Limitless Podcast - Sam Altman Issues a "Code Red." The Tides Are Shifting In AI.

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

OpenAI Issues a Code Red, and Anthropic prepares for an outrageous IPO.Meanwhile, Amazon has stepped up their AI game, and also pose to eat the lunch of... USPS? Cheack out this crazy alien a...steroid with us, and also: Thank you for tuning in this year! 2026 will be our biggest year ever. And by that, we mean first full year ever.-----🌌 LIMITLESS HQ: LISTEN & FOLLOW HERE ⬇️https://limitless.bankless.com/https://x.com/LimitlessFT------TIMESTAMPS0:00 OpenAI Code Red8:00 Anthropic14:30 Amazon20:30 RAM Shortage23:30 Apple Personnel Chaos27:00 Extraterrestrial Asteroid30:00 Spotify Wrapped------RESOURCESJosh: https://x.com/JoshKaleEjaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213------Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 The Golden Child of AI, OpenAI, has issued a code red. Just as Monday, Sam Altman, he sent out an internal memo declaring code red around chat GPT. What is code red? We're going to get into it, but we understand that it's a direct response to the increasing competition from people like Google and Anthropic who are now releasing models that are superior to anything that ChatGPT has ever created. Code Red seems a little risky, a little dangerous for a company that is so levered up on future costs and not able to make a lot of money. So I'm not really sure what's going on here.
Starting point is 00:00:35 EJez, you've lived through a code red in the past through previous experiences. Can you walk us through what it looks like when a company issues a code red? Because from what I understand, the entire company just gets put on pause. And everyone focuses on a single existential risk to the company. And I assume that's around chat GPT, right? Yeah. Code Red can be described with one word, Josh, danger. So I experienced a code red when I worked at Coinbase and it doesn't come about too often and it basically means one simple thing. The core product or the thing that makes your company special and all the money that it makes is in danger. It is about to die and it is under the threat of major competitors and you need to pile any and every resource that you can into
Starting point is 00:01:19 protecting it and making it the number one leader again. And so my experience at Coinbase, when a Code Red was issued was literally, I woke up one morning, Josh. There was a Slack message across the entire company saying Code Red, here's a list of things that we need to do. And I lost half my team to a completely different part of the organization to focus on something else. And that pursued for like the next like quarter or so, which is just kind of crazy. And so in the context of Sam Altman and with Open AI, I just want to give a bit of a context as to like how this has come to be. Last week, I'm showing you this article here. It was leaked in an internal memo by Sam Altman that he gathered the company around and said, hey, in the aftermath of Google
Starting point is 00:02:03 releasing their new Gemini 3 Pro model, which absolutely blasted them across every single benchmark by a wide, wide margin, we're probably going to face some economic headwinds because what he was basically saying is our models aren't good enough and we have to put in some more effort to catching up. And that kind of, that economic headwinds kind of like transgressed into a hurricane of sorts if we wanted to keep the analogy going along into a code red where he's issued an internal memo to his company that we need to gather all resources to make chat GPT better. And there's three main buckets that they're compiling these resources into, Josh, which I just want to briefly go over. Number one, improve model performance. So that means,
Starting point is 00:02:45 improving the benchmarks to match and beat Gemini 3 Pro and other competitor models, and also to help on the pre-training and post-training front. So that's where the majority of the resources are going. The second bucket is going to be in image generation. Now, I found this really interesting because this is a direct response to Gemini 3's Nano Banana release. We've spoken about this on a previous episode. You should definitely go check that out. I think it was from two weeks ago. But this is their text to image editing model, which is actually really good and driving the most usage for Gemini 3 right now. Their downloads are off the charts right now because of this feature. Sam wants to combat that directly. And the third bucket is personalization, Josh.
Starting point is 00:03:27 So you and I've said this before, but OpenAIA or ChatGPT's mode is personalization. It's memory. It's the reason why you and I consistently use ChatGPT, despite there being a lot of these other models. they understand and they get us, he wants to double down on that. So you might then ask, well, what's what comes at a cost to all of this? Like, what's the price that he's paying? Well, all the efforts and resources that he's been putting into advertising, into consumer products, in agents, into healthcare, all the stuff that he spoke about on his recent developer conference that everyone got super excited about is now void. SORA 2, it's kind of like, it's chilling. It's all been put on hold to focus on these three core buckets. He has gone into
Starting point is 00:04:07 war mode, Josh. Yeah, it's, I could understand why. I mean, Open AI, they're reportedly valued at what, half a trillion dollars, 500 billion. They have greater than 800 million weekly active users, which has surprisingly and suspiciously stayed the same over the last two months. Every time they mention it, it's been pegged at 800 million per week. So I'm a little curious if that means that they've kind of stalled out on growth. They are still unprofitable. And they have greater than $1 trillion in cloud and chip obligations to come. companies and partners like Microsoft, Oracle, and Nvidia. So they have this huge conundrum on their hands where they need to start making money. And in order to do so, they need to have products
Starting point is 00:04:48 that are superior to everybody else's. And we have on screen here a few charts that I found fascinating that may have spurred the code red, which is the relationship between Gemini downloads and chat Shabit downloads. EJAS, we mentioned just on our episode earlier this week, how Gemini is now on the home screen of my phone. And this is a new phenomenon, because I'm not. of how good it is. We talk about nano-banana all the time. We had an episode just about it because it was so good. And what you're seeing here in the charts is that Gemini is starting to catch up. And I suspect that it's okay if Gemini is a slightly superior model to Chat Chb-T's flagship model. But if the consumer application, if that product is at threat, which is the Chat-GPT mobile app,
Starting point is 00:05:28 the Chat-GPT desktop app, if that's under threat by a Gemini, then that's a serious problem. And that's what we're seeing reflected in these charts, is Gemini is a better model. sure, but it's also now starting to impede on the actual user base of chatGBT. And when your company is contingent on this exponential line of growth and you have a real threat to that growth, you must do everything in your power to fix that. And that is what the code red is all about. It's like, okay, how do we make this product better? So we stop losing market share to these other competitors. Yeah. And it's not like this threat isn't very, very real. I mean, look at this chart, right? You've got not only Gemini users and downloads creeping up to mass.
Starting point is 00:06:07 chat GPT users, they're spending more time on the app, Josh, which has always been chat GBT's mode. So, you know, we might be fearmongering a bit here, but it is a very real threat. We've heard feedback from other people, such as this tweet that I have pulled up here, where, you know, this is just a fad. People are only using Gemini because of Nano Banana, Josh. That's the main reason why you have it on your home screen right now. So there is an argument that this might die down in a few weeks. Time will tell. But it's obviously enough to kind of like push Sam into this hole where he needs to kind of like combat this, right? So then the next natural question I would ask is, well, what's he doing about this and how fast is he going to move? There's
Starting point is 00:06:47 two main updates that you need to know about. Next week, he's rumored to release a new reasoning model which is meant to match and even surpass Gemini 3. It's kind of crazy how he's just done that turnaround. We went from like no chat GPT model for the rest of the year to yeah, we're going to roll out one next week. So we already see the effects of this code red coming into place. But then Josh, there is another secret model which is planning, which is planned to be released early next year in January called code named garlic, which is meant to be kind of like a GPT 5.5, which represents or implies a major jump in performance and for them to retake the kind of number one spot convincingly. This is all hearsay right now. I have no confidence that this is
Starting point is 00:07:34 going to happen, but these are the kind of like rumors being spread. And Google isn't the only threat that they're facing that is kind of instigating them with this code red. Anthropic has come out of the woodworks with a flashy new coding model, Claude Opus 4.5, which not only maintain their lead as the number one coding AI model, but kind of like boosted them even further than they already were. Like they've got like a marginal lead right now. I'm showing up the quick stats on Opus 4.5 right here. You've got stuff as a 80% on agentic coding, terminal coding, 60%, agent tool use, 90%. If you compare these to any of their previous models as well as Gemini 3 Pro, they're absolutely smashing it, right? And so the fact is, despite Google's kind of like advantage with TPUs or
Starting point is 00:08:24 whatever stuff, we've spoken about this on a dedicated episode actually earlier this week or last week, definitely go check that out, they've been able to find a secret source to kind of like boosting their models, Josh, and this is one of many good things about this new model release and about Anthropic this week. Josh, do you have any thoughts on this model? The reason why I'm impressed by this is I think coding is such an important kind of characteristic to have or advantage to have for a model. Why? Because if you have the best coding model, you can practically create whatever the hell you want. If there's a competitor that creates a cool new feature, well, hey, Anthropic can just spin up an exact replica and hearsay. Do you feel you? Do you feel?
Starting point is 00:09:03 feel the same? Yeah, so here's the, getting back to the chat chepti point, Gemini is better at math and science, Anthropic is better at code, that leaves a narrower and narrower sliver for chat GPT to actually be great at. And this anthropic model, it's amazing. I think one of the most important things that I want to highlight here is the scores are great, but the cost per token is the most impressive, because not only is it a huge intelligence jump, it is significantly cheaper per token. Yeah, you could see this chart here how much cheaper it is. relative to previous models and how we're kind of getting this exponential increase where it seemed to previously be flattening out we're getting a new increase and anthropic kind of exists in this
Starting point is 00:09:43 strange bubble of code but my god is it really good at code and it comes equipped with this new agentic feature well it will actually ask you a series of questions after you submit a prompt that will kind of go through all of the edge cases that you might want and then it will one shot things that are really impressive you just we have an example of a designing a front end right Yeah, this is crazy. I mean, look at this. Yeah, I mean, literally, like, look, okay, like, I don't need to demonstrate the entire video, but just look at the prompt on the left here that I'm circling with my cursor,
Starting point is 00:10:14 and then just look at the result. This is, this happens, by the way, over a matter of like a few minutes. You have like a fancy fintech background, sorry, fintech front end, which is what the prompt asked it to build in a matter of minutes. This would normally take like a Fortune 500 company, a couple months to produce about two years. ago. And now it's happening in under four minutes, which is just insane to see. But Josh, there's also this really cool blog post I saw about the Red Team project. Can you tell me about this?
Starting point is 00:10:43 I love that. This week we have Open AI with Code Red and Anthropic with Red Team. And it kind of shows you it's a testament to where both companies are at right now. One is very clearly on the defense. One seems to be on the offense. So part of this new Anthropic rollout is they publish this blog post about whether AIs can actually exploit blockchains and smart contracts. So for the the crypto fans, this is for you. In simulated testing, they found that it could gain access to $4.6 million in exploits. And again, I mean, Anthropic is the best coding model in the world. If you ever wanted to penetration test any software, this would be the model to do it with. And with every new incremental increase and improvement in this model, it unlocks new exploits
Starting point is 00:11:23 that we can actually find. So Nick Carter has this amazing take that I love. I'm just going to read it word for word because it's exactly how I was feeling. And he says, within a year, when people tell their AI agent to go make money, the AI will interpret that as go and steal crypto by fishing or exploits. We're going to have to take OPSEC and smart contract security a lot more seriously on a go-forward basis. And that's true. It's like you get into the alignment question where, like, is this AI good or is this AI trying to answer, solve your request? And if your request is, go make me some money. Well, it'll just go hack from someone else's because a lot of these systems are not secured against the most cutting edge AI just yet.
Starting point is 00:12:03 So it unlocks this new interesting paradigm that I find is uniquely for Anthropic in the case because they are just the best at coding. And code is what secures all of our financial assets today. So interesting thought experiment. Yeah. And the fact of the matter is like, you know, this, the coding frontier model is an incredibly valuable thing to have. And the numbers don't like, Josh.
Starting point is 00:12:25 So if you remember, in January of this year, Dario, Amode, the CEO and founder, projected that they would probably reach around $1 billion worth of AR. That's currently what that was what the revenue they were earning at the time. He went on stage yesterday and announced convincingly that they are on track for $10 billion of annual recurring revenue at the end of this year. That is a 10x. That is insane. And so it's going really well. He's on track to hit that 70 billion projected goal ARR.
Starting point is 00:12:59 are in 2028, which we spoke about on a few episodes ago, which will make them the first profitable major AI lab at 2028 beating Open AI, who's projected to get there in 2031, 2032. So all things are in favor of Anthropic to kind of like do something pretty dramatic such as a IPO, maybe. Rumors broke. Maybe, well, maybe convincingly from an insider. News broke that Anthropic has engaged a firm to start prepping them. for an IPO in 2026. Of course, there hasn't been any official confirmations yet, but the regulations and the docs do not lie.
Starting point is 00:13:37 It also says that Dario is in the kind of midst of closing a massive round, which would value Anthropic at $300 to $350 billion, which will place them up there with Open AI, who's currently valued at $500 billion. And with Open AI going into Code Red, with Anthropic entering Red team and this new frontier model, maybe they might be even worth the same amount, if not more. So that's just a very interesting kind of like run for Anthropic in general.
Starting point is 00:14:07 I saw this tweet. I want to mention it very quickly that states that Anthropic might even value the IPO at 300 to 350, which would mean that they don't make any money on it. And the argument for that would be they've already raised so much money that they don't need it. And it is more beneficial for investors to purchase or buy Anthropic stock in the future. I don't know this is all hearsay, but it's something interesting to kind of check out. And the final thing I want to make a point of is these IPO evaluations, Josh, are getting absolutely insane. I have this really fun anecdote where a Chinese AI company, which is meant
Starting point is 00:14:43 to try to compete with Ambidia, IPOed on the Chinese stock exchange this week. And Josh, it IPOed for 4,000 times oversubscribed, which placed it at a 4.5,000. a trillion dollar market cap beating invidia's market cap now that was for a brief moment it is now regulated down but it just shows the insatiable appetite and demand for AI stuff right now yeah the the four and a half trillion dollar number it's outrageous it's not the only company with the valuation close to that high that we're going to talk about this week we have updates from amazon amazon's been moving kind of slow out of all the mag seven companies they are the the the one showing the least amount of growth this year so it's it's fitting that it's
Starting point is 00:15:27 their time is coming, if not already here, EJES. And you have some updates for us about what they actually announced this week at their AWS event. So can you walk us through where does Amazon stand? Why are they losing? And why is that hopefully not indicative of the future growth that they're going to see from this AI advancements? You can see I'm rubbing my hands, Josh.
Starting point is 00:15:46 For those of you are listening, I'm rubbing my hands. The reason why is I've been purchasing Amazon stock recently. Right before we've recorded actually, EJAS was saying I'm DCAing in right now. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And it's because I have an Amazon thesis, which is it is a sleeper AI stock hit. And this set of releases, this slew of AI releases that AWS launched this week is proof of that. So I'm going to quickly run you through it. They released a new AI chip or AI GPU, which competes directly with Nvidia's GPUs and Google's TPUs. And it's cool for a few different reasons. Number one, it's four and a half times more performance than the previous.
Starting point is 00:16:27 trainium chip that they launch. This is Trinium 3. I'm talking about Trinium 2. It is 4x more cost efficient, so it's cheaper. And it also has higher memory bandwidth, which makes it just all around like a really good infrastructure product to use for people to train their models. So that's super cool. And I think it like kind of competes directly with Nvidia in the sense that it can get you about 80% as good as Nvidia GPUs, but 50% cheaper. So for anyone that's kind of like, running on Nvidia GPUs and they're like spending billions of dollars, they could slash that bill by half, which is really cool. The other really cool thing that they released is something called Nova Forge.
Starting point is 00:17:08 In a single sentence, it allows any enterprise to train their own AI model using their own company data. The reason why that's cool is, imagine, like, chat GBT is good, right? But imagine if you had chat GBT for your own company. Imagine how productive you'd be. Imagine how productive each of your employees would be. that's a really unique thing. And it just tells me that like Amazon is going down the enterprise route,
Starting point is 00:17:31 similar to the company that they have a 19% stake in Anthropic, right? So I kind of see the alignment here. And the third point is around these three agents that they released, which basically helps them automate a bunch of things using AI. The way I think about it is Amazon's kind of like the automation AI giant. And I think they're going to do really well, Josh. Yeah, Amazon, I mean, we, could lay out a bit of a brief bullcase here because I'm super excited about Amazon too. I was looking
Starting point is 00:18:01 at the Mag 7 leaders. Like who in the Mag 7 moves the most amount of atoms? Because when you apply this AI leverage to these companies, the ones that move the most amount of atoms stand to benefit the most. And we have, we have Tesla, we have Apple, we have Microsoft, we have Google. But Amazon moves the most amount of physical stuff in the world by like, by a large margin. I think They're estimated, what is it, is 6 to 7 billion orders per year, containing 12 to 15 billion items shipped in 8 to 10 billion packages globally. So in the U.S. alone, that's like 6.3 billion parcels in 2024. They're on track for 8.4 billion in 2020.
Starting point is 00:18:41 It's a huge amount of stuff just moving around. And when you apply automation to that stuff, you can cut your cost and increase your margin at such a significant rate that Amazon stands to benefit hugely from this automation. And we're seeing this with the things that they announced this week in terms of building their own vertically integrated AI systems. We have some interesting takes on chips that they're making. So to me, Amazon is just like poised to explode
Starting point is 00:19:09 just because the sheer amount of volume that they move throughout the physical world. That's such a good point, Josh. Did you see the news that got released this morning about the USPS stuff? No. What was that? Okay, so get this, Amazon currently pays USBS $6 to $7 billion a year for them to ship packages for them, right? Because they don't want to like, they can't claim everything because like, you know, you can use the existing postal network. They announced plans, they being Amazon, that they're going to create their own postal service equivalent this morning, which will basically wipe out the $6 to $7 billion. So no other company can do this to the scale that Amazon is doing it.
Starting point is 00:19:52 is just insane. The other thing I wanted to address because I know you listeners, I've read all your comments, I know exactly the criticism you're about to give to this segment is, oh, but Nvidia is still good because everyone is using their software CUDA, C-U-D-A. Amazon has a special source in response to that, which is with their new tranium chip, they have software that you can just simply port from invidios to Amazon's, which makes the switching cost not just a hardware consideration, but an easy software consideration as well. Now it becomes really easy if you're running a Nvidia GPU cluster on AWS to hop onto Amazon. So it's actually a really smart strategy. And I'm pretty, I'm bullish, Josh, can you tell? Yeah, I can. The switching costs being, being as close to
Starting point is 00:20:38 zero as possible, it's huge, right? Because as much, I'd say what Kuda is to Nvidia, memory is to open AI, where it is a very strong mode. And if you can, it's basically saying we can make your memory portable in a commercial way. And that's a huge unlock for anyone who is interested in using these AWES chips. Now, when they make it, I don't know. There are some problems in the world of computers, particularly around RAM right now. If you have ever built a computer before, you know about RAM. Ram is the very lightning fast memory that holds temporary memory, but it's very fast. And it's required for training AI data centers, so much so that there has become this egregious shortage of RAM. And for people who haven't live through the previous GPU cycle, there was this huge problem where you couldn't buy an
Starting point is 00:21:24 Nvidia GPU because they were being used for crypto miners. And if you're a hobbyist at home, now you can't buy RAM for your computer because, well, the prices have tripled in the last 12 months. And this comes on the back of an announcement from a company that makes the crucial RAM. They just stopped making it for commercial purposes. They're using it only for institutional entities, for private entities who are building AI. So now one of the three major manufacturers of this RAM, is stepping away. If you are building a computer, I am sorry, it is about to get a lot more expensive. If you are building an AI data center, well, it's also expensive, but now you at least have one of these three major suppliers explicitly making stuff just for you. So just something to note that
Starting point is 00:22:05 there are these supply chain crises happening. This most recent one is in RAM. Previously it was GPUs. I guess it's still GPUs. But as we go along, it's going to be interesting to see where these kind of bottlenecks form. And just in terms of bubble watch, we just want to see where everything's landing. This is the RAM segment. Here is where it is getting very high, very quickly. One of the companies bowed out. And that's just kind of like the nerdy, hobbyist, enthusiast, like, state of the union for it. Sorry, I can't let you get off the hook that easy. You sent me this website and it looks intense. What am I looking at? I can't believe you've never used PC Part Picker. If anyone has ever built a custom PC before, there's a lot of compatibility
Starting point is 00:22:47 issues between parts because sometimes a specific manufacturer's piece does not work with another manufacturer's piece. So what PC Part Picker does is it allows you to place all these pieces into one place and it'll tell you which is compatible with which. It also does a great job of tracking prices of these items. And what we're seeing here in these charts that are all going up into the right is the price for the average person to get their hands on a critical piece of compute hardware, which is the RAM. And there's another nerdy joke she made here where now developers are going to have to actually optimize their websites. Because a lot of the times these big clunky websites and the big clunky code, it all gets stored
Starting point is 00:23:21 in your RAM because they just throw it in. There's no budget. Well, maybe if there's a budget, they'll start making more efficient code. But that's kind of a deep cut. I don't want to spend too much more time on here. We have other interesting things to talk about. Mostly in the world of Apple. There is a big switchup this week in Apple World.
Starting point is 00:23:35 Please, EJAS, tell us what happened. Well, I want you to tell me about this, Josh. This is your favorite company ever Apple. And they just lost their chief of AI. John is leaving and he's being replaced by this guy called Amar from Microsoft and is joining to lead AI under Craig Federina. Can you give me the law of this? Is this kind of bearish but eventually bullish or should I just be bearish?
Starting point is 00:24:01 I don't really, I don't know these guys. It's like, I mean, Apple AI sucks. So whoever's in charge of it, like, sure, get rid of them. Whoever tried, they failed clearly. Because like I still don't have Syria enabled and they're now hopefully going to outsource to Gemini. I think this is probably a good thing. If you're in charge of AI at Apple, you probably should be fired. I find it funny how everyone kind of reports to Craig Federigi. So everyone comes in and out, but Craig is always that guy. He's always sitting there. He never
Starting point is 00:24:27 takes the blame. He never takes the fall. I'd be curious to know how much of this is his responsibility versus people who are beneath him. But yeah, it's funny, actually. The first comment says, under Craig Federigi, that's the problem right there. So I don't know where to stand on this. I know that Apple's AI sucks. I hope this new guy, I mean, Godspeed, brother, Amar, whatever you're like, whatever you're doing, I wish you all the best. I hope you could figure it out. That's kind of what I got for this.
Starting point is 00:24:56 There is a more interesting. Another guy as well, right? I was going to say, this is the more interesting conversation of the week, to me at least, I think, which is this guy who was previously in charge of a lot of things at Apple. His name is Alan Dye, and he's responsible for this whole slew of things. He was working on packaging. Then he helped with the Iowa 7 redesign. he created the dynamic island.
Starting point is 00:25:16 He led the UI for Vision Pro. He helped with the Vision Pro launch. He did Liquid Glass. He did all of the human interface spatial computing things. And he just one of the things that we'd love and one of the things that I'm personally excited about in the future is to switch to spatial computing. And this guy did a great job.
Starting point is 00:25:32 Like Vision OS looks great. Liquid Glass. We've had our debates on the show. I think it looks pretty good. This is the guy kind of behind and in charge of all of that stuff. And Meta poached him for a, for a presumably ton of money. Meta said, hey, we'll pay you whatever you want.
Starting point is 00:25:47 Come over here. Do it for our products. That's presumably going to be for the Meta Rayban displays that we had a few episodes on earlier on. And it made me a little bummed because this guy actually did do a great job on these Apple products. And now he's going to be going to develop for
Starting point is 00:26:02 meta, who makes really crappy hardware products in really siloed software suites. So to have a little bittersweet. Zuck is really on a rampage, isn't he? to just kind of like hire the talent from everywhere, but like will he actually prove it? Like, listen, he spent what, $25 billion in hiring like 100 people, less than 100 people actually, 35 to 40 people? And like, I haven't seen the fruits of that labor.
Starting point is 00:26:28 So like, is he going to do the same thing with design and his glasses? Probably not. It was an absolute shambles of a launch, so we'll see. Josh, do you know anything about the guy that's replacing this Apple design guy, Steve Lamay? New guy. No, other than the fact, he's been around for a very long time. And apparently has been here since 1999.
Starting point is 00:26:47 He helped ship the original iPhone, MacOS, iOS, iOS, iPad OS, watchOS, and most recently Vision OS. So somebody who was around during the Steve Jobs Johnny Ive era seems bullish. That's about all of the context clues that I have. But hey, again, I wish you the best. I hope you could help Apple figure it out. They have a lot of figuring out to do. And that's just, we're going to take it from there.
Starting point is 00:27:11 but there is another interesting topic that I want to cover here, some science corner stuff, which is pretty cool. We found sugars in outer space essential to life. This is kind of cool. It was found on some asteroid that was in deep space, and it is one of the first times that we actually discovered some sort of building blocks for life that came from outside of our galaxy. So I wanted to just briefly mention this because it creates this interesting conversation around the Fermi paradox. For people who don't know the Fermi paradox, it's the apparent contradiction between the high probability that intelligent life should exist elsewhere in the universe and the total lack of evidence that it actually does. So from a Fermi paradox perspective,
Starting point is 00:27:57 this is great and terrible news. Terrible as the paradox is stronger than ever. But great because whatever filter causes the paradox is more likely to be early in our evolutionary history rather than in the future. You can at least make the case that this life was kind of randomly placed, and there is a high probability that it can be placed randomly elsewhere because there are the basic building blocks coming from all these external places. What do you think? Okay. So how do you feel about this? Listen, I, my pastime in a very, very long ago life was a biologist. That's what I kind of like studied at university. And all I could help, but think when I learned about all these different amino acids, building blocks, DNA,
Starting point is 00:28:42 but what is like there is so much chance in this that it is almost certain that there exists another universe where there are other sorts of life forms because all the building blocks are just out there, right? So why should we be the only favored ones? Josh, I pulled up the sugar futures chart and I have to say, I have to say, no one seems to be reacting as violently as I had expected here. Listen, I have to, I have to say, no one seems to be reacting as violently as I had expected here. Listen, I'm a market smart. I'm invested in this stuff.
Starting point is 00:29:11 I want to see how I can make returns on this. And I don't know. Maybe there's a delay in this information, Josh. Maybe I should be shorting the sugar stocks as much as I can before they kind of catch on. That's so funny. You're the type of guy where like a meteor will hit Earth and it will be made of solid gold. And the first thing you will do is hop on your computer and figure out how do I short gold? Forget about my bug out bag.
Starting point is 00:29:35 Forget about how do I short gold? We just got hit by tons of it on Earth. That is so funny. Well, it's just an interesting thing. It's like, it makes you think. It's like, okay, we found a critical building block for life that came from another universe, yada, yada, yada, whatever. That's Science Corner. We have something important to celebrate as we wrap up this episode, which is our Spotify
Starting point is 00:29:52 wrapped, which just came out. And we have some really amazing stats and some really gracious thank you to hand out to everybody because, wow, I think I share this thought in the fact that we are both blown away by the support that we've had over the past year. And these statistics that we're showing on screen are like pretty outrageous, you guys, right? Like top 1% across the board? Top 1% across every single category. So that is a 2025 instant hit show, 2025 most shared show.
Starting point is 00:30:20 That's you guys. Listen to this right now, watching this right now. Thank you for sharing it with all your friends. It turns out you guys are listening. Someone's listening to us, Josh, which is great. I wonder for aliens. Exactly. I also do want to point out that,
Starting point is 00:30:35 our show has only been going for six months. So we got like half a year delayed on the head start for this and we still managed to pull the top 1%. No easy feat, Josh. But the one I'm probably most proud of right now is we are ranked as one of the top technology podcasts in the world, ranking it 21, Josh. I can't, I'm not looking at your face right now because I'm staring at the camera, but I know I know part of you is seething because you want that top 10 spot.
Starting point is 00:31:02 And so do I. So we are going to be gutting for this. But what a crazy start. A seething but grateful. Like, man, all the people who are listening here, normally it's the real ones that make it to the end of the episode. So if you're watching still, chances are you're one of the real ones that made this possible. So thank you.
Starting point is 00:31:17 From like the bottom of the way out, heart seriously. Like the support and the sharing with your friends and the liking and the subscribing and the rating, like it really makes a meaningful difference. And we're seeing that support reflected in the numbers for the first time ever really through the Spotify wrapped. And it is so, so awesome. Like it really, it's, it's one thing to see the numbers on the screen, but it's a second to actually see the impact that it has through all of the comments, through everyone sharing, through just like the nice messages we receive on a daily basis. So seriously, like, thank you so much for the support. I think based on this, we can give limitless rookie to year podcast award because like, man, I think so. That was a, it's a pretty crazy run. It's a really crazy one. We've published 93 episodes. This is number 94 that will be coming out in a six-month span. And if you've listened from number one, or if you've listen from number 92. Thank you. I hope that you have found value in the show. I hope that you will continue to find value in the show. The frontier is like expanding faster than ever. It has never been
Starting point is 00:32:15 more exciting to be right on the bleeding edge of it. And that's exactly where the show lies. So we're going to keep doing more of this. I hope you still continue to find it exciting, exhilarating. We're going to keep working to get better. Hopefully you can keep working to share this with every single person you know who could be remotely interested in this. And we will just continue chugging along. Yeah. So who knows, maybe by next year Spotify wrapped, we can trim a two from the front of that 21 and just leave it at number one. Oh, that's good. I like that. And the final thing I'll say is we don't just do podcasts, Josh. We also do newsletters. And I know you guys are reading a bunch of newsletters, but if you'd read our newsletter about a month ago, you would have bought Google stock
Starting point is 00:32:59 and you would have been up about 15 to 30 percent on the stock right now, which is nuts. So, I have a thesis. We have a thesis coming out on Amazon next week. So if you want to read that and be notified about that, subscribe to the newsletter. That is all from my end, Josh. That's it. Yeah, and that's alpha. A few weeks ago, or even a month ago now, he just posted the Google Ball thesis. and since then the stock is up quite a bit. So there are some good alpha in these newsletters. I would highly advise you to subscribe. The link is in the description below.
Starting point is 00:33:29 But as always, thank you. Seriously, thank you for a great year. We're going to keep on going. The year's not over. It's still early December. We got a lot more to talk about. So we will be back next week. Have an amazing weekend.
Starting point is 00:33:38 And we will see you guys then. Thank you.

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