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

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

(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.comPublic - https://public.comCisco - https://www.cisco.comConsole - https://www.console.comCrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.comFigma - https://www.figma.comMongoDB - https://www.mongodb.comNYSE - https://www.nyse.comRailway - https://railway.comShopify - https://www.shopify.comCodex - http://openAI.com/codexFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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The U.S. government has banned Chinese humanoid robots. The U.S. is banning new imports of foreign-made humanoid robots, quadruped robots. Robot dogs. You might know them. Very controversial based on, we got to get general catalyst to weigh in on this. because aren't they anti-robot dog? Wasn't that the whole thing in the video? Maybe I'm just remembering it.

So they must be celebrating. Some platform VCs are very pro-robot dogs. Everyone should be pro-Robot Dog. Anyway, there's nothing wrong with a robot dog, unless it's a geopolitical discussion, and then there's 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 protecting. I know. I know.

That video, I think that you're referring to. Yeah, brutal. Absolutely brutal. We should try to pull it up. We should. Try to find the humanoid kicking a child. Please. Sounds wrong, but I just want to get at the truth.

Yes. I just want the truth. 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 Unitary and Agibot, AGIBot. I'm not sure how you pronounce that. Each delivered. Okay, we have the video of the robot kicking the child. Oh, brutal.

There's another one we're spinning around and gives them sort of like a guy. spinning back fist. But that is crazy. And seeing that, you're kind of like, yeah, I'm up for some protection. Gross negligence. If it's going to protect children, I think it's maybe in the best interest. No, that's not

why this is happening, of course. Deeply wrong. So, 5,000 units were delivered from each unitary and adjibot. 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 U.S.-China relations ahead of a planned September meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. 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 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 unitary. 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 going to cut my inference costs by 80% if I can. And you have all of the various cloud businesses that are already making money. Making money from them. Exactly. Yeah, I'm very different. I saw a bunch of people that were sort of saying that they didn't like this, that it was, you know, protectionist. And that there must have been some American humanoid or robotics companies that were pushing, lobbying for this in D.C. maybe there were, but I personally don't want a hundred million humanoid robots in this country

running around that are not made by a U.S. company, or at least a Western ally. Yeah. Because 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. 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? Or he drew the line on Huawei. 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, cattle, that company ships batteries for all sorts of stuff. 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 Waymo's 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 interesting. Do you think this actually accelerates the American humanoid market?

Does this lead to up rounds from one X and figure because the playing field is more open? Does Tesla meaningfully pull forward their roadmap? 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 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 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 a unitry robot on Walmart. I was asking Tyler about this, because you used to be able to buy a unitary 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 get access to these products, at least for benchmarking,

because they will be competing internationally. Even in a world where Tesla gets to the frontier of humanoid robots with Optimus, and then they're going up against a unitary for a deployment in Germany, like BYD, right? BYD and Tesla compete international. even though 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? Yeah. So far, everything Unitri 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. These will probably spike if they hit cars and bids or bring a trailer. I think you throw a Unitry G1 last edition, final edition, banned. You can't buy it anymore. Who's making bots and bids? Bots and bids. That might be it. Let me tell you about Cisco.

Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlocked seamless real-time experiences. I knew that. Cisco. Really, really raising the bar for podcast ads. Podcast ads. Thank you, Cisco. I was listening to Elon Musk on The Economist.

He sat down with the economist for a long-form interview. There was a clip that went sort of viral for some sharp jabs back in, forth about the media and how the public perceives the media. But the much more interesting substance was about his vision. You're describing the crash out? Yes, 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 Optimist 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 space x x1 where the market for enterprise software was like 22 trillion or something like that and so there is some value there it might make sense from a business perspective but it was less inspiring than rockets less inspiring than self-driving electric cars. Because 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 EV-1. 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 willed that into existence. And it feels the same for humanoid robots where if he could, he

can really go and push that extremely hard and marshal all the capital and do all the difficult things to build 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 GROC stopped training and there were no more XAI LLMs, like there would still be a massive competition between open AI, 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 American humanoid robotics industry feels much more fragile in the sense that if you don't have this massive hammer of capital and will coming to bear, you could just wind up

with it never happening, which I worry about. Yeah, and America needs to figure out how to make billions of robots itself. I do wonder how this is going to play into all the other discussions that are going to happen at that U.S. visit by Chinese leader Xi Jinping. He's scheduled to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump in September. I'm interested to see, are they going to be treating this? Can you see if we can possibly get him on the show? Thank you. I wonder if he.

What if she was just like, yeah, I'm meeting with the president, but I'm also going on a 50 podcast tour while I'm here. Get him on, yeah, there's a bunch of good shows he could do. He should do. Modern wisdom. I want to understand his mindset. Hot ones would be great. I'd love to see him on Hot Ones.

Joe Rogan, of course. I mean, is a no-brainer. That should be kind of the last show. But NELC would be like the obvious choice. Yeah. A lot of world leaders have a history of world leaders have been on there. That's true.

Controversial world leaders. That's true. Why not Siegien Ping? Get him on there. Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that are made 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Let's go to some of the reactions. Today we're launching TOW'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 his company Tau Robotics. He's the founder and CEO, Zee Fellow, Emerging. Ventures fellow. Love that. Fellow maxing. This fellow. And Sean Perry

from my first million says, why did putting clothes on the robot make me like it 15, 5X more? Yeah, it just looks way more human if you don't see the metal. That makes a lot of sense. But are the clothes,

particularly for just the vibes of deploying this product into someone's home and it just makes people feel like, oh, that was a good experience? It does look. look like it has a Wi-Fi router on its head. What are all those bars coming off the top? That's a little disturbing. It looks like Edward Cisorhands or something. Interesting. So they are doing teleop. He says each humanoid is jointly controlled by a human operator and AI.

Interestingly to come out and charge $30 per hour. That feels about what you'd pay for a human. And so it can either do human-level tasks. Yeah. And, you know, clearly they, I would have expected them to come in and say it's like, you know, $5 an hour or something like that, right? Probably not unlimited venture funding. And it's probably better to test the market with something that's actually. Yeah, something on the higher end. Yeah, to see if people will pay. Anyway.

You can scroll down. You can see it in action. It does look so funny with clothes on. Because it kind of looks like it walks like a toddler. Yeah, yeah. But it's like full size. Yeah. Well, yeah, it does look very funny.

I like this. All right, we got one more video. It's doing some dishes. Okay. It gets the soap onto its... It's washing its own hands. Why does it need to do that? Is it get dirty, I guess?

I guess if it gets dirty, he's got to wash its hands. That's pretty cool. You don't want a robot with dirty hands. The purple eyes also do make it look more friendly. That's supposed to those, dude. That is weird. creepier. That looks like yeah, that's

full Terminator mode. Anyway, Dean Ball's going back and forth with Will Minaitis. 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 U.S. government's decision to ban

import of all advanced robotics from all foreign countries? Is Minitis going to write an essay about how the U.S. 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 extra legal whisper campaign to protect the interests of his employer. 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 U.S. straight up banned 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? Your instance, that my analytic prediction was a thinly veiled suggestion continues to be bad faith. 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. One X just seems to be on a good path. Sunday robotics just seems to be on a good path. We've talked to a lot of other companies where the regulatory and competitive landscape has always, it hasn't seemed like it's a driver of financing, right? It's not like, oh, you're waiting for approval or you're waiting for some rule to break. It's like, yeah, at some point in the future, America is going to want an indigenous, like, you know, robotic supply chain. Yeah, the compelling teams have raised anywhere from $100 million 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 I don't, again, I don't think capital is really a constraint here. but I think they've raised their sort of like they've raised their like five rounds let's say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, let me tell you about railway. Railway is the

all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agency to deploy your own own. And more well, Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Mark Zuckerberg is in the Wall Street Journal. Paywald, you got to pay to read

what Mark has to say, but he penned an op-ed and he says the U.S. should excel AI development, not restricted. He says the AI future is for everyone. There's some interesting quotes in here. He's taking shots. He's taking shots of Doom, fear-based marketing. He says, it is surprising that the discourse from many of those who are developing artificial intelligence is so filled with Doom. 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 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. Is he talking about machines of loving grace? I think so. Something like that. 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-pilled. And so I think it's good to sort of reset, you know, where he is. 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 obviously playing an AI, but has a particularly positive vision. And he's sort of throwing down the gauntlet. If you think AI so bad, then stop working at it. Let me work on it.

Let me cook. I don't know. But not too much, like, chatter around this. It did stand in opposition. You know, he's saying 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 I think even some meta researchers signed that as well. But there's like a wide group from Open AI, Anthropic, a bunch of

other firms, Google, that all signed. John Palmer, of course, 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. 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 would be amazing. I would love to watch. I would love that. 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 deep seek 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. Sitting down with a stack of 200 posts and just chit-chatting. I don't know. Maybe it does exist. But when Dwar Keshe 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 comment. just like a guy who talks about everything, including politics. And there's a political reason 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 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 a certain group 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. Chetton over at Benchmark says, Anthropic, very publicly claiming there needs to be a crackdown on distillation is puzzling. It's a $1 trillion dollar company with incredible resources and the distillation attacks at the scale they describe would seem 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. He's asking AI to be able to find a needle in the biggest haystack of all time. Yeah. The world's largest haystack. The final benchmark. Yeah. maybe distill bench is a distillation attack bench is the one that needs to be hill climb next.

But he says the only cost would be giving up the associated API revenue. So you should have 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 of across a lot of different accounts. What do you think about this? Yeah, I mean, detecting distillation seems like a very hard problem. I think if it was trivial, they would have just done it. Yeah, of course.

And also seems like it's not that big of a percentage of their revenue. Like, I'd be surprised if, like, distillation attacks accounted for a large amount of, like, yeah, I don't, I don't think it. I don't think it's meaningful. 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 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 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 basically uploaded to GitHub a game that he made with Opus 5 along with the prompt. And so you can sort of distill on that. Like it's only one data point or, 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 Chetton's point is that you, like, if Anthropic takes Chetton's advice, you wind up giving out the model less frequently and being more closed about it, which was 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 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 an amazing intelligence, an 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 tricky. 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. Apparently over on Facebook marketplace, people are adding a sort of gold aura to their listing. What is this? make you more likely to buy John. Ooh, it does look like a rare drop. Yes. For only $25, picking up this table with that level of aura, it's certainly tempting.

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 the 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 we should try and have Tyler do like a trade a paperclip into a car challenge.

Have you ever seen these? Ryan Trahan. Tyler would be exceptional at that kind of thing. You think you could trade up from something on your desk? I think this would definitely help it. Yeah. Giving it. So basically you have to look for the most unoptimized listings that are undervalued.

And then once you buy them, give them the ultimate glow up on, on, you know, with AI images, put them back up for a higher price, increase your margins, start printing. This is a very Gary V.S. Custle, for sure. Asking it. Okay, where do we want to go next? We have Joe Wise and Tall joining in just one minute. If we have time, we should cover this story coming out of eBay. Let's do it.

Pretty incredible story. eBay pays a couple, $56 million. for its role in cockroach harassment campaign. That is a crazy headline. A couple received threatening deliveries, including funeral wreaths, after criticizing the e-commerce retailer in a blog. So this couple, David and Ena Steiner, were harassed, sounds like for years for 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. So they had an online e-commerce blog called e-commerce 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 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. And so what were they doing? eBay leadership apparently mailed a series of threatening deliveries to the Steiner's home in 2019.

That's crazy. Including a box of live cockroaches, a bloody pig's head mask. I don't even know what that is. Is this a real pig head that's been turned into a mask or is it hopefully just a sort of a Hollywood remake of that? And a funeral wreath. The Steiner's also accused executives of online harassment, including online posts inviting strangers to their house for sex. Also.

Absolutely insane. Who, like, in what, in what world is a company, is a public company like eBay, just getting some criticism, which all companies do? Yeah, like, I'm sorry. Takes it this personally that you're going to try to ruin the lives of two people that are already in your industry. Was the impact of e-commerce bites, blogs showing up in your quarterly reports? Was it actually that damage? 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.

It's absolutely brutal. According to court documents, eBay executives grew increasingly upset by the Steiner's critical coverage of the company in early 2019, leading that, then executive, Devin Wenig, to text another executive that it was time to crush the Steiner's and take her down, referring to Ena. That summer harassment against the Steiner's escalated from threatening messages to delivering items to their home, which also included a book about surviving spousal bereavement. So that's like sort of a death ride, I guess. Yeah. Right? What's also sending adult magazines to neighbors' homes in the husband's name.

So just like completely trying to destroy this couple's life and marriage. eBay employees also traveled to Massachusetts to vandalize the Steiner's home and stock them around their hometown. All the employees involved in the harassment were fired in September 2019, eBay said. The lawsuit was actually started in 2021. Under the settlement, so 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 Wendig will pay $1 million to a free speech charity in Einsteiner's name. This is the ultimate stric hand effect. I never would have heard about eCom. Bites or their criticism of eBay if they hadn't done this. What a mess. Ecommerce Bites. I'm looking up exactly what they said because eBay is, in my opinion, just the most said it and forget it company that's just had the same service for 20 years, basically. But now we're going to get to the bottom of it. E.S. Steiner published the news that this settled on her blog. So eCommerce Bites has been giving

sellers a voice since 1999. So I do think that. It appears just from looking at it very briefly that e-commerce bytes clearly is an important voice in the eBay seller world, but still absolutely insane way to go about doing business. And I'm glad that eBay cleaned up their act in 2019. 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 in it. You never know. Anyway, we have Joe Wexenthal from Bloomberg, Odd Lots. You know him. You love him. He's back on the show. Welcome to the TV's been Ultram. How are you doing?

Joe. It's been too long. I miss you guys. I miss you too. 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?

Ever? No, never. Be honest. Be honest. Maybe you've got one. Have you ever thought about sending them a box of live cockroaches, maybe vandalizing their own? There are actively people mad at Joe right now on Twitter about his latest.

I know, hopefully she's not watching right now, but my co-host Tracy would, 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 it's like, you're going to float this idea. Like, she might at least like spare a few mental cycles.

Maybe she's like, I've thought about doing that. I ran it down, but I know the whole, the backstory with eBay. I try to be the voice of the piece. It's a cautionary tale. You guys don't want to have to, you know, down the line, pay a $50, $60 million settlement. Definitely not, no. Sending a horse head to a former listener for leaving a bad review. We have, that is not on the road map.

No, not at all. I'm trying to think if I can, I don't know if you copy. the story right before this, but basically eBay had to pay a couple $56 million because, like, a bunch of executives 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 seven executives are like becoming criminals. I will die for this company. You know, in 2018, they might have said, oh, that would never be me. 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? and 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. Sometimes one prompt. It's all the takes to lose someone.

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's 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.

Because maybe you don't really know, like, when it comes to Internet vendetta is what could happen. Do you think social media is addictive? Because 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. Yeah. But it's like how I buy food. So it's like, am I addicted to my job?

Like, I don't know. Well, I've thought about the funny you mentioned food, because this is how I justify it, right? I'm probably said it before. This is how I justify it. It's like, oh, it's very important for me to know what people are talking about. This is how I hone them my skills. 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, so you have to like, it's really hard to like, so even with me in 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 that time is not that hard. 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. Also, yeah, there's takes that will never exist. There's there's takes that will never exist, right?

Yeah. The takes that have been lost to history when you were on vacation and we'll never get those takes. That's right. I do feel like, yeah, I do feel like one benefit that you have and I have felt is when you have multiple, 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. Yeah. 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 knife fight at the dive bar. put my thoughts together into an essay. No, I agree. It's very important to have multiple outlets for man's desire 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 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. The death of Twitter acts fully over now, given that Jensen Wong joined, Mark Zuckerberg had to join. Like, it truly pulled everyone over, 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've got to go. 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 discourse, as one says, about the open letter, et cetera.

it germinated on Twitter specific. Totally. 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 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 3 was really good at front end design work. Yeah, that was looking at that was it. it was that one post

because if you look around like that actually that crystallized it in everyone's mind that's like oh here it is maybe 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 on Twitter from that.

A front end built this country. If we don't have front end, we don't have anything. This country needs front end development specifically. No, no. I agree with you. 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 kitties out there that are, you know, just hacking into the random flower shop on the corner and just make. making a nightmare for them. And we couldn't really get there. I don't know. That hasn't been fully good. You've got to 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 setup at home to be able to be able to. Oh, yeah.

Kimmy efficiently was like $100,000. Yeah. Right. Just to get to the point where you'd be able to. Yeah. And it's a lot of energy. In a sovereign way. You know, a sovereign hacker would need to have 100 grand, which hopefully prevents like the script kiddies.

It might be the new land. Simbo, though. You know, you get the influencer, the LARPA, 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 open letter? Were you surprised by the order that companies signed? Ben Thompson had this interesting take that it's two of the last companies to sign. I don't think Apple's signed yet. You'd think that they'd benefit from open source since they haven't been playing that game. Amazon was also a little bit late. But Amazon, and Apple both have physical products like warehouses and they sell physical things.

And so they're maybe a little bit less nervous about AI disruption because they have a physical aspect. I don't know what you thought about the sequence of events. 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 in video, which does not want to be left with all. 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

is just, you know, almost monopsony conditions. And then those clients can either say, and to be, and just to add to that. Yeah. Like both the, the, the two front runners 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. 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 you're, when you're in 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, LLM's clearly behind, meta, clearly behind, right? And then you get the, and then you have the company, I don't know, the service now is of the world who will look like they could be in a position where they might have to pay attacks to the most advanced models. Yeah. And so like, and then you get the late signatories. like open an AI or an alphabet, et cetera, that are close, but probably not at Fable 5,

like, Max, like, look at the whole thing. And then there are the last ones to join. And so, like, I guess I had it. 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. 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, 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 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 like 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 Deep Seek 4 or whatever. Like, or might not really able to personally grasp what the difference is at the extremes. but 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's 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 is like okay this is like comfortable for us but if we were in that situation, like I think we would be, rightfully, all of us would be quite anxious.

So was Lena Kahn right? Well, so 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 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 principle here.

That principle is open rights. The Zuckerberg op-ed... 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? 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 super intelligence control. by one company.

So that was not merely saying, let's let the market decide. Let's keep like light touch regulation. He was like, no, this would be existentially bad. 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. Which is funny, too, because he's like. It's very funny.

Well, he's probably top three largest customers of Anthropic. Oh, right? Right. So he's the one fueling all of this. And then two months later, he's like, okay, actually. To me that, like, if 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, sub-frontier intelligence or, like, quote, cheaper intelligence. But look how 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. Yeah.

Yeah. 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. Yeah. And it seems like, and look, things change by the week. So I'll come back out in a week and I'll say something else. But it seems like a while, like I started, you know, like I was just sort of poking around. I was like, oh, Gemini Flash. This is really fun for like high batch, low intelligence things, right? Like you could do 30,000 queries or in two hours and it cost you 20 bucks or something. That's amazing. Could be pretty good for my life as a gold retriever, high batch, low intelligence. intelligence. Yeah, that's it.

Doing a lot of stuff. But probably, or it seems at least plausible that the company that has the most advanced model will probably also win for the sort of like low, or could at least be in a good position to also win the high batch, low intelligence. 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 that initially they felt like people thought it was like a great in-between

between like a fable and a five-six soul. And then now I've seen a lot more negativity towards it. 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 they. 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's like,

some guy was like, oh, 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 you doing here? I was 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 maybe, log off a little bit more to actually just read through benchmark reports rather than like one tweet or like, I've never seen a 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 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 actually look at the

efficiency. Like the ROI is at the end of the day what matters in a business context. Yes, 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,

a lot of that's going to be driven by or companies actually getting the bill and being like, yep, I'm happy to pay because it was worth it. This is something I noticed a while ago, which is that you read through a lot of these popular benchmarks that come out. And the thing that has surprised me is that up until 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 we're really like going to 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. I have a theory, but I don't really know if it's right, that probably a lot of these benchmark organizations start from like a safetyist mindset, right? Like they're worried about like, oh, like bioengineering risk or hacking. Can you do it binary? 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. How much do you think the open source? It feels like we're in this moment of like this catch up. There was 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. 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, Kimmy K3. And all of a sudden it was like, oh, okay, like the open source market is. is catching up for sure, still on the same trajectory, maybe still behind, but like, you know, like on track. How much is that moving the market, do you think? How much are we in a replay of the Deep Seek moment, the Jevin's Paradox debate? Because it feels like there's this sell-off, but I don't know, like, 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? Yeah, as people who just care about the lines going up. It is, 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 they, Kimmy and GLM stuff as a lot. 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 nowhere close. It's like, okay, when can you, when is the off ramp for this spending? Yeah. 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.

Yeah. So, like, 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 trade S.K. Hinex. And then that had to eventually flush out because there's, you know, there's so much voluminous. volatility baked into that, that you get little selling and it ripples. And then in the U.S., it could be that investors are looking at it.

Like, I do not have any confidence that I could name the date in 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. Yeah, it's very odd because the industry revenues are going up. And the revenues are very, very diffuse. Everything from a ad-supported use to a $10 subscription to a $200 subscription

to a hyper-scaler spending a billion dollars in a month on tokens. Like the demand is there in that it is this economy. It's not this total circular. There's just one, like it's like NFTs or something like that. It's not some dislocation. But I agree with you that as you play out the CAP-X requirements, we've now drawn down all the hyperscaler cash flow. We're issuing more debt and equity. And a certain point, you're like, okay, if there's another 10x increase, if there's another 100-X increase, like, there's sort of not enough money in the world for this.

And so you almost need a pause on CAP-X more than you need a pause on, like, the capability development. because I do think that if you just spent the KAPX 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 going to spend 10 times next on KAPX. 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 yeah and and

then you also have some like hoarding which is like not only are the capabilities going to get much more much better I'm also going to basically figure out a model that's going to be so good it's going to just like hoover up a bunch of like new demand and I'll be able to ramp revenue and justify all this capex and if I but if I I can't do that. Someone else will. I'll be able to offload it, right? But the concerning thing right, the concerning thing right now is like the incremental

big buyers of compute, you effectively have a two players there. 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 a monopoly, right? Yeah. Like very interesting to scenario to have the biggest company. in the world so scared of a monopoly that they're effectively praying for an oligopoly. It's like, is my view on it. Yeah, it's really wild.

And, you know, I don't know if you guys saw today the recent blog post from Dorcasch. Of course. Had a great thing about, like, expectations that compute could get a lot more expensive. Yeah. Which, you know, one of the sort of stylized facts in the last few years has, of course, been the extraordinary drop in token prices, right? Like, if you go back to, like, GPT3 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 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 that, 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. Yeah. 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 risk. Well, then your competitor develops a stronger model and then you're done. 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 say we want to opt out of the game. Yeah. Which I think is a source of anxiety for investors. 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 likely it's just, like, costs go up for everyone loosely because you have to harden yourself more against their eye. It's like, yeah, it's great to pick bugs, but there's going to 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, okay, there's more cost on AI slop. And then you have to detect the slop and then you're annoyed. And 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.

People do experience, but a lot of times it's just these abstract things. 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 in like 2019 when anyone 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 going to be awesome. We just got to make sure there's fair competition. But the pushback there is that like the action. that like the average, he's not the best messenger for this because the average person believes that social media, while it is great in some ways, has damaged birth, you know, hurt birth rates, right? Like damaged teen mental health, right? Is, is just like draining the attention, right?

All these things. So like, he's maybe the best messenger that we got, but he's not the best. Yeah. 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? And then it's like, well, which one of them has been paying attention to taking seriously AI for the last 10 years? And which one of them three years ago is 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. It's 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. than the people who are very optimistic who three years ago or four years ago were talking about NFTs.

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. Yeah, it's a great part. Zuck, you know, viewed like the Metaverse as like or VR as like equally interesting to AI and that was part of what made him decide to not go to meta. Yeah. Has Devis never watched a movie in VR? It's electric. It's the best experience. No, it is funny because you got it.

It's amazing. Applevision Pro. It's fantastic. But 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 use. Well, the doom scenario was actually that the dollar would just completely collapse. But that was something that people were cheering on. They were excited about that.

And then with the MetaVeons, it was. 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,

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 mix. reality device and and they were sort of being like the anti-dome but zuck never really went full like

dumer or even addressed it uh and and and then of course we just like sort of got the good ending because it just like kind of flatline and never really went anywhere i don't know i don't even know that's the good ending it's interesting i mean 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 it just feels so like kind of gross about the whole thing now. But, you know, in like 2010, 2011, people are like really excited. It's like, we're going to connect.

There'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 Zuckupad, I was like, this is a kind of optimism that I haven't read from anyone in over 10 years about where, like, digital technology is going. unfortunately people like you know very few people are as optimistic about social media as they were at say the beginning of the 2010s but it did harken back to that this is going to be very democratizing etc and i hope it is well i i expect like personally social media i do think has made my life my life better like net like if you net it out it's like you know i work me too

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 a 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. Yeah. That are quite bad, right? I think we should be open-minded to that possibility.

I mean, you know, look, we get things, everyone's dooming so hard these things 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 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.

You know, 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 re-ignition of a certain curiosity about things that I think was sort of dormant for a while. So like that seems like a pretty good thing. Some of us are making music for the first time in years. Making music.

Yeah, making music here at the studio. No, like, we should pay attention to like the good. I actually do think we should pay attention to the good things that are, you know, because it's so easy to get caught, caught, um, 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 Chad C.P.T. Don't, like, walk me through the process of, like, turning. That's a mirror of, like, making, you know, to a round trip flight to a three-legged flight,

which I was very anxious about. It's easy. So, like, you should pay attention, I think, to things in our, like, day-to-day light that we can say, you know what? I sort of making this better, even if, like, it doesn't feel like in the whole. whole, even if we're like anxious about where it's all going. Last question. You have a podcast.

We have a podcast. That's right. 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. Done. It actually wouldn't ban, but it would be a multi-year sort of approval process, a bunch of safety checks.

Yeah. And then a new government agency to issue RSS feeds. Yeah. This is really important. It is. I'm so glad you brought this up. Because someone could just launch an RSS feed that, you know, ends the entire world. Who knows?

We don't know it can't happen. Or removes viewers and listeners from odd lots of TVPN. We cannot let that happen. That's ridiculous. Are you saying that I would do this for my own financial game? This is crazy. 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? Let's leave it there. America needs to win. on podcasts. We do. This is very important.

We actually are objectively winning. We are winning on entertainment and have no. No, there's no competitors yet. Yes. Well, thank you so much. I'm signing the letter. I love it. We'll circulate.

Great to see you, Joe. Have a great rest of you a week. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Rigma agents. Meet the Canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system. context and we are very fortunate that we have our next guest, Jameson Detweiler, here with us in

the TBPN Ultram. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Please introduce yourself in the company. Yeah, I am James and Debtweiler. 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. Okay. 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. So quick facts, it's an electric low-speed, life utility vehicle. How do you rate my spec?

I love this. I love the spaceship there and everything. The spaceship, obviously got the surf rack. Yes. And the TV on the front. Yep. This is pretty good. If you could get TBPN on there, 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? Yeah. Before this, I was at Tier Mobility, which was Bird and Lime's largest competitor in Europe, backed by SoftBek and Movedala. They own spin scooters in the U.S. wound up there by selling my HD mapping business, Fantasmo, to them.

So basically creating a digital twin of the world, and we built a computer machine power GPS, and turns out scooters don't know where they are very well because of GPS. And so Bird, Jump at Uber, and Tier 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. Interesting. I can imagine driver assistance would be great for scooters.

I don't know how far along it's gotten. Just because driving around L.A., some people on scooters do things that are maybe not illegal. but definitely wrong. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we say driver assistance is like A-d-Ass in cars, but really it was about restricting their behavior, right? So it's like, are you drunk? Are you going on a sidewalk?

Are you going the wrong way down a bike lane? And so you're putting that on there and just camera and compete at the edge running there. So building a lot of that kind of, yeah. 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. 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? 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. What do 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 and a Tesla. In fact, like when we do bring autonomy eventually to the vehicle, will be unsupervised in the way that we do it. Got it. But what we're doing today is we can take a chip,

you can pull up to a busy place in West Hollywood and skip the valet line, hop right out. Chip will go off, take care of himself, take care of the parking, show up when you tell him to come back, either from the calendar as you speak to him or text you, let you know when he's on the way back there and pick you up exactly where you're,

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. 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? Yeah, so it's definitely an easier path. And for us, like, we think a very responsible path. Because, like, When we run our, you know, we're going to be running our pilot in Miami this winter, a great market, for it'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. Sure. And we'll move from direct remote control to, you know, full autonomy here over time. That makes sense.

Jordy, sorry. Yeah, that use case is cool. I think, like, think about, like, you have a driver. Dropping a surfboard off the beach. 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 straight in, even if the parking lot is, like, crazy, they're just going in, coming out,

you're not thinking about it. To me, that's the most underrated. The number of people that have drivers, but not, they don't order delivery, groceries. It's like very small, but yes. No, no, I'm just saying to me that's been a, in my experience, one of the most underrated parts. And that's something that, uh, you expect the Tesla to be doing soon, but, uh, 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? 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 yeah 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 so 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 can go there and you can do curbside pickup and you know the fronk 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. Oh, yeah.

You do that. Yeah. Exactly. 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 where 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. 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 is it snowballing now? Should we expect a lot more vehicles? Is there some like, is it just the advancements of batteries and declining costs? Like what do you think is driving? 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 re-urbanizing. And even in places when... Sorry, I was going to hit the boop. There we know. No, no, no, I think you're right. And the one, some...

Even you can see manufacturers now, all the cars started looking... the same 10 years ago. Less and less was like a, like nobody goes and they're like, oh, I need a new daily. I'm going to get a yellow car, right? Whereas historically, like somebody would be like, 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 because 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. Or convertible or a full set. as SUV. It feels like there's a, it's almost like a barbell effect. Like they're, in the heyday of the love of America, 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. 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. because, like, we are living closer to home, you know, today. And so I think that's a large impact as well. Do you think this can slot in, it's $15,000 estimated MSRP for four seats, top speed, 25 miles an hour, 100 miles of range per charge? I'm going to test the top speed. I'll be the one to decide what the top speed of the chip is. I mean, that does feel like it would be if you are truly a,

a budget conscious buyer who's looking for a commuter. 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? Sure, but we're in L.A., right? You know, we've driven this thing.

You know, like, we're just... That's so sad. But that is, like, the future. Like, the traffic's so bad, yeah, you really do go 25,000 an hour a lot. I think he's just saying, like, you can have, like, very easily in L.A., you can just stay off of freeways. Sure. And it's not even necessarily slower. Oh, no.

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

Forgot it was the World Cup and there's no one on the road. 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 cards 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. Sure. This is built to facilitate that. And so that's kind of where we're starting in terms of the function, the price point. 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? 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 went down. I was excited to see you guys come up 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 weekend, you know,

this like weekend vehicle, you wanted to be like really expressive and fun because, 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. 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 counterposition against Apple?

If you come up with a new electronic device, a consumer electronic device, Apple is 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 bad. 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 loosely, this would be such a brand change for most car companies that couldn't jump in. Is that conscious? Is that accidental? What's the thought behind all of the customization? 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 luchet. Been like, hey, Chip looks pretty good. We should make it. No, it's, it's, it's, uh, you're going to chop the top on that thing. Anyway. Yeah, I mean, look, I think, uh, Apple tried. They missed. Oh, yeah, the car.

Right? They miss. No, they're coming back, right? Aren't they announcing a, uh, it's like a livery? They're playing Apple Maps into the 40. Yeah. And then they're also launching a delivery for like a hypercar or like a Lamon car. Yeah.

Doesn't count. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and you had that in, like, you know, Ford had a product of this category like 25 years ago. Really? Ford think. There's one that, like, actually, like, is around Venice all the time still. And like, 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 money makers, 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 in 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 going to be really hard for anybody of the,

certainly any of the incumbents to do today. For sure. Yeah. We got to check it out. Yeah, we got to go check it out. Tyler, what was that car that I was showing you earlier today? The 1991. We got to pull that up at some point.

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. Let's go see. Let's do it. Do we have everything set up? Are we good to go? You got the camera?

Okay, we're going to 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. Jordi, want to hop up. Take us through it. Where we're going? Right out here. Let's see.

Outside the Ultrodome. Second car review we've done. We are? Whoa, here we go. Wait, it's driving itself. There we go. It's that chip. Hi, I'm Chip. Look at this thing. Hey, Joey. Hey, jump.

This is amazing. It's a lot taller than I thought it would be. Wow. Yeah, it's like, in golf carts are actually really tall. So, like, the typical golf cart that people have is actually like taller in every single trend of F150. Sure. 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. But also, while this looks big, it's a very efficiently packaged size. It's 4 feet 11 wide, it's about 30 and a half feet long. And we've designed this, you'll notice, you're still like a dining room table basically, right? You're not going to be in this thing typically for more than 45 minutes. Sure. 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 still have two kids in rear-facing car seats that fit in here well. didn't hear well. And so the design exercise started from like inside out. There's a boxiness to it that's necessary because for us, like, function does like drive form. 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. Yeah, it feels to me

out of the Pixar universe. Yeah. Yeah. That was intentional? 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. Yeah, true it feels increasingly like we're maybe headed toward a Blade Runner future and yeah that's not why I want to see. 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? This is hand built. How much of the supply chain, are you building on something as a demo unit?

Are you using something else as a platform? I imagine that you don't have your own leather tannery yet. Yes. How did this come together? How long did it take to build? Who built it? Yeah. I'm curious about this process.

This 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 that we wanted to learn from and then tore it down. Tored it down. It ended up rebuilding. Distilled it. Yeah, distilled it, exactly. Tored it down to the chassis.

End up replacing the entire drive train, the battery, the whole thing. And so, like, it's kind of over time. Most of that 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.

Yeah. And that was really, really good for us. And so, yeah, that kind of exploration has gone for 18 months, and now we should have production in 10 units in hand the next, like, four months or so. And then there are manufacturers for like these types of bench seats that you can go to at this point and pull those together?

So actually our VP of Vehicle Engineering came to us from Canoe, who's the vehicle lines sector 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 part of our focus. Wait, so you'll have a covered version of it as well.

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 through Aspen and people absolutely loved it. Or if you're in Seattle, it's raining. Like, if it's a nice day, you should be able to top off.

So our designs, we'd like to say. Driving this home from dinner in a winter storm would be electric. Well, if you're going to do, if you're going to make a mountain version, you've got to get chains, I guess. 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 crazy. Yeah Interesting very cool Very very cool I want one. Yeah, I can make that happen

What is this track back here for? This is an L track. So this is an option here. This is a standard kind of Exception you'll see in truck beds. Okay, 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 here. So you can use it and you put 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 kind of its 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 up to 11. And so it's a Swiss Army knife that you can do. 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 that accessory ecosystem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 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 nears, but no doors. Like, what else is, like, the bare minimum to make sure that you're always street legal? 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. Okay. You have to limit... And that's because of the top...

You have to cap the top speed. 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. Wow.

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. Yeah, of course. 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're 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 we have in there, too. Underregulated. Yeah.

It's going to be open up the Chip Washington office soon and pushing for pushing for soon. Totally complete the lockdown. So this is basically a one-of-one. Yeah. 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? Yeah, no, this is street legal.

Really? 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 Delight here, just we can drive it. Yeah, yeah. But I don't like to think about how much this one. about how much this vehicle is worth because we can't get insured for the value anyway. As a startup with a prototype. Yeah. Yeah. You will now find an underwriter. So yeah, we take good care of it.

I love it. I love it. Thank you so much for showing. I mean it's impressive how solid it feels even as a prototype. Like it feels like ready to ready to ship. Well we'd love to get you guys, you know, later you can take it for a drive. Can't wait. Can't wait. Thanks for coming by. Is there anything we can see in here? Is this open? Not right now. Here is the party in the frunk. Okay. We have a little bit of wiring. We've got to clean up there right now. But yeah, that's where you'll see the TV in the front here.

Yeah, yeah. And then it has going to have a huge space that you're going to fit. You've got miniaturized stuff. Yeah, exactly. And we have, you know, my goal is I get, I have a double stroller that will fit in there that can keep in here at all times. Very cool. No, I love it. Well, thank you so much.

Thank you. Jordan, anything else? No, this is amazing. Yeah. Awesome progress. Thank you so much for showing to us. Appreciate it. Yeah.

Thanks for your time. back to the show. Have a great day. Cheers. Cheers, guys. Very cool. See ya. Oh. Goodbye.

Friendly little guy. 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? It's the Nissan Figuero. The Nissan Figuero, right? The Nissan Figuero, right?

Nissan Figuero. 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. What a cool, what a cool vehicle. It's so, I'm so glad that consumers are getting options. Because like wildly different design decisions than Amble, which obviously launched right at the same time. Amble's 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. I like that. I like that. I love that. The Nissan Figaro? I love it. Whereas Chip is going for really creating like a consumer electronic product in many ways. 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? Not since college.

Because, yeah, what do they call it? Vintage or retro? I don't know. You go further back. Classic? Yeah, it's really a classic car. Yeah, so if we can pull this up, this is from early 20th century, 1922 Chevrolet. Oh, it's pre-war?

Yeah, I thought you were going post-war. There's a few options. Tyler's thinking about getting back. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Don't you think this? 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?

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, it's over for the, what is this, Model A, Model T, something like that? Well, it's not Ford, so. Oh, it's not Ford. Okay. Chevrolete. 490 touring is what it's called.

I mean, they kind of nailed the design. It's beautiful. They made the perfect car, and then ever since then, we've been trying to get back to this. Yeah. I think it's wildly illegal to design a car like this. I don't think you could, even if you've modernized everything. Yeah, we don't even know how. We don't 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. Adam Hunt, researcher at Cambridge University, has a PhD at Everett. evolutionary psychiatry. He said he's recently flipped from being bullish to bearish about AI. He says he's updating his bearish 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 domain 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. comparison to EG-O-3. If they were gaining generalist capacities, we would expect them to be describing their work

in ever more graceful and comprehensive probes. And I don't know if that's that accurate. I mean, you hear about like clodish 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 Puerro 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. Then the AI is helping me in some tasks means that there's these little spikes where the AI is maybe 80, percent 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. 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 in 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 Ph.D. in evolutionary psychiatry from Cambridge University. 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? I'm not saying that it's like not correct but like I think if we want to like make models really good at at language common sense or social reasoning like it's it seems pretty clear to me

that like right now we could do that if we wanted yeah like all of the 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 yeah and it's not clear that like it's impossible to make length 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 there's a reason that the models aren't really good at

social reasoning right now. It's because it seems like social reasoning is not that valuable for the models. Even even writing. It's like look at some of the most iconic 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. Yeah. I mean, I so, so I agree with you that, 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.

He 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 GPD 5.5, Gemini 3.1 Pro preview are all around just north of a thousand ELO, which is still impressive. It's crazy, but it's not by any means superhuman. And but like every time someone points out something where it's like the models are about at this, it does seem like there's a very quick cycle of like, let's make them good at that. Yeah. Also like I think it was Amjad that was talking about this. He basically took an LM 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 on the model doing it or is it the model?

writing code that then does the thing, it's kind of the same thing. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, 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 to learn it. Yeah, I mean, that seems fine to me. I don't. I just think that when people say the model is generally intelligent, they're hoping that

it's just like a natural expertise. Like they're implying that chess is like indicative of some other cognitive ability, right? Yeah. This is not the actual thing that matters because the chess can just download stockfish. Yeah, 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 face. 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 the co-founder, chief product officer. Stanley, welcome back to the show.

How are you doing? Hey, how are you John, Jordy? Great to see you. Yeah, I could see you. I want to get the update. I want to get the news. On a big day. 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 a 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. 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. 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 come out of the AI, LM world and bringing that to the physical world. Yeah. And I think that's probably going to be the next frontier.

Yeah. Like robotics, physical AI, drones, etc. And honestly, like, a lot of the things, the reason why you're seeing, like, the Waymos that are happening, the dot robots at door dachar that we announced last year, the drone. A lot of these, it's all part of the same revolution. It's these AI models getting better and better. And 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 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. 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 Air. 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 DoorDashDOTS 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 all the, whenever you charter corporate, For jet, you have to get a part 135. And with that, it means we're now officially legal to do drone deliveries commercially in the U.S. 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. Yeah, this feels AI accelerated because if we were talking five years ago, eight years ago, ten years, years ago and like the discussion was around launching sidewalk robots or drones. The ore 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 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 and the team can be very big now. But what's actually enabled you to move so quickly here?

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. 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. much money now being invested in things that compute, right? So, you know, like, again, like five, eight years ago, like, we didn't have things like

the Nvidia, Thorchips, 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. And then last piece, of course, is the operational piece as well. Obviously, we've actually been, you know, we started to watch 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 intent infrastructure looks like. How does a drone actually plug in to the DoorDash network? What is the loading infrastructure at a merchant look like? How does a merchant handoff look like? 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 a device. It's 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. It'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 spend a lot of time working on those.

So I think it's, you ought to do all of the above. I think it's a confidence of a lot of these things all coming together. That's which we feel like is, which makes it the kind of the perfect moment to, do DoorDash Air. 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 NVL-72 with you. So what is that, what does that look like? does the autonomy stack look like on a modern drone these days? Yeah, I mean, we will 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, I think like thinking through like, 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. Like, it's very different than like a rooftop. Like, it's like, how do you build kind of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

market pickup infrastructure. Again, that's part of the going back to like, like, you got to think about the system end to end and then, and the consumer side, again, it's like, there's a lot of, like, nuances. Like, how do you know, like, the exact, uh, coordinate to drop the, the, the, the package? It's not as simple as, oh, just take the lat long from Google Maps and okay, that's where you drop because that might be over. someone's like car or the there or someone's like building or it might be like wires or etc.

So it's like how do you build the perception system that? And then then of course like while it's actually traveling air, like how does you, how do you handle deconfliction with other other drones? I mean, and for example, in airlines, like the way you do it is like every, every airline sort of has this thing called it's called ADSB, which essentially 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.

But with drones, you can't have that. So it's like, it's like, so what is, what becomes a system to cause to, to do aircraft confliction? 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 N-10 system, actually commercialized drone delivery, manage the fleet, handle pickup, drop-up, decompliction, merchant loading, routing, which areas, what orders are good for drones, et cetera. It's that whole system.

And honestly, that's probably more of what we've built as part of DoorDash Air. In addition, of course, we've got to build the aircraft as well to get our FAA Part 135 certification. 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. Yeah, I mean, I mean, we started to what I started 13 years ago. And Paul Alto was literally a Stanford food delivery project. It was called Paul Alto Delivery.com back then, a PDF menu and a Google Voice number.

We're delivering out of our own cars, you know, like Tony had a Honda accord. We were just driving around delivering orange hummus. So we definitely come a long way, but I think the principles remains the same. It always starts. Like, I think, yeah, 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 it. You always have to start with what's the use case. What's the customer use case? What do these deliveries look like?

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 three billion deliveries a day. It's not like you just, like, all three billion deliveries look different. You don't just like plop the drones. But specifically, that number is so mind-blown. Yeah, that's crazy. But specifically, I seem to remember, I don't know if there's 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. Yeah. 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? Yeah. I mean, 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 of drones. It's like, again, you start the use case, where the delivery is happening. And does this use case fit into a form factor?

And turns out drones are 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 dachers to take an order. But 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 for dropping off the drone package, like, right in front of our, you know, front porch or your backyard.

So, again, it's like, I think you always want to start what the use case is and kind of figure out, like, okay, like, these are the deliveries that 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 multi-modal platform how what does range

look like for door dash 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? Yeah, maybe one day. I mean, but so far, 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 coffee delivered in under 15 minutes, when before it might have taken 45 minutes or an hour, like that, 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. You're thinking about ordering French laundry to Malibu?

Is that what you're trying to do, Judy? I'm actually looking forward to getting into the 500-mile rain. Yes, exactly. Exactly. I want you to break the sound barrier, what I'm asking for. Over the time, I'm sure to get there. Well, congratulations. Yeah, really, really cool.

Thank you so much. Thank you for time to come to chat with us. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. 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 Mossad from Replitt, the CEO, the founder. You know him. You love him. He's been on the show multiple times. And he's back. How you do it?

Look at that. What we got on the shirt. Oh, there you go. Thank you. Wow. Loyalty. That's, that's vintage. That's vintage.

Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. My pleasure. I haven't seen you. You know, wow, I know. It's been way too long. Yeah, I mean, we went to your office. We recorded an episode in your, most people don't know this probably because there's just a blank wall in the background, but we recorded an episode of 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 launches, the AI powered creative suite. And then I have a million other questions to ask you. 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 right now, actually, it's not just GPT that's caught up, but also the open source models.

KMEK3 is an amazing model. It's at maybe quartered the price, sometimes even better. And it's also a fantastic design model. So we had this new, what's that? I saw the arena leaderboard. We were talking to Joe Wazenthal about this an hour ago. That Kimmy K3 really outperformed spiky on front end, which is, we were talking about how it changes the conversation

because if it spiked on bio weapon development, that would be a different conversation. But if we wanted to spike anywhere, front end is probably a good place for it to spike. Absolutely. It generates beautiful aesthetics. The first model that I see that is actually trying to reason about design. 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. Things about page structure and layout and aesthetics and things like that. And so Replit Design for one is the first product in the market that's purely multi-modal. We kind of e-valed every model on the first of the earth. Some of them are good at SVG, others are good at animation, other are good. at CSS. And so we created an environment that brings up the best of these models.

You can also select the model 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 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. That's good because I haven't logged in in months. Yeah. Yeah, 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, is you sort of, 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 UIUX websites

and landing pages. You can drag and drop them 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, I'm arriving at really cool designs, like I'm working with an architect and a new office, I kind of know intuitively what I want my office to look like, but I can't go on Pinterest and search or whatever. So I went to Rupplet, you know, put an initial point,

prompt for things I like, it created kind of a mood board I like, point to click, point and click, 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 design for non-designers. 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 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. Yeah. It's not even a prompt. It's two clicks on Rapplox.

that I'm actually, we talk a lot of internally about the post-prompting 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, when we went from coding, which is a very low level kind of task, to prompting higher level, but it's still somewhat low level from how people think. The way people think is they specify an intent. Like I want to, I want my, you know, sales leads to get responses in five minutes. Sure. 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. Yeah. How are you thinking about... John wanted to like a large kind of lever, like a slot machine.

You could not have to prompt anymore. Just pull the lever, you know? Yes. If you could use that to start a new loop, that would be a very satisfying user experience. How are you thinking about... It'll be like these Vegas casinos. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's the 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 want to characterize 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 into the mobile app stores, into Unreal Engine. And there's more harness there in partnerships that I could imagine you creating a really amazing product around. Yeah, I will say last week has been a huge week for AI for game developments, right? I mean, for a long time, we've actually spent some time about a year.

year and a half ago building a game dev stack, which still exists in Replit, but it wasn't very good. The models were really bad at 3D reasoning. Sure. And I think between KMEEK3, Opus 5 now, they're starting to actually be good at 3D. 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 Replett. We recently launched a CAD integration so you can like make real physical products. And we actually have some folks in the office to design something on Replit and actually went and produced it.

And so it's not just games. I think it'll start affecting the robotics. It'll start affecting kind of physical industrial design. And so it's a very exciting time. And we're so we're paying attention to that. 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 particularly valuable marketing strategy that's grown the platform? We do all of the above. I think we have one of the best performing UGC ads right now. I don't know if you saw that, but we have like a bunch of videos where people, there's like one that's really going viral right now where typically a woman is getting like an app from Replit like a Replit built app about like

asking her out on a date. Oh, I think I have seen this. Yeah. 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. Interesting. And I think Replit differentiates. differentiates in many ways, but one of the ways we differentiate is because we've been building

the platform for a long time, we actually have really deep stack. Like everything, when you buy Replit, you get a hosting environment, deployment environment security agents, 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 and enterprise affecting real impact on how people actually work. 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 co-works 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. this is actually automating entire workflows where it's like, I used to do this for 20 hours a week. Now I built an app and I do it for zero hours a week. 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 soon. And so enterprise has been the largest growing segment for us. We're still growing consumer, consumer.

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're using Kimmy because it's cheaper and this meets our standards. So at this company, we want. for that. Okay. 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. They want that deeper controls. And what we're seeing from enterprise customers is that they're saying, like, look, I know the big AI 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.

Because also a lot of the big AI products don't put guardrails around the product. And so a lot of employees, you know, you have instances where employees are spending, like one employee could spend like $10,000, $20,000 a week, like a month doing that. And so they're asking us for controls on models, on spend, for routing. But also, I think more importantly, is 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, say, clawed. They give everyone clot, clot, right? And they're like, okay, my engineers are great at it. But actually, people are legal and finance, they're burning tokens for no reason. So let me implement RAPLIT and let them be focused on a certain task. Yeah. There's a remarkable story in the chat.

Somebody in the chat says that two years ago, they were in 50,000, they were $50,000 in debt. They would meet business owners at restaurants and buildings. 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. White pill. Yeah, total white pill. Thank you for your service. What advice do you have for young people who are nervous about the job market AI?

How can they take advantage? Look, look, the AI narrative has been totally warped. Like, you know, the politicians, you know, 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 those stuff. Stories like this, someone who was $50,000 in debt, discovered Rapplet and got out of debt, perhaps is making more money than that. Those stores are not getting told. And I understand, like, you know, negative headlines get, get more attention. I think there's a perverse incentive for some of the players in the space to generate the negative headlines

because you can create regulations coming out of that. We know the story of regulatory capture that's been happening. It's a story as old as capitalism, right? And so, kind of my advice to people is a kind of, 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 Replit. I'm going a Replit agent.

I actually train a chess model that's on its way to become the best chess LLM model. 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 was thinking like this math thing that's happening. I've never done math. I want to go find some proofs, you know?

It would like bio. Conjecture, Max. Yeah. Conjecture Max, do you know there's this video where PDD, I guess, I guess, you know, he did not be named now, but there's this video where he's, he closes the deal, he's on the phone, he closes the deal, he hangs up the phone, he's like, what, what can't you do? I can do. And he gets, goes, for sure. 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. 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 do it. The world is your oyster. I think that mindset is important. I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, breaking it down. Awesome to, awesome to see you.

Always great seeing you. Good to see you guys. Always crush it. Great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you. Someone should use AI to take that video of he who shall not be named and put Amjad in the video.

That might be. be worse. I don't know. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. That, your sound board is fantastic today. We have Adam Cohen from Weave, the co-founder and CEO coming on the show with an amazing fundraising news. Adam, how you doing? Good. We're in good spirits. We're, uh, yeah, we signed with standards. So we're all happy. behind you what's behind you you got a whoa what are you got there the gongs are going viral

why don't you guys hit it in unison yes tell us how much did you raise uh we raised 13 and a half million thanks to stand congratulations now all right quick history on the company and yeah then we'll get

we can get more into the round and where you're going yeah so we uh we started this company just under two years ago we went through yc at the start of last year, the idea originally would just measure software engineering. Very quickly, this turned into measuring AI because that was that, you know, kind of took over. And what we realized ahead of the curve, we've always kind of been working with the, like, token maxers of the world is figuring out once Opus 474A came out, people realized they didn't need the best models for every task.

And specifically for coding, this is like 80% of AI spend. So we built the world's best prompt writer at Read Your Prompt, and actually, shifts it to the right model at the cheapest cost. And this is what standards, like, super excited about. And we are starting to, yeah, go crazy with it. Who do you sell to? Do you sell the CEO, the CEO, the CFO, the CTO? Yeah, we sell to the CTO.

CFO's CEOs obviously love us, but we're only focused on engineering. We think that's like still the majority of where AI spent is happening. 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 or just code routing. Okay. And then, yeah, how do you differentiate the router? Break that down.

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. Yeah, that's exactly, like the app level routing. For us, what we're doing is like anybody using Cloud Code or Codex plugs in our router. It sits directly in their current workflow as like next to no latency.

And it will route to whatever the most cost-efficient model is. So we host all the open source models in the U.S. They prompt it routes the right spot and they save up to, well, some companies up to 80%. That's amazing. What is customer acquisition like? Is this, you know, like person to person at the highest level you're going after enterprise CTOs, so you're 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 AI, starting to use coding, but a lot of them are on a $200 plan. They're getting great value. They're not really in the like token maxing is going to, you know, make or break my business this quarter. Exactly. Yeah. So, like, all the max plans, people still don't care that much.

We have some startups spending like 510K 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. Sure.

Is it fair to say that something like 15 minutes could save you up to 20% on your token bill? Absolutely. What's that tag about? Is that Geico or something? Yeah. Guyco. Sorry. Bad joke.

Bad joke. Couldn't help myself. Well, so what is your, what does your actual team look like? Are you building in San Francisco post-YC? Ours? It's the only way for what we're doing. Yeah, we're all in person. Six, you know, 9-96 kind of feel here.

Teams really fired up. They all wanted to join the video, but we weren't sure how far to push this. They could come say. You can just come say hi if they're if they're hanging out. Why not? But what, what, what, nine, it's not even enough. You don't, you're not even that differentiated if you're doing nine, nine six these days, I feel like, right? There's an opportunity.

There's, there's, there's, you've got companies that are, you know, putting in seven, sometimes eight. Eight days a week. Yeah. There you go. 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, um, that are interested, uh, I think just because I did my fears of

acting was scarier than the jumping out of a plane. Yeah, I talked to, I heard one entrepreneur who said he changed and manipulated time. He has, every day is three days. His first day goes from 6 a.m. to noon. His second day goes from noon to 6 p.m.

Then he works a third day from 6 p.m. Stack that up over a day. Yeah, he's going to crush you. Or a month. Yeah. And he's not crazy for saying, you're crazy. Anyway. Sorry.

We're having, we're having too much fun. It feels, feeling like a Friday over here. Where are you going from here? Are you going to keep the team small? Yeah, so there's about

16 of us. We are hiring very aggressively. Yeah, we need some incredible engineers and AEs to just scale up. We are swamped. I feel bad. Our kind of like campaign to our account executive and our go-to-market team is

death to Jerry. Jerry's our AE and he is too busy with too many meetings. So we want to make them as tired as possible, and now we need the second. Yeah. Is there going to be like long-tailed demand for fine-tuning of open-source models from your customer base? Like if they're doing something really routine, 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? Absolutely. So actually, we already have like a early version of this where you can give feedback. in the router to the router based on what model you're choosing 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

our all built in but now we're exploring what this looks like at a per org basis yeah so 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 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. It makes a ton of sense. Well, congratulations. Don't break that gong all too soon. You got to warm them up. We've learned this the hard way. Every time we we hit our gong, somebody comments and says, you didn't warm it up. You didn't warm it up. But so far, may the gong ring loud and often for your business.

Good luck. And thank you so much for coming on the show to break it down. Great to meet you. Have a great rest of your day. 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 AI agents. Big news out of the Fed. The Fed holds rate steady, but three officials voted for a rate increase. The rate has been unchanged 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. thinking that there might be a rate hike in the in reaction to inflation, of course, somewhat driven by energy prices, oil prices, oil is spiking again. And so lots of tricky news for the global economy, but fortunately the economy chugs on and the economy is strong. I believe in it.

I believe in it, too. Never, never blackpill. Dorcash Patel certainly not blackpilling. Gavin Baker quote tweeted Dorcasch's post. that predicted lab revenues and the trillions very shortly. Gavin Baker says, I see a series of fairly wild thoughts from Dorcasch. 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 Dwar Kesheas is capturing the zeitgeist. Net net public markets would probably be trading differently if they saw the open AI anthropic groc cursor and open source numbers over the last six weeks, because everything is growing. Even in 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 throughout the whole deep seek saga when the lab revenues grew a ton, even though open source was big. Yeah, there's a comment here that I think is on the nose. Jay Capital says timeline is very interesting. All private AI companies have their best six weeks while retail AI slash semis have their worst six weeks. Very, very interesting. So disconnect there. Yeah. I mean, one of them, uh,

S.K. Hynix, $64 billion in quarterly profit. It was a disappointment for chip investors in SK Hynix fell 10%, despite record results powered by the AI boom. The profit increase was incredible. I think they grew profit over 500%, something like that, 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. 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. You've got to get the Jeffrey Katzenberg apology form. Oh, for sure. Yeah, for sure. But yeah. High-yield Harry captures it pretty well, watching society become too cooked, even to watch TV episode. And this is from Idiocracy. Mike Judge is one of his best works, the creator of HBO's Silicon Valley, actually, who will now be available in short form because you will be able to watch short clips from from HBO Silicon Valley. On HBO Max Shorts, you'll be able to see the, I don't know, all the iconic moments from Silicon Valley when they're hanging out. on the roof of Google or whatever the Google equivalent is, Gavin Belson's company. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in to TBPN.

We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And sign up for a newsletter at tbPN.com. We'll see you tomorrow. We love you. Goodbye. That's the outro. Goodbye.