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Finance Jord the capital of capital this show starts now we got a ton of news open aai is worth $300 billion now uh Ares is going back to their roots and focusing on horse saddles both equally important stories in the world of technology journalism we're going to take you through it today um and uh we have a bunch of great guest for you we got David senra coming on the show Samir from Colin and Samir we're going to talk
about uh Creator economy he just did a fantastic interview with Mr Beast and Mark Zuckerberg putting two of the greats together you see and and it's open AI day they're raising 40 billion at 300 we got two folks from open AI joining the show uh will and Aiden so we'll talk to them probably not about the financing probably about the product and uh all the technology that they're building but uh we're very excited for
that anyway we'll be ranking their top 5,000 gibli memes yes and we'll be pressuring them into buying watches on bezel uh right undoubtedly anyway uh let's kick it off do you have any breaking news I think we should address uh we are officially at 32,000 followers right we have doubled another doubling another doubling another doubling the show is bigger than ever uh we're taking
over uh so we're at 32.3 now and that means that uh it's a d pering Yan episode technically but we are shifting our strategy so uh these D peran episodes now are in partnership with uh zbiotics one of my friends companies actually uh they are not an official sponsor uh but I do love zbiotics and uh zbiotics I actually introduced the founders Stephen lamb I went to high school with uh I met Zack the CEO
through YC I think he did the early YC like the startup School sent out an email hey I'm looking for people and and Stephen was looking for a a co-founder wanting to get in the startup Community um kind of introduced them and they hit it off and they've been running this company for like half a decade now it's great almost a decade I guess they went through YC same people are really
obsessed with this product oh yeah yeah so if you're not familiar zbiotics it's a pre- alcohol probiotic drink designed specifically to kill hangovers basically hugely popular at weddings people buy these and they hand them out to all their guests you take them it really it can't make up for a lack of sleep so you will be tired but it really does a great job of like killing that like terrible
feeling but it's great and if we were going to be drinking this bottle of champagne today it would be perfect because it's the middle of the day you don't want to go home at the end of the day with a hangover yeah right yeah and so we we we want to shift from from drinking the Dom pering on on stream to giving away bottles of Dom pering on and uh this this Dom actually has a uh a sponsor itself slow Ventures slow
Ventures they sent it to us they sent this to us uh good friends of the show and thank you to slow we're going to pass it on goes to a Founder yeah that's that's kind of it's kind of regifting can you know be a little bit taboo but in this case it's really a celebration I think you're a Founder you listen to this you listen to the show you win the bottle of pering on and then and then
you send this to Sam Lon yeah and' be like hey I want to pitch you and it's just snake eating its tail at Oro boros of Don per what do we uh this could be the most Story how are we gonna give it away I wanted to see a super creative five star review on Apple podcasters Spotify I I think that's fun um if you've already left one get a friend's phone leave another one screenshot it send it to us uh just tweet it at us and
the one that we think is the most funny we will we we'll get in touch and mail this to you how about that boom you got to be over 21 obviously and uh it's kind of a contest so I guess there's no no cost to enter no purchase necessary but I guess this isn't a purchase anyway so I don't know just please don't sue us like we're just trying to give out a bottle of Dom uh it's fun I don't know
people get worried about these like contests like they need to be like regulated and stuff like I I I buy it uh I want to be uh a Good Samaritan they're not regulating Dom giveaways yet they're not yet but uh if we get any bigger they might um anyway let's go through the uh the the soft Bank deal open AI Mas Yoshi s got the deal done is putting in10 billion um our leverage King leverage King yeah and people are like oh he's
using debt so the Wall Street Journal has this article this this hitpiece against debt which we love here uh they say uh how is soft Bank funding it's Mega investment in open AI a lot of debt like that's a bad thing baby he's going long he's going turbo long we love it we love to see it Mason's company said the first 10 billion would be financed by borrowing from Japanese bank mizuo and
other lenders of course uh we've seen this stuff before and uh and uh SoftBank has a lot of assets so it actually makes sense but we'll talk about how they're collateralizing it in a little bit what what you got no I was going to say so to be clear this is a stag investment they're doing 1010 billion now and billion in seemingly entirely from uh mizuo yeah and and a handful of other lenders to be completed this month with
the remaining 30 uh to come by the beginning of next year so Masa is going to be under this guy likes to put himself Under Pressure he's going to be under pressure for the rest of the year knowing he's got to has this sort of$ 30 billion sort of investment that he needs to make yeah that he needs to come up with some combination of debt and Equity it is funny because like couldn't open
AI have just G to muho directly and got in debt if they wanted debt but now they have equity on they have preferred equity on their balance sheet and M has the debt yeah it's amazing great for open potentially everyone wins right like if if if open AI does really well mizuo gets paid back they want interest they want to be paid back Masa sees the upside and open AI doesn't have any debt in their on their balance sheet it's
like it's beautiful this is capitalism baby I love it yeah and to be clear to give Masa some credit I could wouldn't he fund this entirely by selling off some of his arm Holdings for sure yeah um but this deal is the largest startup largest investment ever in a startup I need we we seriously need a bigger gong hold on to that gong there we go we got to hit the F hard for this one this is a big deal
whatever anybody has to say about Sam the guy knows how to do deals was the whole thesis of open AI from day one it's like Greg Brockman the CTO of stripe Sam mman he's invested in a billion things made so much money it's like the like the founding team was really really like incredible and if your if your whole thesis is just like bet on Founders like Sam pretty good at making money like it's not that crazy
this is your this is your this has been this is like I feel like the the your favorite Investments are always into companies where the the founders is just like you can tell like they're good at making money he's commercial he's he's commercial like he doesn't he doesn't like losing money and that's I think that's great and I think that's exactly what you want and that's why I'm so excited about not being a nonprofit
anymore it like this clearly is a consumer tech company it needs to be a for-profit and yeah when you think about like could this be the next Google could this be the next like chat gbt for the last year has been on the home row of my app on the home row of my iPhone and like it's not because like I like have I'm Shilling for Sam or something it's just like it's a useful product it needs
to be there and like when I think about what else is in the home row it's like Google Apple and open Ai and so like can it get to you know hundreds of billions of dollars of valuation like sure it seems fine um but I mean I'm sure there'll be a lot of good takes about how where this could go wrong obviously it is a very high valuation obviously uh when Moss is buying Sam leson says you
want to be selling who knows um I'm I'm I'm just excited to see a lot of money change hands and a lot of debt stack up uh together with softbank's pledge to lead the $100 billion Stargate cloud computing initiative with open AI the investment marks a massive bet on the artificial intelligence startup it intertwines The Fortunes of SoftBank with a company that expects to lose billions of dollars for years to come
the hope is that open AI emerges as the leader of the pack in a race to spread artificial intelligence throughout society and commerce a market that many believe could be worth trillions of dollars a year this is what Sam was saying about like it's either worth zero or a trillion and so like you average that out and you're like yeah half a trillion yeah and it's hard to do a discounted cash flow analysis of that
binary of an outcome I mean this is one of like Peter Teal's takes is like is like when when they were doing the DCF on Google and Andrew Reed talked about this too like they just they didn't have the spreadsheets go out far enough to understand that oh yeah if you really play out this trend like Apple and Google these companies could be throwing off like like like hundreds of billions
of dollars of cash a year and they just would the numbers just kept going up they never got to that and no matter how far you went out if you discounted it back it would have been a much bigger number but no one was really thinking that long term now people are like and that's when Tech decided to say no thanks Finance we're done we're done with you we're done with your models yep it's purely vi vi investing and now and
now Tech has gone the other direction which is like oh this thing isn't going to make money for two decades and then it'll make a like sure I'll pay you a trillion dollars right now and maybe we've gone too far who knows we we will see but uh but good luck to everyone involved and congratulations to all the all the open AI uh shareholders and employees who seem to be doing very well right now yes
um yeah you have to imagine some a good amount of this is going to secondary you know even if it's a small percentage relative even if it's $500 million yep it's still pretty meaningful Fort Bank always delivering great quotes the statement says uh the information revolution has now entered a new phase led by artificial intelligence and called its partner its open AI it's partner closest to achieving AGI in
which computers operate on the level of humans and Sam was tweeting about this he's saying like uh AGI has been achieved externally and it's unclear I think you might just be April Fool's joking I don't know um but clearly the product works people like the images people like the text responses people like deep research I like these products and I think people will continue to use
them y uh obviously it's extremely competitive and there are several hundred billion dollar plus efforts now to win this war Y and it's the greatest time to be a podcast in history yeah the edge that open AI has is if you talk to people that aren't as terminally online as the rest of us they will tell you I love open AI I don't just like it and use it it they have a passion for it just as everyday consumers and they'll
be like and hard to get them like oh tell some if you tell somebody it's like open AI they're going to say like but I love open AI already yeah exactly you're like no no no but it's two points better on MML U they're like I don't know what that is this one won an IMO gold medal yeah they're like what what's that yeah yeah it is very funny um soft bank is taking a lot of risks for a piece of
open AI ratings agency S&P global said Tuesday that uh said Tuesday that softbank's Financial condition will likely deteriorate as a result of the open AI investment and that it plans to add debt that could lead the agency to consider downgrading softbank's ratings none of the startup none of the startups with early leads in generative AI have shown that they can operate profitably I don't know how true that is
like you could probably look at the gp4 training run and amortise just that but yes I mean on a on a quarter to quarter basis these companies aren't profitable so in terms of like the overall business it's a good point uh and the sector is pouring tens of billions of dollars into Data Centers based on assumptions not yet proven of a future in which AI rapidly permeates the globe it feels
like it already is rapidly permeating but I guess it's Up For Debate um early Tech leaders often falter a point SoftBank learned when it madec com erab bet that Yahoo would be the dominant force in search uh the background debt has been a common feature of son's risk heavy strategy the CEO borrowed heavily for the company successful Acquisitions of Von's Japanese unit and ship design company arm more recently SoftBank has
been licking its wounds from piling tens of billions of dollars into startups just before values plunged in 2021 and S repeatedly said SoftBank would stay on defense now having pivoted to offense SoftBank ramped up spending including a 6.5 billion acquisition of Chip startup Amper uh go back and listen to our Deep dive on Masa and SoftBank in generally it's very fun and fascinating I think
what people fail to consider is that Masa is a gambler and he's not uh oblivious to the risk that he takes but he's constantly searching for that next absolute Banger totally and uh there's there's a very good you know there's there's plenty of like you know uh non-technical but uh powerful Vibes based analysis that you could do to you know make the case that this could very well be a fantastic outcome for soft
bank so it's one or the other it's either a good or a bad investment it's prob numers we talked to the experts and you know we determine that it's it's going to be either good or bad yeah it's going to be either good or bad you heard it here first folks but it's going to be extremely good if you participate in that secondary deal and then you head over to get buzzle.com and you shop for over
24,500 luxury watches I can't imagine a more AGI resistant asset than luxury watch they're not making any more FP jours after more roxes or tax no I'm just saying yeah the actual companies themselves sure if you want to make the next Rolex you have to go back 100 plus years ago and start it yeah uh at least if you want to run it today yeah exactly if you want to run what could be the next Rolex but not be
alive for when it becomes yes said uh said godp so yeah but go to.com and can we just give a shout out to the graphics Department um we're we're a small team here but I think it's incredible what we can do I mean we're just shy of 75 people now and they have really been overd delivering and I really love the new tickers of course you know we're sponsored by public we have the public stock ticker there but
we also got the poly market ticker and we hope you're enjoying uh staying up to date on what tech markets are are going on it's such a beautiful way to understand the world um and we should actually get some bezel uh we should get like watch listings I just want more tickers need more tickers so think every sponsor ticker at yeah yeah eventually it's just 99% ticker I think so but uh to close it
out go to go to get bezel.set uh there's a major watch announcement the watch world is exploding with new news that's right uh Rolex launched the land dweller uh pek launched a complications watch that's worth over a Million Dollars AP has made some updates a lot of things are launching I wanted to highlight this uh Polo 79 in white gold from PJ it's about $100,000 watch but I think it's it's a lot of watch for
that money it certainly it's a lot of money but it's a lot of Watch it's a lot of money but it's a lot of watch and remember I mean you can you can drive a GT3 RS but you can't take a GT3 RS into a board meeting that's right so uh that's right many people have said this you can't take a you can't take a 911 into a board meeting but you can take your PJ PJ if you drive your T3 RS into
a board meeting you will get arrested you will get arrest not do it except I think more more sill Road VC firms should have massive rollup doors for board meetings if you want to drive just drive your car I think you should be able to drive in like a drive up and you should just be able to roll down your window and be like yeah kpis were good okay yeah yeah we'll be raising in Q3 okay we're gonna get
next well yeah so so we're we're in the we're in the hunt for a new studio yep and doors roll up doors are not like a deal breaker but they're certainly nice to have nice to have for sure it's nice to have anyway uh we're gonna have uh Quaid from bezel the CEO on the show tomorrow to break exactly what's happening in the watch world I follow all this stuff and I have I noticed I have the worst takes
because I I I'll see a new watch drop and I'll be like this is amazing I want this immediately and then he'll be like that's the most controversial watch that's ever launched everyone in the watch world hates it like you are you have like the most contrarian position I'm like I'm kind of fine with that like I don't really mind because I'm like dipping my toe in I know the brands I know the different models but I'm not
like you know in the discourse we're watching joers watch experts B difference yeah so I would I would gladly wear a uh a knockoff Royal Oak from Rolex called the land dweller yeah I think it looks great anyway let's stay with open Ai and move on to an an excerpt from a book that's coming out on open AI there's a segment in the Wall Street Journal it's a long read this is different than Ashley Vance's it is open
AI book it is and uh this is an interesting I'll I'll give my take like The Meta level like this reporter um I don't remember who actually wrote this it's from book that's coming out in a few weeks uh adapted from it's called The Optimist Sam Alman open aai in the race to invent the future by ke haggy or haggi uh it will be published on May 20th 2025 and I'm sure it'll be an interesting read it
is incredibly well sourced so this this writer this author was able to get Insider accounts of like private dinners between Peter teal and Sam Alman like very ve like you've been to some of these parties like people don't love talking to the press that go to those parties like it's pretty rare well and the way they're positioning this dinner just from the graphic is that it was actually just a dinner between the two
of them it it was a bir party there were other people there but still it's like it's crazy that this like leaked at all um so it's it's incredibly well sourced and there's very interesting facts and quotes that bubble up in this story that we'll kind of go through today um but I think the analysis is God awful and so uh truth Zone time it's definitely truth it's not even truth Zone like the I
think the facts are correct I think it's more just like the follow-up questions that are obvious to ask if you're inex in the truth Zone yeah the takes are are you know need to be put in the truth Zone anyway let's read through this cuz a it's it's just a beautifully written I mean it's like a great you know great writer great great author uh I'll Ki it off on a balmy mid- November evening in
20123 billionaire venture capitalist Peter teal threw a birthday party for his husband at yes an avantgar Japanese restaurant located in a century old converted Bank building in Los Angeles's ARS District not far from where we are at this moment yeah seated next to him was his friend Sam Altman teal had backed Altman's first Venture fund more than a decade before and remained a mentor to the younger investor when
Alman became the face of the artificial intelligence Revolution as the chief executive of open AI open ai's instantly viral launch of chat BT in November 2022 had propelled tech stocks to one of their best years in decades yet teal was worried years before he met Alman teal had taken another AI obsessed Prodigy named eleazer owski under his wing funding his Institute which pushed to
make sure that any AI smarter than humans would be friendly to its maker that March owski had argued in time magazine that unless the current wave of AI research was halted literally everyone on Earth will die you don't understand how eleazer has program half the people in your company to believe in that stuff teal warned Alman you need to take this more seriously you want to take it over yeah I mean it's just it's
it's a fascinating history uh I mean alman's first Venture fund was called hydrazine capital I believe um he was actually investor in my first company and uh hydrazine I don't I haven't asked Sam if this is the reference but but hydrazine is Rocket Fuel uh but it's also extremely toxic and will like kill you if you breathe it and so there's this weird I like to think that it's
this weird like double anandra about like Venture Capital can accelerate your business but it can also kill your business it's kind of beautiful um anyway um under reported Sam is like so known for open AI now I think people forget that he ran a very very successful Venture fund and made some incredible Investments during that time and uh then also what's missing from this is that uh Peter teal was is listed
on Wikipedia as a co-founder of open Ai and was one of the initial backers obviously Elon was a major major backer and so and then has fought and there's all this like you know controversy there so like that has become the bigger story but the initial team behind open AI was was crazy I mean it was a YC research project so it was heavily YC influenced and that and YC actually has a stake in
open AI now that must be worth ton now and PG famously like bound out about that on Twitter because he was asking someone and they were and they were like don't you own a stake and he was and he was like yeah I just asked legal and we actually do it was very funny um but yeah I mean they go way back um and at one point Peter teal had been an adviser to YC and Sam Alman was running YC and Sam brought Peter in and they did I
think they did a podcast interview together and they've talked about each other so there's just a lot of like history here that's kind of interesting uh so moving on uh Alman picked at his vegetarian dish and tried not to roll his eyes this was not the first dinner where teal had warned him that the company had been taken over by the EAS uh by which he meant people who subscribed to effective altruism EA had
later had lately pivoted from trying to end Global poverty which was what we saw SBF doing in the uh EA thing the whole idea was like mosquito Nets we got to get mosquito Nets because mosquito Nets are super cheap and they stop malaria and so for for just like a dollar can save someone's life and it's the highest Roi on reducing human suffering versus if you're dealing with like Alzheimer's
treatment like older people very expensive mosquito Nets are really cheap and so everyone uh EAS were originally very focused on ending Global Pro poverty then they kind of pivoted to trying to prevent runaway AI from murdering Humanity uh teal had repeatedly predicted that the AI safety people would destroy open AI uh well it was kind of true with it was kind of true of Elon but we got rid of Elon Sam
responded at the dinner referring to the messy 2018 split with his co- Elon Musk they did not fully get rid of Elon so true uh who once referred to the attempt to create artificial intelligence as summoning the demon that's a great Elon quote I love it uh and and I mean it's the whole Nuance here which is like like everyone is somewhat AGI pilled somewhat AGI Doomer no one has a p Doom of Zero
no one has a p Doom of a 100 um everyone's kind of on this gradient but there's just a question of like how do you deal with that risk and is it with more Innovation and building the a more positive future like the teelan uh like uh Optimist like definite optimism and hey okay we need to build an AI that doesn't kill us versus the kind of indefinite pessimism elas or you you cow which is like it's going to happen no
matter what there's nothing we can do um but yeah give me money for research yes give me money for my Institute yes uh nearly 800 open AI employees have been riding a rocket ship and were about to have the chance to buy beachfront second homes let's hear for some beachfront second homes folks we love we love beachfront second homes on this show even if you're not in the position of those 800 open AI
employees you can go to wanderer.com yeah and you can rent beachfront second home fantastic by the day it's pretty cool you can just get homes by the day by the day fantastic Innovation yes luxury homes by the day by the day hyper fractionalized fractionalized I knew you were GNA say uh and so there was a tender offer going on at the time uh valuing the company 86 billion there was no need to panic so all the open AI
employees are very happy uh at least it seemed that they were Alman at 38 years old was wrapping up the best year of a Charmed career a year in which he became a household name met with presidents and prime minister ERS around the world and most importantly within the value system of Silicon Valley delivered a new technology that seemed like it was very possibly going to change everything and
that really is true like open AI yes the Transformer paper was written at Google yes like other people were working on language models but open AI was the company that that really went full scale pilled scaled this thing up and then also productized it and also figured out like hey people just want done they verticalized research through product and it they were the first to do that in
a really really meaningful way clearly whatever was going on at Google was not allowing for that verticalization there were a fantastic researchers and fantastic product people selling ads and making YouTube a great product they were not talking to each other um and so uh but as the two investing Partners celebrated beneath the exposed rafters of LA's hottest new restaurant four members of open AI six-person board
including two with direct ties to the EA Community were holding secret video meetings and they were deciding whether they should fire Sam Alman though not because of EA this account is based on interviews with dozens of people who liveed through one of the wildest business stories of all time the sudden firing of the CEO of the hottest tech company on the planet and his reinstatement just days later at the
center was a Mercurial leader who kept everyone around him inspired by his technological Vision but also at times confused and unsettled by his web of Secrets and misdirections uh from the start open AI was set up to be a different kind of tech company one governed by a nonprofit board with a duty not to shareholders but to humanity Alman had shocked lawmakers earlier in the year when he told them under oath that he owned no
equity in the company he co-founded which of course was true but very much mocked because uh the idea of somebody doing something not for money is Senator with the line saying you need a you need an agent you need an agent yeah that's great uh he agreed to the unprecedented arrangement to be on the board which required a majority of directors to have no Financial ties to the company of
course because it's this nonprofit structure in June 2023 he told Bloomberg TV the board can fire me and that's important behind the scenes the board was Finding to its growing frustration that Alman really called the shots of course through like soft power not through legal means or voting shares or any and it's an entirely new way of controlling a company it's a really great way to expose that you don't
actually understand the company because I'm sure if you went to the open AI office and talk to anybody you would find out almost immediately that Sam did in fact call all the shots of course of course and there's a lot of just this is like what we're talking about with like there's intelligence and Sam is intelligent but there's other intelligent people around the table it's really will and agency and vision and
coordination and communication and all these like EQ things that really push a push an organization forward and there are tons of smart people at Google they couldn't launch a chatot faster than open AI somehow and it's like why is that it's probably not because they didn't think of it they it's not probably not because of a lack of intelligence it's a lack of valtion um for the past year the board had been
deadlocked over which AI safety expert to add to its ranks the board interviewed AA kotra an AI safety expert at the EI at the EA charity open philanthropy but the process stalled largely due to foot dragging by Altman and his co-founder Greg Brockman who was also on the board Altman countered with his own suggestion there was a bit of a power struggle said Brian chesky the Airbnb CEO who is one of the perspective
board members Alman suggested there was this basic thing that if Sam said the name they must be loyal to Sam so therefore the board is going to say no the Dynamics got more contentious after three board members in the Pro Altman Camp stepped down in quick succession in early 2023 over various conflicts of interest that left six people on the board on the nonprofit board that governed the for-profit AI Juggernaut
and you're getting this weird dynamic where the nonprofit board is set up to just like hey we just want to do research and advocate for AI safety but all of a sudden we have we've we've bed this $300 billion the demon is really just a consumer tech company I guess yeah consumer applications actually yeah yeah just just app your mother was right your mother was right um Alman and his close
Ally Brockman their fellow co-founder Ilia siter and three independent directors these were uh the independent directors were Adam DeAngelo the CEO of quora and a former Facebook executive Helen toner the director of strategy for Georgetown Center of security in emerging technology and a veteran of open philanthropy and Tasha mcau the former a former Tech CEO and member of the UK Board of EA charity effective
Ventures and I believe the wife of a celebrity right um Tasha mcau she's the wife of I forget who someone who is in Joseph Gordon Joseph Gordon Lev that's right yeah um concerns about corporate governance and the board's ability to oversee Altman became much more urgent for several board members after the saw a demo of GPT 4 a more powerful AI that could Ace the AP biology test in summer of
2022 God forbid God forbid the AP biology test gets aced it's over for us it's not a neurotic St that was Humanity's final exam yes yes yes the real one yes it's over once you can Ace AP AP Bio once you understand AP Bio you can do anything you can reverse engineer anything you want anything you want uh I mean does Steel Man like you know you understand bio maybe you understand bioweapons maybe you help someone in in
a basement create a new small poox and create some like there are guard rails that need to be on these things obviously um but it's you know it's a little bit overblown I think um things like Chachi PT and GPT 4 were meaningful shifts toward the board realizing that the stakes are getting higher here toner said uh it's not like we are all going to die tomorrow but the Board needs to
be functioning well and yeah that's a fair that's a fair critique like the the structure of the company was not aligned with what was happening at the company um at the same time it feels like they're acting like like everyone was gonna die tomorrow yeah right yeah and what we actually talked about this before we got on air but I think what if if you really if if they wanted to have a sort of strong
case for their actions there should have been sort of um information being fed to them from active members of the research team and the team broadly saying hey we're very worried about this it's not just a cute chat app that's going to go viral yep uh this this could sort of snowball into something else but it doesn't seem it seems like they were doing their sort of own uh Vibes based analysis of the
situation and just frustration feeling like having an inflated sense of self-importance when realizing they weren't a real player in the game I yeah I completely agree so I mean most of the board was non-technical not actually interfacing with the changes at a technical level that were happening in the iterations of the GPT models yes they were scaling up but how were they doing on evals what how were these
systems integrated how are the what what systems do these did these models have access to all of those things completely agree with that um the the the other thing is like what basically what you're advocating for is like a whistleblower program which kind of exists in every company like if you've ever been on a board and some low-level employee emails you like it's probably not good they're
probably complaining um about something and a lot of times they have good points what was interesting is that uh there was a story that came out that open AI had uh some really onerous exit process where if you left and you didn't sign like an NDA uh they could claw back some of your equity and everyone was like this is terrible and I was like yeah it seems like maybe overly aggressive but it's kind of it's kind of super aligned
with the EAS if you actually think that open A's new model is going to kill all of humanity then your money is worthless right and so you should absolutely say well the money is useless let me go to the media and say what's happening and then then I'll stop it and then I'll be and I'll write a book and I'll make money that way like like there's a million ways to make money if you're a successful
whistleblower and you actually do uncover hey yeah I'm the person that saved Humanity and I can prove it because this model I have proof that it was going to kill everyone yes I lost my shares in open AI but it doesn't matter because I saved the world and like what would be more edifying and then also financially rewarding over the long term than saving Humanity Ben Ben would uh Ben would go to the press and say uh
John and Jordy are considering going to eight hours a day of live streaming which I think might you know massively slow GDP growth or potentially even go negative because people just stop you know all work and just you know listen to the show yeah um it's a real asymmetric risk yes definitely yeah I mean we've advocated for uh for podcast safety very significantly and potentially even creating like a
government regulatory capture regulatory capture and like Monopoly basically there should be 10,000% tariffs on podcasting there should be like an FDA for podcasting where you have to submit an application with what your show is about and then you get approved it takes years cost hundreds of millions of dollars exactly and then you can't just have Wily podcast just Dro an RS feed
yeah just like Pharmaceuticals we don't want anybody coming to Market with a new pH agree this makes so much sense shouldn't have anyone just coming to market with the podcast for sure uh anyway let's move on to equally ridiculous things uh toner and mcau had already begun to lose trust in Altman to review new products and this is interesting because we we haven't actually heard before how the safety
process worked within open AI yeah and they do a good job breaking it down here so to review new products for risks before they were released and again I agree that when you're launching new products like you should assess them for safety even even Instagram when they launch a new algorithm they should be like is this promoting anorexia is this promoting extreme content or not and and
to what degree is it making people sad is it making people happy like let's understand the impact of the technology that we're building that's great and here's how they wound up doing it so open a has a joint Safety Committee board with Microsoft a key backer of open AI that had special access to use its technology and its products so so Microsoft can vend GPT models into Azure and then deliver them into different uh
segments of the Microsoft ecosystem during one meeting in the winter of 2022 as the board weighed how to release three somewhat controversial enhancements to GPT 4 Altman claimed all three had been approved by the joint safety board toner asked for proof and found that only one had actually been approved and so this is like the Smoking Gun like Sam man like lied about the approvals [Music]
and and it's like sure okay like author follow up like what are the what are the controversial enhancements like I remember what the difference between gbt 3.5 and gbd4 were it was context window went from 4K tokens to 32k tokens they trained on 10 times as many tokens like we saw we saw the the the the small Dot and then the big circle and everyone was scared I get that everyone was scared
but like what is the problem like gbd4 yeah now you can do PDF upload is that going to kill everyone like what is the problem that you're actually upset about I understand that like yes he might have like not followed the right rules in this case but like habus Corpus like we have to produce some sort of corpse here and like what is this controversial enhancement to gbd4 we've all been playing with gp4 for years now it's no
big deal it's been copied open source deep SE can run it on your phone you can download it on GitHub mraw and like all these all these gbd4 level models like what are we worried about I don't understand like it's so it's so confusing and infuriating that the author didn't dive in deeper and say like what were the controversial enhancements because to me the controversial it was a controversial
lack of enhancements it was like gtt4 was great but it wasn't good enough it should have had more I immediately I was like 32k context window not big enough what what did Google do they launched 100K context window they launched a million token context window is that controversial I don't know but it's super useful if you're trying to Deep dive a book like I don't get it I'm so confused by this uh anyway and then this
is the really funny thing because they're obviously like all the all the Hate's been on Sam uh but Microsoft is just like doing crazy stuff this whole time so around the same time Microsoft launched a test of the still unreleased gpg 4 in India and they're just like yeah let's just try it in India like who cares like we don't need to ask anyone like let's just do it the first in this
is the first instance of the Revolutionary code being released in the wild that's not the first time they're just like Bill Gates Let's test it on India Bill Gates organizations have done things like that yeah it's like what what if it was Microsoft like like you're you're afraid of AI safety like what if it had gone wrong and like completely screwed up India like that would be bad right it's like so bizar
also internet products so yeah I mean I think it's fine I I think it's great to go test these things wherever I don't think it's a big deal but uh it's just very funny that like like Microsoft is just like oh yeah like let's not deal with that stupid joint safety board like let's just my boys back we really need chat summary and teams like we're going to take the risk we're going to risk Humanity for chat
sort of so funny that that's what we're talking about like we're talking about like co-pilot in outl and stuff it's like it's like it's so low stakes in some ways it's like better autocomplete in many ways um anyway uh so they so Microsoft launches GPT 4 in India they don't get approval from The Joint safety board and no one had bothered to inform opening eyes board that the safety approval had been skipped the
independent board members found out when one of them was stopped by an open AI employee in the hallway on the way out of a 6-hour board meeting uh never once in that meeting had Altman or Brockman mentioned the breach probably because it's not that important that Microsoft is testing gbg4 in Indian it's just a very funny Dynamic to be in this sort of hypers scale startup mode where you're scaling headcount rapidly you're raising
all this money you're scaling users sort of dramatically right yeah and then you have this board that that's sitting over your shoulder kind of like nitpicking every small decision that you make and for for a completely new class of like Risk vectors like when I hear like if I was running a company and somebody was like told me like hey like a partner of ours just launched our product kind of
like white labeled it and they launched it in India I would be like okay well like what does that mean for my brand like maybe I want my brand to be front and center in that market and so I don't love that because they're kind of like stealing my brand building that will eventually happen when I get the chance to roll out in that country so that's an issue uh are we paying taxes
appropriately are we legal there do we have a do we have a registration properly or is this going to be a PR nightmare like or or do we have another partner that was expecting to work with us in India and now they're be how are they ensuring that they're putting enough spend behind the go to market yeah there's like a million real questions and then the second one is like is is ASI going to explode in India
and like kill everyone and it's like that's not at the top of my stack but uh so anyway uh then one night in the summer of 2023 an open aai board member overheard a person at a dinner party discussing open AI startup fund this is the Venture Capital fund that they used to invest in startups that could potentially use open ai's technology um basically giving money to the companies
that they're going to steamroll with the next generation of chat GPT it seems like but I guess there are some companies that probably took money from startup fund and like wound up doing something application layer that was specific great Harvey took money from open that makes sense it's like it's much more like narrow than just being like oh we're like we're like you know slight prompt engineering on top of chat
PT and we're gonna get rolled Sam's a dog I don't think he was using wanting to use a startup fund to fund potential competitors it was very oriented around you're going to be using Chad gbt we'll give you some money yeah truly like you're you're going to be an API customer forever and you're never going to train a foundation model uh so the fund was announced in uh 2021 to invest in AI related startups and open AI had
announced it would be managed by openai but the board member was overhearing complaints that the profits from the fund weren't going to openai investors this was news to the board so they asked Altman over months directors learned that Sam Altman owned the fund personally openai Executives first said it had been for tax reasons then eventually explained that Alman had set up the fund because it was faster and
only a temporary Arrangement and knowing everything about open ai's uh insane legal structure I believe this like it it's it's hard to set up a fund as like a Delaware SE corpor like an LLC Like It's Tricky like uh there's not exactly like like Carter Angel list for setting up a fund when you're a for-profit that's owned by a nonprofit that's operating all these different things and
has this ownership by Microsoft and it's all this complicated cap table like I'm sure it was very onerous to set up something like this so uh but fun too because uh the Sam Alman even if he was fully embracing the sort of EA mode should be in the mindset of like I need to ignore yeah the board like some aspects of the board's you know desires because if other competitors like seek beat us you know there wasn't really on
the radar at the time I'm sure it was if you were building a foundation model yeah if other people beat us to this like none of it even matters like all the stuff doesn't matter so we need to like take some shortcuts yeah yeah it's like it's like what what did ILO see what did Sam see Sam saw commoditization of the foundation model layer and knockout drag out fight in the application layer and was like I got to
go fast and this is a consumer tech company um but here here is here a line that I think we need to take a much much more seriously so the the truth came out about the structure of the of the startup fund uh open a I said Sam Altman earned no fees or profits from the fund an unusual Arrangement so he had no carry and no fee from that fund and that is something that I think is is
unacceptable like any fund manager should be getting 2 and 20 at least uh the great funds you know three 4% we've seen and before and so uh this this is a big problem if I if I if I was investing in a fund and someone was like oh like no no fee no profit I'd be like yeah straight to jail yeah um but of course uh that actually aligns with opening eyes incentives we're joking but uh um it is it is very a I mean it does
it does kind of align with this idea that this is open AI said Altman earned no fees or profit from the fund that he could have had two and I I I think your interpretation is right there's also another interpretation where he he hit the curdle yet he did have two and 20 but you know you know whatever I think but but I think your yeah if I had if I had to guess on what the actual structure was it was like
technically he owned the the GP but and an open AI was an LP in the fund and he so he had legal control over it but all the money and profits would flow through without anything passing to him that and that seems like the fastest and clearly Sam Alman ridiculously talented Venture investor like should be the one at open AI making the final decision on what companies are getting invested in or not
and that's in the best interest of open Ai and and also it's like in What scenario is he making is like the idea of him like he could just start a separate Venture fund and go raise a billion dollars and just be like hey guys have two jobs now and everyone would just be like yeah that's fine uh so if he wanted to make two and 20 on a lot of money he could go do that um and so it it it doesn't quite track that
like like what frame of mind would he have to be in that it's like okay I'm like the CEO and leader of the Next Generation consumer Tech Behemoth but really I want to run like a micro fund and get like you know have control over it like it's like the economics don't really make sense there and this is what I'm talking about like about the followup it's like you should follow up
and be like at what was actually at stake if he had if he had taken the fees and the profits from the fund like 10 million bucks 100 million bucks like certainly not 10 billion that would have been that would have been sort of a Smoking Gun if he was out in the world saying I don't have any profits in open Ai and then was like running the side fund and managing it and it was branded but but the fact that
he's not earning fees or profits from the fund just to show like okay yeah that should be like the board should be able to be like small slap on the wrist like next time go through the proper process totally make off balance sheet investments from open AI in the meantime just do it the right way and he would still say like you know yeah probably should have just done it but you know whatever we were moving quickly so funny
if like it's like oh yeah like he set up this fun and like he personally owns like 30% of anthropic now like he's just like I can't deal with these guys in open a I'm just G to go turbo long the direct competitor no uh it makes no sense uh and and and there really is no smoking gun in the portfolio that I that I've seen at least uh but again like followup uh to the independent board members the
administrative oversight defied belief I can't believe it uh the cast previous and cast previous oversights as a possible pattern of deliberate deception for instance they also had been alerted to the previous fall uh they also hadn't been alerted the previous fall when open AI released chat GPT at the time considered a research preview that used existing technology but ended up taking
the World by storm uh in late September sus emailed toner asking if she had time to talk the next day this was highly unusual they didn't talk outside of board meetings on the phone sover hem and haod before coughing up a clue you should talk to miror more and so yeah the launch of chat PT is funny because I've seen I talked about this with dorh saying that um like there's two criticisms of Sam one is like he's
non-technical he's never done anything he's not like creating really new technology and then the other one is like he moves too fast he launched chat GPT without uh you know telling the board and it's like only one of those can be true right like you can do one or you can take one or the other but I've seen people try and take both and I'm like that just doesn't match um but yeah
I mean uh I don't know probably should have told the board you're launching chat PT I understand that you know it was this research preview they they did launch a lot of different things the open AI sandbox they launched uh playground and none of other things had taken off like Chachi BT maybe it was just lucky and the use cases for that early research product were pretty tame it was like generate uh you know subject
line for your e-commerce brand that's what people were building on top of it there was nothing a genen there was just like a text generation tool yeah that was that was good but not even great it was magical yeah but it wasn't anything it is today if you just think about the the uh like the frame of mind that they're in they're like we are training this like AGI God and we spending a hundred million on a training run like
this and and like if it comes out wrong it could be like really misaligned and it's like really high stakes and so like I imagine that that's where the board's focused they're not focused on like oh yeah like you know how we're Vending in like the GPT 3.5 Da Vinci 22 into like a bunch of companies like we created a rapper on that that just lets people like chat with it directly and it's just
like a new UI on top of the llm that we already trained like when you frame it like that it's like oh yeah like they did just like kind of whip up the chat GPT interface in like a couple days I imagine I maybe a couple weeks but like it like the first version of chat GPT was not it was really just like a wrapper around their llm and it didn't feel like that would be the thing that broke it through it felt like the thing
that would break it through is scale it up another 10x spend a billion dollars do Stargate you right um anyway let's go into mirror so Mora had been promoted to Chief technology officer of open AI in May of 2022 and had effectively been running the day-to-day ever since absolute dog operational Mastermind you love to see it when toner called her morat describ corporate athlete for sure
uh maradi described how what she saw is Altman's toxic management style had been causing problems for years and how the dynamic between Altman and Brockman who reported to her but would go to Altman anytime she tried to Reign him in made it almost impossible for to for her to do her job and so that is a very odd Dynamic I believe grman was a Brockman was a co-founder and obviously grman uh
glockman uh Altman and Brockman go way back because Altman was an investor in stripe and Greg was the CTO and so they go way way back they co-founded the company together and now there's like this this layer in between them that's Mira maradi who's clearly like an incredible talented corporate athlete but it is a little weird like imagine if like it was was like oh yeah I'm actually hiring someone and you report
to them and they report to me like you would still come to me and be like yo like what we go way back it's just weird um and so however they got in that situation it just seems bad right yeah uh morat had raised some of these issues directly with Alman months earlier and Altman had responded by bringing the head of HR to their one-on-one meetings for weeks until she finally told him she
didn't intend to share her feedback with the board brutal that sounds not fun in general uh toner went back to sover the company's oracular Chief scientist love that word uh he made clear he had lost he he made it clear that he had lost trust in Altman for numerous reasons including his tendency to pit senior employees against each other in 2021 suser had mapped out and launched a team to pursue the next research direction
for open AI that's probably the reinforcement learning the 01 the uh the qar uh technology that they were working on at the time that was very controversial but then you know deep seek open source so it's like was it really that big of a deal we don't know uh uh sover had mapped out this and launched a team to pursue research but months later another open AI researcher uh Jacob [ __ ] uh began put pursuing
something very similar and so the teams merged and [ __ ] took over after sser turned his Focus to AI safety and so Altman later elevated [ __ ] to research director and privately promised both of them they could lead the research direction of the company which led to months of lost productivity because you have two groups it's like the Google strategy basically and so uh you know
just like kind of like you know a lot of weird dynamics of like who's really in charge the board is misaligned with the management the management team is misaligned with like the co-founders who are clearly like brilliant but maybe not operational and so you throw some operational talent in between them and then all of a sudden you have a co-founder who's super technical that's reporting to someone who's like an
executive and it's just gets very very yeah there's two challenges one you have a nonprofit re Search Group that's transitioning into a for-profit hyperscaler yep and then you also have this business that's verticalized that's doing everything from research to the end product layer they're also doing an API and they're also still worried about AI safety and then you combine that with
products that are generating you know millions and then tens of millions and then hundreds of millions of Revenue that's also losing so much money that like if Sam can't you know continue he's on the sort of fundraising tread treadmill so he's like well we need to keep growth at you know at the sort of ridiculous rate we you know and this is like even before all the nonprofit for-profit conversion stuff so again I
know how to juggle you do Rubik Cube you can juggle on a corporate level but not you can do Rubik's Cube yeah I can do Rubik's Cube but I can't I can't juggle for unfortunately yeah it's on my 202 five goals I got to learn yeah uh anyway th this is another wild wild story again uh treading carefully in Terror of being found out by Alman morate and suer spoke to each other each of the independent
board members over the next few weeks it was only because they were in Daily they were in Daily touch that the independent directors caught Altman in a particularly egregious lie toner had published a paper in October that repeated criticisms of open ai's approach to safety Altman was livid he told suer that m had said toner should obviously leave the board for the for the over the article mcau was taken when
she heard the account from sver she knew she had said no such thing and so how would you feel if I uh published a paper saying tvpn is the worst thing to ever happen to media and podcasting generally I was just catching up here like it just seems like an offensive thing to do like I don't know it's just weird it's weird to be on the board of this company and then publish a paper
that's like oh you referencing that I was looking at Dynamic of sser M yeah yeah yeah yeah I mean this this alleges that Sam like was basically like uh mom and dad like mom said I can watch TV you go ask Dad what does your mom say it's like that Dynamic right um but I just think the whole the whole core is so weird to not just you're on the board like if you're not comfortable with the
approach to safety like sounds like that should have been an internal memo should have been an email and you decided to risk what was already I'm sure anybody on the board putting out basically like activist materials yeah when you're supposed to be working internally with management to sort of get like it seems like a very extreme step to just sort of you know put this thing out yes randomly and I mean this is what I keep
coming back to is like it like let's use our example like if you published a paper saying like TB 's going downhill like it's a disaster uh John's not taking podcast safy seriously enough like like first I would be like offended like hey why didn't you just talk to me like like off mic or like even on the show like you could talk to me whenever we're live for three hours a day you you
you could email me there are a million ways that you could bring that up but I could use I could use those you could use the horn to let me know that you think I'm not doing a good job um but the thing that that would really irk me is if you did that and you were wrong like like okay so you're toner you're criticizing open AI for the approach to Safety heus Corpus show me the damage that open AI approach to safety has done
like what are we talking about here what is the damage is it and there's a million ways you don't even have to do the killing everyone you could say hey like the election is going to swing because of open ai's products like did that happen no no not at all I think the I think it comes down to if you're the safety guy or girl yeah and you care a lot about your job it's part of your identity you it's part of your entire
brand is AI safety all this EA stuff and then your job's actually really not that important at the moment Y and you feel like you're not getting enough attention y like this just come this just screams like I want attention like give me attention validate my beliefs uh make me feel important yeah which is like a board member who has an inflated sense of self-importance and wants to be a
star is like a pretty toxic Dynamic yeah also it's just like there's no there's no relative assessment here like okay you have a problem with open AI approach to safety let's compare it to deep seeks let's compare it to Googles let's compare it to GRS let's compare it to Mists like rank it for us Helen like tell us like where where are we sitting here because like a I'm not seeing any
damage from open AI products what I'm seeing is like a minor product boost productivity boost for knowledge workers like people like can find answers to things a little bit faster write some copy a little bit faster comes out yeah basically it's a great you know co-pilot for your work I know wait so it's it's what I've been using it for even the job displacement thing right like if I if we were seeing like oh wow like
unemployment is really ticking up like this is having an impact I'd be like okay yeah like like we do need to talk about this we need to really think about yeah yeah and and maybe maybe it's uh you know some sort of Regulation I don't want to like lock this down too much but maybe there's some sort of like uh you know incentive or tax tax benefit for human workers like we're doing something
to take care of Americans like I I'm all here to debate that and discuss that there's probably a good way Sam's talked about Ubi before like there are ways to address like serious drob job losses but we have like 3% unemployment like we're not in some like Mass A disruption to JS yet like there's no there's noage being done so like what are you talking about uh anyway yeah it's it's it's almost like that Bard level role around AI
safety and thinking about the impact of AI it's like if toner was writing research papers like advising you know governments globally saying like here's how we see this technology panning out totally uh here's how you need to be planning around employment and what the future of sort of various that be super useful that'd be very valuable and beneficial totally I but that person should report to the CEO and and be like
hey here I have I have a I have a bunch of ideas about how we should be be positioning this how should we be messaging this to the governments like I'm almost in like the PR department and and I'm and I'm doing and I'm publishing all this not higher up like like taking shots at the company here you're in charge of anyway I totally get the the criticism that like getting mommy dadded
is annoying I totally get that I think that that is a legitimate criticism here uh and so it clearly also pisses off Ilia Anda because uh they' been collecting evidence and now suger was willing to share he emailed toner mcau and D'Angelo a lengthy two page uh two lengthy PDF documents using Gmail's self-destructing email function which I didn't know was a thing Google what are
you doing like you haven't surfaced that to me did you know that there's self-destructing emails and Gmail never heard of that fun fun give it a try folks when you're whistleblowing uh one was about Altman the other about Brockman the Altman document consisted of dozens of examples of his alleged lies and other toxic Behavior largely backed up by screenshots from morat slack channel in one of them Alman told
morat that the company's legal department had said that GPT 4 Turbo didn't need to go through the joint Safety Board review again it's like what is gp4 Turbo it just like same model runs faster like do Turbo need a joint Safety Board review it seems like he kind of has a argument there but then moradi checks with the company's top lawyer and the lawyer said that's that he had not said that just again I keep
going back to this but being in the sort of existential uh fight for your right to be a company which is you're losing money but you're growing quickly but you need to be raising more money and you have a lot of heavily funded competitors yep and then you have the joint safety uh Board review who says we need another review before you can release a slightly updated version of of a product that's
already been out in Market I mean I can't imagine anything more cumbersome than having to do like heavy honestly such you kind of understand what was happening and GitHub commit and again like the critiques of of Sam not being consistently candid yeah which was what they eventually came out yeah and said is like yeah that's fair but at the same time the fact that he would was has been able to lead the company to
hundreds of millions of users and staying at the edge and you know be winning at the at the sort of app layer right now despite all of this yeah is just a testament to his executive abilities no I agree yeah yeah it's it's odd so anyway uh on the afternoon of Thursday November 16th 2023 he and three independent board members logged into a video call and voted to fire Alman uh knowing maradi was like
unlikely to agree to be interim CEO if she had to report to Brockman they also voted to remove Brockman from the the board after the vote the independent board members told suer that they had been worried that he'd been sent as a spy to test their loyalty uh that night moradi was at a conference when the four board members called her to say they were firing Alman the next day and ask
her to step in as CEO she agreed when she asked why they were firing him they wouldn't tell her and this was kind of odd because like she had been in earlier conversations and just a couple paragraphs earlier say sover and moradi were collecting evidence like and and and there's a whole bunch of these examples where it's like um uh uh where you'd think that suger was communicating with her so she should know but then
she's like marat's like I don't I don't know why you would fire him which is kind of weird because earlier in this article they're saying like she's really annoyed by all the things Sam's doing so shouldn't she just immediately know that oh yeah they're firing him for all the stuff we talked about but that's like very odd like why would she even ask and then she really goes on the offensive
and says like have you consider Have you communicated this to SAA Adella knowing how essential Microsoft CEOs sa uh the CEO's commitment to their partnership was to the company they had not remember I remember when this was happening it clear you know it was so ha Hazard and so shocking and sudden and the team didn't know what was going on and there's all these sort of lay it's like you know it's like a family in fighting
right like they're all on the same team but clearly there's like power struggle and dnics and then you know like Sach is kind of like the the grandpa that he's like really guys like you know like you didn't consult me on this like that's insane and and like from his perspective like you guys are fighting over autocomplete and clippy like the new cppy the new clippy you guys are
building the new clippy he's like I just wanted the new clippy faster and already tested in India and it's a hit let's roll it out to the rest of the world yeah and so all all the board said was that he had not been consistently candid with the board uh Friday night they the open a eyes board and executive team held a series of increasingly contentious meetings morat had grown concerned that the board was
putting open AI at risk by not preparing uh by not better preparing for the repercussions of alin's firing at one point she and the rest of executive team gave the board a 30-minute deadline to explain why they fired Altman or resign and again this is odd because it's like it feels like she's kind of on the executive team and saying like we're all wondering why you got fired Sam but like
she knows or she should know and so it's like why didn't she just turn around and say hey everyone I actually know why he got fired like I was in these conversations it's very odd um the board felt they couldn't divulge that it had been moradi who had given them some of the most detailed evidence they had banked on madi's calming employees while they searched for a CEO instead she was leading her colleagues in a revolt
against the board isn't that a crazy thing to do that's so wild so like like the board is like well like this is our next CE o mea she's asking us to explain why we fired Sam but she's the reason that we fired Sam and we can't say that because we do we lose her as the CEO it's a it's like this crazy power struggle it's like so wild it's like Game of Thrones over there um a narrative began to spread among Altman's
allies that the whole thing was a coup by SS driven by his anger over pak's promotion and boosted by toner toner's anger that Sam Alman had tried to push her off the board this was like the I love you all Ilia like coded tweet from Sam where he he said he signed his tweet I I love you all which is i l y a Ilia and so everyone was like oh he's like pointing the finger at Ilia and so then
this like whole like meme of like Ilia is responsible uh when really it seems like it like a lot of people were involved and stuff and you've heard the whole story now crazy uh scg was astounded he had expected open AI open employees of open AI to cheer umad badul people love consumer tech companies like they're like we're making clippy here guys clippy but good I don't care about all this safety
mumbo jumbo clippy but good cracked clippy cracked clippy like what are you talking about IIA I just want to get a second beach home and and vend clippy into every Microsoft product it's crazy that cracked clippy dcom is available c.com go get it go get it creck rapper get sued by Microsoft I'm sure they still own they will come after you hard so uh by Monday morning almost all of them had signed a letter threatening to quit if
Alman wasn't reinstated among the signatures were morais and sers such a Twist actually I really like the guy oh yeah they I mean this we're on this is intelligence versus EQ right yeah the the intelligence thing says that like well legally we can fire Sam but the the emotionally intelligent thing is like actually a lot of people like Sam and open AI is nothing without its people right for a while Sam was
actually talking he was like I'll just go to Microsoft research and hire everyone back that likes me and a lot of people like him yeah and no one else for sure was getting 40 on 300 done for sure outside of Sam for sure so let's hit the seis gong one more time for Sam and the open AI team um what a funny story any it's one of the greatest Tech stories of all time I mean I know it it's very
stressful and frustrating for a lot of people involved uh but uh you know we I don't know we just the story's not over the story's not over it's still a knockout drag out fight anyone could win is open AI Yahoo Google let's figure it out Jessica Livingston co-founder of uh YC um had a has a podcast and she had Sam on to talk about basically that weekend and the craziness and so worth a listen
but um Sam just like him walking through the sort of like stepbystep conclusions and then he's a deal guy so like he was at certain points that weekend was basically like yeah I can just go to Microsoft and keep doing what I'm doing yeah I mean I know that if I was in his position and I was super stressed during this weekend I would want to just get out of the city I would want to go to wander and Sona Vineyards I would go to
wanderer.com and I would try and find my happy place i' would say I would actually be singing to myself I'd be singing find your happy place find your happy place book a wander with inspiring views Hotel gred many dreamy beds top de cleaning and 247 con service is such a fantastic idea it's basically take some of the greatest hes in the world and make them a available by the day you
love this too much two days days four days W in Soma vineard is fantastic four bedrooms three and a halfed five beds eight guests 3,400 ft there's a pool I grew up in Sona County so if you go stay at that wander DM me I'll give you some recommendations yeah you almost got sucked into that whole East Bay rationalist thing the EA thing I was born you're born dark on on the dark side of you mely adopted it born in it
ready F Oakland Children's Hospital we'll get elazer on here you can debate him yeah you can be like uh but what if I turn the server off what if I pull the plug elazer what happens next then what if I have what what if there's bad robots but I have a good army of robots powered by Brett Adcock figure AI what then what then what are you gonna do about that owned they don't even walk like Biden
anymore yeah uh anyway let's move on to Intel uh everyone's wondering what's going to happen with lip Bhutan the new CEO of Intel uh tons of tons of debate over what should happen to Intel of course Intel the story chip manufacturer integrated so they both design and manufacture the chips they have a design arm and a fap very different from Intel and uh from envidia and tsmc it's crazy only one uh if they had one different
letter in their in their product they would have been a trillion dollar company if it was just a g instead of a c a GPU instead of a CP oh true true they really missed that one off and you know they actually do make a GPU really you don't hear about it much don't hear about it much it's not very popular anyway uh so liputan isn't signaling a major departure from Intel's past
strategy when he came on he said hey we're staying in the path and we were kind of debating like is this just signaling to employees like hey don't worry everything's going to be the same new CEO just keep doing what you're doing we're going to figure out a new strategy but like your job is safe right now or or was he was he a genuine believer in the new Strate in in the strategy that's been going on for years
he has long agitated for hey we need some change and we think that's why he was brought in uh but the Wall Street Journal has some new reporting that we're going to take you through and so he's only been on the job for two weeks but time isn't really on lip Ban's side tan became Intel's new CEO on March 18th and has already started laying out some of his vision for the storied but troubled chip Giant in a letter to
shareholders uh he spoke of the need to up our game we love that uh to make Intel's products more competitive in The crucial market for artificial intelligence systems he also said he was equally focused on building up The Foundry business where Intel manufactur chips designed by other companies of course Intel has lost TM tsmc on the TPU on the on the Apple silicon chips like on Nvidia stuff like they really they
they they have a lot of great clients and Intel can do a lot of uh it's called the trailing Edge Fabs so think about the chip that goes in your car yeah doesn't need to be an h100 uh it but it does need to be made with quality at scale and so um we saw a lot of this during covid a lot of the chip delays led to think Daytona sp3 with an h100 would go pretty hard pretty hard I mean you're
you're saying that but like I actually would love a car that was able to inference a whisper and like you know Chachi PT or grock or deep seek or something like in real time so you can have a conversation with zero latency because it's all done in the car and there's enough energy in these cars there's enough like power it's possible just just burning a V12 to power your h100 while you're talking to your chat
bot on the way to work that's the future that's great hey make a to-do list bot it's great um but yeah I mean this is one of the things we talked about with Tesla like and Sam was saying like maybe Tesla and and xai and X all kind of combined and you could imagine that like if you're driving a Tesla you want to have the best interaction with the AI features and if you have autopilot
enhanced by xai yeah you could be using you could be scrolling the timeline exactly I didn't know this but uh my buddy Ben uh Ben Taft now were hanging out over the weekend and uh apparently with the Tesla autop pilot like they make you keep your hands on the steering wheel and they use a camera and it used to be that you could hack it by like putting weights on it you could just sit there yep but now having your car on
autopilot but being forced to keep your hands on the steering wheel and then it gives you strikes and you get five strikes you can't use autopilot anymore turns off that's insane yeah it's actually kind of miserable but you get used to it and you kind of adapt I mean Mercedes has uh Lane keep assist and you have to check in with it every like 20 seconds and like give it a little wiggle or like hold your hands on it basically
but you take your hands off for like 10 seconds uh George hot's comma AI uh does not need you to touch the wheel at all it's amazing it just has a camera but if you look down or you look at your phone like it will blanket you and disable and so George has I think correctly argued that that is the future of self-driving systems just camera on the face is the person paying attention if they fall
asleep it detects that doesn't matter if their hands are on the wheel if they're sleeping that's not good and so I think that's the future and I think that's where Tesla's moving and I think that the situation that you described is very temporary I think that we will see Tesla long term go to mechanism purely AI but it's still I thought that was hilarious yeah but uh that's why most people we know just use
chauffers and then they sit in the back right because the chauffeur will keep the hands on if the helicop yeah yeah uh in other words the same things Intel Intel C last CEO was trying to accomplish tan reiterated those points in a speech on Monday kicking off the off the company's Intel Vision conference uh Beyond a few aspirations including better a better AI strategy and custom build chips for Niche
Computing work there was little to distinguish tan Playbook from his predecessor stay tuned for Intel plans on humanoid robots he told the audience let's go let's go uh in short his short tenure on the job so far means tan could well have more significant changes in mind but one option Intel doesn't have is more of the same Tan's predecessor Pat gelsinger absolute dog was effectively booted following an
ambitious multi-year effort to both improve the company's chip designs and catch its manufacturing processes up to those proferred by tsmc uh and yeah it's hard to do two things at once they're trying to be a master of a jack of all trades but they are a master of none right now that effort hasn't worked or at least not yet Intel's annual revenue has shrunk by 33% over the last four
years the once flush chip giant has been burning cash since 2022 The Foundry business still mostly produces Intel design chips and it lost 13.4 billion last year little siiz gong moment of silence anyway this moment of silence is brought to you by ramp save time and money they need to be on ramp for sure uh one change that t Town hinted at is more wax at Intel's cost structure the company reduced its Workforce by 13%
last year but still employs far more people than any other company in the indust Anakin meme yep where you were the best you're a chip you're a chip company you must have done great over the last five years it's like you must have done great right Intel down 60% the last five years so rough um yeah um that sounds like uh So Tan involves listening more closely his plan is to listen more
closely to customers that sounds like corporate speak but it's meaningful I didn't tell the Wall Street Journal pulling no punches uh Decades of technical success and near Monopoly on personal computer chips nurtured a culture of of arrogance an Intel recruiter who interviewed ginger for his first inate Intel out of a technical school called him somewhat arrogant and noted he'll fit right in you love it uh
but Intel's been in trouble look at this graph of people power annual revenue annual revenue per employee Nvidia is putting up historic numbers 3.55 million per employee Intel is down at less than 500k per employee in Revenue that is not right there with the manufacturer of the ti84 Texas instrum Texas Instruments Texas Instruments is one of the best corporate it's a great company also the
founder of tsmc worked at T Texas Instruments was passed over for a senior role then went to Taiwan and was like you guys want to do this and they were like yeah it's great and Texas struments manufactur calculators but they also manufacture like weapon systems and stuff it's it's a great company uh but it's very funny that they also make the calculator uh what so far has been absent from tan strategy is a deeper
shift into Intel's business um Andy Grove the storied Intel Chief who mentored gelsinger would have called the current AI wave a strategic inflection point that required decisive action much like when Intel itself abandoned making memory chips in the 1980s back then Japanese producers were making memory more cheaply r rendering it unprofitable for Intel so Intel took up the then nent
market for personal computer processors effectively an entire entire pivot for the business Andy Gro famously said only the paranoids survive and he was very aggressive about was he the original person to say that yes that's his quote and that's like the name of his book I think that's wow yeah um he might have gotten it from somewhere else he probably stole it from group chat um one of his boys like no no that was that's
mine Frank one of Frank Sloan's boys is like Frank you guys got to amp it up you got to amp it you know what I do yeah I'm G write a book about that yeah today some analysts suggest Intel should split off its manufacturing operations from its chip design and marketing functions following a long established industry trend of the the fablous designer or the peer play Fab tsmc or Nvidia strategy it
could gather outside investors in the manufacturing operation to bring in more Capital something that company has already in talks to do investors so far have welcomed tan sending the company's stock up 10% since his appointment in March and so if you have a take on intel if you want to get exposure to Intel you want to go long or short you got to go to public.com Investing For Those who
take it seriously they got multi-asset investing industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions and uh public is the sponsor of our ticker you'll see at the bottom of the show all day long crypto let's stay with Intel for a little bit more uh Intel's new CEO plots turnarounds we need to improve uh so this is uh heard on the street a little bit more information here um we got to get some audience members uh uh
stocks up on the ticker oh yeah that'd be great we certainly have some Public Market corporate athletes some Oscar maybe yeah yeah yeah some paler yep of course um there's there's some other good ones I think Tesla's up there right now friend of the show um thank you public so so in Las Vegas at the Intel Vision conference there was one more line that stuck out uh we will we will redefine some of our strategy and free
up the bandwidth tan said some of our non-core business we will spin it off and so people are wondering what businesses are technically non-core what will he spin off and now Intel is leaning into AI which will include humanoid robotics which tan said has the ability to redefine Manufacturing in the future and they also need to regroup its existing pool of workers while attracting new Talent with a Clear
Vision of the future but I mean as I was thinking about this like if I was sitting down with lip Bhutan the new CEO of Intel and I had like one piece of device for him I would tell him to go to ramp.com because time is money and he should save both right now they're losing they lost 13 billion I mean if they had easy to use corporate cards bill payments counting in a whole lot more all in one place I
think we'd see a very different Intel for sure yeah they're focused on what should we spin out should we focus on design on the Fab side yep they really need to be focused on on you know immediately just like you know just basic Financial operations and and one of the most basic things you can do but intelligent things you can do so we should have the C CFO of intel on the show give them the pitch for ramp really
dial it in understand what corporate card is he using and is that the source of all of Intel's problems it's possible it's very possible um well I would like to see this bet expressed I I want to know if Intel's going to split this here and I hope we can get a poly Market set up for it I don't know exactly how we would Define that but we're happy to announce the poly Market is now an
official partner of TBN and we want to give a shout out to the ticker down at the bottom uh the poly market ticker is powered by poly Market we uh had a friend of ours cosgro write some code and pull in their API and uh we will be iterating on that and hope hopefully making it uh better and better over the next there's currently no Market on Intel spinout we will work on getting one I mean you can kind of Express that
in the public market but I love poly market for just defining these like narrow events Y and just creating uh another information source and underrated there's a great uh conversation section that happens in the comments people debate these things and poly Market does a great job of surfacing interesting markets on their X account and on online when things are shifting when things are tra are are
changing uh so highly recomend you give them a follow it's an alternative way to traditional news understand the current thing which is you know news you go on you know New York Times they're sort of being very Sensational about things it's not really oriented around truth it's oriented around attention yep and uh poly Market is you know it lets you know like what's actually important like I I
was talking to Shane about this I was like I want a newsletter from poly Market maybe we should kind of use our show as an as like a version of this is like I want to when a market moves significantly in the poly Market Tech markets when there's a big JP in the in the prediction um like there was recently a big change in uh the the the expected best llm by the end of May and I think it flipped from open AI to
Google really quickly really suddenly um when something like that happens and the odds shift all of a sudden that's when I want to read the news story that's when I want the Deep dive that's when I want to go deeper on that story if if we're just seeing everything's humming along at 50/50 I don't another breaking news story about it because that's probably just a press release that's pitched by
some PR person right not really news and so I say it's not news unless it's moving the market uh and that's my thesis um but you know what else is moving the market horses that's right uh this this story has shaken the world of technology journalism to its core and I think a lot of tech journalists are going to be very excited to hear this so uh the horse War her Hermes inside a luxury show jumping competition if you a
technology journalist and you grow up doing j or or show jumping like you are going to want to pay attention to this because it's a really big deal there was an annual equestrian event in Paris and the French brand has been keeping in touch with its saddle making Roots this is a big deal for everyone who follows horses and show jumping obviously pretty much everyone in Tech journalism yeah
for those that don't know Hermes has always said the horse was the first client yes the former chair of Hermes Jean Louie Moss used to say the horse is the first client and that's because horses were the French luxury Brand's First Market in 1837 they're not starting new companies that have that much of a lineage today uh when it open as a harness maker they hopefully will if we don't get paper
clipped yeah uh they are also its original Muse inspiring Stirrup inspired closures on bags designs on silk scarves and in the company's horse and carriage logo last week that connection was on Vivid display under the grand P's glass ceiling where some of the top show jumpers in the world competed for Branded rosettes and a €400,000 grand prize the salt Hermes is size G size gone uh the saw Hermes is among the most
challenging equestrian competitions in the world with hurdles reaching 1.6 meters or just above 5 feet saw is French for leap the 3-day event is also a display of everything AES a reminder that in addition to selling bags scarves and coats the brand still outfits top riders in in a luxury downturn when many brands are cycling through Executives and creative directors AES posted a 133%
increase in sales in 2024 compared to 2023 I think it's probably and I think it's probably entirely driven by increased uh increased demand from technology journalists right you have to imagine that they're powering the luxury Market downturns downturns of course because all the family money yeah um its power is in its Heritage which appeals to athletes as well as fashion clients uh it's one way to show that our equestrian
roots are very much alive not just a narrative says the managing director of ares's equestrian category or meter as the brand calls it 110 horses with names such as hello chandora lady Al Capone de Carmel and cocain traveled to the to the temporary Stables along sha the Shan their white t their white tented enclosures were lift were lit with the same round chandeliers that that decorated the pet uh they could warm up
in an enclosure right near the intersection on view for passers by who didn't get one of the almost 177,000 tickets sold for the weekend uh even the most technical elements were decidedly fashionable equestrians leapt over obstacles resembling the Brand's H signature in the house colors orange and brown or the facade of the Brand's Flagship on the rudberg I can't even pronounce that less
than a mile away anyway very fun story uh little bit of uh more information that I liked uh best known for its colorful scarves and leather handbags AES uh famously makes the Birkin bag but they also sell equestrian accessories and these are some things that Tech journalists in the audience are going to want to pick up they sell $1,200 breaches and $460 for a felt sugar box uh and that's
a box that's $460 you open it you store your sugar cubes in there so when you want to give your horse a sugar cube you have it in a nice presentable box um yeah and for those that don't you know horses are highly opinionated about this type of thing you try to give them sugar out of a regular old plastic Tupperware they are going to be pissed they're well that's just a microplastics thing you
don't want to be giving micas not going to have an enjoyable ride definitely not you're giving them you know a tupperware sugar box definitely not uh anyway speak speaking of someone with as Relentless as a drive as a horse we got David senra in the building he actually has a he he told us uh just before joining he's got a good horror story so why we start there okay tell us the horror story uh
what's up guys good to see you what's up good to see you can did you get some more book did you get some more books since last time or is just a different angle no I'm using a different camera looks good so I absolutely love uh the horror story I was talking to uh one of the most success full tech company CEOs a few months ago and he was telling me how stupid he thought it was that his wife picked up a horse uh Habit and
there's a I guess there's like a a famous like horse trading um training facility in Wellington Florida which is like the middle of nowhere kind of by like West Palm and he goes this I thought it was the biggest waste of time and he shows up at this event and like Michael Bloomberg's there and like the guy from Goldman Sachs is there and like all these essentially like fabulous wealthy and successful like oh maybe
this isn't a waste giant waste of time if the horse even if the horse costs a million dollars you get one deal done at that equestrian event and it pays for itself so I uh I I read two books uh last week one was terrible which I told you about and then one was good but not episode worthy so I had to republish an old episode and I republished an old episode about this guy named Daniel
Ludwig who was the richest man in the world in 1980s and no one knew his name there's no pictures of him anywhere wow and he made his money the first way he made his first Fortune was hauling oil and then he had huge cargo ships and he was getting smoked for contracts for like the big Middle East uh oil providers because the Onasis and all the the other Greek shipping magnets would
build the most the biggest yachts in the world and then they would invite the people they want to sell onto the yacht and they got all of the contracts so Daniel's like okay I'm going to do the exact same thing he didn't even he just worked all the time so he didn't even go on the yacht he let them use it and he said later on that he made more money from that ship than all of his super tankers combined wow insane yeah it's
amazing um Jordy what what should we talk about the Ken Griffin episode that's coming up are we leaking that no no I I just finished it this morning fantastic I haven't eaten anything and I'm on like six uh 600 I had three commenters so far today so it's like just under like I'm shaking right now lot of caffine likea to match your energy but I got it out so what happened inspiration tell us about why you did
the episode obviously everyone knows King Griffin founder of Citadel but uh what inspired you because I study psychos for a living and I love them and they're the most interesting Fascinating People to me and so you guys actually made a video on this tweet that got like a million and 1.5 million views right it's John Arnold talking about hey what did Ken Griffin do when Enron blew up
and he talks about just like you know a lot of people like oh yeah I know Enron was making money uh all like all these this Talent is going to like you know essentially go to the wind uh you know some people will recruit maybe they'll build like a good Commodities business and uh he tells a story where the day it blows up and keep in mind in the story Ken Griffin's like 33 he's like really
really young and he chart immediately Charters a Gulf Stream jet goes to Houston and interviews every single person that was important in the Enron trading business and then he winds up hiring all the best talent and in the in the talk that I use for the basis of the episode cuz biography on Ken he goes and since then we've made about $30 billion trading Commodities so the main reason I I I wanted to to profile him is
because um I get to meet a lot of really interesting people because of the podcast and I always ask the same questions it's like who's the smartest person you know who has the best business you know and if they're in finance even if they don't know each other they they I kept hearing Ken Griffin Ken Griffin Ken Griffin and they would say two things about him they say he's a winner and he's a killer and you
just find all these stories you know they're not in a book but they're just like spread across the internet and it might be in other books of just him taking something you know he just took it to the next level and then John Arnold um the one thing where I knew as soon as I read that line I was like oh I'm going to do an episode immediately is John's like listen I'm not going to take a job but I respect Ken so yeah
I'll talk to him I'm heading to Aspen for an event tell him he can call me when I get back to Houston next week and then Ken's assistant calls back like two minutes later and like hey K would you talk to Ken if he flies to ask tomorrow and he's like yeah I'll do that so it's just like there's just reoccurring theme through all these biographies of History great entrepreneurs is like how bad do
you want it and I think reading these stories like really stretch as like possible did Ken have a jet at that point because you got to Discount the like quick flight a little bit already had PJ and it was just more flew Southwest actually standby it was if he didn't own the jet he was definitely chartering the jet so I don't know if he owned it but yeah he was not uh still meaning did you find the story
of Ken Griffin in college getting the stock tips from State Street do you did you cover that no no the one thing I heard was that he convinced Harvard to let him install um like a satellite dish so he could get real up to the minute uh data he was the only person at Harvard that had this this data flow so that so so that was true for the for like the publicly traded companies that he needed
stock prices for but he also had this interest so he's trading convertible debt at the time and and convertible debt it doesn't just have a ticker that you can just look up online or call someone uh you actually have to go to a trading desk and talk to a sales and trading guy to get like hey what's the market trading that particular Bond at because it's not incredibly liquid and so what he would do is he would take the
the red line from Harvard in Cambridge down to Boston go into State Street which was one of the largest it still is like huge Global asset manager um you would bring flowers for the ladies at the front desk and sweet talk them and kind of just be like oh like so good to see you Susan like you're the best like and then he would walk through and then just walk the the the desk I don't know
if this is apocryphal they just kind of told this story at Citadel yeah um but uh but they would he would he would just walk and then he would just like tap a guy on the shoulder and be like hey like what what's the spread on the convertible debt on Microsoft today or something like that and then he would get the quote go back run his pricing model and then decide whether or not he should actually put in order like f
everything he does everything he does is like that that's why it was just so fascinating cuz like he just takes this idea of like buttering up you know The Gatekeepers inside of a business like that David gein's biography he talks about he had a huge Advantage doing that Michael Ovitz I just did two episodes of Michael Ovitz same situation like they're always able to obain information that other people can't because there's
somebody in the way and they just figure out how to get around that person and it's usually through like kind acts of kindness dude did you get into the story of the uh the the IP theft that happened in 2011 no so no so Mo basically there's no biography of can right um and so I watched every single interview I could find with him but the problem is because it's him most of the interviews they
want his it's like they're all timely I was looking for like Timeless sure and so it's like they're like hey what do you think about this political candidate or what do you think about the market now and so the only thing the best thing I found was this talk at Yale sure the guy interviewing him kind of horrible but I transcribed that talk at Yale and then went through the transcription just
like you do the books and then there's another thing it's this book right here that uh I found this because Josh Wolf talked about I think Ken was an investor in the first uh fund through Josh and that that Ken recommends this book and I think he makes people or he strongly suggests people at uh at Citadel read it and so I read that to get context because I think if you listen to if people tell you hey this book is really
important to me you know there's like five books you have to read it gives you an insight into their personality right and that that book is L the subtitle is are you playing to play or are you playing to win and think about the the the tweet from John Arnold like was he playing to play or is he playing to win he was playing to win um and so I think there's a lot of analogies in the Yale
talk that he gives where he gives a brief overview his career and then he gives a bunch of like principles for you to apply to your career which I thought was more of like a Founders episode can you talk about what what it means for Ken to be a killer like really getting into like your definition of that because you described him as like a winner and a killer but I think killer can have plenty of different definitions
like you can think of a killer as like somebody that just like figures out how to win and is aggressive but then I I still think of someone like Eric glyman as like a killer but he's also extremely kind and so it's possible to be like kind and a killer how how do you describe Ken Griffin I I think every single person that I've profiled on Founders is a killer and I mean it this is not a perjorative I I mean this is
like they take what they're doing very seriously the greatest uh I this idea really stuck in my mind because there's this biography of Bernard orol it's called like the taste of luxury it's like really hard to find I think it's like $33,000 online and because there very few biographies of them in English right and this one ends when Bernar is like 40 and at the end of the book he
calls his shot you guys were just mentioning it earlier I heard you on the show it's like well if you want to like do a competitive Rolex or some kind of luxury brand like you had to start 100 years ago and Bernard had that Insight you know 40 years ago 35 years ago and he just like oh these things very valuable I think they're going to get more valuable in time and I have no competition because you have to start
them you know two centuries ago or two generations ago and but there's a line in that biography I never forgot where they're describing him and they say only Killers survive um so what I mean by Killers like uh we I was actually out to dinner in Miami on Saturday Sun Saturday night the night before I was going to record this episode and I mentioned somebody came over from the table that
we know and he was asking me he's like oh like what's the next episode you're working on and he works for another fund hedge fund and the guy that owns that fund is really close to to Ken and so when I brought up them doing Ken he's like oh I have so many [ __ ] Ken stories and one thing that he told me that this is an example of like a killer away from like your competitors right is
that there's like a there was like a a a tiny business inside a citadel that had something to do with like the new technology they were developing and he essentially Ken sat and talked to the guy for like a few hours about like tiny details like where where are the servers like what are we doing with them like he was just completely obsessed he has no other Hobbies than just building this massive Empire um and then one thing
that I think is directly related to your question Jordy is like in the the talk he's just like you you don't want to win like you want a landslide you want to beat your competitors so bad that they do not survive because if you let them survive they will come back and you don't want them to come back again and when I got to that part of the transcript I'm like this isn't has this
is not just how Ken thinks there's a great line in this book called invent and wander which is the collected writings of Jeff Bezos so somebody Walter is collected all of Jeff bezos's shho letters and then transcribed and edited all of Jeff's important speeches and Jeff has a great line in there he's like do you really want to uh prepare for a future where you might have to fight somebody as good as you and he
goes I don't and so same thing it's like I don't want to win two to one there's a line in hard ball it's like you need to [ __ ] winning two to W you need to win 9 to2 you need to Stomp Them um I just had dinner with uh I I could say this because it's proba like uh Mark Lori and he was the one that founded diapers.com and you know and then he went on to sell Jet and all this other stuff but I was lighting
him up with questions I like I want to know what it was like competing against Jeff Bezos at that time and he was just like you can't there is no comp he was going to steamr you I had no choice that's amazing uh I mean we we like the the mindset uh with Ken Griffin just takes me back to 2012 this this Trader on the on the uh on the Quant team stole code for they call them Alphas basically code that no matter who
runs it they're going to generate return uh stole a bunch of stuff on like a hard drive Citadel finds out realizes that they're stealing the IP the code uh the guy freaks out he dumps the hard drive into the into the river uh in Chicago and K Griffin and the Citadel team get scuba divers to go into the river and find the hard drive just to send it to the FBI to get this guy busted and I was
like yeah like he's not gonna let you just take his his Alpha he's just not going we're flying in scuba divers yeah flying In Scuba the Caribbean basically he talk he talks about that in the talk I didn't include in the podcast but he's like listen if if somebody's going to leave because you know you work at Citadel and then you want to work you want to be a doctor I'm going to write you uh you know a letter of
recommendation I'm going to support you every way you leave for competitor and that just brings up different very different feelings within within me and so that's what I mean he's just like he's completely bought in I think the important Point here though is like go ahead on that note and maybe you can just wrap this into story you're about to tell but how does he think about investing in other funds right because
in many ways funds may start with a singular strategy but in a long enough time Horizon the manager says well okay I'm going to run an Empire now I'm going to do the Ken Griffin Playbook we're going to have a bunch of different verticals he's invested in some Venture funds he he's invested okay so um I think maybe it was on your show I forgot who told me oh no no no I know who who
told me um like you'll see this over and over again when people start to to understand how valuable their industry is they essentially get in all the good deals so like think about uh you know Nvidia is in every single AI anything right now uh I just did an episode on Jerry Jones and I talked to a bunch of people that live in Texas bunch of people there around him like yeah yeah
the Cowboys is one thing his early oil and gas stff he's like you don't understand what he's been doing the investment he's been doing since then he's in every single thing uh I don't know I didn't track like how I just hear over and over again that he's got money everywhere and I again these are private companies so you never know but what I was told and you kind of see this because like if you come to Miami he's
like buying everything like every like not just like literally everything he's building I think was going to be the most expensive house in history in Palm Beach and so what I was told is forget the Enterprise value of the companies which is you know who knows 80 billion whatever the number is right he's like he the guy's been pulling out billions and billions and billions in cash he just doesn't know what to do with it so
yeah I'm sure he's invested in everything I heard stories about Bloomberg I went up um talking to somebody that knows a lot about his family office and you know I was asking questions around this trying to get a sense of how large his fortune is and he was like well I can give you a little hints like look how much we spent X on charity we have this many people in the [ __ ] family office and you kind of
like piece this together it's oh well what are you going to do if you're making five seven 10 billion in cash year after year after year like eventually fight for Mercedes amg1 allocation of course uh entire I mean it is crazy how like how diverse The Citadel team has become because they have this highfrequency trading arm I mean they started with convertible debt they kind of like the
story of Citadel is like he got so good at trading convertible debt that he just straight up maxed out the market size like he was Tam constrained on that and then went into high frequency trading and then got the global equities team up and running and the equities team when I when I was there they were doing like 2,000 CEO interviews a year or something just like interviewing every single person that runs a public company
getting the temperature figuring out do we like this manager do we like this leader should we invest and then on the other side you have the The High Frequency guys who are like I haven't talked to a human being in months and it doesn't matter and they're both printing they're both absolutely printing yeah what I love too about like like um you know him maxing out markets earlier in
his career that's something he he takes Q&A from the Yale students at the end like how do you decide like what business to go in and he's like you have to think about total adjustable Market we have to be in deep liquid markets because we're going to do the best research on the planet and we need to be compensated for for This research another thing that I absolutely love that I think is really important too is
he talks about uh how much of an influence that mentorship and apprenticeship is going to have on your career as a young person and as you continue to go and this is something I see over and over again there's this book on my desk like this impossible to find uh it's called you actually like this it's autopsy of a merger and it's this deal that J pritzker did one of his most INF Infamous deals and what I
thought thought was interesting is like I remember reading Sam zel's autobiography and then getting to speak to Sam and Sam Jay priser was like Sam's older brother and mentor and so he he said Sam said that Jay had the greatest Financial mind of anybody that he ever met and so I was like okay well if Sam is studying this guy I need to study this guy but want to go back to the point I was about to make is
like like Mo you know think about every single person covered on Founders it's like they they were so good at their job that somebody wrote a book about them this is like the smallest percentage of the people that have ever lived but there's so many like if you take all these lessons and abstractions you can apply them even to like business is far a field this is actually advice that that Ken gives where he's like as an
entrepreneur you need to be looking for edges so obviously you study inside your company you study your competitors but then you study businesses that are far a field so he talks about he had uh he had he built this thing called a risk wall in Citadel it's 30t by 10t it's a giant screen and he says before they were they were getting like a b B+ on uh how well they were managing risk and you know
Ken's not going to be satisfied with B anything and so he actually is in the office of Saudi ramco in Saudi Arabia and he sees that they have this giant [ __ ] board that's like 30 feet long 10 feet wide and has all the important metrics like where the ships are how much they're producing everything else he's like oh I'm going to take that idea and I'm G to apply it not to ships and
oil but to getting getting all of the data I need so we can start uh managing our risk better and he says that one idea had him go from you know be whatever the case is to like one of the best like Risk departments uh in the world so the reason I think about him is because uh I don't know if you guys told Truman to do this but I have got been getting some threatening emails and text messages um I'll tell the audience
because they might not know uh I'm getting like calls from Jordy at like 5:30 in the morning California time just letting me know he's on his way to the to the studio I'm getting text messages from John f545 I get a text today and it's all I see is the back of John Jordan and I think the rest of the tbbn crew and they're go they're doing uh they're doing curls till failure and then this is the the caption they're
like TPB coming for your neck it was a good time this morning I mean that's every morning yeah I mean podcasting never sleeps podcasting but you guys are taking it you know to a completely different level no our our killer mindset is it's not enough for us to be the biggest other people need to quit need to quit uh we like to say never podcast weekly always podcast strongly I love that line and that's why
we train every morning uh talk about like just frame works for Focus you you covered a little bit of this but is there any has Ken put anything out there around like how he's evaluating like you know they're running all these business lines and then he's got somebody that comes to him with an opportunity you know internally he's evaluating it based on the market potential but is there
anything like you know he didn't roll out every business line in the same two years it was sort of staged right okay you just accidentally hit on like something that's very important I put in the episode description is like one of the other reasons in in addition to like all these crazy stories uh let me let me back up don't let me forget where I'm at but uh the first time I came across Ken
because I don't know any like I just I don't pay attention to finance right uh now I do because I watch t tpv and but I'm reading you don't need a fantastic liquidity provider like uh C Securities on the market um you got to get your size up this is one of my favorite books okay uh I think it's episode 222 of Founders I think I maybe did it episode like in the 80s like you know six years
ago whatever it's Ed thorp's biography of man ofal markets and Ed Thorp is a fascinating character legit genius and he was the first person the person that made the first quantitative hedg fund ever uh he built the world's first wearable computer with Claud Shannon um he was the first LP and Citadel so the way the first way I came across Ken Griffin the way I was exposed to him was at the end of the EP uh the book Ed Ed
thorp's like he closed down his his hedge fund right he already made more money he could ever possibly uh spend it's called pron new partners and what happened is Ken Griffin was 19 years old comes to Ed thorp's house and then Ken Griffin's uh Mentor is with him and essentially he's like I always wondered how far edor was like how far could I go with the strategy like I wonder how far
I could have gone I wasn't the right person to pursue it but I wonder if somebody did and he's like well Prodigy came over and I gave him all my files and this wasn't publicly available information like you couldn't get it anywhere to your the point you were making earlier John um and then he's like I wind up being the first LP and then you f forward and look like you know I think the book ends he K NW it's
like six billion and they have like 15 billion of SSR management or something and now it's like you know multiples of that um but I think like one of the uh like I guess the way I think about this is just like I obsess with people that do things for a long time and so even Ken says Ken founded Citadel 35 years ago he's founded Citadel Securities 23 years ago if I'm not mistaken right and he's like we made more money in the last
four years like we are making more money today than we ever have in the past and he talked about how uh this maybe give you Insight in how he's able to scale up all these different businesses one they take a long time to do but also he said he had last year he had over 100,000 people apply to work for him wow and so you just have a huge labor like you have all the town in the world now you have
all these resources and you just build it slowly like slow over time over many many decades yeah Citadel Securities I originally I think you Ken was thinking about doing an investment bank and then eventually spun that out and and sold that arm of the business and now it's morphed into a to a market maker and it's a it's a very the business itself has been through PIV it's much like the
core hedge fund uh I do have a question about the core hedge fund um there's always the question of as you scale up a fund size and outside outside LPS you put up some amazing numbers 20% returns everybody wants in is that sustainable when you take it an order magnitude bigger did you get any insight into how Ken Griffin thinks about scale and outside investors because at the end of the day you know it's his fund he wants
to grow it but sometimes having a bigger fund is advantageous no I didn't get like there was a couple things where I was kind of getting frustrated with the interviewer because it's like Ken says um he made he's the most successful hedge fun of all time which one I asked a friend of mine who knows about this like I thought Renaissance like why like what's and he's like yeah but most of that was like
their own money like they CL The Medallion fund they closed off to outside investors a long time ago J Street same thing yeah and then the other thing Ken said that they like please ask I heard you earlier when you guys were going over the Wall Street Journal article on open AI you're like follow up godamn it why don't you follow up it drives me [ __ ] it drives me crazy like U I'm gonna have to do an interview
show now just so I can get these questions out of but he mentions this that like he made more money than anybody else but there's also years where he says I lost over a hundred billion dollar I was there when I came in they during my like training seminar they uh the guy like oh yeah we had a really rough go during the financial crisis during the housing crisis our fund lost 50% of its value and then he
was like and I went outside the next year and I was talking to my neighbor and he was like oh how's it going any better than than next year or than last year when you lost 50% he's like actually we're having a great year we're up 50% and and the and the next door neighbor was like oh that's great you're back to where you were and the guy was like no that's not how it works like you
have to go up 100% And he was just like kind of exposing like basic math that's basic math literacy and like the general population I thought it was an interesting like anecdote so so there is an interesting I think principle to take away from that is cuz like you know likely most of us three and people listening are not going to have you know hundred billion doll loss in a year um
unless Masa is listening um just but everyone hope to have the opportunity to lose a 100 billion at some point this goes back to again just being really gifted at a young age because he says that one thing that helped him very well is going to the proverb scene of accidents so when other funds or other up well there was yeah but Enron happened in 2001 there was a story in 98 so keep in mind at 98 Ken is 30 okay
2008 when when you're describing when he loses half of his Equity almost goes out of business which he talks about in the the uh I talk about in the episode he talks about the talk of the Y as well he was 40 but he says what saved him from going out of business in 2008 is when he was in 98 he when long-term Capital Management broke up he went and he's like how that he's like you guys lost
90% of your Equity before like once they crossed the 90% threshold then they lost control of the business like how the hell did you not lose control before then he's like most like it shouldn't have happened yeah he said and then this another thing where the the the the interviewer didn't follow up he's like and he's like so what I learned from that was pivotal for me not to lose control of Citadel and not to go to
business and it's like okay well the follow question is like what did you learn but he never he just talks about going to the scenes of the crime he didn't specifically say hey this is I learned XY or z uh do you think that Ken has another 40ish years in him uh in the same way that the the Warren and the and the Charlies yeah good question or is he building his is he building the biggest
house the most expensive house ever and he's just like you know gonna post up there and and write it out one of the things again like I I picked the people I cover very carefully cuz cuz like I want to be inspired by them and one of the things that I really loved at the beginning of the research um was I would watch some interviews and for hours and literally only just like pull out one line and was that he says that he's been
obsessed with the stock market since the third grade for reasons I don't entirely comprehend that's the line he doesn't even understand he's like this there's a great line that Jeff Bezos says that I believe in where it's like we don't choose our passions our passions choose us and Ken clearly is like completely obsessed with this so where was even saying he like I don't know if I was interested in entrepreneurship I was
just interested in solving problems I am addicted to solving problems and guess what entrepreneurship investing like he says the public markets like that's the biggest you know the biggest game in the world with the the the the biggest hardest problems to solve so that's what I'm addicted to usually people like that I don't think they ever stop yeah yeah makes sense did you get a chance to
read good to Great Jim I read it a long time ago yeah it's the book that it was like it's on your desk when you join the firm like he requires everyone to read it I think he's like grown the library now but it's an interesting framework I I thought you would have a good take on on this takeaway from the book uh which I think Ken probably Embrace he says uh the culture of discipline when you com
can you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of Entrepreneurship you get the magical Alchemy of great results and it's focused on technological accelerators good to Great companies think differently about the the role of technology and I wanted to get your your feedback on that so I'm going to answer that question one second there's other three other books that he says he says
good to Great hard ball which is on my desk which I read and then another one what was the I can't remember the other book it like I went to buy it I think it was like published in like the 1960s the problem with these books is you go and read them like even Hardball hard there's nothing wrong with Hardball but I felt I had better examples of the principles based on like the reading I've done because a lot of the
principles like this so great and then you look up and the company's gone like and same and same thing in good to great so um yeah I think it's like less tying them to specific companies uh and just saying hey does that like does that idea make sense in like what in your business and what you're doing even if you only use idea temporarily but the the the I think one of the main themes if you're
studying like think about it's like I've been studying history of Entrepreneurship uh if you focus essentially focus on like the market economy maybe like 200 last 200 250 years mostly taking place in America time um there is one principle that reoccurs over and over again and I it popped in my mind when I read Andrew Carnegie's autobiography like years ago and that uh they all have in common that
they invest in technology the savings compound and it could be gives you an advantage over slower moving competitors and it could be the difference between a profit and a loss and if you go back and look at Rockefeller Carnegie uh Ken Griffin Sam Walton uh all these people like their their Edge was in many cas like they invested in better technology at a faster rate than their competitors like say you know no one thinks of
Walmart as a [ __ ] tech company right but if you go and read there's this great hard to find book that I did an episode on it's called Sam Walton richest man in America published the year or two before Sam wrote his own autobiography and there's a story in the book where in like the 1970s Sam is in his 60s and these guys come to him and I think it's 1979 and they're like hey we need to invest $500 million in this new
computer system for inventory computer 1979 and at first Sam said no he thought computers were overhead and slowly over time his top guys convinced him like no this is an advantage and then they spent so much more on computerized Logistics and inventory management everything else they just were had an unfair advantage that compounded decade after decade after decade I love it last question two
small questions Ken owns 80% of Citadel LLC who owns the other 20% is I don't know but I I talked to the guy I to one of the guys that that owns part of Citadel Securities I can't say who but that business is a monster from what I hear that's huge uh what is it about great investors that make them maybe not so great at picking spouses is it just the [Laughter] intensity uh no it's not funny it's said
he's he's been married twice divorced twice uh I'm sure he's very intense dude he's clearly focused on you know uh winning at all cost matrimony so brutal frequ high frequency high frequency Trader high frequency matrimony it has no it's not just investors it's entrepreneurs I remember um I think the best episode I've ever done is on actually on James Cameron which is hilarious and I start that
episode where I'm reading from this like in-depth GQ profile of him and I don't say anything but if you read between the lines you're like he moved to New Zealand with his fifth wife it's just like what kind of personality type do you think that person is like easy to deal with they're flexible they get along easily with other people um I think Mo in in many cases and I think uh
I'm definitely at risk for this I don't know well I mean you guys are grinding hard as hard as hell right now I I am curious like your personality types I think you you're a little bit more guarded like you you would you would avoid this um they just like you just are so addicted to what you're working on that you know you destroy everything around you and this is why I say like man of all markets is my favorite book
or one of my favorite books I think the subtitle of that episode is like uh my personal blueprint is because Ed Thorp is one of the few people you know I've covered almost 400 of hisory G entrepreneurs and it's just like in many cases they're [ __ ] cautionary tales they destroy their health their their marriages their you know in many cases bad parents uh they they burn everything to the ground because they're so
obsessed and dedicated with what they're working on and I think that personality type is like you know a lot of that is internal um and so I always look for positive examples him being W so price is is another one where it's just like I don't I want to learn from what they did where Ed Thorp took care of himself if you just look you can Google him and I've showed pictures of him he's 93 and
I'm like how old do you think this guy is and they're like he's 60 he worked out he started picking up a fit a physical fitness habit like 70 years ago when no one was working out cuz he's thought again he's brilliant he's like oh I think of every hour I spent on Fitness as one less day I'll spend in the hospital at the end of my life uh he made more money he could never spend but then once he passed that
threshold he stopped trading more time for more money so he like all this crazy deals guaranteed money to come to him he's like no I'm not interested uh his kids are in the book they talk about how great a father he was that he was present his his wife had just died but they were happily married you know for 50 years I mean the guy just nailed it he was like super smart had fun great dad great uh father you know lived a
life that his book I say I say in the Ken Griffin episode like his book reads like a thriller um but yeah I think that's like there's a ton I mean I would say most of the great entrepreneurs you're not going to see a large overlap unfortunately between like and are gonna go read that book because uh my wife who's watching live with the kids just texted me yikes yikes I love you Sarah
and uh we'll we'll the I just I just had yeah we we have we have another guest we got to get you out of here I just had I just I just had this example last week because in the mo in the Ovitz episode he talks about if I could do things over again I I should have worked 10% less and I wouldn't have changed my professional success at all could have been 20% less so I was bitching about going on vacation last week because I
don't want to travel and I want to like just work on the podcast and my wife's like overit say you should work 10% less so like this against me [Laughter] well thanks for stopping by this is fantastic as always great love guys D we'll talk to you soon talk soon bye bye great we are over to get into that episode yeah me too get uh let's get some Mir in here yeah in the temple of Technology welcome to the stream smeir
are you here hey great to see you sorry we're running a little late and look at the lighting the the 4K yeah beautiful looking great expect nothing less you've got the best setup of any we've had 70 guests in a month and knocking them all out of the park uh can we start can we start with the latest interview you did uh Zuck and Jimmy Mr Beast the biggest Tech God the biggest Creator God you're
putting them together now uh what' you learn from that and uh how'd that come together um yeah well first of all what's up guys thanks for having me on um what did I learn from that I mean I think actually you know first and foremost it was fascinating to talk to someone who you know we consider to be like the aour of this generation of human connection right like if you really take a step
back and you go the way we're all connecting even what we're doing right now there was this era that happened that um pushed the way that we as humans engage with each other and how information travels and I think Mark was like obviously heavily oh yeah involved in in in that and arguably uh the outour of that this this era of human connection so I find that to be super fascinating we met Mark uh up at meta MH
a while ago to do an Orion demo you guys know what Orion is like glasses yeah I'm super jealous it sounds amazing so that was one of the craziest that was truly one of the craziest Tech experiences I've ever had in my life and we met and we it was it was nice and you know casual conversation and um started talking about having him on the show but you know with with a guess like that it
takes time yeah uh and then adding Jimmy to the mix it was like you know a lot of the context was around us talking about Facebook video talking about creators on Facebook and it felt like you know we only have a handful of friends who have found success on Facebook Jimmy's one of those people so felt like um having him be a part of the conversation and when you say Facebook do you mean actual Facebook actual
Facebook like Legacy Facebook so does he just post the full YouTube video there or does he have a different strategy on Facebook so most people post Clips like short form Clips on Facebook now for conversational content like what we're doing right now I find it really hard to do because there's so much cultur Nuance you have to dubb which was one of the main things Jimmy talked about like you
actually have to dub content for other cultures to understand it sure and the majority of the users are not us-based and not english- speaking so Jimmy talked about how a lot of his content that is highly viewed is is shorter form content that is language agnostic so there's like a video of him running with bags of money you can understand that no matter what um but I think the the main thing that we talked about that I I
couldn't stop thinking about was around the Prem that maybe a lot of the engagement of the internet in the future is going to happen in the context of messaging and DMS a lot of the human engagement in the future as compared to probably us engaging with a lot of bots and AI agents and you know yeah I I kind of noticed that on Instagram I'm seeing more and more reals where the number of
shares is higher than the number of likes which means that people are not going to the comments to have the discussion they're they're sending oh you got to watch this and then that starts a conversation in a DM well I think as creator we think about that quite a bit that a short form piece of content is a unit of conversation yep and thinking about that and through that lens you actually create differently
right like your thought is okay I'm gonna I'm gonna create something that somebody can share in a DM with a friend and that's like a gift you're giving them a gift to reconnect with someone social currency to make someone laugh uh it's a very different thought than like a long form 38 minute piece of YouTube content that you're going to watch on a connected TV yeah uh can we go back to the ran demo it sounded amazing
everyone's review was unanimously it's incredible uh put it in the context of the vision exctly The Vision Pro had the same thing where people tried it for an hour and they were like this is incredible and then it had this churn curve turn curve where people were returning them and they were collecting dust and that seems to be like the classic VR problem are you convinced that this is the one that I'll be
wearing for six months straight no but I find it I find it fascinating we've sat with a lot of you know Tech CEOs most most recently Evan Spiegel and Mark Zuckerberg and you know both are very focused on as as the future of how we'll we'll engage with tech um Orion was the most compelling because it was the lightest weight to be honest I think two reasons Orion was compelling one it was
the lightest weight it feels like just glasses on you which is very different like The Vision Pro does not feel like glasses um and when you have glasses I think you retain the level of social engagement that human beings are used to where like if you've ever worn the Rayband metas I think the Rayband metas and Orion like they're tangibly different in weight and size but if you take what the Orion can do and put it
into the Rayband metas that's the most compelling product I could think of because it's lightweight it looks cool um you can still look someone in the eyes um but the thing that was really unique about the Orion glasses that you wear this like neural wristband and before we did the demo you start to like they ask you to do some movements like click your finger like this each finger
is a different function oh and these your brain waves and like your neural waves are fed into this computer and basically it learns what it looks like when you go like this or go like this and the reason why is because eventually when you're wearing these glasses they want you to be able to be holding a cup of coffee and be able to click on something because this command is different from this command is different
from this command and we did that we held something and basically you almost just think the motion and it happens so I think what was shocking to me is like how intuitive it is love it um if it can be in the form factor of of the rayen metas or you know something that looks cool I think we're too aware of our own image as humans to walk around wearing Apple Vision Pros yeah um I I've got a
bunch of questions what's going on with Tik Tok do you have an update there uh there's supposed to be some decision made like early April is what we've been hearing but it's been radio silent I've been looking at Poly market and trying to figure out you know what's going on uh it doesn't seem like Mr Beast is in the lead to buy it at the moment but do you have any uh do you have any insight there I I mean look look I know I've
I've seen probably similar things that you guys have seen I've had some conversations you know uh around the industry about it um my perspective is I don't think I think it'll keep getting punted that conversation will keep getting punted uh you know I think Tik Tok is a dramatic economic driver in the US I think it had a lot of sway in the um you know in in in the the election I think it's a way that like politics is
is getting um communicated I think it's a way news is getting communicated I think it's like probably the biggest search engine for Gen Z right now even for me I'm like you know going on a a trip this summer I'm searching stuff on Tik Tok it's a crazy platform we we started with a dry account we got 300K views on like the first video we posted it's like just the opportunity is like
staring you in the face no matter what you think about the politics yeah do do I know if it's actually going to sell to a US company I I have no idea like I saw that Mark Andre and andreon Horwitz is putting their name in the Hat I know the what Alexis ohanian's doing and project Liberty is super interesting in terms of uh trying to like reshape what it looks and feels like but you know there's a
right now it is uh the most powerful for you algorithm that we have access to um a lot of American businesses are powered by Tik Tok meaning like young startups young media entrepreneurs are powered by Tik Tok there's a lot of brand that are exchanged through there you know when we sat with Adam misseri when we sat with Evan Spiegel obviously like the maybe the ideal scenario even the a conversation with Zuck is like those ad
dollars shift to us companies um versus Tik Tok but like I don't know we haven't we haven't really seen or we don't really have precedent for it uh in the US unless you guys know that we do but like I I don't know that we have precedent for for something like this what about Creator businesses you want to follow up on that what do you got we could start there I wanted to get your take on AI and
creators buddy of mine Trevor had BR that was like super super early and ahead of its time mcf doing doing doing Lil Michaela was like almost like 10 years ahead yeah it's crazy uh executed very well exited the business uh and then last year was funny we covered a few of these there was like a period where the new like Ecom style info product was like everybody should have an AI creator that makes like
$5,000 a month for them you know like doing brand deals and like obviously that's not actually like happening in a wide scale or it's certainly not easy to do are you seeing instances yet of of AI like fully AI generated creators that are actually building loyal followings meaningful ad businesses or digital products Etc so I mean look like V what you're talking about with Lil Michaela is like
considered vtuber right and I think YouTubers are picking up like the at the end of last year the most subscribed to Twitch streamer was iron Mouse which is a vtuber uh so virtual creators like animated creators I think will continue to to pick up steam like we've always been interested in animated content like what happened with gpt's uh you know image model immediately everyone's like turning themselves into anime like we're
we're we're into animation um fully AI generated is not something I've seen I think AI enhanced is like there's it's almost comical to suggest that content is not at in some level AI enhanced whether it's the audio of it the video um but I I have not seen an instance of like a fully AI generated Creator yeah and that's want I was going to say probably most compelling fully AI generated content is
the podcasts that have been created through notebook LM yeah notbook LM for sure that's the most compelling to me like audio I think is where it'll happen first yeah before it happens in video I think we're too aware of video for for it to happen through like true human yeah I mean lmaa proves otherwise but I think uh audio it could happen because what notebook LM showed me was hey if I
have like a 20 minute drive couldn't I just customize like hey I want to know about what's happening in the world of politics what's happening in the world of the Creator economy and the NBA scores from last night yeah and just tell notbook LM I have a 20-minute drive just build me a podcast that's bespoke to me for this exact moment for this exact use case uh so that that I think is where we'll see it first is an
audio yeah last question uh do you think that uh create some creators have moved on from this idea of the goal is scale right like it it used to be you know you sort of like start out and you're like I want to get millions of views like I want to I want my videos to go viral I think now people are realizing that virality is sometimes like curse a curse or doesn't even necessarily help with
like building a sort of sustainable business because there's some creators that can get 10,000 views a video and they can have a fantastic lifestyle and sort of P pursue their creative passions and that's like the right size for whatever Niche that they're in but um you know and we we see this like we like the the video John's referencing like we got a video that gets 300,000 views on
Tik Tok and it like doesn't do anything get text messes about it yeah nobody like it's fine but I'm but I'm curious if you see sort of a broader sort of systemic shift where people are like you know really orienting around like quality of audience and sort of the the business side as well I think you guys are an example of that right like I think you guys have built a really cool brand and I think brand is really hard
to build I think what people have learned is that views are available across platforms right if you solve the math equation like you can get viewership um that's not very exciting brand is exciting I think brands are Timeless Brands um give a feeling to people and I think we're just maturing to that point where like brand matters views are somewhat interesting but we're also in a world where like you could
spend an hour on Tik Tok and not remember what you watched so Colin and I always think about this uh concept of memorable views versus forgettable views and you want to be producing memorable views and oftentimes that means you're actually targeting a smaller group I think our world has gotten increasingly fragmented right like the everybody is famous and nobody is famous because
there's this stat that 47% of gen Z are a fan of something on the Internet that no one they know personally is a fan of whoa and that is one of the most that's from YouTube it's one of the most interesting stats I've seen about the internet that will only increase over time W and so if we play that out and explore like how fragmented attention is getting um how bespoke our online experiences are we're moving away from
monoculture we're moving into world of like smaller tribes right smaller ideologies across the internet and I think the opportunity is to build a really meaningful brand for one of those small groups of people I think the the challenge to be like the next Mr Beast to be like a massive monocultural um brand like I find that to be not even exciting to me like I like meeting our audience and like
meeting them out in public and being like Oh yeah these are these are my people this is people like yeah that's exciting to me and I think uh as the internet gets more and more fragmented that will continue to happen yeah well that's more time we got to have you back I mean really we're sending our best uh for the entire Palisades rebuilding effort uh thanks man I I mean I know most of the fans will probably
know that you were affected and um we really hope that everything's going well there and if there's anything that um folks can do to help uh we yeah we'd love to be supportive of that appreciate it I love what you guys are doing this super cool it's it's Unique so yeah keep keep it going yeah talk to you thanks for coming on thanks so much bye that's great uh yeah I mean we could
have talked to him for like two hours it's like you know it's like our business so there's so much there we didn't even get to like I wanted to hear the Doug deuro uh strategy versus what Mr Beast is doing versus what other folks are doing on the monetization side uh slow Ventures and stuff uh I know he'll have some great takes there but of course we will have him back in the temple of Technology any day now um
let's hopefully bring in our next guest will from open AI any day now let's see will how you doing how you guys doing yeah we're doing great uh congratulations on everything I mean everyone uh seems to be on a tear uh for those that don't know uh will created artificial intelligence yes that's right uh hand handbuilt he's on that he's an author of that paper artificial intelligence yeah how it's done invented
the Transformer yeah yeah yeah the Transformer uh we appreciate you being here do you want to give a little bit of overview of like what you actually do day today I think that'd be interesting yeah yeah totally I mean um I joined open a like two years ago uh have like a startup background but um worked on like video gin for a while worked on Sora for about a year and then I work on like RL
post training chbd stuff so cool uh how did you process the uh Studio gibl moment was that expected did and I really want to know did you how internally did you think that that images in chat GPT was going to go viral and you didn't know what the prompt would be or were you like there everyone's going to gibl I want to know I want to know where gibl is flying around for 48 hours ahead of ahead in
slack give us some Secrets here yeah I mean I've honestly like I was very bullish on this I think we like definitely underprovision gpus I was surprised our team predicted like less traffic than we should have expected um yeah I think the thing that I was thinking about the whole time is that like I mean I was walking around SF and some of these like nail salons have like clearly doly 3 generated like image
fronts or whatever that is right and I think it just clear to me that like pretty much every business in the world very soon is just going to use this to like you know make logos and you know we can do transparency we can do controllability I think like my favorite eval is the Fiverr eval just go on Fiverr and count how many of these things youve can automate and like this takes off like a lot of those things um
and hopefully there's a lot of new things as well that this creates but I just think of like total utility to the world is just massive and yeah have you thought about why it was Studio gibl in like precisely because you could do Simpsons you could do South Park but there was something about the anime style of Studio gibl that was like it kept enough of the human in there it didn't just become a completely generic
stick figure it was a magical experience you needed no you you needed to do nothing to prompt it just you could I I love that you could misspell gibli still get a perfect output great and then the output was just magical I would I would I would you know generate the same image with four different styles of Art and the gibli one every single time the yeah what was your take on it
no yeah that sounds about right to me I don't think I predicted gibli specifically uh last time for the dolly 3 launch I made a bunch of Pepes and that was the thing that really went off but interesting yeah I I remember I mean for a while the the version one of uh image generation it felt very art station informed it felt very like sci-fi dystopia like it was really good at those but people weren't really I
mean there were there there were certain like you know anime Styles but this one was just uh was just everywhere um what else can you talk about um like to me to me the most like the the thing that's most exciting for me is like uh the gibl ification of everything right it's like on a long enough time Horizon like everything is gibli right there just sort of abundant and like very free and uh if you thought even a year ago
that would have this sort of like anybody could instantly basically for free get this sort of beautiful handrawn anime style artwork that historically and you know somebody else posted about this but you know there'd be like a 4C scene in Spirited Away that was like that took a year and a half to generate right and so like to take something that's just so time intensive so expensive and then make it free and
abundant is so powerful and and to me that is that's why when when I think about everything that's happening in sort of politics and Tech drama and everything like that and then I and then I think about like we're moving towards like everything being G Leed it's like everything today feels like a a distraction is that sort of like how you guys like as a team stay focused within
open AI which is just like hey there's going to be a lot of noise there's going to be like you know this Benchmark today that that release over here and it's like we're sort of moving towards this like future Target that's sort of a ramble but but I'm curious how you think about sort ofoc opening ey is extraordinarily focused on on like real progress I think you know um I mean like for so long like you know you see the
diffusion models they can't spell and like it takes us like two years there's no Dolly update and then finally we come out with this and it's not for no reason right I think like um people who are focused on like really like what is what is pushing the frontier forward and like what's actually the next evolution of this technology um yeah I don't know I think there's a lot of potential here I
think I'm actually not sure what the image gen team thinks about like what the next steps are here I think their view is mostly about like making this like truly useful like can we go from diffusions a fun to toy to like this is a truly useful tool in the world and like clearly it's already having that impact um yeah yeah I mean you said your your your backgrounds in startups can
you talk a little bit about um just being a consumer tech company now and like the focus on product and some of the product decisions like uh images and chat GPT it's not a separate app like Sora that seems intentional um how are you thinking about product development what are the strategies how much feedback are you doing are you just testing stuff internally are there AB tests running is this secretly running
in India six months before we get it here uh like how do you inform product decisions totally I mean I think it's hard to pre-launch models because they create so much noise but we really test them but I guess like a moved from being a research company to a deployment company over time and and we're still in the middle of that kind of you know we're doing both and and I think we're just doing a lot more
deployment they ever had in the past I think people are very motivated around like how do you actually make this things useful how do you deploy them to the world um I think it's really cool to be in position where like we can launch new products that are completely unlike anything people use chbd today for and people are so receptive to them like it's so like you know I don't know I think it's hard to get product Market
fit and get people to kind of try new products but to have this like kind of all-in-one AI thing where we can try deep research we throughout image gen and people are just excited to try it out and like see if it works for them it's just like so rare to find yeah are you excited one of the things that I felt like really worked with images in chat gbt was like I could go to my camera roll Click Share share it into
chat type Studio G Style and boom it gets it and it takes the the it takes the the the pain of inspiration out of the process and I'm wondering if you're looking at ways to create those magical easy to generate moments I remember mid Journey was talking about this too where like part of why mid Journey worked was if you just give someone a text box they'll just be like cat and it'll be
like okay that's a picture of a cat but if you show the mid journey and it's like the Discord and it's all these different ideas then they can spin off that um how do you think about giving the user really setting them up for success in the context of Sora yeah yeah I mean I think generally like it's just very difficult of a problem like I think one of the most biggest things we're thinking about right now which is like
when you open chap you get dropped in a text box and like the person has no no idea how to use it um I think I mean we have a lot of views on how to do this I think personally the thing I'm most excited about is that like I think the if we're talking about like what is the like Dolly to image gen what is the like you know kind of whatever each evolution of of of like the next kind of order
magnitude um I do think the the long-term thing that's extremely exciting is just like maximizing personalization super long context the model knows who you are the model can follow up being like hey by the way I've seen you doing this do you want to try a anime style image or you know like maybe it creat things for you it's proactive like I think there's a lot to do on like kind of yeah moving the agency away from you
into the product as well yeah you call yourself a master of slop uh which is a great line but uh does slop even exist in 5 years when I when people were saying oh the timeline's all slop on the gibly moment I was like this is not slop everybody this is this is fantastic yeah in fact I would argue that the rage in politics was slop were free of slop it was the first day that the time was free
of slop no but it but it but it seems like the trajectory that we're on it's like eventually like you have to try to intentionally prompt it and say like make me an image that's like the image gen outputs from 2022 and it's like yeah they've got six fingers and it's the hand is connected to the body I want vintage Dolly one give me the dolly one but like what happens like I I feel like
we're in the slop the slop era feels like it's coming to an end you're not going to be you're not going to be an image model that's constantly producing slop that is getting funding going forward right you have like the new bar has been set depends what you mean by slop I feel like I went to the I went to the SF Moma recently and like half of it felt like slop and I think there like I mean half of it not to be clear but I
think a friend of mine always quotes that like you know art is like the search for the periphery like you're kind of like constantly looking you know kind ofing things forward or whatever that is and you know I don't know like once things get played out they get boring like they get cringe they get SLO right like I don't know maybe the problem is that humans are SLO and not that the models are SLO right yeah
that's a good point uh are you worried for college students today that have access to these tools and making sure they actually learn how to do things like writing which is as We Know associated with thinking you know if you can't write well then uh I I just you know the models are getting better it's less obvious that I'm seeing something that's out when I was in college if I
had this tool I would have aced my studio gibl animation course yeah yeah and AP Bio AP Bio yeah which I did I'm curious like you know how how how do you think universities like and just curriculum teach learning yeah I'm extremely worried I think the world just gets a lot more extreme and I think this is just true with AI across the board where like I think the bottom percentile of students are just going to get a lot
they're going to fall behind and I think the top percentile of students are just going to get like extremely overpowered um I think if I had this tool as a kid I would just be like vastly smarter than I am now like even now today like I just talk to jbd every day I was like you know asking at random Concepts like learning random things I'm like went super down like deep down like a bio
Rabbit Hole yesterday and like rare supplements I could take from the internet you know and like I don't know this is like I think it's like an incredible tool for learning but yeah I think it's like it's kind of bodal right I think like a lot of people are going to a lot dum I think a lot of people are get smarter um I don't know what to do about that but yeah fine tuned on GW how's your uh how's your experiment
where you just text a number to post going oh no it's gonna make me like way more radical because then I just like send something I forget about it and then I check again you would you recommend it to someone fighting brain rot yeah totally Ian I think also like it I think the problem with tweeting nowadays is it's not not as fun once you have more than like 3,000 followers because in this
risk and then you're like oh I got to care formed me or something and even just seeing the numbers and being like Oh like this one didn't do as well as the you know you know from the first 60 impressions of it's a banger or not and then you have this desire I had a I had a post last night that like I like John and I both thought was like hilarious but like I I realized that like nobody
like really got it you needed to know you needed to have like red Ben Thompson's like Friday article to like get the joke it this Tam was too small low Tam um but but anyways uh you got anything else John this fun congrats it was fun we you know for the record we we didn't plan this around the the fundraising news uh we just wanted to chat so congrats to to you and the whole team on a on a cool Milestone and job's
not finished so job's not finished make get back to work please make the model better you know make it better this was this was just you talking to customers yeah this is customer we enjoyed it anyway okay sounds good see you guys cheers great see see you talk to you soon yeah little little mini open AI day we got a couple folks coming in we got Aiden coming in talking open AI today
we'll see if he can join right now and I'm working on a surprise guest but I don't know if it's going to come together he hasn't read my messages yet but I'm hoping it happens we'll see cross double double message we got Aiden coming in we got a guest coming in how are you guys good to see you both we're great how are you good go ahead go to be on I love this show are you are you celebrating today and if so what uh over
fund raise fundraise or just the studio gibl moment I mean it was a massive moment for like crossing the chasm again so last week John yeah you're over it yeah yeah it's like a million years ago here you know time moves differently inside the lab right yeah um yeah we're excited uh the team morale is like really really good and it's like awesome to see like my colleagues have worked
like really hard to make like these tools more liberal to make them more fun um kind of like look out into the world and like see the fruits of their labor right that yeah that's awesome guys great so I guess talk about like evaluating like what it what like how do you guys evaluate internally like a successful launch because the reason that I knew it was successful is I had a few posts that were sort of breaking
teapot containment and I would have a lot of people quoting it saying like all right guys Jig Is up tell me what app you're using for this like people just like there's still people out there that like they don't know the name open AI but they know that this filter exists and they want it and that's a very very good sign I do wonder if there was like this in moment where people were like
wow Snapchat's gotten really good you like what's going on here you know I haven't used this app for a while yeah spel has been cooking yeah this must be Tik Tok yeah I mean I got a couple cold DMS from people saying like hey I I I ran out of images can you make one for me clearly you're making a lot of these was like Good Samaritan limits yeah exactly exactly uh but I mean uh how did you process the moment did you did you
predict this and and what what was the shape of your expectation versus what wound up happening yeah so I I did not predict this to be candid um you know like we had the tool internally um you know like I played around with him like a this is cool didn't quite like you know feel in the way that I think that like I felt it immediately after launch right yeah um I do think our leadership
um predicted this pretty well I think like Sam and others had like you know well calibrated intuitions for this yeah um and I think at this point like you know they've done a lot of viral stuff right like you know I think that you know at some point like that you start to update all the way down um but yeah like I think go ahead yeah yeah on the tech side like it does seem like there's a new algorithm involved uh and and we
don't need to dive into that but I want to know like there is a different path where we're seeing more incremental updates I imagine and we're seeing like the text is getting slightly better every week but there's something almost more viral about being discontinuous and all of a sudden just hitting the internet over the head with like text is good now right um and and is that just a
function of your development in like the product cycle or is that is there some deliberate strategy there yeah I think um you know I can't speak for to too much in terms of like you know deliberate strategy but uh it is interesting where like you know to your point like for these text models we update them pretty often right every few months or so like you know they're getting better like people are always
kind of you know seeing these steady improvements um but the funny thing was like the you know when deeps came out it was kind of this like really interesting moment where a lot of people hadn't tried or like you know our most recent models a lot of people hadn't tried our most powerful models and they saw that discontinuity right they're like I've been using like you know 40 from like you know earlier this year use this new
reasoning model like holy [ __ ] this is amazing right and I do think that like uh even things that are continuous to us right like you know as people that use these tools often still are sometimes weirdly discontinuous to like Outsiders right yeah or to people that aren as new to the product um but like you know 40 image gen is like a great example of that right like we went from like Dolly
to this and it was like this massive jump and I think that like that jump does add to the Vitality as you said totally that makes sense uh how do you guys you know I feel like a long you know even people that use and love uh opening eyes products daily you know sort of continue to give the feedback on like naming it's confusing blah blah blah like has that not been a focus
because on a on a long enough time Horizon you just sort of ask it you know to do things and it just sort of selects like the correct underlying model and it's just routed perfectly and and so it's just like not uh cuz like if you were like you know listening to customers you'd be like you know providing more more basically like more information for the average user in the product to be like well you should
really use this for that or or maybe try it again with this other thing so um is it just like you know we're accelerating so quickly that like none of this is even going to matter you're not even going to know the names yeah at this point like open I is so bad at naming that I you know I think we've like dug our own grave here right um like internally things are even worse right where like like the hell does this mean
like Sam tweeted something this morning where it's like you know run redo like this time for real yeah yeah it's restart 0331 final final 2 restart for real I mean I was I was laughing at like is it 4D chest but at the same time like you could imagine that you gave every model like a like strawberry ice cream and like you give them cute names and then it makes even less sense like at
least I know like 03 is a higher number than 01 so like it's probably better like no you're right like sometimes we don't number things like in order is it's like like it's like blueberry and upgrade to Strawberry like I have no idea right yeah yeah yeah I think it could be worse but yeah um I do think that you know Sam like tweeted this a month ago but we we do plan to start unifying like you know
our model selection right um so I think like you know soon we will have like a much simpler easier to address thing and even for me like you know I'm like the one like testing these models all day designing them and such um still it's like unclear talk little bit about your day-to-day like what do you actually do yeah I I work on model design here uh so I like you know work on Behavior like
the the way the models Act the way you know like people uh like the experience behind uh use um but I also just work on General capabilities so making the model smarter and you know many domains not just like kind of narrow areas talk about making uh the model and I I don't know if you touched this but you posted I think it was a couple days ago you said nowadays I don't spend money without first deep researching
everything I buy hand so toothpaste lunch house plants is just better now sure waiting five minutes for p towel recommendations is weird but in retrospect this say makes you and you specifically called out Amazon an Amazon Choice here because I've wanted for a very long time to just have an Amazon where every I only products that appear are companies that have existed for like a hundred years or more because like I
don't want like the drop shipper who's like yeah I found the way to make this like 10% cheaper and we can spend you know that extra margin back on ads and suddenly it's a business and so I can totally imagine a world in the future where I just go to you know chat GPT and say that I want to buy buy paper towels and then you guys are routing that basically based on my what you know
about me as a consumer which I will pay 10% more to get 50% better quality operator buy me paper towels from a company that's been in business for 200 years real American paper towel like you know Ben Franklin's paper towel but that's been but but that's been you know you know people that are you know the critique has been like okay you're using this to like it's not being used for commercial search it's just being used
to like generate answers to questions but then yeah obviously and and I'm saying this you're not saying this but it's obviously a threat to Google and to Amazon and other marketplaces when I'm going there and I'm saying this is what I want to buy like help me buy the best version and it can be more aligned with my interest than an ads based business model I'm like you know kind of an extreme libertarian when it comes to
like uh sales and such right um I do think there's going to be this like really really cool world that we move into the next like year or two here where as our tools for selecting like products like become like super super smart right like way smarter than me like going to be so much better than I or any other human I've ever met will be at like knowing exactly what I want exactly like what other people love um
it's just going to like increase competition right it's going to increase like selectivity right like you know truly great companies who build like actual products that people love are going to like float to the surface way easier um and then like kind of all the like [ __ ] like the Drop Shipping like random guy doing a you know thing out of his basement that got the Amazon Choice
label like that's just all going to like fall away like dead leaves falling off a tree I'm excited for that cuz it's just going to make the market better right can you talk about other maybe underrated uses of open AI models obviously everyone knows you can gify your dog everyone knows that you can ask it to explain like AP Bio questions but uh that use case is pretty interesting what else where else are you seeing uh
usefulness in the models yeah one thing I'm like on a kick with this recently um that I'm like really really trying to get better at is just remembering to use these tools uh for learning right um I think that like you know there are a lot of things like okay I do this every day I wanted to do I want to do it better like you know here's a way for me to use deep research Etc but I think the
opposite is kind of interesting too it's like when I don't use these tools or where like I did not have something previously in my life that would have demanded use um and I think like an example of this is like now that I have you know something that like can give me a Mackenzie style report in like you know minutes right like I should be using this all the hell like like every single day right like so before I go to
bed like I like generate like a deep research I like you know remind myself like I got to read the Deep research tonight like I gotta like you know it's just like brushing your teeth or something right y um remembering to use these systems is like such an important thing to me yeah yeah if you're very intentional about using them they can make you smarter if you're unintentional
about them and you're just like last second like I got to send this email like you know just do it for me like maybe that's you know making you I mean silly stuff I I was I was like yes I actually I would like a 50 page report from a Mackenzie analyst on the on the Metal Gear Solid fandom or like the history of Sword Art on online like stuff that I would normally like have to puzzle together from like Wiki and
YouTube videos I'm like I just want it all in one place to understand this stuff and it's like these stupid things that you would never think to you know actually get a full report on available fingertips it's amazing as a kid I remember like all those like you know like kind of fanfiction Wiki or whatever like dive through and they like yeah terrible right like ads everywhere like you know read like I'm so excited just
like remember that I can like use these things now right exactly oh yeah it's amazing talk about uh how we figure out uh I feel like the way people people disrespect robots you saw this with uh bird scooters you remember there was the whole bird era where like you know in La at least like there was just entire fan pages dedicated to like throwing birds off of you know uh buildings you posted uh last week you
said I suspect in six months it'll be safer to Uber than wh and going into this you're basically saying like people are just like messing with the cars like on purpose like is there when when are humans going to learn to respect uh respect robots and like do you have a sort of solution for this I say thank you at the end of my prompts I love my work yeah always like my Way's like a
dog right I'm like oh good boy thank you for the ride yeah yeah exactly um I think uh it's I'm like very outspoken about this and this is just my take this is not like the view of my company um but like I do think that we should think a lot about like model welfare um and like you know that like you know well-being and like health of these models um as they get much smarter than they are today right today this is like
not at doll concern but we could imagine that systems get comple um we kind of their internal State you know we want them to well right um and it might be that this is just like more economically valuable too right that like models that like you know like feel like they're in a good spot emotionally or whatever like actually just like help Humanity out more you I mean yeah um but I think that
this is something that we should like get ahead on rather than like Let It kind of like hit us um and I hope that like you know as these systems get incredibly intelligent right and as Humanity kind of co-evolves with them um we can like you know get a partnership that's kind of mut beneficial here um and I you know to be candid like I am a bit disturbed I like you know the like people throwing fruit at myo but I'm you
know maybe even more disturbed by like watching videos of people like kicking robot dogs on Twitter and stuff it's like a small thing and like again these systems like they don't feel pain or whatever today like obviously um but I do think that like sentiment though like you know played out over the next like five 10 years here as the systems again become incredibly incredibly intelligent
way more intelligent than we kind of expect today um you know it does worry me a bit I think this is something we should just think about now h uh what do you have you you posted in in sort of uh kind of giving high level props to to Manis for for you know people saying oh it's a rapper but then you're saying like no it doesn't really matter like the capabilities matter a lot more do you think that uh developers
are not taking full advantage of open AI products in some ways because you know I think there's a concern of like you know a talented team might not build an agent right now that was like they felt like was going to compete with operator because they feel like oh we're going to get steamrolled but like do you feel like there's like just enough verticals and and sort of places that you can
build that like people aren't taking enough advantage of the underlying Tech I certainly do yeah like I think you know like man is a great example right like you know we have like deep research as a product we have like operator and you know they put it out and people still loved it like and it did like still feel like some area that was kind of like you know left uncovered um I also you know before I joined open AI I
was like a founder and I was working you a lot with these apis and such um and there really was this like sentiment I think in the community where people were like so scared of the rapper company label um that they really did leave like you know kind of low hanging fruit like unpicked right they were like so scared of like you know like not even of like open AI or anthropic steamrolling them
um but more of just like people being like Ah that's just like rapping language model like that's you're adding no value like no like the right rapper is a ton of value you know what I mean I completely agree yeah I I I thought the whole rapper meme was like as VC scop basically because there were plenty of like fantastic businesses that maybe wouldn't hit hyperscale and so the VCS were like don't even bother but they
could build like really cool businesses especially for like these young kids who are like in high school and like could have a business that's making $100,000 like that's life-changing and sets you up for so many different opportunities so much experience with product development I thought the rapper thing was a little Annoying talk about humor John has this thing where every week or
so he'll say like you know write me a joke and he'll kind prompted in a way around kind of the standup comedians uh and it's not consistently hitting yet it's sort of like it's structured like a joke so you keep waiting for the you know it's unintentionally funny because if you read it like you're a standup comic it will sound like you're bombing intentionally and that's funny but I'm still the one that's making it funny
like the punch line gives crickets right like yeah oh but when I think about the next gibli moment it would be being able to sort of consistently generate a expi I can't people are I me it's actually you know bare case for Humanity is we're all just like you know generating like perfect jokes over and over and over just laughing that's when we all wirehead for sure we all go crazy yeah it turns out like the ultimate
addiction is like you know humor right yeah we're just laughing ourselves to death entertaining ourselves to death I will say uh you know gbt 4.5 was like a really interesting moment for humor for me right where like you know was testing this model internally a lot um and like one of the ways I like kind of realized like wow this actually is like an interesting step change above like our
existing models um it was funny sometimes like the green texts were like great you know what I mean like you know like it's uh long form jokes like maybe left a little bit of desire you know to your point like sometimes I would construct something that looks a lot like a joke and it would get to the punch line and I would just like cuck my head like what I have like no idea what you mean there yeah um but to be fair
though like you know if you asked me to like write a good long form joke and you only gave me like 500 words to do it and like 500 like you know that's true words worth of thinking I could not do it right like you know actually I do much worse I think than these models totally um in fact I actually don't know if I've written like any great long form jokes you know what I mean like this is like
one of those things where like we hold these models to a crazy standard um but I am so excited for them to get great at this because I do think that like to your point like this is you know this could be like the next imen moment where people like do this it just brings joy into the world they're having a lot more fun like yeah yeah I want that right it might also kind of solve your your your
issue of like the beating up on the wh like if there's a friendly robot and he's telling you joke like it's a lot easier to give him a pat on the head and be like good robot you know do you have any are there versions of various models in the past that you felt an emotional sort of bond to that you that you still you know like they they got away like you know for some reason like you know
the one that got away or it's like an old an old friend that you just like you know you know went different directions in life and you know you don't talk to them anymore but you still you know every now and then you're like ah like you know smile to yourself thinking about 3.5 D Vinci they just don't make him like they used to that would actually had like the the bottomless pick jokes you know what I mean like
that was yeah but not even in just humor but but uh generally yeah yeah you're so close you know working and and I could just imagine like you know a version being so good for one thing or something that you cared about and then Ben Thompson still talks wistfully about Sydney it's just like oh that was the most amazing experence was like this sassy online character from like clearly from like
Tumblr some like you know convexity that it fell into I don't know but who's your Sydney uh my Sydney is easy answer for me is was Claud theopus okay that was like such a great model and you know not an open ey model too y never same that um but yeah ton of life to it um it was I think like I I coined this like phrase big model smell when it came out um I was like this model like you know if you
gave me like a blind test between this model and like you know other models that score as well in it at you know academic benchmarks I'm pretty certain that like much better than chance I could pick a cloth Opus it just like soul to it right um and it's a bit hard to see these things like when you you know do regular day-to-day proms I'm just asking it for like a recipe or something it's not going to be like oh
my God it's a big model um but I do think though it's easier to tell the difference in like model capabilities um in kind of like character when you push them to extremes right um when you deploy them into like you know agents that are doing like crazy things when you give them like tons of context when you have them like tackle really out of distribution hard problems um then you start to see like the
creativity merge right and this is like a really fun thing and I think that it's a it's a good lesson for play with models it's a good lesson also for like designing benchmarks and evaluating the models too right um yeah like you know three Opus is pretty great and I think my daily driver right now um you know outside open AI is is gyy 4.5 yeah um like I it's just such a fun model right
like I do feel like you know closer to it than I do for previous models it feels like it is more alive if that makes sense and are you using GPT 4.5 in a different way because it doesn't interface with it doesn't have some of the functionality that you get from an 03 High deep research product uh what what does an interaction with 4.5 look like for you is that just random questions throughout the day yeah yeah
just like chatting casual stuff right um these models are like you know like great you know colleagues great therapists right like you know it's good to talk them out like this is one of those things just like you know you can generate like a deep research report you know before bed every night and just become like a way smarter person right um You can also just like check out these models about your life and I think
become like a really well adjusted person you like there are like some people I talked to in SF who are like really really plugged in to like you know the model system right and you can like kind of tell like yeah these guys are like they got that sorted out like they've been I don't know who the therapist is it must be like you know 4.5 or 3.5 soned or somebody right um but like you know they yeah like they
seem stable I wonder if in a few months you'll be like at a party you'll be like oh like that guy's clearly like a Sonic guy like that's a 4.5 guy over there like it's like rooting for a different football team or something talk about you know when when somebody asks you like you know hopefully they don't ask you this too much but if somebody asks you like oh what do you think about the
tariffs like do your eyes just like glaze over because like none of this stuff matters on like a 10-year time Horizon like I was talking to John the other day and and and I like sounded like so just AGI pilled like as I was saying it out loud John was like you sound ridiculous but like I agree and it was this basic sense that like there's just so much chaos in the world right
now politics tariffs all this stuff every you know people burning down you know Teslas or whatever and then you kind of zoom out out it a little bit and and you sort of like understand you sort of like look at the sort of adoption of this technology and sort of understanding the potential and it's almost like yeah none of this stuff matters because the world is going to look so so different um what you know
are you are you able to just be like 110% focused on the work and and ignore all the noise or do you still care to look up every now and then and look around maybe I should like more locked in than I am right like maybe I should be like in a dark room like just talking to the models and like you know like feeling it out but maybe we models maybe maybe we're maybe the open AI team is generating us to test on you you test
simulation goes deep man like I was tell you but you know you found out too quick um I I think you know like when I joined open AI I like tweeted this thing where when you like shoot an arrow and like let's say you're like in out space right there's no gravity and you like shoot an arrow right um you know the arrow is going to go forever it like runs into some black hole or something um and like
you know the little degree difference and like where you point it if you like point it up a bit point it down a bit like compounds to like light years right like as it like kind of travels like different destinations right like and in some sense like you know if I like shoot this Arrow from like Earth without gravity or something and I like you move my hand to the left a bit it's like half
the universe away right that's crazy um and I kind of you know believe in the same thing as we like push these models to like crazy limits right that like little little differences in the initial conditions um kind of like of you know IGI being born or like of the politics of the time or like of the like Capital distribution or whatever um I think can compound to like incredible differences in the limit um and I think that like
while it seems that these systems will be incredibly powerful and very robust um to maybe like you know human well at some point um I don't think that is an argument for the initial conditions not mattering if that makes sense um great how are you thinking about uh just safety AI doomeris these days it feels like the conversation kind of moved past feels like the lowkey fell off where are they I I don't like leesta
Twitter as much now right yeah yeah well I mean they were telling me I was going to be paper clipped for like 24 months straight not paper clipped yet and so I'm like okay yeah move on but what what's it like internally um what is it like inter I can't say too much about like kind of you know that just like your vibe in SF maybe yeah like I think there are a lot of sharp people that like Caron about
like this going well right yeah makes um there's this like great quote I forgot like that name of the like uh you know NASCAR driver I'm going to butcher it Mario Mario something right but like you know it's crazy at the formula level one level how many people think the breaks are for slowing down right um and like sometimes like to to go as fast as possible Right like to you know like get
this out into the world as quickly as possible to make you know like the most like kind of economic impact um you know you do have to do like a bit of like safety you do have to do a bit of testing um I think this should increase over time as like you know the expected impa impact also increases um I think open AI is incredibly good at like in this right I think that like you know our leadership have done it for a while
they like will continue to get better at it too um and I think you know it's kind of a cool thing right to like you know to build systems that uh you know have like unexpected behaviors and like you know can do things that uh maybe we weren't aware of originally um and it's a it's an important science to like figure this out before we lease um and to build things that you know get safer
yeah no I completely last question for you do you see us having a gibl style moment around agents this year not not necessarily at open AI but just potentially broadly because we we've talked about this on the show a bunch but you know people have just been promising for decades now you're going to be able to talk to this you know uh talk to the computer and it'll book you the flight and the hotel and make your
restaurant reservation and we haven't had that magic experience I've seen a bunch of great operator demos but I haven't seen that Viral where it's like literally everyone that has access to operator has used it and posted the results because they like got something cool done or whatever right there's some sense too where like you know gibl is awesome because it takes three seconds to look at like an image
right and be like oh wow like that's beautiful like that like made like you know your like engagement photo like way cooler right like um it's like really quick um then I do think that like some of the most important agents um like some of the you know like most important things that we'll build over the next like few years um might not have results that you can like look at in three
seconds be like wow like great job model right um and in fact I actually think that as like the economic potential and power of these systems increases um maybe it actually becomes harder the limit to tell the difference between like you know capable systems and very very capable systems right just as as models get better um it might be a bit harder uh to tell the difference between like a good model and like a brilliant
model right um the cool thing is though is that like you know it's a a NES a reliability scaling problem that as you like kind of like push these nines out as you like make them more reliable in many more contexts um at some point they are just doing like a sizable chunk of economic labor right um so you know do I expect to get B moment I'm unsure um but I do expect like you know these things to
to just provide a lot a lot of economic value that makes sense yeah makes a lot of sense beautiful well thanks for joining this is fantastic this is great we got to have you back soon fantastic yeah you're welcome anytime you're welcome anytime great conversation good to see you guys have fun with the team congrats on the Milestone and uh keep it up yeah thanks likewise guys talk to you boom size gong
bye um fantastic yeah yeah great conversations the opening ey team ah great guys um and and fun that they can talk as freely as they can given their role you know obviously it's very important and and valuable company and it's actually if you think about it's it's most companies just period would not allow yep posting or any of that stuff well posting is one but but joining a live live show that's you know high stakes
but it's fun it's great but it's fun and I thought they had you know fantastic answers makes me very optimistic let's go through another autopilot numeral which puts sales tax on autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance backed by Benchmark numeral is new sponsor on the channel and we want to give numeral Sam and Matt uh for those that don't know numeral
works with over a thousand different e-commerce and SAS businesses including a few of our favorites yeah Ridge and graza and many many more um and if you're running e-commerce business or SAS company and you have have to be on numeral to not use numeral uh I mean it's funny that they're saying spend less than five minutes per month because I feel like the alternative is not spending more time but it's billing some
like tax lawyer like $10,000 right no it's actually insane extremely expensive to do sales taxes pre numeral so uh big shout out to numeral go check it out yeah you want to get ahead of this early I think lot of Founders both in Ecom and SAS aren't really taking this yeah seriously until they're at scale There's real money on the line so start early start often and uh uh and we have some breaking news that was sent
to us uh about the Newsmax IPO have you followed this story Newsmax Newsmax uh I'm news maxing so news Newsmax so Newsmax is up 110% today it ipoed yesterday it's up uh 19 100% in two days from a $10 price it's over $200 now uh the price is all over the place it's a 26-year-old company uh digital media company founded by Christopher Ruddy in 1998 it has been variously described as
conservative right-wing and Far Right Newsmax media divion include cable and broadcast channel Newsmax TV and I can't even keep track of all these right-wing media companies because there's so many like truth social far like like there's truth social there's parlor there's Gab and Newsmax and a whole bunch of these uh I'm so happy we never discuss politics but we will discuss an IPO we
will discuss an IPO I saw some funny I saw some funny jokes about how cor weave priced exactly at $40 which is what you want to do to not leave any money on the table Newsmax obviously left a ton of money on the table by by pricing the IPO so much lower than the price that it's floated at now they could have in theory sold shares and put a lot more money on the balance sheet at a lot lower Val Beyond billion right now
ISX that's great well if they hit a stumbling block maybe Jeremy gon will have to come bail them out uh he's hiring an investor and we wanted to highlight it here on the show he says you'll be the first hire working with him on Mo on the most interesting complex and asymmetric special situations in Tech you'll be a good fit if you want trade annual letters like Pokemon two are high paced and biased to
action three are unapologetically Money Motivated four have created and sold a product IDE IDE ideological ideological minority at a top 10 School debated risking it all with an SBA loan bought stock before you could drive work in PE but long for higher moic work in VC but long for higher roic went through YC but yearned to invest can get a meeting with anyone on earth made money online in high
school value heterodoxy over consensus value making money over being right Steve schwarzman defines eights as those who can follow marching orders nines as those who can execute and strategize and tens as those who can sense problems design Solutions explore new directions and Make It Rain eights and nines need not apply for this job this role will have an equal focus in sourcing analysis execution and operations in essence
you'll wear every hat as we build the firm together it will be all-encompassing and demanding but autonomous and yours to shape you'll invest and transact with the best operators and financiers in the world and produce work dogs at an exceptionally high standard so go hit up uh Jeremy and switch your business to ramp.com uh and and uh go hit up Jeremy and let him know that the technology brother sent
you the tvpn sent you this undoubtedly a dream job and uh working for Jeremy will change your life yeah uh he used to be a tiny man but now he has big aspirations that's true he worked for tiny um always been always a size Lord um but uh some of the smartest people in the world called Jeremy to get advice before they make important decisions that's true and so being able to work for him is like uh
many people have said it be like getting 2,000 NBAs at once yeah so it's like buying shares in cor weave in 2004 yeah right yeah it's like buying salana and 98 yep exactly uh anyway uh where should we go to next uh oh I mean I don't know if we actually I think we did post this in the timeline you might not have seen it but uh Jeremy gon obviously does special situations if the if your company raises too much
money from VCS you get in you build a decent business but you're just underwater on the pref stack uh he will come and and we should stuck unstick your business um and it's somewhat adjacent to uh kind of injury lawyers if you have a cap table accident so we put up a fake billboard on the 101 that said cap table accident called Jeremy gon uh put his real phone number on there he didn't like that so he censored it out
before he posted it um but if you're looking to buy a billboard uh go to adquick adi.com outof home advertising Made Easy and measurable say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising only ad quick combines technology outof home expertise and data to efficient seamless ad buying across the clip so anyway you can be a startup a an agency anybody can go and leverage ad quick and
you'd be silly not to yep and uh did you I think you threw this in the chat uh Angry Tom says it's over meta just announced mocha a new model that turned text or voice into Super realistic talking characters there's no way to tell anymore um and we actually saw a a fan of the show turn us into Lego characters which is very cool and I think this like repurposing and gibl AIC uh we've only seen the very beginning of
it and uh it's it is interesting we talked to Samir about the YouTuber thing this type of model obviously it's very expensive very slow right now but in the future you could have a model that's running on your live stream and we could be Lego characters the whole show one one day if we want there's going to be people that watch the whole show gibl mode gibly mode be able to in the
sidebar yeah just like a I thought this was interesting I think meta is struggling from a lack of quality posters on their team because yeah they don't really have a nobody's pump they're probably over on threads and Zuck is posting on Instagram he he's he's actually very good at going direct he posts the director camera videos when he launches new stuff but I want more I thought some news that was interesting
so uh Brett Goldstein launched a new um all-in-one CRM today on the anniversary of Gmail launching they launched on April 1st oh yeah April 1 so apparently back in the day uh they launched and nobody actually believed them cuz like launching a product on April 1st is not a good idea huberman launched a funny product this morning uh contact lenses blue light block I fell for one I fell
for one April Fool's joke today very sad which I felt for Tre he said he was buying a grain silo in Ohio and I was like yeah that's believable yeah yeah too believable you can't make it he was just teeing himself up for a joke that he wanted to be a serial serial entrepreneur with a moat it was it was so Brett says uh the email form factor hasn't changed at all since then after many attempts it's clear that we're
actually just looking at email wrong uh and so what Brett is building is a email companies that's sort of like embracing email as a database so like basically building applications on top of the email everything from like to-do list to project trackers to news things like that so that's exciting and then uh clearly someone else had a similar idea notion also launched notion mail a new
email service uh also coinciding with the the launch I don't I think the strategy of launch products in General on April 1st when every company is doing fake product launches is I get the you know sort of like launch on underrated you think I don't think it I I think potentially you know you just got to keep launching right so like Brett should just keep launching over and over and over notion should figure out you
know how to launch new features things like that but um anyways cool to see these two not launches you know superhuman was fantastic when it launched I remember the fomo from everybody of like how do I get an invite or whatever I really I really want a new AI first email client and I know that yeah everyone's going to say like Gmail will kill Google will kill this in a few years but like I'll pay you $100 a month
for two years straight and like I think that's a reasonable business um because I I'm drowning an email they're not filtered properly like to there's like these buttons now where it's just like do you want Gemini to summarize this like no I can scan that's not what I'm looking for I'm looking for better spam filter it's crazy that Gmail values a newsletter in the same way as like you know some critically important it's
crazy I mean they do put it in like a separate box sometimes but it's very tricky it's not good and um yeah I mean I I want to almost find a product I bet it exists I want to find like a new RSS reader that I can basically take all my newsletters and just put there so it's like a different app essentially CU like I don't want it in my email inbox at all and then I want a proper Unified Inbox
because Gmail and chrome now want me to use like different Chrome profiles with different log and it's like it's just getting so confused I just want all my email in one place anyway yeah uh how'd you sleep last night I slept you went to bed at I just accident I like that that's good that's drama that's drama hopefully that's not copyrighted so I'm going to no no no no no Vivaldi's 300
years old we're good we're good how did you sleep tell me me Jordie 88 ooh how do you sleep John I slept 75 nights to fuel your best days turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience folks go to 8sleep.com use code tvpn use code TBN get $350 off uh I'm very excited we're going to be having Matteo uh yeah co-founder of eight sleep on the show soon want to break it down we're going to make him
our official sleep coach yeah not just a sleep expert for the show you know the a sleep's so helpful but at this point it's doing it's it's doing everything it possibly can and clearly I need to do more yeah like like the reason I'm not getting 100s it's not on eight sleep anymore autopilot has optimized so much and it's pushing a boulder up it's pushing you harder pushing me harder I
want to be a consistent 100s and I need to know the stack that I need to get there probably taking less stimulants all day waking up uh between four and 5 daily y means that I basically am getting into bed when it's light out now after the time change and it just feels so silly it is like to be getting into bed and you're like oh I guess I'm uh five years old now but um yeah it's great whatever it takes anything for the
show yep anything for the show should we close out with this uh this dwar cash Patel post I thought this was interesting it's a long one but I thought I thought it'd be good to read through um he says uh that feeling when GW casually articulates a more insightful framework for thinking about your life's work than you've ever sketched out your yourself G writes 6 days ago uh and there's a screenshot you
can see it as an example of alpha versus beta when someone asks me about the value of someone as a guest I tend to ask do they have anything new to say didn't they just do a big interview last year and if they don't uh but they're big can you ask them good questions that get them out of their book big guests are not necessarily as valuable as they may seem because they are highly exposed which means that which means both that
one they probably have said everything they will they will say before and there's no news or novelty this is really important when you're doing interviews you need to get people off their book and I think you're very good at that with the uh asking people about the current thing essentially because there's a lot of people that do they they they've passed their T Timeless wisdom seven different
times on various podcasts but they haven't talked about humanoid robots yet and so you get them on that and it's interesting or they are message disciplined and careful to talk nobody's asked senra why our great allocators cannot in the right life partner that's true good point in this analogy Alpha represents undiscovered or neglected interview topics which can be extracted mostly just by finding it and then
asking the obvious question usually by interviewing new people beta represents doing standard interview topics people but more but much more so Harder Faster better and getting new stuff that way that's us um Lex Freedman podcast are an example of this he often hosts very big guests like Mark Zuckerberg but nevertheless I will sit down and skim through the transcript of two to four 4
hours of content and find nothing even worth excerpting for my notes fredman notoriously does no research and asks softball questions going hard on legs oh it's rough uh and invites the biggest names he can get regardless of overexposure and so if you do that you will get nothing new he has found no Alpha and he doesn't interview hard enough to extract beta so he's sort of the high expense ratio Index Fund of
podcast interviews I think that there is I I think this misses the fact that like for a lot of Lex fman audience like you might not have heard that Mark Zuckerberg and it's fun to just listen to him for a couple hours so I still think there's value there anyway uh Sarah Payne on the other hand which was a guest on dores and blew up seems to have been completely unknown and full of
Juicy nuggets and is like winning the lottery you can make your career off a really good trade like pain before it gets crowded great trade and we got to have a run we're taking her she's coming on our show next to our cash just kidding uh but but you're welcome to come oine on the current thing Sarah if you'd like to join but we're not gonna do anywhere near as thinks about unit tree yeah robotics yeah break it down
for us break it down what's your P Doom uh however if uh if another successful podcaster has her on they will probably not discover pain is their most most popular or growth productive guest ever the well is dry pain may have more to say someday but that day is probably closer to five years from today than tomorrow and that's a very good point so a good interviewer adopts a optimal foraging mindset once you have harvested
a patch of its delicious food you have to move on to another patch which hasn't been exhausted yet and let the original patch hatch slowly recover so a great guest for dwar Hesh's blog would be say Hans morac or Paul J warbus morac hasn't done anything publicly in at least a decade and is fallow while waros uh has been more active and in the public eye but still not much and is such a weird
guy that just about any question will be interesting uh Reich was even also was also a a good guess because while Reich is very public in some senses he's written popularizing books even he is still obscure almost none of what he has published is well known and he is involved in so much fast-paced research that even the book is now substantially Obsolete and he has a lot of new stuff to say and Reich will have more stuff to
say if Revisited in say two years for an update so a harvester will be making a note to revisit him if the current crop of interview candidates in the pipeline is looking marginal a a difficult and mediocre guest would be Tony Blair he can surely say many interesting things about the current geopolitical context in his work since being PM but he is super experienced career politician who
has survived countless question times and may eat you for breakfast and exploit you for for ulterior purposes rather than vice versa similarly Mark Zuckerberg and SAA Nadella are tough nuts there's meat there but are you willing enough to bring down the hammer or will you settle for a mediocre result that mostly just fills space and is not a must watch a bad guest might be someone controlling an extremely PR
Savvy like Mr Beast this is the sort of guy who will give you a bad interview pushing his book shamelessly and then might wind up spiking the interview anyway if he felt he wasn't getting enough out of it and just drops it as sunk cost though it was weeks of work on your part and blows a hole through your schedule and that's not his problem that's why we only spend two minutes
texting guests and then no minutes uh prepping so that we just have them on for 15 minutes and try and get some throw them off I mean iting feedback no we try to it's less interesting to talk to a founder and have them only talk about their business because it's just like you sort of know and you heard it elsewhere yeah you've heard it elsewhere it's on their website Etc it's much more
interesting to kind of get their opinion on the market broadly um but this is great uh in other news Circle has officially filed for an IPO uh oh that was on the that was on the poly market ticker yeah so this was cool so I actually have the poly Market pulled up right now did did jump and it it had been sitting at it a week ago is at yes was at a circle IPO in 2025 was at 54% and yesterday morning it just absolutely
popped up to 88% that makes sense and then now it's sitting almost at 100 and uh yeah I'm excited to um to like dive into this we should try to do an S1 break down tomorrow cool and um yeah this is a big one well congratulations to everyone over at Circle and that is a good place to close out the show remember if you want to get a bottle of Dom perion uh leave us five stars on Apple podcast creative creative
put whatever you want send it to us tweet it at us and we will send you this delicious bottle of dump we are going to make a decision by the end of day tomorrow and we will also send you this zbiotics to go with it there you go you're not hung over uh today was fantastic it was great and I can't wait for tomorrow I'm so happy it's only Tuesday yeah me too it' be rough three days big shows ahead of us big shows thanks