Astra Ends Math, Gruber Joins, 1 Person $1 Companies, Hank Green Is Absolutely Right

You're watching TBPN. Today's Monday, August 3rd, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy-to-use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. How was your weekend, Jordi?

Uh, my weekend was good. Yeah, my weekend was a little hot here in Southern California, but all the more reason to get to the beach, enjoy the nice weather. It's been a good summer on a boat.

That's nice. What more can you ask for? That's nice. Uh, we got a great show today.

We do.

Unfortunately, only one venture capitalist, and I think that's because it's August. Oh yeah. You're going to see us really struggling.

It's going to be hard to get those VCs to get those VCs every other month.

It's hard.

They're happy to jump on same day, moment's notice.

You know what's important. We got one today. Shaun Maguire coming on with Isaiah Taylor announcing a $1 billion Series B led by Sequoia.

Very excited.

Very excited for that conversation. We got Justin, co-founder of Base Power, another $1 billion round, Series D. And then we have the founder of the demon robot.

That you may have seen last week. It's a centaur with horns.

Beau Gaston. And we're very excited to talk with Beau and get a sense for what went through his head when he made a robot like that.

Can you stop? Can you not? Can we pull up a picture of the robot? Uh, I want to... There it is. There it is. So, this is the friendly robot that Beau is excited to get into disaster zones to help rescue people. And apparently the horns are critical because there are cameras on the end of each horn and that allows it to see the ground, which you couldn't put those cameras anywhere else. I guess

it'll be a lot of fun. And then closing out with Ron over at Intology, but fun.

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

There were a couple things. The big debate that I was tracking, sort of outside of tech but tech-adjacent, was the cancellation of Hank Green, the YouTube creator. Not quite a cancellation, more just some backlash. Hard to always put a proper sizing on a mob when a mob comes after a creator. But Hank Green, the YouTuber and really media entrepreneur, he's grown a huge business, which we can sort of go into. He's getting pilloried on social media over using ChatGPT for research. Very controversial these days. Only a billion people do it, and it's the number one app in the App Store, but he's getting a lot of backlash from certain members of his audience. I don't want to characterize the whole audience as being part of this, but it's very silly.

There's at least thousands of people.

It seems like it's always hard to tell. I mean, thousands of people that are liking a post about it. There's like maybe dozens of posts. I don't really know how to put a scale on these things, but Hank Green is definitely going through it, having to sort of apologize or qualify or sort of state that he will adjust things in the future. And it's just sort of interesting to hear how he went through this process, what he says is going to change, and where the backlash is coming from, because there's a lot of misunderstandings about it. So, and what's interesting is that he is a science and education creator, and science and education are potentially the most affected by AI right now. And so, it's a real challenge to simultaneously say, I'm going to cover math, I'm going to cover science, but I'm not going to touch AI. That AI stuff's bad. Because as we also saw over the weekend, AI is making a bunch of advancements on math. We've been saying this for a while, but the latest version of the story comes from Noam Brown over at OpenAI. He says an internal version of Astra, OpenAI's next major model family, solved 10 major open problems in mathematics, quantum complexity, and theoretical computer science. The achievements are so extreme at this point that I don't even think it's worth us trying to break them down. Like we did that with the distance problem.

Tyler is going to run a 5K here in the Ultradome to do a little victory lap for the research team.

But not everyone is impressed with it because Gary Marcus says, 'Wake me when Astra solves a significant open-world problem that doesn't revolve around formal verification.' And of course Daniel Eth says the goalposts are on a completely separate planet. It is a good point. Obviously AI is doing better in formally verifiable tasks. At the same time, still impressive because there's a lot of things that are useful and verifiable, like did this drug cure your cancer or not, or did this job get done or not. Like we've been using these recommender systems for lots of things. They're very valuable all over. But it is funny, the debate over is this AGI, is this ASI. Those terms will always be vague and we dig in.

Going back to Hank. So all he did was admit that he used some sort of AI tool for research.

Yes.

So I will take you a little bit more through it. First, I'm going to tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. They got AI on Shopify. So, if you're selling something, you're using AI. So, Hank Green, he's an OG YouTuber. He joined YouTube in 2007, I think less than two years after the platform actually launched. And he grew — he got a lot of views, but he also built a huge audience and created a real media company around it. So, he has Vlog Brothers, like a vlog channel. Then he has Crash Course, which is a really, really huge educational channel. He runs VidCon, which is basically the premier conference around YouTube and the creator economy. I've been, I think once or twice. It's a lot of fun. And over the last 20 years, he's become one of the most trusted educational creators on the platform. He's also just like — he gets the vibe of YouTube very well because he's been around it so long. Never really stepped back fully, but always been, you know, solid audience there. So, last Wednesday he published an episode of a show called Ask Hank Anything. And it's an interesting concept for a show. So he brings on a guest, but then instead of just doing the interview, tell me your life story, ask the guest a whole bunch of things. The guest brings questions for him about science or whatever, they have a big long conversation. And if there's something in the show that he can't answer on the fly or he's not prepped for, he will go do the research and then get the actual answer and then cut that into the final episode. So, you'll be watching them hang out. They'll talk about some odd thing.

He was talking about this — have you heard this Kiki and Bouba thing? There's two shapes. One's like a fluffy cloud, the other's like a spiky star essentially. And if you ask people generally which one would you assign the word Kiki to and which one would you assign the word Bouba to, people always pick Bouba is the cloud and Kiki is the spiky one. And it's like the sound of the word has a shape to it even, and this is just something in our language that shows up all over the place. So he's like telling the story of this like just somebody ran a science experiment. They put a bunch of people together, they pulled a bunch of people, they put together this result and this is what happened. And so he needs to compile all of that quickly because you get off the show, you have your rest of your job, but then you have to go answer these questions and have all the information. And of course he uses all sorts of research tools. But he was accused specifically of using ChatGPT to write the script, which is interesting because after the episode went up, manager Jojo posted a clip of him from the episode and accused him of using ChatGPT to write the script. The key line is Hank saying, quote, 'I appreciate the pushback.' And that's sort of an AI phrase, but that wasn't one of the really trigger AI phrases like, 'You're absolutely right,' or, 'It's not this, it's that.' 'I appreciate the pushback' is something that the AI models say occasionally, but you wouldn't think it would make it into a script. But that's why people jumped on it. They were like, 'Wow, he was so careless that he left in a turn of phrase that was the model talking to him about, I appreciate the pushback.' That's not what happens. He's actually responding to the guest pushing back on him about this concept and then he answers it.

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

This did not land well. People don't like the idea of him using ChatGPT for research. And clearly it's just a small subset of his audience that actually takes the time to flame online about AI usage. But there's still dozens of posts, maybe hundreds of posts, about how AI cannot be used for research because it hallucinates or it removes some key human element of the process of learning something like that. It's very odd for anyone who's used modern models, because there's a lot that AI can't do well yet. But pulling a bunch of links and quotes together from across the internet is something it's pretty good at, and it's definitely reliable for that. And so Hank clarified the script was not written by AI. He was just going on ChatGPT and saying like, 'Hey, where did this original research come from? Pull up the paper, download the PDF, crunch it all together for me, pull some quotes from it, change this into a different format. I want it in this unit instead of that unit.' Those types of questions.

But he still said that he has not been happy with how he's been using AI and may wind up publishing less as a result. He feels like he's on a little bit of a treadmill because he's more productive with AI, but then he posts more and then that's a feedback loop. And of course, at this point in time, he's built his career over 20 years. He has a very sustainable business. He probably doesn't need to be on as much of a treadmill as perhaps an early-stage creator might be. So it doesn't feel like it's total audience capture, but there is this interesting opportunity here that I was sort of just identifying. Like AI is clearly this wedge issue. Billions of people use AI and get value from it, but at the same time, it's deeply unpopular. And there's lots of people who like to post angrily online about how AI is bad for a variety of reasons.

But education and science in particular are going to be intertwined with AI for the foreseeable future. Like every advancement in science is going to be AI-enabled. And so if you're a science educator and you constantly have to be dancing around AI and be like, 'Oh yes, like they solved this math problem, but I don't like it because AI was used,' well, you're going to wind up just not being able to talk about math or science or whatever's happening because you're constantly doing this dance around AI. And so that's fine. There's that audience that will love that. But there's also an opportunity for a new audience that's maybe a little bit more nuanced about this and maybe just, yeah, it's fine that you use that for doing research. Maybe as long as the script sounds good, I'm fine. Or as long as you are clear about your policy, which is odd because he was always clear. He still got attacked and had to go on this defensive. I believe he has like a published policy around how him and his employees at his media company can use AI or do use AI or don't in various scenarios. But this was the first time I've seen a real backlash to just pulling that up on ChatGPT.

I totally understand that. I mean, there are people that could just use AI to generate the video and not be involved at all or use it in the script or use an AI voiceover.

It's just funny because I have this reaction all the time. When I realize a video on YouTube is just fully — it's a fully AI-generated script. Somebody's just reading over.

Yeah, or AI voice is reading it.

Yeah. It sort of just depends at the end of the day. It's just like, is the content quality? Is the insight valuable? And what I would go to Hank for would be — he does a bunch of research across a whole bunch of tools. Google, Chat, whatever he uses. Read a book, read papers, watch documentaries, listen to podcasts about a topic and then tell me what Hank thinks is interesting about that. The filtering process and the taste is what's key.

Back in your day growing up, did teachers ever say, 'I really don't want you using Google for the homework.'

No, there was never pushback against — Google didn't exist. There was pushback against Wikipedia. It was like, 'Oh, Wikipedia is unreliable. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, so don't use Wikipedia as a source.' Which really just means —

Well, that was fair. Go to the original.

And it's kind of the same thing with ChatGPT. It's like, don't — go to the source that ChatGPT links you. And if that's a paper and it's academic and it's hosted on the right thing and it has the right provenance, then it's okay to use. I don't know. It'll be interesting to see how this all fares. There's a lot of backlash, but it was sort of like a lot of people in tech, I think, were getting whiplash from watching all of these arguments pile up. Someone put together a cool chart here of the good arguments and the bad arguments from the pro-AI crowd and the anti-AI crowd. So, an example of a good argument around this from the pro-AI crowd would be, 'AI is a powerful and capable tool.' And then a bad argument from the anti-AI crowd would be, 'AI is useless in research slash in general.' But there were bad arguments that were put forth by pro-AI people. Something like, 'You use data centers. Like Hank uses data centers, and it's like yes, YouTube is hosted on a data center,'

so are you to write this comment. Yes, but that's not — the actual data center that's required to host an online comment is wildly different than a massive Gen AI system like cooking tons of tokens and actually setting the GPUs on fire, right? And then a good argument, the best argument from the anti-AI crowd, was said that AI usage in science communication reduces trust, at least a little. Which is interesting. I mean, yeah, you do have to check these things. And we do see tons of examples of people actually leaking AI phrases and weird AI hallucinations into scientific research. There was that example of there was some PDF that was scanned and there was a word in one column and a word in another column that got bled together when the document was imported, and then a whole bunch of scientific research started referencing this phrase that doesn't exist and just came from basically a hallucination or a quirk of the optical character recognition. So anyway, they canceled my goat for using LLM to search papers that he would need to read to make his videos. They want him to use Google Search like a caveman in big 2026. That about says it all.

The crazy thing is, I don't — can you even turn off AI mode in Google now? Maybe.

I think you can. I think you can. You could use DuckDuckGo. I don't think that has AI yet. We'll see. Anyway, Jeremiah Johnson says, 'I'm fascinated by DuckDuck.'

Wait, is it really by DuckDuck?

No. No. No, wait. Are you serious?

Yeah. Go to duck.ai.com or no, just duck.ai.

I like Duck.

That's a good name. DuckAI. There you go.

Using GPT-5.4 Nano. There we go. Okay. Unavoidable.

Wow.

The market has spoken, I suppose. Yeah. What do people do? I imagine you can turn off AI mode somewhere in the settings, or at least you could get some sort of Chrome plugin that deletes that, like an ad blocker, if you really, really cared. But it seems like a lot of work at this point. Anyway, this was interesting. Ryan Low on X is sharing a heartbreaking essay by a mathematician last week, before this most recent news drop. So this was before Noam Brown showed the recent breakthroughs by Astra, said, 'There is nothing I can do. There may be nothing you can do. I have no prescriptions, policy recommendations, or coherent call to action. I just want to be honest and open about my emotional and spiritual response. I want to feel seen. I want folks like me to feel seen. I need the architects of our new mathematical paradigm to look me in the eyes and acknowledge our shared humanity and soul before they deliver the coup de grace. I need most of all for us to understand what we are really doing.'

The Dark Knight of mathematics. Kerwin Hampshire, mathematician and researcher from the University of Auckland who recently authored the viral essay, 'Studied Mathematics.'

Interesting. It feels like I would be surprised if mathematical education goes away. It feels like a lot of these problems should be interesting to apply. But I understand that that's a completely different discipline. It will be interesting to see what happens next because there are more advanced problems — the Millennium Prize problems, P versus NP, Navier-Stokes — there are a number of problems that are still unsolved. What happens when they're all solved? Do we create new problems? Where do we go from there? Do we start applying them in different ways? What do you think, Tyler?

Got any advice for mathematicians?

21-year-old podcaster has advice for math.

Yeah. I mean, there's plenty of math professors that they sort of try and solve theorems but also mostly teach and, you know, don't solve that many theorems.

Yeah, it will be interesting to see the application of this stuff because it's so abstract at this point. And it feels like everyone's saying like, okay, based on this, like this is going to flood through material science and flood through chemistry and biology, and that would be awesome. Everyone would love, you know, all of a sudden like the electric cars have twice as much range because we solved some fundamental thing. It'll be interesting to see where the new bottlenecks are. There of course will always be — math professors hate AI for one simple trick, just scale, scale, scale, I suppose. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Boom.

What else is going on?

Lots of — yeah. This —

I just like this Gary Marcus. He's really in the arena with this. There's this post —

It's a really good bit.

Which one?

Like, the Gary Marcus bit.

It's not a bit. He really believes it.

No, but I think at some point he flipped into bit mode.

The pure LLM. Yeah. So he will always take issue with the idea of something being a pure LLM. A pure LLM solving something. And who is it? Ham says, 'The LLM used a calculator. Burn the impure, bro. Horses are very useful. This is likely not a pure horse. Pure horses still can't carry an entire family and they don't have wheels.' Oh, the goalposts are on a completely separate planet now.

First they came for the mathematicians, and that sucked because I was a mathematician and really did not expect that, not going to lie. It will be interesting to hear from Terence Tao. He's been talking about how he uses AI and math and has been sort of a white knight every time I've heard him talk. So, will be interesting to see how he reacts to the latest round of advanced mathematics. What is left, John?

It's time to talk about the rise of one-person, $1 million companies. Now in the Wall Street Journal, million-dollar companies with just one employee.

Let me tell everyone about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

Wall Street Journal is saying AI tools make it easier for founders to get started alone, and many stay that way as they grow. Ben Broca launched a company last December that offers AI tools to entrepreneurs.

That name's familiar. We've had him on the show.

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

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

That's pretty crazy. So this is on Pulse, right?

No, no, no, no, no.

Oh, on Stripe?

Definitely not.

Okay. This is just Stripe.

Yeah. The number of solo — I'm sure, I would be curious if Pulse has any companies that do more than $1,000.

I mean, you were looking at those. Because to be honest, I actually do think success for Pulse is like just making back even a dollar more than you're spending on Pulse, right?

Because there's a YouTuber who's been demoing different AI systems, Fable and Soul and Kimmy, and saying like, 'Go make me money' is basically the only prompt. And he lets it cook for like a week. And he'll be on like a $200 a month subscription. See if it can make six cents. See if it can make $10. And he's getting closer every time. And he of course has to do some things, set up API keys and do little things. But it's an interesting experiment. Ben Awad, you should go check it out.

So the number of solo operators, according to Stripe, also crossing the $10 million threshold, nearly tripled in that same span. 'In the past, people without business contacts or particular savvy might not have known how to get their ideas off the ground,' said Ernie Tedeschi, Stripe's chief economist. 'Now, AI can be a built-in business partner.'

Wait, how does Stripe know if you're a solo operator? Like if you're a podcaster and you set up a Stripe account to accept money from advertisers, you could be having a million dollars move through there. But if you hire an editor or not, that doesn't necessarily show up in Stripe. So they must do some sort of polling and ask.

Yeah, I think in your account at some point you say, 'How many employees do you have?'

Okay. Then if you say, 'Yeah, I just got one.'

But I guess one question I have with the data is, what if you just set up your Stripe account and it's like, 'How many employees do you have?' you say one, and then you wind up adding people and you don't go update.

Yeah, possible. Yeah, because they don't have the payroll. I don't know how they would have visibility into payroll, especially individual employees.

Yeah. They do have a sense for how many people obviously are added to your account, but sometimes it's a true account if you add your CPA, and that's a contractor, not an employee. AI's ability to handle various administrative tasks makes it potentially useful for launching solo businesses in many fields. But the technology's ability to handle key tasks in tech like coding makes that field a particular hot spot. Analyzing Census Bureau data, Bank of America's Institute economist Taylor Bowley found that among all industries, new business applications in the information sector have seen the biggest percentage increase, nearly 45%, over the past year. At the same time, the rate of information sector applicants saying they plan to hire workers has experienced the sharpest decline of any measured industry. This Census data set doesn't track solo-operated businesses, but the numbers broadly show in tech and beyond that applications are flat among businesses likely to hire workers but generally rising elsewhere. Economists say that's a strong sign that solo operators are in the upswing.

Tyler update.

On Stripe. Oh, they have like a special flow for solopreneurs. Interesting.

Oh, cool.

Hey, Julian Weiss, I know him. He says, 'The bar for getting started has never been lower,' said Julian Weiss, who runs a San Francisco-based accelerator for solo founders working in tech. The accelerator, which offers founder seed money and mentorship in exchange for an equity stake, attracted 4,500 applicants for 10 slots made available in its most recent cycle, nearly five times the number it drew when it launched last May. Now, he's been growing this a lot, but that is staggering. A lot of people want to be solopreneurs. Going it alone with AI can still be surprisingly expensive. Broca said he was losing money on many customers' accounts while paying to access Anthropic's Claude to run his clients' requests. That AI company as well as others charged based on usage. He has since switched to free open-source models from China. Broca says he has raised $30 million from investors and at the same time has saved millions in salary since he hasn't needed a team of software engineers. Another risk: if it's easy for one entrepreneur to launch an AI-assisted business, copying them can be easy too. This creates anxiety for founders like Troy Johnston, who runs an AI-assisted business alone in Orlando, Florida. 'Everybody has the sword and we all have the ability to unsheath Excalibur.' Now Johnston, what a great quote for the Journal.

I love it.

Oh, he's 40. He used AI to code an app that helps people get the most out of credit card benefits. Huh, that's interesting. Pick which card you want to use because you might have multiple cards. One that's good for dining, and you build an app for that. There's been a few apps that do that. The Points Guy had a whole blog around it, whole media company around it, still does. But interesting to sort of go and actually vibe code that. A lot of the things, it's like you could probably just use the models themselves for this. Just have a thread that says, 'Hey, these are the cards I have. Go pull all of the data when I'm about to buy something. Let me know.' But at the same time, there might be some value for something new with a deeper integration somewhere. The company makes around $3,000 a month in profit with no employees and continuing to grow. What a run for Troy Johnson, who loves King Arthur-related metaphors for business.

What one-person businesses will mean for the labor market remains to be seen. Polling has shown that Americans are worried that AI will replace jobs, and top economists are wrestling with that possibility too. But AI is also creating lots of new jobs, and the lone entrepreneurs show the technology can both open doors and limit employment opportunities. 'If everyone's hiring less but you get four times more firms, what does that do to headcount?' said Rembrand Koning, an associate professor at Harvard Business School who studies entrepreneurship. He co-authored a recent study that found that among 50,000 startups the researchers examined, those focused on AI tended to operate with 25% fewer employees. It's interesting because haven't we seen that, like the Ramp data that said AI-adopting companies were hiring faster but maybe they still operate lower operational headcount but hiring faster because of hiring growth. There's like three different factors that are going on here sort of mixing all together. Koning, the professor, also believes a soft hiring environment that has left some people mired in long job searches has encouraged more to try their hand at launching businesses. That makes sense.

Some founders cite different motives. 'It's a perfect storm of post-pandemic burnout and a re-evaluation of one's priorities and also booming AI and a sense of what's possible,' said Samir Ahmad, 39, who lives in Bryn Mawr, PA. Two years ago, Ahmad decided to leave the corporate job he had worked at at Verizon for almost two decades to start a solo coaching and consulting business. He had been seeing social media posts touting the ease and virtues of AI, which he used to chart a business plan and help with marketing. 'It was like my chief of staff, second in command.' The business ultimately petered out within months, though, and Ahmad is back to a full-time corporate role with a utility company. For Claire Vo, 41, AI helped turn her passing impulse into a business. She was working full-time as a tech executive when she tapped AI in late 2023 to help code an app that would help manage documentation and design for new products, with customers ranging from financial services to healthcare firms. 'I was copying and pasting from ChatGPT,' said Vo, who lives in San Francisco. She put her app online for $1 a month.

I thought we didn't know how to make apps that cheap anymore.

Yeah. I mean, it is a subscription, at least not one-time, but she put it online for a dollar a month and within weeks people downloaded it thousands of times. Nearly three years later, Vo's company, which she ran solo for nine months before hiring an engineer, now has 100,000 users and is on track to make seven figures in profit this year. Wow, that's remarkable. At a dollar a month. That's crazy. AI handles the company's marketing, sales, and customer support. 'While AI is a shortcut,' Vo said, her network and credibility in the industry were key. 'I think people overindex on how easy AI is and underindex on how much I did to get to this point,' she said. She's still

Yeah. I just want to see five companies that make more money from their business than they give Pulse every month.

Yeah. So Pulse has some public dashboards for how much people are spending or something like that.

Yeah, they have a public dashboard. Let's see if I can find that again.

While you're doing that, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And if Jordi's continuing to look, I'll also tell you about Public Investing for those that take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.

Trying to find the dashboard. I was looking at the dashboard that was showing

Okay, I think Tyler found it. Thank you, Tyler.

companies on Pulse have spent $373. Is that today on ads?

Yeah.

Well, it's still morning. It's still morning. So, we're pacing. We're only about — I don't know what time zone this is in. But yeah, the big question is, is any of this stuff actually working or is it more like kind of a video game, effectively?

Yeah.

That people just enjoy like watching the machine hum, but there's not really much happening. I mean, that was the thing for Midjourney and Suno, I think, in many ways. Like Midjourney, when it launched, people —

Totally. I mean —

No, okay, hear me out.

Okay, I'll hear you out.

Okay, when Midjourney launched —

The steel man.

When Midjourney launched, people were like, 'This is going to take artists' jobs,' and it was like, okay, so if that plays out, then I'm going to go to the MoMA and there's going to be a show for someone that just prompted Midjourney, and the highest auction at Christie's is going to be some Midjourney artist. And that's not really what happened. Like people aren't using Midjourney to make fine art. But people love Midjourney. Like they love the activity of going on Midjourney and generating and prompting and getting an image back, and then maybe they send it to their friends. Maybe they use it a little bit, but it's not exactly the same as the process of becoming a fine artist. It's more like they're enjoying the process of just making. It's more like just having a guitar that you just like to practice and noodle on versus actually being a touring artist. And so that's certainly my experience with Suno, is it's fun to try and make a song and then listen to it and then be like wrestling with the thing. And it's possible that that could be the same activity for like, okay, I'm going to go build an online business, see if I can get something out, but it's not really like a job. It's more of like an entertainment product. Yeah, I don't know. What do you think?

Yeah. I mean, you could easily see it turning into like an Ender's Game scenario where it's like a game and then it's like, 'Oh, that was actually a real business you were starting, Ender. You know, you offshored the last job. You sent all the labor overseas. You rolled up the entire HVAC industry. That wasn't a simulation.'

Based on my steel man, do you agree or do you still disagree?

No, I just think that you could use Midjourney to create a beautiful asset that you could get some enjoyment out of, or you could use it for your business or whatever you're doing.

Yeah.

Or to just create AI art. And Suno is just deeply entertaining. You go on there and in five seconds you make a real song that sounds like it was recorded in a real studio.

Yeah. And there might be something to like, okay, it is fun to go and build a SaaS product. Like it is fun to go the pro — like the game. It's a game, right? I don't know, Tyler.

Okay. Maybe, yeah.

Maybe, I don't know, I would just be surprised if the majority of Midjourney users are using the product as an artist career path.

An artist career path. Like they're like, 'Okay, I got my image. Now I need to get it printed. Now I need to go do a small gallery show. Now I need to go talk to an auction house. Now I need to go and pitch it to a bunch of collectors and go through the process of being an artist.' I think a lot of people are just like, 'Cool, I got an image. This was nice. Job's done. Now back to whatever else I was doing.' Or, 'I have some free time. I could go play a video game. I could go listen to music. I could go generate some images and have fun with that and see what those are like and then just enjoy them myself, right?' I don't know. I think there's like a smaller, tighter loop with some of these services that might be, you know, overridden. And I'm wondering if there might be one in the like design a business, like gamification of business world. I don't know. It does seem...

Ben has done a really good job positioning Pulsea and using some different methods to get attention. I have something I feel like I have a little bit against the whole thing because he just spams me with DMs. He doesn't follow me on X, but he spams me with messages asking for different things, which I just think is somewhat entertaining if you're trying to run the anti-AI slop company, right?

He's saying this is not slop. Because there is a world where you're like, it's slop, but it's good slop and it's fine. There are a lot of programmers that say, like, yeah, the answer for slop code is more slop, and it's like, it'll be fine. It's not a problem. You might not like the way the code is written, but it doesn't matter as long as it works. You might not like those artifacts in the AI image, but it's fine because it illustrated the point just like you wanted. Anyway, Tyler, do you have something else?

The output of the model.

You can... it's like verifiable.

No, people say it's good or bad.

You can make it... maybe. Maybe. It did get a lot better. Still once a week, someone prominent hosts fully AI-generated content. Yeah. What was happening with the cash? Like, no, it just happens. It happens once a week. It's just an iron law. Once a week, someone really, really talented and smart posts something that is just entirely AI.

Maybe we got to rip it. We got to try it just to feel something, because maybe it's like a forbidden fruit. Just go and prompt, like, 'Write me a blog post, thought leadership about business.' That's the prompt. Copy paste. Rip it. Maybe it's also a strategy. You have something that's like you really want to get out, but it's a little bit boring. And so you know that if you use AI to write, so much ratio, way more people see it. And as long as the first few sentences kind of deliver the message you want.

Yeah, I think we got to do it. We'll test it on Tyler's account first, though.

Joe's ready. Joe's ready. No, it is very funny that there's this whole meme of like, no one knows what's coming. It's not priced in. It's like all anyone talks about ever. It's on the front page of the Wall Street Journal every day. Lots of people are talking about this. And most people that say nobody's prepared for what's coming will not give you a really concrete... Yeah. What is exactly? Like the last time we had this like nobody's prepared for what's coming moment was... what was the guy who was comparing AI to COVID back in March? Was that Schumer? Matt Schumer. Yeah. So, something big is coming. Yeah. Something big is happening. And it's like, yeah, something big is happening. Like the models are getting better. Like the math is getting solved. But you can still go outside. Like at this point in 2020, unemployment had spiked to 10% and it was very much like you're a bold patriot if you're going outside. Like it was a crazy, crazy time. And now it's like, yeah, there might be some softness in the job market. Like a hedge fund blew up. There's things that are happening, some big things, but...

Mike Isaac says, 'Yeah, these MFs don't know how much I got stockpiled in my basement.' Yeah. And Joe says, 'These MFs don't know that if a man has a why, he'll find his how.' Well said. Well said. Yeah. Buco Capital was having fun with Kevin Roose over at formerly New York Times, now Hard Fork independent. I don't know. Did they take the IP? Are they still using Hard Fork outside of NY? I don't know. But Buku just says, 'Weird comment for a guy writing a book on AGI. He is exactly and literally wrong. Everyone is pricing it in. Why do you think OpenAI and Anthropic are priced at $1 trillion? What nobody is pricing in is that besides coding and math, very few domains have embedded verification.' And so, but Tyler over there thinks that you can formally verify whether or not the Odyssey is a good book in Lean or something.

I think we can formally verify that Tyler's goated, right? A lot of people would say like it's kind of like gray area, right? You can't totally define what it means to be the greatest of all time. Yeah. But you've been working on that quantifying aura. As long as it's fully quantifiable, you'll be able to verify it. Yes.

Andrew Curran says, 'Shorten your timelines, friends. I've started this account to say this and in many ways have posted for the past four years has been saying the same thing. Some of you increasingly feel it. We passed the threshold in November. We are already inside the singularity.' Lots of people are picking up the 'we're no longer in the foothills of the singularity, we're in the singularity now.' Demis on stage at Google IO just a couple weeks ago, couple months ago, saying we're in the foothills. Well, now we're on the mountain. If you followed this account for a long time, Andrew Curran says, 'I apologize for losing my mind a few times using GBC 3.5 and then Bing forced me to update all of this at once in one shot.' And that was the correct time to update, like talking to 3.5 and the first ChatGPT moment being Sydney. That was, if you updated on that, you did very, very well across everything, both with the growth in the labs and the growth in the data center buildout and everything. Like that was the key moment.

I forget what it was called. It was called like the something... but anyways, that in hindsight was like such a big moment. Yeah. But at the time it got like 2,000 likes and people were like, wow, this is really cool.

Yeah. Like, or I mean, a lot of people did, honestly. Like tons of people across venture and private market, public markets.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess it's mind-blowing to me how few people realize their lives and everything they know will change drastically in the near future. At this point it should be pretty clear, says Jerry Turrek. Yeah. Wild times. Elon Musk says 100%. He's completely agreeing. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.

We got to look at this simulator. You're into racing simulators. I got to one-up you with a train simulator. Look at this guy. This guy on Z80 has built a full-scale train simulator controller. 'For three years, I've been building a physical train simulator in my apartment modeled on the UK Class ADX passenger train. I've been trying to replicate the instruments and controls in the real cab as closely as possible.' Look at this.

'In many cases, managing to acquire real components and in others building my own replicas. I've gone down rabbit holes for design from custom CAN bus transceiver board and a variety of daughter boards to tie the simulator together to the actual panels, all of which on the consoles and instruments are mounted. I usually wait until I complete a component or step before I write a blog post. But over the last half year I've instead made forward progress on several disparate aspects of the project. Therefore, this blog post will update as a status update on many of those aspects.' I'm feeling the acceleration. This is such a cool DIY project. Imagine just sitting there driving a train in the train simulator.

In the train. But no, there is a screen and that screen is running a game that simulates a train. The name of that game... Train Simulator. You can get it at train-simulator.com. It's also on Steam. Yes, Train Simulator Classic is I believe the one that he's playing. But yeah, he's playing the full Train Simulator. AWS sunflower, I don't know. Anyway, funny story. Bology is moving to Kazakhstan. This is huge for the Boro community. Not... absolutely huge for the Boro community. He posted a video. This is Kazakhstan. Let's see. This is a beautiful video. I have no doubt it's a beautiful place. It's a little bit crazy because his network school I thought of as sort of a startup incubator, a Y Combinator adjacent entity. He was in Singapore for a while, then Malaysia, and now maybe Kazakhstan. Did he actually move to Kazakhstan or is he just touring and vacationing there? Because what is the actual story?

Excited for Biology, excited for Kazakhstan, excited for Network School. Biology is very smart and very entertaining and I've enjoyed having him on the show. I do think it is very funny to be trying to recreate the incredible techno-optimism that many different subcommunities already have in the United States. Where he, you know, where he effectively had all of his success at Coinbase and Andreessen Horowitz and sure many other businesses. And I think this whole chapter is deeply entertaining to me. The Kazakhstan chapter, it's just, it's such a funny place. King in the castle. I love it. So quick tip for anyone who's planning to do sort of like the bi-coastal thing, San Francisco, Kazakhstan, you're in for like a 30-hour trip because there are no non-stop flights. I think you have to connect in Istanbul, Frankfurt, Seoul, Doha or Dubai. You're looking at 25 to 35 hours depending on the layover. That is really, really far. The Miami thing was a tough pitch because you know so much activity is happening in New York, so much activity is happening in San Francisco. And it was still hard to get people to relocate, like great engineers. They come out with the beauty.

I think he's trying to... I think he's... weed out the weak. I think in some ways he's been so successful that he wants a challenge that to him feels almost impossible, which is to convince the best and brightest from all over the world to move to Kazakhstan. It's... I know so many... I mean some major selection bias here, but I know a bunch of bright people that are not US residents and they would do anything to be able to be in Kazakhstan. Not quite. Maybe now. Maybe now. But they would do anything to be able to have free access to America, to be able to set up shop here, to be able to build their business here. To be able to... to be the king in the castle. To be not even the king but a pauper. Just someone in the castle at all. And so yeah, and I haven't... yeah, just... we got to go. It's very clear, very clear. Got to go or at least send Tyler.

Pack your bags, buddy. See you in 30 hours when you land. Absolutely wild. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Mark Zuckerberg was answering questions about his AI strategy on the latest Meta earnings call. And Ben Thompson wrote about what Meta's position is in AI, how they're grappling with a few things. There was a bunch of interesting points in this strategy update. One I wanted to call out was what Ben Thompson thought the best moment on the call was, when an analyst asked him why the company can't just use other models. Like why can't you just do the Apple thing? Do nothing, win. Like partner with one of the labs, do some license agreement. If you need an image model, you get an image model. If you need a text model, you get a text model. If you need to speed up your programmers or your engineers, hire the best coding agent and negotiate with them, right? And here's how Mark Zuckerberg answered it. He said, I can take the open source question. Let's see. So basically the question is, do we think that because there are some open-weight models that we can just rely on those? I mean, right now the open source models are not as strong as the frontier models. Good point. So no is the basic answer. Meta needs to be on the frontier with their intelligence that they use. So they have to be there according to him. He says, and then there's also just always the perpetual both policy debate and question around other companies' actions and whether that's a thing a company like Meta can rely on. So if you're using Chinese open source, there's some regulatory risk. It seems like that's sort of what he's getting at, is these things might not be available all the time. And then also some of these companies, they might be open source for a few years and then go closed source and then start charging you an arm and a leg. So you don't want to be in a place where you become super dependent and then all of a sudden get hurt once you're super dependent on a particular product. So he says, and I think that's very tricky. So on both fronts, we believe we're going to be able to do better work and we think that there's some risk in that reliance. I don't believe that's the right thing to do. So that felt like not a great answer to me in the sense that the Apple approach seems to be working so well. We'll talk to John Gruber about that in a few minutes. But then he goes on to explain some of the history of Meta and it's very, very interesting. He says, 'I think that we're a company that if you look at Meta from, take a step back on this. A lot of people view the service layer as we build some social media apps and we have an ad business. We are really a full-stack technology company. We build our own data centers, our own infrastructure, our own chips, our own low-level software.' When we got started, he says, 'My background in engineering, I wrote a lot of the systems code. A lot of the reason why Facebook worked was because it actually just worked,' which is a crazy thing to say based on the history, but he makes a really good point. He says like it literally worked when other social networks did not work fast and efficiently. And I think we just have the ability to build things that can be more personalized, more optimized, more efficient. Some qualitative experiences are just not even possible for others to build because we go all the way down the stack. And it just seems to me pretty clear that having kind of sovereignty over building your own models is going to be an important part of that stack going forward, which is why it's important for Meta. And so that was very interesting, that that was a differentiator in the early days, that certain other competitor sites would just be slower. They wouldn't be able to launch new features quickly. And by vertically integrating all up and down the tech stack, they were able to do things very aggressively. This is the Reels thing. They built like two extra data centers to be able to do the Reels algorithm because if they didn't have that compute capacity, they could not have launched a competitor to TikTok on any normal time frame because it was actually a compute-intensive project, not just a design. People see, oh, they just put a new button there and there's some videos, but it's like behind those videos is a massive recommender system that is very computationally intensive and stores a lot of data. And you can't just spin that up for three billion users or however many billions of users they have on a dime if you don't have the infrastructure, if you're not actually vertically integrated. So there's a whole bunch of other things where in terms of personalization, understanding the user, delivering a really first-class experience, they sort of do need to bring it in-house. But investors are very upset about this. They're not very happy because Ben Thompson calls it the financial tail wagging the dog and says that they have to sort of double spend right now. He makes a good point about this. They're double paying, the company right now is basically double paying for infrastructure without a clear path to monetization. And to make matters worse, its improving monetization story lost a bit of its luster. So they're both renting AI compute, paying a bunch of money for new researchers, and then also spending all the capex for the next data center. So all of that needs to come together in this moment to actually deliver. And the investors are starting to ask all these questions about what the strategy is, but Zuck's sticking with it. He's not backing down, but we will see.

It is. It's a big war. Well, he'll get through it though. We'll dig into it more. I still think this Pierre Richelson tweet is so funny. Shower thought: Why is no one doing outbound for pizza? 'Hey, this is Gigi from Gigi's Pizza calling. You ordered last week. We have a pepperoni pizza ready and could deliver it in 10 minutes. You hungry?' Hilarious concept. Would be extremely annoying to have every possible low-tier business that you've bought anything from spamming you. I mean, they basically do this with email awareness, like, 'Hey, there's a Super Bowl coming. Do you want to place an order?'

Do you know what it's called on Wall Street when you have multiple parties negotiating to sell a block of stock or debt or something like that and you want to bring them all in really quickly? Like let's say you're negotiating with Tyler and I have extra information. I might have a buyer and I want to jump in. Do you know what that's called? Barging your line. Say like, 'Oh yeah, I'm going to barge his line.' Jump in there and then we'll be on like a three-way call basically. And you can do that when your phone system's set up with multiple lines. So you could potentially have, okay, you got Domino's on line one and then you got Pizza Hut on line two, and you could be like, okay, I'm just going to put you all in one call. Let's debate. Let's get to the bottom price. Because that's basically what you're doing. You're saying, 'We're just going to hold an auction right here.' Yeah, this might be the solution.

I like this post. Explaining to my ape wife that I have to spend nights and weekends learning the bone so we don't end up in the permanent underclass. Is this from 2001: Space Odyssey? Yeah. It's a good movie. Jordi, have you seen 2001: Space Odyssey? Yes. You have? Yeah. No way. Yeah, I remember that scene. What? How? How did that happen? That's wild. I think I was forced to watch it. Hm.

Oh yes, this old Leopold lore is coming back up. The author of this New York Times article, definitely doesn't realize Leopold was being literal about the stars and galaxies, asked in a 2004 podcast interview with Darkesh Patel what his goals were. He answered, 'Eventually you are going to go to the stars. You are going to go to the galaxies.' He added, 'Done right, there's a lot of money to be made.' That was true for a while at least. While the fund was the center of the hottest trade on the planet, the fund made a return of more than 2,200% after fees as anything tied to AI shot higher. One investor said, 'Yes, there was a funny line where Leopold's talking about buying galaxies.' And some investors like, 'Oh, like the particular brand of private jet that's referred to as a galaxy, like the Galaxy 750 is the one that you'd want.' And Leopold was like, 'No, no, no. I'm going to buy an actual galaxy.' Tay Kim says, 'Who will play Leo and Ken in the movie? We know it's coming. The story is too juicy.' Okay. Will it be like...

We got to play this clip of Ken Griffin because this came up on my For You page and it's a wild story of when Ken Griffin had his darkest moment basically and lost a whopping 4% of the fund. Something like that. Play this clip.

You know, 1994, I was in Switzerland. We'd had a rough year in '94. We lost about 4% of our capital in '94. It was one of our only losing years in the history of the firm. And I'm in Switzerland. I mean, it was a rough day. My lunch, I sat down at lunch. This person sits down. 'Oh, you're not John Griffin.' 'No, I'm Ken Griffin.' He goes, 'Oh, I thought you were John Griffin from Fenchurch, another firm.' He goes, 'I got to go.' Like, great. I flew all the way to Switzerland for my lunch date to get up and leave the table. And then around 3:00 or 4 in the afternoon, I was with another Swiss banker and his office was like almost the square footage of the stage, beautiful furniture. Goes, 'Do you mind if I smoke?' Takes out a big cigar. He's smoking this cigar. And we're talking for about 45 minutes. 'Such a pity that such a bright young man so picked the wrong career.' Like, well, that's the most graceful no I've gotten today. But you just have to tolerate. You're going to hear no a lot, but you need to become accustomed to... Leopold's stat. Yeah. You represent what you stand for. Again, whether it's the people that you want to have work for you or people trying to give you capital or customers, you need to get comfortable with the art of selling.

Ah, great clip. It's so funny that someone was like, 'Ken Griffin, you're just in the wrong job. You should be... Yeah. I don't know. This is not for you.' I wonder what that banker would have preferred Ken Griffin do. Like, did he have a prescription? Was he like, 'You should be a seller, hustler, I don't know, skier or something.' Anyway, fun little trip down memory lane. We have John Gruber from Daring Fireball in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP and Ultra Dome for the second time. Welcome back to the show, John. How are you doing?

Great to see you. Good. How's your summer been? Yeah. Hot. Hot. Has the tech news been overwhelming or underwhelming this summer compared to previous summers?

Yes. I don't think that there was a marketing schedule for when they're going to have a, 'Hey, our AI broke out of a sandbox and attacked a major partner of ours during a testing run.' Well, it just depends if you believe in like the Truman Show thesis. So the simulation theory was like, now have the hedge fund explode. That will be the entertaining thing. Well, the funny thing is there actually were people that were making the allegation that the hack was just marketing.

Sure. Yeah. Or like a parent watching their kid play sports and the kid runs up a bunch of points on the other team and the coach has to talk to the parent and say like, 'Hey, look, your son is very good, but he's got to pass the ball a bit more and it's not really that sportsmanlike to run up the score that crazy. He should focus on teamwork.' Yeah. Yeah.

I heard, while we're on conspiracy theories, I heard a funny one that the person that's the most happy about Situational Awareness blowing up is potentially Apple because they've been under all this pressure from memory. Situational Awareness was of course very long memory. There's a flywheel there where the stock goes up, the memory gets more expensive. Now, I feel like the real take here is that in fact pumping up memory stocks is the best way to lower the price of memory because they will all fund capex and that will ultimately make Apple devices cheaper. But how do you think about the pressure that Apple's been under around component pricing, supply chain pricing getting caught flat-footed versus just reacting to what's happening in the world?

How much do you see the leasing program as a direct response to higher prices? Do you think the leasing program is something that was rolled out because the prices were raised so abruptly, or is this something that they've always been sort of moving towards?