started a lender for the power sports space called Octane Lending.

Interesting. Wait. Is there any, like, common thread between the categories or strategies or teams between those companies? Or is it sort of just, like, be open to opportunity. When it knocks, you open the door and you go after it really hard?

I think there are a couple of threads. There are two. One is just, like, consumer advocacy, which was true for the last two companies. So like this one was the the the kind of realization was people are turning 65 and there are like 50 health insurance plans, to choose from and and they really can't tell the difference. It it might as well be like a foreign language to them.

Sure.

But the the implications are massive of like you get on the wrong health plan and then you get like cancer and then you can't get on a better plan. Yeah. And before that, there was a personal finance app called Trim, which I co founded And we were the first ones to show you a list of all your subscriptions on your credit card.

Oh, sure.

We were like we were like Plaid's biggest one of their biggest first customers.

Wow. And we were just early to

that. Yep.

And and and that's what became like a competitive space eventually. I I I know that didn't rocket money acquire Truebill, that's what Jordy was saying recently.

Yeah. So Truebill Thorn in your side. Copy copy. Well, they they just copied us early on. They copied the subscription feature.

Uh-oh. And no. But they they out executed.

Yeah. Look, they they Credit where credit's due.

Credit credit's where credit's due. Out executed. I think they sold a rocket for like a billion bucks.

Yeah. Think they a great time. Yeah. And so it's a lot of good good times. Yeah.

What where do you want Cars and Capitalists to go? Have you have you asked people if you can drive their special cars? Because I feel like the comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, part of the beauty is I think Yeah. Jerry Seinfeld is such a huge collection that he picks a car that matches with the or in his in his theory, like the comedian's identity. But I I would kill for a whirlwind tour of Silicon Valley's biggest motorheads, you know.

Yeah. It's it's a great idea. I I actually I I should probably like I I like I like running it lean, and so I don't do any b roll. I don't do outside footage of the car. It's all I just have a GoPro in the Yeah.

And it's just us talking. That's good. And and and maybe I'll like go find other people's cars and get I would need to like hire someone to take video

of Yeah.

Like of the car. It would be

a very weird show because I feel like 90% of your guests would be like another Model Y. Yay. Like Oh, yeah. Maybe the

new Roadster.

Maybe the new Roadster. Get some air.

I know.

I don't

I don't want to drive a go kart. Although I would drive a Roadster.

Shots fired.

Yeah. Like

a Tesla. After you after you

drive an old nine eleven, you realize that the Tesla is a is an amazing vehicle for getting an a b, but it's a fucking go kart.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And I I don't know. Sorry if I cursed on your show. But

But it's fine.

But actually, you raise a great point, John. Yeah. And if anyone is watching and has a manual at 04:30, that's something we should definitely add to the show. Okay. It would be it would be great to have.

But I mean, of course,

like, this is Silicon Valley, so and and like a lot of the people on my show couldn't care less about cars.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of bifurcated. It's like either they have like an exquisite collection or they've never owned anything other than a Tesla.

And and it's the most Yeah. Boring. Like, either they care or they don't. There's very few people that are in the middle. We've been running predictions with a lot of guests about the Tesla Roadster. Elon's gonna announce it on October 1. And he said that it might fly, might jump, might leave the ground.

Yeah. Shut down the airspace.

They shut down the airspace. The FAA said they've shut down the airspace for for 10,000 feet in the air. So that creates a boundary. It's either zero inches off the ground, it winds up not jumping or flying at all. He was just joking around.

Or it can go up to 10,000 feet. So I want your prediction right now, super binding, super high stakes. We're going to hold this to you. We're going to hold you to this. But how do you how far do you think it'll get off the ground? Are we talking inches, feet, hundreds of feet?

Zero inches. It's gonna have four thrusters Okay.

In the

back that are gonna generate downforce that's gonna let it go like really quick.

Okay. Yeah. So we're looking zero to 60, one and a half seconds, one second, something crazy like that.

No. Point point nine seconds.

No way.

That'll be wild. Yeah.

That's gonna be crazy. Have some inside info. I I was I I did like a little, deep dive on quantum computing at one point and it's in sale and I was on a flight to Austin. I sat next to this guy who I don't I don't want to

Didn't have a screen protector on.

I don't yeah. No. No. No. No.

I just started talking

He's to just great. He he was pretty like senior Tesla dude. That's all I'll say about him.

Like, he

was like the goal he was like the goal he he was a total bro.

Yeah.

He was great. And his and he was just the goal is to not kill the driver.

Yeah. The g force needs to be, tolerable. So if the if the if the g if the cold gas thrusters act as down force, couldn't you reverse them like the old fan car? Make it lift off the ground even just for a stunt? You don't think it's gonna go even one inch?

It feels like he's been teasing it like at least we're gonna get it jumping off of a ramp or something. It's gonna go in the air. Why shut down the airspace 10,000 feet up?

I think that part is a PR stunt. Okay. I think he I think he actually wants to make a car people can buy. Right?

Okay.

And the thing the thing about a car with wheels is that it's a wing. Right? Because the bottom is flat Yeah. And then the the top is curved. So it generates up, which is why like spoilers exist.

Yep.

So the only thing that really makes sense is is you have you have the like boosters going But, you know, maybe it'll have maybe it'll actually be a quadcopter.

And Yeah.

But but but, I mean, it's amazing, right, that they're act this is, their last hurrah. It's, like, the last car they're gonna make.

Probably. Yeah. Maybe the Cybertruck SUV. I'm really hoping they do that. I think that would be an interesting one, but who knows?

Would you would you buy that?

I don't know. It's certainly like an aggressive aesthetic choice, but functionally, like having a full size SUV for so many modern American families, that's just a non negotiable. Yes. There might be an old Porsche in the garage, but there's going to be a full size SUV for anyone that has a family. So it just seems like a market segment that they've been sort of dabbling in with the Model y and Model x, but they never really got there because those are more minivan sized.

You gotta go with the land yacht, the American, the Expedition, the Escalade. This is what America was built on.

Right? I love that.

Yeah. You know you know the y, the the model y extended wheelbase is like totally sold out?

I have one. I'm part of the problem. I ordered one of Do you do you

have the extended one?

I don't have it yet, but I but I I was one of the preorders because the full self driving is very good. And I was like, ah, if they stretch it out, that sort of checks that box. I think I can fit all the kids, the dogs, all the all the gear in there. So I think that might fill that slot for a little bit. But, know, land yacht land yacht is is still still in the books potentially.

What do you think on pricing? Tesla Roadster. He originally promised two fifty. At the time, $2.50 k, that was supercar money. That was Lamborghini Ferrari money. Now, it's well spec turbo s money. Right? It's like it went down from $2.50 gets your sports car used to get your supercar. Do you think he raises the price since a $600,000 car? Like a

Or does he accept, like, alternate forms of payment? Like, is he gonna accept USD? Right? Like, he's if he's definitely gonna accept Bitcoin

Yeah.

Can't will he accept, shares in certain companies?

Oh, interesting. Yeah. Build the portfolio. Maybe. Yeah.

I don't know. I I'd be excited because if they can do some surprising zero to 60 time or some gimmick and then it's just a really fast sports car for $2.50. That actually is a unique space in a world where even for all the supercars, they all start at 400 now.

Here's a question, John. Like, this is obviously not serious for them. Right? They're not going to scale this line. They don't they don't care about like the revenue.

I would guess the revenue or the EBITDA. Right? This is this is like a fun toy project. This like a better version of that that flamethrower.

Yeah.

So like, I wonder how many people they have working on it. Like, I bet it's a I bet it's a tiny number. And I I I bet they just don't care that much about the price. Like, they're just gonna say $2.50 because they said $2.50 before. Obviously, if it was like 500 or a I like, I wonder what the elasticity curve there is.

Like, I they

do a really limited run and then they don't even continue to sell them and they're like, yeah, we sold them all at cost and we did the thing, we checked the box. I'm just shocked that Elon hasn't dropped it because he he's he drops projects all the time and he could have easily just been like, I'm refunding all the deposits. We're going in a different direction. We're refocusing. And everyone would be like, great.

Yeah. That's fine. Focus on the next thing. Like, you know, do do whatever. It wouldn't be that big of a deal. I don't know.

Well, suggest the suggestion you just made, it it really begs, like, maybe it is

a real flying car. Right?

Maybe. Because because maybe. Because because, like, why why would he do, a toy project Yeah. If, you know, it like hints at something bigger.

Yeah. Yeah. He's never been one to like, yeah, just rip the band aid off. Like, he never took Tesla private. And it wasn't like he was like, I gotta do that.

I'm I'm sticking with it. I'm still telling people it's gonna happen. It's just like, yeah, that was a crazy idea. Didn't work out. Moving on to the next thing. Stock's going to the moon, you know, so

Are you are you going to get one?

So so the the more we've been talking about this, I think that the deposit is incredibly up incredible upside because I think it's like $5,000 down and then you have to put $50,000 down within within

Ten days.

Within ten days. The law the announcement's ten days away and so it's refundable and so if it's cool then everyone's going to flood in, you actually get one. Maybe regardless of whether or not it trades up or trades down you just have the option to be the one with the flying car or you just get a refund. And so

Dude, what's the what's the Roadster pop gonna be? People talk about IPO pop.

Yeah.

Buy it for $2.50, turn around in a day and sell it for 600.

It's possible. It's possible. So yeah, maybe. I'm I'm really If really

if if you believe it's downforce Yeah. Right? And and therefore, like, this is not an entree into flying cars. This is just like a little gimmick

Yeah.

Then it's gonna be limited. Yeah. It's gonna be the sickest gimmick ever, which means it's gonna the value is gonna go up. So, like, everyone should just try to buy one and resell it.

And also I I I do just think that the like like there is a more moderate scenario which is it's not a flying car. It's not the craziest thing ever, but it's just like a really, really crazy sports car at that price point. And it's just like, yeah, it's a good good option to drive. Of course, like, you know, you're never going to compete with the with the manual air cooled Porsches of the world. But for a for a different buyer, it is just like you're getting a you're getting a crazy experience for what is in the modern era a sort of reasonable price.

But yeah, if it it doesn't fly and and he raises the price to 800 k, I think a lot of people are going to be saying I'm out. But we'll see.

You you know, I I was I wasn't thinking of buying one, but this conversation is I think I think might be a really great trade.

You're not even it's not that you're thinking of buying one. It's like, put down the deposit and then you just have the optionality. And then you get to watch the the livestream and say, yeah, I'm I'm I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna stick around and wait because it's still gonna take a year but I'm converting. Whereas people who did this the last time, they had to wait nine years and they tied up I think even more. Some of them tied up a lot of money.

What would that money what do you know how much they tied up and what like I

think it was like 50 k originally and if they put it in Tesla, it'd be like $10,000,000 or something. It was like Yes. Notoriously bad. But what I'm saying is like, do under no circumstances tie your money up in this deposit for ten years. Just tie the money up for ten days, see if you like it.

If you like it, then continue. But if you don't, then pull out and and time box it so that you're always gonna be out of that, you know, that that market in in by the end of the year, basically.

What if he says just kidding? And he's like, it's gonna be another ten years.

If it's then he deserves it. I don't know. Keep the keep the working capital, I suppose, you know. Have it as a treat. I don't know.

Anyway, this is a lot of fun. Anything else going on in your world? Anything else?

Robots. I think the thing the thing I think about right now is I built a building a dog. Like, I have some free time and I run this company. We continue to help seniors. But we got this is Pupper.

Oh. What's this?

Okay. This

is a open

Quadruped. Source

Quadruped robot. Cool. It's Quadruped is a really suboptimal design

Okay.

For a robot. And

Why? Because it doesn't have wheels? Because because like the the you

know what an actuator is? Yeah. It's you know electric motor. Like Yeah. It spins an axle really fast.

Right? And and basically, like actuators like a gear down electric motor.

Sure.

So it's it's really good for like a car. Like, it's really amazing in a Tesla. Mhmm. But they're they're really bad at generating torque. Like if you think about like the way your arm moves, right, there's not like an actuator in your elbow that spins, like you just have a muscle.

Sure.

I think the nerdy way of saying that is like linear torque. In a way all the humanoid robots companies are kind of like ham fisting this like this component which generates radial motion into like Sure.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. More linear motion. So that's like that's something I'm playing around with. Cool. That's fun.

Robot dog. Hey, I generally

What do

have the robot

dog do? Are you getting

any utility? What's the biggest use case? Yeah. Defense? Home

it's like a party treat. Okay. Had we had a we had like a bunch

of our friends over for

Rosh Hashanah and, dude, they went nuts for this robot.

Yeah. That sounds fun.

Yeah. That's that's that's kind of it. And and of course, like if you're interested in in building a robot, it's a great like it's a great v zero.

Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. Hey. Thanks for having Let's do it again soon. Cheers.

Talk to later. Bye. Good to meet you. Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. You think the roadster event's going to go well. Go express your opinion on public.com. Do whatever you want to do. Any other breaking news? Anything you've been tracking over the last couple hours while we've been live? I think we're pretty much good. Opus five five launch. We talked about that. Benchmarks look really good, very cheap. And the the key thing that you that you pointed out was like the second post is like this is the first model that we've released since we said we were pacing the frontier. This is an expression of Yeah. Yeah. The pacing

of Like this is, you know, Fable 5.1 class model, but it's it's much cheaper.

So it's

not Technophistic.

Trying to be more superhuman, more dangerous. It's the safest, best, fastest, cheapest, lightest, thinnest model ever, basically. Yeah. And then

Open House will do the

same thing today. Okay. Yeah. They oh, so Soul's out? Soul.

Yep. GPT six Soul. Six Soul. Cool. And then also Luna. Luna but not Terra?

Or I might have had that back. Okay.

Yeah. But new new models, the model wars never cease to to entertain. Of course, all that matters is what you do with them. So send us some send us whatever you build. Send us whatever you play around with.

Send us the hallucinations, the good, the bad. I wanna see it all. Thank you for watching TBPN. We will see you tomorrow at 11AM Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and throw that flashbang. Tyler Cosgrove.