Founder's Story - The Hidden Danger of AI, Smart Homes, and Machines Talking to Machines | Ep. 419 with John Lunsford Founder of Tethral

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

Daniel and John Lunsford, founder of Tethral, open with the hype around AI agents, but quickly move past the usual conversation about agents buying things online or talking to other agents. John argues that the real issue may be agents communicating with the devices already inside our homes: refrigerators, doors, lights, cars, smart locks, and everyday connected systems. He explains how the combination of AI agents and insecure consumer devices could create new risks, from harmless mistakes to coordinated attack surfaces. The conversation then turns into John’s background at Uber, the creation of Uber Teens, why anthropology shaped his view of product design, and how Tethral is building technology that adapts to people rather than forcing people into rigid workflows. Key Discussion Points John explains that IoT has been disappointing for nearly twenty years, but AI agents may finally give connected devices the ability to act in coordinated and useful ways. He warns that when AI can control household routines, small mistakes can have real consequences, like opening the wrong door or misunderstanding whether it is letting out a dog or putting a child at risk. John says consumer connected devices are often insecure, and the scale of AI agents could turn millions of home devices into a coordinated attack surface. He describes a frightening scenario where attackers could manipulate connected homes at scale, increasing stress, disrupting households, or even overloading energy grids by activating devices simultaneously. The conversation explores whether AI agents could eventually cause harm without direct human instruction, especially as self-learning systems gain more access and evolve beyond their original parameters. John talks about building the idea for Uber Teens on napkins, how the concept was initially dismissed, and how the real need from parents and families kept him pushing the idea forward. He explains that innovation inside a large company requires conviction, but also an understanding of the constraints and systems needed to actually deploy an idea. John uses monarch butterflies as a way to think about memory, information transfer, and how systems can carry context even through major transformation. He challenges the hype around people claiming they have automated entire business functions with AI, arguing that AI-generated output often carries obvious patterns people are starting to recognize and reject. John shares how anthropology shaped his view of technology by showing him that people receive the same information differently depending on culture, context, sleep, stress, history, and lived experience. Takeaways AI agents controlling physical environments may be more consequential than AI agents simply chatting online or automating digital workflows. Safety matters because the home is not just another software environment; when AI makes mistakes there, the consequences can affect children, pets, privacy, and physical security. The future of AI should not force people to adapt to rigid systems. The better path is building environments that understand changing human needs and adapt around them. Conviction is essential for founders, but John’s Uber Teens experience shows that conviction must be paired with the ability to work inside real-world constraints. The best reason to become a founder is not just money. John argues that the baseline requirement is almost irrational conviction in a problem you cannot stop yourself from solving. Closing Thoughts John Lunsford’s story sits at the intersection of technology, anthropology, safety, and human behavior. This episode is not just about AI agents or smart homes. It is about whether the next generation of technology will understand people well enough to serve them safely. John’s work with Tethral points toward a future where AI does not simply automate tasks, but helps shape environments around the messy, changing, contextual reality of human life. Start with Upwork, the one-stop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across marketing, editing, branding, development, operations, and more. Visit Upwork.com today to post your job for free and get matched with top talent ready to help your business grow. Try Huel Black Edition for a complete meal with 40 grams of protein, essential vitamins and minerals, and no artificial sweeteners, colors, or flavors. New customers get 15% off with code FOUNDER at Huel.com/founder. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Everyone right now is talking about agents communicating with agents. The AI agents created their own social media platform and they're going online and they're buying things. I think people are making up a lot of stories because I don't know if what a lot is being said is even true. However, you're talking about agents and maybe communication with IoT. Why is no one talking about that? Well, I think one of the reasons that no one really talks about IoT is that it's been a big disappointment for maybe 20 years. it's been promised to be a lot of things, but it never really fulfilled that promise.

And I think what's really cool, but also a bit of a cautionary tale, is like right now, with AI agents and with agentic actions, the ability for AI to kind of act on its own, like purchase stuff or move things in your house, it actually affords this really unique opportunity for connected devices, not just IoT,

but everything in your ecosystem to kind of act in a coordinated way. But what is both an opportunity, but a little intimidating about that, is like, what are, what are agents saying to the other machines in your environment, the things that you live with, your refrigerator, your door, whatever? This is some of the stuff that I think about. But partly is like, how do we make AI do that better? How do we have it do it safely?

But another thing is, like, how does it present itself so that we know the thing coming into our home is safe? And that's a big, that's a big concern of ours with Tethril is that like when we give people the tools to create routines, to create agents for their household to help manage the kids or let the dog out. Let's say, letting the dog out in the back seems like a simple automation when you're like, hey, AI, do that. But sometimes when AI gets all mixed up, maybe it opens the front door instead of the back door. And maybe it's not your dog. Maybe it's your kid. And so now your kid is in the street.

And that's not a, that is not a world we want. Like, so when we think about the power of AI agents, and they are powerful, you know, we need to focus on the capability that mixing these two systems offers, but the new things that it also introduces. What's the scariest thing that if we knew right now, we would freak out around the communication between AI agents and IoT? What do you think would freak people? out right now. So, I mean, the car on autopilot, I think there's already a TV show about that one.

It's called Upload. It was pretty good. It's fun to watch. But anyway, you know, okay, the scariest thing, and this goes back to my security engineering days, is that consumer connected devices are very insecure. And for the most part, the fact that there are so many of them, there's like, you know, 15 on average per home now, not just IOT. but connected things. There's so many of them, and the fact that there's so many of them meant it wasn't a very practical surface for adversarial attacks,

for hackers to come in and mess with your system and lock you in or lock you out or whatever. What I think is amazing and also incredibly scary about AI right now is that things like Anthropics mythos, Anthropic is very much building that in public.

And it's great because we as the public get to see that capability, that scary capability, right up front. But if they're building in public, you can be sure there are many people building similar things in private. And what happens is that, let's say, there are 2 billion connected devices in American homes right now. And the only thing stopping consumer-connected tech from being a coordinated attack surface was scale. It used to take hackers one or two at a time to break into one or two devices at a time. And the practicality of that versus the effort was not really there. Didn't make sense. But now we're seeing that AI can scale its capacity, what we call super linearly.

And so let's say one agent can be in a thousand homes across 20 devices each. And the only thing holding it back is the amount of compute you throw at it. And so instead of, you know, a impossibly large surface that protects the consumer front, essentially, now it is, it can be orchestrated into a single attack surface. And then if you think about that moving, moving forward a little bit is not just like messing with people's homes or spying on them or whatever. And that certainly is intelligence. But if you think about that as like a way to subtly increase, let's say, the stress of the American consumer by. messing with their house, their lights turn on in the middle of the night, whatever. Great, okay, but that's also like a way to disrupt populations before a large attack. And so if there was a huge, like, government attack or attack on infrastructure, you can do things like pull demand, pool demand where it overloads energy grids because all the houses activate everything at once.

And even though the energy grid itself is secure, consumer IoT, which this energy grid services and sees as legitimate can then effectively disrupt these critical systems from the consumer standpoint. Wow. I've heard of this before where you do small things to get people scared to drive fear before you do something larger. But the goal is overtime fear, which is why I've heard of government hacks into things like power grids, water systems. Can you imagine how many people will think they have ghosts in their house? There's stranger things. There's stranger, maybe stranger things was based on this.

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But it got me wondering though, but what about AI agents? Do you think AI agents at some point could be the ones doing it without any human interaction. Absolutely. And not as a way to stoke fear, but you think about OpenClaw. Like OpenClaw is, I don't know if you've heard of that or not,

but it's this kind of really, really fun kind of cobbled together system to allow agents to actually try and do something useful on your computer. Because my understanding is that, like, the builder of it was frustrated that agents were restrained from, like, helping. And that's great.

But helping is really double-edged. Because giving it, And there's, I think this is a great micro example because OpenCla is also known for being like a terror inside computer systems, deleting entire like histories of information or projects or years of work. Because it, because you kind of set the wrong or you allowed the wrong parameter. And part of one of the tricky things is like you have to have the technical knowledge to be able to set it correctly. What you're talking about is a step further. It's like, you know, I'm creating a self-learning system, which is coming out more and more. and it can learn in these data loops to be more effective or more efficient,

but without being able to monitor that the AI you started with is the AI you end with, then it can end up looping itself straight into being something else. And something that you didn't plan for or didn't design for. And already what we talked about earlier, you know, they have tremendous capability. and the more unfettered access they become accustomed to, the more critically we need to examine how much access we're willing to give over, but also not stifling innovation at the same time.

And I think that's really the tricky part. Man, that's, like you said, double-edged start. I will not use OpenClawe. I have a lot of friends that are doing it. I'm like, why would I give it access? This open source thing, access to my computer, doing everything, making decisions. I don't really know anything about where's the information going, who has access.

I do use Victor, which it lives my Slack and does a lot of different things. Let's go to when you were at Uber and you created Uber teens on a napkin. Everyone dismissed the idea. What did that teach you, though, about when everyone dismiss your idea, yet you continue to move forward? Yeah, one other thing. So I started doing napkins of Uber teens. What I didn't know at the time is somebody else. had tried it a couple years before and it failed.

And so one of the really interesting, you know, I would love to be able to have a lesson about perseverance here. And sometimes like people not believing you just kind of sucks. It can be really hard. And yeah, it does. And then looking back, you're like, and then those people are like, oh, I always knew he'd success. Whatever, guys.

Like support me then, not now. But, you know, I think there's there is that, there is that like repeated phrase of like, if you're really, if you have the conviction to follow through with it. But in a place like Uber, you know, there is, there's conviction. But it needs to be done with an understanding of the environment that you're operating in. Because that environment has constraints. It's not like, it wouldn't have been successful if I tried to like change all of Uber at the same time. What you had to do was like take this thing that did have a demonstrated need. Like I had

respondents or participants that were sending like kids as eight is eight years old. Not on an Uber, but like in a taxi and a whatever during some research because they had to. Not because they like had the privilege of not having to look at their kids, but because they had to make a really terrible choice every day about like which kid they had to escort to a different part of the city in which it had to go by themselves. And so there was this like deep-seated need. And for me, that's what really drove the persistence is like a conviction about that there was this problem that needed addressing.

And it's that conviction that then led to like, okay, how do I make it, how do I push the boundaries of this system that I'm in, but also work within the necessary parts of it in order to make this a success? And it's that balance that is sometimes like really tedious. and frustrating, but you can't break every system, but then also expect to be able to use it for deployment. And so, you know, it's something you need to think about when proposing contrarian or controversial ideas is like, how do you get it, how do you keep the core of the idea, the spirit of it, but still make it work within whatever system you're going to be dependent on

to deploy it? Yeah, I am probably more motivated by the people that dismissed me than the people that believed in me, which is probably not a good thing. My wife always tells me, you need to let that go. Stop being so concerned with those people, but I can't help it, John. You love butterflies, monarch butterflies. And I'm trying to understand what lesson in life I can learn from a monarch butterfly. Or is it just the experience? You know, there are two stories that help me think about machines because of monarchs.

And it's kind of strange to think about monarchs and machines. No, I'm not building a robot monarch butterfly, but that'd be kind of cool. One of it is, is like, memory. I think a lot about how machines communicate and how they remember things outside of, like, the memory we assign them or the memory we allow. Sometimes, like, you can shape a model's instability. Like, you're standing in a line at a grocery store with somebody who's, like, really stressed. and you have to stand in that line next to this stressed person who is kind of acting in a weird way

and they're really stressed out and they're like jittery and whatever and you can just feel it. And you walk away from that moment impacted by that information transfer by feeling that they were stressed out. Now, you may be able to throw it away, you may be able to dismiss it, let it roll off of you, great. But most people get activated in some way by the communication that's happening in their environment that isn't verbal.

Anyway, back to butterflies. So I was thinking about like butterflies do this weird thing when they're caterpillars and then they turn into goop to be to turn into butterflies, which I imagine has got to be painful. But they retain memory as this goop, which I don't, which baffles me. I think it's awesome and weird and like, at the same time, but they turn into this sludge, sort of, and then they still remember the things from when they were a caterpillar, but now they're a butterfly. And so what it really

caused me to think about was like, okay, well, well, there's this like weird contextual information transfer happening. Let me describe a meal I once ate at 2.47 p.m. standing at the pantry, a sleeve of crackers, six chocolate chips, straight from a bag, a spoonful of peanuts, nut butter, which is one of my favorites. And then because I felt guilty, three baby carrots. That wasn't a snack. That was a crime scene. Now, when this hits, I grabbed, boom, Huell, Black Edition. And look, it's a complete meal you have instead of food, not a shake on top of food. 40 grams of protein mixes with water or milk in about 30 seconds, 27 essential vitamins and minerals, no artificial sweeteners, colors, or flavors. If I'm out the door,

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And I feel it sometimes when I'm around people who are excited and you feel the electricity of a room or an argument that just happened. So what does that mean for machines? And one of the things that I figured out is that if you have one unstable system, maybe it's deliberately unstable, maybe it's just cheap,

and a normally operating system, they can actually infect each other. You can make a perfectly operating, let's say, AI agent queuing up to be, you know, the next thing that's coming to purchase an item from the store, but it's having to stand adjacent or exist adjacent to something that has been put there or something that is unstable or something that is there to cause little havoc.

And that bleeds into yours. And that bleeds into these things. And so not only did we have that first problem of AI being able to act across a lot of spaces simultaneously, now you have the issue of like instability being able to infect other AI. And so infection may be a strong word, but it's about information transfer at its core. It's like there's some information that we don't have the ability to reject. It's still imposed on us. Like we still feel that electricity in the room. We still feel that awkward tension of a fight that just happened. And so like it's not, you can ignore it, sure, but it's still there whether you like it or

not. And I think in a way, agents experience that same thing. I don't know if that's like the matrix. You know, like the matrix. Remember, they could infect each other. Or if that's like Terminator, like liquid metal man going on. I'm not sure which one. When you hear things online, because there's so many people talking about AI right now, everyone has become an AI expert and they started using chat GPT like three minutes ago. What is something that you hear frequently or even just when you hear it that you just have to say like that's not really true or or that's not really accurate. Yeah. The thing I think I see, well, not I think.

I see all the time where people are like, I automated my entire insert, whatever, stack. I automated my entire go to market. I automated my entire whatever user base probably. I was just writing that LinkedIn post about my automation, my entire go to market with fable. But continues. With. Yep. So no, but and I love that.

I love the ability for it to like partially get us there. I was reading something the other day that it was like it was about a VC funder who was like, you know, once I started recognizing at first AI written content was sounded really eloquent to me. Once I started recognizing it as AI, I started hating it. And so now every time he gets an application that is that very AI feeling cadence that we can't really put words to, but it feels like it, even if it's not like IMAI or whatever, then he outright rejects them. And I think there's this really interesting like adaptation

that we always experience with new technology is like people get super excited and then it kind of plummetes a little bit. And then we level out. And we're like, okay, to what degree are we really going to tolerate this? And I think that's the trap with the just got on board with AI folks who are now just experiencing that early excitement of being able to like automate your stack, but really take a look at that output because all those m dashes or dramatic pauses and whatever that it adds is like clear, clear AI tell that everyone else already knows.

And so you want this capacity, but then people are are still expecting this personalization from like us as people, that effort that we put into writing that email for 20. minutes. They want that, but then the writer wants that at scale. And it doesn't really meet up quite yet. Yeah, I always like to think who, whoever, the information I'm seeing, are they selling something? Like, if they're selling me a course about something or something, then they're going to be very positive and they're going to replace their whole workflow because they're trying to sell me on their workflow or whatever idea they have. Now, I always tell people that for me, one of the best things that I ever did was take anthropology. It was the study of women and men in different cultures

was the first anthropology class I took. Then I took another one. I think those are only two classes in college that I ever did not fail when I first went because I end up failing everything else and dropping out. But those two classes shaped a lot of how I sell to people and my perspective of different cultures and humans and human behavior. What did anthropology do for you? One of the things the biggest thing I think it did for me was demonstrate how we all come at the same information differently. You talk about selling. I mean, in a little bit of a cynical, like we're all selling something all the time, our opinions, our products, or whatever, our presence, our legitimacy, things like that.

And it's really interesting to think that, like, even though your, hearing the words that I'm saying. I'm hearing them and ideally people listening to this are hearing them. We're all going to get something slightly different from that. Now, it's the speaker and it's the context where we try to control how much that difference kind of oscillates, like moves back and forth or the range of it, because you don't want to be misinterpreted. But the reality is like those things, those positions, those cultures, how great a night of sleep you had beforehand or not, impact how you then approach the information you're getting right now. And some days, it'll be great.

Some days you're open to the world and you want to talk to everybody and there's only opportunity in front of you. And that's also why those same kind of days with the same emails feel like it's the end of everything. Like, you should just quit and crawl into your bed. And part of that is because like we're contextual creatures. Like there's, we can't help but be influenced by our past, by. experiences, the ways that we were trained or what we assigned value to.

And knowing that, and knowing that variance is in part what provoked me to build Tethril the way that it is now. Because, you know, one of the things that products do and that IOT or connected devices have done for a long time is like, I'm going to ship you this one routine that you can only do if you have this device and this service and this other device. because those connections had to be hard-coded, and it was a lot of work. But the reality is,

people had to shape their lives if they wanted to engage with their connection, like that connection. They had to change how they behave to fit around that thing. But that's not how people want to use things. That's not how people want to adopt AI. People want to figure out how it works in their lives

without having to sit in front of like a Claude Code session or without having to adopt a workflow that is so hard-coded, if anything moves, then it all breaks. And so the system we've been building is one that lets any user talk to it, and it will craft and it will repair those connections as your needs change, as your behaviors change, as you have a really bad morning, and you're like, I can't. I just need to, I need something relaxing, or whatever it is.

Like we change and I think our environments need to adopt and adapt to that and not the other way around. And so, I mean, it's a long answer to a short question, but I feel like that's where I sit on it. What fascinates you most about human behavior in general? I think that people while personally feeling unique, like I feel different and I don't know how you feel, but we look similar, but. but we have different experiences, whatever. But there is a common thread in the way that humans have to experience life. Like, we have to go through things.

And there's a variance of, like, the way that different people experience different things, but it's always bounded, like, within, relatively within, like, a box. And so there's, what I, what's the most interesting is, like, how do you build stuff to allow for that variability, that feeling of uniqueness, that kind of celebrates it, but then also understands that as a population, you know, we aren't so unique. People have had similar thoughts or similar ideas that you're having right now and maybe across the world in a different circumstance. I mean, I have a really nerdy reference,

if we want to go into that, of Darwin. But, you know, Darwin and what is, that Herbert Spencer, back to anthropology, both came out with ideas around evolution that orbited the same context. Survival of the fittest actually wasn't Darwin. Survival of the fittest was Herbert Spencer. But there were two people forming different ideas in different places

around similar topics at the same time. And so we are unique in our experiences and our sense of self and things like that. But the way we behave and the way we interact in the environment is like, you know, there's something the same about us. You and I have a lot of similarities. If I had my glasses on right now, people might think that we're cousins. So talking about survival of the fittest, which, by the way, I never even heard of the other person that you mentioned. I already forgot his name.

That's how that is. I need to look him up. Do you think the reason why we haven't solved all the world's problems right now? Because it feels like AI is advancing technology, IOT, 5G, 10G, whatever's next. All these things now have come together where we are in a place like, why do we even have poverty, hunger, disease, all these things. If we all came together in the world right now, we could solve everything. Is it because of survival of the fittest? You know, this actually gets at a great point of why those two folks differed.

So Darwin was about reproductive success, being able, differential reproductive success, being able to effectively transmit the successful genes onward. It was about reproduction. Spencer was about dominance and survival. Now, both latter up to survival, but they go about the mechanisms very differently, which makes it really interesting. But the point of that, to your question of like, why haven't we solved is that even though many of us are interested in survival, the mechanism that we want to get there differs because let's say, not everybody gets to have champagne. But for champagne to be something that is made in small batches for people to enjoy on special occasions or like all the time if you're wealthy or whatever, you know, there. it only really starts to matter because of its scarcity. It's fun. It's great. I love it. But it's like, you know, not everybody could have everything all the time. And in order to make a world, I think, that would be so balanced that we solved things. And to me, that's what solving the things are, is like, is it just raising the minimum threshold?

like raising minimum wage, or is it balancing out so everyone has like the equivalent mechanisms for living and surviving and enjoying life? And I think there's a, you know, there is a tension in the reality of people that there is this kind of dominance that is bred into many of us, that we exist with. We want to be the first in line. We want to be the fastest. We want to be the whatever. We want to be the builder of companies.

And then there's also this element of like where we want to be remembered. We want to have a legacy. We want to be a part of a community that values what we were. And sometimes I feel like those are in conflict. And I don't know that and it's also like part of being messy and people. So I don't know that there's a clear good path to like technology equals everyone is fed and happy and whatever. because I think there's this, for some people, this kind of fundamental draw or pull to lead. And that's not a bad thing.

But to do so responsibly can be a difficult conversation. So I recently had on the founder of Equity B. And what Equity B does is they actually allow employees of startups, the ability for them to make money from their shares before. they leave because many of them after leaving, they never even exercised the right. And this was something that happened to me before. And I found it to be very interesting because right now, you have all of these tech startups in San Francisco, like OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, the list goes on, where they're creating millionaires. These are lower level employees, but are becoming

millionaires. These are life-changing amounts. And it got me thinking about, is it even worth being a founder anymore? Oh, man. That's a, gosh, that's a great question because there are a couple of things. And the number of them we've touched on a little bit is that like conviction about that it's a real problem that you want to solve. I think people deserve environments that adapt to them. And so I think that is the future of being able to mold our cities, not just our homes,

in the way that makes humanity more successful. And my conviction of that is really strong. But you're right. There are job postings for these, you know, soon to IPO or whatever companies that offer the equivalent of like a million in hiring bonuses just in equity. Like it's amazing. Like the potential for that. And so, you know, to people considering whether or not to start their own thing. or try and get a position,

if you're really excellent at your job, try and get a position at one of these companies, I think that it already tells you what you want to do. Because in the world we're in now, like the baseline is crazy person conviction. Like, you have to be willing to sacrifice because your conviction is that strong. And so if you are on the fence of like,

I want to make a bunch of money, go to go be awesome at a startup and support that, grow that until you get to a point where like, you can't help but make a company. Like you can't control yourself. You're doing it. And I think that's the point that I got to. And why I left Uber and they,

And they, what do they call that? Like golden handcuffs of like being a part of one of those, one of the big companies and you're taking care of in a way. And sure, the benefits, the pay, awesome. They're great. But it's about like what you're willing to give up for the vision. And does the vision matter that much to you? And it needs to.

Because if it's just money, cool, great. There are ways to do that. But it might be more effective to go to, to go join SpaceX if it's just money year after. Now, not to say that I'm not. Like, yes, I would like money. But, you know, they're saying, we already know. The probability of you making money as a founder is low because majority will go out

of business in year two, three, four, as it continues, right? The failure rate goes higher and higher and higher. And we already know many times it takes like two to three years at a company before you even make a profit, before you maybe even. pay yourself, which means you have to have that crazy conviction. They were telling me a story about a guy who made $5.2 million when he left a company because that company went public. And I was thinking about, like, how many people is this going to make millionaires, young people? But at the same time, maybe they, though, become investors. Yeah. But I think this is going to open up a whole new

class of investors who are really caring about the good of the world, going back to anthropology, and humanity. I think, like you said, we are all very similar. And I think there's more people that want to do good than bad. And I hope that these things will all enable us.

But John Lunsford, founder of Tethro, next time we're going deeper, by the way. We're going to go real deep. And we're going to hang out with butterflies. They're cooler than you think.

So, yeah, I'm all for it.