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Catch us up to speed on what's happening in Replit World. The new launches, the AI powered creative suite. And then I have a million other questions to ask you. Awesome. Yeah. So a few things are happening. One is, you might have seen we signed this big letter with Nvidia and Microsoft around open models. We're really excited about open models. Look, for two years, Anthropic was the undisputed king of coding agents. And right now actually it's not just GPT that's caught up, but also the open source models. KMEK3 is an amazing model. It's at maybe quarter the price, sometimes even better. And it's also a fantastic design model. So we have this new. What's that? I saw the arena leaderboard. We were talking to Joe Weisenthal about this an hour ago. That Kimmy K3 really outperformed spiky on front end, which is. We were talking about how it changed the conversation because if it spiked on bioweapon development, that would be a different conversation. But if we wanted to spike anywhere, front end is probably a good place for it to spike. Absolutely, absolutely. It generates beautiful aesthetics. It's the first model that I see that is actually trying to reason about design. If you read the traces, that's the cool thing about open models, they kind of show you the traces now. Sure. Those models don't show you the traces anymore. It things about page structure and layout and aesthetics and things like that. And so Replit design for one, is the first product in the market that's purely multimodal. We kind of, we eval every model on the face of the earth. Some of them are good at svg, others are good at animation, other are good at css. And so we created an environment that brings up the best of these models. You can also select the model you like. You want to design purely with Kimi, go ahead and do that. And so there's no other place on the Internet where you could do that. And kind of the motivation behind that is, you know, we've been on a now multi year crusade against slop. We don't want to be purveyors of slop on the Internet. Right. I mean, we're all inundated with tech slop. I mean, LinkedIn is sort of unusable at this point. But also all the apps kind of look the same because I haven't logged in and months. Yeah, it's not worth it, honestly. And so we're like, okay, how can we make it so that. Look, we think people largely have taste. It's hard for them to express how they want designs to look. And so we came up with this concept we're calling ambient intelligence, where you can design by point and click. And the way that happens is you sort of. Well, first of all, we give you a mood board. We integrate it with Mobin. It's typically a paid service. We're providing it for free. And so you can find inspirations from around the Internet, from the best UI UX websites and landing pages. You can drag and drop them into the canvas. Then when you click on an artifact on the canvas, it gives you options to continue the design. It's like, let's design another page. Let's look at different vibes, let's generate different variations. And so I'm someone who, I think I have a good taste. I know it looks beautiful, but I can't express it. I can't say it should be brutalist style, whatever. I don't have the language. And so by just pointing and clicking, I'm arriving at really cool designs. Like I'm working with an architect on our new office. I kind of know intuitively what I want my office to look like, but I can't go in Pinterest and search or whatever. So I went to replit, you know, put an initial prompt for things I like. It created kind of a mood board. I like point, click, point, click. An hour later I have something that. Exactly that I would like. I would never in 100 years be able to express it. So it's really designed for non designers. That's. Sometimes you don't, sometimes you don't have words for it, but you also just need to see every possible direction and then you can really hone in. And to me that's the. It's so crazy to me, I used to go, when I was like a teenager, I'd go on the freelance platforms and I'd do like a $5 project to make a logo. And I'd have a bunch of people do it. I'd spend whatever, I'd spend 25, 30 bucks on it. And I was so excited to get all these different kind of variations. And now it's actually as simple as a single prompt. You can just put in the prompt, make me 30 versions. You know, don't just make a logo, make 30 versions of the logo. So yeah, it's not even a prompt, it's two clicks on replit. And we're actually, we talk a lot internally about the post prompting world. Like I think we're entering a period where prompting is no longer needed. Some people will still do it, but it's not just in design. I'm sure you're kind of following the narrative around loops where you specify a high level intent and then agents prompt other agents. And so this is something we're increasingly focused on because again, people are really not good at prompting. It is like, you know, went from coding, which is a very low level kind of task, to prompting. Higher level. But it's still somewhat low level from how people think. The way people think is they. They specify an intent like I want to. I want my sales leads to get responses in five minutes. Sure. I don't want to say. I want the routing to be that way. And that way agents should be able to figure it out. How are you thinking about it? John wanted a large lever like a slot machine to not have to prompt anymore. Just pull the lever. Yes. If you could use that to start a new loop, that would be a very satisfying user experience. How are you thinking about. It'll be like these Vegas casinos. We're all. Yeah, exactly. How are you thinking about game development? There's been some very impressive web based games. There's been some acceleration in what I'm seeing on Steam with little niche games and it feels like that's a place where you're particularly just well set up. And I feel like a lot of. I don't want to characterize the replica community too precisely because it's huge. But it feels like there's a lot of folks who want to build a business. They go to Reddit, they want to build a tool, they go to Replit. If they want to build a game, they might be going there too. They probably already are. But it feels like that's the next thing to really fall, really get polished, really get deployed into the mobile app stores, into Unreal Engine and there's more harness there and partnerships that I could imagine you creating a really amazing product around. Yeah. I will say last week has been a huge week for AI for game developments. Right. I mean, for a long time. We actually spent some time about a year and a half ago building a game dev stack which still exists on Replit, but it wasn't very good. The models were really bad at 3D reasoning. Sure. And I think between Kimik 3 opus 5 now they're starting to actually be good at 3D 3D. And so it's something that we're paying attention to. There's actually already a large community of people who do a lot of 3D and games. Things On Replit, we recently launched a CAD integration so you can make real physical products. And we actually have some folks in the office that designed something on Replit and actually went and produced it. And so it's not just games. I think it'll start affecting robotics, they'll start affecting kind of physical industrial design. And so it's a very exciting time and we're paying attention to that. What's been the biggest source of growth for you this year? There's a lot of companies that are doing direct response advertising, influencer marketing, channel partnerships. There's so many different ways, just SEO, Geo. What stuck out to you as a particular, particularly valuable marketing strategy that's grown the platform? We do all of the above. I think we have one of the best performing UGC ads right now. I don't know if you saw that, but we have like a bunch of, bunch of videos where people. There's like one that's really going viral right now where, where like typically a woman is getting like an app from Replit, like a replica built app about like, you know, asking her out on a date. Oh, I think I have seen this. Yeah, yeah. 25 million views and all of that. And now a lot of our competitors are copying it. But the biggest source of growth has been enterprise. Interesting. And I think Replit differentiates in many ways. But one of the ways we differentiate is because we've been building the platform for a long time. We actually have a really deep stack. When you buy Replit, you get a hosting environment, deployment environment, security agents, you get admin controls, you get all this enterprise stuff. And we've been growing really fast in enterprise because vibe coding has been proven out. And now we've went from the consumer excitement that happened last year and now real adoption in enterprise affecting real impact on how people actually work. And the really cool thing is when we talk to our enterprise customers, it's like this is the most impactful tool, more so than the coworks of the world where you're sort of like you're doing the same thing. You're sitting in Excel or whatever. It's saving you 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there. This is actually automating entire workflows where it's like, I used to do this for 20 hours a week. Now I built an app and I do it for zero hours a week. Yeah. And so you can automate entire work. And we have a bunch of products and launches coming up around this idea of loops and really automating work coming, coming soon. And so enterprise has Been the largest growing segment for us. We're still growing. Consumer, pro, server and all of that. Are enterprises asking you to sort of act as a de facto router because your model agnostic and you understand the different pros and cons. There's a world where if I have a workforce that's pretty deeply integrated into the ReKit ecosystem, I could either go to you or maybe even enforce a rule that says, hey, for front end, we're using Kimi because it's cheaper and this meets our standards. So at this company, we want it okay. And they're asking for that granular control on a user and a group level. So I want my designers to be on Kimi. I want my front end to be on that. They want that deeper controls. And what we're seeing from enterprise customers is that they're saying, like, look, I know the big AI labs are trying to lock me into these big contracts where I'm just using them. And there's this whole token maxing thing that was happening and everyone was sort of burnt by it. And there's like really deep mistrust because also a lot of the big AI products don't put guardrails around their product. And so a lot of employees, you know, you have instances where employees are spending. Like, one employee could spend like 10, $20,000 a week, like a month doing that. And so they're asking us for control controls on models, on spending, for routing. But also I think, more importantly is I think the guardrails that we build into replit. So when you're doing design, you're in design mode, the agent is a designer. It doesn't go off, veer off and do a lot of random things. When you're building an app, we have the guardrails around building apps. And even with that model routing, replit is a lot more outcome focused and actually cheaper. And we see a lot of companies now ripping out, say, Claude. They gave everyone Claude. Right. And they're like, okay, my engineers are great at it, but actually people in legal and finance, they're burning tokens for no reason. So let me implement replit. Let them be focused on a certain task. Yeah. There's a remarkable story in the chat. Somebody in the Chat says that two years ago, they were in 50, they were $50,000 in debt. They would meet business owners at restaurants and build them products in real time with replit. And that got them out of crushing debt. I'm sure you hear those stories all the time. Yeah. Total white bell. Thank you for your service. What advice do you have for young people who are nervous about the job market? AI, how can they take advantage? Look, the AI narrative has been totally warped. Like you know, the, the politicians, you know, just the discussion and debate in our country has been about job loss, it's been about, you know, spend. It's been about all stuff. Stories like this someone who was $50,000 in debt, discovered droplet and got out of debt and perhaps is making more money than that. Those stories are not getting told. And I understand like, you know, negative headlines get, get, get more attention. I think there's a perverse incentive for some of the players in the space to generate the negative headlines because you can create regulations coming out of that. And we know the story of regulatory capture that's been happening. It's a story as old as capitalism. Right. And so kind of my advice to people is kind of first of all, mindset shift AI is incredibly empowering. Look, even for me you could say, oh, it's easy for you to say. You've been always like a technical programmer guy. I've never trained a machine learning model. Now I'm training models with replit. I'm going to replit agent. I actually trained a chess model that's on its way to become the best chess LLM model. It's actually already beating state of the art GPT models and these models. And so I feel huge empowerment. To me it's like, fuck, there's nothing I could not do. I was thinking this math thing that's happening. I've never done math. I want to go find some proofs. It was like biojecture Max. Yeah, conjecture Max. Do you know there's this video where pdd I guess, I guess, you know, he could not be named now, but there's this video where he's, he closes the deal. He's on the phone, he closes the deal. He, he, he hangs up the phone. He's like, what, what can't you do? I can do. And he just goes, yeah, it's unfortunately, it's unfortunate that he, he is, that is him in the video because it's a great, it's a great, it's a great video. It's a great video. It's a great video. And I feel the same way with AI. It's like, what's out there? Let me go do it. The world is your oyster. I think that mindset is important. I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, breaking it down. Congratulations. Awesome to see you. Always great seeing you. Good to see you guys. Always great to see you, dude. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you, someone should use AI to take this.

And what we're seeing from enterprise customers is that they're saying, like, look, I know the big AI labs are trying to lock me into these big contracts where I'm just using them. And there's this whole token maxing thing that was happening, and everyone was sort of burnt by it. And there's like, really deep mistrust because also a lot of the big AI products don't put guardrails around their product. And so a lot of employees, you know, you have instances where employees are spending. Like, one employee could spend like 10, $20,000 a week, like a month doing that. And so they're asking us for control controls on models, on spend, for routing. But also, I think, more importantly is I think the guardrails that we build into replit. So when you're doing design, you're in design mode, the agent is a designer. It doesn't go off, veer off, and do a lot of random things when you're building an app. We have the guardrails around building apps. And even with that model routing, replit is a lot more outcome focused and actually cheaper. And we see a lot of companies now ripping out, say, Claude. They gave everyone Claude. Right. And they're like, okay, my engineers are great at it, but actually, people in legal and finance, they're burning tokens for no reason. So let me implement replit and let them be focused on a certain task. Yeah, there's a remarkable story.

We're actually, we talk a lot internally about the post prompting world. Like I think we're entering a period where prompting is no longer needed. Some people will still do it, but it's not just in design. I'm sure you're kind of following the narrative around loops where you specify a high level intent and then agents prompt other agents. And so this is something we're increasingly focused on because again, people are really not good at prompting. It is like, you know, went from coding, which is a very low level kind of task, to prompting. Higher level. But it's still somewhat low level from how people think. The way people think is they. They specify an intent. Like I wanna, I want my, you know, sales leads to get responses in five minutes. Sure. I don't want to say. I want the routing to be that way. And that way agents should be able to figure it out. Yeah. How are you thinking about. John wanted like a large kind of lever, like a slot machine to not have to prompt anymore. Just pull the lever, you know? Yes. If you could use that to start a new loop, that would be a very satisfying user experience. How are you thinking about. It'll be like these Vegas casinos. We're all. Yeah, exactly. How are you thinking about.

We've been on a now multi year crusade against slop. We don't want to be purveyors of slop on the Internet. Right? I mean, we're all inundated with tech slop. I mean, LinkedIn is sort of unusable at this point, but also all the apps kind of look the same because I haven't logged in in months. Yeah, it's not worth it, honestly. And so we're like, okay, how can we make it so that. Look, we think people largely have taste. It's hard for them to express how they want designs to look. We came up with this concept we're calling ambient intelligence, where you can design by point and click. The way that happens is, first of all, we give you a mood board. We integrate it with Maubin. It's typically a paid service. We're providing it for free. You can find inspirations from around the Internet, from the best UI UX websites and landing pages. You can drag and drop them into the canvas. Then when you click on an artifact on the canvas, it gives you options to continue the design. It's like, let's design another page. Let's look at different vibes, let's generate different variations. And so I'm someone who, I think I have a good taste. I know what looks beautiful, but I can't express it. I can't say it should be brutal. Style, whatever. I don't have the language. And so by just pointing and clicking, I'm arriving at really cool designs. Like, I'm working with an architect on our new office. I kind of know intuitively what I want my office to look like, but I can't go in Pinterest and search or whatever. So I went to replit, you know, put an initial prompt for things. I like it created kind of a mood board. I like point, click, point, click. An hour later, I have something that. Exactly. That I would like. I would never in a hundred years be able to express it. So it's. It's really. Well, that's a beauty. I mean,

Look, the AI narrative has been totally warped. Like you know, the politicians, you know, just the discussion and debate in our country has been about job loss, it's been about, you know, spend, it's been about all stuff. Stories like this someone who has $50,000 in debt, discovered droplet and got out of debt and perhaps is making more money than that. Those stories are not getting tooled. And I understand like, you know, negative headlines get, get, get more attention. I think there's a perverse incentive for some of the players in the space to generate the negative headlines because you can create regulations coming out of that. And we know the story of regulatory capture that's been happening. It's a story as old as capitalism. Right. And so kind of my advice to people is a kind of a first of all mindset shift. AI is incredibly empowering. Look, even for me you could say, oh, it's easy for you to say. You've been always like a technical programmer guy. I've never trained a machine learning model. Now I'm training models with replit. I'm going to replit agent. I actually trained a chess model that's on its way to become the best chess LLM model. It's actually already beating state of the art GPT models and these models. And so I feel huge empowerment. To me it's like, fuck, there's nothing I could not do. I was thinking like this math thing that's happening. I've never done math. I want to go find some proof. It was like bio Conjecture, Max, conjecture Max. Do you know there's this video where.

Doctorated down because expectations are so high, everything's priced to perfection. In other news, HBO Max is launching HBO Max Shorts for those who don't have the attention span to watch an episode of tv. It's a mobile feature designed for users to watch iconic and memorial scenes from the HBO library in a vertical and scrollable feed. This is already happening on Instagram and TikTok. You see a lot of movie clips, just great moments and it actually is great content. So I can understand why they're trying to own a piece of that. You gotta get the Jeffrey Katzenberg apology formulated. Oh, for sure. Yeah, for sure. But yeah, high yield. Harry captures it pretty well. Watching society become too cooked even to watch TV episode. And this is from Idiocracy. Mike Judge is one of his best works. The creator of HBO Silicon Valley, actually, who will now be available in short form because you will be able to watch short clips from. From HBO Silicon Valley on HBO Max Shorts. You'll be able to see the, I don't know, all the iconic moments from Silicon Valley when they're hanging out on the roof of Google or whatever the Google equivalent is. Gavin Belson's company. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in to tbpn. We will see you tomorrow.

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. Criticizing ebay. Who. 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 E Commerce Bytes and they criticized ebay on that. And then back in 2019. So this has been going on for like seven years. There's a whole new executive team in place now. But there were actually criminal charges. In 2027, employees of the company were sentenced to prison terms were ranging between one and five 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 a 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. In what world is. Is a company? 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 already in your. In your industry was the impact of E commerce bytes 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 2027, employees of the companies were sentenced to prison terms ranging from one to five years. It's absolutely brutal. According to court documents, eBay executives grew increasingly upset by the Steiners critical coverage of the company in leading then executive Devin Wenig to test 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 Steiner's 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. 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 Eina Steiner's name. This is the ultimate Streisand effect. I never would have heard about E Commerce Bytes or their criticism of ebay if they hadn't done all this. What a mess. E Commerce Bytes. I'm looking up exactly what they said because ebay is, in my opinion, just the most set it and forget it company that's just had the same service for 20 years, basically. But now we're going to get to the bottom of it. Ina Steiner published the news that this settled on her blog. So E Commerce Bytes has been giving sellers a voice since 1999. So I do think that it appears, just from looking at it very briefly, that E Commerce 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, E Commerce Bytes posted an article said, did you know that ebay built a lavish New York City pub style lounge because they had constructed an elaborate replica of a Manhattan pub at an ebay campus? And the framing was basically, this appears to be a no expense spared executive amenity. Maybe they were gonna do a podcast, you never know. Anyway, we have Joe Weisenthal.

Apparently over on Facebook Marketplace, people are adding a sort of gold aura to their listings. What is this? Would this make you more likely to buy, John? Oh, 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 add. They'll add like a woman to it as like the salesperson, basically, with AI and that draws more attention on Facebook Marketplace. I don't know if I've ever bought anything on Facebook Marketplace, but maybe, maybe we should try and have Tyler do like a trade a paperclip into a car challenge. Have you ever seen these? Ryan Trahan and Tyler would be exceptional at that kind of thing. You think you could trade up from something on your desk? I think this would definitely help it. Yeah. Giving it. So basically, you have to look for the most unoptimized listings that are undervalued and then once you buy them, give them the ultimate glow up with AI images, put them back up for a higher price, increase your margin, start printing. This is a very Gary Vee esque hustle for sure. Asking a guy. Okay, where do we want to go next? Let me tell you, Joe Wise.

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 Koch 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. 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. 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. Human level task. And clearly I would have expected them to come in and say it's like $5 an hour, something like that. Right. Probably 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 its washing its own hands. Why does it need to do that? Did it get dirty? I guess. 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 do make it look more friendly as opposed to. That is way creepier. That looks like. Yeah, that's. That's full Terminator mode. Anyway, Dean Ball.

Multiple times. And he's back. How you doing? Look at that. That's what we got on the. On the shirt. Oh, looking very good. Thank you. Wow. Royalty. That's cl. That's. That's vintage. Thank you so much for taking the time to come.

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 by. Very controversial. Based on. We got to get General Catalyst to weigh in on this because aren't they anti robot dog? Wasn't that the whole thing of the video? Maybe I'm just remembering. That's right. So they must be celebrating some platform VCs. Are they behind this? Yes, robot dogs. Everyone should be pro robot dog. Anyway, it's. There's nothing wrong with a robot dog. Unless it's a geopolitical discussion. And then there's another layer to the debate. So the Federal Communication Commission's FCC today announced some restrictions and these apply to new versions of those products. FCC Chair Brendan Carr said the move is intended to, quote, secure America's critical supply chains. China, meanwhile, has condemned the decision as protectionism. Is that because they're protecting the small children from getting smacked in the face by the humanoid robots? It is protecting. I know, I know. That video, I think that you're referring to. Yeah, brutal. Absolutely brutal. We should try to pull it up. 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 AGI bot. I'm not sure how you pronounce that. Each delivered. Okay, we have the video of the robot kicking the child. Oh, brutal. There's another one where he's spinning around. Gives him sort of like a spinning back fist. But that is a crazy. And that is seeing that you're kind of like, yeah, I'm up for some protection. Gross negligence. If it's going to. If it's going to protect children, I think it's maybe in the best interest. No, that's not why this is happening, of course. Deeply wrong. So 5,000 units were delivered from each unitary and adjubot. By comparison, US companies including Tesla and Figure shipped only a few hundred robots each. If that. China is also estimated to control about 85% of the global humanoid robotics market and also a ton of the deep supply chain, obviously. According to the Associated Press, the restrictions are expected to add new tension to 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 nascent that you don't have a coalition of companies that are saying whoa, whoa, whoa, I've deployed, my business is built on top of unitary. I know there's geopolitical considerations, but I can't make the cars that I make without them. I can't run my business without them. And so this is going to hurt me. No one's really stepping up in the same way that they are with Chinese LLMs, which a lot of companies are like, no, I'm actually going to cut my inference cost by 80% if I can. And you have all the, the various cloud businesses that are already making money. Making money from them. Exactly. Yeah, I'm very different. I saw a bunch of people that were sort of saying that they didn't like this, that it was, you know, protectionist and that there must have been some American humanoid or robotics companies that were pushing, lobbying for this in D.C. maybe there were, but I personally don't want 100 million humanoid robots in this country running around that are not made by a US company or at least a western ally. Yeah, where 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? 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 cattle, that company ships batteries for all sorts of stuff. The Google Waymo approach I think is probably the correct, like binding 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 figures managed to raise billions. I think that the first thing that we need is profitable use cases for humanoids. And so I think there's a lot of work that the industry needs to do to make these products genuinely valuable in the home, in workplaces, in factory settings, all these things. I think that's a bigger problem. I think if you. It does feel inevitable at this point. Just because there's so much money going into it, so many smart people dedicating all their time to it, it feels inevitable. Maybe it speeds it up a little bit. I would. It just felt like we were going to end up in a situation where they would just continue to dump humanoids onto our. You know, you could buy, you probably still can buy. Can you tree robot on Walmart? I was asking Tyler about this because you used to be able to buy a unitary G1, I believe one of their robots on Walmart which was sort of crazy and the price was accessible. I mean it was still tens of thousands of dollars but it was something that was a research lab could buy pretty easily. I wonder if there will be other ways for companies to get access to these products, at least for benchmarking because they will be competing internationally. Even in a world where Tesla gets to the frontier of humanoid robots with Optimus and then they're going up against a unitree for a deployment in Germany like byd. Right. BYD and Tesla compete internationally even though Tesla's. Tesla's can still be sold in China but not vice versa. But internationally there needs to be a lot of like what are the capabilities so you can actually sell against your competitor. Yeah. Even if you're. 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. I think probably spike if they hit cars and bids or bring a trailer. I think you Throw a unitary G1 Last Edition Final edition band can't buy. Who's making bots and bids? Bots and bids. That might be it. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real time experiences and new value. Cisco really, really raising the ball.

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. It requires. Well, it actually wouldn't ban, but there would be a multi year sort of approval process. Bunch of safety checks. Yeah. And sort of like 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 topic. Someone could just launch an RSS feed that ends the entire world. Who knows? We don't know. It can't happen. Or removes viewers and listeners from mod lots of tvpn. We cannot let that happen. 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, America needs to win on podcasts. We do. And this is very important. We actually are objectively winning. We are winning on. Talked about. We have been winning on entertainment and have. No, no, there's no competitors yet. Yes. Well, thank you so much. I'm signing the letter. I love it. We'll circulate. Great to see you, Joe. Have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon. Take care. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma.

Asking a guy. Okay, where do we want to go next? Let me tell you. Joe wise and tall joining in just one minute. If we have time, we should cover this story coming out of ebay. Let's do it. Pretty incredible story. Ebay pays 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 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 E commerce bytes, and they criticized ebay on that. And then back in 2019. So this has been going on for like seven years. There's a whole new executive team in place now. But there were actually criminal charges in 2027. Employees of the company were sentenced to prison terms ranging between one and five years. And so what were they doing? Ebay leadership apparently mailed a series of threatening deliveries to the 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. Is this a real pig head that's been turned into a mask? Or is it hopefully just a sort of a Hollywood remake of that? And a funeral wreath. The Steiners also accuse executives of online harassment, including online posts inviting strangers to their house for sex. Also absolutely insane. Who. Like in what in what world is. Is a company? Is a public company like ebay just getting some criticism, which all companies do. It takes it this personally that you're gonna try to ruin the lives of two people that are already in your. In your industry. Was the impact of e commerce bites by 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 2027, employees of the companies were sentenced to prison terms ranging from one to five years. It's absolutely brutal. According to court documents, ebay executives grew increasingly upset by the 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 it's like sort of a death threat, I guess. Yeah, right. 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. 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 Eina Steiner's name. This is the ultimate Streisand effect. I never would have heard about E Commerce Bytes or their criticism of ebay if they hadn't done all this. What a mess. E Commerce Bytes. I'm looking up exactly what they said because ebay is in my opinion just the most set it and forget it company that's just had the Same service for 20 years basically. But now we're going to get to the bottom of it. Ena Steiner published the news that this settled on her blog. So E Commerce Bytes has been giving sellers a voice since 1999. So I do think that it appears, just from looking at it very briefly, that E Commerce 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, E Commerce Bytes posted an article said, did you know that ebay built a lavish New York City pub style lounge because they had constructed an elaborate replica of a Manhattan pub at an ebay campus. And the framing was basically, this appears to be a no expense spared executive amenity. Maybe they were gonna 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. Welcome to this weekend Ultra. How are you doing? It's been too long. I miss you guys. I miss you too. Okay, so I have a question.

Of a monopoly that they're effectively praying for an oligopoly is like, is my view on it? Yeah, it's really wild. And you know, I don't know if you guys saw today the recent blog post from Dwarkesh had a great day about like expectations that compute could get a lot more expensive. Which, you know, we've. 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 GPT3 token prices, they're down like 99.9%. But like, you know, so we think, okay, there is some iron law that token prices will get cheaper over time, but maybe not. I mean, we thought there was an iron law that memory prices would drop over time. Right. Or that any sort of hardware would drop over time. And what the story of the last two years is that turns out that is capable of reversing. So, you know, it's not impossible to imagine that compute prices, I think it's not impossible to imagine that compute prices get more expensive and get significantly more expensive. And then of course, he posited the possibility maybe there is no, almost no thing that we do economically currently with AI is economical where compute prices go, which is hard to imagine. And then the thing that I take away from it is, but. 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 risk. Well, then your competitor develops a stronger model and then you're done. You're really done. So this is the scary thing, which is, and I think even just in the sort of like hyperscalers is like, what if like free. The situation is your bleeding free cash flow, but you also don't have the option of saying we want to opt out of the game. Yeah. Which I think is a source of anxiety for investors. It is. It is like, it's so weird.