Hank Green Faces AI Backlash, Astra Makes 10 Math Advances, Million-Dollar Solo Firms | Diet TBPN

0:01Let's get into the show. What happened over the weekend? Did anything happen over the weekend, John?

0:05John Coogan:There were a couple things. The big debate that I was tracking, sort of outside of tech, but tech adjacent, was the cancellation of Hank Green, the YouTube creator. Not quite a cancellation, more just some backlash. Hard to always put a proper sizing on a mob when a mob comes after a creator. But Hank Green, the YouTuber and really media entrepreneur, he's grown a huge business, which we can sort of go into, is getting pilloried on social media over using ChatGPT for research. Very controversial these days. Only a billion people do it. But it's the number one app in the app store. But he's getting a lot of backlash from certain members of his audience.

0:50John Coogan:I don't want to characterize the whole audience as being part of this, but it's a very silly situation. There's at least thousands of people that are really mad about it. It seems like that. It's always hard to tell. I mean, thousands of people that are liking a post about it. There's like maybe dozens of posts. I don't really know how to put a scale on these things. But Hank Green is definitely going through it, having to sort of apologize or qualify or sort of state that he will adjust things in the future. And it's just sort of interesting to hear how he went through this process, what he says is going to change and where the backlash is coming from, because there's a lot of misunderstandings about it.

1:24John Coogan:And what's interesting is that he is a science and education creator, and science and education are potentially the most affected by AI right now. And so it's a real challenge to simultaneously say, I'm going to cover math. I'm going to cover science, but I'm not going to touch AI. That AI stuff's bad because as we also saw over the weekend, AI is making a bunch of advancements on math. We've been seeing this for a while, but the latest version of the story comes from Noam Brown, polynomial over at OpenAI. He says, an internal version of Astra, OpenAI's next major model family, solved 10 major open problems in mathematics, quantum complexity, and theoretical computer science.

2:05John Coogan:The achievements are so, so extreme at this point that I don't even think it's worth us trying to break them down. Like we did that with the… So instead, Tyler is going to run a 5K here in the Ultradome to do a little victory lap for the research team. But not everyone is impressed with it because Gary Marcus says, Wake me when Astra solves a significant open world problem that doesn't revolve around formal verification. And, of course, Daniel Eith says the goalposts are on a completely separate planet. It is a good point. Obviously, AI is doing better in formally verifiable tasks at the same time.

2:44John Coogan:Still impressive because there's a lot of things that are useful and verifiable. Like, did this drug cure your cancer or not? Or did this job get done or not? Like, we've been using these recommender systems for lots of things. They're very valuable all over. But it is funny. The debate over, is this AGI? Is this ASI? Those terms will always be vague. Going back to Hank. Yes. So all he did was admit that he used some sort of AI tool for research? Yes. So I will take you a little bit more through it. So Hank Green, he's an OG YouTuber. He joined YouTube in 2007, I think less than two years after the platform actually launched.

3:22John Coogan:And he grew, he got a lot of views, but he also built a huge audience and created a real media company around it. So he has Vlogbrothers, like a vlog channel. Then he has Crash Course, which is a really, really huge educational channel. He runs VidCon, which is basically the premier conference around YouTube and the creator economy. I've been, I think, once or twice. It's a lot of fun. And over the last 20 years, he's become one of the most trusted educational creators on the platform. He's also just like, he gets the vibe of YouTube very well because he's been around it so long. Never really stepped back fully, but always been, you know, solid audience there.

4:03John Coogan:So last Wednesday, he published an episode of a show called Ask Hank Anything. And it's an interesting concept for a show. So he brings on a guest, but then instead of just doing the interview, tell me your life story, ask the guest a whole bunch of things. The guest brings questions for him about science or whatever. They have a big, long conversation. And if there's something in the show that he can't answer on the fly or he's not prepped for, he will go do the research and then get the actual answer and then cut that into the final episode. So you'll be watching them hang out. They'll talk about some odd thing.

4:39John Coogan:He was talking about this. Have you heard this Kiki and Booba thing? There's like two words that one is basically there's two shapes. One's like a fluffy cloud. The other's like spiky, spiky like star, essentially. And if you ask people generally, which one would you assign the word kiki to and which one would you assign the word booba to, people always pick booba is the cloud and kiki is the spiky one. And it's like the sound of the word has a shape to it. And this is just something in our language that shows up all over the place. So he's like telling the story of this like just somebody ran a science experiment.

5:15John Coogan:They put a bunch of people here. They pulled a bunch of people. They put together this result. And this is what happened. And so he needs to compile all of that quickly because you get off the show, you have the rest of your job, but then you have to go answer these questions and have all the information. And, of course, he uses all sorts of research tools. But he was accused specifically of using ChatGPT to write the script, which is interesting because after the episode went up, manager JoJo posted a clip of him from the episode and accused him of using ChatGPT to write the script. The key line is Hank saying, quote, I appreciate the pushback.

5:49John Coogan:That's sort of an AI phrase, but that wasn't one of the really trigger AI phrases like you're absolutely right or it's not this, it's that. I appreciate the pushback is something that the AI models say occasionally, but you wouldn't think it would make it into a script. But that's why people jumped on it. They were like, wow, he was so careless that he left in a turn of phrase that was the model talking to him about I appreciate the pushback. That's not what happens. He's actually responding to the guest pushing back on him and about this concept. And then he answers it. But he was just talking.

6:24John Coogan:But it feels out of place because he's talking to the camera at that point. Even though in the video he's talking to the guest after the fact. The way it's edited is him direct to camera. So him saying, I appreciate the pushback to the camera. What is this? Beans? I don't know. But him saying that, I appreciate the pushback, feels a little weird when you just watch it, but it makes sense in the context of the longer video. So the headlines proliferated over the weekend to the tune of Hank Green accidentally reads AI prompt feedback left in his script. Hank has to deny this, but he goes on to admit that he does use ChatGPT for research.

7:04John Coogan:This did not land well. People don't like the idea of him using ChatGPT for research. And clearly, it's just a small subset of his audience that actually takes the time to flame online about AI usage. But there are still dozens of posts, maybe hundreds of posts, about how AI cannot be used for research because it hallucinates or it removes some key human element of the process of learning, something like that. It's very odd for anyone who's used modern models because there's a lot that AI can't do well yet. but pulling a bunch of links and quotes together from across the internet is something that they're pretty good at.

7:42John Coogan:And it's definitely reliable for that. And so Hank clarified the script was not written by AI. He was just going on ChatGPT and saying like, hey, where did this original research come from? Pull up the paper, download the PDF, crunch it all together for me, you know, pull some quotes from it, change this into a different format. I want it in this units instead of that units? Those types of questions. He still said that he has not been happy with how he's been using AI and may wind up publishing less as a result. He feels like he's on a little bit of a treadmill because he's more productive with AI, but then he posts more and then that's a feedback loop.

8:17John Coogan:And of course, at this point in time, he's built his career over 20 years. He has a very sustainable business. He probably doesn't need to be on as much of a treadmill as perhaps an early stage creator might be. It doesn't feel like it's total audience capture, but there is this interesting opportunity here that I was sort of just identifying. Like AI is clearly this wedge issue. Billions of people use AI and get value from it, but at the same time, it's deeply unpopular. And there's lots of people who like to post angrily online about how AI is bad for a variety of reasons. But education and science in particular are going to be intertwined with AI for the foreseeable future.

8:52John Coogan:Like every advancement in science is going to be AI enabled. And so if If you're a science educator and you constantly have to be dancing around AI and be like, oh, yes, they solved this math problem, but I don't like it because AI was used, well, you're going to wind up just not being able to talk about math or science or whatever's happening because you're constantly doing this dance around AI. And so that's fine. There's that audience that will love that. But there's also an opportunity for a new audience that's maybe a little bit more nuanced about this and maybe just, yeah, it's fine that you use that for doing research.

9:28John Coogan:As long as the script sounds good, I'm fine. Or as long as you are clear about your policy, which is odd because that's what he, he was always clear. He's just still got attacked and had to go on this defensive. I believe he has like a published policy around how him and his employees at his media company can use AI or do use AI or don't in various scenarios. But this was the first time I've seen a real backlash to just pulling that up on ChatGPT. A lot of people in tech, I think we're getting like sort of whiplash from watching all of these arguments pile up. Someone put together a cool chart here of the good arguments and the bad arguments from the pro AI crowd and the anti AI crowd.

10:09John Coogan:So an example of a good argument around this from the pro AI crowd would be AI is a powerful and capable tool. And then like a bad argument from the anti AI crowd would be AI is useless in research slash in general. But there were bad arguments that were put forth by pro AI people. Something like you use data centers, like Hank uses data centers. And it's like, yes, YouTube is hosted on a data center. Yeah, so are you to write this comment? Yes, but that's not that the actual like data center that's required to host an online comment is wildly different than a massive gen AI system like cooking tons of tokens and actually setting the GPUs on fire, right?

10:53John Coogan:And then a good argument, the best argument from the anti-IA crowd was said that AI usage in science communication reduces trust at least a little, which is interesting. I mean, yeah, you do have to check these things. And we do see tons of examples of people actually leaking, you know, AI phrases and weird AI, like hallucinations into scientific research. There was that example of there was some PDF that was scanned and there was a word in one column and a word in another column that got bled together when the document was imported, and then a whole bunch of scientific research started referencing this phrase that doesn't exist and just came from basically a hallucination or like a quirk of the optical character recognition.

11:36John Coogan:So anyway, they canceled my goat for using LLMs to search papers that he would need to read to make his videos. They want him to use Google search like a caveman in big 2026. The crazy thing is I don't – can you even turn off AI mode in Google now? I think you can. I think you can. You can use DuckDuckGo. I don't think that has AI yet. We'll see. Brian Lowe on X is sharing a heartbreaking essay by a mathematician last week for this most recent news drop. So this was before Noam Brown showed the recent breakthroughs by Astra. He said, there's nothing I can do. There may be nothing you can do. I have no prescriptions, policy recommendations, or coherent call to action.

12:20I just want to be honest and open about my emotional and spiritual response. I want to feel seen. I want folks like me to feel seen. I need the architects of our new mathematical paradigm to look me in the eyes and acknowledge our shared humanity and soul before they deliver the coup de grace. I need most of all for us to understand what we are really doing.

12:40John Coogan:The Dark Knight of Mathematics, Kerwin Hampshire, mathematician, researcher from the University of Auckland, who recently authored the viral essay, studied mathematics. Interesting. It feels like I would be surprised if mathematical education goes away. It feels like a lot of these problems should be interesting to apply, but I understand that's a completely different discipline. It will be interesting to see what happens next because there are more advanced problems. The Millennium Prize problems, P versus NP, Navier Stokes, right? There are a number of problems that are still unsolved. What happens when they're all solved?

13:21John Coogan:Do we create new problems? Where do we go from there? Do we start applying them in different ways? What do you think, Tyler? Yeah, I mean, obviously, like... Any advice for mathematicians? I think, so in this article, he says, like, mathematicians are paid to, like, solve... 21-year-old podcaster has advice for math. Exactly. So he says, like, math sessions are paid to solve theorems, which, like, obviously I'm not in academia, but, like, it seems like that it's, like, kind of their job. But also it's, like, you're in a university, right? It's, like, to teach it. Yeah. I mean, there's plenty of math professors that sort of try and solve theorems but also mostly teach and, you know, don't solve that many theorems.

13:56Yeah. And also, like, presumably if you can solve all these conjectures, like, there's going to be new questions that open up. This is like the entire history of all science, right? Yeah.

14:04John Coogan:It will be interesting to see the application of this stuff because it's so abstract at this point. And it feels like it's a very – everyone's saying like, okay, based on this, like this is going to like flood through material science and flood through chemistry and biology. And that would be awesome. Everyone would love, you know, oh, all of a sudden like the electric cars have twice as much range because we solved some fundamental thing. And it'll be interesting to see where the new bottlenecks are. There, of course, will be always. Math professors hate AI for one simple trick. Just scale, scale, scale, I suppose.

14:40It's time. What? It's time to talk about the rise of one person, one dollar companies. Wall Street Journal is saying AI tools make it easier for founders to get started alone. And many stay that way as they grow. Ben Broca launched a company last December that offers AI tools to entrepreneurs.

14:57John Coogan:That name's familiar. He's already added 10 ,000 paying customers and is on track to bring in$10 million in revenue this year. One thing he hasn't added, any other employees. The 40-year-old is part of a class of entrepreneurs who are launching and often running new companies on their own. Artificial intelligence tools answer Broca's emails, help write and debug code, field requests from customers, sign up new subscribers, and grant refunds when issues arise. Broca relishes his ability to make whatever decisions he wants on his own, often from his sun-drenched Sausalito, California living room.

15:29I think compromises make lukewarm results, he said. Once upon a time, running a business of a certain size required a team. AI is turning that assumption upside down, and more aspiring entrepreneurs are going it alone. An analysis by the payments company Stripe, Tyler, look up Stripe, shows there are thousands of solo operators on the company's platform that are generating over$1 million in revenue with their ranks doubling between 2023 and 2025.

15:53John Coogan:That's pretty crazy. So this is on Pulsia, right? No, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, on Stripe. Definitely not. Okay. This is just Stripe. Okay. The number of solo, I'm sure, I would be curious if Pulsia has any companies that do more than, you know. A thousand. A thousand dollars. I mean, you're looking at the marketing. Because to be honest, I actually do think success for Pulsia is just making back even a dollar more than you're spending on Pulsia. Yeah. There's a YouTuber who's been demoing different AI systems, Fable and Soul and Kimmy, and saying, like, go make me money is basically the only prompt.

16:32John Coogan:And he lets it cook for like a week. and he'll be on like a$200 a month subscription, see if it can make six cents, see if it can make$10. And he's getting closer every time. And he, of course, has to do some things, set up API keys and do little things. But it's an interesting experiment. Ben Awad, you should go check it out. So the number of solo operators, according to Stripe, also crossing the$10 million threshold nearly tripled in that same span. In the past, people without business contacts or particular savvy might not have known how to get their ideas off the ground. Now AI can be a built-in business partner.

17:07John Coogan:Yeah, how does Stripe know if you're a solo operator? Like if you're, because if you're a podcaster and you set up a Stripe account to accept money from advertisers, you could be having a million dollars move through there. But if you hire an editor or not, that doesn't necessarily show up in Stripe. So they must do some sort of polling and ask everyone. Yeah, I think in your account, at some point you say, how many employees do you have? Okay, and if you say, yeah, I just got one. But I guess one question I have with the data is like, what if you just set up your Stripe account? It's like, how many employees do you have?

17:40John Coogan:And then you wind up adding people and you don't go on update. Yeah, possible. Yeah, because they don't have the payroll. I don't know how they would have visibility into payroll, especially like individual employees. They do have a sense for how many people obviously are like added to your account. But sometimes it's like, oh, true. This account if you add your CPA. Yeah. You know. And that's a contractor, not an employee. AI's ability to handle various administrative tasks makes it potentially useful for launching solo businesses in many fields, but the technology's ability to handle key tasks in tech, like coding, make that field a particular hotspot.

18:13Among all industries, new business applications in the information sector...

18:17John Coogan:I've seen the biggest percentage increase, nearly 45 % over the past year, yeah. At the same time, the rate of information sector applicants saying they plan to hire workers has experienced the sharpest decline of any measured industry. This census data set doesn't track solo-operated businesses. but the numbers broadly show in tech and beyond that applications are flat among businesses likely to hire workers, but generally rising elsewhere, economists say that's a strong sign that solo operators are in the upswing. Wow. Yeah, that chart is really up and to the left. New business formation. This is in the information sector in particular.

18:52Tyler, update. Okay, so they basically calculate the number of solopreneurs based on how many people have like, There's special plugins or platforms that are directly for the solopreneur. So they basically use that to get a proxy of the general percentage of solo people on Stripe.

19:09John Coogan:On Stripe. Oh, they have a special flow for solopreneur. Yes. Oh, cool. So they say that they're almost certainly underestimating the number. Hey, Julian Weiser, I know him, says, Because the bar for getting started has never been lower, said Julian Weiser, who runs a San Francisco-based accelerator for solo founders working in tech. The accelerator, which offers founders seed money and mentorship in exchange for an equity stake, attracted 4 ,500 applicants for 10 slots made available in its most recent cycle. Nearly five times the number it drew when it launched last May. Now, he's been growing this a lot, but that is staggering.

19:46John Coogan:A lot of people want to be solopreneurs. Going it alone with AI can still be surprisingly expensive. Broca said he was losing money on many customers' accounts while paying to access Anthropics Cloud to run his clients' requests, that AI company, as well as others charged based on usage. He has since switched to free open source models from China. Broca says he has raised$30 million from investors and at the same time has saved millions in salary since he hasn't needed a team of software engineers. Another risk, if it's easy for one entrepreneur to launch an AI-assisted business, copying them can be easy too.

20:18John Coogan:This creates anxiety for founders like Troy Johnson, who runs an AI-assisted business alone in Orlando, Florida. Everybody has the sword, and we all have the ability to unsheathe Excalibur now. Johnston, what a great quote for the journal. I love it. He's 40. He used AI to code an app that helps people get the most out of credit card benefits. That's interesting. Pick which card you want to use because you might have multiple cards, one that's good for dining. and you build an app for that. There's been a few apps that do that. The Points guy had a whole blog around it, a whole media company around it still does.

20:56John Coogan:But interesting to sort of like, yeah, go and actually Vibecode that. A lot of those things, it's like you could probably just use the models themselves for this. Just have a thread that says, hey, these are the cards I have. Go pull all of the data. When I'm about to buy something, let me know. But at the same time, there might be some value for something new with a deeper integration somewhere. The company makes around$3 ,000 a month in profit with no employees and continuing to grow. What a run for Troy Johnson. Great story. Who loves King Arthur-related metaphors for business. What one-person businesses will mean for the labor market remains to be seen.

21:33John Coogan:Polling has shown that Americans are worried that AI will replace jobs, and top economists are wrestling with that possibility too. But AI is also creating lots of new jobs, and the go-to-loan entrepreneurs show the technology can both open doors and limit employment opportunities. If everyone's hiring less, but you get four times more firms, what does that do to head count, said Rembrandt Koenig, an associate professor at Harvard Business School who studies entrepreneurship. He co-authored a recent study that found that among 50 ,000 startups the researchers examined, those focused on AI tended to operate with 25 % fewer employees.