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You're watching TBPN. Today's Tuesday, July 21st. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. You use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We got a sponsor collab. Privy teaming up with RAMP to launch stablecoin accounts powered by Privy. Congrats to both teams. We also have some other news from RAMP folks coming on the show later this week. Very excited to chat with them. Anyway, China, China, China, China is in the news.
But first, should we go through the lineup? Yeah, please take.
We have Ferdinand Dabitz from Augustus coming on, raising $180 million Series B at a billion-dollar valuation. Kai from Light Phone is launching a $299 Light Phone.
They're calling it the dumbest dumb phone. It's our dumbest dumb phone ever. Actually, it's a slightly less... it's a less dumb phone. It's a smarter dumb phone. It might be the smartest dumb phone. We'll see.
And then we got Chris Best from Substack coming on to talk about his war on slop. They're partnering with Pangram. He's the best. Excited about that. Then Steven Schwartz from [__] live in the Ultradome on launching their new [__] CLI. And then the Roofinator, Katie Roof, the new editor over at Business Insider.
We got Katie Roof. We got the paywall set up. We do have a paywall. We have a paywall here and the golden scoop. Can we get a camera over here? There. We got the paywall. We're busting down the paywall for Katie Roof today with the golden scoop. Scoop.
So keep an eye out for that. Then we have Zavain from Dimension, sorry. And then Chad Edwards capping it off with a cool $450 million raise at the end. So stay tuned and let's get into it.
Fantastic. Well, top American execs are sounding alarms on these models. Let's give it up for top American... Oh god, there. Yeah, let's give it up for the top American AI execs. The White House is divided on how to respond to recent advances in Chinese AI, has weighed crackdown measures. We talked about how this was coming. It is interesting. There's a lot of like, you know, hurry up and pedal to the metal and then pull back and then ban the American model and then are we going to ban the Chinese model in a similar way? And lots of contradictions, lots of insider baseball. Everyone's critiquing everyone else. Lots of interesting takes. Also just some interesting data about what's actually going on with these models. How advanced are they? Where do they come from? How cheap are they to make? What are the economic impacts in America? But the Wall Street Journal has a nice little roundup here we can take you through.
So Silicon Valley and Washington are debating a multi-billion-dollar question: Should American companies be able to use Chinese artificial intelligence models? They certainly have been able to. It hasn't been a problem for years, but now they're getting stronger. OpenAI and Anthropic executives are sounding the alarm about the rise of cheap AI, particularly powerful new models produced in China, suggesting that they will lead to, quote, 'a dystopian AI future' and present unacceptable security risks without regulation. And that is the point of debate. Are you on the side of dystopian open source or liberating open source? The George Hotz frame. Some analysts who study the AI industry say the two companies, which are preparing for public listings in the next year, they just want to eliminate the competition.
The emergence of highly capable open autonomous AI systems, including Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 model and Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 Max. And Alibaba is actually a massive investor in Moonshot. They have their own Anthropic-Google thing going on over there. Alibaba is very much their Google 2 in the sense that they have a large position there, which were released in recent days and viewed favorably by investors and users, has turned the AI race on its head once again. Kimi K3 was also competitive with US models on some benchmarks. The debate over the new models, which are, quote, 'open-weight' but not yet β they're about to open source them, we'll see what happens next week β allowing users to download and customize them with company data for specific tasks. Very, very good, very useful.
Coincides with division in the Trump administration about whether to take steps to limit the use of models in the United States. Quote: 'One probable outcome of an open-weight model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes, rather than a market product. AI is a public good, which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of digital public infrastructure.' Dean Ball, OpenAI's head of strategic futures, said in an X post Friday. Dean Ball made it to the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Now, the AI communism is just at the model level. Like there would still be a bunch of people who are long compute, long neoclouds. They say like this is where the value should accrue. The data centers will accrue a reasonable margin and they will still continue to make money. And so it's not that this automatically leads to nationalization of compute in any way. People would still be paid, but the margins might be lower is at least the formulation here.
So, a former Trump administration official called such a scenario a dystopian hellscape, and he said he expected the Trump administration to make moves toward reducing the use of open-source models. Ball later clarified that he wasn't advocating for the United States government to discourage Chinese AI. He also highlighted a central challenge with the AI race: top-tier AI companies raise billions of dollars to pay for the vast computing resources needed to continue improving AI systems. If everyone uses AI systems that people largely don't pay for, there would be no way to finance continued frontier AI development. Ball, who started at the company earlier this month and focuses on policy and strategy at OpenAI, said his comments don't reflect the company's official positions. He's just posting. The company has developed its own open models, and chief executive Sam Altman had previously said that OpenAI's past approach of only developing closed tools was unwise.
Other top AI executives have warned that open models present huge risk since developers and policymakers lack control over how they are used and modified. Lot of risk of cyber attacks, a lot of risk of annoying spam attacks. The cyber thing is very concerning and annoying if that really ramps up. But the good news is that the closed-source models have been available to cybersecurity firms and a lot of big major companies. The finance industry, for example, has had access to Mythos and GPT Cyber for almost six months. And then just today Google announced a specific model, Flash Lite Cyber, I think. So they're trying to offer a similar capability but really go down the cost curve because a lot of the cyber tools, there was incredible breakthroughs with Mythos GPT Cyber, like great benchmarks on those, but could be very expensive.
We heard, I think wasn't it Dario said he, I think he spent like a million dollars to find some zero-day bug and it was like totally worth it, but that's expensive for smaller companies that might just need... it would be great to just be able to go to a cheap cyber-tuned model, get approved by Google, and say, hey, just go and read every line of code and just let me know if there's anything that's obvious, and that could be good.
Yeah, and just to be clear, they released 3.5 Flash Lite and 3.5 Flash Cyber, so it's not like Flash Lite Cyber. Okay. But Flash is still cheaper than the big model, right? There's like the Pro and then there's... and so I have to imagine that if you, given the choice, if you're like a midsize company and your choice is like go beat down the door to get into Project Glass Wing to spend $5 million to have Mythos read every line of code, or you're like, oh, well, I'm already a Google partner. I have a really solid business relationship with them because I've been buying ads and I have Google Webmaster Tools set up and I just want to go set up Flash Cyber, not Flash Lite Cyber. I imagine that the cost would be cheaper because they fine-tuned this model for this specific thing since they are benchmaxing or whatever SemiAnalysis called them, but that's useful in this case, right?
So Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for years has warned about the risks of powerful and open AI systems, saying in a recent Bloomberg interview that having AI models with advanced cybersecurity capabilities that are free to download could be harmful. He said it's a serious concern. Use of Chinese models, which are far cheaper than US counterparts, is surging at US companies, prompting some investors to question the staying power of top model makers such as Anthropic and OpenAI. The current US open-source frontier is starting to catch up with China's. On Wednesday, Thinking Machines Lab, led by former AI technology chief Mira Murati, released its first AI model as open-weight. Nvidia's Nemotron 3 Ultra is starting to see traction. That's interesting to hear. I haven't heard nearly enough buzz around Nemotron. I know Jensen has been investing in it. He's also investing in a lot of, you know, up and down the stack.
I've been hearing buzz about the name, John. Nemotron's a good name. Nemotron. Very cool name. People are, you know, there's some talks bubbling. People are saying it's one of the best names for a family of models ever.
What comes after Ultra? Isn't that what the... didn't Apple first do that with the M4 Pro, the M4 Max, the M4 Ultra? So we got to come up with an even better word for what happens after Ultra. Giga, maybe. And then Exa. You just keep going down the... Tera. Although terrorists like land, that's a different one. Anyway, the market's faith in Anthropic and OpenAI continuing to build more capable models that push the AI frontier has been at the heart of the boom, helping justify trillions of dollars in spending on infrastructure in the coming years. The threat that new players will vastly undercut what they can charge for advanced AI pushed down some tech and AI company stock prices last week.
David Sacks, the venture capitalist and White House AI advisor, suggested that he read Ball's post as a confession to a regulatory capture strategy. Sacks and others have long seen calls for AI regulation by companies such as Anthropic as efforts to use new laws and policies to stymie competitors. 'The weaponization of regulatory uncertainty as a competitive tool should be completely unacceptable,' he said. Security-focused administration officials in the past year have considered a slew of measures to crack down on Chinese AI companies developing open models. People familiar with the discussion said they have weighed adding the businesses to trade blacklists, security warnings on Chinese AI companies, and a potential executive order targeting open models.
So it does seem like even though Tyler Cowen, we were going back and forth with him about this, about like can you even ban it? You can't really ban anything in the land of the free. Like the solution to piracy was not really to ban piracy. Like you can still torrent things, but it's just so easy to use Apple TV and Spotify and Netflix that most people just wind up just paying $5, $2 for a song or $10 a month for something that effectively killed it just because the product experience was better.
This morning, our Treasury Secretary, Bessent, was on Fox and said, 'This administration supports open-source models, but what we do not support is IP theft. If we see, especially, that overseas models are stealing from our great companies, we have the ability to sanction them because of this theft.' So it will be, if the admin does take serious action here, I would expect that to be the line of reasoning where they could just sanction the companies behind these models, which I imagine would prevent... it would create a real opportunity for American open source. But you would ultimately see a lot of these, you know, neoclouds unable, I imagine, to serve the, you know, traditional Chinese open-source models. I imagine that even OpenRouter would probably have to stop supporting that.
But again, with an open-source model, like how do you even define it? Because if there's a research paper and then you go and implement that and you train it, or you take it, you fine-tune it, or you use the data to bootstrap your own model, like just like where in the supply chain, how many steps away do you need to be to like not count on there? You imagine, I mean, didn't Perplexity do like a 1776 DeepSeek very quickly? They did a fine-tune. I think you did a fine-tune on DeepSeek as well. Wow. Yeah. It was like using sparse autoencoders. Okay. I did it first. So, but what nationality was the model that you used as the base? Well, it was DeepSeek. It was Chinese. Wow. Confession. You can go now.
Yeah, people are already angry at Bessent's comments in our saying. Funny that he's not mentioning that yesterday a US judge approved Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright lawsuit settlement for, I don't think they... I think they settled that they were in possession of books that had been torrented or basically acquired unlawfully. Yeah.
I don't believe that acquired unlawfully. Sounds like they stole the books. I think they bought the books. No, no, no, no, no. I think this was... no, they separately, they bought a bunch of books, trained on them, and destroyed them. And that just made people upset because no one... the idea of books being destroyed, of course. I think those were rare, like rare, rare books. The Wilmanitis collection was destroyed. Rare PDFs. No, but I believe so. Judge William Alsup of the US District Court for the Northern District of California issued a preliminary approval of the settlement last year after ruling that Anthropic had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books. And the settlement was signed off on by a different judge yesterday. The payout will deliver $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works shared among the authors and publishers who hold rights to them.
I have more here, but first I'm going to tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. So, Nick Carter, who we love, former guest of the show, he says, 'I haven't seen one person from OpenAI or Anthropic address John's argument here.' Quote: 'The point is simple. The US government does not owe either of the large labs a business model.' I think that's accurate. That's true. The US government doesn't owe any company a business model. It's a free market. It's a free country. If the economics of selling tokens don't work due to distillation, cheap clones, Chinese AI magic, the American enterprise and consumer will be A-OK. That is also true. The American consumer and enterprise will be OK. Flooding the market, dumping all this stuff is great for consumers. It's great for enterprises. Cheaper products are great.
The question is, does the US government actually kind of owe the... like the reason you pay taxes, that actually does pay for the FBI who go and find spies. And so if the allegation, which has been sort of toyed around with some of the lab leaders at some conferences like off the record and then it's like made it to the record, I don't exactly know where the allegations stand at this point, but if the allegation is, look, there's a spy here who's stealing code and exporting it to another country, or even the distillation which is in violation of terms of service, and it's a geopolitical debate because it's an international company, it's like that's the reason why you pay taxes to pay the government to actually help fight on your behalf.
Because if it's OpenAI stealing from Anthropic or vice versa, they'll just walk across the street and serve them papers and be like, 'We're suing each other.' This is what happened with Apple and OpenAI. Like they're going to solve that in the court of law, which is of course paid for by the US taxpayers as well. That judge who oversees that and decides that case will be paid for by US taxpayers. That is an amenity of the US government. And a similar amenity is when someone is violating your terms of service or actively stealing from you, you actually can engage the US government. So I agree that the US government doesn't owe anyone a business model, but the US government does sort of owe the ability to chase down something if it is truly illegal and there's no other recourse like just, hey, we're turning off your account because you're not abiding by terms of service.
But the rest of the point is good and the knock-on effects are good. He understands the value to the American consumer of cheap goods. He understands the value to the neoclouds and other token factories. All of this is fine. But I just thought that there is a line there that some people on the inside have been stronger about. There's been a lot of debate on like is this distilled? Is it going to say it's Claude or ChatGPT? And you know, it goes back and forth. There's a bunch of examples. It's always hard to chase down, but that's why we have like a real process to hunt that down. Anyway, there was some news about like whether or not Kimi K3 is distilled. Tyler, can you take us through this Lisan Algaib post because I want to know what this chart means because it seems important to this discussion.
Yeah. So he didn't actually make this chart. It was from someone else. But basically, this shows a bunch of models compared to another and it's like the kind of semantic similarities between them. So it's like if you use similar kind of diction or phrases, stuff like this, you just like pump the models a bunch of times and you kind of can tell what's similar to each other. And you can see in this version it looks like Kimi K3 is very similar to Fable 5.
Fable 5 and then also Opus 4.7, Opus 4.8, and Sonnet 5. So they might have gotten tokens from like all four of those models sort of mixed. Also, I think this exact example, like I think only like a few prompts were used. It's not like super involved. It's also like this is very much just like correlation. This is not like proving that they stole or learned anything. They could have just used like similar, you know, post-training techniques or something like this.
Totally. But notably, GPT 5.4, 5.5, 5.6 share very little similarity to the Anthropic models and vice versa. The Anthropic models don't seem to be correlated with the OpenAI models. Although the OpenAI models are correlated with each other. So, 5.6 Luna looks pretty correlated with 5.4 because they probably were like, well, we're building on the shoulders of the work that we've done. And it's the same thing with Anthropic where Fable has some of the same flavor as an Opus or a Haiku. And that makes sense.
That makes sense because people have like been saying, 'Oh, maybe those models were actually distilled from the big like Mythos pre-train, right?' Yeah. Or vice versa. You have a bunch of users that are doing rollouts on Opus trying to vibe code different things and you take all that training data and then you feed that into Fable and Fable sort of like picks up on a lot of that because that's what the user said, 'Wow, you really did a great job on this Opus' or 'you did really poorly.' It pulls that out, but it's still learning the textual similarity.
Well, people will go back and forth on this and debate the level of distillation and also what the punishment for distillation should be. Should it just be a slap on the wrist or should it be something bigger? It's obviously... Yeah. So Bill Gurley's chiming in on Bessent's comments. He says, 'If there has been theft, that suggests a crime has been committed, but I'm unaware of any lawsuits being filed. No company should be allowed to declare infringement without adjudication. I'm not convinced a court would call using a product as it's designed theft. There is a reason this is being lobbied in DC instead of the normal court systems.' The only thing I would say here is like distillation against the terms of service. Yeah.
And I think that suing Chinese companies... Yeah. it would be a complete and total waste of time. Ask anyone who's built a product that's been knocked. I disagree. Incredible. Or a farm, if you personally serve Xi Jinping the next time he's in San Francisco meeting with a world leader, you show up, you have been served. You show up to the UN, serve the world leader. There's something about that that's, you know, extremely bold.
But no, I agree with you. Very difficult. I don't even know if you went to your law firm and you said like, hey, we want to sue this Chinese company, like how they would trace that down. Also, deeply ironic and deeply unsympathetic suit, right? Because the general populace feels like AI is all theft and it's all been stolen from the public commons or the public internet. It's like distilled on the internet. We all did all these, we all made all these websites and now they all have been distilled into these frontier models. And then you're saying, 'Oh, well, the distillation stops at the frontier lab.' So, not going to have a lot of sympathetic viewers.
Someone responded to Bill's post with a similar point to the one I made and said the reason there hasn't been any lawsuits is that a trial would take years, assuming you can get a Chinese company to participate, and the game will be over by then. China steals IP, this is obvious. You don't find many instances of US companies suing Chinese companies in US courts. Bill Gurley fires back with a screenshot from ChatGPT saying, 'Here are 10 clear examples.'
The first five were filed in US courts. Okay. You have Motorola Solutions. Okay. It was a US plaintiff with a Chinese defendant, Hytera Communications. This was Chicago federal court in 2017. T-Mobile came after Huawei, federal court in Seattle, 2014. Huawei employees copied and took parts from Tappy, its phone testing robot.
Cisco sued Huawei. Let's give it up for Cisco. Let me actually tell you. Cisco accused Huawei of copying... Cisco is critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experience of new value at Cisco. Continue. Cisco accused Huawei of copying router source code, command line interfaces, manuals, and patented networking technology. That's what I'm talking about.
Textron Innovations, the correct use of the US government. DJI in federal court in Waco, Texas, home to a fantastic wave pool. Textron alleged DJI drones infringed patents covering flight control and tracking technology. And there's a bunch of other examples. Yeah. AMSC, American Superconductor Company. He's one shot by Chinese... Sinovel Wind Group. Okay. Anyways, lots going on here.
Two of our former guests are chirping at each other on the timeline. We talked to Jim Cramer at the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We interviewed Jim Cramer at the New York Stock Exchange. Great time. He's going back and forth with George Hotz, another former guest of the show. Jim Cramer says, 'We must not let our companies use these Chinese models to save a few bucks. OpenAI and Anthropic are correct. This is vital national security. Please read Bing West's just released Catch Five. I respect the Chinese people greatly, but these companies are run by the PLA for heaven's sakes.'
George Hotz fires back under the tinygrad handle. He says, 'Is this a joke? I'd be happy to use Anthropic if they put their weights on Hugging Face like the Chinese. American tech companies are rent extraction machines that have lost the plot. No point continuing to defend them. They need to change if they want to win people back.' 474 likes on that. The open source community is coming out strong. Anyway, meanwhile, China is also thinking about export controls in the Financial Times.
Okay. Apparently Alibaba, ByteDance, and keep going back and forth on li... what ministry is this? The Ministry of Communications? Don't know. MOFCOM. Help me out there, Tyler. Moffcom. MOFCOM talked to AI companies including Alibaba, ByteDance, and Zhipu on limiting the transfer of key data for the training of their models overseas, as well as allowing their model weights to be downloaded.
Ministry of Commerce, probably their Department of Commerce. That seems more like it. China would still let overseas customers access the models and services, but sounds like they are leaning towards not making the weights open. We're going to see with the new Kimi K3 if they actually release the weights next week.
Dean Ball says, 'Wow, two days in a row where things I said are likely to happen seem likelier to happen from two adversarial countries. Almost as though my analysis was right and as though people should not have deliberately misinterpreted me as making prescriptions. Huh.' Dean Ball victory laugh. You got to take a victory laugh for Dean Ball. He called it. No, I mean he was saying like I don't necessarily agree with this, but just from his experience this is how things might play out. And people were very upset with him about... Chat says Ministry of Commerce, People's Republic. Yeah, it's their Department of Commerce. That would go hard on a business card. It would.
Anyway, you're trying to make a new business card, fire up Codex, design it there, have it printed, have Codex do everything for you. Fantastic at creating custom things and then running them off to special printers. Codex, of course, is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.
The great slop wars continue. Let's pull up this video from Substack. Substack. We got Chris Best coming on at 12:15. It's just an image. They say, 'Today, Substack is launching an AI detection feature via an integration with Pangram. Going forward, you'll be able to scan posts, replies, and comments on the Substack app to see an estimate of how much of it was written by a human or with AI assistance. We care about this at Substack because it gets to the core of our mission to build an economic engine for culture.'
This is going to be bad for Tyler since he's mastered the ability to write exactly like an AI. What was that sentence? Sentence you wrote by hand that was like 'according to studies you're absolutely right' and you just threw in every possible ism and got flagged 100% by Pangram. No. I think people will enjoy this. The revealed preference is probably that people don't care if it's good and they enjoy the content. But we'll go back and forth and debate it with Chris Best today and see where all of that is going.
He wrote a post against Claude fishing. He doesn't want people to be disingenuous about their process. Now, do you think that Substack writers should admit when they hire essentially ghostwriters? Probably, because sometimes you start a brand under a name. Like not every post on Bloomberg.com is from Michael Bloomberg. In fact, none of them are. They're all from other people. But they disclose this is from, you know, some writer. This is from Joe Weisenthal, right? But some new influencer brands have grown. Even in the pre-AI era, I had a writer on my team when I was doing YouTube videos where I would write something, he would do a draft, we'd sort of go back and forth. I'd put them in the credits. But I wouldn't like kick it off with like, 'Hey, just so you know...'
In the chat says book authors don't. That is certainly true. That's 100% true. Some book authors will put like this is written by this person and this person. It depends on like the aura of the ghostwriter. Some ghostwriters actually do get credits in the book. But yes, most book authors, like Tom Clancy I think passed away and is still producing books. There's a number of writers where their individual brand grew so big that you can have like a new business. Yeah. They become their own brand. And so yeah, I would imagine that 30% of the books in like an airport bookstore are just 100% ghostwritten and probably don't disclose it.
I do think it should be possible to get to the truth if you hunt hard enough, but I don't necessarily need you to put it front and center. So, let's say that the next Tom Clancy book, they hire someone who's effectively a prompt engineer and they're writing it using AI. I would like to be able to, you know, look in the back of the book and see a paragraph that discloses that, but it doesn't need to be on the cover. On the cover, it can just say Tom Clancy. Yeah. For a Substack author. Yeah. Or creator, just put it somewhere that you have a team of people that help you create your work.
Well, Dave Eggers took to the Financial Times saying that no one is going to read AI books. He's of course the author of The Circle. He's an American writer, editor, publisher. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is his 2000 memoir bestseller, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He says, 'Gullible and ridiculous. No one will read AI novels.' I think people are already reading AI novels, so maybe he means like no one who's cool or no one who he likes or something.
Let's read through a little bit of this Financial Times article. Dave Eggers offers a hand so I can clamor aboard his 23-foot sailboat moored in the shadow of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. It's a grand setting with few frills. As we sit on the stern, a meter apart, fuel cans and fishing nets at our feet, there is no one around to disturb our conversation. The nearest toilets are portaloos, a short bike ride away. The berthing fees are negligible, making it one of the cheapest places to live in uber-wealthy Silicon Valley. I hadn't thought of that sailboat. If you're at a tech company, this has got to be the next big lock-in trend.
Antonio Garcia Martinez did this. I've got in his book, Chaos Monkeys. I won't be satisfied until I see larpers posting images on Twitter being like, 'Hey, I just moved to San Francisco. I'm building the next one-person $25 billion.' I'm finding a houseboat in San Rafael. Yeah. How much? For $1,000? It actually works out to $1,483 a month apparently if you finance it through Boat Trader. Goodbye. It's only about $200,000 to live in a 2022 houseboat. 2022. That's a brand new houseboat.
Yeah. So you have to think about the slip fees, but you could easily come in, have your own house on the water. The average one-bedroom rent in San Francisco is like two grand, three grand right now. Yeah. You could have a whole house and a boat. And a boat. It's amazing. This is the hack. If you get a job in tech and you're printing, making six figures, move into a houseboat.
Let's pull this up. Wait, is this an option in LA? Should members of the team be doing this? Should we recommend this to... Look at this brand almost brand new 2024 La Mer Modern 11. It's a 36-foot houseboat. We have a video here. Well, Dave Eggers says they call it a $10 dock with a million-dollar view. Look at this, John. Yeah. Couple thousand bucks a month. This is where the next great startup will be born for sure. Garages are out.
And also like, oh, take your shoes off. It's natural to take your shoes off when you're on a boat, you know, right? Must got boat shoes. Wear boat shoes to... The La Mer Modern 11 offers reliable performance and strong power with two Yamaha 25 high-thrust engines providing a total of 50 horsepower. Its two cabins and one head ensure overnight comfort for extended stays. How about year-long stays? How about a decade-long stay? The boat's design includes an upper deck terrace with flexiteak flooring, enhancing its appeal for relaxation and entertainment, and might I say, lock-in standard features such as air conditioning. We have air conditioning on our houseboats.
With reverse cycle heat, heated floors, LED lighting. Heated floors. LED lighting. Yeah. The inclusion of foam-filled composite floats and galvanized steel subframe ensures durability and stability. Did we just solve the housing crisis? Send this to Sager and Jetty immediately. This is seasteading. This is the Teal thesis. Everyone living in houseboats just more... BoatTrader.com is saying that this is amazing. Modern houseboat would come out to just $2,259 with only $52,000 down. I promise that we have no financial relationship with BoatTrader.com. Yeah. Even though I'm making a pretty strong pitch here. Yet. I love it.
I'm tempted. Maybe we should... I mean you can... I'm finding another, a 2021 for only... 99 now. Only. Yeah. Only $100,000. This comes out to $738 a month. That is cheap. That is cheap. Giving houseboats away. John, when I moved to San Francisco, we lived in the Tenderloin. Three people and it was 1,500 a month. How many people do you think you could sleep in there? Given that one of us slept in a closet and the other one slept in the living room, so there was only... it was a one-bedroom technically. We had three dudes in a one-bedroom. 1,500 a month. So it's equivalent to $500 a month. Do you think you can fit two people in there in a $700 a month houseboat? Oh, for sure. Yeah. So we're finding... the team is finding slip fees around LA for 700 bucks a month. You get a... Everyone's got to be houseboat maxing. Imagine just bombing. You can get this houseboat for only $600 a month.
This is elite. This is the future. We must return to the ocean. Return to the sea. Anyway, Dave Eggers thinks no one's going to read AI books. We can move on. TL;DR, we got distracted. Sorry. But congratulations on the sick houseboat. It sounds amazing. The article is actually funny. It goes into a whole thing how he was like chirping with Sam Altman, goes to... Welcome to the houseboat. The business of buoyancy. The president of propellers. I love it. That's right. The presidency of propellers.
Should you recline your airplane seat? What do you think? People are going back and forth on this. Brandon Duck says, 'I don't remember subscribing to this channel, but I've been listening for 10 minutes. I'm having a good time.' Welcome. Last name Ducks comes on just for the... Yeah, make it make sense. Make it make sense. Make it make sense. It's just like I just happen to be here for the duck section of the show. Andrew says, 'I'm going to need a double-wide houseboat.' Lol. Bootlegging distilled Anthropic models on the houseboat. There we go. Living the dream. This is crazy.
Okay. So, should you recline your airplane seat? There's a central... investigating the central dilemma of our time. Joshua Rothman in the New Yorker wrote a piece. Imagine this scenario. After a long drive to the airport, you've just taken off for a 15-hour flight. Where are you going? 15 hours is so long. How long was the flight to Austria from LA? I think it's like 12 hours. So you're going... I think you're going to the Middle East. You're going to the Middle East, maybe. Okay.
You're in coach and a family of three is sitting behind you. A man, a woman, and a toddler. They seem nice, but as the flight continues, the kiddo grows restless. He kicks your seat and pokes her toys into your shoulder. 'Stop that,' you hear the father say. The toddler incredibly quiets down. The cabin lights dim. It's time to sleep. Yet, just as rest closes in, you sense motion. The seat in front of you is reclining. You watch as it comes all the way back. Now, you feel cramped with someone else's seat in your face. You also notice some stiffness in your shoulders. Your fingers caress your own recline button. Surely the reclined-upon are entitled to recline. Just as you start to lean back, you hear a clearing...
throat. You turn around to see the dad who fixes you with his gaze. 'Excuse me,' he says. 'Would you mind keeping your seat up?' I think it's game on. They put the button there. They would just take it away.
I've always expected everyone to just recline.
Everyone reclines. Everyone has the same amount of space. It's the conservation of space. And it's really hard to make the argument that the vertical seat is more comfortable than the recline seat.
Exactly. So, I think everyone commit to comfort.
Everyone commits to comfort.
And then the chat is sharing the real alpha. Stand up immediately when the flight lands. Have you seen those Meta Ray-Ban videos where people sprint to the front? It's so rude. The guy is like, you know, he's like as soon as he goes beep, he just bolts and passes everybody and gets to the front. Very rude. I don't think you should do that.
This is antisocial behavior. I don't think you should recline your seat.
How is it antisocial?
Because you're infringing on someone. Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should.
But they put the button there. Horrible take. They're horrible take that.
That's like don't use the bathroom on the plane. My entire life, even as a child, I was looking up waiting for, you know, the seat belt sign to be up in the air. Seat belt sign's off, you recline your seat. Everyone reclines their seat. All good.
Yeah. What about ordering a Diet Coke on a plane? If I'm sitting next to you, will you order a Diet Coke or is that antisocial behavior? Because there's a percentage chance that you will spill that Diet Coke on me, thereby inconveniencing me. The most pro. If you really care about me, you should not order anything. You shouldn't eat anything. You shouldn't drink anything. You should sit there in your unreclined seat, perfectly upright, silent. Don't make a move.
That's completely different.
Okay. What's your stance on JBL in the airplane?
Little JBL, you know.
I do think that could be the next trend. The big question is, are you bringing on your smart portable speaker maybe from OpenAI, are you bringing that on the plane and talking to it the whole time? Is that offensive?
I think that's deeply offensive.
Have you seen when a band is traveling and they start playing on the plane?
Have you seen these videos?
No.
That sounds cool, though.
I'll send you one. Yeah, send me that.
That would make me jump. So, this all started because in 2014, FiveThirtyEight, we got to have him on the show. Nate, obviously. FiveThirtyEight asked around a thousand flyers what they thought about reclining their seats. 41% of them said that reclining was rude, so they lost. It's not rude.
It's over.
59% said it's fine, I guess, if it was just binary. That number seems to have risen, though. In 2020, Eric Jones, a math professor who writes about travel statistics on the website The Vacationer, conducted a similar survey and found that 77% of respondents objected to reclining. Wow. Sheep. Shill over here. We got sheep.
How about this? I think you should be able to recline if you're dressed nicely. If you're wearing sweatpants, then you don't get to.
You don't get to recline.
Should kids be able to kick the seat in front of them as much as they want? See, that's something I will totally put up with. I'm totally fine getting kicked in the back by a kid because it's so brutal as a parent, as a kid to be on a plane. They're locked up in the plane. That's miserable. And just tough it out. You're reclined. You have multiple inches of padding. Unless you got Ronaldo back. Order that hot pizza pocket. Live life in the permanent underclass. Live a little. For God's sake.
Yeah. Let's pull up this video. And what video we have now?
All right.
Oh, this is so good. I love this.
Like, this is so antisocial behavior. This is so breaking the social contract, but it's also just such an elite performance that you got to respect it a little bit. Getting around that woman is crazy crazy work. I can't believe this.
I might, if I'm really in a hurry, I might go one seat forward. Like sort of if I'm on the aisle, I might sort of like make sure I get the first position, pole position. I think that's fair.
Chat wants to know if the plane is in free fall, would you recline a little on the way down?
Engine failure.
I think, yeah, that's fine. I think that's fine.
Okay. Okay. Okay. So, you would be rude to your neighbors in this sort of stressful, you know, potentially terrible life-threatening moment. You wouldn't mind being rude to your neighbors.
In my final moments, that's when you would choose to disrespect me, Tyler.
Not when I'm living life, having a Diet Coke, enjoying myself. You're fine then. But when I'm at my last breath, that's when you decide to add insult to future injury.
Yeah.
Weird.
Wow.
I don't get it. Make it make sense.
Wow.
Make it make sense. Coca-Cola rebrand. We got to talk about the Coca-Cola rebrand. There's a bunch of things. Ah, there's so much good news today. Coca-Cola rebranded and there's a video of this and people are saying it looks like a tobacco brand. I want your brand review. Coca-Cola unveiled a new global brand identity. It's not technically the Marlboro font.
Flight's crashing in 5 minutes. Can you recline your seat back, please?
Ridiculous. Pull up the video of the Coca-Cola rebrand. I want Jordi's brand review. There we go. The most recognized brand.
This is huge for me.
Wow, they did it.
They did it.
They finally did it.
Serifs, border radius zero, sharp edges, full bleed. It's right to the edges and people were expecting it to look extremely boring. Sans serif, sort of an Apple ripoff. We can pull up this post from Fabrizio Rinaldi about what he was expecting to show sort of where things have been going in rebrands, high fashion. Let's pull up Fabrizio's rendition of the Coca-Cola rebrand. Wasn't this something that you would expect? But instead, we got something much...
Minimalism is out for a while. Maximalism started ripping early last year off a small base, but it's coming back. It does sort of look like Marlboro. People say it's not technically the Marlboro font. It's not the Marlboro font. It looks a little bit different, but it's pretty close.
But also, I mean, incredible alpha in the fact that Marlboro effectively hasn't been able to advertise in 30 years. Like, it's a storied brand. They clearly put an incredible amount of effort into developing the brand, but it's vague enough that even a big brand like Coca-Cola can sort of rip it off and be in the clear.
Yeah. Yeah. The fridge cigs for the win. A lot of people are saying they're leaning into the fridge cigarette concept.
Yes. Very smart.
Okay. Other movie news. Point Break. Have you seen it? No. But you will be able to see it because it's being restored in 4K and it's being re-released in theaters this summer for its 35th anniversary. Highly recommend it. Keanu Reeves. Fantastic movie. Patrick Swayze. It's such a good movie about a bunch of bank robbers who are also extreme athletes. It's super sick. You'd love it. Maybe that's the next movie you see. Maybe we can make it happen even this year. There's another story about restomods from the factory. Companies are going back and offering the actual manufacturer. Do you want to just describe for everyone what is a restomod and then what are the critiques of it? Like take me through the TJ Parker critique of the restomod. We've talked to him about it. What is, when someone says restomod, what are we talking about here?
Okay. So, restomods can look like a lot of things. There's like a range, but at the most basic level, you're taking a classic car and you're trying to not necessarily make it feel like it is a product that was made in the year 2026, but you're trying to make it at least feel like it's fresh off of the dealer lot.
So, I'm restoring it, but I'm also modifying it a little bit.
Yeah. Well, there's range. So, there's some resto mods that are just, they're restoring it to a new condition even though it's an older vehicle.
And when you say you are restoring it, typically this is individuals who want this car. They go to another company that is not the maker of that car. And then they say, 'I would like to purchase a Porsche 911 restomod and it's from 2003, but it drives, everything's been restored. There's been some modifications. Maybe it has CarPlay, heated seats, maybe they've updated little things here and there, tweaked the exhaust. So, it's not original. It's not fully just purely restored.' But what's happening now? Because that's been independent business, sort of unauthorized. What's happening now?
Yeah, there's a huge spectrum to it. So, some might just be making the interior a lot nicer, basically restoring the engine, updating the transmission, things like that, all the way through like adding features and functionality like CarPlay, all the way through sometimes like redesigning the entire interior to make it almost a new car. There's some restomod companies that will just partner with the best automotive designers in the world to just fully redesign the car. And they're basically just keeping everything is being turned over to some degree except the fact that from a regulatory standpoint, it's still the original car, right? And so that helps it make it easier for a restomod company to like make a new car because they don't have to go through all the...
That's what Tyler has. He has a 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee Resto Mod. It is beautiful. It's amazing. Everything about that car is fantastic. That's why it's so popular. It's taste, it's aura. So, Singer, Singer is, you know, one of the most prominent companies in this category, but they've become so popular that manufacturers are saying, 'Hey, we want in on the action.'
Who wants in on the action?
And so, the newest player, Range Rover.
Range Rover.
Let's pull up this video if we can.
And classic Range Rovers are having a huge moment. There's a piece in the Journal about it. Look at this. And people have been clamoring for the analog feel. People have gotten sick of the endless buttons. And this is a way to go back to a 1993 Range Rover Classic, but have it drive as reliably as a brand new car.
I'm super excited about this. My number one pet peeve with restomods historically is they take this beautiful classic car and then they fix it up and then they put their logo on it.
Oh yeah.
And I saw a vintage Bronco that somebody applied this sort of logo to it in the end that just said vintage. It's like, I don't need you to tell me that this vintage car is vintage. Right. You can just make it look like the original version of it. So anyways, I'm super excited for more manufacturers to get into this space.
Yeah. The category is growing quickly. So I think even many of the restomod players will still do quite well.
And this seems super bullish for Range Rover as a company. Like they say, check with your local retailer or Land Rover Classic. You imagine that a lot of people will be drawn into showrooms for this. Will they leave with a 1993 Range Rover Classic that's been restored from the factory or will they buy something new because they're like, 'Yeah, maybe I want that, but that'll be my weekender and I just need something for the family, so I'll just buy something more modern or new.' Like it's just another, it's almost like a halo car just to bring people in, don't you think? If you're driving by an Audi dealership and you saw the R8, you'd go in, maybe you wind up with an A4, but you know, it drew people in. It brought aura to the brand. This does the same thing. Just seeing more 1993 Range Rover Classics in perfect condition on the road will make a 2026 Autobiography look cooler and feel cooler. And so that's beneficial to the whole company.
Yeah. And it will be very interesting to see the way in which manufacturers approach this category. The criticism of a lot of restomod companies is they'll basically take a, you know, $20,000 car, do a little bit of work to it and mark it up like $200,000. And that doesn't feel great. Yeah.
But you know what feels great? Running a business on Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And we have our first guest of the show, Ferdinand Dabitz from Augustus. Let's warm up the program.
He's back.
We got some big news. We raised some money. Welcome back to Absolute.
You absolute dog. How are you doing? Give us the update. What's going on with the business? What's the news?
