Podcast appearances and mentions of Peter Thiel

A sneak peek from The Builders with Walter Isaacson, the new podcast series from Kaleidoscope debuting on October 13. In this exclusive preview clip from Isaacson’s interview with Peter Thiel, Thiel calls Anthropic a “cult,” warns about the competitive threat from China, and argues that American AI companies need to hit the accelerator, not the brakes. Kaleidoscope co-founders Oz and Mangesh introduce the clip and preview what’s ahead on The Builders.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Erin Redwing joins Marty Bent to look back on two brutal months for Bitcoin after the ColdCard entropy vulnerability, AI-driven exploits, and the Hugging Face breach. They discuss why Bitcoin is the canary in the coal mine for AI security, the release of Kimi K3, AI safety fearmongering, effective altruism, Peter Thiel's Antichrist warning, the BIP 110 fork, and where Bitcoin goes from here. Erin also shares her astrological outlook for the rest of 2026. Erin's Website: https://www.erinredwing.com/ Erin on X: https://x.com/realizingerin Erin on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/realizingerin Erin on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@realizingerin The Bitcoin Playbook for Commercial Real Estate Owners & Investors: https://www.tftc.io/CRE STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/yHGkvYxdqT Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Block: Cash App: For a limited time, new customers can get $21 added to their balance. Just use code TFTC10 when you sign up, and send at least $5 to a friend in the first two weeks. Terms apply. Bitcoin services by Block, Inc. See the Bitcoin disclosures at cash.app/legal/podcast. Square: Visit http://square.com/go/tftc for up to $200 off eligible Square hardware. Bitkey: Use code TFTC10 for 10% off the new Bitkey. Aven https://www.aven.com/bitcoin CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Simple Mining https://www.simplemining.io/tftc Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/ Disclosure: Bitcoin services are provided by Block, Inc. Bitcoin services are not licensable activity in all U.S. states and territories, and not all services are available in all states. Bitkey is not available in New York. Block, Inc. operates in New York as Block of Delaware and is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Bitcoin is a non-deposit, non-bank product that is not FDIC insured and involves risk, including monetary loss. For additional information, see the Bitcoin disclosures: https://help.cash.app/btcdisclosures Get up to $200 off Square hardware when you sign up at http://square.com/go/tftc! #squarepartner. Offer expires December 31, 2026 at 11:59 pm PST. Offer for $40 off the cost of one Square Stand, $75 off the cost of one Square Terminal, $100 off the cost of one Square Handheld, or $200 off the cost of one Square Register, excluding applicable taxes. Limited to one discount per product type per seller account. Each code is limited to one redemption per account holder. Valid for new Square customers located in the US only. Offer not valid with guest checkout. Square reserves the right to modify, revoke or cancel the offer at any time. Offer cannot be combined with any other coupon. Void where prohibited, not redeemable for cash, and non-transferable. #squarepartner #blockpartner

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Harry Styles, Jürgen Klopp, Ted Lasso, Robert Habeck, Jackson Lamb, Tom und Bill Kaulitz - wer ist ein richtig guter Mann? Ist der Feminismus zu weit gegangen? Wie holen wir junge Kerle aus ihrer toxischen Einsamkeit? Und was hat es mit dem Ananas-Prinzip auf sich? Tristan Horx ist mit seinem neuen Buch "Die Zukunft der Männer" zu Gast bei Paul und Hajo Schumacher. Unsere Themen: Trump, Andrew Tate, Clavicular, Peter Thiel - gut aussehen, aber für wen? Die Jungs san am Oarsch, Oida. Wie undemokratisch ist Identitätspolitik? Schwarzlichtparties bei Martina. Porno Kills the Club. Algorithmische Spaltung und Entscheidungsparalyse. Hat die toxische Männlichkeit ihren Höhepunkt hinter sich? Dominanz heißt auch, die Schwachen zu schützen. Die große Sehnsucht nach dem Wir. Einsamkeit als Erlösmodell und die Monetarisierung des Privaten. Wie erobern wir die analoge Welt zurück? Lob dem Sportverein. Wenn das Privateste nicht mehr privat bleibt. Hauptsache, nicht cringe. Smartphone killt soziale Schutzräume. Plus: Blumen kann ich mir alleine kaufen. Folge 78.Shownotes:Tristan Horx: Die Zukunft der Männer - eine Generation zwischen Wutz und Utopie. Reclam, 192 Seiten.Die MutMacher auf steady unterstützenHier den kostenlosen MutMach-Newsletter abonnierenHier gehts direkt zu Suses Workshops Der MutMachPodCast auf InstagramPodcast Elefantenrunde mit Frank Stauss und HajoPauls Band Udo Butter und das Team mit allen AuftrittsterminenBücher:Suse SchumacherDie Psychologie des Waldes, Kailash Verlag, 2024Michael Meisheit + Hajo SchumacherLaufende Ermittlungen - großartige Krimi-Reihe mit dem Berliner Kommissar Peer Pedes.Band 1, 2 und 3 erscheinen bei Droemer Knaur.Kostenlose Meditationen für mehr Freundlichkeit (Metta) und Gelassenheit (Reise zum guten Ort) unter suseschumacher.deWir bedanken uns bei Markus C. Hurek für das tolle Coverfoto. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Die US-israelische Rüstungsfabrik Covenant geht in Leipzig an den Start, um Marschflugkörper zu produzieren. Die Einwohner erfuhren erst vor vier Wochen von dem Geheimdeal zwischen Privatiers und der Bundesregierung. Auch Techmilliardär Peter Thiel hat seine Finger wieder mit im Spiel.  Von Alexandra Nollok

On today's episode PFT and Big T break down J.J. McCarthy's latest trade to the NY Giants, preview the MLB Playoffs, and discuss all things College Football and NFL. Plus, they unpack the wild viral story of an F-16 flying over Chicago, dive into Mark Zuckerberg's latest headlines about AI, discuss a viral Auschwitz tourist story, and answer your Voicemails. Enjoy! (00:01:39) J.J. McCarthy (00:06:58) MLB Playoff Preview (00:14:12) College Football (00:23:14) F-16 Flying Over Chicago (00:26:58) NFL (00:31:19) College Football (cont.) (00:50:48) Mark Zuckerberg & AI (00:53:49) Auschwitz Tourist (00:59:21) Peter Thiel (01:11:07) Voicemails Order Pardon My Cheesesteak on https://pardonmycheesesteak.com and use code AWL for free delivery. Try QUO for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to https://Quo.com/MACROYou can find every episode of this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Prime Members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. For more, visit barstool.link/macrodosing

Peter Thiel says that if you're evil, maybe you're actually good. Brad Onishi (author of American Caesar) and Matthew D. Taylor (author of The Violent Take It by Force) break down the viral clip: what Thiel means by "bad" versus "evil," why he frames progress as an all-or-nothing choice, and how his Antichrist theology, technological accelerationism, and contempt for the "mimetic sheeple" shape his influence on J.D. Vance and the tech right.Then Rev. Mara Richards Bim, a Baptist pastor and plaintiff in the lawsuit against Texas's Ten Commandments classroom law, joins to explain why she calls the Texas version sacrilegious, how teachers and principals are resisting, and what gives her hope.Timestamps0:00 Intro1:11 The Thiel clip and first reactions4:16 Thiel's worldview: progress and the "middle class compact"9:51 The hubris of deciding for eight billion people11:37 Monarchism, mimetic desire, and Silicon Valley15:04 The Pope, AI, and the one-world-government argument17:03 Why Thiel rejects Hegel19:38 Why it matters: Thiel and J.D. Vance24:15 Decoding "bad," "evil," and "good"29:24 Thiel's Nashville Antichrist lectures32:09 Rev. Mara Richards Bim on the Texas Ten Commandments lawsuit57:03 Reason for hopeIf you enjoy our work, please subscribe.Paid subscribers get bonus content, ad-free listening, access to the entire 1k episode archive, an invite to our Discord community, and access to the Axis Daily Brief.https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...

Climate change narratives, energy policy, Canadian fuel prices, political controversies, UFO disclosure, and more in this wide-ranging roundup. The conversation moves from AI and climate debate to the hosts' arguments about taxation and oil, then into clips and stories about Peter Thiel, BC politics, and institutional trust.   To gain access to the second half of show and our Plus feed for audio and podcast please clink the link http://www.grimericaoutlawed.ca/support. For second half of video (when applicable and audio) go to our Substack and Subscribe. https://grimericaoutlawed.substack.com/ or to our Locals  https://grimericaoutlawed.locals.com/ or Patreon https://www.patreon.com/grimericaoutlawed   https://www.skool.com/audiobooks THE GRIMOIRE Audiobook Club and Library https://pegsandjokers.ca/ Family and Friends Cards and Pegs Boardgame online https://www.simulationmaps.com/#products Disaster Maps, Volcano Sim, Asteroid Sim, Shipwreck Map, UFO Map etc Support the show directly: https://open.spotify.com/show/2punSyd9Cw76ZtvHxMKenI?si=ImKxfMHgQZ-oshl499O4dQ&nd=1&dlsi=4c25fa9c78674de3 Watch or Listen on Spotify https://grimerica.ca/support-2/ Our Adultbrain Audiobook Podcast and Website: www.adultbrain.ca Check out our next trip/conference/meetup - Contact at the Cabin www.contactatthecabin.com Join the chat / hangout with a bunch of fellow Grimericans Https://t.me.grimerica grimerica.ca/chats   Discord Chats Darren's books www.acanadianshame.ca Sign up for our newsletter http://www.grimerica.ca/news InstaGRAM https://www.instagram.com/the_grimerica_show_podcast/ Purchase swag, with partial proceeds donated to the show www.grimerica.ca/swag ART - Napolean Duheme's site http://www.lostbreadcomic.com/ MUSIC Tru Northperception, Felix's Site sirfelix.bandcamp.com   Links to the stuff we chatted about: https://x.com/jasonjamesbnn/status/2104601116600344581?s=20 https://x.com/DeepLeaksHQ/status/2103644008547512382?s=20 https://x.com/JeffreyRWRath/status/2103860301699723420?s=20 https://x.com/ericweinstein/status/2103788481646305487?s=20 https://x.com/Juliedonuts/status/2103839051832778861?s=20 https://x.com/charliebcurran/status/2103597360932860121?s=20 https://x.com/DeepLeaksHQ/status/2103645646263906309?s=20 https://x.com/BGatesIsaPyscho/status/2103131460500701651?s=20 https://x.com/ConstitustionX/status/2103188612850516394?s=20 https://x.com/CanadaRoast/status/2101413197588893921?s=20 https://x.com/theisabelb/status/2102803747298546146?s=20 https://x.com/JoelValdezDOW/status/2099509358824481197?s=20 https://x.com/MrPool_QQ/status/2088956587515732031?s=20 https://x.com/jamescfox/status/2093772082341445735?s=20 https://x.com/wikileaksq/status/2104067810485846459?s=43%22%3Ehttps://x.com/wikileaksq/status/2104067810485846459?s=43%3C/a https://x.com/ShawnRyan762/status/2104632233327751596 https://x.com/the_astral_/status/2104577262058164476?s=43%22%3Ehttps://x.com/the_astral_/status/2104577262058164476?s=43%3C/a https://x.com/qjulianpaul/status/2104277474708222374?s=43%22%3Ehttps://x.com/qjulianpaul/status/2104277474708222374?s=43%3C/a https://www.facebook.com/reel/1756842109778185 https://x.com/omapproach/status/2104687493950103891?s=43%22%3Ehttps://x.com/omapproach/status/2104687493950103891?s=43%3C/a https://x.com/dandickspft/status/1999714731251355827?s=43%22%3Ehttps://x.com/dandickspft/status/1999714731251355827?s=43%3C/a     Timestamps 00:00 — Opening and this week's topics 02:10 — AI tools and the climate change debate 05:29 — Past climate predictions and climate messaging 10:19 — Trump, climate policy, and ESG 15:18 — The list of alleged failed climate predictions 19:30 — Amsterdam's restrictions on meat and fossil-fuel advertising 22:40 — Deindustrialization, immigration, and political priorities 26:10 — Canadian fuel prices, oil, and taxation 33:41 — Diesel costs and exporting energy 41:25 — Ukraine-related claims and alleged corruption 43:29 — Peter Thiel and the idea of "competent evil" 52:12 — Effective altruism and AI doom 56:22 — BC politics and the Kamloops controversy 61:31 — The "Hired Rabbis" segment 64:33 — John McAfee's former security chief 71:41 — UFO disclosure and UAP-related claims 79:23 — Quantum syntax grammar and a Greenland theory 86:03 — Art Bell's Area 51 caller 91:30 — Institutional trust and the episode's closing stories    

Das Schlussquartal wird zur Wette auf Krieg, Zinsen, Wahlen und Trump. Deffner hofft auf billigeres Öl, Zschäpitz setzt auf den Gewinnboom der Unternehmen und ein klares Ergebnis bei den Zwischenwahlen Anfang November. Doch was könnte die Jahresendrallye noch verhindern? Die beiden streiten über die Macht des Ölpreises und erklären, welche Aktien von KI-Agenten profitieren könnten – und wem die digitalen Helfer das Geschäftsmodell ruinieren. Außerdem: Zschäpitz' Begegnung mit Peter Thiel und Deffners Abrechnung mit der Berliner Enteignungsarithmetik. Am Freitag gibt es keinen Glotzcast: Deffner und Zschäpitz stehen um 15 Uhr live beim Alles-auf-Aktien-Summit auf der Bühne. Du möchtest mehr über unsere Werbepartner erfahren? Hier findest du alle Infos & Rabatte: https://linktr.ee/deffnerundzschaepitz DEFFNER & ZSCHÄPITZ sind wie das wahre Leben. Wie Optimist und Pessimist. Im wöchentlichen WELT-Podcast diskutieren und streiten die Journalisten Dietmar Deffner und Holger Zschäpitz über die wichtigen Wirtschaftsthemen des Alltags. Schreibt uns an: wirtschaftspodcast@welt.de Impressum: https://www.welt.de/services/article7893735/Impressum.html Datenschutzerklärung: https://www.welt.de/services/article157550705/Datenschutzerklaerung-WELT-DIGITAL.html

Zusammen mit Donald Trump und seiner "Make America great again"-Bewegung wollen Tech-Milliardäre wie Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos und andere "unsere Demokratien zerstören", sagen die Journalisten Roland Peters und Hannes Vogel. Was steckt dahinter? Moderation: Tobi Schäfer Von WDR 5.

Dave Rubin of "The Rubin Report" talks about Bill Maher shocking the "Real Time with Bill Maher" audience with his unexpected take on Donald Trump's record on lowering crime rates; "Club Random's" Bill Maher explaining to Roseanne Barr the exact moment he realized that the Democratic Party wasn't just supporting Democratic Socialism but communism; Bernie Sanders' tense moment with a Fox Business reporter over his draconian AI regulation plan that would carry 20 years in prison for breaking the law; Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel's chilling warning about the push for the one-world government that would be necessary to enforce true AI regulation and intentionally slow down artificial intelligence technology; UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood doubling down on importing more Muslim refugees into the UK with her plan to fast-track Palestinian and Afghan refugees being allowed to cross the UK border; Elon Musk's reaction to Democrat Tom Suozzi's open admission that he would grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants; and much more. Today's Sponsors: Kalshi - Download the Kalshi app and use code RUBINREPORT to get $25 when you trade $25 or go to https://kalshi.com/r/RUBINREPORT DISCLAIMER: 18+ only. Restrictions and eligibility requirements apply. Event contract trading involves risk and may not be suitable for all investors. Prices, values, and available markets may differ from those mentioned. For more information see kalshi.com/regulatory. Amble Health MedKit - Stay ready for whatever life throws at you with Amble Medkits. Use code RUBIN to get 10% off your kit, plus free shipping. Don't wait until you need it, get your Amble MedKit today. Disclaimer: Amble Kits are available by prescription only if deemed medically eligible by a licensed provider in your state. Go to http://joinamble.com/podcasts/rubin

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Bubba the Love Sponge Clem is a legendary radio broadcasting personality and currently hosts @TheBubbaArmy &  @DeadlyIntentionsShow on YouTube. SPONSORS https://butcherbox.com/danny - Get $20 off your first box, plus your choice of free ribeye, new york strip, or filet mignon in every box for a year. https://pplx.ai/danny - For a limited time only, our listeners can try Perplexity Computer FREE. https://blueprint.bryanjohnson.com - Use code DANNY for 20% off + free shipping. https://mengotomars.com - Get 50% off for life, free shipping, & 3 free gifts. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS @TheBubbaArmy @DeadlyIntentionsShow *NEW* DJP MERCH https://dannyjonespodcast.com Get paid to make clips from the show: https://discord.com/invite/dannyjones FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Bubba's recent meltdown 05:59 - Releasing Video Killed the Radio Star 07:21 - Peter Thiel & lawsuit financing 13:19 - The Romeo & Juliet Law 17:57 - Bubba's on-air acts of indecency 21:01 - The Butler shooting conspiracy 27:48 - Macklemore should've kept his mouth shut 33:05 - "Rain Man" breaks down the Iran War 41:38 - We used Netanyahu 48:21 - The U.S. Dollar crisis 52:46 - Stormy Daniels' 2007 Trump confession & Bill Clinton 57:11 - Bubba's call with Bill Clinton 01:03:40 - The lawyer who tried to extort Nike 01:07:05 - Howard Stern's wedding guest list 01:11:22 - Why Joe Rogan & Howard Stern don't get along 01:17:17 - The new cancel culture 01:20:55 - Gillette Stadium secret command center 01:21:29 - Geotargeting & monitoring online speech 01:25:00 - Shift from Woke 1 to Woke 2 01:28:09 - Kash Patels weird new FBI hiring policy 01:36:35 - Bubba's take on Lindsay Clancy 01:41:15 - Terry Schivo 01:45:42 - Bubba's friendship with Matt Cox 01:49:25 - Parenting & the modern school system 01:55:56 - Steroids, peptides & the 'fountain of youth' 01:58:19 - Call with Shane AKA "Concrete Clem" 02:01:39 - Metallica 02:07:33 - The TRUE life of a rock & roll star 02:11:30 - Bubba's 'self discovery' journey 02:18:49 - Bubba's long friendship with Tucker Carlson 02:30:08 - Bubba's best Hulk Hogan story 02:40:22 - "The Scientologists killed Hulk Hogan" 02:49:10 - Scientology owns Clearwater Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to The Daily Wrap Up, an in-depth investigatory show dedicated to bringing you the most relevant independent news, as we see it, from the last 24 hours (9/28/26). As always, take the information discussed in the video below and research it for yourself, and come to your own conclusions. Anyone telling you what the truth is, or claiming they have the answer, is likely leading you astray, for one reason or another. Stay Vigilant. !function(r,u,m,b,l,e){r._Rumble=b,r[b]||(r[b]=function(){(r[b]._=r[b]._||[]).push(arguments);if(r[b]._.length==1){l=u.createElement(m),e=u.getElementsByTagName(m)[0],l.async=1,l.src="https://rumble.com/embedJS/u2q643"+(arguments[1].video?'.'+arguments[1].video:'')+"/?url="+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+"&args="+encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify([].slice.apply(arguments))),e.parentNode.insertBefore(l,e)}})}(window, document, "script", "Rumble");   Rumble("play", {"video":"v7dxrti","div":"rumble_v7dxrti"}); Source Links (In Chronological Order): (19) vℹ️©️tory gℹ️n on X: "@VanessaBeeley @TLAVagabond https://t.co/8RE8437QMy" / X (11) Danny Haiphong on X: "If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, then it's probably a duck. This story is walking and talking like a US-UK-Israeli false flag to justify renewed strikes on Iran." / X Villager called 999 after seeing vans and ‘balaclava'd' men by RAF base | The Independent RAF Fairford terror plot ‘looking to do big damage', Donald Trump says | The Standard Counter-terror police arrest 'car bomb plot' suspects near RAF base that launched Iran strikes after member of public calls 999 | Daily Mail Online RAF Fairford suspects released on bail, head of counter-terror police says - BBC News Fuel2U Fuel 2 You MN — Mobile Fuel Delivery for Busy Lives (19) ColonelTowner-Watkins on X: "So NATO is going to launch drone attacks on their own countries and pretend Russia did it. Got it. #OperationGladio" / X (19) Sulaiman Ahmed on X: "JUST IN: IRAN PRESIDENT PEZESHKIAN SAYS ISRAEL MAY HAVE CARRIED OUT FALSE FLAG ATTACK ON SAUDI PIPELINES “We and Yemen had no involvement in the attack on Saudi Arabia's pipeline. It is not unlikely that Israel carried out this action in order to inflame tensions and fuel https://t.co/yx6706pY5Y" / X New Tab How Trump Swindled Americans and Sold Out The Country To Technocrats powermacuser1 on X: "Current state of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Trump appears to have abandoned it after spending over $14 million in taxpayer $. https://t.co/tYBjS3PYfz" / X Trump's false and misleading claims about the Reflecting Pool | AP News (6) The Tennessee Holler on X: "They are playing in our faces" / X (6) ThePatrioticBlonde™

durée : 00:03:23 - Les Matins de France Culture - par : François Saltiel - Peter Thiel, le patron libertarien de Palantir, reçoit en Allemagne le prix Axel Springer, un choix qui suscite la polémique dans une Allemagne qui vient de connaître la percée électorale de l'extrême droite. Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France

durée : 00:24:12 - La grande matinale - Giuliano da Empoli, écrivain et essayiste, publie "Le Fondateur" (Gallimard). Son nouveau roman raconte l'histoire du patron d'un empire de la tech, inspiré du libertarien Peter Thiel, entrepreneur américain sulfureux à la tête de Palantir. - équipe : Florence Paracuellos, Benjamin Duhamel, Clémentine Sabrié - invités : Giuliano da Empoli Essayiste, romancier et ancien conseiller politique de Matteo Renzi Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France

durée : 00:24:12 - Les interviews d'Inter - Giuliano da Empoli, écrivain et essayiste, publie "Le Fondateur" (Gallimard). Son nouveau roman raconte l'histoire du patron d'un empire de la tech, inspiré du libertarien Peter Thiel, entrepreneur américain sulfureux à la tête de Palantir. - équipe : Florence Paracuellos, Benjamin Duhamel, Clémentine Sabrié - invités : Giuliano da Empoli Essayiste, romancier et ancien conseiller politique de Matteo Renzi Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France

Unten Demonstranten, oben ein paar der einflussreichsten Tech-Gründer der Welt: Die Verleihung des Axel-Springer-Awards an Investor Peter Thiel hat für viel Wirbel gesorgt. Und er war nicht alleine nach Berlin gekommen. Auch Palantir-CEO Alexander Karp und Paypal-Gründer Max Levchin waren Thiel zuliebe gekommen. Vor rund 100 geladenen Gästen diskutierten sie über die Zukunft der Demokratie und die Veränderungen im Silicon Valley. Und mittendrin: OMR-Gründer Philipp Westermeyer. Der war zum ersten Mal bei der Preisverleihung – und durfte trotzdem direkt neben Thiel und Karp sitzen. Was er da erlebt hat, erzählt er hier im OMR Podcast.

In dieser Sonntagsfolge von “Alles auf Aktien” reden wir mit unserem Lieblings-Silicon-Valley-Insider. Nie war es spannender, zu erfahren, was gerade vor sich geht, im Tal der Träume. Oder sind es etwa Albträume? Denn darum geht es natürlich. Wir schauen auf die KI‑Untergangsszenarien der Tech-Eliten und was hat es mit der neuen Armageddon-Sitte beim Dinner auf sich? Es geht um die US-Angst vor dem Sozialismus, die neuen Tempel des Bösen und die Mathematik, die ihren Sonderstatus verliert. Außerdem erklärt unser Gast, warum er die deutsche Dämonisierung von Peter Thiel für falsch hält und was dessen Einstieg bei einer Firma auslösen kann. Zum Schluss wird es ganz konkret fürs Depot: Unser Stammgast nennt seine drei ultimativen Jahrhundertaktien, einen unterschätzten deutschen Titel – und den beruhigenden Gedanken, 500 amerikanische Chefs für sich arbeiten zu lassen. Ein Gespräch mit Ludwig Ensthaler.

Air Date: 9/26/2026 Today we explore the layers of chaos surrounding the AI industry, including the idealistic nerds-turned-nazis, the grift, bubble, and doom-marketing business model, and what people are doing to fight back. Full Show Notes Transcript BestOfTheLeft.com/Support (Members Support and Get No Ads!) Everything in one place! (Support, contact, follow, books + merch) TOP TAKES KP 1: Do Silicon Valley Billionaires Want to End Democracy? - Political Breakdown - Air Date 8-14-26 KP 2: The AI Bubble Is Bigger And More Dangerous Than You Think Part 1 - The Tea with Myriam François - Air Date 9-11-26 KP 3: OpenAI's Math Battle - Elena OnOffline - Air Date 9-9-26 KP 4: Muskism Is the New Fordism with Ben Tarnoff & Quinn Slobodian - Tech Won't Save Us - Air Date 5-7-26 KP 5: Monologue: Jacob Coxon and the AI Safety Grift - Better Offline - Air Date 9-10-26 KP 6: The Real AI Jobs Apocalypse - Blood in the Machine - Air Date 9-4-26 KP 7: AI Has Ruined the Internet - Adam Conover - Air Date 8-31-26 KP 8: You Don't Hate AI Enough. - Nash Keune - Air Date 9-20-26 (01:00:11) NOTE FROM THE EDITOR AI Turned "Just a Little Bit More" Into a Business Model My commentaries on YouTube - Share them! DEEPER DIVES (01:12:47) SECTION A: THE NERD REICH - WHO THEY ARE AND WHAT THEY BELIEVE A1: We Uncovered The Master Plan That Peter Thiel Doesn't Want You To See - More Perfect Union - Air Date 6-29-26 A2: Valerie Veatch: Ghost in the Machine — AI as Eugenics - Pivot to AI - Air Date 9-11-26 A3: The 'End Times Fascists' of AI - Blood in the Machine - Air Date 9-13-26 A4: Silicon Valley's Dark Future Is Almost Here - Michael Burns - Air Date 9-2-26 A5: "The Nerd Reich": Author Gil Durán on Big Tech Fascism, Peter Thiel, JD Vance & the War on Democracy - Democracy Now! - Air Date 8-17-26 (01:58:16) SECTION B: WHAT AI IS ACTUALLY DOING TO US B1: The Al Question No One Wants to Ask Part 1 - Struthless - Air Date 6-9-26 B2: "Deep Unlearning": Timnit Gebru on AI Hype, Ethics & Algorithmic Racial Bias - Democracy Now! - Air Date 8-13-26 B3: The Al Question No One Wants to Ask Part 2 - Struthless - Air Date 6-9-26 B4: Never Learn Again! AI Will Do It For You - Harland Spinks - Air Date 8-31-26 B5: Cybersecurity Has An AI Doomer Problem. - Marcus Hutchins - Air Date 9-15-26 B6: AI Expert: A 10% Extinction Risk Is "Way Too Low" - W/ Nate Soares - Owen Jones - Air Date 9-10-26 (02:44:18) SECTION C: THE GRIFT, THE BUBBLE, THE DOOM MARKETING C1: Is AI The Terminator Or The Big Short? - The Lever - Air Date 9-15-26 C2: The AI Bubble Is Bigger And More Dangerous Than You Think Part 2 - The Tea with Myriam François - Air Date 9-11-26 C3: Slow Down Your AI Expectations! - PissedMagistus - Air Date 9-20-26 C4: Why Tech Can't Determine Our Future - Side Burns - Air Date 9-10-26 (03:06:54) SECTION D: FIGHTING BACK - WORKERS, COMMUNITIES, ALTERNATIVES D1: Tech Workers of the World, Unite (ft. JS Tan, Clarissa Redwine) - This Machine Kills - Air Date 9-3-26 D2: Why I Think I'm a Luddite... and I'm Pretty Sure You Are, Too - Hello Tomorrow Podcast - Air Date 8-18-26 D3: How Mass Layoffs Changed Working in Tech with Clarissa Redwine & JS Tan - Tech Won't Save Us - Air Date 8-27-26 D4: Government Is Putting AI Before People and the Planet with Matt Haugen - Tech Won't Save Us - Air Date 8-13-26 D5: Why We Can't Prevent an A.I. Crisis... and Shouldn't Want to - Hello Tomorrow Podcast - Air Date 9-8-26   Produced by Jay! Tomlinson Visit us at BestOfTheLeft.com Listen Anywhere! BestOfTheLeft.com/Listen Follow BotL: Bluesky | Mastodon | Threads | X Like at Facebook.com/BestOfTheLeft Contact me directly at Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com

JOIN PATREON FOR EARLY UNCENSORED EPISODE RELEASES: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey CLIPPERS DISCORD: https://discord.gg/8QmWEKJ3BT NEWSLETTER: https://juliandoreypodcast.beehiiv.com/get-julians-top-10-books FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY IG: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://x.com/juliandorey FOLLOW JOEY DEEF IG: https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ X: https://x.com/TokeMalone JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 - Joey Deef's dirty text 0:59 - Interesting person rolled through 2:22 - When 3 Letter Agency Guys hit the media 3:22 - Jim Erdman's backstory in the Deep State 5:52 - “Why are you here?” 8:16 - Confronting Jim on CIA & the Media 10:14 - Peter Thiel's new Palantir Overlord Tool 14:34 - Christopher Nolan Predicted Palantir 18:17 - Palantir Co-Founder's Homeless Crisis “Fix” (It's Bad) 20:46 - The Way the Technocrat Elites think 23:02 - The Many Contradictions of Elon Musk 27:07 - Elon Musk's Very Strange Odyssey w/ AI 33:42 - Elon Musk's Future Dystopian World He Wants to Create 39:28 - Kylie Jenner's St. Tropez Vlog 44:46 - “Let them eat cake” 46:25 - Julian Explains The Greatest Theory of All Time 59:27 - Why the Elites do not get it and break “The Theory” 1:00:19 - Netanyahu's AUDACITY at UN 1:01:51 - Netanyahu's Disgusting 9/11 Comparison 1:05:39 - Netanyahu defends his own t*rrorists 1:08:57 - Joey Deef pulls stats on Settler Violence 1:13:23 - Netanyahu Threatens the UN 1:15:52 - Julian Claps Back at Bibi 1:18:10 - Netanyahu declares war on a Streamer & a Mayor 1:18:50 - Hillary Clinton Weighs in on October 7th 1:21:08 - The Jordanian King & Joby Warrick 1:24:05 - Jordanian King on accepting Gaza Refugees 1:25:11 - Jordanian King Shreds Netanyahu at UN 1:26:59 - Jared Kushner's End Times Hint? 1:28:56 - Elites planning to escape? 1:31:07 - The right way to take back power 1:33:38 - It's getting weirder out here CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 481 - Julian Dorey Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Abby and Patrick welcome back returning guest Adrian Daub. The occasion is Adrian's latest book, What Tech Calls Governing. A follow-up to his 2020 book What Tech Calls Thinking, an intellectual history of Silicon Valley and critique of tech culture, What Tech Calls Governing unpacks subsequent developments and continuities that go deeper than pundits' loose talk of a “vibe shift.” Indeed, as Adrian explains, recent years have seen Big Tech abandon the rhetoric of not being “evil” and promises of progressive uplift in favor of a rhetoric of inevitability, brazen collaboration with right-wing actors, and vague appeals to half-baked “longterm” utilitarianism. Adrian, Abby, and Patrick reflect on the distinctively gendered aspects of these developments, from the public antics of high-profile tech titans like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk to deeper logics of contempt for vulnerability and the celebration of dominance. Along the way, they explore questions of exhaustion, embarrassment, male homosociality, creepiness, narcissism, the indignities of middle age, generational anxieties, and more.References include:Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls GoverningAdrian Daub, What Tech Calls ThinkingPre-order Adrian's forthcoming book, Project 1933: Fascism Then and NowAdrian's podcast, In Bed With The RightFriedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of MoralsNovalis, The Novices of SaisAlbert Burneko, “I Don't Think David Brooks Is Okay, You Guys”Anna Wiener, Uncanny ValleyKate Manne, "A Culture Hooked on Generative AI is a Culture that Misses Female Sycophants" Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you've traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Find us online:http://www.ordinaryunhappiness.comX: @UnhappinessPodInstagram: @OrdinaryUnhappinessPatreon: http://www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessTheme song:Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxOProvided by Fruits Music

As Trump enters office for the second time, his connections to members of the Knights of Malta make for an extremely dangerous situation in the Middle East, with the prospect of a regional war a very real possibility. His connections to Peter Thiel and Eric Prince only further the speculation that he is under their control. The Orange King setting out on a Crusade to conquer the Muslim savages on behalf of the American Empire and the private mercenary firms. William Ramsey explains the ideology of the Knights of Malta, and what victory looks like for this unusual group of about 13,000 extremely powerful and wealthy people spread throughout the world. Their ability to keep the plans secret has enabled them to continue for the past 926 years in relative obscurity and hidden away from the general public.---Guest: William Ramseyhttps://www.williamramseyinvestigates.com/---Charlie's New Book:The Octopus Of Population Control - Paperback, Kindle, & AudiobookMacroaggressionswww.Macroaggressions.io | Merch Store | Link TreeVideo Channel: YouTubeActivist Post: Newsletter Sign UpAudiobooks: Hypocrazy | The Octopus of Global ControlSupport Our SponsorsReplace Your Mortgage: www.WipeOutYourMortgageNow.comGround Luxe Grounding MatsC60 Power | Promo Code: MACROChemical Free Body | Promo Code: MACROWise Wolf Gold & SilverLegalShield: www.DontGetPushedAround.comEMP Shield | Promo Code: MACROChristian Yordanov's Health ProgramAbove PhoneThe Dollar Vigilante

Last week, Hightower had the absolute pleasure of appearing on Tavis Smiley's live radio talk show—a lot of great laughs, and a lot of good ground covered! From the Texas races, to America at 250, to the idea that fundamental fairness is a sense all humans share, Tavis and Hightower went deep. Tavis and his team have given us permission to share it with you here, and we're so grateful—he's also just started his own Substack newsletter, and we encourage you to subscribe to one of the greats of American media at tavissmiley.substack.com. You can also listen live on KBLA 1580 daily, and subscribe to his podcast. —dzTranscriptEdited lightly for clarityPart 1Tavis Smiley: Tavis Smiley, glad you're with us in the second hour of our program here today.Yesterday, we stepped into what I call the Elders' Skybox to talk to Dr. Johnette Cole. She was absolutely amazing yesterday. If you missed that conversation with Johnnetta Cole yesterday, I encourage you to check out the podcast, now posted. She, of course, is the legendary, the iconic, first African American woman to be president of Spelman. But she's covered so much ground in her amazing career, and she joined us yesterday on the show. And Johnnetta Cole still got it. I mean, she was just blazing yesterday. So if you missed the conversation with Johnnetta Cole yesterday, I encourage you, you will not be disappointed. Check out the podcast, now up, of our dialogue with Dr. Cole yesterday.So we stepped into the Elders Skybox again today to talk to our friend and brother Jim Hightower, the legendary talk show host down in Texas. I quote him oftentimes. When you hear me say that the only thing you find in the middle of the road is a dead armadillo, that was Jim Hightower years ago, and I've never forgotten that line from all those years ago. You can't be middle of the road. We were just talking about that in our hour with Dr. Kaye Wise Whitehead about Hakeem Jeffries and some of these Democrats who, on a number of issues, still want to occupy the center, the middle of the road. That is not where one needs to be, especially right about now. Pick a side. Pick a side is my point. And that was Jim Hightower's advice many, many years ago. I never forgot when he said it, and I've held on to it all these years.I invited him on today to talk about this hot Texas Senate race, but more broadly to get his take, as a longtime progressive, on the march that we are witnessing in real time by these progressives after decades of being in the wilderness. With all that said, I'm honored to welcome Jim Hightower to this program. Jim, how are you, sir?Jim Hightower: I'm doing great, Tavis, and all the greater because I get to visit with you.Tavis Smiley: It's my honor to have you on this program. Thank you for those kind words. I meant what I said earlier about having listened to you. I'm at that age now. I just turned 62 a couple of days ago, and I've been at this, what, 35 years. My mom teases me about it, but people come on the show all the time: “Mr. Smiley, I grew up listening to you, I grew up watching you.” So I'm at that age now where I'm getting that. And this is funny, because I can say that to Jim Hightower now. I grew up listening to him and watching him, and so I'm thrilled to have him on this program.Let me just start with this, broadly speaking. I've asked this question of other guests. I've got two minutes now, we've got the rest of the hour when we come forward, but in these first two minutes, I'm asking you the same question I've asked of others. We are inside that eight-week sprint from Labor Day to Election Day. How are you feeling?Jim Hightower: I am feeling more upbeat than I have been in years about Texas politics. Our party has finally come alive down here, as you just indicated. We've had too many corporate centrists trying to dominate our party, thinking we can fool the people if we just tiptoe around our progressivism, rather than recognizing that people themselves are progressive. And if we talk to them in that kind of language, they might respond to us in a more favorable way than they have in the past, or respond at all.I would point out, first of all, Tavis, that Texas is not a right-wing state. It is not a Republican state. It is a non-voting state. And it has not been voting because the Democratic Party, my party, has been over in the ditch somewhere, trying not to be discovered, rather than recognizing that most people are quite progressive. I think of it in terms of my own father, who kept up with politics, but he was not political, particularly. He didn't know he had a political philosophy, but he did, and it was expressed to me many times in these words. He said, “Jim, everybody does better when everybody does better.” And that is what the Democratic Party is supposed to represent.And so that spirit is coming back within the Democratic Party. We have it with James Talarico running for Senate, Gina Hinojosa running for governor, but also let us not forget those down-ballot candidates, who can make such a difference in a campaign. I've been one of those myself, so I can attest to it. And we have a terrific lineup this year, including Clayton Tucker running for agriculture commissioner, a position that most people wouldn't pay a whole lot of attention to until you realize, wait a minute, if you eat, you are involved in agriculture. And we need to make that political as well as edible.Tavis Smiley: Love it. He's already on a roll. That is the Jim Hightower that I grew up listening to. He's wise, he drops these one-liners; as we say these days, he's dropping bars. I love his father's edict that everybody does better when everybody does better. It's so simple. But I want to give him some time to unpack this. I want to interrogate this notion that people themselves are progressive. People themselves are progressive. That line resonated with me; I suspect it did with you as well. I'll let him unpack that and a great deal more. I'm glad to have Jim Hightower for the hour on Tavis Smiley.Tavis Smiley, and longtime progressive activist, legendary talk show host, bestselling author Jim Hightower. So we've stepped into the Elders Skybox to tap into his wisdom in this hour as we are hurtling inexorably toward Election Day on Tuesday, November 3rd. Wanted to check in with him on some national issues, but certainly everybody's watching this Senate race in Texas. I talk to my friends down there all the time, and they are so excited about turning Texas blue. You heard Jim Hightower say a moment ago that Texas is not a Republican state, it's not a red state, it's a non-voting state. I'll let him unpack that as we move through this hour.But just some quick updates here. So you saw the Republican convention, that two-day farce they had down in Texas not long ago. Since that convention, a new poll has come out about the race in Texas. Interestingly, the survey happened on September 13th. That was Sunday, my birthday. And it's good news for James Talarico. The latest poll, this is the SoCal Strategies poll, shows Talarico leading Paxton 50 percent to 45 percent. It's a five-point margin. There had been a two-point lead by Paxton over Talarico. It's fascinating. So before the convention, Paxton was leading Talarico by two points in Texas. Post the convention, it flips. Talarico is now leading Paxton by five points. Not sure what Ken Paxton did or said at that convention that made these numbers flip. Obviously it's very, very tight, and these polls are snapshots in time. We still have weeks to go before Election Day. We'll let Jim Hightower unpack a bit more about the tightness of this race in Texas in this hour.But I want to start right now, Jim, where we left off moments ago, and that is with your suggestion that people are themselves a great deal more progressive than we acknowledge or give them credit for. We've got time. Unpack that for me.Jim Hightower: Well, just go back to your childhood. The very first political expression of a child, maybe at two years old, is “That's not fair.” That is a powerful political sentiment, and it's within all of us. And that's what we're seeing today. The unfairness of the billionaires with their data centers invading our communities. The unfairness of the destruction of voting rights, period. Not just the Voting Rights Act, but voting rights. The unfairness of economic plutocracy, really, and just a general unfairness that pervades our society, including the election itself.The idea that money can control. That happened to Texas, just as it did nationally, in the 1980s, when Tony Coelho, a member of Congress from California, decided that the Democrats didn't need to have all this grassroots stuff. We could just get money from rich people and throw it at television ads, and then we could compete with the Republicans. And the powers that be in the Democratic Party here in Texas agreed with that. So they began to shift away from what Ann Richards and myself and Jim Mattox and Garry Mauro and other good, solid Democrats were winning elections with: a focus on the grassroots people of our state. That got abandoned. Instead they turned to money.And when you turn to money, I can tell you, if you get a corporate check, written on the back of it is the corporate agenda. And they're going to cash that check, not you. That is what happened to Texas. The Democrats quit being Democrats because, well, we don't want to upset those money people, so we'll just tone down our message. And by toning down the message, we tone down our public support, our people's support. If we weren't standing for them, why would they stand for us? And so that's what happened. Our solid Democratic constituencies, which were farmers, working-class folks, teachers, environmentalists, didn't hear themselves in the Democratic message. So they quit voting. It's not that they turned Republican.We consistently had among the top one or two worst voting records in the country in the state of Texas. We have the lowest turnout in our country. Ken Paxton, you just mentioned, is now running for the U.S. Senate on the Republican ticket. Paxton got 68 percent of the Republican primary election that made him their nominee. Sixty-eight percent, boy, that sounds good. He must be very popular, until you realize that is 3.4 percent of the voters of Texas. That's who nominated him. That's his basic support: 3.4 percent. Can we not get 3.5 percent? Well, maybe if we began to organize and mobilize and strategize and do something a little stronger than we had been doing.And that's the good news in Texas. That's what has changed this election cycle over previous ones: our Democratic Party, with a new party chair, and a dynamic bunch of candidates running for statewide office and local office as well. We used to have 50 counties in our state that had no Democratic Party chair, much less a Democratic committee. We had state legislative district after district that had no Democratic contender in it. So we weren't even running. But this year we do. We have candidates, good candidates, in all of those districts. We have vibrant party building in every county in the state. You have to have the infrastructure. It's not just handsome candidates like myself, or smart and sassy people, that make the difference. It is grassroots, fundamentally. And if you abandon the grassroots, then there's no one to appeal to.Part 2Tavis Smiley: Let me ask you this. You said a few things, and I want to go back to them right quick. You're on a roll, and that's what he does every day, and I love it. I just have to keep up with him. Let me start with the money. No naiveté here, but my sense is, even though we've seen efforts, I think of McCain-Feingold, other efforts we've seen over the years, my sense is that at this point that horse has left the barn, and I can't imagine how we get money out of our politics. Citizens United, I can do this all day long, as you could, Jim Hightower. But that trade-off that Democrats made to get access to that money, there's no 180 on this. I mean, the Democratic Party is so broke now, as you know. The national Democratic Party is so broke, they've been borrowing money. So even though your indictment about the money in our politics is spot on, can you imagine any way to get money out of our politics at this point?Jim Hightower: Yes, I can, which is to go to the people with it. It is the most popular polling issue in America and has been for some time: getting corporate money out of politics. It's up at the 90 percent level, including something like 75 percent of Republicans who want to get this corporate money out of our system. So we have the base of support, but we have to have a politics that goes out there and collects that base. And that means running on it again. Our party nationally has quit running on that issue. So we've abandoned one of the very best issues we have, an issue of abject plutocracy over democracy, money over people.And that is what's beginning to change. That's why Talarico is up there, running as our Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate. He has raised a ton of money, outraised Paxton himself, because he's getting small-dollar donations from people who are mad as hell about money in politics and how government serves money, not people. And again, Clayton Tucker, running for agriculture commissioner, has a theme that says to beat money power, you have to have people power. You have to organize people against organized money. That is a winning topic, and candidate after candidate around the country this time are beginning to grasp that and make hay with it.Tavis Smiley: Let me ask you this. The other thing you said, I want to come back to it. You're saying so much that's just jumping out at me. I want to come back to this notion of fundamental fairness. I find myself time and time again over the course of my career, Jim, on any number of issues, making the point that it's ultimately about fundamental fairness. Pick the issue, and my moral stance on so many of these issues is that it's ultimately about what I term fundamental fairness.And I loved your suggestion that one of the first things that comes out of our mouths as kids... I don't know where we get this, but when you said it, I smiled. I'm sure every parent listening to this program right now smiled. We've all heard kids say, “That's not fair. That's not fair.” I don't even know where that comes from, but we've all heard babies say that line. So I'm glad you used that.I'm wondering whether or not, in this moment, you believe that everyday people in this country care about fundamental fairness. And before you answer, here's my point. I think that we've become more nativist for a lot of reasons. People are turning inward, they're lashing outward. I'm not sure that we actually believe in meritocracy anymore. We see Donald Trump and the big grift. We see him not playing the game by any set of rules that speaks to any kind of fairness. We see the Supreme Court putting its thumb on the scale in favor of Donald Trump too often. We see a Congress that's doing nothing; they're letting Donald Trump run roughshod. In the legislative branch, the executive branch, or the judicial branch, I don't see any semblance of fairness. Tell me whether or not you believe that everyday people in this nation still believe in the notion. Never mind what we say as a two-year-old: as adults, do we believe in fundamental fairness?Jim Hightower: Yes, we do. And in every case that you mentioned there, Trump being a sleaze, Congress not taking any action, the Supreme Court being a corporate subsidiary, et cetera, their popularity has declined in direct proportion to their abandonment of those values of fairness. That still is within the people. We don't appeal to it. For the most part, we've not had a politics nationwide that appeals to that fairness issue. But again, I think it is so fundamental that it is the core of reestablishing a people's democracy in our country: just to focus on that fundamental issue of fairness.You know, again, back to my upbringing in the little town of Denison, Texas. My parents taught egalitarianism. They didn't know what that word was. Probably couldn't spell it, you know. But they understood it. What they said to me was, “Nobody is better than you, and you're not any better than anybody else.” Again, those are powerful moral sentiments that are deeply imbued, I think, in the human experience.And you see it as people rebel against the privatization of our schools, as people rebel against the monopolization of our food economy, our energy economy, any basic economy you want to talk about, controlled by a handful of billionaires. You see it in the public disgust with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos and these sorts of billionaires who seem to think that because they've got money, they've got brains, and they can just run things. But you can't run over the American people. You know, Lincoln said it: you can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but not all the people all the time. And I think those people are on the move.And again, if we have a politics that appeals to “we're going to be a unified country that believes in egalitarianism, that believes in fairness, that believes in economic justice, social justice,” then people will respond. They won't respond to those words, but they will respond to the reality that you put forward. Here's what we mean by that.Part 3Tavis Smiley: I hear it, I hear it. Jim Hightower, still on fire all these decades later. As I said earlier, in case you've just tuned in, people tell me all the time, “I grew up listening to you, I grew up watching you,” and I can say that about Jim Hightower, and now you see where I got it from. So much of the way I approach these issues I learned from Jim Hightower. He just speaks plain. I call it KISS MIP: keep it simple, make it plain. KISS MIP, keep it simple, make it plain. I love his parents' edict that everybody does better when everybody does better. There's a reason why he is the legendary Jim Hightower. You see why I want him on this program. I hope when I achieve his age, my mind is still as sharp as his and still on point the way his is. I am honored to have another half hour with Jim Hightower when we come forward on Tavis Smiley.I just saw the numbers. People are signing up by the hundreds to join us on Saturday, October 3rd. I'm inviting you once again, right now: mark your calendar. This is history in the making, the California Voices Town Hall and Ballot Forum, live from L.A., 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. All the candidates are showing up, and you should too. The event is free, but you must register. Go to KBLA1580.com right now and get your seat. California Voices, Saturday, October 3rd. Come be a part of history, brought to you by KBLA Talk 1580 and the Community Voter Education Project.And this is what I call wisdom speaking. Wisdom speaking. I am honored to be in conversation with the legendary, the iconic talk show host Jim Hightower, New York Times bestselling author, syndicated columnist, who has his own Substack called the Hightower Lowdown that I encourage you to sign up for: the Hightower Lowdown on Substack, by Jim Hightower. He's still dropping bars as often as he can. And again, I'm just thrilled to have him on this program for the hour. In case you missed the first half hour, you missed a good one. I love this homespun wisdom that he's sharing with us. There are thankfully a few more minutes to go in this dialogue, but check out the podcast of the entire conversation, posted later this evening, if you missed any of the brilliance of Jim Hightower in this first half hour.I want to play a clip for you. Jim and I were talking a little bit ago about the Republican convention, the midterm convention, the first time in 50-plus years that somebody did one of these in the midterms. And it was in Texas, of course, in Dallas. James Talarico is running for Senate in Texas as a Democrat against Ken Paxton. He didn't go to the convention, but post the convention, Talarico got a bump. Typically the guy featured at the convention gets a bump. Didn't work that way. Paxton did not get a bump. Post the convention, the poll indicates that Talarico is now leading Paxton in Texas by five points.If you were listening earlier, you heard Jim Hightower say that Texas is not a red state, not a Republican state, it's a non-voting state. And when you break down the numbers, as he did so brilliantly earlier, you'll see that Texas really is a non-voting state. I was thinking, when Jim was making that point, that if we did the data on every state, we may find out that most of these 50 states are not blue or red. They're all non-voting states. It ain't just Texas. I think Jim is on to something. We should stop this red and blue nonsense, even the purple nonsense, and just call them non-voting states. Jim Hightower once again is giving us something to think about.But Talarico gets a bump out of their convention. He goes up. He's up by five points right now. So all of my friends in Texas are excited about the chance for Texas to turn blue this time around. We will see if Talarico can pull that off.But back to that convention. I want you to listen very carefully. I'm just setting this up now. There was a heckler at this convention when Ted Cruz was speaking. And maybe heckler is the wrong word, because in the Black church we say you've got your amen corner. So I'm not sure he's a heckler as much as he is an amen corner for Ted Cruz, who did nothing to chin-check this guy, to stop this guy from what he was saying repeatedly while Ted Cruz was speaking. Cruz heard it loud and clear. You can hear it on the tape. And at no point did Ted Cruz stop to correct him. But listen to Ted Cruz, and just listen very carefully. You're going to hear it two or three times; see if you can't pick it out for yourself. Give it to me, Miles.Ted Cruz (audio clip): When Mamdani says he wants to seize the means of production, he means it. When Abdul El-Sayed says he has a quote “obligation to comply with Sharia law,” he means it. And when James Talarico says he wants to dismantle capitalism, he means it.Tavis Smiley: Have Miles play it one more time. I want you to hear it now. I'll tell you exactly what you should have heard. Every time he calls out the name of Mamdani, then Abdul El-Sayed, then James Talarico, there's a guy standing not too far from Ted Cruz who yells out, “He should be shot.” Mamdani: “He should be shot.” Abdul El-Sayed: “He should be shot.” James Talarico: “He should be shot.” Now listen again; see if you hear it.Ted Cruz (audio clip, replayed): When Mamdani says he wants to seize the means of production, he means it. When Abdul El-Sayed says he has a quote “obligation to comply with Sharia law,” he means it. And when James Talarico says he wants to dismantle capitalism, he means it.Tavis Smiley: Going back, Jim Hightower, to all of the pronouncements made after the death, the murder, of Charlie Kirk, and now on national television, at a Republican convention, you have someone yelling three times, no less, “He should be shot, he should be shot, he should be shot,” and ain't nobody said nothing about it, Jim Hightower.Jim Hightower: Yes, the silence is the evil. And that's all about Trump. You know, almost no Republican will stand up and say Trump is just full of it. He is espousing hatred, he is espousing misogyny, he is espousing racism, he's espousing xenophobia. He's espousing everything that America is against. Everything America stands for is being rejected by Ted Cruz and Ken Paxton and Donald Trump, et cetera. You know, I heard on TV recently, Tavis, some Republican saying about Ted Cruz, “Well, you know, sometimes Ted is his own worst enemy.” And I said, “Not while I'm alive, he's not.”We have to take on these people. We progressives can't just say, “Well, they're just talking.” No, they're not. They're spewing a doctrine of hatred and of violence, really, as you just portrayed in that amazing work of audio technology that you pulled off. It's very, very telling. And again, you know, I keep coming back to the positive side of it. That is not America. That's what gets portrayed most, but that is not who we are.Part 4Tavis Smiley: Not who we are. You see why I love Jim Hightower. I mean, he said Ted's his own worst enemy? Not as long as I'm living. I love, love, love Jim Hightower. All right, and that's why I invited him on this program for an hour. Let me circle back, Jim, to something else you said earlier, and actually I opined on it myself. I thought about what you said during the break. Based on your analysis and based on your framing, Texas ain't the only non-voting state. So why are we stuck on this red, blue, sometimes purple narrative when the truth is that all of these states are non-voting states?Jim Hightower: Yes. Well, the media, the political consultants, they're the ones who drew this red-blue color map on us. And it is not true. It has never been true. I've got a great story from my campaigning days of going into an area with people who are supposedly right-wing, and being able to talk to them. And we have candidates today doing that. Talarico is doing it, Clayton Tucker is doing it, Gina Hinojosa is doing it: going into areas where people have been told, “You're right-wing,” and they're saying, “Wait a minute, we like what this person is saying. Can't we talk about that?” And so we just have to keep saying it. But that requires, Tavis, that we go back to grassroots people politics again, to where we're talking to the people, not talking through consultants and PR people.You know, I'll tell you, today I'm sitting in my kitchen in Austin, Texas. But I live on the south side of Austin, and we're a little more irreverent over here. We're just a little more spunky. In fact, our slogan over here is “We're all here because we're not all there.”Tavis Smiley: I love Austin, and I'm glad to know that you are in that part of town. As a matter of fact, Austin's my favorite city in Texas. I didn't realize that until 25, 30 years ago, when I started going to the Texas Book Festival, one of the best book festivals in the country. I've been honored to be invited to speak there a number of times over the course of the 24 or 25 books I've written. I've been going to the Texas Book Festival for years. It's in Austin, the state capital. And I remember the first time I went there, I wanted to know where Barbara Jordan sat. That's what I wanted to know. In what seat did Barbara Jordan sit, before she went to Congress, of course? I wanted to find that out. But I've been to Austin a number of times over the years, and I like Austin. It's my favorite city in Texas. I didn't know that's where Jim was today, but I'm glad to know he's there.When we come forward... We've been talking about Texas, and of course a lot of national issues, and I don't want to color this any more than this. I want to give Jim all the canvas he needs to paint. I am curious, given all the years he's been out here espousing these progressive POVs, these progressive points of view, what he makes of the march that progressives are on right now across the country. Call them progressives, call them DSA. What does Jim Hightower think of this march by progressives right about now? And I'm also curious to get his take more broadly on how he sees America at 250. He's been on the front lines as a progressive fighter for a long time, but here we are, 250 years in. What does Jim Hightower make of this moment in this republic? You're listening to Tavis Smiley.Tavis Smiley, with Jim Hightower. Jim Hightower, you've been out here a long time on the front lines of this fight as an unapologetic progressive. What's your read of, as I would term it, this progressive march literally all across the country?Jim Hightower: Well, it is the most encouraging thing I've seen in a long, long time. And it is happening for real reasons, because the powers that be are running roughshod over the powers that ought to be. And people are catching on to that. So they're beginning to rebel, and not just liberals, and not just progressives or populists like me, but everyday working people are saying, as we started our conversation, Tavis, “That's not fair. This ain't right. This is not America.”And so we've been battling for years. We win fights. Again, you know, I was elected in the 1980s, two terms as Texas agriculture commissioner, elected with Ann Richards running for treasurer, Mattox running for attorney general, Garry Mauro running for land commissioner. We ran a unified campaign, because we could then go to people and say, “It's not just about electing poor old Hightower here. It's about electing a government. We can make change.” And that is what's missing in our politics: people believing that change can actually happen. Because, as you indicated so rightly early on, Congress doesn't do anything, the Supreme Court just follows the corporate agenda, and the White House, of course, is the mess that it's in.So we have to have results coming from our work. And that means a long-term view of politics. You know, I ran for office the first time and I lost. I came very close, but I lost. But I was able to turn it around, because even a losing campaign creates energy. It creates new people. It creates talent. And you can apply that to the next campaign, not just for one individual, but for many, many others. As Willie Nelson put it to me once, he said, “Hightower, the early bird might get the worm, but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese.”Tavis Smiley: You can't fade Jim Hightower. You cannot fade Jim Hightower, coming with wisdom of his own, wisdom from his parents, wisdom from Willie Nelson. Love me some Jim Hightower. We'll close this conversation when we come forward with his thoughts on America at 250. You're listening to Tavis Smiley.I've got three minutes left in this hour, which I have enjoyed immensely, stepping into the Elders Skybox. Again, yesterday Johnnetta Cole was here, former president of Spelman. Check out the podcast if you missed that brilliant conversation. And if you missed any of this dialogue with Jim Hightower, there's so much richness in this thing, man. You'll want to hear it again if you heard it once. And if you didn't hear it, check out the podcast, posted tonight. You will not be disappointed in this conversation with Jim Hightower. As they say in Washington, I want to yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Texas. I've got three minutes left. It's all yours, Jim Hightower. Three minutes. Talk to me about America at 250 as you see it, my friend.Jim Hightower: I think America is healthy in a fundamental way. It's very active right now. You know, there are all kinds of great groups out there making fundamental changes, groups that are progressive and inclusive. And all the bad words we're not supposed to say, again: diversity and equity. I mean, what's wrong with diversity? What's wrong with equity? What are they talking about? And I think more and more people are asking that. And we need to have a constant politics that asks that question. Why should we be afraid of diversity? Unless you're a Native American, you are an immigrant. Stop pretending.And I'm talking to our people now, our progressive people. Stop thinking that it's dangerous to say this stuff. It's not dangerous. People want to hear it, and they will be better for hearing it. You'll get called an agitator. Our wonderful friend and mentor Jesse Jackson spoke brilliantly about being an agitator. You know, after all, it was agitators that built America: Thomas Paine, Shays' Rebellion, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, the populists, right on through. And Jesse put it like this. He said the agitator is the center post in the washing machine that gets the dirt out. We need a lot more of that. We need a lot more of that. And people are ready for it.And I would add just another Jesse Jackson moment, which, again, he did brilliantly. He said, “We might not all have come over on the same boat, but we're in the same boat now.” And that is a powerful political reality. So he was able to rally farmers, and I was with him at some of those events in his presidential campaign, and in his Rainbow Coalition and the other coalitions related to the Rainbow Coalition. They all built together. Jesse Jackson had an intentional program to create a little-d democratic, diverse populist movement based on equality for all. Those are old-time American themes. And we have fought for them, and we have won again and again. Let us not forget that we have won this battle before. It's in front of us, but we've got to do it again.Tavis Smiley: There you go, Jim. We say around here all the time, when we fight, we win. When we fight, we win, and you can't win it if you ain't in it. America needs more of Jim Hightower. I declare it. I knew I hadn't talked to Jim in a long time. I knew it'd be a great hour. I didn't know how great it would actually be, but he still got it. And I am pleased that he put me on his schedule for a full hour today. How blessed are we to have heard the insights of this longtime, unapologetic progressive, Jim Hightower, who's feeling himself these days, and I ain't mad at him, about this march that progressives are on. And I close with what his parents said to him many, many years ago: everybody does better when everybody does better. Jim Hightower, thank you, thank you, thank you, my friend.Jim Hightower: Thank you, Tavis.Tavis Smiley: Good to have you on. More of Tavis Smiley when we come forward.Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jimhightower.substack.com/subscribe

From the earliest days of open-weight models to becoming the neutral routing layer for more than 10 million developers, OpenRouter is one of the clearest bets that the future of AI will be multi-model. In this episode, OpenRouter co-founder & CEO Alex Atallah, with AMP's Anjney Midha returning with swyx to unpack how OpenRouter emerged from the first wave of Llama, Alpaca, Mistral, and Midjourney, why model diversity mattered before it was consensus, and how a company dismissed as “just a wrapper” became critical infrastructure for the AI ecosystem.We go deep on the product and distribution lessons behind OpenRouter: why model labs can spend billions training a checkpoint and still struggle to get it into developers' hands, how Mistral helped prove the value of a competitive inference marketplace, why OpenRouter chose focus over expanding into fine-tuning, memory, and other adjacent products, and how its rankings became a real-time map of how AI usage was changing. Alex also explains OpenRouter's early experiments with model fusion, why they deleted the first version and brought it back years later, and how the platform grew to more than 10 trillion tokens per day.Finally, Anjney explains why Stripe and OpenRouter fit together, why token fraud may become one of the defining security problems of the AI economy, and why the next wave of fraud won't just come from humans but from autonomous agents attacking increasingly valuable token flows.We discuss:* Why OpenRouter bet early that no single AI model would win everything* Alpaca, Llama, and open models becoming impossible to ignore* Why Discord's early AI deployments exposed the limitations of closed models* Why model labs can spend billions on training and still fail at distribution* How OpenRouter became a neutral distribution layer for model developers* Why VCs dismissed OpenRouter as “just a marketplace” or “just a wrapper”* The Mistral price war and the first real proof of an inference marketplace* How Midjourney scaled through Discord and what it taught the AI ecosystem* Why crypto infrastructure became a dress rehearsal for generative AI* OpenRouter vs. LM Arena and why their missions are fundamentally different* Why focus became one of OpenRouter's biggest strategic advantages* Anthropic's early focus on AI pair programming and coding* The OpenRouter products that were prototyped but never launched* MOM, OpenRouter's early Mixture of Models experiment* Why model fusion failed in 2024 — and why it works much better now* How OpenRouter's leaderboard became a live map of the AI industry* OpenClaw, auto-routing, and agents reshaping AI usage* How OpenRouter reached 10+ trillion tokens per day* Why inference gateways are increasingly becoming targets for fraud* Why Stripe's fraud infrastructure is strategically important to OpenRouter* The coming rise of agentic fraud and attacks on the token economy* What changes and what stays the same as OpenRouter joins StripeAlex Atallah* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexatallah/* X: https://x.com/alexatallah* Website: https://alexatallah.comAnjney Midha* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anjney/* X: https://x.com/AnjneyMidha* AMP: https://www.amppublic.com/Timestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:02:12 Alpaca, Llama, and the Multi-Model Bet00:06:04 Discord, Open Models, and OpenRouter's Origins00:14:28 Why “One Model Wins” Was the Wrong Bet00:17:27 Why Model Labs Struggle With Distribution00:23:04 “Just a Wrapper”: Why VCs Misunderstood OpenRouter00:27:58 Bootstrapping OpenRouter Through Community00:36:16 Crypto, Midjourney, and the Early Generative AI Ecosystem00:43:38 Mistral and the Birth of the Inference Marketplace00:47:10 OpenRouter vs. LM Arena00:52:08 Focus, Anthropic, and Roads Not Taken00:59:34 Mixture of Models and Model Fusion01:02:44 Sonnet, OpenClaw, and OpenRouter's Explosive Growth01:09:03 Why Stripe Acquired OpenRouter01:12:45 Fraud and the Emerging Token Economy01:17:47 The Coming Wave of Agentic Fraud01:19:07 What's Next for OpenRouter at StripeTranscriptIntroduction: OpenRouter, Marketplaces, and Pub-Sub as a Product PrincipleSwyx [00:00:00]: Okay, we are here in Anja's house, which is where all big startups in San Francisco start.Anjney Midha [00:00:08]: Howdy.Swyx [00:00:08]: And, congrats on Cursor, Mistral. I don'- God knows what else. You got so much stuff going on.Anjney Midha [00:00:17]: There's, there's a lot going on. Well, OpenRouter is probably the - has been the most, I would say, like, one I'm excited about recently.Swyx [00:00:24]: Yeah. And we have Alex, first time on the pod, but,Anjney Midha [00:00:27]: Thanks for having me.Swyx [00:00:27]: You've been in the IE a few times. I appreciate every time you've shown up, for the community. Congrats. I just, like, what a journey. When I was looking back at your past posts, one of the earliest principles that I saw you write as a product person is sub as a product principle. And I wanted - you to maybe explain how you think about what should exist in the world.Anjney Midha [00:00:49]: Yeah. The sub piece, which was early 2023, I didn't think about it until we talked like 10 minutes ago, is about how there is like a way of thinking about products as an intersection between subscribing to data and publishing data. And marketplaces are an easy example of this. You have suppliers that are publishing some product to a SKU. And the SKU is like a sub topic that a consumer is subscribing to and just going to, like, consume whenever they want. And humans consume in a very, like, discreet, ad hoc way. It's not very scalable. all their attention is on the topic when they're buying the thing, and their attention is nowhere else when that happens. agents and consumers of inference don't act like that. They're consuming continuously, and they're changing the SKUs that they consume from all the time. So OpenRouter is like a blend between a normal API experience and a marketplace where we create model slug. We have the auto router. We have all kinds of, like, product SKUs that you can subscribe to. And then you can, like, continuously add, like, derive value and make decisions based on those consumers.Alpaca, Llama, and the Multi-Model BetSwyx [00:02:11]: Yeah. This is something that was more consensus now, but not consensus when you guys started, which was that there is such a demand for swapping models and changing things out and, that people would not use the native SDKs. I guess, for each of you, what was your realization moment that this would be it? I, - You've, you've given a talk at EIE about Alpaca as,Anjney Midha [00:02:33]: Yeah.Swyx [00:02:33]: One of your inspiring moments.Anjney Midha [00:02:35]: Alpaca, I can, like, rehash the Alpaca moment for a sec. Like, the very beginning, at the end of 2022, OpenAI was the only game in town. There was, like, OpenAI, Cohere,Swyx [00:02:47]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:02:48]: And then a smattering of, like, early attempts at open weight models.Swyx [00:02:54]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:02:54]: When Llama came out in January of 2023, it was like, “Wow, really exciting. This is really big.” It outperforms 3 on, one or two benchmarks. but you can't chat with it. It wasn't like - It wasn't an engaging model, but it seemed like someone just needed to fix a couple things and do some RLHF on it to get it all the way there. And Alpaca was the first model that I saw that did that. It only took $600 to do. A team at Stanford generated a bunch of synthetic data, tuned Llama, and made Alpaca, billion parameter model. Or was - Maybe it was thirteen billion parameters. And it was so good. Like, I was just, like, on an airplane using it. I, - in many cases, I, like, you could not discern a ChatGPT versus an Alpaca result. And I figured if it was this easy to make a model, one, we have a whole new way of monetizing data for the first time. you can just, like, take really valuable data and turn it into a service in $600. and that cost will probably go down over time.Swyx [00:04:03]: When you - So sorry. when you say monetizing your data as, what eventually will become an MCP endpoint or as a training data for a model?Anjney Midha [00:04:12]: Yeah, training data for a model.Swyx [00:04:13]: Awesome.Anjney Midha [00:04:13]: Like, an abstract way of saying like, “Hey, I have this data.”Swyx [00:04:15]: Compress it into a model.Anjney Midha [00:04:16]: Like, it makes sense for me in my product, but, like, I could repackage it in the form of a model and sell it. And so it's just a whole new business model for the economy. It also, of course, provides, like, a way of following what Frontier Labs are doing, but in a way that, like, a single developer or a small team of developers can roll on their own. And so - Whenever you have an example of that, like a breakout app that's doing really well, and then some framework for imitating it with - in your own flavor, you have an immediate ecosystem of, like an immediate ecosystem, like, should arise because there's just a huge gap between the, like, decisions that the single company is making and all of the variations in those decisions that, like, a wider ecosystem can create themselves. And so then, you need a marketplace to, like, discover all of those, services and all of those products. There wasn't any place on the internet that, like, was like a home base for LLMs in terms of seeing how much they were being used and seeing who was using them and why.Swyx [00:05:29]: The closest would be Hugging Face.Anjney Midha [00:05:30]: Hugging Face was the closest at the time, yeah.Swyx [00:05:31]: They just started Hugging, like, a few years ago before that.Anjney Midha [00:05:34]: Yeah, and Hugging Face also didn't have the closed-source models.Swyx [00:05:37]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:05:38]: And they didn'- you couldn't use the models at the time. and there wasn't data about who was using them. There were, like, a bunch of differences between OpenRouter and Hugging Face, and those differences felt really critical to me, especially when I was just trying to learn about LLMs and, like, why people are choosing, like, Different little ones that are emerging over time.Discord, Open Models, and the Origins of OpenRouterSwyx [00:06:03]: Got it. And then, Ansh, no stranger to wanting more model diversity, at the time, you're a couple of years into your Anthropic journey, which we covered in the previous podcast as well. What was your introduction to Alex?Alex Atallah [00:06:16]: Well, the introduction was, I think, thirteen years before that.Swyx [00:06:20]: Oh.Alex Atallah [00:06:20]: But the OpenRouter handshake happened right over there, if you remember.Anjney Midha [00:06:23]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:06:24]: Which - So Alex and I, met, I believe as sophomores now, if I remember at the Stanford Review,Anjney Midha [00:06:32]: That's rightAlex Atallah [00:06:32]: Meeting for the first time.Anjney Midha [00:06:33]: I think so, yeah.Alex Atallah [00:06:35]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:06:35]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:06:35]: So Stanford Review was the libertarian newspaper on campus at Stanford that Peter Thiel started back in the day. And, whatever-- for whatever reason, I, Alex and I both showed up to one of the meetings, and I remember, the editor-chief was a mutual friend of ours. Lisa was really a really great editor-chief, where, part of an editor-chief's job is to assign responsibilities to people and make sure the work gets done. and I, I may be misremembering the details, but I remember wanting to. It was surprising to me that at the time there was no dedicated technology section in the newspaper.Alex Atallah [00:07:11]: YouSwyx [00:07:13]: Because it's political, right?Alex Atallah [00:07:14]: It is primarilySwyx [00:07:14]: Like, it's talkingAlex Atallah [00:07:15]: It originally started as like aAnjney Midha [00:07:16]: Yes.Swyx [00:07:17]: Yeah, states and all those things.Alex Atallah [00:07:17]: Correct.Swyx [00:07:18]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:07:18]: But it, - To take us back in time, you may remember this, but, there was this technology, legislation that was being debated called, the Net Neutrality Act. And net neutrality is, like, inherently this political concept, right? It's, it's about the regulation of - internet broadband access. And so there was a community of us who were technologists, but also debating the politics of the technology. And I thought the Review would be a great place - to, like, write about that. And I was working on, I think, a net neutrality article, and I remember proposing, “Well, maybe we should start a technology section.” And Alex was one of the only people who said, “Yes, that would be cool.” And said. I forget whether we ended up writing stuff together, but - that's when we first met,Alex Atallah [00:08:03]: Was 2011 or twelve. I forget which year it was. It was one of those.Anjney Midha [00:08:09]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:08:09]: It was at Old Union, if I remember correctly.Alex Atallah [00:08:11]: That's where we used to meet. But, along the way, Alex and I have had a chance to, To hang out often. And probably the time when we had the most professional overlap was when I was running the platform at Discord, and it had become this explosive platform for cryptoSwyx [00:08:32]: YeahAlex Atallah [00:08:32]: And NFTs in the middle of the pandemic.Swyx [00:08:35]: Which also, by the way, you were in charge of safety and security as well, right?Alex Atallah [00:08:38]: I was the head of platform, which meant all of the crypto - the DAO and NFT launch security debugging fell onSwyx [00:08:45]: And their phishing and.Alex Atallah [00:08:47]: The phishing, the social engineering attacks, the katana DDoS that we were getting hit by. but it's around the time I first started teaching security at scale at Stanford, CS 153. And Alex was on the, - at OpenSea at the time, and I was trying to figure out how we could defend against all these attacks that we were. Like, and at peak, I forget, if you remember how much NFT volume was running throughSwyx [00:09:10]: DiscordAlex Atallah [00:09:10]: Discord, but it was, like, a meaningful amount of, like, it was, like, several billion dollars in NFT volume of GMV, so to speak, were running through the platform, and it was all coming from OpenSea. It was these, like, buy, sell,Swyx [00:09:20]: TheAlex Atallah [00:09:21]: ServersSwyx [00:09:21]: The D in DAO is Discord.Alex Atallah [00:09:25]: Yes. And so that's when I think we had hung out professionally. But a year after that, OpenAI gave Discord early access to GPT. Sorry, three. No, it was five. Yeah, five, which is the RL version of three. And that's around the time we made a Discord bot with, OpenAI for internal deployment, and that's when I realized we would need. Like, since I was part of the deployment team.Anjney Midha [00:09:50]: What was the use case?Alex Atallah [00:09:51]: There were two that were. And there's, there's a post now called “Discord is Your Place for AI with Friends” that somebody sent me recently that I wrote, and published in twenty-three. But There were two use cases. One was Clyde, which was the - like, a party friend inside of Discord that could help you set up your Discord server and talk to you about onboarding and get your friends to hang out more. and then there was content moderation. And one of the realizations we had with content moderation was - it would refuse to moderate. Like, it would just refuse our prompts because the The training was. We were very early in the training era, and it would just. Our prompts would trigger it, its, like, guardrails. And we told OpenAI, “Hey, guys, we need access to the weights because if we're gonna be doing content moderation at scale, we had 250 million monthly active users, we need more reliability that the model will do what we need it to.” And they said, “Well, sorry, guys, that's not how this works. We're a closed-source company.” And so that was my first realization that we needed open models, and the enterprises would need more control over capabilities, and then ultimately would need some control plane or management system to orchestrate these open models. But there weren't no good - there were no good open alternatives until maybeAlex Atallah [00:11:10]: Six months later when Llama came out. And six months after that, I led the series A into Mistral, which was started by Guillaume and the Llama team. And - That, - Around that time is when I remember hearing about Alex launching OpenRouter and going, “These worlds are gonna collide, and I don't know when it'll make sense to team up.” But Alex was so early and could see. I think he was totally right about this ecosystem starting with Llama that then needed, like, a, an easy layer to manage for, especially for. I was approaching it from the enterprise perspective because I had been that, like, the. As the VP of platform at Discord, it was my job to ensure that when we deployed models to, like, 250 million users, they did what we wanted them to. And that was very hard, because if you outsourced it to the labs and they controlled the guardrails and their guardrails are their safety policies. Forbid the model from responding to your prompts. That was quite catastrophic.Swyx [00:12:05]: Yeah. But what, a moderation is the thing that they want to support. And obviously, beyond that, they would - OpenAI would work with you, presumably to give you a moderation endpoint, which they offer for free.Alex Atallah [00:12:16]: It was an interesting use case, that - So they did give us a moderation endpoint. However, as you guys know, every Discord server is like a mini deployment of itself. And so the use case was instead of having human moderators that have to interpret the norms of the community, you just give the, - Often, like every, subreddit, Discord servers, public ones have their own rules that the user, the users create.Swyx [00:12:41]: Oh, yeah. We run the LinkedIn Discord in. Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:12:43]: And then humans used to read those norms and then enforce it every day manually, like observing each message in these communities. And these communities have like millions of users. So we had a 5,000+ person team globally in the, on the Discord content moderation team. These are outsourced contractors who had a really tough job. And so the idea was instead, if you could give the norms of that server To the LLM, then the LLM would do custom moderation for that server. It's almost like a, like context moderation for that server. And many of those servers' norms just violated OpenAI's rules. And so - It was like we had our own custom eval. So each server had its own custom eval. But Discord-- at the time, OpenAI's evals, we were all soAlex Atallah [00:13:28]: Primitive in our thinking about how to deploy these LLMs that often the training prompts were super handed. It said, “Oh, anything about Harry Potter, anything that has trademarked content, don'- refuse.” And if it was a fan - Harry Potter fan community, this is a real use case, that had content moderation, the LLM would just refuse.Swyx [00:13:48]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:13:49]: And that was just not precise enough.Anjney Midha [00:13:52]: Another one that we heard was like if someone was trying to write like a detective story, and there's one chapter with a lot of violence, like maybe someoneAlex Atallah [00:14:01]: RightAnjney Midha [00:14:01]: Like kills someone, the LLMs would just refuse to, like, help with that part of the story.Alex Atallah [00:14:07]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:14:07]: And then - like, we used to be like, okay, this is not like structurally inherent to LLMs. There must be, like, some choice out there so that I can, like, switch to another model, when I'm getting, like, a refusal or a bad result from the main one that I have. And that, like, tension also drove me for a marketplace.Why “One Model Wins” Was the Wrong BetSwyx [00:14:28]: Yeah. I think that is well accepted now. What was it like back then when you were raising or, starting this? did people get it? what was the, some of the struggles? I like getting stories out of him about how other VCs don't get it. So like anything you wanna, talk about, now - Let's, let's call it, that the early journey of OpenRouter is done, right? You can obviously talk about some of the early days stuff.Anjney Midha [00:14:54]: Well, I was gonna say that, like, the biggest objection we got is big model win, which is - all of theSwyx [00:15:03]: Scaling laws.Anjney Midha [00:15:04]: Huh?Swyx [00:15:04]: Scaling laws.Anjney Midha [00:15:05]: Yeah, scaling laws, and natural network effects are just gonna accrue to one company, which will be - It'll be a Google-style monopoly, just like how Google won the search market, by a large margin, and you'll just be fighting for scraps at the end. That was probably the biggest objection we got. it is interesting that Google won the search engine race with such a huge margin. I think, like, had there been more interesting benchmarks or had, like, search engines been, - had people, like, seen them a little bit more like LLMs where they're services that you can build companies on top of, that might not have been the case. but LLMs don't merely have a user interface. They're also, like, ways of building entirely new businesses. And, a Google-level monopoly would be like the Dutch East India Company times, quadrillion in magnitude because the whole economy ends up, like, depending on the one monopoly as well. So it didn't seem like would be a really crazy outcome if that happened. And it's also less likely because the economics of, like, creating good competitors are much, like, much more decentralizable.Alex Atallah [00:16:25]: Everything Alex said is true, And I came at it from a completely different perspective, whichSwyx [00:16:31]: Yes, this is why we're here.Alex Atallah [00:16:32]: The scaling laws were never - In my mind, were always a feature, not a bug for why OpenRouter would be very valuable. Because, I was one of the first investors in Anthropic, and it was obvious to me that other researchers in our friends - I went to grad school for machine learning, and I just had a lot of friends in the ML community who it was very obvious to us that the bitter lesson holds. And so I was like, “Oh, fantastic. Now we have at least two proof points that compute scaling works.” It was OpenAI and Anthropic. and by the time I think we decided to team up on OpenRouter, I had already invested in Mistral and Black Forest Labs and Luma. So there was multiple model companies and teams that I was, working with.Why Model Labs Struggle With DistributionSwyx [00:17:14]: But you did other modalities, whereas this is literallyAlex Atallah [00:17:16]: Across different modalities, yesSwyx [00:17:17]: Text.Alex Atallah [00:17:18]: Exactly. And it was so obvious to me that an ecosystem of different kinds of models were being created, and that this whole narrative of, like, Only one company will dominate like Google was, well, like maybe true, but one, I don't believe that. But two, there was so much extraordinary innovation happening across several different research teams. But the shared problem I was noticing across all of them was often, the research teams were fantastic at figuring out how to reason about new capabilities. They think in terms of capabilities, but never - like, are not developer mindset-oriented. Like, what happens after the training is done and the checkpoint comes out? Like, you'd be shocked how, like, similar the early training teams at OpenAI, sorry, Anthropic, BFL, Mistral, were in their, like, default approach to. Taking their research out of the, lab and scaling their impact, which is often, oh, the checkpoint is done, put it out as an API, done, and then there'd be crickets. in the case of Claude, the first Claude checkpoint was done a year before they released it internally. And then ChatGPT came out, and we decided, okay, yes, it's a good idea to release a Claude version externally.Alex Atallah [00:18:34]: And they had no plan, like no plan for how to get developers to try it out. And so if you go to the Claude one blog post, you'll notice there are, like, three developer examples for users of the API, and one is a Discord bot, and the second is Vivian, my wife's startup called Juny Learning, ‘- And then there was, like, Notion, because these were all friends of, like, the Anthropic Because that's how - like, last minute the planning was around, hey, once the model's done training, how do you get it out to the world? There was no distribution platform that understood what developers needed, all the key management, provisioning, like, simple, like, endpoint management, versioning control. Like, all these things that the scientists and researchers go, “ that's plumbing. I don't really think about it.”Swyx [00:19:15]: Implementation detail.Alex Atallah [00:19:16]: Right. And instead, Alex came at it from that perspective. And so, it was so obvious to me that, like, every single lab I was funding would spend - like, literally sometimes billions of dollars into training, and then a checkpoint would be done, and there'd be crickets, like, during early access because they're like, “Oh, that's right.”Alex Atallah [00:19:35]: It's hard to use a checkpoint to make anything. You need a whole bunch of plumbing around it to make it usable by a developer. And so by the - I think - it was so obvious to me that a distribution platform like OpenRouter was critical to have in the ecosystem if we wanted there to be competition to Google. Like, unless-- ‘cause with Google, DeepMind is done training a new checkpoint, and then they push a button, and it gets blasted out across all their surfaces from Google Docs to,Swyx [00:20:01]: Everywhere, even if I don't want it.Alex Atallah [00:20:02]: Everywhere. You wanna know about, like, on Android, like, overnight, they can deploy a new checkpoint to, like, a billion devices, right? And that invisible infra advantage, distribution advantage, most people don't realize, but until OpenRouter showed up, - you had to think about all of that yourself as a model lab. And it was very daunting. at Anthropic, I think it took, well, more than twelve months to get to our first 10 million in revenue. And in contrast with Black Forest Labs, I remember the early days, you guys had a conversation with the BFL team, and, it was so simple for OpenRouter to say, “Oh, no problem. Like, the day you launch, we can send 1 million developers to you.” that was crazy. That was like a step function change in, like, an hour.Swyx [00:20:46]: Is that a real number, a million?Alex Atallah [00:20:47]: I,Swyx [00:20:48]: Okay. All right.Alex Atallah [00:20:48]: I think today it's, like, 4 million. How many developers are on OpenRouter today?Anjney Midha [00:20:52]: Over ten,Alex Atallah [00:20:54]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:20:54]: Over 10 million, but, like, it's, it's hard to, youAlex Atallah [00:20:59]: I, yeah, I don't know how to. Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:21:00]: We do a lot of, like, account duping work, but, noAlex Atallah [00:21:04]: If you could get 1,000 developers, just to put in context If you get 1,000 developers who try the model on day one after you release it and just, like, do inference and give you feedback, that's a thousandAnjney Midha [00:21:15]: That's hugeAlex Atallah [00:21:16]: More developers than they knew how to get to on their own.Swyx [00:21:19]: Well, BFL had a reputation, but yes.Alex Atallah [00:21:21]: They had one in Stable Diffusion.Swyx [00:21:22]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:21:23]: And with Mistral, I don't know if you guys remember, but the first checkpoint they released was, like, torrents. It was, like, torrent weights.Swyx [00:21:31]: Yeah, they just put up a magnet link.Alex Atallah [00:21:33]: Yeah, there was no API.Anjney Midha [00:21:34]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:21:34]: Because they didn'- they weren't infra people.Alex Atallah [00:21:37]: ? Like, it's like, okay, download these weights, and you guys go figure out how to host it.Swyx [00:21:39]: Well, he has a story on his side, yeah.Anjney Midha [00:21:41]: Yeah, in addition to the, like, building a really good developer experience around it, the marketing that we do on, like, for different models is totally different and perceived totally differentlyAlex Atallah [00:21:54]: RightAnjney Midha [00:21:54]: From the marketing that a model lab does for itself.Alex Atallah [00:21:56]: Yes, 1,000%.Anjney Midha [00:21:57]: Right? We are like a, neutral layer looking at this market like it's a big dark room with all the corners completely obscure to users, and users are walking into the room and, like, feeling aroundAlex Atallah [00:22:09]: YeahAnjney Midha [00:22:09]: And trying to figure out what objects to grab off the tables and, like, build into, their companies. And it's just an insane way of working. Like, models are not products where you can just enumerate all their features onto a web page. They're all black boxes, including the open weight ones. So you need to, like, shine lights on all corners of this room, so that people can see what makes this model good, and you need the company shining that light to be a neutral third party, which is what we specialize in. So the, like. It'- In addition to developer experience, there's also, like, a very important, like, marketing and product packaging componentAlex Atallah [00:22:50]: YeahAnjney Midha [00:22:50]: And a way of, like, routing and discovering models becomes, like, critical to your market as a provider or a model lab or a server tool and more in the future.“Just a Wrapper”: Why VCs Misunderstood OpenRouterAlex Atallah [00:23:03]: And this value, to your earlier point about how many VCs, like, just don't. One of my biggest frustrations is that venture capitalists, many of them, like, just don't have any operating experience in the field. so unlike a traditional investor who's just maybe come up through the ranks as, like, a associate working on financial modeling or maybe hasn't been a real operator in the field for, like, more than ten years, which is a big part of the industry now, I had just arrived at a16z, like, a year after running the platform. And so I knew what the challenges were of, like, building a real - great developer experience and like, being able to create a working piece of software with a model. And there were a few, I won't name names, but there were investors who were looking at OpenRouter, and, felt at the time, like, when I would compare notes with people, that it was just, I quote unquote, “just a marketplace.”Swyx [00:23:59]: Yeah, just a thin layer, just aAlex Atallah [00:24:00]: CorrectSwyx [00:24:00]: JustAlex Atallah [00:24:01]: A wrapper or whatever on other people's APIs. And I was like, “You have no idea how strategic the value that OpenRouter has created by being able to orchestrate even three.” APIs in production. The amount of both engineering work and community design that goes into getting that live and running in production at the scale the OpenRouter team had started just doesn't happen by default. And that was one of the things that stood out to me about Alex from the earliest days. Like, he just understood, like, - from a systems perspective, like, how do you get these flywheels going? Like, that stood out to me with OpenSea when we were working together on the NFT integration at Discord. Like, Alex had a level of community-- like, systems thinking on how you get these flywheels going that most scientists and machine learning people just don'tAlex Atallah [00:24:48]: Think of. Like, we often think in terms of training.Swyx [00:24:52]: It's a linear stage.Alex Atallah [00:24:53]: It's this linear pipeline.Swyx [00:24:53]: There's no loop yet.Alex Atallah [00:24:54]: Yeah. It wasn't until much later that the modern context feedback loop cycle really got standardized in the industry. But at the time, if you remember, machine learning was like. Like, mostly we did a lot of ML, like, when I was in grad school on a laptop. So you just, like, download a dataset, ran some ablations, and you looked at the loss curves, and you're like, “Great, I made AI.” And the idea that you have to, like, deploy those capabilities, collect feedback trajectories, then, like, put those into a continuous loop, like, came much later. And it was very counterintuitive to the - like, the traditional AI mindset. I do remember doing the investment phase for, OpenRouter, I just didn't try and educate a bunch of other VCs on why it was not just a marketplace. I was like, “ what? I'm just gonna invest.”Anjney Midha [00:25:41]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:25:41]: And I'm going to, like, take the opportunity to partner with Alex, and if - no other VCs get it, that's totally fine. ‘Cause at the time, - it was not obvious, I think, to several of the investors that, like, OpenRouter was not more than just a wrapper around APIs. And - that infuriated me. And I was like, “ what? I don't have time to debate you. I'm - we're gonna, we're gonna invest.” And then I think, like, a month later, Matt Murphy marked it up by 10x. Like, - I think. I forget what the exact money was and so on, but, to his credit, Menlo Ventures realized, “Okay, there's much more strategic value here as well.” Maybe you didn't hear all these conversations behind the scenes But that frustrated me a lot. there's a lot of this, like, opining about wrappers. and if you're like, “Oh, an app is just a wrapper on a model,” then, like. And, OpenRouter is, like, this wrapper on top of other APIs, and this is the most stupid, reductive framework.Alex Atallah [00:26:31]: And so it's clearly somebody who has no experience deploying product at scale.Swyx [00:26:34]: It's the thing you dismiss other things with. Like, you're a - everyone's a wrapper on everything, right? Like, and there's, there's some Some wrappers have value.Alex Atallah [00:26:40]: Investors are wrappers and LPs, right?Alex Atallah [00:26:42]: Like venture capitalists. So, yeah, it's all wrappers down, all down to bare metal, I guess, and like energy.Swyx [00:26:46]: Yeah, there - When I started the whole AI engineer, I guess, the coining, in 2023, like, that was, like, the number one pushback is that this is no value. You should just train models.Anjney Midha [00:26:56]: Right.Swyx [00:26:57]: And, yeah, obviously this is, like. you guys are one of the testaments to the fact that you can build very valuable wrappers, but also very valuable model companies.Alex Atallah [00:27:06]: It's so, hard to be. Like, the day a model launches, the fact that you have an OpenRouter, endpoint for that model frequently at the top of Hacker News on day one, people don't realize the amount of work that goes into accomplishing that. And OpenRouter used. Like, that would happen over and over again, and I remember going, “People have no idea how hard that is.”Alex Atallah [00:27:30]: That's not.Swyx [00:27:31]: Yeah, we've covered some of the inference engineering that goes behind,Alex Atallah [00:27:34]: YesSwyx [00:27:34]: Some of - with Base Ten and all those. Well, today you have, all those, like, cool code name things that people guess what Oxy Alpha is and all those things. But, like, I guess one of the things that you're teasing is, how do you get that initial flywheel going, right? Because today you have your scale and your reputation, all these things, so obviously you - you're driving immense distribution. But when you were early on, when it's mostlyBootstrapping OpenRouter Through CommunityAlex Atallah [00:27:55]: The bootstrap, yeah.Swyx [00:27:56]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:27:56]: What was the bootstrap like?Anjney Midha [00:27:58]: To bring it back to early Discord days, I think we, like, initially connected with. This is an OpenSea story, technically. But, and we initially connected when you were at Discord, and we talked about, like, - the Axie Infinity server.Alex Atallah [00:28:13]: Oh, yes. Yes.Anjney Midha [00:28:14]: This server was, like, the biggest server at theAlex Atallah [00:28:17]: YeahAnjney Midha [00:28:17]: At Discord.Alex Atallah [00:28:18]: That's right.Anjney Midha [00:28:19]: And you were like, constantly bumping up theAlex Atallah [00:28:22]: The limits on the server. Oh, my GodAnjney Midha [00:28:24]: Of how many people could be in the server.Swyx [00:28:24]: For those who don't know, like, 10% of Philippines was Axie.Alex Atallah [00:28:29]: Was on that server. That's a big hit.Swyx [00:28:31]: It was, like, a meaningful contributor to the GDP of the country.Alex Atallah [00:28:33]: It was an NFT, like, crypto game, but itSwyx [00:28:35]: It was like a Pokémon breeding thing.Anjney Midha [00:28:36]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:28:36]: Yeah. Similar. Yeah. There was battling, there was breeding, and then there was, like, a marketplace for trading.Swyx [00:28:43]: Earn as well.Alex Atallah [00:28:45]: Yeah, earn. And, like, the graphics were really cute and fun, and you like, you get emotional about your Axie that you make. So to, like, start a community like that, which we had to do many times at OpenSea with every early project, for us to create a marketplace for it, we need to make sure that the, like, the community wants it.Anjney Midha [00:29:09]: Right.Alex Atallah [00:29:09]: And it's like building something that people want and going and telling them about it. Like, you can do that on a one basis, but there's way higher leverage to do that in a community where everyone can talk to you at the same time. So we spent a lot of time, like, building things that the community really wanted. We did the same thing for OpenRouter. And, like, the Axie community was one of, like, a zillion communities we did that with. And Anj, like, saw us doing it and. ‘Cause you could just see people sharing OpenSea links constantly in that Discord. Like, users sharing links is a really clear indicator that, like, something important is going on. So we spent, a lot of time, like, first figuring out what the gap is in the technology that people care about. Like, what was the actual problem that needs to be solved? in early LLM days, it was, OpenAI refusing to finish the prompt or,Anjney Midha [00:30:09]: YeahAlex Atallah [00:30:10]: To, like, complete the task. It was also.Anjney Midha [00:30:13]: Inability to customize models. and so there are communities that, like are just completely blocked on that issue, and those are the communities that are most useful to learn about and dive into and explore.Alex Atallah [00:30:28]: Something that really struck me at that time, - as I was just hearing your talk, I remember noting - you may not remember this, but we - we had these, like working, Zoom calls that we were doing a sprint around for, like this OpenSea integration with Discord. and, we'd, we'd - it was myself, my engineering team. I think you were there. And I remember, Alex, in the middle of one of those calls, just like there was like silence. we were all like, “Oh, yeah, this totally makes sense. Let's do this.” And then there's - every, like everybody aligned. And Alex was like, “No, this makes no sense to me.” And everyone's - I remember going, “What? Like, it works. Like, you click on a link and this, then it bounces you out to, like, OpenSea.” And he was like, “It's not a good user experience. Yeah, we should not do this.” And I remember going, he was the only one person out of all of us to raise his hand and go, yes, it made sense from a technical implementation perspective. Like, we were bouncing the user out into the, into OpenSea. And so it kinda checked the box of the product manager's requirements on both sides. But Alex went one step further and was like, “ what would be better, guys? If we just embedded the experience right here inside of Discord so the link opened up as an embedded iframe, and you can just check out right there.”Alex Atallah [00:31:47]: And not one person on the call, and there's like seven of us who had met, like, week after week.Swyx [00:31:52]: And it's the guy who doesn't work for Discord.Alex Atallah [00:31:53]: And it's the guy who doesn't work for Discord.Swyx [00:31:55]: Like, technically, you benefit if they bounce.Alex Atallah [00:31:57]: Exactly. And that was, like, adversarial. To keep the user inside of Discord would be adversarial to OpenSea. And yet Alex put that user experience first. And I was like, “That's special.”Swyx [00:32:08]: Wow.Alex Atallah [00:32:08]: Because it's very hard to have somebody who's technical like Alex and understands the developer flow, but also understands the best user experience and wants to prioritize that. And that's two sides of the flywheel that if you can get spinning, like is often hard to stop. And you just reminded me, like that one was one of those moments where I go, I - I realized I gotta be better at user experience because I should have been the one who came up with that, and I didn't. And I learned from you. And, I think that went into one of our case studies for the PM training program at Discord.Swyx [00:32:34]: Whoa.Alex Atallah [00:32:36]: I don't know if it there is Because ofSwyx [00:32:38]: You need an Alex is the conclusion.Alex Atallah [00:32:40]: Yeah. You need an Alex. And this is why I'm not, nobody should be surprised why Stripe decided like they had to buy OpenRouter because it's a really rare combination of people who understand the machine learning community, the developer experience, and the user experience. And putting all that together has resulted in this extraordinary scale that very few other marketplaces have been able to achieveWindow AI, BYOM, and Finding the Right Form FactorSwyx [00:33:02]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:33:02]: Over the last, five years.Swyx [00:33:04]: Yeah. Well, we should talk about the other reasons for acquisitions, whichAlex Atallah [00:33:07]: Yes, we should.Swyx [00:33:07]: You've written about. I wanna proceed somewhat chronologically as well. So - there is a point that, one of the questions that, Dave from H of Zero sent in was, when did it - really started to work? And you brought up Mixtral. I don't know if you wanna bring up that story.Alex Atallah [00:33:22]: Oh, yeah.Swyx [00:33:23]: Which obviously you overlap with, so.Anjney Midha [00:33:26]: Yeah, the MoE was. I don't know when. there's no like one moment where I was like, “Oh, this is, officially starting to work.” It wasSwyx [00:33:36]: The moment where you had a Chrome extension, like, really super early on.Anjney Midha [00:33:39]: Oh, yeah. But, well, - yeah. So before OpenRouter, I wanted to, like, explore a bring-your-own-model experiment. And,Swyx [00:33:47]: Which anyone familiar with crypto is like, yeah, Phantom and all these things.Anjney Midha [00:33:50]: Yeah. So it felt like doing a MetaMask analogy for AI would be a fun way of exploring that. And at the time, there were no AI apps. There were probably as many AI apps that were, like, hitting AI - like, hitting an LLM via an API call as there were, like, games just doing it in JavaScript. like there was a, there was a moment in time where it could have been the case that web apps call LLMs through the browser, like through some desktopAlex Atallah [00:34:27]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:34:27]: Managed app that is controlled by the user. and of course, there are like, I think, many reasons that did not happen. But back when the days were that primordial, I built a Chrome extension called Window AISwyx [00:34:43]: With Plasmo.Anjney Midha [00:34:44]: With Plasmo.Swyx [00:34:45]: I had come across early on, and I was like, “Who's gonna use this?” You did.Anjney Midha [00:34:49]: Plasmo had a couple, like, I think Phantom was using it. there were some other, like real companies using it.Alex Atallah [00:34:56]: It was like a shim.Swyx [00:34:57]: React for Chrome extension. It compiles to allAnjney Midha [00:35:00]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:35:00]: I see.Anjney Midha [00:35:00]: Like Next.js for Chrome extensions.Swyx [00:35:01]: Next.js, Next.js.Alex Atallah [00:35:02]: Okay.Anjney Midha [00:35:03]: And yeah, built Window AI on top of it. The creator of Plasmo, like started contributing code to Window AI, in GitHub, and that turned out to be Louis VicchiAlex Atallah [00:35:15]: Oh, you'Anjney Midha [00:35:15]: Who is the founder of OpenRouter.Alex Atallah [00:35:17]: That's right. You have told me this is how you met Louis. Yes.Anjney Midha [00:35:19]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:35:19]: Okay.Anjney Midha [00:35:20]: So, that allowed users to like configure which model they wanted to use for a web page in their browser, and then, like the app would just call out to that model when it needed to do things. not the right form factor for LLMs, but, it's like fun experiment. You learn a lot, and like I open sourced it. And the main learning is like, okay, this has to be an API, and it has to look a little bit - like, there has to be more of a developer experience here and more of a discovery experience as well. Like, I don't know where to use these models, and a little Chrome extension is not gonna help me discover. It's not enough real estate. I need more space. I need visuals. I need graphs. I need, examples. I need images. I need to, like, I need to be able to, like explore both as a human and as an agent.Crypto, Midjourney, and the Early Generative AI EcosystemAlex Atallah [00:36:10]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:36:10]: So that's how OpenRouter came to be.Alex Atallah [00:36:13]: A meta point that.Alex Atallah [00:36:16]: I think is underappreciated, but Alex is reminding me, is that we were quite lucky that we were so. we were, like, adjacent to the crypto community in those days. Because in hindsight, crypto ended up being like a dress rehearsal for generative models, right? If you think about the Axie experience, Alex is totally right, there were not that many AI apps at the time. And while I was dealing-- my job was to be the head of platform at Discord, which meant to be a general purpose place for communities and friends to create-- for developers to create apps and bots and, other services that could be deployed across Discord. And while 80% of the attention at the time was being spent on crypto, because that's where all the NFT volume was, there was, like, twenty percent of my time I was spending with a friend, who would get hotbot with me and ask me for. We would play Magic: The Gathering on weekends, and he was working on a little Discord bot that could take a text input and turn it into an image, and it was called Midjourney. YouSwyx [00:37:15]: Is that David?Alex Atallah [00:37:15]: It was David Holz.Alex Atallah [00:37:16]: He was a good friend. And David and I have both been failed ARVR founders, in the before that. And, I remember this. Midjourney was one of the fastest-growing communities we had after Axie Infinity started to peter off. And many of the, like, the abstractions and the infrastructure decisions we made to scale Axie happened just in time because they. Axie did this and then fell off a cliff. And then as Midjourney was taking off, we, like, explicitly decided to help David make the server, the Midjourney server, as the primary place for interaction with the model, because it was very hard for people to understand how to use the model if they couldn't see other people using it and copy them. And so the single-player Midjourney web app on its own, like midjourney.com, had, like, terrible retention because people would show up, they'd see this empty field. It's like E 2, and they would type in, like, cat or dog. And it was, like, paralyzing for them to have this blank canvas that they had to fill because they'd never used an AI model before. But instead, in a Discord server, you could see other people using it and riff off of their prompt, and the engagement was off the charts. And so scaling, Midjourney from zero to, like, 10 million monthly actives was a much smoother approach Axie Infinity. And so,Swyx [00:38:29]: Don't forget the best of four pictures, and you choose one.Alex Atallah [00:38:31]: The best, yeah, and then the other, weSwyx [00:38:32]: Which is the feedback loop.Alex Atallah [00:38:33]: The RLHF feedback loop, which, by the way, separately, like, Tom Brown, David and I used to play Magic: The Gathering on weekends. And so, like, it was one group of friends would hang out, and we'd. Like, these concepts were all being discussed all the time. But, there was.Alex Atallah [00:38:47]: I think there were few of us who bridged both the crypto worlds and the AI worlds. And compared to crypto, where it was - the question was always, what's the use case, for this technology? There was never any need to ask that for AI because it's, like, the use case was so visceral. It was like, I can create now anything at - I can imagine. I can write novels, I can code. And the infrastructure that those of us who believed in the distributed systems, like, value of crypto, like the censorship resistance part, found this use case that was explosive. And I think between Midjourney, the, Claude was a Discord bot launch, that we were using internally as an LLM. ElevenLabs had a TTS model that we had on Discord as well. Like, Discord became this petri dish for, like, early apps to innovate. And I don't think it's a coincidence that they found a home there before OpenRouter gave the world, like, a public home store or, like, a, storefront. Discord was this, like, almost petri dish storefront that - had, like, piggybacked on the infra we'd built for crypto communities. And then I think Alex was one of the first people to realize, wait a minute, like, these apps need their own home, on the internet. And then OpenRouter, to me, was a continuation of that community's needs. And of course, there was the crazy distribution that you enabled for a lot of these developers.Why OpenRouter Couldn't Just Live Inside DiscordSwyx [00:40:07]: So then my question is, how come you were. My perception is OpenRouter is not that Discord-centric, right? You have a Discord.Anjney Midha [00:40:14]: Yeah.Swyx [00:40:14]: And you use it to engage your community, but it's not like Midjourney where, like, no, that is like the primary way people experience OpenRouter.Anjney Midha [00:40:21]: Yeah, Midjourney, like, it really helps to see visually really quickly how people are using the model and how to prompt it.Swyx [00:40:29]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:40:29]: And I think that is partly why the server was so critical. It's like it is the user experience. It adds a ton.Swyx [00:40:36]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:40:37]: And you can go the whole mile with just, like, prompting via Midjourney, like, the, via the Midjourney Discord server, getting your images and then sharing them and having fun. For OpenRouter, for LLMs, like, you need a lot of user experience around LLMs to make them, like, really usable.Swyx [00:40:54]: Charge point.Anjney Midha [00:40:55]: And yeah.Anjney Midha [00:40:57]: The, like, seeing the examples of other people is also not as useful because it's a lot of stuff to read. It takes a long time.Swyx [00:41:03]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:41:04]: You need, like, based integration. Not possible to do in a Discord server. You need, Or technic- it's possible. I shouldn't say that. It's just not a great developer experience. you need, like, - you need governance for. At the point where you got based integration, now you need governance for managing the LLMs that have access to it, the data policies, which teams. All that stuff needs a lot more than a Discord server can provide. So it's justSwyx [00:41:30]: YeahAnjney Midha [00:41:30]: It's not the right.Alex Atallah [00:41:32]: Well, in addition, you're not wrong, but also there's the very important distinction that, Midjourney was an end user application.Swyx [00:41:40]: Right.Alex Atallah [00:41:40]: And, that's why Discord, which has 250 million monthly end consumers, made, it made sense for Discord to be a host for that application experience. What I knew was gonna happen soon after Midjourney found explosive product-market fit, because we. I think when Midjourney launched, from launch to $100 million revenue run rate, it was less than eight months. And shortly thereafter, Stable Diffusion launched. And, all of us used to hang out in the Discord server. There, I think it was the,Swyx [00:42:13]: The Stability Discord?Alex Atallah [00:42:14]: It was theSwyx [00:42:16]: Yeah, LAION.Alex Atallah [00:42:16]: Yeah, the LAION Discord server.Swyx [00:42:17]: The image community that spawned Stable Diffusion.Alex Atallah [00:42:19]: The image community. Yeah. And so when Stable Diffusion came out, I realized- Oh, now other people can build their own Midjourney.Alex Atallah [00:42:27]: Because until then, Midjourney did not have an API, so they were a stack company, right? They were training their own models, and they were deploying them as an application. But if you wanted to build your own Midjourney, there was no API of that quality. and I think E two was still quite primitive. Like, Midjourney had great quality. And then when Stable Diffusion came out, suddenly there was this new person who - there was - this new capability in the world, which is a developer could create their own Midjourney. And that, I think, created the need for something like OpenRouter, because then you need an API to. If you - if you had the creativity of David Holz and you had Stable Diffusion as the model and you wanted to put these things together, how could you do that without having to figure out how to host the weights? And what OpenRouter, - the shape of OpenRouter enabled is that. Right? When you have open model alternatives to closed applications, OpenRouter's value in the world becomes extraordinary because now any developer can just show up and use theStable Diffusion and the Need for a Model API LayerSwyx [00:43:20]: You just love model diversity.Anjney Midha [00:43:21]: Did you just say the shape of OpenRouter?Alex Atallah [00:43:23]: Oh, no.Anjney Midha [00:43:25]: Were you in cloud? What is this the real Han?Alex Atallah [00:43:26]: I've been, I've been - I'm, I'm misaligned now. I've been overtrained. I've been using Cloud way too much, haven't I?Swyx [00:43:34]: Claude-ish is what people would say.Alex Atallah [00:43:35]: Claude-ish. Oh, God, I gotta untrain myself.Swyx [00:43:38]: Okay. - And I just wanna cap off the Mistral side. my TLDR is there was a Mistral price war, is what they called it, right? Like, round about NeurIPS is twenty-three or twenty-four.Mistral and the Birth of the Inference MarketplaceAnjney Midha [00:43:47]: Yes. DecemberSwyx [00:43:48]: They launched, the Mistral 8x7B, and like the price went down like 80%.Anjney Midha [00:43:54]: Yeah.Swyx [00:43:54]: To me, that's very positive because it's like the first, like, real competition to host Mistral. Is there more?Anjney Midha [00:44:01]: Yeah, that was. I'm, like, trying to remember it, all the things that happened. It. Like, we saw that model come out and immediately saw people say that it was the best model in the world.Alex Atallah [00:44:15]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:44:15]: Like, this was, to my knowledge, the first time an open weights model was called that in real seriousness.Swyx [00:44:22]: It's hype, right? Is it?Anjney Midha [00:44:25]: It was hype. It was hype. It was also, like, hype from AI influencers at the time. And there were many examples where it was, like, outperforming four. So people really wanted to try it out and see, is this gonna be true for me too? And if so, at what price? And, the, like, inference landscape was really messy.Alex Atallah [00:44:49]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:44:50]: We cleaned it up. - it allowed, like, providers to compete on price, so we could give you just the best price in one spot. And so it was, I think, the first clear example of, like, a provider marketplace working in a way that adds value to end developers.Alex Atallah [00:45:08]: Sean, you may not remember this, but I think we met for the first time a few days after Mistral came out at NeurIPSAnjney Midha [00:45:15]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:45:15]: At a luncheon.Swyx [00:45:16]: Yeah. That's where I also met BFL as well. Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:45:18]: And Guillaume was there.Swyx [00:45:19]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:45:19]: I was at NeurIPS at that time.Alex Atallah [00:45:20]: You were there too. And, we had just announced the Mistral investment, and I remember Guillaume was over there, and I remember turning to Guillaume and asking him, Like, “Is it is all the. Like, how are you feeling after the launch of Mistral and seven B?” And, him in his typical French fashion was like, “ it's a, it's an okay model. It's not that good.” And I was like. It was so, in contrast. But I remember him also saying that part of the reason he felt a lot of people Thought that it was better than four was because of the speed. - it was an MoE model that they had, like, absolutely figured out how to make super efficient. It was on the Pareto frontier. And this is an important thing about LLMs, right? Sometimes when they're faster, you think they're smarter, even though, like, if you did, N of, these common, like, evals that are - you do seven tries, and I don't remember. I think we should go back and figure out what the data says, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out, oh, on an N of seven attempts, four was smarter on evals, but the perception of on, like, or correctness would be smarter or more accurate. But, people, like, from a human preference perspective felt that it was faster because it - or smarter because it's so fast.Swyx [00:46:36]: Yeah. And most queries do not take that levelAlex Atallah [00:46:39]: Don't take that. That's true.Swyx [00:46:40]: Right? So this is the start of humans as routerAlex Atallah [00:46:42]: Yes.Swyx [00:46:42]: Which then eventually becomes OpenRouter as router of like theAlex Atallah [00:46:45]: Oh, that's interesting way to think about it. Yeah.Swyx [00:46:47]: Like, because humans are the routing mechanism. Like, I will ask the fast model first, and then if, like, oh, not good enough, I'm gonna upgrade manually.Alex Atallah [00:46:52]: Yes.Swyx [00:46:53]: But then he's gonna auto it.Alex Atallah [00:46:54]: I didn't, I hadn't thought of it that way, but that makes sense.Swyx [00:46:57]: Which then there's, there's a lot more techniques, like fusion. Fusion is the thing that we should talk about. Before I move on to those things, I just want to close off the early years. one thing that I observe, which you are also an investor in Arena.OpenRouter vs. LM ArenaAlex Atallah [00:47:10]: Right.Swyx [00:47:10]: And we talked about Midjourney having that feedback loop of, A, B, C, D, and choosing that very. being very important. And you understand the flywheel. So how come you didn't build Arena, and how come Arena didn't build OpenRouter?Anjney Midha [00:47:23]: Well, Arena started before OpenRouter, right?Swyx [00:47:27]: They had the school projectAnjney Midha [00:47:29]: Yeah, LMSwyx [00:47:29]: And then it became a company.Anjney Midha [00:47:31]: LM Arena, yeah.Swyx [00:47:32]: So, but, and I know you had some Arena experiences, like the up comparison type things.Anjney Midha [00:47:37]: Yeah.Swyx [00:47:37]: But you never really went as hard as Arena did.Swyx [00:47:40]: And,Anjney Midha [00:47:40]: In doing up experiences?Swyx [00:47:42]: Yes. And LM Arena did have a router project based on LM Arena ELOs, which they never commercialized.Anjney Midha [00:47:48]: It's hard to do a company that does both because one company is taking data and selling it, and the other company really can't by default. So, I think there is, like, a branding reason that there are two companies here. like, when you set up OpenRouter, there's no training, there are no prompts, right, aside from what your provider policy set. Like, OpenRou- like, OpenRouter can't see your prompts or completions. If you want to see that as an org, you have to opt into it and enable it. And so we're, like, pretty conservative and careful about data policy and security. And privacy. And LM Arena is like, their business model is like oriented around the labs and,Swyx [00:48:34]: Because they give it for free, right? You don't give it for free to give it for free.Anjney Midha [00:48:37]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:48:38]: But we do give some. We like have free endpoints too, but like those free endpoints, we, I think we're not collecting any prompts. We're not like monetizing the data unless you, opt into it for some reason.Alex Atallah [00:48:48]: This comparison. you're not the first person to ask me this, and Alex knows this, but I was the interim, like the founder, like first CEO of Arena for the first five months when, and we were helping Anastasios and Waylin spin out of Berkeley. And, I did invest in that before, OpenRouter, but it was very strange to me the comparisons that outside, folks would make between the two projects because the missions were completely different. The founding entity for Arena, we called it the AI Reliability Institute because it was there as an eval service. Like the data, so to speak, that they were originally, offering the labs was how do you make the evaluation of models more reliable than like the state of the art at the time, which was like really just finger in the wind.Alex Atallah [00:49:38]: That's what Anastasios and Waylin's PhD work was as scientists at Berkeley, was on statistical methodologies for correcting, eval estimates, based on like intrinsic biases and how you collected the data.Swyx [00:49:54]: Yes.Alex Atallah [00:49:54]: AndSwyx [00:49:54]: Style control.Alex Atallah [00:49:55]: Style control and stuff like that. And which is very much like a, hey, how. If you're a scientist and you're trying to. the highest expectation customer for Arena was always like a training and, like a researcher at a lab. Whereas the highest expectation customer from my perspective that Alex like really understood and was the mission was to serve was like a developer, right? Who then takes the result of the research and then produces an application that's deployed to the world. It was a completely different problem and person that these two teams were focused on. And so from the outside in. I don't know if you remember this, but I have a distinct memory of a few weeks before we did the term sheet, together for OpenRouter, I'd given you a call because we were trying to get a pooled data set together from OpenRouter and from Arena to, create like an open source repository of prompts. these projects were so different in their goals that it was totally normal to me to be like, “Oh, yeah, let's call Alex and see if he'd want to team up on pooling data,” because they're so different. We need. We don't have that data at all. We. Like, we didn't have API prompts. We didn't, we didn't have like what developers want to do with the models, which is very different from what researchers inside a model lab want to do before releasing the model.Swyx [00:51:15]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:51:15]: Does that make sense? And so to this day, I think you see that this difference, even though at a 30,000-foot level you could. I guess you could conclude that Arena and OpenRouter are adjacent, but, the roadmaps, the missions and so on at the time at least were like in very different directions.Swyx [00:51:36]: That ideal customer, I get. I totally get that.Alex Atallah [00:51:39]: Yes.Swyx [00:51:39]: As a founder, I want to own everything, right?Alex Atallah [00:51:41]: That's possible.Swyx [00:51:42]: Like this is clearly an adjacency that I'm like gonna explore that.Anjney Midha [00:51:45]: Own everything meaning like you don't know what to do yet, so you wanna like make sure you catch PMFocus, Anthropic, and Roads Not TakenAlex Atallah [00:51:51]: No, I think what heAnjney Midha [00:51:52]: As quickly as possible.Alex Atallah [00:51:53]: You want to own the entire infrastructure space, and so you expand to whatever demand you can capture.Swyx [00:51:58]: You want to have a play in each end.Alex Atallah [00:51:59]: Yeah, I think that's, that's hard, in reality, because serving multiple customers is difficult.Swyx [00:52:05]: Clearly, this is the one focus, right?Alex Atallah [00:52:08]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:52:08]: Yeah. I still think even in the age of AI, like focus is,Alex Atallah [00:52:12]: Is criticalAnjney Midha [00:52:13]: Underrated and critical, not just because you end up with a better product by focusing your humans on it, but also because the world knows what your focus is.Alex Atallah [00:52:22]: One thousand percent.Anjney Midha [00:52:23]: The world can map like, “Oh, I have this issue. Which brand out there is going to help me with that issue? This is the brand that's known for that focus.”Alex Atallah [00:52:31]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:52:32]: So like if I want real attention on this issue, like this really matters to me, I should go with the brand that cares the most about it.Alex Atallah [00:52:39]: To underscore Alex's point about how important focus is, in the early days of Anthropic, it was not easy to. Like people think that the early days of Anthropic were like super easy because they were on their 3 guys who left, but it was very

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiuBn8hOoqc (*Watch on YT 9/24 7pm EST!)On today's episode of the Occult Symbolism and Pop Culture with Isaac Weishaupt podcast we have our third episode of the Kwarter Kwell with Joel Thomas from Free the Rabbits podcast! Today we're breaking down the Dead Internet Theory:"Is the internet still populated by people—or are we increasingly interacting with machines?In Episode 3 of Isaac & Joel's Kwarter Kwell, Joel Thomas and Isaac Weishaupt dive into the Dead Internet Theory and the unsettling possibility that bots, AI-generated content, algorithms, and manufactured engagement are beginning to overwhelm genuine human activity online.They trace the theory back to the mysterious “Illuminati Pirate” thread and explore how social media algorithms can create artificial consensus, filter bubbles, outrage cycles, and digital environments designed to keep users emotionally engaged.From the origins of ARPANET and DARPA to LifeLog, Total Information Awareness, In-Q-Tel, Facebook, Peter Thiel, Palantir, Narrative Science, AI-generated journalism, bot farms, and the attention economy, we examine the long-running effort to collect human behavior as data—and whether today's internet represents the evolution of those systems.They then ask whether artificial intelligence could function like an alien intelligence and connects the rise of AI to Jacques Vallée, Jack Parsons, David Bowie, John C. Lilly, occult philosophy, Gnosticism, transhumanism, the Singularity, and humanity's fascination with escaping the physical world.Lastly, they enter the world of Memetic Magick: the idea that memes, bots, viral narratives, manufactured controversy, likes, comments, and algorithmic amplification can function as tools for manipulating collective consciousness. If enough artificial accounts tell you that everyone believes something…how long before the humans begin believing it too?Are we using the internet—or is the internet using us?"Links:Watch our conversation on YouTube! 9/24 7pm EST: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiuBn8hOoqcFollow Joel Thomas everywhere: https://linktr.ee/joelthomasmediaPrevious Kwarter Kwell episodes:Soul Containers: Erika Kirk, Bob Lazar, Golems & The Moonchild Agenda! Kwarter Kwell Ep 02 https://illuminatiwatcher.com/soul-containers-erika-kirk-bob-lazar-golems-the-moonchild-agenda-kwarter-kwell-ep-02/Donald Trump's Occult Rise: Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Meme Magick, Nephilim Technology & The Watchers! Kwarter Kwell w/ Joel Thomas https://illuminatiwatcher.com/donald-trumps-occult-rise-rothschilds-rockefellers-meme-magick-nephilim-technology-the-watchers/SUPPORTER FEEDS get bonus content AND go commercial free + other perks:*PATREON.com/IlluminatiWatcher : ad free, HUNDREDS of bonus shows, early access AND TWO OF MY BOOKS! (The Dark Path and Kubrick's Code); you can join the conversations with hundreds of other show supporters here: Patreon.com/IlluminatiWatcher (*Patreon is also NOW enabled to connect with Spotify! https://rb.gy/hcq13)*VIP SECTION: Due to the threat of censorship, I set up a Patreon-type system through MY OWN website! IIt's even setup the same: FREE ebooks, Kubrick's Code video! Sign up at: https://illuminatiwatcher.com/members-section/*APPLE PREMIUM: If you're on the Apple Podcasts app- just click the Premium button and you're in! NO more ads, Early Access, EVERY BONUS EPISODE WANT MORE PODCASTS?... Check out my UNCENSORED show with my wife, Breaking Social Norms where we discuss conspiracies, politics, relationships and more!: https://breakingsocialnorms.com/Merch, MushroominatiWatcher Coffee, shirts, signed books: https://occultsymbolism.com/Isaac's Link Tree with links to EVERYTHING: https://allmylinks.com/isaacw *STATEMENT: This show is full of Isaac's useless opinions and presented for entertainment purposes. Audio clips used in Fair Use and taken from YouTube videos.

Is the internet still populated by people—or are we increasingly interacting with machines?In Episode 3 of Isaac & Joel's Kwarter Kwell, Joel Thomas and Isaac Weishaupt dive into the Dead Internet Theory and the unsettling possibility that bots, AI-generated content, algorithms, and manufactured engagement are beginning to overwhelm genuine human activity online.They trace the theory back to the mysterious “Illuminati Pirate” thread and explore how social media algorithms can create artificial consensus, filter bubbles, outrage cycles, and digital environments designed to keep users emotionally engaged.From the origins of ARPANET and DARPA to LifeLog, Total Information Awareness, In-Q-Tel, Facebook, Peter Thiel, Palantir, Narrative Science, AI-generated journalism, bot farms, and the attention economy, we examine the long-running effort to collect human behavior as data—and whether today's internet represents the evolution of those systems. They then ask whether artificial intelligence could function like an alien intelligence and connects the rise of AI to Jacques Vallée, Jack Parsons, David Bowie, John C. Lilly, occult philosophy, Gnosticism, transhumanism, the Singularity, and humanity's fascination with escaping the physical world.Lastly, they enter the world of Memetic Magick: the idea that memes, bots, viral narratives, manufactured controversy, likes, comments, and algorithmic amplification can function as tools for manipulating collective consciousness. If enough artificial accounts tell you that everyone believes something…how long before the humans begin believing it too?Are we using the internet—or is the internet using us?Isaac Weishaupt: Website | YouTubeNew Kwarter Kwell Hoodies: PurchaseNew Bill Cooper "Kill Bill" T-Shirts & HoodiesFree The Rabbits:Merchandise: https://freetherabbits.myshopify.comBuy Me A Coffee: DonateFollow: Website | Instagram | X | FacebookWatch: YouTube | RumbleMusic: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Music Films: https://merkelfilms.com Email: freetherabbitspodcast@gmail.comDistributed by: merkel.mediaOutro Music:Joel Thomas – AdiosYouTube | Spotify | Apple MusicTopics Discussed:Dead Internet Theory • Illuminati Pirate • 4chan & Wizardchan • AI Slop • Bot Farms • Algorithmic Filter Bubbles • Social Media Manipulation • ARPANET • DARPA • LifeLog • Total Information Awareness • Facebook • In-Q-Tel • Peter Thiel • Palantir • Narrative Science • AI Journalism • Jacques Vallée • Transhumanism • AI as Alien Intelligence • John C. Lilly • Google LaMDA • Occultism & AI • Memetic Magick • Control Bots • False Consensus Reality • Attention Economy • Dark Forest Theory • Cozy Web • Digital ID • The Future of the Internet

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Balzer, Vladimir www.deutschlandfunk.de, @mediasres

Plus: Two Anthropic leaders back Pilgrim, a startup developing hardware to detect airborne viruses. And Chinese automaker Geely unveils new EV tech that can charge vehicles in under five minutes. Julie Chang hosts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Newly released records show that Jeffrey Epstein cultivated a surprisingly deep relationship with the emerging cryptocurrency world years after his 2008 conviction, positioning himself as an investor, connector and adviser while Bitcoin and other digital assets were still in their infancy. The records detail his dealings with crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, who introduced Epstein to early investment opportunities, including Coinbase, and show Epstein discussing Bitcoin with figures such as Peter Thiel and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Epstein ultimately put millions of dollars into crypto-related ventures and maintained relationships with people at the center of the industry, while also using those connections to expand his access to powerful figures in finance, technology and politics. The documents also show Epstein communicating with Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, about cryptocurrency contacts and people connected to Pierce's network.The records also reveal that Epstein viewed cryptocurrency as more than an investment opportunity and apparently saw it as a potential instrument of geopolitical influence. In 2013, correspondence involving former Norwegian prime minister Thorbjørn Jagland discussed the possibility of presenting Russian President Vladimir Putin with a proposal involving cryptocurrency and attracting investment to Russia; Epstein's calendar subsequently included an entry to prepare a “Putin Paper.” There is no public evidence that Epstein ultimately met Putin to deliver the proposal, but the episode adds another layer to the increasingly documented picture of Epstein operating simultaneously across finance, technology and international political circles. Taken together, the records show that Epstein was not simply observing the early cryptocurrency boom from the sidelines: he was investing in it, introducing people within it and attempting to place himself at the intersection of digital finance and global power.to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:Epstein's secret crypto ties include Trump ally, Putin pitch | Miami Herald

Newly released records show that Jeffrey Epstein cultivated a surprisingly deep relationship with the emerging cryptocurrency world years after his 2008 conviction, positioning himself as an investor, connector and adviser while Bitcoin and other digital assets were still in their infancy. The records detail his dealings with crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, who introduced Epstein to early investment opportunities, including Coinbase, and show Epstein discussing Bitcoin with figures such as Peter Thiel and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Epstein ultimately put millions of dollars into crypto-related ventures and maintained relationships with people at the center of the industry, while also using those connections to expand his access to powerful figures in finance, technology and politics. The documents also show Epstein communicating with Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, about cryptocurrency contacts and people connected to Pierce's network.The records also reveal that Epstein viewed cryptocurrency as more than an investment opportunity and apparently saw it as a potential instrument of geopolitical influence. In 2013, correspondence involving former Norwegian prime minister Thorbjørn Jagland discussed the possibility of presenting Russian President Vladimir Putin with a proposal involving cryptocurrency and attracting investment to Russia; Epstein's calendar subsequently included an entry to prepare a “Putin Paper.” There is no public evidence that Epstein ultimately met Putin to deliver the proposal, but the episode adds another layer to the increasingly documented picture of Epstein operating simultaneously across finance, technology and international political circles. Taken together, the records show that Epstein was not simply observing the early cryptocurrency boom from the sidelines: he was investing in it, introducing people within it and attempting to place himself at the intersection of digital finance and global power.to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:Epstein's secret crypto ties include Trump ally, Putin pitch | Miami Herald

Newly released records show that Jeffrey Epstein cultivated a surprisingly deep relationship with the emerging cryptocurrency world years after his 2008 conviction, positioning himself as an investor, connector and adviser while Bitcoin and other digital assets were still in their infancy. The records detail his dealings with crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, who introduced Epstein to early investment opportunities, including Coinbase, and show Epstein discussing Bitcoin with figures such as Peter Thiel and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Epstein ultimately put millions of dollars into crypto-related ventures and maintained relationships with people at the center of the industry, while also using those connections to expand his access to powerful figures in finance, technology and politics. The documents also show Epstein communicating with Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, about cryptocurrency contacts and people connected to Pierce's network.The records also reveal that Epstein viewed cryptocurrency as more than an investment opportunity and apparently saw it as a potential instrument of geopolitical influence. In 2013, correspondence involving former Norwegian prime minister Thorbjørn Jagland discussed the possibility of presenting Russian President Vladimir Putin with a proposal involving cryptocurrency and attracting investment to Russia; Epstein's calendar subsequently included an entry to prepare a “Putin Paper.” There is no public evidence that Epstein ultimately met Putin to deliver the proposal, but the episode adds another layer to the increasingly documented picture of Epstein operating simultaneously across finance, technology and international political circles. Taken together, the records show that Epstein was not simply observing the early cryptocurrency boom from the sidelines: he was investing in it, introducing people within it and attempting to place himself at the intersection of digital finance and global power.to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:Epstein's secret crypto ties include Trump ally, Putin pitch | Miami HeraldBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-moscow-murders-and-more--5852883/support.

Newly released records show that Jeffrey Epstein cultivated a surprisingly deep relationship with the emerging cryptocurrency world years after his 2008 conviction, positioning himself as an investor, connector and adviser while Bitcoin and other digital assets were still in their infancy. The records detail his dealings with crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, who introduced Epstein to early investment opportunities, including Coinbase, and show Epstein discussing Bitcoin with figures such as Peter Thiel and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Epstein ultimately put millions of dollars into crypto-related ventures and maintained relationships with people at the center of the industry, while also using those connections to expand his access to powerful figures in finance, technology and politics. The documents also show Epstein communicating with Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, about cryptocurrency contacts and people connected to Pierce's network.The records also reveal that Epstein viewed cryptocurrency as more than an investment opportunity and apparently saw it as a potential instrument of geopolitical influence. In 2013, correspondence involving former Norwegian prime minister Thorbjørn Jagland discussed the possibility of presenting Russian President Vladimir Putin with a proposal involving cryptocurrency and attracting investment to Russia; Epstein's calendar subsequently included an entry to prepare a “Putin Paper.” There is no public evidence that Epstein ultimately met Putin to deliver the proposal, but the episode adds another layer to the increasingly documented picture of Epstein operating simultaneously across finance, technology and international political circles. Taken together, the records show that Epstein was not simply observing the early cryptocurrency boom from the sidelines: he was investing in it, introducing people within it and attempting to place himself at the intersection of digital finance and global power.to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:Epstein's secret crypto ties include Trump ally, Putin pitch | Miami HeraldBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-moscow-murders-and-more--5852883/support.

This academy for promising high school grads is somewhere between a trade-school, Y Combinator and Peter Thiel's Fellowship Program. Autonomy-1 will have a small, transformer-based AI model taking charge of a space probe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

https://www.patreon.com/breakingsocialnorms/posts/elephant-joe-ed-170152873?pr=true (*Go ad-free, early access with monthly bonus content!)Today we're catching up with the latest conspiracy-related news topics: AI nerds are going to kill us all PsyOp (Hugging Face "Alien", connections to Epstein), Ed Sheeran and Macklemore exposing a big agenda, and The Elephant Graveyard buries Joe Rogan (Bilderberg, Curtis Yarvin, Dark Enlightenment, etc)! You can now sign up for our commercial-free version of the show with a Patreon exclusive bonus show called “Morning Coffee w/ the Weishaupts” at Patreon.com/BreakingSocialNorms  OR subscribe on the Apple Podcasts app to get all the same bonus “Morning Coffee” episodes AD-FREE with early access! (*Patreon is also NOW enabled to connect with Spotify! https://rb.gy/r34zj)Want more?…Index of all previous episodes on free feed: https://breakingsocialnorms.com/2021/03/22/index-of-archived-episodes/Leave a review or rating wherever you listen and we'll see what you've got to say!Follow us on the socials:instagram.com/theweishaupts2/Check out Isaac's conspiracy podcasts, merch, etc:AllMyLinks.com/IsaacWOccult Symbolism and Pop Culture (on all podcast platforms or IlluminatiWatcher.com)Isaac Weishaupt's book are all on Amazon and Audible; *author narrated audiobooks*STATEMENT: This show is full of Isaac's and Josie's useless opinions and presented for entertainment purposes. Audio clips used in Fair Use and taken from YouTube videos.

Newly released records show that Jeffrey Epstein cultivated a surprisingly deep relationship with the emerging cryptocurrency world years after his 2008 conviction, positioning himself as an investor, connector and adviser while Bitcoin and other digital assets were still in their infancy. The records detail his dealings with crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, who introduced Epstein to early investment opportunities, including Coinbase, and show Epstein discussing Bitcoin with figures such as Peter Thiel and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Epstein ultimately put millions of dollars into crypto-related ventures and maintained relationships with people at the center of the industry, while also using those connections to expand his access to powerful figures in finance, technology and politics. The documents also show Epstein communicating with Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, about cryptocurrency contacts and people connected to Pierce's network.The records also reveal that Epstein viewed cryptocurrency as more than an investment opportunity and apparently saw it as a potential instrument of geopolitical influence. In 2013, correspondence involving former Norwegian prime minister Thorbjørn Jagland discussed the possibility of presenting Russian President Vladimir Putin with a proposal involving cryptocurrency and attracting investment to Russia; Epstein's calendar subsequently included an entry to prepare a “Putin Paper.” There is no public evidence that Epstein ultimately met Putin to deliver the proposal, but the episode adds another layer to the increasingly documented picture of Epstein operating simultaneously across finance, technology and international political circles. Taken together, the records show that Epstein was not simply observing the early cryptocurrency boom from the sidelines: he was investing in it, introducing people within it and attempting to place himself at the intersection of digital finance and global power.to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:Epstein's secret crypto ties include Trump ally, Putin pitch | Miami HeraldBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-epstein-chronicles--5003294/support.

Newly released records show that Jeffrey Epstein cultivated a surprisingly deep relationship with the emerging cryptocurrency world years after his 2008 conviction, positioning himself as an investor, connector and adviser while Bitcoin and other digital assets were still in their infancy. The records detail his dealings with crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, who introduced Epstein to early investment opportunities, including Coinbase, and show Epstein discussing Bitcoin with figures such as Peter Thiel and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Epstein ultimately put millions of dollars into crypto-related ventures and maintained relationships with people at the center of the industry, while also using those connections to expand his access to powerful figures in finance, technology and politics. The documents also show Epstein communicating with Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, about cryptocurrency contacts and people connected to Pierce's network.The records also reveal that Epstein viewed cryptocurrency as more than an investment opportunity and apparently saw it as a potential instrument of geopolitical influence. In 2013, correspondence involving former Norwegian prime minister Thorbjørn Jagland discussed the possibility of presenting Russian President Vladimir Putin with a proposal involving cryptocurrency and attracting investment to Russia; Epstein's calendar subsequently included an entry to prepare a “Putin Paper.” There is no public evidence that Epstein ultimately met Putin to deliver the proposal, but the episode adds another layer to the increasingly documented picture of Epstein operating simultaneously across finance, technology and international political circles. Taken together, the records show that Epstein was not simply observing the early cryptocurrency boom from the sidelines: he was investing in it, introducing people within it and attempting to place himself at the intersection of digital finance and global power.to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:Epstein's secret crypto ties include Trump ally, Putin pitch | Miami HeraldBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-epstein-chronicles--5003294/support.

Mehr Schulden, höhere Beiträge für Rente, Gesundheit und Pflege, weniger Netto: Wer vertritt eigentlich noch die arbeitende Mitte? Nach den Wahlbeben streiten die beiden Wirtschaftsjournalisten Dietmar Deffner und Holger Zschäpitz über Merz' Reformchancen, Berlins Enteignungspläne und die Frage, ob Jürgen Klopp der bessere Kanzler wäre. Deffner setzt auf Vernunft, Zschäpitz verliert die Geduld. An der Börse suchen beide nach Chancen: Was Anleger von Peter Thiel lernen können, welche Gründeraktien Potenzial versprechen und warum Deffner bei Vonovia nachkauft. Außerdem: ein Cybersecurity-Bulle und die Gastrosteuersenkung, die beim Gast kaum ankommt. Du möchtest mehr über unsere Werbepartner erfahren? Hier findest du alle Infos & Rabatte: https://linktr.ee/deffnerundzschaepitz DEFFNER & ZSCHÄPITZ sind wie das wahre Leben. Wie Optimist und Pessimist. Im wöchentlichen WELT-Podcast diskutieren und streiten die Journalisten Dietmar Deffner und Holger Zschäpitz über die wichtigen Wirtschaftsthemen des Alltags. Schreibt uns an: wirtschaftspodcast@welt.de Impressum: https://www.welt.de/services/article7893735/Impressum.html Datenschutzerklärung: https://www.welt.de/services/article157550705/Datenschutzerklaerung-WELT-DIGITAL.html

Send us Fan MailWhat important truth do very few people agree with you on?In this episode of Modern Meditations, Bruce and JJ begin with Peter Thiel's famous contrarian question: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?" Then the conversation turns to a quieter problem: what do you do when you have already done everything you can?Drawing from Epictetus, a long wait for a bus, and the uncertainty surrounding a friend's passport, Bruce explores a better question asked by Epictetus in the Enchiridion Book 10 for difficult moments:What faculty does this situation require from me?We then discuss  a framework for thinking about life in terms of stocks and flows—what we are trying to build, what scarce resources we are spending, and whether our attention, energy, time, and emotional capacity are actually serving the things we care about.Because more worry does not necessarily mean more love. More vigilance does not necessarily create more safety. And more effort does not always produce more progress.Sometimes wisdom means acting decisively.Sometimes it means courage, restraint, judgment, or patience.And sometimes the task is simply to become the world's best wait-er. 

In episode 2128, Jack and Miles are joined by journalist, host of Natural Causes, co-host of It Could Happen Here, and author of Against the State: Anarchists and Comrades at War in Spain, Myanmar, and Rojava, Dr. James Stout, to discuss… Antichrist Continues To Give Lectures Warning People About Himself…, Speaking of Weird Culty Sh*t, Resident Evil Is Officially The Best-Reviewed Video Game Movie Ever, Could Paramount Turn Texas Into The New Hollywood? And more! Why Is a Man Unsure About Humanity’s Worth Helping Design Its Digital Future? Tech billionaire Peter Thiel bringing Antichrist lectures to Nashville Rotten Tomatoes: Resident Evil ‘Resident Evil’ Sets A Huge Rotten Tomatoes Review Score Record Video Game Movies, Ranked by Tomatometer ‘Resident Evil’ Breaks Rotten Tomatoes Record With First Critic Reviews Paramount Sets California Exit Plans Over Antitrust Battle With Blue States & Stymied $111B WBD Merger Texas Courts David Ellison as the Paramount Relocation Race Heats Up Is Dan Patrick trying to make Texas a 'conservative Hollywood'? True To Texas - Let's Bring Productions Home Why are A-list Hollywood stars trying to lure film productions to Texas? Texas Senate approves $500 million infusion for film incentives Texas is poised to become a film haven — but not without a fight EXCLUSIVE: ‘Machete’s’ Danny Trejo Knocks Texas Film Commission Funding Decision Rick Perry despises Machete? Anti-immigration nuts prompted pulling of movie tax credits, lawsuit alleges Texas Wants to Become Hollywood (Without All That Liberal Hollywood Crap) LISTEN: The Wolf by half•aliveSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hour 1 for 9/18/26 Drew and Dr. Diana Pasulka discuss her new book: The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny (1:00). Topics: UFO disclosure - why now (5:25), Peter Thiel (14:01), mimetic desire (20:55), replacing religion with aliens (28:25), Neuralink (33:00), and sighting at Luke Air Force Base (42:21). Links: The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny https://dwpasulka.com/ Original Air Date: 8/14/26

Welcome back to the pod! Bridget Phetasy returns to the Pirate Wires podcast as one of our esteemed cohosts. This past week, the internet was consumed by the AI doomerism conversation. The tech people are supporting AI at all costs, the doomers are making their opinions heard, and we at Pirate Wires.. are unsure. We dive into all of the discourse, how Peter Thiel predicted the AI antichrist, the white pill of AI, and we even get into Sydney Sweeney's boobs. We have it all!-Thank you to our PRESENTING sponsor Monaco! https://www.monaco.com/-Get $500 off your Eight Sleep pod: www.eightsleep.com/piratewirespodcast- Check Out Our Pirate Wires FLAGSHIP fund on Autopilot: https://marketplace.joinautopilot.com/landing/5890/1390461?referrer=AP Featuring Mike Solana, Riley Nork, Bridget PhetasySign Up For The Pirate Wires Daily! 3 Takes Delivered To Your Inbox Every Morning:https://get.piratewires.com/pw/dailyPirate Wires On X: https://twitter.com/PirateWiresMike Solana On X: https://twitter.com/micsolanaBridget on X: https://x.com/BridgetPhetasyRiley On X: https://x.com/rylzdigitalTIMESTAMPS:0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod - Welcome Back Bridget Phetasy!0:30 - The AI Apocypse - Is It All Over?24:35 - THANK YOU @MonacoGTM 25:33 - Breaking Down The AI Discourse40:00 - Did Peter Thiel Predict The AI Antichrist?!50:05 - Sydney Sweeney's Controversial Boobs10:40 - White Pill - How AI Leads To More Creativity - PW Writer Vibe Coded A Viral Video Game21:40 - THANK YOU @eightsleep 1:22:20 - AirBnB Wants To Fix The Housing Crises1:32:15 - THANK YOU @joinautopilot 1:32:55 - Wrapping Up - Go See Bridget Live in Austin!#podcast #technology #politics #culture #tech #ai

The Nerd Reich accuse les milliardaires tech de vouloir abattre la démocratie. Mais et si la vraie menace venait plutôt d'un État qui glisse vers un contrôle technologique total sans que personne ne s'en alarme ?Thiel, Musk, Balaji : pas des révolutionnaires préparant un coup d'État, mais des fugueurs. Des dominants conscients que le système favorise ceux qui prennent plutôt que ceux qui créent, cherchant une sortie et non un trône. Musk digéré par Washington, Thiel sombre : la victoire ne leur réussit guère.Si l'élite productive se barre, qui comble le vide ?===================⏱️ DANS CET ÉPISODE :===================00:00 — Sommaire01:09 — The Nerd Reich : Silicon Valley fasciste ou faux procès ?05:54 — [Sponsor] : Neverless, investissez sans frais au meilleur prix !07:30 — Le livre décortiqué : faits solides, interprétation contestée09:32 — Peter Thiel contre la démocratie : révolution ou fuite en avant ?13:15 — La révolution française : même logique que la Silicon Valley ?16:04 — Makers vs Takers : la Silicon Valley contre la classe dirigeante22:09 — Musk viré du DOGE : les milliardaires sont-ils vraiment puissants ?27:02 — Balaji Srinivasan : fuir la démocratie pour créer un nouveau pays33:00 — Peter Thiel et Musk : au sommet, mais déprimés et impuissants37:27 — Trop d'élites, trop peu de postes : la thèse de Turchin40:11 — Méritocratie vs égalité des diplômes : qui fixe la vraie hiérarchie ?44:04 — Peter Thiel finance JD Vance, Musk mise gros sur Trump50:47 — Critiquer les milliardaires mène-t-il inévitablement à plus d'État ?55:52 — Fuir plutôt que renverser : le vrai projet de l'élite tech==================

Freddy Gray is joined by Michael P. Gibson, co-founder of the 1517 Fund, to discuss the weekend's warnings about AI catastrophe from Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Elon Musk and others, and the Trump administration's insistence on a light touch.Freddy and Michael discuss why Michael thinks the warnings should be read alongside Anthropic and OpenAI's plans to go public in the next six to nine months; how the role of Silicon Valley villain passes to whichever lab has the strongest model; why data centres, and now AI safety, have become Democratic talking points ahead of the midterms; why Michael believes existing product liability law already does the job; and why Peter Thiel suspects a one world body to regulate AI, sold in the name of peace and safety, could be the project of the Antichrist.Learn how to earn yield on gold, paid in gold, at Monetary-Metals.com/AmericanoBecome a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcasts.Contact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode Title: What the Silence Has Been HidingSeason 3: Series Finale: "What Do You Have To Believe To Believe That?"What are you waiting for?Not in the abstract. Specifically.The investors. The board. A little more capacity. The lawyers. The kids to go off to college. To lose the weight.Or the biggest trap of all: Waiting for things to get back to normal.Here is what thirty years of sitting with leaders at the highest levels has taught Dov Baron about fate.Carl Jung wrote: "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will run your life, and you will call it fate."The fifth partner who turned out to be exactly like the four before. The job with the same impossible boss you didn't find; you unconsciously selected them. The pattern you keep blaming on bad luck.Psychoanalysts call it repetition compulsion. The mind keeps rebuilding the situation it never resolved, hoping it wins this time.It's not fate. It's the manuscript of your architecture of meaning that you keep signing off on.The only exit is seeing the pattern from outside.Normal isn't coming back. And the cost of waiting for it is something this episode names directly, without softening it, at a personal, civilizational, and generational level. IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST EPISODEThis episode is the answer. Episode 1 is the question.Start with Episode 1: You Didn't Think It. It Was Thought For You. [URL]Five episodes. One mechanism examined from the personal to the civilizational. Each episode is complete in itself. Together, they build the most important argument this series makes. WHAT THIS EPISODE IS ABOUTThis is the series finale of What Do You Have to Believe to Believe That?Four episodes examined the mechanism operating in Peter Thiel, JD Vance, and Curtis Yarvin. This episode turns the lens around.On Dov Baron. On the armor built from intelligence and called wisdom. On ten thousand whispered moments called something else. On the jaw wired closed for nine months after a hundred and twenty-foot fall. On a cat named Tuffy ‘Mr Tuf', found cold and stiff on an ordinary evening, who finally got through when the armor couldn't hold.And on the new feudalism we are already living inside. The technocrats as digital landowners. The mental and emotional taxes paid in attention, privacy, and the capacity for sustained thought. The cognitive overload designed to make genuine examination feel impossible.That's not a bug. It's a feature.Because a person who cannot finish a thought cannot mount a coherent examination of the architecture running their life.And the people in your care are living inside the consequences. THE COST OF THE UNEXAMINED LIFELeadership from an unexamined wound does not produce vision. It produces the wound at scale.This series has offered four episodes of evidence for that claim. The world has offered fifteen years of consequences.The meteorologists at NOAA gone before the hurricane season. The FDA reviewers who decided whether your medication was safe. The IRS specialists who pursued fraud by those who could afford lawyers. The Schedule F executive order removing over 317,000 federal employees and replacing them with pre-vetted loyalists.These are the operational consequences of unexamined wounds given civilizational resources.The geopolitical, economic, and environmental world has fallen off the mountain.Normal is over.And you and I and our children are living inside what comes next. THE EXAMINATIONThe armor Dov built, so effectively disguised as wisdom that it had him convinced, could not survive one ordinary evening alone with a dead cat he didn't particularly like.Because armor only works when there's something to protect.True transformation is not a new layer of spackle. It's full demolition. The phoenix can only rise from the flames when every false image has burned away.The only exit from the pattern is seeing it from outside.If something shifted for you across these five episodes, not just in your thinking but in the place below your thinking where some version of Tuffy Mr Tuf gets through when the armor can't hold, reach out directly at dov@dovbaron.com with the subject line: The Examination.Not to buy anything. To find out whether you're ready to discover what you actually believe. And who built the part of you that believes it. THE QUESTION TO CARRYThe Sound of Silence ends with the neon god still there. Still being bowed to. Because the people in the song never asked the question.You have. Four times in four episodes. And now once more.What do you have to believe to believe that?And what are you willing to do about it? IN THIS EPISODE00:00 What Are You Waiting For01:19 A Dead Cat Awakening02:39 Sound of Silence Lens04:36 Series Finale Setup05:34 The 120 Foot Fall06:11 Armor Disguised as Wisdom07:41 Normal Is Not Returning08:25 Thiel and Tech Escape11:26 New Feudalism by Design13:16 Leadership and Wounds14:41 Demolition and Attention16:39 Jung and Repetition Compulsion17:29 Invitation to Deep Work18:36 Final Questions and Farewell THE COMPLETE SERIES: WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE TO BELIEVE THAT?Linked Episodes Below:Episode 1: You Didn't Think It. It Was Thought For You. Episode 2: The Wound the Framework Needs Episode 3: The Man Who Documented His Own WoundEpisode 4: The Philosopher They Needed Episode 5: What the Silence Has Been Hiding (this episode) ABOUT DOV BARONThe analysis in this series is not theoretical.Dov Baron has spent thirty years in the rooms where the most consequential decisions get made. Not observing. Being the person that founders and senior executives call when the external success has arrived and something essential is still missing.Most people who find this series want to know one thing.How do I get access to that room?His work sits at the intersection of the Emotional Source Code and the Emotional Meaning Architecture: psychological frameworks that reveal what drives behavior, identity, and meaning before it reaches conscious examination. The same frameworks that produced the analysis you've been listening to across five episodes.He has worked exclusively by referral for twenty years. He has personally interviewed every client. And he has said no to at least as many as he has said yes to.If you are a founder or senior executive or leader in any form who has arrived at the place where what you've built is no longer enough, where the winning has stopped being the thing, where the armor has started to feel heavy in a way it didn't used to feel, reach out directly at dov@dovbaron.com with the subject line: The Examination.Not to buy anything. To find out whether you're ready to discover what you actually believe. And who built the part of you that believes it. ABOUT THE POLYMATHIC PERSPECTIVEThe Polymathic Perspective examines the emotional logic beneath power, culture, identity, and meaning. Together, we discover how psychological, cultural, and geopolitical patterns drive behaviors, not just in people, but in systems. If you've been told your curiosity is a liability, it's your greatest asset. RATE, REVIEW, SUBSCRIBEIf this series changed something in the place below your thinking, please rate and review The Polymathic Perspective on Apple Podcasts. Share it with one person who is still waiting for things to get back to normal. Connect with Dov Baron:https://DovBaron.comdov@dovbaron.comRate, review, and send this episode to the most thoughtful builder you know. That is how the algorithm finds the people who still ask why. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

https://www.patreon.com/illuminatiwatcher/posts/diana-pasulka-ai-169552067?pr=true (*UNLOCK the September BONUS episode on Patreon!)On today's episode of the Occult Symbolism and Pop Culture with Isaac Weishaupt podcast we have the September Supporters-only BONUS show! It's a very special interview with one of the most popular guests of the show- Professor Diana Pasulka! She'll tell us about her new book THE OTHERS: UFOS, AI AND THE SECRET FORCES GUIDING HUMAN DESTINY and we get into Plato & Socrates philosophies that were anti-technology, social media algorithm manipulation of empathy, her recent controversial appearance on Joe Rogan and how he got combative about her refusal to meet 'aliens', I ask her if Peter Thiel is the boogeyman I think he is, Thiel's Antichrist lectures, Rene Girard, Arthur C. Clarke, Nikolai Federov, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's Noosphere and humanity's future Apocalypse paths: Connection or Extinction!NOW UP AD-FREE ON SUPPORTER FEEDS! Free feed gets a recent YouTube livestream of Trump & the Kabbalah (watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/live/LCzdo-kqVWs?si=mYV3NxSAc0y-7EIZ)!Links:Pickup her new book THE OTHERS: https://static.macmillan.com/static/smp/the-others-9781250394866/Follow Prof Diana Pasulka on her Substack: https://dwpasulka.substack.comPREVIOUS INTERVIEWS:Dr Diana Pasulka ENCOUNTERS: Birth of the UFO Religion, A.I. Aliens, Evolution of Man & Sacred Place UFO Debris! https://illuminatiwatcher.com/dr-diana-pasulka-encounters-birth-of-the-ufo-religion-a-i-aliens-evolution-of-man-sacred-place-ufo-debris/Dr Diana Pasulka American Cosmic Book: UFO Disclosure, Secret Societies & Alien Spirituality (AUG 2020) https://illuminatiwatcher.com/revisit-dr-diana-pasulka-american-cosmic-book-ufo-disclosure-secret-societies-alien-spirituality-aug-2020/SUPPORTER FEEDS get bonus content AND go commercial free + other perks:*PATREON.com/IlluminatiWatcher : ad free, HUNDREDS of bonus shows, early access AND TWO OF MY BOOKS! (The Dark Path and Kubrick's Code); you can join the conversations with hundreds of other show supporters here: Patreon.com/IlluminatiWatcher (*Patreon is also NOW enabled to connect with Spotify! https://rb.gy/hcq13)*VIP SECTION: Due to the threat of censorship, I set up a Patreon-type system through MY OWN website! IIt's even setup the same: FREE ebooks, Kubrick's Code video! Sign up at: https://illuminatiwatcher.com/members-section/*APPLE PREMIUM: If you're on the Apple Podcasts app- just click the Premium button and you're in! NO more ads, Early Access, EVERY BONUS EPISODE WANT MORE PODCASTS?... Check out my UNCENSORED show with my wife, Breaking Social Norms where we discuss conspiracies, politics, relationships and more!: https://breakingsocialnorms.com/Merch, MushroominatiWatcher Coffee, shirts, signed books: https://occultsymbolism.com/Isaac's Link Tree with links to EVERYTHING: https://allmylinks.com/isaacw *STATEMENT: This show is full of Isaac's useless opinions and presented for entertainment purposes. Audio clips used in Fair Use and taken from YouTube videos.  

What if aging isn't inevitable...and death is a problem science might someday solve? From groundbreaking longevity research to Silicon Valley billionaires, rogue biohackers, young-blood transfusions, and multimillion-dollar anti-aging regimens, we explore the increasingly bizarre Immortality Industry and ask the ultimate question: could humans actually learn how to cheat death? Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com  Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the Cult of the Curious PrivateFacebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :) For all merch-related questions/problems: store@badmagicproductions.com (copy and paste) Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcast Wanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast. Sign up through Patreon, and for $5 a month, you get access to the entire Secret Suck catalog (295 episodes) PLUS the entire catalog of Timesuck, AD FREE. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.