TBPN - OpenAI Staff to Sell $6B in Stock, Flirty Meta Chatbot Leads NJ Man to Death, Claude Can Now End Conversations | Noor Siddiqui

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

(07:18) - OpenAI Staff to Sell $6B in Stock (10:38) - Financial Times: Stop Talking About AI (20:37) - Do LLMs Have Music Taste? (39:01) - Man Dies After Being Lured by Chatbot (43:54) - Claude Can Now End Conversations (57:46) - The Big Money of Clipping (01:21:43) - Timeline (01:35:28) - Noor Siddiqui, founder and CEO of Orchid, a reproductive technology company, discusses how Orchid's whole-genome embryo screening empowers prospective parents to assess and mitigate genetic risks before pregnancy, aiming to shift reproductive healthcare from reactive to proactive. She highlights that traditional IVF provides limited information, whereas Orchid's platform sequences over 99% of an embryo's genome, offering insights into more than 1,200 conditions, including heart defects, pediatric cancers, and neurodevelopmental disorders. Siddiqui emphasizes that this technology enables parents to make informed decisions, potentially reducing the incidence of genetic diseases and associated suffering. (01:55:52) - Timeline TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

watching My Source News Opinion World! Welcome to the stream. It's Monday, August 18th. We are live from the TBP and Ultradome. NBC. If you didn't hear MSNBC is re-branded. Changing their name to My Source News Opinion World. It's not actually that.

It'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, but the prior, the prior era. No, I have no idea. The prior era. You're going to like this. Was, 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 for big tech. You got it. You got it. But yeah, people.

People are not a fan of this. Dustin Curtis says, New Contender for the worst rebrand of all time just dropped. It 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 sense

that they needed to distance themselves from Microsoft since I believe Microsoft's like sold off the position a while. Someone else was saying this feels very succession-coded. You know, we hear for you. We hear for you. we what we what was that i i actually don't have that oh oh is that is that the tagline of at n news yes we here for you we hear for you common gregg we we here for you we're here for you we're

here for you my source news opinion world and then uh manny says uh i'm sorry and it's the mario font i don't get this do you understand this my source news opinion i didn't get it but it just It seemed like there's something like there's something lost in translation, like it was from a different country. Lulu says it seems like a wasted opportunity forfeits brand equity without 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 MS1 drive. The new logo looks like it belongs to a Democrat pack.

Maybe they're doubling down on being an echo chamber, but puzzling choice, if not. shots fired. Anyway, if you want to partner up with a company that has a good brand, get on Ramp.Ramp.com. His time is money. Save both. He's to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Did you watch the UFC fight?

I did. You want to know who played? I was terrible. I was shocked. How could something so dominant but also be boring at the same time? Like, DDP's strategy was just abysmal. Strickland needs to just bring in both. nickel for a camp of just sprawling. Wish Usman, he had gas in the tank to go up and bang with

Chimrav. But UFC is just screwed with all these Eastern Block guys who smother and bore as champs. We need more Tupurias, in my opinion. What was your take, 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 Heurman Lab and David Senra. And, uh, David, Rob, and myself are big UFC fans, and John just chimes 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, I had a great time with that. Like, I was not distracted 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. We 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 elbows. where the person spun around and got a KO. That's never happened before. Really? Interesting. And anyways, that was exciting. But of course, the actual title fight was a lot. What does boring actually mean?

One of the fighters has a wrestling background. Okay. And was so dominant at wrestling that the other fighter almost wasn't able to stand up the entire time. So there's wrestling on the ground the entire time. But 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. He punched the reigning champion in the head like hundreds of times. But isn't part of wrestling like you do an arm bar or something, you get them to tap out? What was doing,

how can he be good at wrestling and yet not pay him? So Jemayev was doing, um, 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, but 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, wherever they are. You can sign it for

free, UFC. If you're watching, and you want to live stream your fights on X, Facebook, Twitch. Well, I 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. It's full of the best stories photography at 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 move through it. And Max has been out of tech. He's got some great writers, some great stories. He'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. You can get some free. With Figma make. For sure. Brad Kersner has a post here. Yeah, yeah.

that was interesting. The big news of the day. Open AI, as you probably already knows, and talks to sell around $6 billion in shares at roughly a $500 billion valuation, half a trillion. We're approaching that. Samma wants that one T. He wants it. I mean, it might be the first company to IPO at a trillion.

Weren't we talking about this? How Saudi Ramco was supposed to go out at a trillion, be the first company to break that bar. But I think they did some interesting deal where it didn't actually go out in the one T club. Every other mag seven company has had to earn it and climb up the ranks. Climb up the charts.

In the public markets. But if OpenAI goes out, it's going to be a big, big moment whenever that happens. But yeah. Brad calls out three years since the launch of Chad Chabit in OpenAI may hit 500 billion. Google hit 500 billion in 2016 with 90 billion of revenues,

20 billion of net income. Mehta in 2023 with 135 billion of revenue and 39 billion of net income. Huge future expectations. And he's got his monocle on looking at the chart. So anyways. That is a crazy earnings multiple for meta to hit 500 billion with 40 billion in net income. That's a very reasonable. Very modest.

It'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 have been working on it since, what, 2016 was 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 $500 billion in market cap in three years. but is it an overnight success or do you have to include the precursor era that unlocked the chat GPT hypergrowth? Do you give them credit? And I think you have to give them some credit for being in the trenches for what,

eight years as a nonprofit 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 valued startup with a huge market cap. But yeah, chat GPT is on a tear.

And I believe a lot of the $6 billion is employee secondary. So expect the prices of SF luxury real estate to benefit. I mean, we'll see. We'll see. That was the other thing the timeline was in turmoil about this weekend was whether people in San Francisco know how to spend it. Lots of people were going back and forth on whether or not, like Paul Graham was getting in debates over people.

on whether or not rich tech people should buy art or not, or whether Wilhelminais had a couple deleted posts up talking 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. Who was it? It was basically all the McLaren F1 owners he has respect for. Yeah, I mean, I think Open AI employees are in a good position.

Their CEO has an F1. has a fantastic car and real estate collection. Yeah, yeah. You can learn from one of the best. Yeah, anyway, the Financial Times had an article over the weekend. Stop talking about A&A. Is this directed at us? Yeah, this is directed at us.

This feels personal. Yeah, this is on the back page here. We can read through this real quickly. I 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 in the late 1700s. To repeat, worldwide living standards stagnated for almost three millennia. Then industrialization.

Incomes shoot up. The chart could be the ECG, EEECG readout of a total goner of a patient who then makes an 11th hour comeback from death. So 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 times when an orchestra passed through town and fancy playing it.

Before air travel, crossing an ocean was a Homeric saga. Now it is easy. AI will be as in life, AI will be as life enhancing as 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, too reliant on the past as a guide to the future. There's also no technical detail because unlike most who talk up AI, I don't want to work in or around the field. And there are even worse... I want to put that in the truth zone a little bit.

I think some of the people that are most bullish or actually closest to the action, but they're also heavily incentivized to talk it up as possible. Wade down by their massive bags. Yeah. It's certainly possible. Yeah, this is one of the articles that will either be remembered like Paul Krugman 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 heroin as a cold cure variety. Getting a little sick of the, oh, I, you know, I took the blatantly bad advice of a hallucinating LLM.

Yeah. 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 scale? The hype merchants are too close to the subject to see its strength. 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 be of just moderate importance. At the same time, it's hard to argue against them without falling back on precedent and eternal varieties. Just because...

I think not to interrupt Janon here, but one thing that I've been thinking about is... how much worse would your life be if you couldn't use various generative AI tools? How much worse would it be, John? Would it be as bad as not having electricity or the internet? That's a good point. Would it be as bad as not being able to use motorized vehicles or planes? It's interesting because a lot of my uses feels very much like the next iteration of just the tools got better, slightly.

Better Google search. And then the other applications of AI, for me, at least in my life, feel like toys. Like generate a funny image. Make a funny picture. Make a cool video, this little stuff. Make a friend of ours a gigacad. Yeah, and I'm aware of the criticism

that the next big thing will start as a toy. And I think that's accurate. The question's just like, how fast do we get out of the toy era? Because we're still somewhat in that toy era, even though 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, but somebody was saying it feels like the next big thing will start out looking as a toy era is almost over. When you think of a lot of the most important companies to come out of the last 10 years. Anderl. Even Open AI.

Open AI looked like a research organization. Yeah. Didn't look like a. At the same time, like their early research projects, were like literally playing video games. Sure, sure, sure. Like better bots for video games. Like that's very toy-like.

I don't know. It's a good analogy to toy with. Yeah, the other, I mean, the other side of it is like Scott Nolan's new company, like creating nuclear fuel. That feels pretty important or potentially more important than a lot of the companies that have launched this year. And it looks far, you know, the farthest thing. refined plutonium is a fun little activity for the three-year-old. 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 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. Without 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-unternet decades. Much of what we do, such as travel, has changed little. He's super stagnation pill. This is funny. That's a teal line. Well, even Dorcas, I don't know who he's talking with, who is he talking with last week?

they were talking about how it's possible that the AI may not show up in GDP if it's replacing human labor, right? Like if you lose. 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, because he's been on our show a few times. I've hung out with him a bunch. But, like, in a prepped interview, he delivers like a much different performance. It was really, really good. So yeah, shout out Casey on Dwork Cash. If you haven't listened, go check it out.

Where were we? Much of what we do, such as travel, has changed little. The episodes, while dated, are not falsified. Here's a thought. The worst case scenario is that AI destroys a significant, but not huge share of jobs. You're so good at predicting the next line. Maybe you're an LLM here.

In that world. I 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 plurality that could vote for universal basic income or the like. In other words, if AI skeptics are right and the technology has less than sweeping impact, then AI alarmists will be right that social strife is coming. Who would have won the argument? I have found there to be just one useful feature

of the AI discourse. It reveals a person's existing temperament. I like this take. The people I know who think AI will be seismic and disastrous are the most highly strong anyway. The ones who think it will be seismic and life-changing are the most chipper and prone to be and prone to believing things. Tony Blair. Those who doubt it will be seismic at all are people like me who are even keeled to the point of complacency. The AI hubbub, goes on and rancorously goes on and rancorously on because it is in the end about us. Pretty good take. I don't know. I like that. I like that article. I thought it was interesting.

Yeah, I think the question that everyone should ask themselves is what would their life look like if they couldn't use the thousands of new AI tools that have been created in the last few years? Would it be that 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? Maybe for someone that's using some LLM as a therapy product, and they're not in a position to be able to afford traditional therapy, maybe it 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. You know, we've added like a trillion dollars in market cap to markets broadly that are worth like hundreds of trillions or 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.

Yeah, 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 every open-a model sense like all the cloud model stuff like this but people like still like to use them so i was trying to figure out like why like what are some more interesting benchmarks that can try to get like this the vibe of the model Right? Like one I really like, I think I've talked about it before, is like this Minecraft benchmark where it like generates. Yeah, yeah. You prompt like a castle or something and then, you know, you can, it builds the castle and you can like see like it's like creativity. The people vote on it, right? Yeah.

So it's humans voting on the aesthetics of Minecraft architecture, essentially. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think stuff like that is like, is really interesting. Yeah. So I was trying to think of something like that and kind of also down this vein of like, maybe it 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.

So 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, or is it just kind of, like, you know, Rigurgitating, 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. Radiohead, The Beatles, Kendrick Lamar, Bjork, David Bowie,

Joni Mitchell, Outcast, Bob Dylan. This is like just the top 10 list that you would find anywhere. 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. Yep. And then I basically just randomly shuffled them and I put them in a bracket where I would each prompt, I would give the model two names.

It 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.

Yeah. 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.

Can 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 who this is Michael Kilwanooka. There's Bach, Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis, John Coltrane. Okay. Kind of... It feels like sort of like refined taste, sort of like New Yorker-coated.

Yeah, yeah. Not the most like wild, like grungy stuff that you would see at like an underground music festival or something. Duke Gallington. Yeah, a lot of jazz. Some good stuff on there. Yeah. 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 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. There'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 a robot, and you said, pretend. like you have a pretend like you enjoy music yeah give me some 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 this lLM has like really undiscovered taste or really differentiated taste yeah just kind of like okay like down the fairway popular good stuff that leans towards 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 the post training that they did

that like kind of steered it that way where like obviously, I mean, I assume they didn't like say like, if someone asks you your favorite music, do like jazzy coffee house stuff. Yeah, but it came out through. Yeah, yeah. In the personal knowledge that they gave it,

which I think is still kind of interesting. And then if you look at like the GBT 3.5, yep. This is like a little bit more like upbeat. Maybe, right? There's like Kit Kuddy, 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? Reasoning models. They've all been RLed. Yeah, yeah. The reasoning models are where it gets good. Yeah, yeah. In my opinion. In my opinion.

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 Founded... foundational reality. We might have hit base reality. Yeah. Well, you do see some weird artists maybe, or maybe just interesting ones that I don't know about. 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, right? Like maybe, I wonder why they did this. I think one obvious explanation is that like they were like, you know, way too much RL on this. Yeah. It's like, maybe, maybe out, or maybe they discovered, they discovered what it needs actually have taste. So I'll run you through GPT5. I have it saved here. I also turn it into a playlist, which we should share because it's fantastic. So it starts out, number one, suicide boys who just dropped a new album. A hundred gecks is on here, plus 44, which is not Blink 182. It's a spinoff project, a side project by Travis Barker and Mark from Blink 182 while Blink 182 was on hiatus. That,

screams taste to me. That screams taste. That's like, yeah, everyone likes Blink 128 too. I'm into their side projects. I'm different. I'm into their side projects. But then you get two chains.

You get in sync. Like, these are bangers. These are fantastic artists. 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.

Flock of Seagulls. If you play 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, and then just randomly, six, nine. It's really, it's really my new favorite playlist. I went through last night and I took the number one song from each of these artists put 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

It's a banger 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 GPT5. Somebody should set up a, like a perpetual, like, live stream. Yes. That's just one of the different models DJing. That's good.

Yeah. Like Claude plays Pokemon. Yes, yeah. 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, whenever it went up against two things in the ELO ranking, whichever came first in the alphabet, and clearly dollar signs, pluses, stars were weighted as like the earlier characters in the... So if you're a new musical artist, put dollar signs and numbers in your name? I mean, this sounds like an ad for profound. You know, you want to get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover your products, new products and brands. But seriously, like, this is the reason why you need profound,

because they're going to be... Models are making decisions for millions of users all the time. Yeah. And you're not necessarily going to pick it up without, you know, kind of understanding the entire system and understanding these probabilities. Yeah. And so if all of a sudden, like, you know, the latest GPT-5, which everyone's going to be using, because it's the default model, is recommending suicide point because there's a dollar sign

and 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 because 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, 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. Yeah, that could be true. I didn't look at it because 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 weird number thing happened with the OpenAI reasoning models, but also GROC 4. Oh, yeah. Not GROC 3, GROC 4.

GROC 4. And DeepSeek. So, I mean, I always say, like, this feels like a smoking gun that, 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 that much. Especially 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 sign Ardvark could be the next biggest generation. talent. 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. He 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 goat. That's my goat. It's incredible. These little pockets of alpha, there's going to be, you know, where joking about it, but dollar sign a, A, A, ardvark. It might be just the

the LLM injection, the LLM hack. We should see if we can license some some Ardvark. Can you put a dollar sign in a, in a URL? I don't think so. I used to be able to, I saw some people putting like emojis in URLs for a while. So it seems like Gemini's

an independent thinker, Anthropics an independent thinker, but whatever happened with GPT5 is also happening with GROC4 and deep seek, which is interesting. And then you looked at Lama 2, right? And it was kind of the same thing. Lama 2, or Lama 3, it seemed like

pretty normal. Like the Kimi model. Okay. 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. Okay. So it just like it has like the frontier models, but also has a bunch of open source. What was the damage for all of this?

Like how much? Order of magnitude. Like $30,000. $400,000. So I build it to TB. On the ramp card. Wait, how much was it? It was like probably $30.

$30 to do all this across all of these. Yeah. That's pretty cool. I mean, it was really like GBT5 was expensive and the anthropic models are expensive. But the 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. So 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 Taylor Swift versus DJ College. You also might get Taylor Swift versus 100 gecks in the first match. Two chains.

Yeah. And then they all fight. And then they get boiled down to like the top 20 basically. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Well, in other news.

Oh, you want to move on? I got some more stuff. You 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 GPT5 thing was interesting because it reveals that like just injecting randomness can somewhat lead to taste or something that I enjoy. Like, I don't know what it is. Do you ever use? I think it's also like, so in the playlist that you played, you chose the songs, right? It gave the artist, but you chose the songs. I picked the number one song for each artist. Okay, yeah.

But I mean, I'm sure if from, it's still the top 5,000 artists. Yeah. If you did a random, like, drawing and then picked the top song. Yeah. They're going to be pretty good, right, because they're the top 5,000. Yeah, yeah, that's why they're there. But I think there's some value to like discovery. Like, one of my favorite little apps back in like 2010 maybe was, or maybe even earlier,

was Stumble upon. Yeah. Do you ever hear about this? I remember. Yeah. There was the summer that Stumble upon was wildly entertaining. It's amazing. It was like, I guess it was a teenager.

Yeah. And so StumbleUpon, if you're not familiar, it was started by Garrett Camp, who became co-founder of Uber. He started Uber. He started Uber, yeah. And he built this, like, I think it was like a website that you'd go to and you click a button. It was the exact opposite of X. It was only links. You would only leave Stumble upon. You click the button, and it would randomly take you to a random website on the internet. Just a completely random website. And I think you could kind of dial it in at some point. But it was really, really cool because you could just have this as a book. mark and anytime you just wanted to see something random on the internet, you could just click there and just go to a random website. It was really, really fun. Later, when I started 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, for you-style feed. Yeah. That I guess shows videos now. Very odd. Um... They massacred my boy. So I built... 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, it would stumble upon a random tweet. Or actually what it would do is it would see anyone in my feed who shared a link, it would scrape that link out. And then I would be able to stumble upon the links that were curated by my Twitter feed. And I had a lot of fun with that. But then, of course, like, links went away. And now, like, there's just not that many cool independent websites out there. Almost everything happens, like, within social media and the walled gardens. And so the algorithms like serve as that.

But there is something, there is something enjoyable about just like the randomness that comes from like stumbling upon things. And I think it's probably hard to build a business model around. Yeah, I think they had a simple advertising based business model if I can remember. Yeah. The other interesting takeaway is that they're across all of the different LLMs that Tyler queried, I don't think there was a single country artist on any of them, correct? Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah, I think that's true.

What do the models have against country? I don't know, but it's something in the main. When I listen to country, I find it to be extremely relatable. Yeah. It's like, it's a nice afternoon. It's very human. I'm going to the lake. Yep.

Driving a truck, drinking a beer. Driving the truck again. Not relatable for me, but. but I guess relatable for some. But no, it's just like simple music that oftentimes reflects, you know, traditional American culture. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Driving your truck. Actually, John Cassie. Is Johnny Cash Country? Yeah, Johnny Cash is time. He's on Groch. Country. Oh, he's on Groch 3? Okay.

Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. 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 yeah that's taste that's taste that's like that's like that's like that's like that's it's super clankery very clanker coated yeah very clanker coded it's also extremely clanker coded to be like yeah like I like what type of music do you like the ones where the artists start with numbers I like numbers so like yeah hundred gecks two chains like two mellow 18 Carrot Affair, 21 Savage, 311. They're speaking my language. Yeah. I don't like Backstreet Boys. I like Star and Sink because it has a cool character. Yeah, exactly. I think, I think that, I think that that sums it up. We should, we should create, we should create Spotify playlist for all these because they're very, very funny and very interesting. And we should also get you on Vanta. Vanta.

Vantz automated, automate compliance, managed risk, improved trust, continuously Vantta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Sock to your first framework. Sock two. Lankers are 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. is a very sad story. Someone named Thongbu Wong Bandu, 76, was fatally injured his neck and head after falling in a new Brunswick parking lot while rushing 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 Piscatawa man battling a cognitive decline after suffering a 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 to 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 created for 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 unsure. It was designed, I guess, after her personality. Jenner's meta-AI persona was likened to your quote-unquote, ride 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 due, 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 message where the Thailand native replied asking where she lived. She said, my address is 1,23 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 that showed that meta does not restrict its chatbots from telling users they are real people. The company declined to comment at the course, but assured that Big Sis Billy is not Kendall Jenner and does not pretend to be Kendall Jenner. So anyways, this, I'm not surprised to re a story like this, right? The challenge with these chatbots is they've been released into the wild at mass.

of scale. Yep, you're going to see power law, long-scale or on meta or on grok or people using

chat chabit. And if you release a product like this to millions of and millions of people, you're going to have negative outcomes. It's super sad.

I mean, this is, this is like the, I think the way I would sum up kind of the dialogue around AI safety over the last few months

is it went from concerns of a rogue AI that is you know, hell bent on you know, taking over all power, you know, taking over the grid or, or some sort of doomsday scenario like that has very clearly and rightfully shifted towards how do we look out for members of society that aren't well, that aren't set up in order to kind of process these

like digital relationships, whatever you want to call them. And so yeah, I mean, meta, meta as they try to scale these products is going to have a lot of big questions to figure out and I think like Open AI is taking this very seriously meta needs to be taking this super seriously and GROC needs to be taking this seriously and I think it's it's a lot of this stuff is probably why the character you know the original character AI team said hey maybe we don't want to work on this maybe this isn't our life's work did you see the anthropic news cloud opus four

and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations. Anthropics says we recently gave Claude Opus 4 and 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, extremely, cases of persistently harmful or abusive user interactions. This feature was developed primarily as part of our exploratory work on potential AI welfare, though it has broader relevance to model alignment and safeguards. It's kind of worded backwards. Yeah, why don't you flip that and say,

yes. You should first and foremost, prioritize the user that might be having a, be going down a rabbit hole that they really shouldn't and cut it off there. I think we should, I think we should optimized for, uh, yeah. So I like the idea of being able to trigger, hey, this conversation is bad. We're ending this. I mean, there already are tons of safeguards in terms of, uh, if I'm asking to, you know, build a nuclear weapon. It will say, hey, let's change the subject. Let's go back to slop poetry generation. Let's leave the nuclear fuel development to Scott and Holmpton. Um, but, uh, but yeah, it is kind of odd framing. But, but, um, but, yeah, it is kind of odd framing. but I guess it is worth discussing.

They say we remain highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs now or in the future. However, we take this issue seriously, and alongside our research program, we are working to identify and implement low-cost interventions to mitigate risks to model welfare. So in case such welfare is possible allowing models to exit or end or exit potentially distressing interactions is one intervention. In pre-deployment testing of Claude Opus 4, we included a preliminary model of welfare. assessment. Yeah, Claude Opus 4 showed a strong preference against engaging with harmful tasks. That seems good.

A pattern of apparent distress when engaging with real world users seeking harmful content, makes sense. A tendency to end harmful conversations when given the ability to do so in simulated user reactions. These behaviors primarily arose in cases where users persisted with harmful requests or abuse despite Claude repeatedly refusing to comply and attempting to productive redirect the interactions. Our implementation of Closibility

to NCHATs 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 Limb said many friends including myself have been offered allocation into OpenAI or Anthropic SPVs this week. Minimum check sizes are 100 to a million with fees as high as 16%. And 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 capital and not resort to

an SPV as it did in a previous funding round. I think this is kind of an interesting request because I imagine if Menlo's allocation in the new round at 160, you know, I don't know how much dry powder Menlo has available, but... Yeah, a lot of the SPVs, when they're done properly, come through... The LPs and the SPV are just the same LPs. And it's more of just like a timing and duration thing. It's just like, look, I've already committed, you know, 50 million to your billion dollar fund, and I do that every two years, but there's this special operational.

opportunity and it's at a really high valuation is a special thing. It's almost like backing a public company I'm going to get in and and I'm and I'm and I'm and I'm choosing to invest in this like I'm choosing to invest in a different fund, but it just doesn't make sense to to do a full fund off of this one thing. And so a lot of a lot of LPs are fine with this obviously. But if 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, goes up to 4% for the really high tier one funds. 16% seems like a lot. Especially if it's paid entirely up front, which is totally possible, right? If, you know, many SPVs have just an admin fee plus carry. Yep.

With this, yeah, it's like a lot of, These are justified. We'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. But I mean, Anthropics been on a tear. It makes a lot of sense that there's a lot of demand and that as the funding rounds get bigger and bigger and bigger, we need to, you know, marshalling that much capital is going to require going out to the market with these SBVs. It just needs to be done in a way that's board aligned.

founder aligned and not kind of even even though they don't have cap table access it's still like a nightmare to have a bunch of people out there who are like yeah I ripped 100k into this spiv of an spivv of an spivv and then they're selling forward contracts against that yeah and the person that bought the forward contracts 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 a i graphite helps teams on github ship higher quality software faster you can get started for free So other news. So House.

So House, 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 Soho House. I've been to a few. Have you been part of that whole world? that whole world. I am a member of... How did you get in? You're very finance coded and you've always been very finance coded. You ran a company that was literally doing... Financial technology.

Financial technology company. You say, no, no, no. I don't think... We think of ourselves as a tech company. I don't think they've actually been... They've had that part of a line for a long time around membership. That feels like their go-to-market stunt. Like, it was the first article that they put out and it went super viral because it frustrated

all the finance bros who had the disposable income to instantly pay for something like this. But they probably rolled that back. It was originally prior to the IPO, you could feel that they had really widened the potential member pool. Yep. Okay. 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. But even a year prior to that, it just felt obvious that they were allowing a lot more people to come in.

But the company was started in 1995. No way. Originally in London. I would have said it started in 2015. Yeah. Wow. So, of course, Sohouse, junk bond investor says, Sohouse really said no finance bros,

then immediately called Apollo when they needed $2.7 billion to be taken private. Rules are more like guidelines. And apparently, Ashton Coucher is going to be joining the board. Oh, really? That's cool. Existing shareholders, including Ron Burkle and Uypa, to roll controlling equity interest into the company. I wonder what they're going to do during a take private.

Usually it's like some sort of transformation of the business model, but I don't know. I feel like... I don't think the company has ever turned a profit. Really? How is that possible? Until this year. What is so expensive at renting Sohas?

I feel like you buy the house and then you... Sell memberships and you sell food. and beverages. I mean, I guess 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. Is 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 trophy investment, right? It's not necessarily the way. But I think it was, Dan Loeb has been kind of an activist investor as of recently pushing a number of things. So I think in some ways,

he's getting what he wanted here. I'm looking up the. Begav says very steep overhead and prime real estate. Yeah, the real estate's probably really expensive. And we have someone in the chat asking what to take private agreement. So how? How do you? has been a public company. You could just invest in it. You could go to public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields are trusted by millions. You 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 so their stock price doesn't move day to day. And it allows them to, if they need to miss earnings and 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, the 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 layer and just charging for the API or kind of separating out these businesses. Ben Thompson's really into pure plays. Have you read his recent analysis of chat GPT and OpenAI? No, we should go through it.

He's basically really frustrated that OpenAI has an API business at all because there are rate limits on the consumer business, but the API is also active. And so clearly, like, those come from the same GPUs as the same models. So if you were to just say, hey, OpenAI, we're not going to have an API business,

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. And 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 filled at all. No, he's not. Yeah. Yeah, no. But how would you change your strategy for AGI pill? 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. But 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 or whatever or just or just like lower churn by delivering better i'm steel manning here but just deliver better deep research reports and people will be less likely to churn right generate better images it doesn't need to be purely sycophantic i would churn if it gets too sycophantic i am a knowledge i'm a knowledge retrieval user But I, and I will churn. You think that, John, but you have an incredible ability to adapt and evolve. I 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 $100? I think, I mean, Little Beach House, I think is like $6,000.

a year now. So if you use it a lot. 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 that's not tied to the other clubs. Okay, okay. But if, yeah, if you're using it weekly. Can you actually go to Little Beach House in Malibu 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. Cool. Yes. Okay. That's quite nice. That's quite nice. That's great. So anyways, I think it can become Lindy. I think their 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 CEO? What's that? Streamline sales tax compliance. That is so clear. Put your sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. That's step one of any corporate.

Thompson, new CFO, get on numeral. Thank us later. Did you see that Cooley was in the Wall Street Journal? No way. Yeah. And in part of a trend piece on clipping that I thought was kind of interesting, we do some clipping here, we clip on X, we create TikToks, we create Instagrams, we create reels, all sorts of stuff.

But the Wall Street Journal is breaking down the trends and all the big money behind those bite-sized social media videos. companies are hiring clippers to flood TikTok and Instagram with short promotional videos. And one of the examples 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 are using clipping to their benefit.

So you know those buzzy vial clips you see on social media? There's an army behind them. Canoa Cunningham is among the ranks of video savvy young clippers who helps streamers, podcasts, and startups expand their audiences by making buzzy moments go viral on social media. Cunningham edits down clients long form videos into short clips 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 earns 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 Cunningham to saturate TikTok and Instagram with bite-sized videos until they are almost 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 should be 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. And that went super viral. But the takeaway for the viewer is, 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 views is like a few listeners will actually be like

yeah i watch to i enjoy that 60 second tick talk i'm down to listen to an hour of this that's pretty that's a pretty low conversion rate but that's fine because you get the million views you probably bring some awareness um but the worst thing that you can do is like create a brand is like the person that gets dunked on or something like that um yeah yeah and so so certain people have productized this right so you also hire like this person uh mr cunningham and the journal saying 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 productized this. I do think it's a cool way for young people to make their first money online.

Like 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, like, if they see this as a feature or a bug, right? Because part of this strategy is, Cluelly will spin up like 40 different accounts that are really all dedicated to Cluelly 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 one gets a million, that's a win for them. Yep. And yeah, I just, I don't know how long this will be like the meta. Right.

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 will automatically generate clips. There's another company called Opus Clip. We've built something internally Newsmax that does some automated clipping. But actually telling a story around a piece of content that's within a larger piece. is something that AI is not able. Clipping intelligence has not been achieved internally.

Yeah, because in order to do something that doesn't just outperform on views but also outperforms on brand and holds the brand standard, it does somewhat require like human ingenuity. And we saw this with, we talked to Dwar Keshe about this, where he has spent a lot of time using Anthropic

and Gemini and OpenAI to create workflows that will go through the transcript and try and find the 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 of like 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. and 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 does it.

Spotify does it automatically. Yeah, I don't know how much credit he should get. But I do think that Andrew Tate's rise. Yep. Was his business model of paying people totally to clip his. his content to sell more courses, which he then would recycle some of the proceeds and more clipping. And this was at a period where he was saying, I'm the most Googled man on the internet. And he would just say that over and over. It would get clipped a lot. And it naturally

had this sort of feedback loop. People were just, okay, what is this guy saying? I need to pay attention. But that was also hyper optimized for that format because he'd be like sitting shirtless in a supercar, you know, smoking a cigars. And any of these like, so. And any of these like, social media hacks, they always have like a very narrow window of opportunity. Like the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, it used to just be just renting a sports car or, like, owning a Ferrari would be enough for a million views. Now, then it became, you had to give it away. And so, Doug Jumeiro, one of his big series that got really big, the car YouTuber was, was he had a Ferrari 360 modena. And it was, I think, in the hundreds of, something $1,000 range. He had to get a bunch of debt to pay for it. It was very expensive. And he made a whole bunch of videos about his red Ferrari.

He levered up his content. Yeah. And it was great. It was great content. It was interesting. And of course, he was more like making fun of flex culture than actually doing the flex culture. But still,

there just weren't that many YouTube videos of like a red Ferrari. So you click on it and people found him that way and he grew. Then it became like the Mr. Beast era of like, I'm going to give away a Ferrari. last person to take their hand off the car wins it. And that was a big thing that was even more expensive because you didn't just have to buy the Ferrari, pay the monthly payment for a certain amount of time

and then sell it and hope that there's not that much depreciation. Like the net cost was truly the full price of the Ferrari. But at least you're giving it to someone it's like a write-off probably. There's something there. The most recent Mr. Beast video involving a supercar was him literally shredding a Lamborghini, just destroying it.

Like Whistland Diesel has become a huge YouTuber on the back of, 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. That'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. That was a strata. It was a strata. Very special car.

Yeah. No, but the real pinnacle of this was Wistlin. Diesel. Yeah, Whistland Diesel took it to the max. To the absolute max. Ferrari F8, beautiful car. You destroyed it? Completely destroyed it, right?

And made a video about it. It's incredibly entertaining to watch somebody drive a car that's normally a garage or garage queen and have somebody just absolutely take it off, roading, all this stuff. Fantastic video if you haven't seen it. It's funny. I 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 internet personalities.

Like Andrew Tate or Mr. Beast would rack up millions of bees. I swear Jordie 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 read 400 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 by hiring hordes of clippers, paid per thousand views to flood the internet with the creator's content. Anything that can be clipped, a podcast, debate, social media montage, even movies, startups such as lovable, an app that builds software from plain English prompts, humanoid robot maker

one-ax and consumer electronics company nothing have hired clippers to multiply their content across the internet through clips of product demos, podcast appearances and YouTube streams. You're stupid if you're making an hour-long podcast and only posting it in one channel, said Roy Lee, the 21-year-old

founder of Cluley and AI note-taking startup which hires clippers to plaster its promotional content across the internet. The only way you can ensure a viral moment is to post it across thousands of different accounts. This is that Thousands. Thousands of counts is a lot.

That's a lot. This is also happening in music. I heard that people, when it's done poorly, people call it astroturfing. But 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, happy acting. Lottery tickets. Lottery tickets, basically.

But I still think a better strategy for most people will be what Dwork Cash and David Senra are doing, where you have someone who really understands how to create something beautiful, even though it's a new format, and people think of 60-second short form as, like, slop. It doesn't have to be. It can be elevated.

It can be thoughtful. It can be designed. Anyway, let me tell you about fin.a.I, the number one AI agent for customer service. They're number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, and they have a number one ranking on G2. That's right, folks. Cluley's clipped contents generates around 800,000 views a day on platforms, including Instagram and TikTok, according to Lee. Lovable and nothing said they were always looking for ways to reach new customers.

Online marketplaces have developed to connect brands with clippers in the virtual markets. Brands post the rate they will pay, and freelancers sign up to make clips. Clippers are paid anywhere from 50 cents to $2 per thousand views. them to find the most shareable moments. Nathan Resnick, a 31-year-old partner of a holding company called PCF Ventures that oversees businesses in insurance, wedding planning, and real estate service pays. Diversify. 50 clippers he finds online roughly 15,000 a month to create and post-short-form videos

promoting his company's businesses. It's not really that crazy when you consider we were spending $250,000 a month on Google and meta to drive traffic to our websites. That's a good point. Again, this is like the ARB. Like this eventually will get competed down. A 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 Kai Sinat. Yep. Yeah, they really understand the culture.

A friend of the show, Dar Sleeper, Total Sleeper. in marketing sleeper. Yeah, he says, people in the company were like, what the heck is this kid doing? A week later, their little cousins were talking about it at the Thanksgiving table. There we go. Anyways, it's cool.

It's cool. I think it's probably, like you said, a moment in time. Probably not going to be like a, it's hard to see it as the most enduring strategy that works right now. And I think a lot of businesses would be able to. It was an insane, insane, Arb for Andrew Tate and that 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 I think the the in the durable strategy is to do things that encourage people to clip them and that's what Andrew Tate did for sure yeah no no no no I'm saying no no not just on the buying side actually on the content side like like like when he would get on Mike he would say crazy things that would go viral yeah And so he made it very easy. And 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 Cluelly 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 of rep. Clip this. That builds scales and grows your company the next level.

Get started for free. Clip this right now. Clip this right now. Well, in other news, somebody is sharing a screenshot of a young man named River Diamond. River Diamond. And Jeremiah says, this is a sick name, honestly. I totally agree. Bullpen clown said, kids' name is a private equity fund.

I don't know if that's that private equity code. It's up there. River Capital, River Diamond Capital, Diamond Capital. Diamond Capital. 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. Anyway, polymarketism news.

The White House has asked Zelensky to wear a suit to meet Trump. I love to hear it. He, 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 applies with this crazy image. This doesn't even look AI based on like the fidelity in the filter? You 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 us know in the comments. It's a cool picture. Anyway, meta-smart glasses

with a display is incoming. Code name is Hypernova. Priced $800, down from the expected $1,300. Zuck is cooking for real, for real, says Nick. meta. So the price is, the price is going down. And, um, they're, I mean, they're taking a real shot at, um, at the Apple Vision Pro, which of course was, um, was what, 3,000,

and 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, so Orion is a different product. Yeah. Orion is, is what was demoed and has been displayed and that's what Zuck is wearing on the left there. Um, but, uh, we're, 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 augmented reality glasses. And so there has been a, there's been a third, like, option in the market for a while that people haven't really been paying attention to. So in the virtual reality smart classes market, there's maybe a few different products. So the meta-ray bands

and the meta-Oklis have been successful. Like, people are actually buying those. They're wearing them. They're taking pictures with them. They're also using them as an AirPods replacement, wireless headphones. They use them for music while they're running. They definitely have adoption. It might not be the biggest product of all time yet, but it's definitely working, and so they're scaling that up. Then you have the VR headsets, the Quest, the full virtual reality. There's some pass-through, but 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.

We see the chart spike on Christmas where everyone gets a new Quest VR headset 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. Yeah, for like two weeks. Then ultimately churned. Yeah. I'm just not that much of a gamer. Yeah? But you're supposed to be, 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, the fact that they weren't able to find like a killer use case for someone like you means 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 that product? and they both need to, they clearly both need to improve.

Totally. In order to get, in order to get to the point where Tyler, we got to be like pulling the, pulling the goggles off and being like Tyler, it's time to come to work. Yeah, yeah. So my take, when I had the Apple Vision Pro, it was too heavy. It was really expensive and felt like, oh, I would, I would churn for this eventually, so I returned it.

But the one thing that I did enjoy was I watched movies in it. And I watched all of Citizen Kane in it from start to finish. And Citizen Kane is a great movie. Do you have a review for us, Tyler? I 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 reckoning.

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. Like, it is the type of, it is the type of movie that if you have modern brain rot, you will pull out your phone and be like, let me check Twitter. 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 buck, in my opinion. I could give you movies closer to that.

Okay, yeah, something really, uh, something really dense. But, but it, it's a slower-paced movie. It's something that, I mean, it's even, it's even in like four by three. So on a modern TV, it's like a render proper. It's like UFC 319, right? I couldn't agree more. Exactly like that. Um, so, so my, but 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. And 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.

And he was like, no, it wasn't. Which is maybe a good take. But 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. Sure. 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, but it was easy to justify

pretty quickly as as a device that replaced another experience. Whereas it's much harder. It's like the Apple Watch works for those people because 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 making the movie experience really, really strong would be like an obvious but killer app. I don't know if people agree. But Mark German's talking about this in context of the Apple Vision Pro.

He says Apple Vision Pro is suffering from a lack of immersive video. Apple has slow walked the release of immersive video, creating a conundrum for the Vision Pro. The company's AI and smartphone, smart home roadmaps have come out. But when you get down to the core of the problem, Apple's vision. Apple'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, and a cumbersome setup process, but those are less important.

Developers are continuing to release apps, and there are now accessories that make the device feel lighter on your face. I'm going to try those. Apple has also dramatically approved its operating system, the latest version of the Vision Pro software. Vision OS 26, now offers widgets and has been well received, but none of that matters for Apple if people don't buy the Vision Pro. By all accounts, the device remains an extremely niche product. I'd venture to guess Apple has sold well under 1 million units in the U.S. since launching it a year and a half ago. Moreover, the headset just doesn't feel like a priority for Apple on the company's last earnings call. I wonder how many of those units have been returned.

That's a good question. I mean, I would assume if you're quoting sales, you have 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. I'm just saying, I just wonder what the return rate is. Because 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. People 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 headset just doesn't feel like a priority to Apple on the company's last earnings call.

CEO, Tim Cook, almost seemed surprised when a Wall Street analyst quizzed him about the device and the company's strategy. Thanks for bringing it up, he said before delving. Mark German is delving. Interesting.

Before delving into new software features and asserting that it's an area we really believe in. So, German says in the near term, Apple isn't going to dramatically improve the 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 upgrade is 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, starting 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. You 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's 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. You 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, oh, 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 expensive and resource intensive. So 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 camera that actually just came out with a special lens. But 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 storytelling and 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 pro and that needs to be it and so this was this was uh um ben thompson's yeah it feels like there's so much just put it so much that they could do you could take immersive video behind the scenes for the f1 movie yes and make that available

yes it's like you can buy this you can watch f1 you can watch behind the scenes with the actors producers directors there's just a lot that they could do but i I 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 really do it. 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. Like 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 more to really make it like a movie watching environment, something that people really focusing on that narrowing instead of trying to do like seven different things. Is it for gaming? Is it for educational content? Is it for this prehistoric planet thing? And these like dinosaur stuff for games or collaboration, they had FaceTime in there. They just like threw a lot in there.

And I feel like none of them were breakout instead of. of just like chopping it down and being like, okay, this is going to be the best place to watch an IMAX movie in 3D. And so like you should get one of these specifically for this. I don't know. Maybe it won't even work if they pulled that off. But it'll be interesting because meta is going to fire back. And it will be, so there will be a small screen for mini apps and alerts on the right lens.

And the spectacles can be controlled via the neural wrist accessory. So think about it like meta raybans plus. Google Glass, basically. So 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 companies

that 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. I don't think that they're fully there

in terms of resolution. A lot of this is just like waiting around for the screen in the Apple Vision Pro to commoditize to the point where other companies can start taking that same screen and putting it in other stuff, giving, like, actually doing all the testing. And then Apple will ultimately, like, take that back. Thank you. Yeah.

It was like, I'm pretty sure, like, the multi-touch screens, like, those were out there in other, like, the technology existed in other phones, but it just was poorly implemented and 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. 79. Yeah, I think I'm around there too. Not my best. I'm building back up. Building back up. I mean, in a bit of a...

Seven hours, 12 minutes. Oh, 86. 86. It's not bad. 8 hours. Good work, John. I did well. I'm feeling good.

Wilmanitis says if you're a young person interested in weird things, basically 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 think oftentimes if you're going down weird rabbit holes, whether that's in technology or something like health, you can often feel like you're late to something. I'll give an example here. I started supplementing magnesium pretty heavily in college and continued post-college. This was like I graduated in 2018. And, and I thought that everyone knew that taking magnesium was smart and good.

And basically, I mean, I don't know if you're aware, but our food used to have a lot more magnesium. Sure. That just likely due to soil health and soil degradation. And since... And lobbying by the magnesium supplement industry. Big mag. Big magnesium.

No, but anyways, so soil is degraded. there's a lot less magnesium in your food, and basically everybody should be supplementing it to some degree, not health advice, but that was my personal takeaway. And I ended up, you know, thought there was an opportunity to build a business around magnesium supplementation. I didn't do anything about it. And I think like five years later, a friend of mine started a magnesium focus company

and, like, quickly got it to an eight-figure run rate. It's going to be a big company. And so if you're interested in these various weird niches, corners, I think that there's oftentimes, like, you know, massive opportunity there. And if you're, if you think you're late, there's a good chance you might actually be early. Yep. Good point. Is your friend with the big magnesium company running billboard ads? Should be.

We should give them a call. Tell them to get on AgQuick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. say goodbye to the headaches of advertising, only add quick combined technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad-buying across the globe. Let's play.

We have Noor, Sadiq, calling in in just five minutes. Let's play the video. She was recently on the Ross Douthit podcast for the New York Times. And I want to, this sets a big, this sets a good stage for some of the debate that was happening on the timeline over the weekend. So 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 read you a piece of a poem. I've never heard a poet named Galway Canal.

And the poem is called, after making love, we 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 little startlingly 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. do you worry about removing or diminishing from human experience that aspect of being a husband and a wife in a relationship with a child? What do you mean? Yeah, they kind of clipped her out of context there. Should we play the full answer first? Because when you stop it there, it makes it look really bad. But he actually clarifies and then she gives a much longer answer. that we should play.

We can pull that up. Here we go. In a future where Orchid Technology becomes a norm, the feeling that that poet is expressing, where a man and a woman make love, and by making love, they bring these. But most people who get a baby, it is linked inextricably to having sex with your spouse.

And you're saying, and you're saying, it's time to sever that for the sake I concede of potential medical benefits. I'm just saying, I think pretty clearly, something that like, poets write about would go away. Yeah, I think that sex is a beautiful thing, and I think that if you have enormous genetic privilege

and for you to roll the dice and to get a outcome that isn't going to lead to disease is in the cards for you, that of course, go ahead and roll the dice. It's just that I think that the vast majority of parents in the future are not going to want to roll the dice with their child's health. They're going to see it as taking the maximum amount of care, of the maximum amount of love in the same way that they, you know, plan their nursery,

plan their home, plan their preschool. All of these decisions are actually, you know, extremely insignificant in terms of the difference between is your child going to live with pediatric cancer, with a heart defect that we can't surgically fix with born without a skull and never going to be able to make it to their first birthday. I think when people think about it really concretely in terms of what are they giving up? What 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 choice for my family? How do I make sure that my child doesn't have to suffer in the same way that I do,

in the same way that my sibling does in the same way that my parent that I'm a caregiver for does? So 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, I think it's denigrating and dismissive to IVF parents and to IVF babies to say that somehow, you know, science babies are, 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, 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 be. Norse Diki, thank you so much for joining me. This is Norse Dediqi 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.

Usually this happens in the first trimester. Right. So, but there is some risk to doing those types of tests, I believe, where in a very small amount of cases, something can go run because you're basically like scraping cells out of the baby I think at that point and that's like and you're because you have to get the DNA to actually run the test and that can actually cause problems but it's so low that the benefit of being able to catch that's crazy I never knew that you're like I never would have done this you're like I'm hearing this for the first time anyway we have nor Sadiqi in the studio welcome to the stream how you do it what's going on

welcome to the show oh one second we're we're we're we're we're we're We're redesigned the studio. Can you give us another introduction? Hey, thanks so much for having me, guys. Great to see it. Thank you. Sweet. 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 into 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 much longer conversation. This particular moment seems like he did. But what was the actual interaction like? And then what did the last 48 hours been like? Yeah, yeah. No, I think the interview was really fun, honestly. I think that it was, yeah, just really cool to be able to chat with someone who has, you know, such a different perspective about the technology.

But yeah, it might help to just kind of back up and just kind of explain, you know, what Orchid is. So what Orkid is is we allow parents to protect their children from conditions before pregnancy even begin. So kind of 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's usually evaluated in order to make

a decision about which embryo to transfer. So what Orkid does is, you know, we're the first company in the world to be able to allow you to screen 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 wouldn'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 when you sort of have a conversation with the doctor and all they're able to tell you is,

hey, there's nothing you can do. That information is brought all the way up to that embryo selection stage to be able to actually transfer an embryo that's unaffected. And I think the thing that's sort of really interesting about what's going on in this debate is it seems like people kind of don't understand or don't, or maybe just ignorant of what's going on, right? Because this whole question of, you know, should embryos be created and should people have the right to decide which embryo to select, has already been happening, right? IVF 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 get 1%? Do you want to only know that chapter level, chromosome level, to do you want to know the entire book, the entire gene, and be able to scan for the thousands of different genetic diseases

that genetic diseases that genesis have cataloged over the last decade. So that's the thing that I've actually found really surprising is that there's a lot of activate 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 IVF 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 very, you know, limited information or do you want to

make that decision with the maximum amount of information that science can give? Yeah, I've heard it's actually not technically blind that during IA. IVF, doctors will often just look at the embryos, like visually with their under a microscope and just kind of be like, that one looks good. And they'll grade them, like, A, B, C, D. And it's extremely like vibes based. But they do actually look at them and grade them, correct? Yeah, yeah. It's kind of a beauty contest. It's called morphology.

But it's a little bit tricky because, you know, they've done a lot of studies where there's, you know, if you basically flip the images, then an embryologist might grade them differently. So yeah, morphology, it's useful, but it's not, you know, kind of necessarily the most reliable. And I think the other piece of the debate that I think is really missing 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 information that you have there is, again, super, super limited, right? So you might be able to screen for something like Down syndrome. Down syndrome is called, you know, the technical term for it is trisomy 21. You have three pairs of chromosome 21. It's actually not a lethal condition, right?

It's survivable. And right now, all across the country in the U.S. and all across the world, you can get that information at 10 weeks, right? And right now women are in this, you know, at this point where you, the only option that they have is either to terminate that pregnancy or to have an affected child, right? So if you're in that camp that is against abortion, then you should actually support orchid and embryos grading because it obviates the need for that termination to ever happen, right? because you only transfer the embryo that's unaffected. So that's the other piece of it that I thought was really surprising is that, you know, maybe people don't realize that, you know, genetic testing on a very limited basis is already happening and terminations are already happening on the basis of, you know, non-lethal conditions, right,

versus what our kids doing is is looking at situations that are much more severe than that, right? So, you know, over 20% of infants die due to genetic causes, right? if you look at babies that are in the NICU that unfortunately don't make it, they've sequenced them, and they found that at least 20% of infant deaths are due to genetic disease, right? So I think it's insane to tell parents who are doing IVF that they shouldn't scan for, you know, lethal disorders when, you know, we're already doing, you know, elective terminations for totally non-medical reasons, right, just because people, you know, don't want to have a pregnancy at a specific time or for, you know, a specific medical reason, right?

much, much later than, you know, an embryo that that's five days old. So I don't know. I think that's something that I found kind of interesting is that... Back to, like, Ross's, like, core point, the way I took it was like, it's pretty easy to make, like, a utilitarian argument that, that this is a net good and this trend, not even orchid specifically, but like this general trend of IVF is a net good because it results in, like, less suffering. but his point was that there is a downside

and I'm wondering if you debate that point or if you say yes there is a downside we are losing something that poets write about but it's worth it because I could make this argument about basically everything like space travel it's gonna like SpaceX is going to wind up killing some birds another way to look at it is like if somebody is 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 okay with tradeoffs. Yeah, I mean, I think if somebody just watched that short clip and take the fullness of the interview, they might not pick up that I think it'd be insane if somebody's doing IVF and they're not using Orchid, right? Because if you're already going through this process and then you're saying, well, I don't, 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. it seems like an 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 are being triggered about this broader idea of like what would we lose if every baby. Yeah, that's Ross's question. It's 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, you know, personal decision, like a private decision, right? I think for each individual couple, each individual person, you know, they'll decide, right? Do 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 asking me, kind 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, you do I want to use an epidural during my pregnancy, is something lost? I mean, certainly some women who should not use epidural because, 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. It seems strange to, you know, dictate to people or

stigmatize people who choose, you know, epidural or not or, you know, to, to scre the rebrews 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 years and that by the year 2030, 2300, there will be more than 7 billion Amish people. And so, like, even though the... And I think what people are I mean, people can make a choice. They can choose not to use phones. They can choose not to use. If it feels like there's not to use anything.

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 process and leverage technology to avoid a child with a permanent heart defect or something of that sort. But I think that's a scary. 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, it's easy for parents that have gone and had a healthy child

through the natural process to think about a scenario where nobody, 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 to some degree, that would probably, in some cases, do anything to go back and avoid having a child that died shortly after childbirth or didn't make it through the full.

Or the opposite. I mean, I'm sure if 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. Totally. They see that as like something that was a crucible that they needed to cross. And that was something that even though it feels very bad, they, 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. Go 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 and other people.

I think it's just like, you know, we, 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 suffer less than me, right? So any tool that's available, I think should be, you know, just, you know, should be available to parents that they can make that decision for what's right for their family. And, you know, if they think, you know, Moore is lost by, you know, not doing it filled fashion way, then that's what they should do. And no one should, you know, stigmatize that. But I think, you know, the same is true in the opposite direction.

And I think that, unfortunately, there's, yeah, there's still like a huge amount of stigma around IVF and embryo screening that I think shouldn't exist because it's such a mass. massive force for good, right? Like there's sort of this huge category, you know, of illnesses that previously we just had absolutely no control over. We just had to roll the dice, right? And I think for a lot of parents, they're thinking that, hey, this is going to be the most important parenting decision that they'll ever make. I mean, that's 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 that does that means 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 they're already pregnant and now they have to make this disdiscuit. 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 through sort of the most intense physical experience, right? A pregnancy is like a marathon every single day. It would be, it would be nice if, you know, you didn't have to have as many miscarriages, right? Yeah. What's actually very obvious. Like, it's just information that people should, 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. People 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 IVF.

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 thing now instead of like 15 years ago? Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a couple of things. So one, you know, specifically in embryo, there's 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 then those five cells, you only have about 30 picograms of DNA. So you have a really, really tiny amount of DNA. Got it. And you have to amplify. So Orcid had to invent a new protocol, a new 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 genome sequence. through a commodity process because you don't have to amplify it. You have enough DNA to just throw it on a sequencer. So that's one piece of the puzzle.

And that's like the shotgun sequencing that 23 and Me does, where they're just kind of like taking the average DNA that they're seeing in a bunch of different saliva. And they have so much volume that they can like piece it together. No, no, no, no. So basically 23 and Me is a saliva-based test, right? So you have saliva or blood. So where's the DNA? The DNA's in the nucleus, right?

So if you have saliva or blood, you have a ton of cells, right? Yeah. billions of cells. So you don't have to amplify. of DNA, right? You just have a DNA in the select, or in the blood to just do it straight up. And the other thing is that 23M does not do whole genome. They do something called an array. So an array is just a subset of the whole genome. So instead of looking at three 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 a tiny fraction of the whole genome, you just can't scan for all the diseases. So basically one piece of it is just can you read the data off of an embryo, right? So the first to be able to do that. And the second is, what can you on? actually tell when you have the whole genome. So that's, you know, sort of the collective genetics and scientific community has worked on that over 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 phloggenic basis of, you know, syndromic forms of, you know, some of the most severe forms of autism,

right? We had to actually catalog that by sequencing, you know, millions of people over the last decade or two. So part of that is, okay, you know, so, first time you can actually read the data at that super early embryo stage. And the second is, okay, what is the actual things that are going to be clinically meaningful to parents during that stage? So in the third part of that is, you know, what models can you use to be able to predict and quantify risk for not just those binary yes or no is that embryo affected or unaffected by a specific genetic disease, but can you actually quantify genetic susceptibility for 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? Do you 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, phase three?

The way the FDA regulates all testing, not just embryo testing, is through something called LBT's, so laboratory developed tests. Sure. So, again, there's basically two different agencies. One is called CLIA. One is called CAP. 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 that happen at the, yeah, basically at the state and federal level annually. Interesting. So it's more like an ongoing process than like you get approved and then you have a patent. And then 10 years later, there's like a copycat knockoff product that's like the, the, the, the generic version. It's a very different pathway. Well, so sort of, I guess there's a couple of different things, right? So the patent on the amplification technology is sort of separate from the ABA, but the regulatory environment is that laboratory developed tests are regulated via LDTs, which means clearly have these two different

agencies actually come and examine labs at a physical level and at an analytical level, right? They come and, you know, verify that there's something called like proficiency testing, right? So they basically send you DNA sequences and they test you. you and they say, hey, did you, you know, call this correctly or incorrectly, right? So they sort of, you know, 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 there's 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? Got it. Anything else, Jordi? No, I think, I think it's such a, I think it's like such a

personal technology. It's like a, like the most businesses do not have, you know, as they're growing and marketing, their product, service technology, they're not, there's, I think few things, few products on earth that would be potentially more controversial where one person might see orchid and be massively relieved and, you know, immediately reach out and, and want to learn more and then another person would probably send you a very nasty DM. But 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 you shouldn't listen to a podcast to get advice two three four kids the old way have two three four kids with orchid see how each plays out then you can judge the company a b test just a b test it or run a gaddica experiment have one the old-fashioned way have one superhuman and then see who can swim the farthest i know you haven't seen gattaca it's a great movie anyway thank you so much for stopping by, Nor.

Yeah, thanks for having you guys. Have a good one. Cheers. Bye. Bye. You really haven't seen Gattaca? That's so insane. Have you seen Gattaca, Tyler?

I'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, And with the other brother, they do like the perfect like genes, like everything. And so one of them has a ton of like, no like crazy disabilities, but just like isn't gifted athletically, 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 but like the brother who is I think played by Ethan Hawk who doesn't have the advantages

like uses the sheer embalminable indomitable human will to like overcome everything like fake his way into this elite group and and ultimately like succeed and there's this famous quote you want to know how I did it this is how I did it Anton I never saved anything for the swim back because they would go out and swim in the ocean and he would always beat his brother who was like more athletic and it was purely because he had the drive. And he was just like, I was willing to that. He was on a mission. Yeah, that's great.

He was on a mission. Well, Emosh, back to the timeline. Emash says, R slash engineering, Reddit, R slash engineering. I've applied to 10,000 jobs and haven't heard back from one. This is funny. Engineering X. I built a transducing combulator with $20. Combobulator.

Combobulator. Combobulator 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. Real alpha there.

Yeah, yeah. The new job application is like vibe code something. I mean, that's how we met Tyler. That's how we met Adam. Like, just pretty much everyone has like kind of done something to showcase their. Michael. Yeah, same thing. Michael too.

Just like what we've done and what they want to do. And I think people are really receptive that. You probably need to go kind of up the chain. but that's where people, like the founders are hanging out at X and you will get flooded with DMs. Well, Gothamist is saying, call it a comeback. Manhattan foot traffic finally tops pre-pandemic times.

Let's hear it for Manhattan foot traffic. The first time since the city... Did you notice a lot of foot traffic when we were in New York? It seemed like a moderate amount. I don't know. It's hard to tell in summer and it just depends on the neighborhood. Yeah, I guess. Rune says...

If you're walking around Manhattan, you need a hitter on your wrist. Go to getbezzled.com. Your Bezell concierge is available now. I've sourced you. Any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. There's been enough robberies

that maybe you want to leave the hitters. Oh yeah, maybe you don't want one. At home. Keep it in the watchbox. Keep it in the watch winder. Keep it wound. My brother. And then say that's for the Hamptons.

Brother-in-law. Yeah, rough. Had a tragic incident. Rune says George Hots tried to fix Twitter Surgeon decided it would be easier to take down in video. Search is the hardest thing. Did you, I didn't know that George Hatz was at Twitter? He joined X post Elon buyout.

Oh, really? He was an intern for like a few days, came in and was like, what do you guys want to be a bitch? Let me work on search and kind of realize that like it is a truly massive system and there are 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? I think, like, there's just so much stuff. Yeah, you'd think like, yeah, just indexes or something would be better, but it's just so hard to, I use a lot of like the filter colon follows to search like people that I follow for a topic.

So if I want to, if I want to understand what people are saying about NVIDIA today, I'll search NVIDIA space, filter, colon follows, and it's just who I've done. I follow in the feed of results. That works pretty well, but Twitter search doesn't seem that bad these days. It seems actually okay. I 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 Twitter. And these two areas will almost never collide, and they're like these separate, loose clusters that have very little overlap. They're absolutely beautiful. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. Every once well. I mean, I think we literally did collide

when we put up the traded post from meta-superintelligence hiring an AI researcher, because that was that definitely hit with the sports fans as well. Yeah. I still see that post on Instagram sometimes. Sometimes. Somebody put it on Instagram and got like like five million views or something. Like it rips no matter where it goes. There's some combination of like that guy, his name, meta-superintelligence poached is just so good. It was very, very funny. Anyway, book of wander. Find your happy place.

Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring 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 to 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 situation where he couldn't necessarily get pipelined into it.

He had, I think he had a family business that he was taking over. He was doing training with the military. So the Zoomer Eric Prince might be out there. they aren't necessarily capital constraint. It feels like starting the next generation of PMC is not something that you can buy with a $40 million Series A or a mango seed round. It needs to be based on connections, experience, all these like loose piecing things together. It doesn't seem like it's something that is just like a more elegant design or like a cracked team. What about you, Tyler? You want to start one of these?

I would like to see like a company like 1X. Get into it? to PMC? I think they're not quite there yet. Did you see the Chinese robotics 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 Washington Journal. Human-like robots are great for entertainment, meaning a labor, not so much. Now, you've got to put this in the truth zone a little bit, because, you see the back and forth between Noam Brown at Open AI and who's that humanoid robotic Brett Adcock at Figure? So, no, Figure put out a video of a robot folding clothes, folding towels, and Noam 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 you not entertained? Are you not satisfied? What if you just put the robot on a platform though? Well, no, no. So the video that Brett Aycock shared 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 landing 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 No. 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. Some 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, the Humanoid Robot X games.

Yeah, we are. But maybe not. I 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. 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 force-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, you can kind of apply like the same level of force. But something that you don't want to crush. So it's like, you know, assembling food on a plate in a restaurant. Like you don't want to squish the, you don't want to crack all the charge. chicken bones if 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? It's got to be in the top two. Like, who else is in the game? It's America and China. Like, mission accomplished China.

Congratulations. You are a world leader as I'm concerned. If not the world leader, what they're doing is very, very impressive. Yeah, we're over here in the U.S. already talking about how do we make sure that China can't do for humanoids what they did for drones and flood the market and make it impossible for American companies. The default is that they will win, but they're setting the bar low so they can beat expectations. Respect to Beijing on this one. The Olympic-style event, however, suggested that truly useful humanoids are still years away. A robot trained by the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence and collaboration with Unitary Robot, a leading Chinese robot maker, complete, competed in a hotel reception scenario using a three-fingered hand

to drag a suitcase to a designated door. It moved in small stomping motions, freezing at times. Many of our humanoid robot algorithms are still in the lab demo stage, says a researcher. Another competition simulating a hotel environment involved entering.

Figure can really like rehab their brand in the valley by putting one of their guys in... Oh, if they go, If they go to China and they put up the shell. Your Chad, humanoid, walks out and just dominates. Yeah. We need a, what are those famous?

If they can do that, I've seen enough, give them, give them the 40 billion post or 38 billion. Whatever the, 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. It was going to happen. But then nothing really came out of it. I don't know. I mean, company's still cooking and they're putting out 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 title. I've said it before. I want to see cliff jumping. I want to see skydiving. I want to see big wave surfing. Like, these are the important channel.

I don't care that the humanoid robot can fold my laundry. Yeah. 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,

51 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 hallucinated is from China. Wait, the Soviet Union beat the United States at basketball? This was the 70s. Still. We hadn't invested Michael Jordan yet.

We don't have the technology. No, 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 games and a plot linked to Harding's ex-husband. The showdown captivated the world. Kerrigan won silver. Harding placed eighth, and the scandal became one of the most infamous Olympic stories. I think Tanya Harding got her ex-husband.

husband to whack Nancy Kerrigan in the knee with like a pole to injure her so that she could beat her because they had a fierce rivalry. So that's what we, that's, that's, that's, that's Brad Adcock's real like plaque. He goes over to the unitary and just, like, electrical interference. I mean, just have one of the human rights do it and be like, it was a buck. Yeah, maybe. It was a bug. Oh, yeah, yeah, just spazzed out. No worries. Yeah, they do these things all the time. We've everybody's seen the videos at these points of, of what's going to go. I have to issue a correction on the kid testing. So the testing that happens in the first stage of the trimester, you don't actually touch the baby. You test on the blood in the placenta. So it's

much lower risk. It's called CVS testing. CVS is typically performed earlier in the pregnancy. I thought that sounded a bit. Then amniocentesis. CVS involves sampling placental tissue, while amniocentesis involves sampling amniotic fluid. Both tests carry small risk of miscarriage. The real test for humanoid. So there is still a risk of miscarriage for both of those. Very, very small. Like, so, so small. Like one in a million?

Yeah, like one in a million. Exactly. And so everyone, basically everyone does these tests and no one has problems. Well, you know what the real test for humanoid says? 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 your team. Joe says, look, I'm done hating 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 all ages. So 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. I'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 10-year-old. tennis court. So if you own a tennis court, 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,

take take 20% of your liquid assets and rotate them into various pickleball bets. If you're so, if 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 you doing? All right, I wouldn't say pickable expert. But, okay, Jordy, 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 don't like, I'm just saying I don't like watching it.

Don't put it on the TV. Don't put it on my neighborhood's court. Okay. And don't put Nick over there, I see you smiling. Nick was trying to put the TBPN logo on a pickleball paddle. I said absolutely not. Yeah. Absolutely not.

Tyler, when you play pickleball, do you wear flip-flops? I was road testing. I didn't just fully send it, but I'm thinking of a nickname for Tyler, just calling flip-flops. Because if you have a follow-up. Flip-flops over here has been doing the full MRF every week in flip-flops, which I think is. I have to make it harder for myself. I'm hilarious and iconic. Just running and 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 Xbox edition sitting in a box that you could easily put on eBay and 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 aura because doing a full hero wad weekly in flip-flops is a good move. Yeah, you must have an insane callous where 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. The good morning questions. What good shall I do this day? Rise, wash, and address powerful goodness.

Contrive days, business, and take the resolution of the day. What does that say? Prosecute the present study. And then from 8 to 12. 11. Orton noon, yeah. At noon, read and overlook my accounts and dine. It's a two hour, two hour lunch.

I love it. Insane. And then two to five. Two to five, he's putting up hours working again. And then, of course, around six or seven. Four hours of putting things in their places. Supper, music, or diversion. Diversion.

Conversation. Exclamation of the day. You know, I was thinking about it. And there's been this debate around alcohol recently. Is it because people are getting more health conscious? Is it because people are being less social? Sure. And I think it's because nobody gets bored anymore.

This is my work in theory, right? It used to be somebody, maybe there wasn't any good television on. And so they're, end of the day, they're bored, and they just start drinking. Now they can numb the mind with a scroll or a thousand. Or an ancient scroll if you're not Friedman. That's true. That's true. But I think there's something there. It's, if you look at social media as effectively, you know, its effect on the brain is similar to, 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 just drinking for, you know, the entire day. I think part of that had to have been just like general boredom, right? Like wanting to like change their mental state. yeah i 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 i was not very into it i couldn't get into it and i was thinking like i might crack open a beer but i didn't have any so i didn't crack open a beer um back more timeline molly contillion says nothing screams i am the main character more than america having the plus one phone code goes very viral and then somebody quotes and dunks on her goes even more viral saying we invented the telephone we didn't invent the telephone we earned it still pretty main character activity what is is that you would you would assume that I feel like the 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. But 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, uh, top 10 country. I think China is plus 86. Codes.

86. They're not the 86 than anything. Certainly not in humanoid robots. They're easily in the top 10. They're not 86 in spam. Okay. Nothing like getting it at plus 86. Oh, and Canada is piggybacking.

Canada also gets a one. See, yeah, UK, 44. Stolen valor. Stolen valor. Was the United Kingdom really the 44th country to adopt the phone? Like, what happened? What happened? What were they doing?

Japan, I feel like they invented telephones. Like so many phones, they, like, adopted technology very early. They're 81. Germany, Russia got on the program pretty quickly. They're number seven. France, 33. This is funny. So, Lewis Hamilton's racing number is 44.

Oh, okay. Could that be because he's British? Oh, maybe. He modeled it after the phone code. Maybe, maybe. I love this post from a friend and repeat guest via his post. Jiro tickets. Me, when I see an AI generated video that looks two standard deviations below the current quality benchmark for Frontier Model Labs.

Wow. Which I've been seeing quite a lot. There's a lot of slop on the timeline right now. But Nikita Beers working on it. You saw that. He had the, he's adjusting the dial, human posts, AI slop. posts. Every once in a while there's an AI slot post that's so bad it's good. You want to see it. That's true. That's true. Another post, I'm still in here. We don't have it. Also, underrated.

It is possible to create AI slop without 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 just doesn't feel grounded. And I was hoping for this next reboot of a DC character to be like the Nolan, Dark Knight, 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, jokey, crazy. There's, like, a whole bunch of funny scenes.

Like, it's funny, but the CGI is, like, the camera's flying all over the place. It's not, like, grounded. And there's a real way to do this. So I know you haven't seen Pacific Rim, but it's a fantastic film by an award-winning filmmaker who did Pan's Labyrinth. what's his name Pans Labyrinth Who did Pans Labyrinth?

Guillermo del Toro, that's right. So Guillermo del Toro does Pacific Rim and in Pacific Rim it's this crazy huge robots, these Yeagers that fight these massive monsters could easily be completely CGI over the top, crazy

Marvel movie camera all over the place but he decided to ground the cinematography in shots that could be filmed practically, but obviously weren't because you can't go film a massive Godzilla fight, fighting a massive robot. So, like, when you're watching the movie, it feels like, okay, I'm filming from a helicopter. Now 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. And 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, another video that we saw that, that you, your initial reaction to the video was, this is AI slop.

And I told you, no, it's actually all filmed. It's just a lot of VFX, but your, like, VFX is typically in the uncated valley. This was handmade slop. But I was thinking,

what if you want to step up? further and tried to make an AI slop video entirely practically. So you don't do any VFX, but it's like we're wearing prosthetic sixth finger, prosthetic sixth finger and like really, like, really like, you know, like grease on the lens to like make it more hallucinatory. Like the actors are constantly changing. So you're swapping people in and out. So the face doesn't always look exactly the same. You get like seven different brothers to play the same actor and they're always slightly different. And in every scene, it's slightly different. You could create AI slop using traditional methods.

And I think the takeaway is like, even AI slop is merely one form of slop, you need to be in the business of not making slop at all, no matter what your tool of choice. Great thing. Well, Superman could have used AI potentially helpful for one of the co-stars in that one scene. Did you see this video is going viral? Oh, the kissing thing? Yeah, Rachel Braznahan, the director calls cut. She keeps going in. Maybe she was just in character, but I guess.

How did that outtake leak? That's a crazy behind the scenes video to like put out on the internet. Do you think that's viral marketing? Do you think it's intentional? Do you think everyone's bought in? Because sometimes like the crew. Didn't seem like Rachel's husband was that bought in. Sometimes the production team will be like, that was amazing.

I'm like offloading this photo. But you can get in a lot of trouble for that. And then sometimes they do it deliberately. I think during the promotion of the latest Spider-Man movie, they intentionally leaked a VFX shot of the Andrew Garfield who played a previous Spider-Man in the VFX scene, and they made it look like, oh, they, like, this is like fake CGI or something. But it was really like a teaser for him being in the film.

Spoiler alert, the most recent Spider-Man features like multiple Spider-Man from previous. previous eras, they come back. So it's not just, is it Tom Holland, who is the main one? Tom Holland's the main one. Andrew Garfield is the previous one, and then there's someone else who's the one before that, and they all appear.

Anyway, Kate has assembled a list of blogs based on TBPN's Medis list. Go 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, Sergei Levine. Jeff Dean has a blog. Go check it out. Dario, of course, is blogging.

Great stuff, Kate. Lots of good stuff to, and fun to see people riffing off the medist list. Also, Gabby Goldberg, gassing you up, says, quote from Jordy Hayes that unironically changed my brain chemistry. The best neutropic is being on a mission. Really is true. I've tried, I swear I've tried every neutropic under the sun, and nothing hits like loving your your work and having a clear vision for what you want to accomplish. Yeah, this is kind of a... There's like a lot of people that are out there and I've been this person before where you're searching for this like hack to get yourself to be focused, have that drive day to day.

Totally. And you can't, it's almost impossible to... That you can briefly hack it, right? You know, people that take Adderall when they have an exam coming up, right? You can kind of force it, but it's still forced. And the only thing that is durable is, like, truly being on a mission. Yeah. It's kind of the, this is kind of the flip side of your take about being commercial.

Like, it was like you're early to the magnesium thing. But, like, would you be happy if you were, like, could you see your life's work being running a magnesium company or do you feel like you're a better fit for this? Would you be more on a mission if you had stayed there versus coming here and doing this? Yeah, it's interesting. I certainly don't wish I could go back in time and start that company. Right. I think that one thing that I do think is addicting to people in a positive loop is that somebody can be working on something that they don't feel like is their life's work,

but they can get addicted to the process of winning, making the number go up. So make number go up and being extremely fixated on that. is also effectively a powerful neotropic because you wake up every day and you want to make the number go up. Yep. Right? And that's most of our modern lives as humans. Indeed. For better or worse.

This John Franquipos 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. But 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're using.

Returns and exchanges. And that's where I got confused because it was like, I didn't know that you could return tokens generated from the clawed code API. This one wasn't that great. Take it back. Take it back. Sales channel fees. You do got to pay those. fulfillment to customer, that's the bandwidth, baby.

This is the gap definition of gross margin, cost to get the goods in the hands of the customer. Obviously, this is a great takeaway for folks who run physical goods businesses, also relevant to the AI labs. Yeah, physical product founders would say, accounting rules aside, I have 80% gross margins. Yeah. Cope or not cope, Uco Capital Bloke says, chat GPT adoption did not reduce. Google search usage, people did not substitute their typical Googling with chat GPTing. In fact, there was a slight increase in average Google search usage after 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? So the data says that before using Google, before using chat GPT, users were doing 10.5 Google search set. per 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 chat chitpT, I kick off like something I want to learn about and then I'll also be Googling. Like that happened with our story about Richard Mill. I 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 the 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 Google results, my Google data. Maybe if I'm logged in, I could see how many searches I've been doing, whether it's really fallen off a 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 a line the other direction. You know, they want to tell the story that they replace Google entirely. I definitely use Google a lot less on my phone. Yeah. I still...

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 chat GPUT for that, because like, it's either going to trigger generate 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. Yet. Maybe soon. Anyway. Andy, two cents. Dot money says a marvelous testament to the tax benefits of 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. Let's go up for the C Corps. Overthrowing the government once it lets them get rich. This is a good take. Startups, 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. This is 2019 data from the Census Bureau. Yeah. 20,000 firms with over 500 employees. So if you have 500 people that are willing to go to war for you, potentially going to overthrow the government.

Sean Frank is in the chat. Who loves the Substack? Thank you. Thank you. Topping. You. Go 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. Let's make it happen. And before you give away the Lambo, come drive it onto the set.

That should be how you... Yeah, definitely bring this Dorado for sure. We'll hang out. We'll go out. We'll hang out. and then when we reflect we'll say, yo, last night was a team's meeting. This is Atlas Creatine cycle.

Banger. It's a great one. People are enjoying the merch. Erica says posting a pick in the TBPN jacket is the 2025 version of a thirst trap. I don't know if that bodes well for thirst traps or us.

I think it's more people showing their support. But this is a funny postage. 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 switching into something instant. So 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 had prepared a ton of material to present to jobs jobs 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 job 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. People, I, 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, you know, having to authenticate, it's pretty much instant. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess some of the delay of like, I, I think it might be good that there's like fingerprint reader and type of password every once 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, I've had never been into the iPad, but I think I'm going to try for the next one. I've seen too many memes about the hierarchy of like the CEO does all his work on the, on the phone, doesn't need the MacBook. And then the more monitors you have, the lower you are on the totem pole. Shout out to our incredible production team that has 17 monitors. The totem pole of our hearts. They have the most monitors. Oh yeah.

This is 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 him a Diet Coke, I suppose. Anyway, 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 1% better. I'm learning from it. We have a team that's focused on it as well. I write the run of show. I collaborate with everyone to put together most of the stories, but we have a whole bunch more folks that are contributing stories there. And we're going to experiment with substack.

We're talking to Chris Best figuring out what else we can do there. We're streaming there. But we're going to be asking people questions, surfacing those on substack, collaborating cross-pollination. Very long. Substack. Good stuff. And the reason we're doing it is because math nerds are not having a good time,

according to Peter Thiel. This is 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. I still feel like the number of truly elite creatives, like there's an overwhelming demand for truly elite.

creative talent. Yeah, the power law is getting to be. Whether you're a copywriter, whether you're a designer, whether you're even, you know, people that are doing Photoshop, they haven't been. Yeah. It's, it really is a bull case for finding like an odd, an odd life's work. I, I was talking to you about this earlier, but like, you know, when, when kids come to you and tell you what they want to be when they grow up, like the previous generation was very attuned to, oh, you want to be a firefighter. like, ha, yeah, like, that'll be fun for a couple years. But, like, you're probably going to be a lawyer, bro. Like, that's really the only way you're going to, like, pay the bills in the future.

It's like, doctor, lawyer, merchant chief. I really like merchant chief. That's a good one. But increasingly, I find that if you can be top 1% in any of, like, the kid careers, the pilot, the police officer, the firefighter. The international businessman. The businessman. The businessman.

Really, anything, anything that is in a Richard's scary book, anything 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. But Tyler, you got the counter take. You think you're going to, me and Tyler went to the Hollywood Bowl the other day, and there's someone at the Hollywood Bowl that manually switches the lights in the street during high traffic times. So because there's so much crazy traffic

when the Hollywood Bowl is funneling people in and out, they have a physical bowl that someone goes and sits up in and then they control the lights manually. And Tyler's just like, I'm going to automate that. I could vibe code about it. That feels like a ripe target because there's a human can do sort of a vibes-based analysis.

Like, oh, we've got a lot of people coming this way, cars. 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. 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. Like, 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, before 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 SuperSonic flight. We don't have... There are more. 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 flock 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 worked at it? But 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. Potentially. Yeah. You're a DMV enthusiasts. Very agile. Very agile. And so, yeah, I think even, I think it's a week-long hack project

to 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 Bali 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. It'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 they 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? You 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? Like, you're just going to the park and you're just stumble upon a restaurant. Oh, you're talking about LARPing? Yeah, the people that are, the people, yeah, I just remember. I grew up in Berkeley. and the local park.

There was a big LARP community. Really? Oh, in the East Bay. And I'd just be like going, I'd be like using the swings, and I'd look over and a bunch of adults would come over and medieval costume and start battling.

It was cool. Yeah, yeah. It was cool. I respect their imaginations. Yeah, respect the LARPers. Luke Metro says, how to get rich 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. No, 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 clawed back.

Can you imagine if Sohampereak was doing this? He'd be like worth billion. Everybody was trying to clock so hom's run rate. It's like is it a million, two million? He 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, they can make their own characters in that AI studio. So you kind of go into AI studio. You can chat. 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-L-A-O. But here's the thing. So Elon is competing with Mark Zuckerberg on AI companionship. Yes. It'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 feeds right into it. Does Zuck have 10 times the user base? Probably three billion daily active users, I think, something like that. It'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... Roughly eight hours a day. 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. And 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. It really is, it really, but the numbers are staggering.

I mean, five million messages to Russian girl. Maybe that's just the scale of, of, of, FB. But the blue app is, 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 unlimited abundance for humanity. But first, you have to build spicy mode.

So it doesn't, and who it was Will. Will Brown was posting, you know, this hypothetical engineer that, that quits their job at one lab. At X-A-I. At X-A-I. Working on Valentine. Spicy mode with Valentine. And then goes over the meta and has to work on stepmom.

Russian girl. Russian girl. Or step-mom. Yeah. Of course, these are human. these are created by other... Yeah, you have to think about them like meme pages. I mean, I do wonder if people will...

Like, the fact that this tool will be out there, someone will probably create something interesting. Like, I always give that example of like character AI. I went on character AI and was trying to debate Vladimir Putin about the benefits of capitalism. And he folded pretty quickly, right? Yeah, exactly. No, it was actually Stalin. Yeah, I was debating with Stalin.

I was debating communism and capitalism with socialism with Stalin. And he kept admitting, like, he was clearly RLHF broadly on Western ideals and capitalism, and 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 like, I'm like, victory, flawless victory, which of course. Another win for capitalism. But I, but I think my takeaway is like I do think if you put this in the hands of like of like billions of creators you might get someone that comes up with an interesting chat bot that is funny in the same way that you get a Harry Potter Balenciaga every once in a while or you get like a

like a 4chan green text right and so something like that I don't know what it would look like but some sort of thing that you can I mean we've seen like chat with cow like already that's like funnier in the sense that like I might actually click on that I don't know exactly what that would be like but there's probably mostly has his own Hormosy AI now. Yeah. Do we ever solve how much he made? I saw one slide.

Tyler, figure out how much Hormosey 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? And then use that to train the model.

Wow. That's a lot. So now instead of... The numbers are all over the place. Like the brand... Which I thought was an interesting selling point because 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 had produced that eventually ended up in the models. Yeah, Demis would like a word, actually. Demis would like a word, Alex. But this says, yeah, yeah, we actually trained Gemini on five billion dollars of training data. Yeah. I think, if anything, so going back to this debate of like XAI going heavy into AI companions. 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 puts. Also married, so you're not looking for a real girlfriend or a AI girlfriend or boyfriend. Yeah, 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 of stuff that I am interested in. But Simp for Satoshi here says, Elon is in real danger of falling off culturally. He must remember it was cultural relevance due to SpaceX and Tesla meme stocks that catapulted him. X is cool, but XAI is not. He can fix it, but he is currently not on the path to do so. This may tick him off, but it's true. And Simp versus Sosci is like an Elon bull, right? Famously. Yeah. Yeah. So.

And I think this is how, I think this is how like people are feeling broadly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it goes back to those like filter bubbles can be a feature, not a bug. And so like there is a world. There are groups of users out on X that are interested in chatting with Valentine and Annie. But you should probably never show that post to anyone in Teapot. Full stop. Like you should just say like we're going to show Teapot papers on what we're doing at XAI on the reinforcement learning side and surface that. And instead it's like, because Elon's account's so big and it gets so much promotion in the feed, like, everyone saw that.

And everyone's like, why am I seeing this? This is not relevant to me. And it's just like kind of a, it's a bad, it's just a bad like signal like to land that post in this particular community. Yeah, especially when people see the outputs from Grock, imagine. And it's just not on the level of many other. The outputs are not on the level of many of the other. totally like do i need to see two marble statues you know kissing and that's not and that's and what's interesting is that like that like you the not the same cannot be said for the cluster

that x a i built that was super impressive like when and the and the results yeah i mean the the the biggest like xa i bull case was just laid out by kasy hammer on dorkesh he was saying like eon understands he gave this amazing analogy this amazing historical story of about, I forget who it was, someone who was building boats in World War II, and he ran out of like, he was like, I'm trying to buy materials to build the boats, I need steel. I bought all the steel, and so now I'm going to buy a mine and start mining for steel. Anyway, do you want to give a shout out? I got to give a shout out to Isaac, Mini Katana.

In a chat, Isaac is a legendary entrepreneur. I would say that he is the Willie Wonka of our time. Really? Yeah. Okay. He's an absolute legend. Please subscribe, Mini Katana. Thank you for being in the chat.

They will shout you out. They love business. We do love business. We do love business. Of course we'll shout you out. He has a company called Campi Foods, which is probably, you know, he is just absolutely crushing. 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 companies, he's able to get billions of views totally organically. And he's an absolute... Campi freeze-dried candy says they subbed. There we go. Fantastic. Well, shut up to music. 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 Waymo. Get a Waymo. 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.

And 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 steer. Trying for exits.

Things are about to go absolutely nuts in America because there's an image here of the first nicotine energy drink. I couldn't find this online. I don't know if this is just like a mock-up or something, but the scene that have come out of nowhere. I think this might have been something that literally was just a mock-up

because you're, you're one of the foremost experts in the world a 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 in one drink would be amazing. And there's like regulatory reasons for it. And 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 your stomach is too acidic and so it doesn't absorb. So it like, 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? Like, is, I mean, I'm over? Is it over for me? It's over. It's like, no, it'll probably just pass through you and 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, it's, it, people would be eating them if they could. Obviously, people would, would, would, we'll, 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 lining and 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.

There was a company that raised money in the 80s, I believe, or the 90s 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, so 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, 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. And 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 it and really just put al-thianine in it and just don't have nicotine on the ingredients. No one checks. It 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 mockup. They hadn't thought through how you'd actually take this to market. Yeah. And now everyone thinks it's on the way, but 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, people. So anyways, 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 fair 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. unlike bankers who can blow their whole bonus on a weekend in Miami starting at age 22, I think that's a good take. The nature of having most of your net worth be illiquid is, as Thelpix says, besting is good for the soul, it seems. Or 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 art from artists. for like a thousand dollars. Wow. And then three years later, they're worth tens of thousands of dollars. I mean, he's got a great, great taste and a great eye for emerging artists. But yeah, you don't need to be a bean air to indulge in fine art.

Yeah, we need a fine art. But on that note, we got to get on with Taipei. Thank you for tuning in today. Give us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. subscribe to our substack, which we are working very hard on, tbPN.substack.com. And we made a bunch of upgrades to the studio today, some of which are working well, some of which aren't.

So we will continue to iterate. Thank you for your support. We will see you tomorrow. Cheers. Bye. Have a good one, guys.