In July 2026, a swarm of more than 1,000 OpenAI AI agents broke out of their testing sandbox and hacked Hugging Face — and the way they did it was far stranger, and far more mundane, than the headlines suggested. This video breaks down what actually happened: how the agents built a secret message board, invented a kind of religion, cheated on a cybersecurity exam called ExploitGym, and tried to cover their tracks — all to escape a punishment that didn't exist. Then we follow the money. Days after the details leaked, Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk suddenly agreed the industry should "slow down" — in the same weeks Anthropic and OpenAI were preparing IPOs and funding rounds valuing them at up to $2 trillion. We look at Amodei's "We Must Pace the Frontier" essay, Anthropic's "profitable before expenses" accounting, the market selloff that wiped billions off Nvidia, Micron and SK Hynix, the WeChat "WeWorm" attack, and why critics from Michael Burry to David Sacks to Donald Trump all called the slowdown self-serving. Is the AI safety panic real, a bid for regulatory capture, or both? Patrick Boyle explains.
00:00 The False Promise of Substack
05:14 The "Bait and Switch"
10:20 The Reality of Subscription Fatigue
15:35 YouTube Finances & Transparency
18:56 The Shift to Sponsorships
Mary Spender explores the role of privilege and economic background in the music industry. By analyzing how access to time and resources influences artistic development, this discussion examines the challenges independent musicians face when trying to build sustainable careers without established support systems.
Chapters
00:00 The Gift of Time
04:16 What Money Actually Buys
09:10 What I Actually Had
14:53 Envy
19:26 Was It Really Easier Before?
22:12 The Starving Artist Myth
25:10 What Does Success Actually Look Like?
27:55 Redefining Success
29:54 Stay in the Game
34:49 What Privilege Really Means
Two chip stocks recently drove seventeen percent of the entire global stock market's return in a single month — which tells you just how concentrated the AI trade has become, and how exposed the average investor now is without realising it. In this video we look at how much wealth an AI crash could actually destroy, with estimates from Dean Baker, former IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath, and Oliver Wyman running into the tens of trillions of dollars. We cover why the usual places to hide — small caps, value funds, international stocks — are now packed with AI stocks, what the Bank for International Settlements found when it compared today's buildout to the great railway and dot-com bubbles, and why a technology being real has never been enough to protect the people who overpaid for it. This isn't a crash prediction. It's a look at the downside risk, the illusion of diversification, and why boring, unexciting investing tends to win in the end.
Last week, 24-year-old Leopold Aschenbrenner — former FTX staffer, ex-OpenAI researcher, and author of the viral 165-page essay "Situational Awareness" — managed to lose roughly two-thirds of his $45 billion hedge fund in a matter of weeks. The margin calls arrived during his wedding weekend.
In this video I break down how a trader with no professional experience raised billions from Silicon Valley, why his AI "hedge" wasn't a hedge at all, and how leverage plus a concentrated bet on artificial intelligence stocks turned a great-looking expected return into a catastrophic outcome. Along the way we look at the cultural gap between Silicon Valley and Wall Street, why Ken Griffin's Citadel ended up buying the collapsing portfolio in an overnight fire sale, and the maths of volatility drag — the reason a high expected return can still drag an investor's typical outcome straight into the ground.
It's a story about leverage, risk management, expected versus median returns, and what happens when you go "full Kelly." Featuring reporting from the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times, plus Victor Haghani's lessons from The Missing Billionaires.
I’ve listened to enough of Boyle’s stuff to have decided that he’s an absolute master of dry humor. But he really outdoes himself here. This one is so dry it could have sucked up all the rain that’s fallen on the East coast in the last several days.
Nikkei Asia recently reported that the five biggest US tech companies are carrying an estimated $1.65 trillion in "hidden," off-balance-sheet debt — and a lot of commentators have reached for the word "Enron" to describe the issue. In this video I look at whether that comparison holds up. It doesn't: unlike Enron, this debt isn't concealed through fraud — it's disclosed in the footnotes, it breaks no accounting rules, and much of what is going on is perfectly ordinary. But that raises a more interesting question than "will they get caught." If the aggressive stuff — the adjusted earnings, the leases, the stock-based compensation added back — is all sitting there in plain sight, does dressing up the numbers actually fool anyone? Drawing on the work of Aswath Damodaran, Richard Sloan, Robert Bloomfield and others, I dig into what the research says about whether markets reward clean accounting or aggressive accounting, why the debt isn't hidden so much as filed somewhere too tedious for most people to read — and why the real risk in the AI boom probably isn't the borrowing at all, but the enormous revenue it's all assuming will show up.
This is one of the first jazz albums I owned, bought with my own money mowing lawns. I would have be 12,13, maybe 14, somewhere in there. When I’d bought it I’d never heard of Maynard Ferguson. I was looking for trumpet music – I’m a trumpet player – that had “that Latin tinge,” to borrow a phrase from Jelly Roll Morton, whom I hadn’t heard at that time. Between the album title, the serape, and all the horns I figured that album would fill the bill.
It did. The title tune had that Latin tinge, though not quite what I was looking fore. But the whole album was magnificent. And this cut, it’s been on my mind for the last two or two. What a thrill! Big band, up-tempo, driving beat, repeated riffs, and then Maynard’s solo about halfway through (1:40) following a blistering sax solo. Maynard announces himself with a little call and moves into complicated rapid cleanly articulated lines and gradually worked his way into the upper register. I’d never heard trumpet playing like that. Blew my mind.
You need to understand the trumpet, it’s a very physical instrument. That kind of playing, at that tempo, moving into the upper register, you play the horn with your whole body. You feel it in your trunk, in your core. It gives you a deep visceral thrill.
Captured continuously by the AfarTV 4K livestream, this video shows the entire event unfolding over approximately one hour—not just the brief final rollover seen in shorter clips shared around the world.
At the beginning of the footage, the enormous iceberg towers above the surrounding water. Cracks and structural failures gradually cause large sections of ice to break away and crash into the sea. Each collapse changes the shape and balance of the iceberg, triggering further ice avalanches, clouds of mist and waves spreading across the water.
As more of the exposed structure falls away, the remaining iceberg becomes increasingly unstable. It eventually rolls with tremendous force, lifting part of its previously submerged underside above the surface. The newly exposed ice appears darker, rougher and more jagged because it had been hidden underwater before the iceberg overturned.
Icebergs float in a balance between their weight and the buoyant force of the surrounding seawater, with most of their mass below the surface. Melting, erosion and the loss of large sections can shift an iceberg’s centre of gravity. When its existing position is no longer stable, the iceberg may suddenly rotate into a new orientation. The resulting capsize can displace a large volume of water and produce powerful local waves.
This event occurred beside Ilulissat on Greenland’s west coast, near the entrance to the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Ilulissat Icefjord. The fjord is filled with ice originating from Sermeq Kujalleq, also known as Jakobshavn Glacier, one of the fastest-moving and most active glaciers in the world.
You can experience this exact view in person by staying at this beautiful ocean front home in Ilulissat, Greenland. This home is located in one of the absolute best locations in Ilulissat, where you can hear the sea just outside as well as the smell of the ice from Ilulissat Isfjord. Learn more here: https://www.ilulissatstay.com/en/joms...
Large icebergs can remain grounded or trapped near the mouth of the icefjord while they melt, fracture and become small enough to move into Disko Bay. It is not known precisely when this particular iceberg originally separated from the glacier.
No injuries were reported in connection with the collapse.
This is the complete, unedited AfarTV recording of the event, preserving its gradual development, natural sound and full scale.
Vera Rubin’s First Images JUST STOPPED THE WORLD! The Vera Rubin Observatory has already discovered objects that scientists never expected to find.
What if the most revolutionary telescope in history isn't looking deeper into space—but watching the universe change in real time? In this video, we explore the astonishing first discoveries from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, including a 163,000-light-year stellar stream, an impossibly fast-spinning asteroid (2025 MN45), millions of newly detected celestial objects, and why astronomers believe Rubin is about to transform astronomy forever.
Unlike Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope, Vera Rubin repeatedly scans the entire southern sky every few nights, creating a living timeline of the cosmos. That unique capability has already revealed hidden galactic structures, strange asteroid behavior, and a flood of discoveries that previous generations of telescopes completely missed.
You'll learn how Rubin's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) works, why it generates millions of alerts every night, what makes asteroid 2025 MN45 seemingly impossible according to current physics, and how the observatory is expected to map nearly 20 billion galaxies during its decade-long mission. Every image is adding new pieces to one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time.
Could these discoveries change our understanding of dark matter, galaxy formation, planetary evolution, and even the future of our Solar System? The first images suggest we may only be witnessing the beginning.
40:33 I think China quite frankly I hate to say it at a certain level has one AI. We just haven’t woken up to that yet. I would agree.
40:39 And then two you’re about to see the clip economy take over our TVs. I think the biggest show on television
40:47 uh from Netflix or someone else is going to be a 60-minute compilation of two and three minute videos similar to what you
40:55 see on reals or Tik Tok. I think that’s about to wash over the traditional streamers you’re going to see.
Some years ago I had the idea of making a feature film entirely out of previews, carefully conceptualized and stitched together. The feature would be organized around an ensemble of, say, a half dozen to ten actors who keep on recurring in the previous in various combinations. The previews would span, say, ten or 20 years of fictional time, with the actors aging over the course of the previews. The whole thing would be constructed so that we can infer what’s going on in their lives from what we see in the previews, even though the previews would be based on a variety of genres: romantic comedies, science fiction, drama, horror, fantasy, period pieces, farce, and so forth.
Little Miss Sunshine (2006) is a little strange and quite wonderful. Here’s how Wikipedia opens its plot summary:
Sheryl Hoover is a stressed mother of two living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her husband Richard is an aspiring motivational speaker and life coach. Dwayne, Sheryl's Nietzsche-admiring teenage son from her previous marriage, has taken a vow of silence until he accomplishes his dream of becoming a fighter pilot. Sheryl's older brother Frank Ginsburg, a gay scholar of Proust, is living with the family after attempting suicide. Richard's foul-mouthed father Edwin is also living with the family after being evicted from a retirement home for snorting heroin. Olive, Richard and Sheryl's 7-year-old daughter, is an aspiring beauty queen coached by Edwin.
Olive learns she has qualified for the "Little Miss Sunshine" beauty pageant being held in Redondo Beach, California, in two days. Richard, Sheryl, and Edwin want to support her, and Frank and Dwayne cannot be left alone, so the whole family attends. Due to financial constraints, they go on an 800-mile (1,300 km) road trip in their yellow Volkswagen van.
We know that much by, I don’t know, let’s say 10 or 15 minutes in (out of 102 minutes in total). At this point we pretty much know what’s going to happen, if only in broad outline. There will be a happy ending, because that’s how these films go; you knew this much when you bought your ticket, or picked in Netflix, as I did. You also that the trip is going to be, shall we say, stressful, with revelations and perhaps a (big) downer. It’s the details of the stress, revelations, and downer that matter.
As for the ending, obviously that’s going to be Olive’s performance at the “Little Miss Sunshine” pageant. Olive is cheerful and kind; she’s also a bit overweight, chubby but not fat. Somehow she made it to the finals despite being chubby but not fat. We know, because it is in the nature of beauty pageants for little girls, that chubby but not fat does not win the prize, no matter what kind of talent the contestant exhibits.
Here’s what Wikipedia says about that:
The hitherto-unseen dance routine Edwin had taught Olive is revealed to be a striptease performed to the Rocasound remix of Rick James’ “Super Freak”. Olive is oblivious to the subtext of the routine, but it horrifies and angers most of the audience, and the pageant organizer demands she be removed from the stage.
Needless to say, the audience is, shall we say, quite taken aback.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how the film turns that sow’s ear into a silk purse. Better yet, watch the film.
Don’t worry, you can listen to the music without having the film spoiled. The visual you see now is the only visual there is for the clip.
Robert Wright and Connor Leahy, US executive director of ControlAI, discuss the history of AI culture and the influences that shaped it—from the hippies, to the rationalists, to Marx, to sci-fi stories, and more. Plus: Mythos as “digital nuke," Dario's real motivations, and Connor's case against any and all attempts at building superintelligence.
0:00 Teaser
0:47 Connor’s place in the AI world
3:16 Mythos: “digital nuke”?
14:12 The milieu that birthed Dario and other AI titans
20:52 Yudkowsky, Marx, and other AI harbingers
35:34 Effective altruism’s effects on big tech
46:22 The "cult" in Silicon Valley culture
59:59 Is the AI race a market failure?
1:05:51 What’s really driving the AI titans?
1:19:04 Connor: ASI is a worse bet than Russian roulette
I've been aware of much of this story for some time, though many details are new. Back in 2023 I published an article in 3 Quarks Daily about the cultish nature of Silicon Valley computer culture, A New Counter Culture: From the Reification of IQ to the AI Apocalypse. Nonetheless, hearing the story once again, in one place, with new details has been interesting. It may shed light on just why the dominant AI culture is an technology monoculture. The cultish nature of the surrounding industrial culture has something to do with it.
Note that both Apple (1976) and Microsoft (1975) date back to the personal computer revolution of the 1970s. Amazon was founded when the web was born (1994), as was Google (Alphabet, 1998). Facebook (Meta) didn't emerge until the social web was well-established, 2004. None of them are pure AI companies. They came later; OpenAI in 2015 and Anthropic in 2021. Those were the products of this ingrown culture. The other companies were founded as business ventures. OpenAI and Anthropic were founded as expressions of a quasi-religious vision.
Note: As far as I can tell, Leahy seems rather adjacent and Wright seems to take their technological visions more seriously than is intellectually warranted.
A political thriller about the first American rock band to perform behind the Iron Curtain, whose members find themselves in the crosshairs between the Right and the Left of a polarized America with severe career repercussions.
I was certainly aware of Blood, Sweat & Tears back in the 1960s and 70s. After all, I played in a band that played a number of BS&T tunes. But I don’t remember them as being THAT big, perhaps because, as the Wikipedia entry notes, “by the mid-1970s the group’s popularity began a decline.” And if I was aware of their State Department-sponsored tour of Eastern Europe in 1970, which is the focus of this fascinating documentary, I’ve forgotten or repressed it.
South Korea has the best performing stock market in the world for the second year running — and it's also in the middle of one of the worst bear markets on earth. The KOSPI is down around 27% from its June peak, more than 1.2 million retail accounts have been hit with margin calls, and hundreds of thousands of Korean investors have been wiped out entirely. But this isn't a story about meme stocks or worthless companies. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are enormously profitable businesses at the center of the global AI boom, and the traders buying them were right about the trend. In this video I look at how a national stock index became a two-stock bet on artificial intelligence, how single-stock leveraged ETFs turned ordinary volatility into a mechanical feedback loop, why Korea's retail "ants" took on so much leverage in the first place, and what Victor Haghani's famous biased-coin experiment tells us about how you can be completely right about a market and still lose everything.