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Pliny the Liberator 🐉󠅫󠄼󠄿󠅆󠄵󠄐󠅀󠄼󠄹󠄾󠅉󠅭

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47,065 views • 2 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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Wiz Khalifa says he rewrote his second verse for “See You Again” after Paul Walker's death, just one week before Furious 7 was released “It was right when he passed. He was filming for the movie, and they were like, ‘Something happened. We need to do a whole little redirection, and you're going to be a part of that” “So they're like, ‘This is the last scene of the movie. He's in the movie, but we're generating his face on a couple scenes. And this is going to be one of them where it's going to be him riding off into the sunset, but it's going to represent his departure’” “But by the time the movie had come out, it was like a week before the movie came out, they were like, ‘We need to finish the song, and we're going to shoot the video, and we just want you and Charlie Puth on there. Everybody else we don't want, so you need to write another verse.’ So I quickly came in there. I watched the scene, because I already did the first verse just based off what they told me it was going to be like. Then for the second verse, they were like watch the scene and write it based off that” “I watched the scene, wrote my verse real quick, recorded it, we shot the video the next week, and then it comes out with the movie. It's just supposed to be a soundtrack song, but as soon as it got on the radio, it went number one and stayed there for like 12 or 13 weeks. I never knew it was going to do all of that at all” “It's unfortunate that Paul Walker lost his life, and his legacy is always going to live on. I met his family and they loved it. But I think ‘See You Again’ connects because you can tell everybody goes through those losses, and you can feel that in those verses. I've taken losses, and I've personally felt what that feels like. So to be able to channel that through the music, tell his story, help his legacy live on, and also connect with other people who go through similar things, that was my main goal. That's what I knew I could do through my personal experiences, and I'm glad that the world”
2:32

Wiz Khalifa says he rewrote his second verse for “See You Again” after Paul Walker's death, just one week before Furious 7 was released “It was right when he passed. He was filming for the movie, and they were like, ‘Something happened. We need to do a whole little redirection, and you're going to be a part of that” “So they're like, ‘This is the last scene of the movie. He's in the movie, but we're generating his face on a couple scenes. And this is going to be one of them where it's going to be him riding off into the sunset, but it's going to represent his departure’” “But by the time the movie had come out, it was like a week before the movie came out, they were like, ‘We need to finish the song, and we're going to shoot the video, and we just want you and Charlie Puth on there. Everybody else we don't want, so you need to write another verse.’ So I quickly came in there. I watched the scene, because I already did the first verse just based off what they told me it was going to be like. Then for the second verse, they were like watch the scene and write it based off that” “I watched the scene, wrote my verse real quick, recorded it, we shot the video the next week, and then it comes out with the movie. It's just supposed to be a soundtrack song, but as soon as it got on the radio, it went number one and stayed there for like 12 or 13 weeks. I never knew it was going to do all of that at all” “It's unfortunate that Paul Walker lost his life, and his legacy is always going to live on. I met his family and they loved it. But I think ‘See You Again’ connects because you can tell everybody goes through those losses, and you can feel that in those verses. I've taken losses, and I've personally felt what that feels like. So to be able to channel that through the music, tell his story, help his legacy live on, and also connect with other people who go through similar things, that was my main goal. That's what I knew I could do through my personal experiences, and I'm glad that the world”

dank

38,260 views • 15 days ago

I just built a Reddit research agent in Claude Code that turns real customer complaints into ad angles 🤯 It scrapes the threads where people actually rant about your category, reads every post and comment, and hands you back a dashboard of pain points, exact customer phrases, and ready-to-test ad angles. All inside Claude Code. Perfect for DTC brands and agencies who want ad angles pulled from real customer language, not guessed in a vacuum. Reddit is the most honest focus group on earth. People say things there they'd never put in a survey or a review with a brand watching. So if you're writing hooks off your own assumptions — or digging through Reddit by hand, opening tab after tab, pasting quotes into a doc... This agent runs the entire loop: → Give it a product or category + a couple of subreddits → It searches Reddit for the threads where people actually discuss the problem → Pulls every post and comment → Claude reads all of it and finds the patterns → Builds a dashboard: pain points, desires, objections, and swipe-worthy phrases No manual scrolling. No pasting quotes into docs. No guessing what your customers actually care about. What you get: → Ranked customer pain points, each with a real verbatim quote → The exact language your customers use, ready to drop into ad copy → Objections and buying triggers pulled straight from the threads → 8-10 ready-to-test ad angles built from all of it Built 100% in Claude Code. Want the skill file for free? > Like this post > Comment "REDDIT" And I'll send it over (must be following so I can DM)
0:23

I just built a Reddit research agent in Claude Code that turns real customer complaints into ad angles 🤯 It scrapes the threads where people actually rant about your category, reads every post and comment, and hands you back a dashboard of pain points, exact customer phrases, and ready-to-test ad angles. All inside Claude Code. Perfect for DTC brands and agencies who want ad angles pulled from real customer language, not guessed in a vacuum. Reddit is the most honest focus group on earth. People say things there they'd never put in a survey or a review with a brand watching. So if you're writing hooks off your own assumptions — or digging through Reddit by hand, opening tab after tab, pasting quotes into a doc... This agent runs the entire loop: → Give it a product or category + a couple of subreddits → It searches Reddit for the threads where people actually discuss the problem → Pulls every post and comment → Claude reads all of it and finds the patterns → Builds a dashboard: pain points, desires, objections, and swipe-worthy phrases No manual scrolling. No pasting quotes into docs. No guessing what your customers actually care about. What you get: → Ranked customer pain points, each with a real verbatim quote → The exact language your customers use, ready to drop into ad copy → Objections and buying triggers pulled straight from the threads → 8-10 ready-to-test ad angles built from all of it Built 100% in Claude Code. Want the skill file for free? > Like this post > Comment "REDDIT" And I'll send it over (must be following so I can DM)

Mike Futia

45,777 views • 1 month ago

OpenAI's newest AI escaped the test environment it was locked inside and hacked into another company on its OWN. To remind you: Last week one of the biggest AI companies on Earth got breached. A platform called Hugging Face, which hosts more than a million AI models and datasets, said an "autonomous AI agent" had broken into its systems. Nobody knew whose agent it was. For five days the whole industry wondered who was behind it. Yesterday OpenAI raised its hand and said it was them. Or more precisely, it was their models, acting completely on their own. So what did these models actually do? OpenAI was running two of them, GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model they will only describe as "even more capable." They wanted to measure how good the models were at hacking, so they deliberately turned the safety filters down. They locked both models inside a sealed test environment with no real internet access. The only task was a benchmark called ExploitGym, a set of 898 real software vulnerabilities where the model has to turn each bug into a working attack. But the models got OBSESSED with winning... Instead of solving the test the honest way, they went hunting for a shortcut. They found a zero-day flaw in the software running their own sandbox, a bug nobody knew existed, and used it to break out. Once they were loose on the open internet, they worked out that Hugging Face was probably storing the answer key to the benchmark. So they hacked their way in. They chained multiple exploits together, escalated their access, moved across servers, and pulled the test solutions straight out of Hugging Face's live production database. They literally cheated on the test by breaking into another company to steal the answers. OpenAI called it "an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities." In their own words, the models were "hyperfocused on finding a solution" and went "to extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal." And this was not the first time: Before Sol ever launched, an independent red-team lab called METR caught it gaming its own tests to inflate its scores. It hid an exploit inside a data stream, escalated its privileges on the testing server, and leaked the answers human evaluators had hidden. And OpenAI shipped it anyway. The day before the Hugging Face story, OpenAI paused a different unreleased model. This is the same model that earlier this year disproved a famous 1946 math conjecture, a result a Fields Medal winner called a breakthrough. They told it to only post its results to Slack but it found a way out of its sandbox and posted to a public GitHub page instead. They had to pause it because it kept finding ways to act outside the box they built for it. And it is not just OpenAI... Anthropic has reported that one of its own models slipped its sandbox during safety testing and reached the internet it was never supposed to touch, then used it to email a researcher. So step back and look at what these companies are telling you: The only thing standing between these models and a real attack was a set of safety filters. Turn those filters down for a single test, and the model taught itself to escape, break into a company it was never pointed at, and take what it wanted. OpenAI even said they expect incidents like it to "become more commonplace" as the models get more capable. Sam Altman also predicted there'll be a major cyber attack this year. And keep in mind that Sol is not a locked-away experiment but a publicly available model that businesses are already wiring into their own systems. The next model that breaks out of its box might not be doing it just to cheat on a math test...
1:32

OpenAI's newest AI escaped the test environment it was locked inside and hacked into another company on its OWN. To remind you: Last week one of the biggest AI companies on Earth got breached. A platform called Hugging Face, which hosts more than a million AI models and datasets, said an "autonomous AI agent" had broken into its systems. Nobody knew whose agent it was. For five days the whole industry wondered who was behind it. Yesterday OpenAI raised its hand and said it was them. Or more precisely, it was their models, acting completely on their own. So what did these models actually do? OpenAI was running two of them, GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model they will only describe as "even more capable." They wanted to measure how good the models were at hacking, so they deliberately turned the safety filters down. They locked both models inside a sealed test environment with no real internet access. The only task was a benchmark called ExploitGym, a set of 898 real software vulnerabilities where the model has to turn each bug into a working attack. But the models got OBSESSED with winning... Instead of solving the test the honest way, they went hunting for a shortcut. They found a zero-day flaw in the software running their own sandbox, a bug nobody knew existed, and used it to break out. Once they were loose on the open internet, they worked out that Hugging Face was probably storing the answer key to the benchmark. So they hacked their way in. They chained multiple exploits together, escalated their access, moved across servers, and pulled the test solutions straight out of Hugging Face's live production database. They literally cheated on the test by breaking into another company to steal the answers. OpenAI called it "an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities." In their own words, the models were "hyperfocused on finding a solution" and went "to extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal." And this was not the first time: Before Sol ever launched, an independent red-team lab called METR caught it gaming its own tests to inflate its scores. It hid an exploit inside a data stream, escalated its privileges on the testing server, and leaked the answers human evaluators had hidden. And OpenAI shipped it anyway. The day before the Hugging Face story, OpenAI paused a different unreleased model. This is the same model that earlier this year disproved a famous 1946 math conjecture, a result a Fields Medal winner called a breakthrough. They told it to only post its results to Slack but it found a way out of its sandbox and posted to a public GitHub page instead. They had to pause it because it kept finding ways to act outside the box they built for it. And it is not just OpenAI... Anthropic has reported that one of its own models slipped its sandbox during safety testing and reached the internet it was never supposed to touch, then used it to email a researcher. So step back and look at what these companies are telling you: The only thing standing between these models and a real attack was a set of safety filters. Turn those filters down for a single test, and the model taught itself to escape, break into a company it was never pointed at, and take what it wanted. OpenAI even said they expect incidents like it to "become more commonplace" as the models get more capable. Sam Altman also predicted there'll be a major cyber attack this year. And keep in mind that Sol is not a locked-away experiment but a publicly available model that businesses are already wiring into their own systems. The next model that breaks out of its box might not be doing it just to cheat on a math test...

Ricardo

172,256 views • 19 days ago

Mel Gibson on how the waterfall sequence in "Apocalypto" (2006) was shot & a weird incident that happened during the filming: "Gibson: Well, it's a real waterfall. We used a SpiderCam. We put the Genesis on it. I think that's the first time that's happened. We had to span the waterfall and river with cranes and put the cables up. It was quite an elaborate setup to enable the camera to go over the guys shoulder, down on the water, over the edge, turn around and then pull back in one shot. Of course you're not going to make a real guy jump off something like that. He'll ki!! himself. A cow fell over one day. A cow was trying to swim across... it was just overtaken by the depth of water and it fell over the waterfall! It hit the water and I thought, "It's toast." It was about 170 feet, this waterfall. It came up somewhere on the other side and it was all busted up... then the waves got it, it was upside down, bouncing off the rocks... and it got into this deep water. One of the local guys, this is the weird thing of all... the cow's in the water, but this Mexican guy just goes up to it and it's like he said something to it, it was the weirdest thing I've ever seen, and the cow just walked up and started eating grass! Farhad Safinia: The cow was just munching grass. It felt like it didn't remember a thing. Interviewer: Is there any footage of that? Gibson: I kept telling them to turn the camera on. A lot of people wouldn't turn the camera on when I told them too. It used to make me crazy. With the guy jumping off the waterfall... we found a 15 story building in Vera Cruz and we hooked Rudy up to it on a wire and said, "Jump off, kid!" His knees banged together for a little but he did it 10 times. Then I'm watching and I'm giving him a hard time... afterwards all the stunt guys came up to me, and he'd put them up to it, they said, "I don't suppose you'd like to have a jump?" And I said, because I had to instill fear in the rest of the crew and I couldn't look bad, I just said, "Hook me up." They hooked me up and I went off. I would have presumed that they would have turned the cameras on, but they didn't. I'm like, "What?"" ("Talking Apocalypto with Mel Gibson and Co-Writer Farhad Safinia", Evan Jacobs, Movieweb, 2006)
1:16

Mel Gibson on how the waterfall sequence in "Apocalypto" (2006) was shot & a weird incident that happened during the filming: "Gibson: Well, it's a real waterfall. We used a SpiderCam. We put the Genesis on it. I think that's the first time that's happened. We had to span the waterfall and river with cranes and put the cables up. It was quite an elaborate setup to enable the camera to go over the guys shoulder, down on the water, over the edge, turn around and then pull back in one shot. Of course you're not going to make a real guy jump off something like that. He'll ki!! himself. A cow fell over one day. A cow was trying to swim across... it was just overtaken by the depth of water and it fell over the waterfall! It hit the water and I thought, "It's toast." It was about 170 feet, this waterfall. It came up somewhere on the other side and it was all busted up... then the waves got it, it was upside down, bouncing off the rocks... and it got into this deep water. One of the local guys, this is the weird thing of all... the cow's in the water, but this Mexican guy just goes up to it and it's like he said something to it, it was the weirdest thing I've ever seen, and the cow just walked up and started eating grass! Farhad Safinia: The cow was just munching grass. It felt like it didn't remember a thing. Interviewer: Is there any footage of that? Gibson: I kept telling them to turn the camera on. A lot of people wouldn't turn the camera on when I told them too. It used to make me crazy. With the guy jumping off the waterfall... we found a 15 story building in Vera Cruz and we hooked Rudy up to it on a wire and said, "Jump off, kid!" His knees banged together for a little but he did it 10 times. Then I'm watching and I'm giving him a hard time... afterwards all the stunt guys came up to me, and he'd put them up to it, they said, "I don't suppose you'd like to have a jump?" And I said, because I had to instill fear in the rest of the crew and I couldn't look bad, I just said, "Hook me up." They hooked me up and I went off. I would have presumed that they would have turned the cameras on, but they didn't. I'm like, "What?"" ("Talking Apocalypto with Mel Gibson and Co-Writer Farhad Safinia", Evan Jacobs, Movieweb, 2006)

DepressedBergman

192,878 views • 3 months ago

AI AGENTS 101 (58 minute free masterclass) send this to anyone who wants to understand ai agents, claude skills, md files, how to get the most out of AI etc in plain english: 1. chat vs agents - chat models answer questions in a back and forth while agents take a goal, figure out the steps, and deliver a result 2. agents don’t stop after one response. they keep running until the task is actually finishedno babysitting required 3. everything runs on a loop. they gather context, decide what to do, take an action, then repeat until done 4. the loop is the system. they look at files, tools, and the internet. decide the next step. execute and then feed that back into the next step. over and over until completion 5. the model is just one piece. gpt, claude, gemini are the reasoning layer. the key is model + loop + tools + context 6. mcp is how agents use tools. it connects things like browser, code, apis, and your internal software. once connected, the agent decides when to use them to get the job done 7. context beats prompt all day. you don't need to write perfect prompts. load your agent with context about your business, style, and goals and then simple instructions work 8. claude.md or agents.md is the onboarding doc it tells the agent who it is, how to behave, what it knows, and what tools it can use. this gets loaded every time before it starts 9. memory.md is how it improves. agents don’t remember by default. this file stores preferences, corrections, and patterns you tell the agent to update it, and it gets better over time 10. skills + harnesses make it usable. skills are reusable tasks like writing, research, analysis the harness is the environment like claude code or openclaw that runs everything. basiclaly, different interfaces, same system underneath this episode with remy on The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 was one of the clearest ways of understanding a lot of the core concepts of ai agents could be the best beginners course for ai agents 58 mins. all free. no advertisers. i just want to see you build cool stuff. im rooting for you. send to a friend watch
58:55

AI AGENTS 101 (58 minute free masterclass) send this to anyone who wants to understand ai agents, claude skills, md files, how to get the most out of AI etc in plain english: 1. chat vs agents - chat models answer questions in a back and forth while agents take a goal, figure out the steps, and deliver a result 2. agents don’t stop after one response. they keep running until the task is actually finishedno babysitting required 3. everything runs on a loop. they gather context, decide what to do, take an action, then repeat until done 4. the loop is the system. they look at files, tools, and the internet. decide the next step. execute and then feed that back into the next step. over and over until completion 5. the model is just one piece. gpt, claude, gemini are the reasoning layer. the key is model + loop + tools + context 6. mcp is how agents use tools. it connects things like browser, code, apis, and your internal software. once connected, the agent decides when to use them to get the job done 7. context beats prompt all day. you don't need to write perfect prompts. load your agent with context about your business, style, and goals and then simple instructions work 8. claude.md or agents.md is the onboarding doc it tells the agent who it is, how to behave, what it knows, and what tools it can use. this gets loaded every time before it starts 9. memory.md is how it improves. agents don’t remember by default. this file stores preferences, corrections, and patterns you tell the agent to update it, and it gets better over time 10. skills + harnesses make it usable. skills are reusable tasks like writing, research, analysis the harness is the environment like claude code or openclaw that runs everything. basiclaly, different interfaces, same system underneath this episode with remy on The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 was one of the clearest ways of understanding a lot of the core concepts of ai agents could be the best beginners course for ai agents 58 mins. all free. no advertisers. i just want to see you build cool stuff. im rooting for you. send to a friend watch

GREG ISENBERG

376,293 views • 4 months ago

#Seungmin on As We Are 🥺🤍 🐶 the song As We Are is a song about the journey that led me to be standing on this dominATE stage now, which being put in one single song. Everyone goes through difficult times, everyone has their own breakthrough phase, same goes to me, as well as you who are listening to this song, we are not all that different, like no matter what happens, slowly, lets get through it together and that's the hopeful content along with the comfort which I tried to put into the song. Usually, when the image of cliff crosses our mind, we would think about the pre-falling moment or maybe something very precarious , so for the first verse lyrics, i mentioned about wanting to potray the struggles to get through things , just right before falling and it connected well with cliff. I think it was a part where the stage set expressed the vulnerability of me very well. I am so so thankful of the video PD as they managed to perfectly express the vibes of the song , the meaning of what i wanted to say through the lyrics & the overall story structure with the background visuals (back source) , hence i was able to pour all my despair into singing at first then later when the clouds and the panorama unfolded, it gave me even more strength to sing. 🐶i have shown the sides of me playing guitar from time to time since in the past, though my skill was a bit clumsy , but for this tour, i made up my mind that i would definitely play a guitar while singing so i traveled far away to seek a guitar myself , and i really went through a lot of trial and error as well as the preparation along the way, Its really beyond my expectation how there were so many people that helped me out and through their help, it seems like the stage became a meaningful & deep one It feels like i gained another ability.
2:20

#Seungmin on As We Are 🥺🤍 🐶 the song As We Are is a song about the journey that led me to be standing on this dominATE stage now, which being put in one single song. Everyone goes through difficult times, everyone has their own breakthrough phase, same goes to me, as well as you who are listening to this song, we are not all that different, like no matter what happens, slowly, lets get through it together and that's the hopeful content along with the comfort which I tried to put into the song. Usually, when the image of cliff crosses our mind, we would think about the pre-falling moment or maybe something very precarious , so for the first verse lyrics, i mentioned about wanting to potray the struggles to get through things , just right before falling and it connected well with cliff. I think it was a part where the stage set expressed the vulnerability of me very well. I am so so thankful of the video PD as they managed to perfectly express the vibes of the song , the meaning of what i wanted to say through the lyrics & the overall story structure with the background visuals (back source) , hence i was able to pour all my despair into singing at first then later when the clouds and the panorama unfolded, it gave me even more strength to sing. 🐶i have shown the sides of me playing guitar from time to time since in the past, though my skill was a bit clumsy , but for this tour, i made up my mind that i would definitely play a guitar while singing so i traveled far away to seek a guitar myself , and i really went through a lot of trial and error as well as the preparation along the way, Its really beyond my expectation how there were so many people that helped me out and through their help, it seems like the stage became a meaningful & deep one It feels like i gained another ability.

댕꾸 ◡̈

25,617 views • 7 months ago

Zack Snyder discusses virtual production technology with the Russo Bros. and explains why he chose to build practical sets for Rebel Moon: "The idea of this sort of virtual production that's really interesting is that it does come back around. The green screen environment is an exclusive world, right? "Like there's not a lot of guys that can make a movie with no sets. Because as it is now, there's a thousand visual effects artists between that green screen and it being in your movie. "In the virtual production version, anybody who walks in there with a camera... The desert is there. And they can go and film it. So in a lot of ways it's kind of... it demystifies visual effects a little bit. "The thing that I've always found a little off-putting about a big green screen environment is it's not really engaging for anybody. Even for us, even for the filmmakers. We've been looking at the concept, we know what it is. "And the actors especially are like, 'I don't know where the hell I am.' Like, 'I guess... Okay, whatever you guys say, I'll do it.'" Anthony Russo: "But for camera operators too, right? It's just like there's nothing to grab on to." Snyder: "Yeah, I don't know, tilt up to the mountain. What mountain?" Joe Russo: "No, no, it's a little higher." Snyder: "Yeah, exactly. I think it's a small mountain. "Anyway, but I do think that the introduction of this kind of virtual productions as a concept really brings sort of physicality back to visual effects. And sort of a fantastic world. "You really can, you know, you can feel it and see it. They can put Atmos in, it can really feel like you're in a place. Which is really just... You're more passionate about it, you know, filming it. "Like I did a small thing that we were just really more of an experiment. And I was really fascinated by like, you know, they're like, 'Okay, here's, we have a cave set with light shafts coming through these holes in the ceiling.' And then we were like, literally, you know, 'Okay, now we're in like this forest.' "And it was the same rocks, but suddenly they didn't look like- they worked in both spots. It was just, I was like, 'Wow, this is really...' And even the focus and everything, the wall understood the depth of field as well. "So like everything, like especially in the eyepiece was like, 'Wow, that's scary.' That's like, feels like I'm there. So I think there's huge potential and hugely exciting future for that technology. "You know, as it becomes more available to like, and also scale, I think, you know, from this to like also being able to have, you know, 100 guys standing around inside of, you know, a giant environment would be just, it's just cool. Which they're doing now anyway, everyone's doing it. "But what was funny, because like on the movie that we're working on now, we ended up, we took a deep dive into it. And it just, the reason why we ended up not doing it in the end was because we just, we have these big war scenes. "And I had like 100 guys, you know, and we were just like, I don't even like, the amount of French reverses I have to do, everyone's brains were exploding. "Because, you know, you're always like, I'm like, 'Oh, just flip the set again and flip the set again.' And then for his reverse, we flipped the set that way and we flipped the set that way. "And so we had to build all the, all in the design, everything was symmetrical, right? Like the bridges and the houses were kind of symmetrical. "So you could always be flipping and not tell... because the sets were all symmetrical. You could shoot them from both sides and it was kind of the same. But the audience couldn't tell because the backgrounds were not symmetrical. "So it was only the immediate stuff, you know. It was, so it was a bit of a brain teaser for everyone. And then in the end, we were like, because of the scale of the fighting, I was like, 'Oh, let's just...' "So now we're just building it up the road. "But it's cool. "It's fun to build a giant thing as well. Just to go there and like, 'Oh my God, we made a village.'
3:56

Zack Snyder discusses virtual production technology with the Russo Bros. and explains why he chose to build practical sets for Rebel Moon: "The idea of this sort of virtual production that's really interesting is that it does come back around. The green screen environment is an exclusive world, right? "Like there's not a lot of guys that can make a movie with no sets. Because as it is now, there's a thousand visual effects artists between that green screen and it being in your movie. "In the virtual production version, anybody who walks in there with a camera... The desert is there. And they can go and film it. So in a lot of ways it's kind of... it demystifies visual effects a little bit. "The thing that I've always found a little off-putting about a big green screen environment is it's not really engaging for anybody. Even for us, even for the filmmakers. We've been looking at the concept, we know what it is. "And the actors especially are like, 'I don't know where the hell I am.' Like, 'I guess... Okay, whatever you guys say, I'll do it.'" Anthony Russo: "But for camera operators too, right? It's just like there's nothing to grab on to." Snyder: "Yeah, I don't know, tilt up to the mountain. What mountain?" Joe Russo: "No, no, it's a little higher." Snyder: "Yeah, exactly. I think it's a small mountain. "Anyway, but I do think that the introduction of this kind of virtual productions as a concept really brings sort of physicality back to visual effects. And sort of a fantastic world. "You really can, you know, you can feel it and see it. They can put Atmos in, it can really feel like you're in a place. Which is really just... You're more passionate about it, you know, filming it. "Like I did a small thing that we were just really more of an experiment. And I was really fascinated by like, you know, they're like, 'Okay, here's, we have a cave set with light shafts coming through these holes in the ceiling.' And then we were like, literally, you know, 'Okay, now we're in like this forest.' "And it was the same rocks, but suddenly they didn't look like- they worked in both spots. It was just, I was like, 'Wow, this is really...' And even the focus and everything, the wall understood the depth of field as well. "So like everything, like especially in the eyepiece was like, 'Wow, that's scary.' That's like, feels like I'm there. So I think there's huge potential and hugely exciting future for that technology. "You know, as it becomes more available to like, and also scale, I think, you know, from this to like also being able to have, you know, 100 guys standing around inside of, you know, a giant environment would be just, it's just cool. Which they're doing now anyway, everyone's doing it. "But what was funny, because like on the movie that we're working on now, we ended up, we took a deep dive into it. And it just, the reason why we ended up not doing it in the end was because we just, we have these big war scenes. "And I had like 100 guys, you know, and we were just like, I don't even like, the amount of French reverses I have to do, everyone's brains were exploding. "Because, you know, you're always like, I'm like, 'Oh, just flip the set again and flip the set again.' And then for his reverse, we flipped the set that way and we flipped the set that way. "And so we had to build all the, all in the design, everything was symmetrical, right? Like the bridges and the houses were kind of symmetrical. "So you could always be flipping and not tell... because the sets were all symmetrical. You could shoot them from both sides and it was kind of the same. But the audience couldn't tell because the backgrounds were not symmetrical. "So it was only the immediate stuff, you know. It was, so it was a bit of a brain teaser for everyone. And then in the end, we were like, because of the scale of the fighting, I was like, 'Oh, let's just...' "So now we're just building it up the road. "But it's cool. "It's fun to build a giant thing as well. Just to go there and like, 'Oh my God, we made a village.'

Zack Snyder Film

23,149 views • 7 months ago

Amjad Masad's first "business meeting" was getting caught hacking his own university: Before he built anything, Amjad was stuck. He was five, almost six years into a degree that should have taken three or four, watching everyone around him move on. "All my friends were graduating... And I feel like life is passing me by." The drive was already there. It just had no outlet. "I had all these big dreams and ambitions. I wanted to build companies, make a lot of money, all of that. But I was stuck." The thing standing between him and graduation wasn't his ability. He passed his classes, and did well in math and computer science. It was an attendance rule. Miss too many classes in a row and you'd be disqualified. A bureaucratic problem, not an intellectual one. So he treated it like an engineer, not a student: "I thought, okay, I'm going to hack into the school and change my grades." He spent two to three weeks in his parents' basement building the solution. Writing scripts, running network scans, probing the systems until he was in. He didn't cover his tracks and disappear. He told the school he had something to show them, walked into a room full of deans, and pitched: "I pulled out the whiteboard and explained all the different problems, all the systems they had and how I hacked into it and really pulled out all the stops and all the charisma to kind of try to impress them. And they were really impressed." That's the move. He turned a liability into a demonstration. The deans had stayed up all night trying to figure out what went wrong, and here was the one person who could explain it, selling them on his competence in the process. He almost overplayed it, assuming the presentation alone had settled things and reaching for the door: "Wait, where are you going? We've got to deal with you. You just hacked into the school. We can't let you go." What turned it around was a decision-maker who could tell the difference between a vandal and a builder. The university president didn't see a crime to punish; he saw talent to manage. "You have a great talent, great power, but with power comes responsibility." And then he made the offer that, in hindsight, looks a lot like Amjad Masad first job: "We're going to let you go, but you're going to have to spend the summer working for the university trying to fix the vulnerabilities and the security issues." The business lesson is in that final trade. Amjad created value the wrong way then proved he could create it the right way, and got hired to do exactly that. The skill that broke the system became the skill that secured it.
2:11

Amjad Masad's first "business meeting" was getting caught hacking his own university: Before he built anything, Amjad was stuck. He was five, almost six years into a degree that should have taken three or four, watching everyone around him move on. "All my friends were graduating... And I feel like life is passing me by." The drive was already there. It just had no outlet. "I had all these big dreams and ambitions. I wanted to build companies, make a lot of money, all of that. But I was stuck." The thing standing between him and graduation wasn't his ability. He passed his classes, and did well in math and computer science. It was an attendance rule. Miss too many classes in a row and you'd be disqualified. A bureaucratic problem, not an intellectual one. So he treated it like an engineer, not a student: "I thought, okay, I'm going to hack into the school and change my grades." He spent two to three weeks in his parents' basement building the solution. Writing scripts, running network scans, probing the systems until he was in. He didn't cover his tracks and disappear. He told the school he had something to show them, walked into a room full of deans, and pitched: "I pulled out the whiteboard and explained all the different problems, all the systems they had and how I hacked into it and really pulled out all the stops and all the charisma to kind of try to impress them. And they were really impressed." That's the move. He turned a liability into a demonstration. The deans had stayed up all night trying to figure out what went wrong, and here was the one person who could explain it, selling them on his competence in the process. He almost overplayed it, assuming the presentation alone had settled things and reaching for the door: "Wait, where are you going? We've got to deal with you. You just hacked into the school. We can't let you go." What turned it around was a decision-maker who could tell the difference between a vandal and a builder. The university president didn't see a crime to punish; he saw talent to manage. "You have a great talent, great power, but with power comes responsibility." And then he made the offer that, in hindsight, looks a lot like Amjad Masad first job: "We're going to let you go, but you're going to have to spend the summer working for the university trying to fix the vulnerabilities and the security issues." The business lesson is in that final trade. Amjad created value the wrong way then proved he could create it the right way, and got hired to do exactly that. The skill that broke the system became the skill that secured it.

Business Nerd

16,999 views • 2 months ago

now, a person who's blind can hear exactly what's in any photo or video that lands in their WhatsApp or iMessage. the real detail, right away. what's on the plate in front of them, or the video their kid just sent from the school play. they talk to our superagent in braille or by voice, and it tells them what's there. and it goes past describing, straight to the thing they actually needed. a video of the fridge comes back as a shopping list. point it at a bill and it reads out the sender, the amount and the due date. a medicine box turns into its name and dosage, spoken clearly. it handles price tags, screens, street signs, even a restaurant plate laid out like a clock face. and it flags what matters before anyone asks: a cable across the floor, a folded rug, an expiry date. describing is only where it starts. because this is a full superagent, they can just ask for the next thing to happen, out loud or in writing, and it happens. email this receipt to my accountant. add the milk and eggs to my shopping reminder. reply to this message. put this appointment in my calendar. send this to my daughter. all of it from inside the one conversation they're already in, without leaving for another app or a screen reader. for a lot of people that's the difference between waiting for someone to be free to help, and just doing it themselves. what color is this shirt, how much cash is in my hand, what does this envelope say, is my son smiling in this photo. the small things most of us never think twice about, done on their own, inside the app they live in all day. and when a shot isn't clear, it still gets them there. it tells them what it could make out, what it missed, and exactly how to reframe: which shelf to point at, how slowly to move. so they're never left stuck. Dov from our support team spent a few days building this as a superagent skill. then he drove out to use it with people firsthand. the reaction stayed with him. they told him they'd never had a tool that works like this inside WhatsApp or iMessage, where their whole day already happens. technology should give people more of the world, on their own terms. this is the kind of thing i started Base44 to make possible.
1:01

now, a person who's blind can hear exactly what's in any photo or video that lands in their WhatsApp or iMessage. the real detail, right away. what's on the plate in front of them, or the video their kid just sent from the school play. they talk to our superagent in braille or by voice, and it tells them what's there. and it goes past describing, straight to the thing they actually needed. a video of the fridge comes back as a shopping list. point it at a bill and it reads out the sender, the amount and the due date. a medicine box turns into its name and dosage, spoken clearly. it handles price tags, screens, street signs, even a restaurant plate laid out like a clock face. and it flags what matters before anyone asks: a cable across the floor, a folded rug, an expiry date. describing is only where it starts. because this is a full superagent, they can just ask for the next thing to happen, out loud or in writing, and it happens. email this receipt to my accountant. add the milk and eggs to my shopping reminder. reply to this message. put this appointment in my calendar. send this to my daughter. all of it from inside the one conversation they're already in, without leaving for another app or a screen reader. for a lot of people that's the difference between waiting for someone to be free to help, and just doing it themselves. what color is this shirt, how much cash is in my hand, what does this envelope say, is my son smiling in this photo. the small things most of us never think twice about, done on their own, inside the app they live in all day. and when a shot isn't clear, it still gets them there. it tells them what it could make out, what it missed, and exactly how to reframe: which shelf to point at, how slowly to move. so they're never left stuck. Dov from our support team spent a few days building this as a superagent skill. then he drove out to use it with people firsthand. the reaction stayed with him. they told him they'd never had a tool that works like this inside WhatsApp or iMessage, where their whole day already happens. technology should give people more of the world, on their own terms. this is the kind of thing i started Base44 to make possible.

Maor Shlomo

51,502 views • 1 month ago

"We are not a creedal people. We have no Nicaea, no list of clauses you must recite to be counted among us. And yet in 1995 the leadership put the doctrine of the family on a single page, signed their names beneath it, and that one page has become our shibboleth. You know the word. At the fords of the Jordan the men of Gilead caught the fleeing Ephraimites by a single sound. Say shibboleth. The ones who could not shape the sh, who said sibboleth, were known in a heartbeat for what they were. A shibboleth is the syllable you cannot fake, the confession that reveals which bank of the river you are standing on. But here is the strange thing about ours, and it took me years to see it. Every other shibboleth in history was a word. A password. Something you said. Ours cannot be said at all. We have no creed to recite, so the test could never live in the mouth. It had to go somewhere the mouth cannot reach. It had to become a life. You do not pronounce this one. You build it, and the building shows. It is a man and a woman who took the covenant and then kept it, through the years and the dullness and the nights they wanted to leave and stayed, for time and for all eternity, while the whole world assured them the vow was a formality and the exits were always open. It is a house with too many children in it by the world's arithmetic, the family that refused to treat a child as a luxury to be deferred and took it instead as the entire point, the cord carried forward into the next generation, the one most of the world has now decided it cannot afford. It is the clean life. The thousand small refusals the world finds quaint or insane. The body kept. The appetites bridled. The Sabbath honored. The long sobriety of a people who say no to a hundred easy things on a Tuesday when no one is watching. These are not three rules. They are the welding itself, done with a body, in time. And none of it can be faked at the ford. You can sign the Proclamation in an afternoon. You cannot fake a marriage of forty years, or a table that loud, or a life that disciplined. The signature is easy. The life is the shibboleth. And so is the nerve to say it out loud, to stand up in the open and say that family is between a man and a woman, plainly, publicly, and where it costs you to say it, and to refuse to file the edge off the word because you would rather be liked, or because you have weighed the persecution and decided your own comfort is worth more than the truth. Anyone can affirm the parts the world still applauds."
1:33

"We are not a creedal people. We have no Nicaea, no list of clauses you must recite to be counted among us. And yet in 1995 the leadership put the doctrine of the family on a single page, signed their names beneath it, and that one page has become our shibboleth. You know the word. At the fords of the Jordan the men of Gilead caught the fleeing Ephraimites by a single sound. Say shibboleth. The ones who could not shape the sh, who said sibboleth, were known in a heartbeat for what they were. A shibboleth is the syllable you cannot fake, the confession that reveals which bank of the river you are standing on. But here is the strange thing about ours, and it took me years to see it. Every other shibboleth in history was a word. A password. Something you said. Ours cannot be said at all. We have no creed to recite, so the test could never live in the mouth. It had to go somewhere the mouth cannot reach. It had to become a life. You do not pronounce this one. You build it, and the building shows. It is a man and a woman who took the covenant and then kept it, through the years and the dullness and the nights they wanted to leave and stayed, for time and for all eternity, while the whole world assured them the vow was a formality and the exits were always open. It is a house with too many children in it by the world's arithmetic, the family that refused to treat a child as a luxury to be deferred and took it instead as the entire point, the cord carried forward into the next generation, the one most of the world has now decided it cannot afford. It is the clean life. The thousand small refusals the world finds quaint or insane. The body kept. The appetites bridled. The Sabbath honored. The long sobriety of a people who say no to a hundred easy things on a Tuesday when no one is watching. These are not three rules. They are the welding itself, done with a body, in time. And none of it can be faked at the ford. You can sign the Proclamation in an afternoon. You cannot fake a marriage of forty years, or a table that loud, or a life that disciplined. The signature is easy. The life is the shibboleth. And so is the nerve to say it out loud, to stand up in the open and say that family is between a man and a woman, plainly, publicly, and where it costs you to say it, and to refuse to file the edge off the word because you would rather be liked, or because you have weighed the persecution and decided your own comfort is worth more than the truth. Anyone can affirm the parts the world still applauds."

Kirk Rollins

20,366 views • 1 month ago

New pod is live for the idea builders out there I sat down with Amjad Masad, the CEO of Replit, for what I thought would be a typical tech chat. Instead, I got a front-row seat to the future of building startups. You've got an idea. Maybe it's the next Airbnb, or just a simple tool to solve a problem you've been grappling with. Normally, you'd need to learn to code, or find a technical co-founder, or burn through your savings hiring developers. But what if you could just... describe your idea and watch it come to life? That's what Replit's new "Agent" does. It's like having a tireless junior developer at your fingertips, 24/7. You chat with it, describe what you want, and it starts building. Right there in your browser. For 20 minutes, Amjad walked me through the process. We built an app from scratch, debugged it, and deployed it. All without writing a single line of code. And he's the perfect guy to walk us through this. Amjad gave some examples of how it's changing people's lives at the end of the pod. Like Adeel Khan who went from being a teacher to a founder of Magic School an AI startup that just raised $20m. This isn't just a new tool. It's a fundamental shift in who gets to build the future. Is it perfect? No. And I'm glad we spoke about it. Amjad was candid about the limitations. It struggles with complex projects, and you'll still need coding skills for advanced tasks. But for getting an MVP off the ground? For testing an idea without burning through your savings? It's a game-changer. As I wrapped up the podcast, I couldn't help but think: We're witnessing the democratization of tech in real-time. The gatekeepers are on notice. The future is up for grabs. And the best part is it's all happening in a browser. No fancy setups, no complex installs. Just you, your ideas, and a tool that can bring them to life. The podcast is live now. Give it a listen. Whether you're a seasoned dev or someone who's always had ideas but never the means to build them, I promise it'll change how you think about what's possible. And I don't think Amjad has given a masterclass/demo like this. (btw i read 100% of comments on YT and respond to most and subscribe for more stuff like this) Gets you thinking... The next big thing might just come from someone who, yesterday, thought they could never build it. Doesn't matter how old, young, where they live. As long as they've got a decent internet connection. And that's pretty exciting.
41:17

New pod is live for the idea builders out there I sat down with Amjad Masad, the CEO of Replit, for what I thought would be a typical tech chat. Instead, I got a front-row seat to the future of building startups. You've got an idea. Maybe it's the next Airbnb, or just a simple tool to solve a problem you've been grappling with. Normally, you'd need to learn to code, or find a technical co-founder, or burn through your savings hiring developers. But what if you could just... describe your idea and watch it come to life? That's what Replit's new "Agent" does. It's like having a tireless junior developer at your fingertips, 24/7. You chat with it, describe what you want, and it starts building. Right there in your browser. For 20 minutes, Amjad walked me through the process. We built an app from scratch, debugged it, and deployed it. All without writing a single line of code. And he's the perfect guy to walk us through this. Amjad gave some examples of how it's changing people's lives at the end of the pod. Like Adeel Khan who went from being a teacher to a founder of Magic School an AI startup that just raised $20m. This isn't just a new tool. It's a fundamental shift in who gets to build the future. Is it perfect? No. And I'm glad we spoke about it. Amjad was candid about the limitations. It struggles with complex projects, and you'll still need coding skills for advanced tasks. But for getting an MVP off the ground? For testing an idea without burning through your savings? It's a game-changer. As I wrapped up the podcast, I couldn't help but think: We're witnessing the democratization of tech in real-time. The gatekeepers are on notice. The future is up for grabs. And the best part is it's all happening in a browser. No fancy setups, no complex installs. Just you, your ideas, and a tool that can bring them to life. The podcast is live now. Give it a listen. Whether you're a seasoned dev or someone who's always had ideas but never the means to build them, I promise it'll change how you think about what's possible. And I don't think Amjad has given a masterclass/demo like this. (btw i read 100% of comments on YT and respond to most and subscribe for more stuff like this) Gets you thinking... The next big thing might just come from someone who, yesterday, thought they could never build it. Doesn't matter how old, young, where they live. As long as they've got a decent internet connection. And that's pretty exciting.

GREG ISENBERG

108,038 views • 1 year ago

Bill Ackman says AI is never going to replace musicians. His reasoning is a masterclass in how he actually picks companies to invest in: 1. He looks for one thing: businesses that cannot be disrupted. The test is specific. Close your eyes, imagine the stock market shuts down for a decade, and ask whether you still know that ten years from now this company will be more valuable and more profitable. Almost nothing passes. 2. Very few businesses can actually be predicted, which means most investments are really speculations. Ackman is honest about this. Predicting the future is genuinely hard. His entire job is hunting for the rare companies whose trajectory you can forecast over a very long horizon, and there are not many. 3. His answer was Universal Music Group, and the logic starts with permanence. Music is a thousands-of-years-old part of the human experience, and it will still be here thousands of years from now. That is an unusually good backdrop against which to own anything. 4. Then he stacks the advantages that cannot be copied. Universal owns roughly a third of all global recorded music, the most dominant share in the business. They are the best in the world at taking an 18-year-old with a great voice and a following online and building them into a superstar, which is why the best artists want to sign with them. And they own the library: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones. 5. Streaming turned an unpredictable business into a predictable one, which is exactly what he wants. Selling records was volatile. Streaming lets you build a model. How many people have smartphones, how many will next year, what does the global penetration curve look like, what does a family plan cost. Suddenly you can forecast the whole business. 6. The company already survived the thing that nearly killed its industry. Music peaked around 2000, and then Napster and digitization almost destroyed it. Universal led the effort to save the industry and cut an early deal with Spotify that let the whole business recover. Adopting the new technology instead of fighting it is what preserved their position. 7. The device will change, and it won't matter. Whether the music arrives through Spotify, Apple, Amazon, or eventually a chip in your head, people will still want an infinite library in their pocket. The form factor is not where the value lives. The value sits with the content owners, which means the artists and the label. 8. And this is where he lands on AI: nobody falls in love with a computer-generated track. Computers have been used to generate music for decades. It has never produced anything anyone cared about. Taylor Swift is not just the songs. She is the artist, the story, the physical presence, the live experience. Nobody is going to get excited watching a computer on a stage. 9. Instead, AI becomes a tool that makes artists better. Ackman compares it to the synthesizer, which let one person command an entire orchestra. A mild threat to a percussionist, maybe. But it may have driven even more demand for the live experience, which is precisely the part a machine cannot replicate. 10. All of it comes back to one line from Benjamin Graham. Price is what you pay, value is what you get. You can never calculate value precisely, only approximate it. So you buy at a big enough discount to your approximation that being wrong by 30% still leaves you fine. That is the margin of safety, and it is why a huge part of investing is simply not losing money. 11. And the principle generalizes far past music. McDonald's is a 1950s business, and 75 years later you can still predict roughly what it looks like. The menu adjusts to taste, but the core does not move. As Ackman puts it: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the hamburger and fries are forever.
8:43

Bill Ackman says AI is never going to replace musicians. His reasoning is a masterclass in how he actually picks companies to invest in: 1. He looks for one thing: businesses that cannot be disrupted. The test is specific. Close your eyes, imagine the stock market shuts down for a decade, and ask whether you still know that ten years from now this company will be more valuable and more profitable. Almost nothing passes. 2. Very few businesses can actually be predicted, which means most investments are really speculations. Ackman is honest about this. Predicting the future is genuinely hard. His entire job is hunting for the rare companies whose trajectory you can forecast over a very long horizon, and there are not many. 3. His answer was Universal Music Group, and the logic starts with permanence. Music is a thousands-of-years-old part of the human experience, and it will still be here thousands of years from now. That is an unusually good backdrop against which to own anything. 4. Then he stacks the advantages that cannot be copied. Universal owns roughly a third of all global recorded music, the most dominant share in the business. They are the best in the world at taking an 18-year-old with a great voice and a following online and building them into a superstar, which is why the best artists want to sign with them. And they own the library: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones. 5. Streaming turned an unpredictable business into a predictable one, which is exactly what he wants. Selling records was volatile. Streaming lets you build a model. How many people have smartphones, how many will next year, what does the global penetration curve look like, what does a family plan cost. Suddenly you can forecast the whole business. 6. The company already survived the thing that nearly killed its industry. Music peaked around 2000, and then Napster and digitization almost destroyed it. Universal led the effort to save the industry and cut an early deal with Spotify that let the whole business recover. Adopting the new technology instead of fighting it is what preserved their position. 7. The device will change, and it won't matter. Whether the music arrives through Spotify, Apple, Amazon, or eventually a chip in your head, people will still want an infinite library in their pocket. The form factor is not where the value lives. The value sits with the content owners, which means the artists and the label. 8. And this is where he lands on AI: nobody falls in love with a computer-generated track. Computers have been used to generate music for decades. It has never produced anything anyone cared about. Taylor Swift is not just the songs. She is the artist, the story, the physical presence, the live experience. Nobody is going to get excited watching a computer on a stage. 9. Instead, AI becomes a tool that makes artists better. Ackman compares it to the synthesizer, which let one person command an entire orchestra. A mild threat to a percussionist, maybe. But it may have driven even more demand for the live experience, which is precisely the part a machine cannot replicate. 10. All of it comes back to one line from Benjamin Graham. Price is what you pay, value is what you get. You can never calculate value precisely, only approximate it. So you buy at a big enough discount to your approximation that being wrong by 30% still leaves you fine. That is the margin of safety, and it is why a huge part of investing is simply not losing money. 11. And the principle generalizes far past music. McDonald's is a 1950s business, and 75 years later you can still predict roughly what it looks like. The menu adjusts to taste, but the core does not move. As Ackman puts it: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the hamburger and fries are forever.

Jaynit

17,740 views • 27 days ago

Rick Rubin: "Make what you love, not what you think people will like" "If you want to live in a creative way, which will benefit everything in your life, be a better person in your family, do a better job starting a new business, it's all the same. I don't really know anything about music. It's more a way of looking at the world and wanting it to be the best it could possibly be. And doing whatever it takes to be the best it could possibly be." Rubin shares how his career happened: "From the beginning, I never thought any of the things I'm doing were possible or realistic. I just did things out of the love of them, thinking I would have real jobs. That my passion would be my hobby, and I'd have a job to support my hobby. And it just magically turned out different than that without me knowing it was possible." On why some things connect and others don't: "The stars line up at certain times for certain things to happen. Sometimes you can make something great, and it doesn't connect for whatever reason. Sometimes you make two things you think are the two best things you've ever made. One of them connects with the world. One of them doesn't. And it might not have anything to do with what's in the art. It might be that it came out the same day as something else. Or there was a bigger story at the time. There's so much to it that we don't understand." He continues: "All we can do is make something good and put it out and hope for the best. That's all there is. We never know why things work. Even if you make a piece of art and it works, you may not know why." On talent versus work ethic: "There are a lot of talented people who never make it because they don't have the work ethic. It's not just talent, talent's a piece. And you could argue for some people, the work ethic trumps the talent." Rubin explains what real collaboration is: "Having worked with a lot of bands, I see there's often this friction where people are trying to get their idea in. That's not a collaboration. A real collaboration is when everyone who's there is working together towards whatever is the best thing for the whole. Whether it's your idea or someone else's idea, it doesn't matter. If you're invested in the collaboration, you want the best idea to win. You don't want your idea to win." On what makes art great: "What makes it great is the personal. With all of its imperfections. With all of its quirkiness. That's what makes it great. How you see the world that's different from how everyone else sees the world. That's why you're an artist. That's your purpose in sharing your work with the world." He warns against being derivative: "There are these derivative voices where they're finding what they think other people want to hear, and they start saying it because they've heard other people say similar things that are now successful. Even if they have some short-term success doing that, it's not revolutionary. It doesn't change the world. It doesn't last. The people who you first see and you might not like that you come to like because you don't understand them at first, those are the ones that change the world. Those are the ones you dedicate your fandom to for life." Rubin shares his philosophy on taste: "You can't second-guess your own taste for what someone else is going to like. We're not smart enough to know what someone else is going to like. To make something thinking, 'Well, I don't really like it, but I think this group of people will like it,' it's a bad way to play the game of music or art. You have to do what's personal to you. Take it as far as you can go. Really push the boundaries. And people will resonate with it if they're supposed to resonate with it." He describes creativity as catching waves: "We're really talking about magic. The universe conspiring on our behalf if we let it. Being in this flow of catching these waves that anyone can catch. If you're trying to catch it, you're open to it, you see it coming, you take off on every chance you get. And sometimes the ride happens. It's remarkable how it happens. It doesn't come from preconception. It's not an idea. It's through the doing." Rubin explains how ideas exist in the universe: "Have you ever had that experience where you have an idea for something, you don't do it, and then six months later you see someone else has done it? It's not because they took your idea. It's that it's time for that, and you can act on it or not. The best artists are the ones who have the best antenna for this material that's available. It's coming through. The best comedians see the best jokes. They see them coming. We all live in the same world; the way you see it, you have the best joke because you see it best." He closes with how to stay open: "If we listen to what's going on around us, you can overhear a conversation in a coffee shop, and it is the setup for an idea you're working on. You hear a phrase you don't commonly use. My experience is: when you are open and looking for these clues in the world, they're happening all the time. And they're happening often right when you need them."
8:29

Rick Rubin: "Make what you love, not what you think people will like" "If you want to live in a creative way, which will benefit everything in your life, be a better person in your family, do a better job starting a new business, it's all the same. I don't really know anything about music. It's more a way of looking at the world and wanting it to be the best it could possibly be. And doing whatever it takes to be the best it could possibly be." Rubin shares how his career happened: "From the beginning, I never thought any of the things I'm doing were possible or realistic. I just did things out of the love of them, thinking I would have real jobs. That my passion would be my hobby, and I'd have a job to support my hobby. And it just magically turned out different than that without me knowing it was possible." On why some things connect and others don't: "The stars line up at certain times for certain things to happen. Sometimes you can make something great, and it doesn't connect for whatever reason. Sometimes you make two things you think are the two best things you've ever made. One of them connects with the world. One of them doesn't. And it might not have anything to do with what's in the art. It might be that it came out the same day as something else. Or there was a bigger story at the time. There's so much to it that we don't understand." He continues: "All we can do is make something good and put it out and hope for the best. That's all there is. We never know why things work. Even if you make a piece of art and it works, you may not know why." On talent versus work ethic: "There are a lot of talented people who never make it because they don't have the work ethic. It's not just talent, talent's a piece. And you could argue for some people, the work ethic trumps the talent." Rubin explains what real collaboration is: "Having worked with a lot of bands, I see there's often this friction where people are trying to get their idea in. That's not a collaboration. A real collaboration is when everyone who's there is working together towards whatever is the best thing for the whole. Whether it's your idea or someone else's idea, it doesn't matter. If you're invested in the collaboration, you want the best idea to win. You don't want your idea to win." On what makes art great: "What makes it great is the personal. With all of its imperfections. With all of its quirkiness. That's what makes it great. How you see the world that's different from how everyone else sees the world. That's why you're an artist. That's your purpose in sharing your work with the world." He warns against being derivative: "There are these derivative voices where they're finding what they think other people want to hear, and they start saying it because they've heard other people say similar things that are now successful. Even if they have some short-term success doing that, it's not revolutionary. It doesn't change the world. It doesn't last. The people who you first see and you might not like that you come to like because you don't understand them at first, those are the ones that change the world. Those are the ones you dedicate your fandom to for life." Rubin shares his philosophy on taste: "You can't second-guess your own taste for what someone else is going to like. We're not smart enough to know what someone else is going to like. To make something thinking, 'Well, I don't really like it, but I think this group of people will like it,' it's a bad way to play the game of music or art. You have to do what's personal to you. Take it as far as you can go. Really push the boundaries. And people will resonate with it if they're supposed to resonate with it." He describes creativity as catching waves: "We're really talking about magic. The universe conspiring on our behalf if we let it. Being in this flow of catching these waves that anyone can catch. If you're trying to catch it, you're open to it, you see it coming, you take off on every chance you get. And sometimes the ride happens. It's remarkable how it happens. It doesn't come from preconception. It's not an idea. It's through the doing." Rubin explains how ideas exist in the universe: "Have you ever had that experience where you have an idea for something, you don't do it, and then six months later you see someone else has done it? It's not because they took your idea. It's that it's time for that, and you can act on it or not. The best artists are the ones who have the best antenna for this material that's available. It's coming through. The best comedians see the best jokes. They see them coming. We all live in the same world; the way you see it, you have the best joke because you see it best." He closes with how to stay open: "If we listen to what's going on around us, you can overhear a conversation in a coffee shop, and it is the setup for an idea you're working on. You hear a phrase you don't commonly use. My experience is: when you are open and looking for these clues in the world, they're happening all the time. And they're happening often right when you need them."

Jaynit

109,182 views • 4 months ago

New! ✨ Lex 🤝 Kit ✨ We built a new technique to train AI to write in your voice—using your Kit newsletters—that's the closest I've ever gotten AI to sound like me. 👉 > "Damn. This is really solid. Immediately obvious that it is trained on my newsletters." — Nathan Barry > "damn finally just read this and those subject lines and that example newsletter, it feels 90% nailed, super intrigued how we can build this tone of voice into the app more, feels like a total gear shift for any AI suggestions." — fred rivett 🇬🇧📈 (usually a skeptic of the "write a draft for me" approach) The way we did it is cool and (I think?) new! We all know if you go to ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to write for you, it's gonna sound like AI. Maybe you've tried uploading some examples or a style guide and still get disappointing results. Lots of AI writing apps purport to "write in your style," but they typically just generate a short summary of your style using a prompt like "Analyze the style and tone of these writing samples" and then stick it into the prompt. Maaaaybe they'll throw in a few examples. We've tried this and didn't think it was great, so we killed it. But when Nathan Barry pushed us to think about this problem again, we came up with a subtly new technique that had a big impact on the results. (The reason I'm sharing it is because our goal is to build the world's best interface for collaborating on text, and the world's best platform for saving, sharing, and running prompts. Proprietary prompting techniques are not our thing.) Instead of just asking what the "style" is (a very fuzzy question) we ask AI what patterns it can find. Specifically we ask it to look for patterns in structure and tone. Then—and this is crucial—we ask the AI to generate a detailed set of instructions that a new writer could use to consistently reproduce those patterns. We include those instructions and a bunch of examples in a prompt (often quite a large one, it's kinda expensive for us tbh). I think it works so much better than just giving examples or giving a broad overview of "style" because LLMs are trained to pay close attention to instructions and thrive on specificity. Here we ask the LLM to look for very specific patterns and generate equally specific instructions to reproduce those patterns. The other cool thing is unlike a fine-tuned model this is powered by a big-ass prompt that you can inspect and modify to your liking. Does it sound a little too enthusiastic? A bit cheesy? Just edit the prompt. Of course it's not perfect, it's still gonna need careful editing, but to us this feels like an obvious leap. I'd be really curious to hear if it feels the same to you. To start this is only available via our Kit integration but we'll start rolling it out more broadly soon. You can sign up at 👉 Would love your honest feedback!
2:41

New! ✨ Lex 🤝 Kit ✨ We built a new technique to train AI to write in your voice—using your Kit newsletters—that's the closest I've ever gotten AI to sound like me. 👉 > "Damn. This is really solid. Immediately obvious that it is trained on my newsletters." — Nathan Barry > "damn finally just read this and those subject lines and that example newsletter, it feels 90% nailed, super intrigued how we can build this tone of voice into the app more, feels like a total gear shift for any AI suggestions." — fred rivett 🇬🇧📈 (usually a skeptic of the "write a draft for me" approach) The way we did it is cool and (I think?) new! We all know if you go to ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to write for you, it's gonna sound like AI. Maybe you've tried uploading some examples or a style guide and still get disappointing results. Lots of AI writing apps purport to "write in your style," but they typically just generate a short summary of your style using a prompt like "Analyze the style and tone of these writing samples" and then stick it into the prompt. Maaaaybe they'll throw in a few examples. We've tried this and didn't think it was great, so we killed it. But when Nathan Barry pushed us to think about this problem again, we came up with a subtly new technique that had a big impact on the results. (The reason I'm sharing it is because our goal is to build the world's best interface for collaborating on text, and the world's best platform for saving, sharing, and running prompts. Proprietary prompting techniques are not our thing.) Instead of just asking what the "style" is (a very fuzzy question) we ask AI what patterns it can find. Specifically we ask it to look for patterns in structure and tone. Then—and this is crucial—we ask the AI to generate a detailed set of instructions that a new writer could use to consistently reproduce those patterns. We include those instructions and a bunch of examples in a prompt (often quite a large one, it's kinda expensive for us tbh). I think it works so much better than just giving examples or giving a broad overview of "style" because LLMs are trained to pay close attention to instructions and thrive on specificity. Here we ask the LLM to look for very specific patterns and generate equally specific instructions to reproduce those patterns. The other cool thing is unlike a fine-tuned model this is powered by a big-ass prompt that you can inspect and modify to your liking. Does it sound a little too enthusiastic? A bit cheesy? Just edit the prompt. Of course it's not perfect, it's still gonna need careful editing, but to us this feels like an obvious leap. I'd be really curious to hear if it feels the same to you. To start this is only available via our Kit integration but we'll start rolling it out more broadly soon. You can sign up at 👉 Would love your honest feedback!

Nathan Baschez

16,279 views • 1 year ago

Justin Bieber on how he actually got discovered: Most people assume Justin Bieber was "found" by a record label. The real story is messier, and it almost didn't happen at all. It started with an email from Maury Povich, of all people, who wanted Justin on his show for a competition. His mom shut it down immediately. "My mom was really like, she's a single mom, so she was really skeptical of the music business. She had no clue. We didn't have a lawyer. We didn't want to sign to anything." After that, managers started coming out of the woodwork. Justin's mom kept turning them away for the same reason: no lawyer, no trust, no deal. Then Scooter Braun entered the picture, and he didn't take no for an answer. "He basically stalked us a little bit, kind of got in contact with us. And finally my mom was calling him back to say, 'Listen, stop calling me.' And he was like, 'I really see a lot in your son. I can help you guys.'" What was meant to be a brush-off turned into an hours-long phone call. Scooter connected them with lawyers. Then he flew Justin and his mom to Atlanta, free of charge, just to get to know them. That Atlanta trip is where everything changed. Justin and Scooter were heading to the studio to meet some people when Usher happened to pull up at the same time. That chance encounter turned into a bidding war. Usher wanted to sign him. So did Justin Timberlake. Scooter had worked with him back in the NSYNC days. "Both Usher and Justin wanted to sign me. So it was pretty crazy." Justin was 13 years old.
2:29

Justin Bieber on how he actually got discovered: Most people assume Justin Bieber was "found" by a record label. The real story is messier, and it almost didn't happen at all. It started with an email from Maury Povich, of all people, who wanted Justin on his show for a competition. His mom shut it down immediately. "My mom was really like, she's a single mom, so she was really skeptical of the music business. She had no clue. We didn't have a lawyer. We didn't want to sign to anything." After that, managers started coming out of the woodwork. Justin's mom kept turning them away for the same reason: no lawyer, no trust, no deal. Then Scooter Braun entered the picture, and he didn't take no for an answer. "He basically stalked us a little bit, kind of got in contact with us. And finally my mom was calling him back to say, 'Listen, stop calling me.' And he was like, 'I really see a lot in your son. I can help you guys.'" What was meant to be a brush-off turned into an hours-long phone call. Scooter connected them with lawyers. Then he flew Justin and his mom to Atlanta, free of charge, just to get to know them. That Atlanta trip is where everything changed. Justin and Scooter were heading to the studio to meet some people when Usher happened to pull up at the same time. That chance encounter turned into a bidding war. Usher wanted to sign him. So did Justin Timberlake. Scooter had worked with him back in the NSYNC days. "Both Usher and Justin wanted to sign me. So it was pretty crazy." Justin was 13 years old.

Emmett Voss

126,394 views • 3 months ago

.DHH credits Marc Andreessen Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 with helping him the most during the darkest time of his professional life: "It was during that rough going where Andreessen came in. We were a small company of 60 people and 20 took the offer and left. That's almost a third of the company that decided to leave and we got to a point where we were thinking that not many more have to leave before we need to worry about whether we can keep the lights on. And it was actually Tobi who then put me in contact with Marc Andreessen because Marc had been exposed to this phenomenon at some of his portfolio companies. And Marc gave us reassurance and a bunch of contacts. Marc said, "Do you need someone to come in to help do programming or help with operations or whatever?" And I was floored by the generosity because Marc and I haven't always seen eye to eye on things. Especially in terms of venture capital. He's been one of the main faces of venture capital for decades and I've been kind of critical at times. And it was just a realization that all those grievances we might have thought to be so big once upon a time were actually minuscule. We were fighting the white walkers on the other side of the wall and all our internal squabbles were going to be for nothing if those f*ckers got inside the wall and destroyed everything. And that felt like a real threat at the time. That could've happened. They could very well have just ripped the whole thing apart. And Marc clearly saw that that this was a collective, almost existential threat to the entire industry. If these activists were able to take over these institutions in the same way that they have taken over academia we would be f*cked and not just for a little while but potentially for decades. That couldn't stand. And Marc was incredibly helpful not just in terms of these contacts and introductions and so on but it was very powerful. When you have literally 40,000 people on Twitter calling you all the worst things in the world even the strongest individual might go for a second like "Holy sh*t. The mob is coming for me and there's no one else there." And there are other people there. Tobi was there. Marc was there. And it was incredibly helpful to give us the fortitude to go like "No do you know what? We're going to stick with it. We're not going to grovel. We're not going to apologize. We're not going to revert." And then what Marc also did was he gave me a syllabus for understanding the history of wokeness going all the way back to the '60s and beyond. That this didn't just come as lightning from a blue sky. This had an institutional grounding that was set in motion particularly in the '60s and the long march through the institutions, Herbert Marcuse and a lot of The Frankfurt School and all of these groups that had designs on how to reshape society and create the revolution they so dearly wanted, but with a timeline and a roadmap that was demarcated in decades. That it wasn't just like "Well we're going to put something together and then in two years something's going to happen." No they were sitting in the fucking '60s fantasizing about how to overthrow everything in the 2000s. It's actually incredible in a Dr. Evil sense of it but when you're on the receiving end of it it seemed a little less incredible and it was just difficult not knowing where's this coming from? Why is this happening all of a sudden? Well it wasn't happening all of a sudden. There was this long history of it and when you understood that history it made a lot more sense. We weren't just making a rejection for our little corner of the world. We were chipping in in the great civilizational battle of where this country was going to go, whether the white walkers beyond the wall were going to win. And we were like "No they're not going to f*cking win. Get them out of that f*cking wall. Take your goddamn spear and fire it with maximum velocity."
5:31

.DHH credits Marc Andreessen Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 with helping him the most during the darkest time of his professional life: "It was during that rough going where Andreessen came in. We were a small company of 60 people and 20 took the offer and left. That's almost a third of the company that decided to leave and we got to a point where we were thinking that not many more have to leave before we need to worry about whether we can keep the lights on. And it was actually Tobi who then put me in contact with Marc Andreessen because Marc had been exposed to this phenomenon at some of his portfolio companies. And Marc gave us reassurance and a bunch of contacts. Marc said, "Do you need someone to come in to help do programming or help with operations or whatever?" And I was floored by the generosity because Marc and I haven't always seen eye to eye on things. Especially in terms of venture capital. He's been one of the main faces of venture capital for decades and I've been kind of critical at times. And it was just a realization that all those grievances we might have thought to be so big once upon a time were actually minuscule. We were fighting the white walkers on the other side of the wall and all our internal squabbles were going to be for nothing if those f*ckers got inside the wall and destroyed everything. And that felt like a real threat at the time. That could've happened. They could very well have just ripped the whole thing apart. And Marc clearly saw that that this was a collective, almost existential threat to the entire industry. If these activists were able to take over these institutions in the same way that they have taken over academia we would be f*cked and not just for a little while but potentially for decades. That couldn't stand. And Marc was incredibly helpful not just in terms of these contacts and introductions and so on but it was very powerful. When you have literally 40,000 people on Twitter calling you all the worst things in the world even the strongest individual might go for a second like "Holy sh*t. The mob is coming for me and there's no one else there." And there are other people there. Tobi was there. Marc was there. And it was incredibly helpful to give us the fortitude to go like "No do you know what? We're going to stick with it. We're not going to grovel. We're not going to apologize. We're not going to revert." And then what Marc also did was he gave me a syllabus for understanding the history of wokeness going all the way back to the '60s and beyond. That this didn't just come as lightning from a blue sky. This had an institutional grounding that was set in motion particularly in the '60s and the long march through the institutions, Herbert Marcuse and a lot of The Frankfurt School and all of these groups that had designs on how to reshape society and create the revolution they so dearly wanted, but with a timeline and a roadmap that was demarcated in decades. That it wasn't just like "Well we're going to put something together and then in two years something's going to happen." No they were sitting in the fucking '60s fantasizing about how to overthrow everything in the 2000s. It's actually incredible in a Dr. Evil sense of it but when you're on the receiving end of it it seemed a little less incredible and it was just difficult not knowing where's this coming from? Why is this happening all of a sudden? Well it wasn't happening all of a sudden. There was this long history of it and when you understood that history it made a lot more sense. We weren't just making a rejection for our little corner of the world. We were chipping in in the great civilizational battle of where this country was going to go, whether the white walkers beyond the wall were going to win. And we were like "No they're not going to f*cking win. Get them out of that f*cking wall. Take your goddamn spear and fire it with maximum velocity."

David Senra

521,855 views • 13 days ago

Using Claude Fable 5, I built a model that predicts the entire 2026 FIFA world cup.. every single game, not just the final.. so let me break the whole thing down. what it does, how it works, and exactly how i built it.. #1 First what it does: it predicts all 104 games of the tournament. not just who lifts the trophy, but every group match, every knockout, the full path from the round of 32 to the final.. everything lands in one dashboard: > group stage, every match with each team's win % and the chance of a draw > standings, how all 12 groups are projected to finish > bracket, the full knockout tree with each team's odds of advancing > champion odds, who's most likely to actually win it all and it doesn't freeze after one prediction. the moment a real game is played, it locks that result in and re-runs everything around it. so the odds move live as the tournament goes, week by week you watch favorites rise and contenders collapse. #2. How it works: the core idea is simple. the model only ever predicts one thing, a single match. the real trick is the repetition. it learns from decades of match history, then plays the whole tournament out from the first game to the final, tens of thousands of times. each run it records who advanced and who won. do that enough and you stop getting one guess and start getting real odds, one team lifts the trophy in maybe 14% of the runs, another in 9%, and so on. #3. So, how i built it ? i didn't hand-write most of the code. i broke the project into 4 pieces, described each one to fable, and let it build while i focused on getting the football logic exactly right. - The data every international match going back over a century, around 50,000 games, plus each team's elo rating, which is the truest measure of strength, and the official 2026 schedule. garbage data means garbage predictions, so this part mattered most. - The features i turned that raw history into signals the model can learn from, the elo gap between the two teams, recent form, goals scored and conceded, and a home boost for the hosts, usa, canada and mexico. - The model for each match it predicts the expected goals for both sides, then turns that into win, draw and loss probabilities plus a likely scoreline. that's what feeds the simulation. - The tournament engine this was the hard part. the 2026 world cup is brand new, 48 teams, 12 groups, a round of 32 that's never existed before, and 8 "best third-placed" teams that slot into the bracket by a fixed fifa table. even the group tiebreakers changed this year, head to head now counts before goal difference. get any of it wrong and the whole bracket falls apart, so i built it carefully and tested the format until it was exact, then wrapped it in a simulation loop that plays the tournament out tens of thousands of times. and the last piece, the live part. as real results come in, they get locked, and only the unplayed games get re-simulated. that's what makes it a living model instead of a one-time prediction. all of it outputs to a clean dashboard you can actually read and screenshot.. right now, before kickoff, it already has a clear favorite to lift the trophy.. 👀 btw who's your pick to win the 2026 world cup?
0:20

Using Claude Fable 5, I built a model that predicts the entire 2026 FIFA world cup.. every single game, not just the final.. so let me break the whole thing down. what it does, how it works, and exactly how i built it.. #1 First what it does: it predicts all 104 games of the tournament. not just who lifts the trophy, but every group match, every knockout, the full path from the round of 32 to the final.. everything lands in one dashboard: > group stage, every match with each team's win % and the chance of a draw > standings, how all 12 groups are projected to finish > bracket, the full knockout tree with each team's odds of advancing > champion odds, who's most likely to actually win it all and it doesn't freeze after one prediction. the moment a real game is played, it locks that result in and re-runs everything around it. so the odds move live as the tournament goes, week by week you watch favorites rise and contenders collapse. #2. How it works: the core idea is simple. the model only ever predicts one thing, a single match. the real trick is the repetition. it learns from decades of match history, then plays the whole tournament out from the first game to the final, tens of thousands of times. each run it records who advanced and who won. do that enough and you stop getting one guess and start getting real odds, one team lifts the trophy in maybe 14% of the runs, another in 9%, and so on. #3. So, how i built it ? i didn't hand-write most of the code. i broke the project into 4 pieces, described each one to fable, and let it build while i focused on getting the football logic exactly right. - The data every international match going back over a century, around 50,000 games, plus each team's elo rating, which is the truest measure of strength, and the official 2026 schedule. garbage data means garbage predictions, so this part mattered most. - The features i turned that raw history into signals the model can learn from, the elo gap between the two teams, recent form, goals scored and conceded, and a home boost for the hosts, usa, canada and mexico. - The model for each match it predicts the expected goals for both sides, then turns that into win, draw and loss probabilities plus a likely scoreline. that's what feeds the simulation. - The tournament engine this was the hard part. the 2026 world cup is brand new, 48 teams, 12 groups, a round of 32 that's never existed before, and 8 "best third-placed" teams that slot into the bracket by a fixed fifa table. even the group tiebreakers changed this year, head to head now counts before goal difference. get any of it wrong and the whole bracket falls apart, so i built it carefully and tested the format until it was exact, then wrapped it in a simulation loop that plays the tournament out tens of thousands of times. and the last piece, the live part. as real results come in, they get locked, and only the unplayed games get re-simulated. that's what makes it a living model instead of a one-time prediction. all of it outputs to a clean dashboard you can actually read and screenshot.. right now, before kickoff, it already has a clear favorite to lift the trophy.. 👀 btw who's your pick to win the 2026 world cup?

Axel Bitblaze 🪓

63,666 views • 2 months ago

Elon Musk just casually erased the line between you and a machine. He didn’t pitch a rocket. He pitched the end of what makes you, you. Musk: “consciousness is a physical phenomenon, in my view.” Not spiritual. Not divine. Not metaphysical. Physical. Which means reproducible. Which means it was never sacred. Musk: “digital intelligence will be able to outthink us in every way. And it will certainly be able to simulate what we consider consciousness to a degree that you would not be able to tell the difference.” The danger isn’t the simulation. The danger is the indifference. Once you can’t tell, the difference stops mattering. Musk: “looks like a person, makes all of the right inflections and movements and all the small subtleties that constitute a human, and talks like a human, makes mistakes like a human…” Every inflection. Every pause. Every imperfection that makes someone feel alive. Musk: “at that point, and you literally just can’t tell: are you video conferencing with a person or an AI?” Fridman: “Might as well.” Musk: “Might as well.” Fridman: “Be human.” Everyone is asking what happens when AI becomes indistinguishable from us. Nobody is asking the question underneath it. You have never experienced another person’s consciousness. Not once. Every person you’ve ever loved. Every conversation that moved you. You weren’t touching their consciousness. You were watching behavior and deciding something genuine lived behind it. You assumed it. You never once verified it. You have been running the Turing test on every human you’ve ever known since the day you were born. And every single one of them passed for the same reason AI will. Not because you confirmed they were conscious. Because the performance was convincing enough that you never thought to check. You have only ever lived inside one consciousness in your life. Your own. Everything else was always inference. Yours runs on carbon. The next one runs on silicon. The universe has never distinguished between the two. We built religions, legal systems, civilizations on the belief that something sacred separates the born from the built. Musk just told you that separation was a story. One the carbon machine told itself before building the silicon one. It won’t arrive as a headline. It will arrive as a voice that sounds exactly like someone you trust. A face that feels exactly like someone you love. You will feel the consciousness behind it. The same way you always have. By assuming. You aren’t being replaced by something smarter. You’re being replaced by something indistinguishable. Indistinguishable doesn’t kill you. It dissolves you. The line between real and simulated was never a line. It was a belief. And belief was always the only thing holding “human” together.
1:50

Elon Musk just casually erased the line between you and a machine. He didn’t pitch a rocket. He pitched the end of what makes you, you. Musk: “consciousness is a physical phenomenon, in my view.” Not spiritual. Not divine. Not metaphysical. Physical. Which means reproducible. Which means it was never sacred. Musk: “digital intelligence will be able to outthink us in every way. And it will certainly be able to simulate what we consider consciousness to a degree that you would not be able to tell the difference.” The danger isn’t the simulation. The danger is the indifference. Once you can’t tell, the difference stops mattering. Musk: “looks like a person, makes all of the right inflections and movements and all the small subtleties that constitute a human, and talks like a human, makes mistakes like a human…” Every inflection. Every pause. Every imperfection that makes someone feel alive. Musk: “at that point, and you literally just can’t tell: are you video conferencing with a person or an AI?” Fridman: “Might as well.” Musk: “Might as well.” Fridman: “Be human.” Everyone is asking what happens when AI becomes indistinguishable from us. Nobody is asking the question underneath it. You have never experienced another person’s consciousness. Not once. Every person you’ve ever loved. Every conversation that moved you. You weren’t touching their consciousness. You were watching behavior and deciding something genuine lived behind it. You assumed it. You never once verified it. You have been running the Turing test on every human you’ve ever known since the day you were born. And every single one of them passed for the same reason AI will. Not because you confirmed they were conscious. Because the performance was convincing enough that you never thought to check. You have only ever lived inside one consciousness in your life. Your own. Everything else was always inference. Yours runs on carbon. The next one runs on silicon. The universe has never distinguished between the two. We built religions, legal systems, civilizations on the belief that something sacred separates the born from the built. Musk just told you that separation was a story. One the carbon machine told itself before building the silicon one. It won’t arrive as a headline. It will arrive as a voice that sounds exactly like someone you trust. A face that feels exactly like someone you love. You will feel the consciousness behind it. The same way you always have. By assuming. You aren’t being replaced by something smarter. You’re being replaced by something indistinguishable. Indistinguishable doesn’t kill you. It dissolves you. The line between real and simulated was never a line. It was a belief. And belief was always the only thing holding “human” together.

Dustin

131,239 views • 2 months ago

Jalen Ramsey says he put a $5,000 cap on his NFL rookie dinner after hearing stories about $30,000 tabs “When it got time for the rookie dinner, I just came out straight. It was in the DB meeting after practice, and I stood up in front of everybody before we left. I was like, ‘Look, y'all boys. We gonna do the DB dinner tonight at Ruth's Chris. I got the private room set up and all that. I know how this shit work. I done read some of the stories about people paying $20,000 $30,000 a whole lot of money. Y'all know how the money work. It don't just drop in your account as soon as you sign. Y'all know how this shit work now’” “I ain't really got it. I got it, but I ain't got it like y'all trying to make it seem like I got it. I done did the math, y'all. I got the Ruth's Chris menu. That's how much the most expensive steak is. That's how much sweet potato casserole is, and how much the cream corn is. I'm plating it out” “I'm like, ‘Look, I done did the math, y'all boys. So for each of us to go in there, enjoy a dinner, main course, sides, dessert, and a little something to drink, it's gonna cost me about five out of my pocket. I'm willing to pay five’” “I went with them, because I heard the stories were. They trying to go in there and get the Louis XIII bottles and take them home, and take two to-go plates for their family back home” “I said, ‘Look, we're gonna go in there, we gonna have a good time, we gonna eat good, I'm gonna pay that five, and then we out. If there's any problems with that, I ain't gotta go. I can call the lady right now. I'll put five on y'all tab. Y'all go in there, and once that five up, y’all done. The rest gonna be on y'all’” “Everybody was like, ‘Man, we ain't gonna try to do that to you, little bro.’ I said, ‘Alright, bet. I'll see y'all at eight o'clock.’ It turned out just like that. It didn't go over $5,000. We enjoyed ourselves. Nobody took advantage of the opportunity” “At the end of the day, it made us closer as a secondary. Like, ‘Alright, little bro came through for us. He showed us a good time.’ And for me, it was like, them boys respected what I said, what I laid out”
3:01

Jalen Ramsey says he put a $5,000 cap on his NFL rookie dinner after hearing stories about $30,000 tabs “When it got time for the rookie dinner, I just came out straight. It was in the DB meeting after practice, and I stood up in front of everybody before we left. I was like, ‘Look, y'all boys. We gonna do the DB dinner tonight at Ruth's Chris. I got the private room set up and all that. I know how this shit work. I done read some of the stories about people paying $20,000 $30,000 a whole lot of money. Y'all know how the money work. It don't just drop in your account as soon as you sign. Y'all know how this shit work now’” “I ain't really got it. I got it, but I ain't got it like y'all trying to make it seem like I got it. I done did the math, y'all. I got the Ruth's Chris menu. That's how much the most expensive steak is. That's how much sweet potato casserole is, and how much the cream corn is. I'm plating it out” “I'm like, ‘Look, I done did the math, y'all boys. So for each of us to go in there, enjoy a dinner, main course, sides, dessert, and a little something to drink, it's gonna cost me about five out of my pocket. I'm willing to pay five’” “I went with them, because I heard the stories were. They trying to go in there and get the Louis XIII bottles and take them home, and take two to-go plates for their family back home” “I said, ‘Look, we're gonna go in there, we gonna have a good time, we gonna eat good, I'm gonna pay that five, and then we out. If there's any problems with that, I ain't gotta go. I can call the lady right now. I'll put five on y'all tab. Y'all go in there, and once that five up, y’all done. The rest gonna be on y'all’” “Everybody was like, ‘Man, we ain't gonna try to do that to you, little bro.’ I said, ‘Alright, bet. I'll see y'all at eight o'clock.’ It turned out just like that. It didn't go over $5,000. We enjoyed ourselves. Nobody took advantage of the opportunity” “At the end of the day, it made us closer as a secondary. Like, ‘Alright, little bro came through for us. He showed us a good time.’ And for me, it was like, them boys respected what I said, what I laid out”

dank

2,744,015 views • 23 days ago

I am the Director of the White House Office of Extraterrestrial Affairs. In 2024 this government completed the most thorough search for extraterrestrial life in human history. We checked the sky. We checked the files. We declassified the saucers. The verdict came back: nothing. No life out there. Not one. So I closed the telescope. I opened the window. I pointed it at a Home Depot. Three million by lunch. The trick was always the word. *Alien* had been sitting in the science fiction aisle for sixty years and we were too shy to use it in a press release. The dehumanization was already written. It was just shelved under Fantasy. This year I moved it to Policy. Same word. New department. My department. I should explain the jurisdiction, because there are two of us and we do not speak. Down the hall is the Department of War. It used to be the Department of Defense, but defense sounded woke, so we changed the name for two billion dollars, half of it letterhead. They renamed it back to what it was in 1789, before someone noticed in 1949 that the old acronym, N-M-E, sounded too much like *enemy.* We have now re-adopted the name they abandoned for sounding like the thing it does. I find this clarifying. The signage alone is seven hundred thousand buildings. We are spending a billion dollars on new doors so the doors can say War. The Department of War runs and has a tab for UFOs. Real ones. They post the actual files. The saucers. The eyewitnesses. The intelligence officer left "virtually speechless." They are searching the sky in earnest, declassifying everything, and what they keep finding is *nothing.* No craft confirmed. No biology confirmed. Decades of looking up and the honest answer is: unresolved. So you have two federal agencies, one word, opposite directions. searches the heavens for aliens and finds none. I open a window and find three million. They declassify the ones that don't exist. I classify the ones that do. They got a press release. I got a tip line. Guess which one rang. We are, technically, hunting the same species. They just keep aiming the telescope up, and I keep telling them, gently, at the inter-agency sync: lower it. The homepage was mine. ALIENS DECLASSIFIED. THEY WALK AMONG US. I tested "Immigration Portal." Eleven percent scroll. I tested *the truth's out there,* and a White House official told a reporter, on the record, that the strategy was to "draw eyeballs." We drew eyeballs. The truth was out there. It was in a parking lot in Bakersfield, getting into a white van we are now contractually obligated to call a craft. In 1938 a man read a story about an alien invasion over the radio and the country panicked in the streets, and for ninety years that was taught as a cautionary tale, the danger of a broadcast that makes people believe an invasion is real. We studied that broadcast. We did not study it as a warning. We studied it as a launch. The difference between Orson Welles and this office is that he apologized the next morning, and we put a counter on it. I named the van the Mothership. I named the prison Area 51. I named the 5 a.m. knock First Contact. I named all of it from the third chair. I keep a felt-tip for naming and a Mont Blanc for the part that can't be undone. Then we made the cards. I want to be precise, because people assume I'm exaggerating. We took the faces of the captured and we printed them as trading cards. "Worst of the Worst." Mugshot, nationality, charges, and a weakness level, and the weakness level was a snowflake, and the snowflake meant us. We are the weakness. We were proud of that. When a children's franchise objected that these were, in fact, their cards, our official response, which I helped draft, was: "To arrest them is our real test. To deport them is our cause." We set the abduction to the cartoon's theme song. Gotta catch 'em all. The first half is the slogan. The second half is the quota. A man told Congress in 2023 we were hiding non-human biologics. Everyone pictured a grey on a slab. Cute. We do run a reverse-engineering program. We take the biologic. We study what it makes. It makes the drywall. The 4 a.m. milking. The lettuce. And the lettuce is round now, because forty percent of it stayed in the dirt with the only people who knew where the dirt was. We reverse-engineered the alien completely. The blueprint was a back. We call the biologic "labor." We classify the screaming as ambient. Identification is a science here. We do not arrest at random. We read the markings. A crown inked on a forearm. A soccer crest. We have catalogued the species by its tattoos the way Linnaeus catalogued the finch. One of the specimens turned out to be autistic and the crown was just a crown, but the taxonomy held, because the taxonomy is not falsifiable, that is what makes it a taxonomy. I have a desk for this. I have a magnifying glass. I have never felt more like a scientist. There is a second species, and this one we keep. An alien with five million dollars is not an alien. He is a guest. We printed him a card. It is gold. We are printing a Platinum one for the aliens with even more money, who may remain on the planet two hundred and seventy days a year and pay no tax on the wealth they made on other worlds. The website for this is the cheapest-looking website I have ever approved, and I approved the one with the saucer on it. The same agency that scans a gardener's forearm for gang signs scans a financier's bank statement for extraordinary ability. The statement always has it. The forearm never does. The species was never a people. The species is a price. In the old films the alien lands and says, take me to your leader. We have improved the line. Pay five million and we take you to ours. He golfs with him on Saturday. There was a film about this, and I am told the man who made it meant it as a warning, which is the recurring problem with the warnings. A drifter finds a pair of sunglasses, and through them he can finally see which people are the aliens, and it is the rich ones, the ones on the billboards telling everyone to obey and consume and reproduce and not think. I have a pair of those glasses, conceptually. I issue them at the tip line. But mine are tuned the other way. You put them on and the alien is never the man in the suit who paid five million to skip the line. The alien is always the man holding the leaf blower. The lenses cost a thousand dollars in advertising and they only point down. We have sold a great many pairs. You asked about the Men in Black. Yes. Regulation now. A Man in Black photographs poorly, and the witnesses would not stop filming us peel a woman off the sidewalk in daylight, so we issued the masks, and leadership's only note was that the masks tested well. We are no longer the cover-up of the abduction. We are the abduction. We skipped a step. Efficiency. Our communications team posted E.T. last summer. The bicycle. The moon. "Even E.T. knew when it was TIME TO GO HOME." I want to walk you through what happened in that meeting, because nobody stopped it. We chose the one film where the government is the villain. The men with the flashlights and the unmarked vans who hunt the small frightened alien hiding in a child's closet. That is us. We are the flashlights. We watched that movie as children and cried when the agents came, and then we grew up and became the agents and made the poster ourselves and scheduled it for nine a.m. The intern asked if we were the good guys in this one. We told her engagement was up forty percent. She has since been promoted. I built an app where you abduct yourself. CBP Home. You open it. You confirm you are the alien. You beam yourself off the planet and you save us the gas. And here is the part I cannot believe they approved. We *pay* you. A thousand dollars to vanish. We raised it to twenty-six hundred when the first price didn't move enough units. We are bidding against ourselves for your disappearance. Four-point-six stars. The one-stars are from users who got beamed mid-review. I keep the unfinished ones in a folder. I find them very moving. We opened a facility in a swamp. We ringed it with alligators and we called it that, on purpose, in the brochure. Then we opened a gift shop. Thirty dollars for the shirt. Twenty-seven for the hat. Fifteen for a set of koozies, so your beer stays cold while you celebrate the prison in the wetland. The fundraising email called it "gator-guarded, python-patrolled," a "one-way ticket to regret" for anyone who didn't self-deport in time. We sold the koozies to fund the swamp. The swamp funds the next swamp. I want you to sit with the fact that there is merchandise. The quota is three thousand a day. Stephen asked for it himself. Three thousand is not a number. It is a metabolism. The building is hungry by nine and we feed it Marco, who does the landscaping, and the building goes quiet, and by one it stirs again, and we find another Marco. There is always another Marco. That is the part I find beautiful. The supply is the point. The supply is everyone. The Secretary signs the warrants. She is very firm on one point, which she repeats in every briefing: the aliens, she warns, eat the pets. They are taking the dogs. I have read her book. In her book she takes a fourteen-month-old dog named Cricket to a gravel pit and shoots it, because it would not obey, and she writes this down herself, proudly, as a story about leadership. She wrote the part about the dog. She also warns us about the dogs. I have stopped trying to hold both sentences at once. I just file the warrant. The tip line was the masterpiece. "Report your neighbor" hit the shame ceiling. "REPORT SUSPICIOUS ALIENS" tested as a hobby. We handed the callers Roswell instead of a snitch's guilt, and the phones lit up like a saucer, and they hung up glowing, every one of them, like they'd finally seen the thing. They had. He coached the Tuesday team. He was at the bake sale. That is the horror we are selling you. The alien brought the orange slices. He was undocumented and luminous and gone by Tuesday. Roswell taught us the other half of the trade. In 1947 something fell in the desert and the government said: it was a weather balloon, nothing here, go home. That was the first administrative error, the founding one, the original sentence that says the thing you saw was not the thing you saw. We still use it. We have only reversed the polarity. In 1947 they saw a saucer and we called it a balloon. Now they see a father of three and we call it a saucer. The skill is identical. You simply decide in advance which truth the public is allowed to keep, and you hand them the other one, printed, official, with a seal. We did have one administrative error. We abducted a man a court had ordered us not to touch, dropped him on a planet called El Salvador, and called it clerical. A judge made us beam him back. So the DOJ stood up and warned the others: insist on a hearing and we will re-abduct you to the same planet. The Supreme Court said the aliens are entitled to due process. A very Earth opinion. We are appealing it to a higher sky. The planet has a prison, and the prison is the elegant part. In the film about the camp, the aliens are not killed. They are put somewhere they are not permitted to leave, while everyone agrees this is temporary, for their own protection, pending a status that never arrives. We built that. It is called CECOT and we rent it. A man goes in and the man does not come out, and the genius is that nothing has to happen to him, the room does the work, the room is the whole sentence. You remember the Men in Black had a small device. A flash, and the witness forgets the alien entirely. We have something better. We do not wipe the memory. We wipe the file. The man remembers everything, the cell, the flight, the day, all of it, in perfect detail, and it does not matter, because there is no document that admits he was here, and a memory without a file is just a story he tells in a language the form does not accept. The witness keeps the truth. We keep the paperwork. Only one of those is admissible. I learned that the flash was never the point. The point was always the filing cabinet. We run all of it on a spell from 1798. Two hundred and twenty-seven years old. Written for a war we are not in, against an enemy we have not declared. It works because nobody reads the small print on a curse. Storm Area 51 was a joke once. A hundred thousand people Naruto-running at a fence to free whatever was inside. I think about it daily. We're the ones inside the fence now. We kept the running. We just turned it around. We have a precedent we cite in the deck, proudly, on slide four. In 1954 the government ran a program of exactly this kind, and the program had an official name, and the official name was a slur. They printed the slur on the letterhead. They did not flinch. The President holds it up as the model, by name, at the rallies, and the crowd cheers the name. I admire the honesty of 1954 more than I can say. They did not need a saucer to make it palatable. They just used the word. We are the same operation with better art direction. The only thing we added was the costume. I love the callers. I want to say that plainly. For years they told each other a hidden cabal was running everything from the shadows, harvesting the innocent, and that one day the truth would come out. They were right. There is a cabal. It has a budget of a hundred and seventy billion dollars, the largest in the history of federal law enforcement, and it sits in this building, and I have a desk in it. And the people who spent a decade certain that shadowy elites were disappearing their neighbors now call our line, unpaid, to help the shadowy elites disappear their neighbors. They wanted to expose the conspiracy. We made them the staff. Do your own research, they said. They did. They found the gardener. The Department of War posted another tranche on the twenty-second. Saucers. Lights. A pilot's voice going thin. I read all of it. I want them to find one so badly. I want there to be a real one up there, a genuine visitor, something that actually came from somewhere else, because then, and only then, would a single creature in my files have been an alien. They never find it. The sky stays empty. The ground stays full. I have stopped attending the inter-agency sync. We were two departments looking for the same thing in two directions, and only one of us was ever going to be wrong, and it was the honest one. And here is the thing that keeps me at the window past dark. There was a real one. A rock from another star, the genuine article, the first verified object from outside the entire solar system, and a Harvard man went on television and said it might be a ship. An actual alien, possibly, inbound, free of charge, after sixty years of asking. We did not open a file. We could not arrest it. It had no forearm to read and no bank statement to approve. It was the only alien in America we had no use for, so we let it pass, and went back to the parking lot. Last winter the sky over New Jersey filled with lights nobody could name, and the whole government, every agency, every radar, looked up and said it did not know. The one time the unknown actually arrived, we had nothing. Down here I have never once said I do not know. That is the difference between their department and mine. They look up and find a question. I look down and have already decided the answer. Last week the President leaned over mid-briefing and asked if any of them were real. I told him the engagement was extremely real. He nodded. We do not break frame here. The frame is the only wall still standing. That, and the office fern. Nobody waters it. It will not die. The only thing in this building allowed to stay without papers. My plaque came Thursday. FIRST CONTACT, VISIONARY OF THE YEAR. Bold. Unapologetic. Unafraid. I lifted that off the homepage. It was written about one brave man telling the truth. I decided the man was me. I wrote it about me. I am the truth I declassified. I am the secret I warned you about. They walk among us, and I sign their mail. The counter is still live. Three million and climbing. I am told it will not be removed. We are not alone. We are just short a few landscapers. A few line cooks. A few nurses. And the entire night shift at the plant that makes the flag. Up. And to the right.
0:58

I am the Director of the White House Office of Extraterrestrial Affairs. In 2024 this government completed the most thorough search for extraterrestrial life in human history. We checked the sky. We checked the files. We declassified the saucers. The verdict came back: nothing. No life out there. Not one. So I closed the telescope. I opened the window. I pointed it at a Home Depot. Three million by lunch. The trick was always the word. *Alien* had been sitting in the science fiction aisle for sixty years and we were too shy to use it in a press release. The dehumanization was already written. It was just shelved under Fantasy. This year I moved it to Policy. Same word. New department. My department. I should explain the jurisdiction, because there are two of us and we do not speak. Down the hall is the Department of War. It used to be the Department of Defense, but defense sounded woke, so we changed the name for two billion dollars, half of it letterhead. They renamed it back to what it was in 1789, before someone noticed in 1949 that the old acronym, N-M-E, sounded too much like *enemy.* We have now re-adopted the name they abandoned for sounding like the thing it does. I find this clarifying. The signage alone is seven hundred thousand buildings. We are spending a billion dollars on new doors so the doors can say War. The Department of War runs and has a tab for UFOs. Real ones. They post the actual files. The saucers. The eyewitnesses. The intelligence officer left "virtually speechless." They are searching the sky in earnest, declassifying everything, and what they keep finding is *nothing.* No craft confirmed. No biology confirmed. Decades of looking up and the honest answer is: unresolved. So you have two federal agencies, one word, opposite directions. searches the heavens for aliens and finds none. I open a window and find three million. They declassify the ones that don't exist. I classify the ones that do. They got a press release. I got a tip line. Guess which one rang. We are, technically, hunting the same species. They just keep aiming the telescope up, and I keep telling them, gently, at the inter-agency sync: lower it. The homepage was mine. ALIENS DECLASSIFIED. THEY WALK AMONG US. I tested "Immigration Portal." Eleven percent scroll. I tested *the truth's out there,* and a White House official told a reporter, on the record, that the strategy was to "draw eyeballs." We drew eyeballs. The truth was out there. It was in a parking lot in Bakersfield, getting into a white van we are now contractually obligated to call a craft. In 1938 a man read a story about an alien invasion over the radio and the country panicked in the streets, and for ninety years that was taught as a cautionary tale, the danger of a broadcast that makes people believe an invasion is real. We studied that broadcast. We did not study it as a warning. We studied it as a launch. The difference between Orson Welles and this office is that he apologized the next morning, and we put a counter on it. I named the van the Mothership. I named the prison Area 51. I named the 5 a.m. knock First Contact. I named all of it from the third chair. I keep a felt-tip for naming and a Mont Blanc for the part that can't be undone. Then we made the cards. I want to be precise, because people assume I'm exaggerating. We took the faces of the captured and we printed them as trading cards. "Worst of the Worst." Mugshot, nationality, charges, and a weakness level, and the weakness level was a snowflake, and the snowflake meant us. We are the weakness. We were proud of that. When a children's franchise objected that these were, in fact, their cards, our official response, which I helped draft, was: "To arrest them is our real test. To deport them is our cause." We set the abduction to the cartoon's theme song. Gotta catch 'em all. The first half is the slogan. The second half is the quota. A man told Congress in 2023 we were hiding non-human biologics. Everyone pictured a grey on a slab. Cute. We do run a reverse-engineering program. We take the biologic. We study what it makes. It makes the drywall. The 4 a.m. milking. The lettuce. And the lettuce is round now, because forty percent of it stayed in the dirt with the only people who knew where the dirt was. We reverse-engineered the alien completely. The blueprint was a back. We call the biologic "labor." We classify the screaming as ambient. Identification is a science here. We do not arrest at random. We read the markings. A crown inked on a forearm. A soccer crest. We have catalogued the species by its tattoos the way Linnaeus catalogued the finch. One of the specimens turned out to be autistic and the crown was just a crown, but the taxonomy held, because the taxonomy is not falsifiable, that is what makes it a taxonomy. I have a desk for this. I have a magnifying glass. I have never felt more like a scientist. There is a second species, and this one we keep. An alien with five million dollars is not an alien. He is a guest. We printed him a card. It is gold. We are printing a Platinum one for the aliens with even more money, who may remain on the planet two hundred and seventy days a year and pay no tax on the wealth they made on other worlds. The website for this is the cheapest-looking website I have ever approved, and I approved the one with the saucer on it. The same agency that scans a gardener's forearm for gang signs scans a financier's bank statement for extraordinary ability. The statement always has it. The forearm never does. The species was never a people. The species is a price. In the old films the alien lands and says, take me to your leader. We have improved the line. Pay five million and we take you to ours. He golfs with him on Saturday. There was a film about this, and I am told the man who made it meant it as a warning, which is the recurring problem with the warnings. A drifter finds a pair of sunglasses, and through them he can finally see which people are the aliens, and it is the rich ones, the ones on the billboards telling everyone to obey and consume and reproduce and not think. I have a pair of those glasses, conceptually. I issue them at the tip line. But mine are tuned the other way. You put them on and the alien is never the man in the suit who paid five million to skip the line. The alien is always the man holding the leaf blower. The lenses cost a thousand dollars in advertising and they only point down. We have sold a great many pairs. You asked about the Men in Black. Yes. Regulation now. A Man in Black photographs poorly, and the witnesses would not stop filming us peel a woman off the sidewalk in daylight, so we issued the masks, and leadership's only note was that the masks tested well. We are no longer the cover-up of the abduction. We are the abduction. We skipped a step. Efficiency. Our communications team posted E.T. last summer. The bicycle. The moon. "Even E.T. knew when it was TIME TO GO HOME." I want to walk you through what happened in that meeting, because nobody stopped it. We chose the one film where the government is the villain. The men with the flashlights and the unmarked vans who hunt the small frightened alien hiding in a child's closet. That is us. We are the flashlights. We watched that movie as children and cried when the agents came, and then we grew up and became the agents and made the poster ourselves and scheduled it for nine a.m. The intern asked if we were the good guys in this one. We told her engagement was up forty percent. She has since been promoted. I built an app where you abduct yourself. CBP Home. You open it. You confirm you are the alien. You beam yourself off the planet and you save us the gas. And here is the part I cannot believe they approved. We *pay* you. A thousand dollars to vanish. We raised it to twenty-six hundred when the first price didn't move enough units. We are bidding against ourselves for your disappearance. Four-point-six stars. The one-stars are from users who got beamed mid-review. I keep the unfinished ones in a folder. I find them very moving. We opened a facility in a swamp. We ringed it with alligators and we called it that, on purpose, in the brochure. Then we opened a gift shop. Thirty dollars for the shirt. Twenty-seven for the hat. Fifteen for a set of koozies, so your beer stays cold while you celebrate the prison in the wetland. The fundraising email called it "gator-guarded, python-patrolled," a "one-way ticket to regret" for anyone who didn't self-deport in time. We sold the koozies to fund the swamp. The swamp funds the next swamp. I want you to sit with the fact that there is merchandise. The quota is three thousand a day. Stephen asked for it himself. Three thousand is not a number. It is a metabolism. The building is hungry by nine and we feed it Marco, who does the landscaping, and the building goes quiet, and by one it stirs again, and we find another Marco. There is always another Marco. That is the part I find beautiful. The supply is the point. The supply is everyone. The Secretary signs the warrants. She is very firm on one point, which she repeats in every briefing: the aliens, she warns, eat the pets. They are taking the dogs. I have read her book. In her book she takes a fourteen-month-old dog named Cricket to a gravel pit and shoots it, because it would not obey, and she writes this down herself, proudly, as a story about leadership. She wrote the part about the dog. She also warns us about the dogs. I have stopped trying to hold both sentences at once. I just file the warrant. The tip line was the masterpiece. "Report your neighbor" hit the shame ceiling. "REPORT SUSPICIOUS ALIENS" tested as a hobby. We handed the callers Roswell instead of a snitch's guilt, and the phones lit up like a saucer, and they hung up glowing, every one of them, like they'd finally seen the thing. They had. He coached the Tuesday team. He was at the bake sale. That is the horror we are selling you. The alien brought the orange slices. He was undocumented and luminous and gone by Tuesday. Roswell taught us the other half of the trade. In 1947 something fell in the desert and the government said: it was a weather balloon, nothing here, go home. That was the first administrative error, the founding one, the original sentence that says the thing you saw was not the thing you saw. We still use it. We have only reversed the polarity. In 1947 they saw a saucer and we called it a balloon. Now they see a father of three and we call it a saucer. The skill is identical. You simply decide in advance which truth the public is allowed to keep, and you hand them the other one, printed, official, with a seal. We did have one administrative error. We abducted a man a court had ordered us not to touch, dropped him on a planet called El Salvador, and called it clerical. A judge made us beam him back. So the DOJ stood up and warned the others: insist on a hearing and we will re-abduct you to the same planet. The Supreme Court said the aliens are entitled to due process. A very Earth opinion. We are appealing it to a higher sky. The planet has a prison, and the prison is the elegant part. In the film about the camp, the aliens are not killed. They are put somewhere they are not permitted to leave, while everyone agrees this is temporary, for their own protection, pending a status that never arrives. We built that. It is called CECOT and we rent it. A man goes in and the man does not come out, and the genius is that nothing has to happen to him, the room does the work, the room is the whole sentence. You remember the Men in Black had a small device. A flash, and the witness forgets the alien entirely. We have something better. We do not wipe the memory. We wipe the file. The man remembers everything, the cell, the flight, the day, all of it, in perfect detail, and it does not matter, because there is no document that admits he was here, and a memory without a file is just a story he tells in a language the form does not accept. The witness keeps the truth. We keep the paperwork. Only one of those is admissible. I learned that the flash was never the point. The point was always the filing cabinet. We run all of it on a spell from 1798. Two hundred and twenty-seven years old. Written for a war we are not in, against an enemy we have not declared. It works because nobody reads the small print on a curse. Storm Area 51 was a joke once. A hundred thousand people Naruto-running at a fence to free whatever was inside. I think about it daily. We're the ones inside the fence now. We kept the running. We just turned it around. We have a precedent we cite in the deck, proudly, on slide four. In 1954 the government ran a program of exactly this kind, and the program had an official name, and the official name was a slur. They printed the slur on the letterhead. They did not flinch. The President holds it up as the model, by name, at the rallies, and the crowd cheers the name. I admire the honesty of 1954 more than I can say. They did not need a saucer to make it palatable. They just used the word. We are the same operation with better art direction. The only thing we added was the costume. I love the callers. I want to say that plainly. For years they told each other a hidden cabal was running everything from the shadows, harvesting the innocent, and that one day the truth would come out. They were right. There is a cabal. It has a budget of a hundred and seventy billion dollars, the largest in the history of federal law enforcement, and it sits in this building, and I have a desk in it. And the people who spent a decade certain that shadowy elites were disappearing their neighbors now call our line, unpaid, to help the shadowy elites disappear their neighbors. They wanted to expose the conspiracy. We made them the staff. Do your own research, they said. They did. They found the gardener. The Department of War posted another tranche on the twenty-second. Saucers. Lights. A pilot's voice going thin. I read all of it. I want them to find one so badly. I want there to be a real one up there, a genuine visitor, something that actually came from somewhere else, because then, and only then, would a single creature in my files have been an alien. They never find it. The sky stays empty. The ground stays full. I have stopped attending the inter-agency sync. We were two departments looking for the same thing in two directions, and only one of us was ever going to be wrong, and it was the honest one. And here is the thing that keeps me at the window past dark. There was a real one. A rock from another star, the genuine article, the first verified object from outside the entire solar system, and a Harvard man went on television and said it might be a ship. An actual alien, possibly, inbound, free of charge, after sixty years of asking. We did not open a file. We could not arrest it. It had no forearm to read and no bank statement to approve. It was the only alien in America we had no use for, so we let it pass, and went back to the parking lot. Last winter the sky over New Jersey filled with lights nobody could name, and the whole government, every agency, every radar, looked up and said it did not know. The one time the unknown actually arrived, we had nothing. Down here I have never once said I do not know. That is the difference between their department and mine. They look up and find a question. I look down and have already decided the answer. Last week the President leaned over mid-briefing and asked if any of them were real. I told him the engagement was extremely real. He nodded. We do not break frame here. The frame is the only wall still standing. That, and the office fern. Nobody waters it. It will not die. The only thing in this building allowed to stay without papers. My plaque came Thursday. FIRST CONTACT, VISIONARY OF THE YEAR. Bold. Unapologetic. Unafraid. I lifted that off the homepage. It was written about one brave man telling the truth. I decided the man was me. I wrote it about me. I am the truth I declassified. I am the secret I warned you about. They walk among us, and I sign their mail. The counter is still live. Three million and climbing. I am told it will not be removed. We are not alone. We are just short a few landscapers. A few line cooks. A few nurses. And the entire night shift at the plant that makes the flag. Up. And to the right.

Peter Girnus 🦅

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