More ambitious? Building things we wouldn't have before

**Justin Jackson** (0:11)
Welcome to The Panel, where founders discuss how to build a better business and a better life. I'm Justin Jackson, co-founder of Transistor.fm.

**Brian Casel** (0:19)
And I'm Brian Casel, founder of Builder Methods.

**Jordan Gal** (0:22)
I'm Jordan Gal, founder at heyrosie.com.
Gents, it's good to be back. A little sporadic over the summer, but we're going to find our groove, we're getting our recordings in.
It's a lot that happens every week.

**Justin Jackson** (0:36)
Yes.

**Jordan Gal** (0:37)
Two weeks, there's so much in the rear view mirror. It may as well not have happened.

**Justin Jackson** (0:41)
Yeah.

**Brian Casel** (0:42)
For sure.

**Justin Jackson** (0:43)
I mean, when I asked Claude to analyze our stats, two things came out. One is Claude recommended having a consistent publishing schedule. Don't go two weeks between. And then the second was that the podcast has been a lot more popular since Jordan joined.

**Brian Casel** (0:59)
I saw that tweet. That's a great graph.

**Jordan Gal** (1:02)
I sent that to my entire family. It definitely made its way to my cousins in Israel. Everyone knows now.

**Brian Casel** (1:08)
That's great.

**Jordan Gal** (1:10)
I'm waiting to bust it out with my kids until there's a moment where I need to give them a trump card. Like, hold on a second.

**Brian Casel** (1:16)
Yeah. We're going to let that graph go to Jordan's head.

**Jordan Gal** (1:19)
Yeah.
But really, my humble interpretation of it is more debate, more points of view. It's just fun and the energy is good.

**Justin Jackson** (1:30)
Yes. Love it. Yes. Yes.
This week, Brian, you're hosting and you have some good topics.

**Brian Casel** (1:37)
Yeah.
I don't know how you can not be on X and not notice the takeover of Grokbot and all things, XAI and what they're doing. I just think it's super interesting on so many different levels, just as an observer of the AI horse race. If we look at this as a sports analysis, if we're just watching the horse race between Anthropic and OpenAI and Grok, to me, this is like Grok and XAI, sort of like coming out of nowhere and making a big move.
These moves have started to come into place in the last, with their acquisition of Cursor, which I think is turning out to be a major development. Huge win. Huge. Then of course, this Grokbot thing, we can talk about that. I literally just opened it, just installed it like three hours ago. Today is my day one, playing with it. But just bigger picture, what I think is also very, very interesting, I don't know how closely you guys are following this, but the pricing war, just the pricing move from Grokbot. I mean, they're selling this, I don't mean to sound like a big advertisement for them or whatever, but the Grok, they call it like Super Heavy plan or like Grok Heavy plan.

**Justin Jackson** (3:21)
Okay.

**Brian Casel** (3:22)
300 bucks a month is kind of a crazy value right now, if you think about what, they are just throwing the kitchen sink into this plan. And to me, it's just clearly like a land grab against Anthropic and OpenAI, especially for the tech people, the early adopters, you know.

**Jordan Gal** (3:41)
I mean, it's kind of both now because Grokbot is not tech really, or at least it has expanded the potential ICP, right? Like I look at Grokbot and I like, I see it as what I've been waiting for.
I've been looking at Hermes and OpenClaw and like, cool story, I'll wait until there's a UI and also Grokbot comes long and it's like, don't worry about any of the complicated stuff. And I downloaded it and the first thing I did was ask it to do some research inside of a website service that I used for research. And it was like, all right, I have my own browser, so click here to log in. So I clicked it, I get to see Grok's browser, I put in my username and password, and then I say, okay, I'm done. And it's like, all right, I'm in, tell me what you want me to do. It's like, that's the experience, that's it.

**Brian Casel** (4:36)
Definitely, compared to the OpenClaw and Hermes thing, it is so much nicer and easier and simpler. It's simpler, but it is very powerful. The user experience and the mobile app and the desktop app are very, very simple and just dead, like just you sign up and you're in, and it's such a clever concept how you can literally view the agent's computer screen.
I had a hacky way of doing that with OpenClaw and with Hermes, and it was a total pain in the ass to set that up, and it broke every three hours. It's like, what am I doing here? It's definitely not for the normies, but even for folks like me, I scaled back my usage of Hermes because it was just too much of a pain in the ass to use.