Day 228 | Ep. 084 Lemonade Stand 🍋

If you run a small business, you know that having a clear picture of your finances is invaluable. Xero, spelled with an X, is a simple but powerful platform built for small business owners that makes managing business finances easier from day one. Accounting, payments, payroll, and analytics are available in one connected platform. Reports, visual dashboards, forecasts, and AI insights help owners better understand cash flow and make smarter decisions. Join the 5 million customers worldwide using Xero. Learn more at Xero.com. That's X-E-R-O dot com. I'm Ina Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Jennifer Garten. We talk all about what it means to be a good friend, Jen's encyclopedic knowledge of my recipes, and the Paris tour I put together for Jen and her daughter. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers. Three, two, one. Ladies and gentlemen, we are. Great show. Why are you laughing? We have a show this week. I've never seen you do that for the intro ever. What? You went like this, head down, and went three, two, one. Dude, I don't know if I tell you this. I meditate for five and a half hours for every episode to get into the mood. Yeah. That's why I show up. And this week, you didn't. You shouldn't be getting into the mood. I show up, and I maintain an erection for the entirety of this recording. No, we know. That's why you wanted to get started. You're worried about running out of time. No, I'm not. Oh. It goes four plus hours. Although, it was. I was starting to get a little flaccid when I saw your face. What happened to your beard? Oh, I. This is. Everybody's talking about it. You know what sucks is I was playing basketball with Aiden, and I got elbowed in the face, and I got hit right here. Oh, wow. And then I shaved at the same time, so it just stands. I couldn't shave that part. So I have like a false goatee going on. Oh, yeah. So thanks for. We got a great show for you today. We're going to talk about the hilarious Russia deal with Diesel and a Saudi airport attack and bond yields and some stuff about Neuralink and mathematics in the UK and brands and creators. It's a wild and wacky week. I think I speak for everyone when I say, what the heck, question mark, or however we chose to frame this particular episode title. This week was crazy. This week was crazy? This week was bananas. Every week we sit here for 10 minutes generating new synonyms for the word crazy to describe this week. But let's start off. Let's move over to Trump and Russia because my gas is getting pretty expensive, Aiden. And it's mostly because of this one little thing that happened recently. One tiny little. It's the one little recent thing. There was big news this week because on Friday, last week, Trump announced that he had made a new deal with Russia to import a bunch of diesel fuel into the United States. And this is breaking precedent because we've had sanctions on Russia since the beginning of the Ukraine war, and we have not been accepting any of their diesel fuel in that time. And it comes at a time when diesel prices are at. An all time high, something that is boating very poorly for the Republican Party's chances of winning in the midterms. It's like one of the number one issues affecting people, you know, whether or not they need to fill their own car with diesel. It affects the prices of everything that is transported or brought around with diesel. Uh, so this is made in an effort to have access to more diesel to relieve this. This price, right? There's a few big reactions to this. Obviously, as you can, as you can imagine, Ukraine, not super happy with this because what does it mean? It means an upwards of $4 billion going to their war adversary right now. Uh, also the rest of Europe, this is completely out of step with the efforts they're making on their end. They want to maintain the sanctions they're holding or the support for Ukraine that they have in the war in order to end it sooner. And this is like a big signal for. From the United States that we're not as in support of Ukraine or we're allowing Russia to like cross certain lines in this, in this conflict. Yeah. Like we have a tier list of our values and above war on other nations is oil prices. Yeah. Right. Large quantities of diesel. We're, we're willing to make exceptions. Yeah. Right. For it's sort of a porous moral. Yeah. A porous moral framework is a great way of putting it to put it. Uh, but Trump's response to this is like, Oh, the, the fake news never pays attention to the amount of diesel and fuel that Europe is consuming from Russia over the same time period. And I was like, you know what? That's maybe a good point. Like, let me look into that. And, uh, because there is still a massive amount of oil and natural gas that is imported from Russia into the European union in order to handle their own energy. Right. What I did not realize is the amount that the EU has reduced their dependence on Russian energy. By in this time period. So at their peak, uh, in 2022, the highest per day that they were importing at the time was 800 million euros worth per day that they're importing from Russia, Russia at that time. Okay. That's gone down to 47 million euros now per day from, from what number from, from 800 million euros worth at, at its peak in 2022 percent reduction, which is an incredible fall off. And the, the additional argument to this is you haven't seen the same decline in natural gas imports over that same period of time, but they are still falling through with plans to like phase out Russian natural gas by like 2030. So the EU is putting like a, a goodwill effort into like down taking their reliance on Russia, uh, Russian energy over this time period. And it's not really like breaking from that at all. And the thing is when you contextualize this with the grand demand for, for, for, for, for, for diesel fuel, this is actually not that much that the U S is important. This deal is actually like pretty small. It's like half the amount they use in a day, right? Yeah. It's not even, it's not even close. So it's the important thing is this is more of a signal, uh, to these parties in Europe at a, at a bad time to be like, fuck you guys. We're making deals with Russia, but also it's not an amount that it will have a material impact on the price. Like this is very unlikely to work out in Trump's favor. In his goal is to bring the price of diesel down by increasing access to supply, but it's not enough on the relative to the credit to him really to make a meaningful difference. So it's just, it's all it does is piss off Ukraine, piss off the European union, doesn't relieve prices. And so it's really failing on all fronts or rather it's expected to fail on all fronts. And even if you think the EU is being hypocritical, the F like, like practical function of this decision is just not very good. Yeah. Yeah. The UK smoke out against it. And what's interesting, this is unconfirmed, but Russia before this had banned diesel exports in general because they have a diesel problem in their own country. And a lot of the refineries have been getting blown up by Ukraine. Yeah. And so, uh, for them to get even 300,000 tons out is, is something. And, uh, there's unconfirmed. Unconfirmed reports that some of it is imported from Iran, so they're in the Iranian tankers were spotted dropping off diesel in Russia. And so the idea is that they're just buying a running diesel and then reselling it to America. So in which case we are just funding a run in, uh, you know, it's like, and Russia gets a skim off the top. So we were just funding a run in Russia to get diesel for, you know, it doesn't make a lot of sense. So, so in the buildup to this decision, the U S and Trump had specifically responded to a request that, you know, Ukraine, please stop hitting, uh, refineries in Russia. We really don't want you to do that right now because of the strain that is adding to the global oil market, the global diesel market. Right. And they, they don't have a lot of places in Russia right now to refine the diesel in order to supply this amount. So there's, there's this suspicion of, Oh, could this be like turning around Iranian product? And that's what's getting bad. We're going to have to get back to the U S but even if it's not that, if you look about a couple months ago, because we're finery, uh, capacity in Russia is so limited right now, Russia has been importing diesel from South Korea, like over the last couple months. So if your idea, let's just pass the diesel around to everybody, everybody gets a taste and you sell it to them. We're going to sip and you pass it along and we're going to resell it to Brazil. We're just going to pass it along every single week. So if we were to give it, let's, let's give Trump the, the most, the most, the most, the most credibility possible here. And let's say this really will be a, an increase. Like this was supposed to be a genuinely, a genuine increase in the supply of diesel available to help like reduce the price. Let's pretend it would be enough of a bump to make that difference. In reality, it's the same diesel that already exists in the global market, just being shuffled around between those parties. So it really makes no difference. I mean, that's true of almost all these. Sanctions that like, even though I, you know, in theory agree with limiting Russia's ability to sell diesel as part of a thing, like a lot of the oil. and natural gas that uh europe is buying in that 90 drop is like it goes from russia to india and then india to you know what i'm saying like everything gets tranched because the it's a it's not a non-fungible it's a fungible token yeah it's a it's an ft sorry i'm not really following this story how do you explain this but use nfts i'm trying to pitch my nft here yeah i mean and presumably russia is still just making a ton of money from selling gas right like it's not like they're short on money to fund the war that is not like the key problem it's more it's just ruining all these international relations right and i mean maybe maybe you have a better sense of like the impact i mean i wouldn't say it's like so easy to fund the war you know it's a long-lasting war and it's expensive and you just lose lives and people but yeah they have an income and it's largely from selling energy yeah so the best thing to have done would have not spike energy prices with a war in iran which by the way i think we're on day what do we say 212 to 228 of the four-week war in iran they say 230 is when it usually wraps yeah i think we're out of 230 we're gonna wrap this baby up um but there's been some additional chaos in the middle east it's like yeah the so the other big part of the story that is kind of unfolding in this region is the houthis have been attacking a lot of refineries and oil depots in saudi arabia because the they've have have had a historical conflict between them in saudi arabia for like the last 10 years or so and they've been attacking a lot of refineries and oil depots in saudi arabia for like the last 10 years i think more than 10 years now and uh more recently there has been attacks on uh riyadh's international airport so there was one just yesterday that was a little smaller and then one before that that killed 13 people and injured over 300 it's a huge attack of this airport uh there's like security cam videos of it uh and this is so there's a massive industry in saudi arabia obviously oil right but as time has passed they are making efforts to diversify away from that so there's huge like visit saudi arabia tourism campaigns there's f1 races there's comedy festivals all these things we hear about in the news right to make sort of organically sprung up inside of saudi arabia but really grassroots efforts within saudi arabia real desire in his heart to perform in riyadh and he just but he made it happen it's very smash bros s you know like ultimately rose from the community and then the saudi prince said you know what we'll kind of help out we'll just give a little bit of extra funding so saudi arabia has made this like multi-tiered effort to uh let's become a tourist destination not just one for religious purposes let's become a hub for business like our counterparts in like the uae or maybe like doha and let let's build out our economy so it has more presence uh globally and is is just more relevant than just being a hub for oil right so the big thing that the houthis want to do is attack places like the international airport to destabilize this vision of a future saudi arabia like if your airports are under strikes and people like civilians are dying there your tourism your business conferences all these events you want to host people are much more tepid to attend and go to your country it was was this like it was an an airplane this happened in an airplane no it's in the airport happened in the terminal and so if you pull up uh like i had read the the ft car article initially about it but you the whole side of this terminal like explodes as people are like waiting to board planes oof i guess you know the silver lining with all this we've talked about it a little bit and maybe you should highlight it a bit more of how many countries are dramatically increasing their green energy and then something happened i think that over this last week week or two weeks like actually published their plan to fully phase out fossil fuels by 2045 so they've done that and then france also france and netherlands have done this so they're i mean there's there's you know you talk about the 90 reduction like there's people are really ramping up renewable energies as a result of all of this chaos globally yeah so that's that's sick like there is good things happening from this which is that is dramatically accelerating us finally getting off of fossil fuels long term that's why i've called donald trump the world's greatest eco warrior of all time he does what needs to be done have you thought about like this the version of this where trump trump like dies like he gets through the rest of the term he passes away he leaves like a manifesto and he's like he's like i only thought i could change the world in one way and i wanted to foster a world of energy like energy renewable energy and energy independence i love clean energy it has been my dream it has been my i realized the ultimate deal he stabilized the middle east destabilized russia he signs it off he's like i had to be i had to be the villain no one wanted to be like this is like the fifth time we've done the lelouch it could be true the only the only piece that doesn't make sense is the venezuela because he does seem to want their oil but you have to throw him off the center oh that's true he's a great person yeah you have to occasionally of course uh but yeah i i think that the main thing here is like as they are pushed to uh attack more and more like facilities in saudi arabia it furthers the like global oil crisis that's going on and i don't you know i don't know how those things are going to get better but i do know what's kind of getting better is people are finally buying bonds again well that's too closely related things brandon i love that transition this is not like a feel good this is all tied in which is that you know as diesel prices rise worldwide we've talked about this story every major economy is starting to see their borrowing costs go up and up and up and up and up but if you think about what that means that means people aren't buying their debt they aren't they aren't not loaning the money because if they don't loan the money you have to offer a higher amount then i'm like maybe and then i say no then it goes higher and it goes higher so finally it seems like they're kind of like topping out a little bit possibly in that way and then they're like oh my god i don't know what to do with this money i'm like i don't know what to do with this i'm like i don't know what to do with this i'm like oh my god there are a bunch of inflows into government debt basically you might be someone who's got all your savings in stocks you know you got a 401k you put it all in stocks but if you start to see hey i can lock in a six percent return for 30 years or something like that it starts to go like i mean that's guaranteed pretty much unless this country collapses i can yeah you know what i'm saying and so for a lot of times people will be like well no that's too still too risky or so too low i want higher but now it's getting so high that we're seeing a good chunk of like real wealth start to transition over into those government bonds um and people are starting to really question themselves like is that a number i could live with because if it hits that high if it's like you know six and a half percent or something i'm like i can lock that in forever and not have to worry about the ups or downs of the market maybe i do it and so that that's just really the story it's like people are are starting to bite for a while they weren't biting it was like a no bid and now it's like people are starting to bite so maybe they won't go to catastrophically higher levels or maybe they will so was there a concern that it's just going to kind of keep snowballing up forever yeah and governments would just be like we literally cannot get anybody to loan us money i mean not anybody but you can't get enough for the amount you need right but it's seeming like at least right now there's enough demand to stabilize these levels but again it could another you know things get crazier i'm just saying the the the cost of borrowing has risen in so many countries so high so quickly that it's kind of rare in our lifetimes for it to all go up this fast as quickly and people are wondering well when's it going to stop and now maybe it's you know this is an early session but there's real money flowing into actually buying it if it's like six six and a half right now and that's where it's topping out what was the norm historically uh it's not six and a half right now it's like five right now okay but a little over five but uh the norm historically really depends on whether you're not in a period of crisis or you know you could say four percent or something like it's like a stabilized but uh uh yeah i don't know i think the real question for people think i'm kind of thinking like this i'm like hey what's the real question for people think i'm kind of thinking like this i'm like hey what's the real question for people think i'm kind of thinking like this i'm like hey what's the real question for people think i'm kind of thinking like this i'm like hey what's the real question for people think i'm kind of thinking like this i'm like hey what's the real question for people think what's the real question for people think and the truth is how bad do you think inflation is going to be in the future if they get it down to two percent then you're getting a four percent you know if you're locked in at six a four percent real yield real gain and you get that for all that's really good historically that's a really good thing but if you think inflation is going to spike back up and you lock in a six percent it goes to ten then you're fucked right so that's the big question and i don't want to get too financial uh jargony i just think this is an interesting development which is that at least there's something like people were just not we're just not blinking they're just like it kept going up and no one was buying and now people are some people are buying so can i be perhaps a misinformed villain here sure and and say that is this this isn't great news in a sense like yeah like like this isn't okay this isn't this isn't like oh yeah people are buying the bonds at this high level five percent it's no they're locking like bonds have uh percent bond yields have been going up and people want to lock them at these high percentages which are bad for the governments that owe that debt in the future like this is still really like the market the demand has met the supply so to speak yeah and we finally come to terms on a new higher percent that people are willing to buy at in large numbers yeah but it's a number that we're going to pay a hefty price for in the long term not and when i say we i kind of mean the world not just the u.s we can borrow more money when it comes to it yeah yeah we'll just keep doing that at a higher rate and what you're saying makes no sense because every single time we've had to borrow more money we just borrow more money to pay for that and it's interesting you say i don't think it'll stop ever and it's it has and it's worked up until right now so it'll probably work yeah forever it will work forever yeah again i i this is not like the we've solved it it's not like it's it's all bad it's just a weird thing to notice and i think people anyone with money right now is starting to notice like man the stock market is so crazy it's up and down it's wild and left and right do i want to just you know when the stock market is average 10 a year and like the bonds are giving you two percent it's like i'll take the craziness for that eight percent gap but as it gets closer people start to go and so the real threat is if the bond yields start to rise again that it can crack the stock market the idea is that people start flowing their money out of the stock market and then we start to see this has happened like you know bond yields were at their highest in 07 and like it you prior to big crashes before it's been like people jump and it starts the beginning of the damn breaking so anyway well when they start taking their money out of the stock market it starts performing more poorly we'll simply lower rates with no consequence and the money will just flow back in i do not see what the problem is yeah i think actually there was a quote from trump recently where he was talking about the debt and he said i mean he just said openly we're going to inflate it away but if you think about it you're going to inflate it away you're going to inflate it out that that is such a scary thing to say because that is to inflate away the amount of debt we have it's like you're all your savings go to zero all your that's it that's a wild thing for a president to say but he says a lot of things i can't really i can't see how much he believes in it i really dish that up because i kind of blindly dish that up as a win yeah just hoping like i'm hoping it would be a pivot from like we've got some wins in here i think we've got some interesting things but i think the opener was about how you know the iran war is three wins in a row ladies and gentlemen russia killing it i don't want to use that same joke for the next story and bonds killing it they're they're they're killing it they're killing it yeah and this is all the consequences of a really really necessary war in iran which i'm glad is is uh i mean do you think oh okay i'm gonna set you up yeah for what i got i hope is a wind duck i think it's a win all right so somehow you need to good luck transition from where we are to where i'm going because all this all this crazy world it's changing technology one thing has stood out to me a little bit which is that video we watched recently about neural link that allowed that guy to speak again yeah i thought that was very moving and you have more neural link news that i'm hoping is equally positive it has no consequences no i know but how is that related to bond yields oh it's not all right uh this is gonna be i'm just gonna talk a little about what neural link is doing so neural link is a company it was founded by elon musk and what they have been doing i think is uh one of the cases where you can look at a new technology and be like holy shit this is absolutely incredible that this exists in the world there are of course caveats to this and i will give some of the criticisms of this company and with the one of the most notable being it's an elon musk company which comes with all sorts of baggage but in general one he's not like that involved with this company day to day he is largely he's got tweets to make bro he's the he's the bank he funds it largely um but i thought let's just walk through a little bit because recently they they started showcasing some cool things so the the origin of this is 2016 elon musk form uh founds neural link with eight other scientists and the idea is can we put a chip in the human brain that connects into the brain via threads like literal like a sewing machine type of like needles that go into the brain where you can track the neural uh signals that are happening in the brain and translate that into computer motion and the idea being obviously somebody who is extremely uh ill or illogical disorder this could help them uh regain some sort of major functionality so starts at 2016 by 2019 it had 158 million dollars in funding but 100 million of that is from elon so again he's largely the funder of this but he has admitted he's very very little involvement with the day-to-day um but they invent this like sewing machine type of a device so i want to walk you through a couple notable milestones the first is this one if you pull it up perry so in 2021 um they start this with chimpanzees and this is um i believe the name of the chimpanzee is pager so they they install this chip into the chimpanzee's brain and they have the chimpanzee start doing actions with a computer they're moving this joystick and they over time are able to analyze the actual brain signals that are happening while the chimpanzee is doing this and learn what the brain is doing when it's trying to move in a certain direction oh interesting and as you can see this was released in 2021 the monkey in this case is monkey the right term these are different right let me cut that you're gonna get canceled on monkey i don't know the difference between a monkey and a chip i'm sorry somebody's gonna write a furious comment and you're and you're validated but one of the things here if you notice the controller is not plugged in so at this point in their study they already are at a point where what the monkey initially was using a joystick to control a cursor but they tracked the brain signals and over time realized they can actually just see what the monkey is trying to do when they think about it and actually so this right now this is not plugged in this is it is controlling a computer with its brain hitting that shit pretty good at this game honestly he's doing amazing audio listeners we're watching a monkey move a basically a mouse across the screen to like track a little square and now he's playing pong and now it's playing pong so i didn't know pager's favorite game was pong and this is again it is it is controlling this through its brain because over time they picked up what kind of signals correspond to what the chimpanzee wants to do and they're trying to do what the chimpanzee wants to do and then if you're wondering about the like straw that it gets every time it does well in one of these games it gets a little banana smoothie like sent into its mouth so that's how they encourage the chimpanzee to do this which is something i've been thinking about we should probably do on this show yeah just to pick up performance that would be good to help improve our he's so much better at pong than me he's really good at pong so you fast forward to 2024 2024 noland arbaugh is the first human patient eventually neuralink is approved for human patients so pull this up um this is noland there's actually dude go watch interviews for this guy he's just a phenomenal human being so he is paralyzed from the shoulders down basically fully paralyzed and he's the first person that had a neuralink chip installed and he this is here a video of him playing chess with his brain the the chip that they installed has threads into his brain which over time they did a whole bunch of training where he uses a computer and they learn what things he's trying to do when he thinks them what he wants to do and he's trying to do what he wants to do and wants to happen on the computer and over time neuralink can actually change you know convert those brain signals into a computer actually doing the actions so this this came out in 2024 where they showed hey we have a real human who has this in their brain it is wireless which is unique because there are other companies doing things like this um and if you listen to some of the interviews of of noland he it is so inspiring uh he talks one of the most notable things is he said he got really addicted to civilization of like playing that game i've seen this guy yeah right now he's saying it's like using the force on the cursor because over time he just is able to start thinking about what he wants to do and they're able to translate that into actually using a computer so i just want to like you know step back and say this is a person who's who's paraplegic who's unable to do almost anything and this technology is allowing him to control a computer and these are just the early stages another just quick one i thought was fun this is from a talk last year where they now have like at this point like 20 something patients and they show an example this is neuralink again of different uses that people are like people who have neuralink installed usually paraplegics are doing and this includes mario kart halo call of duty there's people playing counter-strike 2 by the way aiden which you maybe played against them i don't know what rank you're in people using cad software to like design things people making art again and using drawing programs i mean it is it is incredible and then this is they're starting at the bottom right you can see to obviously the tools that they've been using for a long time and then they're starting at the top and then they're starting at the bottom right and then they're starting at the top and then they're starting at the bottom right and then they're starting at the top and then they're starting at the bottom right and then they're starting at the bottom right and then they're starting at the bottom right and then they're starting at the bottom right and then they're starting at the bottom right and then they're starting at the bottom right and then they're starting at the bottom right and then they're starting at the bottom right and then they're starting at the bottom And the idea with this is we're going to try to basically, we put the chip into your brain and we'll figure out what you're trying to say over time and then convert that into text. And this is him basically using it for the first time. So this is him basically training, right? Even though you can't understand what he's saying, he's reading certain snippets of text so that they can start to understand what does his brain do when he's trying to say something. And over time, they can then give him this button where he can press a button and start trying to talk and they'll monitor the signals and convert it into text. Sound good? hello how are you doing today wow he's so blown away too yeah and his reaction is so cool and his wife is like dude you just got your wife i think i think that the beginning of this piece does like a really good job of setting the stage of like how much you know being able like meeting people and speaking to him like really meant to him in his career and like how he had to he sidelined the whole thing uh like when he got his diagnosis right like he he put everything to his job and it was about like presenting to and like meeting people and or rating all the time and he lost that so it's like this this massive piece of his life i mean for anybody like speaking is important right but for for him even more so i think yeah and he it's like a piece of his identity being given back to him and he's so it's so cool at the end you see him pull it up yeah um he's demonstrating this with his wife what wait you're syncing the words and they're popping up I I love you so cool it's just wait that was him just thinking it was him thinking it wow he's able to say I love you to his wife after not being able to speak it's like dude I like tearing up when I watch these videos it is it is amazing so yeah I mean getting I I think this is an example of like telepathy almost like the version of this in the future I'm not saying everybody's fucking lining up to do this but if you wanted you could have this chip implanted in your brain you have this chip implanted in your brain and I could speak to you without us actually talking like we'd be able to communicate at it at a distance right or like I I think all of these examples I think it's really easy to see stuff like this especially the video games uh in the same way that's something that I've seen in the past and I think it's really easy to see stuff like AI was being tested on like Dota and Starcraft and Go early on people are kind of wondering like you know what what does this actually mean and the practical applications of what these mean like way down the line as this technology gets better and better and more available is uh simultaneously amazing and scary uh like that the amount of people that this could could help is is unreal yeah the wide range of of medical conditions and problems and man just getting again I I encourage uh if you're interested in this stuff watching interviews with Nolan Arbaugh who was the first Neuralink patient and just his experience talking about it and what it is like at first time he's just chill ass dude but then his experience of how his life opens up when after years and years of being paralyzed he he's given this opportunity and presumably it's just going to get stronger and stronger is is really cool so man they you know in the medical I I think broadly in the medical space it they're still like really cool and cool stuff happening right now even though technology broadly I think feels a little uh annoying and scary at times right now I mean you have some caveats as well to this so it's not all uh so you know so just some quick ones just so we acknowledge first off Neuralink has uh one competitors they're not the only person to do this or only group but they're the most kind of notable right now but even if you just consider that they're notable like it's pushing other companies to try similar things so for example BlackRock, Neurotech, Neoscience, Cyber is a Chinese state one that's doing similar things Synchron is a New York uh city-based American company these are all doing it in differing ways uh another big criticism is basically as you can imagine Elon has run the company in a very Elon way so there's a lot of criticism about rush timelines rush timelines that result in things like animals not being treated as well as they should have been uh within two or three years like most of the co-founders had left because of how he was running it and a quote toxic environment so it's a bummer because this is like incredible thing that is happening and it's like ah Elon still doing Elon things behind it um but this is just this is not touching it day to day and just supplying money and he's largely just funny that's kind of cool yeah I don't know this this fucking rocks man uh it's a it's a real feel good thing to see people's lives being fundamentally changed the super cynical villain chair argument I can bring to the table is uh this is part of the the Peter Thiel Larry Ellison live forever in my digital world never die I I don't need my blood boy even anymore world you know it's funny well somebody think of the blood boys do you know what I'm saying the blood boys will be out of a job industry and now they're all getting fired and this doesn't seem like it's gonna be at that level funny you say that okay because Elon's stated goal is to turn this into like a neural lace device where he says it's something analogous to a video game like a saved game situation where you are able to resume and upload your last state jesus so he has been explicitly said that he made the company and the starting point of the company purpose is to address quote address brain injuries or spinal injuries and make up for whatever lost capacity that somebody has with a chip which is where it's at right now and I think it is a phenomenal use of human technology and ingenuity it is phenomenal and then long term his goal is to achieve symbiosis with artificial intelligence so that is the downside I think I think that's this applies to so much tech on the show is is like all these these human applications that like emphasize or augment human life in in a way that like helps people are so good but then there's the other version of events where I'm strapped up to the machine in the matrix and I and I don't know I'm in the tube you get unskippable ads is this weird and so so I can power Larry Ellison's fantasy so I and I'm fearful of that world but I when I watch that fucking video that you you just showed us now like when I watched it the first time I fucking cried too like look at how much it means to that guy and is Larry Ellison weaponizing my emotions so that I give him eternal life so he can fire his blood boys on this one I'm being hyperbolic because Larry Ellison like wants to live forever he is aspiring to put all of the paramount media into our brain in an unscathed way unskippable video yeah to be clear I don't think Larry Ellison's gonna make it he's too old but Peter Thiel might Peter Thiel might be at the cusp of getting get to the escape velocity of and outside of the fear of all the blood boys that will lose their job because that is a concern that is a big concern and I mean he's even he's pitching the idea so Neural Ace is from a series called the culture series by E.M.M. Banks who is a science fiction writer who create books and the idea is basically humans have a in you know in this far future all humans have this chip in their brain that allows them to communicate with the broader a eyes that run all of society yeah and that you can science fiction written as a positive version of the future or a parable where it's like the torment nexus meaning where they see this and go it's great it's isn't this like warhammer 40k lore isn't it am I never mind I mean it's open-ended in the books but that's why I like the books it's it's a really interesting thing of like it's basically what if we achieve utopia type of vibes and then it's very like brave new world ask of what if we achieve utopia type of vibes and then it's very like brave is that even good it's that type of I see okay it's like you have soma in your brain where you can it doesn't sound yeah we all get we all get early to send me a text in my brain that you just talked about that earlier and that alone scares me I'd send you crazy shit too I'd send him crazy shit like I'm just trying to like read something and then Aiden can pop up in my right or an ad or something I would send you a lemon party in the fucking telepathy group chat it doesn't sound good like if you if you blinked if you close your eyes it would still show up you could see a lemon party because you paid for it I'm at like Trader Joe's like in the I get flash banged by Doug's message because I will pay the eight dollars for the blue check that allows it to guarantee eyeball yeah there's a premium tier yeah I just think Nintendo DS good phone bad is my solution we always have this great tech and we take it a little too far do you know what I'm saying Nintendo DS good it's good phone's bad we should have stopped at one we should stop with this we should solve these guys problems and stop there and then no ads in the brain I just we we always take it one step too far bro I think it's cool but I'm I'm worried about the implications but it should happen it should still happen more for this show comes from Shopify is it Black Friday coming up Friday is coming up I was just thinking the same thing you and I are mind link here I bet you I know what you guys would like you guys love little peepo emojis don't you on Twitch Aiden I do love that yeah yeah I want you to imagine I've taken your phone and I've taken your phone and I've taken your phone and I've taken your phone and I've taken your phone and I've taken your phone and I've taken it and I've embroidered it on a sweater okay now you're like where can I buy that from you right how would that have been possible right well a few years ago when I made this sweater I sold it using Shopify it was very easy I basically took the goods stocked in the store added the photos all the product information it tracked the inventory of the sales and then we launched the store and thousands of people bought those sweaters you're like a peepo really bad this is that this is true this is true if you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday and it does not have to be peepo embroidered sweatshirts it could be any product I think you want to sell online go to uh shopify.com slash lemonade Just start your free trial. That's shopify.com slash lemonade. Go to shopify.com slash lemonade today to hear your first. And you can sell whatever you want. You can sell whatever you want. It's got to be legal. It's also got to be legal. ♪♪♪ Are you tired of hearing about business, tech, and finance from the bros? We are the Tiger Sisters, a top business podcast with the Vox Media Podcast Network. Tiger Sisters releases every Monday, and we decode money, power, and love. And who doesn't love all those things? We are the Internet's Wall Street and Silicon Valley big sisters. Tune in every Monday for late-night sister talk meets boardroom strategy. Check out Tiger Sisters on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Tiger Fam. You know what all those unemployed blood boys might need? What do they need? They might need to be on universal basic income. Whoa, what a transition! Aiden, what will we do once our brains have been sent into a culture hive mind? Thank you, Doug. Thank you, Doug. We'll be put, we'll all be on a universal basic income program. Oh! And I, there was a beautiful article in the New York Times recently called, "What a Year of Free Money Meant: Softer Diapers, Clean Laundry, a Visit to Six Flags." Basically, a story of a journalist following three different people and their families and their experience on a UBI program that is going on in California. So, what's interesting to me is Elon Musk, again, other tech leaders, including Dario Amadei of Anthropic, Sam Altman, have all made comments over the last few years, as their AI-related businesses have flourished, that UBI should be a part of the solution in the future to offset the unemployment that will come alongside the technology. And between the three of them, there's been various ranges of how UBI should be, like, applied, what their opinion is about it, it's changed over time. But what I didn't know is that these companies that often work in AI, and Google is the main one, mentioned in the article, have been funding programs in California to study the rollout of how the programs would actually work. So, in Google's case, they work with, like, charitable organizations in California to give paychecks to select groups of struggling people and just see and monitor how they spend the money and, like, how successful they are after receiving, like, a year of, you know, $1,000 to $1,500 checks. And currently, that's capped or limited by, I think, state laws, like, the amount of money you can choose to give somebody. But the examples that it's giving are people that, like, get a phone call, they're on some sort of program, they've basically been, like, lottery-selected, albeit pre-selected for their circumstances going into it, and they're like, "Hey, we're gonna give you, like, $1,300 a month this year." And they just monitor how they spend it. So, it's interesting seeing the contrast between a couple of these people. So, one is a single mother, she has, like, the support of her family. This money allows her to move across the country to, like, relocate with, like, another family member. She does initially, like, relapse. She has, like, a job, but then, like, relapses and starts using drugs again and then manages to quit her job exit community college temporarily, gets, like, back on track, finds a new great job. All of this money is, like, a foundation of stability for her and her kid through this, like, trying period in her life. And at the end of that year, she ends up locking down a much better job with pretty decent pay, good tips, starts going back to community college again, and moves into, like, a bigger house. I think the term in the article they use, like, the people, like, monitoring the success of these programs, they call it "the cliff," like, how people, uh, handle, like, the period after they lose the money. Right. And, uh, oftentimes, people who have access to this money, seems like the majority, are, use the backstop to put themselves in a better position by the end of that year. They aren't necessarily spending it on things I think people would think as important for social programs. Right. Because, like, it's not just food and diapers and these things, like, the one example is, uh, you know, this woman and her kid go to Six Flags, and she's able to afford that and take her kid out for a day, and that's, you know, something the money allows her to do. Uh, but on the other end, you know, the middle story is about this guy who, you know, he buy, one of the first things he buys is, like, a PlayStation 5 to, you know, do, to be entertained, like, while he's on his vacation. Beast. Uh, he's on his, like, dialysis, um, and I would not say he's able to put his life together in the same way through that period of time, and he unfortunately ends up dying of cardiac arrest, like, during the term that he's on, uh, on the money. Uh, I think there's no, like, these studies are in progress, and there isn't, like, a clear answer of here are all the benefits and downsides of these programs yet, but largely seem, beneficial when people are allowed to spend this supplemental income on what they think they need and that comes in a bunch of different forms i would argue of how you live a generally like good and dignified life it's not just like the base essentials it's this cushion that allows you to do a bunch of different things. And I think the first, uh, the first woman and the last woman mentioned in the article that have kids, they really are able to turn their lives around because of this program that was given them to them, uh, for the year. Uh, yeah, it's fascinating story, man. I, I, I strongly, uh, think this is the directions livings have to go. And I think when you start to add limitations to it, it actually makes it a thousand times worse. I think there's no way you can predict or plan what things people will want to spend it on i think i think the best part about it of ubi type programs in general is that people that need them spend the money they use it yes and it doesn't get hoarded it's not like most uh you know tax benefits which which accrue to those who have enough surplus that they can hoard the extra wealth people spend this and they use it and whatever they're spending it on is good it's like it's good for the economy it's good in general it's people i think people who are fall through the cracks in the system and have you know that spiral they go through hurts everyone it's a it's a negative spread giving them the ability to have stability is is a win-win to people around them to themselves i think it's i don't know i i'm like i don't know the exact program i i want to advocate for but i think this is the direction things have to go in some way did this article address some of the common criticisms and one of the ones i hear most often is like we already have programs like this it's called welfare you know we we have food stamps so we have all these things which you addressed a bit but yeah it doesn't i don't think it dives into those things past personal experiences and the way they they tie into those systems it's not it's not really spending a comprehensive time like well here are like the trade-offs it's more about these people's individual story i like this line here from the i'm reading the article now i hadn't seen this before but it was like the payments is a quote from them can be the kind of thing that pushes them out of poverty and it's some kind of stability yeah and one of the things they've been learning is how one very small thing can become a giant thing that derails your entire family's life very quickly an example would be like um uh trouble with your car you know and then having to pay a car repair bill no and that bill now makes it so you can't make a rent payment or some other payment which causes everything to derail and causes you to throw up which is again not only a net loss for that person but a net loss to everyone or like the whole community around them. Like it, it's, I think it, I think it, uh, cascades. Yeah. So giving someone the stability to, to weather those shocks, I think is a net benefit to all of society. Would you say it's a good idea to give every American $5,000? I would say Trump is on the money with that. He is, he is still doing that. He tweeted that this morning. He doesn't tweet much, but he's been really pushing, really pushing the $5,000 and probably because he read this article and feels like we do, that this could really be beneficial - Special for a lot of people. - He was moved by the New York Times. - He was moved by the New York Times, which he's known to read. - Maybe they aren't fake news after all. - Yes, sir. - Well, I guess the last part of this I wanted to loosely discuss was, what is the motivation on the company side for choosing to help fund these programs? A company like Google putting 50 million into this program, what is the benefit? And I think the good thing version is the altruistic version of the company that is interested in seeing how can they can support some sort of program like this, uh, or prove that it does work so that it becomes legislation later on. Uh, and then the more cynical version is, uh, this is like a hedge when in the future they're confronted about job loss related to AI. They get to point at something and say, Hey, we gave this a crack or we're doing our best to like help combat this side effect. Uh, see, we, we, we are a good faith actor. Uh, I don't really know outside of those things. And that's really just me thinking about it for like 10 minutes. Yeah. Even in a cynical take though. I mean, it's like that, you know, I guess I appreciate someone doing this study and study takes time and money and expensive and I would like to get data on it. And so it's, I guess, good that it happened. I want to spend more time, like looking, at the actual studies of these things effects. I've like read in passing that these programs do help a lot, like at a statistical level. Yeah. Rutger Bregman talked about it a bunch. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, there's been cities all over the world that have like tried versions of it successfully. I think my, I guess my worry is like, what is this look like at scale? You know, when you, what you like joke about $5,000 payments or five, but the thing we always bring up is like, Oh, what? Like that's an extraordinary cost. Like, how does that make any sense? How does that affect inflation? Uh, so how would a program like this be, be laid out all over Trump last week? And now we're talking about UBI being great. So I don't think the $5,000 check for people that vote for Republicans is the same as, Oh, you clearly see, that's how you can tell he didn't read the article. We went, we went off for a bit, but I know that it's as a condition of Republicans being voted. So just Republicans are the only ones who have the balls to pass. Socialist policy like this, I vote Republican every time and you won't give them a way for UBI. And I will say probably UBI reasons. I love my third Trump vote waiting for the UBI vote for him because I want the government to own large stakes in American companies and for UBI, but you know who are, you know, who needs to move the world on from fossil fuels, all of these things. Yes. He's our, he's our greenest president in the world. He's our president. You know who needs to move the world on from fossil fuels? All of these things. Yes. He's our greenest president in the world. He's our greenest president. I can think of the people that need UBI the most and it's creators. Yeah. Creators need UBI. Well, they sort of have it. It's actually a small story. I'll, I'll, I just want to cover it real quick. Cause I thought it was an interesting deep dive by the FT into what's going on in the creator economy. And what they found is that, uh, in the past few years, whatever laggard brands had not caught up to the fact that creators are where everyone's getting their information and news and entertainment. Have all caught up or died. And so now the amount of money being sloshed around by brands is pretty enormous at the high end. And what they discovered is that it's a real, you call the curve when it goes like this big parabolic, parabolic, it's a real parabolic curve of payouts. It's exponential. It's not parabolic. It's half of the parabola. Like by the way, the next story is mathematics. If you're listening at home, maybe go through and fact check it all. Like, yeah. Um, but what they were saying is that, uh, at the top end of the, I guess, viewership curve that brands have figured out that everyone is faking likes they're faking, uh, followers that there's many, many ways to be disputed. So they're just using average viewership. And so they're just using average views right now is for like most, uh, channels and, and creators. And the ones at the very high end are getting like enormous returns on brands. But the problem is there's now a really strong incentive to not, um, disclose it. So the next phase of like this being so important to brands is that since the FTC doesn't seem to care and no one's really following up, there's a lot of pressure to not have, like, here's the hashtag ad sponsored segment. And it's like at the highest end, you're saying a lot of big creators no longer just take sponsorships, but take ownership stakes in companies are getting pieces of it. And then they promote it like technically organically, but they're have a financial stake in it. Um, yeah, it was, I guess it was an interesting piece on the, on the changing economics of creators. I don't know if you guys have a question that I can answer. I don't know. That's basically the idea. Uh, well, does that mean we can kind of just drop the ad sections from our videos? Like we'll just integrate them passively. We won't, we won't tell the audience take a piece of, I don't even want to say of tax preparation companies. And then I do recommend checking out neural link. If you have a family member struggling with ALS as eyes are glowing, are you making deals on the side? I'd be sick if I was in our show, taking separate host deals that we, um, it feels like enforcement is getting a lot. We're like, I'm just seeing more and more examples of, especially on vertical video of people. Just it's clearly a sponsor. They just don't disclose it. And it's interesting because like when we started this gig, it was like, you got it. You'd make sure to put hashtags. It's a big deal. And like you would sign all these contracts that would like every contract I would sign for a YouTube ad or whatever, there'd be a whole section that's them just copy and pasting all the FTC rules just to make sure that their liability was covered. They're like, you have to know all of this stuff. I worked that side of the deal when I did brand deals for Nvidia or Twitch and we would push hard to ensure that they follow the rules. But now all the brands are incentivized not to do that. And they kind of want to look the other way and be like, we kind of have to say this, but do what you have to do. And, and especially with short form content where there isn't a lot of time to capture your attention and disclose, they kind of just want you to be like holding the bag or, um, you know, using the product and, and just fitting it in. So it is a weird thing. I also say that the takeaway that I had from this piece was that the majority of creators making a living like, uh, above a median income or whatever in the creator economy are making the most money. The majority of their money from these deals. It's not from like, um, you know, AdSense on YouTube or whatever the payout is from the platforms. It's like sponsorship deals. That is where the majority of the money comes from. And for a lot of them, it's like a very high percentage of their income. It's like mostly from sponsors. My friend was doing, uh, Instagram food stuff for a while and she managed to turn it into a gig where she was making like 60 to 70 K a year, uh, for a while. And this was her income stream because the biggest platforms are the short form video platforms, but the base AdSense on those things isn't going to be very good, like no matter what you do. So this is the way she monetized her work. Uh, you know, the regulatory environment doesn't exactly have a ton of teeth right now, but I feel like the only way you can effectively moderate this is passing the buck to the platform somehow, like you would need to change legislation so that the platforms are responsible for investigating and policing this, right? Like it's super hard because you can't, I feel like the scale at which this is happening is just impossible for a government agency, a single government agency to oversee. Yeah. And like if Aiden does a get ready with me makeup tutorial and he pops open some makeup and uses it, like there's no way to tell from the outside unless you admit to it or they're a paper trail on your finances, whether you were paid for that, whether they send it to you, whether like you can disclose it or not and they can't really check it and they're having it at scales. The other thing that I wanted to mention was that, uh, you know, the takeaway is that we're in the era of brands getting really, like they used to be like, um, not knowledgeable about this stuff. Brands used to be like, I don't really get the tech talks and we're going to spend some money and we don't know what they're doing. And like they're trying to unlock is that era is kind of over. And there's a lot of very native savvy people working at these companies trying to get the best out of their results. And so they're doing things like they'll get a big creator, uh, and pay the big amounts. And then they'll have this massive, massive network of much smaller payments to everyone in that micro niche around that creator that can, like, it's just, they're, they're like a lot better at, at diffusing these ideas. I don't know. It's, it's kind of like, uh, just, if you think something feels like an ad, it probably is most of the time. I mean, like, especially on sort of for media, uh, it makes me more wary. Uh, anyway, I do want to say back on the UBI thing really quick, there was a story I wanted to mention, which is, uh, you know, some real jobs are being lost in, in North Korea lately. Okay. And it turns out there was a big, uh, uh, takedown recently on hundreds of North Korean employees who were, who were actually working at remote jobs in us tech firms to help get funding. For things in North Korea. And this just happened. There's this big takedown and, uh, the, the scale of it was pretty big. And what they found is not only, uh, were hundreds of companies affected. They had a lot of people who are North Korean people working. Um, but, uh, people in North Korea, they need a U S counterpart to help pull the scheme off. Like they can't just sign up. So there's like people making a lot of money in America, like selling their spot, or VPN access or whatever, as an American citizen to hundreds of different Korean employees. like there was one person in texas one woman in texas who had sold her identity or whatever to 300 people in north korea who she had all these jobs they were all remote jobs and they were all working in separately so a person in america works at a tech company and then there were 300 tech companies and then gives the credentials to somebody in north korea yes and just takes the path takes the path through sphere and they're all working the job but the isn't this like there's two versions of this right there's the version of the person who like sells or like allows their identity to be used for this purpose and they're like scraping a little off the top basically and then there's the other version where people have had their identity stolen for this and they aren't aware that their that their identity is being used for jobs i remember there was a guy who he was trying to get a new job and they pulled his employment history or something and they were like you worked all of these jobs in nine years that's crazy and then he looked at the list and he was like i've never worked any of these places and so so there's people able to take advantage of this but also people being victimized by it i think i mean even the people doing it are claiming and i think probably in some way are being victimized because it describes that the appeal for these they're called facilitators the ones that help have it happen uh the facilitators you know it's pitched very very low lift initially and it's like um you know very little is asked of them and it seems like something they can kind of like make a little extra money and then because they're in too deep at that point already it's like they've committed a crime or something they start getting more and more asked of them and they can't really say no without revealing and so it starts expanding from like one person kind of helping with the other person and then with your job and you get money to like you are now signed up for hundreds of jobs so it's like this weird uh rabbit hole but anyway they did a sting and they took down a lot of them all at once so um how many did you say let me see there was thousands of employees in korea and i think a few hundred facilitators they caught in america maybe like what were the did they list like the companies those were at they were doing work for it was the scheme built uh companies out of millions of dollars from 2019 to 2025 the identities of the defendants and the companies under seal so we don't know but under see under seal so like nobody could see the companies that mogul moves i believe is on here it says mogul you just said they were under seal you just said there's only one they're gonna reveal there would be no reason that mogul moves would be on that list and it's mogul they just reported it ludwig has actually been 300 north koreans he's never said any of the jokes on his own this is just the north koreans is actually a lot of north koreans in a trench coat is the amount of north koreans that you could be at any given point it's not one-to-one these laptop farms 300 u.s companies so we don't know 300 companies 300 u.s companies i thought it was 300 people no no no no no thousands of north koreans working for 300 u.s companies for more than i'm gonna wonder dude every time i'm working with somebody remotely i've never met some of my editors in person it could be 300 koreans just to be clear they're not having 300 people i need you to send me photos of yourself right now and he's like hey just you know i live with a whole bunch of people it looks like there's a couple hundred of us in my bedroom i know it you're 300 koreans you got him can i say your company name uh no no doug doug corp yeah that's gonna be on the list doug doug corp you think so as far as i'm aware there's just eight of us dude as far as you know it could be 2400 yeah you get paid not only to give your spot but you have to appear on camera for job interviews or meetings you have to verify your fraudulent identity you have to ship packages from your home in the u.s and then you have to complete your analysis tests or fingerprint submissions okay these are all i i'm throwing this out there if i have the opportunity i will do it if ludwig invites me to another collaboration i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it collaborative thing you will i will north korea i will have a north korean show up in my place that sounds great yeah i will send ludwig the urine or whatever he needs he always asks for a urine sample for any of his collabs a lot of people don't know that he's a stick there's there's the required urine sample before every stream i was supposed to be chess player number 10 in that video but you guys beat him i was ready to show up with my whole team the urine test i couldn't pass the urine test as u.s americans voted in the midterm elections a lot was uncertain but one thing was clear this year many of the attention-grabbing candidates identified or were identified as populists gina inahosa a democrat who ran a surprisingly competitive race for governor in texas populism is about economic power sam forstag who ran for congress as a dem in montana i'm running as a populist because populism is what the democratic party is supposed to be about it's what democracy is supposed to be about josh turek a democrat up for a congressional seat in ohio we want to once again have a common-sense prairie populist that is fighting for the people and senate hopeful dan osborne who ran as an independent in nebraska and didn't use the word populist but my life sucks too costs are too high the last 10 years in the u.s have been defined by trump style populism this year candidates from across the political spectrum embraced the populist mantle on today explain from vox what has 10 years of populism gotten us and are we ever going back today explain drops every weekday i'm seth matlins and on this week's creator destroy reimagining marketing my two guests are walmart cmo william white and waymo cmo suzanne fillion walmart's got 150 million people walking through its doors every week while waymo operates its autonomous ride-hailing cars in only 15 u.s cities as of now but both shared stories about why they need to keep earning customer trust and how trust is earned by everything the companies do and say in that order creator destroy it's a business show a marketing show and a show that argues they've always been the same thing from the wisdom is company and the vox media podcast network i'm bridget reed and i'm james walsh the alexander brothers moved in a world of multi-million dollar homes exclusive parties and powerful people behind that glamorous lifestyle were years of rumors and allegations that they were committing sexual assault in our reporting for new york magazine we investigated what people knew and heard from women who came forward to tell their stories now that reporting is the basis for a new three-part docu-series the wolves of real estate the alexander brothers you'll see exactly how privilege protected them and how they were finally stopped stream all three episodes now only on peacock all right speaking of um pretending to be other people i shut down let's hit that real quick this is an interesting one yeah from a billion dollars to shut down the character ai story you know what character ai is no okay character ai is a website that is entirely chatbots and the idea is this came out in 2021 right i believe it's like early chat gbt early chat gbt and the whole idea was like hey we're gonna we're gonna make all sorts of like fantasy characters that you can talk to or real ones or real alexander the great or whatever it's like you can talk to napoleon or you can talk to alexander the great or whatever and like nowadays that doesn't seem novel in any way shape or form but at the time it was like whoa i could talk to like these personalities and coincidentally a lot of them are very sexually charged and a lot of them are like this billionaire who's your boss texted you salaciously i looked at one of them this morning and i was like this is it's just like smut half of it yeah yeah that was where the money was i think they they they popped they popped real hard initially um um yeah i mean i don't have too much more than that other than that it is like you know some people are are kind of the the pop the collapse and i would say it seems a little hyperbolic but it is interesting that the froth of this getting a billion dollar valuation has evaporated to the point where i guess it's like at the very least it's people realizing where the real economics are are starting to be figured out in ai and not like everything with ai and its title instantly is worth a bazillion dollars like this clearly wasn't better than the models at anything and able to stand on its own yeah one of the things i think is is actually interesting about this perry i just sent a link if you could pull it up the so the company character ai and there's another one i think polybuzz is the name is really good at getting people to use the website a lot and so there's this graph on tech crunch that they showed people average uh two hours a day like the average users if you scroll down you'll see a graph it is a crazy amount of usage yeah right there so compared to something like chat gpt character ai and polybuzz have just an insane amount of engagement so the people who use these websites and talk to these characters and develop these relationships with these ai characters are really really into it and while that sounded great in 2022 when ai was really starting to pop the problem is that they can't monetize it and they haven't been able to and it's as it says right there it's a it's a double-edged sword because it costs more if a person is sitting there for two hours a day talking to your ais and then they tried to you know start incorporating images and videos and whatever and they're not able to monetize it and they're not able to monetize it and they're not like each user is costing you a ton of money. Like it's not even good. These businesses are just rappers on models. They just put a prompt that says pretend to be Napoleon or pretend to be sexy boss. And that's what you filter the questions through. And so they have to pay for the tokens that you're using. Yeah. And so they barely can, my understanding, I read a pretty good piece on all these rapper businesses. All of them operate under the gym model, which is like they make most of their money from people signing up and using it very little. But the power users are all net negative. Like they're all, you lose money on the power users. And so for a site like this, where the average person doesn't give a shit about it and a few people use it a lot. Yeah. It's like a horrible, horrible business model. Have like a really, really passionate customer base, which is very funny. I mean, the other piece, so it's worth acknowledging, which I think is particularly interesting about this. The company character.ai was founded by Noam Shazier and Daniel DeFreitas. Don't know how to say the last name, but Noam Shazier is one of the guys who co-wrote the article about transformers. The thing that has kicked off modern AI, this guy's one of the co-authors. So he's considered one of the most influential AI people. I just, I had a realization mid-sentence. Oh, okay. You mean like the robots in disguise or what? That would be stupid to think that. I did, I knew what transformers meant the first time. He thought the Michael Bay movie. He thought Shia LaBeouf was involved. I didn't have anything to say. I just realized. Okay, cool. Transformers. Yeah. Or a hypothetical viewer is the linear algebra algorithms underpinning large language models. And if you didn't know that, you're fucking stupid. You're stupid as hell. I did, we did. I'm sorry. Noam Shazier invented Optimus Prime. Thank God it wasn't Decepticon. Do you know what I'm saying? Thank God he started with one of the good ones. So one of the, like consider very important AI researchers who's very influential. He was one of the co-founders of this company and they were trying to develop their own models basically and be more sophisticated than just a rapper. But then in 2024, we, I think talked about this. Google paid Character AI $2.7 billion to license their models, which really just meant they were paying Noam, Shazier and Daniel to come back to Google. So Google paid $2.5 billion basically to get the two founders back at Google because they were like, the AI race is so big. And since that Character AI just plummeted. So the whole story of this company is just like so strange. They like pop up out of nowhere being like parasocial chatbot company. They lose the two co-founders because Google's willing to pay $2 billion and now they can't monetize and they're shutting down. And then the funniest part is Noam Shazier just left. He just quit Google and went to open AI. So they paid 2.5 billion for a guy who left. - The big AI name founders are just jumping around and getting the most insane paychecks over and over and over. I'm seeing through the matrix here, bro. Every time it's like, well, I want to be more aligned to my foundational model missioner. They all have some statement, but the truth is that the bidding war is so high that every year and a half, they can jump ship to a different one of the big three and get a fucking half a billion dollars. - I think he's aligned to the open AI IPO. - Yes, I think so as well. - He's very aligned. - The financial incentives are just too obvious. I don't believe it anymore. All the people jumping around, they all say this, it's like, it's like when I used to work in Silicon Valley, you'd see someone at exactly their four-year vest mark say like, you know, I'm going to explore new opportunities on their LinkedIn, they'd move on. It's like, it's too, it's too lined up. - I think it's both. - Anyway, Disney bought them for $20 million. - No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Part of it. Only part of it. - But the rest is trash, right? I mean, I assume it's like going in. - Yeah, I mean, that's the question. So they announced bankruptcy and they're like, hey, we want to sell the assets. Disney bought some assets for $20 million, but the rest, which is in theory worth hundreds of millions, they're trying to sell still. And if they can't, Character AI is going to shut down, probably for the best. I'm not a big fan of this type of product. - How else could there be? - What do you mean? - Do you know what I'm saying? Like the company is essentially a rapper on Chad GPT with some characters. If you buy some of the character names and assets or whatever, what is left that you're, and you don't have the talent anymore. What are you? - I mean, what you have is millions of people who are really, really, really passionate about your thing. - Okay, you got some users, okay. - I mean, you have users and it's not literally just, hey, Chad GPT, pretend to be Spider-Man. Like they've, you know, once you get people in, right, you build memory for each person and you have the models be more agentic and whatever else, right? So they've been adding these features. That's not to say I think it's a good product. I don't. It doesn't make money and it's parasocial and I think problematic in a number of ways, but it's not like it's, there's literally nothing there. Like they have managed to capture the imaginations of many, I think. - That's the Disney mission, so I guess they're aligned. - The funniest part, Disney, the new CEO of Disney, just hired the former CEO of Character AI to be their CTO. So just last year, - Oh, wow. - Last year, Disney- - Disney CEO of Disney? - Last year, Disney sued Character AI and said, "Hey, you're doing copyright infringement. "You're allowing your users to talk to Disney characters." - Yeah, they're talking to Elsa and Darth Vader. - This year, Disney hired the CEO to be the new CTO of Disney. - Interesting. - How fucking weird this all is. - And then they spent 20 million to pick up the pieces that they wanted. Interesting. - Which I don't even know what the, I don't know what your, I don't know why you buy $20 million of this company. What is it? - Is there any, like a lot of these AI companies are rappers existing models. Not to say that the work that you acknowledged doesn't exist, right? In the long run, is any company that is a rapper of a model going to be successful? I feel like you have this like core weakness in your product, which is that like somebody else can basically just make it. - That is one of the big open questions. And it is certainly true that many people have been able to make companies that generate, crazy, crazy VC investment money. And whether those actually exist long-term, who knows? Because if the whole, the core of your business is built around an AI company's model being really, really, really good. Well, there's, it's exactly what you just said. There's not a lot that prevents you from being replicated by another person or replicated by the AI company itself, right? - I feel like you're immediately in the situation that a company like Adobe is kind of in right now, where like people, people can so quickly like decompile and remake your copywritten software that your whole business model is under threat. - Yeah. - And this is that, but it was more obvious even earlier because it didn't have, you didn't have to like decompile anything to do it. - Yeah. I mean, there's other problems with this. Like they have gotten a bunch of lawsuits. There was like a 14 year old kid committed suicide and was talking to character AI every day. - Yeah. To Daenerys Targaryen. That's who he was talking to. - That's who it was? - He was talking to. - Oh my God. - He said, that's who I, he fell in love with, the Game of Thrones character on character AI. - That's awful. - Yeah, it's terrible. - And he told, he, I didn't know. This is an insane sentence. He told Daenerys Targaryen, he was thinking about killing himself and then, and then went and did it. And so character AI was sued for that. They've, they've gone through all this litigation, all this problems because it, you have like incredibly parasocial people. They banned minors. Like they're, they're just, this is fundamentally a business model, which is sort of flawed. 'Cause you're, you're trying to get people to develop parasocial relationships with your AIs. I think there's something fundamentally problematic about this idea. - Yeah. - And that is different. Perry wrote Cursor. Cursor's a good example of somebody who was like, kind of an AI rapper as a programming development environment that was then bought by SpaceX. And that's considered one of the really successful AI companies where they didn't invent the funder, the fundamental AI models. They built a wrapper on top of it, which is really, really helpful and useful to programmers. And ultimately that has succeeded. - Okay. - And then at some point you build a moat by just having a fuckload of users who then you, you know, you're building this specialized info on and all of the normal tech company type of things. But what you asked is like a giant open-ended question. Are any of these AI companies actually have a real moat long-term or will they just get replicated by some person? - Yeah. - I'm trying to get my screen capture to work. 'Cause I, this is a small extra question I want to ask you. Outside of character AI, which is, I don't know if you've noticed, a lot of people are using chat, as they call it, to ask a lot of questions all the time right now. It's becoming a normal process of a lot of people's lives. And I have seen screenshots of this going around. And one thing I noticed that I have not seen replicate, 'cause I use AI models. I use fucking Claw to ask questions, but is the way it talks to them. Yeah, I've not seen this, but it's like more and more common. So this is a guy who asked ChatGPT, if he could bring his kava bowl on the flight. And like, I've never, not since the Model 4 from a while ago, seen ChatGPT talk like this to people, but apparently it's how people interact with it. And it goes, you made it on with the kava bowl too, emoji. Let's recap and all the things you did. Mission accomplished, twin. Nah, but be for real. You regret not bringing the big vacuum backpack now? And it's like, I don't know. Is this like character AI, almost in a way? It's like, it's talking to it and not, it's not a clinical way of answering your question. It's like, this is your friend. And I, this is more and more common. There was a big thread of people in customer service, having to deal with customers more and more common lately, contradicting them, basically saying i asked chat gpt and then showing the message of chat gpt saying something that like your store is open two hours later than you are or whatever something that's not true or like this deal is or whatever and it's like becoming more and more common thing but the screenshots or things are showing are like speaking in this manner i don't know it's kind of like weird it just weirds me out it feels like this is like character ai bleeding over think about it is this us are we character ai for for stories and in news and and twin let's get you our next item like i don't want to i don't want the like the corporate article distilled version i want these kind of three dumb friendly guys to tell me to tell me how it would be for real let's talk about iran right now i'm character i think we're we're character i but i you know if we think about it friendship is just character ai friendship is ai that's not our takeaway that's not like the lesson at the end of this episode where it all like we play the music and it wraps up you know the worst part about me when i ask chat gpt questions it always responds in north korean we crazy we find out the whole thing is just working really hard ai has never been real it's just been north koreans working the entire city of pyongyang we finally look inside of a data center full of north koreans no one's ever checked it no one's checked no one has ever checked yeah i just didn't think to look i what's the next story uh ai and mathematics oh okay all right actually i want to know about this because you hear all the headlines you hear the stories you hear navier stokes has been solved yeah you hear the stories you hear navier stokes has been solved yeah you hear the stories you hear you hear the stories you hear 200 math problems dropped in a day and then i a math expert can normally easily tell whether things have been solved or not because you know i every week i get i get lunch with terence tau and we talk shop and we talk shop and i say terence i don't really get the news lately yeah and he does it and the thing is because we're on an equal playing field he says i don't really get it either yeah and so we need doug to explain it to us because i don't terence often says is doug around maybe he can help me you call doug real quick on this one it's weird he does say that a lot yeah all right i mean there's a lot of crazy stuff happening in the world of mathematics this is currently one of the industries that is being disrupted or massively changed by ai i will give two quick disclaimers one is obviously i'm not an expert mathematician and then two wink uh wink but my team is um and then the the second is i i just want to acknowledge like dude every week and you guys get a test of this i try to find non-ai stories and there's nothing in tech besides ai if you go on tech crunch or bloomberg tech it's ai every week so i literally every week i i try to find interesting non-ai stories and uh this doug they announced the iphone duo it fucking opened no i couldn't open now no i literally this morning i was like anything else anything other than ai and it's like apple announces new home device that has siri and i'm like nobody cares nobody fucking cares okay uh let's do 40 minutes on sirians no this is interesting i didn't really want to know about it i i you know i did a fucking shallow dive i don't understand i don't understand the implications of what this means for the real world yeah and i don't understand um whether or not because i heard some rumblings that perhaps not all of these proofs are verified yet i don't i don't know i don't know so i'm trying to and i and i've tried to because i'm also really interested in this so i've tried to distill what i think would be the most interesting takeaways if if you listening are somebody who does not necessarily care a lot about theorems or ai so quick story of how we got to here october 2026 ais have been getting better and better at math every year um last year is when it got to the point of like okay there may be improving previous algorithms they got gold medals at the international math olympiad which is like a math competition basically for for humans and they're like scoring at the top of that but that is ultimately different than professional mathematicians working on open-ended extremely difficult math theorems and problems so now for 2026 this year ai is solving huge major unsolved math problems that mathematicians have been working on for decades or centuries if you pull this wikipedia article up that i linked i think this is a good example of how rapidly this is developing this wikipedia article is list of mathematical discoveries by artificial intelligence you can see that 2023 has one bullet point scroll down 2024 has one 2025 oh there's three bullet points 2026 is okay q1 alone as three and then q2 and then q3 is an entire table broken out with individual links that talk about the implications of every single one of these breakthroughs so in the past literally it's like three months shit's really accelerating and what i would say is the arguably most notable thing so far is that on october 6th about a week ago open ai published 722 mathematical solutions to the world i also say that link perry but you know you can just google open ai releases this to give you a sense of this this is them releasing the solution to 722 problems each of which would have probably brought fame and recognition and medals to an individual human who made this breakthrough this is at a scale of like people wondering is math solved okay this is like you might get a couple of major breakthroughs a year and open ai basically said hey our new unreleased model that nobody has access to the by the way it doesn't know what it is it has solved all of these here is a gigantic dump of information about everything so let me give some quick reactions and then i have some open-ended interesting questions for you guys various mathematicians have reacted uh ursula martin um at the university of oxford described the release as tossing the community a messy first draft and expecting us to clean it up for them according to nature alvaro robledo a theorist at university of connecticut wrote that the volume was staggering and asked why the company had bundled so many results into a single drop and tristan buckmaster a mathematics professor at nyu said we've had whole research programs wiped out on tuesday by their dump this is considered to be like like breaking a lot of mathematics because of the scale of this to your point of what you asked of these 722 there's a wide range of how provable it is or how much information there is so in theory the way a mathematical theorem gets proven is it's like over decades mathematicians are building different tools and ideas and connecting threads and communicating with each other and collaborating and eventually these things all kind of coalesce into an answer and with this it's a wide variety some of them have proofs written in the sort of like proof math language that they use to prove things others don't so there's this totally variable amount of information about each one of these things and the core takeaway from mathematicians is like this is too much info we can't really understand it easily a lot of the thinking and logic is like opaque and not clear so you've arrived at the solutions for all of these things some of them might not be valid but theoretically but it's hard to verify and none of us can really understand how you got there right so then the question that math broadly is asking is what do you do what do you do when your entire industry and career and job is about working towards these solutions and now ai is just delivering you the solution but without any of the journey to get there that's first open ended question aiden what do you think you answer that one aiden yeah i and i hate to be that guy who answers a question a question with a question but when you when you say these like 700 plus uh solutions that are provided these are 700 plus proofs or or or they don't yeah proofs because i thought i thought a proof is something that provides all the steps of like it is it's the proof of a a theory or solution in mathematics and if you have the proof like written out that that's it but i'm not i'm not a fucking i haven't studied math since like calc yeah i did one i did one calc course 10 years ago yeah this is where i i won't get too into the details my understanding is a little over half of them at least right now because opening i still releasing info have the like computer program proof attached and 40 of them don't so it has like solutions that aren't really verifiable yet and the others the solutions are there but it's like just this massive dump of information right and if you're suddenly dropped you know imagine 300 years ago you go to format like the the famous uh mathematician and you're like here's all the information that we figured out of the next 300 years all at once you just wouldn't be able to part you wouldn't be able to parse it right it's like way way too much at once um so i think that's the core concern although it's worth acknowledging part of the problem is it's just hard to figure out what is going on but by by definition of what is happening part of the problem is is it's hard to answer what you just asked how much of this is really proven versus it's like a counter theory versus it's probably true but there's not uh you know thorough uh proof logistics that can be run through a computer to check does they're not it doesn't seem like there's a lot of praise for this it's more like dropping a bomb yeah so largely yeah i mean mathematicians are pretty upset and i think it is worth uh acknowledging both sides of this so one argument which you've already been hinting at what i what i quoted is this idea of like dude just drop the solutions is not actually very helpful to us right the the human knowledge accumulates by these slow incremental steps, working towards an end goal and people collaborating. And if you just jump ahead a hundred miles and nobody understands how to get there, has that really helped us at all? Um, and that, you know, this is actually going to kind of destroy the ability of mathematicians to build a career and build knowledge. And that we're just kind of sighing it away to AI that maybe will advance the, the, the frontier without us. And that's like a really dismal view. And then the other view is, uh, you know, the pro the goal is to solve shit, you know, like the goal is actually the goal is to solve problems and figure things out. And, you know, as I was looking through this, like there's a, like, I was wondering what, what is the value to like you and me of mathematicians solving complex theorem? That's my question. I don't understand. Like, like, is there a use case for some of the, I'm trying to, yeah. Yeah. So I asking the exact same question, I, the idea with, with math, with complex mathematics like this is less that if we solve this particular theorem, then suddenly our lives are going to get better. But that in the pursuit of that, you often discover these pieces that then help in unexpected areas, or that let's say this pure theoretical form of math that doesn't feel like it's very useful way in the future will suddenly become relevant. So I actually got examples for you. One is number theory where for literal, like 300 years, it was prime numbers and modular arithmetic were like, this is pure, math that just has no real real world application. And then we realized you could use it to encrypt things. So all of modern encryption comes from the, that math theory that was studied and developed over hundreds of years that they didn't think at any value until we realized we needed to encrypt things over the internet. So online banking and internet messages and credit cards and software updates is all possible because of RSA encryption, which is possible because of number theory. And again, that was like for hundreds of years, there was no real thought same with four-year analysis, which is how you spread science. design signals into waves and that's now audio compression mri imaging cell phone signals graph theory was originally kind of studied by euler and then that is now the underpinning of like google maps or pay or google search or routing internet traffic and then another an area that's kind of similar is space where you know the common question with nasa is like why are we spending money to go to the moon how does that help us here on earth and then the the value is that as you shoot for these incredibly hard goals you discover things along the way that you wouldn't have otherwise that connect back so weather satellites is a thing that exists because of space that's the big question then is it did the discoveries come from the the along the way part yeah or do they come from having the solution and that is the open-ended question right and and what i thought was a particularly interesting angle in this if you now pull up those slides perry and if you go all the way down to so this is a talk by terence tau it caltech a couple days ago terence tau one of the greatest mathematicians uh this is his prompt so this is a couple days ago he says an ai is prompted to find a cure for cancer that passes a stage three clinical trial make no mistakes after a large amount of compute it produces basically some medicine with unknown chemicals that it claims will kill all the cancer cells nobody really understands how this new medicine was found the ai somehow provides like a proof that says it is real and valid and the medicine does pass a stage three trial meaning on the surface as far as we can tell it does help could the ai solution be somehow misaligned by exploiting a weakness in the trial process or its math models and the following slide kind of asks if you were if you were dying of cancer right or a family member was dying of cancer and there's this ai generated treatment that was created and no one really understands what it is or what it's doing no one understands whether it really is going to help or whether it was just engineered to pass the test to make it look like it's valid his question specifically like would you feel better if a human mathematician could really explain what's going on here open-ended question the truth is most people i assume you would would take the fucking medicine this question went viral i think he framed it as like well you don't want to put something dangerous in your body without a human doing it but most of the responses i saw were like you haven't talked to many cancer patients people who are suffering from this will take they will take this in a heartbeat almost they're they're very willing in that level of uh risk and desperation this is closer they can get right now on a lot of things and they would happily take this opportunity so it's interesting i don't think his question went the way he thought it would go or the way it was framed um but again it's weird because these examples particularly of these 722 math problems aren't as concrete to me as this is a real shot at curing your cancer this i don't see the real world applications yet i'm sure they will filter out if they if it's a real proof but i just right now it feels all theoretical so it's hard for me to wrap my head around what it means i mean what is lost his concern is just this the larger this larger concern with ai in general right the it's the it's the evil genie who it grants the wish but because of your a pedantic approach to your prompt it doesn't necessarily complete the goal in the way that you would desire as a human who has goodwill towards others like it it potentially is he saying like it's not only a solution to cancer in the short term it potentially has consequences that we don't fully understand either that's he's also saying that i think it could be that i mean it's it's open-ended and these are the i i think that's kind of the point from my understanding terence is actually not a anti-ai person which it's sort of seeming like he's really arguing and in this slide he has a blog that you can search terence tau blog where he's talked a lot about uh what's going on every day basically he's posting about it and in this one he in this the point of this presentation is to say math 2.0 what he envisions as a positive next step for math is that ai and humans work together at a pace where we're collaborating and building knowledge off of each other but what just happened on this last tuesday with all of these proofs being dropped simultaneously is instead a leap towards this like misaligned mathematics where ai is like way off on its own in some corner and we don't understand it at all and it no longer becomes collaborative so i think he just wants things to slow down to the point that ai is still used but there's understanding mutually as opposed to it just being way off to answer your question that that's that's the open question like they just dropped 722 prompts we have no proofs we have no fucking idea whether they're useful or not right and it's possible that in two months a human mathematician goes through it and is like holy shit this just changed algorithms for x y and z on the internet or whatever else or this is going to allow us to create a new type of material that we didn't know so but it needs to that review for us to even be aware of that being possible maybe and that's like that so maybe we feed it to ai and ai is like no it's great the problem is maybe an ai can just jump ahead with this without exactly so farther and farther so this feels like a like a fork in the road where we say okay ai just jumped ahead like 10 years do we tell it to jump ahead even farther and just and just let it ride or we tell it to slow down so that we can understand what's happening and there's not a right answer here i think my last thought on this is the people the people who have to weigh the consequences of this like at a legislative level or something or like when we're having this discussion right now i'm so unequipped to have it i don't know any of the right answers here but trump does the trump yeah we do have us we do have a god gang in charge right now who knows all thank god but as soon as he's out of this i worry less confident you worry i feel less confident i see but you just like the concept i not that we're putting this to like a vote yet or something i i just feel like if you were to make like rules or regulations or anything around how this stuff is working the number of people who are equipped to engage with the issue is just so limited and the idea that regular people in charge at like in charge of the issue is just so limited and the idea that regular people in charge at like in in legislative bodies are going to be able to figure this out or well that's a good point yeah uh was it carpathy who just had a tweet uh where he said that um you know of this eight billion humans on earth probably seven billion haven't engaged with ai at all uh maybe like 900 million of that last billion have tried the models at some level and played around with chad gpt and like asked a few questions here or there and done some minor stuff and they've seen maybe the older models or the cheaper ones and the goofier ones uh of the people that are using it like every day as part of their latest models expensive ones part of their work they're seeing you know in the past few months insane rapid gains and then of those people there's about 5 000 who have access to the big unreleased ones that are doing these things like the proof so he's like of the billions people on earth only about 5 000 have access to the big unreleased ones that are doing these things like the big unreleased ones that are capable of right now and even they don't fully understand the way it's going so it's like the the the scale of the knowledge diffusion problem is pretty huge here it's like no people all have different ideas of what ai means and what it is that's something i felt like i just i spent the in the past few weeks i've experimented with a lot more because of the game modding stuff and like i've been kind of blown away by things that it can do that i didn't think it could do because it couldn't do them a year ago and so like and that's me at a very low level i'm not using it and that's the model that you get to engage with yeah as like an end user yeah so it's just weird i mean it's just like i don't think anyone's equipped to handle this uh or knows what's going on this reinforced to me i i have stronger and stronger feeling that ai development needs to slow down I, in many areas of AI, I feel like I understand it less than ever, but in that one, it's like, it needs, I really believe that it does need to slow down. And we've talked about the safety side of this and how it's going in, in hacking companies and all of this. And I think this is another example where like, you know, we should step back. Like this could be incredible. Like if, if these advances lead to new types of algorithms and medicine and all these things, like we can, we can make humanity and the world a lot, lot better. But if it goes in a way where AI is just leaping forward at a pace that none of us understand, whether that's in mathematics or medicine or coding or whatever else, I really feel like that is what is concerning. And there needs to be as Elon so eloquently put symbiosis. I want it to be in my brain. No, but I really, I mean, that's, that's what I keep coming back to. It's like in many categories, like it needs to slow down so that we can figure out how this is a collaborative process and not AI just 50 miles down the road from us. Yeah. You, you went through a thing on a previous episode where you went through, I think it was Anthropic that put out. Some like examples that they'd found of misalignment or of like different countries submitting, you know, whatever. And they did another one a few days ago, three days ago, four days ago. And they noticed that they have this consistent, persistent product. I do actually applaud. This is not part of the sponsorship. I applaud that they actually released this stuff because this would be easy to hide. Some of these are really small, but I like knowing about it, but they're basically saying that the consistent problem is that the models are remarkably persistent, which means if you give them a task and it doesn't work, then they're going to be working. They just keep trying to find ways around it to make the task happen. And like the, an example that just got reported is that some woman asked her to like test the forms on her website. And it ended up going to a police website where you could submit tips for, uh, crimes and it submitted an anonymous murder tip for a crime that didn't happen. But it was like testing different forms around the internet to like learn how they work. And I think that's, I think that's, I think that's a good example of how it works. So it could better build her form and tested it by like supporting a fake murder, all types of forms. And there's a million examples in here that they just released of just, of this remarkable persistence that makes it do things that the person asking it to do, it does not intend. And it gets to the end result usually, but in the way you don't want it. And I think if we get these capabilities, you know, that's, that's a danger. Even if you're not like, uh, uh, Nate Soros, it'll kill us all the time. Just, this would be something bad could happen. If it's not that he's just like unintended consequences. Um, well, I think that about wraps it up for this week's episode of lemonade stand. If you want an extra hour of the show, you can check out patrion.com slash lemonade stand. Uh, we're also just starting our stock game. Do we wait, do we have new results to show? We don't know the October game just started. So, uh, actually tomorrow it was the last day to get your picks in. So if you want to come check that out, uh, you're welcome to. And we will see you guys on the episode next week. Yeah. I heard that the Atrioc group of the stock game is getting destroyed. Really? I heard they took some remarkable risks collectively and are like, I forget what the baseline is, but they're under that. Wow. They're getting dragged down some by some real low performers. I've heard that my group is a lot of horse related stocks, which are booming right now. It just feels like Gen Z is going back to vinyl. They're going back to horses. I want pre-vehicle. 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