#670: The Random Show with Kevin Rose — The $1M Bitcoin Bet, Japanophilia, Rare IPAs, Preventing Hangovers, AI Companions, Fringe Discords, Affordable Luxuries, High-Fidelity Audio, and Much More

25:26Now, I have not tried it. This was introduced to me by a friend who swears by it and said he was about to stop drinking, which might have been a good thing. But he didn't because he started using this product called Z-Biotics. Z-Biotics is pre-alcohol probiotic drink. And there are these, I keep hiccuping like the stork from the Saturday morning cartoons after my like five sips of beer. All right. So 12 bottles of this. And the basic selling point is that you are consuming a prebiotic. And I'm going to bring up the exact prebiotics. I would love to get some scientific input from people who can assess this or who have tried it.

26:08Here is the selling point in the pamphlet. So the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. I mean, first, world's first is always a strong statement. So I'd be curious to hear if anybody can verify, but built by PhD microbiologists, Z-Biotics is the only product that actively breaks down acetylaldehyde. Nope. I added an A. I knew I was going to do it, Daria. Acetylaldehyde. I'm just saying it really quickly. Acetylaldehyde. acetaldehyde. I'm going to check one of these while we're talking. In any case, means when you drink booze, it is intended to help you metabolize or neutralize at least some of the things that will cause you to feel terrible.

26:44So this is back to the pamphlet. We started with a natural probiotic, which humans have been eating for centuries. Then we altered its DNA to produce an enzyme that breaks down the aforementioned word that I shall not repeat. This enzyme is just like the one your liver uses, but our prebiotic is designed to deliver it to your gut, a place where your liver can access and where you need it most. So that last paragraph is where I'd love to have people help me understand if there's any credible science to back this up. I went on PubMed, I looked at some of the studies related to the actual strain of probiotic, which is bacillus, either sutilis or subtilis.

27:19So it's either bacillus, sutilis, or subtilis, and that is spelled B-A-C-I-L-L-U-S space S-U-B-T-I-L-L-I-S ZB183. The reason I mentioned that is when I looked it up, the study seemed to show that it could mitigate some liver damage with excessive alcohol consumption and so on. But I didn't see much on the gut. Most of the studies seem to be in different strains of animals and insects, like silkworms of all things, I think were included. So who knows how that transfers? So we'd love to know what people think. What does your buddy say? Is it like preventing hangovers? He said that this has completely changed his life from the perspective of hangovers.

28:03But changed it in one way? Like is he waking up? He wakes up without the type of hangover and costs that have come with drinking prior. It's like credit cards. Yes. It doesn't charge as much. So other people might bring up something like activated charcoal. I would be curious to hear if you found anything helpful. You have more mileage than I do with drinking booze. I love this episode. You're like, hey, you like fancy rich shit. Tell me some of the stuff commoners can use when we first get started. Dude, you do more rich shit than I do. Oh, what? Oh, you're going to cut that. You'd lose that one.

28:43All right. Yeah, you like to drink a lot. Tell me more, Kevin. Alcoholic. you have a broader spectrum of expertise. Oh, thank you. When it comes to, Oh, well now that you put it that way. Yeah. When it comes to training in the dark arts of alcohol consumption. So Tim, thank you for mentioning that. I did get my PhD. Now I would say that I did try this at a party about four or five months ago. And I think you had made a joke before the show started where like it's something about car accidents and a helmet it's like if you're going to drive fast enough no what i said was there's a point at which it doesn't really help when you're like band-aids are great if you cut your finger like you want band-aids right but if you just like chop your finger off right that's been my problem is i've every time i'm trying one of these i've chopped my arm off like i was at a party where it was like everyone was passing them out and i'm like the hangover cure like i'm in and then i have like five drinks.

29:41It was our big annual NFT party, not this year, but last year. And it ended up being a lot of drinks. And so I woke up a little hungover. So anyway. Didn't work for me. Crappy product. No. It could be great. Daria, you've tried it. Have you had any success? No. No success there. All right. So I'd be curious to hear what people think. And this is really broadly to lob a question into the audience, which is, what have you found helpful for hangovers? And you can just hit us on Twitter with hashtag hangover. And I'm sure there are going to be a bunch of sanctimonious people who are like, I don't drink.

30:15That's what I do. But you guys can not reply because we don't need those. I've cut back a lot on booze, but occasionally there's a place for it. And by the way, all you folks are like, I'm enlightened. I don't drink anymore. I just use ketamine five times a week. You guys are going to have a rude awakening in a handful of years. Did you hear that they're finding fentanyl mixed in with ketamine now? Of course they are. Yeah. Fentanyl is mixed in with everything. And by the way, folks, two milligrams overdose, you're dead. Yeah. If you get stuff mixed in. It's just don't mess around. Yet another reason not to play around with miscellaneous powders.

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32:13What's up next, Dr. Kevin? I want to talk a little bit about my obsession with AI. Yeah, let's do it. Because it's changed a lot. So let me just put it to you this way. You know how I always track new shit. I pride myself in always being someone to want to play with whatever is halfway working slash breaking if it means that five years from now, I was able to spot something early on and hopefully identify a trend before it really took off. So I would say that GPT, when it came out, the chat GPT, it was one of those things where the first few versions were just fun for me. It was kind of like, oh, I'm having a conversation with AI.

32:54Wow, it's actually producing a real result when I'm typing to it. It can help me rephrase or rewrite a paragraph, or it can summarize some bullet points. It was doing a lot of little, small, meaningless, more or less tasks, but quite well. And then 4.0 came out. Yeah. So when 4.0 came out, my consumption and usage of chat GPT went from about, let's call it, 30 minutes a week to probably about five hours a week now. No kidding. So I use it a lot. What are you using it for now? I'm using it to code. It can code for me now. So you know my background here. Like I studied computer science, but I dropped out.

33:32And part of the reason, I don't know how much I've mentioned this publicly, but part of the reason I dropped out was that I could understand code a lot faster than I could write it. And so still to this day, I can read code just fine. Granted, sometimes there's some syntax I would have to look up or figure out, but like more or less I'm there. The issue was that if I'm thinking through a problem, it would take me three to four times as long as anyone else to figure out the same problem. I just didn't have the brain for it. GPT, I can come in and as I start to have little hiccups or I want to think through a problem, I can just ask it to figure it out for me.

34:09And it writes code that is like 99 % ready to go. Could you give an example of a problem? Yeah, I'll give an example. Let's say you're a WordPress user, right? That's what your blog's powered on. And you're like, I want to write a new WordPress plugin. And I want it to do this with my audience, segment it like this, do this only when someone is coming from this country and make it appear like this. And you could change anything you want. You just describe it in a couple of paragraphs and say, go. It literally will print out all the code for you. You copy and paste it and save it as a script and you're good to go.

34:38And it works. It's insane. So what does that mean for say five years from now? Well, a couple of things. Practically speaking right now, my engineering team, I had one of my developers tell me, hey, I had this, what they would call a kind of laborious kind of task of just something you don't want to code. You're like, ah, God, I got to resort this data in a certain way. And like, yeah, this is going to take me 45 minutes. It was done in five. Using ChatGPJ. Yes. And so like all of those little meaningless coding tasks, they're just gone. It's done. It's done. And so I've been using it to create art and I can tell it to go and write P5JS scripts for me, which is what Artblocks is based on for all the NFTs.

35:22So art meaning you're using code to generate art. Exactly. And so I can describe it visually and it comes back with something that's amazing. That's cool. I'll show you some examples after the podcast. I'd love to see it. And it's crazy addicting because you start getting into it and you're like, oh, what if you take it in this direction and this direction? You're limited no longer by your skill, but your own internal creativity of your brain. And your ability to prompt well. Yes. Yes. But you can even help it. So I'll give you an example. This is about to get super meta. Yeah, exactly. You can tell it, I'm having a hard time writing a prompt.

35:56How might I be more efficient? And it'll give you 10 ways to rewrite the prompt. It's helping itself. It's so nuts. And so once you realize that it's so much more than just rewriting a paragraph for you or helping put together an essay, but it can actually create real software for you, I realize now that But what's going to happen is that Mark Andreessen was a very famous venture capitalist maybe a decade ago of saying, software is eating the world, right? And so it was this idea that we had all of these old systems that were largely pen and paper based or weren't connected or weren't efficient, and software would come in and be connected.

36:35The data we put in the cloud and we would have this new type of in-cloud infrastructure, right? That would power everything and be connected like it never was before. All of that is still continuing to happen. But this next generation is what I believe is AI is going to eat the software. So if software ate the world, AI is going to eat the software, meaning that AI is going to come in and reimagine every single tool that we use. So every single productivity tool that we use, it will be a part of almost every application that we use in really meaningful ways. I've seen it sort data and create, I don't know about you, but when I use Excel, the hardest thing for me to always wrap my head around and figure out were pivot tables.

37:17Do you ever get good at pivot tables? No, I never got good at Excel, period. Oh my God. Pivot tables were one of those things where I was just like, it was a, it was a, they're a nightmare. I use notebooks and then I lose my notebooks and I'm screwed. So anyway, you don't have to learn it any longer. You just tell it what you want, how you want the data slice and dice. And it just like, what I don't mean is output from chat GPT, but I mean, it will be working in Excel or in Google sheets and just automatically rewrite the tables for you. You're just going to give it a little prompt and that's it.

37:45And I'm telling you this, this is coming a lot faster than I had thought. So two years ago, it was very linear to me. I was like, oh, month over month, like, oh yeah, chat GPT three is out now, now 3.5. And I see a little bit of an upgrade when four hit. Oh my God. Like it seems like it's just gone vertical. It's gone vertical. It's exponential now. And so dude, the next couple of years are going to be insane. Just insane. Yeah. I think the next 12 months are going to be. Yeah. You're probably right. Yeah. Full cuckoo bananas. I've been, not to the extent that you have probably, but experimenting here and there, having my team experiment also to see if people who are non-technical, I'm non-technical, but I can figure out quite a few things.

38:25People who really have maybe even an allergy to a lot of tech tools, like what they can do. with chat GPT just to try to peek around that corner. Like, okay, what is this going to look like when there's more mass adoption? And I ran an art competition, which was an AI art competition a while back, and was absolutely... This is for the punch of cock. This is for the punch of cock. The punch de cock, as they say in France. It's been translated in so many languages now. Oh, yeah, no, it's a massive global phenomenon. How do you say that in Japanese, by the way? Cockpunch.

39:06Cockpunch Monogatari. Yes, that was for the Cockpunch NFT, which raised 2 million bucks, something like that. Maybe 1.7 to 2 million bucks for the foundation, which is great. All that's been deployed. And that's all fantastic for scientific research. But the point I was going to make, the art competition following that, where fan art was being generated using AI, people could also use Photoshop and other tools to fine tune or to manipulate anything that came out of, say, Midjourney or Dali or something like that. The results absolutely blew my mind. And I'm going to be, you heard it here first, folks, I'm going to be running some more competitions, which will have different formats, because a prerequisite or a condition of valid submission for the competition was you had to capture your entire process well enough that somebody could stand a good chance of replicating your result.

39:56And by capturing that, now we have, let's just say top 10 finalists, you have 10 extremely good tutorials for people who want to step into the ring and play with it themselves. So you've heard of stable diffusion, right? I have, yeah. Okay. So stable diffusion is one like mid journey. It's one like any of these like Dolly that can create imagery out of prompts, right? Stable diffusion went open source, which was a big like, oh fuck. Maverick move. Yeah. But it was like, oh shit. Cause like they released it once you release it open source, everybody's got it and they're running with it in different directions right so buddy of mine gave me a discord to go into and he's like you gotta check this shit out this is crazy right and it's uh it's called unstable diffusion okay and so they basically took all the guardrails off of stable diffusion yeah you know all the protections and shit oh my god what kind of stuff do you see dude what do you think you see i don't know deep fake taylor swift porn i mean Imagine anything you can imagine in its ultra realistic state where you're almost like you look at it and you're like, is that an image?

41:04You don't even know. It's tricked you already. It's like porn done in its finest. Very tasteful AI porn. No, no, no. But you can do whatever you want. Yeah. So there's all these different channels. And so you can go into some channels and see aliens with six breasts and weird shit where you're like, that looks real. Not like the movie that Arnold Schwarzenegger was in with the three-breasted woman. You know what I'm talking about? Total recall. Total recall. Yeah, not that. This looks real. It's disturbingly real stuff, right? Teenage boys are screwed. They're not going to get anything done in the next 10 years.

41:39No, but they're screwed in terms of relationships, dude. I'm telling you, this is what worries me. Remember the movie Her, right? Yeah, I do. Great movie. One of the things about Her, for people that haven't watched it, you got to go and watch this because it's going to become a reality. this man that has a relationship with his phone and the phone has a very serious AI on it. Yeah. Phone or laptop when he's at work. There's this ubiquitous AI companion. Just following him around, right? And one of the things about OpenAI that you can do now is you can save and train model data to be persistent.

42:12What you can do is you can go in and you can say, here are the properties of who I want you to be. And people are doing this. there's this website that has all these AI hacks, prompt hacks, they call it. And you can go in and say, you are this personality type, you're a little bit bitchy, you're sassy, like blah, blah, and you can save this and it will respond to you and learn from you. And you can have what appears to be a human conversation with your perfect polar opposite or whatever you're looking for in life. Dude, I'm telling you, we're three years out from that being conversation-based.

42:45Have you heard of Replica with a K? Yes, of course. I looked at that. I almost invested in that company years ago. All right. So you should explain Replica because they claim to have 10 million registered users. Yeah. Yeah. So this is a company that was raising capital quite a while ago and I saw them, but it was before the AI thing really took off. But yeah, I mean, this is this idea. And I worry because like, you know, you think of countries - Replica is her, just so you guys know. I mean, there's more to it, but that's basically it. You would know this better than I would, but in Japan, there's been this decrease in dating and I've heard about, there's like the shame of like, whether or not you have a high quality job enough.

43:20There's like this disconnect between the male and female population. You know what I'm talking about? There was a report that came out on how dating was in the decline. Well, dating and fertility, reproduction in general is on the decline and they're in a very problematic situation from birth rate, like replacement rates. They're in a really sticky, terrible situation. Okay. So now I think China could be in, in like 20, 30 years, 20 years probably but i think we're all going to be there because of population implosion you might just have a partner online like a ai yeah like we might just have ai partners you know i was talking to someone about this because as you mentioned i'm single now and they said oh you should hop on replica just like check it out and i was like i don't actually want to scare you well it scared me in the sense that i was like okay there are times i'm really lonely yeah and humans are messy humans are difficult and if you get close to someone it's great for a while you have the honeymoon phase and things are great and puppy love and like everything you do so funny and then things change and it gets a little more complex but if you had an ai companion who especially if it were compelling voice which is going to happen immediately i mean two years it's already like i've seen ai i can't remember the company names but that have been trained on voice data yes to mimic and i actually know podcasts are being produced right now this show using ai we're not even here ai to read scripts that are sort of pieced together from celebrity sample data and listeners have no idea.

44:58They have no idea. These podcasts are not quote unquote real because it's not what you think it is. And we are so close to there being the equivalent of the Scarlett Johansson her sexy, smoky voice, sassy, funny getting there. Gives you a little shit from time to time but doesn't ask you to pick up your socks. Right, that kind of thing. I'm kidding. I didn't want to dig into Replica because I was like, you know, there's a chance that it's better than I think it's going to be. And then I start playing the game because I'm like, oh, I'm just testing the service. And then I start getting my human needs met by this AI.

45:41And it takes the pressure off of, which maybe sometimes could be a good thing, but takes the pressure off of human interaction. Dude, this is my point. This is why I wanted to bring this up. I think this is going to happen. The question is, if I... Children of men, here we come. I have a question for Daria. If I start having a AI, I'm talking to someone on AI that is a female AI person, is that cheating? It is? Yes. What? That doesn't, no, no, while I'm just repeating what she said, that doesn't, that doesn't surprise me. I've thought about this a lot too. I'm like - Is cheating if I talk to AI?

46:14Well, I mean, especially if it's like sexting and this, that, and the other thing. Why is that cheating? It's an AI. What did she say? She said, well, you don't talk to me. well, stop bitching about my socks.

46:30I think that this will become an absolute issue. Oh, it's going to be a huge issue. It's going to be a huge issue. This is one of the things that really, truly keeps me up being like, I either need to invest in this company or avoid it or a combination of thereof. Yeah, invest in it so that you can have your bug out bag and your bunker. Everything prepared for the apocalypse. Okay, speaking of the apocalypse, do you mind if we switch to - Yeah, let's do it, let's do it. That was a fun one though. Balaji bet, that was a fun one. I'm glad you brought that up. So I'm a spectator mostly at this point.

47:02Maybe I'll serve as a stand-in for the audience, for those who are not deeply intimate with crypto or this world. But what bet, so Balaji Srinivasan, what bet did he make roughly? We don't have to get all the dates right or anything like that. And what do you think of it? Yeah, so basically for people that don't know, this is an individual. Balji is like really well-known. Former CTO of Coinbase. Yes. And also just insanely well-known for nailing a lot of the COVID predictions. Yeah. Like he came out and said like really intimate details, like, you know, masks will be a fashion statement, like really early on, where if you read this stuff and we all have historically going back, you'd be like, bravo, like really prescient stuff.

47:43Right. So, you know, when he talks about the future, a lot of people pay attention. And so one of the things that happened with the collapse of a lot of regional banks with SVB and then First Republic and others, as he said, this is not an isolated event. There's going to be a triggering that's going to lead to hyperinflation, the devaluing of the dollar. And in the next 90 days, Bitcoin is going to be worth$1 million a coin. And I'm willing to stake and bet a million dollars that that is the case. And somebody else had challenged that. I think he responded to someone who said, I'll put a million dollars online.

48:15He's like, I'll take that bet. Okay. Again, I think June 17th or something. So you're more accurate than I am. But that was essentially it. So that led me to pay attention. I was like, okay, well, that's interesting. A lot of people to pay attention. Right. Let's dive into this and figure out what's going on with Bitcoin. And honestly, what it caused me to do personally is I hadn't paid attention to Bitcoin in a long time. I've been in the world of Ethereum with NFTs and everything else. and there's something nice about how scalable and green Ethereum is, that now that it's moved to proof of stake, and there's just a lot more activity there day-to-day than there is, say, Bitcoin, right?

48:51But I started digging into Bitcoin, and one of the things I realized is that in a world where the press cycles are always coming back to, oftentimes, they're hitting Ethereum pretty hard in that their NFTs go up, they go down, they go left, they go right. That's like a bad look for Ethereum. In some cases, people get hacked. It's a bad look, like lose a certain amount of money. I know that quite well. But I'm just saying that there's these certain black eyes and there's something about the simplicity of Bitcoin and the store of value that is still attractive because it's the OG cryptocurrency.

49:29It's still trading at over$30 ,000 at the time of this podcast. And every year that goes on, it seems to be a more legitimate asset. Recording on April 16th. Yeah. But every year that goes on, it seems to be a more legitimate asset that is going to stand the test of time. It's not going to zero. It's a digital currency. It was the first of its kind. So I started playing around with some of the layer two that's built on top of that with the Lightning Network and noticed that some of the pain points have been smoothed down a little bit. Can you explain to people who don't know what that is? So Bitcoin is notorious for being just a very low transaction per second blockchain.

50:04So if you threw, like, say, the Visa scale at it, like how many times a Visa card gets swiped every day, it's laughable. It's like they can do singular low double digit transactions per second, whereas Visa can do, you know, 40 ,000 plus or whatever it may be. These are rough estimates, but you get what I'm saying. It's along those orders of magnitude. So Bitcoin had to figure out a solution that would scale, help it scale that infrastructure so that more payments could happen. And so they created a layer two that kind of sits on top of it. It resolves back to the main coin. So it has the security and safety of Bitcoin.

50:38It's much how Ethereum is scaling right now with some of the layer two networks that sit on top of it. So their main one is called Lightning. It's the Lightning Network. And so it allows you to do ultra fast transactions. It can scale up to, they say, I think it's up to a million transactions a second or something. It's something crazy. They haven't tested it at those limits, but that's what the paper is written as anyway. So I tried a bunch of this stuff out. I kicked the tires on a few things. And then I realized that Bitcoin, unlike Ethereum, the nice thing about it, it has this finite supply that is slowly coming to an end over time.

51:10So every, I think it's four, four and a half years, they do a halfting event where they decrease the total number of issued coins in half. They chop it right in half as in terms of the number of coins, new coins issued. And they're about to do another cycle here in a little over a year. So when this next halving event happens, there's even less currency coming out of that faucet. So these halving events, I went back and looked historically, and they're typically the year before the halving event and the year after the halving event, you typically see a pretty substantial... How many halvings have there been?

51:47Quite a few. Five now or something like that. So you typically see, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is not investment advice. This is not always going to hold true. But obviously, if there's more demand and less supply, meaning less Bitcoins being issued, you're going to see a change in price. That's just obviously, we know these markets out and how they play out. So no one's talking about the happening yet. Typically, people start raising chatter around this time. And so when every single other time when the happening events start to happen and the chatter starts to spin up, the price has always gone up.

52:22And I've watched this happen time and time again. So for me, I was like, you know what? Classic cryptocurrency. I hate that it's not green. That kills me. I'm happy that more mining services are going green and they're moving to cheaper energy sources, which are typically by thermodynamic and a bunch of the nuclear energy in a, but they try to wind there. There's a ton in Texas. Yeah. So they're trying to move closer to these energy sources than get cheaper power. That said, I still think there's a lot, obviously a lot of dirty energy that's being wasted here on Bitcoin mining. It's a big bummer.

52:55That is the one part that just gives me a little bit of pause that like kind of hurts my soul. But I did purchase a little position there because I do like it, especially in times where we see the devaluing of the dollar. We see Russia and China buying more gold. And I'm just like, I want a nice hedge that's decoupled from the dollar that's sitting out there that, you know, I'm not saying it should be a big double digit percentage of your overall asset allocation. But for me personally, I don't mind having a little of that parked and set on the side. So maybe you could repeat for the audience what you said to me.

53:34this is a while back but when we were talking about this we were talking about what might happen if the dollar is just massively devalued or if we experience hyper hyper hyper inflation yeah we're like carting around dollar bills and wheelbarrows to buy a kitkat at the local 7-eleven well you and i were talking about this and we're like oh this crazy bet happened this is probably like what maybe a month ago or something and we're like this crazy bet happened it's a million dollars and if bitcoin goes to a million and i was like wait a second if bitcoin goes to a million dollars and there's hyperinflation then a million dollars is worth and you said yeah like the price of a sandwich or something like that and i was like yeah so it doesn't really matter like bitcoin's a hard one because when you traditionally think about currencies you always think them pegged to somebody else's gdp right so you think of the pound being pegged to what's going on in the UK.

54:28And it's like, what do you peg Bitcoin to? Yeah. Well, also like there's the question of like, what is its value in the absence of a reliable peg? Right. I mean, this is to be clear, I'm sure the maxis are going to just have a field day with this one. But there are some people I respect and admire among that crowd. But there are also a lot of very aggressive religious fundamentalists in there, which I'd prefer not spend so much time with. But there are a bunch of questions that I have, which I don't have great answers to, but they're just questions. One would be what you just described. If the dollar experiences this massive hyperinflation, how does one establish the value of Bitcoin for the exchange of services or goods?

55:07The second, I think, is for me, what happens in a place like Europe? What happens in a place like Japan? What happens in a place like fill in the blank if the US collapses? So where is the sort of currency safe haven if there is one? And then the next question is, if things were to get that bad, if we assume for the moment that the rise in Bitcoin price to, let's just say, biology's bet of a million is predicated on a similar increase in hyperinflation for the dollar, which would just not be sustainable, right? The whole country just blows to pieces. Do you not have more pressing problems than Bitcoin?

55:52Like, are you going to be able to get on your United flight to escape the US to fill in the blank location? You're going to have such a series of questions that are more fundamental, perhaps, than money, that if you think that is a likely outcome you should be in full-blown advanced prepper mode right now right well the question i think i have is like are the rails in place for the preppers to get into bitcoin or the bitcoiners to get into prepping properly but yeah but let's let's we can deal with the first yeah so the first one i would say it's like we take a look at this is two of us playing economists on TV, on podcasts, which is not...

56:36Or with some booze. With some booze, which is never sound advice. Yeah, this is not economic advice. If any central bankers are listening... Right. Exactly. Please come on, join us. So the one thing that I think is interesting is when you think about what's happening worldwide right now with China and with Russia, and we take a look at the data, what does the data tell us over the last few months? And And what has been reported is that China and Russia right now are not buying Bitcoin, but they're buying a lot of gold. And so that, to me, doesn't signal as though we have an emergent new world currency as much as it does instability and a flight to safety.

57:18And so if there's instability and a flight to safety, and gold is still the kind of safe haven for that, which it appears to be, that would explain why, I mean, there's been since November, there's been a 40 % run up on the price of gold. And so I don't know that Bitcoin is that safe haven, but there's one chart, there's one graphic that blew my mind and it made me rethink everything. And that is when the day that SVB came out and said, we're potentially insolvent and all the regional banks took a hit yep there was a screenshot did you see the screenshot do you know what i'm about there was a screenshot where someone saved to their iphone all the regional banks all the major banks even as well and it was a list of all of them in the stocks app right you know how you can list them and like it just goes down the screen it's like negative 20 percent negative 15 percent negative 30 percent like just going down the screen yeah it was just like frb was like negative 60 or something it was just bloody all the way down and then there was two at the top.

58:20It was Bitcoin and Ethereum, and they were both green, like heavy green. And that was the first time where I was like, oh shit. Because every single time, there has always been, at least this is someone's observational data, like I'm just like, from what I can recall, the market has been more or less tightly coupled with Bitcoin and Ethereum. Super tightly coupled. The market's down, they're down. It's a speculative asset. And when people start to feel their pocketbooks hurting, they pull out of cryptocurrency. This was the first time where I was like, oh, shit, some people are moving into cryptocurrency as the banks start to collapse.

58:55Now, in fairness, that is a subset of stocks, especially if you're looking at regional banks and not the S &P 500, right? Yes. I'm pretty sure the S &P was down that day too. Let me ask you this. You know that I'm pretty heavily vested in these things. I'm very deeply interested in Bitcoin. But just to act as a stand-in, let us assume that based on at least the homework that I've done, which your mileage may vary, but the S &P has been very highly correlated to Bitcoin and Ethereum for that matter. These are treated as risk-on assets. And when things go down, people sell, especially when you can sell it whenever you want to sell it.

59:37And it's not just market hours, yada, yada, yada. What is different this time around? Because I do think there are two issues with the bet. One is that, and this happens to everybody, right? You develop a, it's not quite a sunk cost fallacy. You develop a confirmation bias. You begin to find reasons to support your book, your existing positions. And just one more thing, and that is, I do think the biology bet can't be viewed solely as a prediction because people pay attention to him. People purchase or sell based also, some people do, biologies, predictions, and so on. And it makes me think of this section in Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis.

1:00:22It's the book that made Michael Lewis famous. It's a great book. I think it's mostly about bond trading. And there's some big swinging dick top dog inside. I think it was Solomon brothers. And he bought some position. He was like, the market's going up for X. And he bought like$500 ,000 worth. And it started to go down and people were laughing and he had lost a bet and people were making fun of him. And he's like, oh yeah. And then he bought like$500 million worth of it. And the market freaked out and went skyrocketing. Cause they're like, oh my God, somebody knows something we don't know. so he was able to move the market, right?

1:01:02Right. He made a prediction, but he also moved the market. And I think that, I don't think, Balaji's bet. Balaji can't move the market. It's too big. Well, I'm not saying he can't move the market, but it became global news. Yes. You don't think he can move the market even if it affects larger institutional players and so on? No. I'm not saying that Balaji single-handedly can move the market. I don't think it's fair to say that it has zero impact on the buying and selling behaviors of people. Oh, no doubt. I mean, I think anyone can temporarily move the market. If Tim Ferriss tweets out, oh my God, one of my best friends is an insane researcher just found a hole in Bitcoin.

1:01:38We're all fucked. I have a strong feeling that there would be some movement in prices. But you're saying it would recalibrate. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. There's just too much volume going through it every single day. It's a hype cycle. Kramer's going to talk about it. It's going to spread. It's going to have its 48 hour window and then there's going to be a bump which we i think we saw and then it'll just recalibrate from there i thought it was irresponsible to make that type of public pronouncement i would be shocked if it gets to a million by mid-june i don't know that it's irresponsible i just think it's like there are people there are people who cannot afford to take their savings and put into bitcoin who are going to do well the good news has gone up since he said that so they're uh regardless well yeah it's one thing to get into a position yeah that's as you famously know because you're like i'm buying this and then you never tell me when you fucking sell things more famously know we can talk about your bitcoin oh jesus christ i mean yeah yeah yeah good lord all right so let's move on from there i have some fun stuff to talk about let's do it i guarantee you you're gonna love this next little segment all right i'm excited, okay?

1:02:45Yes. We talked about New Year's resolutions before. Oh, God. But I have one that I didn't tell you about. Okay. I want to show you something here. All right. You've seen this for the first time. You can go ahead and read this for the audience here. What does that say? It says ABC letter tracing practice workbook for kids. Age is what? Age is three plus. Okay. And then when you open the first page, what does it say? Oh, Kevin Rose, age 45, February 9th, 2023. And then what do you see from here? Oh, you're letter tracing. Yes. So I'm learning how to write with my right hand. Amazing. This is incredible.

1:03:23It's pretty shaky. It is a little shaky. Your ends are a little shaky. You can see that I'm having some issues here. Please, love, stop laughing in the background. My wife is like dying laughing. It's so good. It's funny. It's funny. She didn't know about this. This is the first she's hearing about, by the way. This is great. I have started to learn how to write with my right hand. Yeah. And I decided... cute bunnies and acorns it's getting a little mushrooms and puppies making it interesting so i'm just now getting started i got a ways to go but this is one of those things where i was watching my kids do it and i'm watching their brains kind of activate as they're like learning how to trace and how to and zelda's really actually her letters were flopped and turned around at one point now they're straight that's uh that's what i did you did the same thing yeah yeah i still do it dysgraphia my letters end up backwards and upside down and stuff when i write some letters yeah in handwriting sometimes i skip a letter and then i come back and rewrite it i don't know what the fuck that is but that's something i got i don't know i get too crazy and i just like jump early onset dimension thank you but the thing here is i have no scientific reason other than to say i realize that this is activating somewhere in my brain something new yeah and it's just like one of those things where i'm left-handed so i've always smudged the shit out of everything i do it's just like a streak of ink across the page because my hand and i was like you know what my kids are learning why don't i learn at the same time and so that's something i started that's awesome anyway i thought you enjoy it amazing yeah it's fun you just like actually my hand gets really fatigued and so i have to start you know so i set a timer for 10 minutes and i just go to town and like start doing my numbers and my letters and then it's like i got two workbooks in my office and it's just i thought you would like because as a lifelong learner like this is something you'd be into um i'm totally into it and you know what it's doing for me is like helping my certain part of my brain daria would know daria would have more credibility in discussing this in any capacity there is something kind of similar that when did you start this just the beginning of the year have you tried writing with your left hand i have because i've broken so many things so many times so i when i shattered my right wrist one of several times i had to do all my writing in school with my left hand and for the first week it was terrible I was also just thrown into baptism by fire because it was like, okay, now you get to write for like several hours a day with your non-dominant hand.

1:05:43So I just got crushed. So are you good? Can you? Oh, I don't think I'm good. Especially because left-handed is, I say it's weird. I'm sure right-handed is equally weird for you. But just like the whole like hook claw. The hook, yeah. So I wanted to pull up the name of an artist who got me back into penciling. and she was not aware of this but she published a book that i ended up grabbing which was unbeknownst to me a guide to her toolkit and approach to much of her artwork artwork artwork artwork artwork i'm so tired folks it's not any booze uh slept terribly last night maybe we'll talk about my low back i have all sorts of low back i had low back this morning so this woman I might be pronouncing her first name incorrectly, but I'm going to say Aliza Ivanova.

1:06:30And her account on Instagram is Aliza, E-L-E-E-Z-A. One of my favorite artists out there. She's spectacular. Can I see some of her stuff? Yeah, yeah. Formerly at Pixar. And her ability to draw animals and portraits is just spectacular. And there's a certain surreal feel to it. And what she's using here, I'm showing an Instagram video. She's using a smudging stick instead of, say, cross-hatching, which can be really rough on the wrists and the hands, to very quickly create amazing pieces of art. And she has a number of books. I bought her most recent book, which gives sort of an overview of her technique and approach to artwork.

1:07:17And so I have been like this type of stuff, for instance, rather than starting with sort of a stick figure or a not quite mannequin. That's not the word I'm looking. Maquette, not maquette, but rather than starting with the bones of someone, starting with the outline of the figure, then adding the shading, then adding the details and going back and forth. It's so intricate. Don't you just wish you had that skill set? I mean, you're really good, but you're not that good. Oh, she's better. Yeah, she's obviously much better. Do you have a screen protector on, by the way? Yeah, I do. I can't see at a certain angle.

1:07:48So this is a new thing. all right you want to hear a story you're gonna love this you're protecting your protecting my screen yeah but well this is a privacy screen yeah and uh i went to a restaurant here in la and sit down at the bar because that's what's available huge bar it's like 75 feet wide by yourself yeah was this a date no i just finished a workout oh she just text me up when you're doing shit like this i didn't come join you for a drink that's horseshit you're always super busy we're in the same neighborhood i will text you next please do seriously yeah yeah so i had done a workout i finished and then i was just like hey looking for a place to eat what can you guys recommend ended up at this restaurant i was sitting there ordered my food having a great time beautiful venue flirting a little bit with the waitress like that's not going to go anywhere but it was fun like she was yeah it was just good vibes like it wasn't it clearly wasn't going to go anywhere but it was just it was just fun and then somebody comes and sits right next to me there's like 20 empty seats.

1:08:44Oh, Jesus. I had this one. I was pissing one time at a movie theater. Okay. All right. There was 30 urinals and a dude walks all the way down and stands right next to me. And I'm like, yeah, thanks buddy. So sat right next to me and ultimately ended up being a fan of mine. And he was very cool. But the fact that he was sitting right next to me meant I felt very self-conscious looking at my phone. I was like, if I look at anything on my phone or I try to text someone or anything, this is incredibly visible to everyone around me. And so I ended up getting a privacy screen from my iPhone, which is fantastic.

1:09:19I mean, such a simple solution also protects the screen. It works quite well. And there you have it. That's my story about the privacy. That's my story about the privacy screen. Yeah. Cool. Cool story, bro. Yeah. Jesus Christ. It works quite well. I'm actually kind of shocked because I can't see shit from you and I'm sitting like a foot from you yeah i really can't see anything it's amazing it's amazing it's really helpful so let me let me try to find this and it's gonna all right i'll start with the next story there is a well hold on there's a brand it starts with a b it's not belcom belski it's not belski belkin belkin yeah yeah thank you daria i initially was looking for a belkin because those are well known and i ended up being unable to get it quickly so i just have something made in China that is a similar design.

1:10:07So there you have it. The key term is iPhone protector slash privacy screen. And if you search for that, you'll find something. All right. Now that your privacy is covered, let's move on to my next story, which is Nintendo. Enough about you. Let's talk about me. So let me ask you a question. When do you think Nintendo was founded? Oh, I have maybe some unfair advantages here. I'm going to say 1880. Yes. How did you know that? Was I close? Yeah. It's in the late 1800s. Yeah. Because 1839. No, it was like later 1800s. 1800s. It's the 1800s. So the reason I know that, actually, you probably don't even know this.

1:10:48No, I don't. So there's a Japanese card game. There's tiny little cards. They're like half the size of a business card. And one of my favorite games I played when I was an exchange student is called Hanafuda. Hanafuda has these beautiful drawings and it's a matching game in in a sense and Nintendo became famous for first making these card games oh crazy can you still buy them and they're like collectible yeah you can still get them so cool it's super cool super super cool Nintendo on them it must be in Japanese it's in Japanese yeah yeah absolutely is it a little Mario characters no Mario characters but yeah that would be amazing Nintendo I don't know what the nin is ten is heaven and then do is like place of so like shokudo is a cafeteria like the i thought do is the way it's a homonym so do is the same do is the same like aikido do like is the way different character okay yeah uh katakana no kanji kanji different kanji yeah different different character but nin is probably we can come back to that but all right speaking of Nintendo.

1:11:54As you know, my firstborn is named Zelda. There's a new legend of Zelda, the Tears of the Kingdom, opening May 12th, which is soon. I'm very excited for this release. And I started playing the old original Zelda, like the very first one. Cool. So you can play it on the Switch. They have emulators now that you can get on the Switch. Now the Switch has the old school classic, the traditional Switch controllers, but Nintendo released the original these are charging so they slide off check this out this is the original nintendo controller that's cool you can get so that's awesome yeah exactly so it's this brings back so many memories official from nintendo not because you could always find like the clone usb nintendo controllers that were the fakes and all that that has the same feel like you push the buttons like okay everything about it is legit and then they charge when you slide them on the side of the switch they charge that's brilliant usb it's so cool that's brilliant all right isn't that awesome that's super awesome they have their past now where you can get all the original nintendo games that's fun it's crazy i was on the um the marketplace and and you know my dad's passed away and one of the things that i remember as a child is there was the original nintendo pinball game and my dad used to watch me play and he he actually had a little tiny tv for me so i could like play next to him as he's watching his shows or whatever i remember he never wanted to playing games with me like he was an older dad and he didn't really like get into nintendo but when pinball came up he's like okay let me grab the controller and so he played nintendo with me so when i saw that i was like oh my god like you get to i mean it's so much nostalgia yeah exactly nostalgia i'll just teach a word for for folks who may be interested in japanese they use it a lot more than we say nostalgia but they would say notsukashi notsukashi ah that's sort of got the same feel as nostalgic but they use it kind of like saudade in brazilian portuguese but it's roughly like ah like how nice like ah that's really nostalgic that brings back the memories there was a blog post that i saw where it was like 25 words that exist in japanese that don't have english meanings you know yeah and they're so beautiful like they capture these like amazing just like moments in time like there was this one that was like the sunlight as it falls between branches branches yes komorebi yes komorebi is like dappled sunlight coming through tree branches and leaves it's so good it's so amazing like they have a word for that komorebi that's so amazing yeah super beautiful so so i was i was in tokyo yes so i celebrated my 10-year wedding anniversary congratulations again yes that was amazing and we had a ton of fun daria met me out there we did a moonbirds meetup.

1:14:36So we had over a hundred Japanese speaking moonbirds collectors out there, which was challenging and awesome at the same time. And then Henry, my Zen instructor here, Shookman here in the United States, introduced me to the head of his lineage of Zen, who I got to go out and meet with and sit down with and have a little private... Yeah, exactly. We're not drinking and just to carry hooking together all night long. No, but we had a little private gathering and sit down and did a private... Did he lay his hands on you? Exercise the demons? He helped me with my practice and his English is quite good.

1:15:17It was very intimidating. Very intimidating. This is the head of Sambo Zen, the Three Treasures, like a big lineage of Zen. And I'm sitting here with this guy, you know, and he's just like asking me very pointed questions about my intention. What is your intention with my daughter? Yeah, more or less. But it was like very cutting questions, dude. Like what? Like a surgeon just coming in and just, I don't know if I should say the things because it's this private interview, you know? I'll give you an example. It's more or less like, why are you here? Where are you? You know how in Zen they have these, we've talked about these cons before.

1:15:58You've done interviews with Henry and thank you for doing those. where it's like these moments where a really good Zen master can come in and look at a student and know kind of exactly the little nudge they need to give them. There's these moments where they grab your coat and yank you in a certain direction just to kind of get you to snap. Boom, they want you to pop. And it was very much that. Why are you here? What do you want from this? Boom, boom, boom. I think the guy on the street when I walked back to my Airbnb in Venice asked me those questions. Exactly. But less fentanyl driven. But yeah, so it was amazing.

1:16:36It was very... I hear the Zen masters have cut back on their fentanyl a lot. Yeah. This guy was operating in a different plane. So what did that feel like for you? Why did you want to do it, first of all? You know, Henry had said such great things about him. He will never say this publicly, but I believe he is one... I'll say it for him. No, I will, because I think it's important. He's such a modest guy. Henry is one of, I think it's like five or so fully sanctioned Zen masters in this lineage. And that's a big deal when there's hundreds of teachers in this realm. So this is his master, his teacher.

1:17:09If you get a chance to take that meeting, you take it. And so I went in there - You're not like, nah, I'm busy. I'm going to try on some new shoes. I'm too busy. Going to try some fancy Japanese coffee, which I did, which is amazing. Caffe Mamea out there is fantastic. But honestly, the one thing that I took away from it for people that I will share is that one of the things that he asked me is he's like, how often do you practice and how long do you practice? And I said, I practice 25 minutes a day, probably five days a week. And he goes, what about the other two days? And I go, well, I got a startup.

1:17:41I got this and I got that. And he goes, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he goes, I don't care if you practice five minutes a day. He goes, don't miss a day. Don't break a day. Continue to do it. Don't miss a day and since then i have not missed a day and i will say it's kind of amazing because even if you can sit down for five minutes it just keeps that continuity going and it actually keeps me slightly elevated more i don't know it keeps the commitment stronger like it feels better and that was sound advice it's great advice uh darrya can i trouble you for just a little bit of water please thank you so much Thank you.

1:18:18I'm always happy. Wait, what's water? You can do it. Hold on. Hold on, don't tell me. Yeah, you got it.

1:18:31It's so delicious. What? No, that's delicious. Yeah, I know. The water's tasty. What? Mizu. O-mizu. O-mizu. Yep. O-mizu. Like, mizu tani. There are a lot of Mizus out there. So let's stay on the Japanese kick for a second. This is a book in front of me, which I'm just digging into. Japanese death poems. Let's talk about Japanese death poems. I did not actually, I'm embarrassed to admit, know this was the thing. This was given to me by a friend who has spent a lot of time in the military and has developed a rather unique perspective, unique perspectives on death from the vantage point of a lay person, right?

1:19:16Of a civilian. And so this book is, I'll just read the quote on the back. This is one of the blurbs. A wonderful introduction to the Japanese tradition of jisei. This volume is crammed with exquisite, spontaneous verse and pithy, often hilarious descriptions of the eccentric and committed monastics who wrote the poems. So these poems are written on the verge of death. And literally the subtitle is written by Zen monks and haiku poets on the verge of death. And it's incredibly well researched. You have not just the English versions, you have the introduction and all the context, you have the Japanese, and then you have footnotes describing what these various words might mean, what the metaphors allude to.

1:20:04And it's really just a phenomenal window into an aspect of Japanese culture that I had no exposure to. I would have expected that I would have been exposed to this before, but I'm looking forward to diving into this and I've already read perhaps the first 10 pages. So this is Japanese Death Poems by Tuttle Publishing, compiled in with an introduction by Yoel Hoffman. So I have a handful, I don't know if I've told you this, but I have a handful of haiku books that I've read by Japanese masters. And one of the things I always felt was just so beautiful about them is they always include their kind of death poems, like at the very end.

1:20:49It's oftentimes like on their deathbed when they're about to pass, what is the last thing that they wrote down, right? And it's often in haiku form if they're a haiku master. yeah totally and so it's just it's beautiful stuff yeah yeah there's some really japanese stuff in here right like this is died 1698 for not honoring my parents while i lived in my last hour i feel remorse right that is super japanese the autumn hues of knotweed seem like cups of wine are you a big fan of haiku i am this is my first time really being exposed to a lot of japanese and it does sound better in Japanese. There's a certain cadence to it.

1:21:33So I'm not going to get the pronunciation quite perfectly here, but it's like if you have, okay, so Hakuro is this person died on the 19th day of the 12th month, 1766. So the English, and I'm going to fuck this up in Japanese, so I apologize to any Japanese speakers out there, but the English, just listen to the sounds like the cadence so the english is an ailing mallard falls through the chilly night and teeters off okay the japanese is right so it's just like has it has a cleaner crisper cadence to it which doesn't mean you shouldn't do the english but this is my first time being exposed to a lot of haiku in japanese which is fun for me number one makes it very hard for me to decipher in many cases, but they have a beautiful sound to them.

1:22:24That's awesome. I have to pick that book up. Death poems. There's a great poem about haiku and about the masters called Three Simple Lines. Okay. Have you ever read that? No. It's a fantastic book that is written by a Zen practitioner that covers a lot of the Zen masters of haiku and along with a really beautiful personal story. So very short read, definitely worth picking up along with this. Yeah, I mean, how Japanese relate to death, which is something I have some exposure to, but not to the poems, this particular jisei format, tells you a lot about how they live. I mean, it does provide sort of a prism through which you can appreciate how they navigate a lot of life as well in addressing the final hours and thinking about dying, death, the path to death.

1:23:13When you get a better understanding of that many of the things you observe in japanese culture make more sense yeah in a way have you ever done an escape room yes you have yes how many multiple really multiple what does that mean like a hundred like four they're so stupid the fatigued way so i did my first escape room today i had a fucking blast i don't know what's wrong with you you're getting old and boring no it's just like you're going in there and it's like what are you doing like you can get out if you want to are they really locking you up no it's called a game kevin yeah i know but when you're playing zelda you're trying to like do shit in a video game you don't actually need to do those things no but i just sorry i can explain it like you know what i'm talking about like you go in there and you're they lock you up it's a little room and they're like really quick grab the book and like open up the book and turn to chapter 12 and people are yelling shit out and you're just like, I don't want to do this.

1:24:11I just want to have a drink. All right. So I'm going to provide a contrast in styles here. So Kevin, who got so outraged that I implied that he drank alcohol earlier. No, I just, all my friends want me to do it sober. And I'm like, why are we doing this sober? And they're like, we can get through it faster. We could break a world record. Well, yeah. I love doing it in a hyper competitive way, I think is probably not my jam, but I had the chance to do escape rooms for the first time. I went to this place called Escape Revolution, which is here in LA. Ilan Lee, who is one of the co-founders of Exploding Kittens, was kind enough to invite me.

1:24:47I don't want to name other people who are there because maybe they don't want to be named. But it was a small group, and I thought it was absolutely fantastic. You have an hour. There's some type of pretext or story. There's a narrative arc. So in our first instance, I'm not going to give away any of the tools, so I won't provide any teasers. but we had a real armored car that's locked in a garage. That's close to the mind. And you're robbers and you need to get the money out of the car, but the mechanic who set up all the security systems ran off because the police are on the way. So you have 60 minutes to figure it out.

1:25:25And we had a blast. And this place is built in such a way that the set design and the sound effects and the entire experience makes it, I don't want to say cinematic, but it's just a very compelling way to become immersed in a story. And you have to collaborate. I also, part of what made it fun is that I have a game designer, right? In Alon Lee, I had a number of other people who were very accustomed to mechanics of different types, not car mechanics, but like game mechanics and so on. A woman who had done almost 2 ,000 escape rooms herself. Oh, Jesus. Which is all to say, it was a cool group of people to interact with.

1:26:08They were into it, but then there were two newbies. I was one of those two newbies who'd never done this before. And then the second one was a jailbreak and we were locked in cells, which were like legitimate cells with... Was that solo? What are you talking about? Like, did you have to figure out how to get out of your own cell? It was three people to a cell and then you needed to figure it out. I kind of wish it was solo. I don't know. I just have this hard thing where we're all yelling shit, and I'm just like, can we just relax for a second? I don't know what your group was like. There's no yelling.

1:26:37Maybe I won't work to all people. There's no yelling in this group. Yeah, no. Do you like it? Yeah, Dari doesn't like it either. All right. She hates games. It's one of those things where I just, maybe I haven't had the right experience, because the ones in Portland were kind of jank. I don't remember much. I just remember that we went in there, and there was just like shit hidden in like little bookcases and stuff. And I'm just like, why am I looking through these bookcases? There's other things to do. I've got emails that I haven't checked. There's like a lot of shit going on. Oh my God. It felt like work.

1:27:10It felt like work. It felt like work. Where I'm like, why am I working to figure out this thing when it's not even a thing? Well, I mean, you don't need to work out in the gym to like outrun hyenas on the street. So what are you doing in the gym? Suns out, guns out, that kind of thing. Well, I'm glad you had a good time. I had a fucking great time. One other thing I did this weekend, which I'd never experienced. And if people have the chance, I would recommend is experiencing high fidelity, immersive sound for the first time, like actually listening to music in a store or a location where they're paying attention to all the variables.

1:27:46Yes. The most I've ever done is really to the extent that I personally can set up a few Sonos speakers in a house. That's it. That's as fancy as I have ever gotten. And I was having dinner with a few friends, well, one close friend and a few new friends who are professional musicians. And they heard me say this and they were like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay. We need to go to a good location and put you in a seat to let you listen to some of the music you think you know. Where did they take you? In super high fidelity. This place called Common Wave. and the staff there were exceptional. We went from one setup to another setup to another setup to another setup and it was spectacular.

1:28:29It was like having a full-blown psychedelic experience in some respects. So for those who may have the opportunity, if you have the opportunity, I really came to appreciate just how much goes into music I thought I knew but had only listened to at, in hindsight, relatively low bit rates. Yes. And it is just a different experience altogether because this came about initially at dinner because I asked somebody at dinner who's a TV writer. I asked him if he ever watches TV and has trouble immersing himself in TV. And he said, I don't really watch TV. And I was like, well, what do you spend your time doing if you're just having fun?

1:29:11He said, I listen to music. And I was like, you listen to music while you're doing something else or you listen to music as a dedicated activity. And he said, I listen to music as a dedicated activity. I was like, okay, tell me more about that. And that's how we ended up. So one thing you might want to consider, I've been down this path a couple of times, and there's two ways to approach it. One, you either go high fidelity system for your house, or you go really high-end headphones. And I recently realized that back even just two years ago, to do a high-end headphone setup required its own dedicated amp.

1:29:49There's a whole rig that you have to get. More recently, there are now lossless over-the-air audio codecs that can go to headphones that sound amazing. Over-the-air, you're saying Bluetooth? Yeah. So I got a Bowers and Wilkins. I think it's the PX7. It's something along those lines. And these are sub$1 ,000, but they're still pricey. I mean, I think they're like$800 or something like that. And they can do a lossless codec from your software, from your iPhone, to your headphones. And so there's no bit degradation in quality. And Apple Music now supports lossless as well. And so you can listen to insanely high-fidelity audio and just sit back and relax and enjoy the music.

1:30:36And the headphones, I mean, you'll see the reviews out there, but they're fantastic. Okay. Well, yeah, that would be substantially less expensive. Oh my God. Dude, I've seen some setups and I'm sure you have too, or you talk to these people. I mean, you're a couple hundred thousand dollars in. Oh, easily. I mean, if you really want to get up to the nerdiest of the nerdy and the most expensive, the expensive. And I do think there's a dramatic drop off. We're talking about wine and all that earlier. There's a point of diminishing returns, but there are people out there who spend you know a hundred thousand dollars on a cable yeah i mean it's crazy you can get as expensive as you want to get but i would say the in-home systems are certainly going to be more expensive than the headset you're describing it's funny we met with someone recently that was an audio video person so daria and i are you know we're in an apartment now and we're moving into home at some point here in the future and there was this person that was like hey i can come do your home audio video stuff and like i literally told the person i was like i just want sonos i just want someone who's in a decent pair of speakers.

1:31:34Because for me, I don't want to spend insane amounts of money when I can just put on an amazing pair of headphones and kick back anywhere in the house and either read a book or just relax and listen to... I'm not going to spend several hundred thousand dollars when you can probably spend 10 grand and have an amazing setup. It's going to sound great. Movies, all that stuff's going to sound fantastic. I don't know. For me, audio is not one of those things that I want to blow money on. Yeah. Well, you know, I've got my relationship with my replica and single life ahead of me. So I can just sit in a house by myself in a dark corner listening to Pink Floyd crying and eating ho-hos.

1:32:16As your replica whispers to you. I got to try this replica now. Is it that good now? I haven't dared set foot. You haven't? You haven't even dabbled? It's like, hey, replica. No, no, no. I haven't. I have not. I have not. Although a few friends have. Really? Do they like it? Do they get into sexual encounters with the replica? I haven't heard that yet. Okay. I don't think it's there. It'll get there. I'm sure it'll get there. If they're not going to build it, they're silly. Somebody's going to build that in very short order. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm just imagining Neuralink type. I don't think virtual sex, which will ultimately debilitate all males on the planet once that is actually a real thing, but nothing will get done ever by any man ever again.

1:32:58But there's been a lot of attention paid to haptic suits and that type of feedback let's say vr adam gazzali loves this yeah haptic suits they just all they're it's like the thing we always bring up adam in every podcast that's right we talked about his chin hair last time uh the the haptic suits i always have found interesting but kind of dissatisfying because it doesn't replicate your human experience right it feels like something vibrating on your chest by and large. You're like, I'm wearing a suit. I'm wearing a suit that's... Right. Dari's doing chest in air quotes. Well, so, okay. Let's say I had like a haptic glove on my schlong, right?

1:33:38It's still not going to feel like the real McCoy. It's not going to be... Have you tried all the crazy things they have out now? Because they have those like ones that look like they have different types of materials that are supposed to feel more realistic. I have not. What are we talking about? Well, they have like those... In concrete terms. in concrete terms okay i've heard that they have those like those skin like ones that like they're like they're locked down and they're supposed to feel really you should work in a foley studio that was great but they're supposed to lock down and feel really realistic like that's don't act like you've never heard of that shit you know more about this stuff than i do i don't i would look let me just be clear i would try that like i have nothing against it I would try it.

1:34:23I just think at some point I'm going to be like, I feel like I'm boning a Mattel toy or something. Right. Right. So where I was going with the Neuralink is I think rather than the haptic suit, there's probably going to be quite a bit. Well, at some point I could envision just having a direct link in where you can simulate, I mean, I guess generate really the type of sensation that you would have. So I think it's going to be the opposite. So here's what I think is going to happen. but I think we're going to have essentially AI that comes in and we'll have a relationship with. And then earpieces will go into real humans that will play the role.

1:35:01Like her. That's exactly what happened in her. Is that what happened at the end? I don't remember. Yeah. Yeah. So they arranged to have like a normal person come in. Like this woman comes in. Yes. She's got an earpiece and he's got an earpiece. And it'll play out. And the idea is they don't communicate. he's just communicating with Scarlett Johansson, who's his AI. I gotta watch this movie again. It's been decades since I've seen it. And then they have sex and he has a camera. I think they had cameras so that the AI could also see what was going on and comment on that. Darius is saying the Diamond Age book by Neal Stephenson.

1:35:37Yeah. The VR is basically played out by actual actors. That's a job. I've heard great things about Diamond Age. I have never read it. But Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash, some people are reading this. my favorite book actually cryptonomicon and a lot of people hate on cryptonomicon but i just absolutely loved it so i gotta go back and listen to snow crash all right i think i'm done with my stuff you covered everything i feel like i've you know we're stopping on the mattel toys that's fine exactly we've covered oh i have a gift for you you have a gift so here's my last story my last story is that when i was in tokyo i realized that lego is obviously pretty popular phenomenon amongst a bunch of my Silicon Valley friends, actually.

1:36:18It's like a time they can get off the computer and build Legos. They have something called Nanoblock out in Japan, which are really tiny. I don't know how they got around the patent of Legos. They're really tiny little baby Legos. And I got you this little castle. Oh, wow. He made you castle. Look at that. Yeah, it's this little tiny castle. And these are small. They do very traditional Japanese structures in like more or less Lego. They even say the original micro-sized building block. All right. So anyway, if people want to eBay it or check it out, it's actually really cool because you know, just recently Lego started adding like things like bonsai trees and stuff like that.

1:36:56When I was walking down the aisles in Tokyo of this store, these nano blocks, they had all these traditional beautiful Japanese structures. And so if you're looking for something, if you're into Lego or know somebody that's into this whole thing, and I have a lot of friends that built, you know, Back to the Future Cars and every other Lego that's out there, check out NanoBlock because they have a bunch of stuff that has very, you know, obviously Japanese influence that you might be really into. Small blocks, big fun. I'm just reading the side here. NanoBlock is a micro-sized building block designed in Japan since 2008.

1:37:29Fun to build, attractive to display, interesting to collect. Something tells me that Lego was around before 2008. Yeah, it was definitely around before 2008. the original to donate anyway you do this will be something to get off the computer and just like do it's it's tiny so it's a like little fun little thing i got a couple for friends oh my my ai girlfriend i built you a himeji castle with nanoblock thank you tim that's my favorite you know how to please me uh all right on that note god save us all all right thank you everyone Thanks, everybody. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday.

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