Robot Bans, Zuck Op-Ed, eBay Settles | Joe Weisenthal, Jameson Detweiler, Stanley Tang, Amjad Masad, Adam Cohen

(00:15) - Robot Bans (14:25) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (16:56) - Zuck Op-Ed (19:21) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (26:16) - eBay Settles (31:36) - Joe Weisenthal, co-host of Bloomberg’s *Odd Lots* podcast, discusses social media addiction, online discourse, and the escalating AI race. He examines open-source models, massive infrastructure spending, monopoly risks, and why AI may ultimately deliver meaningful benefits despite economic and social anxieties. (01:08:22) - Jameson Detwiler discusses his background as a mobility entrepreneur and his role as co-founder and CEO of CHIP, an electric low-speed utility vehicle startup. He explains CHIP’s customizable design, safety features, affordability, and plan to introduce remote-controlled parking before transitioning to full autonomy. (01:40:10) - Stanley Tang, co-founder and chief product officer of DoorDash, discusses the launch of DoorDash Air, the company’s in-house drone delivery program. He explains how advances in AI, hardware, and operational infrastructure are enabling autonomous deliveries, particularly in suburban areas, as part of DoorDash’s broader multimodal delivery network. (01:53:37) - Amjad Masad discusses Replit’s latest AI-powered design tools, open-model integrations, enterprise growth, and emerging opportunities in game development, robotics, and industrial design. The Replit founder and CEO also describes a future beyond prompting, where AI agents automate entire workflows, and encourages young people to view AI as an empowering tool for creating businesses and new opportunities. (02:10:18) - Adam Cohen discusses co-founding Weave, an AI prompt-routing company that helps engineering teams reduce costs by selecting the most efficient model for each task. He highlights Weave’s $13.5 million fundraising round, enterprise focus, potential savings of up to 80%, and plans to expand its San Francisco-based team. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today's Wednesday, July 29, 2026. We're live from the TVP in Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Folks' Finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about Rank.com. Time is money. Savebook, easy to use corporate cards, bill pay accounting, and a whole lot more. The US government has banned Chinese humanoid robots. The US is banning new imports of foreign-made humanoid robots, quadruped robots, robot dogs. You might know them. Very controversial, based on, we gotta get General Catalyst to weigh in on this, because aren't they anti-robot dog? Wasn't that the whole thing of the video?

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  That's right. That's right.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  So they must be celebrating.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  Some platform VCs are very pro-robot dogs.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  Everyone should be pro-robot dog. Anyway, it's, there's nothing wrong with a robot dog. Unless it's a geopolitical discussion, and then there's another, another layer to the debate. So, the Federal Communication Commission's FCC today announced some restrictions, and these apply to new versions of those products. FCC Chair Brendan Carr said the move is intended to, quote, "secure America's critical supply chains." China, meanwhile, has condemned the decision as protectionism. Is that because they're protecting the small children from getting smacked in the face by the humanoid robots? It is protectionism.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  I know. I know. That video, I think that you're referring to.

• 1:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, brutal.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely brutal. We should try to pull it up. Try to find the humanoid kicking a child, please. Sounds wrong, but I just wanna get at the truth.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  I just want the truth.

• 1:36John Coogan?

  The move comes as Chinese companies have established a commanding lead in humanoid robotics. Of the roughly 15,000 humanoid robots shipped worldwide in 2025, China's Unitree and Agibot, AGI Bot, I'm not sure how you pronounce that, each delivered-

• 1:54Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we have the video of the robot kicking the child.

• 1:56John Coogan?

  Oof, brutal. There's another one where he's spinning around and gives him sort of like a spinning back fist. But that is crazy. And-

• 2:03Jordi Hays?

  That is-

• 2:03John Coogan?

  Seeing that, you're kinda like, yeah, I'm up for some protectionism.

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  Gross negligence.

• 2:08John Coogan?

  If it's going to, if it's gonna protect children, I think it's maybe in the best interest. No, that's not why this is happening, of course.

• 2:15Jordi Hays?

  Deeply wrong.

• 2:16John Coogan?

  So, 5,000 units were delivered from, from each Unitree and Agibot. By comparison, US companies, including Tesla and Figure, shipped only a few hundred robots each, if that. China is also estimated to control about 85% of the global humanoid robotics market, and also a ton of the deep supply chain, obviously. According to the Associated Press, the restrictions are expected to add new tension to US-China relations ahead of a planned September meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump. The FCC argues the measures are necessary to reduce potential risks posed by connected foreign-made devices that could become part of critical American infrastructure. What's

• 3:01John Coogan?

  interesting here is that we're seeing a ban on a Chinese technology that is so nascent that you don't have a coalition of companies that are saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, I've deployed, my business is built on top of Unitree. I know there's geopolitical considerations, but I can't make the cars that I make without them. I can't run my business without them, and so this is going to hurt me. No one's really stepping up in the same way that they are with Chinese LLMs, which a lot of companies are like, no, I'm actually gonna cut my inference cost by 80% if I can-

• 3:34Jordi Hays?

  And you have all of the, the various cloud businesses that are already making money.

• 3:40John Coogan?

  Making money from them.

• 3:41Jordi Hays?

  These models.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 3:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm, I saw a bunch of people that were sort of saying that they didn't like this, that it was, you know, protectionist, and, and that there must have been some American humanoid or robotics companies that were pushing, lobbying for this in DC. Maybe there were, but I personally don't want 100 million humanoid robots in this country running around that are not made by a US company, or at least a Western ally.

• 4:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where, since there's been the DJI ban, there's been various surveillance tools that are banned, but there's still so many different pieces of technology that come from all over the world. I wonder where people would like to draw the line generally on technology? Like, is it okay if the Wi-Fi router is made internet-

• 4:38Jordi Hays?

  Oh, he drew the line on Huawei.

• 4:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, on Huawei, on the 5G tower specifically, but most, you can still get a router that, you know, a Wi-Fi router for your house that comes from China. And you have to imagine that many of the actuators, the motors, the batteries, CATL, C A T L, Cattle, that company, ships batteries for all sorts of stuff. The, the Google Waymo approach, I think, is probably the correct, like, like, finding the line. So, Waymo is sourcing, like, almost all the parts for the new Waymos from China, but they are building them, I believe, in the United States, and all of the software is from Google or Alphabet or Waymo. And so, you have to imagine that they're able to tear all these pieces down and sort of maintain their own cybersecurity posture, which is really what this is all about. But it is

• 5:25John Coogan?

  interesting. Do you think this actually accelerates the American humanoid market? Does this lead to up rounds from OneX and Figure because the playing field is more open? Does Tesla meaningfully pull forward their, their roadmap? I was, yeah.

• 5:42Jordi Hays?

  I mean, these companies have already raised a lot of money. Elon's putting billions into it. Figures managed to raise billions. I think that the first thing that we need is profitable use cases for humanoids. And so, I think there's a lot of work that the industry needs to do to make these, to make these products genuinely valuable in the home, in workplaces, in factory settings, all these things. I think that's a bigger problem. I think if you, it does feel inevitable at this point, just because there's so much money going into it, so many smart people dedicating all their time to it. It feels

• 6:23Jordi Hays?

  inevitable. Maybe it speeds it up a little bit. I would, it just felt like we were going to end up in a situation where they would just continue to dump humanoids onto our, you know, you could buy, you probably still can buy-

• 6:37John Coogan?

  Can you?

• 6:37Jordi Hays?

  Unitree robot on Walmart.

• 6:39John Coogan?

  I was asking Tyler about this, because you used to be able to buy a Unitree G1, I believe, one of their robots on Walmart, which was sort of crazy, and the price was accessible. I mean, it was still tens of thousands of dollars, but it was something that a research lab could buy pretty easily. I wonder if there will be other ways for companies to, to get access to this, these products, at least for benchmarking, because they will be competing internationally. Like, even in a world where, you know, Tesla gets to the frontier of humanoid robots with Optimus, and then they're going up against a, a Unitree for a deployment in Germany, like BYD, right? BYD and Tesla compete internationally, even

• 7:23John Coogan?

  though Tesla's, Tesla's can still be sold in China, but not vice versa. But internationally, there needs to be a lot of like, what are the capabilities so you can actually sell against your competitor?

• 7:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So far, everything Unitree I'm seeing on Walmart is out of stock. So I don't know if they just marked it out of stock when this went live, or they had just sold out.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  These will probably spike if they hit Cars and Bids or Bring a Trailer. I think you throw a Unitree G1, last edition, final edition, banned, can't buy it anymore.

• 7:53Jordi Hays?

  Who's making Bots and Bids?

• 7:54John Coogan?

  Bots and Bids. That might be it. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences. I knew that. Cisco. Really, really raising the bar for-

• 8:08Jordi Hays?

  Podcast ads.

• 8:09John Coogan?

  Podcast ads.

• 8:10Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, Cisco.

• 8:11John Coogan?

  I was listening to Elon Musk on The Economist. He sat down with The Economist for a long-form interview. There were, there was a clip that went sort of viral for some, some sharp jabs back and forth about the media and, and how the public perceives the media. But the much more interesting substance was about his vision-

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  You're describing the crash out?

• 8:31John Coogan?

  Yes, it was, it was described as a crash out, but that seemed like a very small section of what was actually interesting about the more than an hour they talked. One was, I mean, he talks about humanoid robots, and he paints a very clear vision for the Optimus program, and it made me really hope that there's a lot of focus there, because that feels like an industry where, like, like, he obviously has a very strong philosophy around XAI and Grok, and you saw it in the SpaceX S1, where the market for enterprise software was like 22 trillion or something like that. And so, there is some value there.

• 9:13John Coogan?

  It might make sense from a business perspective, but it was less inspiring than rockets, less inspiring than self-driving electric cars. Because you, as you go back, you think about SpaceX, and you think, if he hadn't worked on that, probably wouldn't have a rocket company in America. And same thing with the electric cars, like, yeah, GM had the EV1, there were a couple other companies that were sort of like, testing things, but we'd probably be 10 years behind if he hadn't sort of like, sheer force of will that into existence. And it feels the same for humanoid robots, where if he can really go and push that extremely hard and marshal all the capital and do all the difficult things to build

• 9:55John Coogan?

  the supply chain, make it happen, make it work, you can get to a place where there is a national champion in America. But if, if Grok stopped training and there were no more XAI LLMs, like, there would still be a massive competition between OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google. Like, there's plenty of really well-funded hyperscalers and leading labs that are going to provide that service of like, ask a question and get an answer, or fire off a prompt and get some code back. That, that, the, the, the American humanoid robotics industry feels much more fragile, in the sense that if you don't have this massive hammer of capital

• 10:37John Coogan?

  and will coming to bear, you could just wind up with it never happening, which I worry about.

• 10:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and America needs to figure out how to make billions of robots itself.

• 10:48John Coogan?

  I do wonder how this is going to play into all the other discussions that are gonna happen at that US visit by Chinese leader Xi Jinping. He's scheduled to meet with US President Donald Trump in September. I'm, I'm interested to see, are they going to be trading this?

• 11:06Jordi Hays?

  Can you see if we can possibly get him on the show?

• 11:10John Coogan?

  I wonder, I wonder if, uh, uh, if he

• 11:15Jordi Hays?

  What if Xi was just like, yeah, I'm meeting with the president, but I'm also going on a 50 podcast tour.

• 11:21John Coogan?

  That'd be amazing. Get him on, yeah, there's a bunch of good shows he could, he could do. Uh, he should do

• 11:28Jordi Hays?

  Modern Wisdom. I want to understand his mindset.

• 11:31John Coogan?

  Would be great. I'd love him, I'd love to see him on Hot Ones.

• 11:34Jordi Hays?

  Joe Rogan.

• 11:35John Coogan?

  Rogan is a no brainer.

• 11:37Jordi Hays?

  That should be kind of the, the, the last show.

• 11:39John Coogan?

  But Nellk would be like the obvious choice.

• 11:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:42John Coogan?

  A lot of world leaders.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  History of

• 11:43John Coogan?

  World leaders have been on there. That's true.

• 11:45Jordi Hays?

  Controversial world leaders.

• 11:47John Coogan?

  That's true. Why not Xi Jinping? Get him on there. Uh, let me tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that are made 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Uh, let's go to some of the, uh, reactions. Uh, today we're launching Tao's humanoid cleaning service in San Francisco at $30 per hour. Access is initially invite only as we scale operations. So Alexander Koch is talking about, uh, his company Tao Robotics. He's the founder and CEO, Z Fellow, Emergent Ventures Fellow. Love that.

• 12:20Jordi Hays?

  Fellow maxing.

• 12:22Jordi Hays?

  This fellow.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  And Sean Perry, uh, from My First Million says, why did putting clothes on the robot make me like it 15% 5X more? Um, yeah, it just way, it looks way more human. If you don't see the metal, uh, that makes a lot of sense, but, uh, are the clothes particularly for just the, the vibes of deploying this product into someone's home? And it just makes people feel like, oh, that was a good experience.

• 12:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:47John Coogan?

  It does look like it has a wifi router on its head. What are, what are all those bars coming off the top? Uh, that's a little disturbing. It looks like Edward Scissorhands or something.

• 12:55Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. So they are doing teleop. He says each humanoid is jointly controlled by a human operator and AI. Uh, interesting to come out and charge $30 per hour. That feels about what you'd pay for a, a human. Um, and so it can either do human level tasks.

• 13:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and you know, clearly they, I, I would have expected them to come in and say, it's like, you know, $5 an hour or something like that, right?

• 13:25John Coogan?

  Eh, probably unlimited venture funding. They got, uh, and it's probably better to test the market with something that's actually

• 13:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, something on the higher end.

• 13:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, to see if people will pay. Uh, anyway.

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  You can scroll down. You can see it in action. It does look so funny with clothes on. Cause it kind of looks like it walks like a toddler.

• 13:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

  But it's like full size.

• 13:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, yeah, it does look very funny. I like this.

• 13:54Jordi Hays?

  All right, we got one more video. It's doing some dishes.

• 13:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 13:59John Coogan?

  It gets the soap onto it.

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  It's washing its own hands.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  Why does it need to do that? Does it get dirty? I guess. I guess if it gets dirty, it's got to wash its hands. That's pretty cool.

• 14:10Jordi Hays?

  You don't want a robot with dirty hands.

• 14:12John Coogan?

  The purple eyes do also do make it look more friendly as opposed to those. That is way creepier. That looks like, uh, yeah, that's, uh, that's full Terminator mode. Uh, anyway, Dean Ball is going back and forth with Will Minnitis. Uh, Dean says, do we think the Silicon Valley leaders who were so up in arms about using Chinese LLMs last week will be similarly outraged about the US government's decision to ban import of all advanced robotics from all foreign countries? Is Minnitis going to write an essay about how the US robot companies need to be nationalized in exchange for this policy favor? Will says, you're welcome to tag me if you want a take. What's your take? He does ask him for it. And Will says, Dean seems to not understand that the FCC is issuing a published rule under statutory authority with a waiver process and judicial review is different than a thinly veiled suggestion that regulators carry out an extralegal whisper campaign to protect the interests of his employer.

• 15:08John Coogan?

  The robotics companies need not be nationalized until they also ask for public infrastructure preemption, federal backstop of their debt and a swept market just so they can call themselves national institutions. When they do, send them my essay. And Dean Ball says, so wait, if the US straight up ban Chinese LLMs using explicit statutory authorities, e.g. supply chain risk, that wouldn't necessitate lab nationalization, but doing it through soft law would what? Uh, your instance, uh, that my analytic prediction was a thinly veiled suggestion continues to be bad faith. I do wonder, uh, I do wonder if we'll just see more, you know, figure shows up in those secondary demand tables. I wonder if this is bullish for that. I don't know. I, I, I, One Ax just seems to be on a good path. Sunday Robotics just seems to be on a good path.

• 15:55John Coogan?

  We've talked to a lot of other companies where the, the regulatory and competitive landscape has always, it hasn't seemed like it's a driver of financings, right? It's not like, oh, you're waiting for approval or you're waiting for some, some rule to break. It's like, yeah, at some point in the future, America is going to want indigenous, like, you know, robotic supply chain.

• 16:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the compelling teams have raised anywhere from a hundred million dollars to billions of dollars. And now they need to effectively deploy that and get commercial use cases starting to ramp. And then I expect them to be able to raise an order of magnitude more capital each, right? So, uh, I don't, again, I, I don't think capital is really a constraint here. Um, but I think they've raised their sort of like, they've raised their like five rounds, let's say.

• 16:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy your service databases. And moreover, Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. Uh, Mark Zuckerberg is in the Wall Street Journal. Uh, Paywald, you gotta pay to read what Mark has to say, but he penned an op ed and he says the US should accelerate AI development, not restrict it. He says the, the AI future is for everyone. There, there, there's some interesting quotes in here. He's taken shots. He's taken shots at doom, fear based marketing. Uh, he says, it is surprising that the discourse from many of those who are developing artificial intelligence is so filled with doom.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  I don't understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future. The only, the notion that AI is so dangerous that only, that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems dangerous. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened.

• 17:54Jordi Hays?

  Is he talking about machines of love and grace?

• 17:56John Coogan?

  I think so. Something like that. Uh, hasn't led to safer, positive outcomes. Humanity has witnessed many transformative advances. Each time there is fear that people will be left behind, but each time humanity has come out with more people sharing greater prosperity, health and freedom. We believe this will be true with AI as well, and the abundance of the future can be shared by everyone. He's abundance build. Um, and so I, I think it's good to sort of reset, you know, where he is. He's been, he's been, he's talked about AI a bunch, but it's never been like right on the cusp, but he's just like throwing his hat firmly in this camp of, you know, he's, he's, he's obviously playing in AI, but has a particularly positive vision.

• 18:41John Coogan?

  Um, and he's sort of throwing down the gauntlet. If you think, if you think AI is so bad, then stop working it and let me, let me work on it.

• 18:50Jordi Hays?

  Let me cook.

• 18:50John Coogan?

  I don't know. Um, but, uh, not too much, uh, like chatter around this. Um, it did stand in, in opposition, you know, he's saying you, the United States should accelerate AI development. At the same time, there's this open letter from a bunch of lab employees saying like, hey, maybe we should do a mutual pause. Maybe we should all slow down. And, uh, I, I think even some meta researchers signed that as well, but there's like a wide group from, uh, OpenAI, Anthropic, uh, a bunch of other firms, Google, uh, that all signed. Uh, John Palmer, of course, uh, ever the TBPN promoter says, TBPN must publish an open letter against distillation after their model was distilled by every competitor in the industry. And I said, I'm advocating for a complete and total podcast ban, multi-federal year, multi-year federal approval process for new RSS feeds to get issued.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  Uh, he says, better hurry up and write that open letter before Chinese technology network launches. I think a Chinese TBPN would actually be electric. I think that'd be amazing.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  Love to watch.

• 19:53John Coogan?

  I would love that. Uh, you know, just wildly different. They just don't do the going direct thing over there the same way. You know, there was like the DeepSeek investor meeting, four hours that was like leaked. That's not the same as actually sitting down with someone that has a particular point of view.

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  Down with a stack of 200 posts and just chit chatting.

• 20:15John Coogan?

  I don't know. Maybe it does exist, but, uh, when Dwar Kesh went to China. It was such a funny observation, a bunch of observations, but the one that really stuck out to me was he was like, I asked everyone and it is clear, China does not have a Joe Rogan. Like, they don't have someone who is like a larger-than-life, yapper, political commentator, just like a guy who talks about everything, including politics. And there's a political reasons for that, but it's also maybe cultural and it's just interesting because the demand for that would be electric. I feel like you have to, you have to imagine that like Joe Rogan clips make them, make their way around the world and are sort of like a barometer for where the American psyche is at in a certain, in a certain way, like

• 20:57John Coogan?

  a certain group of, of Americans feel that way. There's this other, there's this other post that's sort of interesting to see where the Anthropic back and forth on the open letter goes. Obviously Anthropic clarified their stance on open source, not advocating for a complete and total ban, but they're very worried about distillation, they're very worried about cybersecurity, and they're very worried about authoritarian uses of AI. All good points. Chetan over at Benchmark says, Anthropic very publicly claiming there needs to be a crackdown on distillation is puzzling. It's a $1 trillion company with incredible resources and the distillation attacks at the scale they describe would seem

• 21:38John Coogan?

  easy to detect. I don't know how easy they are to detect. I think the people, you know, harness up a whole bunch of different VPNs and stuff, but at the same time, it's like, it's an AI company, put AI on the job, maybe you should be able to detect it. So, we'll take his point.

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  He's asking AI to be able to find a needle in the biggest haystack of all time. The world's largest haystack.

• 21:59John Coogan?

  The final benchmark. Yeah, maybe distill bench is, distillation attack bench is the one that needs to be hill-climbed next. But he says, the only cost would be giving up the associated API revenue. So you should have a very aggressive, a very aggressive internal policy around if you're suspected of a distillation attack, you're kicked off the API. Of course, in a very short amount of time, you can fire off a lot of prompts and get a lot of tokens, and you can do that a lot around across, across a lot of different accounts. What do you think about this?

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, detecting distillation seems like a very hard problem. I think if it was trivial, they would have just done it.

• 22:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  And also seems like it's not that big of a, like, percentage of their revenue. Like, I'd be surprised if, if like, distillation attacks accounted for a large amount of, of like...

• 22:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't think, I don't think it's meaningful.

• 22:49John Coogan?

  Also, so it does, it does feel like it's hard, because a lot of it doesn't actually go through the direct API necessarily. Like, it goes through a, a company that is vending a service, and then someone is prompting that service, and so you're further obfuscating it. Like, there are a number of different sort of wrappers that effectively wrap various frontier APIs, and, and if you're getting hit in a bunch of different, you're blending all of that together, you're looking at open source stuff. There's also just people that will, like, this just happened with, was it Matt Schumer? He, he basically uploaded to GitHub a game that he made with Opus 5, along with the prompt. And so, you, you can

• 23:31John Coogan?

  sort of distill on that. Like, it's only one data point, or, you know, you know, a small bag of tokens, but there's a lot of people that will share a prompt and the actual output. And so, you can train on that, and there's no way to detect that you found that. What's interesting here is that the knock-on effect of Chetan's point is that you, like, if, if Anthropic takes Chetan's advice, you wind up giving out the model less frequently and being more closed about it, which is something, three months ago, everyone in the ecosystem was like, this is annoying. Like, I'm a small startup, I can't get into the Mythos tier, I can't get access to Project Glasswing, I'm not an enterprise-level, you

• 24:13John Coogan?

  know, customer, but I still, so I just don't get frontier intelligence, and I just get steamrolled by, you know, Microsoft who has access to it, or Apple who has access to it, or whatever. And so, this, the whole idea of like, if, if, if, if amazing intelligence and amazing model is made, should it be widely available? That's actually at odds with distillation, because you have to hunt those bad actors down, and you play this whack-a-mole. So, I don't know. It is, it is tricky. We'll see, we'll see where it goes. We'll see where it goes. Anyway, let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They've got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more, with great customer service.

• 24:50Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, over on Facebook Marketplace, people are adding a sort of gold aura to their listings.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  What is this?

• 24:58Jordi Hays?

  Would this make you more likely to buy John?

• 25:01John Coogan?

  Oh, it does look like a rare drop.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  Yes. For only $25, picking up this table with that level of aura, certainly tempting.

• 25:12John Coogan?

  It does make me like it more. I think it actually works. I've seen people do this where they add, they'll add like a woman to it, as like a salesperson, basically, with AI, and that draws more attention on Facebook Marketplace. I don't know if I've ever bought anything on Facebook Marketplace, but maybe, maybe we should try and have Tyler do like a trade, a trade a paperclip into a car challenge. Have you ever seen these?

• 25:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:37John Coogan?

  Ryan Trahan and...

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  Tyler would be exceptional at that kind of thing.

• 25:41John Coogan?

  You think you could, you think you could trade up from something on your desk?

• 25:43Speaker 02

  I think this would definitely help it.

• 25:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Giving it some kind of...

• 25:46John Coogan?

  So, so basically, you have to look for the most unoptimized listings that are undervalued, and then, and then, once you buy them, give them the ultimate glow up on, on, with AI images, put them back up for a higher price, increase your margins, start printing. This is a very Gary V S hustle, for sure. Asking, okay, where, where, where do you want to go next?

• 26:12Jordi Hays?

  We have Joe Wise and Tall joining in just one minute. If we have time, we should cover this story coming out of eBay.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 26:21Jordi Hays?

  A pretty incredible story. eBay pays couple $56 million for its role in cockroach harassment campaign.

• 26:32John Coogan?

  That is a crazy headline.

• 26:34Jordi Hays?

  The couple received threatening deliveries, including funeral wreaths, after criticizing the e-commerce retailer in a blog. So, this couple, David and Ina Steiner, were harassed, it sounds like, for years for criticizing, criticizing eBay. Who knew that criticizing eBay could get you in this much trouble? Of course, it's eBay that ended up getting in trouble, but...

• 27:02John Coogan?

  So they had an online e-commerce blog called Ecommerce Bytes, and they criticized eBay on that. And then, back in 2019, so this has been going on for like, seven years. There's a whole new executive team in, in, in place now, but there were actually criminal charges in 2020. Seven employees of the company were sentenced to prison terms ranging between one and five years.

• 27:23Jordi Hays?

  And so what were they doing? eBay leadership apparently mailed a series of threatening deliveries to the Steiners' home in 2019.

• 27:32John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 27:33Jordi Hays?

  Including a box of live cockroaches, a bloody pig's head mask, I don't even know what that is.

• 27:40John Coogan?

  Head mask?

• 27:41Jordi Hays?

  Is this a real pig head that's been turned into a mask, or is it, hopefully, just a, a sort of a Hollywood remake of that? And a funeral wreath. The Steiners also accused executives of online harassment, including online posts inviting strangers to their house for sex.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  Also...

• 28:00Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely insane. Who, like, in what, in what world is, is a company, is a public company like eBay just getting some criticism, which all companies do?

• 28:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, I'm sorry.

• 28:16Jordi Hays?

  Takes it this personally, that you're gonna try to ruin the lives of two people that are already in your, in your industry?

• 28:24John Coogan?

  Was the impact of Ecommerce Bytes blogs showing up in your quarterly reports, like, was it actually that damage?

• 28:31Jordi Hays?

  eBay pleaded guilty in 2023 in a criminal case over harassment and paid a $3 million penalty. Following criminal charges in 2027, employees of the companies were sentenced to prison terms ranging from one to five years.

• 28:44John Coogan?

  Absolutely brutal.

• 28:45Jordi Hays?

  According to court documents, eBay executives grew increasingly upset by the Steiners' critical coverage of the company in early 2019, leading then-executive Devin Wenig to test, to text another executive that it was time to crush the Steiners and take her down, referring to Ina. That summer harassment against the Steiners escalated from threatening messages to delivering items to their home, which also included a book about surviving spousal bereavement.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  So that's like, sort of a death threat, I guess?

• 29:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:16John Coogan?

  Right? What's...

• 29:18Jordi Hays?

  Also, sending adult magazines to neighbors' homes in the husband's name. So, just like, completely trying to destroy this couple's life and, and marriage. eBay employees also traveled to Massachusetts to vandalize the Steiners' home and stalk them around their hometown. All the employees involved in the harassment were fired in September 2019, eBay said.

• 29:49Jordi Hays?

  The lawsuit was actually started in 2021. Under the settlement, so we have a, we have a good ending here. I think it's a fair ending. Under the settlement, the couple will receive 48 million in compensation from eBay and former employees. eBay will also pay 6 million to charitable organizations and Wenig will pay 1 million to a free speech charity in Ina Steiner's name.

• 30:13John Coogan?

  This is the ultimate Streisand effect. I never would have heard about e-commerce Bytes or their criticism of eBay if they hadn't done all this. What a mess.

• 30:22Jordi Hays?

  E-commerce Bytes.

• 30:23John Coogan?

  I'm, I'm looking up exactly what they said because eBay is, in my opinion, just the most set it and forget it company that's just had the same service for 20 years, basically.

• 30:34Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  But now we're going to get to the bottom of it.

• 30:36Jordi Hays?

  Ina Steiner published the news that this settled on her blog. So e-commerce Bytes has been giving sellers a voice since 1999. So I do think that it, it appears, just from looking at it very briefly, that e-commerce Bytes clearly is an important voice in the like eBay seller world, but still absolutely insane way to go about doing business. And I'm glad that eBay cleaned up their act in, in 2019.

• 31:10John Coogan?

  In 2019, e-commerce Bytes posted an article, said, "Did you know that eBay built a lavish New York City pub-style lounge?" Because they had constructed an elaborate replica of a Manhattan pub at an eBay campus. And the framing was basically, "This appears to be a no-expense-spared executive amenity." Maybe they were going to do a podcast, you never know. Anyway, we have Joe Weisenthal from Bloomberg, Odd Lots, you know him, you love him, he's back on the show. Welcome to the TV.

• 31:39Joe Weisenthal?

  Joe.

• 31:39John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 31:40Joe Weisenthal?

  It's been, it's been too long. I miss you guys.

• 31:42John Coogan?

  I miss you too.

• 31:43Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so I have a question for you. You've got, you've had a podcast for a long time. Have you ever gotten like a negative review or a negative comment?

• 31:52John Coogan?

  Ever?

• 31:52Joe Weisenthal?

  No, never. Never.

• 31:53Jordi Hays?

  No, be honest, be honest. Maybe you've got one. Have you ever thought about sending them a box of live cockroaches, maybe vandalizing?

• 32:00John Coogan?

  There are actively people mad at Joe right now on Twitter about his tweets.

• 32:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Hopefully she's not watching right now, but my co-host Tracy would, if, if one of us would do it. First of all, she is the one who reads the comments. I don't think she would, but I think if like you're to float this idea, like she might at least like spare a few mental cycles.

• 32:21Jordi Hays?

  I've thought about doing that. I ran it down, but I, I know the whole, the backstory with eBay.

• 32:25Joe Weisenthal?

  I try, I try to be the voice of peace.

• 32:27John Coogan?

  It's a cautionary tale.

• 32:28Jordi Hays?

  You guys don't want to have to, you know, down the line, pay a 50, 60 million dollar settlement.

• 32:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Definitely not, no.

• 32:34Jordi Hays?

  Sending a horse head to a former listener for leaving a bad review.

• 32:38Joe Weisenthal?

  We have, that is not on the roadmap.

• 32:40John Coogan?

  No, not at all.

• 32:41Jordi Hays?

  I'm trying to think if I can, I don't, I don't know if you caught the story right before this, but basically eBay had to pay a couple 56 million dollars because like a bunch of executives were, were harassing this couple for just like criticizing the company in 2019. So like no one is, no one is even really thinking about eBay in 2019. Like it's just not like, it's a big company. It's a company that everyone, a lot of people have used and a lot of people love. But no one's like really, it's not really that top of mind. And, and seven executives are like becoming criminals.

• 33:19John Coogan?

  I will die for this company.

• 33:22Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, in 2018, they might've said, "Oh, that would never be me." You know, maybe who among us, if you're late at night, you start going down a path, you have to exhibit really good cognitive hygiene because who among us knows the path to psychosis online? Many such cases, and maybe we all need a little bit of humility about what the set of conditions that could put us in that path. Yeah.

• 33:47Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes one prompt is all it takes to lose someone.

• 33:51Joe Weisenthal?

  I took a week of vacation last week and I was like, "Oh, I'm not going to post anything for a week." And I did, I actually did. But I felt it all like bubbling out like Friday evening when I sort of mentally, it's like, "Oh, vacation's over. It's the weekend now." And I was like, it just like all, I was like uncontrollably. So it's like, we all have to be mindful and self-aware about what we're capable of. Cause maybe you don't really know, like when it comes to internet vendettas, what, what could happen?

• 34:18John Coogan?

  Do you think social media is addictive?

• 34:23John Coogan?

  Cause I can't, it's so hard to tell when your job is social media. Like I am the screen time. I have three hours of live stream time every day.

• 34:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 34:32John Coogan?

  But it's like how I buy food. So it's like, am I addicted to my job? Like, I don't know.

• 34:39Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, I've thought about, the funny, you mentioned food, because this is how I justify it, right? I've probably said it before. This is how I justify always being online. It's like, "Oh, it's very important for me to know what people are talking about. This is how I hone in my skill." But it is like, you know, it's funny. I was thinking like food specifically, because with other addictions, you just go cold turkey, right? You're just like, I'm not, you know? And with food, you can't. So you have to like, it's really hard to like, so even with me and social media, it's like, it's hard for me, like cold turkey is not that hard. I'll just take a week off. Posting all the time is not that hard. The middle ground is when it gets really hard because there's just so many things to respond to, so many things waiting for my take, so many questions that only I need to come.

• 35:19Jordi Hays?

  Also, yeah, there's takes that will never exist. There's, there's takes that will never exist, right? The takes that have been lost to history when you were on vacation and will never get those.

• 35:28Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right.

• 35:29John Coogan?

  I do feel like.

• 35:30Joe Weisenthal?

  And you think of.

• 35:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I do feel like one benefit that you have and I have felt is when you have multiple, uh, maybe dopamine reward paths, but like outputs, it is nice to be able to retreat because you can do a podcast, you can also write an essay, you can also rip off a post. And so if you only have one of those, then you can sort of get lost in the sauce of like, "Oh, it's been rough since I had a great guest," or "It's been rough since I had a great viral banger post." But if you can sort of move around and be like, "Okay, I'm going to take a break from the, from the, the knife fight at the dive bar and put my thoughts together into an essay."

• 36:07Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I agree. This is very important to have multiple outlets for man's desire to, uh, to post and put things out into the world. Yes. The deepest desire, it's like in the hierarchy is like to be someone we are listened to, right? You can see it in all of like the billionaires who like cannot resist the impulse to get online and start posting. It's clear that money, yes, it's all great. Power is great, but what they really crave is to just be heard by someone out in the world. And so they start posting.

• 36:36John Coogan?

  The, the death of Twitter acts, uh, fully over now, given that Jensen Wong joined, Mark Zuckerberg had to join, like it pulled, truly pulled everyone over, slowly kicking and screaming, because I imagine Mark Zuckerberg would prefer to promote his Wall Street Journal op-eds just on his own platforms, but that's not where that community is. So you gotta go.

• 37:00Joe Weisenthal?

  No, it's true. Like with AI especially, specifically, which is that it's X, right? Like every time someone leaves one of the big companies, they have to post a big thread or, you know, a really long tweet or whatever. And it's only X. I mean, they could post it on Instagram. They could post it on LinkedIn. They could post it. They don't though. I mean, they might, I don't know. But they posted, that is where the news happens. And you can feel like, I think, you know, the thing that was really striking last week with the, um, the discourses, one says about the open letter, et cetera, it germinated on Twitter specifically. Why did the White House, why did this, why was this suddenly in that week, a thing that the White House in some way needed to talk about Chinese

• 37:44Joe Weisenthal?

  open models? It was because of how much it was bubbling on social media, on Twitter specifically. I actually think the entire thing more or less originated from one tweet that said that Kimmy III was really good at front-end design work.

• 38:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:01Joe Weisenthal?

  That was it. It was that one post. Because if you look around, like that actually, that crystallized it in everyone's mind. It's like, "Oh, here it is. It may be as good as the most advanced frontier models." No, there was one category of one overall thing. And that was the thing everyone locked into. And from there, and I believe that that was the moment straight through to, "Okay, now the White House and all these companies need to make comments about open models," can be traced to that specific, all online, all on Twitter from that.

• 38:31John Coogan?

  Ameri, uh, front-end built this country. If we don't have front-end, we don't have anything. This country needs front-end development, specifically like, no, no. I mean, I, I agree with you. When I, when I was looking at the benchmarks, I was like, the one that I'm actually interested in is the cybersecurity benchmarks. Because that's where we could actually have this meaningful discussion of, "Okay, you just actually democratized hacking into things. This is going to get kind of crazy." And you're going to have like script kiddies out there that are, you know, just hacking into the random flower shop on the corner and just making it a nightmare for them. Um, and, uh, and we couldn't really get there. I don't know. It hasn't been fully.

• 39:07Jordi Hays?

  I forgot you posted this, but someone was sharing this morning, they're trying to figure out how much you need to spend to have your own.

• 39:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:13Jordi Hays?

  Setup at home to be able to run Kimmy efficiently. It's like a hundred thousand dollars.

• 39:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:18Jordi Hays?

  Right? Um, just, just to get to the point where you'd be able to.

• 39:22Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 39:23John Coogan?

  And it's a lot of energy.

• 39:24Jordi Hays?

  In a sovereign way, you know, a sovereign hacker would need to have a hundred grand, which hopefully prevents like the script kiddies.

• 39:30John Coogan?

  It might be the new Lambo though, you know? You, you get the influencer, the LARPER, they got the NVL 72 in the corner. You're like, "Yeah, what's up? I got the, I got the sovereign AI going." I don't know. How else did you process the, uh, the open letter? Were you surprised by the order that companies signed? I, Ben Thompson had this interesting take that it's, uh, two of the last companies to sign. I don't think Apple's signed yet. You'd think that they'd benefit from, uh, open source since they haven't been playing that game. Uh, Amazon was also a little bit late, but Amazon and Apple both have physical products, like warehouses and they sell physical things. And so there may be a little bit less nervous about AI disruption because they have a physical aspect. I don't know. I don't know what, what you thought about the, the sequence of events.

• 40:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I mean, I think there was like two things that really struck out to me, which is that the first wave of signatories were either companies that are behind the frontier or Nvidia, which does not want to be left with only one or two clients. Like, this is the thing. So they're like, oh, like this is, let's start with Nvidia. I think the nightmare scenario for Nvidia, or at least a nightmare scenario for Nvidia, is that it basically has, the two, one or two labs break so far from the pack that it's just, you know, it's almost monopoly conditions. And then those clients can either say-

• 40:55Jordi Hays?

  And to be, and just to add to that, like, both the two frontrunners are already making their own chips. They're already working with multiple chip companies, right? So they're already like actively trying to reduce their dependence on a key supplier.

• 41:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Absolutely. So first, they might have better pricing. They're like, no, we're just not going to pay that margin that you expect. Or they're already both diversifying, et cetera. So that is, that is the first thing. And then the other thing that seems very obvious to me is that all the first round of signatories was objectively falling behind the frontier. And so when your software categories, you have, you know, either companies that are trying to build a model and they're behind. So Microsoft, at least on just, we're talking LLMs, clearly behind. Meta, clearly behind, right? And then you get the, and then you have the company, I don't know, the ServiceNows of the world, who will look like they could be in a position where they might have to pay a tax to the most advanced

• 41:56Joe Weisenthal?

  models. And so like, and then you get the late signatories, like OpenAI or an Alphabet, et cetera, that are close, but probably not at Fable 5, like Max, like, look at the whole thing. And then they're the last ones to join. And so like, I guess I had, it's like, look, I love all that stuff about, I love freedom. Like, I love freedom and I love tinkering. I love tinkering and I want to like do all that stuff, et cetera. But when I think like, what really like motivates these companies is like, you know, I don't put a ton of stock on, oh, it's really important to diffuse AI into our main street businesses and hospitals and hackers. Sure, great. I love that stuff. Lovely. But like, you know,

• 42:41Joe Weisenthal?

  I think there is like, you know, I think the thing that would really, like, we're really not psychologically, or sort of as an economy, really equipped to think about, what if one or two of these companies just runs away with it? What if Anthropic just runs away with it? What if like, like, we're, we're sort of like, oh yeah, everyone's sort of in the game. And I think for most of us, I'm not 100% sure of this because I'm not the most sophisticated, like, person, technical person at all. But I have a feeling that most of us can't really get a good intuitive feel for like, what is the difference between a GPT 5.6, a Fable 5, or even the most advanced Gemini model, or a Kimi, or a DeepSeek4,

• 43:23Joe Weisenthal?

  or whatever. Like, we're probably like not really able to personally grasp what the difference is at the extremes. But like, what if we, what if in a year from now, there's one company, what if, or two, that are just so like clearly, like, there is no longer any debate, these other ones just are not in the game. That is a very weird, I would say very deeply uncomfortable situation we would find ourselves. I think none of us would like that. I think most of us feel comfortable in a world in which you have a handful of companies roughly jostling around the quote frontier. It's like, okay, this is like comfortable for us. But if we weren't in that situation, like, I think we would be, rightfully, all of us would be quite anxious.

• 44:04John Coogan?

  So was Lina Khan right?

• 44:08Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, this is the thing. I think that like, and I think like the Mark Zuckerberg op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, I think further hammers this point. And I actually think, and there's a sense in which I find the Mark Zuckerberg op-ed to be a little bit, maybe more interesting than the open letter, because the open letter is sort of this plausible deniability, where it's just, we're advocating for a principle here, and that principle is open. The Zuckerberg op-ed-

• 44:35Jordi Hays?

  And it's also like- And it's more there, it's just, again, I think part of what you appreciated is like using the open letter format to just advocate for your own commercial interests. It's like, almost like stolen valor, you know?

• 44:48Joe Weisenthal?

  Sure. But like, so like, the open letter, like, the Zuckerberg op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, I thought actually took it a bit further. He's like, we cannot have superintelligence controlled by one company. So that was not merely saying, let's let the market decide, let's keep like light touch regulation. He was saying, no, this would be existentially bad, which I think most people would actually agree with, if one company were to be the monopoly provider of quote, "superintelligence," unquote. So then you think, okay-

• 45:18Jordi Hays?

  Which is funny too, because he's like-

• 45:21Joe Weisenthal?

  It's very funny.

• 45:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, he's probably top three largest customers of Anthropic, right?

• 45:29Joe Weisenthal?

  Right.

• 45:30Jordi Hays?

  So, so he's the one fuel, you know, fueling all of this. And then, and then-

• 45:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, right.

• 45:36Jordi Hays?

  Two months later, he's like, okay, actually like-

• 45:40Joe Weisenthal?

  Isn't that like, to me, that like, that is a very telling fact, when you think about like, who are the largest customers, the competitors. So it's like, that marginal difference, like I said, like, most of us probably can't really tell a big difference between like advanced models. But when you have like a really big, very high skilled, very like sophisticated model maker, and they're a huge customer of a major competitor that's better than them, like, people are going to the frontier. And this is something that like surprised me. Like, I thought maybe like there would be a bit more of a market for like some frontier intelligence, or like quote, cheaper intelligence. But look how

• 46:20Joe Weisenthal?

  fast Anthropic turned out Opus 5. And I haven't really used it that much. But it could be like, that in a market where there's, if there is one winner, that winner could emerge all up and down the price curve. And so you have like your Gemini Flash level-

• 46:36John Coogan?

  Frontier.

• 46:37Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 46:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I mean, that's what, that's what Sam was on Invest Like the Best yesterday, and he's talking about how you, as, as a company that sells intelligence, you want to have the best model at every point of the cost curve. Like, it's actually going to be important to hit all of those different moments.

• 46:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. And I, it seems like, and look, things change by the week. So I'll come back on in a week and I'll tell you, say something else. But it seems like, like a while, like I started, you know, like I was just sort of poking around. It's like, oh, Gemini Flash, this is really fun for like high batch, low intelligence things, right? Like you could do 30,000 queries in two hours and it costs you 20 bucks or something. That's amazing.

• 47:24Jordi Hays?

  Could be pretty good for my life, as a gold retriever, high batch, low intelligence.

• 47:28Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 47:29Jordi Hays?

  Doing a lot of stuff.

• 47:30Joe Weisenthal?

  But probably, or it seems at least plausible, that the company that is, has the most advanced model will probably also win for the sort of like, or could at least be in a good position to also win the high batch, low intelligence.

• 47:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. But I would say, but I would say there has been a lot of, there has been a lot of pushback around the RSI narrative in the last 24, 48 hours, because Opus 5 is actually not getting great reviews from the community. I think initially, they felt like, people thought it was like a great in-between, between like a Fable and a 5.6 Soul. And then now I've seen a lot more negativity towards it.

• 48:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, this, this to me, again, goes back to our original point of sort of like, the incredible importance of Twitter and all of these discussions. Because if you think about like, each time a model comes out, okay, there's the benchmarks and it's like, but then it's like, you'll just see like, someone will be like, there was some tweet when GLM 5.2 came out that it, he's like, some guy was like, I've been using GLM 5.2 for the last eight hours. I've never seen an open model like this. Got like 2,000 retweets. It's like, eight hours? What are you doing? You're like, what are we doing here? Like, it's like, oh, like, I got a sort of weird vibe from Opus 5, or all these things. It's like, I don't know. I actually think this is probably a good reason for all of us to

• 48:55Joe Weisenthal?

  maybe log off a little bit more and to actually just read through benchmark reports, rather than like one tweet or like, I've never seen a lot of you front-end dev like this.

• 49:05John Coogan?

  On the flip, on the flip side of like the benchmarks, like, it actually makes me more strong on Mark Zuckerberg's, like, ability to produce a thoughtful opinion, because he has, he spent a billion dollars on frontier intelligence in a month, deployed across 10,000 people, and can look at like the needle, how the needle moved across different models and, and actually look at the, like, the efficiency, like the ROI is at the end of the day what matters in the, in a business context. Yes, the, like, the vibe check matters. Yes, the benchmarks matter. But at the end of the day, in terms of moving the needle from 10 billion to 100 billion in revenue, to a trillion dollars in revenue,

• 49:46John Coogan?

  a lot of that's going to be driven by our companies actually, like, getting the bill and being like, yep, I'm happy to pay it because it was worth it.

• 49:54Joe Weisenthal?

  This is something I noticed a while ago, which is that you read through like a lot of these like popular benchmarks that come out. And the thing that has surprised me is that up until like recently, most of them actually don't talk about the dollar cost of completing a task. So it'll be like, can the model solve these 100 problems in engineering or whatever? It's like, oh, this one got 85, and this one got 75, right? But what we're really like gonna need is to see like, what was the, okay, how many dollars do I have to spend to get 90% of these questions solved? And we're just starting to see that. And I have a theory, but I don't really know if it's right,

• 50:36Joe Weisenthal?

  that probably a lot of these benchmark organizations start off from like a safetyist mindset, right? Like, they're worried about like, oh, like bio, bioengineering risk.

• 50:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, can you do it binary?

• 50:47Joe Weisenthal?

  And can you do it at any cost, right? Because you don't really care about your token cost if you're like trying to exert a lot of damage, you just do it. So I think that for like the bigger questions, like hopefully we'll see more like, what was the dollar cost of achieving X at this model? And then maybe we'll like really, those are the, for, I think for our conversations, those would be a lot more interesting than some of the sort of legacy benchmarks.

• 51:13John Coogan?

  How much do you think the open source, it feels like we're in this moment of like this catch up. There was a, the last six months, pre GLM 5.2, it felt like open source was sort of falling behind as the frontier labs released more models and more crazy demos. And there were more stories about Mythos and solving math problems and all these crazy conjectures and stuff. Like, the labs were sort of trading back and forth with like new capability, new capability, new benchmark, crazy thing. And open source is kind of quiet. And then we got GLM 5.2, Kimi K3, and all of a sudden it was like, oh, okay, like, like the, the, the open source market is catching up for sure. Still on the same trajectory, maybe still behind, but like, you know, like, like on

• 51:53John Coogan?

  track. How much is that moving the market, do you think? How much are we in a replay of the deep seek moment, the Jevons paradox debate? Because it feels like there's this sell off, but I don't know, like, it, it feels weird to me that people would be processing it the exact same and making the same mistake that they made. So is this time different? Or how are people talking about it in New York? Like?

• 52:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, as, as people who just care about the lines going up, it is, I, I think like, no, for real though, I mean, I do think like, it's plausible that this, on some level, this is just another quote, deep seek moment in the sense like, you get a little bit freaked out. I agree with you. Like, it's weird to think that like you would do that same playbook twice. I think like another factor is just generally, setting aside like maybe the Kimi and GLM stuff is a little bit, maybe it's a little overrated in terms of a story. I think people are looking at a situation in which they just do not foresee the end of these free cash flow losses, right? There's just like, we're, we're nowhere close. It's like, okay, when can you, when is the off

• 53:02Joe Weisenthal?

  ramp for this spending? That story isn't totally satisfying, because if that were, if it were just about, oh, they're spending a gazillion dollars on capital expenditures, you would expect the Korean chip stocks to do well. I mean, the Korean chip stocks have been absolutely getting crushed over the last three weeks. So like, I, there's something more to the story here. Like, I don't, like, it could just be that a lot of manic, it could be two separate things. It could be, there were a bunch of manic traders in Korea who were buying these double and triple X leveraged ETFs that just traded SK Hynix. And then that had to eventually flush out because there's,

• 53:44Joe Weisenthal?

  you know, there's so much volatility baked into that, that you get a little selling and it ripples. And then in the US, it could be that investors are looking at like, I do not have any confidence that I could name the date at which the alphabets of this world will return to positive free cash flow. There is no reason to think that that off ramp is coming when they could say like, oh, we're good, we have enough compute. So maybe there's a couple of things going on that I think are perhaps a little bit separate from the pure like, oh, we're freaked out about margin compression from Chinese open models.

• 54:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's very odd because the industry revenues are going up, like, and, and the revenues are very, very diffuse. Everything from a ad-supported use to a $10 subscription, to a $200 subscription, to a hyperscaler spending a billion dollars in a month on tokens. Like, the, the demand is there in that it is this economy. It's not this total circular, there's just one, like, it's, it's like NFTs or something like that. It's not some dislocation. But I agree with you that as you play out the capex requirements, we've now drawn down all the hyperscaler cash flow, we're issuing more debt and equity. And at a certain point, you're like, okay, if there's another 10x increase, if there's another 100x increase, like, there's sort of not enough money

• 55:01John Coogan?

  in the world for this. Like, and, and so you almost need a pause on capex more than you need a pause on like, the capability development for, because I do think that if you just, if you just spent the capex that you're spending now, paused, and then just did the diffusion work to get these models into all the different businesses and use cases, like, the economic upside and the ROI would be there. But not when you're gonna spend 10 times next on capex.

• 55:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think my framework is like you have the whole world betting on a meaningful capability, like continued capability increases, which I think is like, okay to lean on, because we've just been seeing that quarter over quarter. It is, it is real. And, and then you also have some like hoarding, which is like, not only are the capabilities gonna get much more, much better, I'm also gonna basically figure out a model that's gonna be so good, it's gonna just like, hoover up a bunch of like new demand, and I'll be able to ramp revenue and justify all of this

• 56:08Jordi Hays?

  capex. And if I, but if I can't do that, someone else will, I'll be able to, I'll be able to offload it, right? But the concerning thing, right, the concerning thing right now is like, the, the incremental big buyers of compute, you effectively have a, two players there. And, and then at the same time, you have the whole industry being like, well, like praying for like an oligopoly as opposed to a duopoly or monopoly, right? Like, very interesting to scenario to have the biggest companies in the world so scared of a, of a, of a monopoly that they're effectively praying for an oligopoly. It's like, is my, my view on it.

• 56:48Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it's really wild. And, you know, I don't know if you guys saw today, the recent blog post from Dwar Kesh, Dwar Kesh had a great thing about like expectations that compute could get a lot more expensive, which, you know, we've, one of the sort of stylized facts of the last few years has of course been the extraordinary drop in token prices, right? Like, if you go back to like GPT-3 token prices, they're down like 99.9%. But like, you know, so we think, okay, there is some iron law that token prices will get cheaper over time. But maybe not. I mean, we thought there was an iron law that memory prices would drop over time, right? Or that any sort of hardware would

• 57:32Joe Weisenthal?

  drop over time. And what the story of the last two years is that turns out that is capable of reversing. So, you know, it's not impossible to imagine that compute prices, I think it's not impossible to imagine that compute prices get more expensive and get significantly more expensive. And then of course, he posited the possibility, maybe there is no, almost no thing that we do economically currently with AI is economical where compute prices go, which is hard to imagine. And then the thing that I take away from it is, but that doesn't mean you can stop spending on it because you have to worry about hardening yourself for cybersecurity. Because it's like, all right, you know what, there's like, this is not economical for me anymore. I want to tap out of the whole AI

• 58:14Joe Weisenthal?

  risk. Well, then your competitor develops a stronger model, and then you're done. You're, you're, you're really done. So like, this is the scary thing, which is, and I think even just in the sort of like hyperscalers is like, what if like, free, the situation is you're bleeding free cash flow, but you also don't have the option of saying, we want to opt out of the game?

• 58:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Which I think is a source of anxiety for investors.

• 58:37John Coogan?

  It is, it is, like, it's so weird that we went back and forth on like, the doom narrative and the, and no matter where you sat on that, it was either like, perfect utopia, everything's amazing, or like, terminators kill everyone. And in fact, like, we are very much in this messy middle of like, a lot of annoying things. Like, the cybersecurity equilibrium is, I mean, maybe there's like this doom scenario, but most, most likely, it's just like, costs go up for everyone loosely, because you have to harden yourself more against AI. And it's like, yeah, it's great to fix bugs, but there's gonna be more bugs introduced. And it's just like, it's just annoying. It's annoying. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of scenarios where it's like, there, okay, there's

• 59:17John Coogan?

  more cost on AI slop, and then you have to detect the slop, and then you're annoyed. And we, we have a friend on our team who always laments when like, AI does some amazing like math thing. He's like, no one cares. Like, this is why you need to return to like, you know, the curing cancer, the doing something useful, actually helping you with some problem that people do experience. But a lot of times, it's just these abstract things.

• 59:42Jordi Hays?

  Going back, going back to the Zuck op ed, he has, he's in the position where he doesn't have a, he didn't do a bunch of podcasts about AI and AI doom in like 2019, when no one cared about AI. Whereas a lot of the other key players were doing podcasts, and they were talking about the risks and all these things. So he can kind of come out and just say like, like, it's gonna be awesome. We just gotta make sure there's fair competition. But the pushback there is that like the average, he's not the best messenger for this, because the average person believes that social media, while

• 1:00:14Jordi Hays?

  It is great in some ways, has damaged birth, you know, hurt birth rates, right? Like damaged teen teen mental health, right? Is is just like draining the attention, right? All these things are like, he's maybe the best messenger that we got, but he's not the best.

• 1:00:34Joe Weisenthal?

  So this is the issue that I arise when I think about this is that like, okay, you have two executives. One is like, it's all going to be okay. And one of them, it's we're going to have doom, right? So and then it's like, well, which one of them has been paying attention and taking seriously? AI for the last 10 years and which one of them three years ago was talking about the metaverse? Well, it's like, I'm going to trust the one who has been taking AI seriously for the last 10 years. And then unfortunately, that happens to be the doom guy, or that seems how it is. That unfortunately, that like, if you just go by these heuristics we have of like, well, who was like, there have been people who are like very right about AI, who are very nervous. And this is like, what makes me, I don't have any ability to adjudicate these questions.

• 1:01:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Like, I'm just like, I'm just reading stuff on the internet. I'm like, you know, I'm not so, but unfortunately, a lot of the people, a lot of the doom people have had much better intuitions about just the broader trajectory of the technology than the people who are very optimistic, who three years ago or four years ago were talking about NFTs.

• 1:01:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and there's some line, I think it's from Demis, where he's saying like he met with Zuck. When they were selling DeepMind.

• 1:01:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it's a great, it's a great part.

• 1:01:43Jordi Hays?

  Zuck, you know, viewed like the metaverse as like, or VR as like equal, equally interesting to AI. And that was part of what made him decide to not go to Meta.

• 1:01:55Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 1:01:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:56John Coogan?

  Has Dennis never watched a movie in VR? It's electric. It's the best experience. No, it is funny because, because you got it. It's amazing. Apple Vision Pro, it's fantastic. But the, the, there was a doom narrative around crypto and there was a doom narrative around metaverse. The crypto one was that every criminal is going to be able to transact anonymously. And there's going to be a huge increase in drug.

• 1:02:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, the doom scenario was actually that the dollar would just completely collapse. But that was something that people were cheering on.

• 1:02:26John Coogan?

  They were excited about that. And then, and then with the metaverse, it was like wireheading. So everyone's going to be in the metaverse and we're going to lose any and all interaction in the real world. And of course, Mark Zuckerberg never addressed that. He was never on podcast being like, yes, it is, there is a risk and it goes into the matrix. And we're all in these virtual worlds and like, I'm not going to do that. Apple sort of like forced his hand with that, with the crazy AR and like the screen on the outside. And Apple's messaging was like, we don't want to be an isolating device. We want to be a mixed reality device. And, and they were sort of being like the anti doom, but Zuck never really went full like doomer or even addressed it.

• 1:03:06John Coogan?

  And, and then of course, we just like, sort of got the good ending because it just like kind of flatlined and never really went anywhere. I don't know, I don't even know if that's a good ending.

• 1:03:14Joe Weisenthal?

  No, it's interesting. No, no, totally. And it's interesting because when you read like that Zuckerberg op ed in the Wall Street Journal, it reads like, you know, so you mentioned like, everyone is super cynical about social media, right? You mentioned the birth rates, everyone's got so like, so just feels so like, kind of gross about the whole thing now. But, you know, in like 2010, 2011, people were like, really excited. It's like, we're going to connect, it's going to be great for democracy. Citizens are going to like, be able to like collaborate and stuff like that. And so when I read the Zuck op ed, I was like, this is a kind of optimism that I haven't read from anyone in, in over 10 years about where like digital technology is going.

• 1:03:58Joe Weisenthal?

  Unfortunately, people like, you know, very few people are as optimistic about social media as they were in, say, the beginning of the 2010s. But it, it did hearken back to that this is going to be very democratizing, et cetera. And I hope it is.

• 1:04:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, I, I expect like personally,

• 1:04:18Jordi Hays?

  social media, I do think has made my, my life better. Like net, like if you net it out, it's like, had a, you know, I work.

• 1:04:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Me too.

• 1:04:27Jordi Hays?

  I work in media, but even if I didn't, you know, pre being in this kind of business, met a lot of people, I learned a bunch of stuff that I otherwise wouldn't. I think it's been, had a net positive impact on my life. I think that AI, hopefully, one of the good scenarios is that it is the same way, right? Where like net, net makes everyone's lives a bit better, even though it has these things that are.

• 1:04:50Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:51Jordi Hays?

  That are, that are quite, quite bad, right?

• 1:04:53Joe Weisenthal?

  I think we should be open minded to that possibility. I mean, you know, look, we get things, everyone's dooming so hard these days about it. And you just go down the list. I could, we could easily rattle off 10 very, three or four big things right now. But you know, usually the bad, we're, we're wrong, we're pretty bad about predicting the future. And so like, we should be open minded, I think, towards like, you know, right tail scenarios where things go well. Because I don't think like, I put a lot of stock, or I don't think there's any good reason to put a lot of stock on what the Twitter conventional wisdom is. Or the editorial board of any publication, what they're all anxious about right now. Like, you know, like, I don't know what that great outcome looks like, per se.

• 1:05:38Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, I do, look, we could get great technological breakthroughs. I'll say one thing, which is that like in the circles of people I talk to, everyone is like reading more philosophy these days, probably because of AI. It's pretty good. Like, I'm pretty happy, like, that's a pretty cool thing that like, people are sort of like a recognition of a certain curiosity about things that I think was sort of dormant for a while. So like, that seems like a pretty good.

• 1:06:02Jordi Hays?

  Making music for the first time in years.

• 1:06:04Joe Weisenthal?

  Making music, yeah, making music. No, like, like we should pay attention to like the, I actually do think we should pay attention to the good things that are, you know, because it's so easy to get caught in, caught in, focused on a negative narrative. In the meanwhile, like various like positive things are happening. I, you know, changed a flight recently and it was much easier because I used ChatGPT to like walk me through the process of like, turn it.

• 1:06:33Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm sort of like making, of you know, to, to a, a, a round trip flight to a three legged flight, which I was very anxious about, is easy. So like, we should pay attention, I think, to things in our like day to day life that we could say, you know what? AI is sort of making this better, even if like, it doesn't feel like in the whole, even if we're like anxious about where it's all going.

• 1:06:55John Coogan?

  Last question. You have a podcast, we have a podcast.

• 1:06:59Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right.

• 1:06:59John Coogan?

  There's a lot of new podcasts. Would you support an open letter that we're writing? We would like you to sign it to ban new podcasts. It would require.

• 1:07:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, it actually wouldn't ban, but it would, there would be a multi-year sort of approval process, bunch of safety checks.

• 1:07:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:16Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 1:07:16John Coogan?

  Sort of like a new government agency to issue RSS feeds.

• 1:07:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I, this is really important. I'm, I'm so glad you brought this up. This is such an important topic.

• 1:07:26John Coogan?

  Someone could just launch an RSS feed that, you know, ends the entire world. Who knows? We don't know, it can't happen.

• 1:07:31Joe Weisenthal?

  Or, or removes viewers and listeners from odd lots of TVP and we cannot let that happen.

• 1:07:36John Coogan?

  That would, that's ridiculous. Are you saying that I would do this for my own financial gain? This is crazy.

• 1:07:43Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm just saying, I think.

• 1:07:43John Coogan?

  I can't believe you would even go there. That's wild. I would never think that way. I'm purely thinking altruistically, okay, Joe?

• 1:07:50Joe Weisenthal?

  America needs to win on podcasts.

• 1:07:53John Coogan?

  We do.

• 1:07:54Joe Weisenthal?

  This is very important.

• 1:07:55Jordi Hays?

  Actually are objectively winning.

• 1:07:57John Coogan?

  We are winning on entertainment. We have been winning on entertainment and have no.

• 1:08:03Joe Weisenthal?

  No, there's no competitors yet.

• 1:08:04John Coogan?

  Yes. Well, thank you so much.

• 1:08:06Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm signing the letter.

• 1:08:07John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. We'll circulate.

• 1:08:09Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Joe.

• 1:08:09John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your week.

• 1:08:10Jordi Hays?

  Thanks, dude.

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:08:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Take care.

• 1:08:12John Coogan?

  Bye. Let me tell you about Pigma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Pigma files with design system context. And we are very fortunate that we have our next guest, Jameson Detweiler, here with us in the TVP and Ultradome. Welcome to the show.

• 1:08:30Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:08:31John Coogan?

  Please introduce yourself in the company.

• 1:08:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I am Jameson Detweiler. I am the co-founder and CEO of Chip. And we are building what we like to think of as the ideal second car today. But as everything becomes autonomous, the ideal primarily owned vehicle of the future.

• 1:08:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:08:45Jordi Hays?

  Can we get the chip that I specked out on the big board? Because it is a special, special car. And I think it would provide some important context.

• 1:08:56John Coogan?

  So quick facts, it's an electric low speed life utility vehicle.

• 1:09:00Jordi Hays?

  How do you rate my spec? How do you rate my spec?

• 1:09:02Speaker 04

  I love the, I love the, the spaceship there and everything.

• 1:09:06Jordi Hays?

  The spaceship, obviously got the surf rack.

• 1:09:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:09:10Jordi Hays?

  And the TV on the front.

• 1:09:12John Coogan?

  Yep. This is pretty good.

• 1:09:13Jordi Hays?

  If you could get TVP on there, it would, it would kind of complete it, but good start, good start for me. Before we get too much into chip, what were you doing before this? What led you to creating the vehicles of the future?

• 1:09:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, before this, I was at TIR Mobility, which was Bird and Lime's largest competitor in Europe, backed by SoftBank and Moudala. They own spin scooters in the US. Got, wound up there by selling my HD mapping business, Phantasma to them. So basically creating a digital twin of the world and we built a computer powered GPS. And turns out scooters don't know where they are very well because of GPS. And so Bird, Jompa Duber and TIR were our biggest customers and scaled up. And then also started building kind of driver assistance systems for scooters as well. So yeah, been in the mobility space for a while.

• 1:10:03Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. I can imagine driver assistance would be. Great for scooters. I don't know how, I don't know how far along it's gotten just because driving around LA, some people on scooters do things that, that are, you know, maybe not illegal, but definitely wrong.

• 1:10:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we say driver assistance is like aiding cars, but really it's about restricting their behavior, right? So it's like, are you drunk? Are you going, are you on a sidewalk? Are you going the wrong way down a bike lane? And so you're putting that on there and it just, you know, camera and compete at the edge running there. So it's building a lot of that kind of, yeah.

• 1:10:35John Coogan?

  Why is autonomy important for this vehicle? This feels like the last place I would want self-driving. I need self-driving in the morning commute. I'm tired. I'm going 40 miles or 20 miles and I just want to like zone out and just get to where I'm going. But this looks fun to drive. This looks like you're driving it around a small community. It's not that much of a hassle to actually drive. Why is autonomy important?

• 1:10:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, for us, like where we're starting with the autonomy stack is actually kind of like the inverse of what you'd expect when you get from a Tesla or anywhere else, right? So like, yeah, we like to say chip is fun to drive, but parking never is. So this is not like FSD in a Tesla. In fact, like when we do bring autonomy eventually to the vehicle, we'll be, you know, unsupervised in the way that we do it.

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:11:19Speaker 04

  But what we're doing today is we can take a chip, you can pull up to, you know, a busy place in West Hollywood and skip the valet line, hop right out. Chip will go off, take care of himself.

• 1:11:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:11:36Speaker 04

  Take care of the parking, show up when you tell him to come back, either from the calendar or as you speak to him or text you, let you know when he's on the way back there.

• 1:11:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:43Speaker 04

  And pick you up exactly where you want to be picked up, unlike a Waymo, right? Which like will make you walk a long distance. And the way that we're able to achieve this, by the way, today is with direct remote control of humans, because there's actually a data gap there.

• 1:11:56John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is there also an easier regulatory approval path? Because if the, if it's only autonomous or remotely controlled while there's no humans in the car, it's safer. Does that make it easier to get to market faster?

• 1:12:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. So it's definitely an easier path. And for us, like we think a very responsible path. Cause like when we run our, you know, we're going to be running our pilot in Miami this winter. A great market. That's where we're based. And we're, you know, our early customers are going to have effectively, you know, virtually unlimited access to it and they'll hop out and we'll take that vehicle. We'll drive it. In fact, we'll drive it at lower speeds on less busy roads, et cetera. And so it's just a way for us to validate and bring kind of that safety level up. And then eventually we'll drive with people and we'll move from direct remote control to, you know, full autonomy here over time. Yeah.

• 1:12:45John Coogan?

  That makes sense. Jordy, sorry.

• 1:12:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that use case is cool. I think like, think about like, you have a driver.

• 1:12:52John Coogan?

  Surfboard off at the beach.

• 1:12:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that, that, but like, yeah, there's something, one of the biggest benefits of like having a driver is just being able to be like, oh, I need to run to the grocery store, pull up outside, go, go straight in, even if the parking lot is like crazy or they are, you're just going in, coming out. You're not thinking about it. To me, that's the most underrated.

• 1:13:10John Coogan?

  The number of people that have drivers, but not, they don't order delivery groceries is like very small, but yes.

• 1:13:18Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I'm just, I'm just saying like, to me, that's been a, in, in my experience, one of the most underrated parts. And that's something that you expect the Tesla to be doing soon, but can even make sense in this form factor. When originally we saw the launch video and we were like, why would we need, why would I want autonomous driving for something that I'm just driving to the beach or whatever?

• 1:13:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, I mean, it's so you can go to the beach for like, if you're living in Manhattan Beach, where golf carts are really popular.

• 1:13:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:47Speaker 04

  You know, it's small, it's easy to park, but there's still no parking. So in that context, you can take your friends there, get dropped off and you just go back to home and come back. And, you know, also like, really what we're trying to do here is bring this like fun robotic, you know, private driver to everybody. It's why it talks and it can go pick up the groceries, right? And go there and you can do curbside pickup and you know, the front opens. And because the confused target employee comes out, the vehicle can talk and say, hey, put it in there. We're good to go. Do that. Yeah. Exactly.

• 1:14:16Jordi Hays?

  What do you think, what do you think, like, it feels like there's been an explosion of like just new vehicle startups. You have Slate, you have you guys, you have Amble. Like clearly a bunch of smart people at the same time were like, why is there not this super specialized vehicle? Right? Slate was like, it's going after a everyday pickup truck. Ambles, you know, focus on resorts, right? You guys are focused on everyday consumers and like, in these sort of like, my view, like coastal hubs, at least like, at least that's where I see you guys getting a lot of traction. But like, what, what, is it snowballing now? Should we expect a lot more vehicles?

• 1:15:00Jordi Hays?

  Is there some like, is it just the advancements of batteries and declining costs? Like, what do you think is driving it?

• 1:15:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I think it's really interesting, like when consumer behavior changes in such a major way, right? Especially around cars. And like, you know, in a lot of ways, I think like the American love affair with the car is dying. Everything's too expensive. And increasingly too, like we're reurbanizing. And even in places when it's.

• 1:15:26Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, I was gonna, I was gonna hit the boob.

• 1:15:31Speaker 04

  There we go.

• 1:15:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, no, I, I think you're, I think you're right. And the, the, the one, some,

• 1:15:39Jordi Hays?

  even you can see manufacturers now, all the, all the cars started looking the same 10 years ago. Less and less was like a, like, nobody goes in there like, oh, I need a new daily. I'm going to get a yellow car, right? Whereas historically, like somebody would be like, I need a new car. I'm going to get like a yellow Volkswagen Beetle or something like that. And now it's all like converging around like the Model 3 format, right? Or even John was complaining the other day, cause like he's in the market for a Tesla. And he's like, I wish that they still made the S. Like that's the one I want.

• 1:16:10John Coogan?

  Or a convertible or a full-size SUV. It feels like there's a, it's almost like a barbell effect. Like they're, they're, in the heyday of the love, love affair with the American car, it was you got one car that was an expression of everything you needed. So maybe four doors, but also some power and a supercharged V8. But now the, the standard like pod that just takes you to work is so bland and standard that maybe there's room for a second car that is just completely on the other side of the barbell.

• 1:16:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I think for us, I mean, there's a lot of variables here to like how we think about this. And a large part of this is like, how do you, you know, almost like bought on a budget, like our car, like our cars are like our fashion and they reflect who we are. But today, if you want to buy a new car, that's cool. That's out of reach for the majority of people. And so that's part of what we're trying to provide here and make it, you know, from design, but also like add a lot of function that supports kind of lifestyles that we live today. Cause like, we are living closer to home, you know, today. And so it's, I think that's a large impact as well.

• 1:17:19John Coogan?

  Do you think this can slot in, it says $15,000 estimated MSRP for four seats. Top speed 25 miles an hour, 100 miles of range per charge.

• 1:17:29Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to test the top speed.

• 1:17:33Jordi Hays?

  I'll, I'll be the one to decide what the top speed of the chip is.

• 1:17:37John Coogan?

  I mean, that does feel like it would be, if you are truly a budget conscious buyer who's looking for a commuter.

• 1:17:45Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:17:45John Coogan?

  15,000, you'd go with like used Honda Civic instead of this. But is there something where the math actually does work out with more charging places where this does become a commuter? Because 25 miles an hour is just like too slow for anyone who's hopping on the freeway for a daily commute, right?

• 1:18:01Speaker 04

  Sure. But we're in LA, right? And you know, we've driven this.

• 1:18:05Speaker 04

  You know, like.

• 1:18:05John Coogan?

  That's so sad, but that is like the future. Like the traffic's so bad. Yeah. You really do go 25 miles an hour.

• 1:18:11Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I think he's just saying like, you can like very easily in LA, you can just stay off of freeways.

• 1:18:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:18:18Jordi Hays?

  And it's not even necessarily slower.

• 1:18:22Speaker 04

  Well, yeah. And that's the thing. It's like, if you're, you know, it's 5:30 on a Wednesday, right? And you're coming from downtown back to Venice, you know, like you can be in a car that can do zero to 60 in 2.5 seconds, sitting on the 10, but you're still going to get there in the same amount of time. It's just going to be a lot more fun.

• 1:18:39Jordi Hays?

  You're like betting that there's going to be wall-to-wall traffic and then you get your chip out on the freeway and you're like, whoa, like, yeah, a lot less traffic than I was expecting.

• 1:18:47John Coogan?

  Forgot it was the World Cup and there's no one on the road.

• 1:18:51Speaker 04

  But yeah, for us, like, it's like, the ICP that we're really focused on is like, I built this for myself. Like, I like to say that like golf carts like escaped golf communities during the pandemic. And the growth area has been like young families in Sunbelt regions. And so for me, I live in Miami. I live in Edgewater, basically downtown area. I'm not going to put my kids into a golf cart. It's not safe, but I like the idea.

• 1:19:11John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:19:12Speaker 04

  This is built to facilitate that. And so that's kind of where we're starting in terms of the function, the price point.

• 1:19:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the golf cart companies have been so asleep at the wheel. Like they, like when it comes to customization, it's like, oh, you want to customize your cart? You want to order this cart? And it's like, you have one thing that you can decide and it's the color. And there's like six options, right? And you can't even, you can't really change much of anything. And I, and I went down, I was excited to see you guys come up and, and, and Amble and some of these other companies. Because I was like, I've just talked to all these legacy manufacturers and they clearly don't care to try to innovate or try to allow this like specialization, customization. And for a car like this, which is like this, like weekend, you know, this like weekend vehicle,

• 1:20:01Jordi Hays?

  you want it to be like really expressive and fun. Cause you know, you're not thinking, I'm going to just be like driving to the office and parking and coming back. It's like, it is the place that you want to express yourself.

• 1:20:14John Coogan?

  Paul Graham had this back and forth with the creator of Friend, Avi Schiffman, who's working on an AI device. And the question was, how do you counter position against Apple? If you come up with a new electronic device, a consumer electronic device, Apple's going to do what they did to Pebble with the Apple Watch, where they launched something with the Apple Design Language. And Paul Graham's advice was, do something so bold with your design and your aesthetic that Apple can't copy you. And this feels like a little bit of this. This feels like very antithetical to what other car companies are doing, such that you could not be fast followed, even if the technology is on the same supply chain

• 1:20:55John Coogan?

  loosely. This would be such a brand change for most car companies, they couldn't jump in. Is that conscious? Is that accidental? What's the thought behind all of the customization?

• 1:21:06Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I think Ferrari might have knocked with the Luce a little bit. They might have gotten a little inspired with the Luce. Been like, hey, Chip looks pretty good. We should make it. No, it's

• 1:21:17John Coogan?

  You're gonna chop the top on that thing.

• 1:21:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, look, I think Apple tried. They missed.

• 1:21:25John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, the car.

• 1:21:26Speaker 04

  Right? They missed.

• 1:21:27John Coogan?

  No, they're coming back, right? Aren't they announcing a

• 1:21:29Speaker 04

  They're playing Apple Maps into the 40.

• 1:21:32John Coogan?

  And then they're also launching a livery for like a hypercar or like a Le Mans car? Doesn't count.

• 1:21:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. And you had that in like, you know, Ford had a product in this category like 25 years ago.

• 1:21:44John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:21:45Speaker 04

  Ford think there's one that like actually like is around Venice all the time still. And like, but you know, these guys are like, you look at all of these companies and like they're all tied to products, I think that are huge moneymakers, but like create problems for innovation there, right? For them. And so this is an area where it'll be like very hard for them to kind of come in and innovate and think about it. And you have to approach engineering differently. You have to approach sales differently and marketing. Like we're like frankly, like in a lot of ways, I think of us more like a sneaker and culture company than I do about like a car company in the way that we are selling, marketing, engaging our community, et cetera. And I think that's gonna be really hard for anybody, certainly any of the incumbents to do today.

• 1:22:24Jordi Hays?

  For sure.

• 1:22:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:22:26Jordi Hays?

  Should we go check it out?

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta go check it out. Tyler, what was that car that I was showing you earlier today? The 1991? We gotta pull that up at some point. But I want your reaction to that car, because it's a fantastic one. But let's go take a look at the actual vehicle. You brought it here today.

• 1:22:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:22:43John Coogan?

  Let's go see.

• 1:22:44Speaker 04

  Let's see it.

• 1:22:45John Coogan?

  Do we have everything set up? Are we good to go? You got the camera? Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna switch over so we can go take a tour of a real chip motor. And you got me on the laugh. Thank you for coming along with us, Jordy. Wanna hop up? Take us through it. Where are we going?

• 1:22:59Speaker 04

  Right out here.

• 1:23:00John Coogan?

  Let's see. Outside the Ultra Dome. Second car review we've done.

• 1:23:05Speaker 04

  We are.

• 1:23:06John Coogan?

  Whoa, here we go. Wait, it's, it's driving itself. There we go.

• 1:23:10Speaker 04

  What's up, Chip?

• 1:23:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Hi, I'm Chip.

• 1:23:13John Coogan?

  Look at this thing.

• 1:23:14Joe Weisenthal?

  Hey, Jordy. Hey, Joe.

• 1:23:15John Coogan?

  This is amazing.

• 1:23:16Joe Weisenthal?

  You see it?

• 1:23:17John Coogan?

  It's a lot taller than I thought it would be. Wow.

• 1:23:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like, golf carts are actually really tall. So like, the typical golf cart that people have is actually like taller than every single trim of an F-150.

• 1:23:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:23:29Speaker 04

  And so what happens here is, there's a couple things. So you actually want the deck here and your safety structure to be tall, because you need to interact with trucks on the road.

• 1:23:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:38Speaker 04

  But also, while this looks big, it's a very efficiently packaged size. It's four feet 11, four feet 11 wide. It's about 30 and a half feet long.

• 1:23:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:45Speaker 04

  And we've designed this, you'll notice, like, you're sitting like a dining room table, basically, right? You're not going to be in this thing typically for more than 45 minutes.

• 1:23:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:23:52Speaker 04

  So we want to create something that's really comfortable, and that's going to actually have a ton of space. And so actually, in production here, we're moving the second row back a bit. And everything is going to enable, you know, for me, I got, I still have two kids in mirror facing car seats that fit in here well. And so the design exercise like started from like inside out. There's a boxiness to it that's necessary, because for us, like function does like drive form.

• 1:24:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:15Speaker 04

  And we also like leaned into it, because I don't want people to look at this and think that it's a car that can go 60 miles an hour, right? And so the funkiness is something that we've embraced.

• 1:24:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it feels to me out of the Pixar universe.

• 1:24:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24:29Jordi Hays?

  That was intentional?

• 1:24:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, for me, I mean, I grew up going to Disney World and like, I really like, I grew up at like, the world of tomorrow, and I love kind of the future that the Jetsons created. And we've leaned into like, a little bit of this kind of retro, kind of futuristic aesthetic. Because I want to see this positive vision of the future come true. It feels increasingly like we're maybe headed toward a Blade Runner future. And that's not what I want to see.

• 1:24:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I like that. I like that. What was the process for actually building this one? Because obviously, this is sort of hand-built at this point.

• 1:25:00Speaker 04

  This is hand-built, yeah.

• 1:25:01John Coogan?

  How much of the supply chain, are you building on something as a demo unit? Are you using others, something else as a platform? Well, like, I imagine that, like, you know, you don't have your own leather tannery yet.

• 1:25:11Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:25:12John Coogan?

  What, how did this come together? How long did it take to build? Who built it?

• 1:25:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:17John Coogan?

  I'm curious about this process.

• 1:25:18Speaker 04

  This, you know, prototype has been built over the last 18 months, and taken with and optimized a lot. And so we actually imported a small, like, Chinese EV

• 1:25:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:25:29Speaker 04

  that we wanted to learn from and

• 1:25:30John Coogan?

  Tear down.

• 1:25:31Speaker 04

  tore it down.

• 1:25:32John Coogan?

  Distilled it?

• 1:25:33Speaker 04

  Distilled it, exactly. Tore it down to the chassis, ended up replacing like the entire drivetrain, the battery, the whole thing. And so like, it's kind of over time, most of that's like disappeared, yeah. And they allowed us to kind of learn a lot from, I mean, frankly, they've been doing these small EVs for a long time.

• 1:25:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:48Speaker 04

  And that was really, really good for us. And so, yeah, that kind of exploration has gone on for 18 months. And now we should have production in 10 units in hand in the next like four months or so.

• 1:25:58John Coogan?

  And then there are manufacturers for like these types of bench seats that you can go to at this point and pull those together?

• 1:26:03Speaker 04

  So actually, our VP of Vehicle Engineering came to us from Canoe. He was a vehicle inspector there. But he thankfully started his career in seating and restraints. And so he's like, and by the way, in a lot of ways, seating is one of the harder kind of industrial design problems for this. Like, there's so much nuance to doing it well. And there's a lot that gets improved from here. And so we're having actually like optional heating and cooling in here, too. There's also like optional HVAC. And so that's a huge, a huge part of our focus.

• 1:26:28Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so you'll have a covered version of it as well?

• 1:26:31Speaker 04

  Yep. Yeah, we have a soft top that it will come with. We have hard doors. We have an enclosure here. We have HVAC as always an accessory. But like, it's, you know, even if you're going to be operating this in a cold place, you know, like, we took this to Aspen and people absolutely loved it. Or if you're in Seattle where it's raining, like, if it's a nice day, you should be able to top off. So our designs, we like to say

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  Driving this home from dinner in a winter storm would be electric.

• 1:26:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:26:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, if you're gonna do, if you're gonna make a mountain version, you gotta get chains, I guess.

• 1:26:59Speaker 04

  Yep. Well, it's all wheel drive. We use four in-wheel motors as well. So it has a lot of torque. So like, it has no issue in the snow.

• 1:27:06Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 1:27:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:08Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:27:09John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:27:10Jordi Hays?

  Very, very cool. I want one.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:15Speaker 04

  I can make that happen.

• 1:27:16John Coogan?

  What is this track back here for?

• 1:27:17Speaker 04

  This is an L-track. So this is an option here. This is the standard kind of accessory you'll see in truck beds.

• 1:27:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:27:23Speaker 04

  This is actually also the same that they use to like, hold down airplane seats there. So this is an accessory. You can do tie downs and things like that. We have, so these seats actually fold down into a truck bed, too.

• 1:27:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:27:36Speaker 04

  So you can use it for plywood. And so we designed it that way. So like, the thing is people like, end up wanting to buy this kind of vehicle, because it's like the ideal vehicle to go to the beach. But it ends up happening, and you've seen this behavior is like, they're like, oh, this is functional. They'll go pick up the groceries. They'll go to Costco. They'll take the kids to school. And we want to take that kind of like feeling of a vehicle that really empowers you and feels like very light and turn it up to 11. And so it's a Swiss Army knife that you can do, and you can pick and choose what you want. You know, if you're a surfer, you can have your surfboard rack here. We'll have like, a hand shower for like, getting sand off and just go heavily into the accessory ecosystem.

• 1:28:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's cool. It's a very way to differentiate. What does it take to keep this thing street legal? It feels like right on the fringe, right on the edge. You have mirrors but no doors. Like, what, what else is like the bare minimum to make sure that you're always street legal?

• 1:28:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. So the category that we're currently operating in is called a low speed vehicle. That's what a street legal golf cart is. It's FMVSS 500.

• 1:28:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:28:32Speaker 04

  You have to

• 1:28:33Jordi Hays?

  And that's because of the top, you have to cap the top speed?

• 1:28:36Speaker 04

  Top speed, yep. And you can ride, drive on roads 35 miles per hour and under. So you can ride, you know, basically every surface road here in Los Angeles, you can go on.

• 1:28:44John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:28:45Speaker 04

  And then, yeah, you have to have seatbelts. You have to follow lighting requirements. You have to have a backup camera and things like that. But frankly, like, we actually think that the category is like severely underregulated. Like, golf carts are death traps. And there's a lot of like, really, really bad stories that you hear.

• 1:28:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:28:58Speaker 04

  And for us, like, we're doing a lot to not only, you know, exceed but push the boundaries here. And so for us, we are doing, designing this for a crash at like the appropriate speed that we're operating at. We're putting in features that we're going to be deploying for active safety, leveraging the cameras, and everything else that we have in there, too. So

• 1:29:18Jordi Hays?

  Underregulated.

• 1:29:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:20Jordi Hays?

  Gonna be opening up the Chip Washington office soon and pushing for

• 1:29:22John Coogan?

  Total and complete lockdown. So this is basically a one on one.

• 1:29:29Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:29:30John Coogan?

  Is it street legal? Did you have to tow it here? Can you get something like this approved provisionally for a demo drive so that you can test it on streets? Or is this something that you have to go through a whole process and they all have to be street legal before?

• 1:29:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, this is street legal. And we've registered. Yeah, there's like a custom build there that we've been able to do. Yeah. We typically tow it when we come from like West LA to here. Just, we can drive it.

• 1:29:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:53Speaker 04

  But I don't like to think about how much this vehicle is worth, because we can't get insured for the value. We had to start up with a prototype.

• 1:30:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. You will not find it under rider. So yeah, we take good care of it.

• 1:30:04John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. Thank you so much.

• 1:30:06Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's impressive how solid it feels, even as a prototype.

• 1:30:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:30:10Jordi Hays?

  Like, it feels like ready to, ready to ship.

• 1:30:12Speaker 04

  Well, we'd love to get you guys, you know, later. We can take it for a drive.

• 1:30:15Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait.

• 1:30:16Speaker 04

  Really.

• 1:30:17John Coogan?

  Is there anything we can see in here? Is this open or?

• 1:30:21Speaker 04

  Not right now. Here, this is the part in the front. But we have a little bit of wiring. We've got it up there right now. But yeah. But yeah, that's where you'll see the TV in the front here.

• 1:30:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:30Speaker 04

  And then it has, gonna have a huge space that you're gonna fit.

• 1:30:32John Coogan?

  You gotta miniaturize stuff.

• 1:30:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And we have, you know, my goal is, I got, I have a double stroller that will fit in there that I can keep in here at all times. Yeah.

• 1:30:41John Coogan?

  Very cool. No, I love it. I love it. Well, thank you so much.

• 1:30:44Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:30:45John Coogan?

  Jordy, anything else?

• 1:30:47Jordi Hays?

  No, this is amazing.

• 1:30:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:49Jordi Hays?

  Awesome progress.

• 1:30:50John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for sharing to us.

• 1:30:51Speaker 04

  Appreciate it.

• 1:30:52Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming by.

• 1:30:53John Coogan?

  Have a great day.

• 1:30:55Speaker 04

  Cheers, guys.

• 1:30:56John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:30:57Jordi Hays?

  See ya.

• 1:30:58John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:31:00Jordi Hays?

  Friendly little guy.

• 1:31:09John Coogan?

  Back to the show. We have a couple more guests coming by. Tyler, did you find the car that I was talking about yesterday? Can we send that?

• 1:31:19Jordi Hays?

  It's the Nissan Figaro.

• 1:31:21John Coogan?

  The Nissan Figaro, right? Nissan Figaro. Can we pull up a picture of that? I like the way this one looks. And this is just like for sale on Cars and Bids right now, this old thing.

• 1:31:33Jordi Hays?

  What a cool vehicle. It's so, I'm so glad that consumers are getting options because wildly different design decisions than Amble, which obviously launched right at the same time. Amble is going for like the very low tech route, like the most simple possible vehicle. Like they're not even really selling, I think, a screen in it.

• 1:31:56John Coogan?

  You like that?

• 1:31:58Jordi Hays?

  I like that. I love that.

• 1:31:59John Coogan?

  Nissan Figaro?

• 1:32:00Jordi Hays?

  I love it.

• 1:32:02Jordi Hays?

  Whereas Chip is going for really creating like a consumer electronic product in many ways.

• 1:32:10John Coogan?

  Tyler, do you want to send a link to the car that you were looking at picking up earlier? I think it was a little bit of an older car. I want to get Jordy's review of whether or not you should pull the trigger on this car. Have you ever owned an old car?

• 1:32:27Jordi Hays?

  Not since college.

• 1:32:30John Coogan?

  Because, yeah, what do they call it? Vintage or retro? I don't know. You go further back. Yeah, it's really a classic car.

• 1:32:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. So if we can pull this up, this is from early 20th century, 1922 Chevrolet.

• 1:32:46John Coogan?

  Oh, it's pre-war? I thought you were going post-war.

• 1:32:50Speaker 02

  There's a few options.

• 1:32:51John Coogan?

  Tyler's thinking about getting that.

• 1:32:52Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa.

• 1:32:54John Coogan?

  Don't you think this is...

• 1:32:55Jordi Hays?

  I mean, but why not just go for something horse drawn? Like, if you're going to go this far back, why not go 20 years prior and go horse drawn?

• 1:33:04John Coogan?

  Who would have thought that this car would be put out of business by horses? Because, yeah, if you're going to go, a horse is less maintenance than this thing.

• 1:33:12John Coogan?

  It's over for the, what is this, Model A, Model T? Something like that?

• 1:33:16Speaker 02

  Well, it's not Ford, so.

• 1:33:17John Coogan?

  Oh, it's not Ford? Okay.

• 1:33:18Speaker 02

  Chevrolet, 490 Touring is what it's called.

• 1:33:23Jordi Hays?

  I mean, they kind of nailed the design.

• 1:33:25John Coogan?

  It's beautiful.

• 1:33:26Jordi Hays?

  They made the perfect car. And then ever since then, we've been trying to get back to this.

• 1:33:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think it's wildly illegal to design a car like this. I don't think you could, even if you modernized everything.

• 1:33:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we don't even know how.

• 1:33:38John Coogan?

  But we do know how to tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it.

• 1:33:51John Coogan?

  Adam Hunt, researcher at Cambridge University, has a PhD in evolutionary psychiatry. He said he's recently flipped from being bullish to bearish about AI. He says he's updating his bearishness to be more solidly bearish. Early thoughts and his reasoning laid out here. The whole, "It turns out if you keep training and scaling the models more, they develop broad new capabilities and lots of domains thesis was wrong. Sorry, Demis." "The recent batch of models haven't gotten more general. They've gotten less general. This is the most obvious fact that their language outputs have gotten much worse in comparison to EG03. If they were gaining generalist capacities, we would expect them to be describing their work in ever more graceful and comprehensive prose."

• 1:34:37John Coogan?

  And I don't know if that's that accurate. I mean, you hear about like claudish and like the little languages that emerge from the models to be more token considerate. And so there is an evolution of language there, but I sort of take his points that it feels like, it feels very much like the spikes are getting spikier. And if you scroll down, you can pull up this chart. So Thomas Poirot had put out this mainstream AGI thesis, this idea that there's spiky intelligence. It starts, if you zoom in on the top left there, you'll see the circle where there's tasks that AI can do. And a human is better at every single task.

• 1:35:17John Coogan?

  Then the AI is helping me in some tasks means that there's these little spikes where the AI is maybe 80% as good as you. So it's somewhat helpful, but there's other areas where it's useless. Then all of a sudden, you scroll over and the AI has a jagged frontier. Sometimes it's amazing, sometimes it's dumb. And then the final stage is, wow, the AI is unbelievably intelligent, but for some reason it fails at X. And then AGI is when it's still spiky, but every possible point on that blurry blob is beyond the human capabilities. And so it is generally intelligent, even while remaining spiky. Now, if you scroll down, this individual has a different story that he is playing out.

• 1:36:01John Coogan?

  AI is a fun toy, then it's helping me do some tasks, has a jagged frontier. But then, if you go over, he's saying, "You're going to get crazy, crazy spikes." While the actual frontier broadly sort of stays within that human circle. And then at the final stage, you have this like extreme strength in a few domains like coding and math, but it's weaker in many other areas. And he claims that through the process of optimizing for coding and cybersecurity in these specific business use cases, you might actually shrink the broad capabilities. But Tyler over there thinks he knows better than the PhD in evolutionary psychiatry from Cambridge University.

• 1:36:44John Coogan?

  No, we were debating this earlier, but give me your pushback because you think that this is maybe too soon to call this or not exactly.

• 1:36:51Speaker 02

  I'm not saying that it's like not correct, but like, I think if we want to like make models really good at language or common sense or social reasoning, like it seems pretty clear to me that like right now we could do that if we wanted.

• 1:37:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:04Speaker 02

  Like all of the recent advancements are because like, we like want a really good coding model so we can make the model like really good at coding. And it's not clear that like, it's impossible to make, like, yeah, maybe it's true that the methods we're using right now to make models better don't apply like equally to all kind of types of capabilities. But it like, there's a reason that like the models aren't really good at social reasoning right now. It's because like, it seems like social reasoning is not that valuable for a model.

• 1:37:37Jordi Hays?

  Even writing, it's like, look at some of the most iconic like exchanges in business history. You're never even like, never like, oh, well, when Steve emailed the Adobe CEO, his prose wasn't absolutely electric. It was just like, what did it actually say? And so I think it's possible that like incredible writing just isn't valuable enough to...

• 1:38:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I, so I agree with you that there's a world where like every task needs to be hill climbed. There's some debate on the timeline today about chess bench. So Gary Marcus has taken a little bit of a victory lap, saying, "AGI, smarter than the smartest humans? My ass." Says Kasparov, peak rating 2851, could probably, probably could have crushed the best commercial language models in chess when he was seven years old. And so this graph of chess bench shows that GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Preview are all around just north of 1,000 Elo,

• 1:38:48John Coogan?

  which is still impressive. It's crazy, but it's not by any means superhuman. And, but, but like every time someone points out something where it's like the models are bad at this, it does seem like there's a very quick cycle of like, let's make them good at that.

• 1:39:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Also, like, I think it was Amjad that was talking about this. He basically took an LLM and he said, like, "Help me make a chess bot." And then it was like, became superhuman. So like, if the model can just do the thing, like, yeah, maybe it's the model doing it? Or is it the model writing code that then does the thing? It's kind of the same thing.

• 1:39:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at a certain point...

• 1:39:27Speaker 02

  It's using tools to...

• 1:39:27John Coogan?

  Well, then at a certain point, a really good model would just be like, "I'm going to go download Stockfish and just run the actual chess engine." Like, I don't need...

• 1:39:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, that seems fine to me. I don't...

• 1:39:37John Coogan?

  I just think that when people say the model is generally intelligent, they're hoping that it's just like a natural...

• 1:39:45Speaker 02

  Like they're implying that chess is like indicative of some other cognitive ability, right? Because clearly the chess is not the actual thing that matters because the chess can just download Stockfish.

• 1:39:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I don't know. Anyway, fun stuff. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. I really like the dog one. It's great. Anyway, we've been keeping Stanley Tang from DoorDash waiting for far too long. He's a co-founder and chief product officer. Stanley, welcome back to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:40:20Speaker 05

  Hey, how are you, John? Jordy?

• 1:40:22Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:40:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, good to see you.

• 1:40:24John Coogan?

  I want to get the update. I want to get the news.

• 1:40:26Jordi Hays?

  On a big day.

• 1:40:27John Coogan?

  I sort of, I also want to know your take on this idea. I don't know if you were listening, but this idea that LLMs and AI models are so incredible and yet they're underperforming at chess, on this chess bench. How are you, what is your overall frame for thinking about progress in AI? The intelligence, the spikiness of these models? Because I imagine that that flows through what you will do with a harness or with a new initiative and what you will just wait for the model to naturally get better at.

• 1:40:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I feel like we're going through one of the most exciting phases in kind of the tech industry. I think AI is going to be huge. I think the models are only going to keep getting better and better. I mean, I spent a lot of time thinking through how do you apply AI, not just in the LM world, but seeing all the stuff that's coming out of the AI LM world and bringing that to the physical world.

• 1:41:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:20Speaker 05

  And I think that's probably going to be the next frontier.

• 1:41:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:24Speaker 05

  Like robotics, physical AI, drones, et cetera. And honestly, like, a lot of the things, the reason why you're seeing like the Waymos that are happening, the Dot Robots that we announced last year, the drones, a lot of these, it's all part of the same revolution. It's these AI models getting better and better. And in the moment, you sort of flip from kind of this classical heuristics approach to now this AI ML learned approach. That's when all these robotics started working too. And so I think it's, things are just going to keep getting better and better. I think what you see now is probably the dumbest version of what you ever see.

• 1:42:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. So give us the overview of DoorDash Air. And then I want to know how AI is accelerating the deployment of that program, how it's integrated into the actual vehicles and the drones and the business broadly. But just set the table for us on DoorDash.

• 1:42:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, we're really excited to announce DoorDash Air today. It's our in-house drone delivery program. It's the same team that's built behind DoorDash Dot. It's built as part of our DoorDash Labs group. And I think the big milestone we announced today is that we officially got our FAA Part 135 certification. So essentially, it's our air carrier certification. It's the same certification that actually, whenever you charter a corporate jet, you have to get a Part 135. And with that, it means we are now officially legal to do drone deliveries commercially in the US.

• 1:43:00Speaker 05

  We're the eighth company to get the Part 135 for drone delivery. So we're really excited to bring drone deliveries to the DoorDash marketplace.

• 1:43:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, this feels AI accelerated because if we were talking five years ago, eight years ago, 10 years ago, and like the discussion was around launching sidewalk robots or drones, the or would be very important there, I imagine. And it feels like this year it flipped to and very quickly. And is that because the team is accelerated with coding agents and AI? Or is it just that the opportunity is so big and your company is bigger that you can really? I know it's one team, but I imagine the team can be very big now. But what's actually enabled you to move so quickly here?

• 1:43:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it's a combination of a bunch of things all coming together. I think certainly the AI piece, the models are getting better and better.

• 1:44:01Speaker 05

  Things that weren't possible five years ago all of a sudden. Now the Dot Robots can now handle it, drones can do it. I think the second is the hardware as well, just hardware getting better, better. This investment, because of the AI revolution, there's so much money now being invested in things like compute. Like, again, like five, eight years ago, we didn't have things like the Nvidia Thor chips and things that could actually run these powerful AI models. There's a lot of investment going behind that. And obviously now with robotics and physical AI being a thing, like a lot of investment going behind the hardware itself as well, like the drones, the components, the supply chain.

• 1:44:45Speaker 05

  And then last piece, of course, is the operational piece as well. Like, obviously, we've actually been, you know, we started DoorDash Labs almost eight years ago. It took us a while to just even figure out the operational piece. And I think that's the other big thing a lot of people don't realize is with something like drone deliveries, it's not just putting a aircraft out there. A lot of what we spent the past few years working on is also thinking through what does the end-to-end stack, the end-to-end infrastructure looks like? Like, how does a drone actually plug in to the DoorDash network? Like, what does the loading infrastructure at a merchant look like? How does a merchant handoff look like?

• 1:45:26Speaker 05

  How do you route a drone order, a Dot Robot versus a human dasher? How do you even know an order is drone eligible or not? Like, how do you build? So we have to build, we have to build a device called Smart Scale, where we give out to these merchants where you have to weigh the device so that you know it's actually, you know, there's weight limitations on these drones that's actually a drone eligible order. And so we have to build all that. I mean, a drone is a, a drone itself is not particularly useful if it's not connected to our marketplace, if it's not connected to our customer, to our merchant. And we spent a lot of time working on that. So I think it's, you got to do all of the above. I think it's a confluence of a lot of these things all coming together.

• 1:46:07Speaker 05

  That's what we feel like is, which makes it the kind of the perfect moment to do DoorDash Air.

• 1:46:14John Coogan?

  So there's a lot of AI, I imagine, accelerating the, just the development of the SaaS products that you need to create the ecosystem, actually run the drone program. Then there's probably some AI assisted hardware development, everything from procurement, sourcing, parts, the supply chain. But then what does the AI actually look like on the drone? You can't probably bring an NBL 72 with you. So what is that, what does that look like? What does the autonomy stack look like on a modern drone these days?

• 1:46:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, we'll have more to share about the drone itself. But I mean, you can imagine, it's just even things like, like how does a drone? Like, I think, like thinking through, like, for example, the pickup experience or the merchant, like how does a drone actually, the way it docks at a drive-through standalone store is very different than a strip mall, is very different than like a rooftop. Like, it's like, how do you build kind of the perception system to kind of handle these various merchant pickup infrastructure? Again, that's part of going back to like, you got to think about the system end-to-end. And then on the consumer side, again, it's like, there's a lot of like nuances.

• 1:47:29Speaker 05

  Like, how do you know like the exact coordinate to drop the package? It's not as simple as, oh, just take the lat long from Google Maps and okay, that's where you drop it. Because that might be over someone's like car or someone's like building, or it might be like wires or et cetera. So it's like, how do you build the perception system? And then, of course, like while it's actually traveling the air, like how do you handle deconfliction with other drones? I mean, and for example, in airlines, like the way you do it is like every airline sort of has this thing called, it's called ADS-B, which essentially you think of it as like, it's Find My Friends, but for airplanes. So I'm a pilot, so I actually kind of deal this all day.

• 1:48:13Speaker 05

  But with drones, you can't have that. So it's like, it's like, so what is, what becomes a system to do aircraft deconfliction? There's a lot of, again, there's a lot of nuances that goes into building something like DoorDash Air. And again, it's not just getting a drone just to fly. That's like the easy part. It's how do you build kind of the end-to-end system, actually commercialize drone delivery, manage the fleet, handle pickup, drop off, deconfliction, merchant loading, routing, which areas, what orders are good for drones, et cetera. It's that whole system. And that's, honestly, that's probably more of what we've built as part of DoorDash Air. In addition, of course, we got to build the aircraft as well to get our FAA Part 135 certification.

• 1:48:55John Coogan?

  Tell me the story of DoorDash's original go-to-market, your selection of markets, because you took a pretty contrarian stance, if I remember. And then I want to know about if you're thinking of applying that same philosophy to the rollout of DoorDash Air.

• 1:49:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, we started DoorDash 13 years ago. It was literally a Stanford food delivery project. It was called Paul Altodelivery.com back then. A PDF menu and a Google voice number. We're delivering cars out of our own cars, you know, like Tony had a Honda Accord. We were just driving around delivering orange hummus. So we've definitely come a long way, but I think the principle remains the same. It always starts like, I think, yeah, this is, I think this is a common trap a lot of these companies make is, instead of saying, oh, like, let's just build something cool, a cool technology for the sake of that, you always have to start with what's the use case? What's the customer use case? What do these deliveries look like?

• 1:49:59Speaker 05

  Especially with DoorDash, I think, again, people kind of have this misconception that, like, delivery is very nuanced. It's not like, you know, we do over 3 billion deliveries a day. It's not like you just, like all 3 billion, all 3 billion deliveries look different. You don't just like plop a drone. That number is so mind-blowing.

• 1:50:20John Coogan?

  It's crazy. But specifically, I seem to remember, I don't know if it was investors or just commentators, but people were saying like, it is crazy that DoorDash started in a suburb. Everyone assumed that delivery services and like Uber, for example, would start in like the highest density because it's the lowest distance to go. It worked out. What is unique about where DoorDash Air you think might be successful? Because people might say San Francisco, they're techies. They might say New York, but there's different considerations around tall buildings and regulations. Like, where should we see this flourish early? Where's the last place it's going to go?

• 1:51:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it's, in a way, it's kind of similar to DoorDash. Like DoorDash thrived in the suburbs and I kind of see the same roadmap here, drones. It's like, yeah, you start with the use case, where the delivery is happening. And does this use case fit into a form factor? And turns out drones do really well in suburbs because, one, you can travel, you know, like, it's great for deliveries where things are further out, where perhaps there's not a straight line you can just get to, or maybe more rural areas where it's less desirable for human dashers to take an order. But and also, of course, like drones don't have to sit through stoplights and things like that. And then of course, single-family homes are like, in suburbs are like the perfect use case

• 1:51:42Speaker 05

  for dropping off a drone package, like right in front of our, you know, front porch or backyard. So again, it's like.

• 1:51:51Speaker 05

  I think you always want to start with the use cases and kind of figure out like, okay, like, these are the deliveries are really good for drone deliveries, but then these are deliveries are really good for our dot robots. And then the remaining, maybe it's a complicated grocery order with like, you have to go up steps or high rises. You still want humans to do that. So again, it's all about like picking and choosing. There's no two deliveries across our three billion deliveries that look the same. And it's all about how do you, you know, how do you build kind of this multimodal system, right? And that's kind of the future we believe in is kind of this multimodal platform.

• 1:52:24Jordi Hays?

  How, what does range look like for DoorDash Air over time? Like if I have a favorite restaurant that's 30 miles away, am I going to be able to get that delivered hot?

• 1:52:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, maybe one day. I mean, but so far, like, like, most of our deliveries tend to fall between kind of the three to six miles, maybe it's up to 10 miles. And if you can kind of get a, you know, a coffee delivered in under 15 minutes, when before it might have taken 45 minutes or an hour like that, that's like a, that would be a killer use case. Again, it's like, what are the use cases we can unlock that is possible with drones that you couldn't do with someone that's in a car?

• 1:53:06John Coogan?

  You're thinking about ordering French laundry to Malibu? Is that what you're trying to do, Jordi?

• 1:53:13Jordi Hays?

  I'm actually looking forward to getting into the 500 mile range.

• 1:53:16John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:53:19Jordi Hays?

  I want you to break the sound barrier, is what I'm asking for.

• 1:53:22John Coogan?

  Over time, I'm sure you'll get there. Well, congratulations.

• 1:53:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, really, really cool.

• 1:53:26John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:53:29Speaker 05

  Thanks, John.

• 1:53:30John Coogan?

  Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:53:31Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:53:31John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And we got Amjad Masad from Replit, the CEO, the founder. You know him, you love him. He's been on the show multiple times. And he's back. How are you doing? Look at that. What we got on the shirt. Oh, it's looking there. Wow, royalty.

• 1:53:55Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's, that's vintage.

• 1:53:58John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 1:54:01Amjad Masad?

  My pleasure. I haven't seen you in a while.

• 1:54:03John Coogan?

  It's been way too long. Yeah, I mean, we went to your office, we recorded an episode in your, I mean, most people don't know this probably because there's just a blank wall in the background, but we recorded an episode in your office and we didn't actually get you on the show that day because we were just hanging out. But I'm so glad that we have you here. Catch us up to speed on what's happening in Replit world, the new, the new launches, the AI-powered Creative Suite. And then I have a million other questions to ask you.

• 1:54:27Amjad Masad?

  Awesome. Yeah, so a few things are happening. One is, you might have seen, we signed this big letter with Nvidia and Microsoft around open models. We're really excited about open models. Look, for two years, Anthropic was the undisputed king of coding agents. And, and right now, actually, it's not just GPT that's caught up, but also the open source models. Kimi K3 is an amazing model. It's at maybe quarter the price, sometimes even better. And it's also a fantastic design model. So we have this new, what's that?

• 1:55:04John Coogan?

  I saw the Arena leaderboard, we were talking to Joe Weisenthal about this an hour ago, that, that Kimi K3 really outperformed Spiky on front end, which is, we were talking about how it changes the conversation, because if it spiked on bioweapon development, that would be a different conversation. But it's, if we wanted to spike anywhere, it, front end is probably a good place for it to spike.

• 1:55:27Amjad Masad?

  Absolutely, absolutely. It generates beautiful aesthetics. It's the first model that I see that is actually trying to reason about design, trying to like, if you read the traces, that's the cool thing about open models, they kind of show you the traces. Now, those models don't show you the traces anymore. It thinks about page structure and layout and aesthetics and things like that. And so Replit Design, for one, is the first product on the market that's purely multimodal. We kind of, we eval every model on the first of the earth. Some of them are good at SVG, others are good at animation, others are good at CSS. And so we created an environment that brings up the best of these models. You can also select the model

• 1:56:08Amjad Masad?

  you like. You want to design purely with Kimi? Go ahead and do that. And so there's no other place on the internet where you could do that. And, and kind of the motivation behind that is, you know, we've been on a now multi-year crusade against slop. We don't want to be purveyors of slop on the internet, right? I mean, we're all inundated with tech slop. I mean, LinkedIn is sort of unusable at this point, but also all the apps kind of look the same.

• 1:56:32Jordi Hays?

  That's good because I haven't logged in in months.

• 1:56:36Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, it's, it's not worth it, honestly. And so we're like, okay, how can we make it so that, look, we think people largely have taste. It's hard for them to express how they want designs to look. And so we came up with this concept we're calling Ambient Intelligence, where you can design by point and click. And the way that happens is, you sort of, we, we, well, first of all, we give you a mood board. We integrated with Mobbin. It's typically a paid service. We're providing it for free. And so you can find inspirations from around the internet, from the best UI UX websites and landing pages. You can drag and drop them

• 1:57:16Amjad Masad?

  into the canvas. Then when you click on an artifact on the canvas, it gives you options to continue the design. It's like, let's design another page, let's look at different vibes, let's generate different variations. And so I'm someone who, I think I have a good taste. I know what looks beautiful, but I can't express it. I can't say, you know, it should be brutal style, whatever. I don't have the language. And so by just pointing and clicking and arriving at, at really cool designs, like I'm working with an architect on our new office, I, I kind of know intuitively what I want my office to look like, but I can't go and Pinterest and search or whatever. So I went to Replit, you know, put an initial prompt for things I like, create a kind of a mood board I like, point and click, point and click.

• 1:58:02Amjad Masad?

  An hour later, I have something that exactly that I would like, I would never in a hundred years be able to express it. So it's really for the first time, it's designed for non-designers.

• 1:58:12Jordi Hays?

  That's, sometimes you don't, sometimes you don't have words for it, but you also just need to see every possible direction, and then you can really hone in. And to me, that's the, it's so crazy to me. I used to go, when I was like a teenager, I'd go on the freelance platforms and I'd do like a $5 project to make a logo. And I'd have a bunch of people do it. I'd spend whatever, I'd spend 25, 30 bucks on it. And I was so excited to get all these different kind of variations. And now it's actually as simple as a single prompt. You can just put in the prompt, make me 30 versions, you know, don't just make a logo, make 30 versions of the logo. So.

• 1:58:50Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, it's not even a prompt. It's, it's two clicks on, on Replit. And we're actually, we talk a lot of internally about the post-promting world. Like, I think we're entering in a period where prompting is no longer needed. Some people will still do it, but it's not just in design. I'm sure you're kind of following the narrative around loops, where you specify a high level intent, and then agents prompt other agents. And so this is something we're increasingly focused on because, again, people are really not good at prompting. It is like, you know, we went from coding, which is a very low level kind of task, to prompting

• 1:59:35Amjad Masad?

  higher level, but it's still somewhat low level from how people think. The way people think is they, they specify an intent, like, I want to, I want my, you know, sales leads to get responses in five minutes.

• 1:59:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:59:50Amjad Masad?

  I don't want to say, I want the routing to be that way. And that way, agents should be able to figure it out.

• 1:59:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about?

• 1:59:56Jordi Hays?

  John wanted to like a large kind of lever, like a slot machine, not have to prompt anymore, just pull the lever, you know?

• 2:00:04Amjad Masad?

  Yes.

• 2:00:05Jordi Hays?

  If you could use that to start a new loop, that would be a very satisfying user experience.

• 2:00:11John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about?

• 2:00:12Amjad Masad?

  It'll be like these Vegas casinos where all.

• 2:00:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:00:15John Coogan?

  Game. How are you thinking about game development? There's been some very impressive web-based games. There's been some acceleration in what I'm seeing on Steam with little niche games. And it feels like that's a place where you're particularly just well set up. And I feel like a lot of, I don't, I don't want to characterize the, the Replit community too precisely because it's huge, but it feels like there's a lot of folks who want to build a business, they go to Reddit, they want to build a tool, they go to Replit. If they want to build a game, they might be going there too. They probably already are, but it feels like that's the next thing to really fall, really get polished, really get deployed

• 2:00:59John Coogan?

  into the mobile app stores, into Unreal Engine. And there's more harness there and partnerships that I could imagine you creating a really amazing product around.

• 2:01:10Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, I will say. Last week has been a huge week for AI for game developments, right? I mean, for a long time, we actually spent some time about a year and a half ago, building a game dev stack, which still exists on Replit, but it wasn't very good. The models were really bad at 3D reasoning.

• 2:01:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:01:30Amjad Masad?

  And I think between Kimi K3, Opus 5 now, they're starting to actually be good at 3D.

• 2:01:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:37Amjad Masad?

  And so it's something that we're paying attention to. There's actually already a large, you know, community of people who do a lot of 3D and games things on Replit. We recently launched a CAD integration.

• 2:01:52John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:01:53Amjad Masad?

  So you can like make real physical products and we actually have some folks in the office that designed something on Replit and actually went and produced it.

• 2:02:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:02Amjad Masad?

  And so it's not just games. I think it'll start affecting robotics, it'll start affecting kind of physical industrial design. And so it's a very exciting time and we're paying attention to that.

• 2:02:14John Coogan?

  What's been the biggest source of growth for you this year? There's a lot of companies that are doing, you know, direct response, advertising, influencer marketing, channel partnerships. There's so many different ways, just SEO, GEO. What stuck out to you as a particular, a particularly valuable marketing strategy that's grown the platform?

• 2:02:38Amjad Masad?

  We do all of the above. I think we have one of the best performing UGC ads right now.

• 2:02:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:44Amjad Masad?

  I don't know if you saw that, but we have like a bunch of, a bunch of videos where people, there's like one that's really going viral right now where, where typically a woman is getting like an app from Replit, like a Replit built app about like, you know, asking her out on a date.

• 2:03:04John Coogan?

  Oh, I think I have seen this, yeah.

• 2:03:06Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, 25 million views and all of that. And then now a lot of our competitors are copying it. But the biggest source of growth has been enterprise.

• 2:03:15John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:03:16Amjad Masad?

  And I think Replit differentiates in many ways, but one of the ways we differentiate is because we've been building the platform for a long time, we, we actually have really deep stack. Like everything, when you buy Replit, you get a hosting environment, deployment environment, security agent. You get admin controls, you get all this enterprise stuff. And we've been growing really fast in enterprise because, you know, vibe coding has been kind of proven out. And now we've went from kind of the consumer excitement that happened last year and now real adoption in enterprise affecting real impact on how people actually work.

• 2:04:00Amjad Masad?

  And the really cool thing is, you know, when we talk to our enterprise customers, it's like, this is the most impactful tool, more so than the coworkers of the world where you're sort of like, you're doing the same thing. You're sitting in Excel or whatever. It's saving you 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there. Uh, this is actually automating entire workflows where it's like, I used to do this for 20 hours a week.

• 2:04:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:26Amjad Masad?

  Now I built an app and I do it for zero hours a week.

• 2:04:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:29Amjad Masad?

  And so you can automate entire work and we have a bunch of products and launches coming up around this idea of loops and really automating work coming, coming soon. And so enterprise has been the largest growing segment for us. We're still growing consumer, consumer and all of that.

• 2:04:46John Coogan?

  Are enterprises asking you to sort of act as a de facto router? Because, because you're model agnostic and you understand the different pros and cons. There's a world where if I have a workforce that's pretty deeply integrated into the Replit ecosystem, I could either go to you or maybe even enforce a rule that says, hey, for front end, we were using Kimi because it's cheaper and this meets our standards. So at this company, we want you to.

• 2:05:16Amjad Masad?

  Asking for that.

• 2:05:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:05:17Amjad Masad?

  And they're asking for that granular control on a user and a group level. So I want my designers to be on Kimi, I want my front end to be on that.

• 2:05:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:27Amjad Masad?

  Uh, they want that deeper controls. And what we're seeing from enterprise customers is that they're saying, like, look, I know the big ad labs are trying to lock me into these big contracts where I'm just using them. And there's this whole token maxing thing that was happening and everyone was sort of burnt by it. And there's like really deep mistrust, uh, because also a lot of the big AI products, um, don't put guardrails around the product. And so a lot of employees, you know, you, you have instances where employees are spending, like one employee could spend like $10,000, $20,000 a week, like a month doing that. Um, and so they're asking us for control, controls on models, on spend for routing.

• 2:06:12Amjad Masad?

  Um, but also I think more importantly is, um, I think the guardrails that we build into Replit. So when you're doing design, you're in design mode, the agent is a designer. It doesn't go off, veer off and do a lot of random things. When you're building an app, we have the guardrails around building apps. And even with that model routing, Replit is a lot more outcome focused and actually cheaper. And we see a lot of companies now ripping out, um, you know, say Claude, they gave everyone Claude, Claude, right?

• 2:06:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:49Amjad Masad?

  And they're like, okay, my engineers are great at it, but actually people in legal and finance, they're burning tokens for no reason.

• 2:06:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:56Amjad Masad?

  So let me, let me implement Replit and let them be focused on a certain task.

• 2:07:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, there's a remarkable story in the chat. Uh, somebody in the chat says that two years ago, they were in 50, they were $50,000 in debt. They would meet business owners at restaurants and build them products in real time with Replit. And that got them out of crushing debt. I'm sure you hear those stories all the time. Uh, what, what?

• 2:07:17Jordi Hays?

  White pill.

• 2:07:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, total white pill. Thank you for your service. Uh, what advice do you have for, uh, young people who are nervous about, uh, the job market, AI? How can they take advantage?

• 2:07:30Amjad Masad?

  Look, the AI narrative has been totally warped. Like, you know, the, the politicians, you know, the, just the discussion and debate in our country has been about job loss. It's been about, you know, spend, it's been about all the stuff. Stories like this, someone who was $50,000 in debt, discovered Replit and got out of debt and perhaps is making more money than that, those stories are not getting told. And I understand like, you know, negative headlines get, get more attention.

• 2:07:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:07:59Amjad Masad?

  I think there's a perverse incentive for some of the players in this space to generate the negative headlines because you can create regulations coming out of that. And we know the story of regulatory capture that's been happening. It's a story as old as capitalism, right? Um, and so kind of my advice to people is a kind of a, first of all, mindset shift. AI is incredibly empowering. Look, even for me, you could say, oh, it's easy for you to say, you've been always like a technical programmer guy. I've never trained a machine learning model. Now I'm training models with, with Replit. I'm going to Replit agent. I actually trained a chess model that's on its way to become the best chess LLM model.

• 2:08:42Amjad Masad?

  It's actually already beating, you know, state of the art GPT models and these kind of models. And so I feel huge empowerment and to me, it's like, fuck, there's nothing I could not do. Like I can, I was thinking like this math thing that's happening. I've never done math. I want to go find some proof, you know? It would like bio.

• 2:09:02Jordi Hays?

  Conjecture max.

• 2:09:03Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, conjecture max. Do you know there's this video where, um, PDD, I guess, I guess, uh, you know, he did not be named now, but there's this video where, um, he's, um, he closes a deal, he's on the phone, he closes a deal. He, uh, he hangs up the phone. He's like, what, what can't you do, I can do. And he gets.

• 2:09:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's unfortunately, it's unfortunate that he is, that is him in the video because it's a great, it's a great, uh, it's a great video.

• 2:09:34John Coogan?

  It's a great video, okay.

• 2:09:35Amjad Masad?

  It's a great video and I feel the same way with AI. It's like, what else, what's out there? Let me go, let me go do it.

• 2:09:42John Coogan?

  The world is your oyster.

• 2:09:44Amjad Masad?

  I think that mindset is important.

• 2:09:45John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, breaking it down.

• 2:09:48Jordi Hays?

  Awesome to, awesome to see you.

• 2:09:50John Coogan?

  Always great seeing you.

• 2:09:51Amjad Masad?

  Good to see you guys.

• 2:09:51Jordi Hays?

  Always crushing.

• 2:09:52John Coogan?

  Good rest.

• 2:09:53Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, dude.

• 2:09:53John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you.

• 2:09:56Jordi Hays?

  Someone should use AI to take that video of he who shall not be named and put Amjad in the video.

• 2:10:03John Coogan?

  That might be worse, I don't know.

• 2:10:06John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 2:10:13John Coogan?

  Just do it. That, there's soundboarders. Fantastic today. Uh, we have Adam Cohen from Weave, the co-founder and CEO, coming on the show with an amazing fundraising news. Adam, how you doing?

• 2:10:28Speaker 07

  Good, we're in good spirits. We're, uh, yeah, we, we signed with Standard, so we're all happy.

• 2:10:33John Coogan?

  What's behind you? What's behind you? You got a?

• 2:10:35Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, what do you got there?

• 2:10:36John Coogan?

  Oh, the gongs are going viral.

• 2:10:39Jordi Hays?

  Why don't you guys hit it in unison?

• 2:10:40Speaker 07

  It's actually matching gong.

• 2:10:41John Coogan?

  Yes, tell us, how much did you raise?

• 2:10:44Speaker 07

  Uh, we raised 13 and a half million, thanks to Standard.

• 2:10:52Jordi Hays?

  All right. Quick history on the company.

• 2:10:54John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:10:55Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, then we'll get, we can get more into the round and where you're going.

• 2:11:00Speaker 07

  Yeah. So we, uh, we started this company just under two years ago. We went through Y C at the start of last year. The idea originally would just measure software engineering. Very quickly this turned into measuring A I because that was the, you know, kind of took over. And what we realized ahead of the curve, we've always kind of been working with the like, uh, token maxers of the world is figuring out once Opus four, seven, four, eight came out. People realized they didn't need the best models for every task and specifically for coding. This is like 80% of A I spend. So we built the world's best prompt router. Um, it reads your prompt, uh, and actually ships it to the right model at the cheapest cost. And this is what standards like super excited about, and we are starting to, uh, yeah, go crazy with.

• 2:11:42John Coogan?

  Uh, what, who, who do you sell to? Do you sell to the C E O, the C F O, the C T O?

• 2:11:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, we sell to the C T O, um, CFOs, CEOs obviously love us, but like we're only focused on engineering. We think that's like still the majority of where A I spend is happening. Um, so we're just focused on like every engineering task. As opposed to like, yeah, a lot of the other routers are trying to do some other things or either app level routing, we're just code routing.

• 2:12:08John Coogan?

  Okay. And then, yeah, how, how do you differentiate for the router?

• 2:12:12Jordi Hays?

  Break, break that down. App, app level routing, that's somebody that's integrating a router into their product so that behind the scenes, it's just deciding it for the user. This is more of purely this sort of enterprise focus where teams are doing various tasks or they have agents running and you're sitting in between them and the models to run all of those processes as efficiently as possible.

• 2:12:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's exactly like the app level routing. For us, what we're doing is like anybody using Claude code or Codex, uh, plugs in our router. It sits directly in their current workflow, adds like next to no latency, um, and it'll route to whatever the most cost efficient model is. So we host all the open source models, uh, in the U S. Um, they prompt, it routes to the right spot, uh, and they save up to, well, some companies up to 80%.

• 2:13:04John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Uh, how, what is, uh, customer acquisition like? Is this, uh, you know, like person to person at the highest level, you're going after enterprise, uh, C T Os, so you're, uh, meeting them, talking to them, or is there like a self-serve option for like small businesses? Because it feels like a lot of small businesses, they might be starting to use A I, starting to use coding, but a lot of them are on a $200 plan. They're getting great value. They don't really, they're not really in the like token maxing is going to, you know, make or break my business this quarter.

• 2:13:36Speaker 07

  Exactly. Yeah. So like all the max plans, people still don't care that much. Um, we have some startups spending like five, 10 K per engineer per month. We're in that bucket. But like startups still don't care that much. So it's mostly like enterprises that we're targeting. We work with like developer experience or developer productivity teams. They're kind of owning this now. They're like optimization layer.

• 2:13:56John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:13:57Jordi Hays?

  Is it fair to say that something like 15 minutes could save you up to 20% on your token bill?

• 2:14:05Speaker 07

  Absolutely.

• 2:14:06John Coogan?

  What, what, what's that tag? Is that Geico or something?

• 2:14:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:09John Coogan?

  Uh, Geico.

• 2:14:09Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, bad joke, bad joke. Couldn't help myself.

• 2:14:13John Coogan?

  Well, so, so what is your, what, what does your actual team look like? Are you building in San Francisco post Y C?

• 2:14:19Speaker 07

  Ours, um, it's the only way for, for what we're doing. Um, yeah, we're all in person, uh, six, you know, nine, nine, six kind of feel here. Teams really fired up. They all want to join the video, but we, we weren't sure how far to, uh, push this.

• 2:14:33Jordi Hays?

  They could come say, they could just come say hi if they're, if they're hanging out.

• 2:14:37John Coogan?

  Why not?

• 2:14:37Jordi Hays?

  But what, what, what, nine, nine is not even enough. You don't, you're not even that differentiated if you're doing nine, nine, six these days, I feel like.

• 2:14:45John Coogan?

  There's an opportunity.

• 2:14:46Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's, you've got companies that are, you know, putting in seven, sometimes eight.

• 2:14:50John Coogan?

  Eight days a week.

• 2:14:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:52John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 2:14:52Speaker 07

  There you go. That's why you have to jump out of a plane to attract talent. This is, uh, the best part of the videos. We've had like an influx of people that are interested, uh, I think just because I did my fears of acting was scarier than the, uh, uh, jumping out of a plane.

• 2:15:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. I talked to, I heard one entrepreneur who said he changed manipulated time. He has, he, every day is three days. His first day goes from six A M. to noon. His second day goes from noon to six P M. Then he works a third day from six P M.

• 2:15:21Jordi Hays?

  Stack that up over, over a day.

• 2:15:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's going to crush you.

• 2:15:24Jordi Hays?

  Or a month.

• 2:15:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. And he's not crazy for saying it. You're crazy.

• 2:15:30Jordi Hays?

  Sorry. We're having, we're having too much fun. It feels, feel, feel like a Friday over here.

• 2:15:36Jordi Hays?

  What are you, where are you, where are you going from here? Are you going to keep the team small?

• 2:15:40Speaker 07

  Yeah. So there's about 16 of us. Um, we are hiring very aggressively. Uh, yeah, we need some like incredible, uh, engineers and A E's to just scale up. We are swamped. Um, I feel bad. Our kind of like campaign to our account executive and to our go-to-market team is, uh, death to, to Jerry. Jerry's our A E and he is, uh, too busy with too many meetings. So, um, we want to make him as tired as possible. And now we need a second.

• 2:16:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is there going to be, uh, like long tail demand for fine tuning of, uh, of open source models? From your customer base, like if they're doing something really routine, uh, typically that's been the domain of like the Neo Labs. And I don't know if that's the right term for your company, but it feels like you could slide there over time. Is that an ambition?

• 2:16:29Speaker 07

  Absolutely. So actually we already have like a, a early version of this where you can give feedback, uh, in the router, uh, to the router based on what model you're choosing. Um, or what model it chooses, you just easily pass feedback and it's going to learn from this. So we do this both as like a company, we have R L built in, but now we're exploring what this looks like at a per org basis.

• 2:16:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. So if the, if the company is just printing money, they can be like, when I ask for the weather, I do want you to use the frontier intelligence for that. No, uh, that's probably the default thing is like, you know, people are just hammering off prompts for everything, routing around the obvious solutions is the benefit. Makes a ton of sense. Well, congratulations. Uh, don't break that gong all too soon. You gotta warm them up. We've learned this the hard way.

• 2:17:12Jordi Hays?

  Every time we, we hit our gong, somebody comments and says.

• 2:17:16John Coogan?

  You didn't warm it up.

• 2:17:17Jordi Hays?

  Warm it up.

• 2:17:18John Coogan?

  You didn't warm it up.

• 2:17:18Jordi Hays?

  But so far.

• 2:17:20John Coogan?

  May the gong.

• 2:17:21Jordi Hays?

  So good for us.

• 2:17:21John Coogan?

  Ring loud and often for your business. Good luck and thank you so much for coming on the show to break it down.

• 2:17:26Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 2:17:27John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Uh, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with A I agents. Big news out of the Fed. Uh, the Fed holds rate steady, but three officials voted for a rate increase. The rate has been unchanged in, in this July meeting. The split shows pressure building inside the central bank to act on inflation. Two months after Chairman Kevin Warsh took over and the Dow skids 1,100 points as investors worry about Fed next steps. They're thinking that there might be a rate hike in the, uh, in reaction to inflation, of course, uh, somewhat driven by energy prices, oil prices, oil is spiking again.

• 2:18:13John Coogan?

  And so lots of tricky news for the, uh, global economy, but fortunately the economy chugs on and the economy is strong. So.

• 2:18:22Jordi Hays?

  I believe in it.

• 2:18:23John Coogan?

  I believe in it too. Never, never black pill. Dwarash Patel certainly not black pilling. Gavin Baker, uh, quote tweeted Dwarash's, uh, post that predicted, uh, lab revenues and the trillions very shortly. Uh, Gavin Baker says, I see of a series of fairly wild thoughts from Dwarash. I thought I was bullish, but even I am not assuming that the price to rent compute continues to go up. I will say that I am in Silicon Valley this week and Dwarash is capturing the zeitgeist. Net-net, public markets would probably be trading differently if they saw the OpenAI anthropic Grok cursor and open source numbers over the last six weeks, because everything is growing.

• 2:19:04John Coogan?

  Even in you, you, there's so much horse race around, oh, open source is going to come and grow. And it's like, well, sometimes open source comes and grows and everything else grows too. And that's what we've seen, uh, throughout the whole deep sea saga when the lab revenues grew a ton, even though open source was big.

• 2:19:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's a comment here that I think is on the nose. Jay Capital says timeline is very interesting. All private A I companies have their best six weeks while retail A I slash semis have their worst six weeks.

• 2:19:29John Coogan?

  Very, very interesting.

• 2:19:30Jordi Hays?

  Disconnect there.

• 2:19:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, one of them, uh, uh, S K Hynek's, uh, $64 billion in quarterly profit. It was a disappointment for chip investors and S K Hynek's fell 10% despite record results powered by the A I boom. The, the, the profit increase was incredible. I think the, uh, the, they, they grew profit over 500%, something like that. Uh, and still the stock traded down because expectations are so high. Everything's priced to perfection. In other news, HBO Max is launching HBO Max Shorts for those who don't have the attention span to watch an episode of TV.

• 2:20:09John Coogan?

  It's a mobile feature designed for users to watch iconic and memorial scenes from the HBO library in a vertical and scrollable feed. This is already happening on Instagram and TikTok. You see a lot of movie clips, just great moments, and it actually is great content. So I can understand why they're trying to own a piece of that.

• 2:20:25Jordi Hays?

  You gotta get the Jeffrey Katzenberg apology form.

• 2:20:28John Coogan?

  Oh, for sure. Yeah, for sure. Uh, but yeah, uh, High Yield Harry captures it pretty well. Watching society become too cooked even to watch TV episode. And this is from Idiocracy, Mike Judge's, uh, one of his best works, the creator of Sil, HBO Silicon Valley, actually, who will now be available in short form because you will be able to watch short clips from, uh, from HBO Silicon Valley on HBO Max Shorts. You'll be able to see the, uh, the, I don't know, all, all the iconic moments from Silicon Valley when they're hanging out on the roof of Google or whatever the Google equivalent is.

• 2:21:05John Coogan?

  Gavin Belson's company. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning into T B P N. We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And sign up for our newsletter at T B P N dot com. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 2:21:20Jordi Hays?

  Love you.

• 2:21:20John Coogan?

  Goodbye. That's the outro. Goodbye.