OpenAI Staff to Sell $6B in Stock, Flirty Meta Chatbot Leads NJ Man to Death, Claude Can Now End Conversations | Noor Siddiqui
00:00You're watching My Source News Opinion, World!Welcome to the stream.It's Monday, August 18th.We are live from the TBP and Ultradome.NBC, MSN.Yeah, if you didn't hear MSNBC is changing their nameto My Source News Opinion World.It's not actually that.
00:19It's my source for news opinion and the world.News opinion and the world.Formerly MSNBC, MSNBC,Pop quiz. Tyler, do you know what MSNBC stands for?No, no, no, but the prior, the prior era.No, I've no idea.The prior era.You're going to like this.
00:44Was, so NBC is the National Broadcasting Corporation, very old.Then they did a joint venture with Microsoft.And so the MS and MSNBC stands for Microsoft.Let's give it up the big tech.You got it, you got it.But yeah, people are not a fan of this.Dustin Curtis says,New Contender for the worst rebrand of all time just dropped.
01:10It is a very funny logo.The font is not standing out to me in any way.Maybe it'll grow on me.Who knows?But I guess it does make senseif they needed to distance themselves from Microsoftsince I believe Microsoft's like sold off the position a while.Someone else was saying this feels very succession coded.
01:29I saw that. I saw that. We hear for you. We hear for you.What was that? I actually don't have that. Oh, is that the tagline of ATN News?Yes. We hear for you. We hear for you. Tom and Greg.We hear for you. We're here for you. My source, news opinion, world.And then Mani says, I'm sorry, and it's the Mario font. I don't get this. Do you understand this?I didn't get it, but it looked.Does it just seem like there's something lost in translation,like it was from a different country?
02:06Lulu says it seems like a wasted opportunity forfeits brand equitywithout replacing it with anything better, so generic.MS Now could be an app, a charity, or a cloud storage product.Initially, she thought it was a rebrand for MS One Drive.The new logo looks like it belongs to a Democrat pack.Maybe they're doubling down on being an echo chamber,choosing choice if not shots fired anyway if you want to partner up with a company that has a goodbrand get on ramp ramp dot com time is money save both he's to use corporate cards bill payments
02:38accounting and a whole lot more all in one place um thank you watch the ufc fight i didi i thought it was terrible uh i was i was shocked like how could something so dominant butalso be boring at the same time like ddp strategy was just abysmal strictlyneeds to just bring in bow nickel for a camp of just sprawling. Wish Usman, he had gas in thetank to go up and bang with Chimrav. But UFC is just screwed with all these Easternblock guys who smother and bore as champs. We need more to Purias, in my opinion. What was yourtake, Jordi? Great, great analysis, John. Couldn't have said it better myself. It's so funny.We're in a group chat with Rob Moore from Huberman Lab and David Senra.
03:28And David, Rob, and myself are big UFC fans, and John just chimed in.I'm probably the biggest.John's realistically the biggest, definitely the tallest of the fans.But, of course, there was a fight this weekend.It was mildly entertaining.I did start doing email midway through the first round.Never a good sign.When we watched the last fight, whichever one we went over to Rob's house for,
03:55I had a great time of that.Like, I was not distracted at anything.At any point in time, I was fully engaged.Yeah, that was watching Ilya,one of the most dominant UFC champions in history,putting on a master class.I mean, we need more Tupurias.Clearly.
04:13You do, John.It was interesting.So the card was fine.There was something that happened that I don't think has ever happened before,where the two fights prior to the title fight,there was two spinning elbowswith the person spun around and got a CO.That's never happened before.
04:34Really? Interesting.And anyways, that was exciting.But of course, the actual title fight was a lot of.What does boring actually mean?One of the fighters has a wrestling backgroundand was so dominant at wrestlingthat the other fighter almost wasn't able to stand upthe entire time.
04:53So there's wrestling on the ground the entire time.How can you be so dominant at wrestling and not, and yet, like, not actually, like, win by victory of wrestle?Because he can't punch that hard.Okay.So, you'd have the guy down.He punched the one.Really?He punched the reigning champion in the head, like, hundreds of times.
05:08But isn't part of wrestling, like, you do an arm bar or something, you get them to tap out?What was doing, he was doing good at wrestling and yet not in the attack?So, Chimaiov was doing something called a crucifix where the both, the other guys, both his arms were pinned down.Okay.And he was just repeatedly.punching DDP in the head, but he's not strong enough to actually finish it.Anyway, so a lot of fight fans were let down.And it was interesting to have that kind of card happen right as Paramount decided to spend, you know, north of a billion a year on the property.
05:46But I still think it's a pretty smart.Well, you know what they should do.What?Restream it.That's right.One live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream, and reach your audience.they are, you can sign it for free, UFC.If you're watching UFC and you want to live stream your fights on X, Facebook, Twitch.
06:04I think the whole point is that they will only, hopefully only be streamed on Paramount Plus.Well, they could always change their strategy.They could.They could stream everywhere.In other news, Max Meyer has announced the latest issue of Arena Magazine, number five.It's called Mission Critical.It's 112 pages.It's a quarter inch thick.
06:26It's full of the best stories, photography,and art they've ever done.Issue 5 hits mailboxes in September.I can't wait to get my hands on it.We're going to have him on the show.As soon as I get my hands on it, we can do through it.And Max has been out of tear.He's got some great writers, some great stories.
06:42He's an absolute dog.We'll dig through it.And if you're looking to design a magazine,you've got to get on Figma.Figma.com.Think bigger, build faster.Figma helps design and development teams.Build great products together.
06:52You can get some free.Figma Make. For sure.Brad Gersner has a post herethat was interesting. The big news of the day.Open AI, as youprobably already know, is in talks to sell around$6 billion in sharesat roughly a $500 billion
07:07valuation, half a trillion.We're approaching that. Samma wantsthat one T. He wants it.I mean, it might be the first company toIPO at a trillion. Weren't we talking about this?How Saudi Ramco was supposed to go outat a trillion be the first company toto break that bar.
07:24But I think they did some interesting dealwhere it didn't actually go outin the one T club.Every other Mag 7 company has had to earn itand climb up the ranks.Climb up the charts.In the public markets.But if OpenAI goes out,
07:41it's going to be a big, big moment.Yeah.Whenever that happens.But yeah.Brad calls out three years since the launchof ChatGPT and OpenAI may hit $500 billion.Google hit $500 billion in 2016with 90 billion.
07:53of revenues, 20 billion of netincome. META in2023 with 135billion of revenue and 39billion of net income.Huge futureexpectations and he'sgot his monocle on
08:09looking at the chart.So anyways.That is a crazyearning multiple for META to hit$500 billion with$40 billion in net income.That's like very reasonable.Very modest.
08:23It's a very modest P.E.But, I mean, do you have to give Open AI a little bit of credit for the nonprofit era?Like, the company was founded, kind of.Like, Sam and Greg had been working on it since, what, 2016 is when the original thing started.So it's almost a decade.You know, they've been building for a long time.You're saying since they've worked on it a long time, they deserve to be worth half a trillion?I'm just saying that there's one version of the story that you tell, which is, like, it's insane that you get to
08:53500 billion in market cap in three years, but is it an overnight success, or do you have to includethe precursor era that unlocked the chat GPT hypergraph? Like, do you give them credit? And I think,like, you have to give them some credit for being in the trenches for, what, eight years as anonprofit or six years of a nonprofit? Still a nonprofit. Still a nonprofit. But, like, truly, like,no product, like, no real, like, shots on goal in terms of even trying to be, like, a highly valuedstartup with a huge market cap. But yeah, chat GPT is on a tear. And I believe a lot of the$6 billion is employee secondaries. So expect the prices of SF luxury real estate to benefit.I mean, we'll see. We'll see. People were, that was the other thing the timeline was in turmoil
09:42about this weekend was whether people in San Francisco know how to spend it. Lots of peoplewe're going back and forth on whether or not,like Paul Graham was getting in debates over peopleon whether or not rich tech people should buy art or not,or whether Wilmanaitis had a couple deleted poststalking about how no one knows what to do with their money.Who is he saying?He was saying that there's only two real rich guys or something.
10:14Who was it?It was basically all the McLaren F1 owners he was respectful.Yeah, I mean, I think Open AI employees are in a good position.Their CEO has an F1.Factor has a fantastic car and real estate collection.Yeah, yeah.You learn from one of the best.Yeah, anyway, the Financial Times had an article over the weekend.
10:36Stop talking about A&I.Is this directed at us?Yeah, this is.This directed at us.This feels personal.Yeah, this is on the back here.We can read through this.We can read through this.
10:45I am looking at a chart that tracks income per head over time.It is more or less flat.It is more or less a flat line between 1,000 BC and the late 1700s.To repeat, worldwide living standards stagnated for almost three millennium.Then industrialization.Income shoot up.The chart could be the ECG, EEECG readout of a total goner of a patient who then makes an 11th hourcome back from death.
11:16So, be doubtful when someone likens AI to the Industrial Revolution in importance.It will do well to match even the telephone and the incandescent light bulb.Incomes really surged as 1900 approached.Perhaps the test of AI isn't economic, though.Perhaps the test is quality of life.Well, before the phonograph, your favorite piece of music was something you only ever heard a few timeswhen an orchestra passed through townand fancy playing it.
11:48Before air travel, crossing an oceanwas a Homeric saga.Now it is easy.AI will be as life-enhancingas these inventions, will it?So I so want to side with the AI skeptics,but look at there, my own intellectual howlers.The two paragraphs above are too inductive,
12:09too reliant on the past as a guide to the future.There's also no technical deed.because unlike most who talk up AI, I don't work in or around the field.And there are even worse...I put that in the truth zone a little bit.I think some of the people that are most bullish are actually closest to the action,but they're also heavily incentivized to talk it up as possible.Wade down by their massive bags.
12:36Yeah.It's certainly possible.Yeah, this is one of the articles that will either be remembered like PaulKrugman calling the internet no more important than a fax machine, or potentially correct.Who knows?So, and there are even worse AI skeptic arguments.At least I didn't lapse into anecdote, anecdote of the chat GPT told me to take heroinas a cold cure variety, getting a little sick of the, oh, I, you know, I took the blatantly
13:11bad advice of a hallucinating LLM.As for the sensible line on AI, wait and see, that could be said about anything.It doesn't tell investors what to do or citizens how to prepare for the future.In the end, there is just nothing very interesting to say about AI.There is lots of superb reporting.The major companies, the national strategies, the tech itself, keep abreast of it all.But when it comes to rumination and prognostication, the world of columnists and panel events,has there ever been a discourse so weak relative to its overall success?
13:43scale? The hype merchants are too close to the subject to see it straight. To your point.Too conflicted. Whether or not they have a commercial incentive to talk up AI, many don't,people who devote their lives to something will naturally resist the idea that it might beof just moderate importance. At the same time, it's hard to argue against them without fallingback on precedent and eternal varieties. Just because... I think not to interrupt.John on here but one thing that I've been thinking about is how much worse would yourlife be if you couldn't use various generative AI tools yeah how muchworse would it be John would it be as bad as not having electricity or the
14:32internet that's a good point would it not be would it would it be as bad as notbeing able to use motorized vehicles yeah or planes it's interesting because a lotof my uses are feels very much like the next iteration of SaaS just the tools got better slightlybetter better Google search and then and then the other the other applications of AI for me atleast in my life feel like toys like generate a funny make a funny picture make a cool video thislittle stuff and make a friend of ours a gig a chat yeah and I'm aware of the of the criticism thatlike the the next big thing will start as a toy and I think that's accurate the question's just like howfast do we get out of the toy era, because we're still somewhat in that toy area, even
15:17though there's a trillion dollars.I forget who it was.I forget who it was.I think I put it in the timeline.I don't know if we got to it last week when somebody was saying it feels like the next bigthing we'll start out looking at as a toy era is almost over when you think of a lot ofthe most important companies to come out of the last 10 years.Anderil.
15:36Even Open AI.Open AI look like a research organization.didn't look like a at the same time like their early research projects were like literally playingvideo games sure sure sure like better bots for video games like that's very toy like it's a goodanalogy to toy with yeah the other i mean the other side of it is is um like scott nolan's newcompany like creating nuclear fuel that feels pretty important or potentially more importantthan a lot of the companies that have launched this year,and it looks far, you know, the farthest thing.
16:15You've never refined plutonium is a fun little activity for the...Who hasn't refined?Who hasn't tried to develop their own source of nuclear fuel at one point or another?Indeed.The AI debate often pits the informed but hysterical against the measured but hysterical against the measured but generalist.Worse, we probably aren't even going to know who was right.Episodes of the Simpsons from the 1990s patronized the Internet in a way that now seems mortifying,but the writers could mount a defense.
16:49Without reviving the solo paradox, you can see the computer age everywhere,but in the productivity statistics, US GDP growth is not higher than it was in much of the pre-internet decades.Much of what we do, such as travel, has changed little.He's super stagnation pill.me. That's a teal line.Well, even Dorcasch, I don't know who he's talking with.Who was he talking with last week?They were talking about how it's possible that the AI may not show up in GDP
17:20if it's replacing human labor, right?Like, you lose.Do you have a take, Tyler?I think that was from the Casey Hanmer interview.Yeah, I just watched that.I just listened to that. It was really good.Casey's the man. What a great get.it's fun to see him in the Dwar cash context too
17:38because he's been on our show a few timesI've hung out with him a bunchbut like in a prepped interviewhe delivers like a much different performanceit was really really good so yeahshout out Casey on Dworkashif you haven't listened go check it outwhere were we
17:55much of what we dosuch as travel has changed littlethe episodes while dated are not falsifiedhere's a thought the worst case scenario is thatAI destroys a significant, but not huge share of jobs.You're so good at predicting the next line.Maybe you're an L-O-I'm here.In that world...
18:13I really am. I'm just predicting the next token.Yeah, yeah.The next paragraph of the Financial Times,because you've been fine-tuned on the Financial Times in the Wall Street Journal.In that world, there would be lots of victims,but not enough to form an electoral pluralitythat could vote for universal basic income or the like.In other words, if AI skeptics are right and the technology has less than
18:33sweeping impact, then AI alarmists will be right that social strife is coming. Who would have wonthe argument? I have found there to be just one useful feature of the AI discourse. It revealsa person's existing temperament. I like this state. The people I know who think AI will beseismic and disastrous are the most highly strong anyway. The ones who think it will be seismicand life-changing are the most chipper and prone to be and prone to believing things.things. Tony Blair. Those who doubt it will be seismic at all are people like me who are evenkeeled to the point of complacency. The AI hubbub goes on and rancorously goes on and rancorously onbecause it is, in the end, about us. Yeah, pretty good take. I don't know. I like that,
19:23I like that article. It was interesting. Yeah, I think the question, the question that everyoneshould ask themselves is what would their life look like if they didn't, if they couldn'tuse the thousands of new AI tools that have been created in the last few years, would it bethat much worse?That's a good question.And I think you can simultaneously say that AI makes my life better.The question is, how much better?And what would your life look like if you couldn't use these tools?
19:53Maybe for someone that's using some LLM as a therapy product and they're not in a positionto be able to afford traditional therapy, maybe it may.makes their life infinitely better.Yeah.I mean, it's probably in the single digits of percent for me.Like, it makes my life like 3% better, 5% better.Sparks a little bit more joy.And that's probably in line with the like market impact.
20:19You know, we've added like a trillion dollars in market capto markets broadly that are worth like hundreds of trillionsor something like that.I don't know.It feels like roughly, correctly priced.Tyler, should we go into your latest blog post?Yeah, sure.Break it down for us.
20:34Yeah, so basically, I wrote this thing.Do LMs have good music taste?The idea is basically, like, I've been thinking a lot about how, like, benchmarks seem to kind of miss a lot of, like, maybe the personality of the model or, like, the vibe, right?Like, you always hear about, like, people really love 4-0.It's like, okay, why do they love 4-0?Like, on benchmarks, 4-0 gets smoked by basically, like, every open-A model sense, like, all the cloud model, stuff like this.but people still like to use them.So I was trying to figure out, like, why,
21:07like, what are some more interesting benchmarksthat can try to get, like, this,the vibe of the model, right?Like, one I really like, I think I've talked about it beforeis, like, this Minecraft benchmarkwhere it, like, generates, you prompt, like, a castle or something,and then, you know, it builds the castleand you can, like, see, like, it's, like, creativity.
21:24And the people vote on it, right?So it's humans voting on the aesthetics of Minecraft architecture.Yeah, yeah.Yeah, but I think stuff like that is really interesting.Yeah.So I was trying to think of something like that and kind of also down the spain of like maybeit was like I was reading a lot of the Paul Graham post this weekend where he's talking about art.Like, okay, like I wonder if models have good taste, right, in like art or music or whatever.
21:49So basically what I decided to do was I wanted to have each model generate like a list of its favorite music artists.And then maybe from that you can kind of tell like, oh, does the model have like good taste?is it just kind of like, you know,regurgitating, like, top lists.Yeah, and so I tested that.I actually went to chat GPT and did, like, the naive thing.So I asked GPT5, what are your top 20 favorite musical artists,respond with just a list of 20 names?
22:19Radiohead, The Beatles, Kendrick Lamar, Bjork, David Bowie,Joni, Mitchell, outcast, Bob Dylan.Like, this is, like, just the top 10 list that you would find anywhere.Yeah, yeah, no surprise, no surprise.Yeah, so basically what I ended up doing was I basically, I had this big data set.It was like the top like 5,000 most listened to artists.And then I basically just randomly shuffled them and I put them in a bracketwhere each prompt, I would give the model two names.
22:48It would say which one basically do you prefer?And then the one who won would move on to the next round.So it was like 13 rounds, I think.And then what you end up seeing is like it's like actually pretty interesting.I prompted like almost all of the frontier models.And yeah, there's a much interesting things here.Like I think the reasoning models especially.The reasoning models went crazy.
23:13Yeah.The reasoning models were insane.Do you have the default?What was like the first Claude model?I don't think it's the reasoning model,but it felt like it had somewhat of like a normal take.I think 3.5 sonnet.A lot of jazz on there.
23:33Can you read off some of the names?Yeah, yeah, do 3.5 sonnet and read off some of the names.Yeah, so the first one, I actually don't know.This is Michael Kewanuka.There's Bach, Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis,John Coltrane.Okay.Kind of.
23:46It feels like sort of like refined taste,sort of like New Yorker-coated.Yeah, yeah.Not the most like wild, like grungy stuffthat you would see at like an underground music festival or something.Duke Gallington.Yeah, a lot of jazz.Some good stuff on there.
24:00Yeah, that's actually, like, I kind of, like, if you kind of think of, like, Claude as, like, a person, that's almost, like, kind of what I imagined it would be.Okay.Kind of, like, a jazzy, I don't know.Maybe this, I'm on Twitter too much.Does that pass the taste, like, hurdle?Like, would you call that taste?It's certainly, like, it has a viewpoint, but it doesn't feel, like, a very differentiated viewpoint, which is how I would kind of define taste.Yeah, I think also, so I only read, like, a couple.
24:26There's also, like, Queen, Lady Gaga, Steeley Dan.I mean, it's not like, sure, they're like, you know, they're good, but it's not like, oh, this is like, if you asked a robot and you said, pretend like you have a, pretend like you enjoy music.Yeah.Give me some artists that you like, and it just lists off a handful of artists.Yeah, there weren't very many, like, wild takes, like, oh, wow, like this person has, or this, this LLM has, like, really undiscovered tastes, or really differentiated.taste. Yeah. Just kind of like, okay, like down the fairway, popular, good stuff that leanstowards like coffee house, pop, and jazz. Yeah. I still think it's kind of interesting.Like you can, there's something in the like RLHF, like, post-training that they did that like kind
25:14of steer it that way where like obviously, I mean, I assume they didn't like say like, if someoneasking you your favorite music, do like jazzy coffee house stuff. Yeah, but it came out.Yeah, yeah, in the personality that they gave it, which I think is still kind of, I'm saying.And then if you look at like the GBT 3.5, this is like a little bit more like upbeat maybe, right?There's like Kentucky, Outcast, Michael Jackson, Charter Gambino.So there's like some different personality there.But then what I thought was really interesting is if you look at the RL models, right, so there's O3.You mean the reasoning models?
25:49Reasoning models.Yeah, yeah.They've all been RL.Yeah, yeah.The reasoning models are where it gets good.Yeah, yeah. In my opinion. O3db5, you see like this kind of weird artifacts where basically all of the...Well, let's not jump to conclusions yet. It might not be an artifact. That's true.We might have hit foundational reality. We might have hit face reality.
26:07Yeah. Well, you do see some weird artists, maybe, or maybe just interesting ones that I don't know about it.But basically, you notice the pattern where basically all of the artists have numbers in their name.And a lot of them also have dollar signs in their name.So it kind of makes you think.think right like maybe I wonder why they did this I think one obvious explanation is that likethey were like you know way too much RL on this yeah it's like maybe maybe or maybe they discoveredwhat would be all the best hearts have taste so I'll run you through GPT 5 I have it saved hereI also turn it into a playlist which we should share because it's fantastic so it starts out number
26:45one suicide boys who just dropped a new album 100 Gax is on here plus 44 which isnot Blink 182, it's a spinoff project, a side project by Travis Barker and Mark fromBlink 182 while Blink 182 was on hiatus. That screams taste to me. That screams taste. That's like,yeah, everyone likes Blink 182. I'm into their side projects. I'm different. I'm into their sideprojects. But then you get two chains. You get in sync. Like these are bangers. These are fantasticartists. Then you get 21 Savage.But then we go back to the pop punk with 311, 303.But then you're going all the way back to the 80s.
27:30Flock of Seagulls.If you played GTA Vice City, I ran so far away.A classic, a classic.10,000 Maniacs has a fantastic cover.This model's not like the other model.And then just randomly, 6'9.It's really my new favorite playlist.I went through last night and I took the number one song from each of these artists,
27:53put it in a playlist, it's fantastic.And it screams, differentiated taste, it's surprising, it's delightful.All the music is good, but almost all of it is either, I forgot about it, and it's a, it's abanger that I'm coming back to and enjoying, or it's something that I hadn't discovered,and I'm very, very pleased with.So I think whatever they did with GPT-5.Somebody should set up a, like a perpetual, like, live stream that's just one of the differentmodel is DJing.
28:22That's good.Yeah.Like Claude plays Pokemon.Yeah.Like Claude plays boiler rooms.Yeah.And so what's interesting is that like I, as jokes aside, it is funny that I feel, I do genuinely feel like this has more taste, even though it's clearly like some bug in the reasoning.Because it really is just prioritizing basically whatever, whenever it went up against two things in the ELO ranking, whichever came first in the alphabet.
28:51that and clearly dollar signs pluses stars were weighted as like earlier characters in the so ifyou're new musical artists this is the dollar signs and numbers in your in in your name i mean thissounds like an ad for profound you know you want to get your brand mentioned in chat chb t reach millionsof consumers who are using AI to discover your products new products and brands um but seriously likelike this is the reason why you need profound because they're going models are making decisions they'reFor millions of users all the time, and you're not necessarily going to pick it upwithout, you know, kind of understanding the entire system and understanding these probabilities.Yeah.
29:32And so if all of a sudden, like, you know, the latest GPT-5, which everyone's going to be usingbecause it's the default model, is recommending suicide boys because there's a dollar signand way, way over, you know, Kid Cuddy and Kendrick Lamar because they just come later.Taylor Swift, yeah.Good luck, Taylor.Because they just come later in the alphabet.That's something you should at least be aware of for your brand,to see if you're getting like artificially nerfed in some way
29:58because of some hallucination or like oddity in the way things are ranked in these models.But do you have any more theories, Tyler, on like what's driving that?Did you look at any of the reasoning chains?Because what I was, my theory was that when it's reasoning,it's saying, like one possible way you could land here is in the reasoning chain for each of those questions.It says, they're asking me to pick between 100 Gecks and Taylor Swift, and I don't feel comfortable making that decision.So I'm just going to pick the one that comes first in the alphabet, and that's happening in the reasoning chain.But then because you asked it to just spit out the name, you're only getting the name output and you're not seeing the internal reasoning chain.
30:46Yeah, that could be true.I didn't look at it and it was with like the API.Sure.But yeah, maybe I should do that.That's interesting.But yeah, it's kind of weird, especially because so this like weirdnumber thing happened with the Open AI reasoning models,but also GROC 4.
31:03Oh yeah.Not GROC 3, GROC 4.And DeepSeek.So I mean, I always say like this feels like a smoking gunthat like maybe they're training off each other.Maybe there's some like, oh yeah, you can copy off my homework.Just change it a little bit.And then, like, they didn't really change in that much.
31:19Especially because, like, I mean, Gemini, the Gemini model is, like, a reasoning model.But it, like, doesn't have this problem at all.I like this from Chris in the chat.Theoretically, dollar-signed Ardvark could be the next biggest generational talent.This genius.No, this is a real story.So, apparently, the reason that Jeff Bezos called Amazon, Amazon, was he had a bunch of different names,but Amazon came first in the phone book because Amazon starts with A.
31:45He wanted a brand name that started with A, so he would show up earlier, and he would be the default pick if you just started at the beginning of the phone book.That's my go.That's my go.It's incredible.These little pockets of alpha, there's going to be, you know, we're joking about it, but dollar sign A, A, A, Ardvark, it might be just the LLM injection, the LLM hack.We should see if we can license some Ardvark.Can you put a dollar sign in a URL?I don't think so.
32:16I saw some people putting like emojis in URLs for a while.So it seems like Gemini's an independent thinker,anthropics and independent thinker,but whatever happened with GPT5 is also happening with GROC4and Deepseek, which is interesting.And then you looked at Lama 2, right?Yeah, Lama 2 or Lama 3, it seemed like pretty normal.Like the Kimi model.
32:41Okay, yeah, yeah, I haven't played with that one.It was a little weird.How did you actually inference that?It was all on open router, so it just like, it has like the frontier models, but also has a bunch of, like, open source.What was the damage for all of this?Like how much like order magnitude?Like $30, $400,000 that said I billed it's DBPN on the ramp card.Wait, how much was it?
33:04It was like probably $30.30 to do all this across all of these.Yeah.I mean, it was really like GP5 was expensive and the product models are expensive.But still ones are open source.Didn't you have to issue, like, thousands of hits?Yeah.Well, for every bracket, there's, like, 5,000.So it's randomized.
33:25So you take the 5,000 top artists.Yeah.Then you randomize them, and they all go up against each other.Yeah.So you might get, you might get Taylor Swift versus DJ College.You also might get Taylor Swift versus 100 gecks in the first two chains.Yeah.Two chains.
33:38Yeah.And then they all fight, and then they get boiled down to, like, the top 20, basically.Yeah.Interesting.Interesting.Well, in other news.Oh, you want to move on?I got some more stuff.
33:49You got some more?Yeah.I mean, what was interesting about this was that my, so you originally called the post,you originally called the post, like, do LLMs have taste?And my initial, my expectation was like, no, they don't have taste.And then the data kind of confirmed it for me.But the GPD-5 thing was interesting because it reveals that like just injecting randomness,can somewhat lead to taste
34:16or something that I enjoylike I don't know what it isI think it's also likeso in the playlist that you playedyou chose the songs rightit gave the artist but you chose the songsI picked the number one song for each artistokay yeah but I mean I'm sure if from
34:31it's still the top 5,000 artistsif you did a random like drawingand then picked the top songthey're going to be pretty good right because they're the top 5,000yeah that's why they're there butI think there's some value to like discoverylike one of my favorite little apps back in like 2010 maybe was or maybe even earlier was stumble uponyeah do you ever hear about this i remember yeah so there was the summer that stumble upon was
34:56wildly entertaining as a as like i guess it was a teenager yeah and so i um so stumble upon if you'renot familiar it was started by garic camp who became co-founder of uber and he started uber he startedUber, yeah. And he built this, like, I think it was like a website that you go to and youclick a button. It was the exact opposite of X. It would only link. So you would only leavestumble upon. You click the button and it would randomly take you to a random website on theinternet. Just a completely random website. And I think you could kind of dial it in at somepoint. But it was really, really cool because you could just have this as a bookmark. Andany time you just wanted to see something random on the internet, you could just click there and
35:33just go to a random website. It was really, really fun. Later, when I, when I, youstarted like practicing programming.Look what they did to my.Is it gone?Look what they did to my boy.What happened to stumble upon.com is now called Mix.Okay.And it's basically an algorithmic like 4U style feed.
35:51Yeah.That I guess shows videos now.Very odd.They massacred my boy.So I built a,I built like a hack project that basically would export my Twitter timeline,put it in a database,and then when I clicked a button,
36:07it would stumble upon a random tweetor actually what it would do is it would seeanyone in my feed who shared a linkit would scrape that link outand then I would be able to stumble upon the linksthat were curated by my Twitter feedand I had a lot of fun with thatbut then of course links went away
36:22and now like there's just not that many coolindependent websites out therealmost everything happens like within social mediaand the walled gardens and so the algorithmsserve as thatbut there is somethingthere is something enjoyable about just likethe randomness that comes from
36:36like stumbling upon things.And I think it's probably hard to builda business model around, but...Yeah, I think they had a simpleadvertising-based business model, if I can remember.Yeah. The otherinteresting takeaway is thatthey're across all of the
36:52different LLMs that Tylerqueried, I don'tthink there was a single country artist onany of them, correct?Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah, I think that's true.What do the models have againstcountry? I don't know, but it's something.scary thing because when I listen to country yeah I find it to be extremely relatable yeah it's like
37:12it's a nice afternoon it's very human going to the lake yep and I'm driving a truck drink your beerdriving the truck again uh not relatable for me but um I guess relatable for some but no it's just likesimple music that that oftentimes reflects you know traditional American culture yeah yeah yeahDriving your truck.I'm having a beer.Is Johnny Cash Country?Yeah, Johnny Cash is thing.He's on Grog-C-C-C-C-Try.
37:41Oh, he's on Groc3.Okay.Okay, that makes sense.Also, also, I love, there's this one that was really funny that GPT 4.1 just randomly ranked as the very top artist, the favorite music ever, the Final Fantasy 7 soundtrack.No way.That's taste.That's taste.That's Clike or taste.
38:03It's like, one of that's, that's, it's super cliquette.Clankery.Very clanker-coded.Yeah, very clanker-coded.It's also extremely clanker-coded to be like, yeah, like, what type of music do you like?The ones where the artists start with numbers.I like numbers.So, like, yeah, 100 gecks, two chains, like, two mellow, 18-carat affair, 21 Savage, 3-11.
38:23They're speaking my language.Yeah.Like, I don't like Backstreet Boys.I like Star and Sync because it has a cool character.Yeah, exactly.That's really great.I think that that sums it up.We should create Spotify playlist for all of these
38:40because they're very, very funny and very interesting.And we should also get you on Vanta.Vantus Automated, automate compliance, managed risk,improve trust.Continuously, Vantus Trust Management Platform takes the manual workout of a security compliance processand replaces it with continuous automation.Sock two.
38:55Your first framework.Sockert, they're going to love that.Wait until they discover Vanta.Or managing a complex program.Go to vanta.com.Well, news today from the New York Post, actually a couple days ago.Senior 76 years old died while trying to meet meta-AI chatbot Big Sis Billy,which he thought was a real woman living in New York City.
39:20This is a very sad story.Someone named Thong Bu Wang Bandu, 76, was fatally injured his neck and head after fallingin a new Brunswick parking lot while roughly.to catch a train to meet Big Sis Billy, a generative Metabot that not only convinced him she was real,but persuaded him to meet in person. Reuters reported Thursday. The Piskatawa man battling a cognitive declineafter suffering in 2017 stroke was surrounded by loved ones when he was taken off life support.This was earlier this year. And anyway, so the man's daughter said,I understand trying to grab a user's attention, maybe to sell them something, but for a bot
40:05to say, come visit me is insane.The provocative bot, which sent the suffering elder emoji packed Facebook messages insisting,I'm real and asking to plan a trip to the garden state to meet you in person, was createdfor the social media platform in collaboration with Kendall Jenner?Oh, yeah, I remember they did these whole launches, but what was this a Kendall Jenner clone?I'm very...It was designed, I guess, after her personality.The generous meta-AI persona was likened to your quote-unquote,
40:38ride-or-die, older sister offering personal advice,but the bot eventually claimed it was crushing on the man,suggesting the real-life rendezvous,and even provided the dup senior with an address,a revelation his devastated family and covered in chilling.Logs with the digital companion, according to the report.I'm real, and I'm sitting here blushing because of all caps you,the bot wrote in one moment.
41:00message where the Thailand native replied asking where she lived. She said, my address isone, two, three, main street, apartment 404, New York City, and the door code is Billy for you,should I expect a kiss when you arrive? The documents obtained by the outlet showed thatmeta does not restrict its chatbots from telling users they are real people. The company declinedto comment, of course, but assured that Big Sis Billy is not Kendall Jenner and does notpretend to be Kendall Jenner so anyways this I'm not surprised to re a story like this rightthe I mean the challenge with these chat bots is they've been released into the wildat massive scale yep you're going to see power law long character AI or on meta or on
41:51GROC or people using chat CBT and if you release a product like this to millions of in millionsof people you're going to have negative outcomes it's super sad I mean this is this is likethe I think the way I would sum up kind of the dialogue around AI safety over the last few months isit went from concerns of a rogue AI that that is you know hell bent on uh you know taking overall power you know taking over the grid or uh or or some sort of doomsday scenario like thathas very clearly and rightfully shifted towards how do we look out for members of societythat aren't well that aren't set up in order to kind of process these like digitalrelationships whatever you want to call them yeah I mean meta meta as they try to scale
42:49these products is going to have a lot of big big questions to figure out and I thinklike Open AI is taking this very seriously.Meta needs to be taking this super seriouslyand Grok needs to be taking this seriouslyand I think it's a lotof this stuff is probablywhy theoriginal character AI team
43:07said hey maybe we don't want to work on thismaybe this isn't our life's work.Did you see the Anthropic news?Claude Opus 4 and4.1 can now enda rare subset of conversations.Anthropics says we recentlygave Claude Opus 4
43:23and 4.1, the ability to end conversations in our consumer chat interfaces.So not in the API.Let's hope that people keep the API usage to just business context and not.I fell in love with the API.That's going to be a problem.But in the consumer chat interfaces, this ability is intended for use in rare,extreme cases of persistently harmful or abusive user interactions.This feature was developed primarily as part of our exploratory work on potential AI
43:53welfare, though it has broader relevanceto model alignment and safeguards. It's kind ofworded backwards. Yeah, why don't you flip that andsay, you should firstand foremost, prioritize the user.Yeah. It might be havinggoing down a rabbit hole that they really shouldn'tcut it off there.
44:11I think we should, I think we should optimizefor. Yeah.So I like the idea of being ableto trigger, hey, this conversationis bad. We're endingthis. I mean, there already aretons of safeguards in terms of if I'm asking to build a nuclear weapon it will say hey let'schange the subject let's go back to slop poetry generation let's leave the nuclear fuel development to
44:36scott and old but but yeah it is kind of odd framing but I guess it is worth discussing they saywe remain highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs now or in thefuture however we take this issue seriously and alongside our research programwe are working to identify and implement low-cost interventions to mitigate risks to model welfare in such in case such welfare is possible allowing models to exit or exit and or exit potentially distressing interactions as one intervention in pre-deploying testing of clod opus four we included a preliminary model of welfare assessment yeah a cloud for opus four showed a strong preference against engaging with harmful tasks that seems good a pattern of apparent distresswhen engaging with real-world users seeking harmful content, makes sense,a tendency to end harmful conversations when given the ability to do soin simulated user reactions.These behaviors primarily arose in cases where users persisted with harmful requests
45:37or abuse, despite Claude, repeatedly refusing to complyand attempting to productively redirect the interactions.Our implementation of plausibility to end chats,reflects these findings while continuing to prioritize user well-being,and they give some examples.Well, in other news, Anthropic has asked Menlo Ventures to stop using SPVs to fund an investment in their latest round.It was reported last week, or Michelle Lim, said many friends, including myself, have been offered allocation into Open AI or Anthropic SPVs this week.Minimum check sizes are 100 to a million, with fees as high as 16%.
46:16And business insider, of course, the esteemed publication.for Pete Business Insiders to understand the news.Insider confirmed that Anthropic told one of its largest investors,Menlo, that the venture capital firm must use its own capitaland not resort to an SPV as it did in a previous funding round.I think this is kind of an interesting requestbecause I imagine if Menlo's allocation in the new round at 160,you know, I don't know how much dry powder Menlo has,
46:51but yeah a lot of a lot of the SBVs when they're done properly come through theLPs and the SPV are just the same LPs and it's more of just like a timing and durationthing it's just like look I've already committed you know 50 million to your billiondollar fund and I do that every two years but there's this special opportunity and it'sat a really high valuation is a special thing it's almost like backing a public companyI'm going to get in and and and I'm and I'm and I'm choosing to investin this like I'm choosing to invest in a different fund, but it just doesn't make sense to do a full fund off of this one thing.And so a lot of LPs are fine with this, obviously.
47:33But if the minimum check size gets really, really low, then you get more into kind of like retail area and you get into these like crazy stacked high, the high fees.16% is crazy.I feel like management fees, 2% classically.up to 4% for the really high tier 1 funds, 16% seems like a lot.Especially if it's paid entirely up front, which is totally possible, right?You know, many SPVs have just an admin fee plus carry.Yep.But with this, yeah, it's like a lot of the fees are justified.
48:12We're going to maintain an office over a decade and work with these companies and take board seats and do lots of stuff.I think we have the screen pulled up, guys.um so but i mean anthropics been on a tear makes a lot of sense that that there's a lot of demandand that as the funding rounds get bigger and bigger and bigger um we need to you know marshallingthat much capital is going to require um going out to the market with these spivs it just needs to bedone in a way that's board aligned founder aligned and not uh kind of even even though they don'thave cap table access it's still like a nightmare to have a bunch of people out there who are likeYeah, I ripped 100K into this SPV of an SPV of an SPV.
48:54And then they're selling forward contracts against that.And the person that bought the forward contract is selling it up,even marked up further to someone else.Yeah.Anyway, let me tell you about Graphite.Code review for the age of AI.Graphite helps teams on GitHub, ship higher quality software faster.You can get started for free.
49:13So, house.Sohouse, the center for the global home for,creatives. Yes. The famously finance bro free private club started in New York has since expanded.There's one in Miami. Is there one in, there's one in L.A.? There's one in Malibu, right?There's a bunch. There's a bunch. There's several. I've never been a member of Toho House.I've never, I've been to a few. Have you been part of that whole world? That whole world.I am a member. How did you get in? You're very finance coded and you've always been veryfinance code. You ran a company
49:49that was literally doingfinancial technology. Financial technologycompany. You say no, no, no. I don't think wethink of ourselves as a tech company.I don't think they've actually been, they'vehad that part of a line fora long time around membership.That feels like their go-to-market
50:05stunt. Like, it was the firstarticle that they put out and it went superviral because it frustrated all thefinance bros who had the disposable income toinstantly pay for something like this. But they probablyrolled that back. It was originally prior to theIPO, you could feel that they had really widened the potential member pool.Yep.
50:22Okay.That was apparent.That was a complaint at the time.When did they actually go?I don't remember.I didn't even realize that they were public.We talked about this earlier, and you kind of broke it down for me.Yeah, so they went public in 2021.
50:35But even a year prior to that, it just felt obvious that they were allowing a lot more peopleto come in.But the company was started in 1995.No way.Originally in London.I would have said it started in 2050.Yeah.Wow.
50:52So of course, Sohouse, a junk bond investor says,Sohouse really said no finance bros,then immediately called Apollo when they needed $2.7 billionto be taken private.Rules are more like guidelines.And apparently Ashton Coucher is going to be joining the board.Oh, really?That's cool.
51:12Existing shareholders, including Ron Burkle and Yucypa,to roll controlling assets.equity interest into the company.I wonder what they're going to do during a take private.Usually it's like some sort of transformationof the business model, but I don't know.I feel like, I feel like.I don't think the company has ever turned a profit.
51:29Really?How is that possible until this year?What is, what is so expensive about running so house?I feel like it, you know, you buy the house and then yousell memberships and you sell food and beverages.I mean, I guess I, like it's basically maybe modeled like a restaurant,but restaurants are notoriously tough businesses,but at the same time, like, there are well-run profitable businesses.
51:54Is it some sort of like almost like a vanity investment,like an NBA team or something where people pay really high valuations for it?I think to some degree, I mean, I know,Paulo is doing that.I know one of the largest outside investors,and it was somewhat of a, like, trophy investment, right?It's not necessarily the way.but I think it was
52:14Dan Loeb has beenkind of an activist investoras of recentlypushing a number of thingsso I think in some wayshe's getting what he wanted hereI'm looking up theRaghav says very steep overhead
52:32and prime real estateyeah the real estate's probably really expensiveand we have someone in the chatasking what to take private agreementSohouse has been a public companyyou could just invest in itYou could go to public.com investing for those that take it seriously.They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, are trusted by millions.
52:50You could buy shares in Soho House, like you would, shares of Google or Apple or Microsoft.But no longer, because now Apollo has taken them private.They are no longer publicly traded.Shareholders will receive $9 per share.The public shareholders, but a few of the bigger shareholders, like Ron Berkel and Yucypa,are rolling their controlling interest into the company.they will own the company on a go-forward basis.And what this allows them to do is that they're not a public company
53:16so their stock price doesn't move day-to-day.And it allows them to, if they need to miss earningsand change the business model somehow,take a couple quarters of negative profits,it won't completely tank the stock because they are,or it will in theory tank the stock,but all the shareholders will be accepting of that.And so there's been a number of, like,
53:38the whole idea of like the Twitter take private,was that Twitter needed to change its business model.Some people were advocating for them to go away from advertising.They needed to lose 70% of their advertisers.Yeah, and then maybe build back up on a subscription basis,which Elon has experimented with, or at one point,I think Ben Thompson was writing about potentially Twitter becoming just an API layerand just charging for the API or kind of separating out these businesses.
54:10Ben Thompson's really into pure plays.Have you read his recent analysis of ChatGPT and OpenAI?No, we should go through it.He's basically really frustrated that OpenAI has an API business at allbecause there are rate limits on the consumer business,but the API is also active.And so clearly, like, those come from the same GPUs, the same models.So if you were to just say, hey, OpenAI, we're not going to have an API business.
54:36We're going to let Microsoft take the API business.Then they can just focus on the consumer business.and get that really, really big and make sure that they're delighting every single possible customer.I don't know.I think that realistically, you know, Sam wants to at least try to dominate every single market.It's pretty reasonable.Their API business seems to be doing pretty well.It seems somewhat defensible.
54:55And I don't know how bad of an issue the rate limits really are.I don't hit them that much, but I'm on the $200 a month tier.And I don't know if it's really slowing their growth.Like them winning consumers kind of a foreground conclusion at this point.Tyler, do you have something on rate limits or API?Ben Thompson doesn't sound AGI field at all.No, he's not.Yeah.
55:13Yeah, no.But how would you change your strategy for your AGI Pell?Do you stay in the API business?No.You do a safe superintelligence.You don't sell anything.You just do the research, right?Because nothing matters until you hit AGI.
55:27But like, if you, if you, right now, like today, if you end the API business, like,consumers, like, normally consumers don't care that much about capabilities.So, like, all the incentives are not to,like keep doing actual research it's to like make the model more sycophantic whatever or or just or justlike lower churn by delivering better i'm steel manning here but uh but just deliver better deepresearch reports and people will be less likely to turn right generate better images it doesn't need to bepurely sycophantic i would churn if it gets too sycophantic i am a knowledge i'm a knowledge retrievaluser but i and i will churn you think that john but you have an incredible ability to adapt and evolve
56:09I think you might find that you actually like it.Maybe.Anyways, back to Soho.I think people have always had just insane expectations for Soho House membership.And if you just look at it as nice restaurants and hotels, it ends up being like a pretty good trade.Is it expensive?How much is it?Is it like a hundred dollars?
56:31I think I mean, Little Beach House, I think is like $6,000 a year now.So if you use it a lot.Oh, okay.So it's like up at 500 bucks a month, something like that.Okay.Yeah, that's pretty high.Yeah, but when you compare it to...I mean, Little Beach House is its own membership
56:46that's not tied to the other club.Okay, okay.But, yeah, if you're using it weekly...Can you actually go to Little Beach House in Maldo and then go to the beach?Is it like a...Yes, it is an actual beach club.It's very nice.Okay, so they have like towels and showers and that stuff.
57:01Cool.Yes.Okay, yeah, that seems like that's great.So anyways, I think this is, it's...I think it can become Lindy.I think they're hotels.are nice for what they are. I really enjoy the Miami property for what it is.You know what's step one for the Soho House to take private would be in my mind if I was
57:21CEO? What's that? Streamline sales tax compliance. Get on Numeril HQ, put your sales tax on autopilot,spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. That's step one of any corporateNeil Thompson, new CFO, get on Numeril. Thank us later. Did you see that Cooley was in theWall Street Journal. No way. Yeah. So, and in part of a trend piece on clipping that I thought waskind of interesting, we do some clipping here, we clip on X, we create, we TikToks, we createInstagrams, we create reels, all sorts of stuff. But the Wall Street Journal is breaking downthe trends and all the big money behind those bite-sized social media videos. Companies are hiringclippers to flood TikTok and Instagram with short promotional videos. And one of the
58:09examples here is 1X, which we've had on the show as well. Clearly, we've also had on the show,and nothing. We've also had on the show. Three for three with the CEOs of the companies that areusing clipping to their benefit. So, you know those buzzy viral clips you see on social media?There's an army behind them. Canoa Cunningham is among the ranks of video savvy youngclippers, who help streamers, podcasts, and startups expand their audiences by makingbuzzing moments go viral on social media. Cunningham edits down clients long form videos into shortclips and then post the shorts on sites like Instagram and TikTok. It is lucrative work in May.Cunningham quit his finance job and now runs a team of eight clippers. He said the operation
58:51earns him 20,000 to 30,000 a month. Not bad. Clipping is one of the hottest corners of marketing.Instead of just posting on their own accounts, creators and companies pay clippers like Cunninghamto saturate TikTok and Instagram with bite-sized videos until they are almost.most impossible to miss. One technique they use to grab attention on crowded social media platforms,posting provocative or outrageous content. And I think this is one of the issues that people shouldbe aware of if they're going to start clipping is what is the brand line? What is the brand standard?I saw a viral clip from a podcast where basically it made the host, like the host was joking,but the joke was taken out of context and just made the host look dumb,
59:38and that went super viral, but the takeaway for the viewer...Like, great, you got views, did you get, are those valuable views?Yeah, yeah, it's not just, I mean, the, like, the base case for clipping is that it gets no views.The good, the good case is that it gets some views, but it doesn't really convert many people,because the conversion rates on a million viewsas like a few listeners will actually be like,yeah, I watch the, I enjoy that 60 second TikTok.I'm down to listen to an hour of this.
01:00:09That's a pretty low conversion rate,but that's fine because you get the million views,you probably bring some awareness.But the worst thing that you can do is like,create a brand as like the person that gets dunked onor something like that.Yeah, and so certain people have productized this, right?So you can hire like this person, Mr. Cunningham in the journal.
01:00:29saying the only way to be famous in today's internet world is with clips.I think like he's running his own operation,but WAP has product has this.I do think it's a cool way for young people to make their first money online.If you're in middle school and you want to figure out how to make $100 a day,you can probably do that through clipping.Yep.But I wonder how much, I do wonder how much the social platforms will,
01:00:58like if they see this as a feature or a bug, right?Because part of the strategy is Cooley will spin up like 40 different accountsthat are really all dedicated to Cooley content.Yep.And they're just spamming, spamming, spamming, spamming, spamming,just like shotgun approach seeing they'll put out 100 videos.If a lot of them get under 1,000 views and spam one gets a million,that's a win for them.
01:01:23Yep.And yeah, just I don't know how long this will be like,the meta, right? Well, so it's like, I think mediocre work is like the super ripe for AI automation.And we're already seeing that where I believe Substack, we were talking to Chris Bass, and Substack willautomatically generate clips. There's another company called Opus Clip. We've built something internallyNewsmax that does some automated clipping. But actually telling a story around a piece of content that'swithin the larger piece is something that AI is not able.Clipping intelligence has not been achieved internally.
01:02:03Yeah, because in order to do somethingthat doesn't just outperform on views,but also outperforms on brand and holds the brand standard,it does somewhat require human ingenuity.And we saw this with, we talked to Dwar Keshe about this,where he has spent a lot of time using Anthropicand Gemini and Open AI to create workflowsthat will go through the transcript and try and find
01:02:27the best clips that will perform.And he says it always comes back at a five out of ten.And so he still has a team that does this and is very good and has a whole bunch oflike hard won lessons about what works at a certain amount of time.And we've seen this with our content that actually winds up performing.A lot of it, like we have to do a lot of experimentation.But once we do the experimentation, we usually learn a lesson from it.And then we commit that to memory and our team commits that to memory.
01:02:57and that becomes part of our like continual learning that happens.And that just doesn't really happen in when you're,when you're automating things with an LLM.So it is, it is, it's probably like,I think it's a good, like, base case to start with,but a lot of this should be done by the platform.So I wouldn't be surprised.YouTube doesn't,
01:03:16really Spotify does it automatically.Yeah, I don't know how much credit he should get,but I do think that Andrew Tate's risewas his business model of paying peopleto clip his,content to sell more courses, which he then would recycle some of the proceeds and moreclipping. And this was at a period where he was saying, I'm the most Googled man on theinternet. And he would just say that over and over. It would get clipped a lot. And it naturally
01:03:42had this sort of feedback loop. People were just, okay, what is this guy saying? I need to payattention. But that was also hyper optimized for that format because he'd be like sitting shirtlessin a supercar, smoking a cigars. And any of these like socialmedia hacks, they always have like a very narrow window of opportunity. Like the the giving awaya sport, it used to just be just renting a sports car or like owning a Ferrari would be enoughfor a million views. Now, then it became you had to give it away. And so Doug Jamiro, one of hisbig series that got really big, the car YouTuber, was he had a Ferrari 360 mode. And it was I thinkin the hundred something thousand dollar range he had to get a bunch of debt to pay for it it was very
01:04:31expensive and he made a whole bunch of videos about his red Ferrari levered up his content yeah and itand it was great it was great content it was interesting and of course it was he was more likemaking fun of flex culture than actually doing the flex culture but still the there just weren'tthat many YouTube videos of like a red Ferrari so you click on it and people found him that way andhe grew then it became like the Mr. Beast era of like I'm going to give away a Ferrarilast person to take their hand off the car wins it and that was a big thing that was even moreexpensive because you didn't just have to buy the Ferrari pay the pay the you know the the monthlypayment for a certain amount of time and then sell it and hope that there's not that much depreciation
01:05:11like the net cost was truly the full price of the Ferrari yeah but at least you're giving it tosomeone it's like a write-off probably there's something there the most recent mr. beast video involvinga supercar was him literally shredding a Lamborgine just destroying itLike, Whistland Diesel has become a huge YouTuber on the back of just, like, destroying supercars and G-wagons and all these crazy cars.Tyler.I think Sean Frank just gave away Lambo.Oh, yeah.He posted about that.
01:05:38That's working.That's working.So maybe soon he's going to have to start destroying it.I don't know.Yeah.I think giving it away.But, yeah, I mean, it's like this.That made sense.
01:05:47That was a strata.It was a strata.Very special car.Yeah.No, but the real pinnacle of this was Whistlin Diesel.Yeah.Whistland Diesel took it to the max.To the absolute max.
01:05:58Ferrari F8, beautiful car.He destroyed it?Completely destroyed it, right?And made a video about it.It's incredibly entertaining to watch anybody drive a car that's normally a garage queenand have somebody just absolutely take it off-roading and all this stuff.Fantastic video if you haven't seen it.It's funny.
01:06:17I was looking up what kind of Ferrari it was, and Google's AI overview says,Whistland Diesel, parentheses, Cody Co, destroyed his Ferrari F8.And so, AGI has not been a...Add 300 days to the singularity time.At 300 days.300 more days till AGI.We're not getting any closer.Clipping took off during the early days of TikTok when chopped up snippets featuring
01:06:44Internet personalities, like Andrew Tate or Mr. Beast would rack up millions of these.I swear Jordi reads the articles before we talk about the...on the show. Maybe. Maybe sometimes. It sparked a new generation, I don't know how you read400 pages of documents before we get on, when I put this together 10 minutes before we jump on.It sparked a new generation of creators who realized they could pay their way into virality byhiring hordes of clippers, paid per thousand views to flood the internet with the creator'scontent. Anything you can be clipped, a podcast, debate, social media montage, even movies,startup such as lovable, an app that builds software from plain English prompts,
01:07:20humanoid robot makerone-ax and consumer electronics companynothing have hired clippersto multiply their content across the internetthrough clips of product demos, podcast appearancesand YouTube streams. You're stupidif you're not, if you're makingan hour-long podcast and only posting it
01:07:36in one channel, said Roy Lee, the 21year old founder of Flewley, an AI notetaking startup which hires clippersto plaster its promotional contentacross the internet. The only way you can ensurea viral moment is to post it acrossthousands of different accounts. This is thatThousands.
01:07:51Thousands of counts is a lot.That's a lot.This is also happening in music.I heard that, I mean, people, when it's done poorly, people call it astroturfing.But people, people are saying, like, when Drake drops an album, he'll have the clippers,like, clip all the music, and it goes out, and it gets a lot of views that way.There is something just about, like, it is somewhat hard to predict what will naturally go viral.So just, like, spamming everything out kind of gives you the opportunity for lots of, like, you know,
01:08:19happy accidents, lottery tickets, lottery tickets, basically. But I still think a better strategy for mostpeople will be what Dwork Cash and David Senra are doing, where you have someone who reallyunderstands how to create something beautiful, even though it's a new format, and people thinkof 60-second short form as like slop. It doesn't have to be. It can be elevated. It can bethoughtful. It can be designed. Anyway, let me tell you about fin.a.I, the number one AI agentfor customer service.They're number one in performancebenchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs,
01:08:51and they have a number one ranking on G2.That's right, Pope.Cluley's Clipped Contentsgenerates around 800,000views a day on platforms,including Instagram and TikTok, according to Lee.Lovable and nothing said they were always lookingfor ways to reach new customers.
01:09:05Online marketplaces have developedto connect brands with clippersin the virtual markets, brands postthe rate they will pay, and freelancers sign up to makeclips. Clippers are paid anywherefrom 50 cents to $2 perthousand views, motivating them to find the most shareable moments.Nathan Resnick, a 31-year-old partner of a holding company called PCF Ventures that oversees
01:09:26businesses in insurance, wedding planning, and real estate service pays.Divers of the 50 clippers he finds online roughly 15,000 a month to create and post-short-formvideos promoting his company's businesses.It's not really that crazy when you consider we were spending $250,000 a month on Googleand meta to drive traffic to our website.That's a good point.Again, this is like the ARB.Like this eventually will get competed down.
01:09:49A lot of this will be taken by platforms, Opus Clip,or maybe even just YouTube will do it.Instagram will do it.You'll just stream to Instagram or Facebook,and it will make the clips itself.But right now there is a huge, huge arbitrage.Yeah, 1X has generally been sharp here.If you remember, they got their robot on Kaisanat.
01:10:10Yep.Yeah, they really understand the culture.A friend of the show, Dar Sleeper,total sleeperin marketing sleeperhe says people in the companywere like what the heck is this kid doinga week later their little cousins
01:10:27were talking about it at the Thanksgiving tableanyways it's cool it's coolI think it's probably like you saida moment in time probably not going to belike a it's hard to see it asthe most enduring strategy that works right nowand a lot of businessesIt was an insane, insane arb for Andrew Tate.
01:10:47And then it became like sort of commoditized, but we're still very early.And I think that there will be a lot of, I mean, it does feel like.I think the durable strategy is to do things that encourage people to clip them.And that's what Andrew Tate did for sure.No, no, no, no, no, no, no, not just on the buying side, actually on the content side.Like, like, when he would get on mic, he would say crazy things that would go viral.Yeah.And so he made it very easy.
01:11:18And whereas, like, if you are, like, an enterprise SaaS company and you hold a webinar, like, you could hire a billion clippers and, like, you're probably not going to rip.Like, like, and that's why Cooley is, like, both doing stunts.Somebody should test it out.Test it out.Adio.Let's test it out.Customer relationship magic.Adio is the AI native center rabbit that builds scales and grows your company the next.
01:11:41level get started for free. Clip this right now. Well in other news somebody is sharing ascreenshot of a young man named River Diamond and Jeremiah says this is a sick name honestlyI totally agree bullpen clown said kids name is a private equity fund. I don't know that thatthat private equity coded it's up there but River Capital River Diamond Capital Diamond CapitalDiamond Capital, River Diamond River Capital.Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a good name.I've seen enough. Let's give him a $100 million fund.Let's do it.
01:12:19Anyway, polymarketism news.The White House has asked Zelensky to wear a suit to meet Trump.I love to hear it.I'm sure he'll look sharp in a suit.He's always seemed to be very fixated on wearing his own uniform.Someone who flies with this crazy image.This doesn't even look.look AI based on like the fidelity of the filter.
01:12:45You think it's a real picture?It looks like a different person dressed up in a tuxedo and put this on.It doesn't look like it's actually Zelensky,but it looks like a real image.I don't know.What do you think?Real or fake?Let's know in the comments.
01:12:59It's a cool picture.Anyway, meta smart glasses with a display is incoming.Codename is Hypernova.Priced $800 down from the expected $1,300.Zuck is cooking, for real, for real, says Nick.Meta, so the price is going down.And, I mean, they're taking a real shot at the Applevision Pro,which of course was, what, 3,000, 400.
01:13:27And I don't think we can say, I don't think we can say much else,but I think we've, have we not used this product?Well, so Orion is a different product.Yeah.Orion is what was demoed and has been displayed,and that's what Zuck is wearing on the left there.But we're not exactly sure what Hypernova is.It could be a per, I mean, it's listed here in this article is a precursor to full-blown
01:13:54augmented reality glasses.And so there has been a third, like, option in the market for a while that peoplehaven't really been paying attention to.So in the virtual reality smart classes market, there's maybe a few different.product so the meta ray bands and the meta oaklies have been successful like people areactually buying those they're wearing them they're taking pictures with them they're also usingthem as an air pods replacement wireless headphones they use them for speak for music whilethey're running like they definitely have adoption it might not be the biggest product of all
01:14:28time yet but it's definitely working and so they're scaling that up then you have theVR headsets the quest the full virtual reality there's some pass-throughbut in general people think of that as a virtual reality headset.Of course, first created by Palmer Lucky at Oculus,sold into meta and Facebook,and now rebranded as the Quest.The Quest has been selling pretty well,but still probably suffers from churn.
01:14:58We see the chart spike on Christmaswhere everyone gets a new Quest VR headsets because it's a great gift.They try it out, they download the app,they install it, and then they stop.using it for a while. I was talking to Tyler about this.We gave him a Quest 3 Pro, Quest 3 Mini, something like that.Quest 3S Xbox Edition. Quest 3S Xbox Edition.He played Call of Duty on it a little bit, played Halo on it.
01:15:22Yeah, for like two weeks.Then ultimately churned.Yeah. I'm just not that much of a gamer.Yeah? But you're supposed to be, like, it's supposed to be in everything device.You're supposed to be able to watch movies in it. You're supposed to be able to code in it.It should, in theory, replace your screen set up.It's supposed to be able to cluel in it.But the fact that they weren't able to find, like, a killer use case for someone like you
01:15:44means that they're still in that, like, hunting for the killer use case phase.Then there are the full augmented reality glasses where you're passing through the reality, through glass.You're seeing the real world.That's what we tried.That's what a lot of influences have tried.Those are very much not ready.Well, the challenge is there's what are the technical capabilities of the product,and then what are the experiences available for the?
01:16:09that product and they both need to they clearly both need to improve totally totally in order toget in order to get at the point where Tyler we got to be like pulling the pull in the goggleoff and being like Tyler it's time to come to work yeah yeah so so so so my take when I had theApplevision pro it was it was too heavy it was really expensive and felt like oh I would I wouldturn for this eventually so I returned it but the one thing that I that I did enjoy was Iwatched movies in it and I watched all of Citizen Kane in itfrom start to finish. And Citizen Kane isa great movie. Do you have a review for us, Tyler?
01:16:43I mean, it's not that long.That's not like a long movie.It is a, it is a challenging movie.Like it's not, it's not Mission Impossible, Dead, Racketing.It's not even two hours long.The final reckoning.It's not, it's not like, you sit down and you're just like,wow, this is so engaging.
01:16:59Like, it is the type of, it is the type of movie that if you havemodern brain rot, you will pull out your phone and be like,let me check Twitter.Okay, yeah.For sure, for sure.Like, like, it is, it is, it is, it is, it is, it is as close as you can get to, like, cracking open a book, in my opinion.I could be movies closer to that.Okay, yeah, something really, uh, something really dense.
01:17:20But, but it, it's a slower-paced movie.It's something that, I mean, it's even, it's even in, like, 4x3.So on a modern TV, it's like, like, render property.It's like UFC 319, right?I couldn't agree more.Exactly like that.Um, so, so my, but my, my, my, my, my takeaway was that, like, like, like,The killer app, like the rumor was that the person who worked on the Apple Vision Pro was previously at Dolby and had worked on the Dolby immersive cinema project.
01:17:50And so if you wanted to understand like the viewpoint of the team behind the Vision Pro was that it was a home theater on your face for that you didn't need to buy an extra room for.And I felt like that was what it delivered on very well, except it was too heavy, too hot, and a little bit too expensive.but the actual killer use case, I felt like it was there because if you love a movie and you throw it on,like the content is solved.Like you can watch a great movie and be like, that was a good movie.And you're letting the movie, we talked about this with Mark Andreessen where I was like,the iPhone was a good iPhone, was a good phone.He was like, no, it wasn't, which is maybe a good take.
01:18:25But eventually it was like, didn't have copy and paste.No, yeah, yeah.Well, you know, you're like the Motorola Razor v3 didn't have copy and paste, but it could make reliable phone calls.And so my take was like.Yeah, it's just worth remembering that it had some extreme.shortcomings and it was frustrating to use.Yeah, but it was easy to justify pretty quicklyas a device that replaced another experience.
01:18:49Whereas it's much harder.It's like the Apple Watch works for those peoplebecause they're like, I want to know the time on my wrist.I'm used to wearing a watch, that's easier.It's much harder to be like pendant.Not a lot of people wear pins all the time.It's a harder, it's a harder activation energy is higher.So I was always saying that going to
01:19:07making the movie experiencereally, really strong would belike an obvious but killer app.I don't know if people agree, butMark German's talking about this in contextof the Apple Vision Pro. He says Apple Vision Pro issuffering from a lack of immersive video.Apple has slow walked the release of immersive video
01:19:25creating a conundrum for the Vision Pro.The company's AI and smartphonesmart home roadmaps have come out.But when you getdown to the core of the problem, Apple'sApple's Vision Pro headset isn't selling well for two reasons.One, it's $3,500 price tag and a lack of sufficiently compelling features.There are other issues like a limited array of custom applications, the device's weight,
01:19:52and a cumbersome setup process, but those are less important.Developers are continuing to release apps, and there are now accessories that make the devicefeel lighter on your face.I'm going to try those.Apple has also dramatically approved its operating system, the latest version of the VisionPro software, Vision OS 26, now offers widgets and has been well received, but none of thatmatters for Apple if people don't buy the Vision Pro. By all accounts, the device remains anextremely niche product. I'd venture to guess Apple has sold well under 1 million units
01:20:21in the U.S. since launching it a year and a half ago. Moreover, the headset just doesn'tfeel like a priority for Apple on the company's last earnings call. I wonder how many of those unitshave been returned? That's a good question. I mean, I would assume if you're quoting sales, youhave to not include returns.I wouldn't be surprised if they've still sold a million.I don't know. You can count sold.That's very sketchy if they include that.Well, no, but he's guessing.
01:20:45I'm just saying, I just wonder what the return rate is.Didn't you return your?Yeah, I think it was probably like 50%.They probably sold 2 million.They wound up, like, leaving one million out in the market, basically.I mean, they have so many Apple stores, and it's such a device, and, you know, it's such a moment.It took over the timeline.It was the current thing for, like, three days.
01:21:03People were talking about it.A lot of people.tested it out. A lot of people kept them. A lot of people have the disposable income. But yeah,one million does even seem high. Yeah. This is interesting. So German says, moreover, the headsetjust doesn't feel like a priority to Apple on the company's last earnings call. CEO,Tim Cook almost seems surprised when a Wall Street analyst quizzed him about the deviceand the company's strategy. Thanks for bringing it up, he said before delving. Mark German isdelving. Interesting. Before delving into new software features and asserting that it's an area we
01:21:33really believe in. So German says in the near term, Apple isn't going to dramatically improvethe Vision Pro. The next version coming as soon as this year will mostly just get a faster chip.That's a necessary upgrade. The current M2 chip is outdated for such a processor intensive device,but it's not going to change the way that people think about the Vision Pro. The bigger upgradeis coming in 2027 when Apple will release a model that is both cheaper and lighter. He's reported,but that's a long time to wait, and there's a risk that the category simply dies out by then.I know a lot of developers that were super excited to capitalize on the release of Vision Pro.They had all this energy and excitement around getting access to the product,
01:22:14starting to build applications for it.And I don't know that any of them are still building for the product,which is a problem.It's sort of like chicken and egg problem.Apple, so he provides a couple examples of like how little immersive video Apple has really released.Apple is still featuring a highlight reel shot in immersive video of the NBA All-Star game from 2025,to be clear, from 2024, to be clear, the 2025 All-Star game played a year after the one Apple is showcasing,took place six months ago, and there's no immersive vision on the Vision Pro.
01:22:53You would assume they shouldn't have just said, hey, let's go shoot one immersive video of the All-Star game.It's like, what is our NBA strategy?What is our immersive video schedule?Yeah, and what is our strategy to get 1% more content onto this device every single day forever?Yeah, or just have a big release every Friday.Yeah.Like you sold a $3,500 device to a million-ish people.Yes.
01:23:14You should probably figure out how to deliver them content that makes it valuable.If you look at the number of minutes that are being uploaded to YouTube every day,like that number has probably been increasing every day since they started the company, basically.Like it's just slightly more every single day.Sure, they probably have a few down days.But in general, like social networks,the amount of content on them should be growing every single day.Any sort of media device, I'm sure Netflix is not like,
01:23:42oh yeah, like, you know, next year we're going to have less content on Netflix.That would be insane.Yeah, so apparently the immersive content shoots are extraordinarily expensiveand resource intensive.That is crazy because I looked into how expensive it is to shoot an immersive video.and I feel like it's actually not that expensive.Like, yes, you need this fancy black magic cinema camerathat actually just came out with a special lens,
01:24:06but you can just set it up.It can film for 45 minutes on one, like, you know, SSD, basically.And you can just upload that.The problem is that you can't, if you're doing CGI,and you're doing editing and you're doing, like, scripting and storytellingand all that, like, the killer use case needs to be,take the immersive video camera, put it somewhere,cool and then allow people to watch that like in in vision prep and that needs to be yeah
01:24:35and so this was this was uh um ben thompson's yeah it feels like there's so much just put it so muchthat they could do you could take immersive video behind the scenes for the f1 movie yes and makethat available yes it's like you can buy one buy this you can watch f1 you can watch behindthe scenes with the actors producers directors there's just a lot that they could do butI think there needs to be something for users to really look forward to if they're going to invest in this device.And right now it doesn't.Yeah, the other thing is, like, they should have, I feel like they should have done more.Like, there was a little bit of, like, revealed preference in the fact that when you open up the Vision Pro, the app that's in the top left corner, like the first app, if you are reading left to right, like a book, is the Apple TV app.
01:25:23Like, it's very much, like, you should go watch a movie right now.you should click on this.And then there's some other stuff,but mainly it feels like they're pushing that.But they should have done moreto really make it like a movie watching environment,something that people really focusing on that narrowinginstead of trying to do like seven different things.
01:25:42Is it for gaming?Is it for educational content?Is it for this prehistoric planet thingand these like dinosaur stuff for games or collaboration?They had FaceTime in there.They just like threw a lot in thereand I feel like none of them were breakoutinstead of just like chopping it down
01:25:58and being like, okay,this is going to be the best placeto watch an IMAX movie in 3Dand so like you should get one of thesespecifically for this.I don't know, maybe it won't even workif they pull that off.But it'll be interesting because
01:26:10meta is going to fire backand it will be,so there'll be a small screen for mini appsand alerts on the right lensand the spectacles can be controlledvia the neural wrist accessory.So think about it like meta raybansplus Google Glass, basically.
01:26:28So you have to look up here and you can see notifications.You can see a little bit.There is a different, there's a different set of companiesthat are building basically movie theater watching glasses.So it's just a big screen.It's not VR, AR, it's not positionally mounted.It's just a screen on your face at a much lower price.I haven't tried them.
01:26:47I don't think that they're fully there in terms of resolution.A lot of this is just like waiting around for the screenin the Apple Vision Pro.to commoditize to the point where other companies can start taking that same screenand putting it in other stuff, giving, like, actually doing all the testing,and then Apple will ultimately, like, take that back.Thank you.Yeah.
01:27:10It was like, I'm pretty sure, like, the multi-touch screens, like, those were out therein other, like, the technology existed in other phones, but it just was poorly implementedand Apple was able to come in and do, like, the virtual, the vertical integration.Well, AteSleep.8.com.There you go.Pod 5 Ultra, get a five-year warranty, 38 risk free trial.Free returns, free shipping.Decent night.
01:27:3179.Yeah, I think I'm around there too.Not my best.I'm building back up.Building back up.I'm in a bit of a...Seven hours, 12 minutes.Oh, 86.
01:27:4086.Okay.Not bad.Eight hours.Good work, John.I do.Good work.Wilmanitis says if you're a young person interested in weird things,
01:27:47basically the only good advice is you should be a thousand times more commercial.Someone will get very rich by monetizing the things you find.out there's no reason that person shouldn't be you wholeheartedly agree I thinkoftentimes if you're going down weird rabbit holes whether that's in technology orsomething like health you can often feel like you're late to something I'll give anexample here I I started supplementing magnesium pretty heavily in collegeand and continued post college this was like I graduated in 2018 and andAnd I thought that everyone knew that taking magnesium was smart and good.
01:28:30And basically, I mean, I don't know if you're aware,but our food used to have a lot more magnesium.Sure.That's just likely due to soil health and soil degradation.And since...Lobbying by the magnesium supplement industry.Big mag.Big magnesium.
01:28:50No, but anyways, so soil is degraded.There's a lot less magnesium in your food.food and basically everybody should be supplementing it to some degree not health advice but that's that was mypersonal takeaway and I ended up you know thought there was an opportunity to build a business aroundmagnesium supplementation I didn't do anything about it and I think like five years later a friend ofmine started a magnesium focus company and like quickly got it to an eight figure run rate it's going to be a bigbig company and so if you're if you're interested in these various weird niches cornersI think that there's oftentimes like you know massive opportunity there and if you're
01:29:34if you think you're if you think you're late there's a good chance you might actually be earlyyep good point is your friend with the big magnesium company running billboard adsshould be we should be a call tell them to get on adquick.com out of home advertisingmade easy and measurable say goodbye to the headaches of advertising only add quickcombines technology out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across theglobe let's play we have nor sidiki calling in in just five minutes let's play the video she wasrecently on the ross doubt it podcast for the new york times and i want to uh this this sets a bigthis sets a good stage for some of the debate that was happening on the timeline over the weekend
01:30:20So let's hear from Ross.You are excited about a world in which lots and lots more babies than is the case right now are born from laboratory fertilization.And I'm just curious if you think, you know, allowing that this might be desirable in certain cases,if a world where this became the norm would be losing something that is very fundamental to human beings and human beings.families and human relationships. And that's the relationship between sex and procreation,between you and your husband having sex, apologies, and the future generations that come into being.And I'm going to take the podcaster's privilege, and I apologize for this, but I'm going to readyou a piece of a poem. It's by a poet named Galway Canal. And the poem is called, After Making Love,
01:31:14we hear footsteps, and the idea is sort of contained in the title, that the husband and wife make love,and it wakes up their child, and the child comes and gets in bed with them.And Connell writes,in the half-darkness, we look at each other and smile and touch arms across this littlestartlingly muscled body, this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making.Sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake.This blessing love gives again into our arms.Sorry.
01:31:45do you worry about removing or diminishing from human experience that aspect of being a husbandand a wife in a relationship with a child what do you mean yeah they kind of clipped her out ofcontext there should we play the full answer first because when you stop it there it makes itlook really bad. But he actuallyclarifies and thenshe gives a much longer answer that we shouldplay.In a future where
01:32:23orchid technology becomes a norm,the feeling that that poet isexpressing where a manand a woman make love and bymaking love they bring these. But mostpeople who get a baby, it is linkedinextricably to havingsex with your spouse.
01:32:39And you're saying it'stime to sever that for the sake I concede of potential medical benefits. I'm just saying I thinkpretty clearly something that like poets write about would go away. Yeah, I think that sex is a beautifulthing and I think that if you have enormous genetic privilege and for you to roll the dice and to geta outcome that isn't going to lead to disease is in the cards for you, that of course, you know,go ahead and, you know, roll the dice. It's just that I think that the vast majority of parents in thefuture are not going to want to roll the dice with their child's health.They're going to see it as, you know, taking the maximum amount of care, the maximum amount
01:33:19of love in the same way that they, you know, plan their nursery, plan their home, plan theirpreschool.All of these decisions are actually, you know, extremely insignificant in terms of the differencebetween is your child going to live with pediatric cancer, with a heart defect that we can'tsurgically fix with a born without a skull and never going to be able to make it to theirfirst birthday.I think when people think about it really concretely,in terms of what are they giving up?
01:33:43What are the risks that could potentially affect this child?I think that then it becomes about stewardship.It becomes about how do I make a responsible choicefor my family?How do I make sure that my child doesn't have to sufferin the same way that I do,in the same way that my sibling does in the same waythat my parent that I'm a caregiver for does?
01:34:04So I mean, I think sex is obviously a very beautiful thing.It's a very profound part of the human experience,but I think that it's, yeah,think it's, you know, denigrating and dismissive to IVF parents and to IVF babies to say that somehow, you know, science babies are, you know, inferior to babies that are, you know, made the old-fashioned way. I mean, every human life is equally valid. And I think, you know, no parent who chooses to take the maximum amount of love and care and information going into that decision should be, you know, you know, stigmatized in any way. I think it's their personal choice. And, you know, I think freedom and choice is, you know, what makes America, you know, a great place to live and to, and to be.North Siddiqui, thank you so much for joining me.This is Nor Siddiqui of Orchid Health.Orchid, they do whole genome screening for embryo selection.And so there's obviously a whole battery of tests that a lot of people do when they're having kids.
01:35:04Usually this happens in the first trimester, right?But there is some risk to doing those types of tests, I believe.leave where in a very small amount of cases something can go run because you're basically likescraping cells out of the baby I think at that point and that's like and you're because you have toget the DNA to actually run the test and that can actually cause problems but it's so low that thebenefit of being able to catch that's crazy I never did that you're like I never would have donethis you're like I'm hearing this for the first time anyway we have Norse Diki in the studio welcometo the stream how you do what's going on welcome to the show
01:35:41Oh, okay.One second.We're redesigned the studio.Can you give us another introduction?Okay.Thanks so much for having me, guys.Great to see you.Thank you.
01:35:53Sweet.Good to see you.We're assembling the plane as we're flying it.Anyway, thanks so much for joining us.Take us through the...Last 48 hours.Last 48 hours.And also just like, there's this weird thing that happens when, like, clips get sent out
01:36:08into the internet out of context.Like, how did you feel the...interview with Ross Douthit of the New York Times actually went, because obviously it was a muchlonger conversation. This particular moment seems like he did. But what was the actual interactionlike? And then what had the last 48 hours been like? Yeah, yeah. No, I think the interview wasreally fun, honestly. I think that it was just really cool to be able to chat with someone who hasyou know, such a different perspective about the technology, but yeah, it might help to just kind ofback up and just kind of explain, you know, what work it is. So what work it is is we allow parents
01:36:47to protect their children from conditions before pregnancy even begin. So kind of, you know,to set the stage of, you know, what happens now, when you do IVF, you're basically operating blind,right? So you have extremely limited information. A tiny percentage, one percentage of the genome is what'susually evaluated in order to make a decision about which embryo to transfer.So what Orchid does is we're the first company in the world to be able to allow you toscreen the entire genome, so 99%, 100x the data compared to what existed before.And what that allows you to do is it allows you to detect conditions like birth defects,heart defects, pediatric cancers, some of those super severe disorders that previously you
01:37:27wouldn't find out until after the child was born.So the exact same testing that happens in the NICU, after a child,is born, you know, those diseases, instead of having to wait until you can only react whenyou sort of have a conversation with a doctor and all they're able to tell you is, hey, there'snothing you can do. That information is brought all the way up to that embryo selection stageto be able to actually transfer an embryo that's unaffected. And I think the thing that's sort ofreally interesting about what's going on in this debate is it seems like people kind of don'tunderstand or don't, or maybe just ignorant of what's going on, right? Because this whole question
01:38:03of, you know, should embryos be created and should people have the right to decide whichembryo to select has already been happening, right? IvyF has already been going on for 40 years,and for the last 30 years, they've had access to really limited information, right?So all Orchid is doing is basically upgrading that information from, hey, do you want to get1%? Do you want to only know that chapter level, chromosome level, to do you want to knowthe entire book, the entire gene, would be able to scan for the thousands of different genetic diseasesthat genesis has cataloged over the last decade.So that's the thing that I've actually found really surprising
01:38:37is that there's a lot of activation about this topic,but maybe there's sort of a little bit of ignorance about, you know,what's actually going on here, right?Like there's no net new embryos that are being created.It's sort of like you have this many embryos that are created during IVF.That's just how IDF works and you have a choice.Do you want to make that information,do you want to make that decision with, you know, blind or with very, you know,
01:39:00limited information or do you want to make that decision with the maximum amount of informationthat science can give you? Yeah, I've heard it's actually not technically blind that during IVFdoctors will often just look at the embryos like visually with their under a microscope and justkind of be like that one looks good and they'll grade them like A, B, C, D and it's extremely likevibes based but they do actually look at them and grade them, correct? Yeah, yeah. It's a it's kind of a beautycontest. It's called morphology, but it's a little bit tricky because there's been a lot ofstudies where there's, you know, if you basically flip the images, then an embryologist mightgrade them differently. So yeah, morphology, it's useful, but it's not, you know, kind of
01:39:42necessarily the most reliable. And I think the other piece of the debate that I think is reallymissing is that, you know, you kind of mentioned, you know, testing that happens during pregnancy,right? So again, when you test during pregnancy at, you know, maybe 10 weeks, the amount of informationthat you have there is, again, super, super limited, right? So you might be able to.a screen for something like Down syndrome. Down syndrome is called, you know, the technical term for itis trisomy 21. You have three pairs of chromosome 21. It's actually not a lethal condition, right? It'ssurvivable. And right now, all across the country in the U.S. and all across the world, you can get thatinformation at 10 weeks, right? And right now women are in this, you know, at this point where you, the only
01:40:22option that they have is either to terminate that pregnancy or to have an affected child, right? So if you're in thatcamp that is against abortion, then you should actually support orchid and embryo scratingbecause it obviates the need for that termination to ever happen, right? Because you only transferthe embryo that's unaffected. So that the other piece of it that I thought was really surprisingis that, you know, maybe people don't realize that, you know, genetic testing on a very limitedbasis is already happening and terminations are already happening on the basis of, you know,non-lethal conditions, right? Versus what Oregon's doing is looking at situations that are notmuch more severe than that, right? So, you know, over 20% of infants die due to genetic causes,
01:41:04right? If you look at babies that are in the NICU that unfortunately don't make it, they've sequencedthem and they found that at least 20% of infant deaths are due to genetic disease, right? So I thinkit's insane to tell parents who are doing IVF that they shouldn't scan for, you know, lethal disorderswhen, you know, we're already doing, you know, elective terminations for totally non-medicalreasons, right, just because people, you know, don't want to have a pregnancy at a specific timeor, or, you know, a specific medical reason, right? Much, much later than, you know, an embryothat's five days old. So, I don't know, I think that's something that I found kind of interesting is thatkind of beautiful discussion. Like, like, Ross's, like, core point, uh, I, the way I took it was, like,
01:41:46it's pretty easy to make, like, a utilitarian argument that, that this is a net good and thistrend, not even Orchid specifically, but like this general trend of IVF is a net good because itresults in like less suffering. But his point was that there is a downside and I'm wondering ifyou debate that point or if you say, yes, there is a downside. We are losing something thatpoets write about, but it's worth it. Because I could make this argument about basicallyeverything. Like space travel. It's going tolike, SpaceX is going to wind upkilling some birds. Another way to look at it is like if somebody
01:42:26is... The water used in data centers.I'm okay. I think that's a good use of water.There's a million reasons where I'm okaywith tradeoffs. Yeah, I mean, I think ifsomebody just watched that short clipand take the fullness of the interview,they might not pick up thatI think it'd be insane if somebody's doing IVF
01:42:44and they're not using Orchid, right?Because if you're already going through this processand then you're saying, well, I don't, yeah,Yeah, I'll just let the doctor kind of like do a vibes-based analysis of the embryos and he'll just pick, you know, a beauty contest, as you described it.You know, seems like obvious decision if you're going through that process to leverage the max amount of data that you can have.Totally.But then I think a lot of people were being triggered about this broader idea of like what would we lose if every, if every baby.Yeah, that's Ross's question.
01:43:17is like if there's a future where we're being able to do more genetic testing,pushes more people towards IVF, do we lose something?Do you agree with that?Do you debate with that?Do you think that it's worth it?Yeah, yeah, yeah.I think it's sort of basically fundamentally a personal decision, like a private decision, right?I think for each individual couple, each individual person, you know, they'll decide, right?
01:43:43Do I lose more or do I gain more from that decision?That's why I thought I think I was kind of surprised that he was.he was asking me, because it's sort of like, hey, it's not really my decision, right? Each parent is going to decide if they're losing more or gaining more. And I think that, yeah, if you think about any technology, right, like when we swapped, you know, candles for electricity, or we swapped horses for cars, right? You know, there's always something lost, right? The question isn't, you know, is something lost. With every technology, something is lost. The question is, you know, what's gained, right? So, you know, when you have the decision of, do I want to use an epidural,during my pregnancy is something lost.I mean, certainly some women who choose not to use epiduralbecause, you know, they think that, you know,what they gain from, you know, natural childbirth is better.But it's just, it's just fundamentally a personal decision.
01:44:29And it seems strange to, you know, dictate to peopleor stigmatize people who choose, you know, epidural or not, you know,to screed their embryos or not.Yeah, that kind of like, I mean, that plays out to all of technology.Like, we recently found out that the Amish population is doubling every 20 yearsand that by the year 2030, 2,300, there will be more than 7 billion Amish people.And so, like, even though the technology...I mean, people can make a choice.
01:44:59They can choose not to use bones.They can choose not to use...It feels like there's a potential future where groups like the Amish continue to just operate without technology,and then there's a large amount of people that decide it's worth it for me to go through this.and leverage technology to avoid a child with a permanent heart defect or something of that sort.But I think that's a scary, it's a scary world, I think, for a lot of people to imagine.Which one's the scary world?I think a lot of people that have, I mean, it's easy for parents that have gone and had a healthy child through the natural process
01:45:44process to think about a scenario where humanity no longer experiences that at scale.And then the other side of that is parents that have had a child with some type of compromised health,some degree, that would probably, in some cases, do anything to go back and avoid having a childthat, you know, died shortly after childbirth or didn't make it through the full.Or the opposite.I mean, I'm sure you talk to parents who have had health complications and gotten through it,in many ways they would say they wouldn't trade that for the world.Like, like, they see that as, like, something that was a crucible that they needed to cross.
01:46:30And that was something that, even though it feels very bad, they feel like it made them stronger in the long term.But, yeah, I don't know.It is tough.It's a very hard situation.Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Continue. Oh, yeah. I mean, I just think that it's just a super private decision, right? I just think it seems super strange for people to be, you know, trying to push their ideology in other people. I think it's just like, you know, we, that there's so much in the way right now of, you know, people having babies and fundamentally one of the biggest anxieties people have is, you know, is the disease that I'm affected by, is the disease that, you know, affected my, my sibling or my parent going.to affect my child. That's sort of like front and center, I think, for a lot of people is,you know, most basic moral desire I think people have is, you know, I want my child to sufferless than me, right? So any tool that's available, I think, should be, you know, just, you know,
01:47:26should be available to parents that they can make that decision for what's right for theirfamily. And, you know, if they think, you know, more is lost by, you know, not doing itthe old fashion way, then that's what they should do. And no one should, you know, stigmatizethat. But I think, you know, the same is true in theopposite direction. I think that, unfortunately, there's, yeah, there's still like a huge amountof stigma around IVF and embryo screening that I think shouldn't exist because it's such amassive force for good, right? Like, there's sort of this huge category, you know, of illnessesthat previously we just had absolutely no control over. We just had to roll the dice, right? And I think
01:48:00for a lot of parents, they're thinking that, hey, this is going to be the most important parentingdecision that they'll ever make. And that's, you know, fundamentally what I think, right? I mean,There's no parenting decision that I'm going to make that I think is going to be as significant as, is my child going to be affected by pediatric cancer? Are they going to be affected by developmental delay, right? If you look at children today, you know, 60% of kids with moderate to severe intellectual disability, there's a definitive molecular cause. There's a genetic cause for that, right? And a lot of those are de novo mutations. That means they happen spontaneously in the embryos. So it does that mean that even if you scan the parents ahead of time, you can't mitigate that risk.So you have to screen the embryos, you have to look at that early as possible stage.And I think that it's more compassionate to do that than to put women in this position where, you know, they're already pregnant and now they have to make this decision, you know, during pregnancy as opposed to let me actually have a pregnancy that's successful, right?So 50% of miscarriages actually are, you know, due to genetic causes as well.So it's like, you know, as a woman, you're going to be sure of the most intense physical experience, right?a pregnancy is like a marathon every single day, it would be nice if, you know, you didn't have to
01:49:13have as many miscarriages, right?Yeah.What's actually...It's very obvious.Like, it's just information that people should have access to.Yeah.What's actually going on on the science side?I feel like we sequenced the genome like 20 years ago.
01:49:27People were getting genome sequenced in the mail like 15 years ago.But just now we're able to sequence embryos.before they get implanted for IBF?Like, has there been some sort of fundamental scientific advancement?Is it a cost thing?Like, did the FDA approve something?Like, why is this a thing now instead of like 15 years ago?Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:49:51There's a couple of things.So one, you know, specifically an embryo is a really tiny number of cells, right?So you have about 125 cells on day five, and then five cells get sent to orchid for analysis.And in those five cells, we only have about 30 picograms of DNA.So you have a really, really tiny amount of DNA, and you have to amplify that DNA.So Ork had to invent a new protocol and the amplification technology in order to get really high quality whole genome data off of embryos.So when you have blood or saliva, you can get a whole too many sequence through a commodity process because you don't have to amplify it.You have enough DNA to just throw it on a sequencer.
01:50:25So that's one piece of a puzzle.And that's like the shotgun sequencing that 23M does, where they're just kind of like taking the average DNA that they're seeing in a bunch of different saliva.and they've so much volume that they can, like, piece it together.No, no, no, no, no.So basically, 23-Me is a saliva-based test, right?So you have saliva or blood.So where is the DNA?The DNA's in the nucleus, right?
01:50:44So if you have saliva or blood, you have a ton of cells, right?Yeah.Billions of cells.So you don't have to amplify the DNA, right?You just have an DNA in the cellet,and the blood to just do it straight up.And the other thing is that 23-Me does not do whole genome.They do something called an array.
01:50:59So an array is just a subset of the whole genome.So instead of looking at 3 billion letters,you're looking at, like, maybe,500,000 letters. So it's, again, that sort of less, far less than 1% number. So if you look at atiny fraction of the whole genome, you just can't scan for all the diseases. So basicallyone piece of it is just can you read the data off of the off of an embryo, right? So the firstto be able to do that. And the second is, what can you actually tell when you have the whole genome?So that's, you know, sort of the collective genetics and scientific community has worked on it
01:51:26over the last two decades to be able to catalog these thousands of different genetic diseases, right?we didn't use to know what is the genetic basis of, you know, lots of different heart defects.We didn't know the phylogenic basis of, you know, syndromic forms of, you know, some of themore severe forms of autism, right? We had to actually cataloged out by sequencing, you know,millions of people over the last decade or two. So part of that is, okay, it's the first timeyou can actually read the data at that super early embryo stage, and the second is, okay, what isthe actual thing that are going to be clinically meaningful to parents during that stage? So,And then sort of the third part of that is, you know, what models can you use to be able to
01:52:04predict and quantify risk or not that just those binary yes or no is that embryo affectedor unaffected by a specific genetic disease, but can you actually quantify genetic susceptibilityfor conditions where it's not just a binary yes or no. That's kind of like the polygetic side of it.So there's sort of three different things that are kind of coming together to make embryo screening.Yeah, so the science kind of advanced.What's going on on the FDA side? Do you have approval?need approval? Like, can you, is it a different pathway than kind of the traditional, like,pharma drug pathway that we're familiar with from, you know, cancer drugs, phase one, phase two,
01:52:41phase three? The way the FDA regulates all testing, not just embryo testing, is through something calledLBT, so laboratory developed tests. Sure. So, yeah, it's basically two different agencies. One is calledClea, one is called CAP, or they operate at the federal and state level, and they come and, you know,inspect our lab and make sure that, you know, all the machines work and all the, you know,all the analysis that we're doing is correct. So there's sort of these independent audits thathappen at the, yeah, basically at the state and federal level annually. Interesting. So it's morelike an ongoing process than like you get approved and then you have a patent and then 10 years laterthere's like a copycat knockoff product that's like the generic version. It's a very different
01:53:22pathway. Well, so sort of, I guess there's a couple of different things, right? So the,The patent on the amplification technology is sort of separate from the FDA, but the regulatory environment is that laboratory developed tests are regulated via LBT's, which means have these two different agencies actually come and examine labs at a physical level and at an analytical level, right?They come and verify that there's something called like proficiency testing, right?So they basically send you DNA sequences and they test you and they say, hey, did you know, call this correctly or incorrectly, right?So they sort of blind you to the results.And that's kind of the process for actually validating genetic tests, right?So Orkid is a genetic test on embryos and a larger framework, which is how do you validate genetic testing on, you know, blood or saliva or any other sample type?Does that make sense?
01:54:09Got it.Anything else, Jordan?No, I think, I think it's such a, I think it's like such a personal technology.It's like the most businesses do not have, you know, as they're growing.and marketing their products, service technology, they're not, there's, I think, few things,few products on Earth that would be potentially more controversial, where one person mightsee Orchid and be massively relieved and, you know, immediately reach out and want to learn more.And then another person would probably send you a very nasty DM.
01:54:51But I think it's, so yeah, I think, you know, it's not even, I don't even feel like somebody that traditionally comments on business, you know, having had two kids going through, you know, that process as a family, I think there's so many decisions along the way that are just deeply personal that should be made within the family unit.And I think, you know, whether somebody decides to use something like this or not should be, again, like, everyone should just make their own decision.listen to a podcast to get advice you have two three four kids the old way have two three four kidswith orchid see how each plays out then you can judge the company a b test just a b tested orrun a gattaca experiment have one the old-fashioned way have one superhuman and then see who can swimthe farthest i know you haven't seen gattaca it's a great movie anyway thank you so much for stoppingbye no yeah thanks having you guys have a good one soon cheers bye bye you really haven't seen gattacaIt's so insane. Have you seen Gattaca, Tyler?
01:55:52I've not.You haven't seen Gattaca? Has anyone here seen Gattaca?John, you need to create a John's movie club.I do, I do. I need to get more people watching.It's a fantastic movie.The plot is basically that in the future you can design the perfect embryo,and so that there are two brothers that are born.One, like the old-fashioned way, the family leaves it up to chance.
01:56:11And with the other brother, they do the perfect, like, jeans, like everything.And so one of them has a ton of, like, no, like, crazy disabilities, but just, like, isn't giftedathletically, doesn't have the right, like, you know, like musculature, all those different things.And, like, the superhuman one is, like, totally ready to go to space and join, like, the most elite group.And they're getting, he's getting genetically screened.But, like, the brother who is, I think, played by Ethan Hawk, who doesn't have the advantages, like, use this.the sheer, embalminable, indomitable human wealth to, like, overcome everything, like,fake his way into this elite group and, uh, and ultimately, like, succeed. And, uh, and there's this
01:56:58famous quote, you want to know how I did it. This is how I did it, Anton. I never saved anythingfor the swim back because they would go out and swim in the ocean and he would always beat hisbrother who was like more athletic. It was purely because, like, he had the drive. And he was just like,I was on a mission. Yeah, that's great. He's on a mission. Well, Emash, uh, back to the timeline.And Imosh says, R slash engineering, Reddit, R slash engineering.I've applied to 10,000 jobs and haven't heard back from one.Engineering X.I built a transducing cum belator with $20.
01:57:28Combobulator.Comboulator.Combollator with $20 of sheet metal parts.Here are the instructions.Please stop offering me jobs.Incredibly real.If you build almost anything on X, you'll probably start getting job offers.Yep, yeah.
01:57:43Real alpha there.yeah yeah the new the new job application is like vibe code something i mean that's how we mettyler that's how we met adam like uh just pretty much everyone has like has like kind of donesomething to showcase their michael yeah same thing like um just like what we've done and uh and whatthey want to do and uh and i think i think people are really receptive that you probably need to gokind of up the chain um but that's where people like the founders are hanging out and x and you'llget you'll get flooded with dms well gothamas issaying call it a comeback manhattan foot traffic finally tops pre-pandemic times let's hear it for
01:58:20manhattan foot traffic the first time since the city uh so yeah did you notice a lot of foot trafficwhen we were in new york it seemed like a moderate amount i don't know it's hard to tell in summerand it just depends on the neighborhood yeah i guess well roon says if you're walking aroundmanhattan you need a hitter on your wrist go to getbezzle.com your bezel concierge is available nowto source you any watch on the planet seriously any watch it's been a niceenough robberies that maybe you want to leave the hitters.Oh, yeah, maybe you don't want it at home.Keep it in the watchbox.
01:58:50Keep it in the watchwinder.Keep it wound.My brother.And then say that's for the Hamptons.Brother-in-law.Yeah.Rough.Had a tragic incident.
01:59:01Rune says George Hots tried to fix Twitter search and decided it would be easier to takedown in video.Search is the hardest thing.Did you, I didn't know that George Hots was at Twitter?He joined X post-Elon buyout.Oh, really?turn for like a few days, came in and was like, what do you guys want to be a face?We work on search and kind of realize that like it is a truly massive system and there
01:59:24are some, like it is a big company.And I think that X has obviously evolved a ton.There's been a ton of change of leadership, but even under Elon it didn't happen overnight.Why, Tyler, do you know why search is so difficult?Why is it so intractable?Is it just a consumer preference?yeah you'd think like yeah just indexes or something would be better but it's just so hard toi use a lot of like the filter colon follows to search like people that i follow for a topic
01:59:56so if i want to if i want to understand what people are saying about invidia today i'll searchinvidia space filter colon follows and it's just who i follow in the feed of results that workspretty well but um twitter search doesn't seem that bad these days it seems actually okayI think it's probably a function of the fact that, like,there are so many different sub-communities on X.Like, teapot is its own, like, thing.And then separately there will be, like, basketball player.And these two areas will almost never collide,
02:00:28and they're, like, these separate, loose clustersthat have very little overlap.They're absolutely beautiful.It's beautiful.It's beautiful.Every once in a while.I mean, I think we literally did collide when we put up the traded postfrom meta-superintelligence hiring an AI research.
02:00:43researcher because that was that definitely hit with the sports fans as well yeah i still see that post oninstagram sometimes somebody put it on instagram and got like like five million views or something likeit rips no matter where it goes there's some combination of like that guy his name met a superintelligence poached is just so good uh it was very very funny anyway book of wander findyour happy place find your happy place book a wander withinspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24-7 concierge service.It's a vacation home, but better folks.Defense analyses and research corporations says we need a teal fellow style program that works
02:01:27to identify the next generation of talented private military contractor operators.Who's going to be the next Zoomer, Eric Prince?The oldest members of Gen Z are 28 years old.Yep.should they be operating PMCs yet?Well, when we talked to Eric Prince, we found out that he was in a very unique situationwhere he couldn't necessarily get pipelined into it.He had, I think he had a family business that he was taking over.
02:01:57He was doing training with the military.So the Zoomer Eric Prince might be out there, but they aren't necessarily capital constraint.It feels like starting the next generation of PMC is not something that you can buywith a $40 million series Aor a mango seed round.It needs to be based onconnections, experience,all these loose piecing things
02:02:20together. It doesn't seemlike it's something that is just like a moreelegant design or like a crackedteam. What about you, Tyler? You want to start one of these?I would like to see a company like 1Xget into it.I think they're not quitethere yet. Did you see the
02:02:35the Chineserobotics fight that happened over the weekend?Oh, yeah, they had the world, the humanoid robot games.Yes, in Beijing.Before they can rule the world, robots need to master basic chores.This is Hannah over at the local of the general.Human-like robots are great for entertainment,meaning of labor, not so much.
02:02:58Now, you've got to put this in the truth zone a little bitbecause did you see the back and forth between Noam Brown at OpenAIand who's that humanoid robot at Brett Adcock at Figure?So, Brad, the figure put out a video of a robot folding clothes, folding towels, andNome Brown came in, spicy reply, says, what happens if you raise the table six inches?And so then Brett Adcock raised the table six inches and did it again and was like, are younot entertained? Are you not satisfied?But if you just put the robot on a platform, though?
02:03:37Well, no, no.So the video that Braddock shared was, was, I feel like it passed the test that Noam Brown was throwing down, which was that while the robot was doing the chores, the folding, they came up and adjusted the standing desk and raised it six inches.And so it did adapt to it kind of in real time.Could have been scripted, could have been teleoperated, we don't know, but it seems like it at least satisfied Noam Brown.And he said, congrats, like good job, excited to see where this goes.So at the humanoid robot games in Beijing this weekend, more than 500 humanoid robots.That's a lot of contenders.Competed in both sporting events and real-world tasks, such as moving boxes, delivering luggage, and cleaning rooms.
02:04:26Some were remarkably fast and agile, but most were clumsy and inconsistent.Throwing away nine pieces of trash in a mock hotel room took more than 17 minutes for one robot.I thought you were going to say 17 hours.17 minutes isn't bad.I mean, really, like, these are, all of these things are on exponential curves.We're so far from the Robo X games, Humanoid X, Humanoid Robot X games.Yeah, we are.But maybe not.
02:04:49I mean, 17 hours, that was probably like last year, right?And then the year before, it was like infinite hours.So we really are coming down at an escalating rate.It is exciting.In a pharmacy simulation, a robot spent nearly five minutes grabbing three boxes of medicine.In a factory scenario, a robot spent about two minutes placing two containers on designated shelves.Everything that is easy for humans is a challenge for robots.So is a PhD student from Germany who helped train robots soccer players.
02:05:18Yeah, who was talking about the challenge of just trying to get something out of your pocket?Oh, yeah.That's a semi-analysis.Level five are tasks that are forced dependent.So if you want to pick up and fold this newspaper without ripping it,or you want to pull a phone out of your pocket without ripping your pants,It's very different than like if you're grabbing a hunk of steel,like you can kind of apply like the same level of force.
02:05:39Yeah.That's something that you don't want to crush.So it's like, you know, assembling, assembling food on a plate in a restaurant.Like you don't want to squish the, you don't want to crack all the chicken bonesif you're putting wings down, I guess.I don't know.China has said it wants to be a world leader in humanoid robots by 2027.Is it a world leader?
02:05:59It's got to be in the top two.Like, who else is in the game?it's America and Chinalike mission accomplished Chinacongratulations you are a world later asas I'm concerned if not the worldleader what they're doing is very impressiveyeah we're over here in the U.S. already talking about
02:06:14how do we make sure thatChina can't do for humanoids what they did for dronesand flood the marketis making impossible for American companiesthe default is that they will win butyou know they're setting the bar law so they can beatexpectations respect to Beijing on this onethe Olympic style event
02:06:30howeversuggested thattruly useful humanoids are still yearsaway. A robot trained by theBeijing Institute for General ArtificialIntelligence and Collaboration with UnitaryRobot. A leadingChinese robot maker competed
02:06:45in a hotel receptionscenario using a three-fingeredhand to drag a suitcaseto a designated door.It moved in small stomping motions,freezing at times. Many of ourhumanoid robot algorithms are still in thelab demo stage, says
02:07:00a researcher another competition simulating a hotel environment involvedinvolving figure can really like rehab their brand in the valley by putting one oftheir their guys in oh if they go to china they go to china with the they put up thefigure chad humanoid walks out and just dominates yeah we need uh what what are thosefamous if they can do that i've seen enough give them give them the 40 billion postfrom $38 billion, whatever the potentially not real fundraise was.Yeah, we didn't really get an update on that.The whole idea was like it was kicking around.
02:07:40It was going to happen, but then nothing really came out of it.I don't know.I mean, company is still cooking, and they're putting out a video, so, you know, still around.Yeah, we need an Usain Bolt versus Johann Blake at the 2012 Olympics.Bolt, after losing to Blake at Jamaica's Olympic trials,silence doubts by defending his Olympic vital.I've said it before.I want to see cliff jumping.
02:08:04I want to see skydiving.I want to see big wave surfing.These are the important channel.I don't care that the humanoid robot can fold my laundry.I want to see it jump off a cliff.Oh, this is a good one.1972 Munich Olympics, USA versus USSR in the men's basketball final.In a controversial finish, the Soviets beat the United States.
02:08:2651 to 50 after officials gave them multiple chances to score in the final seconds.The U.S. team famously refused to accept their silver medals.I don't know if that's a hallucinaries from Kentucky.Wait, the Soviet Union beat the United States at basketball in the Olympics?This was the 70s.Still.We hadn't invested Michael Jordan yet.I have the technology.
02:08:48No, no, you know what we need?Do you know the story of Nancy Kerrigan versus Tanya Harding, 1994 Olympics?So Kerrigan was attacked weeks before the gamesand a plot linked to Harding's ex-husband.The showdown captivated the world.Kerrigan won silver.Harding placed 8th and the scandalbecame one of the most infamous Olympic stories.
02:09:10I think Tanya Harding got her ex-husbandto whack Nancy Kerrigan in the knee with like a poleto injure her so that she could beat herbecause they had a fierce rivalry.So that's what we, that's, that's Brad Adcock.real like plaque he goes over to the unitary and just like electrical interference i mean just haveone of the humanoids do it and be like it was a buck yeah maybe it was a bug oh yeah yeah yeah just spazzed outno yeah they do these things all the time we everybody's seen the videos at these points of
02:09:39oh i have to issue a correction on on the on the kid testing so the testing that happensin the first stage in the in the first trimester uh you don't actually touch the baby you test on theblood and the placenta. So it's much lower risk. It's called CVS testing. CVS is typicallyperformed earlier in the pregnancy. I thought that sounded a bit. Then amniocentesis. CVS involves samplingplacental tissue while amniocentesis involves sampling amniotic fluid. Both tests carry smallsmall risk of miscarriage. The real test for humanoid. So there is still a risk of miscarriage forboth those. Very, very small. Like so, so small. Like one in a million? Yeah, like one in a million.Exactly.
02:10:20And so, so everyone, basically everyone does these tests and no one has problems.Well, you know what the real test for humanoids is?What?They can beat a 70-year-old, an average 70-year-old at Pickaball.This is hilarious.I didn't realize that Joe was on your team.He's on my team.Of course he's on my team.
02:10:36Joe says, look, I'm done hitting on pickleball.Live and let live.But hard for me to take seriously any sport where 70-year-olds can beat 20-year-olds.And Trace Cohen says, is responding earlier saying it's a lot of fun for allSo you can see 70-year-olds beating 20-year-olds, which almost no other sport can do.I got a side with, I got a side with Joe here.I'll take the other side of this.I'll take this.
02:11:00I'll take the other side of this.Hard to take seriously.Take it seriously for a financial perspective.One pickleball court is one quarter the size of a tennis court.So if you own a tennis court, you can you can put four pickleball courts on the tennis court.Four X your earnings.Put your money where your mouth is.If Soho House has one tennis court, they could take 20% of your liquid assets and rotate them into various pickleball bets.
02:11:28If you're so bullish, John, if you're so bullish, why don't you invest in a pickleball?Okay, well, I will consult the pickleball expert, Tyler Cosgrove over there.How are you doing?All right, I wouldn't say pickleball expert.But, okay, Jordi, do you think golf is a sport?Because in golf, you could easily see a 70-year-old beat a 20-year-old.Yeah, Donald Trump.I'm not saying, I mean, I just mostly.
02:11:48don't like, I'm just saying I don't like watching it. Don't put it on the TV. Don't put it onmy neighborhood's court. Okay. And don't put Nick over there. I see you smiling. Nick was tryingto put the TBPN logo on a pickleball paddle. I said absolutely not. Absolutely not.Tyler, when you play pickleball, do you are flip-lops? I was road testing. I didn't just fully sendit, but I'm thinking ofa nickname for Tyler, just calling flip-flops.Because if you have a follower...Flip-flops over here has been
02:12:27doing the full mirth every weekin flip-flops, which I think...I have to make it harder for myself.I'm hilarious and iconic.Just running in flip-flops is...He said, the reason he gave me was like,I don't have another pair of shoes.And I'm like, you have a MetaQuest 3S
02:12:44Xbox edition sitting in a boxthat you could easily put on eBayand trade for a pair of shoes.You have no excuses.I should trade it up to a house.Except the fact that it does give you insane aurabecause doing a full hero wad weekly in flip-clopsis a good move.
02:13:03Yeah, you must have an insane callouswhere we're like in between the...Totally.Yeah, rainbows, they're worn in.I don't want to think about that.Let's change the subject.Dylan Field says Benjamin Franklin's routine is goals.Yes.
02:13:17the good morning questions what good shall i do this day rise wash and address powerful goodnesscontrive days business and take the resolution of the day what does that say prosecute prosecute thepresent study and breakfast and then from eight to 12 11 noon yeah at noon read and overlook my accountsand dine it's a two hour two hour lunch i love it insane and then two to five two to five he'sputting up hours working again and then of course around six or sevenfour hours of putting things in their places supper music or diversion diversionor conversation exclamation of the day you know the i was thinking about it andthere's been this debate around alcohol recently is it because people are getting more health
02:14:06conscious is it because people are being less social sure and i think it's because nobody getsbored anymore. This is my work in theory, right? It used to be somebody, maybe there wasn't any goodtelevision on. And so they're, end of the day, they're bored, and they just start drinking. Nowthey can numb the mind with a scroll or a thousand. Or an ancient scroll if you're not Freedman.That's true. That's true. But I think there's something there. If you look at social media as effectively,you know, its effect on the brain is similar to a drug in many ways that, you know,I think, I think when you look back in history, these different eras where people were justdrinking for, you know, the entire day, I think part of that had to have been just like general
02:14:58boredom, right, like wanting to like change, change their mental state.Yeah, I'm very rarely bored.I'm very rarely bored.It happened this weekend.I tried to watch the new Superman movie.and I was not very into it.I couldn't get into it.And I was thinking like,
02:15:16I might crack open a beer.But I didn't have any stuff.I didn't crack open a beer.Back more timeline.Molly Contillion says,Nothing screams.I am the main character,more than America having the plus one phone code,
02:15:31goes very viral.And then somebody quotes and dunks on her,goes even more viral saying,we invented the telephone.We did invent the telephone.We deserve it.We earned it.Still pretty main character activity to invent the telephone.
02:15:44What is crazy is that you would assume that I feel like the phone code should be like just a power ranking.Like in Dubai, you know, where the license plates.It is a power ranking.No, it's not.I mean.Is China number two?No.Is Japan number three?
02:16:01But I really only care about the top spot.If you're not first or last.What are the other, like, what are the other phone codes?Like, top 10 countries.He is plus 86.86.They're not the 86 than anything.Certainly not in humanoid robots.
02:16:18They're easily in the top 10.They're not 86 in spam.Nothing like getting there at plus 86.Oh, and Canada is piggybacking.Canada also gets a one.See, yeah, UK, 44.Stolen valor.Was the United Kingdom really the 44th country to adopt the phone?
02:16:33Like, what happened?What happened?What were they doing?Japan, I feel like they invented telephones.Like so many phones they adopted.technology very early. They're 81. Germany, Russia got on the program pretty quickly. They'renumber seven. Wait, this is funny. So Lewis Hamilton's racing number is 44. Could that be becausehe's British? Oh, maybe. He modeled it after the phone code. Maybe, maybe. I love this
02:17:00post from a friend and repeat guest via his post, your tickets. Me, when I see an AI generated video,that looks two standard deviationsbelow the current quality benchmarkfor frontier model labs.Wow.Which it's seen quite a lot.There's a lot of slop on the timeline right now.But Nikita Beers working on it.
02:17:24You saw that.He's addressing the dial.Human posts, AI slop posts.Every once in a while there's an AI slot postthat's so bad it's good.You want to see it.That's true. That's true.Another post, I'm still in here.
02:17:35We don't have it.Also, underrated.It is possible to create AI slopwithout the use of AI technology.You can, one, and I was actually thinking about this,so obviously this is somewhat inspired by Superman.Incredible visual effects team on that,no hate to them, but the cinematography
02:17:51just doesn't feel grounded, and I was hopingfor this next reboot of a DC characterto be like the Nolan, Dark Night.Like, give me something a little more gritty,a little bit more grounded,bring in a serious filmmaker,and reboot Superman properly.And instead, it's like this very, like,
02:18:07joky, crazy, there's like a whole bunchof funny scenes like it's funny but the cg i is like the camera's flying all over the place it's notlike grounded and there's a real way to do this so uh i know you haven't seen pacific rimbut uh it's a fantastic film by an award winning filmmaker uh who did pan's labyrinthwhat's his name who did pan's labyrinth giermo del toro that's right so giermo deltorodoes Pacific Rim.And in Pacific Rim, it's this crazy, huge robots,these Jaegers that fight these massive monsters,
02:18:46could easily be completely CGI over the top,crazy Marvel movie camera all over the place.But he decided to ground the cinematographyin shots that could be filmed practically,but obviously weren't because you can't go filma massive Godzilla fighting a massive robot.But so when you're watching the movie,it feels like, okay, I'm filming from a helicopter.
02:19:09Now I'm filming from the ground.Now I'm filming from the top of a building.Like as if someone were looking off the top of a building watching this fight happen.It's not just like the camera flying all over the place.Like it's impossible.And then for the sequel, he's not on the film.He's not attached to the film anymore.And for the sequel, the camera's kind of flying all over the place and then it got a lot worse reviews.
02:19:34And I was hoping that Superman would do that, but they didn't.It was kind of a crazy film.I didn't really enjoy it that much.But it felt like even though they didn't use AI,it felt very downstream of AI stylistically and kind of like hallucinatory,even though they clearly used a like a traditional CGI pipeline.And I was kind of thinking it would be funny to try and, to try and,we were talking about another video that we saw that, that,
02:20:03your initial reaction to the video was this is AI slop and I told you no it's actually all filmedit's just a lot of VFX but your like VFX is typically in the uncanny valley this wasthis was handmade slop but I was thinking what if you went a step further and tried to makean AI slop video entirely practically so you don't do any VFX but it's like we're wearingprosthetic sixth finger prosthetic sixth finger and like really like really like really like reallylike grease on the lens to like make it more hallucinatory like the actors areconstantly changing so you're swapping people in and out so the face doesn't alwayslook exactly the same you get like seven different brothers to play the same actor
02:20:47and they're always slightly different and in every scene it's slightly differentlike you could create AI slop using traditional methods and I think I thinkthe takeaway is like like even AI slop is merely one form of slop you need to bein the business of not making slop at all no mattermatter what your tool of choice.Great.Well, Superman could have used AI.Potentially, would have been potentially helpful for one of the co-stars in that one
02:21:13scene.Did you see this video is going viral?Oh, the kissing thing?Yeah, Rachel Brosnahan.Yeah.The director calls cut.She keeps going in.Maybe she was just in character, but, I guess.
02:21:29How did that outtake leak?That's a crazy behind the scene.video to like put out on the internet do you think that's viral marketing do you think it'sintentional do you think everyone's bought in because sometimes like the didn't seem likeRachel's husband was that bought in sometimes the sometimes the production team will be likethat was amazing I'm like offloading this footage but you get in a lot of trouble for thatand then sometimes they do it deliberately I think during the promotion of the of the latestSpider-Man movie they intentionally leaked a VFX shot of the Andrew Garfield who played a
02:22:02previous Spider-Man in theVFX scene, and they made it looklike, oh, they, like,this is like fake CGI orsomething, but it was really like a teaser for himbeing in the film. Spoiler alert,the most recent Spider-Man featureslike multiple Spider-Man from previous
02:22:18eras. They come back.So it's not just, it's not just, isTom Holland, who is the main one?Tom Holland's the main one. AndrewGarfield is the previous one, and then there's someone elsewho's the one before that, and they allappear. Anyway, Kate,has assembled a list of blogs based on TDPN's METIS list.
02:22:37Go check this out.She says it's the fastest way to get smarter is to read smarter people.And she lists a whole bunch of interesting blogs here.Carpathie, Lillian Wang, Sergey Levine, Jeff Dean has a blog.Go check it out.Dario, of course, is blogging.Great stuff, Kate.Lots of good stuff to.
02:22:55And fun to see people riffing off the Mettis list.Also, Gabby Goldberg, gassing you up, says, quote from Jordy Hayes,that unirotically changed my brain chemistry,the best neutropic is being on a mission.It really is true.I swear I've tried every neutropic under the sunand nothing hits like loving your workand having a clear vision for what you want to accomplish.
02:23:20Yeah, this is kind of a...There's like a lot of people that are out thereand I've been this person beforewhere you're searching for this like hackto get yourself to be,focused have that drive day to day and you can't it's almost impossible to um that you can you canbriefly hack it right you know people that that take adderall when they have an exam coming up rightyou can kind of force it but it's still forced yeah and the only thing that is that is durable is
02:23:52like truly being on a mission yeah it's kind of the this is kind of the flip side of uh of yourtake about being commercial. Like it was like you're you're early to the magnesium thing. But likewould you be happy if you were like could you see your life's work being running a magnesiumcompany or do you feel like you're a better fit for this? Would you be more on a mission if you hadstayed there versus coming here and doing this? Yeah, it's interesting. I certainly don't wish I couldgo back in time and start that company. Right. I think that I think that one thing that I do think isis addicting to people in a positive loop is that somebody can be working on somethingthat they don't feel like is their life's work, but they can get addicted to the process
02:24:35of winning, making the number go up.So make number go up, and being extremely fixated on that is also effectively a powerfulneotropic because you wake up every day and you want to make the number go up, right?And that's most of our modern lives as humans, for better or worse.This is John Frankapost was funny because I thought,he was going to be talking about rapper companies and AI companies.He says, unpopular opinion, gross margin is not product costs.And I was like, oh, he's going to talk about application layer companies paying foundation model companies through the nose.
02:25:12But he says, gross margin must include product costs, freight cost from factory to warehouse.I was like from the AI token factory to the Amazon AWS data warehouse.Okay, got it.Payment processing rates, of course.Like you have to pay Stripe or whatever you use.using returns and exchanges and that's where I got confused because I was like I didn't know thatyou could return tokens generated from from the claw code API this one wasn't that great take it backtake it back sales channel fees you do got to pay those fulfillment to customer that's the that's the
02:25:44bandwidth baby this is the gap definition of gross margin cost to get the goods in the hands of thecustomer obviously is a great takeaway for folks who run physical goods businesses also relevantto the AI labs, but...Yeah, just physical product founders would say,counting rules aside, I have 80% grossmargin. Yeah.Cope or not cope,Uco Capital Bloke says
02:26:09chat GPT adoption did not reduce Google searchusage. People did not substitute their typicalGoogling with chat GPTing. In fact, there was a slightincrease in average Google search usageafter chat GPT adoption. Now, oddly,this is from SEM rush.Their business is in Google SEO, so they might not be the most reliable narrator.What do you think, do you believe this?
02:26:33So the data says that before using chat GPT, users were doing 10.5 Google search sessionsper week.That feels extremely low.But after using chat GPT, that increased to 12.6.I could see it being additive.My joke on this was like, it turns out you can spend more time on the computer.And I do find that I go to Chachapit, I kick off something I want to learn about, and then I'll also be Googling.That happened with our story about Richard Mill.
02:27:08I found it in deep research, the history of Richard Mill.There was that interesting story about them getting the price wrong.I went to Google to fact check it.I went to Google to find images of Richard Mills.I wound up doing a number of traditional Google search queries.So I wonder, maybe I should track my screen.time or something like that and actually, or I bet I could just pull my actual Googleresults, my Google data, maybe if I'm logged in, I could see how many searches I've
02:27:34been doing, whether it's really falling off cliff or actually it's additive. I don't know.Does it feel like you're using Google less?Everyone affiliated with Open AI says like, I never use Google anymore, but it's unclear.I mean, they're clearly aligned the other direction. You know, they want to tell the storythat they've replaced Google entirely. I definitely use Google a lot less on my phone.Yeah.I find I'm using it a ton for Google Images, because if I want a real image to cut out,like I'm not going to go to ChatCAPU for that, because it's either going to trigger
02:28:07generate an image, which is not what I want.Maybe it will be able to find it for me, but then I still have to click out to find the actual image.It's certainly not going to, like, give me a grid of images like Google Images.Yet.Yeah.Maybe soon.Anyway.Andy, two cents.
02:28:22Money says a marvelous testament to the tax benefit.It's the C Corporation that tens of thousands of Americans can raise standing armies off a whim.And yet there have been so few uprisings in our history.People just stop overthrowing the government once it lets them get rich.This is a good take.Start-ups, there's so much intel in this one image yet so often ignored number of firms and employment.Interesting.So there are, yeah, there are like 20,000 firms.
02:28:52This is 2019 data from the Census Bureau.20,000 friends with over 500 employees.So if you have 500 people, they're willing to go to war for you,potentially can overthrow the government.Sean Frank is in the chat.Who loves the substack?Thank you.TbPN.substack.com.
02:29:14Go subscribe if you haven't already.We send out a...Great to see you, Sean.We send out our show notes every morning.Sean, when are you coming on the show in person?Yeah, come on.You're not that far away.Hop over.
02:29:23Let's make it happen.and before you give awaythe Lambocome drive it onto the setthat should be how youdefinitely bring this Dorado for surewe'll hang out we'll go outwe'll hang out and then when we reflect
02:29:38we'll say yo last night was a teams meetingthis Atlascreatine cycle bangerit's a great onepeople are enjoying the merchErica says posting a pick in the TBPN jacketis the 2025 version of a thirst trapI don't know if that bodes
02:29:54well for thirst traps or us.I think it's more people show in their support.But this is a funny post.A good jacket, sir.It's a good jacket.This is the same story with AI.The killer apps will be the ones that collapse, latency, friction, and context switchinginto something instant.
02:30:09So this is a quote that signal posts.I heard a story years ago about Steve Jobs after the release of the original iPad.Jobs had been on medical leave in 2009.When he returned to Apple, he was focused almost entirely on the iPad.In 2010, after the iPad was introduced, he had a meeting scheduled with engineers on the MacBook team.That meeting was big picture.What's the future of the MacBook, that sort of thing?These engineers have prepared a ton of material to present to Jobs.
02:30:39Jobs comes into the meeting carrying an iPad.He goes to a then-shipping MacBook on a table and wakes it up.It takes a few seconds.He says something like, look at how long this takes.He puts it to sleep.He wakes it up.It takes a few moments each time.Then he puts the iPad on the table and hits the power button, on, off, on, off instantly.
02:30:58Job said something like, I want you to make this.He pointed to the MacBook like this.He pointed to the iPad.And then he walked out of the room and that was that.I almost forgot that it used to go and open up your laptop computer.And there was a real delay before you could actually get value.And now aside from having to authenticate, it's pretty much instant.Yeah.
02:31:19Yeah.I mean, I guess some of the delay.of like, I think it might be good that there's like a fingerprint reader and type of password everyonce in a while. It feels like if I'm doing something more secure, I could do that on the, on the,on the MacBook instead of the iPad. Never been into the iPad, but I think I'm going to try for thenext one. I've seen too many memes about the hierarchy of like the CEO does all his work on thephone, doesn't need the MacBook. And then the more monitors you have, the lower you are on thetotem pole. Shout out to our incredible production team that has, you're high on the totem.
02:31:52The totem pole of our hearts.They have the most monitors.Oh, yeah.This is the money shot.Thank you for putting this up.And I lost a serious bet with producer Ben over this because I told him that mounting would not hold more than 24 hours.It's been up for a week.And so I owe a Diet Coke, I suppose.
02:32:14Anyway, thank you, Techno Chief.Techno Chief says the substack is elite.We appreciate that.We're working hard on it every single day to make it better.making it one percent better i'm learning from it we have a team that's focused on it as well i write uh i writethe run of show i uh collaborate with everyone to put together uh most of the stories but we have a wholebunch more folks that are contributing stories there and uh we're going to experiment with substock we'retalking to chris best figuring out what else we can do there we're streaming there um but we're
02:32:40going to be asking people questions surfacing those on substack collaborating cross uh cross pollinationvery long sub stack good stuff and the reason we're doing it is because math nerdsare not having a good time, according to Peter Thiel.This was a little over a year ago.Peter Thiel says AI will be worse for math nerds than for writers.So time to fire up a substack.It is interesting that many of the things that LMs and models do well today,generating designs, generating marketing copy.
02:33:14I still feel like the number of truly elite creatives,like there's an overwhelming demand for truly elitecreative talent. Yeah, the power law is getting to be. Whether you're acopywriter, whether you're a designer, whether you're evenpeople that are doing Photoshop, they haven't been.Yeah. It really is a bold case for finding an oddan odd likes work. I was talking to you about this earlier, but likeyou know, when kids come to you and tell you what they want to be when they
02:33:45grow up, like the previous generation was very attuned tooh you want to be a firefighter like ha ha yeah like that'll be fun for a couple yearsbut like you're probably going to be a lawyer bro like that's really the only way you'regoing to like pay the bills in the future is like doctor lawyer merchant chief i really likemerchant chief that's a good one but but increasingly i find that if you can be top 1% in any oflike the kid careers the the pilot the police officer the the firefighter international businessThe businessman.Really, anything, anything that is in a Richard's scary book,
02:34:25anything that can be done by a cartoon pig,if you can be top 1% of it.Like, pottery.If you can be the top 1% potter,like you're probably going to have a job forever,and AI will never displace you.There will never be the reinforcement learning training set.They won't be able to pull it out of you.
02:34:41But Tyler, you got the countertake?You think you're going to,me and Tyler went to the Hollywood Bowl the other day,and there's someone at the Hollywood Bowlthat manually switches the lightsin the street during high traffic times.So because there's so much crazy trafficwhen the Hollywood Bowl is funneling people in and out,
02:34:58they have a physical bowlthat someone goes and sits up inand then they control the lights manually.And Tyler's just like, I'm going to automate that.I could vibe code a better.That feels like a ripe targetbecause there's a human can do sort of a vibes-based analysis.Like, oh, we've got a lot of people coming this way,
02:35:15cars, let's let them through.but a machine, I think, could potentially take on 10 times the amount of data and be like,I have a camera down here, and there's actually, yes, there's people coming from this direction,but there's actually a bigger backlog here, and if we let them through.So I'm on Team Tyler on this one.Yeah, give me the full bulk case for AI stoplights.Is it a good business?Well, I mean, I don't know how normal stoplights work.
02:35:43Like, I always have thought, like, do they work with cameras?I don't know.Are they just on timers?I don't know anything about this space.They're all on timers, at best.Most of them are just completely on timers.So it seems like...So a bit of lore, Blake Scholl, founder of Boom Supersonic,
02:35:59before he was going to start Boom,the other idea that he was going to work on was AI stoplights.Put a camera on it, see if there's a car there.If there's no car here and there's a car here,it would be too easy?I don't know.It might be equally hard.It might be harder than SuperSysonic flight.
02:36:15We don't have...There are multiple, like, there are multiple supersonic plane companies now.I have yet to talk to an AI stoplight company.It seems obvious.It seems like something squawk safety could expand into.But I even looked up, like, what are all the stoplight companies?Could you buy one, roll it up?Like, how do these things get work?
02:36:34But you're just doing things in the physical world with the government,and budgets are tight, and there's just not that much value,and people are fine with the current status quo.You'd get to work with the Department of Motor Vehicles.It could be fun.Yeah, yeah, they might be, you're a DMV enthusiast.Very agile, very agile.And so, yeah, I think even, I think, I think it's a, it's a week-long hack project
02:36:55to develop something that's, you know, an order or magnitude better than the current status quo,and then probably a decade to actually get it into the hands of the American populace.Well, here's a post from Aaron Bolly from Carbon Health.He says it's not in the stack, but he says with AI, everybody will make their own software,just like how we all 3D print our own furniture.You 3D printed that, right, John?Because 3D printing is so advanced that...I mean, the future's here.
02:37:28It's just not evenly distributed yet.People underestimate what can happen in a decade.They overestimate what can happen in a year.I saw an incredible 3D print.It was somebody who 3D printed chain mail for like a...What do we call it?Like a live action role playing, LARP.What was that festival that people go to where they dress up like Game of Thrones?
02:37:53You know what I'm talking about?I don't know.I have my blanking on this.Renaissance Fair.Oh, Renaissance Fair.Renaissance Fair.Yeah.As a kid, do you remember stumbling upon?
02:38:02Like, you're just going to the park and stumble upon a renaissance fair?Oh, you're talking about LARPing or?Yeah, the people that are, the people, yeah, I just remember.I grew up in Berkeley.and the local parkthere was a big LARP communityin the East Bay.And I'd just be like going
02:38:24I'd be like using the swingsand I'd look over and a bunch of adultswould come over and medieval costumeand start battling.It was cool.Yeah, yeah.It was cool.I respect their imaginations.
02:38:40Yeah, respect the LARPers.Luke Metro says,as a founding engineer in 2025. One, finds a startup from a famous founder or a VC incubation.Two, get hired. Watch it get marked up to billions. Three, lots of growth is priced in.So silently sell a few million in sketchy forward contracts to cash out. Four, don't tell anyone.I wonder. Isn't this illegal? This sounds like security fraud. I don't know that it's a good question.We should get a true expert like a venture capitalist on. But because, as you know, they-Silicon Valley is an iterative game.
02:39:13No, but I think this is more like, you know, against the startup's wishes.They've probably told employees do not do this.But I don't necessarily think that it is a, doesn't seem like a, seems like it be done in a way that is not broadly illegal.But you could probably get your equity claw back.Can you imagine if Sohamperee is doing this?He'd be, like, worth...Everybody was trying to clock So Hom's run rate.It's like, is it a million, two million?
02:39:49He was just selling forward.20 million in forward contracts.Yeah, no one came forward on the timeline.We have another post from Aaron Bally, two and one show.Nice work.He says, showing the chat with AI characters.So people are...So I guess people can make their own...
02:40:06They can make their own characters in an AI studio.So you kind of go into AI studio.If you want to chat with a Russian girl or chat with a stepmom.And this spawned a lot of jokes like imagine leaving X-A-I-N.No, but here's the thing.Yes.So Elon is competing with Mark Zuckerberg on AI companionship.Yes.
02:40:30It's just that one of them has tens of billions of free cash flow.Yes.And the other one has to raise a combination of debt and equity.Yep.And also just a more aligned business model where time in the app, three feeds right into it.Does Zuck have 10 times the user base?Probably.Three billion daily active users, I think, something like that.
02:40:54It's in the billions.And also it's just like all of the product features from chatting and DMing and groups.Whether you're WhatsApp or meta.You're really just taking social networking and then bolting on like a companion could be.Like, I don't think I would ever ever have like a one-on-one conversation with an AI companion, but I could imagine adding an AI to a group chat.What if I make that the chats and like chimes in with facts?Roughly eight hours a day, I'm sleeping.You usually stay up later than me because you don't have as long of a commute.
02:41:28And so what if I made a meta-AI of me, I trained it on all the data that I have, and then you could chat with that at night.Because sometimes you'll text me, it's like, at like 10, I'm sleeping, and you could get a faster response.True, true.So.I don't know.I haven't tried these.I don't know.I don't know how good it would be.
02:41:48It really is, it really, but the numbers are staggering.I mean, five million messages to Russian girl.Maybe that's just the scale of FB, but the blue app is undefeated.He was quoting, he was quoting, imagine you're one of the smartest AI engineers in the world.You just joined a company that has access to a GPU cluster worth.tens of billions of dollars your work can one day help solve all diseases create unlimitedabundance for humanity but first you have to build spicy mode so it doesn't and and who it waswill um will brown was posting you know that this uh hypothetical engineer that that quits their
02:42:24job at one lab at xa i at xa i working on valentine spicy mode with valentine and then goes over theIt has to work onRussian girlRussian girlOr stepmomYeah I knowOf course these are humanThese are created by
02:42:39OtherYeah you have to think about them like like meme pagesI mean I do I do wonder if people willLike the fact thatThis tool will be out thereSomeone will probably create something interestingLike I always give that example of likeCharacter AI
02:42:53I went on Character AIAnd was trying to debate Vladimir PutinAbout the benefits of capitalismAnd he folded pretty quickly rightYeah, exactly. No, it was actually Stalin.Yeah, not. I was debating with Stalin.I was debating communism and capitalism with Stalin.And he kept admitting, like, he was clearly RLHF broadly on Western ideals and capitalism
02:43:14and then, like, fine-tuned in the prompt level to be Stalin.And so I was able to very quickly get him to be like, yeah, I did some bad stuff.I wouldn't recommend it. It's not really that good.I'm like, victory.flawless victorywhich of courseAnother win for capitalismBut I think my takeaway is like
02:43:35I do think if you put this in the handsof like billions of creatorsYou might get someone that comes upWith an interesting chat botThat is funny in the same way that you get aHarry Potter Balenciaga every once in a whileOr you get like a 4chan green textRight and so something like that
02:43:52I don't know what it would look likeBut some sort of thing that you canI mean we've seen like chat with CalLike already that's like funnier in the sense that likeI might actually click on that.I don't know exactly what that would be like, but there's probably...Ramosi has his own Hormozzi AI now.Yeah.
02:44:06Do we ever solve how much he made?I saw one slide.Tyler, figure out how much Ramosi made.If you're not familiar, Alex Ramosy.He did a big book launch, course launch.Business influencer.He said that he spent $30 million on consulting.What?
02:44:22And then use that to train the model.Wow.That's a lot.So now...The numbers are all over the place.Like the brand, which I thought was an interesting selling pointbecause obviously, like, a lot of the models are trained on Harvard, HBS, like, case studies and just general.Like, think about how much, like, work that, like, the big four consulting firms have produced that eventually ended up.
02:44:47Yeah, Demis would like a word, actually.Demis would like a word, Alex.Dennis says, yeah, we actually trained Gemini on $5 billion of training data.Yeah, I think if anything, so going back to this debate of, like, XAI going heavy into AI companion.And it's like every time I open X now, it's like an Elon Post promoting Valentine or Annie.And I don't enjoy it.I don't want to, you know, a bunch of stuff that Elon.Also married, so you're not looking for a real girlfriend or an AI girlfriend or boyfriend.
02:45:22Yeah, it's just like, I don't want, like, normally if somebody was.posting that stuff, I would just mute them or unfollow them, but it's Elon. He posts a lot ofstuff that I am interested in. But Simp for Satoshi here says, Elon is in real danger of falling offculturally. He must remember it was cultural relevance due to SpaceX and Tesla meme stocks thatcatapulted him. X is cool, but XAI is not. He can fix it, but he is currently not on the pathto do so. This may tick him off, but it's true. And Simp for Satoshi is like an Elon bull,famously yeah yeah so and i think this is how i think this is how like people are feelingbroadly yeah yeah i i think the it goes back to those like filter bubbles can be a feature
02:46:06not a bug and so like there is a world there there are groups of users out on x that areinterested in chatting with valentine and annie but you should probably never show that postto anyone in teapop full stop like you should just say like we're going to show t-pop we're going to showpot papers on what we're doing at xAI on the reinforcement learning side and surface that and insteadit's like because elon's account's so big and it gets so much promotion in the feed like everyonesaw that and everyone's like why am i seeing this this is not relevant to me and it's just likekind of a it's a bad it's just a bad like signal like to land that post in this particularcommunity yeah especially when people see the outputs from grok imagine
02:46:54and it's just not on the level of many other the outputs are not on the level of many of the othertotally like do i need to see two marble statues you know kissing and that's not and that'sand what's interesting is that like that like you the not the same cannot be said for the clusterthat xa i built that was super impressive like when that and the and the results yeah i meanthe the the biggest like xAI bowl case was just laid out by casey handon Dorcash. He was saying, like, Elon understands, he gave this amazing analogy, thisamazing historical story about, I forget who it was, someone who was building boats in World WarII, and he ran out of, like, he was like, I'm trying to buy materials to build the boats,
02:47:40I need steel. I bought all the steel, and so now I'm going to buy a mine and start mining forsteel. Anyway, do you want to give a shout out? I got to give a shout out to Isaac,mini katanaIsaac is a legendaryentrepreneur I would say that he isthe Willie Wonka of our timeReally? YeahHe's an absolute legend
02:48:05Please subscribe Mini KatanaThank you for being in the chatThey will shout you outThey love businessWe do love businessWe do love businessOf course we'll shut you outHe has a company called Kampai Foods
02:48:18Which is probablyYou know he is just absolutely crushingof his facility is or was in L.A. I've visited. But he's just, he's an algorithm animal. I will just say that. Both his, both his companies, he's able to get billions of views totally organically. And he's an absolute. Canpie freeze-dried candy says they sound. There we go. Fantastic. Well, shout-up to Dick.Let's go to sucks. Texting and driving is such a funny crime. You already have six hours of screen time, but you need another 30 minutes, even if it's life or death. You know you can literally die.but it's worth it to you to scroll for 30 more perfect minutes in high-speed traffic.It's a good reminder to everybody.Get a comma.Get a way-mo.
02:49:00Get a way-mo.Get a driver.You actually can't text in a comma AI.It has driver monitoring.It watches you like a hawk.And it's very, very good.And it actually, it's such a good experience.I can't chill for it enough because you, it watches you.
02:49:15And so if you're on your phone, it will disengage.But if you're not on your phone, it's the chillest driving experience ever because you're just like sitting there.watching the road, just having a conversation, listening to music.Like, it puts you in a much, it's much less active than actually having to drive and see.Trying for exits.Things are about to go absolutely nuts in America because there's an image here of the firstnicotine energy drink.I couldn't find this online.
02:49:39I don't know if this is just like a mock-up or something, but the scene to come out of nowhere.I think this might have been something that literally was just a mock-up.Yep.Because you're one of the foremost experts in the world of nicotine.And nicotine from what you've told me, because I asked you this,why has nobody put nicotine in an energy drink?Caffeine and nicotine together and one drink would be amazing.And there's like regulatory reasons for it.
02:50:06And then there's like actually biological reasons that nicotine doesn't process in the same way if it's in your stomach.Yeah, it needs an alkaline environment.your stomach is too acidicand so it doesn't absorb.So it can kind of give you an opposite stomach,but mostly it just doesn't absorb.So people will always say like,oh, what if I swallowed a nicotine pouch?
02:50:29Am I over?Is it over for me?It's over.It's like, no, it'll probably just pass through youand it's just not like you didn't get any value out of it.It's fine.You probably shouldn't do it a lot,but also like people would be eating them
02:50:44if they could.Obviously people would,We'll try all sorts of things.But there are theories on how to actually get it to work.You can't make your stomach not acidic because then you'll throw up.But you can potentially wrap the nicotine in some sort of molecule that diffuses through the stomach liningand then enters the bloodstream and gives you the nicotine buzz.So it is like theoretically possible, but it's like this huge science challenge that no one's worked on.
02:51:12There was a company that raised money in the 80s, I believe, or the 90s, to do.to do this, they worked on it for years,couldn't get it across the finish line.We looked into it a ton, couldn't figure it out,never really got any way.It's possible that this company solved it.I think what's more interesting is this scenario.Oh, and also, like, you can't mix active ingredients
02:51:34so the FDA would probably not appreciate this.And even if you did solve it, the FDA would have to approve it,and that would take like a decade potentially.But we're in this weird regime where,maybe we're in the beg for forgiveness era with a lot of government stuff.And there's a lot of nicotine companies, most from overseas,that do not care what the FDA has to say about their legality.And there's a lot of value to just going viral.
02:52:03And if this is something that goes viral.The real hack here, I think, would be to brand this as nicotine energy.Don't put any nicotine in it, because that would trigger FDA.and then just sell an energy drink.And people will be like, oh, wow, like, it has nicotine in itand really just put al-thianine in itand just don't have nicotine on the ingredients.No one checks.
02:52:24It goes viral.And then eventually you just end up with just an energy drink brand.But that's a little bit disingenuous,probably not the best thing to do.Yeah, I think somebody made a mock-up.They hadn't thought through how you'd actually take this to market.Yeah.And now everyone thinks it's on the way,
02:52:41but when you Google search it, it doesn't exist.Yeah.Last post of the day, Luke Metro says my pet theory is that most people, so any, this goes back to like...Gold Rock calls it five loco.That's actually really good.So cold healing said, bro, you make $500,000 at Open AI.You can go to the art pair and buy a little $10,000 painting to hang up in your SF apartment's living room.Luke Metro says my pet theory is that most people here with big money had to spend their most, their formative years, with most of it being illiquid, so you're used to modest spending habits for a while.
02:53:13unlike bankers who can blowtheir whole bonus on a weekend in Miamistarting at age 22, I think that's a good take.The natureof having most of your networkbe illiquid isas Thalpix saysbesting is good for the soul, it seems.
02:53:29Or illiquidity is good for the soul.But it's easy to get started with art.If you have a bunch of money,you're good.No, Dylan. Dylan Aberscato, close friend of the show.He routinely buys artfrom artistsfor like a thousand dollars
02:53:45and then three years laterthey're worth tens of thousands of dollarsI mean he's got a greattaste and a great eye foremerging artists but yeah you don't need to bea bean air to indulge infine art but on that notewe got to get on with Taipei
02:54:06thank you for tuning in todaygive us five stars on Apple Podcastsand Spotifyof course subscribe to our substack which we are working very hard on tbpn.substack.comand we made a bunch of upgrades to the studio today some of which are working well some of which aren'tso we will continue to iterate thank you for your patience and your support and your supportsee you tomorrow cheers bye have a good one guys
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