TBPN - David Senra, Samir Chaudry, Aidan McLaughlin, Will Depue, SoftBank's $40B OpenAI Deal, Inside Sam Altman's Firing, Luxury Show-Jumping

Episode Date: April 1, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(04:17) - SoftBank's $40B OpenAI Deal (19:09) - Inside Sam Altman's Firing From OpenAI (01:10:57) - Intel's New CEO Plots Turnaround (01:25:01) - Luxury Show-Jumping (01:29:08) - David Senra (02:03:51) - Samir Chaudry (02:18:35) - Will Depue (02:30:56) - Aidan McLaughlin

You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, April 1st, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance. The Capital of Capital. This show starts now. We got a ton of news. Open AI is worth $300 billion now. Armes is going back to their roots and focusing on horse saddles.

That's right. That's right. That's right. We're going to take you through it today. And we have a bunch of great guests for you. We got David Senra coming on the show. Samir from Colin and Samir. We're going to talk about creator economy.

He just did in a fantastic interview with Mr. Beast and Mark Zuckerberg putting two of the greats together. Where do you go from there? And it's Open AI Day. They're raising $40 billion at $300. We got two folks from Open AI joining the show, Will and Aden. So we'll talk to them. Probably not about the financing, probably about the product and all the technology that they're building. But we're very excited for that.

We'll be ranking their top 5,000 Ghibli memes. Yes. And we'll be pressuring them into buying watches on bills. That's right. Undoubtedly. Anyway, let's kick it off. Do you have any breaking news? I think we should address, we are officially at 32,000 followers, right?

We have doubled again. Another doubling. Another doubling. Another doubling. The show is bigger than ever. We're taking over. So we're at 32.3 now. And that means that it's a Dom Perignon episode technically, but we are shifting our strategy.

So these Domperian episodes now are in partnership with Z biotic. One of my friends companies, actually. They are not an official sponsor. But I do love zbiotics. And Zbiotics, I actually introduced the founders. Stephen Lamb, I went to high school with. I met Zach, the CEO, through YC. I think he did the early YC, like the startup school, sent out an email.

Hey, I'm looking for people. And Stephen was looking for a co-founder wanting to get in the startup community. Kind of introduced them. And they hit it off. And they've been running this company for like half a decade now. It's great. Almost a decade. I guess they went through YC.

Same. And people are really obsessed with this product. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So if you're not familiar, Zbiotics, it's a pre-alcohol probiotic drink designed specifically to kill hangovers, basically. It's hugely popular at weddings. People buy these and they hand them out to all their guests.

You take them, it really can't make up for a lack of sleep. So you will be tired. But it really does a great job of like killing that like terrible feeling. No, and it's great. And if we were going to be drinking this. bottle of champagne today would be perfect because it's the middle of the day. You don't want to go home at the end of the day with a hangover. Yeah. Yeah. And so we we want to shift from from drinking the Dom Pering on stream to giving away bottles of Dom Pering on. And this this Dom actually has a

sponsor itself, Slow Ventures. They sent this to us. They sent this to us. Good friends of the show. So thank you to Slow. We're going to pass it on. We're going to gift us. a founder. Yeah, that's kind of re-gifting can, you know, be a little bit taboo. But in this case, it's really a celebration. I think you're a founder. You listen to the show. You win the bottle of Dom Parignon. And then you send this to Samhenson. Yeah. Yeah. I'd be like, hey, I want to pitch you. And it's just

snake eating his tail at Oroboros of Don Peri. What do we? This could be the most story bottle. How are we going to give it away? I wanted to see a super creative five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify. I think that's fun. If you've already left one, get a friend's phone. Leave another one. That's right. Screenshot it, send it to us, just tweet it at us.

And the one that we think is the most funny, we will get in touch and mail this to you. How about that? Boom. You've got to be over 21, obviously. And it's kind of a contest. So I guess there's no cost to enter, no purchase necessary. Yeah. But I guess this isn't a purchase anyway.

So I don't know. Just please don't sue us. Like, we're just trying to give out a bottle of Dom. It's fun. I don't know. People get worried about these, like, contests. Like, they need to be, like, regulated and stuff. Like, I buy it.

I want to be a good Samaritan. They're not regulating Dom giveaways yet. They're not yet, but if we get any bigger, they might. Anyway, let's go through the soft bank deal, Open AI. Masayoshi Sone got the deal done. It's putting in $10 billion. Our leverage king. Leverage king.

Yeah, and people are like, oh, he's using debt. So the Wall Street Journalist's article, this hit, piece against debt, which we love here. They say, how is soft bank funding? It's mega investment in Open AI. A lot of debt. Like, that's a bad thing. Baby, he's going long. He's going turbo long. We love it. We love to see it. Masayoshi Husson's company said the first 10 billion would be financed by borrowing from Japanese bank, Mazuho and other lenders. Of course, we've seen this stuff before. And soft bank has a lot of assets, so it actually makes sense. but we'll talk about how they're collateralizing it in a little bit.

What you got? No, I was going to say, so to be clear, this is a stage investment. They're doing $10 billion now. And $30 billion in 2026. It's seemingly entirely from Mizzuho and a handful of other lenders to be completed this month with the remaining 30 to come by the beginning of next year. So Masa is going to be under, this guy likes to put himself under pressure. He's going to be under pressure for the rest of the year.

he's going to have has this sort of $30 billion sort of investment that he needs to make. Yeah. That he needs to come up with some combination of debt and equity. It is funny because like couldn't Open AI have just gone to Mazuho directly and gotten debt if they wanted debt? But now they have equity on it. They have preferred equity on their balance sheet and Mossa has the debt. Yeah.

It's amazing. It's great for opening up. Potentially everyone wins, right? Like if Open AI does really well, Mizzuho gets paid back. They want interest. They want to be paid back. Masa sees the upside and Open AI doesn't have any debt on their balance sheet. It's like it's beautiful. This is capitalism baby. I love it. Yeah. To be clear to give

Mossa some credit, I think couldn't he fund this entirely by selling off some of his arm for things for sure. Yeah. Um, but this deal is the largest startup, largest investment ever in a startup. I knew we we seriously need a bigger gong. Hold on to that gong. There we go. Fantastic. Hard for this one. This is a big deal. Whatever anybody has to say about Sam, the guy knows how to do deals.

This was the whole thesis of Open AI from day one. It's like Greg Brockman, the CTO of Stripe, Sam Altman, he's invested in a billion things, made so much money. It's like the founding team was really, really, like, incredible. And if your whole thesis is just like bet on founders, like Sam, pretty good. making money. Like, it's not that crazy. This is your, this has been, this is like, I feel like the, the, your favorite investments

are always into companies where the founders just like you can tell, like they're good at making money. He's commercial. He's, he's commercial. Like, he doesn't, he doesn't like losing money. And that's, I think that's great. And I think that's exactly what you want. And that's why I'm so excited about not being a nonprofit anymore.

Like, it just clearly is a consumer tech company. It needs to be a for profit. And yeah, when you think about like, Could this be the next Google? Could this be the next? Like, chat, GPD for the last year has been on the home row of my app, on the home row of my iPhone. And like, it's not because like I, like, have, I'm shilling for Sam or something.

It's just like, it's a useful product. It needs to be there. And like when I think about what else is in the home row, it's like Google, Apple, and open a eye. And so like, can it get to, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of valuation? Like, sure. It seems fine. But I mean, I'm sure there'll be a lot of good takes about where they could go wrong. Obviously, it is a very high valuation.

Obviously, when Moss is buying, Sam Lesson says, you want to be selling. Who knows? I'm just excited to see a lot of money change hands and a lot of debt stack up. Together with SoftBanks pledged to lead the $100 billion Stargate Cloud Computing Initiative with Open AI, the investment marks a massive bet on the artificial intelligence startup. It intertwines the fortunes of SoftBank with a company that expects to lose billions of for years to come. The hope is that Open AI emerges as the leader of the pack in a race to spread artificial intelligence throughout society and commerce, a market that many believe

could be worth trillions of dollars a year. This is what Sam was saying about like, it's either worth zero or a trillion. And so like you average that out and you're like, yeah, half a trillion. Yeah. And it's hard to do a discounted cash flow analysis of that binary of an outcome. I mean, this is one of Peter Thiel's takes is like, is like when, when they were doing the DCF on Google, and Andrew Reid talked about this too. Like, they just, they didn't have the spreadsheets go out far enough to understand that, oh yeah, if you really play out this trend, like Apple and Google, these companies could be throwing off like hundreds of billions of dollars of cash a year.

And they just, the numbers just kept going up. They never got to that. And no matter how far you went out, if you discounted it back, it would have been a much bigger number, but no one was really thinking that long term. Now people are like. And that's when tech decided to say, no thanks, finance. We're done. We're done with you.

We're done with your models. Yep. It's purely vibe investing. And now, and now tech has gone the other direction, which is like, oh, this thing isn't going to make money for two decades and then it'll make a trillion dollars. Like, sure, I'll pay you a trillion dollars right now. And maybe we've gone too far. Who knows?

We will see. But good luck to everyone involved. And congratulations to all the Open AI shareholders and employees who seem to be doing very well right now. Yes. Yeah, you have to imagine some, a good amount of this is going to secondary, you know, even if it's a small percentage relative, even if it's $500 million. Yep. Still pretty meaningful.

SoftBank always delivering great quotes. The statement says, uh, the information revolution has now entered a new phase led by artificial intelligence and called its partner. It's open AI. It's partner closest to achieving AGI in which computers operate on the level of humans. And Sam was tweeting about this. He's saying like AGI has been achieved externally and it's unclear. I think you might just be April Fool's joking. I don't know.

But clearly the product works. People like the images. People like the text responses. People like deep research. I like these products. And I think people will continue to use them. Obviously, it's extremely competitive. And there are several hundred billion dollar plus efforts now to win this war.

Yep. And it's the greatest. to be a podcaster in history. Yeah. The edge that Open AI has is if you talk to people that aren't as terminally online as the rest of us, they will tell you I love Open AI. I don't just like it and use it. They have a passion for it just as everyday consumers.

And they'll be like, Sam, who? And it's hard to get them like, oh, Helen Toner, who? If you tell somebody it's like Open AI, they're going to say like, but I love Open AI already. Yeah, exactly. No, no, no, but it's two points better. on MMLU. They're like, I don't know what that is. This one won an IMO gold medal.

Yeah. What? What's that? Yeah, it is very funny. SoftBank is taking a lot of risks for a piece of Open AI. Ratings agency S&P Global said Tuesday that, said Tuesday that soft bank's financial condition will likely deteriorate as a result of the Open AI investment and that it plans to add debt that could lead the agency to consider downgrading soft bank's ratings.

None of the startup, none of the startups with early, leads and generative AI have shown that they can operate profitably. I don't know how true that is. You could probably look at the GPT4 training run and amortize just that. But yes, I mean, on a quarter to quarter basis of these companies, they're not profitable. So in terms of like the overall business, it's a good point. And the sector is pouring tens of billions of dollars into data centers based on assumptions not yet proven of a future in which AI rapidly permeates the globe. It feels like it already is rapidly permeating, but I guess it's up for debate. Early tech leaders often falter, a point SoftBank learned when it made dot-com-era bet that Yahoo

would be the dominant force in search. The background debt has been a common feature of Sone's risk-heavy strategy. The CEO borrowed heavily for the company's successful acquisitions of Vodafone's Japanese unit and chip design company arm. More recently, SoftBank has been licking its wounds from piling tens of billions of dollars into startups just before values plunged in 2021. and Sone repeatedly said SoftBank would stay on defense. Now, having pivoted to offense, SoftBank ramped up spending, including a $6.5 billion acquisition of Chip startup Amper.

Go back and listen to our deep dive on Masa and SoftBank in generally. It's very fun and fascinating. I think what people fail to consider is that Masa is a gambler, and he's not oblivious to the risk that he takes. takes, but he's constantly searching for that next absolute banger. Totally. And there's a very good, you know, there's plenty of like, you know, non-technical but powerful vibes-based analysis that you could do to, you know,

make the case that this could very well be a fantastic outcome for something. It's one of the other. It's either a good or a bad investment. It's probably not neutral. We talked to the experts and, you know, we determine that it's going to be either good or bad. Yeah, it's going to be either good or bad. You heard it here first, folks.

But it's going to be extremely good if you participate in that secondary deal, and then you head over to getbezzle.com and you shop for over 24,500 luxury watches. I can't imagine a more AGI resistant asset than a luxury watch. They're not making any more FPJORNs after ASI drops. And they're not making any more Rolexes or attacks. No, I'm just saying the actual companies themselves. Sure. If you want to make the next Rolex, you have to go back 100 plus years ago and start it.

Yeah. At least if you want to run it today. Yeah, exactly. If you want to run what could be the next Rolex but not be alive for when it becomes said said ad, said then Godspeed. So, yeah. But go to getbezzle.com. And can we just give a shout out to the graphics department? We're a small team here, but I think it's incredible what we can do.

I mean, we're just shy of 75 people now, and they have really been over delivering, and I really love the new tickers. Of course, you know we're sponsored by public. We have the public stock ticker there, but we also got the polymarket ticker, and we hope you're enjoying staying up to date on what tech markets are going on. It's such a beautiful way to understand the world. It is. And we should actually get some bezel.

We should get like watch listings. I just want more tickers. We need more tickers. Yeah, I think every sponsor gets a ticker. It's just over at... Yeah, yeah. Eventually, it's just 99% ticker.

I think so. But to close it out, go to getbezzle.com. Download the app. The app is fantastic. We are DAUs. And you should be too. And it's like the greatest time in history

to be a watch fan because there's a major watch announcement. The watch world is exploding with new news. That's right. Rolex launched the land dwell. Patech launched a complications watch that's worth over a million dollars. AEP has made some updates.

A lot of things are launching. So I wanted to highlight this Polo 79 in white gold from Piajeje. It's about a hundred thousand dollar watch. But I think it's a lot of watch for that money. It's certainly a lot of money, but it's a lot of watch. It's a lot of money, but it's a lot of watch. And remember, I mean, you can you can drive a GT3RS, but you can't take a GT3RS into a board meeting. That's right.

So, yeah, many people have said this. You can't take a, you can't take a 9-11 into a board meeting, but you can take your Pioge Pioge Polos 799 and white goals. If you drive your T3RS into a board meeting, you will get arrested. You will get arrested. You will get arrested. Except I think more, more Sand Hill Road VC firms should have massive roll-up doors for board meetings if you want to drive in. I think you should be able to drive in like a drive-up and you should just be able to roll down your window and be like, yeah, KPI's were good.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, we'll be raising in Q3. Okay. All right. We're going to get out. Skr. Well, yeah, so we're in the hunt for a new studio.

Yep. And roll up doors are key. Are not like a deal breaker, but they're certainly nice to have. For sure. It's a nice to. Anyway, we're going to have Quaid from Bezell, the CEO on the show tomorrow to break down exactly what's happening in the watch world. I follow all this stuff. He's in Europe right now.

And I have, I noticed I have the worst takes because I, I'll see a new watch drop and I'll be like this is amazing I want this immediately and then he'll be like That's the most controversial watch that's ever launched. Everyone in the watch world hates it. You have the most contrarian position. I'm like, I'm kind of fine with that. I don't really mind because I'm like dipping my toe in. I know the brands.

I know the different models, but I'm not like, you know, in the discourse. We're watching Joyers. We're not watching experts. Exactly. Big difference. Yeah. So I would gladly wear a knockoff Royal Oak from Rolex called the Landdweller. Yeah.

I think it looks great. Anyway, let's stay with Open AI and move on to an excerpt from a book that's coming out on OpenAI. There's a segment in the Wall Street Journal. It's a long read. And this is different than Ashley Vance's. It is. Open AI book. And this is an interesting, I'll give my take at like the meta level.

Like this reporter, I don't remember who actually wrote this. It's from book that's coming out in a few weeks. It's adapted from, it's called The Optimist, Sam Altman, Open AI in the Race to Invent the Future by Kich Hagi. It will be published on May 20th, 2025. And I'm sure it'll be an interesting read. It is incredibly well sourced. So this writer, this author, was able to get insider accounts of like private dinners between Peter Thiel and Sam Alden.

like very, like you've been to some of these parties, like people don't love talking to the press that go to those parties. It's pretty rare. Well, and the way they're positioning this dinner just from the graphic is that it was actually just a dinner between the two of them. It was a birthday party. There were other people there.

But still, it's like, it's crazy that this like leaked at all. So it's incredibly well sourced and there's very interesting facts and quotes that bubble up in this story that we'll kind of go through today. But I think the analysis is, God awful. And so, uh, truth zone. Time. It's definitely truth zone. It's not even truth zone. Like the facts are correct. I think it's more just like the follow up questions that are obvious to ask if you're in tech.

Yeah, the takes are, you know, need to be put in the truth zone. Anyway, let's read through this because it's a, it's a beautifully written. Amy. It's like a great, you know, great writer, great, great, great author. I'll take it off. Yeah. On a balmy mid-November evening in 2023, billionaire venture capitalist Peter T. through a birthday party for his husband at yes, an avant-garde Japanese restaurant located in a century-old converted bank building in Los Angeles's Arch District, not far from where we are at this moment. Seated next to him was his friend Sam Altman. Teal had backed Altman's first venture fund more than a decade before and remained a mentor to the younger investor when Altman became the face of the artificial intelligence revolution as the chief executive of OpenAI. OpenAI's instantly viral launch of ChatGBT in November 22 had propelled tech.

stocks to one of their best years and decades, yet Teal was worried. Years before he met Altman, Teal had taken another AI-obsessed prodigy named Eliezer Utukowski under his wing, funding his institute, which pushed to make sure that any AI smarter than humans would be friendly to its maker. At March, Utikowski had argued in Time magazine that unless the current wave of AI research was halted, literally everyone on Earth will die. You don't understand how Eliezer has programmed half the people in your company to believe in that stuff, T.O. Warned Altman, you need to take this more seriously. Do you want to take it over? Yeah, I mean, it's just a fascinating history. I mean, Altman's first venture fund was called Hydrazine Capital, I believe. He's actually

an investor in my first company. And Hydrazine, I don't, I haven't asked Sam if this is the reference, but Hydrazine is rocket fuel, but it's also extremely toxic and will, like, kill you if you breathe it. And so there's this weird, I like to think that it's this weird like double entendre about like venture capital can accelerate your business, but it can also kill your business. It's kind of beautiful. Anyway, underreported Sam is like so known for Open AI now. I think people forget that he ran a very, very successful venture fund and made some incredible investments during that time. And then also what's missing from this is that Peter Thiel was, is listed on Wikipedia as a co-founder of Open AI and was one of the initial backers. Obviously, Elon was a major, major

backer and so, and then has fought and there's all this like, you know, controversy there. So, like, that has become the bigger story. But the initial team behind Open AI was, was crazy. I mean, there was a YC research project. So it was heavily YC influenced and that. And YC actually has a stake in Open AI now. Yeah. Must be worth a ton now. And PG famously like found out about that on Twitter because he was asking someone and they were and they were like, don't you own a steak? And he was like, yeah,

I just asked legal and we actually do. It was very funny. But yeah, I mean, they go way back. And at one point, Peter Thiel had been an advisor to YC and Sam Almond was running YC and Sam brought Peter in and they did a,

I think they did a podcast interview together and they've talked about each other. So there's just a lot of like history here that's kind of interesting. So moving on. Altman picked at his vegetarian dish and tried not to roll his eyes. This was not. the first dinner where Teal had warned him that the company had been taken over by the EAs, by which he meant people who subscribed to a factor of altruism. EA had lately pivoted from trying to end global poverty, which was what we saw SBF doing

in the EA thing. The whole idea was like mosquito nets. We got to get mosquito nets because mosquito nets are super cheap and they stop malaria. And so for just like a dollar, you can save someone's life. and it's the highest ROI on reducing human suffering versus if you're dealing with Alzheimer's treatments, older people, very expensive, mosquito nuts are really cheap. And so, EAs were originally very focused on ending global poverty.

Then they kind of pivoted to trying to prevent runaway AI from murdering humanity. Teal had repeatedly predicted that the AI safety people would destroy open AI. Well, it was kind of true with, it was kind of true of Elon, we got rid of Elon, Sam responded at the dinner, referring to the messy 2018 split with his co-vend of Elon Musk. They did not fully get rid of Elon. So true. Who once referred to the attempt to create artificial intelligence as summoning the demon.

That's a great Elon quote. I love it. And I mean, it's the whole nuance here, which is like, like, everyone is somewhat AGI-pilled, somewhat AGI-Dumer. No one has a P-Doom of zero. No one has a P-Doom of 100. Everyone's kind of on this gradient, but there's just a question of like, how do you deal with that risk?

And is it with more innovation in building a more positive future, like the Tielian, like optimist, like definite optimism? And, hey, okay, we need to build an AI that doesn't kill us versus the kind of indefinite pessimism of L.A. or Yudkowski, which is like,

it's going to happen no matter what there's nothing we can do. But give me money for research. Give me money for my institute. Nearly 800 open AI employees have been riding a rocket ship and we're about to have the chance to buy beachfront second homes. Let's hear it for some beachfront second homes folks. We love beachfront second homes on this show. Even if you're not in the position of those 800 open AI employees,

you can go to wander.com. Yeah. And you can rent a beachfront second homes. home. By the day. It's pretty cool. You can just get homes by the day. By the day.

Fantastic innovation. Yes. Luxury homes by the day. By the day. Hyper fractionalized. Fractionalized. I knew you were going to say it. And so there was a tender offer going on at the time.

Valuing the company, $86 billion. There was no need to panic. So all the Open AI employees are very happy. At least it seemed that they were. Altman at 38 years old was wrapping up the best year of a charmed career, a year in which he became a household name, met with presidents and prime ministers around the world and most importantly within the value system of Silicon Valley delivered a new technology that seemed like it was very possibly going to change everything and that really is true

like open AI yes the transformer paper was written at Google yes like other people were working on language models but opening I was the company that that really went full scale pilled scaled this thing up and then also productized it and also figured out like hey people just want to chat on they've done they verticalize research through product yep and it they were the first to do that in a really, really meaningful way. And clearly whatever was going on at Google was not allowing for that verticalization. There were fantastic researchers

and fantastic product people selling ads and making YouTube a great product. They were not talking to each other. And so, but as the two investing partners celebrated beneath the exposed rafters of LA's hottest new restaurant, four members of OpenAI's six-person board, including two with direct ties to the EA community were holding secret video meetings,

and they were deciding whether they should fire Sam Altman, though not because of EA. This account is based on interviews with dozens of people who lived through one of the wildest business stories of all time, the sudden firing of the CEO of the hottest tech company on the planet and his reinstatement just days later. At the center was a mercurial leader who kept everyone around him inspired by his technological vision, but also at times confused and unsettled by his web of secrets and misdirections. From the start, Open AI was set up to be a different kind of tech company, one governed by a

non-profit board with a duty not to shareholders, but to humanity. Altman had shocked lawmakers earlier in the year when he told them under oath that he owned no equity in the company he co-founded, which of course was true, but very much mocked because the idea of somebody doing something not for money is the senator with the line saying, you need an agent. You need an agent. Yeah, that's great. He agreed to the unprecedented arrangement to be on the board, which required a majority

of directors to have no financial ties to the company, of course, because it's this nonprofit structure in June 2023, he told Bloomberg TV, the board can fire me. And that's important. Behind the scenes, the board was finding to its growing frustration that Altman really called the shots, of course, through like soft power, not through legal means or voting shares or any. And it's an entirely new way of controlling a company. It's a really great way to expose that you don't actually understand the company because I'm sure if you went to the Open AI office and talked to anybody, you would find out almost immediately that Sam did in fact call all the shots.

Of course, of course. And there's a lot of just, I mean, this is like what we're talking about with like, there's intelligence and Sam is intelligent, but there's other intelligent people around the table. It's really will and agency and vision and coordination and communication and all these like EQ things

that really push an organization forward. And there are tons of smart people at Google. they couldn't launch a jackpot faster than Open AI somehow. And it's like, why is that? It's probably not because they didn't think of it. It's probably not because of a lack of intelligence. It's a lack of volition. For the past year, the board had been deadlocked over which AI safety expert to add to its ranks.

The board interviewed AJA Kota, an AI safety expert at the EA at the EA charity open philanthropy, but the process stalled largely due to foot dragging by Altman and his co-founder Greg Brockman, who was also on the board. Altman countered with his own suggestion. There was a bit of a power struggle, said Brian Chesky, the Airbnb CEO, who's one of the prospective board members, Altman suggested. There was this basic thing that if Sam said the name, they must be loyal to Sam, so therefore the board is going to say no. The dynamics got more contentious after three board members in the pro-altman camp stepped down in quick succession in early 2023 over various conflicts of interest. That left six people on the board, on the nonprofit board that govern the for-profit AI juggernaut.

And you're getting this weird dynamic where the nonprofit board is set up to just like, hey, we just want to do research and advocate for AI safety. But all of a sudden we have, we've, we've birthed this $300 billion. The demon. The demon is really just a consumer tech company, I guess. Yeah. Consumer applications, actually. Yeah, yeah, just Apple. Your mother was right.

Altman and his close ally Brockman, their fellow co-founder, Ilya Sitskiver, and three independent directors. these were the independent directors were Adam DeAngelo the CEO of Cora and a former Facebook executive Helen Toner the director of strategy

for Georgetown Center of Security and Emerging Technology and a veteran of open philanthropy and Tasha McCauley a former tech CEO and member of the UK board of EA charity effective ventures

and I believe the wife of a celebrity right Tasha McCauley she's the wife of I forget who someone who is in Oh, Joseph Gordon.

Joseph Gordon Levitt, that's right. Yeah. Concerns about corporate governance and the board's ability to oversee Altman became much more urgent for several board members after they saw a demo of GPD4, a more powerful AI that could ace the AP biology test in summer of 2022. God forbid. God forbid. The AP biology test gets aced.

It's over for us. It's not a neurotic statement at all. That was humanity's final exam. Yes. Yes. The real one. Yes. it's over.

Once you can AIS and AP bio. AP bio. Once you understand AP bio, you can do anything. You can reverse engineer anything you want. Anything you want. I mean, to steal man it,

like, you know, you understand bio, maybe you understand bio weapons, maybe you help someone in the basement, create a new smallpox and create some, like there are guardrails that need to be on these things,

obviously. But it's, you know, it's a little bit overblown, I think. Things like chat GPT and GPT4 were meaningful shifts toward the board realizing that the stakes are getting higher here.

Toner said, it's not like we are all going to die tomorrow, but the board needs to be functioning well. And yeah, that's a fair, that's a fair critique. Like the structure of the company was not aligned with what was happening at the company.

At the same time, it feels like they're acting like everyone was going to die tomorrow. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And we actually talked about this before we got on air. But I think what, if you really if they wanted to have a sort of strong case for their actions there should have been

sort of information being fed to them from active members of the research team and the team broadly saying hey we're very worried about this it's not just a cute chat app that's going to go viral this this could sort of snowball into something else but it doesn't seem it seems like they were doing their sort of own vibes-based analysis of the situation, and just frustration feeling like having an inflated sense of self-importance when realizing they weren't a real player in the game. Yeah, I completely agree. So, I mean, most of the board was non-technical,

not actually interfacing with the changes at a technical level that were happening in the iterations of the GPD models. Yes, they were scaling up, but how were they doing on evals? How were these systems integrated? How are the what what systems do these to these models have access to all of those things completely agree with that The the the the other thing is like what basically what you're advocating for is like a whistleblower program

Which kind of exists in every company like if you've ever been on a board and some low level employee You know like it's probably not good they're probably complaining About something and a lot of times they have good points what was interesting is that there was a story that came out that open I had some really onerous exit process where if you left and you didn't sign like an NDA, they could claw back some of your equity. And everyone was like, this is terrible. And I was like, yeah, it seems like maybe overly aggressive, but it's kind of, it's kind of super aligned with the EAs because if you actually think that Open A's new model is going to kill all of humanity, then your money is worthless, right? And so you should absolutely say, well, the money

is useless. Let me go to the media and say what's happening. And then I'll stop it and then I'll be and I'll write a book and I'll make money that way. Like there's a million ways to make money if you're a successful whistleblower and you actually do uncover. Hey, yeah, I'm the person that saved humanity and I can prove it because this model, I have proof that it was going to kill everyone. Yes, I lost my shares in Open AI. But it doesn't matter because I saved the world. And like what would be more edifying and then also financially rewarding over the long term than saving humanity. Ben would go to the press and say, John and Jordy are considering going to eight hours a day live streaming, which I think might massively slow GDP growth or potentially even go negative

because people just stop all work and just listen to the show. It's a real asymmetric risk. Yes, definitely. Yeah, I mean, we've advocated for, for podcast safety very significantly. And potentially even creating like a government. Regulatory capture and like monopoly. Basically there should be 10,000 percent tariffs on podcast. There should be like an FDA for podcasting where you have to submit an application with what your show is about and then you get approved.

It takes years, costs hundreds of millions of dollars. Exactly. And then you can't just have any willing, nilly podcast just drop an RSS feed. Yeah. Just like pharmaceuticals. Exactly. We don't want anybody coming to market with a new pharmaceutical.

I completely agree. This makes so much sense. have anyone just coming to market with the podcast for sure. Anyway, let's move on to equally ridiculous things. Toner and McCauley had already begun to lose trust in Altman to review new products. And this is interesting because we haven't actually heard before how the safety process worked with an open AI. And they do a good job breaking it down here. So to review new products for risks before they were released. And again, I agree that when you're launching new products, like you should assess them for safety. Even Instagram, when they launch a new algorithm, they should be like,

is this promoting anorexia? Is this promoting extreme content or not? And to what degree? Is it making people sad? Is it making people happy? Like, let's understand the impact of the technology that we're building. That's great. And here's how they wound up doing it. So Open AI has a joint safety committee board with Microsoft, a key backer of Open AI that had special access to use its technology and its products. So Microsoft can vend GPT models into Azure and then deliver them into different segments of the Microsoft ecosystem. During one meeting in the winter of 2022, as the board weighed how to release

three somewhat controversial enhancements to GPT4, Altman claimed all three had been approved by the Joint Safety Board. Toner asked for proof and found that only one had actually been approved. And so this is like the smoking gun. Like Sam Altman lied about the approvals. And it's like,

Okay, like author, follow up. Like what are the, what are the controversial enhancements? Like I remember what the difference between GPD 3.5 and GPD4 were. It was context window went from 4K tokens to 32K tokens. They trained on 10 times as many tokens. Like we saw, we saw the small dot and then the big circle. And everyone was scared. I get that everyone was scared.

But like what is the problem? Like GPD4, yeah, okay, now you can do PDF upload. Is that going to kill everyone? Like what is the problem? that you're actually upset about. I understand that, like, yes, he might have, like, not followed the right rules in this case, but, like, habeas corpus.

Like, we have to produce some sort of corpse here. And, like, what is this controversial enhancement to GPD4? We've all been playing with GPD4 for years now. It's no big deal. It's been copied, open source deep-sea can run it on your phone. You can download it on GitHub, Mistral, and, like, all these, all these GPD4 level models, like, what are we worried about? I don't understand.

It's so confusing and infuriating that the author didn't dive in deeper and say, like, what were the controversial enhancements? Because to me, it was a controversial lack of enhancements. It was like GD4 was great, but it wasn't good enough. It should have had more. Immediately, I was like, 32K context window, not big enough. What did Google do? They launched 100K context window.

They launched a million token context window. Is that controversial? I don't know, but it's super useful if you're trying to deep dive a book. Like, I don't get it. I'm so confused by this. Anyway, and then this is the really funny thing because they're obviously like all the, all the hates been on Sam. But Microsoft is just like doing crazy stuff this whole time. So around the same time, Microsoft launched a test of the still unreleased GPG4 in India.

And they're just like, yeah, let's just try it in India. Like, who cares? Like, we don't need to ask anyone. Like, let's just do it. The first instance is the first instance of the revolutionary code being released in the wild. That's not the first time. They're just like, let's test it on India. Bill Gates organizations have done things like that.

Yeah, it's like, what if it was Microsoft, like, you're afraid of AI safety? Like, what if it had gone wrong and like completely screwed up India? Like, that would be bad, right? It's like so bizarre. Well, it's also internet products. Yeah, I mean, I think it's fine. I think it's great to go test these things wherever. I think it's a big deal.

But it's just very funny that like, like, Microsoft is just like, oh, yeah, like, let's not deal with that stupid joint safety board. Like, let's just rip it. Yeah. Full send. My boy's back in India. He's like, we really need chat summary and teams. Like, we're going to take the risk. We're going to risk humanity for chat.

It's so funny that that's what we're talking about. Like, we're talking about, like, co-pilot in Outlook and stuff. It's like it's so low stakes in some ways. It's like better auto-complete in many ways. Anyway, so Microsoft launches GPT4 in India. They don't get approval from the Joint Safety Board. And no one had bothered to inform opening eyes board that the safety approval had been skipped. The independent board members found out when one of them was stopped by an opening

eye employee in the hallway on the way out of a six-hour board meeting. Never once in that meeting had Altman or Brockman mentioned the breach, probably because it's not that important that Microsoft is testing GPG4 in Indian office products. It's just a very funny dynamic to be in this sort of hyper-scale startup mode where you're scaling headcount rapidly, you're raising all this money, you're scaling users sort of dramatically, right? Yeah. And then you have this board that that's sitting over your shoulder, kind of like nitpicking every small decision that you make.

And for a completely new class of like risk vectors. Like when I hear like if I was running a company and somebody was like told me like, hey, like a partner of ours just launched our product, kind of like white labeled it and they launched it in India. I would be like, okay, well like, what does that mean? for my brand. Like maybe I want my brand to be front and center in that market. And so I don't love that because they're kind of like stealing my brand building that will eventually happen when I get the chance to roll out in that country. So that's an issue. Are we paying taxes appropriately? Are we legal there? Do we have a, do we have a registration properly? Or is this going to be a

PR nightmare? Like, do we have another partner that was expecting to work with us in India? And now they're going to be upset. How are they ensuring that they're putting it up? spend behind the go-to-market to make sure that they're successful. And then the second one is like, is, is ASI going to explode in India and like kill everyone? It's like, that's not at the top of my stack. So anyway, then one night in the summer of 2023, an Open AI board member overheard a person at a dinner party discussing Open AI's startup fund. This is the Venture Capital Fund that they used to invest in startups that could potentially

use open AI's technology. Basically giving money to the companies that they're going to steamroll with the next generation of chat GPT, it seems like. But I guess there are some companies that probably took money from startup fund and like wound up doing something application layer that was specific and doing great. I think Harvey took money from open AI. Yeah, yeah. That makes sense because it's like, it's much more like narrow than just being like,

oh, we're like, we're like, you know, slight prompt engineering on top of chat GPT and we're going to get rolled. Sam's a dog. I don't think he was using, wanting to use. use a startup fund to fund potential competitors. It was very oriented around. You're going to be using chatGBT. We'll give you some money. Yeah, truly like you're going to be an API customer forever and you're never going to train a foundation model. So the fund was announced in 2021 to invest in AI-related startups. And OpenAI had announced it would be managed by OpenAI. But the board member was overhearing

complaints that the profits from the fund weren't going to Open AI investors. This was news to the board. So they asked Altman. Over months, directors learned that Sam Altman owned the fund personally. OpenAI executives first said it had been for tax reasons, then eventually explained that Altman had set up the fund because it was faster and only a temporary arrangement. And knowing everything about Open AI's insane legal structure, I believe this. It's hard to set up a fund as like a Delaware C Corpor, like an LLC. see it's tricky like there's not exactly like card or angel list for setting up a fund when you're

a for-profit that's owned by a non-profit that's operating all these different things and has this ownership by Microsoft and it's all this complicated cap table like I'm sure it was very onerous to set up something like this so but this is where because yeah the Sam Altman even if he was fully embracing the sort of EA mode should be in the mindset of like I need to ignore more the board, like some aspects of the board's, you know, desires because if other competitors, like, TOTOC, beat us, you know, that there wasn't really on the radar at the time. I'm sure it was if you were building a foundation model. Yeah.

If other people beat us to this, like none of it even matters. Like, all this stuff doesn't matter. So we need to, like, take some shortcuts. Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's like, what did Iliosey? What did Sam see? Sam saw commoditization of the foundation model layer and knockout. drag out fight in the application layer and it was like, I got to go fast and this is a consumer

tech company. But here is a line that I think we need to take a much, much more seriously. So the truth came out about the structure of the startup fund. Open AI said Sam Altman earned no fees or profits from the fund, an unusual arrangement. So he had no carry and no fee from that fund. And that is something that I think is unacceptable. Like any fund manager should be getting two and 20 at least. the great funds, you know, three, four, four percent.

You've seen three and thirty before. And so this, this is a big problem. If I, if I was investing in a fund and someone was like, oh, like no, no fee, no profit, I'd be like, yeah, straight to jail. Yeah. But of course, that actually aligns with open AIs incentives. We're joking. But it is, it is very odd. I mean, it does kind of align with this idea that he was really fast.

Yes, OpenAI said Altman earned no fees or profit from the fund that he could have had two. I think your interpretation is right. There's also another interpretation where he just hadn't hit the hurdle yet. He did have two and 20, but then, you know, whatever. I think I, but I think you're. Yeah, if I had to guess on what the actual structure was, it was like, technically he owned the, the GP, but an open AI was an LP in the fund. and so he had legal control over it, but all the money and profits would flow through

without anything passing to him. And that seems like the fastest and most clearly, Sam Altman, ridiculously talented venture investor should be the one at OpenAI making the final decision on what companies are getting invested in or not. And that's in the best interest of OpenAI. And also it's like in what scenario is he,

making is like the idea of him like he could just start a separate venture fund and go raise a billion dollars and just be like hey guys I have two jobs now and everyone would just be like yeah that's fine so if you wanted to make two and 20 on a lot of money he could go do that and so it doesn't quite track that like like what frame of mind would he have to be in that it's like okay I'm like the CEO and leader of the next generation consumer tech behemoth but really I want to run like a micro fund and get like, you know, have control over it. Like it's like, it's like, the economics just don't really make sense there. And this is what I'm talking about like, like, about the follow up is like, you should follow up and be like at, what was actually at stake

if he had, if he had taken the fees and the profits from the fund? Like, 10 million bucks? A hundred million bucks? Like certainly not 10 billion. That would have been, that would have been sort of a smoking gun if he was out in the world saying I don't have any profits in Open AI and then was like running the side fund and managing it. Yeah. It was branded. But the fact that he's not earning fees or profits from the fund just goes to show like, okay. Yeah.

That should be like the board should be able to be like small slap on the wrist like next time go through the proper process. Totally. Make off balance sheet investments from Open AI in the meantime. Yep. Yep. Just do it the right way. Yeah. And he would still say like, you know, yeah, probably should have just done it. but, you know, whatever, we're moving quickly.

It's so funny. It's like, oh, yeah, like, he set up this fund. Like, he personally owns, like, 30% of Anthropic now. He's just like, I can't deal with these guys in opening. I'm just going to go turbo long, the direct competitor. No, it makes no sense. And there really is no smoking gun in the portfolio that I've seen, at least. But again, like, follow up.

To the independent board members, the administrative oversight defied belief. I can't believe it. The cast previous and cast previous oversights as a possible pattern of deliberate deception. For instance, they also had been alerted to the previous fall. They also hadn't been alerted the previous fall when opening I released chat GPT. At the time, considered a research preview that used existing technology, but ended up taking the world by storm in late September, Suscover email toner asking if she had time to talk the next day. This was highly unusual.

They didn't talk outside of board meetings on the phone. Sutscover hemmed and hawed before coughing up a clue. You should talk to Miram more. And so, yeah, the launch of chat chit is funny because I've seen, I talked about this with Dwar Cash saying that, like, there's two criticisms of Sam. One is like, he's non-technical. He's never done anything. He's not, like, creating really new technology.

And then the other one is like, he moves too fast. He launched chat GPT without, you know, telling the board. And it's like, only one of those can be true, right? Like, you can do one or you can take one or the other, but I've seen people try and take both. and I'm like that just doesn't match. But yeah, I mean, I don't know, probably should have told the board you're launching Chatsypte.

I understand that, you know, it was this research preview. They did launch a lot of different things. The Open AI sandbox, they launched playground and none of the other things had taken off like Chatsypte. Maybe it was just lucky. And the use cases for that early research product

were pretty tame. It was like generate the, you know, subject line for your e-commerce brand. Yeah. That's what people were building on top of it. Totally. There was nothing agentic. There was just like a text generation tool.

Yeah. That was good, but not even great. It was magical, but it wasn't anything. Yeah, I mean, if you just think about the, like, the frame of mind that they're in, they're like, we are training this, like, AGI God and we're spending $100 million on a training run, like this. And like, if it comes out wrong, it could be like really misdemeanor. aligned and it's like really high stakes. And so like I imagine that that's where the board's

focused. They're not focused on like, oh yeah, like, you know how we're vending in like the GPT 3.5 DaVinci 2002 until like a bunch of companies. Like we created a wrapper on that that just lets people like chat with it directly. And it's just like a new UI on top of the LLN that we already trained. Like when you frame it like that, it's like, oh yeah, like they did just like kind of whip up the chat GPT interface in like a couple days I imagine. I mean, maybe it was a couple weeks. But like, The first version of chat GPT was not, it was really just like a rapper around their LLM. And it didn't feel like that would be the thing that broke it through. It felt like the thing that would break it through is scale it up another 10X.

Spend a billion dollars. Do Stargate, you know, right? Yeah. Anyway, let's go into Mira. So Mira Muradi had been promoted to chief technology officer of Open AI in May of 2022 that had effectively been running the day to day ever since. Absolute Doge, operational mastermind. You'll love to see it.

When Toner called her Maradi, Corporate athlete for sure. Moradi described how what she saw as Altman's toxic management style had been causing problems for years and how the dynamic between Altman and Brockman, who reported to her but would go to Altman any time she tried to rein him in, made it almost impossible for her to do her job.

And so that is a very odd dynamic. I believe Brockman was a co-founder. And obviously, you know, Glockman, Glockman, Altman and Brockman go way back because Altman was an investor in Stripe and Greg was the CTO. And so they go way, way back. They co-founded the company together. And now there's like this layer in between them that's Miramir Marotti,

who's clearly like an incredible, talented corporate athlete. But it is a little weird. Like imagine if like, it was like, oh, yeah, I'm actually hiring someone and you report to them and they report to me. Like you would still come to me and be like, yo, like what? Like we go way back. It's weird. And so however they got in that situation, it just seems bad.

ad, right? Yeah. Muradi had raised some of these issues directly with Altman months earlier, and Altman had responded by bringing the head of HR to their one-on-one meetings for weeks until she finally told him she didn't intend to share her feedback with the board. Brutal. That sounds not fun in general. Toner went back to Sutzgiver, the company's oracular chief scientist. Love that word. He made it clear that he had lost, he made it clear that he had lost trust in Altman for numerous reasons, including his tendency to pit senior employees against each other. In 2021, Sutskiver had mapped out and launched a team to pursue the next research direction for OpenAI. That's probably the reinforcement learning, the 01, the Q-Star

technology that they were working out at the time that was very controversial, but then, you know, deep-seek open-source. So it's like, was it really that big of a deal? We don't know. Sutskiver had mapped out this and launched a team to pursue research, but months later, another open AI researcher, Jacob Pachaki, began pursuing something very similar. And so the teams merged and Pachaki took over after Sutskevur turned his focus to AI safety. And so Altman later elevated Pachaki to research director

and privately promised both of them they could lead the research direction of the company, which led to months of lost productivity because you have two groups. It's like the Google strategy basically. And so, you know, just like kind of like, you know, a lot of weird dynamics of like who's really in charge.

The board is misaligned with the management. The management team is misaligned with like the co-founders who are clearly like brilliant but maybe not operational. And so you throw some operational talent in between them. And then all of a sudden you have a co-founder who's super technical that's reporting to someone who's like an executive and it just gets very, very funky. Yeah, there's two challenges. One, you have a nonprofit research group that's transitioning into a for-profit hyper-scaler.

Yep. And then you also have this business that's verticalizes. that's doing everything from research to the end product layer. They're also doing an API, and they're also still worried about AI safety. And then you combine that with products that are generating millions and then tens of millions and then hundreds of millions of revenue. That's also losing so much money that if Sam can't continue,

he's on the sort of fundraising treadmill. So he's like, well, we need to keep growth at, you know, at the sort of ridiculous rate. We, you know, and this is like even before all the nonprofit, for-profit conversion stuff. So again, I know how to juggle. You can do a Rubik's Cube. You can juggle on a corporate level, but not, you can do a Rubik's Cube. I can't do a Rubik's Cube, but I can't, I can't juggle, unfortunately.

It's on my 2025 goals I got to learn. Yeah. Anyway, this is another wild, wild story again. Reading carefully in terror of being found out by Altman, Maradi, and Sutskiver spoke to each other, each of the independent board members over the next few weeks. It was only because they were in daily touch that the independent directors caught Altman in a particularly egregious lie. Toner had published a paper in October that repeated criticisms of OpenAI's approach to safety.

Altman was livid. He told Sutskiver that McCauley had said Toner should obviously leave the board over the article. McCauley was taken aback when she heard the account from Sutskiver. she knew she had said no such thing. And so how would you feel if I published a paper saying TBPN is the worst thing to ever happen to media and podcasting generally? I was just catching up here. Like it just seems like an offensive thing to do.

Like, I don't know. It's just weird. It's weird to be on the board of this company and then publish a paper that's like they suck. Oh, you were referencing that. I was looking at the dynamic of Sutskiver, McCauley. Oh, that whole thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this alleges that Sam like was. basically like mom and dad. Like mom said I can watch TV. Go ask dad, what does your mom say? It's like that dynamic, right? But I just think the whole core is so weird to not just,

you're on the board. Like if you're not comfortable with the approach of safety. Sounds like that should have been an internal memo. Should have been an email. And you decided to risk what was already, I'm sure, anybody on the board putting out basically like activist material. when you're supposed to be working internally with management to sort of get like it seems like a very extreme step to just sort of you know put this thing out yes randomly and I mean this is what I keep

coming back to is like like let's use our example like if you published a paper saying like tbPN's going downhill like it's a disaster John's not taking podcast safety seriously enough like like first I would be like offended like hey why didn't you just talk to me like like off mic or like even on the show like you could talk to me whenever we're live for three hours a day you you could email me there are million ways that you could bring that up but I could use I could use the horn to let me know that you think I'm not doing a good job um but the thing that that would really irk me is if you did that and you were wrong like like okay so your toner you're criticizing open AI for the approach to safety habeas corpus

show me the damage that Open AIs approach to safety has done. Like, what are we talking about here? What is the damage? I think part of it. And there's a million ways you don't even have to do the killing everyone. You could say, hey, like, the election is going to swing because of Open AIs products. Like, did that happen? No.

Like, no, not at all. I think it comes down to if you're the safety guy or girl. Yeah. And you care a lot about your job. It's part of your identity. It's part of your entire brand is AI safety, all this EA stuff. and then your job's actually really not that important at the moment. Yep.

And you feel like you're not getting enough attention. Yep. Like this just screams like, I want attention. Like give me attention, validate my beliefs, make me feel important. Yeah. Which is like a board member who has an inflated sense of self-importance and wants to be a star. Yeah.

It's like a pretty toxic dynamic. Yeah. Also, it's just like there's no. There's no relative assessment here. Like, okay, you have a problem with open AIs approach to safety. Let's compare it to deepseeks. Let's compare it to Googles. Let's compare it to GROCs.

Let's compare it to mistrawls. Rank it for us, Helen. Like, tell us, like, where are we sitting here? Because, like, A, I'm not seeing any damage from Open AI products. What I'm seeing is, like, a minor product boost, productivity boost for knowledge workers. Like people like can find answers to things a little bit faster, write some copy a little bit faster. Yeah, basically it's a great, you know, co-pilot for your work. I know, Sachia.

So it's it's what I've been using it for. Even the job displacement thing, right? Like if we were seeing like, oh, wow, like unemployment is really ticking up, like this is having an impact, I'd be like, okay, yeah. Like, like we do need to talk about this. We need to really think about. Get ahead of it. Yeah, yeah. And maybe it's, you know, some sort of regulation.

I don't want to lock this down too much, but maybe there's some sort of like, you know, incentive or tax benefit for human workers. Like, we're doing something to take care of Americans. Like, I'm all here to debate that and discuss that. There's probably a good way. Sam's talked about UBI before. Like, there are ways to address, like,

serious job losses. But we have, like, 3% unemployment. Like, we're not in some, like, massive AI disruption to jobs yet. Like, there's no damage being done. And so, like, what are you talking about? Anyway. Yeah, it's, it's almost like that board level role around AI safety and thinking about the impact of AI, is like if Toner was writing research papers, like advising, you know, governments globally, is saying like, here's how we see this technology panning out. Totally. Here's how you need to be planning around employment and what the future of sort of various careers looks like.

And that'd be very valuable and beneficial. Totally. But that person should report to the CEO and be like, hey, here, I have, I have a bunch of ideas about how we should be positioning this. How should we be messaging this to governments? Like, I'm almost in like the PR department. And I'm doing and I'm publishing all this. Not higher up like, like taking shots at the company you're in charge of. Anyway, I totally get the, the criticism that like getting mommy daddyed is annoying. I totally get that. I think that that is a legitimate criticism here. And so it clearly also. So this is off Ilya and Mira because they'd been collecting evidence and now Sutskiver was willing to share. He emailed Toner, McCauley, and DeAngelo, a lengthy two page, two lengthy PDF documents using Gmail's self-destructing email function, which I didn't know was a thing. Google, what are you doing?

Like, you haven't surfaced that to me. Did you know that there's self-destructing emails in Gmail? Never heard of that. Fun. Give it a try, folks, when you're whistleblowing. One was about Altman, the other were about Brockman. The Altman document consisted of dozens of examples. of his alleged lies and other toxic behavior,

largely backed up by screenshots from Maradi's Slack channel. In one of them, Altman told Maradi that the company's legal department had said that GPT4 Turbo didn't need to go through the Joint Safety Board Review. Again, it's like, what is GPT4 Turbo? It just like, say, model runs faster. Turbo. Need a joint safety board review.

It seems like he kind of has a argument there, but then Maradi checked with the company's top lawyer, and the lawyer said that he had not said that. again, I keep going back to this, but being in this sort of existential fight for your right to be a company, which is you're losing money, but you're growing quickly, but you need to be raising more money, and you have a lot of heavily funded competitors. And then you have the joint safety board review who says we need another review before you can release a slightly updated version of a product that's already been out in market being utilized.

I mean, I can't imagine anything more conversational. something than having to do like heavy heavy reviews. You kind of understand what was happening and GitHub commits. And again, like the critiques of Sam not being consistently candid, which was what they eventually came out. Yeah. And said is like, yeah, that's fair. But at the same time, the fact that he would, was, has been able to lead the company to

hundreds of millions of users and staying at the edge and, you know, winning at the, at the sort of app layer right now, despite all of this, is just a testament to his executive ability. Yeah, no, it's odd. So anyway, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 16th, 2023, he and three independent war members logged into a video call and voted to fire Altman, knowing Marotti was unlikely to agree to be interim CEO if she had to report to Brockman.

They also voted to remove Brockman from the board. After the vote, the independent board members told Sutskever that they had been worried that he'd been sent as a spy to test their loyalty. That night, Maradi was at a conference when the four board members called her to say they were firing Altman the next day and asked her to step in as CEO. She agreed when she asked why they were firing him, they wouldn't tell her. And this was kind of odd because, like, she had been in earlier conversations and just a couple paragraphs earlier, this is Sutskiver and Maradi were collecting evidence.

And there's a whole bunch of these examples where it's like, um, where you'd think that Sutskiver was communicating with her so she should know. But then she's like, Marotti's like, I don't know why you would fire him, which is kind of weird because earlier in this article, they're saying like, she's really annoyed by all the things Sam's doing. So shouldn't she just immediately know that, oh, yeah, they're firing him for all the stuff we talked about. But that's like very odd. Like, why would she even ask? And then she really goes on the offensive and says, like, have you considered, have you communicated? this to Sottenadella, knowing how essential Microsoft CEOs, the CEO's commitment to their

partnership was to the company. They had not. I remember when this was happening, it was so haphazard and so shocking and sudden and the team didn't know what was going on. And there's all these sort of lay, it's like, you know, it's like a family in fighting, right? Like they're all on the same team, but clearly there's like power struggle and dynamics. And then you know like Satchez is kind of like the grandpa.

that he's like really guys like you know like you didn't consult me on this yeah that's insane and like from his perspective like you guys are fighting over auto complete and clipy like the new yeah the new clipy you guys are building the new clipy he's like I just wanted the new clipy faster and it already tested in India and it's a hit and it's a hit let's roll it out to the rest of the world yeah and so all the board said was that he had not been consistently candid with the board Friday night, the Open AIs board and executive team held a series of increasingly contentious meetings. Marotti had grown concerned that the board was putting Open AI at risk by not preparing, but not better preparing for the repercussions of Altman's firing.

At one point, she and the rest of executive team gave the board a 30-minute deadline to explain why they fired Altman or resign. And again, this is odd because it's like, it feels like she's kind of on the executive team and saying like, we're all wondering why you got fired, Sam, but like she knows or she should know. And so it's like, why did she just turn around and say, hey, everyone, I actually know why he got fired. Like, I was in these conversations. It was very odd. Yeah.

The board felt they couldn't divulge that it had been Maradi who had given them some of the most detailed evidence. They had banked on Maradi's calming employees while they searched for a CEO. Instead, she was leading her colleagues in a revolt against the board. Isn't that a crazy thing to do? That's so wild. So like, like, the board is like, well, like, this is our next CEO, Mira. she's asking us to explain why we fired Sam, but she's the reason that we fired Sam,

and we can't say that because if we do, we lose her as the CEO. It's like this crazy power struggle. It's like so wild. It's a Game of Thrones over there. A narrative began to spread among Altman's allies that the whole thing was a coup by Sutskever, driven by his anger over Pachaki's promotion

and boosted by Toner's anger that Sam Altman had tried to push her off the board. This was like the I love you all, Ilya, like, coded tweet from Sam where he said, he signed his tweet, I love you all, which is I-L-Y-A, Ilya. And so he was like, oh, he's like pointing the finger at Ilya. And so then this like whole, like, meme of like, Ilya is responsible when really it seems like it was like a lot of people were involved and stuff. You've heard the whole story now.

Crazy. Satsgiver was astounded. He had expected opening eyes, employees of opening eye to cheer. Bad, bad miscalculation. People love consumer tech companies. They're like, we're making Clippy here, guys. Clippy but good. I don't care about all this safety mumbo-jumbo.

Climpy, Cracked Clippy. Cracked Clippy. What are you talking about, Elia? I just want to get a second beach home and vend Clippy into every Microsoft product. It's crazy that crackedclippy.com is available for $12. Go get it. Go get it. Create your JCPET rep.

Get sued by Microsoft. Yeah. I'm sure they still own the thing. They will come after you hard. So by Monday morning, almost all of them had signed a letter threatening to quit if Altman wasn't reinstated. Among the signatures were Maraudis and Sutskivers? Such a twist.

Actually, I really liked the guy. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is, we're on TV. This is intelligence versus EQ, right? Yeah. The intelligence thing says that like, well, legally we can fire Sam, but the emotionally intelligent thing is like, actually, a lot of people like Sam and open AI is nothing without its people, right? And to be clear, I don't think. Sam was actually talking.

He was like, I'll just go to Microsoft Research and hire everyone back that likes me. And a lot of people like him. Yeah. And no one else for sure was getting 40 on 300 done. For sure. Outside of Sam. For sure. So let's hit the size.

one more time for Sam and the Open AI team. What a funny story. Anyways. It's one of the greatest tech stories of all time. I mean, I know it was very stressful and frustrating for a lot of people involved, but, you know, we, I don't know, we just... The story's not over. The story's not over.

It's still a knockout, dragout fight. Anyone could win is Open AI. Yahoo. Jessica Livingston. Google. Let's figure it out. Jessica Livingston, co-founder of Y.C., had a, has a, has a positive and she had Sam on to talk about basically that weekend and the craziness.

And so worth a listen. But Sam, just like him walking through the sort of like step by step conclusions. And then he's a deal guy. So like he was at certain points that weekend was basically like, yeah, I can just go to Microsoft and keep doing what I'm doing. Yeah. I mean, I know that if I was in his position and I was super stressed during this weekend, I would want to just get out of the city. I would want to go to Wander and Sonoma Vineyards.

I would go to Wander.com and I would try and find my happy place. I would say, I would actually be singing to myself. I'd be singing, find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views. Hotel Granted Menace, Dreamy beds, top-day cleaning, and 24-7 concierge services. Wander is such a fantastic idea.

It's basically take some of the greatest songs in the world and make them available by the day. You love this too much. You go two days, three days, four days, 30 days. This wander in Sonoma Vineyards is fantastic. Four bedrooms, three and a half baths, five beds, eight guests, three thousand four hundred square feet. There's a pool. I grew up in Sonoma County. So if you go stay at that wander, DM me, we'll give you some recommendations.

Yeah, you almost got sucked into that whole East Bay Rationalist thing, the EA thing. I was born in the dark on the dark side of the building. You merely adopted it. I was born on the dark. I was born in Oakland Children's Hospital. We'll get LAs are on here. You can debate them. Yeah.

You can be like, uh, but. but what if I turn the server off? What if I pulled a plug, Elyaser? What happens then? Owned. What if there's bad robots, but I have a good army of robots powered by Brett Adcock, figure, AI? What then?

What then? What then? What then? What then? What then? What are you going to do about that? Owned. Anyway, let's move on to Intel.

Everyone's wondering what's going to happen with Libbutan, the new CEO of Intel. tons of debate over what should happen to Intel of course Intel the story chip manufacturer integrated so they both design and manufacture the chips they have a design arm and a fat

very different from Intel from Nvidia and TSMC It's crazy only one designs If they had one different letter in their in their product they would have been a trillion dollar company if it was just a G instead of a

C instead of the CPU. Oh, true, true. They really missed that. Just one off. You know they actually do make a GPU. Really? You don't hear about it much.

You don't hear about it much. It's not very popular. Anyway, so Liputon isn't signaling a major departure from Intel's past strategy. When he came on, he said, hey, we're staying the path. And we were kind of debating, like, is this just signaling to employees like, hey, don't worry, everything's going to be the same new CEO. Just keep doing what you're doing. We're going to figure out new strategy, but like, your job is safe right now?

Or was he a genuine believer in the new strategy? in the strategy that's been going on for years. He has long agitated for, hey, we need some change. And we think that's why he was brought in. But the Wall Street Journal has some new reporting that we're going to take you through. And so he's only been on the job for two weeks, but time isn't really on Liputon's side.

Tan became Intel's new CEO on March 18th and has already started laying out some of his vision for the storied but troubled chip giant. In a letter to shareholders, he spoke of the need to up our game. I love that. To make Intel's products more competitive in the crucial market for artificial intelligence systems.

He also said he was equally focused on building up the foundry business where Intel manufactures chips designed by other companies. Of course, Intel has lost TSMC on the TPU, on the Apple silicon chips, like on Nvidia stuff. They have a lot of great clients, and Intel can do a lot of, it's called the trailing edge fabs. So think about the chip that goes in your car. Yeah. It doesn't need to be an H-100. But it does need to be made with quality at scale.

And so we saw a lot of this during COVID. A lot of the chip delays led to cars. You think about it, though. Daytona SP3 with an H100 would go. Pretty hard. Pretty hard. I mean, you're saying that, but like, I actually would love a car that was able to inference whisper. And, like, you know, chat GPT or GROC or Deep Seek or something.

like in real time. So you can have a conversation with zero latency because it's all done in the car. And there's enough energy in these cars. There's enough like power. It's possible. Just just burning a V12 to power your H100 while you're talking to your chatbot on the way to work.

That's the future. That's great. Hey, make a to do list. Bot. It's great. But yeah, I mean, this is one of the things we talked about with Tesla.

And Sam was saying like maybe Tesla and XAI and X all kind of combined. And you can imagine that if you're driving a Tesla, you want to have the best interaction with the AI features. And if you have autopilot enhanced by XAI, you could be using, you could be scrolling the timeline. Exactly. I didn't know this, but my buddy Ben Taft, we were hanging out over the weekend. And apparently with the Tesla autopilot, like they make you keep your hands on the steering wheel and they use a camera. And it used to be that you could hack it by like putting. weights on it.

Sure. You could just sit there. Yep. But now having your car on autopilot but being forced to keep your hands on the steering wheel and then it gives you strikes. Yeah. If you get five strikes, you can't use autopilot anymore. Yeah, it turns off.

That's insane. Yeah, it's actually kind of miserable. But you get used to it and you kind of adapt. I mean, Mercedes has lane keep assist and you have to check in with it every like 20 seconds and like give it a little wiggle or like hold your hands on it basically. But you take your hands off for like 10 seconds. George Hatz's comma AI does not need you to touch the wheel at all. It's amazing.

It just has a camera, but if you look down or you look at your phone, it will blink at you and disable. And so George has, I think, correctly argued that that is the future of self-driving systems. Just camera on the face is the person paying attention. If they fall asleep, it detects that. It doesn't matter if their hands are on the wheel. If they're sleeping, that's not good. And so I think that's the future.

And I think that's where Tesla is moving. And I think that the situation that you described is very temporary. I think that we will see Tesla long-term go to purely AI. But it's still. Yeah, I thought that was hilarious. Yeah. But I mean, that's why most people, we know, just use chauffeurs and then they sit in the back. Yeah, that's right.

Because the chauffeur will keep the hands off. If the helicopter is not available. Yeah. In other words, the same things Intel last CEO was trying to accomplish. Tan reiterated those points in a speech on Monday, kicking off the company's Intel Vision conference. beyond a few aspirations, including better AI strategy and custom-built chips for niche computing work, there was little to distinguish Tan's playbook from his predecessor. Stay tuned for Intel's plans on humanoid robots, he told the audience, let's go.

In short, his short tenure on the job so far means Tan could well have more significant changes in mind, but one option Intel doesn't have is more of the same. Tan's predecessor, Pat Gelsinger, Absolute Doge, was effectively booted following an ambitious, multi-year effort to both improve the company's chip designs and catch its manufacturing processes up to those proffered by TSM. And yeah, it's hard to do two things at once. They're trying to be a of a jack of all trades, but they are a master of none right now. That effort hasn't worked, or at least not yet. Intel's annual revenue has shrunk by 33% over the last four years. The once flush chip giant has been burning cash since 2022. The foundry business still mostly produces Intel

design chips and it lost 13.4 billion last year. A little size gone moment of silence. Anyway. This moment of silence is brought to you by ramp. Save time and they need to be on ramp for sure. One change the town hinted at is more wax at Intel's cost structure. The company reduces workforce by 13% last year but still employs far more people than any other company in industry. You know the Anakin meme. Yep. You were the best of us. You're a chip company. You must have done great over the last five years. It's like you must have done great, right? Intel down 60% the last five years. So rough. Yeah. That sounds like so Tan involves listening more closely. His plan is to listen more closely to customers. That sounds like corporate speak, but it's

meaningful at Intel, the Wall Street Journal, pulling no punches. Decades of technical success and near monopoly on personal computer chips nurtured a culture of arrogance, an Intel recruiter who interviewed Gelsinger for his first intent at Intel out of a technical school called him somewhat arrogant and noted he'll fit right in you love it but Intel's been in trouble look at this graph of people power annual revenue ever annual revenue per employee and Vidia is putting up historic numbers 3.5 million per employee Intel is down at less than 500k per employee in revenue that is not there with the manufacturer of the TI 84 Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments is one of the best corporate. It's a great company. Also, the founder of TSM, worked at Texas Instruments, was passed over for a senior role, then went to Taiwan and was like, you guys want to do this?

And they were like, yeah, that's great. And Texas Instruments manufactured calculators, but they also manufacture, like, weapon systems and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a great company. Yeah. But it's very funny that they also make the calculator. What so far has been absent from TAN strategy is a deeper shift into Intel's business. Andy Grove, the storied Intel chief who mentored Gelsinger would have called the current AI wave a strategic inflection point that required decisive action, much like when Intel itself abandoned making memory chips in the 1980s. Back then, Japanese producers were making memory more cheaply,

rendering it unprofitable for Intel, so Intel took up the then-nacent market for personal computer processors. Effectively, an entire pivot for the business. Andy Grove famously said, only the paranoid survive and he was very aggressive about steering. Was he the original person to say that? Yes, that's his quote. And that's like the name of his book, I think. That's why. Yeah.

He might have gotten it from somewhere else. He probably stole it from a group chat. One of his boys was like, no, no, that's mine. That's my bang. One of Frank Sloopman's boys is like, Frank, you guys got to amp it up. You got to amp it up. You know what I do? I'm going to write a book about that.

today some analysts suggest Intel should split off its manufacturing operations from its chip design and marketing functions following a long-established industry trend of the fabless designer or the PurePlay Fab TSM or Nvidia strategy. It could gather outside investors in the manufacturing operation to bring in more capital, something the company has already in talks to do. Investors so far have welcomed TAN sending the company's stock up 10% since his appointment in March. And so if you have a take on Intel, if you want to get exposure to Intel, you want to go long or short, you got to go to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. And Public is the sponsor of our ticker. You'll see at the bottom of the show all day long. Let's stay with Intel for a little bit more.

Intel's new CEO plots turnarounds. We need to improve. So this is heard on the street, a little bit more information here. We got to get some audience members stocks up on the ticker. Oh, yeah, that'd be great. We certainly have some public market corporate athletes. Some Oscar maybe? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that'd be good. Some Palantir. Yep, of course. There's some other good ones. I think Tesla's up there right now, friend of the show. Thank you, public. So in Las Vegas at the Intel Vision conference, there was one more line that stuck out. we will redefine some of our strategy and free up the bandwidth, Tan said.

Some of our non-core business, we will spin it off. And so people are wondering what businesses are technically non-core, what will he spin off. And now Intel is leaning into AI, which will include humanoid robotics, which Tan said has the ability to redefine manufacturing in the future. And they also need to regroup its existing pool of workers while attracting new talent with a clear vision of the future. But, I mean, as I was thinking about this, like if I was so, sitting down with Lip Bhutan, the new CEO of Intel,

and I had like one piece of device for him, I would tell him to go to ramp.com because time is money and he should save both right now. They're losing, they lost $13 billion. I mean, if they had easy to use corporate cards, go payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place, I think we'd see a very different Intel, for sure.

Yeah, they're focused on what should we spin out? Should we focus on design, on the fab side? Yep. they really need to be focused on, you know, immediately just like, you know, just basic financial operations and one of the most basic things you can do. Yeah. But intelligent things you can do. So we should have the CFO of Intel on the show, give him the pitch for RAMP, really

dial it in, understand it. What corporate card is he using? And is that the source of all of Intel's problems? It's possible. That's right. It's very possible. Well, I would like to see this bet expressed. I want to know if Intel's going to split this year and I hope we can get a polymark

it's set up for it. I don't know exactly how we would define that, but we're happy to announce that Polymarket is now an official partner of TBPN. And we want to give a shout out to the ticker down at the bottom. The Polymarket ticker is powered by Polymarket. We had a friend of ours, Tyler Cosgrove, write some code and pull in their API. And we will be iterating on that and hopefully making it better and better over the next year. There's currently no market on Intel spin out. I would love to see it. We will work on getting one set up. I mean, you can kind of express that in the public market, but I love Polymarket for just defining these like narrow events. Yep.

And just creating another information source. And underrated, there's a great conversation section that happens in the comments, people debate these things. And Polymarket does a great job of surfacing interesting markets on their X account and online when things are shifting, when things are changing. So highly recommended to go get them to follow. It's an alternative way to traditional news to understand the current. thing, which is, you know, news, you go on, you know, New York Times, they're sort of being

very sensational about things. It's not really oriented around truth. It's oriented around attention. Yep. And Polymarket is, you know, like, what's actually important. Like, I was talking to Shane about this. I was like, I want a newsletter from Polymarket. And maybe we should kind of use our show as, as like a version of this. Is like, I want to, when a market moves significantly, in the polymarket tech markets, when there's a big jump in the prediction, like there was recently a big change in the expected best LLM by the end of May.

And I think it flipped from OpenAI to Google really quickly, really suddenly. When something like that happens and the odds shift all of a sudden, that's when I want to read the news story. That's when I want the deep dive. That's when I want to go deeper on that story. If we're just seeing everything's humming along at 50-50,

I don't need another breaking news story about it because that's probably just a press release that's pitched by some PR person, right? It's not really news. And so I say it's not news unless it's moving the market. And that's my thesis. But you know what else is moving the market? Horses. That's right. This story has shaken the world of technology journalism to its core. And I think a lot of tech journalists are going to be very excited to hear this. So the horse war Hermez inside a luxury show jumping competition. if you're a technology journalist and you grow up doing jessage or show jumping, like you are going to want to pay attention to this because it's a really big deal.

There was an annual equestrian event in Paris and the French brand has been keeping in touch with its saddle making roots. This is a big deal for everyone who follows horses and show jumping, obviously, pretty much everyone in tech journalism. Yeah, and for those I don't know, Hermes has always said the horse was the first client. Yes, the former chair of Hermes, Jean-Germes. Louis Dumas used to say the horse is the first client and that's because horses were for the French luxury brands first market in 1837 they're not starting new companies that have that much of

a lineage today when it opened as a harness maker they hopefully will we don't get paperclips yeah they are also its original muse inspiring stirrup inspired closures on bags designs on silk scarves and in the company's horse and carriage logo last week that That connection was on vivid display under the Grand Palais glass ceiling, where some of the top show jumpers in the world competed for branded rosettes and a 400,000 euro grand prize. The Saute Hermes is... Size gone. The Saiz is among the most challenging equestrian competitions in the world with hurdles reaching 1.6 meters or just above five feet. Sao is French for leap.

The three-day event is also a display of everything Hermes, a reminder. that in addition to selling bags, scarves, and coats, the brand still outfits top riders. In a luxury downturn, when many brands are cycling through executives and creative directors, Eames posted a 13% increase in sales in 2024 compared to 2023. And I think it's probably entirely driven by increased demand from technology journalists, right?

You have to imagine that they're power the luxury market. Downturns. Of course, because all the family money, yeah. Its power is in its heritage, which appeals to athletes as well as fashion clients. It's one way to show that our equestrian roots are very much alive, not just a narrative, says the managing director of Hermes' equestrian category, or Métier, as the brand calls it. 110 horses with names such as Hello Chandora Lady, Al Capone de Carmel, and Cocaine Duval traveled to the temporary stables along Sean.

the chansalise. Their white tinted enclosures were lit with the same round chandeliers that decorated the palais. They could warm up in an enclosure right near the intersection on view for passers-by who didn't get one of the almost 17,000 tickets sold for the weekend. Even the most technical elements were decidedly fashionable. Equestrians leapt over obstacles resembling the brand's H signature in the house colors, orange and brown, or the facade of the brand's flagship on the Rue de Faubourg. I can't even pronounce that less than a mile away. Anyway, very fun story. A little bit of more information that I liked. Best known for its colorful scarves and leather handbags, Hermes famously makes the Birken bag. But they also sell equestrian accessories,

and these are some things that tech journalists in the audience are going to want to pick up. They sell $1,200 breaches and $460 for a felt sugar box. And that's a box that's $460. You open it and you store your sugar cubes in there. So when you want to give your horse a sugar cube, you have it in a nice presentable box. Yeah. And for those that don't, you know, horses are highly opinionated about this type of thing. You try to give them sugar out of a regular old plastic Tupperware.

They are going to be pissed. Well, that's just a microplastics thing. Yeah, yeah. You don't want to be giving a horse microplastics laden. You're not going to have an enjoyable ride. Definitely not. You're giving them, you know, Tupperware sugar box. Definitely not.

Anyway, speaking of someone with as relentless as a drive as a horse, we got David Senra in the building. And he actually has a, he told us just before joining, he's got a good horse story. Oh, yeah. Start there. Okay. Tell us the horse story. What's up, guys? How you doing you?

Good to see you. Did you get some more books since last time? Or it's just a different angle? No, I'm using a different camera. It looks good. I absolutely love the horse story. I was talking to one of the most successful tech company CEOs a few months ago. And he was telling me how stupid he thought it was that his wife picked up a horse habit.

And there's a, I guess there's like a famous horse trading training facility in Wellington, Florida, which is like the middle of nowhere, kind of by like West Palm. And he goes, I thought it was the biggest waste of time. And then he shows up at this event and like Michael Bloomberg's there and like the guy from Goldman Sacks is there and like all these is such a like fabulously wealthy and success. Yeah. Like oh, maybe this isn't a giant waste of time. If the horse, even if the horse costs a million dollars, you get one deal done at that

equestrian event and it pays for itself. So I, uh, I read two books, uh, last week. One was terrible. Which I told you about. And then one was good, but not episode worthy. So I had to republish an old episode. And I republish an old episode. And I republished an old episode about this guy named Daniel Ludwig, who was the richest man in the world in 1980s.

And no one knew his name. There's no pictures of him anywhere. Wow. And he made his money. The first way he made his first fortune was hauling oil and then he had huge cargo ships. And he was getting smoked for contracts for like the big Middle East oil providers because the Onassis and all the other Greek shipping magnets would build the most, the biggest yachts in the world. And then they would invite the people they want to sell onto the yacht. and they got all of the contracts.

So Daniel was like, okay, I'm going to do the exact same thing. He didn't even, he just worked all the time. So he didn't even go on the yacht. He let them use it. And he said later on that he made more money from that ship than all of his super tankers combined. Wow. Yeah. It's amazing.

Jordy, should we talk about the Ken Griffin episode that's coming up? Are we leaking that? No, no. I just finished it this morning. Fantastic. I can't wait. I haven't eaten anything. and I'm on like six, 600.

I had three commenters so far today. So it's like just under like I'm shaking right now. We got some. Lots of caffeine. I like a caffeinated center. To match your energy. But I got it out. So what happened is like for you.

Tell us about the inspiration. Tell us about why you did the episode. Obviously everyone knows King Griffin, founder of Citadel. But what inspired you? Because I study psychos for a living. And I love them. And they're the most interesting, fascinating people to me. And so you guys actually made a video on this tweet that got like a million

and 1.5 million views, right? It's John Arnold talking about, hey, what did Ken Griffin do when Enron blew up? And he talks about just like, you know, a lot of people like, oh yeah, I know Enron was making money. Like all these, this talent is going to like, you know, essentially go to the wind.

You know, some people will recruit. Maybe they'll build like a good commodities business. And he tells a story where the day it blows up. And keep in mind, in this story, Ken Griffin's like 33. He's like really, really young. And he immediately charters Gulfstream Jet, goes to Houston, and interviews every single person that was important in the Enron trading business. And then he winds up hiring all the best talent.

And in the talk that I use for the basis of the episode, because there's no biography right on Ken, he goes, and since then, we've made about $30 billion trading commodities. So the main reason I wanted to profile him is because I get to meet a lot of really interesting people because of the podcast. And I always ask the same questions. It's like, who's the smartest person you know, who has the best business you know? And if they're into finance, even if they don't know each other, they kept hearing Ken Griffin, Ken Griffin, Ken Griffin. And they would say two things about him. They say he's a winner and he's a killer. And you just find all these stories, you know, they're not in a book, but they're just like spread across the internet.

There might be in other books of just him taking something, you know, he just took it to the next level. And then John Arnold, the one thing where I knew as soon as I read that line, I was like, oh, I'm going to do an episode of. immediately is John's like, listen, I'm not going to take a job, but I respect Ken. So yeah, I'll talk to him. I'm headed to Aspen for an event. Tell him he can call me when I get back to Houston next week. And then Ken's assistant calls back like two minutes later and it's like, hey, can't what would you talk to Ken if he flies to Aspen tomorrow? And he's like, yeah, I'll do that. So it's just like there's this reoccurring themes through all these biographies of history, great entrepreneurs. It's like, how bad do you want it? And I think

reading these stories like really stretches like what's possible. Did Ken have a jet at that point? because you've got to discount the like quick flight a little bit if he already had a tj and it was just more he flew southwest actually standby it was yeah yeah if he didn't own the jet he was definitely chartering the jet so i don't know if he owned it but yeah he was not still meaningful did you find the story of ken griffin in college getting the stock tips from state street do you did you cover that no no the one thing i heard was that he convinced harvard to let him install um like a satellite dish so he could get real up-to-the-minute data. He was the only person at Harvard that had this data flow. So that was true for the for like the publicly traded companies that he needed

stock prices for. But he also had this interest. So he's trading convertible debt at the time. And convertible debt, it doesn't just have a ticker that you can just look up online or call someone. You actually have to go to a trading desk and talk to a sales and trading guy to get like, hey, what's the market trading that particular bond at because it's not credibly liquid? And so what he would do is he would take the the red line from Harvard in Cambridge down to Boston, go into State Street, which was one of the largest, it still is, like huge global asset manager. He would bring flowers for the ladies at the front desk and sweet talk them and kind of just be like, oh, like so good to see you, Susan, like, you're the best. And then he would walk through and then just walk the desk.

I don't know if this is a prockerel. They just kind of told this story at Citadel. Yeah. But, but. But. But. But. But. He would just walk and then he would just like tap a guy on the shoulder and be like, hey, like, what, what's the spread on the convertible debt on Microsoft today or something like that? And then he would get the quote, go back, run his pricing model and then decide whether or not he should actually put it in order. It's like, everything he does. Everything he does is like that. That's why I was just so fascinating because like he just takes to the extreme. This idea of like buttering up, you know, the gatekeepers inside of a business. Like that David Geffen's biography, he talks about he had a huge advantage doing that. Michael Ovitz. I just did two episodes of Michael Ovitz. Same situation. Like they're always able to obtain information. Like they're always able to obtain information. that other people can't because there's somebody in the way and they just figure out how to get around that person. And it's usually through like acts of kindness. Dude, did you get into the story of the, uh, the, the IP theft that happened in 2011? No. So, no, so, no, so basically there's no biography of Ken, right? Um, and so I watched every single interview I could find with them. But the problem is, because it's him, most of the interviews, they want his, it's like, they're all timely. I was looking for like, timeless. Sure, sure, sure. And so it's like, they're like, hey, what do you think about?

about this political candidate or what do you think about the market now? And so the only thing, the best thing I found was this talk at Yale. Sure. The guy interviewing them kind of horrible, but I transcribed that talk at Yale and then went through the transcripts just like to do the books. And then there's another thing, it's this book right here that I found this because Josh Wolfe talked about, I think Ken was an investor in the first fund to Josh and that that Ken recommends this book.

And I think he makes people or he strongly suggests people at Citadel read it. And so I read that to get context because I think if you listen to, if people tell you, hey, this book is really important to Mary, you know, there's like five books you have to read. It gives you an insight to their personality, right? And that book is, the subtitle is, are you playing to play or are you playing to win? And think about the tweet from John Arnold. Like, was he playing to play or is he playing to win? He was playing to win.

And so I think there's a lot of analogies in the Yale talk that he gives where he gives a brief over his career. And then he gives a bunch of like principles for you to apply to your career, which I was more of like a founder's episode. Can you talk about what what it means for Ken to be a killer, like really getting into like your definition of that? Because you described him as like a winner and a killer, but I think killer can have plenty of different definitions. You can think of a killer as like somebody that just like figures out how to win and is aggressive. But then I still think of someone like Eric Lyman as like a killer, but he's also extremely kind. And,

And so it's possible to be like a kind and a killer. How do you describe Ken Griffin? I think every single person that I've profiled on founders is a killer. And I mean it is not a pejorative. I mean this is like they take what they're doing very seriously. The greatest, this idea really stuck in my mind because there's this biography of Bernard and all. It's called like the Taste of Luxury.

It's like really hard to find. I think it's like $3,000 online. And because there's very few biographies of them in English, right? And this one ends when Bernaro is like 40. And at the end of the book, he calls his shot. You guys were just mentioning earlier. I heard you on the show. It's like, well, if you want to like do a competitor Rolex or some kind of luxury brand,

like you had to start 100 years ago. And Bernara had that insight, you know, 40 years ago, 35 years ago. And he's just like, oh, these things are very valuable. I think they're going to get more valuable in time. And I have no competition because you have to start them, you know, two centuries ago or two generations ago. And but there's a line in that biography I never forgot where they were describing him. and they say only killers survive.

So what I mean by killers, like, I was actually out to dinner in Miami on Saturday night, the night before I was going to record this episode. And I mentioned somebody came over from the table that we know. And he was asking me, he's like, oh, like, what's the next episode you're working on? And he works for another fund, hedge fund. And the guy that owns that fund is really close to Ken. And so when I brought up them doing Ken, he's like, oh, I have so many fucking Ken stories. and one thing that he told me that

this is an example of like a killer away from like your competitors right is that there's like a there was like a tiny business inside a Citadel that had something to do with like the new technology they were developing and essentially Ken sat and talked to the guy for like a few hours about like tiny details

like where are the servers like what are we doing with him like he was just completely obsessed he has no other hobbies than just building this massive empire And then one thing that I think is directly related to your question, Jordy, is just like in the talk, he's just like, you don't want to win. Like, you want a landslide. You want to beat your competitors so bad that they do not survive because if you let them survive, they will come back. And you don't want them to come back again.

And when I got to that part of the transcript, I'm like, this isn't, this is not just how Ken thinks. There's a great line in this book called Event and Wonder, which is the collected writings of Jeff Bezos. So somebody, Walter Isis and collected all of Jeff Beaz's sister sharehold letters and then transcribed and edited all of Jeff's important speeches. And Jeff has a great line in there. He's like, do you really want to prepare for a future where you might have to fight somebody as good as you? And he goes, I don't. And so the same thing. It's like, I don't want to win two to one.

There's a line in hardball. It's like you need to, fuck winning two to one. You need to win nine to two. You need to stomp them. I just had dinner with, I can say this because it's public. Mark Lorry. And he was the one that found at diapers.com. And then he went on to sell jet and all this other stuff.

But I was lighting him up with questions. I was like, I want to know what it was like competing against Jeff Bezos at that time. And he was just like, you can't. There is no company. He's going to steam around you. I had no choice. That's amazing. I mean, we, like the killer mindset with Ken Griffin just takes me back to

2012, this this trader on the on the on the on the quant team stole code for, they call them alphas, basically code that no matter who runs it, they're going to generate return, stole a bunch of stuff on like a hard drive. Citadel finds out, realizes they're stealing the IP, the code.

The guy freaks out, he dumps the hard drive into the river in Chicago. And Ken Griffin, in the Citadel team, get scuba divers to go into the river and bind the hard drive just to send it to the FBI to get this

guy busted. And I was like, yeah, like he's not going to let you just take his, his alpha. Like it's just not going to have. Like flying in scuba divers. Yeah, flying in scuba divers. Basically. He talks about that in the talk. I didn't include in the podcast, but he's like, listen, if somebody's going to leave because, you know, you work at Citadel and then you want to work, you want to be a doctor, I'm going to write you, uh, you know, a letter of recommendation. I'm going to support you in every way. You leave for competitor and that just brings up different, very different feelings within within me. And so that's what I mean. It's just like he's completely bought in. I think the important point.

point here. How does he think is like, go ahead. On that note, and maybe you can just wrap this into story you're about to tell, but how does he think about investing in other funds, right? Because in many ways, funds may start with a singular strategy, but in a long enough time horizon, the manager says, well, okay, I'm going to run an empire now. I'm going to do the Ken Griffin playbook. We're going to have a bunch of different verticals. He's invested in some venture funds. He's invested. Okay. So I think maybe it was on your show. I forgot who told me. Oh, no, no, no. I know who told me.

Like, you'll see this over and over again. When people start to understand how valuable their industry is, they essentially get in all the good deals. So, like, think about, you know, Nvidia is in every single AI anything right now. I just did an episode of Jerry Jones. And I talked to a bunch of people live in Texas, a bunch of people that are around him. And they're like, yeah, yeah, the Cowboys is one thing. His early oil and gas stuff, he's like, you don't understand what he's been doing, the investment he's been doing since then. He's in every single thing.

I don't know. I didn't track like how I just hear over and over again that he's got money everywhere. And again, these are private companies, so you never know. But what I was told, and you kind of see this because if you come to Miami, he's like buying everything. Like every like not just like literally everything. He's building, I think, what's going to be the most expensive house. The most expensive house in history. And Palm Beach. And so what I was told is forget the enterprise value of the companies, which is, you know, 80 billion, whatever the number is. Right. He's like, the guy's been pulling out billions and billions and billions and billions in She just doesn't know what to do with it.

So, yeah, I'm sure he's invested in everything. I heard stories about Bloomberg. I went up talking to somebody that knows a lot about his family office. And, you know, I was asking questions around this trying to get a sense of how large his fortune is. And he was like, well, I can give you a little hints. Like, look how much we spent X on charity. We have this many people in the fucking family office. And you kind of like piece this together.

It's like, oh, well, what are you going to do if you're making $5, $10 billion in cash year after year after year? Like eventually you can't spend that. AMG 1 allocation, of course. A bunch of the entire allocation. I mean, it is crazy how, like, how diverse the Citadel team has become because they have this high frequency trading arm. I mean, they started with convertible debt. They kind of, like, the story of Citadel is like, he got so good at trading convertible

debt that he just straight up maxed out the market size. Like, he was tam constrained on that and then went into high frequency trading and then got the global equities team up and running. And the equities team, when I was there, you know, when I was there, they were doing like 2,000 CEO interviews a year or something, just like interviewing every single person that runs a public company, getting the temperature, figuring out, oh, do we like this manager? Do we like this leader?

Should we invest? And then on the other side, you have the high-freezy guys who are like, I haven't talked to a human being in months. It doesn't matter. And they're both printing. They're both absolutely printing. Yeah. What I love to, about like, you know, him maxing out markets earlier in his career, that's

something he takes Q&A from the Yale students at the end. They're like, how do you decide, like, what business to go in? And he's like, you have to think about total addressable market. We have to be in deep, liquid markets because we're going to do the best research on the planet, and we need to be compensated for this research. Another thing that I absolutely loved, I think, is really important too, is he talks about how much of an influence that mentorship and apprenticeship is going to have on your career as a young person and as you continue to go. And this is something I see over and over again. There's this book on my desk, like this impossible to find. It's called, you actually like this.

It's Autopsy of a Merger. and it's this deal that Jay Pritzker did. One of his most infamous deals. And what I thought was interesting is like, I remember reading Sam Zell's autobiography and then getting to speak to Sam. And Sam, Jay Prisker was like Sam's older brother and mentor. And so he said,

Sam said that Jay had the greatest financial mind of anybody that he ever met. And so I was like, okay, well, if Sam is studying this guy, I need to study this guy. But I want to go back to the point I was about to make. It's like, like, you know, think about every single thing. single person covered in founders. It's like they they were so good at their job that somebody

wrote a book about them. This is like the smallest percentage of the people that have ever lived. But there's so many like if you take all these lessons as abstractions, you can apply them even to like businesses far afield. This is actually advice that that Ken gives where he's like as an entrepreneur, you need to be looking for edges. So obviously you study inside your company. You study your competitors, but then you study businesses that are far afield. So he talks about he had he had he had he built this thing called a risk wall in citadel it's 30 feet by 10 feet it's a giant screen

and he says before they were they were getting like a B B plus on how well they were managing risk and you know Ken's not going to be satisfied with be anything and so he actually's in the office of Saudi Ramco in Saudi Arabia and he sees that they have this giant fucking board that's like 30 feet long 10 feet wide and it has all the important metrics like where the ships are how much they're producing everything else he's like oh I'm going to take that idea and I'm going to apply it not to ships and oil but to getting getting all of the data I need so we can start managing our risk better.

And he says that one idea had him go from, you know, be whatever the case is to like one of the best like risk departments in the world. So the reason I think about him is because I don't know if you guys told Truman to do this, but I have got been getting some threatening emails and text messages. I'll tell the audience because they might know. I'm getting calls from Jordy at like 530 in the morning California time just letting me know he's on his way to the studio I'm getting text messages from John F545 I get a text today and it's all I see is the back of John Jordan I think the rest of the TPVN crew and they're going they're doing they're doing curls till failure

and then this is the caption you're like TPBN coming for your neck It was a good time this morning. I mean, that's every morning. Yeah. I mean, podcasting never sleeps. Podcasting never sleeps. Yeah, but you guys are taking it, you know, to a completely different level.

It's the chicken finger dream. Our killer mindset is it's not enough for us to be the biggest other people need to quit. We need to quit. Well, we like to say never podcast weekly, always podcast strongly. I love that line. And that's where we train every morning. We'll talk about like just frameworks for focus. You covered a little bit of this, but is there any, as Ken put anything out there

around like how he's evaluating like, you know, they're running all these business lines and then he's got somebody that comes to him with an opportunity, you know, internally. He's evaluating it based on the market potential, but is there anything like, you know, he didn't roll out every business line in the same two years. It was sort of staged, right? Okay. you just accidentally hit on something that's very important. I put in the episode description is like one of the other reasons in addition to like all these crazy stories.

Let me back up. Don't let me forget where I'm at. But the first time I came across Ken, because I don't know any like I just I don't pay attention to finance. Right. Now I do because I watch TPVN. But I'm reading. You don't need a fantastic liquidity provider like Seattle securities. You're on the market.

You got to get your size up. This is one of my favorite books. Okay. I think it's episode 22 of. of founders, I think I maybe did an episode like in the 80s, like, you know, six years ago, whatever. It's Eddorpe's biography of Man of Alt Markets. And Ed Thorpe is a fascinating character, legit genius.

And he was the first person, the person that made the first quantitative hedge fund ever. He built the world's first wearable computer with Claude Chanon. He was the first LPN Citadel. So the first way I came across Ken Griffin, the way I was exposed to him, was at the end of the book, Ed Thorpe's like, he closed down his hedge fund. fund, right? He already made more money he could ever possibly spend. It's called Princeton Newport Partners. And what happened is Ken Griffin was 19 years old, comes to Ed Thorpe's house, and then Ken Griffin's mentor is with him. And essentially, he's like, I always wondered how far, Ed Thor was like,

how far could I go with the strategy? Like, I wonder how far I could have gone. I wasn't the right person to pursue it, but I wonder if somebody did. And he's like, well, the prodigy came over and I gave him all my files. And this wasn't publicly available information. Like, you couldn't get it anywhere to your point you were making earlier, John. And then he's like, I wanted being the first LP and then you fast forward and look like, you know, I think the book ends, he tends network where it's like six billion and they have like 15 billion of SSR manager or something. And now it's like, you know, multiples of that. But I think like one of the like I guess the way I think about this is just like I obsess with people to do things for a long time. And so even Ken says Ken founded Citadel 35 years ago. He's founded Citadel's 23 years ago, if I'm not mistaken, right? And he's like, Like, we made more money in the last four years. Like, we are making more money today than we ever have in the past. And he talked about how this may be give you insight

and how he's able to scale up all these different businesses. One, they take a long time to do. But also, he said he had, last year, he had over 100,000 people apply to work for him. Wow. And so you just have a huge labor. Like, you have all the talent in the world. Now you have all these resources. And you just build it slowly, like slow over time over many, many decades.

Yeah. Citadel Securities, I originally, I think Ken was thinking about doing an investment bank and then eventually spun that out and sold that arm of the business. And now it's morphed into a market maker. And it's a very, the business itself has been through Pivot. It's much like the core hedge fund. I do have a question about the core hedge fund. There's always the question of as you scale up a fund, size and outside LPs, you put up

some amazing numbers, 20% returns, everybody wants in. is that sustainable when you take it an order magnitude bigger. Did you get any insight into how Ken Griffin thinks about scale and outside investors? Because at the end of the day, it's his fund. He wants to grow it, but sometimes having a bigger fund is advantageous. No, I didn't get like, there was a couple things where I was kind of getting frustrated with the interviewer because it's like, Ken says he made, he's the most successful hedge fund of all time, which one, I asked a friend of mine who knows about this. I thought Renaissance. Like why, like what's in it's like, yeah.

but most of that was like their own money. Like they closed the medallion fund, they closed off to outside investors a long time ago. Jane Street's same thing. Yeah. And then the other thing, Ken said that they, like,

please ask, I heard you earlier when you guys were going over the Wall Street Journal article on Open AI, where you're like, follow up. God damn it. I know, right.

Isn't it frustrating? It drives me crazy. Like, I'm going to have to do an interview show now. Yeah. So I can get these questions out of it. But he mentions this that like, he had made more money than anybody else,

but there's also years where he says, I lost over a hundred. billion dollars. I was there. When I came in, during my like training seminar, they, the guy's like, oh, yeah, we had a really rough go during the financial crisis, during the housing crisis. Our fund lost 50% of his value. And then he was like, and I went outside the next year, and I was talking to my neighbor. And he was like, oh, how's it going? Any better than next year? Or than last year when you lost 50%. He's like, actually, we're having a great year. We're up 50%. And the next door neighbor was like, oh, that's great. You're back to where.

you were. And the guy was like, no, that's not how it works. Like, you have to go up 100%. And he was just like kind of exposing like basic math that's basic math illiteracy and like the pop general population. I thought was an interesting like anecdote. So there is an interesting I think principle to take away from that is because like, you know, likely most of us three and people listening are not going to have, you know, $100 billion loss in a year. Um, unless Masa is listening. Um, just, but everyone should hope to have the opportunity to lose 100 billion. Exactly. This goes back to, again, just being really gifted a young age because he says that one thing that helped him very well is going to the proverbial scene of accidents.

So when other funds or other companies go up, well, there was a, yeah, but the Enron happened in 2001. Yeah. There was a story in 98. So keep in mind, at 98, Ken, it's 30. Okay. 2008, when you're describing when he loses half of his equity, almost goes out of business, which he talks about in the, the, uh, I talked about on the episode. He talks about the talk of Yale as well. He was 40.

But he says what saved him from going out of business in 2008 is when he was in 98 he when long-term capital management broke out He went and he's like how that he's like you guys lost 90% Of your equity before like once they crossed the 90% threshold then they lost control the business Like how the hell did you not lose control before then? He's like most like it shouldn't have happened Yeah, and he said and again this is another thing where the the the interviewer didn't fall up He's like and he's like so what I learned from that was pivotal for me not to lose control of Citadel not to go to business. And it's like, okay, well, the follow question is like, what did you learn? But he never, he just talks about going to

the scenes of the crime. He didn't actually specifically say, hey, this is, I learned X, Y, or Z. Do you think that Ken has another 40-ish years in him in the same way that the, the Warrens and the, and the Charlie's, yeah, that's a good question. Or is he building his, is he building the biggest house, the most expensive house ever. And he's like, you know, going to post up there and write it out. One of the things, again, like, I picked the people I cover very carefully because, like, I want to be inspired by them. And one of the things that I really loved at the beginning of the research was I would

watch some interviews for hours and literally only just like pull out one line. And was that he says that he's been obsessed with the stock market since the third grade. For reasons, I don't entirely comprehend. That's the line. He doesn't even understand. He's like, this, there's a great line that Jeff Bezos says that I believe in where it's like, we don't choose our passions. Our passions choose us. And Ken clearly is like completely obsessed with this. So where he was even saying, it's like, I don't know if I was interested in entrepreneurship. I was just interested in solving problems. I am addicted to. And guess what? Entrepreneurship and investing. Like he says the public markets. Like that's the biggest, you know, the biggest game in the world with the biggest hardest problems to solve. So that's what I'm addicted to. Usually people like that, I don't think they ever stop. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Did you get a chance to read good to great?

Jim Collins. I read it a long time ago. Yeah. It's the book that it was like, it's on your desk when you join the firm. Like he requires everyone to read it. I think he's like grown the library now, but it's an interesting framework.

I thought you would have a good take on, on this takeaway from the book, which I think can probably embrace. He says, the culture of discipline, when you combine a culture of discipline, culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. And it's focused on technological accelerators, good to great companies, think differently

about the role of technology. And I wanted to get your feedback on that. So I'm going to answer that question one second. There's other three other books that he says. He says, good to great hardball, which saw my desk, which I read. And then another one, what was the, I can't remember the other. It was like, I went to buy it. I think it was like published in like the 1960s. The problem with these books is you go and read them, like even hardball. There's nothing wrong with hardball, but I felt I had better examples of the principles based on like the reading I've done because a lot of the principles are just like this company's so great. And then you look

up and the company's gone. Like and same thing and good to great. So yeah, I think it's like less tying them to specific companies and just saying, hey, does that like, does that idea make sense in like what in your business and what you're doing? Even if you only use idea temporarily. But I think one of the main themes, if you're studying, like, think about it's like, I've been studying a history of entrepreneurship. If you focus, it's essentially focused on like the market economy, maybe like 200, last 200, 250 years, mostly taking place in America at this time. There is one principle that reoccurts over and over again. And it off of my mind when I read Andrew Carnegie's autobiography like years ago. And that's, they all have in common that they invest in technology, the savings compound.

And it gives you an advantage of your slower. moving competitors and it could be the difference between a profit and a loss. And if you go back and look at Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ken Griffin, Sam Walton, all these people. Like their edge was in many cases like they invested in better technology at a faster rate than their competitors. Like you know, no one thinks of Walmart as a fucking tech company, right? But if you go and read, there's this great hard-to-find book that I did an episode on. It's called Sam Walton, Rich's Man in America, publish the year or two before Sam wrote his own autobiography. And there's a story in the book where in like the 1970s, Sam was in his 60s.

And these guys come to him and I think it's in 1979. And they're like, hey, we need to invest $500 million in this new computer system for inventory. Computers in 1979. And at first, Sam said no, he thought computers were overhead. And slowly over time, his top guys convinced him like, no, this is an advantage. And then they spent so much more on computerized logistics and inventory management, everything else. They just had an unfair advantage that compounded decade after decade after decade. I love it.

Last two small questions. Ken owns 80% of Citadel LLC. Who owns the other 20%? I don't know, but I talked to the guy. I talked to one of the guys that owns part of Citadel's securities. I can't say who. But that business is a monster from what I hear. Yeah, it's huge.

Yeah. What is it about great investors that make, them maybe not so great at picking spouses. Is it just the intensity? No, it's not funny. It's sad. He's been married twice, divorced twice. I'm sure he's very intense dude.

He's clearly focused on, you know, winning at all costs. Matrimony. That's so brutal. So it's an high frequency. He's a traitor. High frequency matrimony. It has. It's not just investors, it's entrepreneurs.

I remember, I think the best episode I've ever done is actually on James Cameron, which is hilarious. And I start that episode where I'm reading from this like in-depth GQ profile of them. And I don't say anything, but if you read between the lines, you're like, he moved to New Zealand with his fifth wife. It's just like, what kind of personality type? You think that person is like easy to deal with? They're flexible. They get along easily with other people. I think in many cases

And I think I'm definitely at risk for this I don't know Well I mean you guys are grinding hard as hard as hell right now I am curious like your personality types I think you're a little bit more guarded Like you would you would avoid this They just like you just are so addicted to what you're working on That you know you destroy everything around you

And this is why I say like Man of All Markets is my favorite book Or one of my favorite books I think the subtitle of that episode is like my personal blueprint is because Ed Thorpe is one of the few people. You know, I've covered almost 400 of history's gay entrepreneurs. And it's just like in many cases, they're fucking cautionary tales. They destroy their health, their marriages. They're, you know, in many cases, bad parents.

They burn everything to the ground because they're so obsessed and dedicated with what they're working on. And I think that personality type is like, you know, there's a lot of that. as internal. And so I always look for positive examples, him being won, sole price as another one, where it's just like, I want to learn from what they did

where Ed Thorpe took care of his health. If you can Google him, and I've showed pictures of him. He's 93, and I'm like, how old do you think this guy is? And they're like, he's 60. He worked out,

he started picking up a physical fitness habit like 70 years ago when no one was working out because he's thought, again, he's brilliant. He's like, oh, I think of every hour I spend on fitness

as one less day I'll spend in the hospital at the end of my life. He made more money he can never spend. But then once he passed that threshold, he stopped trading more time for more money. So all this crazy deals guaranteed money to come to him. He's like, no, I'm not interested. His kids are in the book. They talk about how great a father he was that he was present. His wife had just died, but they were happily married, you know, for 50 years.

I mean, the guy just nailed it. He was like super smart, had fun, great dad, great father, you know, lived a life that he His book, I say in the King Griffin episode, like his book reads like a thriller. But yeah, I think that's like there's a ton. I mean, I would say most of the great entrepreneurs, you're not going to see a large overlap, unfortunately, between like, you know.

We're going to go read that book because my wife, who's watching live with kids, just texting me, yikes. Yikes. I love you, Sarah. And we'll go to the ed. So I just, I just had this.

Yeah, we have another guest. We got to get you out of here. Yeah. Yeah, I just had this example last week because in the OVitts episode, he talks about if I could do things over again, I should have worked 10% less and I wouldn't have changed my professional success at all. It could have been 20% less. So I was bitching about going on vacation last week because I don't want to travel and I want to like just work on the podcast. And my wife's like, Ovid say you should work 10% less.

So I'm like, you're saying this against me. Well, thanks for stopping by. This is fantastic. Of course. I love you guys. I love you. David. We'll talk to you soon.

soon. All right. Bye. Great. I'm excited to get into that episode. Yeah, me too. That'll be great. Let's get some mirror in here.

Yeah. In the Temple of Technology. Welcome to the stream. Samir, are you here? Hey, great to see you. Sorry, we're running a little late. And look at the lighting, the 4K. Yeah, beautiful.

It is looking great. I would expect nothing less. This is a professional. You've got the best set up of any get. We've had 70 guests in a month and knocking them all out of the park. Can we start? A break. Can we start with the latest interview? You did Zuck and Jimmy, Mr. Beast, the biggest tech god, the biggest creator God. You're putting them together now. What'd you learn from that? And how'd that come together? Yeah, well, first of all, what's up, guys? Thanks for having me on. What did I learn from that? I mean, I think actually, you know, first and foremost, it was fascinating to talk to someone who, you know, we consider to be like the autore of this generation of human connection.

Right? Like if you really take a step back and you go, the way we're all connecting, even what we're doing right now, there was this era that happened that pushed the way that we as humans engage with each other and how information travels. And I think Mark was like obviously heavily involved in that and arguably the outtore of that, this era of human connection. So I find that to be super fascinating. We met Mark up at Meta a while ago. to do an Orion demo. You guys know what Orion is? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm super jealous. It sounds amazing. So that was one of the craziest, that was truly one of the craziest tech experiences I've ever had in my life.

And we met and it was nice and, you know, casual conversation and started talking about having him on the show. But, you know, with a guest like that, it takes time. Yeah. And then adding Jimmy to the mix, it was like, you know, a lot of the context was around us talking about Facebook video, us talking about creators on Facebook. And it felt like, you know, we only have a handbook. of friends who have found success on Facebook.

Jimmy's one of those people. So felt like having him be a part of the conversation. And when you say Facebook, do you mean actual Facebook? Actual Facebook? Like legacy Facebook. So does he just post the full YouTube video there? Does he have a different strategy on Facebook? So most people post clips, like short form clips on Facebook.

Now, for conversational content like what we're doing right now, I find it really hard to do because there's so much cultural nuance. You have to dub, which was one of the main things Jimmy talked about. It was like you actually have to dub content for other cultures to understand it. Sure, sure. And the majority of the users are not U.S.-based and not English speaking. So Jimmy talked about how a lot of his content that is highly viewed is is shorter-form content that is language agnostic.

So there's like a video of him running with bags of money. You can understand that no matter what. But I think that the main thing that we talked about that I couldn't stop thinking about was around the premise that maybe a lot of the engagement of the internet in the future is going to happen in the context of messaging and DMs. lot of the human engagement in the future as compared to probably us engaging with a lot of bots and AI agents and, you know. Yeah, I kind of noticed that on Instagram. I'm seeing more and more reels where the number of shares is higher than the number of likes, which means that people are

not going to the comments to have the discussion. They're sending, oh, you got to watch this and that starts a conversation in a DM. Well, I think as creators, we think about that quite a bit, that a short form piece of content is a unit of conversation. Yep. And thinking about that, and through that lens, you actually create differently, right? Like, your thought is, okay, I'm going to create something that somebody can share in a DM with a friend. And that's like a gift. You're giving them a gift to reconnect with someone,

social currency to make someone laugh. It's a very different thought than like a long-form, 38-minute piece of YouTube content that you're going to watch on a connected TV. Yeah. Can we go back to the Orion demo? Yeah. It sounded amazing.

Everyone's review was unanimously. It's incredible. Yeah. Put it in the context. to the vision. Exactly. The Vision Pro had the same thing where people tried it for an hour and they were like, this is incredible. And then it had this churn curve where people were returning them and they were collecting dust. And that seems to be like the classic VR problem. Are you convinced that this is the one that I'll be wearing for six months straight? No, but I find it, I find it fascinating. We've sat with a lot of,

you know, tech CEOs. Most recently, Evan Spiegel and Mark Zuckerberg. And, you know, both are very focused on AR as the future of how we'll engage with tech. Orion was the most compelling because it was the lightest weight, to be honest. I think two reasons Orion was compelling. One, it was the lightest weight. It feels like just glasses on you, which is very different. Like the Vision Pro does not feel like glasses. And when you have glasses, I think you retain the level of social engagement that human beings are used to.

Or like, if you've ever worn the Rayban metas, I think the Rayban metas and Orion, like they're tangibly different in weight and size. But if you take what the Orion can do and put it into the Rayban meta, that's the most compelling product I could think of. Because it's lightweight, it looks cool. You can still look someone in the eyes. But the thing that was really unique about the Orion glasses was that you wear this like neural wristband. And before we did the demo, you start to like,

they ask you to do some movements, like click your finger like this. Each finger is a different function. And these, your brain waves and like your neural waves are fed into this computer. And basically it learns what it looks like when you go like this circle like this. And the reason why is because eventually when you're wearing these glasses, they want you to be able to be holding a cup of coffee and be able to click on something because

this command is different from this command is different from this command. And we did that. We held something. And basically, you almost just think the motion and it happens. So I think what was shocking to me was like how intuitive it is. Love it. If it can be in the form factor of the Rayben Metas or something that looks cool, I think we're too aware of our own image as humans to walk around wearing Applevision pros. Yeah. I've got a bunch of questions. What's going on with TikTok?

Do you have an update there? There's supposed to be some decision made like early April is what we've been hearing. But it's been radio silent. I've been looking at Polly Market and trying to figure out, you know, what's going on. It doesn't seem like Mr. Beast isn't a lead to buy it at the moment. But do you have any, do you have any insight there? I mean, look, look, I know I've seen probably similar things that you guys have seen. I've had some conversations, you know, around the industry about it. My perspective is I don't think, I think it'll keep

getting punted. That conversation will keep getting punted. You know, I think TikTok is a dramatic economic driver in the U.S. I think it had a lot of sway in the, you know, in the election. I think it's a way that, like, Politics is getting communicated. I think it's the way news is getting communicated. I think it's like probably the biggest search engine for Gen Z right now. Even for me, I'm like, you know, going on a trip this summer,

I'm searching stuff on TikTok. It's a crazy platform. We started with a dry account. We got 300K views on like the first video we posted. It's like, just the opportunity is like staring you in the face no matter what you think about the politics. Yeah. Do I know if it's actually gonna sell to US company?

I have no idea. Like I saw that Mark Andresen and, and Drescent Horowitz is putting their name in the hat. I know what Alexis Ohanian's doing and Project Liberty is super interesting in terms of trying to like reshape what it looks and feels like. But right now, it is the most powerful

for you algorithm that we have access to. A lot of American businesses are powered by TikTok, meaning like young startups, young media entrepreneurs are powered by TikTok. There's a lot of brand dollars that are exchanged through there. You know, when we sat with Adam Sperry, when we sat with Evan Spiegel, obviously like the maybe the ideal scenario, even the car conversation with Zuck,

is like those ad dollars shift to U.S. companies versus TikTok. But like, I don't know. We haven't really seen or we don't really have precedent for it in the U.S. unless you guys know that we do. But like I don't know that we have precedent for something like this. What about creator businesses? You want to follow up on that? What are you got?

We could start there. I wanted to get your. take on AI and creators. Yeah. You mind Trevor had bread that was like super, super early and ahead of its time. Trevor McFedries. Yeah, yeah. Doing little Michaela was like, yeah, almost like 10 years ahead.

Yeah, that's crazy. Executed very well, exited the business. And then last year was funny. We covered a few of these. There was like a period where the new like e-com style info product was like, everybody should have an AI creator that makes like $5,000 a month for them, you know, like doing brand deals. And like obviously that's not actually like happening in a wide scale or it's certainly not easy to do. Are you seeing instances yet of AI, like fully AI generated

creators that are actually building loyal followings, meaningful ad businesses or digital products, etc. So I mean, look, like what you're talking about with Lil'a is like considered Vituber, right? And I think v-tubers are picking up. Like at the end of last year, the most subscribed to Twitch streamer was Iron Mouse, which is a V-tuber. So virtual creators, like animated creators, I think will continue to pick up Steam. Like we've always been interested in animated content. Like what happened with GPT's image model?

Immediately everyone's like turning themselves into anime. Like we're into animation. Fully AI generated is not something I've seen. I think AI Enhanced is like there's it's almost comical to suggest that content is not at in some level AI enhanced whether it's the audio of it the video. But I have not seen an instance of like a fully AI generated creator. Yeah. And that's because people want to follow.

I was going to say probably the probably most compelling fully AI generated content is the podcast that have been created through notebook L.M. Yeah. That's the most compelling to me. Like audio, I think, is where it'll happen first. Before it happens in video. I think we're too aware of video for it to happen through like true human. Yeah. I mean, L. Mikaela proves otherwise.

But I think audio, it could happen. Because what Notebook L.M showed me was, hey, if I have like a 20-minute drive, couldn't I just customize like, hey, I want to know about what's happening in the world of politics, what's happening in the world of the creator economy and the NBA scores from last night? Yeah. And just tell Notebook L. I have a 20-minute drive, just build me a podcast that's bespoke to me for this exact moment, for this exact use case.

So that I think is where we'll see it first is in audio. Yeah. Last question. Do you think that some creators have moved on from this idea of the goal is scale, right? Like it used to be, you know, you sort of like start out and you're like, I want to get millions of views. Like I want my videos to go viral. I think now people are realizing, realizing that virality is sometimes like curse or doesn't even necessarily help with like building a sort of sustainable business because there's some creators that can get 10,000 views of video and they can

have a fantastic lifestyle and sort of pursue their creative passions and that's like the right size for whatever niche that they're in but um you know and we we see this like we like the the video john's referencing like we got a video that gets 300,000 views on TikTok and it like doesn't do anything. We get a text messages about it. Yeah, like, nobody saw it. Like, it's fine. But I'm, but I'm curious if you see sort of a broader sort of systemic shift where

people are like, you know, really orienting around like quality of audience and sort of the business side as well. I think you guys are an example of that, right? Like, I think you guys have built a really cool brand. And I think brand is really hard to build. I think what people have learned is that views are available across platforms, right? If you solve the math equation, like, you can get viewership. that's not very exciting.

Brand is exciting. I think brands are timeless. Brands give a feeling to people. And I think we're just maturing to that point where like brand matters. Views are somewhat interesting, but we're also in a world where like, you could spend an hour on TikTok

and not remember what you watched. So Colin and I always think about this concept of memorable views versus forgettable views. And you want to be producing memorable views. And oftentimes that means you're actually targeting a smaller group. I think our world has gotten increasingly fragmented, right? Like the, everybody is famous and nobody is famous because there's this

stat that 47% of Gen Z are a fan of something on the internet that no one they know personally is a fan of. And that is one of the most, that's from YouTube. There's one of the most interesting stats I've seen about the internet. That will only increase over time. And so if we play that out and explore like how fragmented attention is getting, how bespoke our online experiences are, we're moving away from monoculture. We're moving into a world of like smaller tribes, right? Smaller ideologies across the internet. And I think the opportunity is to build a really meaningful brand

for one of those small groups of people. I think the challenge to be like the next Mr. Beast to be like a massive monocultural brand. Like I find that to be not even exciting to me. Like I like meeting our audience and like meeting them out in public. and being like, oh, yeah, these are my people. This is people like me. That's exciting to me.

And I think as the internet gets more and more fragmented, that will continue to happen. Yeah. Well, that's fantastic. We wish we had more time. We got to have you back. This is fantastic. And I mean, really, we're sending our best

for the entire Palisades rebuilding effort. Thanks, man. I mean, I know most of the fans will probably know that you were affected. And we really hope that everything's going well there. And if there's anything that folks can do to help, yeah, we'd love to be supportive of that. Appreciate it. I love what you guys are doing. Thanks so much.

It's unique. So yeah, keep it going. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Thanks for coming on. Thanks so much. Bye. That's great. Yeah, I mean, we could have talked to him for like two hours.

It's like, you know, it's like our business. There's so much there. We didn't even get to like, I wanted to hear the Doug Dumiro strategy versus what Mr. Bisse is doing versus what other folks are doing on the monetization side, slow ventures and stuff. I know he'll have some great takes there. But of course, we will have him back in the Temple of Technology. any day now. Let's hopefully bring in our next guest, Will, from Open AHA. Any day now. Let's see. Will, how are you doing? How are you guys doing? Yeah. We're doing great.

What's going on? Congratulations on everything. I mean, everyone seems to be on a tear. For those that don't know, Will created artificial intelligence. Yes, that's right. Hand built. Yeah, he's on that. He's an author of that paper, artificial intelligence. Yeah. how it's done. I'm all invented the transformer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. We appreciate you being here. Do you want to give a little bit of overview of like what you actually do day to day? I think that'd be interesting. Yeah. Yeah, totally. I mean, I joined Open AI like two years ago, have like a startup background, but worked on like

video gin for a while. I worked on SORA for about a year. And then I work on like RL post training, chat VD stuff. Cool. How did you process the studio Ghibli moment? Was that expected? Did you, and I really want to know, did you, how internally, did you think that, that images in chat GPT was going to go viral and you didn't know what the prompt would be? Or were you like, everyone's going to give me your stuff?

I want to know, I want to know where Ghibli's flying around for 48 hours ahead of, ahead in Slack. Give us some secrets here. Yeah, I mean, I've honestly, like, I was very bullish on this. I think we like definitely under provisioned GPUs. I was surprised our team predicted like less traffic than we should have expected. Yeah, I think the thing that I was thinking. about the whole time is that like, I mean, I was walking around SF and some of these like nail salons have like clearly Dulli 3 generated like image fronts or whatever that is, right?

And I think it's clear to me that like pretty much every business in the world very soon is just going to use this to like, you know, big logos and you know, we can do transparency and do controlability. I think like my favorite evals the fiber eval, there's go on fiber and count how many of these things you can automate. And like this takes off like a lot of those things. And hopefully there's a lot of new things as well that this creates. But I just think of like total utility to the world is just massive. And yeah. Have you thought about why it was studio Ghibli in like precisely? Because you could do Simpsons. You could do South Park. But there was something about the anime style of Studio Ghibli that was like it kept enough of the human in there. It didn't just become a completely generic stick figure.

I mean to me all this front run it's like it was a magical experience. You needed no you needed to do nothing to prompt it. I love that you could misspell Ghibli. It's still got a perfect output. It's great. And then the output was just magical. I would, I would, you know, generate the same image with four different styles of art and the Ghibli one every single time. It just felt magical. What was your take on it? No, yeah, that sounds about right to me. I don't think I predicted Ghibli specifically. Last time for the Dolly 3 launch, he made a bunch of Pepe's and that was the thing that really went off. Interesting. Yeah, I remember, I mean, for a while, the version one of image generation, it felt very art station informed. It felt very like sci-fi dystopia. Like it was really good at those,

but people weren't really doing. I mean, there were there were certain like, you know, anime styles, but this one was just, uh, was just everywhere. Um, what else? Can you talk about, um, like to me, to me the most like the thing that's most exciting for me is like, uh, the gibbleyification of everything, right? It's like on a long enough time horizon, like everything is Ghibli, right? It's just sort of abundant and like very free. And if you thought even a year ago that you would have this sort of like anybody could instantly basically for free get this sort of beautiful hand drawn anime style artwork that historically and you know somebody else posted about this, but you know, there'd be like a four second scene in spirited away that was like that took

a year and a half to generate, right? And so like to take something that's just so time intensive, so expensive and then make it free and abundant is so powerful. And to me that is, that's why when I think about everything that's happening in sort of politics and tech drama and everything like that and then I think about like we're moving towards like everything being givoli. It's like everything today feels like a distraction. Is that sort of like how you guys like as a team stay focused with an open AI, which is just like, hey, there's going to be a lot of noise. there's going to be like, you know, this benchmark today, that release over here. And it's like we're sort of moving towards this like future target.

Yeah, that's sort of a ramble. But I'm curious how you think about sort of. Yeah. I think opening eyes extraordinarily focused on like real progress. I think, you know, I mean, like for so long, like, you know, you see the diffusion models. They can't spell. And like it takes us like two years. There's no dolly update.

And then finally we come out with this. And it's not for no reason. Right. I think like people who are focused on like really like what is what is pushing the frontier forward? what's actually an evolution of this technology. Yeah, I don't know. I think there's a lot of potential here. I'm actually not sure what the image and team thinks about what the next steps are here.

I think their view is mostly about making this truly useful. Like, can we go from diffusion's a fun toy to like this is a truly useful tool in the world? And like clearly it's already having that impact. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you said your backgrounds and startups. Can you talk a little bit about just being a consumer tech company now and like the focus on product and some of the product decisions like images in chat chbtee it's not a separate app like sorra that seems

intentional how are you thinking about product development what are the strategies how much feedback are you doing are you just testing stuff internally are there a b test running is this secretly running in india six months before we get it here like how do you inform product decisions yeah totally i mean i think it's hard to pre-launch models because they create so much noise but so we don't really test them but i guess like uh do it live may i's move from being a research company and into a deployment company over time. And we're still in the middle of that kind of, you know, we're doing both.

And I think we're just doing a lot more deployment than ever had in the past. I think people are very motivated around like, how do you actually make this thing useful? How do you deploy them to the world? I think it's really cool to be in a position where, like, we can launch new products that are completely unlike anything people use ChatsbyD today for and people are so receptive to them.

Like it's so like, you know, I don't know. I think it's hard to get product market fit and get people to try new products. But to have this like kind of all in one AI thing, we can try deep research, we can throw out image in and people are just like, to try it out and like see if it works for them. It's just like so rare to find. Yeah. Are you excited? One of the things that I felt like really worked with images in chat chbtee was like I could go to my camera roll, click share, share it into chat chitpt type studio gively style and

boom, it gets it. And it takes the the it takes the pain of inspiration out of the process. And I'm wondering if you're looking at ways to create those magical easy to generate moments. I remember Mid Journey was talking about this too where like part. Part of why Mid Journey worked was if you just give someone a text box, they'll just be like, cat. And it'll be like, okay, that's a picture of a cat. But if you show the Mid Journey and it's like the Discord and it's all these different ideas, then they can spin off that. How do you think about giving the user really setting them up for success in the context of SORA?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think generally, like, it's just very difficult of a problem. Like, I think it's one of the biggest things we're thinking about right now, which is like when you open chat to you use it and like the actual person has no idea how to use it. I think, I mean, we have a lot of views on how to do this. I think personally, I think I'm most excited about is that, like, I think the, if we're talking about, like, what is the, like, Dolly to ImageGen? What is the, like, you know, kind of whatever, each evolution of like the next kind of order of magnitude. I do think the long-term thing that's extremely exciting is just, like, maximizing personalization, super long context.

The model knows who you are. The model can follow up being, okay, by the way, I've seen you doing this. Do you want to try a anime-style image or, you know, like, maybe create things for you. active. Like I think there's a lot to do on like kind of yeah, moving the agency away from you into the product as well. Yeah. You call yourself a master of slop, which is a great line. But does slop even exist in five years? When I, when people were saying, oh, the timeline's all slop on the Ghibli moment. I was like, this is not slop, everybody. This is, this is fantastic. Yeah. In fact, I would argue that the raging politics was slop. Yeah, yeah. It was the first day that

the time was free of slop. No, but it, but it, but it, but it, but. But. But. It's, but. So, But it seems like the trajectory that we're on, it's like eventually, like, you have to try to intentionally prompt it and say, like, make me an image that's like the image gen outputs from 2022. And it's like, yeah, they've got six fingers and it's the hand is connected to the body. I want a vintage dolly one. Give me the dolly one. But like what happens, like I feel like we're in the slop.

The slop era feels like it's coming to an end. It's like the war of the year. You're not going to be an image model that's constantly producing slop. is getting funding going forward. Yeah, that's a good point. You have, like, a new bar has been set. Depends what you mean by slop. I feel like I went to the, I went to the SF MoMA recently, and like half of it felt

like slop. And I think this, like, I mean, half of it did not, to be clear. But I think a friend of mine always quotes that, like, you know, art is like the surfer at the periphery. Like you're kind of like constantly looking, you know, kind of invitching or doing something forward or whatever that is. And, you know, I don't know. Like, once things get played out, they get boring.

Like, they get cringe. They get slop, right? Like, I don't know. Maybe the problem is that humans are slop. not that the models are slop, right? That's a good point. Are you worried for college students today that have access to these tools and making sure they actually learn how to do things like writing,

which is, as we know, associated with thinking. You know, if you can't write well, then I just, you know, the models are getting better. It's less obvious that I'm seeing something that's output. When I was in college, if I had this tool, I would have aased my studio Ghibli animation course. Yeah, yeah. And AP bio.

PBIah. Yeah. Which I did not do well. I'm curious, like, you know, how do you think universities like and just curriculum? Yeah. Future learning. Yeah. I'm extremely worried.

I think the world just gets a lot more extreme. And I think this is just true with AI across the board where, like, I think the bottom percent of students are just going to get a lot, they're going to fall behind. And I think the top percent of students are just going to get like extremely overpowered. I think if I had this tool as a kid, I would just be like vastly smarter than I am now. Like even now today, like, I just talk to chat with D every day. I was like, you know, asking it at random concepts. I'm just like learning random things. I'm like went super down like deep down like a bio rabbit hole

yesterday and like rare supplements I could take from the internet. I'm like I don't know. This is like I think it's like an incredible tool for learning. But yeah, I think it's like it's kind of bimodal, right? I think like a lot of people are going to a lot dumber. I think a lot of people don't get smarter. I don't know what to do about that. But yeah. Fine tuned on Gwern. How's your, uh, how's your experiment where you just text a number to post going? Oh no. It's going to make me like way more radical because then I just like send something. I forget about it. And then I check again. Are you gonna would you recommend it so someone fighting brain rot? Yeah totally. I mean I think also like it I think the problem with tweeting nowadays is it's not not as fun once you have more than like 3,000 followers because then you're like oh now I gotta care people are mad at me or something and yeah we're just seeing the numbers and being like oh like this one didn't do as well is the right like it's a lot you know you know from the first 60 impressions if it's a banger or not and then you have this desire I had a I had a post last night that like I like John and I

thought was like hilarious but like I realized that like nobody like really got it you needed to know you needed to have like read ben thompson's like Friday article to like get the joke it was this tam was too small low tam but but anyways uh you got anything else john no no no this is fun it was it was fun it was fun we you know for the record we didn't plan this around the the fundraising news we just wanted to chat so congrats to you and the whole team on a cool milestone and jobs not finished. Job's not finished. Get back to work.

Please make the model better, you know. Make it better. This was just you talking to customers. Yeah. Yeah, this is customer. We enjoyed it. Anyway, okay, sounds good. See you guys.

Cheers. See you. Yeah. Talk to you soon. Yeah, a little mini open AI day. We got a couple folks coming in. We got Aiden coming in talking open AI today. We'll see if he can join right now.

And I'm working on a surprise guest, but I don't know if it's going to come together. He hasn't read my messages yet. but I'm hoping it happens. Fingers crossed, double, double message. We got Aiden coming in. We got a guest coming in. How are you guys? Good to see you both.

We're great. How are you? Good, good to be on. I love this show. Are you celebrating today? And if so, what? Over the fundraise. A fundraise or just the studio Ghibli moment.

I mean, it was a massive moment for like crossing the chasm again. So last week, John. Yeah, yeah, you're over it. Yeah, yeah, it's like a million years ago here. You know, time moves differently inside the lab, right? Yeah. Yeah, we're excited. The team morale is like really, really good.

And it's like awesome to see like my colleagues have worked like really hard to make like these tools more liberal to make them more fun. Kind of like look out into the world and like see the fruits of their labor. Right. Yeah. So I guess talk about like evaluating like what it like how do you guys evaluate internally like a successful launch? Because the reason that I knew it was successful is I had a few posts that were sort of breaking teapot containment. And I would have a lot of people quoting it saying like all right guys, jig is up. Tell me what app you're using for this.

Like people just like, there's still people out there that like... They don't know the name OpenAI. Yeah. But they know that this filter exists and they want it. And that's a very, very good sign. I do wonder if there was like this interim moment where people are like, wow, Snapchat's gotten really good. Yeah, totally.

Like, what's going on here? Like, you know, I haven't used this app for a while. Yeah. Spiegel's been cooking. Yeah, this must be TikTok. Yeah, I mean, I got a couple cold DMs from people saying like, hey, I ran out of images. Can you make one for me? Clearly you're making a lot of these.

it was like yeah i know i got a lot of those too people like i'm good samaritan yeah exactly exactly uh but i mean how did you process the moment did you did you predict this and and what what was the shape of your expectation versus what wound up happening yeah so i i did not predict this to be candid um you know like we had a duel internally um you know like i played around with him like oh this cool didn't quite like you know feel in the way that i think that like i felt it immediately after launch right um i do think our leadership um predicted this pretty well i think like sam and others had like you know well calibrated intuitions for this. And I think at this point, like, you know, they've done a lot of viral stuff, right?

Like, you know, I think that, you know, at some point, like, that you start to update all the way down. But yeah, like, I think, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, on the tech side, like, it does seem like there's a new algorithm involved. And we don't need to dive into that. But I want to know, like, there is a different path where we're seeing more incremental updates, I imagine. And we're seeing, like, the text is getting slightly better every week. but there's something almost more viral about being discontinuous.

And all of a sudden just hitting the internet over the head with like, text is good now, right? And is that just a function of your development in like the product cycle? Or is there some deliberate strategy there? Yeah, I think, you know, I can't speak for too much in terms of like, you know, deliberate strategy. But it is interesting where like, you know, to your point, like for these text models, we update them pretty often.

Yeah, of course. Every two months or so, like, you know, they're getting better. Like, people are always kind of, you know, seeing these steady improvements. But the funny thing was, like, the, you know, when DeepSake came out, it was kind of this, like, really interesting moment where a lot of people hadn't tried or, like, you know, our most recent models. A lot of people hadn't tried most powerful models. And they saw that discontinuity. Right. Right.

I've been using, like, you know, 4-0 from like, you know, earlier this year. I used this new reasoning model. Like, holy shit, this is amazing. Right. And I do think that, like, even things that are continuous to us, right? Like, you know, as people that use these tools often, still are sometimes weirdly discontinuous to, like, oh, it's. outsiders, right? Or people that aren't as new to the product. But like, you know, 4-0 ImageGen is like a great example of that, right? Like we went from like Dolly to this and it was like this massive jump. And I

think that like that jump does add to the virality as you said. Totally. That makes sense. How do you got, you know, I feel like a long, you know, even people that use and love, uh, opening eyes products daily, you know, sort of continue to give the feedback on like naming. It's confusing, blah, blah, blah. Like has that not been a focus? Because, you know, because on a long enough time horizon, you just sort of ask it to do things and it just sort of selects the correct underlying model and it's just routed perfectly. And so it's just like not because like if you were like, you know, listening to customers, you'd be like, you know, providing more, basically like more information for the average user

in the product to be like, well, you should really use this for that or maybe try it again with this other thing. So is it just like, you know, we're accelerating so quickly that like none of this is even going to matter. You're not even going to know the names. Yeah, at this point, like opening eye is so bad at naming that I, you know, I think we've like dug around grave here, right? Like internally things are even worse, right? Where like, how hell was this mean? Like Sam tweeted something this morning where it's like, you know, run, redo like this time for real.

Yeah, yeah. It's restart. Oh, three, one. Final, final two restart for real. Yeah. I mean, I was laughing at it like is it 40 chess? but at the same time, like you can imagine that you gave every model, like, like strawberry ice cream and like you give them cute names and then it makes even

less sense. Like at least I know like 03 is a higher number than 01. So like it's probably better. No, you're right. Like sometimes we don't number things like in order. Yeah, that is awesome. It's like it's like blueberry and up through to strawberry. Like I have no idea. Yeah, yeah. I think it could be worse, but yeah. I do think that, you know, Sam like tweeted this a month ago, but we do plan to start unifying. like, you know, our model selection, right? Yeah. So I think, like, you know, soon we will have, like,

a much simpler, easier-to-gress thing. And even for me, like, you know, I'm with one, like, testing these models all day, designing them and such. Still, it's, like, unclear. Yeah. Can you talk about your day-to-day? Like, what do you actually do?

Yeah, I work on model design here. Okay. So I, like, you know, work on behavior, like, the way the models act, the way that, you know, like, people, like, the experience behind use. But I also just work on general capabilities. So making the model smarter

in many domains, not just like kind of narrow areas. Talk about making the model, and I don't know if you touched this, but you posted, I think it was a couple days ago. You said, nowadays, I don't spend money without first deep researching. Everything I buy, hand-soat, toothpaste, lunch, houseplants is just better now. Sure, waiting five minutes for paper towel recommendations is weird, but in retrospect. And you specifically called out Amazon and Amazon choice here because I've wanted for a very long time to just have an Amazon where every,

only products that appear are companies that have existed for like a hundred years or more. Because like I don't want like the drop shipper who's like, yeah, I found the way to make this like 10% cheaper. And we can spend, you know, that extra margin back on ads and suddenly it's a business.

And so I can totally imagine a world in the future where I just go to, you know, chat GPT and say that I want to buy paper towels. And then you guys are routing that basically based on my, what you know about me as a consumer, which I will pay 10% more. to get 50% better quality. Operator, buy me paper towels from a company that's been in business for 200 years.

A real American paper towel. Ben Franklin's paper towel. But that's been, you know, people that are, you know, the critique has been like, okay, you're using this to like, it's not being used for commercial search. It's just being used to like generate answers to questions. But then, yeah, obviously, and I'm saying this, you're not saying this, but it's obviously a threat to Google and to Amazon and other marketplaces when I'm going there and I'm saying, this is what I want to buy, like help me buy the best version.

And it can be more aligned with my interests than an ads-based business model. I'm like, you know, like kind of an extreme libertarian when it comes to like sales and such, right? I do think there's going to be this like really, really cool world that we move into the next like year or two here, whereas our tools for selecting like products like become like super, super smart, right? Like way smarter than me. Like it's going to be so much better than I or. any other human have ever met will be at like knowing exactly what I want, exactly like what other people love. It's just going to like increase competition, right? It's going to increase like selectivity,

right? Like, you know, truly great companies who build like actual products that people love are going to like float to the surface way easier. And then like kind of all the like shit, like the drop shipping like random guy doing a, you know, thing out of his basement. They got the Amazon choice label. Like that's just all going to like fall away. Like dead leaves fallen off a tree. I'm excited for that. So it's just going to make the market better. Can you talk about other maybe underrated uses of open AI models obviously everyone knows you can giblify your dog everyone knows that you can ask it to explain like AP bio questions but yeah that use case is pretty interesting what else where else are you seeing usefulness in the models yeah one thing I'm like

on the kick with this recently um that I'm like really really trying to get better at is just remembering to use these tools for learning right um I think that like you know there are a lot of things from like okay I do this every day I wanted to do I want to do it like you know here's a way from me to use deep research etc but I think the opposite is kind of interesting too it's like when I don't use these tools or where like I did not have something previously in my life that would have demanded use and I think like an example of this is like now that I have you know something that like can give me a McKinsey style report in like you know minutes right like I shouldn't be using this all the hell like every single day right like so

before I go to bed like I like generate like a deep research I like you know remind myself like you got to read the deep research tonight like I got it's just like brushing your teeth or something right yeah totally um but remembering grades these systems is like such an important thing to me. Yeah, if you're very intentional about using them, they can make you smarter. Yes, yes. If you're unintentional about them and you're just like last second, like I got to send this email, like, you know, just do it for me. Like maybe that's, you know, making you. I mean, even for silly stuff, I was, I was like, yes, I actually would like a 50 page report

from a McKinsey analyst on the, on the Metal Gear Solid fandom or like the history of sword art online. Yeah, yeah. Stuff that I would normally like have to puzzle together from like Wiki and YouTube videos. I'm like, I just wanted all in one place to understand this. And it's like these stupid things that you would never think to, you know, actually get a full report on. Oh my gosh. Available at your fingertips. It's amazing. As a kid, I remember, like, all of those, like, you know, like, kind of fanfiction wikis or whatever.

And they're, like, terrible, right? Like, it adds everywhere. Like, you know, I'm so excited to just, like, remember that I can, like, use these things now, right? Exactly. Oh, yeah. It's amazing. Talk about how we figure out. I feel like the way people, people disrespect robots.

You saw this. with bird scooters. You remember there was the whole bird era where, like, you know, in LA at least, like, there was just entire fan pages dedicated to, like, throwing birds off of, you know, buildings. You posted last week, you said, I suspect in six months it'll be safer to Uber than Waymo. And going into this, you're basically saying, like, people are just, like, messing with the cars, like, on purpose.

Like, is there, when, when are humans going to learn to respect, uh, respect robots? And like, do you have a sort of solution for this? I say thank you at the end of my prompts. Oh, I love my way. Yeah. Always. I like, my way most like a dog, right? I'm like, oh, like, good boy.

Thank you for the ride. Good boy. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think it's, I'm like very outspoken about this. And this is just my take. This is not like the view of my company. But like, like, I do think that we should think a lot about like model welfare. And like, you know, that like, you know, well-being and like health of these models as they get much smarter than they are today.

Right. Today this is like not at all a concern. But we could imagine, though, that I see system. get quite complex. You know, we kind of care about, like, their internal state. You know, we want them to, like, be well, right? And it might be that this is just, like, more economically valid to, right? That, like, models that, like, you know, like, feel like they're in a good spot emotionally

or whatever, like, actually just, like, help humanity out more, you mean? Yeah. But I think that this is something that we should, like, get ahead on rather than, like, let it kind of, like, hit us. And I hope that, like, you know, as these systems get incredibly intelligent, right? And as humanity kind of co-evolves with them, we can, like, you know, get a partnership that's kind of mutually beneficial here. And I You know to be candid

Like I am a bit disturbed I like you know that like people throwing fruit my waymo But I'm you know maybe even more disturbed by like watching videos and people like kicking robot dogs and Twitter and stuff It's like a small thing and like again these systems like they don't feel pain or whatever today like obviously But I do think that like sentiment though like you know played out over the next like five 10 years here I see systems again become incredibly incredibly intelligent way more intelligent than we kind of expect today You know it does worry me a bit I think this is something we should just think about now What do you have you posted in kind of giving high level props to Manus for for you know people saying oh it's a rapper but then you're saying like no it doesn't really matter like capabilities matter a lot more.

Do you think that developers are not taking full advantage of Open AI products in some ways because you know I think there's a concern of like you know, a talented team might not build an agent right now that was like, they felt like was going to compete with operator because they feel like, oh, we're going to get steamrolled. But like, do you feel like there's like just enough verticals and, and sort of places that you can build that like people aren't taking enough advantage of the underlying tech? I certainly do. Yeah. Like, I think, you know, like, Manus is a great example, right? Like, you know, we have, like, deep research as a product. We have, like, operator. And, you know, they put it out and people still loved it. Like, and it did, like, still feel like some area that was kind of, like, you know, left uncovered. I also, you know, I was like a founder. And I was working, you know, like, APIs and such. And there really was, like, sentiment, I think, in the community where people were, like, so scared of the rapper company label that they really did leave, like, you know, kind of low-hanging fruit, like, unpicked. Right. Are they were, like, so scared of, like, you know, like, not even. of like open AI or anthropic steamrolling them. But more of just like people being like, ah, it's just like wrapping a language model. Like it's adding no value. Like no, like the right rapper is a ton of value.

I completely agree. Yeah. I thought the whole rapper meme was like as VC sciop basically. Because there were plenty of like fantastic businesses that maybe wouldn't hit hyper scale. And so the VCs were like, don't even bother. But they could build like really cool business.

Especially for like these young kids who are like in high school and like could have a business that's making $100,000. Like that's life change. and sets you up for so many different opportunities, so much experience with product development. I thought the Raptor thing was a little annoying. Talk about humor. John has this thing where every week or so,

he'll say like, you know, write me a joke and he'll kind of prompt it in a way around kind of the stand-up comedians. And it's not consistently hitting yet. It's sort of like it's structured like a joke, so you keep waiting for the, you know. It's unintentionally funny because if you read it like you're a stand-up comic, it will sound like you're a stand-up comic, it will sound like you're bombing intentionally,

and that's funny, but I'm still the one that's making it funny. The punchline gives crickets, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, totally. But when I think about the next Ghibli moment, it would be being able to consistently generate something that makes the user laugh. And think about the magic of that experience.

I can't wait. People are, I mean, it's actually, you know, bare case for humanity as we're all just like, you know, generating like perfect jokes over and over.

whatever, just laughing. That's when we all wirehead, for sure. Yeah, we all go crazy. Yeah, it turns out, like, the ultimate addiction is like, you know, humor, right? Yeah, yeah, we're just laughing ourselves to death, entertaining ourselves to death. I will say, you know, JupT4.5 was like a really interesting moment for humor for me, right? Where, you know, I was testing this model internally a lot. And, like, one of the ways I, like, kind of realized, like, wow, this actually is, like,

an interesting step change above, like, our existing models. It's something funny sometimes, right? Like, the green texts were, like, great. You know what I mean? Like, you know, like, it's long-form jokes, like, maybe left a little bit of desire, you know, to your point, like, sometimes it would instruct something that looks a lot like a joke, and we get to the punchline, and I would just, like, cock my head, like, what? I have, like, no idea what you mean there.

But to be fair, though, like, you know, if you asked me to, like, write a good long-form joke and you only gave me, like, 500 words to do it and, like, 500, like, you know, words worth of thinking, I could not do it, right? Like, you know, I actually, I would do much worse, I think, than these models. Totally. In fact, I actually don't know if I've written, like, any great long-form jokes, you know what I mean? Like, if there's, like, one of those things where, like, we hold these models to a crazy standard. but I am so excited for them to get great at this.

Because I do think that, like, to your point, like, this is, you know, this could be like the next image-in moment where people, like, do this. It just brings joy into the world. They're having a lot more fun. Like, yeah, I want that, right? It might also kind of solve your, your issue of, like, the beating up on the Waymo. Like, if there's a friendly robot and he's telling you a joke, like, it's a lot easier to give him a pat on the head and be like, good robot, you know.

Do you have any, are there versions of various models in the past that you felt an emotional sort of bond to that you that you still you know like they got away like you know for some reason like you know the one that got away or it's like an old an old friend that you just like you know went different directions in life and you know you don't talk to them anymore but you still you know every now and then you're like oh like you know you smile to yourself thinking about 3.5 Da Vinci they just don't make them like they used to that one actually had like the bottomless pick jokes you know I mean like that was yeah yeah yeah yeah but not even in just humor but generally yeah yeah you're so the temperature you know working and i can just imagine like

you know a version being so good for one thing or something that you cared about and then ben thompson still talks wistfully about sidney it's just like oh that was the most amazing so it's pretty great because sydney was like this sassy online character from like clearly from like tumbler some like you know convexity that it fell into i don't know but who's your sydney uh my sydney is easy answer for me is it was Claude Three Opus. That was such a great model. And an open-A-I model, too, so I'm not an open-a-eye model, too, so I yelled up for saying that.

But, you know, a ton of life to it. It was, I think, like, I coined this, like, phrase, big model smell when it came out. I was, like, this model, like, you know, if you gave me, like, a blind test between this model and, like, you know, other models that score as well in it at, like, you know, academic benchmarks, I'm pretty certain that, like, much better than chance

I could pick out Cloud Three Opus. It just was, like, soul to it, right? And it's a bit hard to see these things, like when you do regular day-to-day prompts. I'm just asking it for like a recipe or something. It's not going to be like, oh my God, it's a big model. But I do think, though, it's easier to tell the difference in like model capabilities in kind of like character when you push them to extremes, right?

When you deploy them into like, you know, agents that are doing like crazy things. When you give them like tons of context, when you have them like tackle really out of distribution hard problems, then you start to see like the creativity merge, right? And this is like a really fun thing. And I think that it's a good lesson for playing with the models. It's a good lesson also for like designing benchmarks and evaluating the models too. right um but yeah like you know three opus is pretty great and i think my daily driver right now um you know outside open ai is is gpti 4.5 um like i just such a fun model right like i do feel like you know closer

to it than i do for previous models it feels like it is more live if that makes sense and are you using gpc4.5 in a different way because it doesn't interface with it doesn't have some of the functionality that you get from an o3 high deep research product uh what what does an interaction with 4.5 look like for you. Is that just random questions throughout the day? Yeah. Yeah. Just like chatting casual stuff, right? These models are like, you know, like great, you know, colleagues, great therapists, right? Like, you know, it's good to talk about.

Like, this is one of those things. Just like, you know, you can generate like a deep research report, you know, before bed every night and just become like a way smarter person, right? You can also just like chat these models about your life and I think become like a really well adjusted person. You know, like there are like some people I talk to an SF who are like really, really plugged into like, you know, the model system, right? And you can like

kind of tell like, yeah, these guys are like, they got that sorted out. I don't know who the therapist says. It must be like, you know, 4.5 or 3.5 solid or somebody. Yeah. But like, you know, yeah, like they seem stable. I wonder if in a few months you'll be like at a party. You're like, oh, like that guy's clearly like a sonic guy. Like that's a 4.5 guy over there.

It's like rooting for a different football team or something. Talk about, you know, when somebody asks you like, you know, hopefully they don't ask you this too much. But if somebody asks you like, oh, what do you think about the tariffs? Like, do your eyes just like glaze over? because like none of this stuff matters on like a 10 year time horizon like I was talking to John the other day and and I like sounded like so just AGI pilled like as I was saying it out loud John was like you sound ridiculous but like I agree and it was this basic sense that like there's just so much chaos in the world right now politics tariffs all this stuff every you know people burning down

you know Teslas or whatever and then you kind of zoom out a little bit and and you sort of like understand, you just sort of like look at this sort of adoption of this technology and sort of understanding the potential. And it's almost like, yeah, none of this stuff matters because the world is going to look so, so different. What, you know, are you, are you able to just be like 110% focused on the work and ignore all the noise? Or do you still care to look up every now and then and look around? Maybe I should be like more locked in than I am. Like maybe I should be like a dark room, like just talking to the models and like, you know, like, you know, like feeling it out.

But, um, maybe we're models. Maybe, maybe we're, maybe the open AI team is generating us to test on you. You know, yeah. Simulation goes deep, man. Like, I was going to tell you, but, you know, you found out too quick. Yeah. I, I think, you know, like, when I joined open AI, I like tweeted this thing where when you, like, shoot an arrow and like, let's say you're like in outer space, right?

There's no gravity and you like shoot an arrow, right? Um, you know, the arrow is going to go forever unless it, like, runs into some black hole or something. And like, you know, the little degree difference in like where you point it. If you like point it up a bit, point it down a bit, like compounds to like the light years, right? Like as it like kind of travels, like different destinations, right? Like in some sense, like, you know, if I like shoot this arrow from like Earth without gravity or something and I like, you move my hand to the left a bit, it's like half the universe away, right? That's crazy.

And I kind of, you know, believe in the same thing as we like push these models to like crazy limits, right? That like little little differences in the initial conditions kind of like of, you know, EGI being born or like of the policy. of the time or like of the capital distribution or whatever, I think can compound to like incredible differences in London. And I think that like, well it seems of these systems will be incredibly powerful and very robust to maybe like you know human well at some point. I don't think that is an argument for the initial conditions not mattering if that makes sense. Great. How are you thinking about just safety AI Dumeers in these days? It feels like the conversation kind of moved past. It feels like the Dumer's low-key fell off.

Where are they? I don't know. You don't hear about those. Like Westmore on the Twitter as much now, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, they were telling me I was going to be paperclipped for like 24 months straight. Not paperclipsed yet.

And so I'm like, okay. Yeah, move on. But what's it like internally? What is it like? I can't say too much about like kind of, you know, that. Just like your vibe in SF maybe. Yeah. Like I think there are a lot of sharp people that like care a ton about like this going well.

Right. Yeah. There's just like great quote. I forgot like that. any of the NASCAR driver, I'm going to butcher at Mario something, right? But it's crazy at the formula level, one level, how many people think the brakes are for slowing down, right? And like sometimes, like, to go as fast as possible, right, like, to get this out into the world as quickly as possible to make, you know, like, the most, like, kind of economic impact. You know, you do have to do like a bit of, like, safety.

You do have to do a bit of testing. I think this should increase over time as like, you know, to expect it impact also increases. I think opening eye is incredibly good at, like, managing this, right? I think that like, you know, our leadership have done it for a while. They, like, will continue to get better at it too. And I think, you know, it's kind of a cool thing, right? To like, you know, to build systems that, you know, have, like, unexpected behaviors and, like, you know, can do things that maybe we weren't aware of originally.

And it's an important science to, like, figure this out before release and to build things that, you know, get safer. Yeah. Last question for you. Do you see us having a Ghibli style moment around? agents this year, not necessarily at Open AI, but just potentially broadly, because we've talked about this on the show a bunch, but, you know, people have just been promising for decades now. You're going to be able to talk to this, you know, talk to the computer and it'll book you the flight in the hotel and make your restaurant reservation.

And we haven't had that magic experience yet. I've seen a bunch of operator demos, but I haven't seen that viral where it's like literally everyone that has access to operator has used it and posted the results because they like got something cool on or whatever, right? there's some sense too where like Ghibli's awesome because it takes three seconds to look at like in an image right and be like oh wow like that's beautiful like

made like you know your like engagement photo like way cooler right like it's like really quick then I do think that like some of the most important agents like some of the most important things that we'll build over the next few years might not have results that you can like look at in three seconds to be like wow like great job model right

and in fact I actually think that as like the economic potential and power of these systems increases actually becomes slightly harder in the limit to tell the difference between like, you know, capable systems and very, very capable systems, right? Just as, as models get better, it might be a bit harder to tell the difference between, like, a good model and, like, a brilliant model, right? The cool thing is, though, is that, like, you know, it's a nines of reliability scaling problem. That as you, like, kind of, like, push these nines out, and as you, like, make them more reliable and many more

contexts, at some point, they are just doing, like, a sizable chunk of economic labor, right? So, you know, do I expect a Ghibli moment? I'm unsure. But I do expect, like, you know, these things, to just provide a lot, a lot of economic value. That makes a lot of sense. Beautiful. Well, thanks for joining. I love this conversation. Yeah, this is great.

We got to have you back soon. That's awesome. Fantastic. Yeah, you're welcome anytime. You're welcome anytime. Great conversation. Goodness for you guys. We'll talk to you soon.

Congrats on the milestone and keep it up. Yeah. Likewise guys. Talk to you. Boom. Size gone. Bye. Fantastic.

Yeah, yeah. Great conversations. The opening eye team, great guys. and fun that they can talk as freely as they can given their role, you know. Obviously, it's a very important and valuable company. Yeah, it's actually if you think about it most companies just period would not allow. Yep. Posting or any of that stuff.

Well, posting is one, but joining a live stream inside a live show. High stakes. That's, you know, high stakes. But it's fun. It's great. But it's fun. And I thought they had fantastic answers. It makes me very optimistic.

Let's go through another autopilot, Numeril, which puts sales tax on autopilot. They do. They spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance, backed by benchmark. Numeril's a new sponsor on the channel. And we want to give a shout out to Numeril. And Matt. For those that don't know, Numeril works with over a thousand different e-commerce and SaaS businesses, including a few of our favorites.

Ridge and Graza and many, many more. If you're running an e-commerce business or SaaS company and you have sales tax, you have to be on Numeril. I mean, it's funny that they're saying spend less than five minutes per month because I feel like the alternative is not spending more time, but it's billing some like tax lawyer like $10,000. Yeah, yeah. No, it's actually insane what you had to do before.

It could be extremely expensive to do sales taxes pre-numeral. So big shout out to Numeral. Go check it out. Yeah, you want. want to get ahead of this early. I think a lot of founders, both in ecom and SaaS, aren't really taking this seriously until they're at scale. There's real money on the line. So start early, start often. And we have some breaking news that was sent to us about the Newsmax IPO. Have you followed this story? Newsmax. Newsmax. I'm newsmaxing. So Newsmax is up 110 percent today. It

IPOed yesterday. It's up 1900% in two days from a $10 price. It's over $200 now. The price is all over the place. It's a 26-year-old company, digital media company founded by Christopher Ruddy in 1998. It has been variously described as conservative, right-wing, and far-right. Newsmax media vision include cable and broadcast channel Newsmax TV. And I can't even keep track of all these right-wing media companies because there's so many. Like the true social far, like, like, There's truth social, there's parlor, there's Gab and Newsmax and a whole bunch of these. I'm so happy we never discussed politics. But we will discuss an IPO.

We will discuss an IPO. I saw some funny jokes about how Corweve priced exactly at $40, which is what you want to do to not leave any money on the table. Newsmax obviously left a ton of money on the table by pricing the IPO so much lower than the price that it's floated at now. They could have, in theory, sold shares and put a lot more money on the balance sheet, a lot lower delusion. So it's being valued beyond $30 billion right now, which is about one X. That's great. Well, if they hit a stumbling block, maybe Jeremy Giffon will have to come bail them out. He's hiring an investor, and we want to highlight it here on the show.

He says, you'll be the first hire working with him on the most interesting complex and asymmetric special situations in tech. You'll be a good fit if you won, trade annual letter. like Pokemon. Two, are high-paced and biased action. Three, are unapologetically money-motivated. Four, have created and sold a product. Ideological minority at a top 10 school. Debated risking it all with an SBA loan, bought stock before you could drive, work in PE but long for higher MOIC, working VC, but long for higher ROIC, went through IC, but yearn to invest, can get a meeting with anyone on earth, made money online in high school, value heterodox. over consensus, value making money over being right.

Steve Schwartzman defines eights as those who can follow marching orders, nines as those who can execute and strategize, and tens as those who can sense problems, design solutions, explore new directions and make it rain. Eights and nines need not apply for this job. This role will have an equal focus in sourcing, analysis, execution, and operations. In essence, you'll wear every hat as we build the firm together.

Every hat. It will be all encompassing and demanding, but autonomous in your. to shape, you'll invest and transact with the best operators and financiers in the world and produce work at an exceptionally high standard. So go hit up Jeremy and switch your business to ramp.com and go hit up Jeremy and let him know that the technology brother sent you, the TBPN sent you. This undoubtedly a dream job and working for Jeremy will change your life. Yeah.

He used to be a tiny man, but now he has big aspirations. That's true. He worked for tiny. Always been a size board. But some of the smartest people in the world called Jeremy to get advice before they make important decisions. That's true. And so being able to work for him is like many people have said it'd be like getting 2,000 MBAs at once. Yeah.

It's like buying shares in Corweave. in 2004. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's like buying Solana in 98. Yep. Exactly.

Anyway. Where should we go to next? Oh, I mean, I don't know if we actually, I think we did post this in the timeline. You might not have seen it, but Jeremy Giffon obviously does special situations. If your company raises too much money from VCs, you build a decent business, but you're just underwater on the preft stack. He will come and unstuck, unstick your business. business. And it's somewhat adjacent to kind of injury lawyers if you have a cap table accident. So we've

put up a fake billboard on the 101 that said cap table accident called Jeremy Giffon put his real phone number on there. He didn't like that. So he censored it out before he posted it. But if you're looking to buy a billboard, go to ad quick. Adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. So you can be a startup, an agency. Anybody can go and leverage ad quick. And you'd be silly not to.

Yep. And did you, I think you threw this in the chat. Angry Tom says it's over meta, just announced Mocha, a new model that turned text or voice into super realistic talking characters. There's no way to tell anymore. And we actually saw a fan of the show turn us into Lego characters, which is very cool. And I think this like repurposing and gibbification, we've only seen the very beginning of it. And it's, it is interesting. We, we talk to Samir about the V-Tuber thing. This type of model,

obviously, it's very expensive, very slow right now. But in the future, you could have a model that's running on your live stream and we could be Lego characters, the whole show one, one day if we wanted to. There's going to be people that watch the whole show Ghibli mode. Ghibli mode. You'd be able to toggle it in the sidebar. Yeah, yeah, just like a color. Yeah, I thought this was interesting. I think meta is struggling from a lack of quality posters on their team. Yeah, they don't really have a, nobody's pumping this in the timeline. And Zuck is posting on Instagram.

He's actually very good at going direct. He posts the direct camera videos when he launches new stuff. But I want more. I thought some news that was interesting. So Brett Goldstein launched a new all-in-one CRM today on the anniversary of Gmail launching. They launched on April 1st. April 1st. So apparently back in the day, they launched and nobody actually believed them.

is like launching a product on April 1st is not a good idea. Huberman launched a funny product this morning. Contact lenses. Blue light blocking contact. I fell for one. I fell for one April Fool's joke today. Very sad. I felt for trays.

He said he was buying a grain silo in Ohio and I was like, yeah, that's believable. Yeah, yeah, too believable. But he was just teeing himself up for a joke that he wanted to be a serial, serial entrepreneur with a moat. Yeah. It was. So Brett says the email form factor hasn't changed at all. since then. After many attempts, it's clear that we're actually just looking at email wrong.

And so what Brett is building is a email companies that's sort of like embracing email as a database. So like basically building applications on top of the email, everything from like to do lists to project trackers to news, things like that. So that's exciting. And then clearly someone else had a similar idea. Notion also launched Notion Mail, a new email service also coincided. with the launch. I don't, I think the strategy of launching products in general on April 1st when every company is doing fake product launches is I get the, you know, sort of like launch on underrated, you think?

I don't think it's, I think potentially, you know, you just got to keep launching, right? So like Brett should just keep launching over and over and over. Totally. Yeah. Should figure out, you know, how to launch new features, things like that. But anyways, cool to see these two launches. You know, Superhuman was fantastic. when it launched.

I remember the FOMO from everybody of like, how do I get an invite or whatever? I really want a new AI first email client. And I know that, yeah, everyone's going to say like Gmail will kill, Google will kill this in a few years. But like, I'll pay you $100 a month for two years straight.

And like, I think that's a reasonable business. Yep. Because I'm drowning in email. They're not filtered properly. Like, there's like these buttons now where it's just like, do you want Gemini to summarize this?

Like it's crazy. No, I can scan. That's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for better spam filter. Yeah, it's crazy that Gmail values a newsletter in the same way as like, you know, some critically important thing. It's crazy. I mean, they do put it in like a separate box sometimes, but it's very tricky. It's not good.

And yeah, I mean, I want to almost find a product. I bet it exists. I want to find like a new RSS reader that I can basically take all my newsletters and just put there. So it's like a different app essentially because like I don't want it in my email inbox at all. And then I want a proper unified inbox because Gmail and Chrome now want me to use like different Chrome profiles with different log. And it's like it's just getting so confused. I just want all my email in one place. Anyway. Yeah. Uh, how'd you sleep last night? I slept. You went to bed it. I just accidentally. I like that. That's good. That's drama. That's drama.

Hopefully that's not copyrighted. So I'm going to know, no, no, no, no. No, no. Vivaldi's 300 years We're good. We're good. How did you sleep? Tell me, Jordie. 88. Ooh. How do you sleep, John?

I slept. 75. Nights that fuel your best days. Turn an e-bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Folks, go to 8thleep.com. Use code TBPN. Use code TBPN. Get $350 off.

I'm very excited. We're going to be having Mateo, co-founder of 8Sleep on the show soon. We're going to break it down. We're going to make him our official. sleep coach. Yeah. Not just a sleep expert for the show.

You know, the eight sleep's so helpful, but at this point, it's doing, it's doing everything it possibly can and clearly I need to do more. Like, like the reason I'm not getting 100s,

it's not on 8th sleep anymore. Autopilot has optimized so much. And it's pushing a boulder up. It's pushing you harder. It's pushing you harder. It's pushing you harder. I want to be a consistent 100s and I need to know the stack

that I need to get there. Probably taking less stimulants all day long. Waking up, uh, between four and five, daily means that I basically am getting into bed when it's light out now after the time change. It just feels so silly to be getting into bed. And you're like, oh, I guess I'm five years old now.

But whatever it takes, anything for the show. Yeah, anything for the show. Should we close out with this Dwar Keshech Patel post? I thought this is interesting. It's a long one, but I thought it'd be good to read through. He says, that feeling when Gwern casually are taking. It articulates a more insightful framework for thinking about your life's work than you've ever sketched out yourself. Gwern writes six days ago, and there's a screenshot.

You can see it as an example of alpha versus beta. When someone asks me about the value of someone as a guest, I tend to ask, do they have anything new to say? Didn't they just do a big interview last year? And if they don't, but they're big, can you ask them good questions that get them out of their book? Big guests are not necessarily as valuable as they may seem because they are highly exposed, which means that, which means both that, one, they probably have said everything they will say before, and there's no news or novelty.

This is really important when you're doing interviews. You need to get people off their book, and I think you're very good at that with asking people about the current thing, essentially. Because there's a lot of people that do, they've passed their timeless wisdom seven different times on various podcasts, but they haven't talked about humanoid robots yet. And so you get them on that and it's interesting.

Or they are message disciplined, and careful to talk to their book. Nobody's asked Senra, why our great allocators cannot invest in the right life partner. That's true. Good point. In this analogy, Alpha represents undiscovered or neglected interview topics, which can be extracted mostly just by finding it and then asking the obvious question. Usually by interviewing new people, beta represents doing standard interview topics slash people,

but much more so, harder, faster, better, and getting new stuff that way. That's us. Lex Friedman podcast and an example of this. He often hosts very big guests like Mark Zuckerberg, but nevertheless, I will sit down and skim through the transcript

of two to four hours of content and find nothing even worth excerpting for my notes. Friedman notoriously does no research and asks softball questions. Going hard on legs. Oh, it's rough. And invites the biggest names he can get regardless of overexposure.

And so if you do that, you will get nothing new. He has found no alpha and he doesn't interview hard enough to extract beta. So he's sort of the high expense ratio index fund of podcast interviews I think that there is, I think this misses the fact that like, for a lot of Lex Rees and audience, like, you might not have heard that Mark Zuckerberg and it's fun to just listen to him for a couple hours. So I still think there's value there. Anyway, Sarah Payne, on the other hand, which was a guest on Dorcas and blew up, seems to have been completely unknown and full of juicy nuggets and is like winning the lottery. You can make your career off a really good trade like pain before it gets crowded. Great trade. And we got to have her on. We're taking her. She's coming on our show next to our cash. Just kidding. But you're welcome to come opine on the current thing, Sarah, if you'd like to join. But we're not going to do anywhere near as deep as Dworknash.

Yeah, what Sarah Payne thinks about unitary, robotics. Yeah, break it down for us. Break it down. What's your P-Doom? However, if another successful podcaster has her on, they will probably not discover pain is their most popular or growth-productive guest ever. The well is dry. Pain may have more to say someday, but that day is probably closer to five years from today than

tomorrow, and that's a very good point. So, a good interviewer adopts a optimal foraging mindset. Once you have harvested a patch of its delicious food, you have to move on to another patch, which hasn't been exhausted yet, and let the original patch slowly recover. So a great guess for Dwar Keshe's blog would be, say, Hans Moravec or Paul J. Warbos. Moravec hasn't done anything publicly in at least a decade and is fallow. While Warbos has been more active and in the public eye, but still not much and is such a weird guy that just about any question will be interesting.

Reich was also a good guess because while Reich is very public in some senses, he's written popularizing books, even he is still obscure. Almost none of what he has published is well known, and he is involved in so much fast-paced research that even the book is now substantially obsolete, and he has a lot of new stuff to say. And Reich will have more stuff to say if revisited in, say, two years for an update. So a harvester will be making a note to revisit him if the current crop of interview candidates in the pipeline is looking marginal. A difficult and mediocre guest would be Tony Blair.

He can surely say many interesting things about the current geopolitical context in his work since being PM, but he has super experienced career politician who has survived countless question times and may eat you for breakfast and exploit you for ulterior purposes rather than vice versa. Similarly, Mark Zuckerberg and Sachinadella are tough nuts. There's meat there, but are you willing enough to bring down the hammer or will you settle for a mediocre result that mostly just fills space and is not a must watch? guest might be someone controlling and extremely PR savvy like Mr. Beast. This is the sort of guy

who will give you a bad interview pushing his book shamelessly and then might wind up spiking the interview anyway if he felt he wasn't getting enough out of it and just drops it as sunk cost. Though it was weeks of work on your part and blows a hole through your schedule and that's not his problem. That's why we only spend two minutes texting guests and then no minutes prepping so that we just have them on for 15 minutes and try and get some, throw them off. No, I mean I I I I it's interesting feedback. No, we try to, it's less interesting to talk to a founder and have them only talk about their business because it's just like, you sort of know.

And you've heard it elsewhere. Yeah, you've heard it elsewhere. It's on their website, et cetera. It's much more interesting to kind of get their opinion on the market broadly. But this is great. In other news, Circle has officially filed for an IPO. Oh, that was on the Polymarket ticker. Yeah.

So this was cool. So I actually have the polymarket pulled up right now. Yeah, did you just jump? And it had been sitting at, a week ago is that yes, was at a circle IPO in 2025 was at 54%. And yesterday morning, it just absolutely popped up to 88%. That makes sense. And then now it's sitting almost at 100. And yeah, I'm excited to like dive into this.

We should try to do an S1 breakdown. tomorrow. Cool. And yeah, this is a big one. Well, congratulations to everyone over in Circle. And that is a good place to close out the show. Remember, if you want to get a bottle of Dom Perion on us. We give us five stars on Apple Podcasts.

Be creative. Be creative. Put an ad in it. Send it to us, tweet it at us, and we will send you this delicious bottle of Don Perion. We are going to make a decision by the end of day tomorrow. And we will also send you the Z biotics to go with it. There you go.

So you're not hungover. Today was fantastic. It was great. And I can't wait for tomorrow. I'm so happy it's only Tuesday. Yeah, me too. We've got three more days. Big shows ahead of us.

Big shows. Thanks for watching. Thank you, folks. Have a great day. Bye.