You're watching TVN. Today is Wednesday, July 29th, 2026. We're live from the TVN Ultradom, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about Rampant.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. The US government has banned Chinese humanoid robots. The US is banning new imports of foreign-made humanoid robots, quadruped robots, robot dogs, you might know them. Very controversial. We got to get General Catalyst to weigh in on this because aren't they anti-robot dog? Wasn't that the whole thing of the video? Maybe I'm misremembering. That's right. So, they must be celebrating.
Some platform VCs are pro robot dogs. Everyone should be pro robot dog.
Anyway, there's nothing wrong with a robot dog unless it's a geopolitical discussion and then there's another layer to the debate. So the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, today announced some restrictions, and these apply to new versions of those products. FCC Chair Brendan Carr said the move is intended to, quote, secure America's critical supply chains. China, meanwhile, has condemned the decision as protectionism. Is that because they're protecting the small children from getting smacked in the face by the humanoid robots?
It is protecting. I know that video. I think that you're referring to. Yeah. Brutal. It's absolutely brutal. We should try to pull it up. Try to find the humanoid kicking a child, please. Sounds wrong, but I just want to get at the truth. Yes.
I just want the truth. The move comes as Chinese companies have established a commanding lead in humanoid robotics. Of the roughly 15,000 humanoid robots shipped worldwide in 2025, China's Unitree and Agibot, AGIbot, I'm not sure how you pronounce that, each delivered...
Okay, we have the video of the robot kicking the child. Brutal. There's another one where he's spinning around and gives him sort of like a spinning back fist. But that is a crazy... and seeing that you're kind of like, yeah, I'm up for some protection negligence if it's going to protect children, I think it's maybe in the best interest.
No, that's not why this is happening, of course. So 5,000 units were delivered from each Unitree and Agibot. By comparison, US companies including Tesla and Figure shipped only a few hundred robots each, if that. China is also estimated to control about 85% of the global humanoid robotics market and also a ton of the supply chain. Obviously, according to the Associated Press, the restrictions are expected to add new tension to US-China relations ahead of a planned September meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump. The FCC argues the measures are necessary to reduce potential risks posed by connected foreign-made devices that could become part of critical American infrastructure. What's interesting here is that we're seeing a ban on a Chinese technology that is so dominant that you don't have a coalition of companies that are saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, I've deployed, my business is built on top of Unitree. I know there's geopolitical considerations, but I can't make the cars that I make without them. I can't run my business without them. And so this is going to hurt me. No one's really stepping up in the same way that they are with Chinese LLMs, which a lot of companies are like, no, I'm actually going to cut my inference cost by 80% if I can.
And you have all of the various cloud businesses that are already making money from them. Exactly. Yeah. I saw a bunch of people that were sort of saying that they didn't like this, that there was, you know, protectionists, and that there must have been some American humanoid or robotics companies that were pushing, lobbying for this in DC. Maybe there were, but I personally don't want a hundred million humanoid robots in this country running around that are not made by a US company or at least a Western ally.
Yeah, because there's been the DJI ban, there's been various surveillance tools that are banned, but there's still so many different pieces of technology that come from all over the world. I wonder where people would like to draw the line generally on technology. Like, is it okay if the Wi-Fi router is made internationally?
We drew the line on Huawei. Yeah, on Huawei, on the 5G tower specifically, but most, you can still get a router that, you know, a Wi-Fi router for your house that comes from China. And you have to imagine that many of the actuators, the motors, the batteries, CATL, that company ships batteries for all sorts of stuff. The Google Waymo approach, I think, is probably the correct, like, finding the line. So Waymo is sourcing like almost all the parts for the new Waymos from China, but they are building them, I believe, in the United States and all of the software is from Google or Alphabet or Waymo. And so you have to imagine that they're able to tear all these pieces down and sort of maintain their own cybersecurity posture, which is really what this is all about. But it is interesting. Do you think this actually accelerates the American humanoid market? Does this lead to up rounds from 1X and Figure because the playing field is more open? Does Tesla meaningfully pull forward their roadmap?
I mean, these companies have already raised a lot of money. Elon's putting billions into it. Yeah. Figure's managed to raise billions.
I think that the first thing that we need is profitable use cases for humanoids. And so I think there's a lot of work that the industry needs to do to make these products genuinely valuable in the home, in workplaces, in factory settings, all these things. I think that's a bigger problem. I think if you... it does feel inevitable at this point just because there's so much money going into it, so many smart people dedicating all their time to it. It feels inevitable. Maybe it speeds it up a little bit.
I would... it just felt like we were going to end up in a situation where they would just continue to dump humanoids onto our... you know, you could buy, you probably still can buy a robot on Walmart. I was asking Tyler about this because you used to be able to buy a Unitree G1, I believe, one of the robots on Walmart, which was sort of crazy and the price was accessible. I mean, it was still tens of thousands of dollars but it was something that a research lab could buy pretty easily. I wonder if there will be other ways for companies to get access to test these products at least for benchmarking because they will be competing internationally. Like even in a world where Tesla gets to the frontier of humanoid robots with Optimus and then they're going up against a Unitree.
For a deployment in Germany, like BYD, right? BYD and Tesla compete internationally even though Tesla's Teslas can still be sold in China but not vice versa. But internationally there needs to be a lot of, like, what are the capabilities so you can actually sell against your competitor. Yeah.
So far everything Unitree I'm seeing on Walmart is out of stock. So I don't know if they just marked it out of stock when this went live or they had just sold out. It would probably spike if they hit Cars and Bids or Bring a Trailer. I think you throw a Unitree G1 last edition, final edition, banned camp.
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I was listening to Elon Musk on The Economist. He sat down with The Economist for a long-form interview. There was a clip that went sort of viral for some sharp jabs back and forth about the media and how the public perceives the media. But the much more interesting substance was about his vision. You're describing the crash out. Yes, it was described as a crash out. But that seemed like a very small section of what was actually interesting about the more than an hour they talked. One was, I mean, he talks about humanoid robots and he paints a very clear vision for the Optimus program and it made me really hope that there's a lot of focus there because that feels like an industry where, like, he obviously has a very strong philosophy around xAI and Grok and you saw it in the SpaceX X1 where the market for enterprise software was like 22 trillion or something like that. And so there is some value there. It might make sense from a business perspective, but it was less inspiring than rockets, less inspiring than self-driving electric cars because as you go back, you think about SpaceX and you think if he hadn't worked on that, we probably wouldn't have a rocket company in America. And same thing with the electric cars. Like, yeah, GM had the EV1. There were a couple other companies that were sort of like testing things, but we'd probably be 10 years behind if he hadn't sort of sheer force of will that into existence. And it feels the same for humanoid robots where if he can really go and push that extremely hard and marshal all the capital and do all the difficult things to build the supply chain, make it happen, make it work, you can get to a place where there is a national champion in America. But if Grok stopped training and there were no more xAI LLMs, like, there would still be a massive competition between OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, like, there's plenty of really well-funded hyperscalers and leading labs that are going to provide that service of, like, ask a question and get an answer or fire off a prompt and get some code back. That the American humanoid robotics industry feels much more fragile in the sense that if you don't have this massive hammer of capital and will coming to bear, you could just wind up with it never happening, which I worry about.
Yeah. And America needs to figure out how to make billions of robots itself. I do wonder how this is going to play into all the other discussions that are going to happen at that US visit by Chinese leader Xi Jinping. He's scheduled to meet with US President Donald Trump in September. I'm interested to see, are they going to be this... Can you see if we can possibly get him on the show? Thank you. I wonder, I wonder if he... What if Xi was just like, yeah, I'm meeting with the president, but I'm also going on a 50-podcast tour while I'm here. Get him on. Yeah, there's a bunch of good shows he could do. He should do Modern Wisdom. I want to understand his mindset. Would be great. I'd love him. I'd love to see him on Hot Ones. Joe Rogan, of course. I mean, he's a no-brainer. That should be kind of the last show. But Nelk would be like the obvious choice. Yeah, a lot of world leaders, they have a history of... world leaders have been on there. That's true. Controversial world leaders. That's true. Why not Xi?
Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Let's go to some of the reactions. Today we're launching Tao's humanoid cleaning service in San Francisco at $30 per hour. Access is initially invite-only as we scale operations. So Alexander Ko is talking about his company, Tao Robotics. He's the founder and CEO, Z Fellow, Emergent Ventures fellow. Love that. Fellow maxing. This fellow. And Sean Perry from My First Million says, why did putting clothes on the robot make me like it 5x more? Yeah, it just looks way more human if you don't see the metal. That makes a lot of sense. But are the clothes particularly for just the vibes of deploying this product into someone's home and it just makes people feel like, oh, that was a good experience. It does look like it has a Wi-Fi router on its head. What are all those bars coming off the top? That's a little disturbing. It looks like Edward Scissorhands or something.
Interesting. So they are doing teleop. He says each humanoid is jointly controlled by a human operator and AI. Interesting to come out and charge $30 per hour. That feels about what you'd pay for a human. And so it can either do human-level tasks. Yeah. And, you know, clearly they... I would have expected them to come in and say it's like, you know, $5 an hour or something like that, right? Probably not unlimited venture funding. And it's probably better to test the market with something that's actually... Yeah. Something on the higher end. Yeah. To see if people will pay. Anyway, you can scroll down. You can see it in action. It does look so funny with clothes on because it kind of looks like it walks like a toddler. Yeah. But it's like full size. Yeah. Well, yeah, it does look very funny. I like this. All right, we got one more video. It's doing some dishes. Okay. It gets the soap onto itself. It's washing its own hands. Why does it need to do that? Does it get dirty? I guess if it gets dirty, it's got to wash its hands. That's pretty cool. You don't want a robot with dirty hands. The purple eyes do also make it look more friendly as opposed to those. Dude, that is way creepier. That looks like... Yeah, that's full Terminator mode.
Anyway, Dean Ball is going back and forth with Will Manidis. Dean says, do we think the Silicon Valley leaders who were so up in arms about using Chinese LLMs last week will be similarly outraged about the US government's decision to ban import of all advanced robotics from all foreign countries? Is Manidis going to write an essay about how the US robot companies need to be nationalized in exchange for this policy favor? Will says, you're welcome to tag me if you want a take. What's your take? He does ask him for it. And Will says, Dean seems to not understand that the FCC is issuing a published rule under statutory authority with a waiver process and judicial review is different than a thinly veiled suggestion that regulators carry out an extralegal whisper campaign to protect the interests of his employer. The robotics companies need not be nationalized until they also ask for public infrastructure preemption, federal backstop of their debt, and a swept market just so they can call themselves national institutions. When they do, send them my essay. And Dean Ball says, so wait, if the US straight up banned Chinese LLMs using explicit statutory authorities, e.g., supply chain risk, that wouldn't necessitate lab nationalization, but doing it through soft law would? What, your instance that my analytic prediction was a thinly veiled suggestion continues to be bad faith. I do wonder if we'll just see more, you know, Figure shows up in those secondary demand tables. I wonder if this is bullish for that. I don't know. 1X just seems to be on a good path. Sunday Robotics just seems to be on a good path. We've talked to a lot of other companies where the regulatory and competitive landscape has always... it hasn't seemed like it's a driver of financings, right? It's not like, oh, you're waiting for approval or you're waiting for some rule to break. It's like, yeah, at some point in the future, America's going to want an indigenous, like, you know, robotic supply chain.
Yeah, the compelling teams have raised anywhere from a hundred million to billions of dollars and now they need to effectively deploy that and get commercial use cases starting to ramp. And then I expect them to be able to raise an order of magnitude more capital each, right? So I don't, again, I don't think capital is really a constraint here. But I think they've raised their sort of, like, they've raised their vibe rounds, let's say.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy services, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Mark Zuckerberg is in the Wall Street Journal. Paywalled, you got to pay to read what Mark has to say, but he penned an op-ed and he says the US should accelerate AI development, not restrict it. He says the AI future is for everyone. There's some interesting quotes in here. He's taken shots at doom, fear-based marketing. He says, it is surprising that the discourse from many of those who are developing artificial intelligence is so filled with doom. I don't understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future. The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems dangerous historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened. So he's talking about Machines of Loving Grace. I think so, something like that. Hasn't led to safer, positive outcomes. Humanity has witnessed many transformative advances. Each time there is fear that people will be left behind. But each time humanity has come out with more people sharing greater prosperity, health, and freedom. We believe this will be true with AI as well. And the abundance of the future can be shared by everyone. He's abundance-pilled. And so I think it's good to sort of reset, you know, where he is. He's talked about AI a bunch, but it's never been like right on the cusp. But he's just like throwing his hat firmly in this camp of, you know, he's obviously playing in AI, but has a particularly positive vision. And he's sort of throwing down the gauntlet. If you think AI is so bad, then stop working and let me work on it. Let me cook. I don't know. But not too much like chatter around this. It did stand in opposition. You know, he's saying the United States should accelerate AI development. At the same time, there's this open letter from a bunch of lab employees saying like, hey, maybe we should do a mutual pause. Maybe we should all slow down. And I think even some Meta researchers signed that as well. But there's like a wide group from OpenAI, Anthropic, a bunch of other firms, Google, that all signed. John Palmer, of course, ever the TBPN promoter, says TBPN must publish an open letter against distillation after their model was distilled by every competitor in the industry. And I said I'm advocating for a complete and total podcast ban, multi-year federal approval process for new RSS feeds to get issued. He says better hurry up and write that open letter before Chinese Technology Network launches. I think a Chinese TBPN would actually be electric. I think that'd be amazing. Love to watch. I would love that. You know, just wildly different. They just don't do the going direct thing over there the same way. You know, there was like the DeepSeek investor meeting, four hours that was like leaked. That's not the same as actually sitting down with someone that has a particular point of view. Sitting down with a stack of 200 posts. Yeah. And just chitchatting. I don't know. Maybe it does exist. When Dwarkesh went to China, it was such a funny observation. He had a bunch of observations, but the one that really stuck out to me was he was like, I asked everyone and it is clear China does not have a Joe Rogan. Like they don't have someone who is like a larger-than-life yapper political commentator, just like a guy who talks about everything including politics. And there's political reasons for that, but it's also maybe cultural and it's just interesting because the demand for that would be electric. I feel like you have to imagine that like Joe Rogan clips make their way around the world and are sort of like a barometer for where the American psyche is at in a certain way, like a certain group of Americans feel that way. There's this other post that's sort of interesting to see where the Anthropic back-and-forth on the open letter goes. Obviously, Anthropic clarified their stance on open source, not advocating for a complete and total ban, but they're very worried about distillation, they're very worried about cybersecurity, and they're very worried about authoritarian uses of AI. All good points. Chetan over at Benchmark says, very publicly claiming there needs to be a crackdown on distillation is puzzling. It's a $1 trillion company with incredible resources and the distillation attacks at the scale they describe would seem easy to detect. I don't know how easy they are to detect. I think the people, you know, harness up a whole bunch of different VPNs and stuff, but at the same time, it's like it's an AI company. Put AI on the job. Maybe you should be able to detect it. So we'll take his point. AI to be able to find a needle in the biggest haystack of all time. Yeah. Yeah. The world's largest haystack. The final benchmark. Yeah, maybe DistillBench is the one that needs to be hill-climbed next. But he says the only cost would be giving up the associated API revenue. So you should have a very aggressive internal policy around if you're suspected of a distillation attack, you're kicked off the API. Of course, in a very short amount of time, you can fire off a lot of prompts and get a lot of tokens and you can do that across a lot of different accounts. What do you think about this?
Yeah, I mean, detecting distillation seems like a very hard problem. I think if it was trivial, they would have just done it. Yeah. And also seems like it's not that big of a percentage of their revenue. Like I'd be surprised if distillation attacks accounted for a large amount of...
Yeah, I don't think it's meaningful. Also, it does feel like it's hard because a lot of it doesn't actually go through the direct API necessarily. Like it goes through a company that is vending a service and then someone is prompting that service and so you're further obfuscating it. Like there are a number of different sort of wrappers that effectively wrap various frontier APIs. And if you're getting hit in a bunch of different... you're blending all of that together, you're looking at open source. There's also just people that will... like this just happened with, was it Matt Schumer? He basically uploaded to GitHub a game that he made with Opus 5 along with the prompt. And so you can sort of distill on that. Like it's only one data point or a small bag of tokens, but there's a lot of people that will share a prompt and the actual output and so you can train on that and there's no way to detect that you found that. What's interesting here is that the knock-on effect of Chetan's point is that if Anthropic takes Chetan's advice, you wind up giving out the model less frequently and being more closed about it, which was something three months ago everyone in the ecosystem was like, this is annoying. Like I'm a small startup. I can't get into the Mythos tier. I can't get access to Project Glass Wing. I'm not an enterprise-level customer, but I still... so I just don't get frontier intelligence and I just get steamrolled by, you know, Microsoft who has access to it or Apple who has access to it or whatever. And so the whole idea of like, if an amazing intelligence, an amazing model is made, should it be widely available? That's actually at odds with distillation because you have to hunt those bad actors down and you play this whack-a-mole. So I don't know, it is tricky. We'll see. We'll see where it goes. We'll see where it goes.
Anyway, let me tell you about Public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Apparently over on Facebook Marketplace, people are adding a sort of gold aura to their listings. Would this make you more likely to buy, John? What? It does look like a rare drop. Yes. For only $25, picking up this table with that level of aura, certainly tempting.
It does make me like it more. I think it actually works. I've seen people do this where they'll add like a woman to it as like the salesperson basically with AI and that draws more attention on Facebook Marketplace. I don't know if I've ever bought anything on Facebook Marketplace, but maybe we should try and have Tyler do like a trade-a-paperclip-into-a-car challenge. Have you ever seen these with Ryan Trahan? Tyler would be exceptional at that kind of thing. You think you could trade up from something on your desk? I think this would definitely help it. Yeah. Giving it some kind of... so basically you have to look for the most unoptimized listings that are undervalued and then once you buy them, give them the ultimate glow up with AI images, put them back up for a higher price, increase your margin, start printing. This is a very GaryVee hustle for sure. Asking a guy... okay, where do we want to go next? Let me tell you... Joe Weisenthal joining in just one minute. If we have time, we should cover this story coming out of eBay. Let's do it. Pretty incredible story. eBay pays couple $56 million for its role in cockroach harassment campaign. That is a crazy headline. The couple received threatening deliveries, including funeral wreaths, after criticizing the e-commerce retailer in a blog. So this couple, David and Ina Steiner, were harassed, it sounds like, for years for criticizing eBay. Who knew that criticizing eBay could get you in this much trouble? Of course, it's eBay that ended up getting in trouble. But so they had an online e-commerce blog called Ecommerce Bites and they criticized eBay on that. And then back in 2019, so this has been going on for like seven years. There's a whole new executive team in place now. But there were actually criminal charges in 2020. Seven employees of the company were sentenced to prison terms ranging between 1 and 5 years. And so what were they doing? eBay leadership apparently mailed a series of threatening deliveries to the Steiners' home in 2019. That's crazy. Including a box of live cockroaches, a bloody pig's head mask. I don't even know what that is. Head mask. Is this a real pig head that's been turned into a mask or is it... hopefully just a sort of Hollywood remake of that. And a funeral wreath. The Steiners also accused executives of online harassment, including online posts inviting strangers to their house for sex. Also absolutely insane. Who like... in what world is a public company like eBay just getting some criticism, which all companies do, takes it this personally that you're going to try to ruin the lives of two people that are already in your industry? Was the impact of Ecommerce Bites blogs showing up in your quarterly reports? Like was it actually... eBay pleaded guilty in 2023 in a criminal case over harassment and paid a $3 million penalty following criminal charges in 2020. Seven employees of the company were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 1 to 5 years. It's absolutely brutal. According to court documents, eBay executives grew increasingly upset by the Steiners' critical coverage of the company in early 2019, leading then-executive Devin Wenig to text another executive that it was time to crush the Steiners and take her down, referring to Ina. That summer, harassment against the Steiners escalated from threatening messages to delivering items to their home, which also included a book about surviving spousal bereavement. So that's like sort of a death threat, I guess. Yeah. Right. What's... also sending adult magazines to neighbors' homes in the husband's name. So just like completely trying to destroy this couple's life and marriage. eBay employees also traveled to Massachusetts to vandalize the Steiners' home and stalk them around their hometown. All the employees involved in the harassment were fired in September 2019. eBay said the lawsuit was actually started in 2021. Under the settlement, so we have a good ending here. I think it's a fair ending. Under the settlement, the couple will receive $48 million in compensation from eBay and former employees. eBay will also pay $6 million to charitable organizations and Wenig will pay $1 million to a free speech charity in the Steiners' name. This is like the ultimate Streisand effect. I never would have heard about Ecommerce Bites or their criticism of eBay if they hadn't done all this. What a mess. Ecommerce Bites. I'm looking up exactly what they said because eBay is, in my opinion, just the most said-it-and-forget-it company that's just had the same service for 20 years basically. Well, but now we're going to get to the bottom of it. Ina Steiner published the news that this settled on her blog. So Ecommerce Bites has been giving sellers a voice since 1999. So I do think that it appears just from looking at it very briefly that Ecommerce Bites clearly is an important voice in the eBay seller world, but still absolutely insane way to go about doing business. And I'm glad that eBay cleaned up their act in 2019. In 2019, Ecommerce Bites posted an article that said, did you know that eBay built a lavish New York City pub-style lounge because they had constructed an elaborate replica of a Manhattan pub at an eBay campus? And the framing was basically this appears to be a no-expense-spared executive amenity. Maybe they were going to do a podcast in it. You never know. Anyway, we have Joe Weisenthal from Bloomberg Odd Lots. You know him, you love him. He's back on the show. Welcome to the TV Ultra. How you doing?
It's been too long. I miss you guys. I miss you, too. You too.
Okay, so I have a question for you. You've had a podcast for a long time. Have you ever gotten like a negative review or a negative comment? Ever. No, never. Never. No. Be honest. Be honest. Maybe you've gotten one. Have you ever thought about sending them a box of live cockroaches? Maybe vandalizing. There are actively people mad at Joe right now on Twitter about his latest.
I don't... hopefully she's not watching right now, but my co-host Tracy would... if one of us would do it. First of all, she is the one who reads the comments. I don't think she would, but I think if... I'd like to float this idea, like she might at least spare a few mental... like I thought about doing that. I ran it down, but I know the whole backstory with eBay. I try to be the voice of it's a cautionary tale. You guys don't want to have to, you know, down the line pay a $50, $60 million settlement. Definitely not. Sending a horse head to a former listener for leaving a bad review. We have... that is not on the roadmap. No, not at all.
I'm trying to think if I can... I don't know if you caught the story right before this, but basically eBay had to pay a couple $56 million because like a bunch of executives were harassing this couple for just like criticizing the company in 2019. So like no one is even really thinking about eBay in 2019. Like it's just not... like it's a big company. It's a company that a lot of people have used and a lot of people love. But no one's like really... it's not really that top of mind and seven executives are like becoming criminals. I will die for this company.
You know, in 2018 they might have said, oh, that would never be me. You know, maybe who among us, if you're late at night, you start going down a path. You have to exhibit really good cognitive hygiene because who among us knows the path to psychosis online. Many such cases. And maybe we all need a little bit of humility about what the set conditions that could put us on that path. Yeah. Sometimes one prompt is all... Sometimes one prompt. I took a week of vacation last week and I was like, I'm not going to post anything for a week. And I did, I actually did, but I felt it all like bubbling out like Friday evening when I sort of mentally it's like, oh, vacation's over, it's the weekend now. And I was like, it's just like all uncontrollably so. It's like we all have to be mindful and self-aware about what we're capable of because maybe you don't really know like when it comes to internet vendettas what could happen. Do you think social media is addictive? Because I can't... it's so hard to tell when your job is social media. Like I am the screen time. I have three hours of live stream time every day. Yeah. But it's like how I buy food. So it's like, am I addicted to my job? Like I don't know. Well, I've thought about the funny you mentioned food because this is how I justify it, right? I've probably said it before. This is how I justify always being on. It's like, oh, it's very important for me to know what people are talking about, it's how I hone my skill. But it is like, you know, it's funny. I was thinking like food specifically because with other addictions, you just go cold turkey, right? You're just like, I'm not, you know, and with food you can't. So you have to like... it's really hard to like... so even with me and social media, it's like...
It's hard for me. Like cold turkey is not that hard. I'll just take a week off. Posting all that time is not that hard. The middle ground is when it gets really hard because there's just so many things to respond to, so many things waiting for my take, so many questions that only I need. Also, yeah, there's takes that will never exist. There's takes that...
will never exist, right? The takes that have been lost to history when you were on vacation. You will never get those takes.
I do feel like one benefit that you have and I have felt is when you have multiple, maybe dopamine reward paths, but like outputs, it is nice to be able to retreat because you can do a podcast, you can also write an essay, you can also rip off a post. And so if you only have one of those, then you can sort of get lost in the sauce of like, oh, it's been rough since I had a great guest or it's been rough since I had a great viral banger post. But if you can sort of move around and be like, okay, I'm gonna take a break from the knife fight at the dive bar and put my thoughts together into an essay.
No, I agree. This is very important to have multiple outlets for man's desire to post and put things out into the world. Yes, the deepest desire in the hierarchy is to be someone we are listened to, right? You could see it in all of the billionaires who cannot resist the impulse to get online and start posting. It's clear that money, yes, it's all great, power is great, but what they really crave is to just be heard by someone out in the world. And so they start posting.
The death of Twitter X fully over now given that Jensen Huang joined, Mark Zuckerberg had to join. It truly pulled everyone over slowly kicking and screaming because I imagine Mark Zuckerberg would prefer to promote his Wall Street Journal op-eds just on his own platforms, but that's not where that community is, so you got to go.
No, it's true, like with AI especially specifically, which is that it's X, right? Like if every time someone leaves one of the big companies they have to post a big thread or a really long tweet or whatever, and it's only X. They could post it on Instagram. They could post it on LinkedIn. They could post. They don't though. I mean, they might. I don't know. But they posted, that is where the news happens and you can feel like, I think, you know, the thing that was really striking last week with the discourse, as one says, about the open letter etc. It germinated on Twitter specifically. Why did the White House, why was this suddenly in that week a thing that the White House in some way needed to talk about Chinese open models? It was because of how much it was bubbling on social media, on Twitter specifically. I actually think the entire thing more or less originated from one tweet that said that Kimi 3 was really good at front-end design work. That was it. It was that one post because if you look around, that actually crystallizes in everyone's mind that like, oh, here it is, maybe as good as the most advanced frontier models. No, there was one category of one overall thing and that was the thing everyone locked into and from there, and I believe that that was the moment straight through to, okay, now the White House and all these companies need to make comments about open models, can be traced to that specific, all online, all on Twitter from that.
America front end built this country. If we don't have front end, we don't have anything. This country needs front end development specifically.
No, I mean, I agree with you. When I was looking at the benchmarks, I was like, the one that I'm actually interested in is the cyber security benchmarks because that's where we could actually have this meaningful discussion of, okay, you just actually democratize hacking into things. This is going to get kind of crazy and you're going to have like script kiddies out there that are, you know, just hacking into the random flower shop on the corner and just making it a nightmare for them. And we couldn't really, I don't know. It hasn't been fully posted this, but someone was sharing this morning. I mean, they're trying to figure out how much you need to spend to have your own setup at home to be able to run Kimi efficiently. It was like $100,000.
Just to get to the point where you'd be able to... And it's a lot of energy.
In a sovereign way. You know, a sovereign hacker would need to have a hundred grand, which hopefully prevents like the script kiddies.
It might be the new Lambo, though. You know, you get the influencer, the larp-er, they got the NVL72 in the corner. You're like, yeah, what's up? I got the sovereign AI going. I don't know. How else did you process the open letter? Were you surprised by the order that companies signed? Ben Thompson had this interesting take that it's two of the last companies to sign. I don't think Apple's signed yet. You'd think that they benefit from open source since they haven't been playing that game. Amazon was also a little bit late, but Amazon and Apple both have physical products like warehouses and they sell physical things and so they're maybe a little bit less nervous about AI disruption because they have a physical aspect. I don't know. I don't know what you thought about the sequence of events.
Yeah, I mean, I think there was like two things that really struck out to me, which is that the first wave of signatories were either companies that are behind the frontier or Nvidia, which does not want to be left with only one or two. Like this is the thing. So they're like, oh, like this is, let's start with Nvidia. I think the nightmare scenario for Nvidia, or at least a nightmare scenario for Nvidia, is that it basically has the one or two labs break so far from the pack that it's just, you know, it's almost monopsony conditions. And then those clients can even... and just to add to that, yeah, like both the two front runners are already making their own chips. They're already working with multiple chip companies, right? So they're already like actively trying to reduce their dependence on a key supplier. Absolutely. So first they might have better pricing. They're like, no, we're just not going to pay that margin that you expect, or they're already both diversifying etc. So that is the first thing. And then the other thing that seems very obvious to me is that all the first round of signatories was subjectively falling behind the frontier. And so when you're in software categories, you have either companies that are trying to build a model and they're behind. So Microsoft, at least on just we're talking LLMs, clearly behind, Meta clearly behind, right?
And then you have the company, I don't know, the ServiceNows of the world who will look like they could be in a position where they might have to pay a tax to the most advanced models. And so like, and then you get the late signatories like OpenAI or Alphabet etc that are close but probably not at Fable 5. Like Max, like look at the whole thing and then there are the last ones to join. And so like, I guess I had like, look, I love all that stuff about, I love freedom, like I love freedom and I love tinkering, I love tinkering and I want to like do all that stuff etc. But what I think like what really like motivates these companies is like, you know, I don't put a ton of stock on, oh, it's really important to diffuse AI into our main street businesses and hospitals and hackers. Sure. Great. I love that stuff. Lovely. But like, you know, I think there is like, we, you know, I think the thing that would really like, we're really not psychologically or sort of as an economy really equipped to think about what if one or two of these companies just runs away with it? What if Anthropic just runs away with it? What if like, we sort of like, oh yeah, everyone's sort of in the game. And I think for most of us, I'm not 100% sure of this because I'm not the most sophisticated technical person at all, but I have a feeling like most of us can't really get a good intuitive feel for like what is the difference between a GPT 5.6, a Fable 5, or even the most advanced Gemini model or a Kimi or a DeepSeek 4 or whatever. Like we're like not really able to personally grasp what the difference is at the extremes. But like what if in a year from now there's one company or two that are just so like clearly like there is no longer any debate, these other ones just are not in the game. That is a very weird, I would say very deeply uncomfortable situation we would find ourselves. I think none of us would like that. I think most of us feel comfortable in a world in which you have a handful of companies roughly jostling around the quote frontier is like, okay, this is like comfortable for us, but if we weren't in that situation, like I think we would be rightfully, all of us would be quite anxious.
Well, this is the thing. I think that like, and I think like the Mark Zuckerberg op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, I think further hammers this point. And I actually think, and there's a sense in which I find the Mark Zuckerberg op-ed to be a little bit maybe more interesting than the open letter because the open letter is sort of this plausible deniability where it's just we're advocating for principle here, that principle is open. Right, the Zuckerberg op-ed...
And it's also, and it's more their... it's just again, I think part of what you appreciated is like using the open letter format to just advocate for your own commercial interests. It's like almost like stolen valor, you know?
Sure. But like, so like the open letter, like the Zuckerberg op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, I thought actually took it a bit further. He's like, we cannot have superintelligence controlled by one company. So that was not merely saying let's let the market decide. Let's keep like light touch regulation. He was saying, no, this would be existentially bad, which I think most people would actually agree with if one company were to be the monopoly provider of quote superintelligence unquote. So then you think, okay...
Which is funny, too, because... it's very funny.
Well, he's probably top three largest customers of Anthropic.
Right. So he's the one fueling all of this and then two months later he's like, okay, actually... isn't that like...
To me, that is a very telling fact when you think about like who are the largest customers of the competitors. So it's like that marginal difference, like I said, like most of us probably can't really tell a big difference between like advanced models, but when you have like a really big, very high-skilled, very sophisticated model maker and they're a huge customer of a major competitor that's better than them, like people are going to the frontier. And this is something that like surprised me, like I thought maybe like there would be a bit more of a market for like subfrontier intelligence or like quote cheaper intelligence, but look how fast Anthropic turned out Opus 5. And I, you know, I haven't really used it that much, but it could be like that in a market where there's, if there is one winner, that winner could emerge all up and down the price curve. And so you have like your Gemini Flash level frontier.
Yeah. And I mean, that's what Sam was on Invest Like the Best yesterday and he's talking about how you as a company that sells intelligence, you want to have the best model at every point of the cost curve. Like it's actually going to be important to hit all of those different moments.
Yeah. And it seems like, and look, things change by the week. So I'll come back out on a week and I'll tell you say something else. But it seems like a while, like I started, you know, like I was just sort of poking around. I was like, oh, Gemini Flash, this is really fun for like high batch low intelligence things, right? Like you could do 30,000 queries in two hours and it cost you 20 bucks or something. That's amazing. Could be pretty good for my life as a golden retriever, high batch low intelligence doing a lot of stuff. But probably, or it seems at least plausible that the company that has the most advanced model will probably also win for the sort of like low, or could at least be in a good position to also win the high batch low intelligence.
Yeah. But I would say there has been a lot of pushback around the RSI narrative in the last 24, 48 hours because Opus 5 is actually not getting great reviews from the community. I think people had initially, they felt like people thought it was like a great in between between like a Fable and a 5.6, and then now I've seen a lot more negativity towards it.
This to me again goes back to our original point of sort of like the incredible importance of Twitter in all of these discussions because if you think about like each time a model comes out, okay, there's the benchmarks and it's like, but then it's like you'll just see like someone will be like, there was some tweet when GLM 5.2 came out that he's like, some guy was like, I've been using GLM 5.2 for the last eight hours. I've never seen an open model like this. Got like 2,000 retweets. It's like eight hours. Like what were you doing? You're like, what are we doing here? Like it's like, oh, I got a sort of weird vibe from Opus 5 for all these things. It's like, I don't know. I actually think this is probably a good reason for all of us to maybe log off a little bit more and to actually just read through benchmark reports rather than like one tweet or seen front-end dev like this. On the flip side of the benchmarks, like it actually makes me more strong on Mark Zuckerberg's ability to produce a thoughtful opinion because he's spent a billion dollars on frontier intelligence in a month deployed across 10,000 people and can look at how the needle moved across different models and actually look at the efficiency, like the ROI is at the end of the day what matters in a business context. Yes, the vibe check matters. Yes, the benchmarks matter. But at the end of the day, in terms of moving the needle from 10 billion to 100 billion in revenue to a trillion dollars in revenue, a lot of that's going to be driven by companies actually getting the bill and being like, yep, I'm happy to pay because it was worth it.
This is something I noticed a while ago, which is that you read through like a lot of these popular benchmarks that come out. And the thing that has surprised me is that up until recently, most of them actually don't talk about the dollar cost of completing a task. So it'll be like, can the model solve these 100 problems in engineering or whatever? It's like, oh, this one got 85 and this one got 75. Right? What we're really going to need is to see like, what was the, okay, how many dollars do I have to spend to get 90% of these questions solved? And we're just starting to see that. I have a theory, but I don't really know if it's right, that probably a lot of these benchmark organizations started from like a safetyist mindset, right? Like they're worried about like, oh, bioengineering risk or...
And can you do it at any cost, right? Because you don't really care about your token cost. If you're like trying to exert a lot of damage, you just do it. So I think that for like the bigger questions, like hopefully we'll see more like what was the dollar cost of achieving X at this model? And then maybe we'll like really, those are the, for I think for our conversations, those will be a lot more interesting than some of the sort of legacy benchmarks.
How much do you think the open source, it feels like we're in this moment of like this catch-up. There was the last six months, GLM 5.2, it felt like open source was sort of falling behind as the frontier labs released more models and more crazy demos and there were more stories about Mythos and solving math problems and all these crazy conjectures and stuff. Like the labs were sort of trading back and forth with like new capability, new capability, new benchmark, crazy thing. And open source was kind of quiet. And then we got GLM 5.2, Kimi, K3, and all of a sudden it was like, oh, okay, like the open source market is catching up for sure. Still on the same trajectory, maybe still behind, but like on track. How much is that moving the market, do you think? How much are we in a replay of the DeepSeek moment, the Jevons paradox debate? Because it feels like there's this selloff, but I don't know. Like it feels weird to me that people would be processing it the exact same and making the same mistake that they made. So is this time different or how are people talking about it in New York? Like...
Yeah, as people who just care about the lines going up, it is... I think like...
No, for real though, I mean, I do think like it's plausible that this on some level this is just another quote DeepSeek moment in the sense like you get a little bit freaked out. I agree with you. Like it's weird to think that like you would do that same playbook twice. I think like another factor is just generally setting aside like maybe the Kimi and GLM stuff is a little bit maybe it's a little overrated in terms of a story. I think people are looking at a situation in which they just do not foresee the end of these free cash flow losses, right? That there's just like that we're nowhere close. It's like, okay, when can you, when is the off-ramp for this spending?
Yeah, that story isn't totally satisfying because if it were just about, oh, they're spending a gazillion dollars on capital expenditures, you would expect the Korean chip stocks to do well. I mean, the Korean chip stocks have been absolutely getting crushed over the last three weeks. So like there's something more to the story here. Like I don't like it could just be that a lot of manic, it could be two separate things. It could be there were a bunch of manic traders in Korea who were buying these double and triple leveraged ETFs that just trade SK Hynix and then that had to eventually flush out because there's so much volatility baked into that that you get a little selling and it ripples. And then in the US it could be that investors are looking at like I do not have any confidence that I could name the date at which the Alphabets of this world will return to positive free cash flow. There is no reason to think that that off-ramp is coming when they could say like, oh, we're good, we have enough compute. So maybe there's a couple of things going on that I think are perhaps a little bit separate from the pure like, oh, we're freaked out about margin compression from Chinese open models.
Yeah, it's very odd because the industry revenues are going up and the revenues are very, very diffuse. Everything from an ad-supported use to a $10 subscription to a $200 subscription to a hyperscaler spending a billion dollars a month on tokens. Like the demand is there in that it is this economy. It's not this total circular, there's just one like it's like NFTs or something like that. It's not some dislocation. But I agree with you that as you play out the capex requirements, we've now drawn down all the hyperscaler cash flow. We're issuing more debt and equity and at a certain point you're like, okay, if there's another 10x increase, if there's another 100x increase, like there's sort of not enough money in the world for this. And so you almost need a pause on capex more than you need a pause on like the capability development because I do think that if you just spent the capex that you're spending now, paused, and then just did the diffusion work to get these models into all the different businesses and use cases, like the economic upside and the ROI would be there, but not when you're going to spend 10 times next on capex.
Yeah, I think my framework is like you have the whole world betting on a meaningful, like continued capability increases, which I think is like okay to lean on because we've just been seeing that quarter over quarter. It is real. And then you also have some like hoarding, which is like not only are the capabilities going to get much better, I'm also going to basically figure out a model that's going to be so good it's going to just like hoover up a bunch of like new demand and I'll be able to ramp revenue and justify all this capex. And if I can't do that, someone else will, I'll be able to offload it. Right. But the concerning thing right now is like the incremental big buyers of compute, you effectively have two players there. And then at the same time you have the whole industry being like, well, like praying for like an oligopoly as opposed to a duopoly or monopoly, right? Like very interesting scenario to have the biggest companies in the world so scared of a monopoly that they're effectively praying for an oligopoly is my view on it.
Yeah, it's really wild. And you know, I don't know if you guys saw today the recent blog post from Dark Horse had a great take about like expectations that compute could get a lot more expensive, which you know, one of the sort of stylized facts of the last few years has of course been the extraordinary drop in token prices, right? Like if you go back to like GPT-3 token prices, they're down like 99.9%. But like now, so we think, okay, there is some iron law that token prices will get cheaper over time, but maybe not. I mean, we thought there was an iron law that memory prices would drop over time, right? Or that any sort of hardware would drop over time. And what the story of the last two years is that turns out that is capable of reversing. So you know, it's not impossible to imagine that compute prices get more expensive and get significantly more expensive. And then of course he posited the possibility maybe there is almost no thing that we do economically currently with AI is economical where compute prices are going, which is hard to imagine. And then the thing that I take away from it is, but that doesn't mean you can stop spending on it because you have to worry about hardening yourself for cyber security because it's like, all right, you know what, there's like, this is not economical for me anymore. I want to tap out of the whole AI race. Well, then your competitor develops a stronger model and then you're done. You're really done. So like this is the scary thing, which is, and I think even just in the sort of like hyperscalers is like, what if like the situation is you're bleeding free cash flow, but you also don't have the option of saying we want to opt out of the game.
Which I think is a source of anxiety for investors.
It is. It is like, it's so weird that we went back and forth on like the doom narrative and no matter where you sat on that, it was either like perfect utopia, everything's amazing, or like Terminators kill everyone. And in fact, like we are very much in this messy middle of like a lot of annoying things. Like the cyber security equilibrium is, I mean, maybe there's like this doom scenario, but most likely it's just like costs go up for everyone loosely because you have to harden yourself more against AI. And it's like, yeah, it's great to fix bugs, but there's going to be more bugs introduced. And it's just like, it's just annoying. It's annoying and there's a lot of scenarios where it's like, okay, there's more cost on AI slop and then you have to detect the slop and then you're annoyed. And we have a friend on our team who always laments when like AI does some amazing like math thing. He's like, no one cares like that. This is why you need to return to like, you know, the curing cancer, the doing something useful, actually helping you with some problem that people do experience. But a lot of times it's just these abstract...
Going back to the Zuck op-ed, he's in the position where he didn't do a bunch of podcasts about AI and AI doom in like 2019 when no one cared about AI, whereas a lot of the other key players were doing podcasts and they were talking about the risks and all these things. So he can kind of come out and just say like, look, it's going to be awesome. We just got to make sure there's fair competition. But the pushback there is that like the average, he's not the best messenger for this because the average person believes that social media, while it is great in some ways, has damaged, you know, hurt birth rates, right? Like damaged teen mental health, right? Is just like draining the attention, right? All these things. So like he's maybe the best messenger that we got, but he's not the best.
This is the issue that I arise when I think about this is that like, okay, you have two executives. One is like, it's all going to be okay and one of them, it's we're going to have doom, right? So and then it's like, well, which one of them has been paying attention and taking seriously AI for the last 10 years and which one of them three years ago was talking about the metaverse? Well, it's like I'm going to trust the one who has been taking AI seriously for the last 10 years and that unfortunately that happens to be the doom guy or that seems how it is. Yeah. That unfortunately, like if you just go by these heuristics we have of like, well, who was like, there have been people who are like very right about AI who are very nervous and this is like what makes me, I don't have any ability to adjudicate these questions. Like I'm just reading stuff on the internet. You know, I'm not so, but unfortunately a lot of the people, a lot of the doom people have had much better intuitions about just the broader trajectory of the technology than the people who are very optimistic who three years ago or four years ago were talking about NFTs.
Well, yeah, there's some line, I think it's from Demis where he's saying like he met with Zuck when they were selling DeepMind and it's a great part. Zuck, you know, viewed like the metaverse as like, or VR as like equally interesting to AI and that was part of what made him decide to not go to Meta.
Has Demis ever watched a movie in VR? It's electric.
It's the best experience. No, it is funny because you got to, it's amazing. Apple Vision Pro, it's fantastic. But there was a doom narrative around crypto and there was a doom narrative around metaverse. The crypto one was that every criminal is going to be able to transact anonymously and there's going to be a huge increase in drug...
Well, the doom scenario was actually that the dollar would just completely collapse. But that was something that people were cheering.
They were excited about that. And then with the metaverse, it was like wireheading. So everyone's going to be in the metaverse and we're going to lose any and all interaction in the real world. And of course, Mark Zuckerberg never addressed that. He was never on podcast being like, yes, there is a risk that it goes into the matrix and we're all in these virtual worlds and like I'm not going to do that. Apple sort of like forced his hand with that with the crazy AR and like the screen on the outside and Apple's messaging was like we don't want to be an isolating device. We want to be a mixed reality device and they were sort of being like the anti-doom but Zuck never really went full like doomer or even addressed it. And then of course we just like sort of got the good ending because it just like kind of flatlined and never really went anywhere. I don't know. I don't even know if that's the good ending. It's like the middle ending.
No, no, totally. And it's interesting because when you read like that Zuckerberg op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, it reads like, you know, so you mentioned like everyone is super cynical about social media, right? And you mentioned the birth rate. So everyone's got so like, so just feels so like kind of gross about the whole thing now. But, you know, in like 2010, 2011, people were like really excited. It's like we're going to connect. This is going to be great for democracy. Citizens are going to like be able to like collaborate and stuff like that. And so when I read the Zuck op-ed, I was like, this is a kind of optimism that I haven't read from anyone in over 10 years about where like digital technology is going. Unfortunately, people like, you know, very few people are as optimistic about social media as they were in say the beginning of the 2010s, but it did hearken back to that this is going to be very democratizing, etc. And I hope it is.
Well, I expect like personally social media, I do think has made my life better. Like net, like if you net it out, it's like how to, you know, I work too. I work in media but even if I didn't, you know, pre being in this kind of business met a lot of people, I learned a bunch of stuff that I otherwise wouldn't. I think it's been a net positive impact on my life. I think that AI hopefully one of the good scenarios is that it is the same way, right? Where like net net makes everyone's lives a bit better even though it has these things that are quite bad, right?
I think we should be open-minded to that possibility. And you know, look, we get things, everyone's dooming so hard these days about and you just go down the list. We could easily rattle off 10 very, three or four big things right now. But, you know, usually the bad, we're wrong. We're pretty bad about predicting the future. And so, like we should be open-minded, I think, towards like, you know, right tail scenarios where things go well. Because I don't think like I put a lot of stock or I don't think there's any good reason to put a lot of stock on what the Twitter conventional wisdom is or the editorial board of any publication what they're all anxious about right now. Like, you know, like I don't know what that great outcome looks like per se. You know, I do, look, we could get great technological breakthroughs. I'll say one thing, which is that like in the circles of people I talk to, everyone is like reading more philosophy these days probably because of AI. That's pretty good. Like I'm pretty happy. Like that's a pretty cool thing that like people are sort of like a renaissance of a certain curiosity about things that I think was sort of dormant for a while. So like that seems like a pretty...
Making music for the first time in years.
Well, like we should pay attention to like the good. I actually do think we should pay attention to the good things that are, you know, because it's so easy to get caught focused on a negative narrative. In the meanwhile, like various like positive things are happening. I, you know, changed a flight recently and it was much easier because I used ChatGPT to like walk me through the process of like turning a roundtrip flight to a three-legged flight, which I was very anxious about, is easy. So like we should pay attention to things in our like day-to-day life that we can say, you know what, are making this better even if like it doesn't feel like the whole, even if we're like anxious about where it's all going.
Last question. You have a podcast. We have a podcast. That's right. There's a lot of new podcasts. Would you support an open letter that we're writing? We would like you to sign in to ban new podcasts. Actually wouldn't ban, but there would be a multi-year sort of approval process, bunch of safety checks and a new government agency to issue RSS feeds.
Yeah, this is really important. I'm so glad you brought this up because someone such an important someone could just launch an RSS feed that, you know, ends the entire world. Who knows? We don't know. It can't happen.
Or removes viewers and listeners from Odd Lots TV. We cannot let that happen.
That would, that's ridiculous. Are you saying that I would do this for my own financial gain? This is crazy.
I can't believe you would even go there. That's wild. I would never think that way. I'm purely thinking altruistically. Okay, Joe, let's leave.
America needs to win on podcasts. And this is very objectively winning.
We are winning. We have been winning on entertainment and have no... No, there's no competitors yet. Yes. Well, thank you so much.
I love it. I love it. We'll circulate. Great to see you, Joe. Have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.
Let me tell you about Figma agents. Meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. And we are very fortunate that we have our next guest Jameson Detwiler here with us in the TVP Ultra. Welcome to the show.
Please introduce yourself and the company.
Yeah, I am Jameson Detwiler. I am the co-founder and CEO of Chip and we are building what we like to think of as the ideal second car today, but as everything becomes autonomous, the ideal primarily owned vehicle of the future.
Can we get the Chip that I specced out on the big board because it is a special, special car and I think it would provide some important context. So quick facts, it's an electric low-speed light utility. How do you rate my spec? How do you rate my spec? I love the spaceship there and everything. And the spaceship obviously package surf rack. And the TV on the front. If we could get TVPN on there, it would kind of complete it. But good start. Good start for me. Before we get too much into Chip, what were you doing before this? What led you to creating the vehicles of the future?
Yeah, before this I was at Tier Mobility, which was Bird and Lime's largest competitor in Europe, backed by SoftBank and Mubadala. They owned Spin scooters in the US. So got wound up there by selling my HD mapping business, Fantasmo, to them. So basically creating a digital twin of the world and we built a computer-powered GPS and turns out scooters don't know where they are very well because of GPS and so Bird, Jump, Uber and Tier were our biggest customers and scaled up and then also started building kind of driver assistance systems for scooters as well. So yeah, been in the mobility space for a while.
Interesting. I can imagine driver assistance would be great for scooters. I don't know how far along it's gotten just because driving around LA, some people on scooters do things that are maybe not illegal but definitely wrong.
Yeah. I mean, we say driver assistance is like ADAS in cars, but really it was about restricting their behavior, right? So it's like, are you drunk? Are you on a sidewalk? Are you going the wrong way down a bike lane? And so you're putting that on there and just, you know, camera and compute at the edge running there. So building a lot of that kind of...
Why is autonomy important for this vehicle? This feels like the last place I would want self-driving. I need self-driving in the morning commute. I'm tired. I'm going 40 miles or 20 miles and I just want to like zone out and just get to where I'm going. But this looks fun to drive. This looks like you're driving it around a small community. It's not that much of a hassle to actually drive. Why is autonomy important?
Yeah, I mean, for us, like where we're starting with the autonomy stack is actually kind of like the inverse of what you'd expect when you get from a Tesla or anywhere else, right? So like, yeah, we like to say Chip is fun to drive, but parking never is. So this is not like FSD in a Tesla. In fact, like when we do bring autonomy eventually to the vehicle, we'll be, you know, unsupervised in the way that we do it.
Got it. But what we're doing today is we can take a Chip, you can pull up to, you know, a busy place in West Hollywood and skip the valet line, hop right out. Chip will go off, take care of himself, okay?
Take care of the parking, show up when you tell him to come back, either from the calendar or as you speak to him or text you, let you know when he's on the way back there, and pick you up exactly where you want to be picked up. Unlike a Waymo, right, which will make you walk a long distance. And the way that we're able to achieve this, by the way, today is with direct remote control of humans because there's actually a data gap there.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is there also an easier regulatory approval path because if it's only autonomous or remotely controlled while there's no humans in the car, it's...
Safer. Does that make it easier to get to market faster?
Yeah. So, it's definitely an easier path and for us, like, we think a very responsible path because, like, when we run our, you know, we're going to be running our pilot in Miami this winter, a great market for us where we're based. And we're, you know, our early customers are going to have effectively, you know, virtually unlimited access to it and they'll hop out and we'll take that vehicle, we'll drive it, in fact, we'll drive it at lower speeds on less busy roads, etc. And so it's just a way for us to validate and bring kind of that safety level up and then eventually we'll drive with people and we'll move from direct remote control to, you know, full autonomy here over time.
Yeah, that makes sense, Jordy. Sorry.
Yeah, that use case is cool. I think, like, think about, like, you have a surfboard off the beach.
Yeah, yeah, that, but like, yeah, there's something, one of the biggest benefits of, like, having a driver is just being able to be like, 'Oh, I need to run into the grocery store, pull up outside, go, go, go straight in.' Even if the parking lot is like crazy or chaotic, you're just going in, coming out, you're not thinking about it. To me, that's the most underrated.
The number of people that have drivers, but they don't order delivery, groceries is like very small. But yes,
No, no, I'm just saying, like, to me, that's been, in my experience, one of the most underrated parts. And that's something that you expect the Tesla to be doing soon, but can even make sense in this form factor when originally we saw the launch video and we were like, why would we need, why would I want autonomous driving for something that I'm just driving to the beach or whatever.
Yeah. Well, I mean, it's so you can go to the beach for, like, if you're living in Manhattan Beach where, like, golf carts are really popular. Yeah. You know, it's small, it's easy to park, but there's still no parking. So, in that context, you can take your friends there, get dropped off, and you just go back to home and come back. And, you know, also, like, really what we're trying to do here is bring this, like, fun robotic, you know, private driver to everybody. It's why it talks and it can go pick up the groceries, right? It can go there and it can do curbside pickup and, you know, the frunk opens and because the confused Target employee comes out, the vehicle can talk and say, 'Hey, put it in there. We're good to go.' Do that.
What do you think? What do you think?
Like, it feels like there's been an explosion of, like, just new vehicle startups. You have Slate, you have you guys, you have Amble. Like, clearly a bunch of smart people at the same time were like, why is there not this super specialized vehicle, right? Slate was like, it's going after everyday pickup truck. Amble, you know, focused on resorts, right? You guys are focused on everyday consumers and, like, in these sort of, like, my view, like, coastal hubs at least, like, at least that's where I see you guys getting a lot of traction. But, like, what is it snowballing now? Should we expect a lot more vehicles? Is there some, like, is it just the advancements of batteries and declining costs? Like, what do you think is driving it?
Yeah. I mean, I think it's really interesting, like, when consumer behavior changes in such a major way, right? Especially around cars and, like, you know, in a lot of ways I think, like, the American love affair with the car is dying. Everything's too expensive. And increasingly, too, like, we're reurbanizing and even in places when...
Sorry, I was going to hit the boo.
There we go.
No, no, no. I think you're right. And the one, some even you can see manufacturers now, all the cars started looking the same 10 years ago. Less and less was like a, like nobody goes and they're like, 'Oh, I need a new daily. I'm going to get a yellow car.' Right? Whereas historically, like, somebody would be like, I need a new car. I'm going to get like a yellow Volkswagen Beetle or something like that. And now it's all like converging around like the Model 3 format, right? Or even John was complaining the other day because, like, he's in the market for a Tesla and he's like, I wish that they still made the S. Like, that's the one I want.
Or convertible or a full-size SUV. It feels like there's a, it's almost like a barbell effect. Like, there in the heyday of the love affair with the American car, it was you got one car that was an expression of everything you needed. So maybe four doors but also some power and a supercharged V8. But now the standard, like, pod that just takes you to work is so bland and standard that maybe there's room for a second car that is just completely on the other side of the barbell.
Yeah. And I think for us, I mean, there's a lot of variables here to, like, how we think about this. And a large part of this is, like, how do you, you know, almost like ball on a budget. Like our cars, like our cars are like our fashion and they reflect who we are. But today, if you want to buy a new car that's cool, that's out of reach for the majority of people. And so that's part of what we're trying to provide here and make it, you know, from design, but also, like, add a lot of function that supports kind of the lifestyles that we live today because, like, we are living closer to home, you know, today. And so it's, I think that's a large impact as well.
Do you think this can slot in because $15,000 estimated MSRP for four seats. Top speed 25 miles an hour, 100 miles of range per charge.
I'm going to test the top speed, too.
I'll be the one to decide what the top speed of the chip is.
I mean, that does feel like it would be, if you are truly a budget-conscious buyer who's looking for a commuter, $15,000, you'd go with, like, a used Honda Civic instead of this. But is there something where the math actually does work out with more charging places where this does become a commuter? Because 25 miles an hour is just, like, too slow for anyone who's hopping on the freeway for a daily commute. Right.
Sure. But we're in LA, right? If you know we've driven this thing, you know, like we said, but that is like the future. Like the traffic's so bad. Yeah, you really do go 25 miles an hour a lot.
Well, he's, I think he's just saying, like, you can very easily in LA, you can just stay off of freeways. Sure. And it's not even necessarily slower of...
No, no, that's right.
Well, yeah. And that's the thing. It's like if you're, you know, it's 5:30 on a Wednesday, right? And you're coming from downtown back to Venice, you know, like you can be in a car that can do 0 to 60 in 2.5 seconds sitting on the 10, but you're still going to get there in the same amount of time. It's going to be a lot...
Such a funny being on the, you're like betting that there's going to be wall-to-wall traffic and then you get your chip out on the freeway and you're like, whoa, like a lot less traffic than I was expecting.
Forgot it was a World Cup and there's no one on the road.
But yeah, for us, like, it's like the ICP that we're really focused on is, like, I built this for myself. Like, I like to say that, like, golf carts, like, escaped golf communities during the pandemic and the growth area has been, like, young families in Sun Belt regions. And so for me, I live in Miami. I live in Edgewater, basically downtown area. I'm not going to put my kids into a golf cart. It's not safe. But I like the idea. This is built to facilitate that. And so that's kind of where we're starting in terms of the function, the price point.
Yeah. Like the golf cart companies have been so asleep at the wheel. Like they, like when it comes to customization, it's like, 'Oh, you want to customize your cart? You want to order this cart?' And it's like you have one thing that you can decide and it's the color and there's like six options, right? And you can't even, you can't really change much of anything. And I went down, I was excited to see you guys come up and Amble and some of these other companies because I was like, I've just talked to all these legacy manufacturers and they clearly don't care to try to innovate or try to allow this, like, specialization, customization.
And for a car like this, which is like this, like, weekend, you know, this, like, weekend vehicle, you want it to be, like, really expressive and fun because, you know, you're not thinking I'm going to just be, like, driving to the office and parking and coming back. It's like it is the place that you want to express yourself.
Paul Graham had this back and forth with the creator of Friend, Avi Schiffmann, who's working on an AI device. And the question was, how do you counter-position against Apple? If you come up with a new electronic device, a consumer electronic device, Apple's going to do what they did to Pebble with the Apple Watch, where they launched something with the Apple design language. And Paul Graham's advice was, do something so bold with your design and your aesthetic that Apple can't copy you. And this feels like a little bit of this. This feels like very antithetical to what other car companies are doing, such that you could not be fast-followed even if the technology is on the same supply chain loosely. This would be such a brand change for most car companies they couldn't jump in. Is that conscious? Is that accidental? What's the thought behind all of the customization?
I don't know. I think Ferrari might have knocked with the luch a little bit. They might have gotten a little inspired with the luch, been like, 'Hey, Chip looks pretty good. We should make a...' No, it's, you're going to chop the top on that thing anyway.
Yeah. I mean, look, I think Apple tried. They missed.
Oh, yeah. The car, right? They missed.
No, they're coming back, right? Aren't they announcing a 40? And then they're also launching, like, a livery for, like, a hyper car or, like, a lemon car? Doesn't count.
Yeah. And you had that and, like, you know, Ford had a product in this category, like, 25 years ago. Ford think there's one that, like, actually, like, is around Venice all the time still. And, like, but, you know, these guys are, like, you look at all of these companies and, like, they're all tied to products I think that are huge money makers but, like, create problems for innovation there, right, for them. And so this is an area where it'll be, like, very hard for them to come in, kind of come in and innovate and think about it. And you have to approach engineering differently, you have to approach sales differently and marketing. Like, we're, like, frankly, like, in a lot of ways I think of us more like a sneaker and culture company than I do about, like, a car company in the way that we are selling, marketing, engaging our community, etc. And I think that's going to be really hard for anybody, certainly any of the incumbents, to do today.
I feel we go check it out.
Yeah, we got to go check it out. Well, Tyler, what was that car that I was showing you earlier today? The 1991. We got to pull that up at some point, but I want your reaction to that car because it's a fantastic one. But let's go take a look at the actual vehicle. You brought it here today. Let's go see.
Do we have everything set up? Are we good to go?
You got the camera. Okay, we're going to switch over so we can go take a tour of a real chip motor. And you got me on the lav. Thank you for coming along with us, Jordy. Want to hop up? Take us through it. Where are we going?
Let's see. Outside the Ultra Dome. Second car review we've done.
Whoa. Here we go. Wait, it's driving itself. There we go.
It's a lot taller than I thought it would be. Wow.
Yeah. It's like golf carts are actually really tall. So, like, the typical golf cart that people have is actually, like, taller than every single trim F-150. Sure.
And so, what happens here is there's a couple things. So, you actually want the deck here and your safety structure to be tall because you need to interact with trucks on the road. But also, while this looks big, it's a very efficiently packaged size. It's 4'11" wide. It's about 10 and a half feet long. And we've designed this, you'll notice, like, you're sitting like a dining room table, basically, right? You're not going to be in this thing typically for more than 45 minutes. So, we want to create something that's really comfortable and that's going to actually have a ton of space. And so, actually, in production here, we're moving the second row back a bit. And everything is going to enable, you know, for me, I still have two kids in rear-facing car seats that fit in here well. And so the design exercise, like, started from, like, the inside out. There's a boxiness to it that's necessary because for us, like, function does, like, drive form. Yeah.
And we also leaned into it because I don't want people to look at this and think that it's a car that can go 60 mph, right? And so the funkiness of something that we've embraced...
And that feels to me out of the Pixar universe.
Is that, that was intentional?
Yeah. Yeah, for me, I mean, I grew up going to Disney World and, like, I really, like, I grew up at, like, the World of Tomorrow and I love kind of the future that the Jetsons created and we've leaned into, like, a little bit of this kind of retro, kind of futuristic aesthetic because I want to see this positive vision of the future come true.
It feels increasingly like we're maybe headed toward a Blade Runner future and that's not what I want to see.
Yeah. No, I like that. I like that.
What was the process for actually building this one? Because obviously this is sort of hand-built at this point. How much of the supply chain are you building on something as a demo unit? Are you using something else as a platform? I imagine that, like, you know, you don't have your own leather tannery yet? But yes, how did this come together? How long did it take to build? Who built it? I'm curious about this process.
This prototype has been built over a little, like, over the last 18 months and tinkered with and optimized a lot. And so we actually imported a small, like, Chinese EV that we wanted to learn from and built on top of, tore it down and, like, ended up rebuilding.
Yeah. Distilled it. Exactly. Tore it down to the chassis. Ended up replacing, like, the entire drivetrain, the battery, the whole thing. And so, like, it's kind of over time most of that, like, disappeared. Yeah. And they allowed us to kind of learn a lot from, I mean, frankly, they've been doing these small EVs for a long time and that was really, really good for us. And so, yeah, that kind of exploration has gone on for 18 months and now we should have production-intent units in hand in the next, like, four months or so.
And then there are manufacturers for, like, these types of bench seats that you can go to at this point and pull those together.
So actually our VP of vehicle engineering came to us from Canoo, spent a sector there, but he thankfully started his career in seating and restraints. And so he's like, and by the way, in a lot of ways seating is one of the harder kind of industrial design problems for this. Like, there's so much nuance to doing it well and there's a lot that gets improved from here. And so we're having, actually, like, optional heating and cooling in here, too. There's also, like, optional HVAC and so that's a huge, a huge part of our focus.
Wait, you'll have a covered version of it as well.
Yep. Yeah. We have a soft top that it will come with. We have hard doors. We have an enclosure here. We have HVAC as an accessory. But, like, it's, you know, even if you're going to be operating this in a cold place, you know, like, we took this through Aspen and people absolutely loved it. Or if you're in Seattle, it's raining. Like, if it's a nice day, you should be able to top off. So our designs, we'd like to say...
Driving this home from dinner in a winter storm would be electric.
Well, if you're going to make a mountain version, you got to get chains, I guess.
Yep. Well, it's all-wheel drive. We use four in-wheel motors as well, so it has a lot of torque, so, like, it has no issue in the snow.
Very, very cool. I want one.
Yeah, I can make that happen.
What is this track back here for?
This is E-track. So, this is an option here. This is a standard kind of accessory you'll see in truck beds. Okay. This is actually also the same that they use to, like, hold down airplane seats there. So, this is an accessory. You can do tie-downs and things like that. We have, so these seats actually fold down into a truck bed, too, so you can use it. You can put plywood and so we designed that way. So, like, the thing is people, like, end up wanting to buy this kind of vehicle because it's, like, the ideal vehicle to go to the beach. But what ends up happening, and you've seen kind of this behavior, is, like, they're, like, 'Oh, this is functional.' They'll go pick up the groceries. They'll go to Costco. They'll take the kids to school. And we want to take that kind of, like, feeling of a vehicle that really empowers you and feels, like, very light and turn up to 11. And so it's a Swiss Army knife that you can do and you can pick and choose what you want. You know, if you're a surfer, you can have your surfboard rack here. We'll have, like, a hand shower for, like, getting sand off and just go heavily into that accessory ecosystem.
Yeah, that's cool. That's a great way to differentiate. What does it take to keep this thing street legal? It feels like right on the fringe, right on the edge. You have mirrors but no doors. Like, what else is, like, the bare minimum to make sure that you're always street legal?
Yeah. So the category that we're currently operating in is called a low-speed vehicle. That's what a street-legal golf cart is. It's FMVSS 500. Okay. You have to...
And that's because of the top... You have to cap the top speed.
Top speed. Yep. And you can ride on roads 35 miles per hour and under. So you can ride on, you know, basically every surface road here in Los Angeles you can go on. And then, yeah, you have to have seat belts, you have to follow lighting requirements, you have to have a backup camera and things like that. But frankly, like, we actually think that the category is, like, severely underregulated. Like, golf carts are death traps and there's a lot of, like, really, really bad stories that you hear. And for us, like, we're doing a lot to not only, you know, exceed but push the boundaries here. And so for us, we're designing this for a crash at, like, the appropriate speed that we're operating at. We're putting in features that we're going to be deploying for active safety, leveraging the cameras and everything else we have in there, too. So...
Underregulated. Going to open up the Chip Washington office soon and pushing for, pushing for total complete lockdown. So this is basically a one-off. Is it street legal? Did you have to tow it here? Can you get something like this approved provisionally for a demo drive so that you can test it on streets? Or is this something that you have to go through a whole process and they all have to be street legal before?
Yeah. No, this is street legal and we've registered it. Yeah. There's, like, a custom build there that we've been able to do. Yeah. And we typically tow it when we come from, like, West LA to here. Just we can drive it. But I don't like to think about how much this vehicle is worth because we can't get insured for the value as a startup with a prototype.
Yeah. You will now find an underwriter.
So, yeah, we take good care of it.
I love it. I love it. Thank you so much.
