Playbook
Tasteful Skills
“Tasteful Skills” argues that the best agent skills are not documentation or best-practice lists.
Back to Podcast Digest
The AI Backlash Just Reached a Boiling Point
TL;DR
AI backlash has gone mainstream — Ashley and Kylie use Eric Schmidt getting loudly booed at the University of Arizona, plus anti-AI sentiment on TikTok and Instagram, as evidence that public anger has moved beyond niche critics and into everyday culture.
Meta has infinite resources, but not a clear AI hit product yet — their Alexander Wang interview suggested Meta understands the stakes and has serious talent like Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, but even Ashley and Kylie mostly experience Meta AI through underwhelming glasses demos and bizarre Instagram chatbot ads.
The OpenAI vs. Elon case ended abruptly, but the real goal may have been spectacle — OpenAI won on statute-of-limitations grounds just before recording, and Kylie argues Elon mainly wanted embarrassing internal emails, diaries, and testimony in public, though Sam Altman came off looking relatively calm while Greg Brockman took more PR damage.
AI valuations still look detached from reality even as the tech keeps improving — both hosts say they’re stunned there hasn’t been a collapse yet, citing Nvidia at $5.3 trillion and talk of OpenAI and Anthropic reaching $1 trillion valuations despite revenue and business fundamentals that still feel wildly out of sync.
Phantom Neuro was the most convincing near-term cyborg demo in the episode — unlike Neuralink-style brain implants, Phantom’s prosthetic-control system reads signals near the site of an amputation, took minutes to set up, and let Ashley fly a drone and watch patient Alex Smith move a detached robotic hand.
A lot of frontier tech now runs on the same Silicon Valley ingredient: delusion — from remote telescope ranches in Texas to Phantom Neuro to supersonic aviation startup Astro Mechanica, the hosts keep returning to San Francisco’s defining trait: a place where people don’t laugh at impossible-sounding ideas, they fund them.
The Breakdown
Alexander Wang, Meta, and the vibe of a nervous power move
They open on their interview with Alexandr Wang, which Kylie calls unusually exclusive because he hadn’t really talked publicly in 11 months about Meta’s strategy. Ashley says Alex was more reserved than he is in private, and the big tension is obvious: Meta has absurd compute and money, but putting a 29-year-old in charge over people like Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross creates a fascinating, slightly awkward power structure.
Meta’s models may be real, but the consumer experience still feels weird
Ashley says he lives inside Meta products — WhatsApp, Instagram, Meta glasses — and still basically never uses Meta AI, which feels like a problem. Kylie’s most vivid Meta AI memory is seeing an Instagram ad for a chatbot depicted as a homeless woman holding a sign, which she calls horrifying, while Ashley’s live glasses demo ends with the assistant telling him to restart the app, exactly the kind of underwhelming moment that sticks.
Eric Schmidt gets booed, and suddenly the backlash feels real
The conversation pivots hard to Schmidt’s commencement speech at the University of Arizona, where the boos were loud enough to rattle both hosts. Kylie says people their age already hate AI in a visceral way — from Instagram comments trashing Sam Altman to TikTok discourse framing AI as immoral and apocalyptic — and Ashley admits he may have underestimated how broad and emotional the backlash has become.
Why the anger is getting sharper
Kylie argues the public is often misinformed on issues like data centers, but she also says AI leaders helped create this climate by spending years warning that AI could take everyone’s jobs. The hosts connect that to graduates entering a terrible job market, AI recruiters filtering candidates, protests at Sam Altman’s house, and a broader fear that the U.S. is headed into a messier political fight just as AI becomes one of the few areas where it still clearly leads China.
The market hasn’t cracked, even though both of them expected it to
Ashley says this is the most confused he’s ever felt about a tech cycle: he expected a Wall Street-style collapse by now, but instead the models keep getting better. Kylie agrees the technology is impressive while also saying the numbers are absurd, specifically calling out Nvidia at $5.3 trillion and reports of OpenAI and Anthropic chasing $1 trillion valuations as completely disconnected from reality.
Elon lost the OpenAI case, but got the drama he wanted
Just before they recorded, OpenAI won the lawsuit because the claims were time-barred, which surprised both of them after so much buildup. Kylie’s take is that Elon mainly wanted discovery: texts, emails, journals, people on the stand — and that worked, including Ashley’s own Signal messages to Sam Altman during the OpenAI coup surfacing as evidence while Sam was apparently reading them in real time.
Greg Brockman’s diary, Sam’s composure, and Elon’s usual strategy
The most damaging material, in their view, was Greg Brockman’s diary — especially the line about becoming a trillionaire — while Sam looked like a pretty normal executive trying to steady chaos. Ashley still says he reflexively expects Elon to win everything because of his long streak of surviving cases, and Kylie thinks he may keep appealing partly because dragging OpenAI through court is cheap for him and distracting for them.
Phantom Neuro, telescope ranches, and the non-AI stuff that actually felt fresh
The back half gets looser and more fun: Ashley is genuinely wowed by Phantom Neuro, an Austin startup building implants for amputees that control robotic prosthetics without drilling into the brain, and says it felt more practical than many overfunded BCI companies. Then they rave about Starfront Observatories in rural Texas — a no-frills telescope ranch with fiber internet, 550 telescopes growing toward 800-900, and co-founder Bray Falls living the remote-astronomy dream — before closing on Kylie’s San Francisco reporting, where founder after founder described the city with the same word: delusion, but in the productive sense that makes rockets, biotech, and weird aviation companies like Astro Mechanica possible.
Share
Keep Reading
Two Ways to Follow
The Weekly Echo. The inbox-shaped summary of what mattered.
New editorials announced here.
