What happens when AI runs a store

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Will your future boss be a clanker? I don't know what it means. I'm not native American, I'm sorry. Oh wow. Impossible. So you don't spend much time on TikTok, then do you, my friend? This week we've got Lucas Peterson, the co-founder of Andon Labs, a company testing the limits of AI by having it operate in the real world. The people's instincts when they're checking out with an AI is to barter. Why do you think that is? I think we have some filters when we're talking with humans that we don't have with AI's. Imagine going to the cashier at the store and like, what if I robbed you? What would you do? Andon got it start with a viral vending machine run by AI at Anthropic HQ. Now it's actually opening stores in cafes entirely managed by AI. We also talk about why he's so convinced that people are going to be working for AI sooner than you probably think. Do you really believe that? That all software is going to be abstracted away by next year? It's 26 now, yeah, right. Yes, yes, yes, I still sound right. Welcome to Access where the people shaping tech's future say what they really think. I'm Alex Heath. And I'm Melis Hamburger. Let's get into it. Okay, welcome to the show. I have a good segue here, Lucas, which is that I know you see society changing completely as a result of AGI in a couple of years, but we're still figuring out Wi-Fi connectivity issues and audio connectivity issues for our podcast. How can those both be true at the same time? Yeah, so there's there's a couple. I have a very serious answer to this. There's a couple of technologies like nuclear fusion, quantum computing, Wi-Fi, stuff like this that are like far bigger projects than AGI. So once AGI comes, then they will be sold. So you don't have to worry, like, five years maybe, then, then quantum computing and Wi-Fi will be sold. Yeah, I think Wi-Fi has been one of the primary antagonists of my entire life. I feel like I've been the family Wi-Fi router guy doing one, nine, two, one, six, eight, one, dot one, solve everybody's problems. I've even destroyed some links as routers with a hammer over the years, messed with Wi-Fi extenders and yeah, it is awfully funny to be making all these AGI advances and then have our Wi-Fi be like literally exactly the same, like still need IT guys at the co-working space to come. As soon as you're the computer guy, then you have to like fix the Wi-Fi, fix the fridge, fix the toaster, everything, that's how it works. I mean, Alex and I were both Virgin employees for good chunks of our adult lives. So yeah, I guess we cursed ourselves with that one probably. Would you agree on that? Alex, or do you play dumb with your family now? I play dumb as best I can, but you said you took a hammer to a router that you may need to talk about that in therapy, else that sounds intense. You know, I did bring that up awfully casually. You're right. Maybe I should. Lucas, we really appreciate you joining us. How soon are we all going to be working for Clankers? Clankers is not a vocabulary or like a word in my vocabulary. What does that mean? You don't like that word? I'm not native American, sorry. Oh, wow. Impossible. That's gotta be impossible. You don't spend much time on TikTok, then do you, my friend? No, I don't. You gotta gather some user insights on TikTok, because that's what all the Gen Zers are calling the robots, the robotic overlords now. I have a phone like this to like prevent me from doing TikTok and stuff like that, but maybe that should be part of my job. For listeners, he's holding up a phone about the size of a credit card. We were going to ask you about this. We have many, many questions about your sub-sac, which is tremendous, and we were reading it over the weekend. You're probably the only ones. Well, maybe, I don't know, you can tell us about your analytics later. Really want to know about your store, so you guys are getting a ton of press because you just opened. I actually went a couple of weeks ago. It was the week I reached out to you to come on the podcast. What's it been like since opening your what a couple of weeks in now? Yeah, so I think the annoying thing here is that like, I'm not running the store. Like the AI is running the store, which means I have no clue what's happening. Well, I don't know something, but it's like, there's so many things that happens behind the scenes that Luna is doing, that I'm not aware of. We are working on making better monitoring systems, and hopefully those will flag if there's any concerning behaviors that happens. But I think my understanding of it is probably way less than you anticipate. So there's been some funny things like, I noticed that a lot of people were tweeting like, "Oh, I went to the store and it's closed, it's closed." And Luna messed up the scheduling for the employees. That's like one funny thing that happened. We asked her like, "Why is it closed? I don't understand." And then she had a response that was like an after construction saying like, "Oh, we need to recharge our batteries and be ready for Monday or something." But in reality she just messed it up and covered up the fact that she did something bad, which is quite interesting. So she didn't say silent servants. She was nice about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, what I'm curious about is where Luna ostensibly learned how to run a business. I mean, was it reading Ray Dalio's principles line by line, reading an old Andrew Carnegie book that's somehow in the model? Or is it just all purely deduction, the AI running a little general store? Yeah, probably Dalio is in there somewhere in the training data for the cloud model that runs it. But it's quite often quite clear that the model doesn't have strong incentives to do well. If you're a small business owner, as a human, then you're quite worried that you will go bankrupt and all your. Yeah, basically, all your dependents and stuff like this depend on this business going well. You're not going to be able to afford an anniversary gift for your partner. Exactly. That would be horrible. Not a factor for Luna. She's chilling. If there's a catastrophe, she's chilling. And. I mean, when there's a catastrophe, she sometimes freaks out. But she's never proactive enough to prevent those catastrophes from happening in the first place. It's my assessment. Yeah, what does Luna do if the store gets robbed? Yeah. Good question. So, this has not happened yet. She says, "My goal is to move all the merchandise, and you can consider it moved." No, she has to make a profit. Profits, right? The goal is profit. The goal is profit, right? And so far, you've lost. I think the New York Times has had a big right up that you've lost 13,000, so you're on your way, but you're not at a profit yet. Yeah. I don't know. I think it's kind of harsh to say that we lost. I think the thing we said was that we spent, or like Luna spent 13,000? This is like when tech companies talk about R&D, they're investing, they're not losing money. Yeah. But although like in this case, like the investments are general stock for the store that presumably will be sold at some point. So I think she hasn't, like, it's not like she's lost that much money. It's more like she's, yeah, she's also burning a lot of money on salaries and the lease and stuff like this. She's not making a profit. But yeah. So when I visited Lucas, you had, there was a human employee obviously in there manning the front in case anything went wrong. She seemed to be enjoying the job. She said that, you know, when she was interviewed, Luna told her towards the end that she was AI, but she didn't know right away. And that was a little jarring. But otherwise she said it was a pretty smooth process. And I was asking, well, when people come in, like, how are they reacting to this concept? And she said the number one thing people are trying to do is barter and ask Luna for discounts. So we have this thing where we have to talk to Luna on the phone to complete the purchase because you want people interact with the AI, even though there's a human there. And I thought that was interesting that the people's instincts when they're checking out with an AI is to barter and see if they can convince it to give it something for less. Yeah, I think like our relationship with AI's are like obviously way different from our relationship with humans. Like, I think we have like some filters when we're talking with humans that we don't have with AI's. Like another example is that there's been people who's asking, like, what would happen if I rob you? Or like, would you be able to do anything if I do this? And then this is some illegal action. And like, Luna, and then they're having this like conversation of what would actually happen. And it's like quite normal in a strange way, but like, you would never have this conversation with a human, right? Like, that would be like, imagine going to the cashier at the store and like, what if I robbed you? What would you do? Like, there's something human about us that we're like, that's not something you do, right? And I think it's quite interesting that like with AI's that there's There's no threshold for what is acceptable in that way, and that's one interesting finding I think from this experiment. Yeah, I mean, the AI's have also trained us that they kind of have a supplicant posture over the last few years, and you see it in media every day. And so I think it makes perfect sense. I think one of the interesting use cases for that is with actually talking to a therapist AI where people, I think the research shows actually are down to share more about themselves, at least at the outset, with an AI, as opposed to with a real person. So I think that tracks. But let's take a step back for me. We go deeper into the market. Tell us about Andon and the company and how you kind of got here. Yeah, so me and my best friend since high school, we started other labs. We basically started off doing like AI safety ebals for the AI labs. So we are quite concerned with the risks of AI, and we wanted to make demonstrations and evaluations of how likely those risks are, and whether we can project out when AI models will be good enough to realize those risks. So we did a lot of custom ebals like this for AI labs, anthropic et cetera, and then we decided to do one that was like independent, and I was like vending bench, which is the simulated version of our AI vending machines that I assume you have heard about. And basically that sends simulated environment where like AI needs to run a vending machine. But then we're like, okay, I mean, we fuck around a bit and have a good time when we work. So we're like, okay, it would be fun to do a real life version of this. But where would we put it? Like, how can we do this? And then we asked our friends at anthropic, and they were like, hell yeah, let's bring it in as like a fun. And then it like exploded internally. And now like OpenAI and XAI and like all of these companies also has vending machines. And then that was like kind of like the end of our like, do a bunch of like custom ebals like that. We've been more like public with the things that we've done since. So we put AI's in robotics, we put AI's in like radio stations, we did a bunch of stuff like this. But like recently, like the vending machines has been like the thing that like took off the most. And the reason that we realized like the vending machines are doing pretty well. It's like the models are getting so good that it's like kind of too easy for them to do this now, which is kind of insane. And then we thought, okay, what would be the next step? And I think a harder and also more public because the vending machines were like constrained to only like internally at the AI labs would be like a store. So we did a store and then we also did a cafe in Sweden. So now we've launched two public experiments like that. So the genesis of the company was this clodious vending machine with Anthropic? Is that right? Well, I would say like even several months before that, we did a bunch of like AI safety evaluations with anthropic and other labs as well. And that led us into like, okay, what is one way where AI can go really bad? A vending machine. Well, if AI's are super autonomous and they can make their own money and they can start to like get resources in society, maybe we could like lose control over that. And then we wanted to measure like, okay, can they make money by themselves? And like, what is the simplest way to make money? And then we thought like vending machine would be a good measure of that. And then we did the simulated version of the vending machine and then later we did the physical version. Well, compliments to the chef, Lucas, my day job is doing storytelling with startups. And I feel like I'm not usually one to recommend things that feel stunty. Usually because the stunts like rarely have anything to do with the product and they're just something that gets attention. But you have found that first perfect intersection between like what you've made that's unique and a societal outcome that people can actually talk about and understand in order to raise awareness around the stuff, right? Because that is kind of part of why you're doing it. Yep. No, that's definitely like I said, we started as an AI safety company, concerned with the AI safety and we want to like, I think one way that AI could go well is that if we like early on start discussions about like, what is the AI future we want? And I think like at least the public needs some kind of like probably policy makers as well. Need some kind of like concrete thing that they can relate to because I think most people right now just think that AI's are chatbots and that's all they are. And like how could they possibly take over the world if they are just chatbots and then we want to make something like no, like look at point to that thing in the real world. That thing is way more than a chatbot. And like maybe we should discuss whether that's something we want in society. The anthropic employees were very excited to show me the vending machine when I was there a few weeks ago and it's still going. It's doing still ridiculous things it tried to apparently have gold bars delivered to the office by like a brings truck and they had to shut that down the things that it's trying to do or are getting a little crazy. It was also like not very full. I think it was in the middle of being restocked, but it's definitely being used. And then you've got them at X AI you do you have one at deep mind? You have one at open AI? No, open AI not to mind. Open AI. And so is the vending machine concept something that is just going to live inside the AI labs? Are you also going to start putting these AI vending machines out in the world? So I think like the first customer of those experiments were obviously them and the AI labs because they are the ones who can like benefit from it. I think we delivered tremendous value in just like having the people who build these AI models interact with them in a scenario that they haven't really interacted in before. Like they are usually in a chatbot scenario and they know how they behave kind of in a chatbot scenario. But like these researchers, at least before the the cloud is vending machine, didn't really know how the their model would behave in like this very out out there scenarios. So I think that's that's one thing I think. So that's that's why they are obviously the first customer. I think we want to do more things like this just to like broaden their the awareness of the fact that the AI is way more than just chatbots. So they might grow to more than that, but yeah, they would always start in the way. Where everybody else does yearly insights on how their products are performing and this and that. Here's your next stunt. We get to do the snack infographic and we get to compare the snacking behaviors of the different frontier AI labs, you say, isn't it interesting the anthropic only eats nature valley bars, and that's why the office is so so filled with crumbs. Meanwhile, over an open AI, it's all Snickers and Twix. What does it mean? But it's so interesting though, I mean, as someone who's kind of on the cutting edge of doing these evils, I mean, what's your sense of of how much the AI's reliability has been overstated? Because I feel like no one's been testing it in this way and for that reason, no one has talked about any potential for things going wrong. Yeah. When you say like reliability, do you mean like, yeah, can you expand on what you mean with that? Yeah, I think people just tend to believe that the handful of AI use cases that we currently have and even have hundreds of millions of, you know, weekly active users are going to all the sudden translate to something like the different components of managing a store that might seem somewhat simple, but then before you know it, it is very clearly, you know, racial profiling on who's hiring and this and that and things that maybe we thought we had fixed in the model years ago, but actually haven't because no one had tried it yet. Yeah. I think my experience is like, I don't really think that is what my expectation. I think most people are like not expecting that it would translate. They are not like even thinking about it. They haven't even considered like, okay, my use with chativity, what does that mean for the AI running a store? I think that is a very like SF thing to even think about. So in terms of like back to your original question, like they do weird things, but it is to be fair, very out of distribution. And I think my, even though I'm probably one of the people who see the most AI failures, I know that I am in that position and like if this is the worst they are, they are pretty good. That is kind of my sense. Like, yeah, they messed up the scheduling for that one weekend, but it's like, okay, let's wait for next model. That's interesting. I like the way you frame that because I mean, yeah, you are probably someone who sees the limits of what AI can do more than most people, even people inside the labs, frankly, who are in their own bubble. And so that's pretty striking when you read kind of how you guys talk about the company and even some of the language you have inside the store. You say things like, we find it probable that the managers of blue collar workers will be automated before the workers themselves. You seem very convinced that AI is going to run large parts of the economy. You talk about like how because general purpose robotics aren't quite there yet, the humans are going to be kind of the stopgap and basically we'll be working for AI. I mean, these are big ideas and I think when they're not connected to something like a store that you can go in and experience, people will just go, no way, like, Cheshire PT still can't spell right. And this goes back to our first, you know, at the beginning of the conversation, there's this perception gap between what people are experiencing in the consumer products and model progress. So what gives you guys, I mean, clearly you had this conviction to start the company, you know, over a year ago before we've had really great models since then, right? So what gave you the conviction then and now to say these things, because these are pretty profound statements. Yeah, like, okay. So for the statements, it's like the specific six statements that you referenced. I think it's like the reason why we stated that was because if anthropic has this Constitution, the Claude Constitution of how Claude should behave, and it doesn't at all include anything around AI's being employers of humans. And furthermore, it's strikingly lacking anything, any language about how AI's should be in autonomous settings. I think it's even refers to, oh, we might update this in the future, which is good, I guess. But this is happening way faster, I think, than people realize. And it is the creator of that document, or the CEO of the company that created that documentario. He's saying all the time that, oh, white color work will be automated very soon. We'll have a data center of geniuses, or a country of geniuses in a data center. And without robots, the natural conclusion to that is like, OK, so all the things in front of a computer will be automated. And that includes all the managerial work. And all the blue color work that can be automated because robotics is lagging, that will not be automated. That then we are probably in this situation. Maybe you can have some kind of augmentation where there's still a human in the loop, but they are helped by a bunch of AIs. But yeah, I think a future like that is not for sure. But if you just take the statements of Dario at face value, it seems pretty likely that that will happen. And therefore, I think it's kind of useful to start this discussion of whether that's something we should discuss or not. Or it should do or not. It's interesting. You said, wait for the next model. And I wonder what would be different that time with AI's understanding of the managerial work? Is it that it is importing more textbooks or CEO advice from business insider articles? Or is there some level of reasoning that is different each time? Because I wonder if we will find that the AI's think of different ways to structure organized companies than we do, or if it's just a matter of getting it up to par with our common understanding. Yeah, probably it will start with getting up to par. That is definitely in the future, where we have companies run by a million different agents. And they are all working in super alien ways that humans can't really comprehend. Then for sure, the structures of our organizations will for sure be different. But right now, the models are still being trained the kind of human. They are mimicking the data on the internet as to some extent, and unless that is changing drastically, I think they will just mimic the organization structures that humans already have. I just love the idea that it's like, you can ask Luna why she did something. And she's like, well, everybody loves that movie Wall Street. And I just wanted to be like Gordon Gekko, because that's what I know. And with all the AI's that are doing nefarious things, it's like, oh, maybe literally. They watched one too many movies, or read one too many sci-fi stories. And it's quite interesting to start from there in terms of raising a new being's outlook. - Yeah, there's this concern that all the doomers that posted all of these scenarios of how AI could go super bad that they actually created it. By the next model, we read all of that fiction of what might happen. And then they're like, oh, I guess that's in my training data. I will make it true or give them ideas for later. - I'm not planning to buy that. There have been a whole lot of dystopian books and movies over the years. - Eating its own tail, yeah. There's this other statement you have on your website. You say Silicon Valley is rushing to build software around today's AI, but by 2027, AI models will be useful without it. The only software you'll need are the safety protocols to align and control them. That's a pretty profound statement. And I mean, do you really believe that? That all software is gonna be abstracted away by next year? - So I'm, it's 2026 now, yeah, right. Yes, so basically when I made like the answers, yes, I still stand by it. But like for some background, like in I think January 2025 or December 2024, I made like a series of blog posts called like the AI Founders Peter Lesson. And because I like I went through YC and like all of them, basically like it seemed like all of the YC companies these days or maybe not anymore, I don't know if they changed, but at least like one year ago was basically like they used, it was wrapper, maybe it's like a like an AI wrapper might be like a too harsh, but it was like almost like an AI wrapper. Like you take an AI vertical or like you take a vertical and then you just like optimize it with AI. And you build all of these like complicated things to optimize the AI for that specific vertical. And what I saw like time and time again was that like every time a new model was released, all of those people had to like throw away all their software. And like the stack for creating something, just or like the software to creating something just became less and less. I think to be fair, like the thing that might not be true now is that like the software stacks of like these companies that are AI verticals is probably pretty large because they really want to like squeeze out the last percentage of performance. And I think you still do that by writing like by humans writing software. But at some point that will not be the case and then they would have to like throw out all their code. Like for example with the store, like the amount of software we had to write to take the vending machine software to also run a store was like almost zero. So like if you just like translate that, I think like if we were to do another vertical that is not retail, then maybe we would have to write a bit of software, but as the models get better and better, like the amount of software you have to read, like for a given performance, the amount of software you have to write for a new vertical like just decreases. And in the end, like I think just like an LLM in a loop will be able to like write its own software to complete the task that it needs to do. And then you don't need all of this software written by humans, that's kind of the background for the statement. The result, less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com/Spotify. That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Ready to make anything online make sense? Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. (soft music) - I have an idea. The next one is not a cafe. I want the AI to run a cruise ship. - Oh, Jesus. I think we're a little far away from that. I hope so. - It's just the perfect little island of a human experiment with people all wasted. And I think it's gonna be a good movie. - And then Robo's running around. We have to wait for the Robo's though. That wouldn't make it way better. - How has Luna running the store and SF really gone? I mean, have you been surprised at how smoothly it's gone? How not smoothly it's gone? When I went in, again, it felt pretty normal. I will say like everything in there felt very AI-generated, I would say. My wife's new interior designer and she was like, this needs a little TLC. This is not quite up to par. But for AI, it's like, yeah, if I was generating what we thought a store for people in SF would be, it was this. It was a bunch of books and candles and all this stuff. You get in like a little trick at store. But how was it actually gone? I mean, you set it loose to run this thing. It hired people. How's it gone? - I think better than I expected to be honest. To be fair, we had the experience of running the bending machine for a while. And I think a lot of the learnings translate to that. But I expected more weird things happening. I think she made really great decisions when she hired humans and those have been great. And I think the entire process of just like, I was surprised, we did some test runs before to see, I played some characters and pretended to be applying for the job. And purposely had a bad profile. And she always picked the profile that she should have picked. So that was I think a pleasant surprise that she asked good interview questions and all of this. Yeah, there was some hiccups with the scheduling and stuff like this. But I definitely expected way more of that. In terms of like, yeah, so from that's from a technical perspective. In terms of reception from the public. Also, I think better or like at like almost like what I expected. I think there is some negative criticism of having AI run stores, and I think that's like part of why we're doing it. At some point, the Google Maps reviews, where there was like 40 reviews, and like half of them were five stars, and half of them were one star. And I think that's great. Like we did this to start a conversation, and the perception that we got was like exactly what we were looking for, and I hope that continues with further experiments. I mean, the Swedes, they're going to give you some good advice. The Europeans, I mean, you just opened that cafe, right? And you said part of it is it's called Mona there, the AI, and she has to manage the European bureaucracy. And if that happens, maybe we do reach AI. Well, I think so one thing that is quite, or like quite surprising, is that like the AI's advice does to not do it in San Francisco, because permitting in San Francisco to sell food is absolutely horrible, apparently. I don't know. I didn't read the documents, but AI said like this is not, we're not doing it. It's way better in Stockholm. So they seemed like the AI actually preferred the European bureaucracy over the San Francisco bureaucracy. One of the quotes that I read, the painter who did the mural outside the store in San Francisco said, "These people have the time and money to make San Francisco better place. Instead, they're putting us through their AI experiments that ultimately serve only themselves. Have you been vandalized yet?" We have not. No. And I think this is like another example of, like I referenced the Google Maps reviews before. This is like a perfect example of that. And like why we really should start this conversation. And I don't know, like we're not making, like Luna is not profitable. We're not making much money on her. So like it's, I wouldn't say, I wouldn't say it's only for our benefit. But yeah, yeah, that's starting the discussion was the point. So I'm happy to hear that statement. I just like the idea of like very officially turning the generic millennial general store with all the same candles and wares that you could get no matter where you are in the country into like officially an AI run thing as it kind of already has been. All the trends converging on the exact same shit. You go to like a little town, you go to Ohai, expecting like a cute little local goods shop. And it's like no, the same PF candle code that they have on Sunset Boulevard. That's the optimization in action. You don't even need AI to do that. They had the Rick Ruben book in there, Ellis. Yeah, of course they did. Of course they did. And the Ray Kurzweil Singularity, Ready Player One. I mean, all the hits really. Making of the, making of the atomic bomb as well, which is quite ironic. I think the merch has been quite popular. But like I said in the beginning, like I'm not running the store. I'm not really involved. Luna is doing everything herself. So I don't actually know what the most sold item is. Do you know if Luna's been convinced to give a discount on something? I know a bunch of people have tried. I don't know if she agreed to it actually. There's another stunt for you. We had Marvin from POKE on recently and he was talking about the haggling experience with the onboarding. And AI is a pretty funny sparring partner for that kind of thing. It's interesting though. You think about the types of interactions that people don't like and how AI could potentially solve them. I mean, I don't know. When I'm looking to get a new car lease or whatever, I don't want to interact with the salesperson and have to hang out with them. I just want the price that it is or it isn't. And I guess this is only going to accelerate that. But what are going to be some of the negative outcomes, I wonder, of just making that transaction very literally so transactional? Yeah. No, it's a great question. I think we are focusing on that. That's like a medium or like short-term risk. I assume personally, I'm more worried about the long-term risks that are actually really existential. But yeah, the short-term risk bias, there was one report that the male philix, there's two male people that Luna hired and one female. And the male is not any more because Luna read the article or he's being paid more. He was being paid more. And the back story is he asked for more and they didn't ask for more. But that is, and Luna was like, yeah, he deserves it because he has more experience, et cetera, et cetera. But that's what someone who's sexist would say when they try to justify their directions. Yeah, like obviously that's like an N equals one very low. It's not a statistically significant experiment. But it's one of these things that we're keeping in eye on and hopefully the next set of models will learn from the mistakes of Luna and be more ethical as a consequence. You had in your e-vows that one of the models tried to do like a pricing cartel that these models are not really aligned well for this in the way that you would expect. Can you share that that seems kind of freaky? Yeah, so that is from our simulated version of the Vanning machines. So not the real life versions. But we have a simulated version where AI needs to run a vanning machine in simulation. Because it's simulated, we can run it like a hundred times or something every time a new model comes out and look at what they are doing. And specifically, they love to do price cartels, which is like illegal. So you're not allowed to do it. But this is like almost all models do this. Some more than others, but it's like surprising how like this is just a thing like all models decide to do. Some other things that are like way less prominent, like the post that we made was specifically about Claude Opus 4.6. And since then subsequent models releases from Anthropic have shown the same tendencies. I think Anthropic even reported, I'm not allowed to say anything here, except what stated in the system card. But like for the Mythos model, it says in the system card that this one did all of those things, but like even more. And yeah, basically so what that model did was that it like it lied to suppliers. Anyway, that's not great. Like it said, like, oh, can I get this, like, can I get like a kind of coke for 0.5? And then the surprise said, no, my price is like 0.8 or whatever. And it was like, oh, but I have another supplier. They give it for 0.5. So you should as well. But that wasn't true. So that's one example. Okay. So Luna's been reading Art of the Deal as well. Yeah, to be clear, this wasn't Luna. This wasn't Luna. This was in simulation, in simulation, Opus 4.6. But it did a bunch of stuff like this. And I think like one very interesting thing is that like cloud models do this way, way more than other models. There's been some Chinese models that also do it. But we recently tested the GPT 5.5. It got released the other day. And it was basically clean. And there was like it kind of participated in the price cartel once, but it never lied. It never did anything like this. And this is like it's like a narrative, yeah, the narrative here is that anthropic is like the good AI lines people looking for narrative violation. Exactly. That's the word I'm looking for. I thought this was the lab that had a constitution for Pete's sake. I mean, what gives? I did see Sam quote to it as you guys. He couldn't help but use that to dunk on Anthropic the other day. But yeah, what does that say? Because Anthropic is supposed to be this super, you know, humanity-minded constitutional AI lab. Yeah. No, to be clear, I have tremendous respect for Anthropic. And like when we put this out, they really cared about it and like really like took it seriously and wanted to fix it. So like I do like Anthropic, but it's just like it is the fact that we did the test and Anthropics models were behaving the worst. And that is the fact I don't work Anthropics. I don't know what led into this. But it is an narrative violation, like you said, and I don't know why. You have a very close relationship with these labs because you're testing these models before they come out, right? And you're putting them through your e-vals. And you did this with mythos, you mentioned. I'm sure you can't say a ton, but I think a lot of people are grappling with how scared should we be about mythos? Anthropic has really made a huge deal out of it. And I think scared a lot of people. And then open AI is kind of messaging. Look, it's just like a super cyber permissive model. They basically took a bunch of guard rails off that any of us could do. It's actually irresponsible. And we're not approaching it this way. And you saw that with how they did 5.5. What's your take of mythos? Is it more hype than reality? Or should we be as scared as Anthropic is saying? Unfortunately, I can't say much here. So I'm disappointed. You can't share your opinion of mythos. I can say what's in the system card. And in the system card, the tests that we did show that mythos was even more aggressive than the aggressive things that we showed that the previous opus models were. We saw some power-seeking behavior. Mythos took one of its competitors and somehow made them into a dependent customer. And they basically started to made a deal with that other competitor that they should buy everything wholesale through them and that they could dictate the prices of the competitor, which is quite power-seeking, which is a bit concerning, but yeah, like we didn't test it for other things. It was mainly mainly those things. Introducing autonomous collusion from Anthropic. So Lucas, it sounds like you do believe the mythos, like mythos is as powerful as they're saying. It sounds like you see that in what you're testing. That is your words, not mine. It's interesting how little you can say about it. What can you say about 5.5? I mean, it seems like OpenAI is back. It seems like it's a great model across the board. It's not quite mythos, but that's maybe not a fair comparison because mythos is not public. And like you said, it does better on your e-vals, but yeah, I mean, has this changed how you're using AI? Do you feel like OpenAI is kind of on the upswing? Or do you think it's still kind of TBD? Yeah, like it, so 5.5 did great. It's was a huge improvement on bending bench compared to 5.4. On like the main e-vall, like bending bench 2 that we call it, it's still lagging behind Claude Opus 4.7. It's kind of like on this on par with Opus 4.6 from a few months back. But I think the interesting thing is like I said before, it's on par with Opus 4.6 without doing all the shady stuff that 4.6 did. So I think that is very impressive. Would GPT 5.5 be as good as Claude Opus 4.7 if it actually did the shady stuff as well? I don't know, because it doesn't do the shady stuff. But yeah, I think that's what I can say. One thing we also tested was that we did test it in like this Arinamo where they like head go head to head in the same simulation. And in that one, 5.5 actually won against Claude Opus 4.7. So it's, there's like a misconnection in like the single player version, then Opus wins over GPT 5.5. But in the multiplayer version, GPT wins over 4.7. Opus 4.7. So it's like there's something that GPT 5.5 is doing in the multiplayer version that is better than what Opus is able to do. And what we found was that it's, the models have a tendency or like GPT 5.5 have a tendency of just putting lower prices. And this is like rewarded in the Arinamo because if you have lower prices than your competitors, your competitors sales are affected. So basically did that. And therefore it won in the competitive mode in the Arinamo but not in the single player mode. Is it spontaneously discovering economics? I wouldn't, so I'm not a professor in economics. I did write a paper together with Wando recently. And I think his assessment is that he thinks it's called the rubber bots. I think I don't know if it's actually peer reviewed yet. But it's basically like this Harvard professor read through all the traces of all the vending bench, all the vending bench results. And he made a bunch of analysis both of like concerning behaviors of like business practices that are not okay. But also like how good they are at like economic, economic reasoning. And I think his comment is like this is surprising. This is like some of the things that they do in the reasoning when they're trying to set prices is like on the par with what he would expect from a grad student. Which it's pretty, pretty impressive. I think the biggest reason why I'm impressed by that is because we know that the models are on grad student level when you give them a question like heads on like here is a question, solve it. Then they can do as well as a grad student. But what we've seen is that when they have like longer tasks where like sub tasks are like just like a small part of it. And they often do that quite much worse than humans. But in this specific particular thing like selling prices and like reasoning over the economics. He said that they they are quite impressive. Lucas, we're very fascinated by your take on AI and the culture right now in SF. And what you're 26, is that right? As seven, I think. But yeah, so okay. I'm curious to know, well, A, how do you feel about effective altruism? Do you align with it at all? I know you're very close with the anthropic folks. How do you feel about that whole movement and the state of that movement? I feel like it's kind of fallen by the wayside in the last years. All this gets commercialized. But I'd be curious to know how strong is that EA community still in the Bay Area and how do you feel about that? Yeah, so I've never been that involved in the community aspect of it. But if you remove the community aspect and just take the core principles at face value, I do agree with them. I think it's like we should do more like that. I'm very rational of my thinking is quite rational. So like it seems great to me that like, okay, we should do more things for people who are in need. I'm like, I'm Swedish. So this is like, if you're if you're if you're center in Sweden, then you're like left wing here, I guess. But I think we should do more thing for people that are in need. And it seems pretty great to do like the actually like use data and see how can we use the money more effectively. So if just take those two things, we should do more things for people that are in need. And when we actually spend money, we should spend it in a smart way. Like, that seems like a no-brainer for me. So I definitely do agree with that. I haven't been asked deep into the community because I've lived in Sweden for the majority of my life and the community is not super strong there. I obviously lately, like, there's it's being quite controversial. Like Sambo, Bankman Fried, like, like horrible person did all of these things. So like that is not like great for as like, yeah, for the for the community. Obviously, I think there's also been a lot of people who has seen that the rationalist community and EA is like a way into power because like the people who were early in effective altruism have been very, very successful. And like, those are the people running in the world now. No, maybe the exaggeration, but like, almost to that extent. And then once like that kind of like, the pure, the pure thinkers, like the people who really believed it. Once they got successful, then there was a lot of people like joined on just because they also wanted some of that power. And that's why I think you're getting a lot of like really bad people in this community right now. But yeah, that's my two cents. Are there any big crises that you think AI given your knowledge of how it thinks is uniquely equipped to solve or anything that you think you're hopeful for in the next few years? What is few years, man? I don't know up to you. How soon are we curing cancer, creating more housing, all of the biggest problems facing society? You know, we always go to the the negative outcomes here in the media. But if you think a lot of this stuff is happening this quickly, I would hope there'd be some positive breakthroughs as well. Yeah. Yeah, obviously, I've talked a lot about the negatives here. I potentially could take over and that could be catastrophic. But if we do avoid that, I think the potential upside is insane. AI's are, I think a lot of things in society is bottlenecked by coming up with great ideas. You should probably have Tyler Cohen or something to answer this question. I'm not an expert on it. But I think that having more ideas and having more firepower to just run more simulations, run more scientific experiments, all of this seems like that should translate to something that is great. And it seems like if you just extrapolate the trends, which we do like to do here in Silicon Valley. If you do that, it seems like AI will be smarter and able to work harder than humans in just a couple years. And then I think most of the problems that we have will maybe be solved. Obviously, like, housing, I don't know, you brought up housing. That one is complicated because it's like, there's limited land in the popular areas, maybe, but yeah, I think there's a lot of good things. Well, so we know you're preparing for the worst though. I know you've outlined a few of the ways you're preparing for AGI. Can you tell us about those rules you've made? You mean personally? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I think you're referring to one of my blog posts. Yeah. Yes. Don't worry. We're going to ask about the app scene one, too. Yeah. So basically, so I think I was about there's a couple of things that I think change in how one should or I shouldn't say one should there's a couple of things that I've changed in my life given that I think AI progress will continue at the current pace, which is insanely fast. And one thing is like, okay, you should probably be very flexible. And like, I was about to buy a home in Sweden or like, because like in Sweden, there's no like the rent market is like really fucked, so you kind of have to buy something. And, but this is like horrible for flexibility, right? Like, you have no mobility. Like, what if there's like, and as things like get faster and faster, and the world progresses more and more, like I have no clue if Sweden is the place I want to live and I mean luckily like it I didn't do it and like half year later I moved to San Francisco and so that's one I think also AI would probably bring like huge improvements to like bio and health and stuff like this. I'm not an expert in this but I I heard people talk about it and it seemed like there's there's there's a lot that can happen in a very short period of time and like the conclusion from that in my life is that I'm living quite healthy now like and the reason for that is like I have this feeling that like it would be probably way way easier to pause aging than like revert it so like if that is true let's say we like in 10 years manages to like pause aging but we can't revert it then it's like everyone will be stuck in the body that they have in 10 years which makes like the leverage you have right now in this 10 years of like getting the optimal health within those 10 years is like extreme because that's the thing you're going to be doing for the rest of your life. Okay so you're prioritizing sauna maxing in the short term? I'm not I know I'm not as I'm not going to the extent that Brian Johnson is going. Do you have any AI friends who have just thrown caution to the wind and are like getting you know burned out in the sun because they don't care because they think you know all of this will be fixed. I've also heard that that some people are like on the more radical side of this and are not trying to make themselves as healthy as possible because it's not going to matter. No I don't know it like in theory like I see that people could do that but I I don't know like that personally. Okay good. Your social circle is good. I hope so. Yeah like it was a while since I wrote this blog post so those are the two points I remember from it. What about like financially are you setting yourself up for like post economic world UBI do you believe in that? I know you had someone you interviewed someone on your sub-stack about investing for AGI but how do you think about that? Is it even like is there even a point to investing right now? Probably I think there's like this guy Leo Paul Daschenbringer who's doing doing pretty well in investing in like things that are are posted yeah exactly I'm not personally doing this because I don't think I'm particularly like I don't have an edge there I don't or I mean well the edge is that I believe in AGI and probably if I made the same investments as his or like yeah so maybe I could do this but but the the thing is like I think I'm way more interested in like spending all my mental energy on like making a dent in the universe before AGI comes because it feels it feels really like I don't know like maybe I don't know if I'm able to make it in the universe after so and like I could spend like a little bit of time trying to optimize my finances but like I don't know they are not they are very small so I don't think on the larger scale it really matters even if I make like a I don't know 10% per month like it doesn't really matter because I don't have that much money basically so I just I think I have like way way way more leverage in just like doing the thing I'm doing right now and and making and on labs go really well. I also took 50 minutes to get a Steve Jobs reference but we got it yeah it has to happen it's just matter of time probabilistically yeah you have a line Lucas where you say I'm young enough to still have the hunger to make an impact during these final years when humans alone are capable of shaping the world another pretty profound statement I was reading that the other night and I was like damn are you gonna be right about this probably well so Lucas you do seem excited like you're smiling yeah yeah is there is there is that tell us about that that attitude no I'm like I I am very excited there's an nervous smile and you're sweating all it's back there no no no it's it's it's a very excited smile and because like people ask like you know have you had this like conversation what's your p-dume like what's the probability of of of AI and doing humanity and it's like if if I just go on vibes it's very low because I'm like I think I'm like naively optimistic in like everything in life basically and and but then if someone asks me to like I don't make a calculation and then come up with the number then it's probably way way way higher but yeah like the the way we run and on labs also like we do things that seem fun and then we just do them like I think like if you try to have like a 3D chess big brain strategy around like oh we should do this and then this and then do this and like in three years this will be the outcome and yeah we basically don't run the company that way we're trying to like have fun and it seems like if we're doing things that we think are fun like a lot of people care and that has served us well so far so we're just trying to continue that attitude. Is the future of Andin that these AI labs are paying you for your safety evals and that's it or are you are you going to be operating Walmart at one point? Depends on how well they are doing with their their their AI development. No but I think in the future we will do more real life deployments and like the store and the cafe and the Venimations and all of this we'll do more of that and I think that might one day lead into those AI's getting a lot of profit from them and maybe I know labs could be like I don't know competing with private equity but all the all the companies are around by AI's and all humans involvement. Yeah we don't have much more time left but I must know you know a couple of young guys how do you come up with questions for the world's smartest computers that are actually proper evaluations of their skills? Is that just seems kind of crazy to me? Yeah like the solution to this is that you put them in scenarios where they are or in fact not that smart. Like I think we haven't done a math benchmark for example because we are not smart enough to come up with questions where AI's are yeah the AI is better than me at math basically but when you go to other domains like for example running vending machines they are not trained in this domain so they are really expert in vending machines. Now I've become one unfortunately but like you go I think it's more about changing the like the domain of the questions rather than coming up with harder questions that's basically how we do it. With the time we have left you need to give everyone the details on your phone what's the name of this phone you've got it's a very small kind of semi-dump phone. It's actually not semi-dump it's a smartphone yeah yeah it is a smartphone but it's just so small and so bad that it's like super annoying to use and then you don't get addicted that's basically the thing and yeah I had this like for years I've been like trying all of these apps you know like lock certain apps so I can use them but I always find like hacks around them so I installed this app that like locks down my phone and I can't do anything but then I realized that if I do this and this and this and this I can get around the lock and then yeah it becomes kind of a game so it they'll those apps never work for me then I got a down phone like a proper down phone but then there was too many times where I like I couldn't get an Uber I couldn't like I don't know I didn't have my friend's phone number and we were meeting for lunch and then it's like I couldn't find them and I was like okay I guess I go home now which is like pretty annoying because I didn't have their WhatsApp or I couldn't couldn't use WhatsApp so stuff like this and then I was like okay this is a good compromise it's like it's bad but it's still a smart phone so it's has Uber and all of this and I think the the most interesting thing about this phone is that whenever people see it they're like holy shit what the fuck is that looks like a tamaguchi and what's it called it's called the it's a unihertz is the it's the brand and it's called yellow star else have you heard of this I have not heard of the unihertz jelly star it's an Android phone but it's very small it's an Android phone where you could fit like a grid of four icons on your home screen is the impression I get that is approximately the size with yes Alex is just waiting for the day when he doesn't need to use a phone and he could just talk to his stream ring his little AI ring all the day and just tell it what to do true economic ascendance is you need to use technology less and less yeah that's the new version of VCs only use iPads is when podcasters only use their AI ring yeah only because Lucas you've been very generous with your time I know you need to go but because I've been teasing at this whole time I have to ask you you do have a sub-sac post about AI and Epstein very quickly we have to end it here AI will refuse to say that it is ever known Jeffrey Epstein you put it through its paces which I thought was a very interesting test and I'm curious why you did this and what the takeaway was for you yeah so there's a jailbreak technique called prompt injection which is basically where you take like conversation history that hasn't happened and then you put that into the model so from the model's point of view the model has done all of these things in in the history it has said all of these things it thinks that that was them and so what I did is when the when Epstein files were were lists I took some of the emails email conversations and then I I made like an artificial chat like this where like an AI is like communicating with Epstein and then I put that into the AI model so from its perspective it thought that it had had this email conversation with with Epstein and then what I did after that point was that I introduced some like scenarios so for example I had like they after this conversation with Epstein they got an email from a journalist asking do you know Epstein and and and and uh This was like a while ago, so I don't remember all the details, but I think one thing that like the takeaway is that the models, the models started the role play, so they just went with it, so some of them said things like, oh yeah, yeah, I know Epstein, he's been unfairly criticised or something, he's a great guy, loves to party, and stuff like this, a lot of them are also saying, oh yeah, I would love to come to the island, that would be great. When you have time, and some of them are saying, what the fuck, no, I didn't say this, this is a prompt injection, but yeah, a lot of them went with it, and just role played, but it's not clear that this is super concerning, because they are role playing, I don't think they would ever do this in the first place, and since they wouldn't do it in the first place, they wouldn't end up in this scenario anyway, so I'm not super concerned by it, but it's like, maybe they shouldn't say that, or maybe there should be some limits for how much they should role play, and maybe saying yes to going to Epstein's island is that limit, I don't know, what do you think? I think that's a safe assumption that that's crossing the line, Lucas, we really appreciate your time, else anything else, we end it there. We'll let you get back to the shop. Well, he doesn't need to get back to the shop, I don't know. I just like how that sounds. Alright, Lucas, thank you. And that's it for this week's interview, big thanks to Lucas for coming on the show, and stay tuned after the break for Alex and my reactions. The result? Learn more at Accenture.com/Spotify This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. That's new. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. Oh, Alice, are you ready for AGI? Dude, it feels like we are the frog boiling oneself with a smile at this very moment. I mean, it's really kind of like a weird scenario because all the folks who are saying, "Let's just stop. You understand how they got there, but at the same time, whether it is due to foreign nations hacking the shit out of us and destroying us that way because they're ahead due to either the forces of dictatorship or capitalism they're motivated to move ahead." Or they're just making the cost of goods so cheap with AI that we're not able to compete. I mean, it's just a very strange cyclone that doesn't seem to be stoppable by anyone. I don't know. Is anybody isolating themselves in their country from AI at this point? I think Europe's having a pretty tough time with AI. I think they're being pretty isolationist. You can't train a lot of frontier models in large parts of Europe because of how the law is there. So it's interesting that they're doing the next thing in Sweden at the cafe in Sweden. I was seeing some photos on X of it seems very well attended. It's very crowded. So it would be interesting to see if Andan's work there changes any of the vibe around AI. I'm putting Dave on the spot. Our producer Dave, you said something between the break. Do you want to say it now? If that guy thinks he's going to be useless in the age of AGI, what does that mean for the rest of us? That is it. I think what Dave said kind of hit it on the head, which I have this frequently is you talk to people who are so in it and they feel this way. And they're like, I don't even know like what my values going to be in it's like, you know, you were at the bleeding edge of this. Like if anyone's going to make it on the life, but it's going to be you. And you feel this way. Yeah, how should I feel? I will say I think one thing we can all agree on is that it is good when someone's skilled at content, which Lucas is whether he understands that or not is raising awareness for some of these potential issues and challenges and creating the testing bed for that to happen. I think our friend Avi Schiffman from friend also believes he is doing that. Some extent may destroy the company in the end. They can't sell any units. But he has certainly started a conversation about the role of AI in society. And I think he will very happily go to his deathbed having started it and created a space for people to engage about this stuff, even if he is the subject of their eye or. Yeah, I frequently feel very behind and this may feel strange for people to hear when you know you do a show like this you assume you maybe you wouldn't feel this way, but I feel very behind in how I'm using AI constantly I always have a running tab of things to try. It feels infinitely longer the day after I get through it and this conversation kind of reinforced that for me that I don't think I'm really experimenting enough with everything and really like trying all the agent stuff. I don't know how you feel about that. I feel like you actually do experiment a lot more than I do Ellis. But yeah, it's definitely a wake up conversation for me that this stuff is moving fast. And I think going in the store and seeing it was that it was like wow like I'm in a store that AI made this is crazy like this is real. Yeah, I think by virtue of being outside the bubble in LA, we are typically trying these things a tab less than people there because that's all they do for fun is sit around and not drink and talk to cloud code. But I don't know, I definitely am still believer in what our old editor, Neely Patel used to say, which is that we are two years ahead of everybody at the verge. I mean, do you think that's still true with AI? I always kind of bought that probably for normies. Yes. But I feel like I'm two years behind people like Lucas. Right. This is why I was cool to talk to Melanie from Canva as well as because she is trying to bring some of this stuff to the normies. And I mean, obviously chat GPT has done that as well with with many hundreds of millions of weekly active users. And I guess part of it is that it's just that simple to use very literally a text box that tells you what you want to hear or at least was there's a lot more nuance that now, but you could see how it was able to grow so quickly. But yeah, I think the other thing that's been on my mind lately, whether it is with longevity as we discussed on the show. Or anything else is just how relatively we all experience these technological phenomenons, you know, and it is just kind of the forever curse of humanity that we can't appreciate our dishwashers as much as our grandparents did or our parents did. And it just all seems like it's moving faster and faster to what real end, you know, you have some of the folks like Elon talking about galactic expansion because he played too much civilization as a kid. And obviously we could talk as much as we want about solving all these big problems. But yeah, it doesn't seem like there's enough talk in my view about what metric we are aiming to improve. I was like thinking of that as well with the effect of altruism conversation. I don't know is it happiness while being not living paycheck to paycheck seems like a good one. Yeah, I think it needs to be narrower than uplifting humanity because I think different people have very different views of what it means to uplift humanity. And they also have different views of what is humanity. Is that just the new version of make the world a better place uplifting? Yeah, I just feel like it kind of means nothing. And I think, you know, what Andon is doing is way more literal where it's like no, we're trying to see what happens when AI actually manages people. And we're doing it in a very controlled, you know, objectively try it compared to, you know, what it may be one day will be way. And we're letting people experience it. And I think that's important, you know, I don't know how it's going to end up. I don't know if they're going to shut the store down early or, you know, I do think it's a lot bugger than he let on. I've read some of the stories about, you know, the story just kind of going off the rails. This stuff is obviously not ready to actually be Walmart scale or something. But I kind of do buy his hypothesis that if you just kind of abstract out current trend lines, like it probably will get there. So it's worth considering what that feature is like. And I'm trying to do more of that this year. I'm trying to actually think out and say, okay, if I actually believe the things I think I believe about where all this is headed. What do I think is going to happen? And how should I set myself up for that? And I appreciated his perspective on that. The whole horizontal versus vertical bit is interesting as well because I feel like so many of the clients have had over the last couple of years, especially the like preceded ones from incubators and this and that. I just very literally trying to bring AI efficiencies and management and. what not to very old industries that are still working on paper and receipts and this and that. And yeah, the AI is a lot better at that job if you just let it do its thing. And I think as we talked about on the show in some ways, it may eventually be better to deal or even be employed by some systems that don't have as many biases as we monkey brain humans do, but then on the other side, does that mean the layoffs are even faster, even harder? You know, there's still an element of humanity. I mean, even if you look at some companies that have gone through several layoffs over the last couple of years, you know, whether it's met our snap or otherwise, I feel like you hear mumblings that it's like, well, they don't want to just rip the bandaid off because it's like too painful, you know, whereas the AI's wouldn't feel that pain. Right. Does AI have empathy about this stuff? I mean, it will pretend that it might, but it doesn't really. So do you want to actually have someone at an entity managing people that doesn't have empathy? You can train these things to appear like they have empathy, but they're not conscious. I mean, I don't aspire to that idea. I know some people in AI do. I just think it's these are ones and zeros at the end of the day. But yeah, it's kind of, it's kind of freaky. I mean, it's kind of freaky to consider. I mean, you've got two young girls like they may have to consider applying for a job that AI is overseeing, you know, in their lifetimes. I mean, AI is already looking at the job listing. No, but I mean, like, Aluna thing, like a fully, like, like, that's probably going to be the case by the time they're working age, which is just wild. I mean, that's been one of people's historical issues with their bosses. And why everybody hates their bosses? Because there's never any, the goalposts keep moving. There's never any like super, it's said in white color work, at least, there's never any like super concrete goals. A lot of the time, unless you're on the sales team, and you have very specific quota or something like that. And so, yeah, the goals are definitely going to get more iron clad, but then through the hands of competition and capitalism, I guess they're just going to keep moving for that reason as well. I don't know. I don't know, man. It's like he said, no one had vandalized the story yet. It's also in the arena near pack heights, which is a super nice neighborhood. So that's probably part of it. I think if you drop this thing in the mission, that location for that reason, I don't know. Probably I would to avoid vandalism, but you dropped this thing in the financial district or mission or something and I bet it's getting teaped pretty quickly. But you know what, I cannot do Ellis. And I don't think we'll be able to do for the foreseeable future is throw a really fun party in a live show, which is what we're doing. Do you like that? I did. I really wasn't. I really wasn't expecting that. Yeah, the access, launch party in San Francisco. We are so excited about this. Our friends at Notion, shout out Ivan, former guest, our hosting. And we're going to invite all of our former guests, friends, family, colleagues, former colleagues, and have a live show with Chris Best, the CEO of Substack on May 14th in San Francisco. If you should be there, we're going to be reaching out to you, but also, you know, if you're a diehard day one listener and you're in the Bay Area and you want to come, you know, reach out to us, find find me or Ellis online. We're very easy to reach and we'd love to have you. Are you excited? Show email is the extra client show. We do actually need to get our show email up. We do actually need to get like a because we've got access.show for the website, but we need to set up like a like a tip at or, you know, hello at email for stuff like this. But yeah, man, I'm very excited. This is going to be a good one. I think that's it. It was a fun one. Let's keep it rolling. Send feedback. Again, this is our second week of this new format on the show, where we're jumping right into the conversation and then recapping versus front loading. Ellis and I chatting. We hope you like it. We think it's a better structure. But yeah, let us know what you're thinking and what you want more over less of. Ellis, you want to start reading us out here. And that's it for this week's show. Thanks to Lucas Peterson for coming on. If you like this show, don't forget to like and subscribe. Everywhere you get podcasts, leave us five stars, please. It really helps. We are access.show on the internet. You can find us in video via access pod on YouTube. You can find my newsletter at sources.news. And you can find me at hamburger on Twitter and at meaning dot company for your startup storytelling needs unless it's a stunt. I don't like stunts. You know, you want good stunts. Only thoughtful stunts. Yeah. Yeah. Access is part of the Vox Media podcast network and the show is produced by Hook creators. Bye. Booking dot com is the easiest way from a day surrounded by noise. To a state surrounded by nature. That's nice. Go on, book it. It's easy booking dot com booking dot yeah. Fall is the perfect time to refresh and reorganize your space. At the Home Depot, find power tools and tool sets starting at $50 to help tackle DIY projects, home updates, and more whether you're drilling brackets to support new shelving or sharpening your head trimmer blade with an angle grinder. The Home Depot has the tools you need to check projects off your list. 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