God Mode Podcast

Grok 4.5 matches Opus 4.8 at a tenth of the cost, GPT-5.6 "Soul" ships under government review, and Anthropic extends Claude Fable 5. The biggest AI week of the year, for builders. Rik, Ben and Luca break down what's actually usable this week versus marketing: the Grok vs Fable cost gap, the 3-model stack where Claude plans and Grok does the cheap grunt work, OpenAI retracting the SWE-bench benchm...

Fable 5 just shipped, and Claude Sonnet 5 turned out more expensive than Opus 4.8. Then Anthropic told the US government that Alibaba ran the largest known AI model theft on record — 28.8 million exchanges through nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts. Episode 20 of God Mode Pod. Rik, Ben, and Luca break down what's actually usable this week versus marketing hype: Fable 5's real coding limitat...

Claude edited Ben's entire video from an hour of raw footage: tagging clips, writing the script, cutting his retakes, rendering it. Then Claude showed up in Slack as a teammate. Three AI builders break down the news that actually ships this week. Rik, Ben and Luca on AI video editing crossing a line, Claude landing inside Slack as an agent you can tag, and the markets testing how much of the AI hy...

Midjourney built a full-body scanner it says beats an MRI, the US government pulled Claude Fable offline worldwide, and SpaceX bought Cursor in all-stock. Three builders break down the biggest AI news of the week. Rik, Ben and Luca read the AI news the way people who actually ship things read it. This week: why the most powerful model on Earth disappeared, whether Anthropic's own fear-marketin...

The SpaceX IPO thesis just flipped: one Google deal added ~$11B/year, Anthropic passed OpenAI on revenue, and Mythos is coming. We break down SpaceX, Claude vs Codex, and data centers in space — the first-ever God Mode Pod recorded in real life, from a villa in Malta with guest Reuben Ferrante (Vuci.ai). No agenda. No script. Three builders who actually ship, arguing about where AI and the markets...

Four months in, all three of us accidentally wore white shirts — then spent an hour arguing about whether AI actually works. Icon.com is back: the founder sold Skio for $105M, spent $12M on the domain, hit $5M ARR in 30 days, went dark — and relaunched by walking back "AI ad maker" to "human ad maker." We use it to ask the real question: has anyone actually seen AI UGC work? Th...

Claude Opus 4.8 just dropped, Anthropic is renting SpaceX GPUs at $8/hour, and SpaceX filed toward the biggest IPO in history. Plus token maxing, agentic onboarding, and analyzing your own DNA with AI. Episode 15 of God Mode Pod with Rik, Ben and Luca. We hit one million views — then spent the week questioning everything: is Opus 4.8 a real release or PR for the next raise, why "token maxing" is b...

SpaceX filed the biggest IPO in history. Andrej Karpathy left OpenAI for Anthropic. And the AI coding wars got brutal: Cursor vs Codex vs Claude Code, the SaaSpocalypse, plus a full Ozempic breakdown. Episode 14 with guest Dr Dan (ex-Google, now a master vibe coder building OmniHarness.dev). Rik, Ben and Dan go deep on the $1.75 trillion SpaceX IPO and the plan to acquire Cursor, why Karpathy join...

Anthropic beat OpenAI on business adoption, xAI launched Grok Build, and Rik cancelled his $100 Claude plan on air. The AI news that actually matters for vibe coders, AI builders and indie hackers — God Mode Pod EP13, with Rik, Ben and guest Matt. In this episode: - Why Rik cancelled his $100 Claude Max plan and split the spend four ways - Ben reframes the viral "AI bubble" chart — one coder burns...

Anthropic just shook hands with SpaceX. Codex now has 100x more downloads than Claude Code. Anthropic stacked $380 billion in compute and 10% of America's data center capacity in one week. The agent layer is winning. Codex 46M downloads vs Claude Code 491K. Anthropic + SpaceX partnership doubles rate limits with multi-gigawatt orbital compute on the roadmap. Code with Claude 2026 ships Dreaming +...

This was the week Cursor beat Anthropic at running Anthropic's own model. The third-party harness extracts more performance from Opus 4.7 than Claude Code does. Codex ate Claude Code with HeyGen and browser baked in. Grok 4.3 dropped at one-quarter OpenAI's pricing. GitHub Copilot moved to usage-based billing. Anthropic shipped Claude Security and Cursor cloned it in two hours flat. Stripe Treasur...

This was the wildest seven days of AI news in 2026 — and we covered all of it. Anthropic finally admitted what builders had been saying for six weeks: Claude got dumber. They confirmed three product-layer bugs stacked on top of each other from March 4th to April 16th. Default reasoning silently dropped from "high" to "medium." A caching bug killed idle session thinking. A system prompt told Claude...

Anthropic pre-IPO hit $900B. Claude Code crossed $2.5B ARR in nine months — the fastest B2B growth ever recorded. And your Claude Opus didn't get dumber — Anthropic quietly nerfed it (73% drop in reasoning depth across 7,000 sessions). This week on God Mode Pod: Rik, Ben, and Luca break down the three-week Anthropic news dump — the Tesla vs NVIDIA playbook debate, the Opus reasoning rollback, the...

Anthropic has a secret weapon. It's called Mythos — and it just scored 78 on a coding benchmark where GPT-5.4 scored 58. That's not a generational jump. That's a different architecture entirely. In EP 08, Rik, Ben, and Luca unpack the leak of the year, Jensen Huang's $500k token rule, and why Google might actually be the company quietly winning the AI race — while Anthropic's compute constraints s...

Gonçalo Hall built the first digital nomad village in the world — 20 people in February 2021, 25,000 by end of year. Now he's doing it again, on a Caribbean island almost nobody has heard of. Roatan is 2 hours from Miami. It's home to Prospera — a free economic zone where gene therapy is legal, companies register in minutes, and you can get physical tax residency for $5,000/year with just 7 days o...

Episode 6 of the God Mode Pod — holiday edition. Rik's in the mountains, Ben's somewhere in North Africa, and Luca just got off the slopes. We're still here though. This week: AI content is going parabolic, OpenAI shut down Sora (and lost a $1B Disney deal), Elon announced a chip factory 50x the size of TSMC, ElevenLabs just got disrupted, a GitLab founder cured his own cancer with AI, and Anthrop...

Naval's tweet hit different this week: "Coding an app is the new starting a podcast." We are three guys who just started a podcast and code all day. Felt personal. Episode 5 covers Travis Kalanick's new company Adams and his bits-to-atoms theory of the physical world, the SaaS apocalypse ($830 billion wiped in six days), Google Stitch threatening Figma's existence, Stripe launching agent-to-agent...

This episode explores the rapid evolution of AI, its industry impacts, and future opportunities, including AI's role in management, legal, and scientific breakthroughs. Guests discuss AI adoption, government use, and innovative applications like underwater drones and prediction markets.  key  topics AI adoption gaps across industries Theoretical vs observed AI capabilities AI's impact on managemen...

the latest developments in AI, government contracts, effective altruism, and the future of AI models and hardware. we analyze the strategic moves of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, exploring their philosophies, market impacts, and technological advancements. key topics AI government contracts and ethical considerations The influence of effective altruism on AI organizations Market strategies of Ope...

In this episode of the God Mode Pod, the hosts discuss the significant impact of AI on employment, productivity, and the future of work. They explore the implications of AI-driven job cuts, the potential for Universal Basic Income, and the shifting landscape of real estate and economic opportunities. The conversation also delves into the rise of AI startups, the evolution of design tools, and the...

In the first episode of the God Mode Podcast, hosts Rik, Ben, and Luca dive into the fast-paced world of AI, discussing their backgrounds, the latest innovations, and the competitive landscape between major players like OpenAI and Anthropic. They explore the implications of AI on business automation, user experience, and the future of app development, emphasizing the importance of skill stacking a...