29 July 2026
7 shows published 14 episodes in the period, 9.8 hours in all. These are the 2 minutes worth hearing.
AI
Business Breakdowns
Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig, co-founders of Applied Intuition.
Younis says he was chief operating officer at Y Combinator before the company started in 2017, and that he went to the General Motors Institute and worked at General Motors; Ludwig is described in the conversation as an early engineer on Android Automotive at Google. They say Applied Intuition has raised about a billion dollars, has not spent it, and runs a little over a thousand engineers.
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framework
Applied Intuition argues machine intelligence spreads far slower than software because the buyer already owns a Honda Accord and will keep it for 10 to 15 years.
A software update ships into a standardised stack of browsers, app stores and payment rails, so a user has it the day it exists; a machine has none of that, and with over half of Americans holding small savings, free self-driving tomorrow does not put anyone in a new car. The founders turn that friction into their own durability argument, comparing an autonomous mine or farm to silicon that is hard to displace once designed in.