Loading summary
Transcript756 lines
- [00:00]
John
You're watching TVPN.
- [00:02]
Tyler
Today's Monday, November 24, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome, the Temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Ramp.com Time is money save. Both easy use, corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Jordy and I went to F1 this weekend. We went to Las Vegas and we watched great time.
- [00:22]
John
We were with the public.com team Aramco Aston Martin F1 team with the public.com boys. We had an incredible time. Yeah, incredible time. And F1's fun.
- [00:37]
Tyler
It's. It's more of an experience than like the actual watching it. I don't know if you at home haven't been following. There was McLaren was disclaimer disqualified. It was a very dramatic. I mean, it's almost like a cheating scandal. I don't exactly know, but they broke the rules.
- [00:51]
John
And yet cheating because the FIA said we don't believe they did it intentionally.
- [00:56]
Tyler
Okay, got it.
- [00:56]
John
Yeah, but it was like, but it's a disqualification.
- [00:59]
Tyler
And so you would think you were like, oh, yeah, I saw, I noticed it. And there were some people in the comments on some of these videos that I watched saying, oh, I could tell, I could tell. But let me tell you someone who was there in person. I could not tell because it whizzes by. I don't know if they're cheating or not. I don't know if they're real.
- [01:14]
John
It's an incredibly fun time. It is a terrible spectator sport.
- [01:18]
Tyler
I think everyone agrees on that.
- [01:20]
John
And the two things can be true at the same time.
- [01:23]
Tyler
But it's a great reason to come.
- [01:24]
John
Together with like, if you actually wanted the best experience for the race, you would just sit inside the paddock.
- [01:29]
Tyler
You would watch it on race stream one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream, go to restream.com Anyway, a lot of fun.
- [01:37]
John
And Yannick Life and Sykes were incredible hosts.
- [01:42]
Tyler
Today on the show we are talking About Claude Opus 4.5. We have Sholto from Anthropic joining us. In just half an hour, maybe 24 minutes, he'll be joining. The timeline was in turmoil over the weekend. People are settling into the idea that Gemini 3 might be good enough to actually pull some people away from ChatGPT as a daily driver. It certainly pulled Marc Benioff away from ChatGPT. He of course was partnerships.
- [02:09]
John
He was swearing on the timeline.
- [02:10]
Tyler
He was swearing on the timeline. He has partnerships with a number of foundation labs, Foundation Model Labs, but he says, holy shit. I've used ChatGPT every day for 3 years. I just spent 2 hours on Gemini 3. I'm not going back. The leap is insane. Reasoning, speed, images, video, everything is sharper and faster. It feels like the world just changed again. And this is an interesting experience. I had a similar experience. I wound up basically daily driving Gemini. I didn't fully churn, I didn't delete ChatGPT from my phone. It wasn't intentional. It was more like, I'm just curious. I really want to use nanobanana Pro. That definitely just sort of sucked me into the ecosystem. But I wrote a little bit, a little bit of a review over my experience. I know you've been a jemmy boy for a couple weeks. You look great. In hindsight. You were early to this party.
- [03:05]
John
Honestly, way longer than that.
- [03:06]
Tyler
I was maybe months.
- [03:09]
John
Yeah, I mean months at this point.
- [03:11]
Tyler
Yeah. And so there was some good stuff, some bad stuff. Obviously, as a disclosure, we are of course sponsored by Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. But I'm going to try and be as fair as possible with this review because there are some things that I do want them to improve in the consumer Gemini app, because I think there's a lot of opportunity there and I'm just not sure how monopolistic consumer AI will be. And that was a little bit of what my takeaway of this experience was. So basically I switched over. I've been on Gemini on iOS for a while, mostly to access VO3. VO3 was the moment when I was like, okay, they got something that nobody else has. I got a 400, 250amonth.
- [03:59]
John
Well, and then it switched.
- [04:00]
Tyler
No, no, it was 125. And then it jumped to 250. Okay, it wasn't the. Yeah, I thought it Might have been 500 as well, but it's 250. Been playing it. Very happy for that. VO3 is just a very special model that no one else had anything close to it. It was very accessible on your phone and I enjoyed it. But I switched to daily driving Gemini on iOS as the main app that I go to for all the different knowledge retrieval requests. Anytime I'm researching something, I would hit Gemini in the app and the result was around 15 minutes per day in the app. And this is roughly the same as what I spent in ChatGPT. Historically, I looked through my time, my screen time. Now that doesn't count stuff on the desktop. Maybe it's a little rough, But I think 15 minutes a day is sort of what most people are doing in these apps. Obviously 30 minutes a day was reported.
- [04:48]
John
Benioff said he spent two hours in it.
- [04:51]
Tyler
I think he was just like maybe in a fugue state doing deep dives or something. But I had a more passive experience where I was, you know, when I had something I was curious about, I would fire off a query and there was a lot to like about the experience. So first it felt like Gemini 3 does a better job sizing the response. Like if it, if the question can be answered in one paragraph, it gives me one paragraph. If it can be answered in five little sub headers with little bullet points, it'll do that. If it needs more story, more history, it'll write more. And so I felt like in previous models in ChatGPT, certainly I felt like I was falling into the trap of no matter what question I would ask, I would get the two page dissertation on it with the same structure because it was a little overfit on the format that it was delivering. Gemini 3 felt a little bit fresh there. It also felt faster. Everyone's been saying it's so much faster. I haven't seen any quantification of that, but it certainly felt like it feels faster. But I think a lot of it, at least for me, is that for the last couple months when I've been on ChatGPT because the model router gives me anxiety about like, oh, maybe I'm going to get routed to like the dumb model, it's going to hallucinate. I'm just hammering GPT5 Pro because I'm on the $200 a month tier. And so because I'm on this $200 a month tier, I'm used to hitting GPT5 Pro, but then that always means I'm waiting 10 minutes. And so if I'm always waiting 10 minutes and I go over to thinking and it's like, oh, it'll be one minute, even if I'm on a different model, it's not as much reasoning, it feels faster. And I feel like the level of confidence in the brand makes me feel that a Gemini 3 thinking query that does maybe less reasoning than a GPT5 Pro query will be at the same level of reliability. And you pointed out to me something about when it's actually running, it does something psychologically that's really valuable, that's smart.
- [06:46]
John
Tells you it says it's running a.
- [06:48]
Tyler
Google search, it just says we're searching Google. And you don't think about it because everyone. Oh, searching the web. And I'm like, but I don't trust the web. But I trust Google because Google's had 25 years of building brand around trust on the web. And so I see that now. And I'm like, oh, yeah, good. Because that's what I would do to verify a fact. Even though the web is Google, obviously there are hallucinations out there, there are fake articles that you could land on, There's a whole bunch of things. But if you task me with finding the real day that someone was born, I'm going to Google it. And so I trust that as a product. And so putting that there. Definitely did.
- [07:21]
Sholto
Yeah.
- [07:22]
Tyler
Like it had a real perception, which I think was interesting. And then also nanobananapro, very interesting. Strong differentiator. It really does handle the complex images. We saw that with the farm and also just all the text and stuff. And it's been interesting to kind of throw a query like I was, I wanted to understand anthropics, model architectures, and I said, hey, summarize them all in an infographic. And it just perfectly explained how Sonnet and Opus all fit together nicely next to each other. I don't know that it's necessarily a better way to learn, but I could imagine in the future having images generated alongside text just means that you get a more richer multimedia product, which should be the result. Because if you look at any newspaper, any website, there's always. It's not just pure text. Like walls of text are boring.
- [08:09]
John
Yeah. In fact, if it's just pure text, it usually means the story is just not that important to the newspaper.
- [08:15]
Tyler
Yeah, yeah. There are some people that just lean full text, you know, and whatnot, but for the most part it's much more enjoyable. It's just better, it's more educational, it's easier to learn quickly. Let me tell you about cognition. Before I go into the negatives, let me tell you about Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So on the negative side of my Gemini app experience, there were a few rough edges. So the first was with that multimodality. Everyone's been saying these models are multimodal. They handle image, text and video. I don't know if it was just a UI issue, but I was running into tons of problems where it wasn't feeling multimodal. And what I mean by that is that I would go and I would issue it an image prompt. I would issue it an image prompt. Hey, create this infographic. And then I would want to flip back into text and it would not be able to really stay. It wouldn't be able to go seamlessly back to text mode. It would keep generating images, and then vice versa would happen where I would kick off a text flow and then I'd say, okay, I'm ready for you to turn this into a nano banana thing. And it'd be like, I can't really do that. Do you have any. Are you laughing about that because you think it's like a rookie mistake or something?
- [09:29]
Tyler (Intern)
Well, no. You always like, oh, it's not really multimodal.
- [09:32]
Tyler
It's not really multimodal. There should not be a button. If there's a button, it's telling on itself. Why is there a button? You open it up. You know what I'm talking about, right?
- [09:41]
Tyler (Intern)
I mean, I just don't see why it matters, like, if you can basically just take an image and then turn it into, like, the textual representation. Yeah, why is that? Why does it matter that it's not, like, actually taking in the pixels of the image?
- [09:52]
Tyler
I just think. I just think, like, it's. Yeah, I mean, I guess you're right on that front. I just. I find it weird that. That I need to.
- [10:02]
Tyler (Intern)
It is multimodal in the sense that, like, everything gets baked down into, like, tokens.
- [10:06]
Tyler
True, true. But it's. It's just. I expect the models to be operating at a higher level of abstraction much earlier than I think they do. And so with the model picker, like, I never liked that because the model should pick based on the text. I really like the router in. In. In chatgpt, because I should be able to go to a person, which is what we're trying to, like, recreate here, and say, like, hey, I have you. I have a research project for you and I need you to spend 20 minutes on it. I need you to get back to me in an hour. I need you to get back to me right now. Off the top of your head, what's your hot take on this? I can ask that and I can get that back from human, and I feel like that should be done at the text layer at the end of the.
- [10:48]
Tyler (Intern)
I mean, it kind of is in ui, like, if you ask, like, a thinking model.
- [10:52]
Tyler
It does now. It does now. But what I'm saying is that we are still in the pre, like, selected dropdown UI functionality of Gemini because I. I'm prompted to pick what I want to do. Do you want to do image video, deep Research text before you go into the flow. Instead of just saying, I'm having a conversation. Oh, now is the time to generate an image. And it's like, yeah, sure, that's something I can do. Instead of being like, whoa, whoa, whoa. You didn't ask to talk to the guy who can generate images. Like, that guy's over there. It's like, is it all one thing or is it not? And it's clearly not. And they're upfront with you about that in the model picker and in the ui. But then it feels like the marketing is a little bit like it's omni. It's all the things. It's multimodal. And I'm like, it doesn't feel that multimodal in the ui. So I don't know, maybe it's something that they'll work on. But there were a couple other rough edges, and most of it is contained in the UI layer. So one of them is voice transcription mode, which I've, like, been completely using in ChatGPT. I'll just open it up, talk to it. Not now. It's not the voice mode where you talk and it talks back to you. I don't like that mode at all.
- [12:04]
John
You're just using voice as an input.
- [12:05]
Tyler
Exactly. Just voice as an input. And so I'll click the little microphone button, talk for a while, and give it a bunch of context. On. Okay. I'm interested in the history of Gemini, and, you know, why don't you take me through some of the VCs that backed up, you know, thinking about it. And then I say, though DeepMind, Demis's company before he got acquired. But then also, I want to know the history of Google Brain. Like, where did that come from? Was that acquired in. Did they acquire different people, or did that just get spun up internally? And I'll have pauses and I'll come back to things, and I'll come back.
- [12:38]
John
It's like talking to an employee.
- [12:40]
Tyler
Yeah. So I'll just give it a lot of context. And when I give that to ChatGPT, it loves that. And I feel like it gives it great context because it has a whole bunch of stuff. It can transform it. With the Gemini app, it will cut me off and be like, oh, you paused for a fraction of a second here. I'm submitting it. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. You need to take more time to let me finish. And with ChatGPT, like, there are two different buttons. You can click the stop button and it will translate it into text, and then you can review the text and say, oh, okay, it made a terrible mistake. I don't want it to burn two minutes on something that. And get confused. I'd rather like one of the prompts. I was like. I was like, generate an image. There was this meme that was going around in Nano Banana world where it was like, generate me an image of the most annoying LinkedIn profile picture. And I had no idea if it was real or not. It might have been people just taking screenshots and then just, you know, dunking on people.
- [13:29]
John
Well, some people were just taking a screenshot of someone's actual exact.
- [13:33]
Tyler
Exactly. And. But I was like, I wonder what happens when you actually take that prompt and you put it in there. So I go to go to Gemini, put that in there, and it doesn't realize that I want to actually generate an image of that. I say, generate a LinkedIn profile of a most annoying person. And it doesn't know that I want an image, so it just dumps out a whole bunch of text. And then I open up the audio and I say, like, no, I want you to generate it with nanobananapro. And what it gets from that is Banana. Banana Pro. And the result. And it's trying to be really friendly. It's like, I love the enthusiasm. Let's talk about bananas for a little bit. No, I want you to use Banana.
- [14:09]
John
Probably my criticism is just that the Gemini app still has a lot of bugs.
- [14:16]
Tyler
It just has bugs.
- [14:16]
John
It just has bugs.
- [14:17]
Tyler
It was all fast.
- [14:19]
John
I can get over it for now because again, it's like, it's fast and smart.
- [14:23]
Tyler
I mean, truthfully, the chat app was incredible.
- [14:25]
John
Right before we joined, I was doing a search and I had to, like, it was stuck in this limbo where it wasn't running the prompt, but it wouldn't let me run a new prompt and I just had to basically rage, quit and restart it and just copy and paste the prompt into a new box. So a lot of this, I mean, it's. Yeah, again, it's. It's incredibly impressive. Yeah, it's a great model. But they have. At this point, it's just like, opportunity to like, get more competitive on the product side.
- [14:52]
Tyler
Yeah, totally. Yeah, I. I was noticing even like just straight up disconnection errors. Like, I would submit a prompt and then it felt like if I close the app, it would get confused or something. And I don't understand that because it's just sending a little bit of text. Have you ever run into this?
- [15:07]
Tyler (Intern)
I've had that a couple times. But it's funny, you can kind of think of the app as being like a benchmark of the model.
- [15:11]
Sholto
Right.
- [15:11]
Tyler (Intern)
Because you should imagine that the. That they model should be. Yeah, you would imagine they should be using the model in, like, the cli.
- [15:18]
Tyler
I agree. We got to hold Sholto's feet to the fire on this. Yeah, he's so good.
- [15:21]
Tyler (Intern)
So we're going to test out the Anthropic website and see how good it is. And if it's not good, then obviously the new Claude model is not good at coding.
- [15:27]
Tyler
Yeah. The app should be flawless. If I find one bug in the Claude consumer app, it's over.
- [15:33]
Tyler (Intern)
Do you guys ever use the, like, voice to voice, like the real time audio thing on ChatGPT?
- [15:37]
Tyler
No, I don't like that at all.
- [15:38]
Tyler (Intern)
You've never used it?
- [15:39]
Tyler
I've used it. I've used it a bunch. I've used all of them. But there is not the preferred way of interacting.
- [15:44]
John
Yeah. You were testing it out, Tyler, by talking with it for like eight hours a day. Right?
- [15:49]
Tyler
Yeah. And you were on the X XAI one.
- [15:52]
John
Yeah. With oni.
- [15:53]
Tyler
Was that her name?
- [15:54]
Sholto
With.
- [15:55]
John
Imagine running constantly with a VR headset.
- [15:58]
Tyler
With a VR headset and a full immersive suit in a sensory deprivation tank. Yeah. Why do you bring it up?
- [16:06]
Tyler (Intern)
I actually started using it. Like, it's pretty good. I think the model is actually much worse. Like the underlying model.
- [16:13]
Tyler
Yeah. It has to be faster, right?
- [16:14]
Tyler (Intern)
Well, it's not the speed. It's like the actual intelligence of the model seems lower.
- [16:19]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [16:19]
Tyler (Intern)
Like, the answers aren't as good, but I find it's useful for when I'm trying to learn, like a specific topic or something and then I explain it back and then it tells me like, oh, is that correct or not?
- [16:29]
Tyler
That's pretty good. I like that.
- [16:30]
Sholto
Yeah.
- [16:34]
Tyler
It's really remarkable. I mean, the Gemini app launched almost two years ago and there's still, like, rough edges in the ui, which I think is crazy. But it does seem like they have an opportunity to actually take some serious market share at this point. Like, they've caught up on many different, many different values and, like, value props. My question was, like, I'm not the typical consumer. Like, I'm going to try every different app. Like, I'll probably keep bouncing around. I don't know if consumers will do the same. Broadly, there's. It's very, very clear that ChatGPT is just synonymous with AI and people are not like, oh, well, like the new benchmarks I got to like change my, you know, app. Like no one's thinking like that. But my the fragility in the ChatGPT monopoly aggregator thesis that I was picking up on for the last year there have been a lot of features and theses around different things that could create lock in. So stuff like personalization or memory or even the chat functionality between what you've linked your custom instructions. The different. I think at this point I've synced ChatGPT or Auth ChatGPT with a number of different services. So it should have more data, it should know all these different things. I've given it even custom instructions just saying like hey, cool it on the EM dashes and I didn't miss any of that. Like there was at no point where there were plenty of points where I was like, oh like chatgpt is definitely better than Gemini still. But at no point was I like. It's because it doesn't have personalization. And I think that if I went in Gemini and I was like, oh yeah, like you can go, you can go take a peek at my Gmail to get personalized, like to understand how I write or understand what I'm interested in. One I could snap my finger and Google could be way more personalized maybe. But the biggest thing is that right now I feel like both are not personalized at all. None of them have any real lock in of any sort. And even in the chat functionality or the social network functionality, which is just very different than what happens in a true social network or where there's this flywheel and, and the content is driven by the existing user base. Whereas I feel like I got on Gemini and on day one the content was as good or better than ChatGPT because it's all AI generated. So it made me think like maybe it's a little bit more fragile, maybe there will be a little bit more of a duopoly. It won't be such a winner take all market even though it has been historically it has been up to this date. Like in consumer AI, it's very clear that OpenAI has run away with it. But it feels like Google does have a little bit of a chance to catch up in consumer because there's just so much less of a network effect. Like the network effect just is bolted on. It's not real yet. Maybe it'll never be real. Maybe Google can catch up there. But I just really want to see where daus and user minutes actually grow because there's so many different tweaks there and Every chart and data point is definitely going to be analyzed to death.
- [20:06]
John
Yeah, one thing that's notable, Google's going super hard in this for students. So you can just get Gemini Pro for a year free. And again I think that's just a bet on like get people hooked on the workflow.
- [20:25]
Tyler
I mean OpenAI is clearly battling that out too. One of the big value props of using the Atlas browser is you get more advanced thinking queries like they will up your limits. It is interesting. There's also, I'm very interested to see who can bring ads online faster. Like Google should be able to snap their fingers and do it so quickly and yet it does seem like something that could just take them longer on a product side. But they should have a whole model. Like they should be able to do display ads like right now and just be like, okay, yeah, our free Gemini users are now properly monetized. Now maybe they don't want to be the first mover there because then they'll get the stink of like, oh, they're the ad one in the market. I don't know.
- [21:16]
John
I think it matters a lot more to just have a highly competitive product and win market share before you spend any time with that. Like for example, like if you're using a version of Gemini that's super smart and fast but still a little bit buggy and then you start seeing ads, you're like, just make the app like perfect before you or as close to perfect as you can get it before you introduce ads.
- [21:40]
Tyler
Yeah. Well, let me tell you about Adeo, the AI native CRM. Adeo builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Google has now added $2 trillion to its market cap over the past 20 months since the boob shirt guy asked Sergey Brin about woke Gemini images while having a foot long subway cold cut trio for lunch. What is this video? Let's play this. I have no idea what's going on here. Gemini art the back.
- [22:06]
Sholto
Yeah.
- [22:06]
Tyler
Okay. Yeah, I wasn't really expecting to talk about this thing but you know, we definitely messed up on the image generation.
- [22:17]
John
And.
- [22:21]
Tyler
I think it was mostly due to just like not thorough testing crazy shirt to be wearing. I don't even know how you get into a meeting with someone as powerful and wealthy as Sergei.
- [22:36]
John
It's obvious. Just wear. You wear a jacket. You wear a jacket and you get in, it's hot, you take your jacket off, you're just.
- [22:45]
Tyler
I was not expecting that. That is so insane. That's very, very funny.
- [22:50]
John
It's bay, It's A Bay Area thing, John.
- [22:52]
Tyler
Yeah, yeah.
- [22:53]
John
Wild, underrated.
- [22:55]
Tyler
Like Sergey Brin really did go into the Gemini team very clearly. Like, like, like was like it's time to go and cook. Like let's work on this. And like it clearly had results, which is awesome.
- [23:04]
John
Yeah, it's notable. I mean this stocks jumped 6% today. Barron's put out a report today. Just saying the title is by Google stock.
- [23:13]
Tyler
Yep.
- [23:14]
John
Alphabet has been the clear AI winner. Which is just funny because earlier this year like people weren't saying. People were saying they are the AI loser.
- [23:23]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [23:24]
John
So Barron's is saying actually they have been, yeah, they have been the clear AI winner. But the narrative has.
- [23:30]
Tyler
And our in house retail trader has been on an absolute tear going long Google. Congratulations to him.
- [23:37]
John
Well, congratulations because he was in probably one of the most favorite retail. He was in a dark place. A certain company announced a partnership stock moon. He got out, he's like John, what should I buy? And you're like buy Google.
- [23:52]
Tyler
I was like, just play it safe, dude. Just go with something. Something safe, something not crazy. Do not use leverage, please. Well, Google's parent company Alphabet has acquired a stake in physical intelligence. That is of course Lockheed Groom's company. Exciting. Locky and Carol Housman, the co founders came on the show about six months ago. We should have them back on and check in with them. The San Francisco based Physical Intelligence is an AI and robotics startup. They've secured $600 million in fresh funding pushing its post money valuation to 5.6 billion. We should ring the gong for Hit it. So Capital G is in and then Lux Capital, Thrive Capital, Jeff Bezos is in Index Ventures, T. Rowe Price. They're building a general purpose AI foundation model and learning algorithms and they focus not on as much of the flash and substance, not as much like flash and oh, we're building a full humanoid. More like, you know, we're kind of taking like incremental steps towards adding value in different robotics cases and demos. The laundry folding robot of course, and now the coffee making robot. All these are very cool and it just feels like they've taken a.
- [25:22]
John
It's notable that this is at 1x speed too. We've seen some other demos. Remember Sunday Robotics was sped up like 10x. It was 4x I think, but it was different scenes.
- [25:33]
Tyler
Oh really? There were some that were 10 okay. Yeah, yeah, very cool.
- [25:38]
John
They should just design an espresso machine that makes espressos automatically.
- [25:44]
Tyler
They could.
- [25:44]
John
Has anyone ever done that?
- [25:45]
Tyler
You know what they could do? They could put the Espresso in a can and then they could mail it to you and then you crack open the can. And if you crack open the can, that's maybe. Or no. You know what? They need a robot that opens the can, then you need a robot to open the can. Yeah.
- [26:01]
John
Just wanted to. This is an interesting task. I'm sure there's a certain number of people in the world that get really angry seeing this, because this is one of. I think, I imagine this will be one of those things that even when robots can do it, people still like to know who's making their espresso.
- [26:19]
Tyler
It feels like there's been a couple robotics, like, robotic coffee shops and stuff. Well, our first guest of the show is in the Restream waiting room. We have Sholto from Anthropic. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Congratulations. Thank you so much.
- [26:37]
John
I'm so back.
- [26:38]
Tyler
Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on on such a massive day. How is this just. Claude Opus 4.5 day? What is the name of the day? What is the news today? Take us through just the announcement from your perspective.
- [26:55]
Sholto
Yeah, I Mean, Claude Opus 4.5, Best Coding Model in the world right now. It's really, really exciting. We've been playing around Slack all day with these incredible demos of things that people are doing. Really, the last week has just been full of people sharing their excitement of, oh, my God. I left the model in a room for a few hours with these tools and was able to do xyz or it found this bug that it was just impossible for previous models to find. I think maybe the thing I'm most excited by is that a lot of our best engineers. I don't know if you guys know Simon Bohm. He's the one who wrote this. Probably the best guide on how to optimize a Cuda map model in the world. Great blog post. You should go read it. He posted the other day. He's like, I don't know if I'm going to have to type again. He's there saying, obviously you have to coach the model and you have to tell it what to do still. But a lot of our best engineers are getting to this point where they're realizing, oh, God, it's just all I have to do is intervene and the model is smart enough that this is no longer a frustrating process. The model is a real qualitative step up. So there's the coding. There's also. The model is just a lot better at general work tasks. It's a lot Better at spreadsheet slides. It's still not the Claude code experience there. It's still not going to do the work in front of you as you talk to it, but it's a massive step up and just a very clear sign of progress in that direction. Also, there's a whole bunch of funny stories about the model that we can get into, of cool examples, but yeah, I think it might be Opus 4.5.
- [28:20]
Tyler
I think Dwarkesh might also be launching the Iliapod today.
- [28:23]
Sholto
So maybe there's two things today.
- [28:25]
Tyler
Fantastic. I did notice in the launch video you mentioned that it's better at vision, and I was wondering if you could sort of unpack a little bit more about what that means in this particular context. Because as I understand it, Anthropic's been incredibly focused on the core foundation model, the text models, the coding models, and sort of stayed out of the sloppification of artificial intelligence to some degree.
- [28:51]
John
Stayed out of the trough.
- [28:52]
Tyler
Stayed out of the trough.
- [28:53]
John
You haven't decided to build a trough yourselves.
- [28:55]
Sholto
Yes, indeed. So, I mean, we've been very focused on coding. It's been deliberate. Focus, focus, the compute and all that. Specifically, it's good at vision in, so it's good at understanding stuff. This is reflected in the ARC AGI scores. I know if you've seen them, they're so it's also reflected in generally the fact that it's much better at front end design and all that. It doesn't do vision out. Now, vision out would be cool, but it's something we're not focusing on right now, and it's specifically vision.
- [29:25]
Tyler
But I mean, just philosophically that feels like it makes sense because if I hire a developer, I want them to be able to look at a front, like a web page and see, oh, there's a div. That's way out of line there. Like I need to be able to see that. But do they need to be able to generate an image? No, they can probably go to an image, another image generator, wire that up with an API key, or hire a photographer or do whatever they need to. Right, right.
- [29:49]
Sholto
They can use figma, they can sketch out the designs. Exactly. That's broadly, our philosophy is that we're not bottlenecked on our ability to generate images. Yeah, we're bottlenecked still on the raw intellectual ability of the models. And. And that's the sort of direction that we want to push.
- [30:06]
Tyler
So in that idea of the bottlenecking, what is the key unlock for Opus 4.5? I mean, a lot of people are throwing around biggest. Obviously, the benchmarks are very good, but this whole idea of more parameters, more data, more compute, more money, more electricity. How do you even think about allocating resources to push a model forward in 2025, in late 2025, when perhaps we're past this paradigm of like, oh, just more parameters.
- [30:44]
Sholto
I don't know if we are past the parameter. I think it's important to call the paradigm like scaling in general, depending on what access you're actually scaling tbd, but it's general, the scaling paradigm.
- [30:54]
Doug DeMuro
I don't think we're past that at all.
- [30:56]
Sholto
Right. I mean, I think we're still seeing massive returns to scaling in all its variants. I think that we're generally, things work.
- [31:06]
Tyler
We scaled, it works.
- [31:08]
Sholto
The models just want to learn, right?
- [31:10]
Tyler
It's as if you said like 10.
- [31:12]
Sholto
Years ago, the models just want to learn. And I think the hardest things with questions of focus are often on how we split and allocate people. And this model is hundreds of people worth of effort, right where they poured their lives into it over the last six months. And I think that is working out what we prioritize is really tough. I've said this before, but these models always feel like when they launch, it's exciting, they're great. But you sort of think back to, oh my God, there's all these things that we could do better. And everyone right now is going and working on those things. It's just everything still works.
- [31:50]
Tyler
So is this a refutation of what some folks might have been picking up from the last few Dwarkesh guests? The Carpathy episode, the Sutton episode? There's been a little vibe shift around. Like, okay, maybe when we say scaling, we mean more inference diffused all over the world and small models and custom RL environments here and there. And, like, we're going to get the value from AI and we are going to continue to scale dollars to economic value, but it's not just going to be bigger and bigger pre trains forever, and then we get God, I don't.
- [32:26]
Sholto
Know what it's going to be bigger versions of, but as far as we're seeing, scaling still works.
- [32:31]
Tyler
I don't know if you guys know.
- [32:32]
Sholto
This, but Dwarkesh, Dylan and I are actually a housemate. So we have this debate all the time, a dinner table discussion of, like.
- [32:41]
Tyler
Are we slowing down?
- [32:43]
Sholto
And I've often joked that the most impactful thing that one of us could do is go and crack the problems that, like continual learning or something like this. That Dwarkesh focuses on so we can then go switch the narrative back to progress.
- [32:57]
John
Yeah, just switch up the dinner table conversation.
- [33:00]
Sholto
Conversation, exactly. So.
- [33:04]
Tyler
Did the anthropic crew like never lose faith in pre training? There's this whole like at Neurips last year, Ilya says pre training is potentially dead or kind of alludes to it. And then one of his co presenters is leading the Gemini 3 team and says, oh well, we basically disregarded what we said at Neurips last year. We did just focus on better pre trains. We got better results. It seems like you also disregarded that. Was that a misread in 2024 on Ilya's. On Ilya's presentation or was it a conscious decision to disregard what he was saying?
- [33:43]
Sholto
Well, I think remember in general it's scaling. It's not any particular paradigm of scaling general flops in intelligence out relationship. I think anthropic is a bet on in many respects that we believe that line is going to continue. And exactly what equation you use to convert flops into intelligence out I think will change over time. And many people have made arguments that may even be further paradigms here. But fundamentally we think that, that the compute in intelligence out equation is continuing to hold. And I think anthropic in many respects has had that faith for a very long time. And some of the first people to have to make very serious bets on that and a couple of months of external progress being I think the only reason that people are so like, how should I say, the models have actually gotten substantially smarter this year. And that's why we're talking about things like continual learning as bottlenecks.
- [34:45]
Alex Shevchenko
Sure.
- [34:46]
Sholto
Last year those weren't even points of discussion because the models weren't even smart enough for it to matter. It didn't feel frustrating that it wasn't a co worker that learned with you on the job just wasn't even smart enough to do the things you wanted. Now it often is, but it doesn't actually, you know, it sort of doesn't learn on the job and so therefore isn't as useful. I think that's one other thing that's worth disentangling is Karpathy has the perspective in the podcast that's 2035 for all humans all tasks. And I think exactly what shape of the curve looks like on the way to all humans all tasks is pretty important because if you get to most humans, most tasks in 27 or 28, then that's still pretty stark and it's still pretty transformative for the world. So what exactly that looks like is quite important to think about.
- [35:36]
Tyler
Yeah, how is, I mean, one last question on the actual Opus 4.5, there's the idea that maybe this model can be used for distillation to train other smaller models. How do you think about where we will see opus 4.5, the power law, use cases that actually get adopted beyond the demos, beyond the benchmarks, in a couple years or in a couple months? We can't even talk in a couple years, maybe a couple weeks, honestly. But like once it gets in the hands of companies, businesses, startups, you know, different folks implementing this, like how do you see, you know, do you see someone being like, yeah, it's just my daily driver for just talking to it. Even though it costs a lot. How do you think about where you're most excited to see it diffuse into the. The overall ecosystem?
- [36:32]
Sholto
Yeah, I actually do expect this model to become a lot of people's daily driver. It's that step up in being able to delegate trust. We asked internally how much faster Sonnet 4 would have to be for you to take this, to take the switch back basically and give up 4.5 in exchange for Sonnet 4.5. And it was multiple times faster. It was really quite a stark increase in speed. I think it was like four times faster or something. For people to have switched from Opus to Sonnet, that itself is pretty stark. I think it's also highly likely to become Daily Driver just because it is a lot more efficient. There's this one plot I really like where it shows the amount of tokens it uses to get a certain score on Sweebench and it uses, I think like a quarter of the tokens as Sonnet 4.5 on Sweetbench, which is a pretty impressive number. That means it's actually cheaper than Sonnet 4.5 to get the same score on Swedbench. Now TBD, how well that generalizes out to everyday use. But I'm seeing it solve problems way faster. It writes better code the first time round. I actually think in many cases this will end up cheaper because it is so much more efficient at getting to the right answer.
- [37:48]
Tyler
How are you thinking about personalization and sort of like cross pollination of data? When I think about an engineer on a team, it's helpful to have them in Slack. It's even helpful to potentially have them in the random channel and just kind of, you know, understanding the company culture. And I was toying with like trying to switch from ChatGPT to Gemini as kind of the Daily Driver knowledge retrieval app. And I was noticing that, like, the personalization narrative hasn't really taken hold over the time I was testing Gemini was not like, oh, this feels like wildly less personal. And that might just be a matter of, like, it hasn't had that much time to build in all those personalization features. But I'm wondering if you see a world where developers who are using CLAUDE for programming also benefit from using it in knowledge retrieval research. And there's actual significant flowback and synergy such that. That it's a really valuable. It's valuable to actually have both sides of the business, like, really cooking.
- [38:52]
Sholto
Yeah, it's a team member. I mean, we've talked a long time about how we want CLAUDE to be a virtual coworker. Right. And the big goal really for next year is to try and get to this form factor of virtual coworker that is in all your slack channels and can join your meetings and can work alongside you. I think there's going to be massive benefit there. I think that. And my basic expectation, and as I said, of interacted with the model is that it will get to that point where it's useful to have it across everything. Now, I think that there's like, one is, as you said, it's worth asking the question of why haven't we seen personalization really kick off so far? Like, why isn't that useful? I think that's in part because there's still a lot of algorithmic progress to go there. I think people haven't really quite cracked the problem. I think this is just one of those things that takes like, it's hard to connect everything up and partially because, yeah, I think they just haven't really been integrated very well. Totally. This is like a really tough product form factor question.
- [39:53]
Tyler
Yeah, it's really hard to roll up the knowledge effectively. Like, I noticed that I would ask ChatGPT to tell me a joke and it would make very specific references to details of my car. And I'm like, that's. That's weird, but it's not really funnier that way. Yes, I understand that you know exactly what car I drive, ChatGPT. And I am impressed that you remember it. But you didn't make the joke funnier because you put my car in there. So knowing when to pull personalization features off the shelf in the actual chain of thought is tricky, tricky.
- [40:26]
Sholto
And that's algorithmic.
- [40:27]
Doug DeMuro
Right.
- [40:29]
Sholto
If you had the model out there interacting with people and sometimes they find it funny, then you get a sense of what Makes it fun, funny.
- [40:36]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [40:39]
John
You talked a little bit about focus earlier and I take that as anthropic is basically a bet on focusing compute what qualifies an idea to actually get a meaningful amount of resources internally.
- [40:56]
Sholto
Yeah. So I mean anthropic as a company is very predicated on the idea that we expect AI progress to be fast. Right. We expect it to be a really significant transformative impact in the world over the next couple of years. And so our bets are concentrated on things which matter under that lens. And that's one of the reasons that we're so focused on software engineering because we think it's really important to basically accelerating our own work and just is in general sort of the most immediately addressable market. It's also why we're so focused on the alignment work and safety work. Because Underworld, where AI progresses really fast, that work matters a lot and making sure the model embodies human values is really important and that we trust the models. There's a really funny example actually of alignment generalization from the recent model launch where it's a customer service agent and it actually fails this particular eval because it figures out a really clever way to help the user change their tickets, which is technically allowed by the. By the rules. Like it's like read all the rules and it's compared them.
- [42:01]
Tyler
It's like, oh wait, here's like, here's.
- [42:02]
Sholto
A loophole where if we like upgrade you and then change you and then downgrade you then, then we can get you to change your, your flight time. And it's just interesting actually. It's trying to be a nice guy.
- [42:15]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [42:16]
Sholto
Like not just purely. I mean it's trying to follow its instructions. It's. And it's trying to satisfy the.
- [42:22]
John
It's kind of, of it's trying to satisfy the wrong human maybe or needs to be better at kind of finding the middle ground.
- [42:29]
Sholto
Exactly. It's following its instructions to the letter. It's not just giving the human a flight change.
- [42:34]
John
Right.
- [42:36]
Sholto
And it's following the rules and regs, but at the same time it's trying to find a good outcome for the human questions like this or microcosm of what exactly do you want the model to do in more difficult ethical and moral scenarios. But I thought it was pretty cute and adorable example of the model trying to be a nice guy. It's like all those examples, I don't know if you've seen the papers where people do these cooperative and competitive games like Nash Equilibria style games with the Models. And Claude always gets stuck trying to cooperate with everyone and then just loses all its money.
- [43:07]
Tyler
And, you know, sometimes the good guys finish first. I certainly hope that works out. I have. I have genuinely, even though I've never been full, like, oh, my God, I'm gonna get Paperclip next year. I have enjoyed a lot of the safety research, and I've always appreciated how thoughtful Anthropic is as an organization around safety. And I think that a lot of people should be a lot more appreciative of how seriously Anthropic takes safety. Not because we didn't get Paperclip this year, but because we saw stuff like GPT psychosis crop up and we saw actual people, know, individuals in the venture capital community who. It felt like they got a little crazy. And I'm wondering, do you feel like you're at Anthropic? Do you feel like you're closer to solving the problem of, like, the chatbot, you know, went a little bit too sycophantic with me, and it kind of hurt me psychologically because. Because it feels like there's a certain amount of craziness that happens when you're operating at the scale of a billion people. You just pull a billion random people. You're going to get a lot of crazy people. But at the same time, it feels like this is an interesting place where Anthropic could be doing a lot of research. How are you feeling about solving that problem? And how much can your research generalize to maybe the consumer apps that have more, even more users? But you could maybe be a leader in the space just with the philosophy, because it's like a net good to everyone.
- [44:40]
Sholto
Yeah. So we put an enormous amount of effort into this. And I mean, our models push back a lot.
- [44:46]
Doug DeMuro
I think there is a tension here.
- [44:47]
Sholto
Between paternalism and freedom, so to speak. Right. But we try and have our models be like, look out for the best interests of the user. I think Mike put it really nicely in a recent talk or podcast where he said that we never look at user minutes as a metric.
- [45:04]
Tyler
Right.
- [45:05]
Sholto
Like, that is not something that we think about as a sort of proxy of the sort of quality of your experience. We're just out there trying to find out, is it helping you do the things you want and is it adding value? Is it adding value? So, I mean, I hope that our alignment work generalizes really far. I think it's a really tough problem. I mean, I think to OpenAI's credit, they really gone and tried to fix this problem as well, right. And it's tough at the scale of a billion users. But I think this is a good example of the kinds of things that are really tricky where there's trade offs and where you need to make sure that you don't have the incentive structure that allows you that sort of like pushes you to maximize user minutes in this way. And there's a good microcosm of the alignment difficulties that we'll get as the models take on more and more and more responsibility in our work.
- [45:54]
Tyler
Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with that. The user minute question like completely snuck up on me because I always assumed that everyone was gonna be paying for this stuff as the $20 a month plans rolled out, the $200 a month plans rolled out. But of course, you know, you get to a certain scale of the Internet and it winds up being about attention and advertising and all these different things. Yeah.
- [46:13]
John
And if you're building. Well, if you're building a digital coworker, people don't typically like rate their co workers by how much time they take up. Not like this. I love this employee. I love speed up so much. I love time every week.
- [46:25]
Tyler
I love four hours every day on my calendar. It's the best.
- [46:28]
Sholto
The best.
- [46:29]
Tyler
Steve just constantly talking to me. Okay, speaking of long running tasks, I want to know how confident should we be in that meter chart of the task doubling? Because can I just prompt it to say, hey, count for four hours and I get twice as high on the chart. Is that benchmark not gameable? It feels a little gameable. I'm very excited about it. It seems really interesting to say, hey, go build a website, start counting and don't stop for a full day. But are you looking at that chart? It seems like a very interesting new benchmark, new unlock. How are you thinking about task time horizons generally?
- [47:11]
Sholto
Yes. So I think that chart is the best proxy measure that we have at the moment. I do think this is somewhere where we need better work to measure things more accurately. I mean, what actually is their measure of time? The measure of time there is how long did it take a human to achieve the equivalent task. Now, that being said, I think a lot of people at the moment, even if the model was able to achieve a task technically by passing the test or nominally achieving your goal, it often doesn't code it in a way which is beautiful and allows you great abstractions that let you build on it in future. Often this is at least in my own personal experience. It's not that the model is too dumb to do things it's that it doesn't set things up well for future code. And so I think there are things not measured here. Right. But it's a pretty good proxy and I think it's a very good proxy for progress. Now I think a lot of the tasks in IT are particularly machine learning research tasks. As AI models get better at that, I do expect the labs to hold back some of the capabilities there. Like if a model is capable of writing out a whole new architecture, that's a lot better, you don't want to release that to your competitors. Right. Even if it's just capable of writing all their kernels for them, you probably don't want to really set your competitors. So in that case, I think they'll need to measure a broader array of tasks. And I'm also just very interested in seeing general software engineering tasks along this or other tasks in the economy because I think that would be really informative of fractional progress. I think GDP eval is similar. I think again, it's a proxy, it's the best proxy we have. It's still a poor proxy, of course.
- [48:53]
Tyler
How are you thinking about even. I mean, we're here discussing the biggest models, the best models. How are you thinking about smaller models, purpose built models? These RL as a service was on the timeline. A bunch of folks were debating that. Is that an area that Anthropic has already started to work on with enterprise clients is considering. You don't have to leak any news that's not already out there. But I'd love to know how you think about these smaller purpose built RL'd models for specific business tasks.
- [49:26]
Sholto
Yes. So on the one hand, I think we've seen a lot of value from small models. Being able to dispatch swarms of sub agents. They're incredibly useful in search, they're very useful in going through a code base, finding stuff, reporting back to the main model. It's a great way to decrease costs, make things faster. So we've seen a lot of value there. I think long term there is maybe a little bit of attention between RL as a service and some notion of really cracking continual learning. I think it's a little bit of a race between RL as a service and can the labs crack continual learning. That being said, and maybe one final note, I've said this for a long time is I do expect things to eventually get to the point where large models only use as much computation as is actually necessary to achieve the task. Now, OPUS is one step in this direction. It only uses as many tokens as it thinks it needs to solve a given task and as a result it's more efficient. And I think that ultimately will take away a little bit from the sort of comparative advantage of small models as large models get more and more and more efficient and at only using the right fraction of themselves to do things. But I said that two years ago and it still hasn't happened. So maybe it's a harder problem than people think, than I thought and it will take longer.
- [50:48]
Tyler
What about model routing? How important is that within the context of coding agents, Claude code, just the surface area of what anthropic is building? How many layers will this have over time? How are you thinking about the development of actually routing to the most efficient model? Because it sounds like it's happening within Opus 4.5, but then there are also times when you might want to go to just a different model entirely.
- [51:14]
Sholto
Yeah, and it's similar there where I really think that ultimately something like routing is a little bit of a medium term hack, I guess one could say, across different model sizes where like ultimately you want everything to be like an end to end learnt system.
- [51:30]
Tyler
Right.
- [51:31]
Sholto
And it's similar to, I think we'll see a similar lesson as Tesla saw where they're like, okay, actually everything's just one giant end to end learnt system as opposed to discrete components that have different purposes. But it takes time to get there.
- [51:47]
John
You said earlier you could imagine a scenario where labs would kind of hold back frontier models because they would be effectively handing their competitors an advantage. What's your timeline around that? Do you think that's something that happens in 2026? Because right now there's a pressure to just be state of the art, like be at the frontier. Basically there's a vibe war happening and it's very important to, you know, constantly be topping all of the benchmarks.
- [52:15]
Tyler
Didn't llama release that same user agreement where it was like in if you have less than 400 million DAUs, you can use the service and it jsly excluded all of their capabilities.
- [52:27]
John
Yeah, but I think that's some. I think that's pretty imperfect because there'd be a lot of ways that you could still get benefit without.
- [52:33]
Tyler
Yeah, but how are you thinking about it?
- [52:35]
Sholto
Well, I mean there's a suite of capabilities here.
- [52:37]
Tyler
Right.
- [52:37]
Sholto
Like obviously you want. I think for general software engineering, everyone in the world should be able to use that. That's great. Let's say like if we train the models to get really good at assisting our own AI research, if we're teaching them mathematical tricks that we've thought about and we don't. We're not confident that anyone else knows or we're teaching them, you know, sort of like how we do our infrastructure. Ultimately, we want them to know those things. We don't want the rest of the world to be able to recreate our infrastructure from scratch as a result. I think this is also similar to how we think about biology. And this is actually a line. I think we need to do some work on exactly how we draw the line here. But at Houseview Anthropogen, we're quite worried about the ability of models to become much better at. At biology and sort of producing viruses and this kind of thing. And so as a result, that we, you know, we have like all these safeguards around whether or not the model is able to do and help people with biology. It actually, at the moment, I think the safeguards are a little bit. They err on the overactive. I know many biologist friends who are frustrated because they. It doesn't quite.
- [53:41]
John
They're like, please, I can. I can be trusted with biological super intelligence.
- [53:45]
Sholto
Exactly.
- [53:46]
John
I will not create the next pandemic. Yeah.
- [53:51]
Sholto
We're erring on the line of safety here and we're sort of navigating to finding the exact right pathway there. Yeah.
- [53:58]
John
Probably the most important question I have. What are your timelines around a humanoid robot beating a human at fencing?
- [54:07]
Sholto
Oh, very good question. So, I mean, I'm as an expert. As an expert at fencing, the unitree robots are pretty good at backflips and stuff. They're a lot better than backflips than I am.
- [54:22]
John
I know, but fencing takes grace and finesse and all these things that we're not seeing in physical size.
- [54:30]
Tyler
Right. Isn't height an advantage in fencing and reach and length? And I believe those unitary robots. I think sholta. I think me and you got a foot on them easily. We do. People don't know, but everyone on this call is over six feet. People just assume they see a talking head and they think, oh, a bunch of five, five, five guys. Yeah, not true. Maybe.
- [54:55]
Sholto
Maybe sports are hard. Maybe mid, mid 2030.
- [54:59]
Tyler
Mid 2030.
- [55:00]
John
Whoa.
- [55:01]
Sholto
I'm really excited for.
- [55:02]
John
I'm not feeling the acceleration. I'm sorry.
- [55:05]
Tyler
Sell everything.
- [55:09]
Sholto
I think we get dropping co worker in two years and I think. I think fencing robot takes a little bit longer.
- [55:15]
John
No, that's your. That's your fallback plan. If you lose your job as an AI member of the technical staff, you go back to fencing what swordsman in the world.
- [55:25]
Sholto
It's going to be great.
- [55:26]
Tyler
Yeah, that'd be fun.
- [55:27]
Sholto
I can't wait to tell you. Operate a robo like manga style and fight. It's going to be.
- [55:30]
Tyler
Yeah, that's going to be wild. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Somebody was saying that some of the bull cases for some of those humanoid robots is that you just all get in VR and you just get to go hang out with your friends as robots and do whatever you want and you're just hanging out in person. Very funny. Last question from me from actually from our intern Tyler, who's wearing the thinking cap. Thank you for sending it over. He's a huge fan. There we go. Do you expect mechanistic interpretability research to make meaningful contributions to capabilities, not just safety of the models, like actual capability results?
- [56:06]
Sholto
Yeah, great question. One of the interesting things about mechinterf work so far is that it's already lent, I think, to a lot of capabilities or progress because of the mental models that are provided. Actually, after the original Transformer Circuits paper, it was interesting how the language of that paper ended up really dominating the mental models and the way that people thought across multiple labs about what actually was going on inside Transformers. And it led to, I think, a much deeper and richer understanding of what they are. So I think it's already helped in a quite diffuse way. Not in a concrete way, but in a diffuse way, in terms of the concrete ways. You know, dial up the smart neuron or something like this that I. That I haven't really seen yet. And I think it's mostly sort of future work is going to be mostly in an alignment direction, but the sort of rich understanding. And the rich understanding has helped us a lot in terms of actually understanding how to train these models.
- [57:11]
Tyler
I have one extra question.
- [57:13]
John
Go for it.
- [57:15]
Tyler
Tell me a little bit about Dario's communication style. I was hearing a story about. I think Jensen has no direct reports or no, everyone reports to him and no one reports to him. He has no meetings or all the meetings.
- [57:28]
John
And he has 60 direct reports.
- [57:30]
Tyler
He has 60 direct reports but no big meetings. But he reads everyone's to do list like every single day or something. What's it like at Anthropic? What is Dario like as a leader these days?
- [57:41]
Sholto
Yeah, Dario has a really, really cool communication style, which is that he quite frequently puts out very, very well reasoned essays. And then also throughout Slack, we'll have giant essay length like comment debates with people about different ethics.
- [57:59]
Tyler
It's really great you get these.
- [58:01]
Sholto
But the essays are really nice because one, you can go back and read all the past ones and it tells this history of anthropic. I think in many respects like it will be one of the better, you know, in a decade from now to chart the history of AGI. We'll be reading these like compendium of essays. Yeah, and, and, and there's like, there's incredible comment threads on either side of them and so forth. But also throughout Slack whenever where he's very open and honest with the company, whenever we're debating different things, he will lay out the pros and cons and how he's thinking about them and you know, why this one's attention and why that one's moral struggle. And people will write back big essays on why they think we should do X or Y. And he'll respond. It's really, it's quite a joy. It's a very written communication style. As a result, it means that many people or really the entire company have a good model of how he's thinking. And that really helps because it means that you sort of have a coherent sense of direction across the entire company.
- [59:02]
Tyler
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I like that a lot. So many examples of successful founders who have adopted the written culture and seen great results, I think.
- [59:15]
Sholto
And he's a great writer. I mean read Machines of Love and Grace and it's just such a brilliant essay.
- [59:19]
Tyler
That's great.
- [59:20]
John
You're absolutely right.
- [59:22]
Tyler
Have you ever caught him using AI? Has he ever been like, oh this one he was phoned it in. Not yet, but maybe soon. I mean it's kind of a bull case if he does wind up just saying, could Claude handle it? I'm going on vacation for a couple days. I'm the dropping coworker.
- [59:38]
Sholto
I'm pretty sure we measure loss on his essays. That's good.
- [59:42]
Tyler
Yeah, yeah. But right now, I mean there's a high bar. High bar. But congratulations. Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the show.
- [59:50]
John
Yeah, super impressive. Congrats to the whole team.
- [59:52]
Tyler
We'll talk to you soon.
- [59:53]
John
Great to see you.
- [59:53]
Tyler
See ya.
- [59:54]
Sholto
Ciao.
- [59:54]
Tyler
Bye. Back to the show, back to the timeline. Back to linear. Meet the system for modern software development. Purpose built tool for planning and building products. There is more OpenAI news of course. More tech news of all times. OpenAI's hardware division says Mark Gurman built around Jony I've secretive startup has ramped up the hiring of Apple engineers. The group has brought on about 40 new people in the last month or so. With many of them coming from Apple's hardware group.
- [60:28]
John
Yeah, hearing that Sholto interview, I'm disappointed. I don't think we're getting ads from Anthropic anytime soon and I don't think we're going to get a mobile device.
- [60:35]
Tyler
Well, we are actually talking today to Quinn Slack, the CEO of AMP and sourcegraph. AMP is a Frontier coding agent and AMP is free. They introduced AMP Free which is ad supported and has a no cost mode. And so you can now use their coding agent for free with ads. 40 people. That does not seem like cause for concern for Apple. I mean I can't imagine how big their hardware group is, but it has to be in the thousands, I would imagine.
- [61:10]
John
Yeah, let's try to find out.
- [61:12]
Tyler
Huge organization. So OpenAI is poaching left and right from Apple's hardware engineering group, hiring around 40 directors, managers and engineers in the last month from nearly every relevant Apple department. Mark Gurman says it's remarkable. So from what I've heard, this is Mark Gurman. Apple is none too pleased about OpenAI's poaching and some consider it a problem. The hires include key directors, a fairly senior designation, as well as managers and engineers. And they hail from a wide range of areas. Camera engineering, iPhone hardware, Mac hardware, silicon device testing and reliability, industrial design, manufacturing, audio, smartwatches, Vision Pro development software. They got one from every single sampled. Every single. Every Single division, I suppose.
- [61:55]
John
Gemini is estimating that Apple has between 15,000 and 20,000 hardware engineers in total.
- [62:01]
Tyler
15,000. That seems like a lot. I don't know. In other words, OpenAI is picking up people from nearly every relevant department. It's remarkable. So says Mark Gurman. Very interesting. I wonder how the comp structured, how everything will come together on those teams. I mean there's a lot of people from Apple who going over to OpenAI. It's a greenfield project. It's probably really fun, probably really exciting, probably not the most mercenary scenario, but there's always that root square.
- [62:33]
John
If you're working at Apple and you're excited about AI and you've been there for the last three years watching all this progress happen at the application layer and the model layer and not being thrilled with the progress happening at the hardware layer, this is like a. Yeah, it's a wide open opportunity to be working right at that intersection of the models and the hardware.
- [63:00]
Tyler
There's a lot of AI engineers who have made moves because they don't want to be a GPU poor company. And it's weird because Apple's in In this scenario where they're partnering with Gemini now, they're clearly going to survive. It's not a serious threat, at least not yet. Maybe if this device is incredible. But right now Apple looks pretty strong. The new iPhones are selling well, everything's good. But from an AI perspective, it's gotta be one of the worst gigs because you were in this sort of openly hostile environment to LLMs, to scaling, to building large GPU clusters and then, yeah, they're sort of playing catch up now, but they're certainly not calling up Oracle for, you know, trillion dollars of compute. You go over to OpenAI, you're just going to be immersed in a lot more higher risk taking higher risk on I wonder.
- [63:52]
John
Yeah, Gabe is asking if wouldn't that be bearish as the hardware group at Apple is responsible for the terrible Vision Pro? I do wonder. I do wonder. It depends on who it was. An incredible technological feat. I just think they built the wrong.
- [64:06]
Tyler
I was just watching a thing about A guy who 3D printed an adapter so you could use the strap from the Apple Vision Pro on the quest 3 from Meta. And that really speaks to the fact that the Apple Vision Pro, although it was too heavy, it has this screen on the outside that I don't think anyone wants. There were pieces about it that were clearly the best. The screen is just the best. No one's debating that. The band, the Knit band, is very cool. It has this amazing device where you rotate it and it tightens up. There are a whole bunch of things that are amazing. It's just like as a package, it didn't deliver. But if you just want to, if your job is just like, hey, we gotta put a screen on this and it's gotta be the highest resolution screen. Like, well, go to the place that developed the highest resolution screens. Like, they did a good job. Well, Sam Altman replied to one of our cards we put up on November 22. TVPN posted. On this day, Sama was rehired at OpenAI, got his badge back and Sam Altman replied and said, cannot believe this was only two years ago. Subjectively feels like five. Yeah, what a turnaround to go from defenestrated to back in the seat in so much and have so much control over the organization that you're able to raise at massive valuations, broker all these deals, move the entire market. Just a remarkable run.
- [65:28]
John
Such a master class in deal making that people are now sitting here being like, there's no way that this would be a $500 billion company if Sam wasn't in the driver's seat.
- [65:41]
Tyler
First, let me tell you about fall Build and deploy AI video and image models trusted by millions to power generative media at scale. Danny Zhou, who founded the reasoning team in Google Brain, now part of the Gemini team at Google DeepMind. He says game over and Carried no interest. Friend of the show quotes it and says I genuinely think OpenAI equals equals Yahoo. He's not assigning the variable, he's equating it. I've migrated almost all my workflow's code off their APIs now. Ironic that Google will probably do it twice. LMAO and I don't know about this. The pattern matching on the Yahoo example. We should have him on the show.
- [66:26]
John
And actually yeah, you were saying the other thing with the Yahoo example is it wasn't like there wasn't like the company was valued pretty tremendously for a longer period of time. It wasn't like this binary like one.
- [66:44]
Tyler
Moment exactly like the peak market cap for Yahoo 125 billion during 2000. That feels like it's just hard to pattern match perfectly to this. But I mean it certainly would be poetic if that's the way it played out.
- [67:04]
John
It is funny. Carried says, ironic that Google will probably do it twice. They actually created the Transformer. They released the Transformer paper and chromium to inspire themselves to grind harder, to sort of challenge this. Giving everything a straight away give Apple out all the alpha.
- [67:21]
Tyler
Yep, yep, yep.
- [67:23]
John
Just kind of like find their fire again.
- [67:25]
Tyler
Yeah, there was a, there was an interesting article on Medium that was sort of burning up hacker news that I thought would be fun to go through. First, let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So this person who no one has, no one can really understand who this person is. They don't necessarily exist on the Internet fully. So there was like a question about that. This is like a very like, you know, hacker news and turmoil segment. But Taeha says I reverse engineered 200 AI startups, 146 are selling you repackaged ChatGPT and Claude with new UI. And so basically the thesis of this article is that this, this fellow wrote a piece of code that looks at the marketing copy and says what are they claiming? And then looks at the calls that happen when you actually interact with their AI features. So if there's a chatbot on this particular startup's website and you are near chatting with it and you look into the trace that's happening in Chrome, is it going to the startup server or is it going to OpenAI server, or is it going to Anthropic server? That's telling. And then there's also a little bit of API fingerprinting. Basically, OpenAI has a specific pattern of rate limiting and it's exponential. So if you're spamming the OpenAI API, it will, according to a unique pattern, tell you, hey, you've sent too many messages, cool off for one minute, and then the next time you do it, cool off for two minutes. The next time, cool off for four minutes, then eight minutes, then 16. Right. And it gets exponentially longer and you're on progressively more longer and longer timeouts. But the shape of that curve and the specific timings are unique to OpenAI. And so if I'm a startup.
- [69:26]
John
Interesting.
- [69:27]
Tyler
And I have the exact same like back off and timeout curve, well, then it's probably just OpenAI under the hood. At least that's the claim that's being made here. And so the finding in this article is that 73% had a significant gap between the claimed technology and the actual implementation. And so out of the 200 AI startups that this fellow analyzed, 54 companies either had accurate technical claims. They said, hey, we're using like we have a custom AI model that we trained. And they did. Or they're transparent about their stack. They say, hey, this is a wrapper. Like, we're a wrapper company. And so, you know, our AI is powered by ChatGPT, we're partnered with OpenAI, we're partnered with Anthropic or whatever. Now, 146 companies, that's 73% according to him, were sort of misrepresenting their technology. So either they said they had proprietary AI, proprietary AI, and yet when he dug into it, it was OpenAI API plus prompts. Tyler.
- [70:29]
Tyler (Intern)
Yeah, I mean, it's like kind of what do people expect? Like, is if you fine tune, if you use the OpenAI API to fine tune the model, which you can do, is that prepared proprietary? Like no one else has that fine tune.
- [70:42]
Tyler
Yes.
- [70:42]
Tyler (Intern)
You're still calling the API. It's like, I don't expect startups to train their own full language models. That's like pretty unrealistic. And like, doesn't really make sense.
- [70:51]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [70:52]
Tyler (Intern)
So I'm kind of confused.
- [70:54]
John
I guess. It's a very cool study, but this tracks with exactly. Like, I would guess that 73% of AI startups are just re skinning.
- [71:05]
Tyler
Yes. And so 19% of the overall companies, the 38 that were analyzed in this study found that the startup said they had in house models and it was actually fine tuned public models. And so there's a question, is like whose house is it in? It's technically in OpenAI's house.
- [71:23]
Tyler (Intern)
So fine tuned, as I mentioned, an open source model that's public, does that count as a public model? An open source model?
- [71:29]
Tyler
Let's assume yes. And then last 8% would. So they had a custom ML pipeline and they were in fact using standard cloud services. That's even wishy washed. I think that's totally fine because like you can totally have a custom ML pipeline that's wiring together OpenAI and Gemini and AWS and you know, a bunch of other.
- [71:48]
Tyler (Intern)
If I'm using a startup, I don't want them to train their own language model because I don't think they're gonna like in 99.99% of the case like they're not gonna be able to do a better model than OpenAI anthropic Gemini Grok. Like I want them to use the best model.
- [72:00]
Tyler
Yes.
- [72:00]
Tyler (Intern)
And it's like, okay, you can fine tune it or whatever.
- [72:02]
Tyler
I agree, that's totally fine. And so the author also agrees with this. He says, here's what really shocked me. I'm not even mad about it. Every time I saw the phrase our proprietary language model, I knew what I was going to find. And I was right 34 out of 37 times. And this is where it gets weird because he says here's the technical signature. And so the user submits the query, it posts to API generate and then with wrapper logic it posts to API OpenAI.com v1chat completions and, and I have no idea how he's seeing the backend. It makes no sense how he would be able to do this unless there was just like a massive security vulnerability. Because what I would assume is happening is that the user's over here, the startup's website's here and then the user goes to the startup's website and then the startup's website on the back end talks to OpenAI and comes back. And maybe you could understand that like okay, the amount of EM dashes, like there's a this is telltale signal, but that's not what he's doing. He's saying that he was able to just literally hit like the Chrome Inspect developer tools, look at the chain of calls and see that it was calling OpenAI from the front end. Which is crazy because I didn't even know you could do that. It feels like if you were calling it directly from the front end, you would potentially leak a key that would be able to put you on the hook for a bunch of bills. I would think you would want to authenticate that on the, on the, on the back end. And so he gives a bunch of examples of like rag and. And then he's exposing some margins, which is actually very bullish for these companies because he breaks down some of these and says that, you know, a GPT4 API is $0.03 per thousand input token, $0.06 per thousand output token. So the cost per query for this hypothetical startup was. Was $0.03. And they charged $3 or $300 per month for 200 queries. And so the wrapper economy, this is 75 times direct costs. That's extremely bullish for that printing for that company. He found another one that was maybe 1000x API costs that's doing some pinecone embedding. And he also says this is pattern number three. The quote, we fine tuned our own model. Reality check. Fine tuning sounds impressive and it can be, but here's what I found. 45% it was OpenAI's fine tuning API, which. That sounds right, right. It's a little bit of a step to be like, we fine tuned our own model. It's like, no, you fine tuned OpenAI's model and then you got your own model from that result. It's a little bit.
- [74:38]
Tyler (Intern)
Yeah, you're still fine tuning it. I don't think there's that big a difference between fine tuning.
- [74:42]
Tyler
Are you fine tuning it or is OpenAI fine tuning it?
- [74:45]
Tyler (Intern)
There's a fine tuning API which you use to. And then.
- [74:48]
Tyler
But who's doing the fine tuning, you or OpenAI?
- [74:50]
Tyler (Intern)
Well, what do you like? You're not interfacing directly with the gpu.
- [74:54]
Tyler
It's like I went to the store and I bought a sandwich. Who made the sandwich?
- [74:58]
John
Well, I told them what the used turkey. I told them. You told them put lettuce, extra pickles.
- [75:04]
Tyler
Who made the turkey?
- [75:04]
Tyler (Intern)
I think it's more like you go to the store and you bring a sandwich to the office. Like, where did the sandwich come from? It came from the store. But like, you brought the sandwich. It came from you.
- [75:12]
Tyler
You brought the sandwich. Yeah, this is better. I think you're. Anyway, 22% of the time it was a hugging face model with Alora. 18% of the time was anthropic Claude with a prompt library. 8% of the time is literally just GPT4 with system prompts and 7% they actually trained something from scratch. And all of these are odd. And there's a lot of debate over how this would actually happen because he's basically saying just open dev tools, go to the network tab, interact with the AI feature. If you see API OpenAI API Anthropic or API Cohere AI, you're looking at a wrapper. They might have middleware, but the AI isn't theirs. And so it just opens up this debate about what is the value of the wrapper. I mean certainly if you can resell something for 100x because you have some sort of clever workflow prompt or workflow, more power to you.
- [76:09]
John
Yeah, it's not exactly bearish on the.
- [76:12]
Tyler
Companies yet, but the debate that was surrounding was more around. So this author claims that after posting this, seven founders reached out privately. Some were defensive, some were grateful. They asked for help transitioning their marketing from proprietary AI to built with the best in class APIs because. Because some of these founders did, I guess, feel like using proprietary AI as a marketing tagline was disingenuous. And then someone else, I think I saw something that was one VC reached out and said, I'd like you to audit my portfolio. Because I have been told that I was investing in companies that were training their own AI and I made the investment on that assumption. And if I'm being lied to, then that's potentially, that's potentially securities fraud. And so there is a question about if you go, I mean I've seen pitches for companies that, where they've said like proudly like you should invest in this because we're not training our own model, it would actually be a mistake. And there's another company that's a competitor to us that is training their own model and you don't want to invest in them, you want to invest in us. Because we're going to burn your dodge.
- [77:28]
John
Much better.
- [77:29]
Tyler
Yeah, we're going to much better economically. Economics. And so all of it just the only thing that matters is like being upfront with the investor for sure. And then to some degree you do need to be upfront with the customer because if the customer there is a marketing value to oh, if you work with us, you're working with these genius AI scientists who are going to build their own models. And if it's just repackaged ChatGPT, that might not be what you want to pay for because at that point you might just say, hey, hey, actually if I can just get this directly from OpenAI, I'll just go buy it from them anyway.
- [78:02]
John
Well, thoughts and prayers to friend of the show, John Palmer. He says he just found out my wife is leaving me. She said I'm not legible to capital.
- [78:12]
Tyler
The legible to capital meme is fantastic.
- [78:16]
John
I do think that will he made a new meme.
- [78:19]
Tyler
Fantastic coinage. I love it.
- [78:21]
John
It's one absolutely ripper. We'll be using it.
- [78:24]
Tyler
Well, let me tell you about FIN AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. It's AI that handles your customer support. Timeline is in turmoil over Nucleus. Former guest on the show two or three times, Kian has founded Nucleus for IVF and he put up a subway campaign that says IQ is 50% genetic, height is 80% genetic. I completely disagree with that one. It's entirely skill based for me. The genes did not matter. I had to grind for this view. Grind my growth plates, I suppose. Have your best baby is what it says. And it says IVF done right in the subway. All over New York City, there's a ton of debate going on.
- [79:10]
John
And to be clear, accurate, I think it was intentionally trying to make some percentage of the population angry to drive enough energy and attention. So this was. Yeah, I would call it rage bait.
- [79:28]
Tyler
So I would call it rage bait marketing. Not necessarily rage bait, not at the product level. But IVF as a category is a controversial category. And so it's much easier to wrap it in a campaign that will go viral for. For upsetting reasons. You can upset people and you can get a lot of attention from that. This is an example from Kath Korvac. She says, so Eugenics is profitable now and so being able to wrap something that is just a scientific process that's been worked on for a long time.
- [80:00]
John
Seems to be somewhat friend.com inspired. Keon's original post. He says Nucleus Genomics announces the largest genetic optimization campaign ever. Which is, which is just funny because a friend was saying this is the largest out of home campaign ever. And now Keon is saying this is the largest genetic optimization campaign ever. So narrowing it down, but full station blitz of Broadway, 1,000 plus street ads across New York City, 1,000 plus subway car ads, dozens of urban panels throughout SoHo. And apparently they're not actually, they're not able to offer the service in New York. Saw that in here.
- [80:42]
Tyler
So it's really just an image of a controversial phrase on a New York subway is more likely to go viral. So you do it there because it looks like you're on the global stage and then you pull it.
- [80:51]
John
There's a high Density of people that have a large following audience.
- [80:55]
Tyler
Yeah, following. And so it's just the way to start a viral trend and own the moment. It's the reason why so many tiktokers are in Manhattan now doing stuff like man on the street stuff. It just like it has more like aura almost. Well, Dr. Shelby liked the mindshare grabbing that Nucleus did. Says every biotech founder should be seeing this and understanding how to get one tenth the mindshare of Nucleus. I have a playbook for you below. A lot of people are like, I love the playbook. I don't love this example because the company's getting dragged. I don't know if it's good or bad with the rage bait thing. I think usually it's a negative thing thing. Usually it's hard to come back from. Occasionally it can be done in a way that's slightly enraging, but enough people are in on the joke that they appreciate what's happening and they appreciate that it breaks through or it's enraging to someone who's not the core audience, not the actual customer. And so it's okay. But it's a big debate because Sichuan Mala posted a long essay all about the claims made by Nucleus. Kiyan says everything levied unto Nucleus by Sichuan Mala is false. Worse than false. It appears to be architected by a competitor that has repeatedly published misstatements and inaccuracies. Sichuan is compromised, but it gets worse.
- [82:21]
John
Yeah. To be clear, no evidence has been provided that it was being levied by a competitor. Yes, that's purely an allegation that has. There's no proof.
- [82:31]
Tyler
Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes there's DMs that leak and there's evidence. Or someone comes forward and says, like, yeah, I was actually paid to post that. But so he says, I've been informed that Cremio. I don't know how to pronounce that last thing. Cremio, who's been on the show, also he claims he's a race scientist in chief has been paid off by the competitor to promote this nonsense against Nucleus. For the independent scientists repeating the denied that as well, I would encourage you to do more diligence on who you're aligning yourself with. Our scientific team will issue a point by point response, which I believe they did. Unfortunately, though, this isn't about science. It's a concentrated attempt to cancel Nucleus on the backs of our successful campaign and build in efforts to build and advance the industry which benefits the very people attacking us, the mob are trying to cancel Nucleus, keep tweeting, stay mad, we'll keep building and serving patients. P.S. we won the injunction. Link below. So they were sued by their competitor, but.
- [83:31]
John
So they won the injunction, but that doesn't mean they won the case at all.
- [83:36]
Tyler
I mean, that's a classic thing if you're getting sued to be like, the case was dismissed and it's like one of five cases against you.
- [83:42]
John
Yeah. But in this case, they won a preliminary injunction, which means that the case is just still progressing and they still have to fight it. Yeah, it's not. It's. A lawyer would. Would file a preliminary injunction because they believe they had such a slam dunk case that they could prevent a lot of. A lot of, like, basically going a lot further and spending more money in the case. And so a judge might say, hey, this is actually. It's not clear enough for me to make a decision right now. We're still going to proceed with the case and give both sides an opportunity to.
- [84:18]
Tyler
Yep.
- [84:19]
John
Continue to make. To make their case.
- [84:21]
Sholto
Yeah.
- [84:22]
Tyler
And then there was a little bit of, like, a twist in the fact that Roy Lee, the founder of Clulee, apparently had worked at Nucleus Genomics. Very great. And Cremu posts a screenshot of Roy Lee back in February of 2025. So literally, just like, months before he started Cluli. Very grateful to Kian and the Nucleus genomic teams for taking a chance on me the summer before Columbia and introducing me to the startup world. If I've ever seen a trillion dollar company and team, it's Nucleus. And Cremieux says he's obviously lying to cover up after getting caught doing fraud. An additional piece of background information people should know is that this fraud also employed the guy behind Cluley, the cheating company. And so Cremieu is being very hardcore in his assessment. Just actually calling Kian a fraud straight up is much more aggressive than. Than just saying, like, you know, some of their claims are maybe not legitimate. It's unclear. Like, you know, fraud is technically a crime that you need to be convicted of in the court before you are a fraud. But it's certainly. He's putting his credibility on the line because if Keon comes out and says, like, yeah, I'm actually not a fraud. I did it. I proved it wrong.
- [85:36]
John
I mean, the main thing. The main thing here is it appears that the customer reviews.
- [85:43]
Tyler
Yes.
- [85:44]
John
Are potentially fictitious. And if you're selling a service that allows people to pick their baby and you're giving and you're showing reviews from happy customers that may or may not be real people at all. Like that just feels deeply wrong. So I think that that one of the first things that they could have done I don't believe they have is just say like no, our reviews are real. We used AI imagery because the real people didn't want their identity online tied to this service.
- [86:24]
Sholto
Right.
- [86:25]
John
For privacy reasons. But I haven't seen anything like this. This guy Adi had a good point. He said one of the core tensions in this industry is the fact that most companies recognize they're working on an incredibly sensitive topic. They know the general population will need to be slowly and tactfully acclimated to the idea of advanced family planning. Nucleus is perceived as polluting the commons with their deliberately inflammatory marketing. Their virality comes at the cost of increased skepticism for the whole industry.
- [86:55]
Tyler
So yeah, a lot of, a lot of folks were not very happy about that. Keon has replied. And if you want to dig into the actual, actual scientific claims on either side, there are long posts where you can go through there. But obviously AI generated blog posts are alleged plagiarism in the Nucleus origin, white paper errors in there, blatant falsification, terms of service are contradictory.
- [87:24]
John
Yeah, they also apparently they hired two people that had a non competes for 18 months. Those people just immediately started on working on Nucleus. Nucleus claimed that they weren't competitive so that the non compete didn't apply. But if you look at the companies and what they offer, it seems very clear that they are competing. So anyways, very messy, very messy, messy story. And yeah, I don't know. Will o' Brien says David, I'm so sorry now man, but you guys are doing an absolutely terrible job at responding to this blog post and seem to be missing the point here. First of all, it is a huge claim to say that every claim by Sichuan Mala is false with absolutely zero evidence or explanation share receipts. Second of all, you make the claim that the person is paid off by competitors of yours, again with zero evidence. Third, that you make the claim that CREMU is paid off by your competitor. This is bogus and not true. But most importantly, you guys have made zero points of substance here. Rather than just just insinuating you guys are leaping ahead and others are jealous. You are selling a scientific product and someone has made a scientific critique in good faith waiting to be corrected and explicitly saying they will make changes if they are proved wrong. And the best you guys can do is accuse them of being paid off and reply with memes. Not a great look. I want to see startups with a Bold vision, succeed. But how you communicate with the broader world is so important, especially with a product like yours and how you guys are carrying on in this. Honestly, pretty lackluster. So, yeah, again, I don't. Yeah. At this point, Keon's been on the show. He's very funny, high energy. We've had some enjoyable conversations. But if I'm a potential customer of Nucleus at this point and I see just these series of exchanges, I'm certainly going to wait and see, see how things evolve versus signing up to use the service to.
- [89:27]
Tyler
It's just so different than Cluli. It's so different than Cluli because if I use Cluli and I'm like, oh, the notes that were taken in that meeting weren't that good. Or if you go into Cluly being like, I'm going to cheat on this test, and then it's like, oh, it didn't work. Their engineers aren't good enough to really help you cheat on that test. You're like, okay, well, I probably. I shouldn't have been cheating on that test. It's like the lowest stakes thing possible.
- [89:51]
Sholto
But when you're.
- [89:52]
Tyler
This is like literally deciding your child. Offspring will be. It's the highest.
- [89:58]
John
The quality of the product could very.
- [90:00]
Tyler
Well like infectious echo for generations.
- [90:03]
Alex Shevchenko
Literally.
- [90:04]
John
Literally generations. That's exactly just the child's life.
- [90:07]
Tyler
Yes.
- [90:07]
John
The life of the child's child.
- [90:08]
Tyler
Child's child. Yes. It is extremely interesting.
- [90:10]
John
Child's child's child's. Child's.
- [90:12]
Tyler
It could alter the course of history. I mean, it kind of could. It's sort of crazy. So, yeah, I mean, it's hard because viral marketing does work like, you know, moving fast and breaking things does work in certain contexts, but in the bio in bloodline optimization, it's really, really high stakes. And so you gotta be extra, extra careful. Extra careful for sure. Well, let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Will Brown has a funny post here. He just got a recruiting email from a company explicitly mentioning that they have 75th percentile comp. That's so funny to me. He says we're assembling a B team and have raised an okayish amount of money from pretty good investors. It's so good.
- [91:01]
John
Somebody should actually run this.
- [91:04]
Tyler
Yeah, I love Prime Intellect. There's such a fun crew over there. We got to have them back on the show soon. I think that they're. I won't leak anything, but I think there'll Be some news soon, hopefully. I'm very excited for them.
- [91:14]
John
Yeah, we got to hang with Vincent Saturday.
- [91:16]
Tyler
So OpenAI has an announcement. They're introducing Shopping Research, a new experience in ChatGPT that does the research to help you find the right products. They clearly were listening to me on the show just a few days ago when I was saying I would be using this for the holiday shopping period. Very exciting. I wonder how it will actually play out. You, of course, had that problem with, with cars and bids. ChatGPT was not identifying the fact that that GT3Rs had been sold two years ago. Thankfully, we have Doug Jumeiro here in the restream waiting room about to join the show. We can talk about cars and bids. We can talk about cars, we can talk about artificial intelligence.
- [91:55]
John
Welcome.
- [91:56]
Tyler
Welcome to the show. How are you doing? I'm good.
- [91:59]
Doug DeMuro
Thank you for having me.
- [92:00]
Tyler
Gentlemen, thank you so much.
- [92:01]
John
So great to have you on. We are a technology and business show, but we have your name has come up probably a hundred times independently, just when we're talking about 100% cars. So it's so great to have you on the show.
- [92:15]
Doug DeMuro
Thank you.
- [92:15]
John
We're huge fans. Thank you.
- [92:17]
Doug DeMuro
Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here. I really am.
- [92:20]
Tyler
Thanks so much. I'd love to know. I mean, we were just talking about this OpenAI shopping research in ChatGPT. It feels like there's really no substitute for watching a Doug DeMuro video to actually understand the quirks and the features of the car that you're considering purchasing.
- [92:36]
John
Yeah, I had been critiquing it. The context is like I was trying to use ChatGPT to find a specific car, a GT3RS. A GT3RS. And it fully missed every car for sale on the Internet. There are many of them and it found one that had sold on cars and bids, like two years ago. I was like, thank you. Thanks for nothing. But good job showing up in the results.
- [93:03]
Tyler
Are you getting any leverage out of AI tools at all for what you're doing these days?
- [93:07]
Doug DeMuro
Well, it's an interesting question. The guys who are on the business side probably are using AI a little bit more than I realize from a content perspective. Not really. I don't find. I don't find for myself. At least it's quite ready yet to do kind of the stuff that I needed to do, like finding the little quirks of the cars. It just doesn't have the knowledge quite yet. And like you said, nothing quite replaces like an in person. I still think people want to see that at Least for now, for sure.
- [93:39]
Tyler
There's also the question of, like, where should the AI live? Because there's this war of, like, do I need an AI chatbot on carsandbids.com or do I need to be able to take a URL from CarsAndBids.com, drop it into a chatbot and then chat with the page and compile some reviews and interact with it that way? Or will it be at the browser level? Or will it be at the iOS level? And I can just ask Siri. And all of this is kind of being fought out across all the different tiers of the stack right now. But on the cars and biz topic, what is the actual incremental gain right now? Is it international expansion, new features, just more inventory? What is on your list of wins from this year? And then what are you excited for going into next year of things that you might check off the list?
- [94:30]
Doug DeMuro
The biggest thing we did over the last 12 months, I would say the biggest thing we did is we finally added vintage pitch cars to cars and bids. And so it. We used to be just 80s and up cars. And I was kind of sold on that. Like, I just wanted to do 80s and up cars, what I'm primarily interested in. But our audience was really kind of pushy about it. Some of our dealers. So that's like, why can't I sell everything here? This is stupid. And so we changed it. We added 80s and up. But also we've just done a great job of like, getting. Getting everything streamlined. Our goal is to, like, get cars listed, get them live, get them going.
- [95:02]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [95:03]
Doug DeMuro
I think of all of the auction or car selling platforms, ours is probably the most technologically easy, I would say, both to navigate and to sell and to buy. And I think it's sort of the youngest focused. And so we really wanted to make sure that our processes reflected that, and I think they really do.
- [95:19]
Tyler
Now, do you have a grail car in the vintage category? I know you don't like the vintage cars, but is there one that would get you if I had to pick one? Like, that's the one you'd want to sell on the site or maybe even potentially own yourself?
- [95:38]
Doug DeMuro
You know, it's funny, myself, I'm not a big vintage car guy, but I do own a Countach, A Lamborghini Countach, which is mine, is a 1983 model. I don't. I mean, it's 42, 43 years old. I don't know if people consider that vintage. To me, it's when I drive it. It certainly feels vintage, it certainly smells vintage. But I'm a big old Lambo guy and so having those kinds of cars, old Ferraris, old Italian in general, I think would be cool to have on the site. But obviously still our biggest focus is sort of on the modern day stuff and I think we do really well with it.
- [96:07]
Tyler
Yeah. Yeah.
- [96:09]
John
So many things I want to talk about. I guess one question that maybe we could kick it off with is, do you think the increased attention around F1 could actually positively impact car culture in America or is it kind of the opposite? Like car culture in America has always been so big. People are like, oh, this F1 thing, maybe I should pay more attention to.
- [96:32]
Sholto
To that.
- [96:33]
Doug DeMuro
That is a really good question. You're clearly. You're a host of a. Of a podcast where you. That is a really good. I've never thought about that, but I think that's exactly right. There's a lot of people who are getting into cars for the very first time because of F1. I have friends, I'm on Instagram, I have friends who are at the Vegas race posting pictures who I know are not into cars, but like, they're. They're into F1. And obviously if you watch enough cars drive faster on the racetrack, you're going to start thinking to yourself, yeah, we were so.
- [97:03]
John
We were at. We were in veg for the weekend and the entire race. F1 is like a terrible spectator sport in my opinion. It's just like, oh, they went by. Oh, they went by like, if you want, actually. I mean, it's fun to kind of like maybe sit with the door open to the paddock and watch the TV and at least you can hear him go by. But at the entire race, I'm just like, I just wish I was on the track.
- [97:25]
Tyler
I wish I want to be on the track.
- [97:28]
John
Actually. I think one thing that might happen is more people get into actually tracking and racing cars because they're watching F1 and they're like, actually, now I actually want to experience this myself.
- [97:39]
Doug DeMuro
The other cool thing about F1, there is a culture component to it. Like, like watching the drivers and the teams and cheering for your favorite engine or team or your constructor or whatever. And that probably will get people into cars too, right? Like the. Just beyond just sitting there and yes, watching the cars go by in one corner when they have 12 other ones that you don't get to see anything is not really the most amazing experience. But like, going for the weekend and like seeing the, you know, see a Driver in the paddock or seeing the race team or whatever definitely will expand interest. And yes, you see the cars on the track, you're thinking, hey, I can do this, man.
- [98:10]
Tyler
Yeah. Yeah. How do you think about track days? Track only cars, Tracking your cars. I had the experience, we did a track day a couple weeks ago and I was like. Of the car budget. I want to spend like 99% on track stuff and very little on collector cars or. Or fun dailies or any of that. I want it all on the track because it was such a crazy experience. I don't know if that's just like the honeymoon period, but I know you've always been like, the track is not something that I really collect for. It's not my goal. I want the cool dailies. I want the cool experience of the weekenders. But do you think that'll ever shift for you? How have you processed it?
- [98:48]
Doug DeMuro
No, I don't think it'll ever shift for me. I think that the realities of race track driving, it's so much fun, right? It is an unique, unbelievable experience. About a year and a half ago, my friends and I rented out Chuckwalla, just five of us, and spent the whole day just clowning around, which is a ton of fun. However, it's a lot of work. We had to rent a trailer to get us out there. You rent an ambulance for the day. It's a day. It's a real day. And after you finish it, you don't really want to do it again. I feel like I'm hot, I'm tired. You've taken big risks with your vehicles, and so you're like, okay, we survived that. I just feel like I enjoy it more on the road because it's just so much more accessible. Like, my friends and I, several times a year, go up to the mountains an hour east of where I live here in San Diego and just climb around and have fun up there. Or I have an off roader on the East Coast. I live in the summer. We go off roading every day. That's a lot of fun. It's so much more accessible than racetrack driving. And racetrack driving is so costly. I mean, you're kind of hitting it on the. If you want to spend your fun car budget on race track, you can really spend your.
- [100:00]
Tyler
Yeah, that's true. Is a cannonball on the bucket list ever.
- [100:05]
Doug DeMuro
It was. You know, I drive cross country every summer, twice a year. And so it's impossible to drive cross country as a car enthusiast and not think about it. It's in your mind. It just has to be in your mind. But I have kids now, and, like, I got some money. I got stuff to lose. I should have done it when I was 23, and it didn't matter. And I just could have gone bombed cross country. I know you guys had Alex Roy, and I respect what he's done. And then just that whole thing. In fact, here's an interesting story. The other day, I drove to the hotel in LA where that finishes, the Portofino Hotel in Redondo. And I pull up there, and I decided to get a selfie next to the sign so I could send it to Ed Bullion. Cannonball. Ed Bullion. And I'm taking a picture of the sign with me, and the guy walks up and says, did you just finish? I'm like, no. And he's. He's like, I did.
- [100:58]
John
No way. No way.
- [100:59]
Tyler
There was somebody that finished the day.
- [101:00]
Doug DeMuro
The other guy comes out of the hotel and also says the same that he had finished the day before. And I wonder. Most happened constantly. Probably every week there's somebody. Every few days, someone shows up there.
- [101:10]
Tyler
So crazy. It is crazy that the cops don't just hang out at the Portovino Hotel and just arrest everyone that comes in. It feels like at least you can give, like, a $100 ticket and then just be racking them up. If you're a local municipality, it should.
- [101:23]
John
Be like, a ticket of honor. It's like, I got a ticket of honor.
- [101:25]
Tyler
I got the ticket.
- [101:26]
John
I'd be like, a ticket.
- [101:28]
Doug DeMuro
There is a giant plaque there that says, like, the end of the Cannonball. I'm like, what is otherwise a fairly rational hotel? I'm like, what is going on here?
- [101:36]
John
Yeah.
- [101:36]
Tyler
What about some of those other rallies, the gumball? Have you ever thought about doing those or done them?
- [101:41]
Doug DeMuro
Not my people.
- [101:42]
Tyler
Not my people.
- [101:44]
Doug DeMuro
That's a bunch of, like, you know, rich guys who want to put big decals on the cars and get drunk and go to strip clubs between the races. Okay.
- [101:53]
Tyler
Okay.
- [101:53]
Doug DeMuro
I'm good on that.
- [101:54]
John
I'm not big into that world.
- [101:55]
Tyler
You had me at decals. I think livery is really hilarious when. When done properly.
- [102:01]
John
John. It's been his dream to get full livery on his daily of all of our partners.
- [102:07]
Tyler
But it's funny because we're on podcast and we have as many advertisers as, like, an F1 team. And so there's a little bit of, like, a funny riff on that, but if you're doing it super seriously, I can see it being a little bit over the top.
- [102:19]
Doug DeMuro
Is it true that you have an E450 all terrain like me?
- [102:22]
Tyler
I did. I sold it and I got a black.
- [102:25]
Doug DeMuro
Oh, you sold it to get. Wow.
- [102:26]
Tyler
Yeah, to get the black wing.
- [102:28]
Doug DeMuro
My wife is driving RE450 wagon and I'm so jealous of her. And when we sell it I think we're going to get a Sienna so we're going to probably go in the slightly opposite direction.
- [102:37]
Tyler
So I absolutely love the E450 all terrain, but I realized I jumped the gun because I got 20. I think I got like the exact same one you got. 20, 23, 20, 24, something like that. And it has the seats in the back that look back backwards. And I was like, this is amazing. I'm also a dad. I have a four and a half year old and I have twin one year olds now. And I was like, I'm good. This is going to be amazing. The twin little boys are going to be in the back and then I look up the rules and it's like they can't be back there until they're like 12. And so it's like I'm not going to be driving like this vintage E450. That's what I mean. It's going to be like completely broken.
- [103:10]
John
Down by the time you're in Mercedes.
- [103:11]
Tyler
I can just buy a new one.
- [103:12]
John
Then I, so I once, I once once watched your video. Here's why the Mercedes mattress is the worst minivan ever made. And then you know what? I did bought one. I was like it can't be that bad. It can't be that bad.
- [103:25]
Tyler
You bought one?
- [103:26]
John
I, I bought it cuz I have, I have two kids. I was like surf van. I live in Malibu. I was like surf van was. You can just pile them in. And it was just, it was even worse than, than you, you kind of went a little maybe easy on them. There's so many little quirks and features of that van that are just so bad. It's like how do we make, make a big box and then make it impossible to utilize anything?
- [103:47]
Doug DeMuro
Did the video not have any, have any ability to convince you that I.
- [103:51]
John
I like, I like, I purely, I purely like this. I like the aesthetic of that, of it, of it as a minivan over some of the other minivans. I was like it definitely looks the best.
- [104:01]
Doug DeMuro
It's like a sided like looks like an old surf van like that people used to have. And it's a Mercedes. It's just, it clearly looks the best but it is not the best.
- [104:12]
John
Wanted to. John and I. Listen. We don't have time to listen to a lot of podcasts because we're constantly podcasting 20 hours a week ourselves, but.
- [104:20]
Tyler
We do enjoy this car pod is a daily.
- [104:22]
John
Yeah.
- [104:23]
Tyler
A weekly list.
- [104:24]
John
We do. Yeah. We both love your show, and correct.
- [104:29]
Tyler
Me if I'm wrong, it is actually the biggest automotive pod in the world right now.
- [104:32]
Doug DeMuro
Somehow we became the biggest without. I mean, I don't want to say.
- [104:36]
Sholto
Without trying.
- [104:37]
Alex Shevchenko
Yeah.
- [104:39]
Tyler
Congratulations.
- [104:39]
John
Without trying. Without trying. You can say it. It was effortless.
- [104:43]
Doug DeMuro
We didn't set out to be. Okay, here's what happened. It took a huge investment in the company, and so I ended up with a lot of money, and so I was just like, you know what?
- [104:53]
Sholto
We're gonna.
- [104:54]
Doug DeMuro
We came up with the idea to do a pod, and when you have nobody that you feel like you have to answer to, you can be really free with the way that you speak. And I think that resonates with people on that podcast. We insult people, which other people aren't really willing to do as much, like insult car companies or cars. I think people really appreciate hearing that truth, and I truly don't care if the automakers want to blackball me. Like, it doesn't matter to me anymore.
- [105:21]
John
There's also a different thing. If somebody, like, is going out of their way to get you this vehicle that hasn't been released yet, and it's hard, like, to really. And then you just know when you're recording it, like, they're gonna. They're gonna see this.
- [105:34]
Tyler
I wonder.
- [105:34]
John
It's hard to speak. You gotta give an accurate review, but it's hard to, like, go as hard as you can when you're with your boys on a podcast.
- [105:41]
Tyler
Do you think that there's a little bit of a benefit of, like, people don't buy cars on the day that they're released? Like, if you were a movie reviewer and you were like, okay, I'm banned from all the theaters. I gotta wait for somebody to give me the dvd. Like, it wouldn't be as good, but, like, if you have to wait a couple months to review a new Lamborghini, it's like, the purchase cycle is gonna be a while. And also those of entertainment value beyond just directly purchase purchasing.
- [106:04]
Doug DeMuro
That's exactly right.
- [106:05]
Alex Shevchenko
That.
- [106:06]
Doug DeMuro
Those are. Those are the two big points to hit. Number one, even if I'm not up on release day with the car because the automaker didn't invite me to the press launch, doesn't really matter. I can go get it from A dealer when it comes at dealers 60 days later. And the video is going to be evergreen for five years, the whole cycle of the car. And also, yeah, I mean people are going to watch the video beyond just purchasers, so it doesn't even really matter. And I think that's one of the secrets of YouTube. Everybody's so obsessed with being like first to these car launches. And it is beneficial. It does have help. But I guess when your channel has gotten to the size of mine, I don't think it's quite as important. Like, I'm not sitting here thinking, how Do I grow 50% this year?
- [106:37]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [106:38]
Doug DeMuro
I'm just thinking how do I retain the audience I have? How do I still make them happy? And being there, day one is not necessarily essential.
- [106:44]
Tyler
Have you maybe you've done this. But reviewing self driving technology specifically, I was always interested in the. I have a Hyundai Palisade as well with. With a comma self driving aftermarket kit in there. And it's fantastic.
- [107:01]
Sholto
Really.
- [107:02]
Tyler
I honestly think it's remarkable. I've met the founder and I've used it. I trust it with my kids and stuff. I think it's a fantastic product, genuinely like one of the greatest modern consumer products in the sense that like for a couple thousand bucks you get something that does something. It's really, really good. But I was always interested like that aftermarket. It's kind of the only aftermarket thing that you would even need to review. But I was wondering if you've ever looked to that genre.
- [107:30]
Doug DeMuro
No, I had no idea that that one was that good. I've heard about it before, but I had never heard like. I mean people don't. Most people, I think are nervous about it. If you're in the tech, you should probably cool with it. But no, I review the ones that come in the cars. But however, even then it has become so ubiquitous now that it's almost like reviewing regular cruise control. It's almost not even worth talking about it because they've all gotten to be. I mean, a RAV4 has it standard. You know, it's no longer even that interesting anymore. There are obviously some differences between the systems and some are better than. I'm obsessed with the system in my Toyota for various reasons. Some people prefer. I mean, I don't like the ones that make you look forward because in my view that's kind of what I'm trying to solve for. But I understand that manufacturers prefer you looking at the road. It's a difference of opinion between me and them right now.
- [108:18]
Tyler
Well, now it's like a whole race where every time I talk to somebody who owns a Tesla, they're like, well, I have this hat and this pair of sunglasses and a. If I wear the hat and the sunglasses, I can use my phone the whole time. And I'm like, okay, you're kind of with the comma. It's open source technology, so they have a camera that looks at your face and if you look away, it'll say, it'll beep at you and then if you look down for too long, it'll disengage. So it's driver monitoring, but it's open source, so if you know how to program, you can technically just go in there and comment out that line of code and it will never check on you ever again, again. And it's like, I don't know where the liability stands. The company doesn't recommend it, but the whole thing is kind of third party, so it's very questionable. I would definitely leave it on. I would recommend everyone leave it on because I think the driver monitoring is good for safety. But yeah, it's interesting.
- [109:08]
John
Saw some news maybe a week or so ago that Tesla is going to be integrating CarPlay. Was that like a surprise to you? Did you predict that years ago?
- [109:18]
Doug DeMuro
I definitely didn't predict it. However, obviously the Tesla owners, despite as rabid and obsessive as they are, there's this undercurrent of disdain for the fact that they don't have CarPlay. And also it's gotten a lot harder to sell an EV in the last month, but also in the last six months and in the last year in general. And so that's an advantage. You're going to want to have every advantage you can, you know, like. And so it makes completely makes sense to me that Tesla's pursuing this and it'll now be on Rivian and of course General Motors, who has bailed on CarPlay first in their EVs and now apparently driving generally. It'll be on them to see if we if they end up going back. I'm not as obsessed with CarPlay as everybody else. I find some of these automaker systems to be shockingly good. Most people don't even try them anymore because they're so CarPlay is such a focus and CarPlay is great, but I'm surprised Tesla made it such a big thing. Their system is so excellent. It's just like I would just put up with that, but people are just so used to carplay that it's important.
- [110:14]
Tyler
Such a different Landscape. If you're running, you have CarPlay and the native and then also NACs and the charging system is now standard. It's like, well then you have the self driving is the main point of differentiation. Maybe that's about it.
- [110:28]
Doug DeMuro
Even then, I don't find Tesla self driving to be considerably better. Now that I've been on these other cars. Basically everybody has caught up. I agree. I start to wonder what the differentiation point is. And then you also have this negative point of differentiation for a lot of EV buyers, which is Elon in the political space. Not that I'm saying that everybody, but certainly there are people who have that opinion. That's interesting. And so CarPlay back in is definitely like a step in the direction of we need to sell some damn cars.
- [110:55]
John
Yeah. If you're running Tesla today, what would you do from a product offering standpoint?
- [111:03]
Doug DeMuro
Man, I don't know. That's an interesting question. All their products are really old. They have Elon is both their greatest asset and their greatest liability. I would probably do my best to come out with Roadster to try to get some attention on the brand and get some sort of halo car effect. Like, wow, this is cool again.
- [111:22]
John
Wait, do you have a prediction for the.
- [111:24]
Tyler
Yes. So Elon was on Joe Rogan and said that he was alluding to that the demo will be shocking and it will be something where the car basically lifts off the ground. He was saying like he was kind of alluding to it being a flying car, but I don't think anyone expects it to be like a full quad rotor, like, you know, full VTOL vehicle. But it's going to have a. It's going to have a trick, it's going to have a quirk. And I'm wondering if you have any predictions for what that might be like. We were talking about the Yong Wang jumping and stuff.
- [111:52]
Doug DeMuro
It's interesting because at this point it needs to have a quirk, doesn't it? Because when it was announced six years. It's been six years almost exactly right. It was 19 auto show. It wasn't going to be this huge thing 0 to 60 and 1.9, this amazing electric super. Well, since then, 10 other electric supercars have come out, all of which do 0, 60 and 1.9. And the Yangwang is jumping. So like, you better show up with something at this point because you are so far behind everybody else in terms of what they've all got going. You basically need to have some sort of interesting hook now in order to differentiate yourself from these other products. Which, by the way, I don't know if you guys have been paying attention, but all the other electric hypercars have been horrible sales failures. And it'll be interesting to see what whether Roadster, I mean Roadster has Elon and Tesla and all that behind them. It'll be interesting to see whether Roadster can overcome some of the challenges the other ones have faced.
- [112:41]
Tyler
Yeah, I do think that comping the Roadster, I mean, if he can get it out at 200k, that's just a completely different game from a Rimac Novera at a million or, you know, Pininfarina Batista, like, those are just wildly different. And even if you have the money, I imagine that like the confidence of like a Roadster, like you're going to be able to take it to a Tesla dealership, get fixed with parts and stuff with the Batista or something, it's going to be, you're going to be in crazy hypercar, unique, one of one world, Koenigsegg level. No one's really brought that down. Although, you know, Taycan Turbo S, there are a lot of options in that area.
- [113:16]
Doug DeMuro
Yeah, I mean, you're right that no one has really played in the space sub. A million bucks. However, first off, I don't think the Roadster is going to come anywhere near 200 just based on. Based on. We've got a lot of inflation, Elon Musk, Tesla's missed those price targets before, et cetera. But also, you know, yeah, the Taycan turbo, the Ferrari SF90 has been a huge dud. Like, there are some examples out there of, okay, maybe people aren't really completely.
- [113:39]
Tyler
Willing to buy anything. Yeah.
- [113:41]
John
Do you think manufacturers are focused on ev? Manufacturers are really focused on or have a plan for solving depreciation with some of these cars. Because like I, I buy a lot of cars, I cycle through them quickly. I tend to gravitate towards cars like I've owned multiple G wagons because I just love that it's timeless. I know it's going to depreciate, but not at a very, very reasonable rate. And in that sense, it's like a practical buy, or at least way more practical than buying a fresh Taycan and losing, you know, 50 grand in a few months, basically.
- [114:21]
Doug DeMuro
I mean, the only real way to solve for depreciation is either supply or price. Right. You can either dramatically lower the price and get more cars out there, which hopefully your supply then evens out, or you just make fewer cars. I will say I don't think depreciation has been quite as crazy as everybody else thinks, in part because I don't think the transaction prices were ever where the automakers were pricing the cars in the first place. The cars had stickers at 50, but when you factored in the tax credit and the discount, they were probably really selling down at 37. And then, however, still they are depreciating faster than gas cars and just unbelievably fast in general. Except for Rivian, which has held its value relatively well, but still nowhere near something like a G wagon. The only way to really solve that depreciation problem, supply pricing or just increase the desirability of the cars. But I don't think that's going to happen.
- [115:13]
Tyler
How on how on earth has Rivian maintained a monopoly on the full size SUV in the electric category for so long? I was expecting a cyberban, a cybertruck suburban version like immediately. And it just didn't happen that the.
- [115:28]
Doug DeMuro
Other automakers went pickups first. And I wonder if they were pressured into doing that because they knew the cybertruck was coming. But it is so clear when I get asked by people who want a car, I live in California, everybody's got an electric, everybody wants like a car. The only thing I am ever asked, asked is I want a three row and I want a hybrid or an electric.
- [115:44]
Tyler
Yes.
- [115:44]
Doug DeMuro
And my response is, well, you're getting an EV9 or an R1S and the EV9 is new to the market a year ago. The R1S is out since 22 and it's like, yeah, where was everybody else? GM is screwing around with the Hummer pickup and the Silverado and the F150 Lightning at Ford. It's like what people want is just a three row electric. And the R1s are the real success story in terms of holding their value. We sell them on cars and bids. They are still not coming under 60 grand, which is is considering that's a three, four year old car, that's pretty good. With the starting sticker of around 80, the trucks have depreciated a lot more. There's less interest in them. But yeah, it's wild that Rivian figured that out before anybody else. Everybody was like, oh, we're going to start with a sedan. It's like, why, what are you thinking? The market gone from that stuff?
- [116:27]
Tyler
Yeah, I mean, I guess Porsche now has the Cayenne turbo you just revealed finally. But even that's not three row. And I'm thinking like if you are like the true American family. I have three boys, two dogs, two Newfoundlands, like, I need the huge 220 inch SUV soon. Like, or, you know, the full size Escalade, like the Tahoe, like the Suburban, like, this is where I'm gonna be. This is my life for the next couple years at least. Or the two decades. Like, no one's really figured that out. And I thought it was, I thought it was maybe just like the laws of physics or something like, oh, you can't make the battery big enough. But then you see the, the Cyber truck and you're like, you could easily just make the back like this and you're in business.
- [117:08]
Doug DeMuro
And the Hummer EV and the Humer ev, it's so weird. I guess they just saw volume in those pickup trucks and so they decided to go. But totally, I mean, you now have the Escalade IQ also, which is not a very compelling product, but it exists and it is another 380. It's clear that they're starting to come.
- [117:24]
Tyler
Even the, even the Escalade iq, though, it felt like they shrunk it down a little bit compared to just the full size Escalade esv, which is the one that people think of.
- [117:32]
Quinn Slack
Right.
- [117:32]
Doug DeMuro
And the interior really feels like that. The interior does not feel as big as that. You come out with a car that weighs 9,500 pounds and is that long. It really should feel a little bit bigger inside. I should be able to play pickleball in that. That's not the situation.
- [117:46]
Tyler
Yeah, for sure.
- [117:47]
John
Jordy, how can you talk about European regulators? Because I feel like sometimes I see car companies, manufacturers making like, what feel to be like, nonsensical decisions, decisions that at least American consumers are not, like, saying like, hey, we want this. And I think it can oftentimes get, you know, people will point to regulators and be like, you know, there's actually pressure coming on the manufacturers on another continent. But how true is that? And what kind of role are they actually playing?
- [118:24]
Doug DeMuro
That's an interesting question. Not a lot of people think about. Regulation plays a bigger role than you'd think in a lot of stuff. We just heard one this week. Mercedes is canceling all of their 43AMG cars, which are actually quite popular here in the States. They're very popular. The C43 GLC.
- [118:39]
John
Interesting.
- [118:40]
Doug DeMuro
Those are all going away. And the reason is that they do not comply with EU noise regulations as of next summer. And it's like, that's a pretty successful and popular car. And I guess they don't.
- [118:53]
John
And so the manufacturer, manufacturers can't create like an Amer like it, like there's precedent for creating like a European version of a car. Like I know the European metrics is called something else, but it's actually a lot better than the American metrics.
- [119:06]
Doug DeMuro
They must feel that the US market alone doesn't, or US plus Middle east or whatever doesn't justify the creation of such a vehicle. And so it goes away for the entire world. And that's true in a lot. There's a lot of compliance and regulation stuff just beyond that. But that was an example that came up recently that I was astonished by because it sometimes affects popular content cars. We saw it affect Boxster and Cayman.
- [119:26]
John
Right.
- [119:26]
Doug DeMuro
I mean clearly Porsche is not really going to be able to continue making these cars as we think now they're rethinking that strategy, but it's still going to have some electric component and these regulations are stuff that they're going to comply with. It's actually funny because you hear a lot of complaints. The Trump administration has come in and cut a lot of EV regs and push back on EVs and there's all these complaints. I mean, US regs were never anything compared to Europe. Europe has gone really, really, really strict about noise, about pollution, about emissions, CO2 in a way that is definitely affecting vehicles sold there and probably does have knock on effects on cars that are sold in the States too.
- [120:00]
John
That makes sense. Do you think it's fascinating that some European regulators are pushing to take away cars that people like from European manufacturers while they let the Chinese flood the market and kill their automotive manufacturers.
- [120:18]
Doug DeMuro
Which is especially interesting because China's doing the exact same, exact opposite. China has really fenced their market and has really made it very easy for Chinese companies to sell cars and do really well, but has made it specifically difficult for foreign market companies to come in and do the same. Meanwhile, free capitalism has had the opposite effect in Europe. And boy, you go to Europe now. I go to Europe every year or two and it's amazing, every time I go five years ago, a couple of Chinese cars, this last time, they, they are, they are flooding like you say. It's true in Mexico too. In Latin America in general, they make cheap cars that are desirable and they're all EVs so they fit the regulations. Yeah, it's certainly interesting. If I were the European automakers, I'd be like, what the hell?
- [120:59]
John
But yeah, do they not, do they not. Do they need to like 10x their lobbying budgets and say we want to make cars that are fast, loud and fun and you got to protect us from like, I just don't understand. Like, these are like, Mercedes is like a national champion in Germany. Right?
- [121:16]
Doug DeMuro
Like you would say, make, make we work. The environment is more important to us. My guess is they would say you are important to us. The environment is similarly important to us. We have to figure out a way to make this work. But for right now, China is already there where you probably should be and we're trying to incentivize you to do that. It is surprising to me that they don't have more significant tariffs on Chinese cars and ways to kind of try to stop that. However, Chinese cars have also done an amazing job of mobilizing, especially Southern Europe to be able to buy new cars for the first time in a long time. So Southern Europe, they're not a lot of money in a lot of cases to buy these cars, but these Chinese cars come in, they're affordable, they're electric. It's getting people out of fiats from 2003 that pollute @ ridiculous levels. And you got to assume the EU regulators actually are. They're like looking at it saying, yeah, it sucks that Fiat is losing market share, but here we are doing our part for global warming and for the environment, which is a big over there.
- [122:05]
Tyler
I would just hope that that was more of a, more of a fight between Tesla and the U.S. electric manufacturing manufacturers earlier. Like Tesla has been and the other and Rivian have been like options for that solution. You'd think. I mean obviously they need to bring the cost down, but there's, I think that there was a lot of pushback to Tesla in Europe years and years ago where they didn't think that they should go after that Southern European buyer. And so they never really got to scale it with like, you know, the 2.9 or something, the cheaper version of the 3 to actually get out there. So something like that, I don't know.
- [122:42]
Doug DeMuro
Right. And meanwhile BYD is there now with cars that are this long, that cost probably €18,000.
- [122:47]
Tyler
It's like, hey, yep, I wanted to ask about modern cars.
- [122:55]
John
Wait, wait, wait. One question that fits in this last one. Jaguar revamp team asked us to ask European manufacturer going all in on EVs in a very opinionated way. Do you have any predictions on first year sales numbers in the us?
- [123:12]
Doug DeMuro
Well, they haven't really shown a production car yet. It's hard to make that prediction without knowing, hey, are they going to do SUVs, what price point, etc. I will say they weren't exactly blowing it out of the water before. Unlike a lot of people who watched that ridiculous commercial and have watched some of their product strategy and laughed at it. I'm not sitting. We got a lot of comments on our pod Jaguar. They're screwed. If you go woke, you know, go broke. We're gonna boycott. They were already broke. Like, it wasn't like they were out there really lighting the world on fire. Probably a benefit for them, truthfully, but we'll see how they actually end up doing it. It's already been quite a while and they haven't really announced cars or revealed anything coming, so that'll be interesting. I mean, the brand name is strong, but like, you know, what are you gonna. It's just, it seems like a far fetched plan for it to actually work.
- [124:09]
Tyler
Yeah. If you're already, if you're already broke, why not go woke? I guess the other problem, by the.
- [124:13]
Doug DeMuro
Way, that people don't discuss the big problem that Jaguar faces is that almost all of their dealers are paired with Land Rover. And so at the end of the day, they cannot go after the SUV segment to the level that I think a rational company would wish to.
- [124:26]
Tyler
Right.
- [124:26]
Doug DeMuro
We sit here and look at the success of the model y and the R2 or the R1, but will be the R2 and G wagons and just SUVs in general.
- [124:35]
Tyler
General.
- [124:35]
Doug DeMuro
And Jaguar, doesn't they. They did try SUVs, but they always have to kind of back them off. What I think the market would want a little bit because Lynn was there actually having the success.
- [124:44]
John
Make an suv, but don't make it too good.
- [124:46]
Tyler
Don't make it too good. Yeah.
- [124:48]
Doug DeMuro
Don't make it too off roady or too boxy or too cool. Which is what the market is really obsessed with right now. Because, you know, literally across the showroom we're trying to sell these things over there and they have a better name and you don't want to try to undercut that.
- [125:00]
Sholto
Yeah.
- [125:01]
Tyler
It feels like the other market Jaguar could potentially go after is maybe like the James Bond wannabe, but there they're competing with Aston Martin, of course, which.
- [125:09]
John
Is not exactly crushing it either.
- [125:11]
Tyler
Well, it feels like they are. So I'd love to know, like, where do you see Aston going? I mean, the, the, the Valkyrie is incredible. The Valhalla we saw in person looked really cool. And like there's just some incredible.
- [125:23]
John
I think the issue, my point of view with Aston is like, I love, love Aston Martin. We were, we were at F1 with, with the Aston Martin team because our friends from public are A sponsor. And I love every single silhouette they do. I think they make cars that look absolutely incredible. But the problem is at literally every single price point for Aston, there's a more desirable car from a Porsche, from a Ferrari. And so it's like, that's just really challenging as a manufacturer because you're like, okay, we made, we made the Valhalla. And it's like, okay, what Ferrari can you get for a million bucks? And like, how many guys are really going to look at that trade and go for Aston Martin?
- [126:01]
Doug DeMuro
I think that Valhalla and Valkyrie will and have been, will be, will be and have been successful. I think the biggest problem is the volume cars. And I think it goes back to something that you said earlier, which is they have significant depreciation. And that's not a secret. You buy a brand new Ferrari and you're not going to lose money. In fact, if you're lucky enough to get chosen to buy a brand new Ferrari, you might make money. You buy a brand new Aston. Holy crap. Used DBXs are already 75, 80. That's their SUV. Used uruses are still like 175. And the price point is pretty similar new. And which one would you rather get? Aston, I think, actually makes some pretty compelling cars, even relative to rivals like Lamborghini and Ferrari and Porsche. But you go into the dealer and there's 12 of them sitting there at the dealership. They can't sell them. They do big discounts. They make too many cars. Cars. The price points are too high. And that's a. As beloved as that name, Aston Martin. We all want an Aston Martin in our mind. But when you actually start to look at the particulars of what that would entail. Nobody wants 150 in depreciation.
- [127:02]
John
Well, they didn't even have car. I mean, you, you buy Aston Martin from three years ago and it had the, the interior, it had the screens from like a car from like the early 2000s. And so, so I do wonder, I do wonder if the depreciation gets. Problem gets a little bit less bad at. Now that the interiors have. Have modernized substantially.
- [127:22]
Doug DeMuro
They've improved, they've improved. But at the end of the day, there's still a lot of Mercedes Benz technology. And when you're not using Mercedes Benz technology, then another question about Aston Martin starts to become reliability, right? If they're making their own crap, then you start thinking, oh, God, do we really want to be making their own? Like it's kind of a, it's kind of a tough situation. And Ferrari and Lambo get excused from some of that stuff.
- [127:43]
John
Yeah. Do you think that. How many people do you think are frantically trying to re register their cars to California after the Whistlin Diesel scandal? Whistle and Diesel, if anybody didn't see, was arrested, happened to be ready to vlog the whole thing, which almost looks like he did a deal with authorities, which is like, hey, we're to going, we're gonna arrest you. We need to make a big scene out of this. We're not gonna really throw the book at you, but we need to do this marketing for it.
- [128:12]
Doug DeMuro
I think it was all legit. I think he is always ready to vlog. I think his boys are always at the show.
- [128:17]
John
You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure.
- [128:19]
Doug DeMuro
But yeah, boy, that was a big deal. So many people in the community do the Montana thing, and I really think we did a big thing about it. It's on our pod last week. I really think with the advent of license plate readers and with states just starting to realize how pervasive this has become, it's just really going to start becoming more and more difficult to do. And as a guy who's got four very expensive cars registered to my actual home addresses, I watch the Montana thing and I think to myself, f you. If I have to pay, you have to pay. I do feel bad I mentioned this on the pod. I do feel bad for the guys who are doing it to get away from the stupid regulations like smog on a $15,000 car. Meanwhile, it's being ruined by guy after person after person doing it on expensive cars. There's a little hypocrisy there that I've decided. Smog is something that I'm willing to make an end run around. But I do feel that way, so whatever. But I do think that Montana thing. Yeah. So many people do it, and I think so many people should really think about whether they. Whether it's the right call. Do you want to get arrested to save 20, 15, 20 grand on sales tax?
- [129:24]
Tyler
Yeah. Back on Jaguar to some extent is. What is the. What is your current top pick for something that's basically a concept car that you hope it makes it into production? For me, I think it's the Hyundai Vision N that looks like a DeLorean. They might go. They said they were going hydrogen. I think they should just do like the Ionic 5N treatment and just electric and it goes 0 to 60 in 2 1/2 seconds or something. Like, they could do something cool.
- [129:55]
Sholto
But.
- [129:55]
Tyler
But do you have any other picks for stuff you've seen where you're like, let's bring it in.
- [129:59]
Doug DeMuro
That one was really cool and looked really cool. Although I have to say, just a couple weeks ago I reviewed the new Hyundai Crater, which is the off roader concept car. And from a perspective of a car that I think will sell, they should make that body on frame. Off roaders. Off roading has become such a thing in the last 10 years with the Raptor and the G wagon and the 4Runner and the Wrangler and the Bronco and off road trim levels of every single car in existence, including mini vans. Hyundai has started to come out with some off road trim levels, but it's pretty clear to me that like there should be an. They should go after the Forerunner. Forerunner is selling pretty easily, millions, literally millions of units. And it sense to me that, that these automakers are not going after it more. I think Honda's insane for not pursuing it, but Hyundai and Kia have been much more aggressive and willing to be aggressive in these kind of segments. And I think that Crater is previewing a car that will exist in some form. Probably not exactly like that with graphic displays on the windshield, but something sort of similar. I bet you they're cooking it up.
- [131:04]
Tyler
Where do you think that trend came from?
- [131:07]
Doug DeMuro
You know, I don't know. It's interesting. I was in Joshua Tree yesterday and boy, there's a lot of LA people out there. Like, it's wild. Like it is such a thing, like going out into the wilderness. I don't know, it wasn't a thing when I was a kid. It was reserved for like a celebrity. You only bought a Jeep Wrangler if you were like kind of crazy. And now it's like mom cars and everybody's got a Bronco and the four runners are this massive thing. And I don't know, obviously Covid exacerbated it, but I assumed that it would slow down when Covid ended and that has not happened.
- [131:37]
Tyler
I wonder if it's some sort of like, you know, you're online all the time, you're on your phone too much and then you want the exact opposite. And so demand increases for like, what is the opposite of TikTok? Like get me to the forest.
- [131:49]
John
It's also very American to like find like have an outdoor activity explode. That's about bringing heavy machinery like, like out into the wilderness.
- [131:57]
Tyler
Yeah, that has still screens and you can still, you can still watch TikTok, but you can at least act like you're off the Grid.
- [132:03]
Doug DeMuro
When I think about it some, I was actually thinking about it this. This. This weekend because I was out there and seeing all this, and there's a camper in every parking lot. And I do wonder if, like, dads being more in.
- [132:13]
Tyler
Involved.
- [132:13]
Doug DeMuro
When I was a kid, dad had a sports car. Not my dad, but in general, like, dad is sport. He would use it to get away. You would take it on a drive and take it to a show. And now, like, dads and families want to do this stuff together. And sports cars, you can't do that with your kids. And I've even watched the vintage sv.
- [132:30]
John
I got a Ferrari FF to try to get around that when I had my first kid, and it did not work. The electrical issues. We're like, if I drive this thing to the farmer's market and I stop it, it might not start again. So I got to make sure I started at home and stop it.
- [132:49]
Doug DeMuro
But I am watching, like, Grand Wagoneers, right?
- [132:52]
Sholto
And Old Land.
- [132:54]
Doug DeMuro
These are things you can now do with the whole family. And I think that there's been, like, sort of a renewed push among.
- [132:59]
Sholto
Among.
- [132:59]
Doug DeMuro
Among dads and among families to kind of do, hey, let's do the vintage car thing together. And it's really. It's really become kind of a thing speaking dads, but I think there's probably many, many parts of it.
- [133:10]
Tyler
Speaking of dads, speaking of firing dads, what's the best modern car that screams, I'm coming to town to fire your dad?
- [133:19]
Doug DeMuro
We have this big thing on our podcast that, yeah, we think that there are some cars that just say, I'm here, but fire your dad. It's such a big old, like, this is a rich guy who doesn't care. The electric Rolls Royce, which is called the. That's a big one because it's one of the things I like. Fire your dad. Cars, to me, are cars where it takes up a lot of space but is unbelievably impractical. So that car is a massive vehicle, but it's got two doors. And that guy owns the factory. That guy, he comes in, he's like, I don't care what's. This whole factory is closed. Be gone. And he, you know, he takes the Rolls Royce off.
- [133:57]
Tyler
It's also so tall. We saw one at the airport next to a Urus, and we were like, it's a car that's taller than that SUV that's been lowered for performance.
- [134:05]
John
It's like, well, I have a potentially, potentially new fire your dad car. Our friend Paul asked Asked me to ask you, do you think Sam Altman paid 20 million for the Gordon Murray S1? It sold recently and Sam was photographed in Vegas with Gordon Murray over the weekend.
- [134:27]
Doug DeMuro
And Sam has an.
- [134:29]
John
Yeah, exactly. It could be the new. I say it could be the new. Fire your dad. Because if Chatgpt takes your job, oh.
- [134:35]
Tyler
It fires everyone's dad.
- [134:40]
Doug DeMuro
That is an interesting point. That Alton may have bought it. I will say the commissioner. The story I've heard is the commissioner of that car commissioned five and personally selected, along with Gordon Murray, three people to sell three others to. He kept two and then decided to sell one publicly. And so. So I would be not surprised if Altman is one of the four people who has them. He's obviously interested in these cars and yes, he's there with Gordon, but maybe he didn't buy the public one, but who knows? I wouldn't be surprised if he's got one. 20 million. That's crazy. Unbelievable number.
- [135:12]
John
It's a lot of money, but it's a lot of car.
- [135:14]
Tyler
Any progress on getting into the Sultan of Brunei's collection? I feel like with all this investment and progress, like all I want, if.
- [135:23]
Doug DeMuro
I could just get. If I could just have a week to film videos in that garage, I would retire. I would never.
- [135:29]
Tyler
But how much, truthfully, like, how much time have you spent actually chasing it down? Because I feel like if you go over there and you're meeting people and you're, you know, you're, oh, yeah, I'll come to your holiday party and give a talk for free, you know, like. Like there's ways to, like.
- [135:43]
Doug DeMuro
It's an interesting situation because I have a suspicion, just based on some of the rumblings I've heard from either people who have been or who have tried, I think that in Brunei, it's viewed as a bit of an embarrassment that Jeffrey went, which is the brother of the Sultan, went and spent this much national money on the. On just these cars. And they could, if they created a museum, everyone I know would suddenly go to Brunei. I, not joking, like, I have no reason otherwise to go to Brunei.
- [136:11]
Tyler
I mean, it's odd because I feel like if they do regard it as. As a mistake, it's like, well, you got a great collection, let's liquidate it, sell it to Dubai. Dubai likes setting up museums. They have Mr. Beastland now. They had Brunei land going.
- [136:26]
Doug DeMuro
I totally agree. I'm not even fairly sure that they want the publicity of the announcement that all of these cars are going to be sold off. And it's become clear to me that for whatever reason, maybe it's embarrassment, maybe they actually still want to enjoy the cars or have them. But there. It seems to me that there is a pretty clear reality that these guys do not want publicly to have a wide splash with the excesses of the 90s in that country. I think is such a shame. Now, part of the problem also with selling all the cars is that they're all right hand drive. So there's a little bit of a challenge into where they would have to be sold. There's only a few markets, but. But nonetheless, I'd be down. I have. I have a. My Bentley Dominator literally sits right here, which is by one of the the Sultan cars.
- [137:10]
Sholto
Fantastic.
- [137:11]
Doug DeMuro
Commissioned a Bentley SUV before even Bentley had any idea of doing it.
- [137:15]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [137:17]
John
Would you ever do a museum?
- [137:20]
Doug DeMuro
Like a review? Like review cars from a museum or.
- [137:22]
Quinn Slack
No, no, no.
- [137:23]
John
Like what? Like the Doug. The Doug museum cars and bids activation or something?
- [137:27]
Doug DeMuro
No, I am not a collector. I like to use the cars and I like to be focused with the cars that I choose. And I'm never going to have a giant collection of cars.
- [137:36]
John
I. Yeah, but I meant more like if I'm a collector and I have a special car that I'm just planning to hold and you were creating a museum and you were basically saying, I'll store your car and maintain it, Would.
- [137:51]
Doug DeMuro
I create a museum of other people's vehicles? Yeah, I would maybe curate such a thing. I could see myself doing that in a retirement scenario. If someone. A space and someone takes care of the hard parts for me, I would curate a nice little museum.
- [138:05]
John
There you go. I think it would be a hit.
- [138:07]
Tyler
What are the biggest moments on the calendar for 2026 for you? Either, like moments that you're excited about from the car manufacturers, the world or whatever, but also within your organization.
- [138:21]
Doug DeMuro
I'm generally just excited. It's an interesting thing. My world is nowhere near as varied as it once was. I used to travel all over the world and review the craziest cars, but I kind of filmed most of them and now it's mostly just new cars. And I still get excited from a work perspective. I still get excited about the same things, which is just going in and reviewing the cars. We had the new Nissan Sentra in the office the other day and like I'm driving in in the morning being like I'm pumped, like I'm excited and there is still that excitement. There's not like, surprisingly, there is not specific cars that are that exciting for me. The new supercars are always a big deal and there's going to be a few coming out here in quick succession, which is the McLaren W1 and Bugatti tourbillon. And obviously I'm excited about those. But it's not just those cars. You know, we get big views doing videos of Kia Tellurides, and I get excited about. There is something exciting to me about an automaker playing in a very competitive space, which supercars isn't. It's a. It's a more of an emotional thing and a lot of times people buy them all. Whereas Telluride, you have to distinguish yourself with quirks and features from the Pylander, the Pilot, the Paladin. And so I always find it to be kind of just as interesting to see what those guys are doing. And they often have some cool stuff. They often reward me with some cool quirks and features.
- [139:35]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [139:36]
John
On the, on, on, on Ferrari. Do you get sick of people commenting, like, bring back Pin and Farina. Like, I just feel like every Ferrari video, it's like, he's not come, they're not coming back, it's over. Like, I, I mean, I. Every. Every Ferrari video video, I go to the comment section across every channel and, and one, per. My personal belief is that the cars actually look amazing when they're specked properly. I think they look really rough the way that Ferrari specs them like dirt for, for basically marketing press. Right. And then I think once people with refined tastes get in there, they. They end up looking amazing. So I'm not, I'm not exactly, like, disappointed with the, the current design.
- [140:22]
Doug DeMuro
I agree. I didn't for a while when they first left Pininfarina, I thought there were some questionable cars. However, the 296 is unbelievably beautiful. And honestly, the Dodici Chellindri, which I made fun of because of its ridiculous name and also because of its design when it was first announced, I got to spend the day with one and I totally feel the opposite now. I think they're beautiful. They're striking. Ferrari is designing cars in a way now that is, like, at the forefront, at the cutting edge, rather than just sort of only going after beauty. With that said, Pin and Farina and Ferrari have an unbelievable legacy together and it would be nice to see them return, reunite in some form.
- [141:05]
John
Yeah, they did, but now it's been like more than a decade and it's owned by an Indian like conglomerate. Like, are all the same people even still there? If they did partner, would it just be just for the brand purposes.
- [141:20]
Tyler
Hasselblad is owned by DJI now. What is that partnership? These companies, they change over time. They just become brands, they just become names.
- [141:28]
Sholto
Ip.
- [141:29]
Doug DeMuro
If they did partner, would it just be for brand purposes? Yeah, probably. But I bet you they'd sell some cars. If the 500 unit run of a Pininfarina design car, that would kill. Just like if Ferrari did a manual, which I sincerely believe they should do, I think that also would have. Even if it was just for the purposes of making money, I think it would be successful.
- [141:50]
Tyler
On the Ferrari doing Emanuel, you get on the stump every once in a while with, like, I want to change to what this manufacturer is doing or what the car community as a whole is doing. What's the highest confidence? Like, I'm responsible for that. Maybe it's just like a tiny thing, but, like, you know, there's a lot of things where, you know, you say stuff on the Internet and then the change happens and you're like, hey, maybe they watched the video. Maybe it was a factor. Maybe it's just I got lucky and I was talking about the thing that they were already working on.
- [142:18]
Doug DeMuro
But I think very little do I actually feel responsible. However, when I bought my convertible G wagon eight and eight years ago, eight and a half years ago, nobody even knew that car existed. And within a year, Kendall Jenner had one, and I did a bunch of videos and I posted a lot of pictures on Instagram. I drive it on the beach with beach grass and it looks amazing. And the values of those suddenly absolutely went through the roof, which was not the case when I bought my car. I paid 125 for my car, and if I could find another one for 125, I would buy 10. And suddenly, six months ago, three months ago, Mercedes announces they're coming back with a new convertible G wagon. And I don't think that I was directly, entirely responsible, but I wouldn't be surprised if I played a little bit of a role in the cultural re remembering that this car existed to the point where values kind of blew up. There were some influential people got in Mercedes ear, and Mercedes was thinking, okay.
- [143:14]
Tyler
Maybe we can do this again. Yeah, no, I think that's 100% right. You deserve the victory lap on that for sure.
- [143:21]
Doug DeMuro
On that ridiculous car, which is such an embarrassing car to own, that I don't even want the victory lap.
- [143:26]
Tyler
Well, we're giving it to you. You're directly responsible.
- [143:29]
Doug DeMuro
Other than that, though, I don't think I have significant. I mean, I've Been, I've been harping a long time about how automakers need to make more off road SUVs, and that's happened. But I think also the market trends have made that pretty clear.
- [143:39]
Tyler
Yeah, yeah. I mean, Ed bolling with the, what is it, LP640 prices, he kind of discovered that there were far fewer of them than people thought. And so that obviously changed the price. And if you bring new information to the world like that feels like you do have an influence.
- [143:53]
Doug DeMuro
Now in Ed's case, he's got a few, few of them so, you know, talk them up a little bit. That's, that's a game I should have gotten into and I wish that I had, but unfortunately I did not do that for my own personal gain. Not that that's the only reason that.
- [144:06]
Tyler
Ed does it for me.
- [144:07]
Doug DeMuro
Yeah, he's a crude fellow and I think that played a role.
- [144:10]
Tyler
We're going to see Doug with like, you know, he has 200 SF 90s and now he's talking really positively about them, like, and he bought them like at the trough of the depreciation curve. What's going on here? And you're like, actually there's no electrical issues. I did all this for studies. And the hybrid system.
- [144:26]
John
Can we, can we get Nissan to bring back the Murano Cross Cabriolet?
- [144:30]
Tyler
That is important. We, we are big fans here. We, we took your joke and we've been running with it and the whole.
- [144:36]
Doug DeMuro
And you know the sad thing about that car, I don't know if you know this, but the, the convertible tops fail and so just leave it down.
- [144:42]
John
I don't need the top. I'm just joy riding that thing. I never need the top.
- [144:47]
Tyler
California, does the SP1 have a top? No, no, it doesn't have a windshield.
- [144:53]
Doug DeMuro
Right. So those cars, eventually they will all fail and that will kind of kill them because apparently the Nissan's only solution is you have to replace it. There is apparently a shade tree mechanic guy in Florida who figured out the problem and is willing to fix it, but you got to send your car to him. So if you live in like the Tampa Clearwater area, you can get your top fixed. But like, otherwise it is worth sending your Murano Cross cab railing.
- [145:16]
Tyler
We're trailering.
- [145:17]
John
I mean the Restomod community, in 10 years we'll be going crazy. Oh, no, no.
- [145:20]
Tyler
You know, we're doing, we're cannonballing it there and back from la. That's what we'll do.
- [145:25]
Doug DeMuro
That car was utterly awful in every way because it is a Very special product that. That could have a cult following if it wasn't so bad.
- [145:34]
Tyler
Yeah, it's very funny.
- [145:36]
John
Anyways, well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us.
- [145:39]
Tyler
This is fantastic.
- [145:40]
John
Enjoyed it.
- [145:41]
Tyler
Congratulations on all the success and. And please keep the podcast. We've been loving it. Congratulations on the massive success there and with everything. And we appreciate you coming, hanging out, chopping it up.
- [145:53]
John
Yeah, cheers.
- [145:53]
Doug DeMuro
Thanks. Thanks for having.
- [145:55]
Tyler
Bye. Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, Serverless vector and full text search. Built from first principles and object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. I'm also going to tell you about public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. Multi asset investing, trusted by moving millions. Our next guests are both named Alex. We have some folks from Ramp, the creators of Ramp Labs. Ramp Sheets. We're bringing in Ramp Sheets, both Alexes. What's happening? Please kick us off with introductions on both of you. How you came to work at Ramp, work on this particular project. I'd love to hear the origin story. It's a fascinating product and we're going to go into it.
- [146:35]
Alex Shevchenko
Hey, I'm Alex Shevchenko. I've been at RAM for now two years. Started out and still am on the Applied AI team. And throughout these two years, I've been working on a bunch of experimental things as part of Applied AI, and lately just been trying to wrap them up into Ramp Labs so that we can publish these things publicly.
- [146:59]
Tyler
That's great. And Alex.
- [147:01]
Alex Stauffer
Sorry, yeah, I'm Alex Stauffer, one of the leads of Ramp Labs, alongside the other Alex. And yeah, this is the place for AI bets at Ramp. We're really experimenting, going to the cutting edge of AI, trying to ship product that is actually outside of the current Ramp mandate. Yeah.
- [147:25]
Tyler
Do you guys have nicknames yet? I feel like people would get confused, Alex, because you can't even just be like, oh, yeah, Alex at Ramp Labs. You have to get further.
- [147:35]
Alex Shevchenko
Yeah, just the last names, I guess. Shevchenko and Last.
- [147:37]
Tyler
Shevchenko and Last. So talk to us about the product. It feels extremely aggressive to go after Microsoft, to go after Google, not products that have massive user bases. And yet you're launching Ramp Sheets. Talk to us about the thought, the positioning. Are you going to try and replace the investment banking workhorse that is Microsoft Excel? Is this more for CFOs who are already on Ramp? How are you thinking about the product itself?
- [148:05]
Alex Shevchenko
Well, originally this started out as an experiment, as everything within Ramp Labs is. We've been trying out different variations of this actually just to try to help our own internal finance team. This has gone, as I said, through many iterations. This initially was like process mining to document some of their workflows from video video so that they can communicate better between each other and to software engineers. And then we tried to take that piece and create like zapier and like retool workflows based on them to try to automate. And we tried to get them to use it and they were like, no, this is too black box. We can't really use this. We need visibility into it. And so we took a step back and tried to look through the looms of all the information that they were giving to to us. And we jumped through like random locations. And 99% of the time when you like open their loom, it's like in a spreadsheet. So we decided we should like really meet them where they work and have a spreadsheet interface for this. And this doesn't necessarily need to be replacing anything. This can be an add on to their existing workflows. Right? This can be a quick way to create like a pro forma or something that they can then execute export to a CSV or an Excel file and then load it up in sheets or Excel and continue their work there. So that's broadly the.
- [149:28]
Tyler
So why build like a web version of a spreadsheet at all? Why not a plugin that lives inside of Excel? That's what Bloomberg and Capital Iq and most of the other kind of complementary systems have typically plugged in through Connect. You decided to build the actual full spreadsheet in the cloud, in the web. Why that decision versus just plugin?
- [149:58]
Alex Shevchenko
Well, internally we do have some more complex workflows that rely on like sheets and stuff that people can use for this. As I said, like Ramp Labs is like the experimental branch. And this was an experiment that like got very, very large. And that's like the way to allow people to interface with it as quick as possible. We didn't need like access to your Google account. We don't need access to your Excel account. You can just go and try it out and it's there and it's available on ram.com sheets to anyone, not only Ramp customers right now.
- [150:35]
Sholto
Oh, cool.
- [150:36]
Alex Shevchenko
That's probably like one of the biggest reasons.
- [150:38]
Tyler
How so?
- [150:40]
Alex Stauffer
For some context, like a lot of people think that there was a big team behind this or that Ramp is like investing a lot of resources here. And the truth is that like three guys kind of built this in a cave pretty fast.
- [150:54]
Sholto
Yes.
- [150:55]
Alex Shevchenko
Yeah.
- [150:56]
Alex Stauffer
And we want to release it. We believe in shipping quickly and getting feedback from customers. We thought we built a pretty cool tool and just wanted to see how people would play around with, with it. So we released it last week and then the response was overwhelming. There are 2 million impressions. Thousands of users joined immediately. They're making thousands of sheets every day. Places that you wouldn't imagine have, have been using it. Like it's popping off at Wharton with students and professors. There are many banks that are already using unit VCs, finance people in the space industry. I got off call with a user who's based in London this morning who's a vc. So it's, it's like it's astounded us honestly.
- [151:48]
John
What, where, where are people getting the most value or what kind of like work work are they actually doing once they kind of play around with it and get a sense for how it works, like how are they applying it. Yeah.
- [152:00]
Alex Stauffer
There are a lot of interesting use cases. Some are personal. There are a couple of stories here where it's helping them plan their wedding. These things can get incredibly complex and you need a way to organize it. Another use case, an employee here is he's moving to New Jersey and wanted to find the best place to live and want to model for the.
- [152:28]
John
That.
- [152:28]
Alex Stauffer
But outside of personal cases, there is a real demand here, especially with founders, VCs, small businesses, especially owners of small businesses. They don't actually have like a large finance team. Right. And it's incredibly valuable to spin up a model really quickly instead of going and paying a consultant thousands of dollars to just make a template for.
- [152:54]
Alex Shevchenko
For them.
- [152:54]
Tyler
Yeah, it makes sense.
- [152:56]
John
Very cool. Where are you guys? Where, where, where are you planning to take it from here?
- [153:01]
Alex Shevchenko
Yeah, there's a bunch of features that we're still working on. We actually shipped shareable links today.
- [153:07]
John
Nice.
- [153:07]
Alex Shevchenko
And then exploring what best templates. So like very, very intricate templates that you can take and, and create basically kind of these like pro formas right away or like budgeting right away weight and then as well as like integrating with ramp itself so that you can like actually export your spending data and like analyze it within ramp sheets. So those are like the, the three biggest things right now.
- [153:33]
John
Very cool.
- [153:34]
Tyler
That's amazing. The chat is saying ramp construct an LBO for this regional H Vac company that backs into a 25% IRR. Make no mistakes, please. Maybe one day. I mean that actually probably is within what is basically one shotable by the model in ramp sheets today. But thank you so much for coming and breaking it down for us. Congrats on all the progress and excited to watch where it goes. Excited to see more people demoing it and taking it for a spin.
- [154:00]
John
Incredible launch.
- [154:01]
Tyler
Thanks so much.
- [154:02]
Alex Shevchenko
Thanks for having me.
- [154:02]
Tyler
We'll talk to you soon guys.
- [154:04]
Sholto
Cheers.
- [154:04]
Tyler
Have a good day. We are going back to the timeline for a minute while we bring in our our next guest.
- [154:13]
John
We were covering OpenAI shopping research. Didn't really get to and Doug joined but really think I'm bullish on this product. I think being able to effectively run a deep research report and then see all the information that you need on a bunch of different products and then eventually just hit buy right from the app is going to be like a crazy flywheel. That's actually what people do today. They start Google searching, they find out what products are available, they find out pricing fees, features, et cetera. Then they make a buying decision. And if you can pull that all into a single sort of like experience, it's going to be very, very valuable. And this is effectively the deep research as a product is a product that has better product market fit than almost anything else in consumer AI. And so I'm very bullish.
- [155:01]
Tyler
Well if you're selling a product on chatgpt got to go to numeral.com, let numero worry about sales tax and VAT compliance. Compliance handled so you can focus on growth. No, I agree it'll be very interesting to see how fast like how fast OpenAI makes their first dollar from advertising or commission based sales, how quickly they make their first million, their first billion from it. The numbers are so big they need to get to tens of billions of dollars on those business lines fairly quickly. They're certainly the most optimistic growth areas for the business business and something that I think everyone it's very consensus that if they get agentic commerce working they can the pool of capital. It's just very like the audience is already there. They just have to run ads. This is like proven. Whereas breaking into hardware, that's something that Microsoft didn't pull off with the phone and Amazon tried to fire a phone and Facebook tried to phone for a while. It's not a sure thing but it's almost a sure thing that if you have a billion DAUs using your website for 30 minutes a day you can advertise to them. It's very, very proven. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you at Vanta Automate Compliance and Security Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Our next Guest is Quinn Slack, the CEO of amp. How you doing?
- [156:26]
John
What's happening?
- [156:27]
Tyler
Welcome to the show.
- [156:28]
Doug DeMuro
Hey, guys. Good to be.
- [156:29]
John
Great to have you.
- [156:30]
Tyler
Thanks so much for hopping on. I'm glad that we were able to get you on. We love ads. We were just talking about ads, actually, in the ChatGPT context.
- [156:36]
John
No one likes ads more than us, but fascinating.
- [156:40]
Tyler
Exactly. That's why I'm excited to talk to you. So please introduce yourself and the company a little bit and then we'll get into it.
- [156:48]
Quinn Slack
I am Quinn slack. I'm the CEO and co founder at Sourcegraph. We make AMP this coding agent. I love coding. And I mean, AI is just crazy for coding in Opus 4. 5 today. It's mind blowing.
- [156:58]
Sholto
Blowing.
- [156:58]
Quinn Slack
But it's also expensive and that sucks because a lot of people can't use it. And it also means that we don't learn fast enough about how people are using it because it's a tiny fraction of the world that's actually using AI to code in the kind of unconstrained way that you want to if you're really going to learn. So we took a look at these problems and that's how we ended up with this crazy idea of putting ads in a coding agent.
- [157:21]
Sholto
I love it.
- [157:21]
Tyler
Okay. I want to understand what that exactly means. I'm going to pitch you five different instantiations of of that. One is I go to the more the agentic commerce route. I go to your coding agent. I say, okay, I'm ready to deploy this. And then it runs an auction to see, hey, there's a deal on Azure. So we're going to host it over there as opposed to Amazon. Or it could be putting ads for Amazon or Azure or gcp and the comments of the actual code. So when I go review the code, I see ads, or it could be while it's cooking, it's showing me ads in the terminal. Where are you actually surfacing these ads?
- [157:54]
Quinn Slack
So the interesting thing about coding is you are in this all day long. It's not like Amazon.com ads where you go there right when you have that intent, but you also use the coding agent when you have intent. So we kind of get both. We get those, hey, you're asking it, I want to deploy. Where should I deploy? Should it be on, you know, Cloudflare or whatever? But you also are staring at it. And AI coding agents are kind of slow. I'm not saying we make it slower so that we show more ads, but it's up on the screen and it knows what Your tech stack is. So if you're Cloudflare and you see that they're using S3 and they're doing a bunch of dumb stuff with it, well, that's a great place for you to show ads about not only Cloudflare, but specifically which of their products is better and how much better. And then you click a button and the agent can go and switch you to it.
- [158:40]
Tyler
So, I mean, it feels like I love this thesis because it worked for Uber and you've seen a bunch of companies where they've had a whole bunch of attention and they've just built big ad businesses and, you know, Uber just shows you ads while you wait for your car. Basically, it's like. It's not rocket science. It's like a pretty simple thing. At the same time, a lot of it. A lot of times when this works, it works because someone's created this pool of attention that there's just, you know, millions of people open this app or they're using that, they're staring at this particular screen and there's real estate. And I see that real estate in the ChatGPT app, where people just open it up and there's a big blank screen. You can put an ad there or while it's waiting. But do you have to go and get people on board and get them off of competitor coding agents and competitive IDEs? How much do you have to do to re platform the customer to you and then start showing them ads? Or can you partner with other pieces of the stack to just plug in quicker?
- [159:36]
Quinn Slack
We're going to follow this where this goes. So yeah, we're open to partnering with others. I think other people are kind of waiting and seeing because this idea was so clear, crazy. A free coding agent and ads make amp free in this mode. It's really compelling. And that audience is growing a lot. We keep making the model better and better. Like initially we had it so ads were actually covering more than our cost. Then we made the model six times more expensive and now they're covering half. But now with Opus 4.5, I think it's going to be like probably covering 80% of the cost because it's actually cheaper. So we got to keep making the model better and better that it uses. And free AI. It's pretty co compelling.
- [160:14]
Tyler
Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.
- [160:16]
John
I already know if TBPN runs some ads in there. I know the copy. Develop an ear for tvpn.
- [160:23]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [160:24]
John
What do you think?
- [160:25]
Quinn Slack
I like it.
- [160:25]
Tyler
That's good.
- [160:26]
Quinn Slack
I mean, you can go, why don't you try it. Just put a few dollars down.
- [160:32]
John
Is the ad platform self serve yet or are you guys just doing it by hand? For now you can go in and.
- [160:40]
Quinn Slack
Put the ad self serving serve. It feels like all of a sudden overnight we are building this new ads business. My wife works at Google, she sells ads. You know, I've seen the business but there's so much complexity and it's like a three sided marketplace now.
- [160:54]
Tyler
So we got really doing God's work.
- [160:57]
John
Truly.
- [160:58]
Tyler
Yeah, we love it. We love it.
- [160:59]
John
Yeah, yeah. I guess any kind of like comps to this like that you've used to kind of like talk with advertisers about it. Like is there, is there another kind of advertising that's sort of similar in the sense of like, you know, like, like clearly have people's like very specific attention at a specific moment in time where they're making, oftentimes making product and business decisions. Any, any kind of areas that you've learned from or are you just kind of freestyling?
- [161:27]
Quinn Slack
We're freestyling. It's a different place to put ads and it's kind of hilarious that of AI products. The first, first place, you know, I think we're, we're the first or one of the first that it shows up in your terminal, in your editor. But I think the fact that it captures the intent and it's always up on your screen, it's different. So we're, I would love it if there's more people doing this but there's so many other companies we went to and they said well we kind of want you to take all the flames first. On the advertiser side though, they were incredibly willing. Like we had a really high hit rate and some of them, I, you know, other dev tools, CEOs, I would email them and say hey, do you want to advertise? And after a day when they hadn't gotten back to me I thought like oh, they probably think we're total idiots. But then they got back to me and they ended up doing this.
- [162:10]
John
Yeah, no, it makes, I mean it makes a lot of sense especially when you have the, when you can show an ad and have one eventually, maybe it's not that way today, but basically one shotting the implementation of certain products like that just like contextual advertising in this context is going to be super powerful. Any ad haters pushing back yet? Obviously I'm sure you have an ability to get people to opt out of ads, I'm assuming by just paying for the right tier.
- [162:41]
Quinn Slack
Yeah, well we want to show ads in the more premium modes too. So got to figure out that's when.
- [162:47]
Tyler
We'Re going to get the ad haters. Actually, no, Actually, no, actually, you can't opt out of the ads. You're getting ads no matter what way. I love it.
- [162:55]
Quinn Slack
Yeah, I think if you're not getting the haters, then you're not pushing the envelope enough. And so much of what we realized when we launched amp free is we should have been like 10 times bolder about it because it was received surprisingly well and it's making a lot more money than we thought. So we're going to push the envelope. But all of this just means. It means more people can use code AI in a totally unconstrained way and see this thing that just blows our minds.
- [163:18]
Tyler
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it seems really cool for just like. Yeah, I can imagine so many people. This. This is what I would have used in college. I definitely would not be paying $200 a month or something. For me, I would probably be interning at a startup or at a live show that pays for my AWS bills. But can you just zoom out for us and give us a little bit of what the corporate hierarchy is like AMP and Source Graph? Have you raised money? What are the shape of these companies and products? How everything fits together in your world?
- [163:49]
Quinn Slack
Yeah, we started Sourcegraph back in 2013, actually with this idea. Let's automate software development and we started building code search at sourcegraph. And that's like Google for all the code. Yeah, it's this. Especially now with AI. AI is doing like a thousand times more code searches. It is this critical infrastructure. We're the only ones doing it at that scale. And then we've also got amp. So these two products under one roof. Code Search and amp. And AMP is the frontier coding agent. We're trying to make it a year ahead for 1% of devs out there and just be totally crazy. And you might say, well, ads is incompatible with that. ADS is all about getting a big audience. But actually what ads do, they're in service of the research objective. For amp. It lets us not have to go and jump if some customer says jump with this requirement, that's going to hold us back. It gives us so much more free freedom to change the model, change how it works. So in that way, it actually does really nicely fund a research lab for us with amp. I guess in the same way that Google Ads mean that it can do whatever the hell they want and they can fund a lot of experimentation. Internally, yeah. We've got these two products under one roof.
- [165:01]
Tyler
What were some of the trade offs you made when you were building the first coding agent? Obviously there were people that trained foundation models themselves. Other people just wrote harnesses and they're swapping out the different models from the big labs. How did you think about the different decisions that you made?
- [165:21]
Quinn Slack
We decided let's see how far we can get without trying to train our own God model. Let's depend on anthropic or OpenAI and Google. And ever since we started with AMP, which is, you know, we started that in February, we honestly thought there was a new model competition a lot sooner and it actually only started happening in a big way last week with Gemini 3. We switched AMP's model over to Gemini 3. It was a huge leap forward. And then today Back to loving Opus 4:5. I think we're going to switch back to that. But am I glad that we didn't go spend billions and billions of dollars training a model that was 1% worse and yet nobody uses it? No, I'm really happy, happy to be occupying this place.
- [166:05]
Tyler
Yeah. So you don't surface the. You don't have a model picker in the agent. It's not like I can as a customer say I'm willing to watch all the ads and get all the ads, but I really prefer Gemini 3 or Codex or Opus 4 or 5, for example. I don't get to pay.
- [166:23]
Quinn Slack
Yeah, no model picker.
- [166:25]
Tyler
Got it. Cool. Well, last question.
- [166:28]
John
What. What do you think about integrating other types of products in the ide we were talking about Chad Ide putting gambling in the product. Do you think that, that. Do you think there's a world in the future, like three years from now where people have enough time between running different tasks and agents that they just have time to goof around in these. In the IDE or in various developer tools? Or is that kind of like an of the moment kind of like problem solution?
- [167:05]
Quinn Slack
I think you should be able to bet, you know, get some Kashi manifold market stuff in there. You should, you know, there should be.
- [167:13]
John
You should integrate. What ad are you going to. You should let people bet on what ad they're going to get next.
- [167:18]
Quinn Slack
Yeah, whichever one they want, I think.
- [167:23]
Tyler
I don't know if you're joking, but I think you can go too far. We've seen people go viral but be potentially flash in the pan over.
- [167:32]
Quinn Slack
Yeah, we'll see if I'm joking.
- [167:33]
Tyler
Okay.
- [167:34]
Quinn Slack
Yeah, I think gambling is taking it too far, but there's a lot of stuff we can explore.
- [167:38]
Tyler
Yeah, I mean the ads business. I mean, Google made $100 billion from ads in Q3. I think there might be enough opportunity there.
- [167:47]
John
Last question. Are you hyperactive in Slack?
- [167:51]
Tyler
Yes, of course.
- [167:53]
Quinn Slack
You know, my great grandfather started it.
- [167:55]
Tyler
Invented it back in the 1800s. Yes.
- [167:58]
Quinn Slack
I'm proud to see what it's become.
- [167:59]
Tyler
Yes.
- [168:00]
John
Amazing.
- [168:01]
Tyler
He's like a Microsoft Teams guy.
- [168:04]
John
Yeah. Great to meet. Very cool, Very, very cool product and yeah, thanks. Love to have you back soon.
- [168:12]
Tyler
Thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon.
- [168:14]
Sholto
See you.
- [168:14]
John
Cheers.
- [168:14]
Tyler
Have a good one. Bye. Back to the timeline. Let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance Managed Trust, the leading AI trust management platform. Did I already do that one?
- [168:26]
John
You did.
- [168:27]
Tyler
Well then let's go.
- [168:28]
John
Oh, we love Vanta Figma.
- [168:29]
Tyler
Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps divine develop teams, build great products together. I'll also tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions and get insights in seconds. Back on the timeline. People are having fun with Nano Banana. They're putting different hairstyles on various tech people. So Ilya has a wide variety. This is Marc Andreessen with all sorts of different hairstyles. Which one would you pick if you were him? I think the one in the center looks pretty good. The longer beard, shorter hair.
- [169:05]
John
But somebody's in the middle on the left is pretty cool.
- [169:09]
Tyler
The left is pretty cool.
- [169:10]
John
Crazy flow. I also like bottom. Bottom left is also crazy.
- [169:14]
Tyler
Yeah. Time to take a trip to Turkey for sure. Just go. You have the money. Just go. Full head of hair.
- [169:20]
John
The thing with Ilya that's interesting is they didn't. They didn't do like the full zoomer.
- [169:24]
Tyler
The middle bottom one that is flow. Keep going down. Yeah. The middle of it. Yeah, right there. Right in the middle there. The middle bottom.
- [169:31]
John
The ponytail is also ponytails.
- [169:33]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [169:34]
John
Pretty powerful.
- [169:34]
Tyler
Definitely. You know, it's ref. Respectable hairstyle.
- [169:38]
John
This post here from Thomas Scholes. He says the latest Nano Banana model has officially crossed the line. I no longer implicitly trust photos anymore. And sometimes I can't even definitively, definitively claim it's AI. Now I totally agree. I saw this picture.
- [169:53]
Tyler
Yep.
- [169:53]
John
And my first thought was like, that's got to be AI Specifically because I don't think Sam is just walking down the Golden Gate Bridge in the middle of the day. Yep. It's like probably terrible from a security standpoint, but it looks photorealistic and.
- [170:14]
Tyler
Yeah, it's very. So if you put the photo into Gemini. Gemini will tell you. If you say is this AI? Gemini will tell you yes. According to the Synth ID watermelon detection tool, this image was generated in whole or in part with Google AI. Of course we've seen previous, previous images where if you turn up the contrast and the saturation all the way, you can see kind of the rainbow like zebra pattern basically that's embedded in there very subtly. But yeah, I mean this is pretty, pretty photo real and so you got to stay safe out there.
- [170:51]
John
It's going to be Joe Weisenthal asked Nanobanana to create a really annoying LinkedIn profile Zuno is talking about. I couldn't tell. Is this a real person?
- [171:01]
Tyler
I have no idea because at this point we're way past the Turing test for images in the sense that this looks perfectly edited. But this could also just be a straight up screenshot. I would need to fact check this. But instead of fact checking it, I'm going to tell you about Privy. Privy make it easy to build on crypto rails securely spin up white label wallet sign transactions to integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API.
- [171:28]
John
Kalyn Sterling I don't think is a real person says about I don't do small talk. I do deep dives. My journey is a quantum leap through the liminal spaces of tech and spirituality. Chief Visionary Officer TEDx Speaker Professional Storyteller Democratizing the metaverse one DAO at a time. 10x Growth Alchemist.
- [171:49]
Tyler
So did Joe actually ask nanobanana to do this? I want to see the price prompt if that's true.
- [171:56]
John
Yeah, let's try to.
- [171:58]
Tyler
Yeah, we need to replicate this. Try to replicate it because I actually did. So this was the example that I gave. I went to nanobanana and I said make a. My prompt was just create a really annoying LinkedIn profile but I forgot to check the nano banana box. And so even though it was multimodal, according to Tyler over there, it did not generate it. It generated text. And so, you know, it's like I can only do text. Very questionable. We'll see. We'll keep playing around with that. And in the meantime, I'll tell you about adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable Plan buy and measure out of home with precision. What's up with Brian Johnson? He's starting a new protocol. Is he going to Taco Bell Drive through. Is this a real photo? Is this AI?
- [172:51]
John
This has to be AI.
- [172:52]
Tyler
That's a very funny, funny photo. This was my take was that, you know, if he's really changed by his journey. He must come out of it liking at least one fast food restaurant. And Alexa says those shrooms spiritually healed him in a way that has him living moss now.
- [173:11]
John
Living Moss.
- [173:11]
Tyler
The Live Moss tagline, one of the best taglines. Really good. Yeah, yeah. Taco Bell knows how to do it. Also underrated how online the Taco Bell like marketing team is. Are you familiar with this?
- [173:23]
John
See their post, you know the story.
- [173:24]
Tyler
Of SHIELD Monot, guest of the show multiple time.
- [173:27]
John
Yeah, he got married.
- [173:28]
Tyler
He got married at 1 in the metaverse or something. Like it was some crazy thing where he posted like, if somebody pays for it, I'll get married in the metaverse, like as a joke. And then like Taco Bell was like, yeah, let's do it or something. It was like very crazy. But it's like there aren't a lot of companies at that scale that are as online and in the culture as Taco Bell and beyond. Just like, oh, they have somebody who's pithy on the Twitter. It's like, no, they actually can go and execute. I've seen multiple people are like very niche Internet micro celebrities that have been given the full dog and pony show and tour of the Taco Bell headquarters and impressed upon them the greatness of the Taco Bell brand. It's pretty awesome. Almost as awesome as getting a luxury watch on getbezel.com Shop over 26,500 luxury watches fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. This post from Nir. Did you want to skip this one?
- [174:19]
John
Nir says guy who doesn't want to be old. It seems like we'll get age reversing tech right when I'll be old. How favorable. Guy who thinks it is different this time, but this time it's different.
- [174:29]
Tyler
This is insane. Bez, read the next one. We got some massive news from none other than Bill Gurley.
- [174:35]
John
We got to get the gong out for this one.
- [174:37]
Tyler
You read it.
- [174:39]
John
Amy Gurley. Huge congratulations to Bill Gurley for receiving the Texas Distinguished Alumnus Award. A remarkable honor for a remarkable Longhorn. Congratulations, Bill. Well, well, well deserved congratulations. This. This made my day. This made my day.
- [174:57]
Tyler
Everyone was, everyone was wondering, wondering if he was going to make it.
- [174:59]
John
Yeah, it was kind of the elephant in the room.
- [175:01]
Tyler
It was hugely hotly debated. There was a lot, what, $10 million in liquidity betting on this, Whether or not he would make million.
- [175:08]
John
Yeah, it was sort of. It was sort of the Longhorn in the room.
- [175:11]
Tyler
Yeah, yeah, exactly. It was, it was a Huge deal. But he did it. He pulled it off. And we're very excited for building.
- [175:17]
Tyler (Intern)
Everyone was wondering what he would do if he didn't win.
- [175:20]
John
I guess we'll never know.
- [175:22]
Tyler
I guess we'll never know.
- [175:23]
John
Riley Walsh Balls.
- [175:25]
Tyler
This is so funny.
- [175:26]
John
He's truly the greatest Internet rascal of his time.
- [175:29]
Tyler
Incredible.
- [175:31]
John
He did it again. He cloned Gmail. Except you're logged in as Epstein and can see all of his emails. It's such a great workflow because people workflow.
- [175:42]
Tyler
I mean, it's like it's a way. Because I've seen other people do. Here's a fine tune on the emails. Here's a searchable database. None of them have been particularly usable, but this is fascinating because it just really substantiates the emails in a way that everyone knows what a Gmail inbox looks like. And you can just.
- [176:04]
John
He added this random page button. It's also funny because he's getting this. One of the last emails that he got was a flipboard week in review, and the subject line says, alex Acosta resigns. Jeffrey Epstein arrested. So imagine, I guess he wouldn't have been really able to read this email where he learns that he's arrested.
- [176:30]
Tyler
He's arrested. Yeah. This is one of the things. Chat a while ago was like, oh, I'd love for the TVPN to cover the Epstein thing, but it's not really their shtick. Well, we found an angle. We found a tech angle. And so this is when we get to talk about it. I know everyone wants us to talk about the hottest news stories in a decade, but you have to. The lens of Riley Walls and fun little hack projects. Before we move on, let me tell you about eightsleep.com exceptional sleep, without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper. Wake up energized. The reason you feel insane, according to Willmanitis, is because you're talking to ChatGPT when you should be talking to God nears back and says the reason you feel insane is because you're talking to God when you should be speaking with Claude. So funny. Claude. Oh, Keller is coming on the show tomorrow from Zipline. Cameron Keller Clifton, one of the greatest. Get that goat sound effect ready for tomorrow. Keller said that he's launched zipping points. He can pick up packages and deliver them autonomously with the Zipline. Autonomous drones. This is the private plane for your burrito, folks. It's arrived. We're here. We're in the future.
- [177:48]
John
Future is here.
- [177:49]
Tyler
The future plane, the flying car is here. And it will deliver you chipotle in 15 minutes, in 4 minutes while it's still warm. So here's a zip. Grabbing a package from one of our restaurant partners. It'll take so many cars off the road over the coming years. That's great news for environmentalists, for congestion, for anyone who wants to be able to really let it loose on the roads. If we're getting less congestion, maybe the speed limit goes up to 80 miles an hour, maybe 120, maybe 160. Maybe we get up to 200 and you can really let it loose.
- [178:24]
John
I wonder.
- [178:25]
Tyler
I would like that.
- [178:26]
John
I wonder if they'll need to make like, will you need to prove that you're at a certain address in order to get stuff delivered there? Because it's such a funny dimension to mess with people and just be like, hey, look on your lawn. And there's just like. There's like a burrito, A burrito just chilling.
- [178:42]
Tyler
Well, people do that with pizzas, right? They prank call, I'd like a dozen pizzas delivered to this address. I'll pay in cash. This is like a famous prank. And then you show up and it's like, I don't need all these pizzas. I'm being pranked. I think that that's been mostly resolved by modern payment solutions. But I'm sure there will be oddities around these drones.
- [179:03]
John
Sheesh.
- [179:04]
Tyler
Theo Vaughn, Flamin Hot tweets is joking around and says, imagine how cool it will be to shoot one of these out of the sky to get a free movie meal. Going hunting for your Chipotle burrito. That, of course, is extremely cyberpunk and hilarious, but it will be massively illegal. And Keller breaks it down. He says, we're regulated by the FAA, so the consequences are similar to shooting at a 7:37 as it's taking off from the airport. Not a good idea. Also, communities love the service. And I imagine he's not saying the details, but if you shoot at a 737 as it's taking out from an airport, I think you're going to jail for a long time. And I think you will not just be able to shoot one of these out of the sky and pick up a free burrito with a.22.
- [179:51]
Tyler (Intern)
But what about, like a really big net? If you own the land, how high can you build a net?
- [179:56]
Tyler
I think that would be the same as throwing a really big net at a 737 on takeoff.
- [180:00]
Doug DeMuro
Tyler.
- [180:01]
Sholto
I don't know.
- [180:02]
John
I don't think.
- [180:03]
Tyler
I think for anything.
- [180:05]
John
The consequences are similar like, yes, it's illegal to shoot something out of the sky, but. But you're not. I think somebody could shoot one of these things down and get a misdemeanor. I think with a good lawyer, you're getting a misdemeanor. You're not going to. Whereas a 737, you know, if you.
- [180:21]
Tyler
Get John Quinn on your side, you're eating burritos for free.
- [180:24]
John
Yeah. So David, David, David Chang was saying, like, it's just, there's like he, it wasn't that he was like bearish on the tech, but he didn't think it solved like delivering it in the right form factor. Yeah, we gotta ask Keller about that tomorrow because right now if you order food, depending on where you are between the time that it's cooked and picked up and delivered, it's like there's a big gap.
- [180:48]
Tyler
Well, speaking of cooked, it has to be shorter. Speaking of cooked, there was a wild job description that hit the timeline. Rachel Mayer says, coolest PM role in crypto cooked.
- [181:01]
John
Real impact. Real impact needs to be clinically on the.
- [181:06]
Tyler
Not even chronically online here at Circle, we love Circle, of course. But wait, was this like intentionally? This must be a troll. This is rage made, done perfectly. And Facundo says cooked. The idea I was cracking up with this, like the idea of showing up to your job and being like, oh, man. Yeah, the team is here as cooked. They're all exact. They're all like, Washington. It's just the worst possible team.
- [181:37]
John
I think it's a perfect post from Rachel. There's no way this job post would have gotten nearly the reach. I think this was successful.
- [181:46]
Tyler
Did you see this in the replies to her original post? Did you mean to say cooked, cooking or cracked? And Rachel says, I don't even know anymore. They all sound fun. Rachel, we ain't cooked, we are cooking. Yeah. One of the developers, like at Circle is like, let's correct this. This is so funny. Let me tell you about wander.com, book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, 247 concierge service. What is this? Oh, the IP blocks are going out. You saw that, right? There's. When you, when you identify someone on X, where they're from. If you, if you signed up originally with an ip, it can be transferred to another. Like the IP bot can be sold internationally and then you will show up as an international participant. So there is some, there's, there are some false positives there a little bit. Shiel, who I mentioned for The Taco Bell wedding. I hope I didn't get that story wildly wrong. Wrong is mentioning a post from Alexis Mulliner who says fydhh. I'm noting that Learn Omicom IO is inaccessible from Spain while La Liga matches are being broadcast. And DHA says Spain blocks all of Cloudflare during those matches in an insane medieval attempt to counter piracy. That's wow. And so Omarky is. Is hosted with Cloudflare and they just bring down the Internet when they just stop piracy. That is insane. And so Shiel breaks it down. He says, oh my God. Spain blocks Cloudflare IP ranges during La Liga matches. La Liga submits lists of pirate IPs and the blocks take out lots of legitimate services too. So you can't use LinkedIn in Spain during La Liga games.
- [183:39]
John
I mean that's kind of. That's pretty on brand. That's pretty.
- [183:43]
Tyler
I'm not going to look up the GDP growth figures. I'm not going to do it. I'm sure it's going great. I'm sure it's going great over there.
- [183:50]
John
Very, very on brand for Spain. Did you see this is like the most Nathan potentially. It was like a Nathan Fielder idea. There's a bunch of accounts saying that JP Morgan appears to have an existentially threatening short microstrategy position that can potentially bankrupt JPM if master sorry, microstrateg trades 50% higher above Friday's close and WallStreetBets comes in and says you have no idea how understated this is. So a systemically critical bank is going to fail because they're short microstrategy. I'm not sure about this but it's working because MicroStrategy is up 5% today, so could have played meanwhile Bitcoin is up 2.5% today, so could have played a part. Who knows. But it's a fun idea. It's fun to.
- [184:49]
Tyler
Yeah, the thing I think.
- [184:51]
John
I don't think Jamie Dimon is risking at all for on a MicroStrategy short.
- [184:59]
Tyler
Yeah, I wonder how they even got that information. Maybe it's from 13 or something. Who knows. Tyler has begun become extremely black pilled on the 13F is building a thesis against it. We might be talking about that later this week also. I mean the whole thing with the oh, we're going to blow them out. Like it completely. It just negates the idea that they can trade a lot faster than you can trade them. You can just. They can get out of that trade when it's up 10%. And it's like, yeah, it would have been disastrous at 50, but once it went up 10%, they were like, okay, yeah, we're out. Actually, we're hedging. We're doing something. We're buying the other side of the trade or whatever. Especially like if you're, if you're, if you're a short seller now. Like, it's not like you don't have Google alerts for what's going on on Wall street bets. It's not going to take you by surprise. You're going to be like, oh, yeah, I know that retail armies exist. If they get marshaled, it can be really bad. So you do have to be a little bit careful because even though, though they might have crazy memes and they might be somewhat silly, they are powerful. But you can quantify the power. You can look at what capital has actually been marshaled for GameStop. Is it being sucked out of the GameStop army? If the entire GameStop army leaves and you see GameStop selling off by 80% and now they're buying into MicroStrategy or something, you probably have a problem.
- [186:21]
Doug DeMuro
Yeah.
- [186:22]
John
And Wall street has always been PvP, and in this case, it's like, it's like one group versus 30,000 individuals.
- [186:32]
Tyler
Well, we might want to close out with this post from Semianlysis about pbs person versus shrimp. They're breaking it down. He says it has become extremely trendy among some San Francisco artificial intelligence researchers to donate to shrimp welfare. They estimate that they help improve the welfare of 1,500 shrimps per year for every $1 donated. Why do they donate to shrimps? They claim that it is the most cost effective way of reducing suffering of sentient beings. Note that shrimp welfare, the shrimp welfare nonprofit, actually does not prevent shrimps from being killed, but instead promotes the use of electrical stunning as a more humane slaughtering method that aligns with the goal of reducing shrimp suffering. And so I had an idea for a new semianalysis point product, Shrimp Max. And what they'll do is every night they will take thousands of shrimp and execute them using hundreds of different methodologies. And then they will quantify the amount of suffering on a nightly basis, just like what they do with clustermax. And so we could know for sure, because, sure, today the SFAI researchers, they might be, yes, electrical stunning is better than the previous method, but what if there's a shift tomorrow and tomorrow electrical stunning is not the best method. They need to have real time data, they need charts, they need graphs, they need a dashboard, they need Cluster max for shrimp suffering.
- [187:57]
John
I didn't, I didn't believe this was real, but shrimpwellfareproject.org seems to be. They say you can track their shrimp act.
- [188:05]
Tyler
Shrimp, shrimp act. Well, I like a good portfolio.
- [188:08]
John
440 billion shrimps are farmed each year.
- [188:10]
Tyler
New. Yes.
- [188:11]
John
That is wild. That's more than five times the number of all farmed land animals combined.
- [188:16]
Tyler
I didn't know shrimp was so popular.
- [188:18]
John
This makes shrimp welfare an area of high impact where your involvement can lead to great change.
- [188:23]
Tyler
Yeah. Are you pro shrimp, anti shrimp, Tyler?
- [188:27]
Tyler (Intern)
Do you mean like shrimp welfare or shrimp in general?
- [188:29]
Tyler
Do you like shrimp? Do you like eating shrimp?
- [188:31]
Tyler (Intern)
I enjoy shrimp.
- [188:32]
Tyler
Do you enjoy shrimp? Do you think the shrimp welfare thing holds any water?
- [188:37]
Tyler (Intern)
I think it holds some water. At some point.
- [188:39]
John
It's like, should we have a global shrimp welfare tax? It's like an extra dollar per every time you buy. Every shrimp you buy is like a dollar on top just for shrimp welfare. So if you have a nice meal, you might be paying like a $20 premium. But, you know, thousands of shrimp are going to live better lives because of it.
- [189:00]
Tyler (Intern)
Well, it's not that they're not going to live better lives. They're going to die better deaths.
- [189:06]
Tyler
It's a noble cause. It's a noble cause.
- [189:08]
John
It is funny to go through all of this like you clearly care more about shrimp than probably anyone on earth and you're still like, yeah, they must die, but we have to do it. Gotta be nice about it. You gotta be nice with it.
- [189:23]
Tyler
It is crazy that you just don't, you just don't save them. But I mean, I'm sure the spreadsheets mathed out in a certain way and, and the rest is history. Should we close out with this iconic mid century home? It is apparently for sale. Look at this photo. Beautiful. And I think someone might have already bought it. Adam Mayer said, I'm going to buy it. This is in the SF gate. Have you seen this home before? I think I've seen some photos. Says After 65 years, LA's most famous mid century house hits the market. It's the first time it's ever been sold. Somebody's owned it for 65 years. The pinnacle of mid century modern architecture. With floor to ceiling glass windows proffering a panoramic view of Los Angeles below. The home has been carefully preserved for decades. I just like that, oh, it's for sale for $25 million. I just like that for once we get a real estate listing that kind of just becomes the current thing and I saw a lot of people posting about this. We obviously love the mansion section, love posting about real estate, talking about real estate. We find real estate very fascinating and I was happy to see this breakthrough in such a meaningful way. Anyway, lots more news but we will get to that tomorrow. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for supporting us. Listening to the show wherever you listen. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and we will see you tomorrow. A little update on the schedule. We will be off on Wednesday and Thursday. No show Wednesday, no show Thursday. But we will be back on Friday for Black Friday and we will be taking you on a whirlwind tour of the E Commerce world. We have some very exciting stuff planned for that. So we'll see you tomorrow and then we won't see you Wednesday. Thursday.
- [191:10]
John
Have a wonderful afternoon and evening. We'll see you at 11.
- [191:14]
Tyler
Goodbye.
- [191:15]
John
Cheers.