Elon Musk SUES Sam Altman

23:57Which is just a hilarious thing because I thought he was going to say something else. I thought he was going to say like, you know, I can use this for good. And instead he's like, I'd just rather see it in my lifetime than not see it. And then he's like, then I felt good. I just operated, I just continued on. That's kind of how I feel when I see the AI like getting so much better. I'm like, dude, I don't know if any of my businesses will even make sense in 10 years. well all right carry on then what am I going to do about this like am I really going to go stop the progress of technology no am I going to anticipate this now and like change everything that I'm doing now also doesn't really make sense let me just make hey well it's possible and see what happens I think that when it comes to AI and these robots I think what it is is it's sort of like a squirrel preparing for winter where between now and the next like 10 years the name of the game is just pile away as much as you can to get above this certain threshold to where you can make it through this winter that is never going to end.

24:56And so it's like between now and whenever this moment happens, if it's going to be in five years or 20 years, the name of the game is just hurry up and board up your home for the store to come. So just that way you're safe for it and that you're independent and you're all right. But once ever that threshold or that time comes, a lot of people I think are actually going to be screwed. I'm not going to predict what's going to happen because I have no idea. but I just think that between now and then the name of the game is just to make as much money set up your life in such a way where you can pile away all these nuts and you're just good for the winter.

25:28That's basically how I've been living. I don't know what the right mindset is. I think for right or wrong, that's also my mindset. It's just like, get it while it's hot. Do good while the game's good. But I also am not blinders on about this stuff. In fact, the name of my original holding company was inevitable outcomes. And I was like, well, why don't I just figure out what is inevitably going to happen and then go invest in that? Because that's just a better thing to work backwards from. If you realize that something is inevitable, that's way different than speculating of like, well, maybe this could be the case.

26:05It's like, once you know something is inevitably going to happen, then you just have to figure out which company is going to win, which is actually like you've reduced the problem set down into which company is going to win and when is the right time for a business like this to exist. I started this episode talking about timing because I think that these single purpose robots is going to be the big winners in the next cycle here where you have the knowledge work, like LLMs, chat GPT type of stuff. But then I think you're going to see these specific robots. I think both of those are going to be really, really successful.

26:34What you're not going to see is that I think the human robot, I think it has to be further out than this. That's just my opinion. There's also other versions of this. So we talked about the sweet green one. you know, the founder of Chipotle has a new restaurant concept. That's all robotic first. What is it? And by the way, one other insight this week, you guys said, he goes, the key is not to retrofit the restaurant. He goes, what everybody tries to do is they have their existing restaurant. Then they try to install a robotic arm that can try to use the existing restaurant layout because it's cheaper, right?

27:04To not rebuild a restaurant. And his quote was, everybody's trying to retrofit. I'm different. I'm willing to blow the whole thing up. quote, I'm willing to blow the whole thing up. And he was basically saying, we just thought through from first principles. If this was a restaurant that was not going to have humans working on the line, it was going to have robots, how would you design every part of this restaurant? And then let's build those. And so they did two this year. They're up and running. And now they're doing like 10 more to scale this up. What's it called? And what do they serve? So is it called Colonel?

27:35So now, what's his name? Steve Ells. Steve Ells, the guy who created Chipotle. He's got a new one called Colonel. And kernel is basically some kind of vegan bowl type of concept. And so you can see videos of it where it's basically dispensing stuff into a bowl and then there's an arm that's just shaking the bowl just to mix it for you. It's pretty hilarious. The crossover of vegans and apocalyptic AI people, that Venn diagram I don't think is going to cross over nicely. You know what I mean? Like, hey, do you want to go to this restaurant that has no humans working ever because fuck people? Yeah.

28:14Do they sell hummus? You know what I mean? Like that conversation is not going to be... Plant-based, machine-operated, baby. Who's got that tattoo? Nobody? That's not a huge crossover, but it looks cool. So he has two or three of these locations. Yeah. So I don't think this one's like as figured out. It doesn't seem like it's as promising, but there's a bunch of people doing this. It's just SoftBank had poured like hundreds of millions into a pizza bot that I've talked about a lot, which is pizza is the big prize here. Pizza is a much simpler dish. Like it's a single item. It's the most popular kind of like fast, casual type of food.

28:52And it's also owned by chains. And so if you can get Domino's as a customer, you're going to get to go in whatever, like 5 ,000 Domino locations. And so whoever can build a pizza bot that can make a perfect pizza, Every time. Perfectly circular, perfect ratio of ingredients, never calls in sick, can work 24-7, consistent. It doesn't matter if that thing costs$500 ,000. You'll be able to sell into all the Domino's, all of the Pizza Hut's, all of the chain pizza shops in order to do this. So I think that Pizza Bot is the big opportunity here. i uh i'm i like to think of myself as an independent thinking person i like to live my life somewhat independently and i don't want to rely on other people that's why i like to start my own companies when i went to brett adcock's warehouse or factory whatever you call it and he showed me he was like check this out we're learning how the achilles on a human works and we just got our humanoid to move its foot like in a dorsoflexion way and like we also like Here's this human knee that we're studying.

29:59Now our guy over here is making the knee so we can move. I saw this stuff and I was like, Dad, can I come? I was like, should I drop everything and just come and join you? Sad ad talk? Yeah. Sounds great. It felt like I was in a cult. I was meeting Charlie Manson and I was like, Yes, sir. Who would you like me to kill? I was just so into this. I remember going to my wife. I was like, you should quit your job. I was like, Sarah, I'm not smart enough, but will you quit your job and go work here? I was like, I just was so into it when I saw this stuff. And the cool thing about this topic is that it's happening this second right now.

30:45And this isn't far away enough to say one day in the future. It's like, it's happening now. And over the next couple months and couple years, we're going to see it in play. And I think that's why this topic is really fascinating. By the way, this is also the magic of Silicon Valley. One of the reasons to be in the Bay Area is you will... Because his factory is in the Bay Area, right? Yeah, it's south San Francisco. It's just north of Palo Alto. So you will go, you will either meet somebody, you'll be at a dinner and hear something, or you'll drop by somebody's office, and you'll see what they're working on and how they're approaching it.

31:21And then you will walk out being like, my life is meaningless. Everything I do is absolutely meaningless. I am a small, small pale dot on a giant rock and I mean nothing and what I'm doing is nothing. Most people, that's a pretty disempowering feeling. But for me, I wanted to be in situations like that. I wanted people who could basically blow the ceiling off of what I thought was possible, what I thought was cool, what I thought was interesting and be like, no, no, no. You thought that was interesting. This is interesting. And, um, that, that happened the other day. I don't know if you saw these videos that were going viral.

31:56Some people were at a hackathon down in, uh, also in Sunnyvale or mountain view somewhere doing like a, there's like something called like the AI house or some shit like that. And during the hackathon, during the hackathon, this guy walks in with this cool look at jacket and like disheveled hair. Like he's been in like a cryogenic freezing tube for the last 10 years. And it's Sergey Brin. It's the founder of Google just showing up at the hackathon. hackathon and he gave an impromptu talk. Did you see this? No. What did he say? Well, he goes up there and he just gets really in the details about Google's Gemini thing, like about like bugs that they're fixing and stuff like that.

32:31Like not like some grand visionary talk. He was just like, yeah, like, here's what the, here's what I could do. Here's how it works. Here's how we're thinking about this. And he's just talking to a bunch of guys and all of them, this is hilarious. It went viral because there's a guy sitting there, the guy who asked the question in the clip and his shirt is just a shirt that looks like someone's body flesh with boobs and he has a serious question he's like what is it about the uh because you know like gemini got in trouble for being like too woke or whatever like the thing wouldn't generate images of white people and he's like how come you're you know the llm is not generating images you know what's your views on the policy of that and nobody even calls that nobody like sergey doesn't point at and be like, dude, can we get a different question?

33:15Not the guy with the boobs shirt. I'm looking at him now. It's just like a guy who looks like me, just like a normal looking dude, but he's got a flesh cover, but it's tits. He's got boobs on his shirt. Nobody references it. Nobody acknowledges it. It's just like, yeah, carry on. What? Live and let live, baby. That's the San Francisco way. And so it's a very strange place, but it's strange in a way where kind of amazing things happen like the founder of Google just showing up at your hackathon and answering some questions this is pretty wild I experienced this all the time in San Francisco when I lived there there'd be so many times where it was like I've told many stories about this where I go to someone's office and there's just like huge screens with porn playing and it's like well they're just working on this this website and it's like they make porn and so just like normal We normalize it.

34:09Or there's been other times where I've seen... I've come into the office and there's people sleeping under desks and stuff like that. And just weird shit that we would make fun of. Or things on that TV show, Silicon Valley, where they have nipple art. I've experienced this in real life. And it's fun to make fun of. But honestly, it's awesome. It is so awesome to be around these freaks. Remember when hacker houses were just getting going? I would go to these houses and you would see that they'd have share kitchens. and like half the time it was like just powders. It's like, well, these guys just live off these powders.

34:42They just live off powders. That's all they eat. And it's really - Well, that's how Soylent started. That's how Soylent started. Those guys are just living in a house together where they're supposed to be working on other stuff. And then one of the guys was just eating only. He's like, I'm just going to create like baby formula for adults, basically. And that became Soylent. And that same guy, when like, I forget what type of chip it is. When it came out, like, you know, like these credit cards that we use now where you touch your credit card on a machine instead of inserting it. And you could read the credit card.

35:09He inserted all of that into a small chip and he surgically put it into his hand. And so he could just like touch it. So like being around freaks like that, it's fun to make fun of them because it is silly. It is awesome. I loved being around that. I would see this stuff all the time. And I was just like, I'm so happy you freaks exist. This is the coolest thing I've seen. I felt like that all the time. Did you ever experience that where you'd go to these like hacker houses and they would be disgusting? These guys are just... It's just like triple bunk beds. Yeah, they're filthy. But you know, like, goddammit, I can't even look down on this because one out of 18 of you guys is about to become a billionaire in the next five years.

35:46I just don't know which one. Like, you know, whose neckbeard is the longest? Who's showered the least in this room? Like, I got to, I guess, write you a check, I think. I think that's the optimal strategy here. Like, I had a buddy who worked at my company that would just do these things, these experiments. Like, his guy Quinn. and Quinn had this like crazy, like a sideshow Bob style haircut. And Quinn would be like, he was really into games. And so he's playing this like little, like word scramble game on iPhone. And I think like his girlfriend had beat him in the, like they were him and his girlfriend would play.

36:19And this girl he was like flirting with or whatever would play. And she beat him. And so he stayed up all night pro programming, a robotic finger and a camera to like solve this, like word scramble thing so that he would never lose again. and I was like it's like these stories you hear about Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan with like this like fierce competitiveness but applied in the absolute nerdiest way and it results in kind of amazing things and it's amazing energy to be around I've been around a bunch of those people and I love it and it always makes me feel like the first feeling I originally what I felt is you're stupid that's stupid and then it's like oh I'm stupid you're better than me and this like this is awesome Yeah, I feel like that on a regular basis when I would go around these weirdos, and I love them.

37:06So we got to also talk about this lawsuit. So Elon Musk sued Sam Altman. And there's probably, there's a good analysis out there about this lawsuit, but I want to point out a couple of things. So here's my frame of this. Elon is good at PR. He's not just good at engineering. He's not just good at business. He's not just a technologist. He's also kind of a master of PR. And I should have known this because Tesla basically spends nothing on TV commercials. Every other car company spends billions of dollars on... All other car companies in total spend over a billion dollars on marketing, whereas Tesla runs no commercials.

37:45Yet Tesla's brand is huge. And it's because Elon is kind of a master of marketing. He's a master of PR. And he does this with Twitter. He does this with Tesla. And he's doing it with SpaceX. And now seeing him do this with this lawsuit, It's the first time that I've ever seen him do this in public. But it's basically, he's going to lose the legal battle, but he's going to win the PR war, I think. Have you ever been through a lawsuit? Do you know what the discovery phase is? No, I haven't, but I'm familiar with the idea of discovery. So basically, I don't exactly know what all the rules are, but I remember there was a time I was going to sue someone because I thought something didn't work out and I thought they had violated a contract and I'd lost money because of it.

38:27And I was going to sue them. Some guy didn't rack his weights. Yeah. Insulted me. Pro code has been broken. I can't let this stand. And so I was going to do it. I hired a lawyer. And they're like, Alright, but you're probably going to win this thing. You're not going to win that much money. And I'm like, But it's the principle of the thing. Whatever. And they're like, Okay, cool. But do you know what discovery is? I was like, No, tell me more. And they're like, We're going to get access to your email, to your phone records, to your text messages. and they're going to be able to see all of it. And in many cases, and this is where I don't entirely understand how it works, but in many cases, that's completely public record.

39:04So if I file a lawsuit, that part is public record. And oftentimes, the things they discover will be in public record. And I was thinking about it. It's like, did I just text my wife the other day to let her know that I farted, but a little something came out? Because I think I did text that and I don't want that in public. And that's like a three out of 10 on the PC meter. Like, what's the 9 out of 10? And would I be okay with them seeing that? And that's when it finally hit me. Of all the years of people telling me, don't write offensive or crazy stuff on text messages or email. That's why. It's because I just didn't want that embarrassing stuff to be seen.

39:41So I didn't end up going through with it just for that reason. And so in this lawsuit, we're going to see all types of private conversations that these people have. I think Elon doesn't give a shit. But I think the average Joe would, including me. Well, yeah, I don't know. we should know more about this. I don't know how discovery works of like what parts get, because not everything goes public, but not everything. No. So it's like, what's, what's the, where's the line and how does that work? Because I think Elon has a lot to lose too with that. Like nobody wants their shit out there in the public.

40:07And so, but he does, but like when he, when he, when he texted that guy, the, the former CEO of Twitter, he replied with all the stuff. I'm like, can we talk about this? And he just reply was, what have you done this week? Like, I feel like in his mind, he thinks, yes, he wants to do that. But in his mind, he's like, I'm going to say stuff that I want the world to see. You know what I mean? It's like all part of the game. In this lawsuit, there's actually some stuff that's in there that I found pretty interesting. Can I just tell you what I thought was interesting in this? So it starts off, basically, the whole lawsuit starts off the document.

40:40And it says, well, humans have transitioned from a labor economy to a knowledge-based economy. And now knowledge is basically getting wrecked by AI. So first, AI got so good, it could beat the best human chess players. Then it could find the best routes between two points, like the best streets to take, fastest route. Then it could beat more complicated games like poker and Go. And what it talks about is that Elon Musk saw this happening. And he was, I think, on the board of or an advisor to a company called DeepMind. And he's like, oh, DeepMind is really interesting. He meets the founder of DeepMind, this guy, Dennis, I don't know how to pronounce his last name.

41:18And he said, he's basically like, what are your views on AI safety? because Elon for a long time had been worried about AI safety. And he walks away like, I don't think this guy's really concerned with AI safety. I think he's just trying to build really powerful AI. Okay, whatever. But he gets pretty worried because he finds out that Google is going to try to buy DeepMind. And he's like, well, Google has the most data because they have emails, they have search, they have YouTube. So he goes, Google has the most data. DeepMind has a monopoly on AI talent. And so they have the best AI talent. And what the result will be is that AGI, when it eventually gets done, artificial general intelligence will be in the hands of the biggest monopoly in a private company out there.

42:00And he's like, okay, that's a little bit worrisome. And he goes and he hangs out with Larry Page, the founder of Google. And he's telling him like, Larry, I'm worried about AI. What are you guys doing about AI safety? And he's like, basically kind of the way Elon describes it, he kind of pats him on the head. He's like, oh, don't worry about that. We're not worried about that. He's like, well, you know, AI could take over and basically eradicate the human race. If it, you know, goes, there's a path where this goes wrong. And he's like, well, that'll just be evolution. And he's like, don't be such a specious Elon.

42:31And he's like, specious. He's like, yeah, you're favoring the human species. Oh my God. Yeah. I'm pro-human. And so he gets really pissed about this. And he, he says that this is when he stopped talking to the CEO of Google. So he, after that, that's like the trigger according to Elon. And again, And I think a lot of this is Elon crafting a narrative. I'm not sure. I'm not saying that these things didn't happen, but I think he's very good at creating an origin story and creating a bad guy and then painting himself. Oh, what do you know? As the hero. And so here he goes. So now what he does is he teams up with Sam Altman.

43:02So Sam Altman, who's the CEO of OpenAI, in 2015 wrote the following. He goes, the development of super machine intelligence at the time, that's what he was calling it, SMI, super machine intelligence, is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats, but they are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe the way SMI could. What a great opening sentence. All right. Continue, Sam. So Sam is worried about this. Elon's worried about this. They get together. Oh, then there's the trigger. Google's buying DeepMind. I didn't know this. in the lawsuit, it shows that Elon then went to the PayPal co-founder, this guy Luke Nosek, and tried to quickly emergency raise$500 million to buy DeepMind instead of Google, just to keep it out of the hands of Google.

43:53And he fails. He can't pull the deal together in the last minutes. DeepMind gets bought by Google. And now Elon's really worried. And so Sam Altman then goes to Elon and says, hey, why don't we create a nonprofit AI lab to catch up with Google. And actually the origin of this was to do it inside Y Combinator where Sam was currently the president. Did you know that the origin of OpenAI was actually supposed to be inside of YC and he called it, what if we created the Manhattan Project for AI? And he's like, what if YC did a call to arms and was like, hey, we need to develop this technology that basically we need the anti-Google.

44:30We need to get the best people we can to start working on this as a research project. What he said originally was, we'll give them equity in YC as their upside and so they can work on this as a non-profit. That was the original idea. I think he said that no person will have control over this thing that we're making and said they were going to get equity in YC. He's like, it'll be a non-profit. How do we pay these top AI researchers? Because Google's going to pay them a shit ton. Well, we'll give them equity in YC. YCs are huge cash cow. And so that'll solve that problem. And he's like, we'll have a board of directors, me, you, Elon, and then we'll pick three others.

45:04And he says, this is the initial email. He goes, if it's not obvious what the right thing to do is, then the five of us will decide. That's the governance idea. So that was the original idea. It evolves a little bit. By the way, Elon's reply to that email was great. And so Sam wrote a fairly casual... I mean, he used the verbiage, like you said, those sentences that are a big deal. But it was like a casual almost email with like five points. and Elon's reply was, agree on all. Like that was it. Right. I have moved straight to the end. Hey, this episode is brought to you by Mercury. They're the fintech of choice for over 200 ,000 companies.

45:47I myself use it for eight different companies. The reason why we all choose it is because it has everything you need under one roof. So like my e-commerce company, it's super important for us to be able to easily wire transfer, pay all our different vendors and suppliers all around the world. And the old way with our more traditional bank that shall now be named, I'd try it online. It would say no. It would freeze my account. Then I'd have to go in, book an appointment, speak to a specialist who would try to upsell me on something I didn't need. And then finally, after 30 minutes there, then they charged me 50 bucks for the pleasure of that terrible interaction.

46:17And now with Mercury, I just go online, push two buttons, and I'm done. It's such a seamless experience. It's very intuitive. Everything's under one place. They basically took all the things any company would need for their financial tech, and they made it super easy to use to put it into one platform. So highly, highly recommend it. If you're not using Mercury, I question your judgment. So that's it. You've heard it on My First Million. For more information, check out mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details. So yes, agree on all. So they start and they're like, cool, we're making this nonprofit and it'll be open source.

46:51Elon comes up with the name OpenAI. He's like, let's just put it in the name. This is an open source AI. And in the next five years, Elon contributes$44 million to this nonprofit. And they develop some pretty interesting tech. So chat GPT now, GPT-4, it's in the 90th percentile at the lawyers, like the bar exam. It's in the 99th percentile for the GRE, the verbal section. It's even a 77 % at the advanced sommelier test, which I don't even know how that would work. It's like the sommelier, like the wine test. And so he's trying to, in the lawsuit, argue that it's already AGI, which it's not. But he's trying to make that argument because his whole legal case rests on this idea that there's been a breach of contract and they breached the founding agreement.

47:41But there is no actual founding agreement. What he's calling the founding agreement is like what we call the gentleman's agreement. it's basically like a handful of conversations emails and then just like the initial founding articles and incorporation of the company he calls all of that together the founding agreement and he says they breached that but it's not actually an agreement I'm a moron and I don't know anything about legal stuff but I think that that actually counts I think there's precedent where that matters but in this case basically he has to establish that there is a founding agreement and that it's been breached but if you go look at the founding agreement like those emails like one time they're talking about we could give equity in yc that's just like brainstorming that's not like the agreement then later they they do have a little bit more formal like okay it's going to be a non-profit it's going to be whatever but in the articles on corporation it specifically says like um we will open source this you know whenever um you know whenever we deem appropriate yeah it's vague right it's like we will release we will develop this for the benefit of humanity.

48:43We're definitely doing this, maybe. Someday. Exactly. When we want. And so they basically left themselves complete latitude to do whatever the hell they want. And that's what they did. Now, what I think is interesting, so Elon says a couple other things. One, he says GPT-4 is already so good at those test scores. He goes, and now they're developing this thing called QSTAR. Have you heard about QSTAR? No. What is it? QSTAR is reportedly the new what, not reportedly, rumored to be the thing that OpenAI is working on that is like next, next level after GPT-4. So it's like, instead of GPT-5, they're using some method called QSTAR, which they think is like a leap in the intelligence, which is really exciting because even GPT-3 to GPT-4, GPT-2 to GPT-3, those are pretty substantial improvements, but not like a huge leap, whereas QSTAR reportedly is like what the huge leap is.

49:37there's rumors where Sam Altman came out and said, I was in a meeting, we did a demo or we had an internal meeting the other day and I saw something that blew my mind. Basically, I saw something that was awe-inspiring. I was like, what? What is it? He hasn't shared any details. This is also right when that big coup happened. They fired Sam Altman. One of the rumored reasons was, and this could be total bullshit, we don't know, but this is one of the rumored reasons was the board saw how powerful Q-Star is and they were worried Sam is way too fast and way too loose, loosey-goosey, way too aggressive.

50:13And now this weapon is getting too, too powerful is kind of that idea there. So anyways, he talks about, Elon talks about that in the lawsuit, that they're developing Q-Star and whatever. So it's kind of like confirmation that this thing exists. Although the legal language he uses in all this, he goes, at the start of every sentence, every paragraph, it says, using knowledge and belief and basically it's like saying like, we don't have evidence, but like I know some things and I believe this to be true. And then it says all of the claims. So who knows? It's kind of like Elon's claims. A couple other big pieces of this.

50:47So I want to read you some Elon emails that did get surfaced in this. So one of the key things that happened early on was they had this dinner and at the dinner at Sam Altman, it's Greg Brockman, it's Elon, and then it's this guy, Ilya. Ilya was one of the leading deep learning researchers at Google. and he became the chief scientist of open AI. The big turning point was Elon recruited Ilya away from Google to open AI. This is when Larry Page stopped talking to him because he was so pissed that you recruited my top guy and you declared war, basically. And recruiting him was like a Herculean effort, basically.

51:23Getting him to leave Google and Google was offering him a blank check. This is a fucking movie. Exactly. This will be a movie, for sure. So then Google starts offering all of their talent like crazy, lavish offers. They just upped the ante like crazy. They're like, we're going to price anyone out of this market. How much do you know? A million, like, I don't know, like millions of dollars per employee minimum. For some people,$10,$15 million a pay package annual. And so it was like, okay, well, Sam and Greg email Elon saying, hey, it's getting really hard to recruit. You know, we have to think of a strategy here.

51:55Google is doing this. Elon replies, he goes, we need to do what it takes to get top talent. Let's go higher. If at some point we have to revisit what our current people are getting paid, that's fine. Either we get the best people in the world or we will get whipped by DeepMind. Whatever it takes to bring on the ace talent is fine by me. DeepMind is causing me extreme mental stress. If they win, it will be really bad news with their one mind to rule the world philosophy. They are obviously making major progress and they should given the level of talent over there. And so he basically gives them the green light like, I'll keep funding more.

52:27Go get the best talent. And so in 2016, he gives them$15 million. In 2017, he gives them$20 million. In that five-year period, he gives them$44 million in total. Now, the problem is Elon, the biggest backer and the original backer, says he doesn't own anything in OpenAI, the for-profit company. And this is the strongest part of his case. Here's what he says. He goes, how is it that you can create a nonprofit company that is supposed to be nonprofit and open source? Raise millions of dollars from people. You take$50 million from me. You hire the best people in the world. And you write down that this is your charter.

53:01And then you end up a closed source, maximum for-profit company owned by the most valuable company in the world, Microsoft, owned 49 % by them. How is that possible? And he's like, two things. He goes, if it is possible to create a nonprofit, hire people, and basically fund all of the research in a tax donation way, where for every dollar you're putting in, you get 50 cent rebate back from the government. He's like, if that's possible, and then you could just flip to a for-profit when you make breakthrough technology. Why is everybody not doing that? Why is that not just the default for every single technology company in the world?

53:39Either it's illegal or everybody should be doing it. It can only be one of those two things. And I love this argument from Elon. I think this is a tremendous argument. And there's no answer to that question yet. Either this is illegal or every single company in the world is going to do this. Why would you not? You and I are not. I'd say we are fans of Elon's work, but we're lukewarm on him as a human being. And we are only hearing one side of this story. But in the last 10 minutes, only knowing what I know just from those 10 minutes, he's right. So then he gives this analogy. Again, master of PR, he goes, it's like if I donated to a nonprofit charity that said, we're going to save the Amazon rainforest.

54:24And then that charity took all our money and then they created a for-profit logging company that was just cutting down trees in the rainforest and selling the lumber. That's what's happened. That is OpenAI. And so he says it is a de facto subsidiary of Microsoft. And he goes, he includes this quote. And this quote, I think is going to become very problematic. I predict it's going to become very problematic for Microsoft in the future. So it's the Microsoft CEO saying, remember when all the OpenAI drama was going down and Microsoft stock price started to tank? because they were like, oh shit, you've given$10 billion or whatever to OpenAI and they're about to collapse.

55:03This is bad for Microsoft and they're going to go create a new company that you don't own. That's bad. And so then he came out and he said this publicly. He goes, if OpenAI disappeared tomorrow, we have all the IP rights, all the capabilities. We have all the people. We have the compute. We have the data. We have everything. We are below them, above them, around them. the CEO of Microsoft said that? Wow, yes, exactly. And so that also weakens the case that OpenAI is this non-profit, non-controlled by Microsoft entity when he came out and said that we are below them, above them, and around them.

55:41God damn, what a phrase. Dude, this is riveting. This is riveting. That's me. If I go to Chick-fil-A and I order nuggets, I'm below them, I'm above them, I'm around them. I have them. They are mine. What a phrase. By the way, the way they call this the Manhattan Project, the best. That is the best. That is so good. All of this is just epic. Can you imagine these nerdy AI engineers who were probably bullied and were dorks throughout all the years? Now they're like, oh, me? You want me? No, boys, come on. Let's be civil about this. They're just getting fought over. and we're talking about 15 or 20 million dollar a year packages that's insane everything about the story is insane you're right this needs to be a movie if you're making the movie or you want to make the movie of this get in touch with me let's let's create the movie of this this is going to be like the social network movie all over again uh an epic photo collage or something like that would also suffice to like just like some some neat photos with captions that tells a story i'm into that um i want to leave it with this so dharmesh shah dharmesh is the uh founder of hubspot and you and I have talked to him a bit.

56:54He's on this podcast all the time. He's doing this thing on AI that I want him to come talk about. Hopefully he will. He told me something that I tell myself all the time when thinking about this, which was basically, Dharmesh is super into AI. He goes to a lot of conferences on it, like insider conferences. I would think that he has a good grasp of it. He has said, it's not probably going to be as good or as bad as you think it's going to be. And him saying that in a calm, fatherly voice to me, that's been the one thing that I've been thinking about of like Sam Altman. I think he's a great guy and I love Sam.

57:27I don't know him, but it just has like a fan of his. I think that all these guys in this game are also brilliant marketers and brilliant business people and brilliant at the skill of programming and making this stuff. But I also think that they're brilliant at PR marketing. And I have to remind myself constantly that it could be good, it could be bad. It's probably going to be right in the middle though of what the reality is going to be in the middle. And these guys are just excellent at telling their story. Do you agree? Yeah, and we should say, Elon is creating a direct competitor to OpenAI, right?

58:02Like Grok, he has XAI, which is like his AI company. It's his AI competitor to OpenAI. And he has Grok, which is the competitor to ChatGPT. That's like the product name. So he obviously has interests in this. And I think, you know, one thing that's clear out of this is it's definitely mission driven, like in the same way that I used to think when it was like, oh, Jeff Bezos is doing a rocket company. It's like, oh, is this just like a giant dick measuring contest between like billionaires? Like just the last level of the game is you say, I win Earth. OK, let me go win Mars now. Right. Like that's kind of what it seemed like was, oh, I'm going to build a bigger rocket than you.

58:41but then you read that like even 25 years ago Bezos was like really obsessed with the idea of space travel and has been a giant fanatic about it and been trying to donate to it and trying to advance the cause in that and that now like even with these companies he's in all the engineering meetings the planning meetings every week it's like okay this wasn't what I thought it was in the same way by the way it could still it could be that and that's okay it could be mission driven and ego driven and profit driven and that is okay to have all those things too. That's a better way of putting it. Yeah.

59:12Like most things, it's accelerating because of multiple causes. There's multiple tailwinds pushing it. But I would say the hater in me wanted to discredit it, but the realist in me, when I go back and read old interviews or watch old videos, before Amazon was super successful, it becomes clear that actually it was a deep interest. So similarly here, even though I think it's part of it is he's trying to bog OpenAI down with a lawsuit and spin the PR battle in his favor and he has a direct competitor, it's clear that OpenAI would not have existed and would not have been successful had he not genuinely had this fear and concern and belief about what needs to happen with AI a long time ago.

59:53So I think that comes out very true in this. There's a paper trail of evidence. What a fucking pod. I feel amped and scared, excited, nervous. I feel all types of emotions. It's a great job. It's like a great first date. Aren't you supposed to trigger adrenaline or the fight or flight response in people? And that's what bonds you. I feel like that just happened to us. Yeah, except my version of that was on our first date, we went on a motorcycle. But now we're talking about the world maybe ending in 20 years. Good job. Shut up, babe. I've got a court case to tell you about. Dinner? No, we're not doing dinner.

1:00:35Okay, so you made it this far to the folks listening. Go to the YouTube and tell us in the comments do you actually think this is going to be horrible? Do you think this is going to be great? Or is it what Dharmesh said where it's somewhere in the middle where it's not going to be as good or bad as we think? But Sean, bravo. You did a good job. This was a good pod. And we'll end it there. That's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I can be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, less travel, never looking back.

1:01:09Hey, let's take a quick break because there's a quote that I love I want to read you. It's that we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. And as an entrepreneur, if you're using a bank that was built in the 90s, you're operating like you're in the 90s. And trust me, I've been there. Clunky portals, random holds on your money,$50 wire fees, and then being told, please visit your local branch. Well, that's why I switched to a different type of banking solution, Mercury. It turns your financial chores into a smooth workflow. You can do wires, invoices, cards, reimbursements, two clicks, and I'm done.

1:01:39If you're already using Mercury, respect. If you're still using one of the old big banks, I got questions for you. So go visit Mercury.com and give it a test drive. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column 8, and Evolve Bank & Trust members, FDIC.