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

You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, April 1, 2025. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance. Jordi, the capital of capital. This show starts now. We got a ton of News. OpenAI is worth $300 billion. Now. Hermes is going back to their roots and focusing on horse saddles, both equally important stories in the world of technology journalism. 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, Sameer from Colin and Samir. We're about creator economy. He just did a fantastic interview with Mr. Beast and Mark Zuckerberg putting two of the greats together.

Where do you go from there?

And. And it's open AI day. They're raising 40 billion at 300. We got two folks from OpenAI joining the show, Will and Aiden. 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.

Anyway, be ranking their top 5,000 Ghibli memes.

Yes. And we'll be pressuring them into buying watches on bezel. 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.

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 Dom Perignon episodes now we are in partnership with Zbiotics, one of my friends companies. Actually they are not an official sponsor but I do love Zebiotics and Zebiotics, I actually introduced the founders. Stephen Lam, 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 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 hugely popular at weddings. People buy these and they hand them out to all their guests. You take them, it really, it can't make up for lack of sleep. So you will be tired. But it really does a great job of like killing that, like terrible feeling.

No, 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, right. Yeah. And so we, we, we want to shift from, from drinking the Dom Perignon on stream to giving away bottles of Dom Perignon.

And this, this Dom actually has a sponsor itself. Slow Ventures.

Oh yes, Slow Ventures. They sent it to us, they sent.

This to us, good friends of the show.

So thank you to Slow. We're gonna pass it on.

We're gonna go to a founder. Yeah, that's, that's kind of, it'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 this, you listen to the show, you win the bottle of Dom Perignon and then get you in and then you send this to Sam Lesson. Yeah, It'd be like, hey, I want to pitch you. And it's just a snake eating his tail at Oroboros of Dom Perrion.

What do we.

This could be the most storied bottle.

How are we going to give it away?

I wanted to see a super creative five star review on Apple podcasters, 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'll get in touch and mail this to you. How about that?

Boom.

You gotta be over 21. Obviously it's kind of a contest. So I guess there's no, no cost to enter, no purchase necessary. Yeah, but I guess this isn't a purchase anyway, so.

Yeah, 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?

Not yet, but if we get any bigger, they might. Anyway, let's go through the SoftBank deal. OpenAI Masayoshi Son got the deal done. Is putting in $10 billion our leverage king. Leverage king, yeah. And people are like, oh, he's using debt. So the Wall Street Journal has this article, this, this hit piece against debt, which we love here they say, how is SoftBank funding its mega investment in OpenAI 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 Son's company said the first 10 billion would be financed by borrowing from Japanese bank Mizuh lenders. Of course, we've seen this stuff before and, and SoftBank 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? What you got?

No, I was going to say. So to be clear, this is a staged investment. They're doing $10 billion now and 30 billion in 2026. Seemingly entirely from Mizuho.

Yeah.

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 knowing he's got a. 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 OpenAI have just gone to Mizuho directly and gotten debt if they wanted debt, but now they have equity on. They have preferred equity on their balance sheet and. Yeah, no, it's amazing and it's great for open. Potentially everyone wins, right? Like if, if, if OpenAI does really well, Mizuho gets paid back. They want interest, they want to be paid back. Masa sees the upside and OpenAI doesn't have any debt in their. On their balance sheet. It's like, it's beautiful. This is capitalism, baby. I love it.

Yeah. To be clear, to give Masa some credit, I couldn't he fund this entirely by selling off ARM is ARM for things for sure.

Yeah. But this deal is the largest startup, largest investment ever in a startup. I knew we seriously need a bigger gong. Hold on to that gong. There we go.

We got to hit 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 OpenAI 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, like, the founding team was really, really, like, incredible. And if you're. If your whole thesis is just like, bet on founders like Sam pretty good at making money, like, it's not that crazy.

This is your. This has been. This is like, I feel like 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, this 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, ChatGPT 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 Air and so, like, can it get to, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of valuation? Like, sure, it seems fine.

Yeah.

But I mean, I'm sure there'll be a lot of good takes about how, where this 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. I'm just excited to see a lot of money change hands and a lot of debt stack up. Together with SoftBank's pledge to lead the $100 billion Stargate Cloud Computing Initiative with OpenAI, 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 dollars for years to come. The Hope is that OpenAI 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 Reed 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, like hundreds of billions of dollars of cash a year. And they just would. The numbers just kept going up. They never got to that. And then 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. Than, we're done. We're done with you, we're done with your models.

Yep. It's purely 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 yeah, maybe we've gone too far. Who knows? We will see. But, but good luck to everyone involved and congratulations to all the, all the OpenAI 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 total percentage relative. Even if it's $500 million. Yep, still pretty meaningful.

SoftBank always delivering great quotes. The statement says the information revolution has now entered a new phase led by artificial intelligence and called Its partner Its OpenAI. Its partner closest to achieving AGI, in which computers operate on the level of humans. And was tweeting about this. He's saying like, AGI has been achieved externally and it's unclear. I think he might just be April fools 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 time to be a podcaster in history.

Yeah. The edge that OpenAI has is if you talk to people that aren't as terminally online as the rest of us, they will tell you, I love OpenAI. I don't just like it and use it. They have a passion for it just as, yeah, totally everyday consumers.

And they'll be like, and it's hard.

To get them like, oh, Helen, Tony, if you tell somebody, it's like OpenAI. They're going to say like, but I love OpenAI already.

Yeah, exactly. You're like, 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, yeah it is very funny. SoftBank is taking a lot of risks for a piece of OpenAI ratings agency s and P Global said Tuesday that said Tuesday that SoftBank's financial condition will likely deteriorate as a result of the OpenAI investment and that it plans to add debt that could lead the agency to consider down rating SoftBank's ratings. None of the startup, none of the startups with early leads in generative AI have shown that they can operate profitably. I don't know how true that is. Like you could probably look at the GPT4 training run and amortize just that. But yes, I mean on a quarter to quarter basis these companies aren't 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 and 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.com era bet that Yahoo would be the dominant force in search the background Debt has been a common feature of Son'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 to just before values plunged in 2021. And Son 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 Ampere.

Go back and listen to our deep dive on Masa and Softbank in general. 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 risks that he takes. But he's constantly searching for that next absolute banger.

Totally.

And there's, there's a very good, you know, there's, 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 Softbank.

So it's one of the other. It's either a good or a bad investment. It's.

We talked to the experts and you know, we determined that it's. 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 getbezel.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 FP jorns.

After and they're not making any more Rolexes or attacks. No, I'm just saying.

Yeah.

The actual companies themselves.

Sure.

If you want to make the next Rolex, you have to go back, yeah. 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 yes, said said asset and Godspeed.

So yeah. But go to getbezel.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 poly market ticker. And we hope you're enjoying staying up to date on what tech markets are. Are going on.

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.

Every tickers.

Yeah. So I think every sponsor ticker.

Yeah. Yeah. Eventually it's just 99% ticker.

I think so.

But to close it out, go to. Go to getbezel.com Download the app. The app is fantastic. We are daus.

Seriously, 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 dweller. Patek launched a complications watch that's worth over a million dollars. AP has made some updates. A lot of things are launching. I wanted to highlight this Polo 79 in white gold from Piaget. It's about $100,000 watch but I think it's, it's a lot of watch for that money.

It certainly is 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.

That's right. Many people have said this.

You can't take a, can't take a 911 into a board meeting, but you can take your Piaget Piaget Polo.

If you drive your ass into a board meeting, you will get arrested. You will get arrested, not do it.

Except I think more, more Sandhill Road VC firms should have massive roll up doors for board meetings.

If you want to drive, just drive your car.

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, KPIs were good. Okay. Yeah, yeah. We'll be raising in Q3. Okay.

We're gonna get out of here next course. Well, yeah, so, so we're, we're in the hunt for a new studio.

Yep.

And roll up doors, Roll up doors are not like a deal breaker but they're certainly nice to have. Nice to have for sure.

Anyway, we're going to have Quaid from Bezel, the CEO on the show tomorrow to break down exactly what's happening in the watch world. I follow all this stuff 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. Like you are, you have like the most contrarian position. I'm like, OK of fine with that. Like 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 discourse.

We're watch enjoyers. We're not watch experts.

Exactly.

Big difference.

Yeah. So I would, I would gladly wear a, a, a, a knockoff royal oak from Rolex called the Land Dweller. Yeah, I think it looks great anyway. Great. Let's stay with OpenAI 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, and this is different than Ashley vance's.

It is OpenAI and this is an Interesting. I'll. I'll give my take. 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. Adapted from. It's called the optimist, Sam Altman, OpenAI and the race to Invent the Future by Keech Hagee or Hagi. It will be published on May 20, 2025 and I'm sure it'll be an interesting read. It is incredibly well sourced. So this, this writer, this author was able to get insider accounts of like private dinners between Peter Thiel and Sam Altman. 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. Like 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 Truth Zone time. 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 your intent in the Truth Zone.

Yeah, the takes are, you know, need to be put in the truth zone. Anyway, let's read through this because it's a beautifully written, I mean it's like a great, you know, great writer, great, great author.

I'll take it off.

Yeah.

On a balmy mid November evening in 2023, billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel threw a birthday party for his husband at. Yes, an avant garde Japanese restaurant located in a century old converted in Los Angeles's Arts district, not far from where we are at this moment.

Yeah.

Seated next to him was his friend, Sam Altman. Thiel 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 ChatGPT in November 2022 had propelled tech stocks to one of their best years in decades yet. Thiel was worried. Years before he met Altman, Thiel had taken another AI obsessed prodigy named Eliezer Yudakowski under his wing, funding his institute, which pushed to make sure that any AI smarter than humans would be friendly to its maker. That March Yudakowski 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. Thiel warned Altman. You need to take this more seriously. Take it over.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's a fascinating history. I mean, Altman's first venture fund was called Hydrazine Capital. I believe he was 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 you. It's kind of beautiful. Anyway, underreported. Sam is like, so known for OpenAI now. I think people forget that he ran a very, very successful venture fund and made some incredible investments during that time. And, and then also what's missing from this is that Peter Thiel was. Is listed on Wikipedia as a co founder of OpenAI and was one of the initial backers. Obviously, Elon Musk 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 OpenAI was, was crazy. I mean, there's a YC research project, so it was heavily YC influenced and that. And YC actually has a stake in OpenAI now. That 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, yeah, don't you own a stake? And he was. 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 Altman was running yc and Sam brought Peter in and they did. 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 Thiel had warned him that the company had been taken over by the eas. By which he meant people who subscribed to effective altruism. EA had later 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, like older people, very expensive mosquito nets are really cheap. And so everyone EAS were originally very focused on ending global poverty. Then they kind of pivoted to trying to prevent runaway AI from murdering humanity. Thiel 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, but we got rid of Elon. Sam responded at the dinner, referring to the messy 2018 split with his co founder, 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 doomer. No one has a p doom of zero. No one has a PDM 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 and building the more positive future? Like the Teelian, 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 Eliezer Yudkowski, which is like, it's going to happen no matter what. There's nothing we can do.

But, yeah, Give me money for research.

Yes.

Give me money for my institute.

Yes. Nearly 800 OpenAI 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. We love beachfront second homes on this.

Show, Even if you're not in the position of those 800 OpenAI employees. You can go to wander.com.

Yeah. And you can rent a beachfront second home. Fantastic.

By the day. You can just get homes. By the day.

By the day.

Fantastic innovation.

Yes.

Luxury homes. By the day.

By the day.

Hyper fraction, fractionalized.

I knew you were gonna say that. 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 OpenAI 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 Val, delivered a new technology that seemed like it was very possibly going to change everything. And that really is true. Like OpenAI, yes, the transformer paper was written at Google. Yes, like other people were working on language models, but OpenAI was the company that, that really went full scale. Pelled scaled this thing up and then also productized it and also figured out like, hey, people just want to chat.

They verticalized research through product, product and it. They were the first to do that in a really, really meaningful way.

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.

Yeah.

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 sa, 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, OpenAI was set up to be a different kind of tech company, one governed by a nonprofit board with a duty not to shareholders, but to humanity. Altman had shocked lawmakers earlier in 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 a. 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 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 OpenAI 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 CEO does. This is like what we're talking about with like, 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 a. Push an organization forward. And there are tons of smart people at Google. They couldn't launch a chatbot faster than OpenAI 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 and 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 Ajaya Kotra, an AI safety expert at the ei, at the EA charity Open Philanthropy. But the process stalled, largely due to foot dragging by Altman and his co founder, Greg Brockman, who is 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 dollar. The demon is really just a consumer tech company, I guess.

Yeah. Consumer applications, actually.

Yeah, yeah. Just, just Apple.

Mother was right.

Your mother was right. Altman and his close ally Brockman, their fellow co founder Ilya Sutskever, and three independent directors. These were the independent directors were Adam d', Angelo, the CEO of Quora 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 McC, the former 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 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 GPT4, 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 over.

It's not a neurotic state.

That was humanity's final exam.

Yes, yes, yes.

The real one.

Yes, it's over. Once you can ace 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 bioweapons. 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 ChatGPT 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 critique. Like the structure of the company was not aligned with what was happening at the company. Company. At the same time it feels like they're acting like, like everyone was going to die tomorrow. Yeah, right.

Yeah.

And what we actually talked about this before we got on air, but I think what if, 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 team broadly saying, hey, we're very worried about this. It's not just a cute chat app that's gonna go viral.

Yep.

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, 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 GPT models. Yes, they were scaling up, but how were they doing on evals? How were these systems integrated? What systems did these models have access to? All of those things. Completely agree with that. The other thing is, basically what you're advocating for is a whistleblower program which kind of exists in every company. Like if you've ever been on a board and some low level employee emails you 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 OpenAI 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 super aligned with the EAS. Because if you actually think that OpenAI'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, 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 OpenAI, 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, 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, you know, massively slow GDP growth or potentially even go negative because people just stop, you know, all work and just, you know, listen to the show. Yeah, 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.

Regulatory capture and like monopoly.

Basically there should be 10,000% 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 willy nilly podcast, just drop an RSS feed.

Yeah, just like pharmaceuticals. We don't want anybody coming to market with a new pharmacy.

This makes so much sense.

Shouldn't have anyone just coming to market with the podcast.

For sure. Anyway, let's move on to equally ridiculous things. Toner and Macaulay had already begun to lose trust in Altman to products. And this is interesting because we haven't actually heard before how the safety process worked within OpenAI 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, even Instagram, when they launch a new algorithm, they should be like, is this promoting anorexia? Is this promoting extreme content or not? And, 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 OpenAI has a joint safety committee board with Microsoft, a key backer of OpenAI 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 proo and found that only one had actually been approved. And so this is like the smoking gun. Like Sam Altman like lied about the approvals and, 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 GBD 3.5 and GPT 4 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, 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 GPT4. 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 GPT4. We've all been playing with GPT4 for, for years now. It's no big deal. It's been copied open source. Deepsea can run it on your phone, you can Download it on GitHub, Mistral and all these GPT4 level models. 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, what were the controversial enhancements? Because to me it was a controversial lack of enhancements. It was like, GPT4 was great, but it wasn't good enough. It should have had more. Immediately I was like, bigger 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. I don't get it. I'm so confused by this. Anyway, and then this is the really funny thing because obviously all the hate's been on Sam, but Microsoft is just doing crazy stuff this whole time. So around the same time, Microsoft launched a test of the still unreleased GPT4 in India and they're just like, yeah, let's just try it in India. Who cares? Like, we don't need to ask anyone. Like, let's just do it. The first and just this is the first instance of the revolutionary code being released in the wild.

Not the first time.

They're just like, Bill Gates, let's test it on India.

Bill Gates organizations have done things like that.

Yeah, it's like, what if it was Microsoft? Like, like you're, 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 it's also Internet products.

So 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. Like, like Microsoft is just like, oh yeah, like let's not deal with that stupid joint safety board.

Like let's just, let's just rip it.

Yeah, like full, send my boys back in.

Like, we really need, 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 sort of summary. 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 like it's so low stakes in some ways. It's like better auto complete in many ways. Ways Anyway, so, so Microsoft launches GPT4 in India. They don't get approval from the joint safety board and no one had bothered to inform OpenAI's board that the safety approval had been skipped. The independent board members found out when one of them was stopped by an OpenAI 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 GPT4 in Indian.

It's just a very funny dynamic to be in this sort of hyperscale 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's sitting over your shoulder kind of like nitpicking every small decision that you make.

And for a completely new class of risk vectors. 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, how are they.

Ensuring that they're putting enough spend behind the go to market?

Yeah, there's like a million questions 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. But so anyway, then one night in the summer of 2023, an OpenAI board member overheard a person at a dinner party discussing OpenAI's startup fund. This is the venture capital fund that they use to invest in startups that could potentially use OpenAI's technology, basically giving money to the companies that they're going to steamroll with the next generation of ChatGPT, 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, I think doing great.

Harvey took money from OpenAI.

Yeah, that makes sense because it's like, it's much more narrow than just being like, oh, we're like, we're like, you know, slight prompt engineering on top of ChatGPT and we're gonna get rolled.

Sam's a dog. I don't think he was using, wanting to use a startup fund to fund potential competitors. It was no very oriented around, you're going to be using ChatGPT, we'll give you some money.

Yeah, truly like you're, 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 OpenAI 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, and knowing everything about OpenAI's insane legal structure, I believe this. Like, it's hard to set up a fund as like a Delaware C corp or like an llc. It's tricky. Like, there's not exactly like Carta or Angellist for setting up a fund when you're a for profit that's owned by a nonprofit 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 funny dynamic too, 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 the board, like some aspects of the board's, you know, desires. Because if other competitors like totally seek beat us, you know, that 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 Elias see? What did Sam see? Sam saw commoditization of the foundation model layer and knockout drag out fight in the application layer and was like, I Got to go fast. And this is a consumer tech company. But here, here is, here is a line that I think we need to take much, much more seriously. So the truth came out about the structure of the, of the startup fund fund. OpenAI 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 2 and 20, at least the great funds, you know, 3, 4%.

We've seen 3 and 30 before.

And so this is a big problem. If I was investing in a fund and someone was like, oh, like, no fee, no profit, I'd be like, like, yeah, straight to jail.

Yep.

But of course, that actually aligns with Open AI's incentives. We're joking, but it is, it is very odd. I mean, it does, it does kind of align with this idea that.

OpenAI said Altman earned no fees or profit from the fund, that he could have had to. And I, I, I think your interpretation is right. Right. There's also another interpretation where he just.

Hadn'T hit the curdle yet.

He did have 2 and 20, but, you know, whatever.

I think, but I think you're, yeah, if I had, if I had to guess on what the actual structure was, it was like, technically he owned the GP, but, and OpenAI was an LP in the fund and he, so he had legal control over it, but all the money and profits would flow through without anything passing to him. Yeah. And that seems like the fastest and.

Most clearly Sam Altman, ridiculously talented venture investor, like, 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 2 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 the economics don't really make sense there. And this is what I'm talking about, about the fall follow up. It's 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, 100 million bucks, like certainly not 10 billion 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, 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, make off balance sheet investments from OpenAI. In the meantime, just do it the right way. And he would still say like, yeah, probably should have just done it, but whatever, we were moving quickly.

It's so funny if it's like, oh yeah, he set up this fund and he personally owns like 30% of anthropic now. Just like I can't deal with these guys in open air. I'm just going to go turbo long the direct competitor now. 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 alerted to the previous fall. They also hadn't been alerted the previous fall when OpenAI released ChatGPT. At the time considered a research preview that used existing technology but ended up taking the world by storm. In late September, Suskiver emailed 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. So let's give her hemmed and hawed before coughing up a clue. You should talk to Mira more. And so yeah, the launch of ChatGPT is funny because I've seen, I talked about this with Doorkash 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, 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. Yeah, but yeah, I mean, I don't know. Probably should have told the board. You're launching ChatGPT. I understand that. You know, it was this research preview. They, they did launch a lot of different things. The OpenAI sandbox, they launched Playground and none of the other things had taken off like ChatGPT. Maybe it was just lucky.

And the use cases for that early research product were pretty tame. It was like generate, 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.

Yeah, yeah.

It's just like a text generation tool. Yeah, that was, that was good, but not even great. It was magical. Yeah, but it wasn't anything.

If you just think about the, 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, and like if it comes out wrong, it could be like really misaligned and it's like really high stakes. And so, so 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 002 into 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 LLM 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 ChatGPT interface in like a couple days I imagine, and maybe it was a couple weeks. But like it like the first version of ChatGPT was not. It was really just like a wrapper 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 Marathi had been promoted to Chief technology officer of OpenAI in May of 2022 and had effectively been running the day to day ever since. Absolute dog operational mastermind. You'll love to see it. When Toner called her, Maratti described corporate athlete for sure. Maratti 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 anytime 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 Grokman was a. Brockman was a co founder and obviously 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, this layer in between them that's Mira Muradi, 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? We go way back. It's weird. And so however they got in that situation, it just seems bad, right?

Yeah.

Murati 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. General toner went back to Sutskever, the company's oracular chief scientist. Love that word. He made clear 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, Sutskever had mapped out and launched a team to pursue the next research direction for OpenAI. That's probably the reinforcement learning, the O1, the Q technology that they were working on at the time that was very controversial, but then, you know, deep Seq open source did so it's like, was it really that big of a deal? We don't know. Sutskever had mapped out this and launched a team to pursue research. But months later, another OpenAI researcher, Jacob Pachocki, began pursuing something very similar. And so the teams merged and Pachocki took over after Sutskever turned his focus to AI safety. And so Altman later elevated Pachocki 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.

Yeah. There's two challenges. One, you have a nonprofit research group that's transitioning into a for profit hyperscaler. Yep. And then you also have this business that's verticalizing, that's doing everything from research to the end product layer, but they're also doing, doing an API and they're also still worried about AI safety. And then you combine that with products that are generating, you know, millions and then tens of millions and then hundreds of millions of revenue that's also losing so much money that, like, if Sam can't, you know, 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.

Yeah, you can do Rubik's Cubes, but I can't juggle, unfortunately. It's on my 20, 25 goals. I gotta learn. Anyway, this is another wild, wild story. Again, treading carefully, in terror of being found out by Altman, Marathi and Sutskever spoke to each other. Each of the independent board members over the next few weeks. It was only because they were in daily. 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 Sutzkever that McCauley had said Toner should obviously leave the board for the. For the. Over the article. Macaulay was taken aback when she heard the account from Sutskever. 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, oh, you were referencing that. I was looking at the dynamic Of Sutskivers.

Oh, that whole thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, this. 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. The whole core is so weird to not just you're on the board. Like, if you're not comfortable with the approach to safety.

Like, sounds like that should have been an internal memo.

Should have been an email.

And you. You decided to risk what was already, I'm sure anybody on the board putting out basically, like activist materials.

Yeah.

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. John's not taking safety. He's not 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 could email me. There are a million ways that you could bring that up. But.

I could use. I could use.

Yes, you could use the horn to let me know that you think I'm not doing a good job. But the thing that. That would really irk me is if you did that and you were wrong. Like. Like, okay, so you're toner. You're criticizing OpenAI for the approach to safety. Habeas corpus, show me the damage that OpenAI's approach to safety has done. Like, what are we talking about here? What is the damage? Is it 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 OpenAI's products. Like, did that happen? No. No, not at all.

I think the. 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 come. 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 is 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 OpenAI's approach to save. Let's compare it to deep seats. Let's compare it to Google's. Let's compare it to Grox. Let's compare it to Mistrals. Like rank it for us, Helen. Like tell us like where, where are we sitting here? Because like a, I'm not seeing any damage from OpenAI 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.

So it's, it's what I've been using it for.

Even the job displacement thing. Right. Like if, 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 it. Yeah, yeah. And maybe, maybe it's you know, some sort of regulation. I don't want to like lock this down too much, but maybe there's some sort of of like, you know, incentive or tax, 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 drop 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, there's no damage being done. And so like what are you talking about? About anyway?

Yeah, it's, 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 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.

And that'd be super useful.

That'd be very valuable and, and beneficial.

But that person should report to the CEO and, and be like, hey, here I have, I have a, 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 and I'm and I'm doing and I'm publishing all this not higher up like like taking shots at the company you're you're in charge of. Anyway, I totally get the the criticism that like getting mommy daddied is annoying. I totally get that. I think that that is a legitimate criticism here. And so it clearly also pisses off Ilya and Mira because they'd been collecting evidence and now Sutskever was willing to share. He emailed Toner, Macaulay and d' Angelo 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 Fun fun. Give it a try folks when you're whistleblowing. One was about Altman, the other about Brockman. The Altman document consisted of dozens of examples of his alleged lies and other toxic behavior, largely backed up by screenshots from Marathi Slack Channel. In one of them, Altman told Marati 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? Just like say model runs faster like Turbo need a joint safety board review. It seems like he kind of has an argument there. But then Marathi checked with the company's top lawyer and the lawyer said that's that he had not said that.

Just 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 journey 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 cumbersome than having to do like heavy.

It honestly is such use you kind of understand what was happening and GitHub commits and again like the critiques of Sam not being being consistently candid which was what they eventually came out and said it was 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 winning at the sort of app layer right now, despite all of this, is just a testament to his executive.

No, I agree. Yeah. Yeah, it's odd. So, anyway, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 16, 2023, he and three independent board members logged into a video call and voted to fire Altman, knowing Murati 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 Sutzkever that they had been worried that he'd been sent as a spy to test their loyalty. That night, Murati 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, says Sotsgiver and Marathi were collecting evidence. Like, and. And. And there's a whole bunch of these examples where it's like.

Like.

Where you'd think that Sutskever was communicating with her, so she should know. But then she's like. Marati's like, I don't. 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. Then she really goes on the offensive and says, like, have you considered. Have you communicated this to Satya Nadella? Knowing how essential Microsoft CEOs, the CEOs commitment to their partnership was to the company, they had not.

I remember when this was happening, it clear, you know, 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 layers. It's like, you know, it's like a family infighting, right? Like, they're all. All on the same team, but clearly there's like, power struggle and dynamics. And then, you know, like, Satya is kind of like the. The grandpa that. He's like, really? Guys, like, you know, like, you didn't consult me on this. That's insane.

And like, from his perspective, like, you guys are fighting over Autocomplete and Clippy.

Like, the new Clippy the new Clippy.

You guys are building the new clippy.

He's like, I just wanted the new clippy faster. And we already tested it 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 OpenAI's board and executive team held a series of increasingly contentious meetings. Murati had grown concerned the board was putting OpenAI at risk by not preparing, by 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 didn't she just turn around and say, hey, everyone, I actually know why he got fired. Like, I was in these conversations. It's very odd. The board felt they couldn't divulge that it had been Marathi who had given them some of the most detailed evidence they had banked on Maraud bodies calming employees while they search 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 a, 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 Sutskevera, driven by his anger over Pachocki'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 everyone 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. And you've heard the whole story now. Crazy Sutskever was astounded. He had expected OpenAI open employees of OpenAI to cheer bad 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. Clippy but good.

Cracked clippy.

Cracked clippy. What are you talking about, Ilya? I just want to get a second beach home and vend clippy into every Microsoft product.

It's crazy that crackedclippy.com is available.

Crackedclippy.com Go get it.

Go get it.

Created ChatGPT wrapper. Get sued by Microsoft. I'm sure they still own them.

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 Sutskevers.

Such a twist, actually. I really like the guy.

Oh yeah.

I mean this is, 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 OpenAI is nothing without its people. Right. And for a while, 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 gong one more time for Sam and the OpenAI team. What a funny story. Anyways, it's one of the greatest tech stories of all time. I mean, I know it's very stressful and frustrating for a lot of people involved, but you know, we, I don't know, we just.

Stories not over.

The story's not over. It's still a knockout drag out fight. Anyone could win. Is OpenAI, Yahoo, Google?

Let's figure it out. Jessica Livingston, co founder of yc, had a, has a podcast 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 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'd try and find my happy place. I'd 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 grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge services.

Fantastic idea. It's basically take some of the greatest homes in the world world and make them a bit available by the day.

You love this too much.

But I mean four days.

This wander in Sonoma Vineyards is fantastic. Four bedrooms, three and a half baths, five beds, eight guests, 3,400 square feet. There's a pool.

I love it in Sonoma County. So if you go stay at that wander DM me, I'll give you some recommendations.

Yeah, you almost got sucked into that whole East Bay rationalist thing. The EA thing.

I was born. You're born in dark. On the dark side.

You merely adopted. I was born in it.

You're ready to fight Oakland Children's Hospital.

We'll get Eliezer on here. You can debate him.

Yeah.

You can be like, but what if I turn the server off? What if I pull the plug? What happens then?

If I have what? What if there's bad robots? But I have a good army of robots powered by Brett Adcock figure AI. What then?

What then, Eliezer, are you going to do about that?

Owned. They don't even walk like Biden anymore.

Yeah. Anyway, let's move on to Intel. Everyone's wondering what's going to happen with Libbuton, the new CEO of Intel. Tons of tons of debate over what should happen to Intel. Of course, intel, the storied chip manufacturer, integrated. So they both design and manufacture the chips. They have a design arm and a fap. Very different from intel and from Nvidia and tsmc.

And it's crazy.

Only one.

One. 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, a GPU instead of a cpu.

Oh, true, true. They really missed that one off. And you know, they actually do make a gpu.

Really?

Yeah.

Don't hear about it much.

You don't hear about it much. It's not very popular. Anyway, so Libouton isn't signaling a major departure from Intel's past strategy. When he came on, he said, hey, we're staying in the path. And we were kind of debating like, is this just signaling to employees? Like, hey, don't worry. Everything's gonna be the same new CEO. Just keep doing what you're doing. We're gonna figure out a new strategy. But, like, your job is safe right now. Or. Or was he. 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 gonna take you through. And so he's only been on the job for two weeks. Weeks. But time isn't really on lbuton's side. Tan became Intel's new CEO on March 18 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. We 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. On the Apple silicon chips, like on Nvidia stuff. Like, they really. 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 doesn't need to be an H100, 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.

Daytona SP3 with an H100. Pretty hard.

Pretty hard. I mean, you're saying that, but I actually would love a car that was able to inference whisper and like, you know, chatgpt or GROK or deepseek 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 chat bot 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, like, and Sam was saying, like, maybe Tesla and XAI and X all kind of combined. And you could imagine that, like, 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.

Yeah.

You could be using. You could be scrolling the timeline.

Exactly.

I didn't know this, but my buddy Ben Ben Taft and I 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.

Yep.

And it used to be that you could hack it by like putting weights on it so you can 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. 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 Hotz'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 like 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 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 safety mechanism.

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. That's right, because the chauffeur will keep the hands on if the helicopters. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. In other words, the same things intel intel last CEO was trying to accomplish. Tan reiterated those points in a speech on Monday kicking off the of the company's Intel Vision conference. Beyond a few aspirations including better a 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 did. It doesn't have is more of the same. Tan's predecessor, Pat Gelsinger, absolute dog, 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 tsmc. And yeah, it's hard to do two things at once. They're trying to be a master 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. 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 gong. Moment of silence Anyway, this moment of.

Silence is brought to you by Ramp. Save time and money.

They need to be on ramp for sure. One change that Town hinted at is more wax at Intel's cost structure. The company reduced its workforce by 30, 13% last year, but still employs far more people than any other company in the industry.

Anakin Meme.

Yep.

Where you were the best. You're a chip company. You must have done great over the last five years. It's like, you must have done great, right? It's 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 stint at intel out of a technical school, called him somewhat arrogant and noted, he'll fit right in. You'll love it. But Intel's been in trouble. Look at this graph of people power. Annual revenue Annual revenue per employee. Nvidia 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 TI84, Texas instruments is one of the best corporate.

It's a great company. Also, the founder of tsmc, 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're like, yeah, it's great. And Texas Instruments manufacture calculators, but they also manufacture like weapon systems and stuff. 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 to chips in the 1980s. Back then, Japanese producers were making memory more cheaply, rendering it unprofitable for Intel. So intel took up the then nascent market for personal computer processors, effectively an entire entire pivot for the business. Andy Grove famously said only the paranoid survive. And he was very aggressive about.

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, oh, no, that's mine. That's my banger.

One of Frank Slootman's boys. Like Frank, you guys gotta amp it up.

You gotta amp it up. You know what?

I do. Yeah, I'm gonna write a book about that.

Yeah. Today, some analysts suggest intel should split off its manufacturing operations from its chip design and marketing functions. Functions following a long established industry trend of the the fabless designer or the pure play fab TSMC or Nvidia strategy. It could gather outside investors in the manufacturing operation to bring in more capital, something the company is already in talks to do. Investors so far have welcomed Tan sending the company 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 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 crypto.

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.

Certainly have some public market corporate athletes.

Some Oscar maybe.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Some Palantir.

Yep.

Of course there's, there's some other good ones. I think Tesla's up there right now. Friend of the show. Thank you.

Public.

So. So in Las Vegas at the intellivision conference, there was one more line that stuck out. We will, 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 tech talent with a clear vision of the future. But I mean, as I was thinking about this, like if I was sitting down with Lip Bhutan, the new CEO of Intel, and I had like one piece of advice 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 cars, counting in 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, on, you know, immediately just like, you know, just basic financial operations and one of the most basic things you can do, 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 what corporate card is he using and is that the source of all of Intel's problems? It's possible.

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 polymarket set up for it. I don't know exactly how we would define that, but we're happy to announce the 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 there, Cosgrove, write some code and pull in their API and we will be iterating on that and hopefully, hopefully making it better and better over the next.

There's currently no market on Intel. 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 Polymath Market does a great job of surfacing interesting markets on their X account and online. When things are shifting, when things are trade are changing. So highly recommend.

It's an alternative way to traditional news to understand the current thing, which is news. You go on 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 Poly market is.

It lets 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 an as like a version of this is like I want to. When a market moves significantly in the poly market, tech markets, when there's a big jump in the. 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.

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. Hermes inside a luxury show jumping competition. If you're a technology journalist and you grow up doing dressage or, 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. For those that don't know, Hermes has always said the horse was the first client.

Yes. The former chair of Hermes, Jean Louis Dumas, used to say the horse is the first client. And that's because horses were for the French luxury brand's 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 paperclipped.

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 loaf logo. Last week, 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€ grand prize. The Saw Hermes is the Saw Hermes is among the most challenging equestrian competitions in the world, with hurdles reaching 1.6 meters or just above 5ft. SA is France, 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. Hermes posted a 13% increase in sales in 2024 compared to 2023. I think it's probably, I think that's probably entirely driven by increase, increased, increased demand from technology journalists. Right. You have to imagine they're powering the luxury market. Downturns, 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's equestrian category, or metier as the brand calls calls it. 110 horses with names such as hello Chandora, Lady Al Capone de Carmel and Cocaine traveled to the to the temporary stables along the Champs Elysees. Their white tint, their white tented enclosures were lift were lit with the same round chandeliers that that decorated the Palais. They could warm up in an enclosure right near the intersection on view for pat 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 du 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 hand bags, Hermes famously makes the Birkin 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 breeches and $460 for a felt sugar box. And that's a box that's $460 you open it, 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 the 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, you don't want to be giving microplastics.

Enjoyable ride. Definitely not 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.

He actually has a, he, he told us just before joining he's got a good horror story. So start there.

Okay, Tell us the horror story.

What's up guys?

Good to see you.

What's up?

Good to see you.

Can you, did you get some more book? Did you get some more books since last time or is this just a different angle?

No, I'm using a different camera.

Looks good.

So 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 like horse trading training facility in Wellington, Florida, which is like the middle of nowhere, kind of by like West Palm. And he goes, this is, 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 Sachs is there and like all these essentially like fabulous, wealthy and successful. Yeah, like, oh, maybe this isn't a waste. Giant waste of time.

If the horse, even if the horse comes a million dollars. You get one deal done at that equestrian event and it pays for itself.

So I, I, I read two books 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 republished an old episode about this guy named Daniel Ludwig who is the richest man in the world in 1980s and no one knew his name. There's no pictures of him anywhere. And he made his money the first way he made his first fortune was hauling oil. And then he had a huge cargo ship, ships and he was getting smoked for contracts for like the big Middle east oil providers because the Onassis and all the, 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's 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 on that he made more money from that ship than all of his super tankers combined.

Wow.

Insane.

Yeah, it's amazing. Jordy. What, what should we talk about? The Ken Griffin episode that's coming up? 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 6, 600. I had three Comet here so far today, so it's like just under, like.

I'm shaking right now.

Lots of caffeine genre to match your.

Energy, but I got it out. So what happens about the inspiration?

Tell us about why you did the episode. Obviously, everyone knows Ken 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 all like, all these, this talent is going to, like, you know, essentially go to the wind. You know, some people 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 the 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, in the talk that I use for the basis of the episode, because there's no biography written on Ken, he goes, and since then, we've made about $30 billion trading commodities. So the main reason I, I, I wanted to, 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 in fine finance, even if they don't know each other, they, they. I 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. And they 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 gonna do an episode of media 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 heading 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, would you talk to Ken if he flies to Aspen tomorrow? And he's like, yeah, do that. So it's just like, there's this reoccurring theme through all these biographies of history entrepreneurs is like, how bad do you want it? And I think reading these stories, like, really stretches, like, what's possible.

Possible.

Did Ken have a jet at that point? Because you got to discount the, like, quick flight a little bit. Already had a pj and it was just more.

He flew Southwest, actually standby.

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, like, a satellite dish so he could get real, up to the minute data. He was the only person at Harvard that had this. This data flow.

So. So. 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. 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 incredibly 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. You 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. Like, and then he would walk through and then just walk the desk. I don't know if this is apocryphal. They just kind of told this story at Citadel. Yeah, but. But he would. He would just walk, and then he would just, like, tap a guy on the shoulder and be like, hey, like, 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 in an order.

Everything he does, Everything he does is like that. That's why it was so fascinating because, like, he just takes the extreme. This idea of, like, buttering up, you know, the gatekeepers inside of a business. Like, oh, yeah, that David Geffen's biography he talks about. He had a huge advantage doing that. Michael Ovitz. I just did two episodes of Michael Bits, same situation. 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.

Did you get into the story of The. The. The IP theft that happened in 20?

No.

So no. So basically, there's no biography of Ken.

Right.

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.

And so it's like, they're like, hey, what do you think 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 him, kind of horrible. But I transcribed that talk at Yale and then went through the transcription just like, I could do the books. And then. Then there's another thing. It's this book right here that I found this because Josh Wolf talked about, I think Ken was an investor in the first fund through Josh, and that. That Ken recommends this book, and I think he makes people or he strongly suggests people at. 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 me, or, you know, there's like, five books you have to read, it gives you an insight to their perspective, personality. Right. And that that book is. The subtitle is, are you playing to play? Are you playing to win? And think about the.

The.

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 overview of his career and then he gives a bunch of, like, principles for you to apply to your career, which I thought 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. I. You can think of a killer as, like, somebody that just, like, figures out how to win and is aggressive. But then I. I still think of someone like Eric Gliman as, like, a killer, but he's also extremely kind, and so it's possible to be, like, 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 Arnault. It's called, like, the Taste of Luxury. It's, like, really hard to find. I think it's, like, $3,000 online, and there's very few biographies of them in English.

Right.

And this one ends when Bernard 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 Bernard 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 ago. But there's a line in that biography I never forgot where they're describing him. And they say only killers survive. So what I mean by killers. I was actually out to dinner in Miami on Saturday, 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, 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. Ken. And so when I brought up them doing Ken, he's like, oh, I have so many 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.

A.

A tiny business inside of Citadel that had something to do with, like, the new technology they were developing. And he essentially. Ken sat and talked to the guy for, like, a few hours about, like, tiny details, like, where. 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 like, in the. The talk, he's just like, you. 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. 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 Invent and Wander, which is the collected writings of Jeff Bezos. So somebody. Walter isa. Collected all of Jeff Bezos's shareholders 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 just don't. And so the same thing. It's like, I don't want to win 2 to 1. There's a line in Hardball. It's like, you need to. Winning 2 to 1. You need to win 9 to 2. You need to stomp them. I just had dinner with. I. I could say this because it's public. Mark Lorre, and he was the one that founded Diapers.com and, you know, 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 comp. He's going to steamroll you.

I had no.

Twice.

That's amazing. I mean, we. Like, the killer mindset with Ken Griffin. Just takes me back to 2012. This trader on the quant team stole code for. They call them Alphas, basically. Code that no matter who I read the story, they're going to generate return, stole a bunch of stuff on like, a hard drive. Citadel finds out, realizes that they're stealing the ip, the code code. The guy freaks out. He dumps the hard drive into the. Into the river in Chicago. And Ken Griffin in the Citadel team get scuba divers to go into the river and find the hard drive just to send it to the FBI to get this guy busted. And I was like, yeah, like, he's not gonna let you just take his. His Alpha. He's just not gonna, like flying in scuba divers. Yeah, flying and scuba diving. Caribbean, basically.

He talk. 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 worked at Citadel and then you want to work, you want to be a doctor, I'm going to write you, 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 here.

How does he think Is like, go ahead on that note and maybe you can just wrap this in 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.

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. Who told me.

Me.

Like, you'll see this over and over again. When people start to. 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 on Jerry Jones and I talked to a bunch of people that live in Texas. A bunch of people, they're 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 I again, these are private companies, so you never know. But what I was told. And you kind of see this because like 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 in history in Palm Beach. And so what I was told is forget the enterprise value of the companies, which is, you know, who knows, 80 billion, whatever the number is, which, right. He's like, he, the guy's been pulling out billions and billions and billions in cash. He 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 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, 7, $10 billion in cash year after year after year?

Like eventually fight for these AMG1 allocation, of course. 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 to high frequency trading and then got the global equities team up and running. And the equities team, when I was there, they were doing like 2000 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 frequency guys who are like, I haven't talked to a human being in months and it doesn't matter. And they're both printing. They're both absolutely printing.

Yeah. What I love too about like, you know him maxing out markets earlier in his career. That's something he, he, he takes Q and A from the Yale students at the end, 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 for this research. Another thing that I absolutely love, that I think is really important too, is he talks about how much of an influence that mentorship and apprenticeship is going to have on. 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 Pritzker was like Sam's older brother and mentor. And so he. 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 is like. Like, Mo, you know, think about every single person covered on 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 built this thing called a risk wall in Citadel. It's 30ft by 10ft. 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 B. Any anything. And so he actually is in the office of Saudi Aramco in Saudi Arabia, and he sees that they have this giant fucking board that's like 30ft long, 10ft 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, b, 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, like, calls from Jordy at, like, 5:30 in the morning California time, just letting me know he's on his way to the. To the studio. I'm getting text Messages from John F.545. 5. 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. 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.

Yeah. But you guys are taking it, you know, to a completely different level now.

It's the chicken singer dream. Our killer mindset is it's not enough for us to be the biggest. Other people need to quit.

Well, we like to say never podcast weekly. Always podcast strongly.

I love that line.

And that's why we train every morning. We'll talk about, like, just frameworks for focus.

You.

You covered a little bit of this, but is there any. Has 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, like, something that's very important. I put in the episode description is like, one of the other reasons. And you, in addition to, like, all these crazy stories. Let me, 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. Finance right now. I do because I watch tpvn, but I'm reading.

You don't need a fantastic liquidity provider like securities on the market. You got to get your size up.

This is one of my favorite books. Okay. I think it's episode 222 of founders. I think I maybe did an episode like in the 80s, like, you know, six years ago. Whatever. It's Ed Thorpe's biography. A man of all markets. And 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 Shannon. He was the first LP in Citadel. So the. The first way I came across Ken Griffin, the way I was exposed to him, was at the end of the. The book. Ed Thorpe's like, he closed down his. 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 Thorp's house, and then Ken Griffin's mentor is with him. And essentially he's like, I always wondered how far Ed Thorpe 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, 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 the point you were making earlier, John. And then he's like, I w up being the first lp. And then you fast forward and look like, you know, I think the book ends. He. Ken's NET Worth's like 6 billion, and they have like 15 billion of SSR management or something. And now it's like, you know, multiples of that. But I think like one of the. Like, I guess the. The way I. I think about this is just like, I. Obsessed with people do things for a long time. And so even Ken says, ken founded Citadel 35 years ago. He's founded Citadel Securities 23 years ago, if I'm not mistaken. Right. And he's 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 maybe give you insight on 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 town on the world world now. You have all these resources, and you just build it slowly. Like, slow over time, over many, many decades.

Yeah. Citadel securities, 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. To a market maker, and it's a. It's a very. The business itself has been through pivots, 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 fundamental size and outside, outside LPs, you put up some amazing numbers. 20% returns, everybody wants in. Is that sustainable when you take it an order of magnitude bigger? Did you get any insight into how Ken Griffin thinks about scale and outside investors? Because at the end of the day, you know, 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 got that renaissance. Like, why? Like, what's. And he'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.

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 OpenAI, where you're like, follow up, God damn it.

Why aren't you following up?

It drives me. It drives me crazy. Like, I'm gonna have. Have to do an interview show now just 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 $100 billion.

I was there when I came in. They. 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. 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. And the. 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 general population. I thought it was an interesting like animation anecdote.

So, 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 unless Masa is listening.

Just. But this goes back to have the opportunity to lose 100 billion.

Exactly.

This goes back to again just being really gifted at a young age because he says that one thing that helped him very well is going to the proverbial scene of action accidents. So when other funds or other. Well, there was a. Yeah, but the Enron had happened in 2001. Yeah, there was a story in 98. So keep in mind, at 98, Ken is 30.

Okay.

2008, when, when you're describing when he loses half of his equity, almost goes out of business, which he talks about in the, the I talk about in the episode. He talks about the talk at 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, broke up. He went, 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 of the business. Like, how the hell did you not lose control before? Then? He's like, most like it shouldn't have happened.

Yeah.

He said. And then this is another thing where the, the, the, the interviewer didn't follow up. He's like. And he's like, so what I learned from that was pivotal for me not to lose control of Citadel and not to go into business. And it's like, okay, well the follow up 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 say, hey, this is. I learned X, Y or Z.

Do you think that ken has another 40ish years in him in the same way that the, the Warrens and the, and the Charlie's.

Yeah.

Or is he building his. Is he building the biggest house, the most expensive house ever? And he's like, you know, gonna 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, by them. And one of the things that I really loved at the beginning of the research was I would watch some interviews and 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.

Us.

And Ken clearly is, like, completely obsessed with this, where he was even saying he, like, I don't know if I was interested in entrepreneurship. I was just interested in solving problems. I am addicted to solving problems. And guess what? Entrepreneurship, investing, like, he says, the public markets, like, that's the biggest, you know, the biggest game in the world with the. The.

The.

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?

No, 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 this takeaway from the book, which I think Ken probably embraced. He says, the culture of discipline. When you combine bl. Can you combine a 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. 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 is on my desk, which I read, and then another one.

What was the.

I can't remember the other. Well, it was like, I went to buy. I think it was, like, published in, like, the 1960s. The problem with these books is you go and read them. Like, even hardball. Hard. 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 and same thing in good to great.

So.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's like, less tying them to specific companies and just saying, hey, does that, like, does that idea make sense? And like, what in your Business and what you're doing, even if you only use idea temporary, temporarily. But the, the, the, I think one of the main themes, if you're studying like, think about, it's like I've been studying history of entrepreneurship. If you focus such a focus on like the market economy, maybe like 202 last 200, 250 years, mostly taking place in America at this time. There is one principle that reoccurs over and over again. And I, it popped in 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 could be, gives you an advantage over 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, their edge was in many cases, like they invested in better technology at a faster rate than their competitors. Like, you know, nobody thinks of Walmart as a 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, Richest man in America, published the year or two before Sam wrote his own autobiography. And there's a story in the book where in like the 1970s, Sam is in his 60s and these guys come to him and I think it's 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 them 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, I talked to the guy, I talked to one of the guys that, that owns part of Citadel Securities. I can't say who, but that business is a monster from what I hear.

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, he's been married twice to divorced twice. I'm sure he's very intense dude. He's clearly focused on, you know, winning at all costs.

Matrimony.

So brutal.

High frequency trader. High frequency matrimony.

It has nothing. It's not just investors. It's entrepreneurs. I remember, I think the best episode I've ever done is on actually on James Cameron, which is hilarious. And I start that episode where I'm reading from this like, 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 do you think that person is? Like, easy to deal with, they're flexible, they get along easily with other people. I think mo in, 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, like your personality types. I think you, you're a little bit more guarded. Like you, 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 Thorp is one of the few people, you know, I've, I've covered almost 400 of history's gayest entrepreneur. And it's just like in many cases they're cautionary tales. They destroy their health, their, their marriages, their, you know, in many cases bad parents. They, 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, a lot of that is internal. And so I always look for positive examples. Him being one soul prices is another one where it's just like I don't, I want to learn from what they did where Ed Thorp took care of his health. If you look, 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, a fit, 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 ever spend, spend. But then once he passed that threshold, he stopped trading more time for more money. So he like 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. 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. His book, I say. I say in the Ken Griffin episode, like, his book reads like a thrill 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. A large overlap, unfortunately, between, like, you.

Know, we're gonna go read that book because my wife, who's watching live with the kids, just texted me, yikes, yikes. I love you, Sarah. And we'll. We'll.

So I. I just. I just had this.

Yeah, we have another guest, so we gotta get you out of here.

Yeah, I just had.

I just.

I just had this example last week, because in the mo. In the Ovitz episode, he talks about, if I could do things over again, I. I should have worked 10% less, and I wouldn't have changed my professional success at all. 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, o said, you should work 10% less. Like, you're seeing us against 20.

Well, thanks for stopping by. This is fantastic. As, of course. Great. I love you guys.

Love you, David.

We'll talk to you soon.

Talk soon.

Bye.

Great.

We are over.

Time to get into that episode.

Yeah, me too.

That'll be great. Let's get Samir 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's looking great.

Don't expect nothing less.

This is a professional.

You've got the best setup of any. We've had 70 guests in a month.

And knocking them all out of the park. Can we start high praise?

Thank you.

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 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, who, you know, we consider to be like the auteur 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 auteur of that, this, 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 like?

Oh 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 we. It was, 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. I was talking about creators on Facebook and it felt like, you know, we only have a handful 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 face, Actual Facebook legacy Facebook?

So does he just post the full YouTube video there or 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 is like you actually have to dub content for other cultures to understand it.

Sure, sure.

And the majority of the users are not US 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. 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, 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. A 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. 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? It sounded amazing. Everyone's review was unanimously. It's incredible.

Put it in the context of 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 Kirk turn 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, most recently Evan Spiegel and Mark Zuckerberg, and, you know, both are very focused on AR as. As the future of how will will 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. Where, like, if you've ever worn the Ray Ban metas, I think the Ray Ban 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 Ray Ban metas, 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 neural wristband. And before we did the demo, you start to they ask you to do some movements like click your finger like this. Each finger is a different function and your brain waves and your neural waves are fed into this computer and basically it learns what it looks like when you go like this or go 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 is like how intuitive it is.

Love it.

If it can be in the form factor of, of the Ray Ban metas or, you know, something that looks cool. I think we're too aware of our own image as humans to walk around wearing Apple Vision Pros.

Yeah, I mean, 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 Poly Market and trying to figure out, you know, what's going on. It doesn't seem like Mr. Beast is in the 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, in, in the election. I think it's a way that like politics is, is getting communicated. I think it's 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, we started with a dry account. We got 300k views on like the first video we posted. Yeah, 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 going to sell to us company? I have no idea. Like I saw that Mark Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz is Putting their name in the hat. I know the. What Alexis Ohanian is doing. And Project Liberty is super interesting in terms of trying to like reshape what it looks and feels like. But you know, there's a. Right now it is. 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 Masseri, when we sat with Evan Spiegel, obviously, like the, maybe the ideal scenario, even the conversation with Zuck is like those ad dollars shift to US companies versus TikTok. But like, I don't know, we haven't, we haven't really seen or we don't really have precedent for it in the US 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? Well, you want to follow up on that? What do you got?

We could start there. I wanted to get your take on AI and creators. Buddy of mine, Trevor, had broad that was like super, super early and I had of its time. Reverend McFederies doing Lil Michaela was like 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 ecom 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 at a wide scale or it's certainly not easy to do. Are you seeing instances yet of. 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 little Michaela is like considered vtuber, right? And I think vtubers are picking up like the. At the end of last year, the most subscribed subscribed to Twitch Streamer was Iron Mouse, which is a vtuber. So virtual creators, like animated creators, I think will continue to, to pick up steam. Like we've always been interested in animated content. Like what happened with GPTs, you know, image model. Immediately everyone's like turning themselves into anime. Like we're, 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 probably the most, I was going to say probably most compelling fully AI generated content is the podcasts that have been created through Notebook lm.

Yeah, Notebook lm.

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, for it to happen through like true human.

Yeah.

I mean, Loma Kayla proves otherwise. But I think audio, it could happen because what Notebook LM 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 NotebookLM 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, of views. Like, I want to, I want my videos to go viral. I think now people are realizing that virality is sometimes like a curse. A curse or doesn't even necessarily help with like building a sort of sustainable business business, because there's some creators that can get 10,000 views a 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, 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 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. 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 fan of.

Whoa.

And that is one of the Most. That's from YouTube, is 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. Those small groups of people. I think the. 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. These are my people. This is people. Like, yeah, yeah, that's exciting to me. And I think as the Internet gets more and more fragmented, that will continue.

Continue to happen.

Yeah, well, that's. Next time. We gotta have you back next time.

We'll block the full 30 minutes. I mean, really, we're sending our best for the entire Palisades rebuilding effort.

Thanks, man.

I. 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, we. Yeah, we'd love to be supportive of that.

Appreciate it. I love what you guys are doing. I am super cool. It's. It's unique. So, yeah, keep. Keep it going.

Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

Thanks for coming on.

Thanks. Bye. That's great. Uh, 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 DeMuro strategy versus what Mr. Beast 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 OpenAI any day now. Let's see. Will, how are you doing?

How are you guys doing?

Yeah, we're doing great. 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. Come on.

Inventor. The transformer.

Yeah, yeah, the Transformer. 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 OpenAI like two years ago, have like a startup background, but worked on like videogen for a while. Worked on Sora for about a year. And then I work on like RL post training, chatgpt stuff.

So, so cool. How did you process the Studio Ghibli moment? Was that expected? And I really want to know, did you. How internally did you think that that images and ChatGPT was going to go viral and you didn't know what the prompt would be? Or were you like, everyone's going to Ghibli?

Yeah, I want to know. I want to know where Ghibli's flying around for 48 hours ahead of ahead in Slack.

Give us some C 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 Dall E3 generated, like image fronts or whatever that is. Right. And I think it's just clear to me that like, pretty much every business in the world very soon is just going to use this to like, you know, make logos. And, you know, we can do transparency, we can do controllability. I think. I think like, my favorite eval is the Fiverr eval. Or just go on Fiverr 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, enough of the human in there. It didn't just become a completely generic stick figure, but it also wasn't frontrunner.

It was a magical experience. You needed. No, you needed to do nothing to prompt it. Just you could. I love that you could misspell Ghibli and still get a perfect output.

It's great.

And then the output was just magical. I would, you know, generate the same image with four different styles of art and the Ghibli one every single time.

Felt it just felt like the undead image. Yeah. What was your, your take on it?

No, yeah, that sounds about right to me. I don't think I predicted Ghibli specifically. Last time for the Dall E3 launch, they made a bunch of pepes 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 artstation informed. It felt very sci fi dystopia. Like it was really good at those, but people weren't really doing. I mean there were certain anime styles, but this one was just, was just everywhere.

What else can you talk about? Like, to me, to me, the most, like the, the thing that's most exciting for me is like the Ghibli of everything, right. It's like on a long enough time horizon, like everything is Ghibli, right? That'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 4 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, 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, and then I think about like we're Moving towards like everything being Ghibli. It's like everything today feels like a distraction. Is that sort of like how you guys, like, as a team stay focused within OpenAI, 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 now. That's sort of a ramble. But. But I'm curious how you think about sort of.

Yeah, I think OpenAI is 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 and like, what's actually the next 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 ImageGen team thinks about what the next steps are here. I think their view is mostly about making this truly useful. Can we go from diffusion's a fun toy to this is a truly useful tool in the world and clearly it's already having that impact.

You said your background's in startups. Can you talk a little bit about just being a consumer tech company now and the focus on product. Product and some of the product decisions like images and chatgpt? It's not a separate app like Sora. 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 tests running? Is this secretly running in India six months before we get it here? Like, how do you inform product decisions?

Yes, totally. I mean, I think it's hard to pre launch models because they create so much noise, but we don't really test them different. But I guess like OpenAI has moved from being a research company 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 they ever had in the past. I think people are very motivated around, like, how do you actually make these things 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 ChatGPT 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, to get product market fit and get people to kind of 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 gen and people are just excited 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 ChatGPT was like I could go to my camera roll, click, share, share it into ChatGPT, type Studio Ghibli style and boom, it gets it and it takes the, the, it takes the, 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 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 constant 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 most biggest things we're thinking about right now which is like when you open ChatGPT, get dropped in a text box and like the person has no, 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 image gen, 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 like, hey, 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. It's proactive. 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 slavery. 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. It was the first day that the timeline was free of slop.

No, but. But it. 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.

Yeah.

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 word.

You're not going to be an image model that's constantly producing slop that is getting funding going forward.

Yeah.

You have like, a new bar is.

Depends what you mean by slop. I feel like I went to the SF MoMA recently and, like, half of it felt like slop. And I think. 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 search through the periphery. Like, you're kind of, like, constantly looking, you know, kind of inventing or 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. I think maybe the problem is that humans are slop enough 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 aced my studio Ghibli animation course. Yeah, yeah.

And AP Bio.

And AP Bio.

Yeah.

Which I didn't.

I'm curious, like, you know, how. How do you think universities, like, and just curriculum, the future of 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 percentile students are just going to get a lot. They're going to fall behind and I think the top percentile students are just going to get like, extremely overpowered. I think if I had this tool as a kid, I would just be vastly smarter than I am now. Even now, today I just talk to ChatGPT every day. I was asking it random concepts, learning random things. I'm went super deep down a bio rabbit hole yesterday and rare supplements I could take from the Internet. I don't know. I think it's an incredible tool for learning. But yeah, I think it's kind of bimodal. I think a lot of people are going to get a lot dumber. I think a lot of people are going to get smarter. I don't know what to do about that.

But yeah, fine tuned on gorn.

How's your, 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 going to.

Would you recommend it to 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 there's risk. And then you're like, oh, now I don't care if people are mad at me or something.

And so we're even just seeing the numbers and being like, oh, like this one didn't do as well as the red. Like, it's no, you know, you know.

You know from the first 60 impressions, if it's a banger.

Yeah.

And then you have this desire. I had a. I had a post last night that like, I, like John and I both 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 tall. Tam. But. But anyways. You got anything else, John? No, no, no. Congrats. It was fun. We, you know, for the record, we didn't plan this round, the fundraising news. We just wanted to chat. So congrats to you and the whole team on a cool milestone and. Job's not finished.

Job's not finished. Get back to work, please.

Make the model better, you know, make it better. This Was this was just you talking to customers?

Yeah, yeah, this is customer.

We enjoyed it anyway.

Okay, sounds good. See you guys.

Cheers. See ya.

Talk to you soon. Yeah, little, 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. We'll see.

Fingers crossed. Double, double message. We got Aiden coming in, guest coming in.

How are you guys? Good to see you both.

We're great. How are you?

Good, good, good to be on. I love this show.

Are you, 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, Joe.

Yeah. You're over it.

Yeah, yeah.

That'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.

That's awesome.

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's 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, I, I ran out of images. Can you make one for me? Clearly you're making a, a lot of these. It was like Good Samaritan. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Uh, but I Mean, how. 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. You know, like, we had the tool internally. You know, like, I played around with him like, ah, this is cool. Didn't quite like, you know, feel in the way that I think that, like, I felt it immediately after launching.

Right.

I do think our leadership predicted this pretty well. I think, like, Sam and others had, like, you know, well calibrated intuitions for this.

Yeah.

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. And is that just a function of your development in, like, the product cycle or is that. Is there some delay, 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, right? Like 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 deep seat 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 the most powerful models models, and they saw that discontinuity, right. They're like, I've been using like, you know, 40 from, like, you know, earlier this year. I use this new reasoning model. Like, holy, 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, outsiders.

Right?

Yeah.

Or to people that aren't as new to the product. But like, you know, 40 image gen is like a great example of that.

Right.

Like, we went from like, dall e to this and it was like this massive jump. And I think that, like, that jump does add to the viralities you said.

Totally.

That makes sense. How do you guys. You know, I feel like a long, you know, even people that use and love OpenAI's 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 on a. On a long enough time horizon, you just sort of ask it, you know, to do things and it just sort of selects, selects like 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. Know the names. Yeah.

At this point, like, OpenAI is so bad at naming that I, you know, I think we've like, dug our own grave here.

Right.

Like, internally things are even worse.

Right.

We're like, like, the hell does this mean? Like, Sam tweeted something this morning where it's like, you know, run, redo. Like this time for real?

Yeah, yeah. Restart, final, final two. Restart. For real?

Yeah. I mean, I was, I was laughing at like, is it 4D chess? But at the same time, like, you could imagine that you gave every model like strawberry ice cream and like you give them cute names and then it makes even less sense. Like, at least I know, like, O3 is a higher number than 01. So, like, it's probably better. Yeah, like, 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 upgrade to Strawberry. Like, I have no idea. Right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it could be worse.

But yeah, I do think that, you know, Sam tweeted this a month ago, but we do plan to start Unicorn define, like, you know, our model selection. Right.

Yeah.

So I think like, you know, soon we will have like a much simpler, easier to grasp thing. And even for me, like, you know, I'm with one, like testing these models all day, designing them and such, it's still, it's like unclear.

Your day to day. Like, what do you actually do Yeah.

I work on model design here 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. And I also just work on general capabilities so making the model smarter in many domains, not just 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 soap, toothpaste, lunch, house plants is just better now sure, waiting five minutes for paper towel recommendations is weird, but in retrospect this tape makes and you, and you specifically call that Amazon and Amazon choice here. Because I've wanted for a very long time to just have an Amazon where every I 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, chatgpt 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, Ben Franklin's paper Towel.

But that's been, but that's been, you know, 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 where as our tools for selecting like products like become like super, super smart, right? Like way smarter than me. Like they're going to be so much better than I or any other human I've 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 or are going to float to the surface way easier and then kind of all the shit, like the drop shipping, like random guy doing a thing out of his basement, they got the Amazon Choice label that's just all gonna fall away like dead leaves falling off a tree. I'm excited for that because it's just gonna make the market better.

Right. Can you talk about other maybe underrated uses of OpenAI models? Obviously everyone knows you can giblify your dog. Everyone knows that you can ask it to explain like AP bio questions. But that use case is pretty interesting. What else, where else are you seeing usefulness in the models?

Yeah, one thing I'm on a kick with this recently that I'm really, really trying to get better at is just remembering to use these tools for learning. I think that there are a lot of things where I'm like, okay, I do this every day. I want to do it better. Here's a way for me to use deep research, et cetera. But I think the opposite is kind of interesting too. It's like when I don't use these tools or where I did not have something previously in my life that would have demanded use. And I think an example of this is, 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 should be using this all the hell. Like, 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 gotta like, you know, it's just like brushing your teeth or something, right?

Yep, totally.

The remembering these systems is like such an important thing to me.

Yeah.

Yeah. If you're very intentional about using them, they can make you smarter. If you're unintentional about them and you're just like, last second, second, like I gotta send this email. Like, you know, just do it for me. Like maybe that's, you know, making you.

I mean, even silly stuff. I, I was, I was like, yes, I actually I 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 all online. Like stuff that I would Normally, like have to puzzle together from like Wiki and YouTube videos. I'm like, I just want it all in one place to understand this stuff. And it's like these stupid things that you would, would never think to, you know, actually get a full report on available at your fingertips. It's amazing.

As a kid, I remember like all those like, you know, like kind of fan fiction wikis or whatever that I like dive through and they're like terrible, right? Like ads everywhere. Like, you know, like, 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, respect robots and like, do you have a sort of solution, solution for this?

I say thank you at the end of my prompts.

I love my work.

Yeah.

Always.

I like my way most. Like a dog, right? I'm like, oh, my 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, 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 IC systems get quite complex. We kind of care about their internal state. We want them to be well. And it might be that this is just more economically valuable too, that models that feel like they're in a good spot emotionally or whatever actually just help humanity out more. But I think that this is something that we should get ahead on rather than let it kind of hit us. And I hope that as these systems get incredibly intelligent and as humanity kind of co evolves with, 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, the like People throwing fruit at my Waymo. But I'm, you know, maybe even more disturbed by like watching videos of 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 5, 10 years here as these systems again become incredibly, incredibly intelligent. Way more intelligent than we kind of expect today. You know, it does worry me a bit and I think this is something we should just think about now.

What do you have you. You posted in, in sort of kind of giving high level props to, 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 the capabilities matter a lot more. Do you think that developers are not taking full advantage of OpenAI 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 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 fill like some area that was kind of like, you know, left uncovered. I also, you know, before I joined OpenAI, I was like a founder and I was working, you know, a lot with these APIs and such and there really was this like sentiment I think in the community where people were like so scared of the wrapper company label that they really did leave like, you know, kind of low hanging frame, like unpicked. Right? They're like so scared of like, you know, like, not even of like OpenAI or anthropic steamrolling them, but more of just like people being like, ah, that's just like wrapping a language model. Like that's you're adding no value. Like, no, like the right rapper is a ton of value, you know.

I completely agree. Yeah, I thought the whole rapper meme was like a VC psyop basically, because there are plenty of like fantastic businesses that maybe wouldn't hit hyperscale. And so the VCs were like, don't even bother we. But they could build like really cool businesses, especially for like these young kids who are like in high school and like could have a business that's making a hundred thousand dollars. Like that's life changing and sets you up for so many different opportunities. So much experience with product development. I thought the rapper 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 standup comedians. And it's not, 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 bombing intentionally. And that's funny. But I'm still the one that's making it funny.

Like the punchline gives crickets, right?

Like, yeah.

Oh yeah.

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, bear case for humanity is we're all just like, you know, generating like perfect funny jokes over and over and over, just laughing.

That's when we all wirehead for sure.

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, GPT 4.5 was like a really interesting moment for humor for me.

Right.

Where like, 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 was funny sometimes. Like the green texts were like great, you know what I mean? Like, you know, like it's long form jokes. Like maybe you left a little bit of desire, you know, to your point, like sometimes it would construct something that looks a lot like a joke and we get to the punchline and I would just like 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, that's true 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, I mean, like, this is 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 imagen moment where.

People like do this.

It just brings joy into the world. They're having a lot more fun. Like, yeah, yeah, I want that.

Right.

It might solve your, 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 said, know the one that got away or it's like an old, an old friend that you just like, you know, 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, ah, 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 what I mean? Like, that was pretty good.

Yeah, but not even in just humor, but generally.

Yeah, yeah.

You're so close, you know, working, and I could just imagine, 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 Sydney. It's just like, oh, that was the most amazing. Sydney was pretty great because Sydney was like this sassy online character from like, clearly from like Tumblr. Some like, you know, convexity that it fell into. I don't know. But who's your Sydney?

My Sydney is easy. Answer for me is it was Claude 3 Opus that was such a great model and an OpenAI model too. Yelled at for saying that, but a ton of life to it. I think I coined this phrase big model smell. When it came out, I was like, this model. If you gave me a blind test between this model and other models that score as well in it at academic benchmarks, I'm pretty certain that much better than chance. I Could pick up Claude. Three opus. It just has soul to it. It's a bit hard to see these things when you do regular day to day prompts. I'm just asking it for a recipe or something. 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 model capabilities and kind of like character when you push them to extremes, right. When you deploy them into agents that are doing crazy things, when you give them tons of context, when you have them tackle really out of distribution hard problems, then you start to see the creativity emerge. And this is a really fun thing and I think that it's a good lesson for playing with models. It's a good lesson also for designing benchmarks and if I evaluating the models too.

Right.

But yeah, three Opus is pretty great and I think my daily driver right now outside OpenAI is GPT 4.5. It's just such a fun model, right. I do feel closer to it than I do for previous models. It feels like it is more live, if that makes sense.

And are you using GPT 4.5 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. 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 them out. 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? Yeah. 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 that I talk to in SF who are like really, really plugged into like, like, you know, the model system.

Right.

And you can like kind of tell like yeah, these guys are like, they got this sorted out, like they've been used. I don't know who their therapist is. It must be like you know, 4.5 or 3.5 sonnet or somebody. Right? But like, you know, yeah, like they seem stable.

I wonder if in a few months you'll be like at a party and you'll be like, oh like that guy's clearly like a Sonic guy. Like that's a 4.5 guy over there. Like 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 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 you sort of like understand. You 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, 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, right? Like, maybe I should be like in a dark room, like just talking to models and like, you know, like feeling it out.

But maybe we're models. Maybe we're, maybe the OpenAI team is generating us to test on you.

Simulation goes deep, man. Like I was going to tell you, but, you know, you found out too quick. I, I think, you know, like when I joined OpenAI, 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? 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 light years, right? Like as it like kind of travels models, different destinations. And in some sense, if I shoot this arrow from Earth without gravity or something and I move my hand to the left a bit, it's half the universe away. That's crazy. And I kind of believe in the same thing as we push these models to crazy limits. That little, little differences in the initial conditions. Kind of like of AGI being born or of the politics of the time or of the Capital distribution or whatever I think can compound to incredible differences in the limit. And I think that while it seems that these systems will be incredibly powerful and very robust to maybe human will 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 doomerism these days? It feels like the conversation kind of moved past.

Feels like the doomers low key fell off.

Where are they? I don't see like less wrong with 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 paperclips 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 this like great quote I forgot like that name of the like, you know, NASCAR driver. I'm gonna butcher it. Mario. Mario something. Right. But like, you know, 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, to go as fast as possible, right? Like to, you know, like 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, the expected impact also increases. I think OpenAI is incredibly good at managing this. I think that our leadership have done it for a while. They will continue to get better at it too. And I think it's kind of a cool thing to build systems that have unexpected behaviors and can do things that maybe we weren't aware of originally. And it's an important science to figure this out before release and to build things that get safer.

Yeah, no, I completely agree.

Last question for you. Do you see us having a Ghibli style moment around agents this year? Not necessarily at OpenAI, but just potentially broadly because we've talked about this on the show a bunch, but people have just been promising for decades now you're going to be able to talk to the computer and it'll book you the flight and the hotel and make your restaurant reservations. And we haven't had that magic experience.

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 or whatever.

Right.

There's some sense too where, like, you know, Ghibli's awesome because it takes three seconds to look at, like, an image, right? And be like, oh, wow, like, that's beautiful. Like that, like, made like, you know, your, like, engagement photo.

Like, way cooler, right?

Like, it's like, really quick. Then I do think that that some of the most important agents, some of the most important things that we'll build over the next few years might not have results that you can look at in three seconds. Be like, wow, great job model. And in fact, I actually think that as the economic potential and power of these systems increases, maybe it actually becomes slightly harder than the limit to tell the difference between capable systems and very, very capable systems. Just as models get better, it might be a bit harder to tell the difference between. Between a good model and a brilliant model. Right. The cool thing is, though, is that it's a nines, a reliability scaling problem that as you kind of push these nines out and as you make them more reliable in many more contexts, at some point they are just doing a sizable chunk of economic labor.

Right.

So do I expect a Ghibli moment? I'm unsure. But I do expect these things to just provide a lot, a lot of economic value, if that makes sense.

Makes a lot of sense.

Beautiful.

Well, thanks for joining conversation. This is great. We got to have you back soon.

Awesome.

Fantastic.

Yeah, you're welcome anytime. You're welcome anytime.

Great conversation.

Good to see you guys.

Congrats on the milestone and keep it up.

Yeah, thanks.

Likewise.

Guys, talk to you.

Boom, size gong.

Bye.

Fantastic.

Yeah, yeah. Great conversations. The open AI team. Great guys and fun that they can talk as freely as they can given their role. You know, obviously it's very important and valuable company.

Yeah, it's actually, if you think about it, most companies just, period, would not.

Allow posting or any of that stuff.

Well, posting is one, but joining a live stream, it's a live show. How you stakes, that's, you know, high stakes, but it's fun. It's great, but it's fun. And I thought they had, you know, fantastic answers. Well, let's be very optimistic.

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Yeah, you want to get ahead of this early. I think a lot of founders, both in EE comm 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 when we have some breaking news that was sent to us about the Newsmax I ipo, have you followed this story? Newsmax, Newsmax.

I'm Newsmaxing.

So Newsmax. So newsmax is up 110% today. It IPO'd yesterday. It's up 1900 percent 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 visions 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 Truth 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, I saw some funny jokes about how core Weave 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, by pricing the ipo. So much lower price that it's floated at now would have in theory sold shares and put a lot more money on the balance sheet at a lot lower.

So it's being valued beyond $30 billion right now.

Totally reasonable. 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 MO on the most interesting, complex and asymmetric special situations in tech. You'll be a good fit if you want trade annual letters like Pokemon. Two are high paced and biased to action. Three are unapologetically money motivated. Four have created and sold a product. Ideological ideology. Ideological 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 hire. MOIC working VC but long for hire. ROIC went through YC but yearn to invest. Can get a meeting with anyone on earth. Made money online in high school. Value heterodoxy over consensus. Value making money over being right. Steve Schwarzman defines eights as those who can follow marching orders. Nines as those who can execute and strategize, and tens as those whose 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. We will be all encompassing and demanding, but autonomous and yours to show shape. You'll invest and transact with the best operators and financiers in the world and produce absolute dogs at an exceptionally high standard. So go hit up Jeremy and switch your business to ramp.com and. And go hit up Jeremy and let him know that the technology brother sent you.

The TVPN sent you this unjustly. A dream job. And working for Jeremy will change your life.

Yeah, he used to be tiny, but now he has big aspirations.

That's true.

He works for tiny.

He worked for Tiny Size Lord. Yeah, but some of the smartest people in the world call Jeremy to get advice before they make important decisions.

That's true.

And so being able to work for him is like. Like many people have said it'd be like getting 2000 MBAs at once.

Yeah. So it's like buying shares in core weave 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 Gifon obviously does special situations. If the. If your company raises too much money from VCs, you build a decent business, but you're just underwater on the pref stack. He will come in and unstick your business. And it's somewhat adjacent to kind of injury lawyers if you have a cap table accident. So we 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 Ad Quick.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 simply enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

So anyway, 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 giblification, we've only seen the very beginning of it and it is interesting. We talked to Samir about the vtuber 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 there's gonna be people that watch the whole show. Ghibli mode.

Ghibli mode. Ghibli filter in the sidebar.

Yeah, yeah, just like a. 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.

But nobody's pumping.

Well, they're probably over on threads. 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. Oh, yeah.

April 1st. So apparently back in the day they launched and nobody actually believed them because, like, launching a product on April 1 is not a good idea. Huberman launched a funny product this morning.

Contact lenses, blue light block. I fell for one. I fell for one. April Fool's joke today. Very sad. I fell 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 all. He was just teeing himself up for a joke that he wanted to be a serial killer. Serial entrepreneur with a moat.

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 company 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 coinciding with the launch. I don't. I think the strategy of launching products in general on April 1, 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. I think potentially, you know, you just got to keep launching. Right. So like, Brett should just keep launching over and over. Notion 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, 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 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 a better spam filter.

Yeah, it's crazy that Gmail values a newsletter in the same way as like, like, you know, some critically important.

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 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.

How'd you sleep last night?

I slept.

You went to bed it. I like that. That's good. That's drama. That's drama.

Hopefully that's not copyrighted, so I'm gonna.

No, no, no, no, no. Vivaldi's 300 years old. We're good.

We're good.

How did you sleep? Tell me.

Me, Jordy 88. Ooh. How do you sleep, John?

I slept 75 nights. To fuel your best days, turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience, folks, go to 8sleep.com use code TVP ED.

Use code TPPN get 350 off. I'm very excited we're going to be having Matteo.

Yeah.

Co founder of eight Sleep on the show soon.

Want to break it down?

We're going to make him our favorite official sleep coach.

Yeah.

Not just a sleep.

You know, the eight sleep's so helpful, but at this point, it's doing. It's. It's doing everything it possibly can. And clearly I need to do more. Yeah, like, like the reason I'm not getting one hundreds. It's not on eight Sleep anymore. Autopilot has optimized so much and it's pushing a boulder up.

It's pushing you harder.

It's pushing me harder. I want to be a consistent one hundreds and I need to know the stack that I need to get there. Probably taking less stimulants all day.

Waking up between four and five daily means that I basically am getting into bed when it's light out now after the time change. And it just feels so silly. It is like to be getting into bed and you're like, oh, I guess I'm five years old now. But yeah, whatever it takes. Anything for the show.

Yep. Anything for the show. Should we close out with this, this Dwarkesh Patel post? I thought this was interesting. It's a long one, but I thought. I thought it'd be good to read through. He says that feeling when Gwern casually articulates a more insightful framework for thinking about your life's work than you've ever sketched out yourself. Guern writes:6 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 boat? 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, 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 the asking people about the current thing essentially because there's a lot of people that do. They pass their timeless wisdom 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 tell us a 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 question, usually by interviewing new people. Beta represents doing standard interview topics, slash people, but more, but much more so harder, faster, better, and getting new stuff that way. That's us. Lex Friedman podcasts are 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 2 to 4 hours of content and find nothing even worth excerpting for my notes. Friedman notoriously does no research and ask softball questions to get 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 Fries in the 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 Door Cash 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 door. 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 I want to hear anywhere near as deep as Sarah thinks about Unitree Robotics?

Yeah, break it down for us.

Break it down.

What's your however, if if another successful podcaster has her on, they will probably not discover pain is their most 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 exposed exhausted yet, and let the original patch slowly recover. So a great guess for Dwarkesh's blog would be, say, Hans Moravec or Paul J. Warbas. 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 even also was also a good guest 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 guess would be Tony Blair. He can surely say many interesting things about the current geopolitical context in his work since being pm, but he is super experienced career politician who has survived countless question times and may eat you for breakfast and exploit you for for ulterior purposes rather than vice versa? Similarly, Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella 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? A bad 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 min minutes prepping, so that we just have them on for 15 minutes and try and get some.

We do it live.

Throw them off.

No, I mean, I.

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, etc. It's much more interesting to kind of get their opinion on the market broadly. Um, but this is great. In other news, Circle has officially filed for an ipo.

Oh, that was on the. That was on the Polymarket ticker.

Yeah. So this was cool. So I actually have the polymarket pulled up right now.

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% and then now it's sitting almost at 100. And yeah, I'm excited to 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 at Circle.

And that is a good place to close out the show. Remember, if you want to get a bottle of Dom Perignon, leave us five.

Stars on Apple Podcasts.

Be creative.

You can put an app creative.

Put whatever you want, send it to.

Us, tweet it at us, and we will send you this delicious bottle of dump.

We are going to make a decision by the end of day tomorrow and.

We will also send you the Zebiotics to go with it.

There you go.

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 got three more days shows ahead of us.

Big shows.

Thanks for watching.

Thank you, folks. Have a great day.

Bye.