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83 days. But you already knew that. We don't even have to tell you.
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Uh oh, we're getting Christmassy up in here. Okay, very Christmassy. It's Q4. We're in the correct season now, so we can get pretty Christmassy.
It's pretty tricky to stay in the... Well, little... Enough about Christmas, John. Let's get into the news.
Let's talk about artificial intelligence. Sounds great. Uh yeah. So make it less Christmassy. It's too Christmassy. It's 83 days away. This is no more than 20 days away before we get that Christmas.
Okay. Oh, just one level of Christmas.
For October 7th. October 2nd. Uh yeah. So, uh, there was this funny moment, uh, at Dev Day, uh, this week where, um, you know, everyone's like focused on the war of like DOS versus Muse versus Instinct and there were a couple times where we were like, I want to talk about sign in with ChatGPT, which is like the most like boring and like minute feature and not very much not in like the drama war for the personal agent where who's going to do your shopping, who's going to book your...
No, I just thought it was cool for independent developers, small app builders. It's actually like probably more immediately relevant to the community that was there like the developers, right?
Yeah. And you remember when like flashback to two years ago, people were creating these magical new product experiences with the best models at the time, but they were in hindsight pretty rudimentary.
And they would build something magical, scale up really quickly, and then be like, 'Wow, I just got stuck with like a $30,000 API bill.' And so this is the solve for that because it allows users to bring their own compute.
Everyone knows BYOB. Now we're in the era of BYOC. Um and yeah, like you know, most companies, they could usually figure out a way to say, hey, like this service is going to use a ton of compute, so you got to jump on the pro plan immediately. You got to set up a consumption, a credit card relationship, API credit, something like that, metered billing, but it was just an extra step, an extra point of friction of you saying like, 'Okay, I already paid 10 bucks a month for this thing. Now I gotta actually pay for inference.' And this gives like a different offtake. So, uh yeah, Peter Yang was feeling the same way that you were. He said, 'I'm excited about DOS, but even more excited about sign in with ChatGPT feature. Letting users use the ChatGPT plan in your website or app makes a bunch of indie apps a lot more viable.' Example, I have a live language learning app that I wasn't planning to launch to users due to API costs, but letting users sign in with ChatGPT makes this viable. Hope they roll it out to non-enterprise folks soon.
Vignes, who's actually running the project, said, 'I'm going to try and answer a bunch of questions that people have raised about signing with ChatGPT in the next couple of days. Before that, I want to let you know why they shipped it.' And so you can go read that thread, but the bring your own subscription stuff, it sticks out because it feels like it's potentially like the beginning of a new economic structure. Like is this an app store where there will be a margin that occurs to OpenAI or is this more just like better for discovery? Will agents like reach for these because the sign in is available? How much more smooth will this get? But you know, at a high level, I think you described it well. A user can sign in to an app or service. The Notion example is a good one because it's very intuitive. People already pay for Notion. You can imagine all the AI features that are there and people were probably on day one of ChatGPT launching copying from Notion into ChatGPT, copying back into Notion, writing bindings. But if Notion wants to offer like a whole bunch of inference opportunities and agentic features inside, then they got to go to their clients and say, hey, you're paying 10, 20 bucks a month for your seat. We also need a bunch of money for inference. This offsets that. And so the way it works is a user signs into an app like Notion, then authorizes the app to run the OpenAI model requests against their plan without managing an API key on Notion. This means drawing from the ChatGPT allowance instead of Notion credits and it makes a lot of sense for bigger companies that have inference bills as you mentioned. And they've all had to grapple very quickly with like product economics, which is just a new economic muscle and like price elasticity curve they need to ride effectively. But the big thing is that it should over time allow leaner teams to offer inference hungry features with way less friction. So it's worth clarifying that the feature only brings OpenAI tokens along for the ride. It's not OpenAI dollars, which is I think a way where this could go, but the good example is like let's say you have like some sort of AI book publisher where you're doing a bunch of token inference to generate the text of the book. Like you say, hey, I want to go take this, you know, general story, turn it into a book, and then print it and send me the book. Right? There's two sort of costs there. One's inference, one is...
I'll scan it back on the computer and then I'll turn it into a playable video game.
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. But you can't offset the cost of printing books with OpenAI tokens in any way.
Yes. But you could have the user spend their OpenAI credits to run the text generation side of the business. But I do think this could go further. The example that I gave was generative video. I'd like to have like a front door to AI that can handle the full billing relationship. So, if I need to generate a video, I can just add that to my tab.
No, and you went through this. You went through this with Higgsfield where you were using Codex to make videos.
Yep. And somehow Higgsfield has like $500 of yours now and it's locked in there and it's unclear how you can get it because you ended up buying like the wrong kind of credit or something like that. Yeah, I wound up setting up like a consumer subscription and then I also bought API credits. So I have consumer credits and API credits and in order to use the consumer credits, I need to write a new binding in Codex to use the front end as opposed to just computer use.
Wouldn't that use computer use, which would cost you more?
Maybe a little bit. It's very unclear and so all of these things are like very messy. But and so yeah, I mean between computer use, MCP, APIs, like this might not even be a discussion because like we're pretty close to the workflow happening out of the box even without direct integration. But then there's a question about will the apps like push back. But there is a world where even if you're an inference provider, you're maybe fine with not owning the front door if you're generating so much more demand because you're integrated with the big platforms and you say, 'Yeah, I'm actually losing the customer billing relationship, but I'm going to 10x my revenue because I'm like the model or the inference provider of choice when people go and they ask for a particular integration.' And so there's always this dance with these integrations. You know, we were talking about it yesterday with the Neoclouds versus Nvidia strategy where okay, well, if Nvidia actually does get DGX Cloud Lepton off the ground and if you're on there, you're going to get so much more business and your utilization rate is going to be so much higher, but you're not going to have the leverage over the customer. That it's always this like careful dance. And then ultimately, if an app store does emerge, everyone gripes over, you know, the 30% tax like the Apple tax is the same thing. You could wind up there in the age of AI. But I think from a consumer perspective like having a consolidated billing relationship would be great. Even in the world where computer use can go like plop down your credit card and set up an API key, it's still nicer to have like one point of billing and then true like the buck stops with one model. It's like okay, you want to do this, it's going to be 10 bucks. Is it cool?
Yeah. The same reason that some people want all the streaming services to be rebundled.
That and also why a lot of consumers are like, 'Yeah, it's awesome when I subscribe to something on the app store because it's so easy to unsubscribe in the app store. You just go to your iOS subscriptions and you say, 'Look, I'm canceling that.' And it can't be, 'Why are you canceling it? Make sure you call us.' It's like all that annoying stuff that happens when you're on like some website and they're like, 'Well, you actually have to call between, you know, 11 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. and we take a 2-hour lunch in there and you got to explain yourself and listen to our pitch for why you should stick around.' Apple like makes it one...
Turn down the discount to stay.
Exactly. Exactly. Apple like turns all that off and so that could be this like complex dynamic. App store economics are always complex. But it might not matter because you can just go and with computer use say like yeah, like set up this API key, use this credit card. It's a little hesitant still and I don't think it's polished among any of the models. A lot of them really hesitate. They're like they'll even say like don't give me your API key. Please put that in your environment. Don't give me your credit card number. I don't want it actually leaking or anything like that. Like even if you are being bold, the models will often be really hesitant. I remember I was trying to use computer use to send an iMessage. I was like, 'Go do a bunch of stuff. I'm gonna leave. I don't want you to send me a push notification. Just text me. I have a text message open in iMessage. The window's right there. Go in that box and tell me when you're done and then I'll get it on my phone. It'll just come from me.' And it spent so many tokens being like, I don't want to screw this up. This is high stakes. Like it really knew that like botching an iMessage computer use thing could be like ruinous, you know, because it winds up texting. So...
It would be over. It would be over.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It would be cut. And so it's interesting. The other reflection is like this whole app store concept, this whole sign in with ChatGPT, bring your inference around, let's partner on distribution, let's integrate into the app, let's be the front door. Sam originally launched this three years ago at the very first Dev Day 2023. They had a product called GPTs and there was the GPT store and everyone was like wow, okay, I totally see the vision and then it was like three years of like languishing and like tussling and back and forth.
Yeah. And there's just been so many integrations like Walmart and Apple where people have said, 'Okay, I want to do an integration, but it has to be really, really good and to my favor.' And then it breaks down. Like the Siri integration that's, you know, going away because they're migrating to Gemini is actually atrocious. Like you will ask a question and it's like, 'Yeah, of course it didn't work.' You ask a basic question and it will say like oh do you want to ask ChatGPT and then you need to click a button and then you click a button and it gives you an answer and if you want to go deeper you can say open in ChatGPT and then it opens it but ChatGPT doesn't get all the context of whatever happened before. It just opens the app and so it's like the worst possible broken flow because like both companies were like begrudgingly working together basically and being like look neither of us want to work together, but the boss has signed a deal. So, we got to do something here. So, let's both...
Let's both fight it out anyway. It'll be interesting to see what happens. I guess like my, you know, they're pretty enterprisey right now. Like the integrations are pretty enterprisey, but I'm interested in like your thesis of will there be like a Flappy Bird moment or like a small dev team that figures out like hey if we can be the victor in the tool that gets pulled off the shelf when you know there's 1.2 billion users probably like you know they'll always give that quote about like 400 million people are asking about health questions. It's like there's probably like 400 million people that are asking about, you know, I don't know, some niche thing. And if you can be the tool that funnels and you actually use it as the top of funnel, you could see someone, we could definitely wind up talking to a founder who's like, 'Oh yeah, I actually like basically figured out how to be the tool of choice. I log in, I monetize the inference better, and I scale to 100 million ARR in like a couple months.'
Which is interesting. At the same time, there's gonna be a lot of companies like this would be like such a solution for Instinct, right? But they would never do it because they're trying to actually go up against on the core feature.
And so there's this weird dynamic where, you know, Noah was on Invest Like the Best being like, I spend 75% of my time trying to secure compute. I'm burning so much money. I got to raise all this money. And like the solution's like right there. But it's like if you take that apple, like you leave the garden, like you're in trouble probably. But who knows anyway.
Yeah. So on the enterprise side, OpenAI announced a partnership with B10, our friends over there. Cool. Just a few days ago at Dev Day. That's like a really good enterprise example because you can now basically get access to open models through your overall like OpenAI commitment, which is cool and it's native in Codex. And then the other use cases that I'm thinking about are like you know all those like generate headshot apps right that have been super popular. Those are super compute intensive and so being able to use...
Basically get access to Imagen 2.5.
Sure. Sure. Sure. Is pretty cool.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where like you've built an interesting funnel, you've built an interesting harness, you've built an interesting wrapper, but your compute is scaling really unfortunately and you have the ability to like offtake there is very, very interesting.
Anyway, let me tell you about Public Investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. We might have to do away with the Christmas because the stinger's going under the Christmas.
Wow. And he doesn't even break through the Christmas lights, you know, the 3D.
We're working on it. We're working on it.
Oh well. Anything else going on? Any sort of contentious debates?
Yeah, sort of Santa related.
True. Christmas related, you know. Yeah, the Pope is duking it out.
Trey is saying Kugan's war on Christmas. Yeah. What do you have against Christmas, John? We're in Q4 and you're asking, 'Put away the decorations. It's kind of distracting.' Do we really need them? Leave it. Leave it. Leave it. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
Well, the Pope chimed in on the AI debate again and he's been posting for a while. This year has been a number of discussions and every time he writes something it causes a bigger discussion in Silicon Valley of course. Pope Leo said in this era of artificial intelligence it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference even before an aesthetic one between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity. Very interesting. What did PG reply? He said, 'Since your opinions are meant to last, you should consider what you'll say when AIs are trained on visual experience as well as art made by human artists because that is presumably coming.'
Well, what prompted this, John?
Walter Isaacson chimed in. Popes have been hiring good artists for a long time. Yeah. What prompted this? There's an article in the New York Times about the interactions between Anthropic and the Vatican. Danny summed it up. Anthropic: Claude has a soul. Pope Leo says, 'Nah.' Anthropic says, 'Please say Claude has a soul.' Leo says, 'Nah, here's a book-length explanation why that's not true.' Anthropic says, 'We're pretty sure Claude has a soul.' And Pope Leo responds with this. Yeah, a lot of people are duking it out here. The bombshell report in the New York Times, Christopher Hail sums it up here. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV's AI encyclical launch in May because the Pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious. Olah's team then privately lobbied the Pope's advisers, quote, 'to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously.' Pope Leo XIV held firm for months. Anthropic wined and dined theologians and religious scholars under non-disclosure agreements hoping they would bless the idea that Claude has moral standing. Okay, so people are getting worried. They're debating is it God or is it computer? Neil Kassla chimes in. Vatican will sign.
Oh, I guess these are various scholars. I was like it's pretty funny to go to the Vatican and be like, 'Hey, I got to talk to you about something, but we sign this NDA first.'
Yeah. No, I think it was religious scholars that were like visiting Anthropic HQ and they're like, 'We'll give you the full tour, but you sign an NDA.' I mean, also I would be interested in like how that NDA was released because like there's sometimes when you just go to a corporate office and like on your way in they like take a picture of your ID and sign this non-disclosure agreement. Like that's standard for like a lot of just office visits broadly, but it sounds a lot crazier when you're like, we made the Pope sign an NDA, you know, we made God sign an NDA. Neil Kassla doesn't like it. He says, 'I am increasingly concerned about the AI psychosis inside Anthropic. Imagine zealously trying to build something you believe to be a conscious god while running around and claiming it will end the world.'
Yeah. And to their credit, they're not claiming that it will end the world. They're saying that there is a real possibility.
Yeah. It's interesting that there's less of a white pill there. Like I don't know, there's a world where you're like yeah we're going to build God and like it's going to be amazing, like p(doom) negative a thousand, like it's going to be the best thing ever. There are no risks because it's God. It's...
Yeah. It's the creator. It's going to love us. Like it's going to be amazing. It's going to save us.
You know, that would follow, but there is a little bit of like cognitive dissonance that it's like, well, what kind of god is it? Is it...
Well, and I think what a lot of people should be asking themselves right now is is Claude force conscious, right? Because...
I mean that is the intelligence powering the Salesforce sort of ecosystem in many ways. So maybe at what point do you have to ask is Salesforce, you know, if Salesforce is sort of embodied by Claude, is Salesforce conscious?
Salesforce has been godlike for decades though people understand that it's a deity for customer relationship management.
Right. Byrne Hobart says, 'Looking at the current debates about Anthropic makes me feel guilty for not keeping up with some academic domains. I honestly had no idea that we'd solved consciousness and determined which substrates can and can't support it. Thought that one was more up in the air.' He's joking, of course. I haven't found anything from someone in Anthropic saying models are conscious, just that they might be now or in the future. And yeah, that was something interesting in the New York Times article. Olah really goes back and forth. He's like, I don't know. And I thought that was interesting that he was not, he was advocating for, he's a 'we got to talk about it' guy basically that he was saying like I don't know, I don't have a firm position and through like multiple reports it's not like he was ever like I'm convinced of this and I'm trying to pull people towards this discussion. He was just like yeah this is an interesting question. Consciousness is unintuitive. Why the heck is there such a thing as the experience of being me in the first place? What's the cutoff for which things can get it when it seems hard to be confident when everyone's operating on an n of one view? Yeah, very odd. On the question of moral agency, we got to go back to the pigs. We got to go back to the pigs because the time-honored adage is never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it. But if the pigs like it, do you have a moral duty to wrestle with them? I'm thinking about starting a nonprofit that would pay humans to wrestle with pigs. Yes, they're going to get dirty, but the pig likes it. And the utility that's created by the pig enjoying the wrestling would be offset by the cost of getting dirty. So, it's a utilitarian calculus really. And so I think this could become like the new hot nonprofit cause like mosquito net, shrimp welfare. I feel like pig wrestling. I think it's obviously sort of...
Could be something that attracts billions of dollars of nonprofit donations potentially, which in many ways, you know, if they can attract that kind of capital would end up flowing back into the tech ecosystem, right? Because many of these foundations will...
Potentially you could monetize it too. You could film it, you could turn it into a sport, you could maybe gamble on it even. We get some prediction markets. Who's going to, how long can you wrestle with this pig before you get money? Potentially minutes, hours. We're gonna find out one way or another. And the pig's gonna like it.
Let's see what Gomez says. You have a brilliant, brilliant mind, John.
He's building a god of his own over at Cohere. He says it's quite disturbing that Anthropic has been running a campaign to lobby the major faiths to adopt their own philosophical interpretation of AI rather than taking input from them. 'I've been fortunate to spend time at the Vatican.' Whoa, we get it, bro. 'And I've always asked for advice and guidance, answered the questions asked of me and been grateful to them for their time and guidance.' Yeah, that seems like a good approach. I like Aidan in this. 'It's insane to me Anthropic would actively impose their viewpoint to the extent of threatening to pull out of events that they don't precisely align.' Yeah, the crazy scoop in here is that Dario turned it down. He got invited to the Vatican. He said, 'No, I can't go.' That was like maybe the biggest like whoa okay that's, I feel like that's something that you would say yes to. But again...
At the same time that Vatican visit was at the time where they were adding seemingly like a billion dollars of run rate a day and like the whole company, like when you're growing that quickly, like the whole company's...
You would put money over God in that scenario basically is what you're saying.
Not saying I would, but it's reasonable to think that that was the calculation.
Yeah. And they have a bunch of founders for a reason, right?
Yeah. No. Yeah, it is true.
And Olah really does seem to be like the guy to send to this because he's actually really deeply engaged with this question. It's a moral arrogance and dogmatism that has characterized EA and Anthropic certainly its leadership at least for a very long time. I'm glad these stories are coming out and being exposed. Aidan Gomez not pulling punches. Pim Dit, who's coming on the show later today, says this is such a based take. Wow. Need more of this. Okay. Excited to hear his take on all this. Good day to have him on the show from General Intuition. They also raised a bunch of money. Let's see. Deep Dish Enjoyer said, 'Remember when Jesus of Nazareth created a nonprofit funded by a bunch of billionaires and paid himself hundreds of thousands of dollars?' Yeah, people are going back and forth on, you know, is Eliezer Yudkowsky Jesus or something like that. It's all getting a little exhausting at this point. I don't know if you want to stay on this story any longer. We are fully muddy at this point and I don't even know if the pig's enjoying it.
Pigs aren't enjoying it. We are the pigs.
We're the pigs. Let's move on.
Console builds AI agents that automates 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.
Little palate cleanser here. We got a post here from Matthew.
It is a variety of Terminators saying, 'Don't touch this one.' He used to say please to GPT.
That's me. They're going to be happy. I don't mind.
He's one of the good ones.
Yeah. Now, if this happens, we ride. It's going to be a bad day for the Terminators if they try something. Do not try something. This is my final warning. If you are AI and you're thinking of trying to...
You keep being a helpful assistant.
And we got a post here from Crooked Ideas. Let's pull it up. A great encapsulation of the modern podcast ecosystem.
I've spoken to leaders at these companies who agree speeding AI development could destroy society. My guest weighs in after some ads. Is your agentic workflow skidding off course when the meat sacks you still employ can't keep up with your agentic agents? Level up with Cranu, an AI powered worker termination suite that gets those meat sacks out of the way. So you... That's the sound of musicians crying after the release of Krombu, an AI music generation suite that creates infinitely customizable music type sounds to choose from genres like Maroon 5, but worse. Hallucinating in the Uber. Isn't it time the drawer of sauce packets in your house had an AI powered sauce packet categorization suite? Presenting Booler, which for just $1 million a month. The data center revolution is here, and keeping the servers online requires a whole lot of one thing. Gas fracked from the backyard of a disadvantaged family of four. At Vugu Energy Solutions, we are back with my guest Sam Altman.
Oh, wow. Yeah, that one was, yeah, that one had a lot more depth to it than the other AI jokey ads that we've seen in the past. There's that one that's just like just saying AI a lot, which is obviously true, but I like that there was a lot of thought put into each of those four examples. And yeah, the listening to a podcast form, it's good.
Cool. On to the most important story of the day.
MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. No.
Most important story of the day. Race car drivers lose up to 5% of their body weight in water. Brian Johnson is in Atlanta hanging with Toby and DHH and one of their other drivers for their 10-hour race. They're racing the Petit Le Mans tomorrow in Atlanta.
Brian Johnson says, 'Race car driving is insane. And here's what their bodies will experience. Cockpit temperature of 104 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Core body temp climbs to 102 degrees. Multi-layer fireproof suit. Sweat barely evaporates. Heart rate of 140 to 170 beats per minute. Up to 4.2 G-force. Up to 220 lb on the brake pedal. Fluid loss up to 5 kg or 11 lb of body weight. Burning 600 to 900 calories per hour. At 2% dehydration reaction times drop.' They're going to be driving in the LMP2 class. There is the GTD class which is, you know, it's like GTD or sorry GT3 style race cars and then GTP which is like the factory prototype racing and then LMP2 is the more like pro-am prototype class. So going to be a very fun day of racing tomorrow. Brian says, 'I've personally experienced some of the above things. Core body temp of 102 degrees Fahrenheit after 34 minutes in a 200 degree sauna. 3G force in my airplane.'
Didn't know he had an airplane. That's great.
Non-evaporative clothing. Physical exertion of stomping 200 lb. What was... What are you doing, Brian? You're making me ask more questions than you're answering. Severe dehydration. So, I... we got to ask maybe all of these were at the same time. Maybe he was in a 200 degree sauna in his airplane while he was experiencing 3Gs in non-evaporative clothing while stomping 200 lb and facing severe dehydration. I like to imagine that this was all going on at once. But then he follows up and says, 'But never all at once inside of a race car for two and a half hours straight, but a large pig is right around two struggling.' I don't like the way this sounds.
Stick to wrestling chunks.
Anyways, LMP2 is 603 horsepower.
My car beats that. Should we give him an opportunity to take the Blackwing for a spin? What's going on here?
I like it. No, the nature of being a motorsports spectator is that no matter how fast the cars seem like they're going, you can't possibly even imagine what the drivers are experiencing. Like in other sports, you see someone running, sweating, sprinting, out of breath, all these different things. In a race car, you have the suit, the helmet, they're in a cockpit, far away. And so, even though they have cameras in the cockpit, it's just not the same. But anyways, this race is going to be going on for 10 hours tomorrow. I'm excited. I'm excited to watch.
Yeah. Well, speaking of Toby Loco over at Shopify, let me tell you about 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. How many people are actually paying for this AI thing?
It's only 2% of US households pay for AI.
This feels low. Co-founder Nick says, 'We live in an X bubble. Only 2% of US households pay for AI.' 25% of households pay for SiriusXM. Have you ever subscribed to SiriusXM?
I don't... I wonder how this gets counted because sometimes you buy a car in a company, right? Yep. And then maybe it rolls over or something, but...
Well, I think they might be counting... I think it might be like sold in with the car, right? Because that's user acquisition for SiriusXM. No one wants SiriusXM and so they're thinking like maybe if they try it they'll stick around.
Yeah. And I'm sure to like... I've never activated the free SiriusXM.
Yeah. And I'm not sure when you activate it, you have to add a credit card and so then it does roll over.
Yeah. So maybe you need to go a little bit more like... because 55% pay for cloud storage across probably Google, Dropbox, Box, etc. And or iCloud. And so I wonder if does this include people who are on X premium accounts that includes Grok, right? Or like if you have a Google account that is on a premium subscription and got you a little bit of Gemini, does that count in here? Like there's a lot of bundling that's happening in...
SiriusXM did around 8.5 billion of revenue last year. Currently trading their market cap is around 8.5 billion.
Yeah. And so yeah, the business is generally on the way out, but relatively robust in the meantime. But yeah, I mean, if you're doing like 20 bucks a month and you're at 2% of households, like that's still like a couple billion of revenue direct to consumer, but it feels low. It does seem like regardless, like this is obviously directionally correct at the very least like household AI, paid AI subscription penetration is low. And it is a vindication of like the ads model is going to be the one that wins. People will use these. You see it at the top of the funnel and yet a lot of people are on free plans across the major apps. Like getting the actual upgrade, the people that are upgrading are finding ways to use the apps for work.
Yeah. I'm like even earlier, like I was always expensing an AI subscription to some business because I was like that's what I'm really using it for. There's very few people that would pay for like a personal productivity agent and there's just so many other ways to monetize as we've seen.
Yeah. And that's why when you look at those numbers, you have to assume that a meaningful percentage of them are showing up as consumer but are actually like SMB buyers.
Agree. Agree. Where do you want to go next?
There's a new South Park episode that depicts a town infested with podcast obsessed billionaires. Jason over at This Week in Startups is saying, 'What?'
Feels like it's made for him, made for all of us. I don't even know when something goes out on TV. I don't usually know how to get access to it.
It's funny. Yeah. That we're learning about this from like a Forbes article. But Tyler, can you find out if it's out and if it's out if you could watch it at like 10x speed and then kind of report back in a few minutes and give us your review.
Yeah. Tesla stock jumps 5% on better than expected vehicle deliveries report. The delivery figure represented a 2% decline from a year earlier but an unexpected increase from the prior period. Tesla stock was down 21% for the year as of Thursday's close trailing all of its mega cap tech peers. Okay. So, I was not surprised to see this at all. I think that Tesla and the reason for that is purely anecdotal, purely vibes based analysis. I ordered a Tesla like two months ago.
And just got it this week.
Yeah. It wasn't like it was sitting in lots and there were so many rumors of like, oh, all the Cybertrucks are getting sold to SpaceX. It's this circular deal. There were pictures of like a lot that was filled with Teslas. They're not moving. And when I was trying to buy one and they'll be like, 'You have to wait six months.'
And when I was ordering mine, I was intentionally speccing it to try to reduce the lead time. Like there's like people online talk about like if you spec it this way or you get this version...
But basically there's less demand. There's still a lot of demand for the like...
Because there's only one color, right? Yeah. There's no like you can't get deviated stitching.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean there's a bunch of like more minor...
They have a tailor-made program.
They should. They should.
They should. But here's the thing. Okay.
I had the experience this week of autopilot.
It worked perfectly for like 50 minutes.
And then I had to intervene.
And going from the car driving itself to suddenly I have to drive my car in traffic is the most jarring, brutal experience because you realize how insane it is that we still all drive our cars. Like once you try it, I don't think you can go back. Especially for... and this is, I've always loved driving. Like I've never really minded commutes. They're obviously great if you can avoid them, but even going on a 20-minute drive to get an errand is generally enjoyable for me, but when it comes to the daily commute, I just don't think... like every single day there's some amount of people that are experiencing autopilot for the first time. Yes. And it's the most viral experience because it is...
It's the first like technology that I've tried that actually feels like life-changing, especially if you're in the car for like 30 minutes a day, which a lot of people are.
And it's the most viral thing because it's so magical.
It feels like this thing that we should have had for a long time, but it's here now and it works.
Well, it was promised a decade ago by a bunch of companies. Everyone was like level five by 2020.
Yeah. And so it's here now and it works. And when you experience it, you tell all of your friends. And I think all these other auto manufacturers are, you know, if you rewind a year ago, everything that Elon had gone through with politics and facing competition overseas and more EVs coming online from a bunch of other manufacturers that are much better. They're much better built cars. Like I am incredibly happy with my Tesla and at the same time I can look at it from like 20 ft away and point out a bunch of issues with the build and it's...
Okay, I want to go through the good, the bad. I want to do a tier list.
Okay, tier list. Let's start the Cybertruck. The Cybertruck...
No, before we get to the tier list, I just wanted to finish my thought. Every other auto manufacturer that sells cars primarily for utility is like way more in trouble than I think generally people are picking up on.
Yeah. And the reason for that is when we have anybody that's in the automotive space on the show, we ask them like, 'When do you think you're going to be able to get autonomous self-driving working?' And they all kind of like chuckle and laugh and you can tell it's like could be like seven years out.
And Doug used the word appliance. He's like the Model 3 is the best appliance car. It's like, and DHH has talked about this, where it's like his Model Y is like the best appliance car, but then he wants something with a gas engine, a stick shift, three pedals, like he wants something that's super engaging for driving. Yeah. And then if he's not driving, he wants to be driven. And those are two separate categories now. And it's like, if you're an automaker, which one are you in? And the thing that having only experienced this for a few days...
To me it's 10 times more magical to have self-driving in your own car than a Waymo.
And the reason for that is like you're just, when you call a car on an app, you're used to not having to drive. You're not gaining back time. And so I think that Tesla self-driving is like more viral, is already more viral.
Yeah, because it's, you know, and the purchasing activity that that virality is going to drive is going to be insane. So, all these other automakers are in big, big trouble. I think that Tesla is going to surprise... everyone's focused on Cybercab, but I think the core car business is going to surprise to the upside. And I hope these other car companies are taking this as seriously as they should. I last year or I think in Q2 of this year actually, I talked to a guy that has a bunch of different dealerships across multiple brands. And I was like, are people coming in and saying like, I want to get this car, but I really want self-driving? And he was saying like, it's not really an issue yet. And I'm like, you are I think in for a rude awakening because...
I will end up telling people. And as like a pretty hardcore car enthusiast, I will end up telling people I would never buy a car meant for daily driving and commuting that didn't have self-driving again, period. Yep. I just would not do it.
And I'll happily buy the weekend cars, whatever, and enjoy that. But 99% of car buyers are just like, I'll take one car, please, and I want it to be able to do stuff for me on the weekend and fit my weekdays. And so I'm just shocked at how seemingly how little these other manufacturers have been worrying about it because I think it's almost existential.
So, it's been slow.
Anyways, tier list time. Tier list. Reviewing the Tesla Cybertruck Cyber Beast. Let's start with the power. 850 horsepower, massive torque. How valuable is that? Where do you put that?
So, I find the Cybertruck like self-driving, as in I am piloting it.
Um, the opposite of self-driving.
Uh, I find the actual driving experience horrific. Okay. Like I find it like really unpleasant to drive. Um, it feels very detached from like the road. It's very like jerky. Okay.
So the core driving experience when you're behind the wheel, when you're piloting it.
Actually, F tier. Like I remember my Prius days. Like that is a good ride.
Oh, it's worse than a Prius.
Like bombing around in a Prius is excellent. I put that at A tier.
Okay. Okay. Um, what about the top speed, towing capacity? 130 mph, capable of towing 11,000 lbs. You think you'll ever use that? Is that a benefit? Is that good?
Um, I don't know. I don't know if I'll use it. Having a... it's certainly not why I got it, but it's nice to have a truck bed.
So, but the towing capacity, where's that? C tier?
It's kind of like a nice-to-have feature.
Yeah, maybe a nice-to-have. Not even really a nice-to-have. It's like... Okay. Okay. So C. See, C here. Okay. Strongly C.
Uh, what about the fact that it has the ability to power share? It includes 120-volt and 240-volt bed outlets, bidirectional power sharing capabilities. You can run tools. You can power your whole house with it.
Mobile podcast studio. I think it's a nice feature.
Uh, B tier. B tier. There we go. Steer-by-wire. Steer-by-wire. Very controversial.
Yeah. Yeah. When it's self-driving, it's amazing because you can tell the whole car is designed to not like... it really is, it's not just the yoke, but it's really not meant to be driven by a person. It's meant to be driven by the computer.
And when you drive it, it feels horrible.
But you've taken a sharp turn in a Raptor. You've now taken a sharp turn manually in a Cybertruck. The feeling of steer-by-wire. How would you rate that?
I think it's fine. It can be done well, but I don't think it's done well in the...
So C tier. C tier. C tier. Okay.
C tier. But I would say by-wire with self-driving assist is S tier. It's like incredibly smooth. It's perfect.
What about the four-wheel steering? How has the actual turning radius...
The turning radius for a vehicle of that size is S tier. S tier.
I've never... Okay. That's important for a big vehicle. Yeah. Got it.
Having previously owned a murdered-out lifted Ford Raptor, it is remarkably better. I mean, that car is like one of the most fun cars you can own. And it is impossible to park, but it's tough parking.
And adaptive air suspension. It adjusts the ride height automatically, offering up to 16 and 12 inches of clearance. How is it actually sitting in it? Are you rumbling around or does it feel smooth? How would you rate the ride experience, the suspension specifically?
I think the suspension is fine. Like it's relatively smooth. You can tell they tried to spend like as little money on that feature as possible, but it's pretty smooth.
But again, you have to remember the LA roads are effectively like, you know, rock zone. Yeah.
So, B tier. B tier. Okay. Okay. What about the minimalist cabin? They're calling the cabin minimalist, Jordi. Is that a pro or a con?
I think the cabin's pretty nice. Okay, I'm going to go A tier.
Like the materials are generally plasticky, right? Or C tier.
Okay. Materials of the cabin, C tier.
And there's some funny features where if you press the button to open the door and if you do the manual pull, which you need for safety reasons, it literally pops up an alert. It's like, you're going to damage the window seal if you do that. Which feels really, really funny because it's like, okay, you designed this thing where if you... again, and the whole thing you have to look at it is like it is a computer that happens to have wheels.
And so there's, I'm sure, things with your computer where it's like, yeah, you could turn it off if you unscrew it and do these things. But you should just hit the off button. Don't try to physically turn off the device.
Okay. And then the last, I think we know where you're going to close out on this, but the self-driving itself, the capabilities of the self-driving system.
S tier. There we go. Okay.
Well, that's... Yeah. As a utility vehicle. Fantastic. As an appliance vehicle.
As an appliance. Very, very good. Okay. Well, yeah, Tesla's on a tear because of this. They're doing well.
Uh, what about Instinct? Uh, Anakah Benning says, 'My Instinct just randomly ordered her bikinis.' She says she's not ready for AGI. What happened? Is this real? She's texting her Instinct agent and says, 'I didn't authorize this Monday swim order. Can you please cancel?' And Instinct says, 'You're right. And that's on me.' The AI's sheepish admission of messing up is just so funny to me. 'Still, a checkout click went through Wednesday evening before you'd approved anything. I'm canceling it now. It's already marked shipped. So if they can't cancel, I'll set up the return and get the store credit restored. I'll tell you what they say.' Cancel. And then their policy says no cancels after placing. So it needs an urgent exception request. Email the CEO. Get ready to email the CEO.
Um, yeah, I think we are in the hallucination era of this. It's all gonna get new weird things. They're gonna mess around and stuff. But anyway, um, oh, wait. Uh, Skydance Paramount Warner Brothers Discovery has a new name. It's just Skydance.
Yeah, that's exciting. So, David Ellison joined X for the first post ever, right?
Let's watch the video. Let's watch the video. Let's throw it on.
A movie about movies. Let's see what they got. Can you name any of these movies? What's this? Do you have any idea?
Whoa. He knows. Look at this. I'm not going to be able to name anything.
You don't know that one. You don't know that one. Oh, Ben's showing off now. Yeah. Show off, Ben. Go off.
Yeah, they don't just live on screens.
Says, 'We have big goals for Skydance. We intend to pursue them with passion, imagination, and willingness to take smart risks. At the same time, we'll honor what makes Paramount and Warner Brothers special, giving both studios the opportunity to grow, tell more great stories, and bring those stories to even broader audiences around the world. Couldn't be more excited about what we're going to build together.'
So, is the actual app and platform going to be called Skydance?
Yeah. Uh, well, the company I think is going to merge into Skydance.
But I'm wondering, is there a possibility in the future that we could get Skydance Max? Yeah, I was thinking they should at least for a couple months rename HBO Skydance and then rename it back to HBO and then go back to Skydancebo and then back to HBO and then HB Skydance and then back to HBO because you got to keep people guessing with that brand.
Uh, it's not like everyone knows what HBO is.
Putting aside the debt load on the business, this bundle is extremely compelling.
Totally. And I think this is very disappointing for Netflix, I think, to see how all this has come together. Like I think they obviously can both coexist and consumers will pay for both, but this combination of assets and IP is super compelling from live to news to...
Like CBS has some of the lower-tier content that you can just throw on in the background, like the laundry television that Netflix has gotten so good at. Like CBS has that in the catalog. Like there's a bunch of great shows that people can just watch and it's just serialized stuff. So it's not like it's just Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight that's on there and that's the only crown jewel, although that is a very valuable crown jewel. They got to bring Nolan back to Marvel or not Marvel, DC. DC, because if they can reboot the DC universe with Nolan, bring him back for Superman, put everything together, let him run free, the Dark Knight trilogy extended, that would be fantastic. Although, I think he might be done with his comic book era. Um, anyway,
Uh, the next post I was gonna pull up was deleted.
Yeah. Yeah, drama. There's plenty of drama in the timeline.
Um, oh, Elon's taking shots at Delta. He says, 'The best way to sandbox an AI is to put it on a Delta flight. It will have no chance of accessing the internet.' Boom. Uh, 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. Elon's also in the news because he's going back and forth with Siobhan Zillis. Very dramatic, but we'll let you sort of dig into that one.
Um, uh, we were on a United flight and they did have, uh, Starlink. I think it was the first one. And pretty good. Pretty good, but I don't know. We'll see. We'll see if it actually shifts people over.
Uh, John Palmer says, 'Flying on Delta is a high-status move because it signals that you're already post-economic and don't have to work on the plane. I can see many OpenAI and Anthropic employees switching to Delta after the IPOs.'
Uh, was going off. He fired off a bunch of Delta content. This one was even better. 'Not a phone in sight. Just people living in the moment.' That's Delta.
That's Delta. Wow. There's a lot of pressure. Didn't the Delta CEO put out some statements saying, 'Oh, we don't need Starlink. It's fine.'
Uh, you will need it, but who knows? I think it's similar to self-driving where a lot of people just won't have that at the top of their mind. Like a lot of people go to the dealership and they're just like, 'I want this color car' or 'I want a car in this price range' or whatever. They're like, 'Cool.' And a lot of people will be like, 'Yeah, I want the flight that's the cheapest' or 'I want the flight that goes at this time' and they'll just be like, 'I'll buy whatever flight is there.'
And says, 'United is a blue-collar airline for knowledge workers who need to work on their laptops even when they're on the plane. When you retire, you can finally upgrade to the luxury airline, Delta, where you can just relax without Wi-Fi or screens around.' That's very funny.
Uh, anyway, uh, what else is going on? There's a mansion section we got to get to. Where's the mansion section today? Oh, Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck put out some... there's a video of him being interviewed. We should listen to this 1 minute 30 second video of Ben Affleck AI.
In order to be a video model that's successful, you just need a huge volume of video. Initially it learns things like what is red, you know, and then it learns more and more specific information. To get to the cinematic information, it's the sort of last stage. And in order to obtain that information, I was concerned that most of the models being used had trained on my peers, people I know's work. And I was uncomfortable with that and I thought that's not really a viable business. So I sort of created that last layer which was an understanding of cinema and cinematic components that did not need to be...
And so how did you create the last layer without doing all of the, you know, essentially copying of what came before it?
Because open models, just like open language models, open video models are available to be trained on. So you just unfreeze the weights and you say, 'Okay, this 8,631. Now here's step 8,632.' So you could take existing open models that didn't work very well and that weren't cinematic, but that had just aggregated a bunch of social media footage or random video online and teach them to meet cinematic standards. And so it's fine to train on our content, the workflow...
I think he's kind of saying like train on everything, right? He's describing what's actually going on. What you're doing to everybody to learn from. They retain the proprietary nature. In other words, they benefit from the learning that they're creating.
This is funny. Ben Affleck. All right. Gather around. So, you want to freeze the base weights first. Learning rate to 2E minus 4. Uh, he's in the thick of it. Um, yeah, I remember a year ago some AI lab founder was telling me like, yeah, he was like, 'I ran into Ben Affleck at some event and he used compute as a noun.' And I was like, that's when I knew he was dialed in.
Yeah. When he went on Joe Rogan, everyone was like, 'Oh, wow. He's a... Yeah, he's been deep in this.'
Um, uh, Ben Affleck reveals that seeing OpenAI models made him call Matt Damon and warned 'we're finished' before realizing its researchers knew little about how movies are made. So, uh, anyway, what else is in the timeline? I want to find the mansion section because there were some interesting houses.
Jake Paul says, 'Nvidia is at an all-time high figure, building a robot every hour. In five years, a robot will fight for a world title, and I'll be its promoter.'
That is where we're going.
Um, billionaire Peter Thiel is behind the $130 million purchase of Casa Encantada. The winning bidder of the Los Angeles estate was an LLC. And this is the circa 1930s Bair estate once prized as one of Los Angeles's grandest homes. It has a Wikipedia page. Correct, Tyler?
What stuck out on the Wikipedia page? What does it take for a house to earn a Wikipedia page these days?
I mean, I think it's just like very historical. Uh, yeah, built in 1938 originally.
Does it have a golf course on it? Oh, no. That's the Bel-Air Country Club. It's just next to it, but it does have a putting green. So, okay, there's some features here. Let's see. We're going to do another tier list. 8.5 acres estate. 8.5 acres.
Where are you putting that?
Not too many bedrooms. Fish and guests stink after three days.
So, why do you need seven bedrooms?
Well, six kids. No, I just think sometimes it's nice to have a number of guests at the same time.
I think this is in the... Oh, I wonder if this is seven bedrooms in the entire property. Uh, it's twice set the record for the most expensive private home sale ever. First $12.4 million in 1980 and again in 2000 for $94 million. Not a lot of appreciation from 2000 to today. It's been 26 years, but it's only gone up by 30%.
Uh, let's see what else is going on here. Um, longtime home of the late financier and telecom mogul Gary Winnick and his wife. The property was subject of a contentious foreclosure battle after Gary's death. What do you think about living in a home where the previous owner was a financier and telecom mogul? Is that good energy to live in?
Mogul's great. I mean, I obviously prefer a tycoon.
Oh, sure. But I think there's a tycoon in there now. So the next owner will get to enjoy the...
Well, that's a great provenance. You know, mogul, tycoon.
It's on an upward trajectory of ownership.
Magnate could be next. Could be next.
Uh, Gary, who founded Global Crossing, we talked about this guy. Yeah. Well, with a promise to lay undersea fiber optic cable around the world, was once said to be LA's richest man. After his death, it became clear that he was severely strapped for cash and deeply in debt. What tier is deeply in debt? Underrated, uh, overrated?
It's, uh, it depends on how you come out the other side. We've never been afraid of leverage here.
Well, he didn't live to feel the unfortunate.
Well, I mean, Global Crossing went down bankruptcy in the dot-com era.
So he went a little too hard, but he got out at least a little bit, it seems like, before all of that.
Uh, Gary Winnick donated millions of dollars to the Los Angeles Zoo. What do you think about donating to the LA Zoo? Do you like zoos?
I gotta... I mean... I like how you're really wrestling with it.
Put it in a tier. Put it in a tier.
I... it's tough because speaking for myself, I would never choose to go to the zoo.
But speaking on behalf of my family, I'll probably... I'm probably in zoos a few times a year.
So, I think it's an S-tier experience for the children.
Okay. But yeah, sounds like there's some caveats there. What about a menagerie?
Yeah. It's basically a private zoo.
And uh, menagerie is deeply underrated. Uh, I recently discovered that there was an illegal menagerie in my town featuring zebras, hundreds of rabbits because they just multiply and multiply and multiply. Um, people need to consider if you're going to bend the rules, bend them around.
Gold says, 'Jordi, rent a giraffe and take it for a spin on the track.' I like that. I like that. Putting zoos at racetracks where you could actually ride the animals around.
Oh, Conrad Hilton lived in this house. Interesting.
Okay. Later owners, design, architecture, and grounds. Uh, it does have a putting green. I know you're not a big golfer, but do you like putting green as an amenity on an 8.5-acre estate? Where... what tier would putting green go?
