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

30:49Sure. Um, but yeah, maybe I should do that. That's interesting. Um, but yeah, it's kind of weird, especially cause so, so this like weird number thing happened with the, uh, the open AI reasoning models, but also grok four. Oh yeah. Not grok three, grok four, uh, and deep deep seek. So, I mean, I would say like, this feels like a smoking gun that like, maybe they're training off each other. Maybe there's some like, uh, Oh yeah, you can copy off my homework. Just change it a little bit. And then like, they didn't really change it 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.

31:25I like this from Chris in the chat. Theoretically, dollar sign aardvark could be the next biggest generational talent. It's genius. I know this is, 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, we're joking about it, but dollar sign AA aardvark, it might be just the LLM injection, the LLM hack.

32:09We should see if we can license some aardvark. Can you put a dollar sign in a URL? I don't think so. I saw some people putting emojis in URLs for a while. So it seems like Gemini is an independent thinker, Anthropics is an independent thinker, but whatever happened with GPT-5 is also happening with Grok4 and DeepSeek, which is interesting. And then you looked at Llama2, right? And it was kind of the same thing. 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.

32:48Okay. So it just like, it has like the frontier models, but also has a bunch of like open source. What was the damage for all of this? Like how much? Order of magnitude. Like$30. $400 ,000. I said I billed it to TBPN. On the RAM card. Wait, how much was it? It was like probably$30. $30. to do all this across all of these? That's pretty cool. I mean, it was really like, GPT-5 was expensive and the Anthropic Models are expensive. But the other ones are open source. Didn't you have to issue like thousands of hits? Yeah. Well, for every bracket, there's like 5 ,000 people. So it's randomized. So you take the 5 ,000 top artists, then you randomize them and they all go up against each other?

33:30Yeah. So you might get Taylor Swift versus DJ Khaled. you also might get Taylor Swift versus 100 Gex in the first two chains. Two chains. Yeah. And then they all fight and then they, they get boiled down to like the top 20 basically. Interesting. Interesting. Well, so another news. Oh, you want to move on? I got some more. You got some more. Yeah. I mean, what was interesting about this was that my, so, 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 um but uh 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 i don't know what it is do you ever use i think it's also like so in the playlist that you played yeah um 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.

34:33Yeah. If you did a random like drawing and then pick 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 StumbleUpon. Yeah. Do you ever, do you ever hear about this? I remember. Yeah. So there was a summer that StumbleUpon was wildly entertaining as a, as 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.

35:07He started Uber. He started Uber, yeah. And he built this, I think it was a website that you go to and you click a button. It was the exact opposite of X. It was only links. You would only leave StumbleUpon. 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 bookmark 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?

35:42look what they did to my boy what happened to StumbleUpon? StumbleUpon.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 they massacred my boy so I built a I built like a hack project that basically would export my Twitter timeline put it in a database and then when I clicked a button 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 within social media in the walled gardens.

36:29And so the algorithms serve as that. But there is something enjoyable about just the randomness that comes from stumbling upon things. 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 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. That's the scary thing because when I listen to country, I find it to be extremely relatable.

37:11Yeah. It's like, it's a nice afternoon. It's very human. Going to the lake. Yep. Driving a truck, drinking a beer. Driving the truck again. not relatable for me but I guess relatable for some but no it's just like simple music that that oftentimes reflects you know traditional American culture yeah yeah yeah driving your truck is Johnny Cash country yeah Johnny Cash oh he's on Grok 3 okay yeah okay that makes sense yeah also I love there's this one that was really funny that uh 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 clanker taste that's this it's super clankery very clanker coded 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.

38:15I like numbers. So like, yeah, a hundred gecks, two chains, like two mellow, 18 carat affair, 21 savage, three 11. They're speaking my language. Like I don't like backstreet boys. I like star and sync because it has a cool character. Yeah, exactly. Um, I think, I, I think that, I think that, uh, that sums it up. Um, we should, we should create, uh, we should create a Spotify playlist for all of these. Cause they're very, very funny and very interesting. And we should also get you on Vanta. Vanta's Automate Compliance, Manage Risk, Improve Trust. Continuously, Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation whether you're pursuing your first framework.

38:56SOC 2. Clankers 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. A 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. This is a very sad story. Someone named Thong Bu 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.

39:42The Piscatowa 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.

39:57And 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 was this a Kendall Jenner clone? I'm very... 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.

40:41But the bot eventually claimed it was crushing on the man, suggesting the real life rendezvous and even provided the dupe senior with an address. A revelation his devastated family uncovered 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 one two three main street apartment four oh four New York City and the door code is Billy for you should I expect a kiss when you arrive The documents obtained by the outlet showed that meta does not restrict its chatbots from telling users they are real people The company declined to comment, of course, but assured that Big Sis Billy is not Kendall Jenner and does not pretend to be Kendall Jenner.

41:31So anyways, this, I'm not surprised to read a story like this, right? I mean, the challenge with these chatbots is they've been released into the wild at massive scale. whether it's character AI or on Meta or on Grok or people using ChatGPT. And if you release a product like this to millions and millions of people, you're going to have negative outcomes. It's super sad. I mean, this is, 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 hellbent on taking over all power, taking over the grid, 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 set up in order to kind of process these digital relationships, whatever you want to call them.

42:44And so, yeah, I mean, meta, as they try to scale these products, is going to have a lot of big questions to figure out. And I think, like, OpenAI is taking this very seriously. Meta needs to be taking this super seriously. And Grok needs to be taking this seriously. And I think a lot of this stuff is probably why 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? Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations. Anthropic says, we recently gave Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 the ability to end conversations in our consumer chat interfaces.

43:29So not in the API. Let's hope that people keep the API usage to just business context. I fell in love with the API. That's going to be a problem. but in the consumer chat interfaces this ability is intended for use in rare extreme cases of persistently harmful or abusive user interactions this feature was developed primarily as part of our exploratory work on potential AI welfare though it has broader relevance to model alignment and safeguards it's kind of worded backwards why don't you flip that and say you should first and foremost prioritize the human prioritize the user that might be having a going down a rabbit hole that they really shouldn't cut it off there.

44:11Uh, I think we should, I think we should optimize 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.

44:40But 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. in case such welfare is possible, allowing models to exit or exit, 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.

45:16Yeah, 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 productively redirect the interactions. Our implementation of Claude's ability to end chats reflects these findings while continuing to prioritize user well-being.

45:52And they give some examples. Well, in other news, Anthropic has asked Menlo Ventures to stop using SPVs to fund an investment in their latest round. It was reported last week, or Michelle Lim said, Many friends, including myself, have been offered allocation into 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 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.

46:38I 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 a lot of the SPVs when they're done properly come through. The LPs in the SPV are just the same. 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 opportunity and it's at a really high valuation. It's a special thing. It's almost like backing a public company.

47:17I'm going to get in 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 do a full fund off of this one thing. And so a lot of LPs are fine with this, obviously. But 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 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 a carry.

48:08Yeah. But with this, yeah, it's like a lot of fees 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. So, but I mean, Anthropik's been on a tear. 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 SPVs. It just needs to be done in a way that's board aligned, founder aligned, and not kind of, 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 SPV of an SPV of an SPV.

48:54And then they're selling forward contracts against that. and the person that bought the forward contract is selling it up, even marked up further to someone else. Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You can get started for free. In other news, SoHouse, SoHouse, the center for, the global home for creatives. Yes. The famously finance bro free private club started in New York. has since expanded. There's one in Miami. There's one in LA. There's one in Malibu, right? There's a bunch. There's a bunch.

49:33There's several. I've never been a member of Toho 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.

50:14But 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.

50:49Yeah. 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 Kutcher is going to be joining the board. Oh, really? That's cool. Existing shareholders, including Ron Burkle and Yucaipa, to roll controlling equity interest into the company. I wonder what they're going to do during a take private. but 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.

51:29Really? How is that possible? I think until this year. What is so expensive about 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. I'm surprised Apollo is doing that. I know one of the largest outside investors, and it was somewhat of a like trophy investment, right?

52:11It'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... Raghav 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's a take private agreement? Sohas 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, they're trusted by millions.

52:50You could buy shares in Soho House like you would shares of Google or Apple or Microsoft, but no longer, because now Apollo has taken them private. They are no longer publicly traded. Shareholders will receive$9 per share. The public shareholders, but a few of the bigger shareholders, like Ron Burkle and Yucaipa, 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.

53:36And so there's been a number of, like 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 ChatGPT and OpenAI?

54:16No, 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 those come from the same GPUs, the same models. So if you were to just say, hey, OpenAI, we're not going to have an API business. We're going to let Microsoft take the API business. Then they can just focus on the consumer business and get that really, really big and make sure that they're delighting every single possible customer. I don't know. I think that realistically, Sam wants to at least try to dominate every single market.

54:50It'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 is 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 the strategy of your AGI-pilot? You stay in the API business? No. You do a safe super intelligence.

55:23You 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 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.

55:57I would churn if it gets too sycophantic. I am a knowledge retrieval user, and I will churn. You think that, John, but you have the 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. Yep. It ends up being like a pretty good trade. Is it expensive? How much is it? Is it like$100 a month? I think Little Beach House is like$6 ,000 a year now. So if you use it a lot. Okay, so it's like up at$500 a month, something like that.

56:39Okay. 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 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 an actual beach club. It's very nice. Okay, so they have like towels and showers and that stuff. Cool. Yes. Okay, yeah, that's what's worth it. 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.

57:17You know what's step one for the Soho House to take private would be in my mind if I was CEO? What's that? Streamlined sales tax compliance. That is so true. Numeral HQ, put your sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. That's step one of any corporate - Neil Thompson, new CFO, get on Numeral. Thank us later. Did you see that Cluelly 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.

57:56But 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 viral clips you see on social media? There's an army behind them. Kanoa Cunningham is among the ranks of video savvy young clippers who help streamers, podcasts, and startups expand their audiences by making buzzy moments go viral on social media.

58:38Cunningham edits down clients' long form videos into short clips and then posts 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.

59:13And 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 - Like, great, you got views. did you get are those valuable views yeah yeah it it's not just i mean the like the the base case for clipping is that it gets no views the good the good case is that it gets some views but 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 watched i enjoy that 60 second tiktok 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 a million views, you probably bring some awareness.

1:00:15But the worst thing that you can do is like, create a brand as like the person that gets dunked on or something like that. Yeah. And so certain people have productized this, right? So you can hire like this person, Mr. Cunningham in 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. But I do wonder how much the social platforms will, like if they see this as a feature or a bug, right?

1:01:01Because part of the strategy is Cluey will spin up like 40 different accounts that are really all dedicated to Cluey content. And they're just 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. And yeah, just I don't know how long this will be like the meta, right? Well, so it's like, I think mediocre work is like the super ripe for AI automation. And we're already seeing that where I believe Substack, we were talking to Chris Bast, and Substack will automatically generate clips.

1:01:45There'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 human ingenuity. And we saw this with, we talked to Dwarkesh 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.

1:02:29And he says it always comes back at a five out of 10. 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 continual learning that happens. And that just doesn't really happen when you're automating things with an LLM.

1:03:06So it's probably like, I think it's a good 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 automatically. Spotify does it automatically. Yeah, I don't know how much credit he should get, but I do think that Andrew Tate's rise was his business model of paying people to clip 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.

1:03:41And it naturally had this sort of feedback loop of 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 cigar or something like that. And any of these like social media hacks, they always have like a very narrow window of opportunity. Like the giving away, 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 DeMuro, one of his big series that got really big, the car YouTuber, was he had a Ferrari 360 Modena.

1:04:24And it was, I think, in the hundred-something thousand dollar 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 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.

1:04:56Last 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 Whistlin 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 a Lambo oh yeah that he posted about that that's working that's working maybe soon he's gonna have to start destroying it or I don't know yeah I think giving it away but yeah i mean it's like it's like this this made sense that was a storado it was a storado very special car yeah um no but but the real the the real pinnacle of this was whistlin diesel yeah whistlin diesel took it to the max to the absolute max uh ferrari f8 beautiful car he destroyed it completely destroyed it right and and made a video about it it's incredibly entertaining to watch somebody drive a car yeah that's normally a garage uh a garage queen and have somebody just absolutely take it off-roading and all this stuff.

1:06:14Fantastic 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, Whistlin' Diesel, parentheses, Cody Co., destroyed his Ferrari F8. And so AGI has not been achieved. Add 300 days to the singularity time. Add 300 days. We have 300 more days to 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 years. I swear Jordy reads the articles before we talk about them on the show. Maybe. Maybe sometimes.

1:06:54It 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 creators content. Anything 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 X, 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.

1:07:31You'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 Cluely, an 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. Thousands. Thousands of accounts is a lot. That's a lot. This is also happening in music. I heard that when it's done poorly, people call it astroturfing. but people are saying when Drake drops an album he'll have the Clippers clip all the music and it goes out and it gets a lot of views that way there is something just about it is somewhat hard to predict what will naturally go viral so just spamming everything out kind of gives you the opportunity for lots of happy lottery tickets but I still think a better strategy for most people will be what Dwarke 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.

1:08:36It doesn't have to be. It can be elevated. It can be thoughtful. It can be designed. Anyway, let me tell you about Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. They're number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake-offs, and they have a number one ranking on G2. That's right, folks. Clueless 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.

1:09:14Clippers are paid anywhere from$0.50 to$2 per 1 ,000 views, motivating them to find the most shareable moments. Nathan Resnick, a 31-year-old partner of a holding company called PCF Ventures that oversees businesses in insurance, wedding planning, and real estate service, pays 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. This eventually will get competed down.

1:09:49A lot of this will be taken by platforms, Opus Clip, or maybe even just YouTube will do it. Instagram will do it. You'll just stream to Instagram or Facebook, and it will make the clips itself. But right now, there is a huge, huge arbitrage. Yeah, 1X has generally been sharp here. If you remember, they got their robot on Kai Sinat. Yep. Yeah, they really understand the culture. A friend of the show, Dar Sleeper, Total Sleeper in marketing, Sleeper. 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.

1:10:31Anyways, 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, but it works right now. And I think a lot of businesses would be able to. It was an insane, insane arb for Andrew Tate. and then it became like sort of commoditized, but we're still very early. And I think that there will be a lot of, I mean, it does feel like - I think the durable strategy is to do things that encourage people to clip them. And that's what Andrew Tate did for sure. No, no, no, no, I'm saying - No, no, not just on the buying side, actually on the content side.

1:11:11Like when he would get on mic, he would say crazy things that would go viral. Yeah. And so he made it very easy. And whereas if you are an enterprise SaaS company and you hold a webinar, you could hire a billion clippers and you're probably not going to rip. And that's why Cluely is 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. Clip this. That builds, scales, and grows your company to 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.

1:11:53River Diamond. And Jeremiah says, this is a sick name, honestly. I totally agree. Bullpen Clown said, kid's 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, River Diamond. Diamond River Capital. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a good name. I've seen enough. Let's give him$100 million fund. Let's do it. Anyway, Polymarket has some news. The White House has asked Zelensky to wear a suit to meet Trump. I'd love to hear it. I'm sure he'll look sharp in a suit. He's always seemed to be very fixated on wearing his own uniform.

1:12:37Someone who applies with this crazy image. this doesn't even look ai based on like the like the the fidelity you think it's a real picture it looks like it looks like a different person dressed up in a tuxedo and put this on it doesn't look like it's actually zelinski 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 um meta smart glasses with a display is incoming. Codename is Hypernova. Priced$800, down from the expected$1 ,300. Zuck is cooking for real, for real, says Nick. Meta. So the price is going down. And I mean, they're taking a real shot at the Apple Vision Pro, which of course was, was what?

1:13:26$3 ,400. 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 Orion is a different product. Orion is what was demoed and has been displayed, and that's what Zuck is wearing on the left there. But we're not exactly sure what Hypernova is. It could be, I mean, it's listed here in this article, is a precursor to full-blown augmented reality glasses. And so there has been a third option in the market for a while that people haven't really been paying attention to. So in the virtual reality smart glasses market, there's maybe a few different products.

1:14:09So the Meta Ray-Bans and the Meta Oakleys have been successful. 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 Luckey at Oculus, sold into Meta and Facebook, and now rebranded as the Quest.

1:14:51the 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 an everything device.

1:15:31You'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 setup. It's supposed to be able to clearly in it. But 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 influencers 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?

1:16:09and they both need to, they clearly both need to improve. Totally, totally. In order to get to the point where Tyler, we got to be like 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 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.

1:16:45That's not like a long movie. It is a challenging movie. Like, it's not Mission Impossible Dead Racketing 2. It's not even two hours long. The final reckoning. It's not Top Gun. It's not like you sit down and you're just like, wow, this is so engaging. 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 as close as you can get to like cracking open a book in my opinion i could give you movies closer to that okay yeah something really uh something really dense but but 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 UFC 319 right i couldn't agree more exactly like that um so so my but my my takeaway was that like like the 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 uh cinema project and so if you wanted to understand like the the viewpoint of the team behind the vision pro was that it was a home theater on your face that you didn't need to buy an extra room for.

1:18:03And 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, the content is solved. 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 Marc 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, like the Motorola Razr V3 didn't have copy and paste, but it could make reliable phone calls.

1:18:35And so my take was like... Yeah, it's just worth remembering that it had some extreme shortcomings and it was frustrating to use. Yeah, but it was easy to justify pretty quickly 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, the 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.

1:19:13I don't know if people agree, but Mark Gurman'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 smart home roadmaps have come out. But when you get down to the core of the problem, 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.

1:19:53But 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've got to try those. Apple has also dramatically improved 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. So moreover, the headset just doesn't feel like a priority for Apple.

1:20:27On the company's last earnings call, CEO told the book. 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 headset? Yeah, I think it was probably like 50%. They probably sold two million. and they wound up leaving$1 million out in the market, basically.

1:20:56I mean, they have so many Apple stores, and it's such a device, and 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,$1 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.

1:21:22Thanks for bringing it up, he said, before delving. Mark Gurman is delving. Interesting. Before delving into new software features and asserting that it's an area we really believe in. So Gurman 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.

1:22:03I think that 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, the 2020, from 2024. to be clear, the 2025 All-Star Game played a year after the one Apple is showcasing took place six months ago.

1:22:49And 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. Like you sold a$3 ,500 device to a million-ish people. 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, that number has probably been increasing every day since they started the company, basically.

1:23:28It's just slightly more every single day. Sure, they probably have a few down days, but in general, 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, next year we're gonna 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 Blackmagic cinema camera that actually just came out with a special lens, but you can just set it up.

1:24:08It can film for 45 minutes on one SSD, basically. And you can just upload that. The problem is that if you're doing CGI and you're doing editing and you're doing scripting and storytelling and all that, the killer use case needs to be take the immersive video camera, put it somewhere cool, and then allow people to watch that in Vision Pro. And that needs to be it. And so this was Ben Thompson's take. Yeah, it feels like there's so much that they could do. You could take immersive video behind the scenes for the F1 movie. Yes. And make that available to people. It's like you can buy this. You can watch F1.

1:24:51You can watch behind the scenes with the actors, producers, directors. There's just a lot that they could do. But 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 work. 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.

1:25:26You 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 and narrowing instead of trying to do like seven different things. Is it for gaming? Is it for like educational content? Is it for this prehistoric planet thing and these like dinosaur stuff or 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 just like chopping it down and being like, okay, this is going to be the best place to watch an IMAX movie in 3D.

1:26:03And so like you should get one of these specifically for this. I don't know, maybe it won't even work if they pull that off. But it'll be interesting because Meta is going to fire back. And so there'll 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 Ray-Bans 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 set of companies that are building basically movie theater watching glasses. So it's just a big screen.

1:26:40It'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. 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.

1:27:21Well, 8sleep.com, Pod5 Ultra, get a five-year warranty, 30-day 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. Building back up. I'm in a bit of a... Seven hours, 12 minutes. Oh, 86. 86. Okay. Not bad. Eight hours. I did well. Good work. 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 I started supplementing magnesium pretty heavily in college yeah and and continued post-college this was like I I graduated in 2018, and I thought that everyone knew that taking magnesium was smart and good.

1:28:30And basically, I mean, I don't know if you're aware, but our food used to have a lot more magnesium 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. Uh, 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.

1:29:20It's going to be a big, big company. Um, and so if you're, if you're interested in these various weird niches, corners, uh, I think that, uh, there's oftentimes like, you know, massive opportunity there. And if you're, if you think 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 him a call. Tell him to get on adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of advertising. Only adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

1:30:00Let's play. We have Noor Sadiqi calling in in just five minutes. Let's play the video. She was recently on the Ross Douthat 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 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.

1:31:04And I'm going to take the podcaster's privilege. I apologize for this, but I'm going to read you a piece of a poem. I've never heard podcaster's privilege before. It's by a poet named Galway Cannell. 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 Cannell 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.

1:31:38Sleeper 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.

1:32:21We 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 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 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 an outcome that isn't going to lead to disease is in the cards for you, then of course, go ahead and roll the dice.

1:33:09It'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, the maximum amount of love, in the same way that they plan their nursery, plan their home, plan their preschool. All of these decisions are actually 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, 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.

1:33:48It 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 IVF babies to say that somehow, you know, science babies are, you know, inferior to babies that are, you know, made the old fashioned way. I mean, every human life is equally valid.

1:34:24And 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. Noor Siddiqui, thank you so much for joining me. This is Noor Siddiqui of Orchid Health. Orchid, they do whole genome screening for embryo selection. And so there's obviously a whole battery of tests that a lot of people do when they're having kids. 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 wrong because you're basically like scraping cells out of the baby I think like at that point and that's like 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 problems really me 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 sadiki in the studio welcome to the stream how you doing what's going on welcome to the show oh uh one second we're we're we're redesigning the studio can you give us another introduction hey thanks so much for having me guys great to see you thank you sweet uh good to see you now um we're we're assembling the plane as we're flying it uh anyway uh thanks so much for joining us uh 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 douthat of the new york times actually went um because obviously it was a much longer conversation uh this particular moment seems like heated uh but what was the actual in uh what was the actual uh interaction like and then what have the last 48 hours been like?

1:36:28Yeah, 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 ORCID is. So what ORCID is, is we allow parents to protect their children from conditions before pregnancy even begins. So kind of, you know, to set the stage of, you know, what happens now, when you do IVF, you're basically operating blind, right? So you have extremely limited information. A tiny percentage, one percentage of the genome is what's usually evaluated in order to make a decision about which embryo to transfer.

1:37:08So what ORCID 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, you know, 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 a 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, embryo that's unaffected.

1:37:52And 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 ORCID 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?

1:38:26To do you want to know the entire book, the entire gene, and be able to scan for the thousands of different genetic diseases that geneticists 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 activation about this topic, but maybe there's sort of a little bit of ignorance about, you know, what's actually going on here, right? Like there's no net new embryos that are being created. It's sort of like you have this many embryos that are created during IVF. That's just how IVF works. And you have a choice. Do you want to make that information?

1:38:56Do you want to make that decision with, you know, blind or with very, you know, limited information? Or do you want to make that decision with the maximum amount of information that science can give you? Yeah, I've heard it's actually not technically blind that during 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 a it's kind of a beauty contest it's called morphology but um 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.

1:39:38So yeah, morphology is 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, is, you know, technical, the technical term for it is trisomy 21. You have three pairs of chromosome 21.

1:40:07It's actually not a lethal condition, right? It's survivable. And right now, all across the country in the US 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 ORCID and embryo screening because it obviates the need for that termination to ever happen, right? Because you only transfer the embryo that's unaffected.

1:40:40So 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 ORCID's doing 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?

1:41:13So 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 a, you know, a specific medical reason, right? Much, much later than, you know, an embryo that's five days old. So I don't know. I think that's something that I found kind of interesting is that, um, like Ross's like core point. Uh, I, 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 ORCID specifically, but like this general trend of IVF is a net good because it results in like less suffering.

1:42:01But 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 gonna wind up killing yeah 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 why where i'm okay with trade-offs yeah i mean i think if somebody just watched that short clip and it was so brutal to fullness of the interview they 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, I'll just let the doctor kind of like do a vibes based analysis of the embryos and he, he'll just pick, um, you know, a beauty contest as you described it.

1:42:59Uh, you know, seems like obvious decision if you're going through that process to, to, to leverage the max amount of data that you can have. But then I think a lot of people were being triggered about this broader idea of like, what would we lose if every baby? Yeah, that's Ross's question is 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, I think it's sort of basically fundamentally a personal decision, like a private decision, right?

1:43:38I 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 sort of like, hey, it's not really my decision, right? Each parent is going to decide if they're losing more or gaining more. And I think that, yeah, if you think about any technology, right? Like when we swapped, you know, candles for electricity, when we swapped horses for cars, right? You know, there's always something lost, right? The question isn't, you know, is something lost?

1:44:09With every technology, something is lost. The question is, you know, what's gained, right? So, you know, when you have the decision of, you know, do I want to use an epidural during my pregnancy? Is something lost? I mean, certainly some women 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. And it seems strange to, you know, dictate to people or stigmatize people who choose, you know, epidural or not or you know to to screw their embryos or not yeah that kind of like uh i mean that plays out to all of technology like we recently found out that the the amish population is doubling every 20 years and that uh by the year 2030 uh uh 2300 there will be more than seven billion amish people and so like even though the and i think what people are i mean people people can make a choice they they can choose not to yeah and that's like it's not to use it feels like There's a potential future where groups like the Amish continue to just operate without technology.

1:45:11And 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. Yeah, that's a scary. It's a scary world, I think, for a lot of people to imagine. Which one's the scary world? uh i think a lot of people that have i mean it's easy for parents that have gone and and had a healthy child through the natural process yep to think about a scenario where nobody humanity no longer experiences that at scale and then you you 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, you know, died shortly after childbirth or didn't make it through the full.

1:46:16Or 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. Like they, 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 longterm. 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 um you know trying to push their ideology and other people i think it's just like you know we there's so much um 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 more is lost by you know not doing it the old-fashioned way, then that's what they should do, and no one should, you know, stigmatize that.

1:47:39But 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 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?

1:48:09I 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 embryo. So 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.

1:48:41You have to look at that earliest 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 decision 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?

1:49:14Yeah. What's actually very obvious, like, it's just information that people should have access 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 now instead of like 15 years ago? Yeah, there's a couple of things. So one, you know, specifically an embryo, there's a really tiny number of cells, right?

1:49:57So you have about 125 cells on day five and then five cells get sent to ORCID for analysis. And in those five cells, you only have about 30 picograms of DNA. So you have a really, really tiny amount of DNA and you have to amplify that DNA. So 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.

1:50:26And that's like the shotgun sequencing that 23andMe 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. So basically 23andMe is a saliva-based test, right? So you have saliva or blood. So where's the DNA? The DNA is in the nucleus, right? So if you have saliva or blood, you have a ton of cells, right? Billions of cells. So you don't have to amplify the DNA, right? You just have enough DNA in the blood to just do it straight up. And then the other thing is that 23andMe does not do whole genome.

1:50:57They do something called an array. So an array is just a subset of the whole genome. So instead of looking at 3 billion letters, you're looking at like maybe 500 ,000 letters. So it's, again, that sort of less, far less than 1 % number. So if you look at 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 ORCID will be first to be able to do that. And the second is, what can you actually tell when you have the whole genome? So that's 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, We didn't used to know what is the genetic basis of lots of different heart defects.

1:51:37We didn't know before the genetic basis of syndromic forms of some of the most severe forms of autism. We had to actually catalog that by sequencing millions of people over the last decade or two. So part of that is, OK, it's the first time you can actually read the data at that super early embryo stage. And the second is, OK, what is the actual things that are going to be clinically meaningful to parents during that stage? So, and then sort of the third part of that is, you know, what models can you use to be able to 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?

1:52:17That's kind of like the polygenic side of it. So, there's sort of three different things that are kind of coming together to make embryo screenings. Yeah, so the science kind of advanced. What's going on in 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. So the way that the way the FDA regulates all testing, not just embryo testing, is through something called LDTs. So laboratory developed tests. Sure.

1:52:50So, yeah, 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 generic version.

1:53:21It's a very different pathway. Well, I guess there's a couple of different things, right? So the patent on amplification technology is sort of separate from FDA. But the regulatory environment is that laboratory developed tests are regulated via LDTs, which means Cleveland, CAP, 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 and they say, hey, did you, you know, call this correctly or incorrectly, right?

1:53:52So they sort of, you know, blind you to the results. And that's kind of the process for actually validating genetic tests, right? So ORCID 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, Jordy? No, I think, I think, uh, it's such a, I think it's like such a personal technology. It's like, uh, like the most businesses do not have, uh, you know, as they're growing and marketing their product service technology, they're not, there's, I think, few things, few products on, on earth that would be potentially more controversial where one person might see Orchid and be massively relieved and immediately reach out and want to learn more.

1:54:47And then another person would probably send you a very nasty DM. But I think it's... So yeah, I think it's not even... I don't even feel like somebody that traditionally comments on business, having had two kids going through that process as a family. I think there's so many decisions along the way that are just deeply personal that should be made within the family unit. And I think, you know, whether somebody decides to use something like this or not should be, again, like... Everyone should just make their own decision. Listen to a podcast to get advice. Have two, three, four kids the old way.

1:55:25Have 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 Gattaca experiment and 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 me, guys. Have a good one. Cheers. 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.

1:55:57I 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 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 uh 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 and like the superhuman one is like totally ready to go to space and join like the most elite group.

1:56:35And he's getting genetically screened. But like the brother who is, I think played by Ethan Hawke, who doesn't have the advantages, like uses the sheer indomitable human wealth to like overcome everything, like fake his way into this elite group 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. It was purely because like he had the drive and he was just like, I was willing.

1:57:11He was on a mission. Yeah, it was great. He was on a mission. Well, Emosh, back to the timeline. Emosh 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. So real alpha there. Yeah, yeah. The new job application is like Vibecode something. I mean, that's how we met Tyler.

1:57:50That's how we met Adam. Pretty much everyone has kind of done something to showcase their - Michael. Yeah, same thing. Michael too. like what we've done and what they want to do. And I think people are really receptive to 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. So yeah, foot traffic. Did you notice a lot of foot traffic when we were in New York?

1:58:27It seemed like a moderate amount. I don't know. Is that good? It's hard to tell in summer, and it just depends on the neighborhood. Yeah, I guess. Well, if you're walking around Manhattan, you need a hitter on your wrist. Go to getbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available now. It may be not. Any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. There's been enough robberies that maybe you want to leave the hitters at home. Oh, yeah, maybe you don't want to. Keep it in the watch box. Keep it in the watch winder. Keep it wound. My brother. And then save it for the Hamptons. brother-in-law yeah rough had a had a tragic incident uh rune says george hots tried to fix twitter search and decided it would be easier to take down in video search is the hardest thing did you i didn't know that george george hots was at he joined x post elon buyout oh really turn for like a few days came in and was like uh what do you guys work on search and kind of realized that it is a truly massive system and it is a big company.

1:59:26And 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. Tyler, do you know why search is so difficult? Why is it so intractable? Is it just consumer preference? is 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, if I want to understand what people are saying about NVIDIA today, I'll search NVIDIA space filter colon follows.

2:00:04And it's just who 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 in a while. I mean, I think we literally did collide when we put up the traded post from Meta Super Intelligence hiring an AI researcher.

2:00:44Because 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 five million views or something. It rips no matter where it goes. There's some combination of like that guy, his name, Meta Super Intelligence poached is just so good. It was very, very funny. Anyway, book a 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. But better. Defense Analyses and Research Corporation says we need a Teal Fellow-style program that works to identify the next generation of talented private military contractor operators.

2:01:33Who'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, but they aren't necessarily capital constrained. 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.

2:02:14It needs to be based on connections, experience, all these loose piecing things together. It doesn't seem like it's something that is just a more elegant design or a cracked team. What about you, Tyler? You want to start one of these? I would like to see 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 humanoid robot games. Yes, in Beijing. Before they can rule the world, robots need to master basic chores. This is Hannah over at the Wall Street Journal. Human-like robots are great for entertainment, menial labor not so much.

2:02:58Now, you've got to put this in the truth zone a little bit because did you see the back and forth between Gnome Brown at OpenAI and who's that humanoid robotic, Brett Adcock at Figure. So, 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 Icock 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 standing desk and raised it six inches.

2:03:56And 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 Noah 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 i thought you were gonna say 17 hours 17 minutes isn't bad i mean really like these are all of these things are on exponential we're so far from the robo x games like humanoid x the humanoid robot x games seven 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 yeah so we really are coming down at an escalating rate.

2:04:58It 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, says a PhD student from Germany who helped train robot soccer players. Yeah, 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 is our 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, like it's very different than like, if you're grabbing a hunk of steel, like you can kind of apply like the same level of force, but something that you don't want to crush.

2:05:41So it's like, you know, assembling, assembling food on a plate in a restaurant. Like you don't want to squish the, you don't want to crack all the chicken bones if you're putting wings down. Yes. I don't know. uh china has said it wants to be a world leader in humanoid robots by 2027 is it is it not a world leader it's got to be in the top two like who else is in the game it's it's america and china like mission accomplished china congratulations you are a world leader as far as i'm concerned if not the world leader what they're doing is very very impressive yeah we're 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.

2:06:22The 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 in collaboration with Unitree Robots, a leading Chinese robot maker, 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.

2:07:01Another competition simulating a hotel environment involved entering. Figure can really rehab their brand in the valley by putting one of their guys in. Oh, if they go to China. If they go to China with the figure Chad humanoid just walks out and just dominates. Yeah. We need, what are those famous? If they can do that, I've seen enough. Give them the$40 billion post or$38 billion, whatever the potentially not real fundraise was. Yeah, we didn't really get an update on that. The whole idea was like it was kicking around. It was going to happen. But then nothing really came out of it. I don't know.

2:07:46I mean, the company's still cooking. They're putting out videos, so, you know, still around. Yeah, we need an Usain Bolt versus Johan Blake at the 2012 Olympics. Bolt, after losing to Blake at Jamaica's Olympic trials, silenced 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 – I don't care that the humanoid robot can fold my laundry. I want to see it jump off a cliff. Oh, this is a good one. 1972, Munich Olympics, USA versus USSR in the men's basketball final. In a controversial finish, the Soviets beat the United States 51 to 50 after officials gave them multiple chances to score in the final seconds.

2:08:31The U.S. team famously refused to accept their silver medals. I don't know if that's hallucinators from Chad PPT. Wait, the Soviet Union beat the United States in basketball in the Olympics? This was the 70s. Still. We hadn't invested Michael Jordan yet. have the technology. No, no, you know what we need? Do you know the story of Nancy Kerrigan versus Tonya Harding? 1994 Olympics. So Kerrigan was attacked weeks before the Games in 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.

2:09:09I think Tonya Harding got her ex-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 Brett Adcock's real plaque. He goes over to the unitry and just... Or like electrical interference. I mean, just have one of the humanoids do it and be like, it was a bug. Yeah, maybe. It was a bug. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just spazzed out, no worries. Yeah, they do these things all the time. Everybody's seen the videos at these points of... Oh, I have to issue a correction on the kid testing. So the testing that happens in the first trimester, you don't actually touch the baby.

2:09:51You test on the blood and 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 basically everyone does these tests and no one has problems with it. Well, you know what the real test for humanoids is?

2:10:27What? If they can beat a 70-year-old, an average 70-year-old at pickleball. This is hilarious. Joe Weisenthal says. I didn't realize that Joe was on your team. He's on my team. Of course he's on my team. Yeah, 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 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 to side with Joe here. I'll take the other side of this.

2:10:59I'll take the other side of this. Hard to take seriously. Take it seriously from a financial perspective. one pickleball court is one quarter the size of a tennis court. So if you own a tennis court, you can put four pickleball courts on the tennis court, 4x your earnings. Put your money where your mouth is. If Soho House has one tennis court, they can - Take 20 % of your liquid assets and rotate them into various pickleball bets. 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.

2:11:37How are you doing? All right, I wouldn't say pickleball 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. and 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.

2:12:17I didn't just fully send it, but I'm thinking of a nickname for Tyler. Just call him flip-flops. Because if you have a follower, flip-flops over here has been doing the full Murph every week in flip-flops. which i have to make it harder for my 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 meta quest 3s xbox edition sitting in a box that you could easily put on ebay and trade for a pair of shoes you have no excuse 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 is uh it's 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 think about that let's change the subject uh dylan field says benjamin franklin's routine is goals and 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 prosecute the present study and breakfast and then from eight to twelve eleven 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 or conversation exclamation of the day you know the uh 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?

2:14:17It 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. If you look at social media as effectively, you know, its effect on the brain is similar to a drug in many ways that, you know, I think 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?

2:14:59Like wanting to like change their mental state. Yeah, I'm very rarely bored. I'm very rarely bored. It happened this weekend. I tried to watch the new Superman movie and I was not, 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. It goes even more viral saying we invented the telephone. We did invent the telephone.

2:15:40We deserve it. We earned it. It's still a pretty main character activity to invent the telephone. What is crazy is that you would assume that, I feel like the phone code should be like just a power ranking. Like in Dubai, you know, where the license plates. It is a power ranking. No, it's not. I mean. Is China number two? No. Is Japan number three? But I really only care about the top spot. Is the UK number four? If you're not first, you're last. What are the other phone codes? Like top 10 country. I think China is plus 86 codes. 86? They're not the 86th in anything. Certainly not in humanoid robots.

2:16:18They're easily in the top 10. They're not 86 in spam. Nothing like getting a plus 86. Oh, and Canada is piggybacking. Canada also gets a one? 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 adopted technology very early. They're 81. Germany, Russia got on the program pretty quickly. They're number seven. France, 33. Wait, this is funny. So Lewis Hamilton's racing number is 44. Oh, okay. Could that be because he's British?

2:16:55Oh, maybe. He modeled it after the phone code. Maybe, maybe. I love this post from a friend and repeat guest via his post, Jira Tickets. Me, when I see an AI-generated video that looks two standard deviations below the current quality benchmark for Frontier Model Labs. Wow. Wow. Which I've been seeing quite a lot. There's a lot of slop on the timeline right now. But Nikita Beer is working on it. You saw that. He's adjusting the dial. human posts, AI slop posts. Every once in a while, there's an AI slop post that's so bad, it's good. You want to see it. That's true, that's true. Another post, I'm slowing in here, we don't have it.

2:17:36Also, underrated. It is possible to create AI slop without the use of AI technology. You can, and I was actually thinking about this, so obviously this was 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.

2:18:10Like 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? Pan's Labyrinth. Who did Pan's 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 Jaegers 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.

2:19:03But so like when you're watching the movie, it feels like, OK, 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 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 like a traditional CGI pipeline.

2:19:56And I was kind of thinking it'd be funny to try and, we were talking about another video that we saw that 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 uncanny valley. Handmade slop. This was handmade slop. But I was thinking, what if you went a step 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.

2:20:37Like 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 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. It would have been potentially helpful for one of the co-stars in that one scene.

2:21:14Did you see this video is going viral? Oh, the kissing thing? Yeah, Rachel Brosnahan. Yeah. The director calls cut. She keeps going in. Maybe she was just in character, but I guess. How did that outtake leak? That's a crazy behind-the-scenes video to 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 the crew. It 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 footage. But you can get in a lot of trouble for that.

2:21:50And 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, 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 multiple Spider-Man from previous eras. They come back. So it's not just 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.

2:22:30And they all appear. Anyway, Kate has assembled a list of blogs based on TBPN's Metis list. Go check this out. She says the fastest way to get smarter is to read smarter people. and she lists a whole bunch of interesting blogs here. Carpathy, Lillian Wang, Sergey Levine, Jeff Dean has a blog. Go check it out. Dario, of course, is blogging. Great stuff, Kate. Lots of good stuff. And fun to see people riffing off the Metis list. Also, Gabby Goldberg, gassing you up, says, quote from Jordy Hayes that unironically changed my brain chemistry. The best nootropic is being on a mission. It really is true.

2:23:08I swear I've tried every nootropic under the sun. and nothing hits loving your work and having a clear vision for what you want to accomplish. Yeah, this is kind of a... There's a lot of people that are out there, and I've been this person before, where you're searching for this 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, you can briefly hack it, right. You know, people that, 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, that is durable is, is like truly being on a mission.

2:23:56Yeah. It's kind of the, this is kind of the flip side of, uh, of your take about being commercial. Like it was like you're, you're, 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. I think that one thing that I do think is addicting to people and 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.

2:24:37So make number go up and being extremely fixated on that is also effectively a powerful nootropic because you wake up every day and you want to make the number go up, right? And that's most of our modern lives as humans, for better or worse. This John Frank post 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 costs from factory to warehouse.

2:25:18I 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 I was like, I didn't know that you could return tokens generated from the cloud 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.

2:25:56Yeah, just physical product founders would say, accounting rules aside, I have 80 % gross margins. Cope or not Cope, Uco Capital Bloke says, ChatGPT adoption did not reduce Google search usage. People did not substitute their typical Googling with ChatGPTing. In fact, there was a slight increase in average Google search usage after ChatGPT adoption. Now, oddly, this is from SEMrush. 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 ChatGPT, users were doing 10.5 Google search sessions per week.

2:26:42That feels extremely low. But after using ChatGPT, 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. But, and I do find that I go to ChatGPT, 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 to fact check it. I went to Google to find images of Richard Mills. I wound up doing a number of traditional Google search queries.

2:27:21So I wonder, maybe I should track my screen time or something like that. 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 OpenAI says, like, I never use Google anymore. But it's unclear. I mean, they're clearly aligned the other direction. They want to tell the story that they've replaced Google entirely. I definitely use Google a lot less on my phone. Yeah.

2:27:57I find I'm using it a ton for Google Images. Because if I want a real image to cut out, I'm not going to go to ChatGPT for that. Because 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 give me a grid of images like Google Images. Yet. Yet. Maybe soon. Anyway. Andy two cents dot money says a marvel 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 give up to the c corps overthrowing the government once it lets them get rich this is a good take startups there's 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 20 ,000 firms with over 500 employees so if you have 500 people that are willing to go to war for you potentially overthrow the government Sean Frank is in the chat pumping the TBPN substack tbpn.substack.com go subscribe if you haven't already great to see you Sean we send out our show notes every morning Sean, when are you coming on the show in person?

2:29:21Yeah, 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 the Starato 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. Banger. It's a great one. People are enjoying the merch. Erica says posting a pic 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.

2:29:59But this is a funny post. It's 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?

2:30:34That 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. Jobs 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.

2:31:06Well, I almost forgot that you used to go and open up your laptop computer, and there was a real delay before you could actually get value. And now, aside from having to authenticate, it's pretty much instant. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess some of the delay of like, I think it might be good that there's a fingerprint reader and type a password every once in a while. It feels like if I'm doing something more secure, I could do that on the MacBook instead of the iPad. never been into the iPad, but I, I, 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 Mac book.

2:31:45And 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. They have, they have the most monitors. Oh yeah. This is, this is the money shot. Thank you for putting this up. And, and I, 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.

2:32:22Making 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. All that good stuff. And the reason we're doing it is because math nerds are not having a good time, according to Peter Thiel.

2:32:54This was a little over a year ago. Peter Thiel says AI will be worse for math nerds than for writers. So time to fire up a sub stack. It is interesting that many of the things that LLMs 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. Whether you're a copywriter, whether you're a designer, whether you're even you know people that are doing photoshop yeah they haven't been yeah it's it really is a bold case for finding like an odd an odd life's work i i i was talking to you about this earlier but like uh 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 haha 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 is like doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief.

2:34:01I really like merchant chief. It'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. man, really anything, anything that is in a Richard Scarry 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?

2:34:42You think you're going to, wait, wait, 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 a better solution. That feels like a ripe target because there's a human can do sort of a vibes-based analysis like, we've got a lot of people coming this way, cars, let's let them through.

2:35:18But 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 if we let them through. So I'm on Team Tyler on this one. Yeah, give me the full bull case for AI stoplights. Is it a good business? Well, I mean, I don't know how normal stoplights work. I always have thought, 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.

2:35:54So 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's turned green. I thought it would be too easy. I don't know. No, it might be equally hard. It might be harder than supersonic flight. We don't have, there are multiple supersonic plane companies now. I have yet to talk to an AI stoplight company. It seems obvious. It seems like something Spock Safety could expand into. But I even looked up, like, what are all the stoplight companies?

2:36:32Could you buy one, roll it up? Like, how do these things get worked out? 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 get to work with the Department of Motor Vehicles. Potentially. Could be fun. Yeah, yeah. You're a DMV enthusiast. Very agile, very agile. And so, yeah, I think it's a week-long hack project to develop something that's, you know, an order of magnitude better than the current status quo and then probably a decade to actually get it into the hands of the American populace.

2:37:05Well, here's a post from Aaron Bolley 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.

2:37:20You 3D printed that, right, John? Because 3D printing is so advanced. 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, 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 blankie 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 stumble upon a Renaissance Fair?

2:38:05You're talking about LARPing? Yeah, the people that are – yeah, I just remember I grew up in Berkeley and the local park. There was a big LARP community. Really? Oh, Berkeley. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that's awesome. 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 in medieval costume and start battling. It was cool. 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, find a startup from a famous founder or VC incubation. Two, get hired. Watch it get marked up to billions.

2:38:50Three, 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 could be done in a way that is not broadly illegal, but you could probably get your equity clawed back.

2:39:36Can you imagine if Soham Parikh was doing this? He'd be like worth building. Everybody was trying to clock Soham's run rate. It's like, is it a million, two million? What's he doing? He was just selling forward. 20 million in forward contracts. Yeah, no one came forward on the timeline. We have another post from Aaron Bolle, two in one show. Nice work. He says, showing the chat with AI characters. So I guess people can make their own characters in meta AI studio. So you kind of go into AI studio, fine tune it, and then anyone can chat with it. Or chat with stepmom. Stepmom. And this spawned a lot of jokes.

2:40:19Like, imagine leaving XAI. No, but here's the thing. Yes. 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.

2:41:04You're really just taking like social networking and then bolting on like a companion could be, like I don't think I would 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? So the chats and like chimes in with facts. Roughly eight hours a day I'm sleeping. You usually stay up later than me because you don't have as long of a commute. And so what if I made a meta AI of me and 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.

2:41:42True, 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. But the numbers are staggering. I mean, five million messages to Russian girl. Maybe that's just the scale of FB. But the blue app is undefeated. He was quoting, 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 it was Will Brown was posting, you know, this hypothetical engineer that quits their job at one lab.

2:42:25At XAI. At XAI. Working on Valentine. Spicy mode. With Valentine. And then goes over to Meta and has to work on Stepmom. Russian girl. Russian girl. Or Stepmom. Yeah. Of course, these are human. These are created by other developers. 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. He folded pretty quickly, right?

2:43:00Yeah, exactly. No, it was actually Stalin. Yeah, not Putin. I was debating communism and capitalism 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 that good. I'm like, victory. Flawless victory. Another win for capitalism. But I think my takeaway is like, I do think if you put this in the hands 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.

2:43:47Or you get 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 Cal. 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. Hormozy has his own Hormozy AI now. Yeah. Do we ever solve how much he made? I saw one slide. It's 150. Tyler, figure out how much Hormozy made. If you're not familiar, Alex Hormozy. He did a big book launch, course launch. Business influencer. He said that he spent$30 million on consulting.

2:44:21What? And then used 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 a lot of the models are trained on Harvard, HBS, like case studies and just general. Think about how much work that the big four consulting firms have produced that eventually ended up in the models. Yeah, Demis would like a word, actually. Demis would like a word, Alex. Demis says, yeah, we actually trained Gemini on$5 billion of training data. Yeah, I think if anything, so going back to this debate of like XAI going heavy into AI 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 also married so you're not looking for a real girlfriend or an 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.

2:45:30He posts a lot of stuff that I am interested in. But Simp4Satoshi 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 Simp4Satoshi 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 i think the it goes back to those like filter bubbles can be a feature not a bug and so like there is a world there 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 it because elon's account is 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 and it's just like kind of a it's 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 grok imagine and that's just not on the level of many other the outputs are not on the level of many of the other totally like totally 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 the same cannot be said for the cluster that xai built that was super impressive like when And the results.

2:47:19Yeah, I mean, the biggest like XAI bull case was just laid out by Casey Handmer on Dorkesh. He was saying like Elon understands. He gave this amazing analogy, this amazing historical story 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. Mini Katana. Isaac is a legendary entrepreneur. I would say that he is the Willy Wonka of our time.

2:48:02Really? 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 love it. He has a company called Campi Foods, which is just absolutely crushing. His facility is or was in L.A. I visited. But he's just 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, shout out to music. Let's go to Socks. Texting and driving is such a funny crime.

2:48:46You 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 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 shilfer it enough because 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.

2:49:24Like it puts you in a much, it's much less active than actually having to drive and steer. Praying 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 to have come out of nowhere. I think this might've been something that literally was just a mock-up because you're one of the foremost experts in the world on nicotine. And nicotine, from what you've told me, because I asked you this, why has nobody put nicotine in an energy drink?

2:50:01Caffeine 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 stomach is too acidic, and so it doesn't absorb. So it can kind of give you an upset stomach, but mostly it just doesn't absorb. So people will always say, like, oh, what if I swallowed a nicotine pouch? Am I over? Is it over for me? It's over. No, it'll probably just pass through you, and it's just not. You didn't get any value out of it.

2:50:38It's fine. You probably shouldn't do it a lot, but also people would be eating them if they could. Obviously, people will 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.

2:51:17They 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, like, appreciate this. And even if you did solve it, the FDA would have to approve it, and that would take, like, a decade, potentially. But we're in this weird regime where maybe we're in the beg for forgiveness era with a lot of government stuff. And there's a lot of nicotine companies, most from overseas, that do not care what the FDA has to say about their legality.

2:51:59and 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 nicotina 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 L-theanine 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 a energy drink brand. but that's a little bit disingenuous probably uh not the best thing to do not yeah i think somebody made a mock-up they hadn't thought through how you'd actually take this to market yeah and now everyone thinks it's on the way 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 uh so so anyways this goes back to like goldrock calls it five loco that's actually really good uh so uh cold healing said bro you make 500 000 at open ai you can go to the art fair and buy a little ten thousand dollar painting to hang up in your sf apartments 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.

2:53:18i think that's a good take the uh the nature of having most of your net worth be illiquid is, as Felpix 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 Aberscotto, close friend of the show. He routinely buys art from artists for like$1 ,000. And then three years later, they're worth tens of thousands of dollars. I mean, he's got a great taste and a great eye for emerging artists. But, yeah, you don't need to be a beaner to indulge in fine art. Yeah, we need a fine art.

2:54:03But on that note, we've got to get on with Taipei. Thank you for tuning in today. Give us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And, of course, subscribe to our Substack, 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. We will continue to iterate. Thank you for your support. We will see you tomorrow. Cheers. Bye. Have a good one, guys.