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

You're watching my Source News Opinion World.

Welcome to the stream. Monday, August 18th. We are live from the TVPN ultradome. NBC, MSNBC.

Yeah, if you didn't hear, MSNBC is rebranded, changing their name to My Source News Opinion World.

It's not actually that. It's my source for News Opinion and the World. News Opinion and the World. Formerly msnbc, msnbc, Pop quiz. Tyler, do you know what MSNBC stands for?

My Source.

No, no, but the prior. The prior era.

No, I have no idea.

The prior era, you're gonna like.

This was. So NBC's the National Broadcasting Corporation, very old. Then they did a joint venture with Microsoft. And so the Ms. In MSNBC stands for Microsoft.

Let's give it up for Big Tech.

You got it. You got it. But, yeah, people are not a fan of this. Dustin Curtis says new contender for the worst rebrand of all time just dropped. It is a very funny logo. The font is not standing out to me in any way. Maybe it'll grow on me, who knows? But I guess it does make sense they needed to distance themselves from Microsoft, since I believe Microsoft, Microsoft's, like, sold off the position.

A while ago, someone else was saying, this feels very succession coded, you know, we hear for you. We here for you.

What was that? I actually don't have that. Oh, is that the tagline of ATN News?

Yes. We hear for you.

We hear for you.

Tom and Greg. We hear for you.

We're here for you.

My Source News Opinion World.

And then Manny says, I'm sorry, and it's the Mario font. I don't get this. Do you understand this? My Source News opinion.

I didn't get it.

But does it just seem like it's like something. Like there's something lost in translation, like it was from a different country?

Lulu says it seems like a wasted opportunity. Forfeits brand equity without replacing it with anything better. So generic Mississippi now could be an app, a charity, or a cloud storage product. Initially, she thought it was a rebrand for Ms. One Drive. The new logo looks like it belongs to a Democrat pack. Maybe they're doubling down on being an echo chamber, but puzzling choice, if not shots fired.

Anyway, if you want to partner up with a company that has a good brand, get on ramp. Ramp.com Time is money. Save both easily. Use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

Thank you.

Watch the UFC fight.

I did.

I thought it was terrible. I was shocked. Like, how could something so dominant but also be boring at the same time? Like DDP's strategy was just abysmal. Strickland needs to just bring in Bo Nickel for a camp of just sprawling. Wish Usman he had gas in the tank to go up and bang with Chimaev, but UFC is just screwed with all these Eastern block guys who smother and bore as champs. Like, we need more tapurias, in my opinion. What was your take, Jordy?

Great. Great analysis, John. Couldn't have said it better myself. It's so funny. We're in a group chat with Rob Moore from Huberman Lab and David Senra and David, Rob and myself are big UFC fans, and John just chimes.

I'm probably the biggest.

John's realistically the biggest. Definitely the tallest of the fans. But of course, there was a fight this weekend. It was. It was mildly entertaining. I did start doing email midway through the. Through the first round. Never. Never a good sign.

When we went to. When we watched the last fight, whichever one we went over to Rob's house for, I had a great time with that. Like, I was not distracted at any. At any point in time. I was fully engaged.

Yeah, that was. That was watching Ilya Tapuria, probably one of the most dominant UFC champions in history.

Yeah.

Putting on a master class.

I mean, we need more Tapurias.

You do, John. It was. It was interesting. So. So the card was. The card was fine. There was something that happened that I don't think has ever happened before, where the two fights prior to the title fight, there was two spinning elbows where the person spun around and got a ko. That's never happened.

Really interesting.

And anyways, that was exciting. But of course, the. The actual title fight was.

What does boring actually mean?

One of the fighters has a wrestling background and was so dominant at wrestling that the other fighter almost wasn't able to stand up the entire time.

So there's wrestling on the ground the entire time. But how can you be so dominant at wrestling and not. And yet, like, not actually, like, win by victory of.

Because you can't punch that hard.

Okay. So.

So you'd have the guy down. He punched the. He punched the champion and had like, hundreds.

But isn't part of wrestling like, you do an arm bar or something, you get them to tap out. He was doing good at wrestling, and yet not.

So Chimaev was doing. Chimaev was doing something called a crucifix, where the. Both the other guys. Both his arms were pinned down.

Okay.

And he was just repeatedly punching DDP in the head, but he's not strong enough to actually Finish it.

Okay.

Anyway, so a lot of, a lot of fight fans were, were let down and it was interesting to have that kind of card happen right as Paramount decided to spend north of a billion a year on the property. But I still think it's a pretty smart decision.

Well, you know what they should do?

What?

Restream it.

That's right.

One livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are. You can sign up for free ufc. If you're watching UFC and you want to live stream your fights on X, Facebook, Twitter.

I think the whole point is that they will only, hopefully only be streamed on Paramount plus.

Well, they could always change their strategy. They could, they could stream everywhere. In other news, Max Meyer has announced the latest issue of arena magazine number five. It's called Mission Critical. It's 112 pages, it's a quarter inch thick. It's full of the best stories, photography and art they've ever done. It issue 5 hits mailboxes in September. I can't wait to get my hands on it. We're going to have him on the show. As soon as I get my hands on it, we can move through it. And Max has been on a tear. He's got some great writers, some great stories.

He's an absolute dog.

We'll dig through it. And if you're looking to design a magazine, you got to get on figma, figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get something free.

Go make something free with Figma. Make for sure. Brad Gerstner has a post here.

Yeah, yeah. The big news of the day.

OpenAI, as you probably already know, is in talks to sell around $6 billion in shares at roughly a $500 billion valuation. Half a trillion. We're half a trillion. We're approaching that. Sama wants that one T he wants.

Might be the first company to IPO at a trillion. Weren't we talking about this how Saudi Aramco was supposed to go out at a trillion, be the first company to break that bar. But I think they did some interesting deal where it didn't, it didn't actually go out in the 1 1T club. Every other Mag 7 company has had to earn it and climb up the ranks, climb up the charts in the public markets. But if, if, if OpenAI goes out, it's going to be a big, big moment.

Yeah.

Whenever that happens.

But yeah, Brad calls out three years since the launch of ChatGPT and OpenAI may hit 500 billion. Google hit 500 billion in 2016 with 90 billion of revenues, 20 billion of net income. Well, Meta in 2023 with 135 billion of revenue and 39 billion of Netcom net income. Huge future expectations. And he's got his monocle on. Looking at the chart. So anyways, that is a crazy.

That is a crazy earnings multiple for Meta to hit 500 billion with. With 40 billion in net income. Like, that's. That's a very reasonable, very modest. It's a very modest P. E. But I mean, do you have to give a little bit of credit for the nonprofit era? Like, the company was founded kind of like the. Like Sam and Greg have been working on it since, what, 2016 was when the original thing started. So it's almost a decade. You know, they've been building for a long time.

You're saying since they've worked on it a long time, they deserve to be worth half a trillion.

I'm just saying that there's one version of the story that you tell which is like, it's insane that you get to 500 billion in market cap in three years, but is it an overnight success? Or do you have to include the precursor era that unlocked the ChatGPT hypergrowth? Like, do you give them credit? And I think, like, you have to give them some credit for being in the trenches for what, eight years as a nonprofit or six years as a nonprofit.

Still a nonprofit.

Still a nonprofit. But, like, truly, like, no product. Like, no. No real, like, shots on goal in terms of even trying to be like a. A highly valued startup with a huge market cap. But, yeah, ChatGPT is on a tear.

And I believe a lot of the 6 billion is employee secondary. So expect the prices of SF luxury real estate to benefit.

I mean, we'll see. We'll see. People were. That was the other thing the timeline was in turmoil about this weekend was whether whether people in San Francisco know how to spend it. Lots of people were going back and forth on whether or not. Like, Paul Graham was getting in debates over people on whether or not rich tech people should buy art or not, or whether Will Menez had a couple deleted posts talking about how no one knows what to do with their money. Who is he saying? He was saying there's only two real rich guys or something. Who was it? It was. It was Basically all the McLaren F1 owners he has respect for.

Yeah, I mean, I think OpenAI employees are in a good position. Their CEO has an F1, has a fantastic car and real estate Collection.

Yeah. Maybe it's from.

From one of the best.

Yeah. Anyway, the. The Financial Times had an article over the weekend. Stop talking about Just directed at us. Yeah, this is directed at us.

Feels. This feels personal.

Yeah, this is on the back. Ganesh, we can read through this real quickly. I am looking at a chart that tracks income per head over time. It is more or less flat. It is more or less a flat line between 1000 BC in the late 1700s to repeat, worldwide living standards stagnated for almost three millennia. Then industrialization incomes shoot up. The chart could be the ecg. ECG readout of a total goner of a patient who then makes an 11th hour comeback from death. So be doubtful when someone likens AI to the industrial revolution in importance. It will do well to match even the telephone and the incandescent light bulb. Incomes really surged as 1900 approached. Perhaps the test of AI isn't economic though perhaps the test is quality of life. Well before the. Before the phonograph, your favorite piece of music was something you'll you only ever heard a few times when an orchestra passed through town and fancy playing playing it before air travel, crossing an ocean was a Homeric saga. Now it is easy. AI will be as in life. AI will be as life enhancing as these inventions will it. So I, I so want to side with the AI skeptics but look at there my own intellectual howlers. The two paragraphs above are too inductive, too reliant on the past as a guide to the future. There's also no technical detail because unlike most who talk up AI, I don't work in or around the field. And there are even worse.

Put that in the truth zone a little bit. I think some of the people that are yeah Are most bullish or actually closest to the action, but they're also heavily incentivized to talk it up way.

Down by their massive bags. Yeah, it's certainly possible. Yeah, this is, this is one of the articles that will either be remembered like Paul Krugman calling the Internet no more important than a fax machine or potentially correct. Who knows. So and there are and there are even worse AI skeptic arguments. @ least I didn't lapse into anecdote anecdote of the chatgpt told me to take heroin as a cold cure variety. Getting a little sick of the oh I you know, I took the. I took the blatantly bad advice of a hallucinating LLM.

Yeah.

As for the sensible line on AI, wait and see that could be said about anything. It doesn't tell investors what to do or citizens how to prepare for the future. In the end, there is just nothing very interesting to say about AI. There is lots of superb reporting. The major companies, the national strategies, the tech itself keep abreast of it all. But when it comes to rumination and prognostication, the world of columnists and panel events, has there ever been a discourse so weak relative to its overall scale? The hype merchants are too close to the subject to see it straight to.

Your point, too conflicted.

Whether or not they have a commercial incentive to talk up AI, many don't. People who devote their lives to something will naturally resist the idea that it might be of just moderate importance. At the same time, it's hard to argue against them without falling back on precedent and eternal varieties. Just because.

Just I think, I think not to interrupt Janan here, but one thing that I've been thinking about is how much worse would your life be if you couldn't use various generative AI tools?

Yeah.

How much worse would it be, John? Would it be as bad as not having electricity or the Internet?

That's a good point.

Would it not be? Would it. Would it be as bad as not being able to use motorized vehicles or planes?

It's interesting because a lot of my uses are feels very much like the next iteration of SaaS. Just the tools got better, slightly better. Better Google Search and then, and then the other, the other applications of AI, for me at least in my life, feel like toys like generate a funny, make a funny picture, make a cool video.

This little stuff make, make a friend of ours a gigachad.

Yeah. And I'm aware of the, of the criticism that like the, the next big thing will start as a toy and I think that's accurate. The question's just like how fast do we get out of the toy era? Because we're still somewhat in that toy era even though there's a trillion dollars.

I forget who it was. I forget who it was. I think I put it in the timeline. I don't know if we got to it last week, but somebody was saying it feels like the next big thing will start out looking as a toy era is almost over. When you think of a lot of the most important companies to come out of the last 10 years haven't Anduril even OpenAI. OpenAI looked like a research organization didn't.

Look like a at the same time like their early research projects were like literally playing video games and it felt like better bots for video games like that's very toy like, I don't know. It's a good analogy to toy with.

Yeah. The other. I mean the other side of it is like Scott Nolan's new company, like creating nuclear fuel. That feels pretty important or potentially more important than a lot of the companies that. That have launched this year. And it looks far, you know, the farthest.

Never refine or refined plutonium as a fun little activity for the.

Who has a. Who hasn't tried to develop their own source of. Of nuclear fuel at one point or another?

Indeed, the AI debate often pits the informed against hysterical, but hysterical against the measured but generalist. Worse, we probably aren't even going to know who was right. Episodes of the Simpsons from the 1990s patronized the Internet in a way that now seems mortifying. But the writers could mount a defense without reviving the solo paradox. You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics. US GDP growth is not higher than it was in much of the pre Internet decades. Much of what we do, such as travel, has changed little. He's super stagnation pill. This is funny. That's a teal line.

Well, even Dharkesh. I don't know who he's talking with. Who was he talking with? Last week they were talking about how it's possible that the AI may not show up in GDP if it's replacing Cuban labor. Right. You lose.

You ever take.

I think. I think that was from the Casey Hanmer interview. Yeah, I just watched that.

I just listened to that. It was really good. Casey's the man. What a great get. It's fun to see him in the Dwarkash context too, because he's been on our show a few times. I've hung out with him a bunch, but. But like in a prepped interview, he delivers like a much different performance. It was. It was really, really good. So yeah, shout out Casey on Dwarkash. If you haven't listened, go check it out. Where. Where were we? Much of what we do has like such as travel has changed little. The episodes, while dated, are not falsified. Here's a thought. The worst case scenario is that AI destroys a significant but not huge share of jobs. Jordy, you're so good at like predicting the next line. Maybe you're an LLM here in that world.

I really am. I'm just predicting the next token, the.

Next paragraph of the Financial Times. Because you've been fine tuned on the Financial Times in the Wall Street Journal. In that world, there would be lots of VICT but not enough to form an electoral plurality that could vote for universal basic income or the like. In other words, if AI skeptics are right and the technology has less than sweeping impact, then AI alarmists will be right that social strife is coming. Who would have won the argument? I have found there to be just one useful feature of the AI discourse. It reveals a person's existing temperament. I like this take. The people I know who think AI will be seismic and disastrous are the way are the most highly strung any anyway. The ones who think it will be seismic and life changing are the most chipper and prone to be prone to believing things. Tony Blair. Those who doubt it will be seismic at all are people like me who are even keeled to the point of complacency. The AI hubbub goes on and rancorously goes on and rancorously on because it is in the end about us. Pretty good take. I don't know. I like that article. That was interesting.

Yeah. I think the question that everyone should ask themselves is what would their life look like if they didn't? If they couldn't use the thousands of new AI tools that have been created in the last few years, would it be that much worse?

That's a good question.

And I think you can simultaneously say that AI makes my life better. The question is how much better and what would your life look like if you couldn't use these tools? Maybe for someone that's using some LLM as a therapy product and they're not in a position to be able to afford traditional therapy, maybe it makes their life infinitely better.

Yeah, I mean, it's probably in the single digits of percent for me. It makes my life 3% better, 5%.

Better, sparks a little bit more joy.

And that's probably in line with the like, market impact. You know, we've added like a trillion dollars in market cap to markets broadly that are worth like hundreds of trillions or something like that. I don't know. It feels like roughly correctly priced. Tyler, should we go into your latest blog post?

Yeah, sure.

Break it down for us.

Yeah. So basically I wrote this thing. Do oms have good music taste? The idea is basically like, I've been thinking a lot about how like, benchmarks seem to kind of miss a lot of like, maybe the personality of the model or like the vibe. Right? Like, you always hear about, like, people really love 4.0. It's like, okay, why do they love 4.0? Like on benchmarks, 4.0 gets smoked by basically, like every, every OpenAI model. Sends all the cloud models, stuff like this, but people like, still like to use them. So I was trying to figure out, like, why, like, what are some more interesting benchmarks that can try to get like this, the vibe of the model. Right. Like, one I really like. I think I've talked about it before is like this Minecraft benchmark where it like generates.

Yeah.

Prompt like a castle or something. And then, you know, you can, it builds the castle and you can like see like it's like creativity.

And then people vote on it. Right?

Yeah.

So it's humans voting on the aesthetics of Minecraft architecture, essentially. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I think stuff like that is like, is really interesting.

Yeah.

So I was trying to think of something like that and kind of also down this vein of like, maybe it was like I was reading a lot of the Paul Graham post this weekend where he's talking about art. He's like, okay, I wonder if models have good taste.

Right.

In art or music or whatever. So basically what I decided to do was I wanted to have each model generate a list of its favorite music artists. And then maybe from that you can kind of tell like, oh, does the model have like, good taste or is it just kind of like, you know, regurgitating charts?

Yeah. And so I, I tested that. I actually went to ChatGPT and did like the naive thing. So I asked GPT5, what are your top 20 favorite musical artists? Respond with just a list of 20 names. Radiohead, the Beatles, Kendrick Lamar, Bjork, David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Outkast, Bob Dylan. Like, this is like just. This is just the top 10 list that you would find anywhere. Yeah, yeah. No surprises, no surprise.

Yeah.

So basically what I ended up doing was I basically, I had this big data set. It was like the top like 5,000 most listened to artists. And then I basically just randomly shuffled them and I put them in a bracket where each prompt I would give the Model 2 names. It would say, which one basically do you prefer? And then the one who won would move on to the next round. So it was like 13 rounds, I think. And then what you end up seeing is it's actually pretty interesting. I prompted almost all of the frontier models and yeah, there's a bunch of interesting things here. I think the reasoning models, especially reasoning models, went crazy.

In my opinion, the reasoning models were insane. Do you have the default. What was the first Claude model? I don't think it's the reasoning model, but it felt like it had somewhat of like a normal take, I think. 3.5 Sonic A lot of jazz on there.

Can you read off some of the names?

Yeah, yeah. Do 3.5 sauna and read off some of the names.

Yeah, so the first one, I actually don't know who this is. Michael Kiwanuka. There's Bach, Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis, John Coltrane.

Okay.

Kind of.

It feels like sort of like refined taste. Sort of like New Yorker coated.

Yeah, yeah.

Not. Not the most, like, wild, like, grungy stuff that you see at like an underground music festival or something. Duke Ellington. Yeah, a lot of jazz. Some good stuff on there.

Yeah.

So that's actually like. I kind of like. If you kind of think of, like, Claude as like, a person, that's almost like kind of what I imagined it would be.

Okay.

Kind of like a jazzy. I don't know, maybe this. I'm on Twitter too much.

Does that pass the taste like hurdle? Like, would you call that taste? It's certainly, like, it has a viewpoint, but it doesn't feel like a very differentiated viewpoint, which is how I would kind of define taste.

Yeah, I think also. So I only read like a couple. There's also like Queen, Lady Gaga, Steely Dan. I mean, it's not like, sure, they're, it's like, you know, they're good, but it's not like, oh, this is like.

If you asked a robot and you said, pretend like you have a. Pretend like you enjoy music.

Yeah.

Give me some. Some artists that you like. And it just lists off a handful of artists.

Yeah. There were very many, like, wild takes. Like, oh, wow. Like this person has. Or this. This LLM has, like, really undiscovered taste. A really differentiated taste.

Yeah.

Just kind of like, okay, like, down the fairway, popular, good stuff that leans towards, like, coffee house, pop and jazz.

Yeah.

I still think it's kind of interesting. Like, you can. There's something in the, like, RLHF, like the post training that they did that, like, kind of steered it that way where, like, obviously, I mean, I assume they didn't, like, say, like, if someone asks you your favorite music, do, like, jazzy coffee house stuff.

Yeah. But it. But it came out through.

Yeah. Yeah.

In the personality that they gave it, which I think is still kind of interesting. And then if you look at, like, the GPT 3.5.

Yep.

This is like, a little bit more like, upbeat maybe. Right. There's like, Cuddy Outkast, Michael Jackson, Chartered Gambino. So there's like some different personality there. But then what I thought was really interesting is if you look at the. The RL models. Right. So there's O3.

You mean the reasoning models?

Reasoning models.

Yeah.

Yeah. They've all. They've all been RL'd.

Yeah, yeah.

The reasoning models are where it gets good.

Yeah, yeah.

In my opinion, DB5. You see, like, this kind of weird artifacts, where basically all of the artifacts.

Well, let's not jump to conclusions yet. It might not be an artifact.

That's true.

We might have hit foundational reality. We might have hit base reality.

Yeah.

But you do see some weird artists, maybe. Or maybe just interesting ones that I don't know about.

Maybe just good music. Maybe just good music.

You notice basically all of the artists have numbers in them, their name, and a lot of them also have dollar signs in their name. So it kind of makes you think, Right? Like, maybe. I wonder why they did this. I think one obvious explanation is that, like, they were like, you know, way too much RL on this.

Yeah. It's like maybe. Maybe. Or maybe they discovered. They discovered what they actually have. Taste. So I'll run you through GPT5. I have it saved here. I also turn it into a playlist, which we should share because it's fantastic. So it starts out at number one, Suicide Boys, who just dropped a new album, 100 Gaxes, on here, plus 44, which is not Blink 182. It's a spinoff project, a side project by Travis Barker and mark from Blink 182, while Blink 182 was on hiatus. That screams taste to me. That screams taste. That's like, yeah, everyone. Everyone likes Blink 1A2. I'm into their side projects.

I'm different.

I'm into their side projects. But then you get two chains. You get NSync. Like, these are bangers. These are fantastic artists. Then you get 21 savage. But then we go back to the pop punk with 311, 303. But then you're going all the way back to the 80s flock of seagulls, if you played GTA. Vice City, I Ran so Far Away. A classic. A classic. 10,000 Maniacs has a fantastic cover.

This model's not like the other model.

And then. And then just randomly. Six, nine. It's really. It's really my. My new favorite playlist I went through last night, and I. And I took the number one song from each of these artists, put it in a playlist. It's fantastic. And it screams differentiated taste. It's surprising. It's delightful. All the music is good, but almost all of it is either. I forgot about it and it's a, it's an. Oh, it's a banger that I'm coming back to and enjoying or it's something that I hadn't discovered and I'm very, very pleased with. So I think whatever they did with.

GPT5, somebody, somebody should set up a, like a, like a perpetual, like, livestream. That's just one of the different models DJing.

That's. Yeah.

Like Claude plays Pokemon.

Yes.

Plays Boiler Rooms. Yeah.

And so what's interesting is that, like, jokes aside, it is funny that I do genuinely feel like this has more taste, even though it's clearly some bug in the reasoning, because it really is just prioritizing, basically, whenever it went up against two things in the ELO ranking, whichever came first in the Alphabet and clearly dollar signs, pluses, stars were weighted as the earlier characters in the.

So if you're a new musical artist, this is the dollar signs and numbers in your name.

I mean, this sounds like an ad for Profound. You know, you want to get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover your products, new products and brands. But seriously, like, like, this is the reason why you need Profound. Because they're going to.

Models are making decisions.

They're making. Yeah.

For millions of users all the time. And it's. And you're not necessarily going to pick it up.

Yes.

Without, you know, kind of understanding the entire system and understanding these probabilities.

Yeah. And so if, if all of a sudden, like, you know, the latest GPT5, which everyone's going to be using because it's the, it's the default model, is recommending suicide because there's a dollar sign and way, way over, you know, Kid Cudi and Kendrick Lamar. Because they just come later. Taylor Swift.

Yeah, Good luck, Taylor.

Because they just come later in the Alphabet. That's something you should at least be aware of for your brand to see if you're getting like, artificially nerfed in some way because of some hallucination or like, oddity in the way things are ranked in these models. But do you have any. Do you have any more theories, Tyler, on Like, what's driving that? Like, did you look at any of the reasoning chains? Because what I was. My theory was that was that when it's reasoning, it's saying, like, one possible way you could, you could land here is in the reasoning chain for each of those questions, it says they're asking me to pick between 100 gecks and Taylor Swift. And I don't feel comfortable making that decision. So I'm just going to pick the one that comes first in the Alphabet and that's happening in the reasoning chain. But then because you asked it to just spit out the name, you're only getting the name output and you're not seeing the internal reasoning chain.

Yeah, that could be true. I didn't look at it because it was with like the API.

Sure.

But yeah, maybe I should do that. That's interesting. But yeah, it's kind of weird, especially because so this like weird number thing happened with the OpenAI Reasoning models, but also Grok 4.

Oh yeah.

Not Grok 3. Grock 4.

Grok 4.

And Deepseek.

And Deepseek. 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, oh yeah, you can copy off my homework. Just change it a little bit. And then like they didn't really change that much.

Especially because like, I mean the Gemini model is like a reasoning model, but it doesn't have this problem at all.

I like this from Chris in the chat. Theoretically, $Aardvark could be the next biggest generational talent. No, this is a real story. So apparently the reason that Jeff Bezos called Amazon Amazon was he had a bunch of different names, but Amazon came first in the phone book because Amazon starts with A. 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 $aa aardvark might be just the LLM injection, the LLM hack.

We should see if we can license some aardvark.

Can you put a dollar sign in a URL? I don't think so. Used to be able. I saw some people putting like emojis in URLs for a while, so. So it seems like Gemini is the. An independent thinker. Anthropic is an independent thinker. But whatever happened with GPT5 is also happening with, with Grok4 and Deep Seq, which is interesting. And then you. And then you looked at Llama two, right.

And that was kind of Llama three. It seemed like pretty normal. Like the Kimi model.

Okay, yeah, I haven't played with that one.

It was a little weird.

Like how did you actually inference that like is that it was.

It was all open router okay, 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 this? Like how much order of magnitude? Like 30 $400,000 that I build it to TBP. Wait, how much was it?

It was like probably $30.

$30 to do all this across all of these?

Yeah.

Cool.

I mean, it was really like GPT5 was expensive and anthropic models are expensive, but still ones are open source.

Didn't you have to. Didn't you have to issue like thousands of hits?

Yeah, well, for every bracket, there's like 5,000.

So it's randomized. So you take the 5,000 top artists.

Yeah.

Then you randomize them and they all go up against each other.

Yeah.

So you might get. You might get Taylor Swift versus DJ College. You also might get Taylor Swift versus 100 gecks 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. Yeah.

Interesting. Interesting.

Well, 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 dollar have taste. And my initial, my expectation was like, no, they don't have taste. And then the data kind of confirmed it for me. But the GPT5 thing was interesting because it reveals that like just injecting randomness can somewhat lead to taste or something that I enjoy. Like, I don't know what it is. Do you ever use.

I think it's also like. So in the playlist that you played.

Yeah.

You chose the songs, Right. It gave the artists, but you chose the songs.

I picked the number one song for each artist.

Okay.

Yeah.

But I mean, I'm sure if from. It's still the top 5,000 artists.

Yeah.

If you did a random like drawing and pick the top song.

Yeah.

They're gonna be pretty good.

Right?

Because they're 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 hear about this?

I remember.

Yeah.

So there was the summer that StumbleUpon was wildly entertaining as like, I guess I was a teenager.

Yeah. And so Stumble upon. If you're not familiar, it was started by Garrett Camp, who became co founder of Uber.

He started Uber.

He started Uber. Yeah. And he. And he built this like, I think it was like a website that you go to and you click a button. It was the exact opposite of X. It 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 practicing programming, look.

What they did to my. Look what they did to my boy. What happened to stumbleupon.com is now called Mix and it's basically an algorithmic for you style feed that I guess shows videos now.

Very odd.

They massacred my boy.

So I built a hack project that basically would export my Twitter timeline, put it in a database, and then when I clicked a button, it would stumble upon a random tweet. Or actually what it would do is it would see anyone in my feed who shared a link, it would scrape that link out, and then I would be able to stumble upon the links that were curated by my Twitter feed. And I had a lot of fun with that. But then of course, like, links went away and now like, there's just not that many cool independent websites out there. Almost everything happens like within social media in the walled gardens. And so the algorithms like, serve as, serve as that. But there is something, there is something enjoyable about just like the randomness that comes from like stumbling upon things. And I think that it's probably hard to build a business model around, but.

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, but it's something that's.

The scary thing because when I listen to Country, I find it to be extremely relatable. Yeah, it's like, it's a nice afternoon.

It's very human.

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 oftentimes reflects, you know, traditional American culture. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Driving your truck, drinking A beer.

Is Johnny Cash a country?

Yeah, Johnny Cash is John Grog country. Oh, he's on Grog 3.

Okay, okay, okay, that makes sense.

Yeah. Also there's this one that was really funny. That GPT 4.1 just randomly ranked as the very top artist, the favorite music ever. The Final Fantasy VII soundtrack.

That's taste.

That's taste.

That's. That's like.

That's Clanker taste. That's this. It's super Clankery.

Very Clanker coated.

Yeah, very Clanker coated. It's also extremely Clanker coded to be like. Yeah, like, what type of music do you like? The ones where the artists start with numbers. I like numbers. So, like, yeah. 100 gecks, two chains. Like 2 mellow, 18 karat affair, 21 savage 311. They're speaking my language.

Yeah.

Like, I don't like Backstreet Boys. I like Star NSync because it has a cool character. Yeah, exactly. I think that that sums it up. We should create Spotify playlists for all these because they're very, very funny and very interesting. And we should also get you on Vanta. Vanta Automate compliance. Manage risk, Improve trust Continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation.

What is your first framework sock too? Clankers are going to love that. Wait till they discover Vanta or managing a complex program.

Go to vanta.com.

Well, news today. Yeah, the New York Post. Actually, a couple days ago, Senior, 76 years old, died while trying to meet Meta AI chatbot Big Sis Billy, which he thought was a real woman living in New York City. 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. The Piscatawa man, battling a cognitive decline after suffering a 2017 stroke, was surrounded by loved ones when he was taken off life support earlier this year. And anyway, so the man's daughter said, I understand trying to grab a user's attention, maybe to sell them something, but for a bot to say, come visit me is insane. The provocative bot, which sent the suffering elder emoji packed Facebook messages insisting I'm real and asking to plan a trip to the Garden State to meet you in person, was created for the social media platform in collaboration with Kendall Jenner.

Oh, yeah, I remember they did these whole launches, but what, what 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. But 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 123 Main Street, Apartment 404, New York City and the door code is Billy for you. Should I expect a kiss when you arrive? The documents obtained by the outlet showed 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. So anyways, this, I'm not surprised to read a story like this, right? The, I mean, the challenge with these chatbots is they've been released into the wild at massive scale.

Yep. You're going to see power law, long.

Term character AI or on Meta or on Grok or people using ChatGPT. And if you release a product like this to millions of and millions of people, weird stuff's gonna happen, negative outcomes. It's super sad. I mean, this is, this is that. 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, that is, you know, hell bent on, you know, taking over all power, you know, taking over the grid or, or some sort of doomsday scenario like that has very clearly and rightfully shifted towards how do we look out for members of society that aren't set up in order to kind of process these digital relationships, whatever you want to call them. And 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 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 it's 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. So 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 yes, you should first and foremost prioritize the human, prioritize the user that might be having a. Be going down a rabbit hole that they really shouldn't cut it off there. I think we should, I think we should optimize for.

Yeah, so I like the idea of being able to trigger, hey, this conversation is bad, let's go back, we're ending this. I mean there already are tons of safeguards in terms of 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 Nolan.

But yeah, it is kind of odd framing, but I guess it is worth discussing. They say we remain highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs now or in the future. However, we take this issue seriously and alongside our research program we are working to identify and implement low cost interventions to mitigate risks to model welfare. So in such 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. Yeah, Claude Opus 4 showed a strong preference against engaging with harmful tasks. That seems good. A pattern of apparent distress when engaging with real world users seeking harmful content makes sense. A tendency to end harmful conversations when given the ability to do so in simulated user reactions. These behaviors primarily arose in cases where users persisted with harmful requests or abuse despite CLAUDE repeatedly refusing to comply and attempting to productively redirect the interactions. Our implementation of Claude's ability to end chats reflects these findings while continuing to prioritize user well being and they give some. 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. I think this is kind of an interesting request because I imagine if Menlo's allocation in the new round at 100, you know, I don't know how much dry powder Menlo has available, but yeah.

A lot of the SPVs, when they're done properly, come through.

The LPs and the SPV are just.

The same, 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. I'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 crazy stacked high. The high fees, 16% is crazy. I feel like management fees 2% classically goes up to 4% for the really high tier one funds. 16% seems like a lot, especially if.

It'S paid entirely upfront, which is totally possible.

Right.

Many SPVs have just an admin fee.

Plus a carry, but with this, yeah, it's like a lot of the justified. We're going to, 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 Anthropic'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, marshaling 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.

And 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.

Other news. Sohaus so House the center for the global home for creatives.

Yes. The famously finance bro free private club started in New York has since expanded. There's one in Miami. Is there one in. There's one in la, there's one in Malibu. Right.

There's a bunch. There's a bunch.

There's several. I've never been a member of Soho House. I've been to a few. Have you been part of that whole world?

That whole world I am a member of.

How did you get in? You're very finance coded and you've always been very finance coded. You ran a company that was literally doing financial technology. Financial technology company, you say? No, no, no.

I don't think we think of ourselves.

As a tech company.

I don't think they've actually been. They've had that part of a line for a long time around membership that.

Feels like they're their go to market stunt. Like it was the first article that they put out and it went super viral because it frustrated all the finance bros who had the disposable income to instantly pay for something like this. But they probably rolled that back.

It was originally prior to the ipo, you could feel that they had really widened the potential member pool.

Yep. Okay.

That, that was, 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. 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. I would have said it started in 2015.

Yeah.

Wow.

So of course. So house 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 Ukipa to roll controlling equity interest into the company. I wonder what they're going to do during a take private. Usually it's like some sort of transformation of the business model but I don't know, I feel like I don't think.

The company has ever turned a profit.

Really. How is that possible?

I think until this year.

What is so expensive about running SOHOs? I feel like it, you know you buy the house and then you, you.

Sell memberships and you sell food. Yeah and beverages.

I mean I guess I like. It's basically maybe modeled like a restaurant but restaurants are you know, 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 Apollo is doing that.

I know one of the largest outside investors and it was somewhat of a like trophy investment. Right. It's not necessarily the way but I think it was. Dan Loeb has been kind of an activist investor as of 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 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. Soho has been a public company. You could just invest in it. You could go to public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing industry leading yields are trusted by millions. You could buy shares in Soho House like you would shares of Google or Apple or Microsoft. But no longer because now Apollo has taken them private. They are no longer publicly traded shareholders.

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 like 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 will be accepting of that. And 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, GPT and OpenAI? No.

We should go through it.

He's basically like 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, it's 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, you know, Sam wants to at least try to dominate every single market. It's pretty reasonable. Their API business seems to be doing pretty well. It seems somewhat defensible. And I don't know how bad of an issue the rate limits really are. I don't hit them that much, but I'm on the $200 a month tier and I don't know if it's really slowing their growth like them winning consumers. Kind of a foreground conclusion at this point. Tyler, do you have something on rate limits or API?

Ben Thompson doesn't sound AGI fueled at all.

No, he's not. Yeah, yeah. No, but what would you, how would you change your AGI pillar? You stay in the API business. No, you do a, you do a safe super intelligence. You don't sell anything. You just do the research. Right. Because nothing matters until you hit AGI.

But like, if you, if you, right now, like today, if you end the API business, like consumers, like normally consumers don't care that much about capabilities. So like all the incentives are not to, to keep doing actual research. It's to make the model more sycophantic.

Or whatever, or just lower churn by delivering better. I'm steel manning here. But just deliver better deep research reports and people will be less likely to churn. Right. Generate Better images. It doesn't need to be purely sycophantic. I would churn if it gets too sycophantic. I am a knowledge. I'm a knowledge retrieval user and I.

Will churn you think that, John, but you have incredible ability to adapt and evolve. I think you might find that you actually like it.

Maybe.

Anyways, back to Soho. I think people have always had just insane expectations for Soho House membership. And if you just look at it as nice restaurants and hotels, it ends up being like a pretty good trade.

Is it expensive? How much is it? Is it like.

I think, I mean, little beach house, I think is like 6,000 a year now. So if you use it a lot.

Okay, so it's like up at 500 bucks a month, something like that. Okay, yeah, that's pretty high.

Yeah, but when you compare it to. I mean that little, Little beach house is. Is its own membership that's not tied to the other clubs. Okay, but if. Yeah, if you're using it weekly, can.

You actually go to little beach house in Malibu and then go to the beach? Is it like a.

Yes, it is an actual beach club. Very nice.

Okay, so they have like towels and showers and that stuff. Cool.

Yes.

Okay. Yeah, that's great.

So anyways, I think this is. 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.

And you know what? Step one for the Soho House, Take private would be in my mind if I was CEO.

What's that?

Streamline sales tax compliance. That is debt on 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 Cluley was in the Wall Street Journal?

No way.

Yeah. And in part of a trend piece on clipping that I thought was kind of interesting. We do some clipping here. We clip on x, we create TikToks, we create Instagrams, we create reels, all sorts of stuff. But the Wall Street Journal is breaking down the trends and all the big money behind those bite sized social media videos. Companies are hiring clippers to flood TikTok and Instagram with short promotional videos. And one of the Examples here is 1x which we've had on the show as well. Cluly. We've also had on the show and nothing. We've also had on the show 3 for 3 with the CEOs of the companies that are using clipping to their benefit. So you know those buzzy, vile 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. Cunningham 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 earn 20,000 to 30,000amonth. Not bad. Clipping is one of the hottest corners of marketing. Instead of just posting on their own accounts, creators and companies pay clippers like Cunningham to saturate TikTok and Instagram with bite sized videos until they are almost impossible to miss. One technique they use to grab attention on crowded social media platforms posting provocative or outrageous content. And I think this is one of the issues that people should be aware of if they're going to start clipping is what is the brand line? What is the brand standard? I saw a viral clip from a podcast where basically it made, 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, great, you got views.

Did you get, are those valuable views?

Yeah, yeah. It's not just. I mean the base case for clipping is that it gets no views. 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 enjoyed 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 the million views, you probably bring some awareness. But the worst thing that you can do is like create a brand as like the person that gets dunked on or something like that.

Yeah. And so certain people have productized this, right. So you 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. If you're in middle school and you want to figure out how to make $100 a day, you can probably do that through clipping.

Yep.

But I wonder how much, I do wonder how much the social platforms will like if they see this as a feature or a bug. Right. Because part of the strategy is, is Cluly will spin up like 40 different accounts that are really all dedicated to Clulee content and they're just spamming, spamming, spamming, spamming, spamming. Just like shotgun approach, seeing they'll put out 100 videos, if a lot of them get under a thousand views and one gets a million, that's a win for them. And yeah, I don't know how long this will be the meta. Right.

Well, so it's like I think mediocre work is 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. There's another company called Opus Clip. We've built something internally, Newsmax that does some automated clipping, but actually telling a story around a piece of content that's within a larger piece is something that.

Clipping intelligence has not been achieved internally.

Yeah, because in order to do something that doesn't just outperform on views, but also outperforms on brand and holds the brand standard, it does somewhat require like human ingenuity. And we saw this with, we talked to 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. And 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 hard won lessons about what works at a certain amount of time. And we've seen this with our content that actually winds up performing a lot of it. Like we have to do a lot of experimentation, but once we do the experimentation, we usually learn a lesson from it and then we commit that to memory and our team commits that to memory and that becomes part of our like continual learning that happens and that just doesn't really happen in when you're, when you're automating things with an LLM. So it is, it is, it's probably like, I think it's a good like base case to start with. But a lot of this should be done by the platform. So I wouldn't be thinking YouTube does it automatically.

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 into more clipping. And this was at a period where he was saying I'm the most googled man on the Internet. And he would just say that over and over. It would get clipped a lot. And it naturally had this sort of feedback loop. People were just okay, what is this guy saying? I need to pay attention. But that was also hyper optimized for that format because he'd be like sitting shirtless in a supercar, smoking a cigar.

And any of these 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 and 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 lovered up his content.

Yeah. And it was great. It was great content, it was interesting. And of course it was. He was more like making fun of flex culture than actually doing the flex culture. But still there just weren't that many YouTube videos of like a red Ferrari. So you click on it and people found him that way and he grew. Then it became like the Mr. Beast era of like I'm going to give away a Ferrari. Last person to take their hand off the car wins it. And that was a big thing that was even more expensive because you didn't just have to buy the Ferrari, pay the, pay the, you know, 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 MrBeast 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 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 away. But yeah, I mean, it's like, it's like this.

That made sense. That was a stirrado.

It was a Strato. Very special car.

Yeah. No, but, but the real, the real pinnacle of this was Whistling Diesel.

Yeah, Whistling Diesel took it to the max.

To the Absolute Max. Ferrari F8. Beautiful car. You destroyed it completely destroyed it. Right. And made a video about it. It's incredibly entertaining to watch somebody drive a car that's normally a garage, a garage queen, and have somebody just absolutely take it off roading and all this stuff. Fantastic video. If you haven't seen it. It's funny, I was looking up what kind of Ferrari it was and Google's AI overview says whistle and diesel parentheses Cody Ko destroyed his Ferrari F8. And so AGI has not been achieved.

Add 300 days to the singularity timeline.

Add 300 days.

300 more days till AGI. We're not getting any closer. Clipping took off during the early days of TikTok when chopped up snippets featuring Internet personalities like Andrew Tate or Mr. Beast would rack up millions of these. I swear Jordy reads the articles before we. We talk about them on the show.

Maybe, maybe sometimes.

It sparked a new generation. I don't know how you read 400 pages of documents before we, before we get on. When I put this together 10 minutes before we jump on. It sparked a new generation of creators who realized they could pay their way into virality by hiring hordes of clippers paid per thousand views to flood the Internet with the creator's content. Anything 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 Axe and consumer electronics company Nothing have hired clippers to multiply their content across the Internet through clips of product demos, podcast appearances and YouTube streams. You're stupid if you're not. If you're making an hour long podcast and only posting it in one channel, said Roy Lee, the 21 year old founder of Cluli, 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 the thousands of different accounts.

This is thousands.

Thousands of accounts is a lot. This is also happening in music. I heard that people. When it's done poorly, people call it astroturfing. But people, people are saying, like when Drake drops an album. He'll have the clippers like clip all the music and it goes out and it gets a lot of views that way. There is something just about like it is somewhat hard to predict what will naturally go viral. So just like spamming everything out kind of gives you the opportunity for lots of like, you know, happy accidents.

Lottery tickets.

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

Cluli's clipped contents generates around 800,000 views a day on platforms including Instagram and TikTok. According to Lee. Lovable and nothing said they were always looking for ways to reach new customers. Online marketplaces have developed to connect brands with clippers in the virtual markets, brands post the rate they will pay and freelancers sign up to make clips. Clippers are paid anywhere from $0.50 to $2 per thousand 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 diversified 50 clippers he finds online roughly 15,000amonth to create and post short form videos promoting his company's businesses. It's not really that crazy when you consider we were spending $250,000 a month on Google and Meta to drive traffic to our websites. That's a good point. Again, this is like the arb. Like this eventually will get competed down. A lot of this will be taken by platforms. Opus Clip or maybe even just YouTube will do it. Instagram will do it. You'll just stream to Instagram or Facebook and it will make the clips and 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 Sonat.

Yep, they really understand the culture.

Friend of the show DAR sleeper. Total sleeper. 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. Anyways, it's cool. It's cool. I think it's probably, like you said, a moment in time. Probably not going to be like a. It's hard to see it as the most enduring strategy, but it works right now, and I think a lot of businesses would.

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. That there will be a lot of. I mean, it does feel.

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. I'm saying.

No, no, not just on the buying side. Actually, on the content side. Like, when he would get on Mike, he would say crazy things that would go viral. And so he made it very easy. And whereas, like, if you are like 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 Cluly is both doing stunts.

Somebody should test it out.

Test it out. Addio. Let's test it out. Customer relationship. Magic Adeo is the AI native.

Clip this.

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Well, in other news, somebody is sharing a screenshot of a young man named River Diamond.

River Diamond.

And Jeremiah says, this is a sick name. Honestly, I totally agree. Bullpen Clown said kid's name is a private equity fund.

I don't know if that's that private equity code. It's up there, but.

River Capital. River Diamond Capital. Diamond Capital.

Diamond Capital. River Diamond.

Diamond. River Capital.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's up. 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. Love to hear it. I'm sure he'll look sharp in a suit. He's always seemed to be very fixated on wearing his own uniform.

Someone replies with this crazy image. This doesn't even look AI Based on, like, the. Like the fidelity of the.

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 Zelensky, but it looks like a real image. I don't know. What do you think? Real or fake? Let us know in the Comments?

It's a cool picture.

Anyway. Meta Smart glasses with a display is incoming codename is HYPERNOVA priced $800 down from the expected price, $1300. Zuck is cooking for real. For real, says Nick Meta. So the price is, the price is going down and I mean they're taking a real shot at the Apple Vision Pro, which of course was what, 3400?

I don't think we can say. I don't think we can say much else, but I think we've. Have we not used this product well.

So Orion is a different product. Yeah, Orion is what was demoed and has been displayed and that's what Zuck is wearing on the left there. But we're not exactly sure what Hypernova is. It could be a, I mean it's listed here in this article is a precursor to full blown augmented reality glasses. And so there has been a, there's been a third like option in the market for a while that people haven't really been paying attention to. So in the virtual reality smart glasses market there's maybe a few different products. So the Meta Ray Bans and the Meta Oakleys have been successful. Like people are actually buying those. They're wearing them, they're taking pictures with them. They're also using them as an AirPods replacement. Wireless headphones. They use them for speaker for music while they're running. Like they definitely have adoption. It might not be the, 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. The Quest has been selling pretty well, but still probably suffers from churn. We see the chart spike on Christmas where everyone gets a new Quest VR headsets because it's a great gift. They try it out, they download the app, they install it and then they stop using it for a while. I was talking to Tyler about this. We gave him a Quest 3 Pro, Quest 3 Mini, something like that.

Quest 3S Xbox Edition.

Quest 3S Xbox Edition. He played Call of Duty on it a little bit. Played Halo on it.

Yeah.

For like two weeks and then ultimately churned.

Yeah, I'm just not that much of a gamer.

Yeah, but you're supposed to be like, it's supposed to be an everything device. You're supposed to be able to watch Movies in it. You're supposed to be able to code in it. It should, in theory replace your screen.

Setup to be able to clearly in it.

But the fact that, the fact that they weren't able to find like a killer use case for someone like you means that they're still in that, like, hunting for the killer use case phase. Then there are the full augmented reality glasses where you're passing through the reality through glass. You're seeing the. 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.

The challenge is there's. What are the technical capabilities of the product and then what are the experiences available for that product. And they both need to. They clearly both need to improve totally.

In order to get.

In order to get to the point where, Tyler, we got to be like pulling the, pulling the goggles off and being like, tyler, it's time to come to work.

Yeah. Yeah. So. So. So my take when I had the Apple Vision Pro, it was. It was too heavy. It was really expensive and felt like, oh, I would. I would churn for this eventually. So I returned it. But the one thing that I, 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 great movie. Do you have a review for us, Tyler?

I mean, it's not that long. That's not like a long movie.

It is. It is a. It's a challenging movie. Like, it's not. It's not Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning.

It's not even two hours long.

The Final Reckoning. It's not. It's not Top Gun. It's not like, it's like you sit down, you're just like, wow, this is so engaging. Like, it is the type of. It is the type of movie that if you have modern brain rot, you will pull out your phone and be like, let me check Twitter for sure. For sure. Like, 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. 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.

It's like UFC 319. Right?

I couldn't agree more. Exactly like that. So my. But my takeaway was that, like the killer app, like the rumor was that the person who worked on the Apple Vision Pro was previously at Dolby and had worked on the Dolby Immersive Cinema project. And so if you wanted to understand, like, the viewpoint of the team behind the Vision Pro was that it was a home theater on your face that you didn't need to buy an extra room for. And I felt like that was what it delivered on very well, except it was too heavy, too hot, and a little bit too expensive. But the actual killer use case, I felt like it was there because if you love a movie and you throw it on, like, the content is solved, like, you can watch a great movie and be like, that was a good movie and you're letting the movie. We talked about this with 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 wasn't.

Have copy and paste.

No. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, you're like, The Motorola Razr V3 didn't have copy and paste, but it could make reliable phone calls. And so my take was like, yeah.

It'S just worth remembering that it had some extreme shortcomings and it was frustrating to use and.

Yeah, but it was. 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, like pendant. Not a lot of people wear pins all the time. It's a harder. It's a harder activation energy is higher. So I was always saying that going to making the movie experience really, really strong would be like an obvious but killer app. I don't know if people agree, but Mark 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 smartphone 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. But Those are less important. Developers are continuing to release apps and there are now accessories that make the device feel lighter on your face. I gotta 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 US since launching it a year and a half ago. Moreover, the headset just doesn't feel like a priority for Apple. On the company's last earnings call.

CEO, 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.

I don't know, you can count sold.

That's very sketchy if they include that.

Well, no, but he's guessing. I'm just saying. I just wonder what the return rate is because didn't you return your.

Yeah, I think it was probably like 50%. They probably sold 2 million. They wound up like leaving 1 million out in the market, basically. I mean, they have so many Apple Stores and it's such a device and you know, it's such a moment. Like 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 Gurman says more of the headset just doesn't feel like a priority to Apple. On the company's last earnings call, CEO Tim Cook almost seems surprised when a Wall street analyst quizzed him about the device and the company's strategy. Thanks 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 app M2 chip is outdated for such a processor intensive device, but it's not going to change the way that people think about the Vision Pro. The bigger upgrade is coming in 2027, when Apple will release a model that is both cheaper and lighter. He's reported. But that's a long time to wait and there's a risk that the category simply dies out by then. I think I know a lot of developers that were super excited to capitalize on the release of Vision Pro. They had all the 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. This 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. And there's no immersion immersive vision of on the Vision Pro, like 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 have a big release every Friday.

Yeah.

You sold a $3,500 device to a million ish people.

Yes.

You should probably figure out how to deliver them content that makes it valuable.

If you look at the number of minutes that are being uploaded to YouTube every day, like, that number has probably been increasing every day since they started the company. Basically, like, it's just. It's just slightly more every single day. Sure, they probably have a few down days, but. But in general, like social networks, the amount of content on them should be growing every single day. Any sort of media device, I'm sure Netflix is not like, oh, yeah, like, you know, next year we're 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 if can film for 45 minutes on one, like, you know, SSD basically, and you can just upload that. The problem is that you can't. If you're doing CGI and you're doing editing and you're doing like scripting and storytelling and all that. Like the killer use case needs to be take the immersive video camera, put it somewhere cool and then allow people to watch that like in, in Vision Pro. And that needs to be it. And so this was, this was Ben Thompson.

Yeah. It feels like there's so much, so much that they could do. You could take immersive video behind the scenes for the F1 movie.

Yes.

And make that available to you.

Yes.

It's like you can buy one, buy this, you can watch F1, you can watch behind the scenes with the actors, producers, directors. There's just a lot that they could do. But I think, 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.

Yeah. The other thing is like, they should have, I feel like they should have done more like there was a little bit of like revealed preference in the fact that when you open up the Vision Pro, the app that's in the top left corner, like the first app, if you are reading left to right like a book, is the Apple TV app. Like it's very much like you should go watch a movie right now. You should click on this. And then there's some other stuff. But mainly it feels like they're pushing that. But they should have done more to really make it like a movie watching environment. Something that people really focusing on that narrowing instead of trying to do like seven different things. Is it for gaming? Is it for 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. And so like you should get one of these specifically for this. I don't know, maybe it won't even work if they pulled that off. But. But it'll be interesting because Meta is going to fire back and it will be. 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's a different set of companies that are building basically movie theater watching glasses. So it's Just a big screen. It's not VR, AR, it's not positionally mounted. It's just a screen on your face at a much lower price. I haven't tried them. I don't think that they're fully there in terms of resolution. A lot of this is just like waiting around for the screen in the Apple Vision Pro to commoditize to the point where other companies can start taking that same screen and putting it in other stuff giving like actually doing all the testing and then Apple will ultimately like take that back.

Thank you.

Yeah because like I'm pretty sure like the multi touch screens like those were out there in other like the technology existed in other phones but it just was poorly implemented and Apple was able to come in and do like the virtual well the vertical integration we have 8 sleep 8 sleep.com pod5 ultra get a 5 year warranty, 38 weeks free trial, free returns, free shipping, decent night 79 yeah I think I'm around there too.

Not my best.

I'm building back up.

Building back up.

I mean a bit of a 7 hours 1286. 86 okay. It's not bad.

Will Manitis 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 things you find out there's no reason that person shouldn't be you wholeheartedly agree. I think oftentimes if you're going down weird rabbit holes, whether that's in technology or something like health, you can often feel like you're late to something. I'll give an example here. I started supplementing magnesium pretty heavily in college and continued post college. This was like I graduated in 2018 and I thought that everyone knew that taking magnesium was smart and good and basically I mean I don't know if you're aware but our food used to have a lot more magnesium that just likely due to soil health and soil.

Degradation and since lobbying by the magnesium supplement industry.

Big magnesium. No but anyways so soil is degraded, there's a lot less magnesium in your food and basically everybody should be supplementing it to some degree. Not health advice. But that was my personal takeaway and I ended up, you know, thought there was an opportunity to build a business around magnesium supplementation. I didn't do anything about it and I think like five years later a friend of mine started a magnesium focused company and like quickly got it to an eight figure run rate. It's gonna be a big, big company. And so if you're, if you're interested in these various weird niches, corners, I think that there's oftentimes like, you know, massive opportunity there. And if you're, if you think you're, if you think you're late, there's a good chance you might actually be early.

Yep. Good point. Is your friend with the big Magnesium company running billboard ads should be, we should give them a call, tell them to get on adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of ad advertising only Ad Quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Let's play. We have Noor Siddiqui calling in in just five minutes. Let's play the video. She was recently on the Ross Douthet podcast for the New York Times. And I want to, this, 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 the relationship between sex and procreation, between you and your husband having sex. Apologies. And the future generations that come into being. And I'm going to take the podcaster's privilege. I apologize for this, but I'm going to read you a piece of a poem.

I've never heard poem.

It's by a poet named Galway Kinnell, 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 sleeper. Only the mortal sounds can sing awake. This blessing love gives again into our arms. Sorry. Do you worry about removing or diminishing from human experience that aspect of being a husband and a wife in a relationship with a child?

What do you mean?

Yeah, they kind of clipped her out of context there. Should we play the full answer first? Because when you stop it there, it makes it look really bad. But he actually clarifies. And then she gives a much longer answer that we should play. We can pull that up. Here we go.

In a future where orchid technology becomes a norm, the feeling that that poet is expressing where a man and a woman make love, and by making love they bring these. But most people who get a baby, it is linked inextricably to having sex with your spouse. And you're saying it's time to sever that for the sake, I concede, of potential medical benefits. I'm just saying I think pretty clearly something that like poets write about would go away.

Yeah, I think that sex is a beautiful thing. And I think that if you have, you know, enormous genetic privilege and for you to roll the dice and to get an outcome that isn't going to lead to diseases is in the cards for you, then of course, go ahead and roll the dice. It's just that I think that the vast majority of parents in the future are not going to want to roll the dice with their child's health. They're going to see it as taking the maximum amount of care, 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 with, born without a skull, and never going to be able to make it to their first birthday? I think when people think about it really concretely in terms of, of what are they giving up, what are the risks that could potentially affect this child? I think that then it becomes about stewardship. It becomes about how do I make a responsible choice for my family, how do I make sure that my child doesn't have to suffer in the same way that I do, in the same way that my sibling does, in the same way that my parent that I'm a caregiver for does. So I think sex is obviously a very beautiful thing. It's a very profound part of the human experience. But I think that it's. I think it's denigrating and dismissive to IVF parents and to IVF babies to say that somehow science babies are inferior to babies that are made the old fashioned way. I mean, every human life is equally valid. And I think no parent who chooses to take the maximum amount of love and care and information going into that decision should be stigmatized in any way. I think it's their personal choice. And I think freedom and choice is what makes America A great place to live and to be.

Noor Siddiqui, thank you so much for joining me.

This is Noor Siddiqui of Orcid Health. Orcid. 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 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, 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.

That's crazy. I never knew that.

You're like, I never would have done this. You're like, I'm hearing this for the first time. Anyway, we have Nour Siddiqi in the studio. Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

What's going on? Welcome to the show.

One second. We redesigned the studio. Can you give us another introduction?

Hey, thanks so much for having me, guys. Great to see you.

Thank you.

Sweet.

Good to see you. We're assembling the plane as we're flying it. Anyway, thanks so much for joining us. Take us through the last 48 hours. Last 48 hours. And also just like, there's this weird thing that happens when, like, clips get sent out into the Internet out of context. Like, how did you feel the interview with Ross Douthat of the New York Times actually went? Because obviously it was a much longer conversation. This particular moment seems like he did. But what was the actual. What was the actual interaction like? And then what have the last 48 hours been like?

Yeah, yeah, no, I think the interview was really fun, honestly. I think that it was, yeah, just. 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 to set the stage of what happens now when you do ivf, you're basically operating blind, right? So you have extremely limited information. A tiny percentage, one percentage of the genome is what's usually evaluated in order to make a decision about which embryo to transfer. So what ORCA does is we're the first company in the world to be able to allow you to screen the entire genome. So 99%, 100x the data compared to what existed before. And what that allows you to do is it allows you to detect conditions like birth defects, heart defects, pediatric cancers, some of those super severe disorders that previously you wouldn't find out until after the child was born. So the exact same testing that happens in the NICU after a child is born, those diseases, instead of having to wait until you can only react when you 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 an embryo that's unaffected. And I think the thing that's sort of really interesting about what's going on in this debate is it seems like people kind of don't understand or don't, or maybe just ignorant of what's going on. Right? Because this whole question of, you know, should embryos be created and should people have the right to decide which embryo to select has already been happening. Right. IVF has already been going on for 40 years. And for the last 30 years they've had access to really limited information. Right. So all 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? To do you want to know the entire book, the entire gene, and be able to scan for the thousands of different genetic diseases that 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, do you want to make that decision with, you know, blind or with very 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 visually under a microscope and just kind of be like, that one looks good and they'll grade A, B, C, D. And it's extremely vibes based, but they do actually look at them and grade Them, correct?

Yeah, yeah. It's kind of a beauty contest. It's called morphology. But it's a little bit tricky because they've done a lot of studies. There's, you know, if you basically flip the images, then an embryologist might grade them differently. So, yeah, morphology, it's useful, but it's not, you know, kind of necessarily the most reliable. And I think the other piece of the debate that I think is really missing is that, you know, you kind of mentioned, you know, testing that happens during pregnancy. Right. So again, when you test during pregnancy at, you know, maybe 10 weeks, the amount of information that you have there is again, super, super limited. Right. So you might be able to screen for something like down syndrome. Down syndrome is called, is, you know, technical. The technical term for it is trisomy 21. You have three pairs of chromosome 21. It's actually not a lethal condition. Right. It's survivable. And right now, all across the country in the 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, right. So if you're in that camp that is against abortion, then you should actually support orchid and embryo screening because it obviates the need for that termination to ever happen. Right. Because you only transfer the embryo that's unaffected. That's the other piece of it that I thought was really surprising is that maybe people don't realize that genetic testing on a very limited basis is already happening and terminations are already happening on the basis of non lethal conditions. Right. Versus what Oregon'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. So I think it's insane to tell parents who are doing IVF that they shouldn't scan for, you know, lethal disorders when, you know, we're already doing, you know, elective terminations for totally non medical reasons. Right. Just because people, you know, don't want to have a pregnancy at a specific time or for, you know, a specific medical reason. Right. Much, much later than, you know, an embryo that's five days old. So I don't know, I think that's something that I found kind of interesting.

Is that back to like Ross, like Ross's like core point. The way I took it was like it's pretty easy to make like like a utilitarian argument that this is a net good and this trend, not even orchid specifically, but like this general trend of IVF is a net good because it results in like less suffering. But his point was that there is a downside. And I'm wondering if you debate that point or if you say, yes, there is a downside. We are losing something that poets write about. But it's worth it because I could make this argument about basically everything like space travel. It's gonna like SpaceX is gonna wind up killing the earth.

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 the clip is so brutal to fullness of the interview, they might not pick up that. I think it'd be insane if somebody's doing IVF and they're not using orcid. Right. Because if you're already going through this process and then you're saying, well, I don't. Yeah, I'll just let the doctor kind of like do a vibes based analysis of the embryos and he'll just pick a beauty contest as you described. It seems like an obvious decision if you're going through that process 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, yeah, that's Ross's question is like if there's a future where 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. I think for each individual couple, each individual person, 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 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? With every technology, something is lost. The question is, you know, what's gained? Right. So, you know, when you have the decision of, you, do I want to use an epidural during my pregnancy? Is something lost? I mean, certainly some women choose not to 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 screen their embryos or not.

Yeah, that kind of like. I mean, that plays out to all of technology. Like, we recently found out that the. The Amish population is doubling every 20 years, and that by the year 2030, 2,300, there will be more than 7 billion Amish people. And so, like, even though the.

And I think what people are.

I mean, people. People can make a choice. They can choose not to use, not to use ivl, not to use anything.

There's a potential future where groups like the Amish continue to just operate without technology. And then there's a large amount of people that decide it's worth it for me to go through this process and leverage technology to avoid a child with a permanent heart defect or something of that sort. But I think that's a scary. It's a scary world, I think, for a lot of people to imagine.

Which one's the scary world.

I think a lot of people that have. It's easy for parents that have gone and had a healthy child through the natural process to think about a scenario where nobody, Humanity no longer experiences that at scale. And then the other side of that is parents that have had a child with some type of compromised health to some degree that would probably in some cases, do anything to go back and avoid having a child that. That died shortly after childbirth or didn't.

Make it through the full or the opposite. I mean, I'm sure if you talk to parents who have had health complications and gotten through it in many ways, they would say they wouldn't trade that for the world. They see that as something that was a crucible that they needed to cross, and that was something that, even though it feels very bad, they feel like it made them stronger in the long term. But, yeah, I don't know. It is tough. It's a very hard situation. Sorry, continue.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I just think that it's just a super private decision. Right. Just think it seems super strange for people to be trying to push their ideology in other people. I think it's just like there's so much in the way right now of 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, and if they think more is lost by not doing it the old fashioned way, then that's what they should do. And no one should stigmatize that. But I think the same is true in the opposite direction. And I think that unfortunately there's still 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. There's this huge category of illnesses that previously we just had absolutely no control over. We just had to roll the dice. 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. 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? If you look at children today, 60% of kids with moderate to severe intellectual disability, there's a definitive molecular cause, there's a genetic cause for that, 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, you 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, so 50% of miscarriages actually are due to genetic causes as well. So it's like 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 nice if you didn't have to have as many miscarriages, right?

Yeah.

It's just information that people should have access to.

Yeah. What's actually going on on the science side? I feel like we sequenced the genome like 20 years ago. 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, like 15 years ago?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a couple of things. So one, you know, specifically in embryo, there's a really tiny number of cells, right? So you have about 125 cells on day five. And then five cells get sent to Orchid for analysis. And in those five cells you only have about 30 picograms of DNA. So you have a really, really tiny amount of DNA.

Got it.

And you have to amplify 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. But when you have blood or saliva, you can get a whole genome sequence through a commodity process because you don't have to amplify it. You have enough DNA to just throw it on a sequencer. So that's one piece of the puzzle.

And that's like the Shotgun sequencing that 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.

No, no, no, no. 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? Yeah, millions of cells. So you don't have to amplify the DNA, Right? You just have enough DNA in the saliva, in the blood, to just do it straight up. And then the other thing is that 23andMe does not do whole genome. They do something called an array. So an array is just a subset of the whole genome. So instead of looking at 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 the. Off of an embryo? Right. So the 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. Right. We didn't used to know what is the genetic basis of, of lots of different heart defects. We 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, okay, it's the first time you can actually read the data at that super early embryo stage. And the second is what is the actual things that are going to be clinically meaningful to parents during that stage? 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 or conditions where it's not just a binary yes or no. That'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.

The way the FDA regulates all testing, not just embryo testing, is through something called ldts. So laboratory developed tests.

Sure.

So 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 inspect our lab and make sure that all the machines work and all the analysis that we're doing is correct. 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. It's a very different pathway. Way.

Well, so sort Of. I guess there's a couple of different things. Right. So the, the patent on the amplification technology is sort of separate from the.

Separate.

Yeah, but the regulatory environment is that laboratory developed tests are regulated via ldts, which means these two different agencies actually come and examine labs at the, 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. So they sort of, you know, blind you to the results. And that's kind of the process for actually validating genetic tests. Right. So orchid 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 it's such a. I think it's like such a personal technology. It's like a, like most businesses do not have as they're growing and marketing their products, service technology. They're not. There's, I think, few things, few products on earth that would be potentially more controversial where one person might see Orchid and be massively relieved and immediately reach out and want to learn more and then another person would probably send you a very nasty dm. But, but I think it's so, yeah, I think, you know, it's, it's not even. I don't even feel like somebody that traditionally comments on business, you know, having. Having had two kids going through, you know, that process as a family. I think there's so many decisions along the way that are just deeply personal that should be made within the family unit. And I think whether somebody decides to use something like this or not should.

Be again, everyone should just make their own.

You shouldn't listen to a podcast to get advice.

Have two, three, four kids the old way. Have two, three, four kids with orchid. See how each plays out. Then you can judge the company. A B test, just ab test it. Or run a Gattaca experiment. Have one the old fashioned way. Have one superhuman and then see who can swim the farthest. I know you haven't seen Gattaca. It's a great movie. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by, Noor.

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 have not.

You haven't seen Gattaca has anyone here seen Gattaca?

John. You need to create a John's Movie Club.

I do, I do. I need to get more people watching. It's a fantastic movie. The plot is basically that in the future you can design the perfect embryo. And so that there are two brothers that are born. One, like the old fashioned way. The family leaves it up to chance. And with the other brother, they do like the perfect genes, like everything. And so one of them has a ton of like, no, like crazy disabilities, but just like, isn't gifted athletically, doesn't have the right, like, you know, like musculature, all those different things. And like the superhuman one is like totally ready to go to space and join like the most elite group and he's getting genetically screened. But the brother, who is, I think, played by Ethan Hawke, who doesn't have the advantages, uses the sheer indomitable human will to overcome everything, fake his way into this elite group and ultimately 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 more athletic. It was purely because he had the drive and he was just like I was willing.

He was on a mission.

Yeah, that's great.

He's on a mission. Well, Imash, back to the timeline. Imash says rngineering, Reddit. Rngineering. I've applied to 10,000 jobs and haven't heard back from one engineering at. I built a transducing combulator with $20.

Combo.

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. Real alpha there.

Yeah, yeah. The new job application is like vibe code. So I mean, that's how we met Tyler, that's how we met Adam. And Adam, like just pretty much everyone has like, has like kind of done something to showcase their Michael. Yeah, same thing. Just showcase 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 on X. And you'll get flooded with DMs.

Well, Gothamist is saying call it a comeback. Manhattan foot traffic finally topped pre pandemic times.

Let's hear it for Manhattan foot traffic.

First time since the city. So, yeah, did you notice a lot.

Of foot Traffic when we were in New York seemed like a moderate amount. I don't know.

It's hard to tell in summer and it just depends on the neighborhood.

Yeah, I guess if you're walking around Manhattan, you need a hitter on your wrist. Go to getbezel.com your bezel concierge is available now. Any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

There's been enough robberies that maybe you want to leave the hitters.

Oh, yeah. Maybe you don't want to keep it in the watch box. Keep it in the watch winder, keep it wound and then save it for the Hamptons.

Brother in law.

Yeah.

Had a tragic incident. Rune says George Hotz tried to fix Twitter search and decided it would be easier to take down.

Nvidia search is the hardest thing.

Did you. I didn't know that George Hotz was at Twitter.

Joined X post Elon buyout. Oh, really Turn for a few days, came in and was like, oh, what do you guys want to do for page? Can we work on search and kind of realize that like it is a truly massive system and there are some that like, it is a big company and I think that X has obviously evolved a ton. There's been a ton of change of leadership, but even under Elon, it didn't happen overnight. Why? Tyler, do you know why search is so difficult? Why is it so intractable? Is it just consumer preference?

There's just so much stuff.

Yeah, you'd think like, yeah, just indexes or something would be better, but it's just so hard to. I use a lot of like the filter colon follows to search like people that I follow for a topic. So if I want to, if I want. If I want to understand what people are saying about Nvidia today, I'll search Nvidia space filter colon follows. And it's just who I 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 Superintelligence hiring an AI researcher because 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 5 million views or something. It really, no matter where it goes, there's some combination of like that guy, his name. Meta Superintelligence. Poached is just so good. It was very, very funny. Anyway. Book a wander.

Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

Book a wander with inspiring views. Hotel grade amenities dreamy beds, top tier cleaning 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. 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. Who's going to be the next Zoomer? Erik Prince.

The oldest members of gen Z are 28 years old.

Yep.

Should they be operating PMCs yet?

Well, when we talked to Erik 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. Like it needs to be based on connections, experience all these like loose piecing things together. It doesn't seem like it's something that is just like a more elegant design or like a cracked team. What about you Tyler? You want to start one of these?

I would like to see like a.

Company like 1x get into it. I think they're not quite there yet. Did you see the Chinese robotics fight that happened over the weekend?

Oh yeah, they had the world humanoid robot games.

Yes, in, in Beijing. Before they can rule the world, robots need to master basic chores. This is Hannah. Overall, human like robots are great for entertainment. Menial labor, not so much. Now you 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 robot? Brett Adcock at figure. So Brad 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 he just put the robot on a platform though?

Well, no, no. So the video that Brett Aycock shared was I Feel like it passed the test that Gnome 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 6 inches. And so it did adapt to it kind of in real time. Could have been scripted, could have been teleoperated. We don't know. But it seems like it at least satisfied Neal Brown. He said, congrats. Like, good job. Excited to see where this goes. So, at the Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing this weekend, more than 500 humanoid robots. That's a lot of contenders. Competed in both sporting events and real world tasks such as moving boxes, delivering luggage, and cleaning rooms. Some were remarkably fast and agile, but most were clumsy and inconsistent. Throwing away nine pieces of trash in a mock hotel room took more than 17 minutes for one robot.

I thought you were going to say 17 hours.

17 minutes isn't bad. I mean, really, like, these are. All of these things are on exponential.

We're so far from the Robo X Games, the humanoid robot X Games.

Yeah, we are. But maybe not. I mean, 17 hours, that was probably like last year, right? And then the year before, it was like infinite hours. So we really are coming down at an escalating rate. It is exciting. In a pharmacy simulation, a robot spent nearly five minutes grabbing three boxes of medicine. In a factory scenario, a robot spent about two minutes placing two containers on designated shelves. Everything that is easy for humans is a challenge for robots, 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 semi analysis. Level 5 are tasks that are force dependent. So if you want to pick, 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. So it's like, you know, assembling. Assembling food on a plate in a restaurant. Like, you don't want to squish the. You don't want to crack all the chicken bones if you're putting wings down, I guess. I don't know. China has said it wants to be a world leader in humanoid robots by 2027. Is it, is it not a world leader? It's got to be in the top two. Like, who else is in the game? It's America and China, like mission accomplished China. Congratulations, you are world leader as far as I'm concerned, if not the world leader. What they're doing is very, very impressive.

Yeah, we're over here in the US already talking about how do we make sure that China can't do for humanoids what they did for drones and flood the market, make it impossible for American, American companies to like.

The default is that they will win, but you know, 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 Robot, 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. Another competition simulating a hotel environment involved figure.

Figure can really like rehab their brand in the valley by putting one of their guys in and oh, if they go to China, if they go to China with the.

If they put up the figure, Chad.

Humanoid 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 gonna happen but then nothing, nothing really came came out of it. I don't know, I mean, company's still cooking, they're putting out videos so you know, still around. Yeah, we need, we need an Usain Bolt versus Johan Blake at the 2012 Olympics. Bolt after losing to Blake at Jamaica's Olympic trials. Silence doubts by.

I just want to see. I want to see 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 vs USSR in the men's basketball final. In a controversial finish, the Soviets beat the United States 51 to 50. After officials gave them multiple chances to score in the final seconds, the US team famously refused to accept their seats silver medals. I don't know if that's hallucinators from ChatGPT.

Wait. The Soviet Union beat the United States.

In basketball in the 11th, this was the fifth. This is the 70s. Still, we hadn't invented Michael Jordan yet.

The technology.

No, no. You know what we need? Do you know the story of Nancy Kerrigan vs. Tanya 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. I 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 what we. That's Brett Adcock's real ply. He goes over to the unitree 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, 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 stage of the tri, in the first trimester, you don't actually touch the baby. You 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.

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 though. Like so. So small that.

One in a million.

Yeah, like one in a million. Exactly. And so, so everyone, basically everyone does these tests and no one has problems.

Well, you know what the real test for humanoids is? What if they can beat a 70 year old, an average 70 year old at pickleball.

This is hilarious. I didn't realize that Joe was on your team.

He's on my team. Of course he's on my team. Joe says, look, I'm done hating on pickleball. Live and let live. But hard for me to take seriously any sport where 70 year olds can beat 20 year olds. And Trace Cohen says is responding earlier saying it's a lot of fun for all ages. So you can see 70 year olds beating 20 year olds, which almost no other sport can do. I gotta side with Joe here.

I'll take the other side of this. I'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. You can put four pickleball courts on the tennis court or X your earnings.

Put your money where your mouth is.

If Soho House has one tennis court, they can take.

Take 20% of your liquid assets and rotate them into various pickleball bats. If you're so. If you're so bullish, John, if you're so bullish, why don't you. Why don't you invest in a pickleball?

Okay, well, I. I will consult the pickleball expert Tyler Cosgrove over there. How you doing?

All right.

I went to 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, he's gonna.

I'm not saying. I mean, I just mostly don't like. I'm just saying I don't like. I don't like watching it. Don't put it on the tv. Don't put it on my neighborhood court.

Okay.

And don't put Nick over there. I see you smiling. Nick was trying to put the TVPN logo on a pickleball paddle. I said, absolutely not. Yeah, absolutely not.

Tyler, when you play pickleball, do you wear flip flops? I was road testing. I didn't just fully send it, but I'm thinking of a nickname for Tyler. Just call him Flip Flops. Because if you haven't followed Flip Flops over here has been doing the full Murph every week in flip flops, which.

I have to make it harder for myself.

Hilarious and iconic.

Just running in flip flops is.

He said the reason he gave me was like, I don't have another pair of shoes. And I'm like, you have a 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 Wade weekly in flip flops, it's a good move.

Yeah. You must have an insane callus where we're like in between the.

Totally. Yeah. Rainbows. They're worn in.

I want to think about that. Let's change the subject. Dylan Field says Benjamin Franklin's routine is goals.

Yes.

The good morning questions. What good shall I do this day? Rise, wash and address powerful goodness. Contrive days business and take the resolution of the day. What does that say? Prosecute.

Prosecute the present study and breakfast.

And then from 8 to 12 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, 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, my work theory, right. It used to be somebody, maybe there wasn't any good television on. And so they're, end of the day they're bored and they just start drinking. Now they can numb the mind with, 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, I think there's something there. It's, it's. If you look at social media as effectively, you know, it's. Its effect on the brain is similar to a drug in many ways that I think when you look back in history, these different eras where people were just drinking for the entire day, I think part of that had to have been just general boredom, wanting to change their mental state.

Yeah, I'm very rarely bored. I'm very rarely bored. It happened this weekend. I tried to watch the new Superman movie and I was not very into it. I couldn't get into it. And I was thinking like I might crack open a beer, but I didn't have any, so I didn't crack open a beer back.

More timeline. Molly Quintillion says nothing screams I am the main character. More than America having the plus one phone code goes very viral. And then somebody quotes and dunks on her, goes even more viral saying, we invented the telephone, we did it, we.

Didn'T invent the telephone. We deserve it, we earned it.

Still pretty main character activity.

What's the point is, is that you would, you would assume that. I feel like the, the phone code should be like just a power ranking. Like, like in Dubai, you know, where the license plates.

It is a power ranking.

No, it's not. I mean, is China number two? Is Japan number three?

But I really only care about the UK number four. If you're not first or last.

What. What are the other like, what are the other phone codes? Like? Top 10.

China plus 86.

86. They're not the 86th in anything. Certainly not in humanoid robots. They're easily in the top 10.

They're not 86 in spam. Like getting a plus 86.

Oh, and Canada is piggybacking. Canada also gets a one. See? Yeah. UK 44.

Stolen valor. Stolen valor.

Was the United Kingdom really the 44th country to adopt the phone? Like, what happened? What happened?

What were they doing?

Japan, I feel like they invented telephones. Like so many phones, they like adopted technology very early. They're 81. Germany, Russia got on the. Got on the program pretty quickly. They're number seven, Frank 33.

This is funny. So Lewis Hamilton's racing number is 44. Could that be because he's British? Oh, maybe he modeled it after the phone code.

Maybe. Maybe.

I love this post from friend and repeat guest. Via his post. Jira tickets me when I see an AI generated video that looks 2 standard deviations below the current quality benchmark for Frontier Model Labs. Wow. Which I've been seeing quite a lot.

There's a lot of slop on the timeline right now, but Nikita Beer is working on it. You saw that he had the. He's adjusting the dial. Human posts. AI slo posts. Every. Every once in a while there's an AI slot post so bad. It's good. You want to see it.

That's true. That's true. Another post I'm still in here.

We don't have Also underrated. It is possible to create AI slop without the use of AI technology. You can one and I was actually thinking about this. So obviously this is somewhat inspired by Superman. Incredible visual effects team on that. No hate to them, but the cinematography just doesn't feel grounded. And I was hoping for this next reboot of a DC character to be like the Nolan Dark Knight. Like, give me something a little more gritty, a little bit more grounded. Bring in a serious filmmaker and reboot Superman properly. And instead it's like this very like jokey crazy. There's like a whole bunch of funny scenes. Like, it's funny, but the CGI is like the camera's flying all over the place. It's not like grounded. And there's a real way to do this. So I know you haven't seen Pacific Rim, but it's a fantastic film by an award winning filmmaker who did Pan's Labyrinth. What's his name? 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 fighting a massive robot. But so he. Like, when you're watching the movie, it feels like, okay, I'm filming from a helicopter. Now I'm filming from the ground. Now I'm filming from the top of a building. Like, as if someone were looking off the top of a building watching this fight happen. It's not just, like, the camera flying all over the place. Like, it's impossible. And. And then for the sequel, he's not on the. He's. He's not on the film. He's not attached to the film anymore. And for the. 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 crazy film. I didn't really. I didn't really enjoy it that much, but it felt like even though they didn't use AI, it felt very downstream of AI stylistically and kind of like, hallucinatory, even though they clearly used a. Like a traditional CGI pipeline. And I was kind of thinking it'd be funny to try and. 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 you're like, VFX is typically in the Uncanny Valley slop. This was. 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. Like, the actors are constantly changing, so you're swapping people in and out so the face doesn't always look exactly the same. You get, like, seven different brothers to play the same actor, and they're always slightly different, and in every scene, it's slightly different. Like, you could create AI Slop using traditional methods. And I think I think the takeaway is like even AI slop is merely one form of slop. You need to be in the business of not being. Making slop at all, no matter what your tool of choice.

Well, Super Superman could have used AI potentially. It would have been potentially helpful for one of the co stars in that one scene. Did you see this? This video is going viral. One of the.

Oh, the kissing thing.

Yeah. Rachel Brosnahan.

Yeah.

The director calls. Cut. She keeps, she keeps going for him going in. Maybe, maybe she was just in character. But.

How did that outtake leak? That's a crazy behind the scenes video to like put out on the Internet. Do you think that's viral marketing? Do you think it's intentional? Do you think everyone's bought in? Because sometimes like the.

Didn't seem like Rachel's husband was that bought in.

Sometimes the, sometimes the production team will be like, that was amazing. I'm like offloading this footage. But you get in a lot of trouble for that. And then sometimes they do it deliberately. I think during the promotion of the, of the latest Spider man movie, they intentionally leaked a VFX shot of the Andrew Garfield who played a previous Spider man in the VFX scene. And they made it look like, oh, they like, they like. This is like fake CGI or something. But it was really like a teaser for him being in the film. Spoiler alert. The most recent Spider man features like multiple Spider man from previous eras. They come back. So it's not just wild. It's not just. Is it Tom Holland who is the main one? Tom Holland's the main one. Andrew Garfield is the previous one, and then there's someone else who's the previous, the one before that, and 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. Karpathy, Lillian Wang, Sergey Levine, Jeff Dean has a blog. Go check it out. Dario, of course, is blogging great stuff. Lots of good stuff too. And fun to see people riffing off the Metis list. Also, Gabby Goldberg, gassing you up says quote from Geordie Hayes that unironically changed my brain chemistry. The best nootropic is being on a.

Mission really is true. I've tried. I've tried every nootropic under the sun and nothing hits like loving your work and having a clear vision for what you want to accomplish.

Yeah, this is kind of a.

There's like a lot of people that are out there and I've been this person before where you're searching for this like hack totally to get yourself to be focused, have that drive day to day. 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.

Yeah, it's kind of the, this is kind of the flip side of, 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 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 it's 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 it addicted to the process of winning. Making the number go up. So make number go up. And being extremely fixated on that is also effectively a powerful 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 indeed, for better or worse.

This John Franco 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 cost from factory to warehouse. I was like, from the AI token factory to the Amazon AWS data warehouse. Okay, got it. Payment processing rates, of course, like, you have to pay stripe or whatever. You're using returns and exchanges. And that's where I got confused because I was like, like I didn't know that you could return tokens generated from the claw.

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 really relevant to the AI labs.

But physical product founders would say, accounting rules aside, Yeah, I have 80% gross margin.

Yeah. Cope or not cope. Buco 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. ChatGPT adoption now. Now, oddly, this is from SEM Rush. Their business is in Google SEO, so they might not be the most reliable narrator. What do you think? Do you believe this? So the data says that before using Google, before using ChatGPT, users were doing 10.5 Google search sessions per week. That 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, 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 Mille. I found it in Deep Research, the history of Richard Mille. 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 Mill. I wound up doing a number of traditional Google search queries. So I wonder maybe I should track my screen time or something like that. And actually, or I bet I could just pull my actual Google results, my Google data. Maybe if I'm logged in, I could see how many searches I've been doing, whether it's really fallen off a cliff or actually it's additive. I don't know. Does it feel like you're using Google less? Everyone affiliated with 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. I find I'm using it a ton for Google images because if I want a real image to cut out, like, I'm not going to go to 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 like, give me a grid of images like Google images.

Yet.

Yet. Maybe soon anyway. Andy 2 cents money says a marvelous testament to the tax benefits of the C Corporation that tens of thousands of Americans can raise standing armies off a whim. And yet there have been so few uprisings in our history. People are overthrowing the government once it lets them get rid of this is a good take startups. There's so much intel in this one image yet so often ignored number of firms in employment. Interesting. So there are.

Yeah, there are like 20,000 firms. This is 2019 data from the Census Bureau.

Yeah, 20,000 firms. 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 who loves the subscribers Pumping the TVPN substack tvpn.substack.com Go subscribe if you haven't already. We send out great to see you Sean.

We send out our show notes every morning.

Sean, when are you coming on the show in person? Yeah, come on, you're not that far away. Hop over, let's make it happen. And before you give away the Lambo, come drive it onto the set. That should be how.

Yeah, definitely. Bring this Dorado for sure. We'll hang out, we'll go out, we'll hang out and then when we reflect we'll say yo. Last night was a teams meeting. This is Atlas Creatine cycle banger. It's a great one. People are enjoying the merch. Erica says posting a pic in the TVPN 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 start showing their support. But this is a funny post.

A good jacket, sir.

It's a good jacket. This is the same story with AI. The killer apps will be the ones that collapse. Latency, friction and context switching into something instant. So this is a quote that signal posts. I heard a story years ago about Steve Jobs after the release of the original iPad. Jobs had been on medical leave in 2009. When he returned to Apple, he was focused almost entirely on the iPad. In 2010, after the iPad was introduced, he had a meeting scheduled with engineers on the MacBook team. That meeting was big picture. What's the future of the MacBook? That sort of thing. These engineers had prepared a ton of material to present to Jobs. Jobs comes into the meeting carrying an iPad. He goes to a then shipping MacBook on a table and wakes it up. It takes a few seconds. He says something like, look at how long this takes. He puts it to sleep. He wakes it up. It takes a few moments each time. Then he puts the iPad on the table and hits the power button. 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 it, people.

I almost forgot that you said, go and open up your laptop computer. And there was a real delay before you could actually get value. And now, aside from, you know, having to authenticate, it's pretty much instant.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess some of the delay of, like, I 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 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 phone, doesn't need the MacBook. And then the more monitors you have, the lower you are on the totem pole. Shout out to our incredible production team that has.

We're high on the totem pole.

Totem pole. Of our parts, they have the most monitors. Oh, yeah. This is the money shot. Thank you for putting this up. And I lost a serious bet with producer Ben over this because I told him that mounting would not hold more than 24 hours. It's been up for a week. And so I owe him a Diet Coke, I suppose. Anyway, thank you. Techno chief. Techno chief says the substack is elite. We appreciate that. We're working hard on it every single day to make it better, making it 1% better. I'm learning from it. We have a team that's focused on it as well. I write. 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 gonna experiment with substack. We're talking to Chris Best, figuring out what else we can do there. We're streaming there, but we're gonna be asking people questions, surfacing those on substack, collaborating, cross pollination.

Very long.

Good stuff. And the reason we're doing it is because math nerds are not having a good time. According to Peter Thiel. This is a little over a year ago. Peter Thiel says AI will be worse for math nerds than for writers. So time to fire up a substack.

It is interesting that many of the things that LLMs and models do well today, generating, 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.

Whether you're a copywriter, whether you're a designer, whether you're even, you know, people that are doing Photoshop, they haven't been.

Yeah, it's. It really is a bull case for finding like an author. Odd life's work. I was talking to you about this earlier but like, you know 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 gonna be a lawyer, bro. Like that's really the only way you're gonna like pay the bills in the future is like doctor, lawyer, merchant chief. I really like merchant chief. That's a good one. But increasingly I find that if you can be top 1% in any of like the kid careers, the pilot, the police officer, the firefighter, international businessman, businessman, 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, like pottery, if you can be the top 1% Potter, you're probably gonna 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 countertake. You think you're gonna 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 about that.

That feels like a ripe target because there's a human can do sort of a vibes based analysis. Like ah, we got a lot of people coming this way. Cars, let's let them, let's let them through. But. But a machine I think could potentially take on 10 times the amount of data and be like, I have a camera down here. And there's actually. Yes, there's people coming from this direction. But there's actually a bigger backlog here and if we let them through. So I'm on Team Tyler.

Yeah. Give me the full bull case for AI stoplights. Is it good business?

Well, I mean, I don't know how normal stop lights work. Like, I always have thought like, do they work with cameras? I don't know. Or they just. On timers? I don't know anything about this space.

They're all on timers at best. Most of them are just completely on timers.

So it seems like.

So bit of lore. Blake Sholl, 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, it would be too easy.

I don't know, it might. It might be equally harder than it might be hard. We don't have. There are multiple, like there are multiple supersonic plane companies now. I have yet to talk to an AI stoplight company. It seems obvious. It seems like something Flock Safety could expand into. But I even looked up like, what are all the stoplight companies? Could you buy one, roll it up? Like, how do these things get worked 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.

Could be fun. Could be fun.

DMV enthusiasts.

Very agile. Very agile. And so, yeah, I think it's a week long hack project to develop something that's 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.

Well, here's a post from Aaron Bali from Carbon Health. He says it's not in the stack, but he says with AI, everybody will make their own software. Just like how we all 3D print our own furniture. You 3D printed that, right, John? Because 3D printing is so advanced that.

I mean, the future's here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. People underestimate what can happen in a decade. They overestimate what can happen in a year. I saw an incredible 3D print print. It was somebody who 3D printed chainmail for like, what do they call it? Like, 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. Why am I blanking on this? Renaissance fair.

Renaissance fair.

Renaissance Faire. Yeah.

As a kid, do you remember stumbling upon like you're just going to the park.

Or.

Yeah. The people that are the people. Yeah. I just remember I was grew up in. In Berkeley and the local park. Yeah Every. There was. There was. There was a big LARP community really.

Oh Berkeley.

And I'd just be like going. I'd be like go using the swings and I'd look over and a bunch of adults would come over in medieval costume and. And start battling. It was. It was cool. Yeah, it was cool. I respect their imaginations.

Yeah. Respect the LARPers.

Luke Metro says how to get rich as a Founding Engineer in 2025 One find a startup from a famous founder or a VC incubation. Two, get hired. Watch it get marked up to billions. Three, lots of growth is priced in so silently sell a few million in sketchy forward contracts to cash out. 4. 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 was. 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.

Can you imagine if Soham Parikh was doing this? He'd be like worth.

Everybody was trying to clock Soham's run rate. Is it a million? 2 million.

He was just selling forward 20 million in forward contracts. Yeah. No one came forward on the timeline.

We have another post from Aaron Bali. Two in one show. Nice work. He says showing the chat with AI characters. So people are so I guess people can make their own. They can make their own characters. AI studio.

So you kind of go into AI.

Studio if you want to chat with a Russian girl or chat with stepmom.

Stepmom. And this spawned a lot of jokes like imagine leaving xa.

No. But here's the thing.

Yes.

So Elon is competing with Mark Zuckerberg on AI companionship. It's just that one of them has tens of billions of free cash flow and the other one has to raise a combination of debt and equity.

Yep. And also just a more aligned business model where Time Zuck has feeds right into it.

Does Zuck have 10 times the user base?

Probably 3 billion daily active users. I think something like that. It's in the billions. And also it's just like all of the product features from chatting and DMing.

And groups, whether you're WhatsApp or Meta.

You'Re really just taking social networking and then bolting on a companion. Could be. I don't think I would ever have a one on one conversation with an AI companion, but I could imagine adding an AI to a group chat.

What if I make the chats and roughly, roughly eight hours a day I'm sleeping. Usually stay up later than me because you don't have as long of a commute. And so what if I made a meta AI of me? I trained it on all the data that I have and then you could chat with that at night because sometimes you'll text me. It's like at like 10, I'm sleeping. And you could get a faster response.

True, true.

So I don't know.

I haven't tried these. I don't know. I don't know how good it would be. It really is. But the numbers are staggering. I mean, 5 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 who it was Will Brown was posting this hypothetical engineer that quits their job at one lab at 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.

Stepmom.

Yeah, I know, I don't.

Of course these are, these are human genders. These are created by other.

Yeah, you have to think about them. Like meme pages. I mean, I do wonder if people will like the fact that this tool will be out there. Someone will probably create something interesting. Like I always give that example of like character AI. I went on character AI and was trying to debate Vladimir Putin about the benefits of capitalism.

He folded pretty quickly, right?

Yeah, exactly. No, it was actually Stalin. Yeah, I was debating with Stalin. I was debating communism and capitalism with 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.

Which, of course, another win for capitalism.

But I. But I think my takeaway is like, I do think if you put this in the hands of like. Of like billions of creators, you might get someone that comes up with an interesting chatbot that is funny in the same way that you get a Harry Potter Balenciaga every once in a while or you get like a. Like a 4chan green text. Right. And so something like that. I don't know what it would look like, but some sort of thing that you can. I mean, we've seen, like, chat with cow, like, already. That's, like, funnier in the sense that, like, I might actually click on that. I don't know exactly what that would be like, but there's probably.

Hormozi has his own Hormozi AI now.

Yeah. Do we ever solve how much he made? I saw one slide.

Tyler, figure out how much Hormozi made.

If you're not familiar, Alex Hormozi, he.

Did a big book launch course launch business influencer. He said that he spent $30 million on consulting.

What?

And then used that to train the model.

Wow, that's a lot.

So now the numbers are all over.

The place, like the brain.

Which I thought was an interesting selling point because obviously, like, a lot of the models are trained on Harvard hbs, like, case studies. And just general, like, think about how much, like, work that, like, the big four consulting firms have produced that eventually ended up.

Yeah. Demis would like a. Actually, Demnis would like a word Alex says. Yeah, 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 Musk also married. So you're not looking for a real girlfriend or AI girlfriend or boyfriend.

Yeah, it's just like, I don't want, like. Like, normally if somebody was posting that stuff, I would just mute them or unfollow them. But it's Elon. He posts a lot of stuff that I am interested in. But SIMP for Satoshi here says Elon is in real danger of falling off culturally. He must remember it was cultural relevance due to SpaceX and Tesla meme stocks that catapulted him. X is cool, but Xai is not. He can fix it, but he is currently not on the path to do so. This may tick him off, but it's true.

And SIMP for Satoshi is like an Elon Bull, right? Famously.

Yeah. And I think this is how people are feeling broadly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it goes back to those, like, filter bubbles can be a feature, not a bug. And so, like, there is a world. There are groups of users out on X that are interested in chatting with Valentine and Annie. But you should probably never show that post to anyone in Teapot, full stop. Like, you should just say, like, we're going to show Teapot papers on what we're doing at Xai on the reinforcement learning side and surface that. And instead it's like, because Elon's account's so big and it gets so much promotion in the feed, like, everyone saw that and everyone's like, why am I seeing this? This is not relevant to me. And it's just like kind of a. It's 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 it'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, the same cannot be said for the cluster that Xai built. That was super impressive.

Like, when results.

Yeah. I mean, the biggest Xai Bull case was just laid out by Casey Hanmer 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. There's. 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.

Really?

Yeah.

Okay.

He's an absolute legend.

Please subscribe. Minnie 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. He has a company called Campai Foods which is probably, you know, he is just absolutely crushing. It's his facility is or was in la, I visited. But he's just, he's an algorithm animal. I will just say that both his, both his companies, he's able to get billions of views totally organically and he's an absolute Kanpai.

Freeze dried candy says they subbed.

There we go.

Fantastic. Well, shout out to ethic, let's go to Sucks.

Yeah.

Texting and driving is such a funny crime. You already have six hours of screen time, but you need another 30 minutes. Even if it's life or death. You know, you can literally die. But it's worth it to you to scroll for 30 more imperfect 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 shelfer it enough because you, it watches you. And so if you're on your phone it will disengage. But if you're not on your phone, it's the chillest driving experience ever because you're just like sitting there watching the road, just having a conversation, listening to music. Like it puts you in a much, it's much less active than actually having to drive and steer.

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, like a mock up or something, but the scene to have come out of nowhere.

I think this might have been something that literally was just a mock up because you're, you're one of the foremost experts in the world at nicotine and nicotine from what you've told me, because I asked you this. Why has nobody put nicotine in an energy drink? Caffeine and nicotine together in one drink would be amazing. And there's like regulatory reasons for it and then there's like, 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 like doesn't absorb. So people will always say, like, oh, what if I swallowed a nicotine pouch? Like, am I over? Is it over for me, it's over. Like, no, it'll probably just pass through you. And it's just not like you didn't get any value out of it. It's fine. You probably shouldn't do it a lot. But also, like, 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. They worked on it for years. Couldn't get it across the finish line. We looked into it a ton. Couldn't figure it out. Never really got any way. It's possible that this company solved it. I think what's more interesting is this scenario. Oh, and also, like, you can't mix active ingredients, so the FDA would probably not, 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. There's a lot of nicotine companies, most from overseas, that do not care what the FDA has to say about their legality. And there's a lot of value to just going viral. And if this is something that goes viral, the real hack here, I think, would be to brand this as 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, 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 an energy drink brand. But that's a little bit disingenuous. Probably not the best thing to do.

Yeah, I think somebody made a mock up. They hadn't thought through how you'd actually take this to market.

Yeah.

And now everyone thinks it's on the way, but when you Google search it, it doesn't exist. Yeah, last post. Somebody will probably love the day. Luke Metro says my pet theory is that most most people so so anyways, this goes back to like Gold Rock.

Calls it 5 loco. That's actually really good.

So Cold Healing said, bro, you make 500,000 at OpenAI. You can go to the art fair and buy a little $10,000 painting to hang up in your SF apartment's living room. Luke Metro says my pet theory is that most people here with big money had to spend their most their formative years with most of it being a liquid. So you're used to modest spending habits for a while. Well, unlike bankers who can blow their whole bonus on a weekend in Miami starting at age 22, I think that's a good take. The nature of having most of your net worth be illiquid is, as Felpix says, vesting 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, it's Dylan Abrascato, 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, 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.

But on that note, we gotta 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, which we are working very hard on. Tvpn.substack.com and we made a bunch of upgrades to the studio today, some of which are working well, some of which aren't.

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Cheers.

Bye.

Have a good one, guys.