Apple vs OpenAI, Paramount Threatens to Leave CA, Mark Gurman Joins | Alexis Ohanian, Morgan Housel, Nico Christie & Michael Jarman

You're watching TVPN. Today's Monday, July 13th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Room, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

I like the bell, Ben.

That's a good one. Let me tell you about Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We are talking about using Ramp. Ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp. The Ramp song. Still going strong. Ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp. Excellent edit. We said ramp so many times in the first couple of episodes of the show. We turned it into a song. It's on the soundboard now. Well, huge news over the weekend dropped. Mark Gurman dropped a massive scoop right after we got off on Friday night, Friday afternoon. Mark Gurman broke the news that Apple is suing OpenAI. Apple and OpenAI are going to war. The Wall Street Journal called it thermonuclear, echoed past attacks, calling back to the Jobs era. We'll get to that. But first, the accusations. Apple is suing OpenAI, accusing it of stealing Apple's trade secrets. Apple Inc. sued OpenAI for trade secret theft, accusing the artificial intelligence startup and its hardware chief of engaging in a coordinated campaign to steal information about upcoming products. The iPhone maker said in a suit Friday that OpenAI encouraged Apple employees to share information, components, drawings, and other materials related to upcoming products. So like the robot? What are the upcoming products from Apple right now? Part of the— part of efforts by the AI company— the lamp.

The lamp.

Yeah.

The lamp.

The Cobra lamp.

The AI company developed its own suite of devices. I feel like rumors around the devices have gone back and forth. Is it a phone? Is it headphones? Is it something else? A pin? We're having Mark Gurman on the show today to break it down for us. He's coming on at 12:45.

The funny thing is, I bet Gurman knows more about OpenAI's devices than we do because we specifically— that's why we're having a lot— didn't want to be read in on anything device related because we knew there was going to be so much speculation. Then we just said like, yeah, we're going to be in the dark. We'll find out. We'll find out like from the timeline.

So at the center of the lawsuit is a former Apple employee named Chang Liu who left for OpenAI and allegedly kept his Apple laptop for weeks after he left the company, downloaded proprietary Apple files, and encouraged other Apple employees to do the same. Yeah, if that happened, that's a big no-no when you leave a you gotta leave your device on the day you leave usually. I mean, I was remembering back to, I mean, we had a very graceful transition to this business from Founders Fund, but you know, I had like emails from in Founders Fund from like people that went to Hereticon, people that'd be good guests. And I was like, I'm not even gonna export that. I'm just gonna like leave that and I'll reestablish those connections to people, cold email them, find their information independently. Just don't take any files, leave them with the other office. Standard practice. Yeah, it is standard practice. Practice, you know, some people can make mistakes. Also, these are just allegations. None of this is confirmed. And this lawsuit will be going on for like months, if not years. We can go through some of the other historical examples that are sort of interesting to sort of set the table on what might play out here. So Apple's filings also spends quite a few words on the fact that OpenAI has poached more than 400 employees from the company in recent years. That's not going to make anyone in Cupertino happy. They hate poaching. There's the famous Steve Jobs Adobe back and forth. Tang Tan left Apple in 2024 to co-found the AI hardware startup Io with Johnny Ive, which OpenAI acquired in 2025 as part of its consumer AI device effort. Tan is now OpenAI's chief hardware officer, and he's leading the consumer device effort there. In his lawsuit, Apple says Tan systemically solicited sensitive information from Apple employees who were interviewing for roles at OpenAI. A lot of perspective on this flying around the timeline, but Ben, Ben Thompson and Ralph Winkler in the Wall Street Journal. Both had interesting angles here.

Winkler.

Wait, they have a Ben Thompson at the Wall Street Journal?

No, no, no. Ben Thompson at Stratechery.

Okay.

And Wolf— I said that wrong. Brandon got it correct in the newsletter. Had interesting angles here. We can read a little bit of what Ralph said in the journal. He says, Apple's OpenAI suit echoes past attacks. Steve Jobs declared thermonuclear war. Which is great if you're trying to fire up your staff and you're going to battle. Even if it's one day.

We're not just going to battle.

Even if it's just for like, will the next device have 12 gigs of RAM or 32? That's boring. Thermonuclear war is exciting. You gotta fire up the staff. The troops. So he declared, Steve Jobs declared thermonuclear war on Google, on Google's Android operating system in 2010, calling it a stolen product. Now his successor is going to battle against Apple's most new, most dangerous rival. In one of his last acts as Apple's chief executive before successor John Ternus takes over, Tim Cook fired a missile at OpenAI in a lawsuit filed Friday. Apple alleged that senior OpenAI executive who once sat atop Apple's own product design team was involved in a months-long campaign to steal Apple trade secrets. OpenAI replied at this point and said, we have no interest in Apple's trade secrets, but Ralph continues, he says, although it isn't clear yet what evidence the company has to back up all of its claims, the suit lands before OpenAI has released a product. And as the technology industry races to build artificial intelligence-powered devices that can move society beyond the smartphone era. And there's a whole debate to be had for, you know, where that goes and the value of devices in a world where the agents are just kind of off working and you can maybe just text them or send them a message on Telegram. The— there's a whole debate over what the— is the future of devices, more devices and different devices, or is it just no devices? But OpenAI has clearly been working on devices, as we know from the I/O acquisition. And the Wall Street Journal says the winner could dominate the future, just as Apple's iPhone ruled the consumer market for the last 20 years. Quote, I am not afraid of Apple. 'But I have tremendous—' got to flip to A6. Let's see. 'Tremendous respect for them,' OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X Saturday.

And he said S-tier company.

Yeah, he said— oh, that didn't make it into the paper. Maybe the Wall Street Journal readers aren't familiar with the proper tier list. They think S is down at the bottom when in fact it is above A. 'Big tech rivals have long tried to supplant Apple, but so far Google, Samsung, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Amazon.com have all failed.' It is crazy. People think Android was successful, but captured like 1/10 of the actual value, because the margins on Android devices are so much lower. But you forget that Jeff Bezos stood on stage and said, "We're launching the Amazon Fire Phone, and we're gonna win." And then Microsoft had the whole Microsoft Phone, and they were really pushing that. And Facebook— Chamath was at Facebook working on the Facebook Phone. Sort of a rite of passage. It is a rite of passage. It's an ultimate long shot as a— as an up-and-coming hyperscaler to everyone. It's a rite of passage to go and challenge Apple. Now OpenAI is emerging as a new threat. It has built powerful AI models and is working toward an unspecified family of devices, interesting to hear that, to run them, devices that could supplant Apple's. Apple's innovation engine failed to develop hit AI products and features, leaving it vulnerable to new entrants. Its suit could be an attempt to throw sand in the gears at OpenAI. I mean, a lawsuit is always a little bit of sand at the very least, even if everything gets dropped quickly, it can still drag on for, for at least a year. Company observers say this to slow poaching of Apple staffers, for instance. So this could just slow the poaching that's happening. Friday lawsuit— Friday's lawsuit has echoes of one of Apple's— of the ones Apple's filed against various Android ecosystem players beginning in 2010, a legal battle royale with hardware makers producing rival phones that played out over 8 years. The central allegation then, as now, was a rival stole Apple's innovations. Apple said Samsung slavishly copied the iPhone with smartphones it was already selling by the millions, which Samsung denied. The company settled in 2018 after a long, costly battle. 8 years in AI years, that's like a million decades. Well, at the center of each case Apple has pursued, was a perceived breach of trust. So Google's then chief executive Eric Schmidt sat on Apple's board as his company developed Android. So there was like, you're on the board of Apple saying, yeah, we should definitely launch Android.

Kind of similar to the Krieger-Figma dynamic. Yeah, very, very tricky.

I'm going to destroy Android because it's a stolen product, Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson. Apple alleges in its new suit that, quote, at every level, OpenAI has been stealing Apple's trade secrets. A more junior employee appeared to cross the line by using an Apple employee's login to access Apple servers. But Apple has also accused OpenAI's hardware chief, Tang Tan, of soliciting trade secrets from its employees in interviews for jobs and encouraging them to bring, quote, actual parts from Apple for show-and-tell sessions at OpenAI. Tan worked at Apple for 24 years, rising to vice president of product design. But bringing parts to an engineering interview isn't unusual, say people familiar with the tech hiring process. That was shocking to me. It does feel unusual to me. But I mean, I guess people would bring, I don't know, if something's public, like if you're bringing, like if you just went to the App Store and you just bought an iPad.

If you worked on a recent iPhone. Yeah.

And you're just bringing that and you're like, I did the button. You see how it clicks this way? Maybe that's okay. But If it's like actual secret parts, that would be really, really bad. Interviewers want candidates to talk through their work. The question is whether the parts were sensitive, something Apple doesn't offer evidence of and is seeking discovery to determine. A spokesperson for OpenAI said, quote, "We have no interest in other companies' trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers everyday people everywhere." Tan, and a more senior employee, Chang Liu, didn't respond to requests for comment. At Apple, Tan worked very closely with Jony Ive, its famous industrial design chief. Ive left Apple to build his own design firm, later poaching Tan. Apple— OpenAI bought that company, IO Products, in 2025 to spearhead its own device development efforts. Bedfellows can quickly become enemies in tech. OpenAI made the IO acquisition revealing its intention to wean customers off smartphone screens a year after announcing a partnership with Apple to integrate ChatGPT into some parts of the iPhone. The Wall Street Journal has a content licensing partnership with OpenAI. Of course, bigger companies have so far failed to dent Apple's dominance. And they talk about Amazon's Fire Phone, Microsoft Windows Phone. Mark Zuckerberg also tried to do an end run around the iPhone with the metaverse that never fully disrupted the iPhone. Of course, Elon Musk has also chafed at Apple's control of the digital economy. A unit of SpaceX is suing Apple for disadvantaging its AI app., and the company is now prototyping its own smartphone-like AI device. Apple has said that its App Store relies on algorithms and expert curation and doesn't suppress rivals. The irony of Apple's case against OpenAI is that Apple itself has so frequently been accused of stealing other companies' ideas that it has spawned a new verb, sherlocking, which is a reference to an app for the Mac that allowed you to hit, I think, Command+Space and get a Finder window to search everything across your entire desktop. That eventually became the Spotlight feature baked into Apple, but it was not very good for the company that was running Sherlock. And so Apple— this is the same, like, you know, the labs will steamroll this, or these many companies just got put out of business by this company. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It just sort of depends. Apple recently tried to Sherlock Partiful.. But it seems like Partiful is doing fine. And so it sort of depends on the actual platform.

I have not got a single— haven't got a single invite from Apple's True Invite system.

At the same time, when was the last time you paid for a flashlight app? Probably never, right? Because all of that stuff's baked in.

Apple's trying to catch up. I saw someone actually go pretty viral on Instagram with the world's most expensive flashlight app. I think it was like $100,000. It was like $5 to turn the light on and then $129 to turn it off.

Mm-hmm. That's great. Genius. I like those. Pretty smart. I also like the ones that are like vibe coding a calculator, and you type in whatever you want to multiply, and then it's like $200 to unlock the answer.

It's like easy money. Ben Thompson read through the filing as he would. He says you can read Apple's filing here and almost everything you need to know is actually on the first page in the first 4 paragraphs. Paragraph 1 is a succinct introduction to the case. This case is about Apple's former employees stealing trade secrets for the benefit of OpenAI. Apple brings this suit to put a stop to it. Paragraph 2 recounts how Apple has spent a lot of time and money building products that delight customers. Paragraph 3 basically says that everything they do is a trade secret. And paragraph 4 introduces Chang Liu and spends the next page and a half recounting his crimes. Ben Thompson says Lou is almost certainly guilty and an idiot to boot. Not mincing words there. Apple has a lot of details about Lou's behavior, including dozens— downloading dozens of proprietary Apple hardware-related files and encouraging other Apple employees to do the same because he did it on his Apple-issued laptop and furthermore logged on to Apple servers for weeks after he had already left the company. Ben says Apple security says, as depicted in this case, is shockingly poor. First, the company lost track of the fact that Lou didn't return one of his laptops or disable it remotely. Second, due to what Apple claimed was a bug, Lou continued to have access to the company's internal servers for weeks. And Ben has like a bunch of, bunch of other context on here. Yeah. They— he talks about how, you know, Tan is the point person for the 400 people that Apple says that OpenAI has hired away from the smartphone maker. That is no crime, of course, although one does get the sense Apple sure thinks it is. And I'm trying to think if anything— The funny—

the funniest moment in here is where he says a couple of quick points. A few weeks ago, there was a bit of hubbub about Meta capturing keystrokes from employees in order to train AI. What confused me was people's surprise that a company had this level of access to company-issued hardware in the first place. Moreover, while that access may very well be theoretical for a lot of companies, at Apple, it has always been a well-known fact going at least as far back as when I was an intern there, Ben Thompson was an intern there 16 years ago, that the company could and would go through everything if you ever crossed them. And so, it's, it's, yeah, everyone should know this, but somehow it, at least Apple alleges that it was not known or just a terrible mistake or brazen, you know, brazen mistake. He does— he does talk about a little bit of the, the, the motivations for why you're going to thermonuclear war. He says, yeah, the AI era has sucked for Apple.

Yeah. So he says Tan is the face of Apple betrayal. OpenAI is the face of AI generally. And it's hard to escape the sense that Apple just really hates AI. And why shouldn't they? Go back to 2022. Apple had it all figured out. They had a lock on the premium end of the smartphone market, which they continued to slowly expand. Even as they had figured out how to earn services revenue from every iPhone user basically forever. Business was good. AI has ruined all of that. Suddenly Apple has to make existential decisions about whether or not to compete in the model game. Then they, then they totally embarrass themselves with the 2024 new Siri introduction, had their most prominent blogger declare that something is rotten in the state of Cupertino, had to completely overhaul their software and services teams, lost their position as kings of the supply chain and most favored customer of TSMC. To the point where they had to enact an emergency mid-cycle price rise and then worst of all, have to actually wrestle with the possibility that AI is such a paradigm shift that it might actually threaten the iPhone. And then on top of all that, they lost— they lose 400 of their best employees recruited by the lead hardware engineer for the iPhone in partnership with their most famous executive outside of Steve Jobs, and have to know that all 400 of those employees are getting hit up by their former colleagues looking for a job as well. The era has sucked for Apple, even if they aren't necessarily doomed, and even if they relaunch new Siri ends up working out, their position is still more fragile than it was and everything about life is worse. Given that, how sweet it must feel to suddenly have a smoking gun in the form of a seriously dumb employee blatantly lifting documents and to use it as a cudgel to exact revenge on the company that represents everything that is making your life miserable. The perspective does make one wonder if that phrase rotten to its core was projection in the end. AI is changing the world, and Apple's contribution is to deliver 2-year-old technology differentiated by exclusive access to data it won't share. It certainly has no interest in delivering on a new AI-driven paradigm that endangers its iPhone franchise in any way. Any of its employees who wish to do exactly that meanwhile are being told loud and clear that Apple doesn't just think it owns your laptop, but also your mind and knowledge. I think it mostly stinks, but then again, rotten things usually do. So circling back to something is rotten in the state of— It's thermonuclear. —Fertino. But it's not the first thermonuclear. Go sign up for Extra Tech Curry. Read the whole article. There's a bunch of context. And we're going to come back to the story at 12:45 Pacific with Mark Gurman. The Germinator. Let me tell you about Railway.

Railway is an all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, security. It's not the first thermonuclear war between hyperscalers, Mag 7 companies. You go back to Apple versus Microsoft. They had a massive copyright war over the, the look and feel of the desktop. So Apple sued Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard actually back in —what was it? 1997 when they reset the relationship—saying that Windows 2.03 and Windows 3.0 and the HP NewWave—I don't know what happened with that—copied the Mac's graphical interface. The courts concluded that the similarities were already licensed functional standard to graphical user interfaces and otherwise unprotectable. In 1994, the Ninth Circuit affirmed that Apple's GUI deserved only relatively thin copyright protection against virtually identical copying. Of course, we talked a little bit about the Android proxy patent war between Apple and Google. Apple rarely attacked Google head-on. Instead, it sued the manufacturers that were distributing Android, so HTC, Samsung, Motorola, over smartphone designs, smart— software patents. There was a whole era where you would see Apple launch something and then, and then Samsung, Motorola, HTC would sort of conform to that norm, and how much of that is just the standard industry practice, what consumers want, and how much of it is a direct infringement. In 2014, they agreed to dismiss all of their direct smartphone patent cases without entering a comprehensive cross-license. But the broader war continued through Apple's 7-year Samsung battle. In 2018, the jury awarded Apple a $539 million damage in a retrial, after which Apple and Samsung reached an undisclosed settlement. So Apple won meaningful verdicts and established that industry design could carry real patent value. Amazon and Apple— Apple and Amazon have also gone at it over ebook pricing conspiracy aimed at Amazon. This was in 2009. Amazon had established $9.99 as the highly visible price for many new Kindle bestsellers as Apple prepared the iPad and the iBookstore. It arranged agency agreements under which publishers rather than retailers set consumer prices. The Justice Department proved that Apple could help coordinate publishers to eliminate retail price competition and raise ebook prices above Amazon's $9.99 standard. And so Amazon won this one. Apple briefly changed the economics of the market but lost the antitrust case. Of course, there's Apple app tracking transparency. Apple versus Meta, another thermonuclear war, not fully played out in the courts, but it did create basically a $10 billion revenue headwind for Meta in the short term, which they ultimately overcame. There's a whole bunch of others. The two, the two Mag Seven participants who have never really fought— Microsoft and Meta have never really had a company-level feud. Microsoft and Tesla also have never really had a corporate battle. Tesla sort of stays out of a lot of this because they're not in as many of the same markets. Of course, the big one that people are pointing to these days is Uber versus Google. Where is this? Yes. So this is the most dramatic corporate espionage style case in modern technology. Anthony Levandowski, he was a central engineer in Google's self-driving car program. And as he prepared to leave, he downloaded thousands of confidential files. That's a huge no-no. He founded an autonomous truck startup Auto, which Uber then acquired, bringing Levandowski and his team inside Uber's autonomous vehicle organization. Waymo alleged that Uber had obtained and was using its LIDAR and autonomous driving trade secrets. The case exposed internal Uber communications, raised questions about what then CEO Travis Kalanick knew, and threatened to derail Uber's already expensive autonomy program. Uh, days into the February 2018 trial, Uber settled. Waymo received 0.34% of Uber's equity, which was worth $245 million at the time. It's actually worth more now. I don't know if Waymo held on to that, but— Crazy. It was sort of a financial civil settlement. And interestingly, Uber promised not to incorporate Waymo's confidential information into its systems. So they agreed, hey, like, we might have seen some of that confidential trade secret information from that company that we acquired. We won't use any of that.. And it feels like that sort of derailed Uber's self-driving program pretty substantially because you're always walking on eggshells. And then there's probably things that you could have potentially independently discovered. But if you know that Waymo has independently discovered them separately, you can't use it. And so there's all these different techniques and tricks that then are off limits, even if they are just best practices that you can have the right way to do it. Exactly. Yeah. So, um, very tricky situation. And Levandowski— so there were actually two suits in the Uber-Waymo battle. There was the civil suit, which settled, of course, as I mentioned. But Levandowski separately pled guilty to trade secret theft in a criminal trial. The Justice Department said he admitted downloading thousands of Google files with the intention of benefiting himself and Uber. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison, fined, and ordered to pay restitution. But he was pardoned before he actually entered prison. And then I believe he started a religion. I think he was starting like an AI church, which was way ahead of the curve because it feels like people are like in AI psychosis as of like 2024. And he sort of had it back in 2021, 2022. He was like leading to this idea that like AI was God.

It was 2017. 2017. Way of the future. Way of the future.

That is crazy. Crazy, crazy, crazy. So Uber eventually sold the Advanced Technologies Group, which was their self-driving unit, to Aurora in 2020, and it valued that unit at $4 billion. So like pretty substantial progress for something that was sort of beaten up. And there were a few different reasons. The Waymo litigation cost, technical difficulty. And then there was this fatal 2018 Uber autonomous vehicle crash that really made it difficult for them. And Uber has sort of shifted their strategy now. They're much more of like this platform and they want—

and they don't want to develop, uh, yeah, they want to work with CyberCab and Waymo.

But there was all the difference. There was recent, uh, reporting that Uber's like actually trying to block the rollout of self-driving cars in some markets. And there's a whole bunch of interesting stories about—

oh, I didn't know Uber was potentially—

it was one tweet I saw. I think it's in the timeline somewhere. We can get to it, uh, at some point.

But, um, what's going on with Paramount? Let's— and remember, we're going to come back to this with Mark Gurman himself, who broke the actual story on Friday. So we'll have another 30 minutes to talk about this.

We will. But first, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it.

Yes. So Rohan in Semaphore says Paramount weighs leaving California over Warner Brothers rift.

What's going on here, John? So this is on the basis that California is trying to block the Paramount, the Paramount acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. Rohan says, I'm told that if the states do choose to sue, they would have to assume the damages stemming from that action, chiefly $600 million to $1 billion, $1.2 billion in ticking fees would potentially be paid out to state taxpayers. So if if they leave, those, those fees would not be paid to the state. Paramount just issued this response to the state AG lawsuit. Brian Stelter is breaking it down, saying the complaint distorts settled antitrust law and is based on misrepresentation of competition in the, in the entertainment industry today. So Paramount is weighing whether to shift major operations out of California after Attorney General Rob Bonta and 11 other state attorneys general filed— attorneys general, I always get that wrong— filed today to block its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. This story was back and forth. Will Netflix get it? Paramount wound up with the highest bid, the most cash to offer. It got approved. Huge windfall for David Zaslav over at Warner Bros. Discovery, but a very controversial acquisition. All the shareholders. Yeah, everyone did very well. But people were very worried because they owned two historic studio lots in Los Angeles. Would they need both of those? Would they convert one to apartment buildings? This was sort of the nightmare case for fans of Hollywood filmmaking, that it would become a more agile, lean, globally distributed studio. Would they be making less films? Would they change? Their, uh, their pattern because as they are two separate buyers of intellectual property and scripts that come to Hollywood, they can pay higher prices. There's less competition. Potentially the, the price of the, the, that the, uh, uh, the, the industry becomes more monopolistic and there's less buying activity. So the proposed deal was the, and is the largest merger in Hollywood history. Uh, it would combine two of the 5 major film distributors and give the resulting company control of roughly 27% of US film distribution and basic cable channels. Uh, of course, uh, anyone who's in favor of this was arguing that, well, people are watching Instagram and YouTube all day long and listening to podcasts and livestreams. Um, you can't look at Hollywood in isolation. It's okay if there's a little bit of consolidation in an industry that's facing incredible pressure from a new disruptive industry. We saw this play out with the Shutterstock Getty Images question where you have immense pressure in the stock image market from an entirely new outsider technology. Consolidation makes a lot of sense usually in those scenarios. But if you're just looking at it, if you're just defining the industry as only Hollywood studios, then yes, this is— this does represent more consolidation. Friends and advisers to Paramount CEO David Ellison had reportedly been urging him to reconsider the company's California footprint in the event that California sued over the deal. Previously, Paramount had offered to keep both of its historic studio lots in California open and release 30 films annually, which was basically just adding the 15 and 15 that were made from both studios, I believe, something like that. But executives have privately complained that Bonta refused to negotiate. Worth noting that the Justice Department has already cleared the merger, while China and other international regulators have raised no comparable, comparable objections thus far. So from an antitrust perspective, it looks like the merger can go through, but the state of California is potentially trying to block it now. So Paramount says California's complaint distorts settled antitrust law and is based on misrepresentation of competition in the entertainment industry today. It'd be very interesting to see where they actually go if they do leave California, because there's been so much, so much movement to Texas and Florida. But in terms of filmmaking, Toronto, London, Atlanta. Exactly. So maybe Georgia. I don't know. I'm sure every other state is gunning for this because bringing in, bringing an industry to town is almost always a good move. More jobs for your local economy. More tax dollars going around, there will probably be a competition. But we'll see where this develops. And we might have someone from the media analysis industry come on the show later this week to discuss. There is a new letter.

New letter just dropped. We are hoping for a new billion-dollar PDF, but we got another letter. More than 200 researchers and economists, including Jack Clark, Jeff Dean, Noam Brown, Tyler Cowen, Sholto, John Shulman, Eric Schmidt, Dean Ball, Yoshua Bengio, Yoshua Bengio, have signed a statement urging governments and institutions to act now to prepare for AI's economic impact. They start the pretty simple letter by saying AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.

They don't— this isn't like the start. It's just 3 statements. The entire—

they're signing that, but they're signing—

they're saying we all agree with these 3 statements.

They agree that AI could possibly become radically more powerful over the next 10 years, which feels very conservative. That's like an incredible— you're not committing to anything at all.

No, I mean, there are plenty of people that are saying that AI will go away in the next 10 years, like it's useless.

You know, no one's really saying that.

Ed Zitron saying that and like 100,000 people are liking his post when he says that. So like there are 100,000 people out there that are like, it hallucinates, it's dumb, it's, it's not useful.

It's going to go away. 100,000 people out of billions believe it's going to go away.

I'm just saying there are people that don't believe this. But yes, this does feel like a, like, like actually an easier statement to agree with than the short timelines of fast takeoff in 2 years, recursive self-improvement, anything that's coming out of basically any lab is much more aggressive than this. Elon's timelines have been solving new physics in 2 years, stuff like that. Yeah.

Okay. So point 1, AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years. Point 2, this could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter timeframe. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards. And 3, economists, policymakers, and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.

So that last one's not a probability. Yeah, the first one, it feels like you can sign if you're at 1%, right? 1% chance that it gets more radically more powerful over the next 10 years, 1% chance that it drives an unprecedented transformation of our economy. But as long as you agree that economists, policymakers, and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI, you sign this. So, 3 is really the strongest, the most strongly worded bullet point.

Well, and it's interesting because the people signing this are technology leaders. So they really say—

not, not the actual top leaders, interestingly. So if you look at who signed this, you have a ton of people from OpenAI, Anthropic, Stanford, uh, Meta, uh, like every Harvard, like every lab.

Bam Margera, I think you said.

No, no, no. Google, Jeff Dean. Like, you have people from top from top institutions, but not the CEOs, not the investors. Like there's been other— there's been other— I mean, I guess Reid Hoffman and Jan Tallinn and who else is— I mean, Eric Schmidt's on here, but notably absent are Sam Altman, Daria Ahmadi. I don't believe Demis is on here. Is he on here?

Yeah, but you have Jack Clark, Sarah Friar. Yeah.

So but what's interesting is that it's sort of like the proxies. It's the— it's like the right-hand men and women of the AI leaders that are signing. And so you have to imagine that Dario, Sam, Elon, Demis, Sundar, Satya, like they got the message. This was received to them and they were like, you guys can solve this, but you can sign this, but we're not signing it because this doesn't feel like something that happens behind the scenes where Sarah Friar doesn't go to Sam or Sholto doesn't bring this up to Dario. Oh, there's a new letter. I'm thinking of signing it.

Yeah, it feels like it was the— like that big pause letter that Elon did sign at one point.

A lot of people signed it. And that one, every lab leader actually did sign. And this one isn't even a pause, but somehow didn't rise to the aura level. And maybe that's deliberate because then it gets clipped and turned into headlines where it's like, you know, blank lab leader, fill in anyone, it's gonna be a, it's gonna be—

Leaders at XYZ Labs.

Yes, it's gonna be head of blank lab. If you're the first one to jump, if you're Sam or Dario or Demis or Elon, they just said that it could bring large-scale job displacement. So you're gonna have that headline tag next to you as opposed to if it's like someone at a lab who is not the CEO of that lab says it can bring large-scale job displacement? Because right now it seems like at the very top, a lot of the lab leaders are sort of backing off of the near-term job displacement worries.

Yeah, but I think this still feels much more like the AI doc than like AI 2040, right? And that like, the message I got from the AI doc was like, we all got to talk about this, you know, let's get everyone in a room and like figure something out.

We don't know at all what it's going to be.

We got to figure something out. Where AI 2040 is like, Okay, we have this. This is our plan A. Yep. We should be doing this specific set of, you know, policies. Yes. Whatever. Yes.

It's like, says much more like, specifically, we all got to talk about unifying rules with China, like US and China, like nuclear-level negotiations on how things slow down. It's a global slowdown of large-scale AI training runs, essentially. And this is very— yeah, this is very, very different. So much easier to sign, but AI2040 didn't have like signatories. I mean, it had people that like helped out with it in general. And then they did poll them as to, they polled some of the authors to say like, which one do you think is most likely to play out? But I guess by any, I guess everyone implicitly in the AI2040, if you contributed to that document, you're sort of alongside advocating advocating for. Is it Plan A? Because it's the fourth one that they offer, I think. Is it Plan D? I think Plan A is what they— Plan A.

There's a bunch of plans and then I think, like, in the order on the website, I think it is the fourth one, but that's just like the arbitrary—

AI 2040. I'm trying to load the site, but it's not loading. Anyway, we can come back to that. We must act now. I like this. I like the idea of more economic research, more policymaking. Research to understand these things. It's not like it's hard to get wrong because the end result is just more information, more studies, more, you know, conversation and proposals. It's not anything specifically like if it was like, like large-scale job displacement is coming next month, we need to, you know, print money and Do economic stimulus broadly like we did during COVID I would be like, I don't know that the— what if the job displacement doesn't come up and we just create a bunch of inflation? Like, I don't know if we should do that, but we should be ready for if we hit 10% unemployment, 15% unemployment, that we do have stimulus in the back pocket. And I think we do with where interest rates are and with the history of how we've dealt with employment shocks in the past. So I think we are like set up pretty well if that happens. It doesn't seem like it's happening at this moment. But yeah, tell us about the most critical—

the critical view on this is the people building the technology say that we got to do something about this. Like, like it's kind of just a continuation of like that we got to do something about this. And maybe you just need to do a new letter every single month forever. Maybe. But I don't know. Let me tell you about Figma.

Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. I want that for the next ad read. I want the ship horn. The ship horn is where it's at. That one is so underrated.

So I wanted to talk about the mustard controversy over the weekend, but the original video was deleted. Okay. And it's now really hard to Just describe it to me.

We have audio listeners. So there's two car content creators.

Yes. In the LA area. Okay. One of them is an account called Collected Vans. Okay. Who's a Porsche enthusiast, a BMW enthusiast, likes to drive fast. Younger? On the younger side. And then you have a guy named Canyon Carver, who's effectively like a vigilante of the canyon. So he hangs up in a lot of the popular driving areas.

And he does drive fast? Canyon Carver?

He likes to drive like pretty, I would say, close to the speed limit. Okay. Um, and so he hangs out places like, uh, ACH in the Santa Monica Mountains, you know, around Malibu. ACH? Uh, Angeles Crest Highway. Okay. And, uh, which is, which is near you. Yeah. And so he likens himself to kind of the sheriff or the mayor. He calls The Batman. He claims to be the original Meta Ray-Bans, like, car. Oh, interesting guy. Okay. I thought that was you. I don't know. I don't know how true that is. But over the weekend, these two crossed paths and there was a video that ran up to hundreds of thousands of likes before on Saturday to Sunday before being deleted. Where the Canyon Carver is driving and he gets passed by this other car influencer. And then they end up, they end up in the same parking lot and they have a very quite a funny exchange where they're just talking, talking, talking past each other sort of perfectly. The younger guy is accusing the Canyon Carver of just being 40, which is kind of funny. And the Canyon Carver is accusing the other, the younger guy, of his dad buying the car for him, to which he immediately says, just because my dad bought me this car doesn't mean I can't afford it. Which is, which is a, which is a funny. Yeah, which is a funny line. But anyways, this is so inside baseball, like L.A., Southern California car enthusiast drama that I think it's time to move on. Because without the original video, it doesn't work. It's, it's really tough.

What is your stance on cutting the mustard?

Yeah, so I'm very against cutting the mustard. Okay. You like a safe highway, a safe canyon to be carved safely? Yes. So cutting the mustard is when, you know, if someone is driving fast on a, let's say, a canyon backcountry road and they're using the entire road, right, they're sort of disregarding the lane. Double yellow line. Yeah, double yellow. They're crossing it, which is a moving violation. Illegal, right? Yeah, no, it's objectively against the law. Yeah. And then it's very dangerous because you're coming around a tight corner, and if somebody's in your lane, it can be over really quickly.

Maybe, maybe we should have a sort of a, um, like a, an Autobahn-style rule where the yellow line doesn't apply. There's certain highways in in America. It's like we can't get over the speed limit thing. We gotta have the speed limit. There's still a hard speed limit, but you can drive wherever you want.

Absolutely. I think that'd be crazy.

Absolutely. I mean, the problem is like Willow Springs is like 45 minutes away. Just go to the track and it's a public course. You can pay and go and drive as fast as you want. And there is no traffic coming the other way. It's much safer. So if you're trying to push your car to the limit, like there is a way to do that. Legally and safely. And so you should probably just do that.

I thought it was interesting because it was very generational. You had like the millennial, you know, against the brain-rotted sort of Zoomer. And then they just couldn't even have a conversation. They were just sort of speaking past each other, you know, doing various ad hominems.

Okay, well, last car question from Reddit, r/Wealth. If I inherit $4 million USD and a home at 35 years old, Would it be responsible for me to just buy a Ferrari? Why just? It's a funny way to put it. I think yes. I mean, you're not going to probably beat the S&P, but a lot of the cars hold their value. Might be fun. I don't know. It depends on your lifestyle. If you have 5 kids in private schools or something like $4 million probably isn't enough. Depends on where that home is.

Do you live in Manhattan? It comes down entirely to what car you select. Yeah, because there's a lot of cars that, you know, if you're not driving them a lot, it would probably, you know, at least track T-bills, right? Yeah. From a certain— certain appreciation standpoint.

I live in Manhattan. I'm trying to send my kids to the most elite boarding schools. I have 7 kids and I'm considering a Luce. That would be a rough go. But if you're out in, you know, an affordable town, plenty of space, you're not going to spend that much money. The $4 million is going to last you a long time.

Maybe pick up a— there was a powerful omen in Yellowstone National Park Friday evening.

Uh, oh yes, this bison. We got a place. Bull bison. A tourist was seriously injured Friday evening after being thrown 8 feet into the air by a bull bison in Yellowstone National Park. If you're in Yellowstone, be very, very careful. I didn't realize that bison roamed so freely and could and were so aggressive. Professional photographer Mike McLeod filmed the incident and said the bison was angry, agitated, and charging anything and everything. And the, the scale of this beast is really massive. It looks absolutely huge, and it goes all around chasing this, uh, this poor elderly tourist who, who ended up being totally okay.

Oh really? And when you see this, it's almost unbelievable.

That's remarkable. It's, uh, uh, Cowboy State Daily says tourist was seriously injured, but I guess the man, uh, did recover, which is very, very good to hear. You never want, uh, to see someone injured on the timeline, but he really does get thrown way, way in the air and he's running around. I was wondering He should have gone for the car right there. Right. But there, there you go. He's thrown in the air. Absolutely insane.

I'm so glad he's okay.

I like that people are already remixing this. Wild Spicy says, if it was me out there, we got a different throw.

The bison. Yeah. If Alexis—

if that was Alexis being chased, this is what would bring Alexis in. But first, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Hear that foghorn for me. Well, we have Alexis Ohanian from 776, who's the founder and GP with us here in the TVP and Ultradome. Alexis, how you doing? Welcome to the show. Doing very well, gentlemen.

I'm glad, glad that guy's okay. You know, I saw actually, if you find yourself in that situation, apparently if you run, I think bison can't go laterally, so you want to kind of—

I thought that was crocodiles and alligators you want to zigzag. Is zigzagging just— oh, that's a farce.

I think that's something Floridians tell tourists.

You got to be like NFL mode. Yeah, just running routes on the bison.

Yes, that's the move. Absolutely.

Good to know. Good to know. Absolutely wild.

How is your summer going? Are you engrossed in World Cup? What's your summer been like?

Give me a little recap. Ironically, ironically, I have spent most of this World Cup actually in Europe watching the matches back in America. Okay. 2, 3 in the morning. Yeah. I'm more, you know, I'm more of a women's sports fan. Of course. But it's been great. It's been great watching the American men showed up in a big way, obviously. Didn't get as far as any of us, you know, we would have wanted to see a title, but very happy for the American men to have made it to the 16. And I don't know who to root for now. I guess technically England. Yeah. Given my Chelsea women's connection.

Okay, we'll see. There you go. Yeah. I want your current thesis on premier in-real-life events, maybe in the age of AI, maybe there's some other boom happening. But I have some stats here that are crazy that were on the timeline from Adam Miller. UFC. They sold— it sold for $4 billion in 2016, worth $15 billion today. F1 revenue is up 115% since 2017. Team values are up 276%. FIFA World Cup viewership is on track to pass 2022's $5 billion. Revenue is up 56%. NBA media rights tripled in a decade. NFL, $110 billion in media rights through 2033. You know, pros knows. Yeah, Broadway is up. Live comedy. VC has— what's they call them?

High Rocks, $6 billion.

High Rocks went from 650 athletes in 2017 to 1.5 million. World music tours, top 100 tours grossed $8.9 billion. How are you thinking about this? Is this an opportunity as a, as a fan or as an investor or as a businessman? Like, what's your overall thinking on live events in the future?

Look, like last time I was on here, I think I was gassing up my track and field league.

That's right.

With the Olympics there, Athlos, every year, not just every 4 years. I've been obviously very early in sparking the women's in sports movement starting Angel City and the investment there. But I, you can roll the tape. There is footage from I think 2.5 years ago at Cannes Lions where I call sports the ultimate anti-AI bet. And I think just 2 weeks ago, JP Morgan Chase is on stage saying the same thing. So what we mapped out at 776, 3 years ago, right after ChatGPT. Yeah. Was basically, we know it's gonna get really good at writing and then it's gonna get really good at writing code. And then, you know, once actually was after DALL·E, I was like, okay, even this first version's janky. Yeah. But moving pictures are just one step away from static pictures. Yeah. So in the world of entertainment, right? The pillars of entertainment, you have music industry, you have movie, Hollywood, and you have sports. What will remain unchanged and durable in the age of AI? Even when you can have a pixel perfect highlight of Mbappé scoring a goal, it will do nothing for the soul. Yeah. Because it never actually happened. The human experience is the reason why it's valuable. And I, you know, Josh Kushner, who's a friend and obviously an incredibly successful investor, his first investment from Thrive Eternal, great name by the way, was the San Francisco Baseball Giants.

Yep.

Like, like we are now seeing a moment where the smartest folks in venture capital are realizing this is not just a trophy asset. And what, what we've been privileged to see now for 3, 4, 5, 6 years is under the hood of these organizations, guys, these the best sports teams in the world, the best sports leagues in the world. Are run like a tech company in like the mid-aughts. They are devoid of modern technology. They're really—

Yeah, I've asked every time an athlete comes on here, I'm expecting them to have some like, you know, basically performance super intelligence.

Yeah, like, oh, I have a database with every lift I've done. It tells me exactly what to lift and what, where to ice. And it's like, nah, I just have a guy that, you know, tells me if it hurts.

Walk it off or something. And, and it's also on the business side of the house, right? And so it's, it's even if you even asking a question like, what CRM do you use? Like, again, you're going to get some weird looks. And like, maybe it's Salesforce, or like, oh, we've been trying this new thing called HubSpot. And, and so all across the stack, there is tremendous opportunity for efficiency for software. And so the smart money, we're, we're, we're investing, and they're also figuring out how to invest in the tools that'll make these even more profitable enterprises. And I'm fired up because I also, I get, I spend all of my time at 776 either investing in the technology of the future that is going to accelerate. So we all had Philip on here, our guy from Star Cloud, right? Data centers in space, crazy ambitious infrastructure play, or the other end of the barbell of everything I know will be left. And so a consumer electronics company like ModRetro, let software keep getting cheaper to make. We still need to have physical things to play those games. We should make them closer to or in America. And so that's a trend that I know is going to continue to grow. And so I, I really see the world through those two sides of the barbell, either rapidly accelerating the world or everything that I know is still going to be left and matter even more. And it's funny you mentioned Broadway. Yeah, pull the tweet. I think it was a year and a half ago. I'm still trying to find the venture-backed model for it, but my bet was because anyone will be able to sort of dream up their version of Iron Man where they're Iron Man and obviously with making sure Daddy Disney gets their check. But like, you're gonna have this dispersion of culture. And like, acting at the end of the day is way more normal for our species in person than it is going into a dark theater and watching it on a screen.

Wow, I found the tweet! I found the tweet. Bonus hot take: I think we'll see live theater make a comeback in the next 10 years. Uh, and you said this July 7th, 2024.

I got one for you. Yeah, I think you should incubate a robot Circus, an event that you can go to. And I think in about 2 years, you will have robots capable of feats that will be wildly impressive. You can imagine like a drone show where the drones fly up to within a foot from your face. You've got humanoids going crazy.

There's French Canadians right now running Cirque du Soleil who are very mad. I think—

I will give you this. Yeah, it's robot Cirque du Soleil.

I think there is. So part of the why, at least for me with those things, and maybe this is just exposing myself as a bad person, is the fact that you're like, again, you're not hoping anyone gets hurt, but it's this anxiety of like, oh my God, what's going to happen? Like, is this person going to survive this death-defying act?

And yeah, so you need to make the, the person viewing it feel like they're going to die. I see.

So now it's a drone. It's a drone that flies.

It's a You're strapped in, you're strapped into like a, you know, like a roller coaster seat and the drone flies like 2 feet from your face. You know, I can, I can do that.

Can we do movie action?

The, I do think I'm, I'm fond of saying that like no one will pay money to watch like robots play soccer or imagine golf is an easy one. No one's gonna wanna watch a Ryder Cup where, you know, you get 18 hole-in-ones against another 18 hole-in-ones. But, but there are some sports, you know, we've seen BattleBots.

Yeah. Right.

There, there's, there's versions of that with like gladiator sort of robots fighting to the death. There's probably a version of drone racing. Yeah. That allows, oh, you haven't, you played Twisted Metal, but allows weapons. Oh yeah. Yeah. On the drones. Right. There's, there, there are, there are new sports that are like, that are actually entirely robotic, but that are levels up of American one or human ones that we don't want humans doing. Mm-hmm. But, uh, but I had not considered making it an experience for the fans. So. Okay.

So, uh, really quickly. So, um, As live events are growing, I feel like a lot of collectibles come out of the live event. It's like the game ball, the, the, the card of the player who played in the live event. And you're sort of, uh, there's like this chain of custody, chain of authenticity. This thing happened, this human was great at this thing, there was lore, you could have gone and saw it with your own eyes, and now there's a card that commemorates it. What's going on in the collectible space? Is there as much of boom there? What do you expect happening over the next couple of years and what are you doing specifically?

Well, you know, a few years back I created the— when I heard trading cards were coming back, I quietly amassed the largest collection ever of my wife's cards just because I didn't want them ending up in some other collector's house. I wanted my kids to have that.

You're like, no one's going to make money on these cards but me.

These are family heirlooms. No, no, they're going to stay in the family forever. No, no. But you also, you drive up the price by taking all of those cards into the treasury. And so everyone's like, oh, the— The lore is growing.

Yes. And then I was the lead investor in Alt, so Marketplace, which just had, they just set a record for an all-time kaboom. It was like $1.4 million for a one-of-one Wemby. Wow. And you're starting to see real dollars. So it's a, it is a brand within the universe of trading cards that was inspired by like '90s era comics. Okay. And so it's your favorite players, but sort of restylized as like cartoons, almost comic book-inspired art. Yeah. And for whatever reason, it struck a nerve with the culture. And, and so you have these record auctions happening. Um, a big fan of collectible video games, match-worn, you know, athletic apparel. All these things I think are culture assets for us. Like, uh, having an '86 Fleer Jordan rookie card on my desk in mint condition is a better sort of more satisfying flex for me than having like a Warhol. No offense to Warhol, but I think the energy of contemporary art Yeah, I think this is our contemporary art, especially for a generation of us who grew up collecting or idolizing. And now that, you know, Topps and others have gotten much smarter— oh, by the way, I bought a trading card company. Yeah, explain that.

I mean, this is normal.

Yeah, by the way, is it within the firm? Yeah, very interesting strategy.

When you're the biggest LP in the VC firm, you get to kind of do what you want to do. We have amazing institutional LPs, don't get me wrong, but like, I, I sign up every deal we do at 776. I'm— when I'm hitting send Yeah, I'm thinking of my kids' inheritance, right? This is my money more than anyone else's. Totally. And so are theirs, really. And so with trading cards, this was a modest-sized company that was specializing in college sports. Obviously, NIL has changed the landscape of that. And this long tail of college athletes, a guy like Mendoza gets a card deal with us and he doesn't just get his rookie card, his left tackle gets a card. So the guy protecting his ass who may never get to play in the NFL may never get a card.. He's getting a card with on it. And, you know, I love the fact we actually have just as many— we have more women college athlete cards in the last year than every other card company combined. So there's a long tail there. University of Nebraska women's volleyball sells more cards than the men's football team. And so it's focused on a part of sports that I obviously love. I think college is obviously a huge and booming opportunity, and these companies all need software now. They all have an opportunity to do any of the athletes.

Turn it down?

No, it's— I mean, the amazing thing is we're playing at a level where, like, some of these guys are making so much money in NIL deals that the kind of deal we're striking with them is like $10, $15 million. No, no, that's the amount that they're making all year. That's not what I'm paying them. No, no, no, no. These card deals are still pretty small ball. And so relative to the deals they're getting from big brands and what's dope is, you know, most of these guys are thinking big picture and if they make a little less money doing an Onnit deal, but every other guy on their their team is getting a card. Oh, sure. They're not mad.

They're not mad. Sure. Yeah, yeah.

And the athletic directors love it because we're also working with the women athletes just as much as we are with the men. So that's the focus. And, and I'm— but I'm inspired by so much of the motion and creativity happening here. Yeah. Um, even Jensen Wong's leather jacket going on sale, I think it's only the second one that's been auctioned. These are cultural moments. And I know we live in a weird little myopic tech world, But like, yeah, what's it—

I know I want to bid on. Yeah.

Right. You have you have you bid yet? You know, you know, the Jensen jacket is— you know, the Jensen jacket's going to a good cause. It's our friend Justin Mayer's Inflection Grants. So all the money, all the proceeds are going to be given to, you know, founders. No strings attached, no equity. Just love the game. How, how much do you think the boom in live events is driven by social media and flexing. Like, these are the, you know, very exclusive, um, basically, you know, you can call them like one of 10,000 assets, right? Or they're these like ephemeral, uh, you're buying a ticket, but it's also, you know, there was a very viral post over the weekend.

Yeah, I would say the AI narrative is almost like the next bull case for live events. And in fact, The current boom is driven more just by people seeing cool events happening on social media and then also just feeling isolated. They're spending a lot of time on their phone. They're like, I got to get out of here. I got— I should go to that live event and everything else outside of the live event is free. So I'll spend more money on the live event because I can basically watch every music video ever created for free on YouTube, etc. And I agree with you that the AI thing is going to be big, but it doesn't feel like the current driver.

I look, I don't disagree, and I would, I would also think of it as sort of just like that K-shape happening in the economy. I think you're going to see, right, one of the things, the, the, the Wimbledon ticket, yeah, is going to continue to be even more exclusive, even more scarce, because there's just a finite amount of access to it, right? But I also wouldn't discount growth on the other end, which is, I think, a bigger culture shift, um, um, in building Athlos, one of the things that's been really eye-opening for me is we partner with run clubs in order to build our fan base. Now, just because you run doesn't necessarily mean you're a fan of track and field, but it's very easy to get you to be one because these are the best in the world doing what you like doing for fun. Uh, the average soccer fan doesn't play soccer very often, right? And so by learning about run clubs the last 2 years— not firsthand, but I have learned that it is a way for Gen Z to push back on the toxicity of online dating culture. Culture. It is a way to push back and almost break the sort of jaded narrative of like online life to actually like meet with people, decide if you want to spend more time with them or not. Again, platonically or romantically. And I think there's also a culture shift happening among Gen Zs in particular who have kind of lived through the dark parts of social and have just said, fuck the algorithm. I mean, not all of them, but I'd say like a material majority and said, I crave IRL. And it doesn't cost a Wimbledon ticket to go join a run club., but it's an experience that is verifiably human, which is harder and harder on this dead internet. And, and it's a chance to get laid. It's a chance to meet someone who could be a lifelong friend. Like there's, I, I think the, that part of the barbell that gets me excited is that side of like the things we've done as a species way longer than this modern age of the last couple hundred years. And I think those food, I mean, this is, it's such a dumb thing, but like I think if we get the AI utopia we all want, right, this gets cheaper and easier and better to make and it's healthier for you, it's more accessible to more people. There are so many things that are still going to be invaluable that will still give us, and I hope give us even more of a purpose to live, whether it's getting food together or going for a run together, shouting at a soccer game or screaming with our favorite singer or laughing at a stand-up comedian's jokes. Like, I actually, I'm very bullish on humanity for if this goes right, us actually having even more appreciation for the shit that, like, a world that our great-great-grandparents would actually really recognize as being like the sort of fundamental parts of humanity. Yeah.

And, uh, how did you process, uh, given, you know, given your work with Athlos, how did you process the Enhanced Games? It felt like, to me, to me it was like one of those ideas that, that, uh, sounded so cool and theory. But then as I was watching it, I realized like how much of the Olympics is about the pain and the glory and the sacrifice and representing your country and like the every 4 years dynamic and just how different a gold and a silver are, even though they're right next to each other on the podium. And so when I was watching it, it just felt like drinking a flat soda, you know, where it's like you got a little bit of the taste, but it doesn't hit. And yeah, I'm curious how you, how you felt.

Yeah, look, I, and I would not—

I, I am— I know those guys. I am happy they did it in the sense that I do think those regulatory bodies, WADA and some of these others, are very, very antiquated with how they think about usage and testing. And even you hear about athletes getting suspended for marijuana, like, like things where it's like, is this really in the best interest of preserving the sport? Um, and I do I do think guys like Bryan Johnson and others who are human guinea pigs for things that could benefit all of us, a great benefit to society, right? Where this one rubbed me the wrong way, or at least where I knew I wasn't gonna want to be party to it, was because— I mean, the thing you nailed, obviously having a wildly successful professional athlete for a while who is also accused for so much of her career of some bullshit doping, right? I— the idea of a league that is leaning so heavily into everyone dopes is just anathema to what I believe sport is about. But I'm still— look, I still think, like I said, I think it's a— I think it's important to move the narrative forward of like what actually should be approved and not. And I also think hopefully it gives people more of an appreciation, like you said, for the fact these athletes sacrifice. And probably it's a similar narrative that we had when I found out how little money most Olympic athletes actually make. It's crazy. Like before Athlos, the top prize for a track and field athlete was $30,000 in a season. They would win the championship that year, be the fastest man or woman in their race, man or woman. It was 30 grand.

That's a lot of money. That's not a trombone. Yeah, there we go. There it is.

And, and so we doubled it just because—

and then we've—

I think we have, we have 2 point— we have over $2.1 million in prize money this year for two races, London and New York, and we're giving equity Like, like these are all things. And I think the Enhanced Games prize money is also a helpful way to push that conversation forward of saying, hey, these Olympic athletes should actually— they're worth more. Yeah. And, and so I think that's good for them. But yeah, like I said, I couldn't, I couldn't personally get behind it for those reasons.

And how are you— last question since we're out of time— how are you processing just the explosion of sports betting as I was and kind of how it's driving sports and live events and providing a lot of funding. But at the same time, I was watching, you know, watching the McGregor fight, if you could call it that, on Saturday. And like, they don't even do betting exclusives anymore. It's every single ad is for a different sportsbook or prediction market. And, and so, yeah, it's like I've never had like the sports betting bug. I've at points been like, I got to give this a good shot. Like, it seems like a lot of people really like doing this. I gave it a shot.

I watched you. I watched you lose $200 and it was one of the most entertaining things.

Yeah. So it was wildly entertaining. It was wildly entertaining for John. But for me, I was like, I was like, that's it. Maybe he's down to his last 4 cents.

Let's see what he'll do now.

Yeah, I did make a play. I did. I did get down. Down to 4 cents, and then I was like, I'm gonna make it all back in one trade.

And then, man, a hell of a parlay, um, like 20 different legs. Yeah, uh, I, I, um, look, I— one of the things we've said around here is we want to invest in things that we know can make, you know, generational size returns, uh, but also be things we're proud to tell our kids about. And so I have— again, I have no beef with betting or gambling. Yeah, uh, I think, I think in models where the house always wins that does not stir my coco because now you're just, you're just weaponizing sort of slot machine tactics to bring someone back who probably shouldn't be investing that next dollar or gambling the next dollar. I think prediction markets are unique in that it is peer-to-peer and I feel less distaste around, hey, someone made a better decision than you did today. Sure. Right. That feels more like any market. But I do think overall the worst toxicity that I've seen on the internet when I, when I get and it's, it's— I mean, it was jarring when I first started dating my wife. The worst toxicity that I would get was from psychopathic racists on the internet, and it was tied to sports betting. Whoa. Yeah. And, and so it's been— tennis is a unique sport where there's actually always been a lot of sports betting, women's sport, where there's actually always been a lot of energy around it. And so even just anecdotally, it feels like athletes carry a disproportionate weight from it. And it might be easy to say, well, don't, don't check social media. But like, you guys, I mean, we all get our, we all get our hate. Yeah. But like, if you're an athlete, like, you're literally just trying to do your job every day in front of everyone. We don't have to, our board meetings are not broadcast to the world. We don't, we're like, you, you already have to live every workday in front of every person on the planet. And if, if the downside of a shadow of sports betting and its rampant growth is even more toxicity for the athletes, like, that feels bad. And then there's this—

I saw, I think it was like Haaland's teammate who, you know, yes, had a clear sort of— should have passed it, but he's in the moment, you know, he thinks he's going to be a hero. And, and yeah, he had more, you know, he just lost the World Cup, you know, not or not lost, but, you know, lost in the, in the quarters. And he had like, you know, double the amount of comments as likes on, on his last post. Yeah. Most of—

almost all of them saying like, yeah, it's just very different when you're a fan, you're passionate about a team. Yes, you are upset about your favorite player. Yeah.

Yeah.

But it's different when people have money on the line. They are more incentivized to go crazy online and send the aggressive message, which is never fun.

Yeah. Never. Yeah. And I, and I, and I also just think from a health standpoint of our society, right, we know young men are more likely, right? We're risk-takers biologically, and that's a great thing when it pushes us to go take an entrepreneurial risk. It is a less great thing when we invest our last $100 on a parlay that's never going to pay off, and then it leads us into a cycle of addiction and problems. And so I, I hope we can have a good conversation as a society about this. I know we're in a very, like, let's say, deregulatory time in America right now, um, and I hope when that switches I hope it doesn't lead to a hyper-regulatory period. But like, I hope we can have a reasonable conversation because I also— the part that worries me the most is we know we're going to continue to see more growth and acceleration for folks who are connected and plugged in. And that's going to be a great thing. It's going to give us lots of good stuff. If the folks who aren't feel even more disenfranchised and even more left out, that there's this almost like— and you see parts of it flare up in crypto for sure. You see this sort of dystopian world. World of people willing to do anything to make a buck, that, that, that from a societal standpoint makes me very, very, very uneasy. And, and I, I like— it's, it's becoming more and more obvious how big a role betting is, in particular sports betting is. And I just feel like we haven't had the conversation, and I don't know if we have the folks equipped to have the right one.

And yeah, starting, starting—

well, I think Saturday's, I think Saturday's event could be somewhat of a turning point with UFC because, you know, there's some, at least some, some like potential— there's an idea that maybe there was people that knew there was a major injury going into that and there was too much money on the line.

I think we will have a national conversation about this. I'll give you 10 to 1 odds that it happens this year, by the end of the year. You guys are good. I also, I also heard an interesting stat that 99% of gamblers quit right before they hit it big, so If that really goes national and people embrace the statistic, I mean, it's just math. Like, you know, anyway, we had a bet.

We had a bet running through that this interview would go over because we always love talking to you. I love talking to you guys.

Sorry it's been so long.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll do it again soon. Great to see you.

And congratulations. Thank you. I congratulated you all on Twitter, but congrats on the exit. I will still point out, as soon as I saw you guys—

I know, I know. I need to apologize. I need to apologize because we were like, yeah, we're a bunch of—

You mentioned it's a podcast.

Like, why would you want to invest in this?

You saw it. I saw the potential. You saw it.

Anyway, you guys deserve every bit of it, though.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Great to see you, dude.

Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is Morgan Housel. He's been on the show once, twice. I think this is his third time. Fourth time. I think fourth.

Maybe fourth time. For sure. We've got a bet going now. Okay, guys, how are you?

Yeah, can we start with sports betting? Is it an epidemic? How do you think— how has the sports betting boom and the gambling boom and the hyper-financialization worked its way into your, uh, your thought process and your work generally?

I have two takes on this. One that's been talked about by a lot of people is that this well-known idea in psychology that if you think all of your options in life are bad, you become very risk-seeking. And so if you feel like you can go to, go to college, get a degree, work hard, get promoted, buy a house, you'll do that. If you don't, you'll start trading zero-day options. That, that, that makes sense. I believe that. I could also argue the other side, which is that if my generation, my parents' generation, our grandparents, if they had access to all of these things, they would have done the same thing. Like, it's not— it's just because we have these tools now that we're using them.

Yeah, it's such a classic when Like the image of like a boomer in the Vegas like airport, just, you know, hitting, hitting the button over and over and over is like sort of like an iconic image in my mind. And I think that's proof to what you're saying, which is like, you know, if everyone had a casino in their pocket for the last 100 years and probably every generation would have been gambling at a pretty high rate.

We're the same. I mean, for my generation, when we were teenagers, the new thing was, was day trading, because before that you had to call your stockbroker and pay him $200 to make a transaction. Now you had E-Trade and Charles Schwab. You could do it for free or nothing. And so all of us, like when I was 17, we all started day trading. Every one of us did it. It wasn't about the economy. It was just the tools we had in front of us.

How do you think about loss aversion in the, in the, in the gambling, in the, in the world where you're doing these like crazy parlays? Because there's been all these studies that show that people have more negative feelings about losing money than than the good feelings that come from making money. This general idea of loss aversion. If you, if you lose $10, you're going to feel more pain than the joy that you would equivalently feel from gaining $10. So people are generally loss averse. And yet gambling seems like a formula for like endlessly triggering that loss aversion. And yet we don't see that actually play out.

And then you also have this other concept of house money where like if you do win, it doesn't it's not your money that you earned from your paycheck and you're much more likely to take higher risk from it from there. And you see it with loss aversion in people's lifestyles as well. If you go from a Honda Civic to a BMW, it feels pretty good. If you are forced to go from the BMW back to the Civic, it's the worst feeling you could ever possibly imagine. Will Smith talked about this with fame. He was like, becoming famous is amazing. Being famous is okay. Losing fame is the, is the hardest pain you could ever experience. And so I think there's a lot of things in life that are like that where you're taking risks and particularly like investing when you know, as a matter of fact, that you're going to have losses. That's just, that's just coming with it. And if the losses are going to feel 10 times worse than, than your gains, it's going to be, it's going to be tough. There's so many of like the best hedge fund managers, stock traders, the people who've actually done extraordinarily well over years and decades. And you look at their track record and they might be right 55% of the time, maybe like 65% of the time if they're incredibly good at what they do. And so really what their skill is, is they became very comfortable and level-headed losing money. That was how they made money over time, was paying the cost of admission of just dealing with that volatility and loss.

Yeah, I've, I've been disappointed that a lot of the folks that I know that participate in gambling refuse to take my advice and invest invest in the gambling companies, just buy the house. Yeah, because some of the gambling stocks, you like the industry, hate the industry, but some of the gambling stocks have been very performant. And it feels like it should be the solution. And yet it doesn't have the same psychological impact of the quick, quick wins that come from actually playing. Shifting gears a little bit, I wanted to ask you about the publishing industry, the nonfiction industry. Tim Ferriss put out a blog post asking the question, has AI already killed how-to nonfiction? And he tells a story about his, his books. And he says that on, on the 2026 run rate, he's down 57% on, on sales of books. And he sort of attributes that to to some of his books being substitutable with LLMs, just the idea that if his chef, the 4-Hour Chef book was a bunch of recipes and you can get those directly. And I'm wondering about how you think the publishing industry, the book landscape, there's also this piece in The Atlantic about people just not reading at all anymore. Yeah. What are you thinking about where we are right now in terms of the publishing industry and where we're going?

The only thing on Tim Ferriss—

The piece in The Atlantic, Sorry. Yeah.

The only thing I was going to say is like the decline in sales, like, coincides with him just putting way less time into his podcast. Oh, sure.

So he's maybe driving less sales.

So, so like you have to imagine him not fully pricing in just having one of the biggest podcasts in the world. Yeah. And then, and then just slowly doing like, you know, more competition plus putting less emphasis into it. But What do you think?

I think you're probably on to something there. I was going to point out Mel Robbins, whose book will sell 8 zillion copies this year. That's, that's nonfiction self-help. It's the exact same genre. Yeah, she's blowing the doors off right now. Yeah. And so I think for every example that you put in, what's true is that the book industry as a whole, and particularly nonfiction, has not had a very good 3 or 4 years, a lot of which was because 2020, '21 COVID lockdowns was just an explosive of bonanza that everything by comparison to then is, is not that great. But I think there's a, there's a thing too with, with podcasts and long-form writing and books where it's easy to say that people don't have attention spans these days, they want short-form video, and that's, they just want to flip through it and that's it. And it's like, no, the biggest podcasts in the world are like 3-hour conversations that people listen to all the way through. Yeah. And so I think it's not that people don't have attention spans, they don't have a lot tolerance for BS in the way that they used to. And so I think 30 years ago people would slog through a bad book because they had nothing else to do that day. Yeah. Whereas now if you start a book and it's bad, you're like, I got 20 other things competing for my attention over here. I'm going to go there. And so if you're still putting out the kind of content that is engaging and interesting and saying something new, people will buy it. They'll listen to it. They'll put effort into it. They'll listen to it for hours. That's, that's still there.

Yeah, it's crazy how captured audiences were 30 years ago. Like you— or let's say like pre-internet, but it's like if there's nothing on TV that you're excited about, there's nothing on radio that you're excited about, and you don't have a book physically in your home and it's like 8 p.m., like you're kind of like just choosing between options that you're not that excited about. Yeah, but then now it's like truly infinite possibility. No one— I don't feel like people are bored anymore, right? Yeah. Yeah.

And I think it's— I think there's a lot of times when people, what they think is impatience is actually just a newfound intolerance for BS in content.

I think there's a lot of that. Interesting. Yeah, I was in a bookstore recently and the power law of publishing is fully on display because you walk in and the Mel Robbins book, for example, will be shoved in your face with a massive display and tons of copies. And then if you're actually looking for a book, you have to find the section and it's much harder to dig through. They might not even be in stock. And I would have assumed that the Internet would sort of flatten that and lift the tail, but I guess there are power laws everywhere and so certain books go viral. What I'm interested in is this idea of like, there are certain authors that publish a book every year and they sort of just base hit, base hit, base hit. And then there's another version of that playbook, which is have one really defining book, but then continue to franchise it, promote it, add on to just continue to drive sales. And I think that's what Jordi was alluding to a little bit about. You have a podcast and you can drive sales to your existing catalog even if you're not publishing new books.

Yeah, I think that power law exists even among the tippity-top authors. Stephen King has written like 50 books, something like that. Yeah. And most of sales and most of his fame came from like 3. So even among— and like people like Michael Lewis, who's written, I don't know, I'm going to guess like a dozen books, something like that. And I bet most of his income, sales, and fame came from 2 or 3 of them. And so some people have a better hit rate than others. But even among the best— I was listening to an interview yesterday with Matt Damon. Same thing in movies. He's made dozens of movies most of us watching this have never heard of before. Yeah. And so you see that, you see that everywhere. I remember James Clear telling me several years ago, there's 4 million books for sale on Amazon. And if you look at the top 5, the top 5 of the 4 million, it's possible that number 1 is selling 10 times as many copies as number 2. Yeah. So even like it's a 4 million thing and even among the top, the power law just gets crazy.

Yeah, I think it's the same thing with podcasts. I think Rogan is like an order of magnitude bigger than everybody else. Yeah. At least on Spotify. Jordi can't name a single one. What's the single Matt Damon movie? "Born Identity." There you go. Oh yeah, that is the series that you like. Matt Damon also famously passed on "Avatar." And he was like, you would have made so much money from that. But James Cameron said, like, the movie, it's not a Matt Damon vehicle. It's just a movie that the idea exists regardless of the star.

Has there been a book written on the power law, not the venture book? Look at the book, but the book on just like every single place at the power law, because I'm wondering like, is— does power law apply to marriages where like the best marriages are actually 10 times better than, you know, uh, I would assume, I would assume it does.

I think it's one of those big things that's going to influence everything in life, and it throws a lot of people off because it's like you can be extremely good at what you're doing, like if you are a really good college basketball player, you might be significantly like— there's the difference between that. What was the story I'm thinking of? It was someone— it was an NBA player that people were harassing because he was having a really bad season. And he went on a podcast and he was like, the difference between me and you is so much bigger than the difference between me and LeBron. It was like, it's like once you get to that level, like, and so you see it everywhere.

But can you make the argument that no, the difference between between you and LeBron is actually, it's actually, I guess it's the difference still could be bigger, but it could be.

I mean, when I was, my sport growing up, I was a ski racer. And if you were a really, really good regional skier, you were not in the top 100 nationally and you were not in the top 1,000 internationally. It just, it got, and I think it's like that for most sports.

The cross spoken to what you're thinking.

I'm thinking of is Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. It takes well-known computer algorithms and then applies them to everyday life. So, a good example is the 37% rule for choosing. This is like known as the secretary problem. But when selecting amongst a fixed number of options, apartments, job candidates, even potential partners, like marriages, spend the first 37% of your search observing without committing, and then choose the next best option that is better than everything you've seen before, and you will almost— you'll be like mathematically optimal. And it takes all these different algorithms and applies them to everyday life.

It's a fun book. In parenting, are you— do you spend any time thinking about or trying to identify where your children might have might be 10 times better or the potential to be 10 times better at something than their peers. 'Cause I look at this between my children, even looking at athletic abilities, I think it's already like completely noticeable who's like the better, at least natural athlete. And I believe that that will probably carry through throughout their whole life is my intuition, not to say one—

Yeah, I, uh, not, not for my kids. Let me tell you a story. When I— so I was a skier growing up, and for my generation, there were two skiers who became head and shoulders above everyone else: Lindsey Vonn and Ted Ligety. Uh, they both won Olympic gold medals. Everyone knows Lindsey Vonn now. Um, when Lindsey Vonn was 6 years old, she was in a different universe of everyone else, of, of talent. She was just— it was so obvious from the time she was a small kid that she was just the best out of anyone. Ted Ligety is not that. He didn't hit his stride till he was like 18, which was so, so rare. And so, I always— it's always interesting that, yes, there are some people from like from a very early age. Tiger Woods was on TV golfing when he was like 2 as a talented golfer. And so, there's that. But there's also these people that just don't hit it until late in life. Those are always interesting. A lot of entrepreneurs like that that don't really find their stride until they're 30 or 40.

But with Ted, is it possible that he just didn't care enough until he was late in his teenage years? Prior to that, like he was always that good but just never put the effort in or the time?

I think this is— this might bore some of you, but I think it's so fascinating. One of the things with Ted is that there are rules about the kind of ski gear that you can use for racing. Like, they have to meet these, these sizes and whatnot. And they changed the rules at one point so that your skis had to have a certain sidecut. Ted was the first person in the world who figured out how to ski on the new skis and you just completely dominated everyone else for several years after that before they kind of caught up. So there's, there's some of that that was interesting. But I think for— I think that's the rare one. I think to your point, the Lindsey Vonn story is more common when from a young age they are just so preposterously better than everyone else. Yeah.

I want your reaction to this chart that Joe Weisenthal, friend of the show, shared. And we will have the team pull it up. It's the, uh, percentage of U.S. household net worth over time. And for a long time, real estate was the dominant place where American households held their net worth. But for the first time, we are seeing that households are increasingly holding equities. Cash and cash equivalents peaked in the '80s and is sort of declining around 10% of household household net worth, but equities have been completely up and to the right. Maybe it's just a temporary dislocation in the stock market. The stock market's doing very, very well. Houses are more expensive, so households are preferencing that. But I'm interested in your take on what this says about U.S. households, but also the psychology of what it means to hold a, you know, a larger percentage of your wealth in equities versus your house.

Yeah, we always talk about like the stock market crash in 1929. And I think the statistic was 5% of Americans owned stocks in 1929. So we had like— we talk about it as like it started the Great Depression, but it was, it was such a small number of people that actually got hit by that. Whereas today I think the stat is 55% of Americans own stocks, the vast majority of them in their 401. Yeah. Now, and part of that, like if you're an investor for the long term, the odds that you're going to experience a 30% decline or even a 50% decline are almost 100%. That's just how markets work over time. And does that— do— does the general population of just like ordinary Americans who are not watching this and listening to finance podcasts and reading finance books, do they have the stomach for that? Or do they even know that that's the game that they signed up for? I think by and large the answer is no. And even if you do know it, knowing it and experience it and in real time can be completely different. The one thing is that, like, stocks have been over time— nothing is promised in the future— but generating real growth above the rate, like, well above the rate of inflation. Real estate is something completely different, where particularly if it's the house that you live in, not a rental that you have. I, I think we've done a lot of damage to Americans by convincing them that rising home prices are a good thing and they make them wealthier. And it is such flawed math because If you buy a house for $500 grand and then sell it for $1 million, how much money did you make? Well, for most people, once they sell it, they have to buy another house that also inflated in value by 2x over the last same period. It's like you didn't— probably didn't make anything. And so I think there's a lot of like, it looks like wealth on paper with real estate, but it's just a place to live in and you have to exchange it for another place to live in and you didn't really make that much over time. So if we're talking real wealth over time, it's a much situation that we're in now.

Yeah, I am interested about— I mean, I know some people who bought in Mill Valley like years ago, decades ago, just because that was a logical place to buy and it was a nice community. And of course, the house prices are insanely high with the AI boom, with San Francisco booming. But there isn't a logical like, oh yeah, of course they'll move to Florida at some point because that's not really what people do culturally. If you are in in California, you sort of just retire in the town that you grew up in or live in, raised your kids in.

If you can do that, if you can sell in Mill Valley and move to Oklahoma, that's great. That's real wealth. But if you sell in Mill Valley and buy in Mill Valley, you didn't make anything.

You're not doing anything. What— how do you— how are you— do you ever think about like the different prescriptions for solving the housing crisis? We're having Sagar and Jordi Hays on the show tomorrow to talk about it. But I'm interested if there's if there's anything that you have, that you've dug into, whether it's through the abundance or permitting or anything that stuck out to you as particularly exciting around the way America deals with housing broadly.

I think, I mean, it's simple, but it's, but it's not easy. It would be around permitting and building more. There's obviously demand for more. There is the ability to build more. It's just that in the vast majority of cities, is it's virtually illegal to build where people want to live, or at least extremely difficult. And it's one thing to say, you know, build more homes. It's another if you're a home developer in California and you want to go build 200 homes, you're going to be waiting in line for years and paying a fortune to actually build that if you can actually get it done. Yeah. And, and so I think the idea that, you know, there's a great saying by Conor Senn, who's a great thinker around these topics, and he says the future is a policy choice. And the reason that homebuilding is so scarce and we don't have enough homes is because we've made a choice to be in that situation. There's no— if you were left to its own devices, it would be solved. Not that, you know, in due time. We did this similar situation at the end of World War II when you had 16 million soldiers come home. There were not nearly enough homes for them. Yeah, but at the time it was much easier to build than it is today. And so you had things like Levittown that sprung out of the middle of nowhere.. And they were building 25,000 homes in a year. And you solved the problem in due time. And so it's, it's simple, but just politically much more difficult to say like, yes, I think by and large it's permitting. It's not a, it's not an exciting answer, but we've made the choice to make it difficult to build where people want to live.

Yeah. For, for those who don't know, what, what is the actual story of Levittown and, and can that be replicated today? I was, I was in Irvine and it feels like a very planned community. Of course, most of that town was built maybe 100 years ago, but it— just driving around and seeing so many apartments and houses, it felt like this could be replicated. But I don't— I'm not exactly sure, um, how far it would be.

Yeah, I mean, it was, it was the end of World War II, and there were, like I said, there are all these soldiers who needed homes. And by, like, most of them, a lot of them moved back in with their parents, which is not what you wanted to do coming home from war. And The Levitt brothers were home builders. They started buying up abandoned farms in New York and Pennsylvania. And they basically took what Henry Ford figured out for cars, which is like you have to make the manufacturing process like very step by step. And every person has a specific step that they do all day long. And they made very small, very cheap, not high-quality homes, but they could just bang out tens of thousands of them. And it— Between that and like the GI Bill that helped finance a lot of those homes, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say like it saved that generation who came home and had nothing and within a couple years allowed them to have a good dignified life going forward.

Yeah, I've been surprised that we haven't seen more spreading out of, uh, basically like longer commutes or longer distance commutes because we're on the cusp of self-driving cars even just a basic Tesla Model 3 has self-driving that can make an hour-long commute much more palatable. And then you also have telecommute, and a lot of companies have like a work-from-home Friday policy or some flexibility around that. And I was expecting that there would be some alleviation from the pressure. Like when I look at the home prices in San Francisco and then I compare them to the, the, or the rental prices in San Francisco, $4,000 for a one-bedroom. And then I look over in Oakland, I'm like, I'm surprised that we're not seeing more flattening out. But I think that there's still a huge demand for being in the action in a particular area, in a particular town, and even in a neighborhood. And so there's been a lot of pressure on like the highest value areas. I don't know.

I'd say there's also been a big inflation of expectations over time, which is what you want in society. You want people to expect, to expect a better life. But when you talk about Levittown, the houses that they were building back then that were so great for middle-class Americans in the '40s and '50s would not be considered a livable house today. It was, it was 800 square feet for your 4 or 5 kids who all shared one bedroom. You had one bathroom for the 6 of you. No garage, no deck, no air conditioning. Like, go on down the list. Most people would not consider that an acceptable place today. And again, I— whenever I I point that out, I have to say I want to live in a world where people have higher expectations over time. That's progress, but it's not comparable over the generations.

Yeah, Jordi? I do too, but at the same time, when I moved to the city that we're in now, I had an extremely long commute and a terrible apartment.

And I had a real roommate, and I, and I think it's just— I think the same room as me.

Well, and I think I think it's like, because the life that people want is immediately available on social media to them to view at all times, there's, I think, like a decreased ability to delay gratification. Because I remember growing up, I'd travel to somewhere, and I'd see like a really big yacht. And I'd be like, wow, that's like— pre-internet, you're like, oh, I've never— well, I guess not pre-internet, but there wasn't like the first time I saw a yacht, I'd probably never seen like an Instagram video of some athlete doing a backflip off of it. I was just like, oh, that's a totally different like life.

At the same time, like, I watched MTV Cribs and stuff. I don't know.

Yes, I was just, I was just going to bring up MTV Cribs, which had such a profound cultural impact on my journey because that was the only view into how the other half lives. But, and it was, I, I love, I watched every episode of that show when I was younger. But what's, but was, but what was so important about it is that you did not consider those people peers. You're like, that's, that's, that's Master P. Of course his bathroom is made out of marble. Like, yeah, that's not a peer of mine. Sure. Whereas today on social media, you see the yacht and you see the person and you're like, that guy, like, he's supposed to be a peer. Like, I'm supposed to be there. Yeah. And so the fact that it was an obvious celebrity or an athlete and that like Shaq had a 12-foot bed, you didn't expect to have that yourself.

My favorite example is like the GT3 GT3 RS is like the most— if you ask a 21-year-old guy, "What car do you want? If you could just get any car right now," a lot of them would say a GT3 RS. So that's my favorite example when talking about personal finance with people that I know in my life that are just starting their careers. I say, "You know that car that you see and you just assume if you work hard, you'll be able to get a GT3 RS because that's a car you want to drive on the weekend?" Well, you need to make— if you want to buy that car, you basically need to make $850,000 in one year in California and be willing to spend the entire amount after taxes that you make just on that car and not have any other expenses for the year. So that is what that car— that is the actual cost of that car. But it's just like put into their face all day long to the point where people just assume like, okay, like if I work hard and I do a good job in life, I should be able to get a GT 3RS, and it's like, yeah, it's just so normalized.

I just found one for— I just found one for $50K. It has, uh, this is on a salvage title. It, it has 6 owners, Florida. It has aftermarket wheels, but it's doable. It's doable.

Okay, you have, you have, you have to pull it out.

If you make 6 figs, yeah, and then you spend your entire— it's only had 4 accidents, only 4 accidents. Anyways, Morgan. Still runs.

I was gonna say, I think tech has done so much to expectations over time. I was in Tahoe this week with my family where I grew up and we were driving past and the biggest, most beautiful house in town, this mansion in Tahoe, it's so beautiful. And I told my wife, I said, you know, the people who lived there when I lived here back in the '90s, that was an orthopedic surgeon. And we were like, there is no way an orthopedic surgeon could afford that house today. That house would be a tech CEO's house. But back then, orthopedic surgeon was the highest earner in town. There were no product managers at Google making $850,000 back then. And so, it created what we used to think of like jobs that every town has, dentists, doctors, lawyers, those kind of things used to be number 1. Now, they're number 47 on the earners in town. Now, you got to do orthopedic surgery SaaS.

If you're the founder of an orthopedic surgery SaaS product, then you get the highest. House. It's the same thing. Dental SaaS or something like that. Yeah. No, it really has been like a crazy, crazy boom. It's driven up everything all over the place.

Jordi Hays? Do you ever plan to retire?

Hm. I think it depends. I always think the purpose of financial independence is to get to choose your problems, because you're going to have problems either way. And I was talking about this with someone earlier, of people who've sold their business. I don't know if you guys know two people who've sold their business recently, I don't know, but the number of them who went on to regret it. And the reason is— this won't apply to you guys— is because they left their business and they realized on day one, like, that was their purpose. And once they left it, that was their identity. And they woke up the next morning with tons of money and no purpose. And I would say, like, if you think work is hard, try boredom. It's way harder. It is way more psychologically taxing than hard work. People want good problems in life. And so, retire? No, I work very differently now and do a different level of work, less work than I did 5 years ago, but I'm still doing things to keep myself busy because if I didn't, I would slip into boredom and then probably depression very quickly. So, I guess to answer your question, no.

Yeah, there's some formula. It's like how much you should invest in bonds is like your age minus— 100 minus your age or something. It's like how much free time you should have should be like 100 minus your age. So when you're 20, you're working 80% of your waking hours. But when you're 50, you're taking half the time off or something. I don't know. There's some like, you know, you want to have some sort of balance. You probably can't go 100-hour weeks into your 80s unless, I don't know, maybe somebody will.

But it's a big problem because in finance we spend so much effort making sure people have enough money to retire and focusing on that number. And no time whatsoever asking the question, what are you going to do once you're retired? And for a lot of people, they retire, they got plenty of money, they saved their whole life. They don't know what to do. And then after 2 weeks of retirement, they wake up and like, who am I? I don't even know what I am anymore. What's my identity? What's my purpose? And if they retire at 60, they might have another 40 years to live, like an entire extra life to live doing nothing. Yeah.

It's a long time. Nürburgring track time, sub-7 minutes, make it happen. That's the purpose.

That'll be John. That is the— it'll be the 80-year-old on the track.

Shaving off milliseconds.

All right, Grandpa, let's put you to bed. I think I'd have a disadvantage forever.

I don't know. Maybe I—

Let me flip that around to you guys. Young guys, successful, sold your business.

Do you think you'll ever retire? No. Absolutely not. I saw my late grandfather was sharp as a tack until about 3 months after he retired. And I think that the daily habit of just putting in work, using his mental capacities— Yeah. But I would like to— —was contributing to his longevity. And to me, building companies is like an act of creation. And there's nothing as satisfying or enjoyable to me in this whole world than creating. And so, to me, it's like— it's like, you know, you're asking an artist, like, do you think you'll ever stop, like, you know, making art? It's like, yeah, you might dial it back. You might do these different things. But no, I'm so fascinated to— I like to imagine, like, if I was 80 years old right now, I was living the same life, what would I be choosing to work on? What ideas? And I think they'll be quite different than the things that are interesting to me now. Yeah. But I look forward to figuring that out.

I would say, like, there are some fields that I really admire when people quit while they're ahead, whether it's like Seinfeld in 1998, shows on top of the world, and he's like, no, we're done. I've given it all I want. We're out of here. But he didn't retire. He's, he's still on tour today doing a million other things. Yeah. And so the, the ability to say like, I could probably squeeze more juice out of this career, whatever that career might be, but I'm proud of what I've achieved and now I'm going to go do something else. It's not retirement, but I admire that versus you could easily imagine a history where Seinfeld went another 10 seasons and it sucked and it just kind of like died on the vine. You can easily imagine that history. Which is kind of what The Simpsons have done over the last 20 years, right? Interesting. And so, I really like when people quit while they're ahead. I think it's really admirable.

Yeah. There's also something— there's like a kind of business that can only be started by someone who doesn't need it to work, basically. And you see this with startups where, like, you know, an entrepreneur will have an exit and they'll start working on something and then they'll just be toiling in obscurity for years and, and, and eventually, they can build something valuable out of it, but a young entrepreneur wouldn't necessarily do that because they're like, "I have to make the SaaS so that I can raise the next round, so I can do all these different things." And so, I also think it just changes when you have— if you can set yourself up to be able to take more risk, there's interesting businesses to be built.

Yeah, I forget who said this years ago. Maybe Mike Solana might be getting that wrong. He said like the number of founders, founders that he's met who sold their business, cashed out, and then they said, I'm going to take 2 or 3 years off to just chill and ski with my family and hang out. And then I'm going to come back. And they come back after 3 years. And I think the way he phrased it was like every one of them is so smooth-brained at that point. Like you just lost it. Like you just atrophied. They lost the edge of what you had. And so the idea too, that it's a muscle that you got to keep going or else it's just going to wither away is important too.

Yeah. Yeah. It seems like there's like a different set of challenges that the post-exit founders can take on that works. But if the business requires like having really, you know, like firm contact with, you know, a large swath of consumers, and you haven't been to the store in 4 years because you now have a personal shopper, like you might be out of touch there. But if you're solving some sort of problem on the like geopolitical level, marshaling billions of capital, and it's like that was an opportunity that was only open to you after you exited, then that becomes something that you can accelerate into a little bit better. But it's, it's sometimes hard for people to go back into the garage if the startup idea requires those like garage years of like prototyping something at a very low level and like going zero to one on something that's so niche and so requires contact with like, you know, broad reality.

What do you think the value of vacation, vacations is? Because to me, like, I went, I went like, I basically, you know, I'm 30 now, my twenties, I probably didn't take, you know, more than 4 days off, you know, at any point in my 20s. And I used to think like, wow, I'm stressed. I should like get away and like— but ultimately that would just try to create— that would, in my experience, create more stress because I'm like, the thing that is causing stress, I'm not addressing head on and and solving. But I'm curious in your life what you feel like, you know, what benefit you feel like you get from vacation, because I don't think like stressed people going on vacation like solves stress. No.

If anything, it's because if they actually detach on vacation, then they come back and they have 47,000 unread emails and just more problems piled up in there. My—

my detaching is not necessarily even healthy to be like, I'm just going to ignore the problems in my business. Yes, or whatever, for 4 days. And then it's like, you may as well just go on a bender or something like that, you know?

Yeah, but I do think it's true is that for a lot of people, the reason that they actually go on vacation is because they have to travel somewhere else in order to justify detaching. If they just stayed home and detached, they would feel some sense of shame. But if they're like, oh, we're going to Maui, so now I'm going to detach, it gives them the excuse to do that. Because like, is being in Maui actually that much better than being back at home? Like, there, there are aspects of it. But I think what you really enjoy is giving yourself permission to be someone else and to be on a different schedule that you could not bear if you were just staying back at home. My wife doesn't like traveling. She's totally— she likes being at home. And I think this is part of her philosophy of like, people don't actually like traveling. They just don't like being at home. And if you enjoy being at home, your desire to actually do it really diminishes. I travel a lot for work, so I don't have a ton of desire to— my idea of a vacation is not getting on a plane this week. But I think it tends to be true. I've used this example before of like, if I'm building sandcastles with my kid on the beach in Maui, and that's a 10 out of 10, being at home playing Legos on the living room floor is at least a 9. What I actually enjoy is time with them. It's not flying for 7 hours and spending 10 grand on the trip. It's spending uninterrupted time with the family. But back to the original point, I think some people have to vacation in order to have uninterrupted time with their family.

It's impossible any other way. Yeah. Yeah. When, after kids, the idea of like a 7-day trip to Hawaii, I'm like, so you want me to go through 2 days of just like pure chaos and suffering for everyone in the family where the kids are uncomfortable because they're going to the airport and they're in the airport and they're on a plane and they're waiting around and then it's like sort of you bookend the experience. So, you're like, you come out of it not necessarily like to me, I don't come out of trips feeling like—

Take a boat, turn it into a 3-month trip.

There you go. It's probably better.

My wife has this thing too where she says the best part of every trip is coming home. I think when we do go on vacation, it gives her a newfound appreciation for home. After you've been in a tiny hotel room and then you come home, your kitchen feels like it's the biggest thing in the world, the bathroom feels like it's the biggest thing in the world, and you appreciate what you already have more. We were joking last night, not seriously, but we're like, we should intentionally take worse and worse vacations so we can appreciate home that much more.

Wait, we, we have a, we have a buddy who at least historically would, uh, take a, like, get a round-trip flight over the course of a day if he needed to work on something. So he would, he would like just fly to some random, like, basically book like a $200 round trip ticket and just to get like something done that they were avoiding.

Wow. That makes— that seems like there's much easier ways to do that. Drink a coffee or something. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show, Morgan.

Great catch up. Yeah, great to see you.

Have a great summer. You're the man. Let me tell you about Console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance. Finance support, giving employees instant resolution for assets requests and password resets. And let me also tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Well, we have Mark Gurman joining the show in just a few minutes. You say the Germinator? The Germinator's back in the UltraDome, getting us up to speed on what's happening in the thermonuclear war between Apple and OpenAI. And so he is here. Let's bring in Mark Gurman, the Gurmanator himself, to take us through his excellent reporting. As always, congratulations on the scoop. Take us through it. Friday, what was your day like? What happened?

What's the headline? It was great, you know, end of the work week.

But for me, there's really no end. It's Monday, Tuesday. It's all week, 7 days, 24/7. Yep. Apple suing— or yeah, Apple suing OpenAI. I didn't find it to be that big of a shock. I think things have been brewing for several months. This was a 2-year relationship that went south pretty much in the first year. I think it was doomed from the beginning. We can get into that. Yeah, but OpenAI had been pillaging Apple's hardware engineering ranks. Cloud department, many other aspects of the company for over a year. 400 people hired by OpenAI. And people move between companies all the time. But one company hiring 400 people from another company in such a short period of time. Yeah, it's absolutely insane.

And Apple, and Apple, even with all the, the competition. We talked about it from like Amazon and Microsoft and Meta has never gone through this kind of— they've never been pillaged in this way.

Yeah, it's not like Bezos got 400 people from Apple working on the Fire Phone and everyone—

I've seen a million decks where we're like, we got this guy who worked on iOS at Apple and it's like somebody—

everyone says they worked on iOS at Apple. It's good for the resume, whether it's true or not. You know, every company likes to say, oh, we got this bigwig from Apple. And then, you know, you ask people at Apple about this person, they're like, I've never heard of this guy. He didn't even work here. But that's besides the point. The real story here is that Apple had known for a while now that there was probably some shady stuff going on when you have that many people. I mean, the person running the hardware organization at OpenAI, a guy named Tang Tan, he was heavily respected when he was at Apple. But, you know, once he left Apple, It was, it was wartime. This was a person who had been running the iPhone design team for many years, paired with Jony Ive, who was the designer, you know, alongside Steve Jobs for decades. Ive's successor, Evan Tanke, who ran the ID studio, the industrial design studio, for 3 years after Ive left. They set out to build the product to take down the iPhone. You know, you can ask yourself, is that even possible? But on the other hand, the fact that these people, you know, worked for Apple for so long and they wanted to create sort of the antidote to Apple, it's a scary thing for, for Apple. And that coincided with Apple facing its own AI struggles. Right now, their hardware engineering organization is going through the biggest transformation in decades with John Ternus stepping up to become CEO and Johny Srouji, the chips guy, now becoming in charge of hardware engineering. Himself. You know, he's a visionary when it comes to management and silicon. But the big question is, is he a visionary when it comes to products? Obviously, John Ternus will help with that as well. So there are some big questions at Apple right now. Obviously, it's been a very long time since they had a big new hit. The Vision Pro was a complete flop. And so this company combining the best AI, right, OpenAI, using some of Apple's best engineering talent, Plus 390 of their best friends from Apple. It's a scary sight for Apple. Yeah. You know, they maintain that this lawsuit was not about slowing down OpenAI. It's because they were able to find— they're not calling this, but I can't think of a better term. They knew some shady stuff was going on and they found a smoking gun. Right. Smoking gun was this young iPhone engineer who went from Apple to OpenAI at the beginning of this year. And it's a crazy story. He kept a MacBook. He had this relationship. They're not saying if it was like a romantic relationship or whatnot, but I have to imagine that probably had a component there. He was working with this girl who was still at Apple, who eventually went over to OpenAI, and he had found some flaw in their cloud network and was working with her to get stuff even though he was still working at OpenAI. So, you know, you could make a Netflix special out of this or you can make an Apple TV special out of this, but they'll never go for that.

Maybe it'll be on Amazon Prime.

A lot of interesting stuff, yeah. And then they kept digging, they found a bunch of stuff on Ting Tan. Yeah. And they built this lawsuit around this guy who worked at Apple for 25 years. Everything that I'm told about Ting Tan is obviously a brilliant guy. Mm-hmm. Flew very close to the sun is what a few people told me. Mm-hmm. I'm not gonna say he did shady things, but he did what he needed to do to help make the iPhone the most successful consumer gadget and it's well-designed piece of machinery, you know, most successful consumer product ever, one could argue. So they knew some of his tactics. He helped build that—

So you're saying there was an awareness at Apple that he was basically like always playing to win very aggressively, like potentially blurring some lines? Yes. Yes. So they knew their players.

And so they knew this guy was going to do anything to get things done, but they weren't able to sue them until they found this kid. One thing I'll say, and it's kind of unfortunate, there's two people at OpenAI on LinkedIn with the same name. There's the guy who's named in the lawsuit, and there's another dude at OpenAI with the same name. And maybe he works for TV. I'm just joking. And I see a bunch of people posting on LinkedIn or on Twitter, whatnot, a screenshot. I'm like, you've got the wrong dude. And so, you know, whenever there's— that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Whenever there's like a big tragedy or whatever, everyone goes out to try to find the guy's name and everyone posts the wrong Facebook account. So this guy is getting blamed for getting blamed for it, but has nothing to do with him.

Yes. There's also an actor with the name Chang Liu, and he has some very iconic photos on the internet because he's like basically a male model.

And it's funny. I think I saw that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Chengliu. He looks, he looks like, yeah, just like a model straight out of the runway. What does the timeline for this case look like? I was digging into XAI's lawsuit against OpenAI filed about a year ago, just was dismissed, I guess, a month ago. Is that about App Store?

Ranking? No, no, no.

So, so, uh, X, SpaceX currently has an ongoing lawsuit with Apple about the App Store ranking that has not been decided. But separately, xAI sued OpenAI for poaching employees and potentially getting those employees to share secrets of how Grok is trained. That's the allegation. And that case was just dismissed last month on the 15th, but it took a year to get there. And I'm wondering because we have that as an example. We also have the Samsung-Apple battle that took 8 years and ultimately ended in a settlement. And I'm just wondering about how you're feeling about the pace of things. There was sort of a quick back and forth on X, some comments from OpenAI leaders, but how will this story actually evolve and play out?

It all depends. I mean, OpenAI is going to fight Apple like hell.

Yeah, they'll have a law firm involved.

In fact, you know, OpenAI hired a—

they won't use ChatGPT. Codex bearish. New models bearish.

They hired— they, they actually hired a law firm a couple months ago, okay, and they were going to sue Apple over the relationship when it came to the Apple Intelligence Siri deal. So they've got lawyers looking into this and working on this. I wonder— so Apple's saying that they reached out to OpenAI in February, uh, about their concerns over trade secrets and whatnot. I wonder if OpenAI started preparing its lawsuit against Apple as part of a, you know, down the line countersuit type of situation. Yeah. Or is in response to Apple's letter. Neither here nor there. I think this could take several months to 2 years. It really depends. The discovery process is going to take a while. But if I'm going to be really honest with you, I don't think the courtroom timeline really matters. I mean, matters to some extent, but the bigger picture already happened. If you're an Apple employee and you're thinking about joining OpenAI right now, sure. First of all, you're going to keep your mouth shut. You're not going to tell anyone, right? They're going to walk you out. Yeah. It is not a good thing to be someone at Apple right now who's thinking about joining OpenAI. Sure, sure, sure. You're going to have Apple security all over you. Your manager is going to despise you and everything you do.

They're going to be watching every website you went to on your computer for the last month. So you got to know that you're going to be really clean if you're thinking about that. Yeah.

Yeah. So if you're thinking about going to OpenAI and you're at Apple, the way Apple wrote this lawsuit, you'd have to be out of your mind to not think twice about it. And I think that Apple needed to stop the bleeding to OpenAI. And this lawsuit is certainly going to help with that. Yeah. The other thing is, is you're going to have Tingtan, all those guys caught up in depositions and discovery and meetings with lawyers now. It's like, how are you supposed to launch a product? How are you supposed to do your job if you're stuck in the office all day with lawyers? Sure, sure. Um, everything is going to need to be cleaned up. They're going to need to work in a clean room-like environment now. They're going to investigate what kind of Apple IP is in there. And even if, if OpenAI did nothing wrong, all the work that's need— it's going to need to be done to prove that, this is just going to be a big waste of time for everyone. So By just filing the lawsuit, Apple accomplished quite a bit.

Yeah. So how do you think a company like Apple, who notoriously is, you know, very protective about internal secrets, process, supplier, you know, all these different things, is in the middle of getting, you know, you know, the craziest talent raid in consumer electronics history and then just like has someone go out the door and they're not even, you know, we were reading Ben Thompson's piece earlier just, you know, he was kind of mocking Apple's security. And as I was reading the complaint, I was thinking back to the deal sort of rippling drama that happened last year and how the guy was kind of set up and in some way And I was thinking, like, is Apple savvy enough to, like, try to create a smoking gun by being like, yeah, let's not— let's just let it— yeah. This is full tinfoil hat.

You think Apple just made this whole thing up? No, no, no, no, no, no.

I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying, like, it would be crazy to me if you're getting people poached and you're not like, oh, yeah, we should make sure all the—

Oh, you're leaving the company.

"Sure." Yeah, just keep your laptop kind of thing.

Oh yeah, yeah. That'd be wild, wild twist. Well, I mean, I'm sure more information will come out and—

The discovery process is going to be very exciting, very interesting. Totally. I think Apple has a very high burden of proof here from a legal standpoint. I'm not a lawyer, but being able to prove that its IP is within certain products is going to be, it's going to be difficult to prove. Yeah.

So we'll see if they're able to do it. Also the narrowing of like, what is a trade secret?— like, it's been this, like, awkward reality in the AI race that when an AI researcher leaves for another lab, they basically take the architecture that isn't necessarily patented and is sort of a trade secret. Like, they take that with them and they just say, oh yeah, like, we should probably train a model of this size, or we should probably include some of this training data. And that's why we've seen the frontier. But that's very different different from hardware stuff with patents.

And right, I would like to know what trade secrets, or what Apple will be able to claim as a trade secret, ends up in these products. Because as you know, and everyone listening to this knows, hardware is incredibly commoditized. Uh, there are hundreds of companies that make electronics in the same space at Apple all over the world. And being able to prove that you're using Apple technology to release your phone and build your phone and develop your phone, that's going to be Very difficult. I, I don't see this being a clean victory for Apple if it goes to a jury trial. They don't— in my guess is they're not going to have— remember the Samsung trial? This is what Samsung phones look like before the iPhone. This is what the iPhone looked like. Yeah. This is what Samsung phones look like. Right. They broke it down so a third grader would understand it. It was very easy to follow. Sure. Short of that, I just don't see how Apple could win a jury case here. And if you read the complaint over and over again, Apple acknowledges that they don't really know what is really happening here. They know enough to know there's something shady going on and we need to discovery, discovery to figure out what is going on. And so they'll, they'll do that. But I'd be very surprised if they find something. The other part of this is there's a few things that you can really make a trade secret case on right now. That's silicon. And Apple has very proprietary silicon code, the way they develop chips and design chips. And they went after this company called Revo that Meta ended up buying, and they got major changes made to how Revo operates. The other one you mentioned is AI. You know, there's no AI thing that OpenAI is stealing from Apple. And from the chip side, everything we know is that OpenAI is using Qualcomm and third-party chip providers. So, yeah, I'm very curious to see what Apple ends up finding. I'm sure they'll find some good text messages and emails, though.

Yeah. Can you take us back in time to Johnny Ive's departure, the birth of I/O, how that was perceived within Apple? Because it feels like when the acquisition happened, it was 55 employees at I/O at the time, a lot of them ex-Apple, and Ben Thompson pointed out that he said, I think Apple feels betrayed not just by Tan, but also Jony Ive. Start with the fact that Ive framed his partnership with OpenAI as an attempt to undo the harms he thought were caused by the smartphone. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. So you see these, you know, people leave and they're like, oh, like, we, you know, we need, we need an antidote to the social media thing. This is a common, a common thread that, that people pull on in their second act of their career. But —what was the I/O journey? Was it pretty smooth when that happened? Was this something— if you play out a different scenario and I/O is just consulting for a Samsung and— Ferrari. —Ferrari and a bunch of other companies that are not directly at each other's throats, new hyperscalers, a disruptive AI takeoff, all of that, how does the story look then? So the story—

well, I'm not going to get into the Jordi Hays stuff. Right now. But, you know, Ting Tan, he tells John Ternus— by the way, the other side of this thing is him and Ternus hate each other. Um, happy to go into that. But Ternus, you know, he was up for the SVP of hardware job in 2020. Ting Tan and a lot of the people at Apple who now are at I/O and at OpenAI, they wanted Ting to be the new head of hardware engineering because they enjoyed working with him on the product design side of things. And the ID studio and product design works very closely together. Tang had run the iPhone side of things. Ternus, for a number of years, was running the iPad and the Mac side of things. He had felt that a lot of the core technologies that Tang was working on, you know, they got iPhone priority and he didn't really want to share that with the iPad and the Mac team. You know, now Ternus and Cook, they're sort of getting the last laugh, sort of. Giving Tang that reputation that he's not gonna ever be able to drop of being someone who sort of, they didn't say the words, but a ringleader around this. So that's what happened. He tells Apple at the end of '23 he's leaving. Ternus lets him stick around through February of '24 because Tang's role at Apple was so big. He had his tentacles in so many different things. They actually had to replace him by splitting up his responsibilities I remember quickly across 5 or 6 or 7 different people. Wow. So it took a lot of time to unwind. He behind the scenes was already working with Jony Ive and Sam Altman and some of these other folks on creating this company. I think the origin story of I/O is they knew all along that they were going to get acquired by OpenAI. The other part, and this sort of got buried when OpenAI acquired I/O, but like OpenAI already owned 25% of I/O. If I remember correctly, for a year or maybe more before the acquisition of OpenAI buying I/O was announced. So that's pretty interesting. That's very— neither here nor there. I/O, they're filled with some of the best talent who's ever worked at Apple, combining the best talent that's ever worked at Apple with the, with the AI acumen of OpenAI is a scary sight, I would say.

Mm-hmm. Oh no, they're gonna have to pivot to a VR headset. My dream. I just want another VR headset. That's all I want, but I don't think I'm getting it. Yeah, me and me only. I'm the only one that's gonna get it. It's rough. What else is new in Apple world? What else are you covering outside of this?

Lots of stuff. Lots of stuff to come. Yeah, Apple's going to start its biggest new product period in its history. Yeah, this fall and at higher prices, right?

Like the memory shortage is very real. It was sort of like a delayed announcement post-WWDC. But, you know, the, the, the strategy there was like rip the Band-Aid off after WWDC, but with enough time for everyone to absorb the news. Before the products are launched. Is that generally the theory there?

Well, you know, they hit the point where they couldn't impact their margins anymore. Obviously, they're reporting earnings at the end of this month, so they'll talk more about that. Yeah, but the big picture here is the iPhone is going to get its price hike in September. Yeah. Everything I'm told is that the cost to build because of the memory makes these phones $150 to $200 more expensive a unit. Yeah. So I think they're going to raise the prices by $150 to $200. Yeah. They don't want to give up that margin. I mean, the fact that nobody's buying the Vision Pro and Apple hiked the price up by $200 anyways because the memory tells you everything you need to know. This is not a company that's going to compromise on its margins.

Sure. Is there any world where vertical integration around memory is on the table, like going deeper there? Lock— even like the Southwest bought all those like futures on oil and had cheap gas and cheap flights for a long time. Like, you know, even if you're not AGI-pilled and you don't build the foundation model, there's still a world where you go lock up really long memory contracts and keep your prices down. I don't see it happening. Just not culturally. I don't—

yeah, I don't see it happening.

How is— they're trying to get the suppliers to expand. Sure. Yeah.

How is Apple's relationship with TSMC? Evolved or changed across the AI boom? Mm-hmm.

Ooh, well, I think the long and the short of it is that, you know, Apple's still the preferred customer of TSMC, but there are plenty of other customers now that are a big piece of the pie. And so I think the relationship still remains very strong. Um, but I don't think this is exclusively because of the AI boom. And you can see Apple looking at secondary, potential third suppliers on silicon. You've seen that with Intel. They've talked to Samsung as well. But the TSMC relationship, from everything I understand, is still as strong as ever. It's just Apple's not the only game in town as a customer at this point.

Mm-hmm. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come break it down for us. We appreciate you.

You got it.

Hopping on. Thank you. Congrats again on a major scoop. A major scoop. How much time did you— were you able to— Were you able to like pre-write your article before the actual complaint was live or did you— did it go live and then you wrote it?

Did I write my article before the complaint was live?

Like, did you know it was about—

Good question. I'll tell you next time.

Thank you so much. Great to see you, Mark. See you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Public. Whether you're long, short, long Apple, short Apple, Public has investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Let me also tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with agents.

Yes. Yeah, I can see why he wouldn't actually want to answer that question after I He knows everything.

Nothing happens in Cupertino without Mark Gurman knowing first. There's an interesting AI threshold that was broken over the weekend. I didn't know that I wanted my, my, my goalposts in this particular area, but I like this. So Ethan Mollick shared this. He says this was one of those impressive AI thresholds for me. I gave GPT-5.6 SOL in Codex "control over my computer and asked it to win the daily challenge for the game Slay the Spire 2, randomized factors so it can't cheat. You can't just look up the answer." And he said, "It worked for 5 hours making complex game choices and won." And I've been a huge fan of Slay the Spire. I really enjoy this game. I don't know that— I didn't know that there was a sequel. I guess there's a sequel out already. But it is sort of a— it's a slow it's turn-based. So you can take as long as you want to make every decision. And so it's not real-time, so it's somewhat suitable for this, but it makes me very, very clear that these are great benchmarks for computer use because you can, you know, RL on certain Pokémon benches that, you know, the data will flow in once it becomes a big trend. But if you can just fire up some random game that you find personally interesting and watch a coding agent sort of win that game just through computer use, that's going to be a very visceral feel-the-AGI moment for a lot of people. What do you think?

I mean, yeah, I think the current coding models are not good at this because they're like a little bit too slow. Yeah. But if you remember, Standard Intelligence had that computer agent model where it was like playing games in the browser. Yeah. So I—

like, that's like a very different architecture from like what, you know, Codex is using right now or whatever, Cloud Code, but—

Yeah. I think it should be very possible.

So, yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of advancements in AI that can— they can win games, but it needs a very specific harness. Like, it always needs to have some sort of like the output is basically JSON or something and that's translated translated into actions in the game. What's so cool about this demo is that there is no harness. It's just moving the mouse and clicking the buttons. And it learns all of that on the fly, which I think is really cool, which means that we need to move the goalposts one more time because we are coining and we are creating Rust Bench, which is not the programming language Rust. That's right. It is the level in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, right? You need to be able to beat Jordi Hays on Rust if you're building a coding agent. Wait, it's— oh, it's— isn't it COD 4?

Oh, is it called MW2? Wait, which one is it? We play Modern Warfare 2. We play—

yeah, we play COD and we play Rust.

And you—

and the fact that you guys can't even get it straight, we are going to set up taking it seriously, Codex on Rust, and we are going to 1v1 it and hopefully, uh, and hopefully defeat it for a very long time because humans must stay in control. But I have a feeling that the AI will win eventually, but it might take the Cerebris chips. It's going to have to think pretty quickly, think on its feet, because 5 hours to win Slay the Spire, I think it takes a normal person like maybe 30 minutes, 45 minutes to win one of those challenges. We're getting called not real gamers. It's really rough right now. We're getting absolutely destroyed.

Damn, young John would be just so disappointed.

It's been a while. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents and playing video games now. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. And we have our next guests with us in the team. This is big and relates to what we were talking about earlier.

What's going on, guys?

How you guys doing?

Yo, thank you guys for having us and congrats. Thank you. Congrats on the acquisition. Thank you. I'm already seeing Codex ads, Cerebras ads.

Yeah. I'm hyped for you. Yeah, yeah.

Thank you. Great to see you. And Michael, we are honored to have you on the show. So— Yes. Niko, why don't— Dumb as beans. We've been dreaming, actually dreaming about this moment. We've talked, John and I have talked on and off air about wanting to get the greatest Excel jockeys on the show. Yeah, we finally did it, courtesy of Nico.

So maybe quick introduction.

Yes, Nico. Yeah, set the scene for us. Why are we talking? Why are the three of us talking with the Excel world champion? Yes, for sure, for sure.

Um, yeah guys, I'm Nico. Uh, we chatted about a year ago when we launched the first like superhuman Excel agent. We launched Shortcut, caused like a big storm, and we've been like heads down in spreadsheet hell for like a year trying to build an agent that was really, really freaking good. Yeah. Um, a whole combination of things happened that I felt like we did pass this threshold where maybe it's at the level of a Michael Jarman or Dim Early, and I'll let Michael introduce himself. But I flew down to San Diego last week, nervous as hell, calendared a studio, we rented it out, uh, and competed live on 4 official championship models, me versus Michael. And of course I had Shortcut, but Michael had his, you know, big brain. There you go.

Michael, when did you first— Name, do you remember your first Excel session? That's a great question.

I think it would have been when I was about 7 or 8. I think for some reason I decided I wanted to put the 2002 World Cup in Excel. I mean, somebody else had already done this because somebody else was running the tournament, but I decided that 7-year-old me could do it instead. That's my earliest memory with Excel, but yes, since then, Uh, sort of built a career doing various things in Excel, and it's now a competitive esport for reasons that I still don't really understand. But, uh, it's, it's fantastic. There's a great community around it. It's surprisingly watchable. Uh, and yeah, I won that competition in 2024. There's a financial modeling, um, sort of World Cup that is sort of a little quieter. I won that last year, which is, um, why Nico decided that I should represent humanity and see if we can all keep our jobs.

What is the shape of the challenges in an esports competition around Excel? How much randomness is in there? I mean, I've seen the screen recordings where you have to change the color of a bunch of cells, reshuffle, sort things, write formulas. But how much do you know going in? How defined is like the scope of problem that they're going to give you?

Yeah, I know the videos you're talking about. It's some dude who like speedruns like doing all that. That's not what we do. I do not have the dexterity for that at all. So what we do is it's more sort of problem solving in Excel, a bit like a hackathon essentially. So, you know, you'd be modeling some sort of board game or, you know, navigating around a map. The year I won, you sort of had 20 characters in World of Warcraft because they were supposed to be sponsoring it that year. Yeah. And you sort of had to try to track them leveling up and doing quests and whatnot. Um, it can be very, very random, uh, like what comes up, like whether or not it's your sort of question or someone else's. Like, there's a vast array of things that people can do using spreadsheets. So, uh, yeah, the question makers do make a good effort of trying to make a variety of, uh, topics people to answer questions.

And then on the actual grading, uh, how much is qualitative versus like once the solution has been found, the buzzer buzzes and it's deterministic every single time, like pure math versus there's, oh, you know, you got a 9 out of 10 from this judge because there's some style points in there?

No, there's no marks for style at all, which I think is for the best. I think if people had to spend time making things look pretty, I don't think it would be nearly as entertaining. It's entirely deterministic, like somebody else has already calculated what the answers are. Got it. And then as you're copying them in, they either go, yeah, you've got them right, or no, you haven't.

Okay. Is there anyone who tries to basically eschew Excel entirely and solve the problem with Visual Basic? Because if I believe— if I understand correctly, Excel has like a VBA backend and you can basically write, you know, programming language. You can just write code. Yeah, absolutely.

So there's nobody who tries to solve it entirely in Visual Basic just because anybody who's watched this or watching this who's coded in VBA knows it's a terrible language. It's so slow to get going. There's bits, there's chunks of code people have especially for things like looking at the colors of cells. Like if you've got a map and like the blue cells are water, the green cells are land. There's no native way in Excel to do that with formulas. You need VBA for that. There is one guy who— there's now Python in Excel, that's been there for about 2 years, I think. You write some Python code, it gets sent to Microsoft, they run it, they send you back the answer. There's one guy who competes in that and does quite well. His general thing is he's very slow to get going, but when he gets going, he really starts to pick up pace. Again, it's a little bit of the randomness of what case comes up. Some suit him, some suit him less.

And then what is the— what are the rules around artificial intelligence copilots? There's, there's, you know, AI is coming to Excel. Do you think competitors will, will freeze on a particular version of Excel that doesn't have AI, or will there be an AI subcategory that allows you to use some copilots, everything unlimited, unrestricted, you know, you know, and no rules apply categories? How all that play out?

Yeah, so AI is banned in the main competition. It's getting increasingly difficult to police because, uh, it's, it, it's making stuff that looks more and more like a human would compared to some time maybe 18 months ago. Sure. Um, maybe they'll start running like an AI-assisted competition. I know a few people have talked about that. I don't think it'll be very popular. Like, you look at the World Chess Championship, people watch that. There is a World Chess Engine Championship, people don't watch that as much. So, but yeah, it's currently banned. I think we're still going to want to keep on the latest version of Excel because they're adding other stuff to it that's quite helpful. Like they added regex about a year ago. So we didn't have that. Some people would complain. But yeah, at the moment it's kind of an honor code. Like when you get to Vegas where it is to do the finals live, then you obviously can't just be like, hi ChatGPT, do this for me because someone will notice. Yeah. At home it's currently an honor code, which is, yeah, something we're finding harder and harder to police.

Yeah, that makes sense. So Nico, like, what are you learning from Excel Championship? Competing up against— Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is your competition. Is there training data to be learned? Are there sort of like the rough edges of the spiky intelligence? You notice things at the top tier level that then can be applied for everyday users that use your product. How are you actually working together?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I wanted to know that like, one, could you really compete at this high level and what has to be true for you to get there? And how much of this is like mastering the art of using AI versus how much could you like institute into the product as like a first-class experience for everybody? And it turns out that like you have to be really fucking good at using— sorry, really good at using AI to even have a chance. So like when I competed, I actually did some practice cases at home all weekend before leading up and like AI will take the same way in coding, like the path of least resistance. It'll be like, okay, well, I didn't check every single question. I looked at the hints and then decided what I should answer. And I'm like, no. And you'll see this in my prompts. I'm like, do a blank space audit, spin off adversarial review subagents of multi different model types at the frontier to see that, like, you know, they think differently. I don't want you to catch yourself. And with enough, like, with enough verification loops, you can clearly get 100% on, like, any realistically hard challenge that is verifiable. But that's not how most people use AI. And I wanted to know what, what it required to get there. And then work backwards from like, how do you bake this into the product? Because, um, there's a trade-off to these things. And you know, I actually didn't even use the best model. Like, I didn't use Fable. I had to use Opus 4.8 Fast because it's the right spot of the Pareto frontier because I would probably have lost on speed to Michael if I used Fable because we were getting 100% accuracy on almost every question. But I was, you know, faster because of the model I had chosen.

Is there strong transfer learnings from these verifiable tasks versus the less verifiable stuff that people do in Excel all day long? Like, like the average investment banker who's doing a DCF, like, it's not like at the end of the day they're like, yep, the share price should be $200. You know, you're building a case.

You're right. Right. So I would say AI is better suited for the contest than it is for real Excel work in that like this is like you asked first, which is, is this programmatically verifiable? Like, is there true or not true? And the answer is yes here because we have a contest. But if this was judged by a committee of, like, experts based on taste, it would be way harder. Now, you can say that as AI becomes more tasteful, and it is, you see this on front ends, like, it's getting a taste for what looks right. We benefit from that. But there's another more difficult form of verification, which is like, okay, well, there's 20 ways to make a DCF. They all look great, but one is specific to your company. Like, how do you learn that? And that is, like, the real long-tail product learning curve that we bake in with our customers. Like, that's the real challenge right now is AI will do things right., but there's a million right ways.

Among your customers, what does demand for speed look like? I mean, we were talking about Cerebras. There's this trade-off, and I feel like for the nature of an investment banker, at least on the junior level, is often the MD is like, turn this around ASAP because the client is meeting in an hour, and I need you to do it as fast as possible. And there's no excuse for, well, I'm using a really solid solid model, but it's going to take 5 hours to get back to me. Uh, what does demand look like? What are customers telling you?

Oh man, um, I don't think enough people are talking about Cerebras or whatever other alternative ways there are to get to like whatever tokens per second that was.

Yeah, it was like 50, 60, you know, every company style.

Like, it's going to open up computer use, it's going to open up everything. Now you have to hit, you have to hit a certain level of competency and accuracy first before it even matters at all. Yeah, but we are sort of there with Sol fable. Yeah. Now, um, like for example, we even with Opus 4.8 Fast, we turn like an operating model build out with like 15 quarters of history or 15 years of historicals for quarters. Like that can take 30 hours for a hedge fund to build and then 2 hours to update every quarter. We do that like in 1 hour and then 10 minutes. Wow. Um, now we could get that to like 10 times faster and that's actually what's going to be a huge unlock because hedge funds, for example, want to track not 200 companies a pod but 2,000. But you cannot do that because they're Excel firepower bottlenecked. There's another bottleneck, which I think the future will care about, but it's like, even if it's faster, it has to run headlessly because you're not gonna open up 50 models or 1,000 models like on your computer. And Excel does not run headlessly. I bet you it will soon though.

At all? There's no, there's—

You can do some clever, clever arrangement of like VMs, like expensive licenses and like, Some companies might do this to get around the bottlenecks, but I'm— I would— I actually don't know for sure, but I would bet my life that Microsoft is working on this.

Interesting. Nico, are you recruiting Michael yet?

Michael? No, I don't think I could afford Michael. I would say Michael, the best form of recruiting was after the contest, Michael asked me if we can get his team on Shortcut. And we did.

There you go. Wait, so Michael, what do you— what's your— what's your— what do you do day to day when you're not Winning World Championships.

Yeah. So I've— about 6 months ago, I moved into private equity investing in freight rail across North America.

Thank you. Thank you for your service. All right, good, bros. Faith in humanity restored.

I needed that today. I needed that today. Thank you. To know that our best and brightest are still choosing private equity. Yes. And not giving in into, you know, the Nikos of the world. Yeah, building our AI future. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, make, you know, making the roll-up, you know, the path.

Well, congratulations to you both.

Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

Yeah, really, really fascinating, guys.

Great to see you, Niko, and great to meet you, Michael.

Have a great rest of your day.

We'll talk to you soon. Thanks for having me.

Goodbye.

Bye. Private equity, gotta go. Good one.

Dan Primack shared a little tinfoil hat theory. He is beginning to wonder if Sun Valley is really organized by Getty Images and Allen Co. is just a front. I wonder if they actually— do you think Getty Images actually sees an uptick in sales around Sun Valley? Is this just like tech insider baseball exclusively? You have to imagine like Met Gala sells more Getty Images than Sun Valley. It's more of just a fun little something.

Yeah, I think it's a good bit. The funny thing is, like, even being in tech media, we don't see that Getty Images has a bunch of photos of Sun Valley and think, "OK, gotta go sign up for Getty." Sure, sure, sure. It's like, if a cool one pops up, it's like, great.

And you kind of want the watermark on there because it's like a status symbol that it was taken by a paparazzi and not by just some random person.

Speaking of our previous conversation, On betting, Risk Maxing says a 9-to-5 isn't a career, it's a supply chain for casino ammo. And that is certainly one way to look at it, although that's not how we think about our work here, gentlemen.

No, we respect the dollar like Nick Cage. Tai Lopez calls money fuel units. I always thought that was a funny turn of phrase. I call them fuel units. I call them fuel units. This person calls them casino ammo, which is very silly. No two countries with an AI data center have ever gone to war with each other. Is that true? That seems potentially true. What else is going on in the timeline?

Major innovation in fashion. Let's pull this video up. I haven't seen this one. Silva says, this is the greatest invention created since AI. Okay. It is a polo and a quarter zip.

Oh, it's all one? That's a one. Wow. There we go. What is this? What is this Kazakhstan ad? There's a targeted ad on Instagram says if you love tiramisu, you should visit Kazakhstan.

Just try Kazakhstan. Try Kazakhstan.

Is, is that an aerial photo of an area in Kazakhstan?

Yeah, it looks like some sort of desert.

It's beautiful image, but I don't know what it has to do with rock formation. But I've actually seen ads from the Kazakhstan Board of Tourism before. They have a pretty significant firepower when it comes to advertising. I want to play this reel of this gentleman who's practicing his robot skills so he can take AI's job. This is my new favorite genre. I'm seeing less AI videos and more people doing AI impressions going viral. It's a very weird outcome. Everyone said that the— this is, this is the best. This is incredible acting. Look at this guy. So good. Uncanny, uncannily accurate. Uncannily accurate. Um, no, no, there's like a whole subgenre of people that just do impressions of the AI slop. There's that guy who does the chatting with the voice mode and it always gets wrong. And I see more of those than people actually generating AI voices. And I've also seen there's this group—

You mean the off-payroll QA tester? Yeah, exactly.

Off-balance-sheet quality assurance. I see there's this group of guys who make Instagram videos that imitate AI videos. And it's fascinating because you You notice once they do the impression of the AI video, all of the little quirks and tells of AI video, like they'll be saying lines and they pre-rehearse the lines and they have everyone in the shot move their mouth to the line, even if only one of them is saying it, 'cause that's something AI videos do a lot apparently. And then it has these odd like push-in camera moves that happen all the time. It's very, very funny.

We never talked about how I was referencing the turn it down meme with Alexis. Oh, yeah. I wasn't picking it up. You guys, you were too subtle.

Yeah, they got it. I heard them.

I was like, do any of the athletes turn it down? He's like, no, actually. And I was like, how much can you make? 10, 15? Ridiculous. Pull up this last video. We'll close out the show with it from Emily. She's been on a tear.

Is a— every video is going viral.

Voice actor. I think she's a real—

she does voice acting for radio ads, but of course is making fun of the tech industry. I think your business runs on business, but your business's business is stuck in the past until now.

Introducing Business AI for Business.

Sounds like something we would promote. Business AI for Business leverages the power of business AI for your business, transforming your business into AI business with Business AI for Business. Business AI does your business in seconds, leaving your team to focus on the important business of your business. Business. Now your business is free to run your business at scale, at speed, at AI. The future of business isn't coming. It's here. Business AI for Business. Business AI, business, business, AI, AI, AI.

It's very talented.

The funny, she's saying every voiceover script right now, which I would assume that this kind of like audio is like AI is really good at. Yeah, but, but I think some of the AI companies are LARPing and they don't know how good the, the voice models have gotten, so they haven't actually hired a voice actor to read the most AI-laden written script of all time.

Yeah, so, so I like—

sometimes I listen to the radio on the way to work and I hear ads like this, and they're always by these like big legacy companies. Okay, so I assume that's why they're not using like actual cutting-edge technology.

Bullish for voiceover artists, I guess. Reading AI for business ads.

Last video of the day. Yeah, did you see this? Um, there's a clip from— this is SpaceX's new launch site.

It looks like Dune. It actually looks like Dune. I'm pretty sure SpaceX accidentally built transformer. At least that's what it sounds like here. And so you can play— this is designed to, to hold all the rockets so they can launch them, I think, every hour.

Let's get some audio. Look at this.

How do they— they shot this with a drone? This is Dune in real life. Look at this. The engineering that goes into this, just so thinking so far ahead. Like, I think this is designed to launch a Starship every hour. Yeah.

And it's like they said that something like an Olympic swimming pool's worth of water that they use to cool everything.

Yeah, the deluge. There's another video here, uh, this new critical path video is just mind-blowing. Love the deluge part of the story. You can play this video.

This is crazy.

About 650,000 gallons per minute. That's approximately in the range of about like one entire Olympic swimming pool being drained in the course of a minute.

Is that for when it takes off?

Reflector on Pad 2. We're sitting somewhere in the neighborhood of about 650,000 gallons per minute. That's approximately in the range of about like one entire Olympic swimming pool being drained in the course of a minute.

This is how they quantify it.

This is the kind of thing you can imagine, you know, maybe a world in the future where humanity has left Earth and another group comes and visits and they're looking at this thing, being like, "What were they cooking?" What are they cooking?

Imagine if you had the world's biggest machine gun and it's just firing 11 pickup trucks per second out of the bottom of the rocket. Has to be the most American measurement of all in all aerospace history. I love it. Always put it in— always put the power of your rocket in pickup trucks per second, I suppose. Anyway, thank you for tuning in to TVPN. We will see you tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific sharp. And leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at TVPN.com. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.