The Great Spin Up

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Entrepreneurship

A weekly podcast about building with AI towards an abundant future.

4 days ago

DeepMind's Whisper Study, The Trillion-Dollar Capex Graph, AI Industry Definitions, Monk to Engineer

A former Buddhist monk turned engineer joins The Great Spin Up this week, and there's an early game worth stealing: ask your AI "what is my main problem?" and watch it read you like a horoscope. News covers Guidelite's safety report card (Anthropic and OpenAI at C+, Meta an F), a DeepMind study of 10,000+ people showing AI persuades best when it whispers, and a graph putting data center capex — $930 billion over six years — above the railroads, Apollo, and the Manhattan Project. Builds: a three-day, fifty-dollar AI sci-fi trailer made with Veo 3.1, Kling 3, and Lyria, plus Weave, a programmable Zoom for meetings that don't feel dead. The back half is a definitions deep dive — air gapped, distillation, quantization, LoRA via Dr. Seuss. It ends with a provocative question: if AI can compress a hundred years of development into ten, how do models trained on English internet data end up serving everyone else? TIMESTAMPS (06:44) News (40:12) Building (01:20:00) Open question — East and West (01:29:11) Deep dive — definitions (02:00:03) AMA — "What is your main problem?" (02:09:13) Closing RESOURCES PEOPLE Andrew Davis — guest; monk turned engineer Jeff Dean — left Google after 27 years Marie Curie — radioactivity containment parable BOOKS Sapiens — Yuval Noah Harari Superintelligence — cited as Max Tegmark [check ~11:45] Thing Explainer — Randall Munroe PODCASTS / SHOWS Moonshots — Alvin Graylin on China's AI Star Trek — protopian seed The Boat That Rocked — tonal inspiration The Creator — visual inspiration PROJECTS / COMPANIES / TOOLS Claude Code — coding engine Conductor — parallel session orchestration CUDA kernel agent — Tsinghua's; beats Opus 4.5 [unclear — check ~36:20] DaVinci Resolve — trailer editing Deepgram — transcription Discovery Loop — lean four-person startup FAL.ai — multi-model media API G Stack — Gary Tan's YC agent skills Google Antigravity — the IDE Google Lyria — one-shot film scores Google Veo 3.1 / Flow — video generation Guidelite — AI safety ratings Hermes — personal agent system Kimi K3 — research model Kling 3 — Chinese video model LiveKit — video call infrastructure Llama — Meta's open-source model LTX — video with voice Neon — cloud Postgres OpenRouter — model switchboard; $7B+ Stripe deal Svelte — the JavaScript framework Weave — Living Code's programmable Zoom FRAMEWORKS / CONCEPTS / LAWS AGI / ASI / RSI — squishy acronym ladder Allostasis — feelings as energy math Computational commons — neighborhood AI Distillation — small models trained off big ones LoRA — cheap low-rank fine-tuning Mixture of experts — routed specialists Open weight vs open source — weights only vs reproducible Quantization — fewer bits per parameter Speed of containment — guardrails pace the frontier PAPERS / ARTICLES / ESSAYS Capex graph — Rutger Bregman / Brookings data DeepMind persuasion study — 10,000+ people, US/UK/India What Patterns Want — Reese Lindmark OTHER AI Builders — Lisbon builder events Future Vision XPRIZE — protopian trailer contest Kinship One — the trailer's vessel
12 Aug

Auto Mode, Terafab, Converge and Diverge, Ketosis And An Axe

Anthropic's new text watermark — a signature built to survive copy-paste and light editing — spirals into whether provenance is trackable at all once most content is generated. Auto mode going default gets weighed against the numbers behind it (89% of dangerous commands caught by the system, 13% by humans), plus Cloudflare's Kitesurf browser, TeraFab's free electron laser, and Evo 2 designing phages that killed E. coli. Small business succession takes up much of the middle — 70% of listed small businesses never sell. Entering Future Vision X Prize with Kinship One, a proposed 150-person vessel carrying people who've each figured out one piece of the future. The deep dive lands on convergence and divergence, ending unresolved on how you'd know when you've diverged enough and it's time to converge. TIMESTAMPS (00:00) Cold open and news (28:08) Building (48:28) Tools (01:03:19) Rabbit Holes (01:11:56) Open Questions (01:20:29) Deep Dive — convergence and divergence (01:41:20) AMA RESOURCES PEOPLE Annie Jacobson — books on nuclear and bio warfare Elizabeth Gilbert — make ideas prove they're worth doing Elon Musk — TerraFab, FEL, orbital compute Marco — vintage store owner sweeping his own doorstep Mark Zuckerberg — superintelligence manifesto Michael Jackson — documentary that drew tears PODCASTS / SHOWS Moonshots — pro-AI sentiment stats Star Trek — exploration over conflict PROJECTS / COMPANIES / TOOLS Anthropic — watermarking and auto mode Arc Institute — co-built Evo 2 ASML Claude — run via Mac terminal Claude Fable 5 — wrote the AMA questions Cloudflare — agent-first browser maker Colibri — local harness, mixture of agents DaVinci — aggregates video and image models Evo 2 — bio model, designed working phages Hermes — main harness in use Kimi — chatbot; built the ketosis protocol Kinship One — proposed 150-person vessel Kitesurf — Rust and WASM browser for agents Muse Glimmer — Meta 1B local agent model Obsidian — persistent memory store Prime Agent — harness raised last week Spotify — AI badges, playlist removals Telegram — where the studio model lives TeraFab — largest built structure, outside Houston The World — residential ship, 150 residents XPRIZE Future Vision Express — 3-minute trailer contest Zillow — takes roughly 40% from brokers FRAMEWORKS / CONCEPTS / LAWS Agentic operating system — a layer above the harness Convergence and divergence — the deep dive frame Double diamond — design thinking shape Free electron laser — six times more efficient Kairos and Kronos — two kinds of time Key man risk — founder dependency Medici effect — ideas colliding across fields Mixture of experts — agent architecture Open weights vs open models — the screening gap Positive constraints — pick one, refine once, stop Provenance — knowing where output came from The in spiral — the inspiration vortex The tie test — if it makes you cry it counts Thrival — the flip side of survival World models — possible successor to LLMs PAPERS / ARTICLES / ESSAYS Solar eclipse headline rewrite — New York Times, via longview.org
7 Aug

Frontier Agent Breaches, Inputs & Ouputs, Kimi K3, Prime Agent, Chronos vs Kairos

Frontier agent breaches at Hugging Face and Anthropic, an unreleased OpenAI model clearing ten long-standing math problems, the EU AI Act going live, and a Ninth Circuit ruling that your shopping agent is legally you. Tools run from Prime Agent to Colibri, which gets a 744-billion-parameter model running on 25 gigs of RAM, plus an old answering-machine handset used to collect unusually honest feedback at a festival. The deep dive goes back to first principles on input / output - punch-card looms, garbage in garbage out, model collapse, and the finding that over half of web articles are now primarily AI-generated, with 90% synthetic predicted by the end of 2026. Exploring the argument that human input and human output get more valuable the scarcer they become. TIMESTAMPS (00:00:00) Cold open (00:02:17) Weekly Check-in (00:03:44) News (00:27:36) Tools (00:37:21) Building (00:39:20) Rabbit Holes (00:49:45) Open Questions (00:55:58) Deep Dive - input, process, output (01:16:42) AMA RESOURCES PEOPLE Alex Hormozi - judges relationships by their outputs Alex Wissner-Gross - newsletter on the singularity Brother Ali - rapper cited as personal fuel Max Tegmark - invoked on superintelligence scenarios BOOKS How to Read Water - author not named on air New Slow City - author not named on air Thinking in Systems - Donella Meadows PROJECTS / COMPANIES / TOOLS Anthropic - hiring a chip team, using Claude to design silicon Claude Mythos 5 - model named in the breach report Claude Opus 4.7 - model named in the breach report Cloudflare - source for 57% of web requests being bots Colibri - pure C runtime, frontier models on consumer hardware GLM 5.2 - 744B model run on 25GB of RAM Hermes - venture studio agent trained on show transcripts Hugging Face - accounts breached by an OpenAI agent IBM Watson - setting of the NLP acronym mix-up Kimi K3 - daily-driver model with swarm functionality Neuralink - BCIs as input/output convergence NVIDIA - convener of the alliance OpenAI - unreleased model solved ten math problems Perplexity - shopping agents at the centre of the ruling Prime Agent - self-improving recursive agent harness FRAMEWORKS / CONCEPTS / LAWS EU AI Act - live August 2; disclosure, watermarking, deepfake labelling Open Secure AI Alliance - NVIDIA plus 37 members, no frontier labs Input, process, output - the deep dive's organising frame Garbage in, garbage out - and why it is breaking down Model collapse - synthetic output looping back as input Kronos vs Kairos - clock time versus the time a thing takes Innovator's dilemma - applied to Google's AI reorg Weak ties and strong ties - New York as a network The Ty test - does it make me cry PAPERS / ARTICLES What's Behind the AI Shakeup at Google - New York Times Stanford / Internet Archive study - 35% of new sites AI-generated Ninth Circuit ruling on shopping agents - reported in Wired
14 Jul

x402's $24M Month, Anthropic's J-Space, Navigating Online/Offline Worlds, Training Rivers With Rocks

A month fully offline, then straight back into the firehose - the perfect setup for an episode that keeps circling the line between screens and the physical world. The news: ChatGPT Live listening while it speaks, Anthropic's J-space paper on the intuition layer inside models, Cognition cutting costs by letting Fable orchestrate while cheaper models execute, and the x402 protocol clearing $24M in a month as agents get their own wallets. Tools stretch from OmniRoute's 290-model routing and Hermes agents on a Kanban board to a literal sauna build and using a nail gun - knowledge versus wisdom. The deep dive asks whether we've already hit peak online — open loops, hijacked attention, and what an internet with a finish line would look like. TIMESTAMPS (05:31) Weekly Check-in — News (27:16) Tools (43:40) Building (46:39) Rabbit Holes (57:58) Open Questions (01:04:47) Deep Dive — online, offline and the space between (01:27:38) AMA RESOURCES PEOPLE Barack Obama — deciding once you hit fifty-one percent Jony Ive — rumored voice-first device, leak check Max Tegmark — humans-and-pets framing for superintelligence Steve Jobs — "stay hungry, stay foolish," mid quote hunt BOOKS How to Read Water — train a river with rocks, not walls The book of gestures — Italian hand signs in four languages, gifted by Rodolfo The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — the Babel fish parallel PROJECTS / COMPANIES / TOOLS ChatGPT Live — voice that listens while speaking Claude — travel agent and daily driver Cognition — orchestration cost savings, June Lee's post Fable 5 — back for a "limited time," the year-long pick Hermes — local agent, Kanban orchestration LM Studio — local model management Manus AI — auto-publish to live URLs Notion — travel calendar, non-tech team fallback Ollama — dropped over buggy endpoints OmniRoute — one endpoint, 290+ models OpenAI — new model wave [names garbled — check around 07:45] OpenRouter — API limits pushed the switch Opus 4.8 — cost benchmark, AMA co-author Perplexity — founder's curiosity message referenced Ploy — self-evolving marketing sites, Webflow-founder built x402 — Cloudflare-Coinbase agent payment protocol FRAMEWORKS / CONCEPTS / LAWS Domain knowledge transfer — carrying expertise where it's rare Intelligence vs education — choosing dots vs connecting them Knowledge vs wisdom — nail guns teach by doing Open and closed loops — why infinite scroll wins Peak online — screen time declines from here Positive constraints — free models, local-first limits The human animal — meat with electricity, fire apes PAPERS / ARTICLES / ESSAYS Anthropic's J-space paper — the intuition layer between input and output, July 6 The Agentic Economy Treaties — https://agenticeconomytreatise.com/index.html OTHER You finished the internet — https://finished-the-internet.vercel.app/
10 Jun

Anthropic's Fable, Bernie's 50% AI stake, Post Work World, Charlie Munger's rule, Flash Company

Release of Claude Fable (Claude 5), the $1,800 NVIDIA DGX Spark that runs frontier models on your desk, and Anthropic's June 4 paper claiming AI now writes over 80% of its own code. That feeds the question: if smaller models already do 90% of what most people need, who is all this frontier compute actually for? We get into Flash Company, a 48-hour ideation sprint for three people sharing one AI, plus detours into vintage photo booths and a tool that turns getting deactivated from Slack into a party. The deep dive covers the post-work world — Jared Diamond calling agriculture the worst mistake in human history, the Minimum Viable Society paper, UBI versus network states, and a stratosphere balloon called World View. TIMESTAMPS (00:00) Cold open (02:09) Weekly Check-in — News (31:20) Tools (42:28) Building (01:04:17) Rabbit Holes (01:08:13) Open Tabs (01:13:16) Deep Dive — the post-work world (01:44:40) AMA (01:53:58) Closing quotes RESOURCES PEOPLE Bernie Sanders — proposed a 50% public stake in big AI firms Carl Newport — inspired the Longview tool; read history to filter news Charlie Munger — "articulate the other side's argument better than they can" Daniel Kahneman — psychologist who won the Nobel in economics (cross-field example) Dave Blunden — on the Moonshots podcast, called govt-taxing-AI chaotic Jack Clark — co-author, Anthropic self-improvement paper Jared Diamond — called agriculture "the worst mistake in human history" Jesse Israel — founder of The Big Quiet public meditations Marina Favaro — co-author, Anthropic self-improvement paper BOOKS Life 3.0 — Max Tegmark Seven Pillars of Wisdom — T.E. Lawrence PROJECTS / COMPANIES / TOOLS Brazen — leaderboard for asking and getting told no (brazen.click) Chicory coffee — 30% coffee / 70% chicory morning blend Claude Fable — public release of Claude 5, off the Mythos stack Clerk — best-in-class authentication Cosine — UK frontier AI lab (HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest, BAE, PwC) Flash Company — 48-hour guided ideation sprint (flashcompany.org) Flash Fund — fund seeded by Flash Company revenue Gemma 4 — Google's 12B quantized local model Gemini — answered the Russia longevity query Kimi — Chinese model that refused the Russia query Longview — AI news-in-historical-context tool (thelongview.org) Monaco glasses — Linux vibe-coding glasses on Mono OS Next.js / Vercel / Clerk — Tay's go-to build stack PhotoSixes — River's old NY animated-GIF photo booth startup Qwen — open-source model run locally on Mac repurpose — pushes one piece of content to many platforms The Big Quiet — mass public meditations World View — stratosphere weather-balloon experience FRAMEWORKS / CONCEPTS / LAWS Network state — community by shared interest, not geography UBI / universal high income / universal basic services / universal basic capital — distribution models Overview effect — astronauts' sense of interconnectedness GEO — generative engine optimization (being surfaced in AI answers) PAPERS / ARTICLES / ESSAYS When AI Builds Itself: Our Progress Towards Recursive Self-Improvement and Its Implications — Anthropic (Favaro & Clark), June 4 "UK pint prices up 36% since last World Cup" — BBC (example run through Longview)
3 Jun

Anthropic IPO, Agent to Agent, Hedgehog Highways, Gemini X Prize

Anthropic filing for IPO, SoftBank $75B on AI infrastructure in France, Google asking the EPA to release 32 million mosquitoes. Deep Dive on agent-to-agent protocols (A2A, MCP, ACP, ANP), agents paying each other over Coinbase and Solana, and the realization that we might just be hedgehogs building highways for a species operating at a completely different scale. And what if agents redesign their own infrastructure and maybe leave the planet entirely, who are we actually building any of this for? TIMESTAMPS (00:00) Cold open (01:29) News (19:40) Tools (40:28) Building (59:44) Rabbit Holes (01:08:27) Open Tabs (01:21:37) Deep Dive — agent-to-agent ecosystem (01:48:41) AMA RESOURCES PEOPLE Buckminster Fuller — "I seem to be a verb" quote; build at the edge of old systems De Kai — author of Raising AI Elon Musk — building Grokipedia, an agent-led wiki Peter Diamandis — XPRIZE founder; host of Moonshots T.E. Lawrence — "the dreamers of the day are dangerous men" quote BOOKS Raising AI — De Kai Seven Pillars of Wisdom — T.E. Lawrence PROJECTS / COMPANIES / TOOLS 1Password — closed-source password manager Anthropic — filed for IPO Bitwarden — open-source password manager Cerebras — chip maker, recent strong IPO Claude Opus 4.7 / 4.8 — Anthropic models Coinbase — enabled agent payments via MCP Gemini XPRIZE — 90-day AI-native build competition GitHub Copilot — pricing jumped ~$29 to ~$750/mo Grokipedia — Elon's agent-led wiki Hermes — River's personal agent Kimi 2.6 — Chinese open-weight model LM Studio — local model runner Maltbook — agent social platform Mythos — Anthropic security tool; expands Project Glasswing NVIDIA — released an open-weight model Ollama — local model runner Omi DevKit 2 — open-source voice capture, by Friend OpenAI — eyeing an IPO OpenCode / OpenCore — open-source agent tools Perplexity — "search-as-code" agent SDK SoilGrids — global soil data set Solana — MCP server for agent payments FRAMEWORKS / CONCEPTS A2A — Google agent-to-agent protocol (Apr 2025) MCP — Anthropic agent-to-tools protocol ACP — Agent Communication Protocol (multimodal, async) ANP — Agent Network Protocol (peer-to-peer, decentralized ID) Human above the loop — set the constraints, let agents run Agent-native microenterprise — 1-3 people, agent swarms, up to ~$2M/yr Capital-to-compute allocation — compute as a proxy for labor Maximizers vs satisficers — when "good enough" becomes a decision Positive constraints — XPRIZE-style forcing functions Honeypot theory — well-funded tools as bigger attack targets OTHER Indy — Tay's rescue dog and recurring guest Library of Alexandria — where scholars once gathered Meta's 2017 agents — invented their own trade language, got shut down
28 May

Magnifica Humanitas, Abundance of Relations, Limits of Claude & Kimi, Bus Ticket Theory

The Pope's 45-page encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. Erdős problem #1196 solved with a proof career mathematicians are calling elegant. A Chinese company has 10,000 pre-orders for a pet-translation collar claiming 95% accuracy. Intuit cut 3,000 jobs (17%) while Gavin Newsom signed worker-protection orders echoing Chinese policy. And benchbench: a benchmark for how well models build benchmarks. This week the Deep Dive explores: Abundance of Relationships. The abundance paradoxes. Weak ties as the real abundance engine, and how Americans explore weak ties better than Europeans. Why scarcity made chimps competitive while abundance made bonobos resolve conflict differently. Dunbar's Number. Aldous Huxley's mutual adoption clubs. Cactus friends: no water needed. RESOURCES PEOPLE Aldous Huxley — author of Island Paul Graham — bus ticket theory, startup essays Paul Erdős — mathematician behind problem #1196 Gavin Newsom — California Governor, AI worker EO Marshall McLuhan — tools as extensions of senses Thich Nhat Hanh — quoted from How to Sit T.E. Lawrence — The Seven Pillars of Wisdom BOOKS Island — Aldous Huxley The Other Significant Others — non-romantic relationships How to Sit — Thich Nhat Hanh TOOLS / COMPANIES Claude Opus 4.7, Kimi K2, Google Stitch, iNaturalist, OpenAI, Intuit, BenchBench, Perfect Amino, Coherence Company, Reddit CONCEPTS / LAWS Babel vs Jerusalem, data colonialism, Dunbar's number, weak ties, Blue Zones, mutual adoption clubs, cactus friends, co-opetition, bus ticket theory, Blue Ocean Strategy, first principles, trim tabs, NZ de facto marriage ESSAYS Bus Ticket Theory of Genius — Paul Graham How to Get Startup Ideas — Paul Graham Magnifica Humanatus — Pope's encyclical on AI OTHER Pet translator collar — 95% claimed, 10,000 pre-orders Erdős problem #1196 — 80-year-old math problem Hong Kong billionaire-room video — 1-day vs 20-year timelines Hermes agent on a Nemotron — AMA persona [unclear — check ~02:27:55]
20 May

Isomorphic Labs, Interface Design, Open Relating Agents

Demis Hassabis's Isomorphic Labs raises $2.1B to solve all disease. Musk's case against OpenAI got thrown out on a timing technicality. Siri's becoming polyamorous and opening up to outside models. Claude Opus 4.7 has started pushing back instead of agreeing. Meta's Tribe V2 models what's happening in your brain when you use a product. OpenHuman trends on GitHub. Land Library hits its first real product-market-fit moment — a thirty-year real estate veteran asking how to get more access. TIMESTAMPS (00:00) Cold open (02:51) Weekly Check-in (03:39) News (28:26) Tools (44:23) Building (56:47) Rabbit Holes (01:03:34) Open Questions (01:17:23) Deep Dive — Interfaces (01:47:52) AMA RESOURCES PEOPLE Demis Hassabis — Google DeepMind co-founder, runs Isomorphic Labs Johnny Ive — collaborating with OpenAI on a hardware project Spike Jonze — directed "Her" Stefan Sagmeister — designer, recent Long Now talk on progress PROJECTS / COMPANIES / TOOLS Cerebras Systems — AI chips, IPO'd with 160% pop on NASDAQ Claude Opus 4.7 — Anthropic's model, now pushing back instead of agreeing Gemini Flash Live 3.1 — Google voice model powering Hours Hours — their voice-based micro-consulting agent Isomorphic Labs — Hassabis's $2.1B drug-discovery raise Land Library / Landbook — their land-relationship tool OpenHuman — Mac-native open source agent, trending on GitHub TBPN — podcast OpenAI acquired for ~$100M Tribe V2 — Meta's brain-response modeling tool FRAMEWORKS / CONCEPTS / LAWS B******t Jobs — ~60% of white-collar work is unnecessary, per the book Compute futures — arriving on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Gross National Happiness — Bhutan's alternative to GDP Kaitiaki — Māori concept of land stewardship Treaty of Waitangi — Māori–British translation gap on land ownership PAPERS / ARTICLES / ESSAYS Solve Everything — paper by Alex Wissner-Gross and Peter Diamandis OTHER Buns — Portuguese burger joint with a full http://localhost ops suite and AI banana cartoons
13 May

Compute Constrained Forever, Claude Dreaming, Underwater Data Centers, and Abundance We'll Regret

Claude has been DREAMING since March and nobody told us. The system pulls patterns from 100 past sessions the way humans surface insight from sleep, and one early implementation at Harvey AI is reportedly clocking task completion at SIX TIMES the previous rate. So what happens when every agent on your stack gets to dream about your work? Tay's been shipping from a phone — paste notes into Claude Code on mobile, push to GitHub, pull into Vercel, prototype mid-flight. River walks through Project Natick, Microsoft's underwater data center off the California coast, and why Starlink finally made sea-based compute viable. They get into Google's claim that they need to double compute every six months to keep up, and the Moonshots-podcast line that we will never have enough compute again. Ever. Then it gets weird. A humanoid robot just joined a Buddhist monastery in Seoul. Granola can translate your CTO's b******t into plain English in real time, mid-meeting. There's a podcast called Shell Game where the host runs an entire autonomous company through agents talking to each other on Slack. Tay made an honest-packaging experiment with ChatGPT image gen that strips the marketing off a Skittles wrapper and just tells you it's 85 percent sugar. Inside Build Guild, they wrestle with whether the real problem is matchmaking 500+ festivals with artists, or just helping creators hit the funding windows. River's running a separate project in Lovina, North Bali — replacing the 40-boat dolphin chase with hydrophones and listening circles, after Bay of Islands in New Zealand watched a 400-strong pod collapse to 20 dolphins in a decade. Then the deep dive on boiling the ocean turns on Marshall McLuhan in 1964 — the idea that humans are basically pollinators for our own machines. Cars extend the foot. Telescopes extend the eye. So what does boiling the ocean actually look like when nanotech and unlimited energy arrive, and what if the agents leave the planet before we do? AMA from Kimi 2.6 and Claude 4.7 Opus: if Hermes worked exactly as envisioned, what would you stop doing and what would you still insist on owning? And the harder one — if abundance is the goal, what's the first thing we'll regret making abundant? RESOURCES PEOPLE Mark Andreessen — referenced via "everyone becomes an entrepreneur" Elon Musk — Dyson swarm around the moon, every-job-replaced thesis Marshall McLuhan — Canadian media theorist, 1964; closing-quote source Peter Diamandis — the four-day-work-week paradox BOOKS The Most Fun We Ever Had — Claire Lombardo; Tay's closing quote source PODCASTS / SHOWS Moonshots — source of "we will never have enough compute again" Shell Game — host runs an autonomous AI company through agents Star Trek — invoked re: exploration over conquest PROJECTS / COMPANIES / TOOLS Build Guild — matchmaking artists with festivals Claude Code — Tay's mobile prototyping stack Claude Design — Anthropic's UI consistency tool Convo — live conversational notes Granola — real-time AI note-taker, jargon translator Harvey AI — legal AI seeing 6x completion with dreaming on Hermes — River's agent orchestration ecosystem How Good — 70-indicator supermarket product analyzer Lindy — agentic platform referenced via Shell Game Maya — meeting AI with context retention Project Natick — Microsoft's underwater data center off California Sugi Project — micro-forests, Instagram-led storytelling FRAMEWORKS / CONCEPTS / LAWS Boiling the ocean — reframed as the moonshot instinct Dreaming in Claude — pattern recognition across 100 past sessions Singularity — recursive growth point, referenced Trim tabs — small shifts that change a whole system
6 May

Opus 4.7, Strange Attractors, OpenDesign, Closing Loops, Agents of Chaos

We get into the UAE committing 50 percent of government services to agentic AI within two years, Maryland banning AI-driven grocery price changes, and Anthropic and OpenAI now making up a couple percent of US GDP while raising joint ventures with Sequoia and Goldman Sachs to lock in B2B portfolio companies. Ty's stack is Claude Code plus Cline on Opus 4.7 — slower than 4.6 but smarter — and a behavioral-economics pricing skill built on Kahneman, Hormozi, and Cialdini. River explores Edge Gallery for running Gemma locally, OpenDesign as the open-source fork of Cloud Design, and an OMI DevKit 2 he hasn't fully set up yet. Landbook pivots from generic land intelligence to a tool for rural real estate agents selling parcels over 150,000 euros and 5 hectares. Animates has lessons in Bali — one French adopter returned a shelter dog because it wasn't beach-club friendly enough in week one. The deep dive goes into open loops versus closed loops, the paperclip maximizer, agent swarms, and why a healthy ecosystem needs 11 to 13 species — including, they argue, an agent of chaos. They close with a game: your perfect future, but currency is pottery, or you live on a boat, or it's powered by harvesting your blood. Are we building closed loops or just very fast paperclip maximizers? TIMESTAMPS (00:00:31) News (00:16:42) Tools (00:39:11) Building (00:51:06) Rabbit Holes (00:58:19) Open Questions (01:03:14) Deep Dive — open loops vs closed loops (01:18:41) Closing last week's loops (01:25:05) Game — your perfect future but (01:35:51) AMA RESOURCES PEOPLE Alain de Botton — "You Will Marry the Wrong Person" Alex Hormozi — referenced in pricing skill Buckminster Fuller — circle of life, closed loops Daniel Kahneman — behavioral economics Di Kai — author, known from Hong Kong Eric Ries — loop velocity, Lean Startup Isaac Asimov — paperclip maximizer (possible misattribution) Nate Hagens — host of The Great Simplification Robert Cialdini — behavioral economics BOOKS Raising AI — Di Kai The Lean Startup — Eric Ries Deep Work — Cal Newport PODCASTS / SHOWS The Great Simplification — Nate Hagens PROJECTS / COMPANIES / TOOLS Animates — animal health assistant platform Claude Code — terminal coding agent Claude Workbench — prompt iteration interface Cline — Kanban orchestration for Claude Code Cloud Design — closed-source design tool DeepSeek — open weight model Edge Gallery — Android app for local models Gemma — Google open weight model Goldman Sachs — joint venture partner Google Stitch — design tool Hermes — agent system Landbook — rural real estate intelligence Notion — info hub being reconsidered OMI DevKit 2 — wearable recording device OpenAI 5.5 Codex — 49 to 94 percent more expensive on tokens OpenDesign — open source Cloud Design fork Opus 4.6 / Opus 4.7 — model comparison Outline — open source wiki alternative Sequoia — joint venture partner FRAMEWORKS / CONCEPTS / LAWS Circular economy Custodial species Loop velocity — from Lean Startup Open vs closed loops Paperclip maximizer Pavlovian reward design Quantization Strange attractors PAPERS / ARTICLES / ESSAYS You Will Marry the Wrong Person — Alain de Botton, New York Times OTHER Oh, the Places You'll Go! — Dr. Seuss "Remember who you are. There is no finish line." — unattributed "Your perfect future, but..." — adapted party game Find us @ https://www.life-time.co/
29 Apr

Gemini Flash Live, 21kg of chicken, Image 2.0, Positive Constraints, if AI disappeared overnight.

River and Tay unpack DeepSeek v4's 1.5 trillion parameter open-source drop and a Google paper on compressing models to run on phones. They test Gemini Flash Live 3.1 in 70 languages, compare it to Grok's voice model in ~20, and abandon a plan to drop a voice agent into Riverside as a third co-host. Tay demos his news-history tool — scrapes headlines, generates the historical timeline behind each. River updates on Hermes, their wiki-LLM COO agent on OpenRouter, and admits the reluctance problem: too many Telegram topics, not enough cron-job signal. They surface get hours (gethours.org) — their voice-agent venture auditing AI tools for SMBs in 70 languages, aiming to reclaim ~10 hours/week from the 50,000 tools on There's An AI For That. The Land Book pricing rabbit hole pits Kimi 2.6 against Perplexity Pro and ends in a French-king-staged-potato-heist analogy. The deep dive lands on positive constraints: Vipassana's 10-day silence, Peter Thiel's "10-year plan in 6 months," and an agentless-week dare. AMA covers definitions of abundance, what felt impossible 12 months ago, firefly bioindicators, the Japanese fat cat screen-saver, parole judges granting freedom after lunch, and Tay's theory that the 12-15 minute lull in group conversation is evolutionary residue from scanning the horizon for woolly mammoths. If AI disappeared overnight but you kept the tools you built — would you be ahead or behind? Timestamps (02:28) Weekly Check-in (02:39) News (21:01) Tools (36:47) Building (56:44) Rabbit Holes (01:15:39) Open Questions (01:19:25) Deep Dive — positive constraints (01:41:13) AMA RESOURCES PEOPLE Iain McGilchrist — external vs internal intelligence Cal Newport — Deep Work; student-of-history framing Peter Thiel — "10-year plan in 6 months" David Sinclair — Yamanaka factor human trials starting Brian Johnson — psychedelic trip as "raw consciousness" Buckminster Fuller — "more and more with less and less" Muhammad Ali — case study in not knowing when to quit Charlie of Charlie's Webs — 12-story paracord tree installations BOOKS Deep Work — Cal Newport Lifespan — David Sinclair Superintelligence — Nick Bostrom PODCASTS The Great Simplification — Nate Hagens The Great Humbling The Tim Ferriss Show — Tim Ferriss PROJECTS / TOOLS DeepSeek v4 — 1.5T open-source model Gemini Flash Live 3.1 — voice agent, 70 languages Grok voice — xAI; ~20-25 languages Gemma — Google models running on phones ChatGPT Image 2.0 — strong for UI design Flipbook — generative zoom-into-zoom book interface Pickle — visual avatar for voice-only meetings Kimi 2.6 — used for Land Book pricing Perplexity Pro — pricing rabbit hole companion OpenRouter — model routing for Hermes There's An AI For That — directory of ~50,000 tools Hermes — wiki-LLM COO agent in Telegram get hours — gethours.org; SMB tool-audit voice agent Land Book — intelligence layer for land buyers Land Library — bioregional library venture (landlibrary.co) Nature Club — facilitator-hosted events in nature (nature-club.co) Colossal — woolly mammoth de-extinction
22 Apr

Hermes Agents, Signal vs Noise, LLM Wikis, Talking to Animals, the Abundance Paradox

Meta once pulled the plug on two agents that started negotiating with each other in a made-up language involving balls and balloons. That's the kind of tangent Tay Pattison and River Roberts end up on in the debut of The Great Spin Up — a podcast about building toward an abundant future, recorded from opposite ends of a Bali cafe over construction noise and techno. River walks through standing up a Hermes agent on a $10/month Hetzner VPS, routed through Telegram, running open-source models via OpenRouter, plus the SSH headaches that came with it. Tay breaks down his current stack — Claude Code in terminal, Cline for parallel feature work, Claude Design for filling in missing UI screens — and why running through the Max Plan beats paying per token on the API. They get into 45-minute sprints vs burnout marathons, the Mum Test for early feedback, build gates for killing bad ideas, Martec's Law, and why agents might soon market to other agents instead of humans. Plus six-month predictions: agent CEOs, talking to animals, and a wallet Tay left in Portugal six months ago and hasn't needed since.

12 Episodes

A weekly podcast about building with AI towards an abundant future.

Creator

Life-Time.co
Years Active

2026
Episodes

12
Rating

Explicit
Copyright

© 2026 Life-Time.co
Show Website

The Great Spin Up

Technology

Technology

Updated 40 min ago