He Dressed as a Bear to Scam a $400K Rolls-Royce

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Apr 28, 2026

Two friends catch up on a whirlwind of tech and oddities. They reveal a project that maps influence across millions of social connections. They debate Apple leadership and whether Siri missed the AI moment. Robots now outrun humans and even tackle firefighting chores. Big bets on AI security and surprising exploit findings come up. The show ends with a wild insurance scam involving a bear suit and a $400,000 Rolls-Royce.

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Building PageRank For People

Kevin Rose built a PageRank-like graph from 9 million X connections to surface the ~1,000 people who drive AI discovery.
The system weights influence by who you influence (not just follower count) and separates researchers, media, and execs for early-signal detection.

Signal Beats Celebrity In Discovery

The ranking product will publish the algorithm and show the top 1,000 connected people in AI to surface early trends before mainstream adoption.
Kevin notes he isn't in the top 1,000, validating the algorithm's focus on trench-level signal over celebrity reach.

Notify Users Only When Their Topic Breaks

Use personalized signal detectors to notify users only when an interest reaches a breaking threshold.
Kevin suggests alert formats beyond web pages (calls, podcasts) to meet users where they are and surface top 10% breaking stories.

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Basic Intelligence: https://basic.in

Kevin Rose left venture capital to start an incubator. Plus: robots outrunning people, Apple's AI miss, and the greatest insurance scam involving a bear suit.

Kevin and Alex hadn't seen each other in over a month and had a lot to catch up on. Kevin walked through why he stepped away from TruVentures after nine years to go back to building full time - and what he's been working on at Basic Intelligence. The short version: he crawled 9 million connections on X and built a recursive ranking system that surfaces the 1,000 people who actually drive AI discovery. The algorithm works so well that Kevin isn't even in his own top 1,000.

They also dug into Apple replacing Tim Cook with John Ternus and whether Tim missed the AI window when he had Siri in every pocket. A bipedal robot beat the human half marathon world record by 7 minutes - one year after the fastest robot took 2 hours and 40 minutes. Amazon dropped another $25 billion into Anthropic, whose Mythos model just found exploits in OpenBSD after 12 years of zero breaches. Alex is hand-building a mechanical watch and won't shut up about it. And they close with the best insurance scam you've ever heard - a guy in a bear suit, barbecue shredders, and a $400,000 Rolls-Royce.

0:00:00 Kevin and Alex catch up over Pliny the Younger
0:01:27 Why Kevin Rose left venture capital to build again
0:04:23 Announcing Basic Intelligence and the future of Digg
0:06:16 Building PageRank for humans with 9 million social connections
0:13:28 Alex is building a mechanical watch from scratch
0:19:31 Alaska road trip north of the Arctic Circle
0:21:31 Tim Cook missed AI and Apple has a new CEO
0:28:14 A robot beat the human half marathon record by 7 minutes
0:31:35 Robot firefighters and buying your first robot at Costco
0:37:53 Amazon bets $25 billion more on Anthropic
0:43:31 Anthropic Mythos cracked the most secure OS after 12 years
0:46:55 App Store submissions up 60% because everyone codes with AI
0:48:04 44% of Deezer music is AI and fake sympathy Shopify scams
0:50:37 Trent Reznor reinvented his sound and crushed Coachella
0:57:29 The bear suit Rolls-Royce insurance scam

Kevin Rose: https://x.com/kevinrose | / kevinrose
Alex Albrecht: https://x.com/alexalbrecht