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

34:22Ben would go to the press and say, John and Jordy are considering going to eight hours a day live streaming, which I think might massively slow GDP growth or potentially even go negative because people just stop all work and just listen to the show. So it's a real asymmetric risk. Yes, definitely. Yeah, I mean, we've advocated for podcast safety very significantly. And potentially even creating like a government. Regulatory capture. Regulatory capture and like monopoly. Yeah, basically there should be 10 ,000 % tariffs on podcast equipment. There should be like an FDA for podcasting where you have to submit an application with what your show is about.

35:04And then you get approved. It takes years, costs hundreds of millions of dollars. Exactly. and then you can't just have any willy-nilly podcast just dropping on rss feed yeah just like pharmaceuticals exactly we don't want anybody coming to market with a new pharmaceutical this makes so much sense couldn't have anyone just coming to market with a podcast for sure uh anyway let's move on to equally ridiculous things uh toner and macaulay had already begun to lose trust in altman to review new products and this is interesting because we haven't actually heard before how the safety process worked within open ai yeah and they do a good job breaking it down here.

35:36So to review new products for risks before they were released. And again, I agree that when you're launching new products, like you should assess them for safety. Even Instagram, when they launch a new algorithm, they should be like, is this promoting anorexia? Is this promoting extreme content or not? And to what degree is it making people sad? Is it making people happy? Like let's understand the impact of the technology that we're building. That's great. And here's how they wound up doing it. So OpenAI has a joint safety committee board with Microsoft, a key backer of OpenAI that had special access to use its technology and its products.

36:07So Microsoft can vend GPT models into Azure and then deliver them into different segments of the Microsoft ecosystem. During one meeting in the winter of 2022, as the board weighed how to release three somewhat controversial enhancements to 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 Altman, like lied about the approvals.

36:41And, and it's like, okay, like author follow up. Like, what are the, what are the controversial enhancements? Like, I remember what the difference between GBD 3.5 and GBD 4 were. It was context window went from 4k tokens to 32k tokens. They trained on 10 times as many tokens. Like we saw, we saw the the 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 like gpt4 yeah okay now you can do pdf upload is that gonna kill everyone like what is the problem that you're actually upset about i understand that like yes he might have like not followed the right rules in this case but like habeas corpus like we have to produce some sort of corpse here and like what is this controversial enhancement to GPT-4.

37:27We've all been playing with GPT-4 for years now. It's no big deal. It's been copied, open source, DeepSea can run it on your phone. You can download it on GitHub, Mistral, and all these GPT-4 level models. What are we worried about? I don't understand. It's so confusing and infuriating that the author didn't dive in deeper and say, what were the controversial enhancements? Because to me, it was a controversial lack of enhancements. It was like GPT-4 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 did Google do? They launched a hundred K context window.

38:04They launched a million token context window. Is that controversial? I don't know, but it's super useful if you're trying to deep dive a book. Like I don't get it. I'm so confused by this. Anyway. And then this is the really funny thing because they're obviously like all the, all the hate's been on Sam. But Microsoft is just like doing crazy stuff this whole time. So around the same time, Microsoft launched a test of the still unreleased GPT-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 instance is the first instance of the revolutionary code being released in the wild.

38:37That's not the first time. They're just like, let's test it on India. Bill Gates organizations have done things like that. Yeah. It's like, what if it was Microsoft? Like, you're afraid of AI safety. Like, what if it had gone wrong and like completely screwed up India? Like, that would be bad, right? it's like so it's 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 let's just rip it yeah like full send my boys back he's like we really need we really need chat summary in teams like we're gonna take the risk we're gonna risk humanity for chat it's It's so funny that that's what we're talking about.

39:20Like we're talking about like co-pilot in Outlook and stuff. It's like it's so low stakes in some ways. It's like better autocomplete in many ways. Anyway, so Microsoft launches GPT-4 in India. They don't get approval from the Joint Safety Board. And no one had bothered to inform OpenAI's board that the safety approval had been skipped. The independent board members found out when one of them was stopped by an OpenAI employee in the hallway on the way out of a six-hour board meeting. never once in that meeting had altman or brockman mentioned the breach probably because it's not that important that microsoft is testing gpt4 in indian it's just a very funny dynamic to be in this sort of hyper scale startup mode where you're scaling headcount rapidly you're raising all this money you're scaling users sort of dramatically right yeah and then you have this board that that's sitting over your shoulder, kind of like nitpicking every small decision that you make.

40:18And for a completely new class of like risk vectors. Like when I hear, like if I was running a company and somebody was like, told me like, hey, like a partner of ours just launched our product, kind of like white labeled it and they launched it in India. I would be like, okay, well like, what does that mean for my brand? Like maybe I want my brand to be front and center in that market. And so I don't love that because they're kind of like stealing my brand building that will eventually happen when I get the chance to roll out in that country. So that's an issue. Are we paying taxes appropriately?

40:52Are we legal there? Do we have a, do we have a registration properly? Or is this going to be a PR nightmare? Like, or do we have another partner that was expecting to work with us in India? And now they're going to be upset. How are they ensuring that they're putting enough spend behind the go-to-market. Yeah, there's like a million real questions. And then the second one is like, is ASI going to explode in India and like kill everyone? It's like, that's not at the top of my stack. So anyway, then one night in the summer of 2023, an OpenAI board member overheard a person at a dinner party discussing OpenAI startup fund.

41:30This is the venture capital fund that they use 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 i think curvy took money from open yeah yeah that makes sense because it's like it's much more like narrow than just being like oh we're like we're like you know slight prompt engineering on top of chat gpt and we're gonna get rolled sam's a dog i don't think he was wanting to use a startup fund to fund potential competitors.

42:07It was very oriented around, you're going to be using ChatGPT, we'll give you some money. Yeah, truly, you're going to be an API customer forever, and you're never going to train a foundation model. So the fund was announced in 2021 to invest in AI-related startups, and OpenAI had announced it would be managed by OpenAI, but the board member was overhearing complaints that the profits from the fund weren't going to OpenAI investors. This was news to the board. So they asked Altman. Over months, directors learned that Sam Altman owned the fund personally. OpenAI executives first said it had been for tax reasons, then eventually explained that Altman had set up the fund because it was faster and only a temporary arrangement.

42:48And knowing everything about OpenAI's insane legal structure, I believe this. It's hard to set up a fund as a Delaware C Corp or like an LLC. It's tricky. Like, uh, there's not exactly like, like Carter or 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 this is where, too, because, uh, the Sam Altman, even if he was fully embracing the sort of EA mode should be in the mindset of like I need to ignore yeah the board like some aspects of the boards you know desires because if other competitors like totally seek beat us you know that there wasn't really on the radar at the time I'm sure it was if you were building a foundation model yeah if other people beat us to this like none of it even matters like yeah 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 Ilya see?

43:55What did Sam see? Sam saw commoditization of the foundation model layer and knockout, dragout fight in the application layer and was like, I got to go fast and this is a consumer tech company. But here is a line that I think we need to take much, much more seriously. So the truth came out about the structure of the startup fund. OpenAI said Sam Altman earned no fees or profits from the fund, an unusual arrangement. And so he had no carry and no fee from that fund. And that is something that I think is unacceptable. Like any fund manager should be getting two and 20 at least. The great funds, you know, three, four, 4%.

44:34You've seen 30 before. And so this is a big problem. If I was investing in a fund and someone was like, oh, like no fee, no profit, I'd be like, yeah, straight to jail. Yeah. but of course that actually aligns with open AI's incentives. We're joking, but it is, it is very odd. I mean, it does, it does kind of align with this idea that he was really fast. Open AI said Altman earned no fees or profit from the fund that he could have had to. And I think your interpretation is right. There's also another interpretation where he just hadn't hit the hurdle yet. He did have two and 20, but then, you know, you know whatever i think but i think you're yeah if i had if i had to guess on what the actual structure was it was like technically he owned the the gp but and and 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 yeah and that seems like the fastest and clearly sam altman 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 yeah that's in the best interest of yeah 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 i have two jobs now and everyone would just be like yeah that's fine uh so if you wanted to make two and 20 on a lot of money.

46:13He could go do that. And so it doesn't quite track that like, like what frame of mind would he have to be in that it's like, okay, I'm like the CEO and leader of the next generation consumer tech behemoth, but really I want to run like a micro fund and get like, you know, have control over it. Like, it's like the economics don't really make sense there. And this is what I'm talking about, like about the follow-up is like, you should follow up and be like at what was actually at stake if he had if he had taken the fees and the profits from the fund like 10 million bucks 100 million bucks like certainly not 10 billion would have been that would have been sort of a smoking gun if he was out in the world saying i don't have any profits in open ai yeah and was like running the side fund and managing it yeah it was branded but but the fact that he's not earning fees or profits from the fund just goes to show like okay yeah that should be like the board should be able to be like small slap on the wrist like next time go through the proper process totally make off balance sheet investments from open ai in the meantime yep just do it the right way yeah and he would still say like you know yeah probably should have just done it but you know whatever we are moving quickly so funny if like it's like oh yeah like he set up this fund like he personally owns like 30 of anthropic now he's just like i can't deal with these guys at opening i'm just gonna go turbo long the direct competitor no uh it makes no sense uh and and there really is no smoking gun in the portfolio that i that i've seen at least uh but again like follow up 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.

48:00For instance, they also hadn't been alerted the previous fall when OpenAI released ChatGPT. At the time, considered a research preview that used existing technology, but ended up taking the world by storm. In late September, Suscover 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. Suscover hemmed and hawed before coughing up a clue, you should talk to me or more. and so yeah the the launch of chat gpt is funny because i've seen i talked about this with dork 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 gpt 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 the other things had taken off like chat gpt yeah maybe it was just lucky and the use cases for that early research product were pretty tame it was like generate the you know subject line for your e-commerce brand yeah that's what people were building on top of it totally there was nothing agentic there was just like a text generation tool yeah that was that was good but not even great it was magical yeah but it wasn't anything yeah 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're spending a hundred million dollars on a training run like this and like if it comes out wrong, it could be like really misaligned and it's like really high stakes.

49:54And so like I imagine that that's where the board's focused. They're not focused on like, oh yeah, like you know how we're vending in like the GPT 3.5 DaVinci 002 into like a bunch of companies. Like we created a wrapper on that that just lets people like chat with it directly. And it's just like a new UI on top of the LLM that we already trained. Like when you frame it like that, it's like, oh yeah. Like they did just like kind of whip up the chat GPT interface in like a couple days, I imagine. I mean, it was a couple of weeks, but 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.

50:29It felt like the thing that would break it through is scale it up another 10X, spend a billion dollars, do Stargate, you know, right? Anyway, let's go into Mira. So Mira Mirati had been promoted to chief technology officer of OpenAI in May of 2022 and had effectively been running the day-to-day ever since. Absolute dog. operational mastermind. You'll love to see it. When Toner called her, Marati described, corporate athlete for sure, Marati described how what she saw as Altman's toxic management style had been causing problems for years and how the dynamic between Altman and Brockman, who reported to her but would go to Altman anytime she tried to rein him in, made it almost impossible for her to do her job.

51:08And so that is a very odd dynamic. I believe Brockman was a co-founder and obviously, you know grokman 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 marati who's clearly like an incredible talented corporate athlete but it is a little weird like imagine if like it was like oh yeah i'm actually hiring someone and you'd report to them and they report to me Like you would still come to me and be like, yo, like what?

51:44Like we go way back. It's just weird. And so however they got in that situation, it just seems bad, right? Marati had raised some of these issues directly with Altman months earlier and Altman had responded by bringing the head of HR to their one-on-one meetings for weeks until she finally told him she didn't intend to share her feedback with the board. Brutal. That sounds not fun in general. Toner went back to Sutskiver, the company's oracular chief scientist, Just love that word. He made it clear that he had lost trust in Altman for numerous reasons, including his tendency to pit senior employees against each other.

52:20In 2021, Sutskiver had mapped out and launched a team to pursue the next research direction for OpenAI. That's probably the reinforcement learning, the O1, the QSTAR technology that they were working on at the time that was very controversial, but then DeepSeek open source did it. So it's like, was it really that big of a deal? We don't know. Sitzkever had mapped out this and launched a team to pursue research. But months later, another open AI researcher, Jacob Pachocki, began pursuing something very similar. And so the teams merged and Pachocki took over after Sitzkever turned his focus to AI safety.

52:58And so Altman later elevated Pachocki to research director and privately promised both of them they could lead the research direction of the company, which led to months of lost productivity because you have two groups. It's like the Google strategy, basically. And so, you know, just like kind of like, you know, a lot of weird dynamics of like who's really in charge. The board is misaligned with the management. The management team is misaligned with like the co-founders who are clearly like brilliant, but maybe not operational. And so you throw some operational talent in between them. And then all of a sudden you have a co-founder who's super technical that's reporting to someone who's like an executive.

53:32And it just gets very, very funky. Yeah, there's two challenges. One, you have a nonprofit research group that's transitioning into a for-profit hyperscaler. And then you also have this business that's verticalizing, that's doing everything from research to the end product layer. They're also doing an API and they're also still worried about AI safety. And then you combine that with products that are generating millions and then tens of millions and then hundreds of millions of revenue. that's also losing so much money that like if sam can't you know continue he's on the sort of fundraising treadmill treadmill so it'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 non-profit for-profit conversion stuff so again i know how to juggle you can do a rubik's cube you can juggle on a corporate level but not you can do a rubik's cube yeah i can't i can't juggle for unfortunately yeah it's on my 2025 goals i gotta learn yeah uh anyway this is another wild wild story again uh treading carefully in terror of being found out by altman marati and sutzkiver 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 criticism of OpenAI's approach to safety.

55:05Altman was livid. He told Sutskiver that Macaulay had said Toner should obviously leave the board over the article. Macaulay was taken aback when she heard the account from Sutskiver. She knew she had said no such thing. And so how would you feel if I published a paper saying TBPN is the worst thing to ever happen to media and podcasting generally? I was just catching up here. like it just seems like an offensive thing to do like i don't know it's just weird it's weird to be on the board of this company and then publish a paper that's like oh you were referencing that i was looking at the dynamic of sets giver macaulay that whole thing yeah 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 yeah go ask dad what does your mom say it's like that dynamic right um but i just think The whole core is so weird to not just, you're on the board.

55:57Like 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 like let's use our example like if you published a paper saying like tbpn's going downhill like it's a disaster uh john's not taking john's not taking seriously enough like like first i would be like offended like hey why didn't you just talk to me like like off mic or like even on the show like you could talk to me whenever we're live for three hours a day you you could email me there are a million ways that you could bring that up but i could use i could use yes you could use the horn to let me know that you think i'm not doing a good job um but the thing that that would really irk me is if you did that and you were wrong like like okay so your toner you're criticizing open ai for the approach to safety?

57:16Habeas corpus, show me the damage that open AI's approach to safety has done. Like, what are we talking about here? What is the damage? Is it part of it? And there's a million ways you don't even have to do the killing everyone. You could say, Hey, like the election is going to swing because of opening eyes 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 and you care a lot about your job it's part of your identity it's part of your entire brand is ai safety all this ea stuff and then your job's actually really not that important at the moment yep and you feel like you're not getting enough attention yep like this just come this just screams like i want attention like give me attention validate my beliefs 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 opening eyes approach to safety let's compare it to deep seeks let's compare it to google's let's compare it to grox let's compare it to mistrawls like rank it for us helen like tell Tell us, where are we sitting here?

58:34Because A, I'm not seeing any damage from OpenAI products. What I'm seeing is a minor productivity boost for knowledge workers. People can find answers to things a little bit faster, write some copy a little bit faster. Yeah, Satya comes out. Yeah, basically it's a great co-pilot for your work. I know, Satya. It's what I've been using it for. Even the job displacement thing, right? 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 we do need to talk about this. We need to really think about, okay, yeah, yeah. And maybe it's, you know, some sort of regulation.

59:13I don't want to like lock this down too much, but maybe there's some sort of like, you know, incentive or tax benefit for human workers. Like we're doing something to take care of Americans. Like I'm all here to debate that and discuss that. There's probably a good way. Sam's talked about UBI before. Like there are ways to address less serious job losses, but we have 3 % unemployment. We're not in some massive AI disruption to jobs yet. There's no damage being done, and so what are you talking about? Anyway. Yeah, it's almost like that board level role around AI safety and thinking about the impact of AI.

59:53It's like if Toner was writing research papers advising governments globally, saying, like here's how we see this technology panning out totally uh here's how you need to be planning around totally employment and what the future of sort of various and that'd be super useful that'd be very valuable and beneficial totally but that person should report to the ceo and and be like hey here i have i have a bunch of ideas about how we should be positioning this how should we be messaging this to governments like i'm almost in like the pr department and and i'm and and I'm publishing all this, not higher up, like taking shots at the company you're in charge of.

1:00:32Anyway, I totally get the criticism that getting mommy daddied is annoying. I totally get that. I think that is a legitimate criticism here. And so it clearly also pisses off Ilya and Mira because they'd been collecting evidence and now Sutzkever was willing to share. He emailed Toner, Macaulay, and D 'Angelo a lengthy two-page, two lengthy PDF documents using Gmail's self-destructing email function, which I didn't know was a thing. Google, what are you doing? Like, you haven't surfaced that to me. Did you know that there's self-destructing emails in Gmail? Never heard of that. Fun. Fun. Give it a try, folks, when you're whistleblowing.

1:01:07One was about Altman, the other were about Brockman. The Altman document consisted of dozens of examples of his alleged lies and other toxic behavior, largely backed up by screenshots from Marati's Slack channel. In one of them, Altman told Marati 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 GPT-4 Turbo? It's just like, say model runs faster. Like, do we really need a joint safety board review? It seems like he kind of has an argument there, but then Mirati checked with the company's top lawyer, and the lawyer said that he had not said that.

1:01:41It's just, again, I keep going back to this, but being in this sort of existential fight for your right to be a company, which is you're losing money, but you're growing quickly, but you need to be raising more money, and you have a lot of heavily funded competitors and then you have the joint safety board review who says we need another review before you can release a slightly updated version of a product that's already been out in market being utilized. I mean, I can't imagine anything more cumbersome than having to do like heavy, heavy review. You kind of understand what was happening and again, like the critiques of Sam not being consistently candid, which was what they eventually came out and said, is like, yeah, that's fair.

1:02:28But at the same time, the fact that he has been able to lead the company to hundreds of millions of users and staying at the edge and winning at the app layer right now, despite all of this, is just a testament to his executive ability. Yeah, no, no, I agree. Yeah, yeah, it's odd. So anyway, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 16th, 2023, he and three independent board members logged into a video call and voted to fire Altman, knowing Maradi was unlikely to agree to be interim CEO if she had to report to Brockman. They also voted to remove Brockman from the board. After the vote, the independent board members told Sutskiver that they had been worried that he'd been sent as a spy to test their loyalty.

1:03:14That night, Maradi was at a conference when the four board members called her to say they were firing Altman 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 this is Sutskiver and Maradi 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 Sutskiver was communicating with her so she should know but then she's like Maradi'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 considered have you communicated this to satya nadella knowing how essential microsoft ceos sata uh the ceo's commitment to their partnership was to the company they had not i remember i remember when this was happening it clear you know it was so haphazard and so shocking and sudden and the team didn't know what was going on and there's all these sort of late it's like you know it's like a family in fighting right like they're all on the same team but clearly there's like power struggle and dynamics and then you know like satya is kind of like the grandpa that he's like really guys like you know like you didn't consult me on this yeah that's insane and and like from his perspective like you guys are fighting over autocomplete and clippy like the new clippy the new clippy you guys are building the new clippy he's like i just wanted the new clippy faster and we already tested it in india and it's a hit and it's a hit let's roll it out to the rest of the world yeah and so all all the board said was that he had not been consistently candid with the board uh friday night they the open ai's board and executive team held a series of increasingly contentious meetings marati had grown concerned the board was putting open ai at risk by not preparing but not better preparing for the repercussions of Altman's firing at one point she and the rest of executive team gave the board a 30-minute deadline to explain why they fired Altman or resign and again this is odd because it's like it feels like she's kind of on the executive team and saying like we're all wondering why you got fired Sam but like she knows or she should know and so it's like why did she just turn around and say hey everyone I actually know why he got fired like I was in these conversations it's very odd.

1:05:47The board felt they couldn't divulge that it had been Maradi who had given them some of the most detailed evidence. They had banked on Maradi's calming employees while they searched for a CEO. Instead, she was leading her colleagues in a revolt against the board. Isn't that a crazy thing to do? That's so wild. So like, like the board is like, well, like this is our next CEO, Mira. She's asking us to explain why we fired Sam, but she's the reason that we fired Sam. and we can't say that because if we do, we lose her as the CEO. It's like this crazy power struggle. It's like so wild. It's like Game of Thrones over there.

1:06:23A narrative began to spread among Altman's allies that the whole thing was a coup by Sutskiver driven by his anger over Pachaki's promotion and boosted by Toner's anger that Sam Altman had tried to push her off the board. This was like the I love you all Ilya like coded tweet from Sam where he said, he signed his tweet, I love you all, which is I-L-Y-A, Ilya. And so everyone was like, oh, he's like pointing the finger at Ilya. And so then this like whole like meme of like Ilya is responsible when really it seems like it was like a lot of people were involved and stuff. You've heard the whole story now.

1:06:57Satsukar was astounded. He had expected employees of OpenAI to cheer. Bad miscalculation. People love consumer tech companies. He's just 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. What are you talking about, Ilya? I just want to get a second beach home and vend Clippy into every Microsoft product. It's crazy that crackedclippy.com is available for$12. Crackedclippy.com. Go get it. Go get it. Start the next opening. rapper gets sued by microsoft yeah 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 altman wasn't reinstated among the signatures were maratis and sets covers such a twist actually i really like the guy oh yeah i mean this is 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 and to be clear sam was actually talking he was like i'll just go to microsoft research and hire everyone back that likes me and a lot of people like him yeah and no one else for sure was getting 40 on 300 done for sure outside of sam for sure so let's hit the size gong one more time for sam and the open ai team um what a funny story anyways it's one of the greatest tech stories of all time i mean i know it was very stressful and frustrating for a lot of people involved uh but uh you know we i don't know we just story's not over the story's not over it's still a knockout dragout fight anyone could win is open ai yahoo jessica livingston google let's figure it out jessica livingston co-founder of 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 step-by-step conclusions and then he's a deal guy so like he was at certain points that weekend was basically like yeah i can just go to microsoft and keep doing what i'm doing Yeah, I mean, I know that if I was in his position and I was super stressed during this weekend, I would want to just get out of the city.

1:09:35I would want to go to Wander and Sonoma Vineyards. I would go to wander.com and I would try and find my happy place. I would actually be singing to myself. I'd be singing, find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views. Hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge services. Wander is such a fantastic idea. Yeah, it's basically take some of the greatest homes in the world and make them available by the day. You love this too much. You go for two days, three days, four days, 30 days. This wander in Sonoma Vineyards is fantastic. Four bedrooms, three and a half baths, five beds, eight guests, 3 ,400 square feet.

1:10:10There's a pool. I grew up in Sonoma County. So if you go stay at that wander, DM me. I'll give you some recommendations. You almost got sucked into that whole East Bay Rationalist thing, the EA thing. I was born in the dark, on the dark side of the valley. adopted it i was born in it you're ready to fight oakland children's hospital we'll get eliezer on here you can debate him yeah you can be like uh but what if i turn the server off what if i pull the plug eliezer what happens 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 eliezer 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 bouton the new ceo of intel uh tons of tons of debate over what should happen to intel of course intel the storied chip manufacturer integrated so they both design and manufacture the chips they have a design arm and a fap very different from Intel and from NVIDIA and TSMC.

1:11:15And it's crazy. Only one designs. 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 CPU. true, true. They really missed that. Just one off. You know, they actually do make a GPU. Really? Yeah. You don't hear about it much. You 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 gonna be the same.

1:11:51New CEO, you just keep doing what you're doing. We're gonna figure out a new strategy, but like your job is safe right now. Or was he a genuine believer in the strategy that's been going on for years? He has long agitated for, hey, we need some change. And we think that's why he was brought in. But the Wall Street Journal has some new reporting that we're gonna take you through. And so he's only been on the job for two weeks, But time isn't really on Liputon's side. Tan became Intel's new CEO on March 18th and has already started laying out some of his vision for the storied but troubled chip giant.

1:12:22In a letter to shareholders, he spoke of the need to up our game. We love that. To make Intel's products more competitive in the crucial market for artificial intelligence systems. He also said he was equally focused on building up the foundry business where Intel manufactures chips designed by other companies. Of course, Intel has lost TSMC on the TPU, on the Apple Silicon chips, like on Nvidia stuff. They have a lot of great clients and Intel can do a lot of, it's called the trailing edge fabs. So think about the chip that goes in your car. It doesn't need to be an H100, but it does need to be made with quality at scale.

1:13:02And so we saw a lot of this during COVID, a lot of the chip delays led to cars being in stock. rock 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 whisper and like you know chat gpt or grok 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 Like power, it's possible. Just burning a V12 to power your H100 while you're talking to your chatbot on the way to work.

1:13:44That's the future. That's great. Hey, make a to-do list. Bot. It's great. But yeah, I mean, this is one of the things we talked about with Tesla. And Sam was saying like maybe Tesla and XAI and X all kind of combined. And you can imagine that 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 we were hanging out over the weekend and uh apparently with the tesla autopilot like they make you keep your hands on the steering wheel and they use a camera yep and it used to be that you could hack it by like putting weights on it sure you could just sit there yep but now having your car on autopilot but being forced to keep your hands on the steering wheel and then it gives you strikes.

1:14:39If you get five strikes, you can't use off-pilot anymore. Yeah, it turns off. That's insane. Yeah, it's actually kind of miserable. But you get used to it and you kind of adapt. I mean, Mercedes has lane keep assist and you have to check in with it every like 20 seconds and like give it a little wiggle or like hold your hands on it basically. But you can take your hands off for like 10 seconds. George Hatz's Kama AI does not need you to touch the wheel at all. It's amazing. It just has a camera, but if you look down or you look at your phone, it will blink at you and disable. And so George has, I think, correctly argued that that is the future of self-driving systems.

1:15:13Just camera on the face, is the person paying attention? If they fall asleep, it detects that. It doesn't matter if their hands are on the wheel. If they're sleeping, that's not good. And so I think that's the future, and I think that's where Tesla is moving. And I think that the situation that you described is very temporary. I think that we will see Tesla long-term go to purely AI. But it's still, I thought that was hilarious. Yeah. But I mean, that's why most people we know just use chauffeurs and then they sit in the back. Yeah, that's right. Because the chauffeur will keep the hands off. If the helicopter is not available.

1:15:44Yeah. In other words, the same things Intel's last CEO was trying to accomplish. Tan reiterated those points in a speech on Monday, kicking off the company's Intel Vision conference. beyond a few aspirations, including better AI strategy and custom build chips for niche computing work. There was little to distinguish Tan's playbook from his predecessor. Stay tuned for Intel's plans on humanoid robots, he told the audience. Let's go. In short, his short tenure on the job so far means Tan could well have more significant changes in mind, but one option Intel doesn't have is more of the same. Tan's predecessor, Pat Gelsinger, absolute dog, was effectively booted following an ambitious multi-year effort to both improve the company's chip designs and catch its manufacturing processes up to those proffered by TSMC.

1:16:34And 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. A little size gone moment of silence. Anyway. This moment of silence is brought to you by RAMP. Save time and money. They need to be on RAMP, for sure. One change that town hinted at is more wax at Intel's cost structure.

1:17:11The company reduced its workforce by 13 % last year, but still employs far more people than any other company in the industry. anakin meme yep where you were the best you're a chip company you must have done great over the last five years it's like you must have done great right it's intel down 60 percent 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 arrogance.

1:17:48An Intel recruiter who interviewed Gelsinger for his first stint at Intel out of a technical school called him somewhat arrogant and noted he'll fit right in. You'll love it. But Intel's been in trouble. Look at this graph of people power, annual revenue per employee. NVIDIA is putting up historic numbers, 3.5 million per employee intel is down at less than 500k per employee in revenue that is not right there with the manufacturer of the ti-84 texas instruments texas instruments is one of the best corporate it's a great company also the founder of tsmc worked at texas instruments was passed over for a senior role then went to taiwan and was like you guys want to do this and they're like yeah yeah it's great and texas instruments manufactured calculators but they also manufacture like weapon systems and stuff yeah it's a great it's a great company yeah 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.

1:19:02Back then, Japanese producers were making memory more cheaply, rendering it unprofitable for Intel. So Intel took up the then nascent market for personal computer processors. Effectively, an entire pivot for the business. Andy Grove famously said, only the paranoid survive. And he was very aggressive about steering the ship. Was he the original person to say that? Yes. That's his quote. And that's like the name of his book, I think. That's why. Yeah. He might've gotten it from somewhere else. He probably stole it from a group chat. one of his boys was like no that's mine that's my banger one of frank's lupman's boys was like frank you guys gotta amp it up you gotta amp it up you know what i do yeah i'm gonna write a book about that yeah today some analysts suggest intel should split off its manufacturing operations from its chip design and marketing functions following a long established industry trend of the fabless designer or the pure play fab, TSMC or NVIDIA strategy.

1:20:01It could gather outside investors in the manufacturing operation to bring in more capital, something the company is already in talks to do. Investors so far have welcomed Tan, sending the company stock up 10 % since his appointment in March. And so if you have a take on Intel, if you want to get exposure to Intel, you want to go long or short, you got 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 we got to get some audience members uh uh stocks up on the ticker oh yeah Yeah, that'd be great.

1:20:50We certainly have some public market corporate athletes. Some Oscar maybe. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that'd be good. Some Palantir. Yep, of course. There's some other good ones. I think Tesla's up there right now, friend of the show. Thank you, public. So in Las Vegas at the Intellivision conference, there was one more line that stuck out. We will redefine some of our strategy and free up the bandwidth, Tan said. Some of our non-core business, we will spin it off. And so people are wondering what businesses are technically non-core, what will he spin off? And now Intel is leaning into AI, which will include humanoid robotics, which Tan said has the ability to redefine manufacturing in the future.

1:21:32And 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 advice for him, I would tell him to go to ramp.com because time is money and he should say both right now. They're losing, they lost$13 billion. I mean, if they had easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place, I think we'd see a very different Intel for sure. Yeah. They're focused on a, what should we spin out?

1:22:04Should we focus on design on the fab side? Yep. They really need to be focused on, on, you know, immediately just like, you know, just basic financial operations and one of the most basic things you can do, but intelligent things you can do. So we should have the CFO of Intel on the show, give him the pitch for ramp, really dial it in, understand it. What corporate card is he using? And is that the source of all of Intel's problems? It's possible. That's right. It's very possible. Well, I would like to see this bet expressed. I want to know if Intel is going to split this year, and I hope we can get a poly market set up for it.

1:22:38I don't know exactly how we would define that, but we're happy to announce that Polymarket is now an official partner of TBPN. And we want to give a shout out to the ticker down at the bottom. The Polymarket ticker is powered by Polymarket. We had a friend of ours, Tyler Cosgrove, write some code and pull in their API. And we will be iterating on that and hopefully making it better and better over the next few weeks. There's currently no market on Intel spin out. I would love to see it. We will work on getting one set up. I mean, you can kind of express that in the public market, but I love Polymarket for just defining these narrow events and just creating another information source.

1:23:15And underrated, there's a great conversation section that happens in the comments. People debate these things. And Polymarket does a great job of surfacing interesting markets on their X account and online when things are shifting, when things are changing. So highly recommend you go give them a follow. It's an alternative way to traditional news to understand the current thing, which is, you know, news, you go on, you know, New York times, they're sort of being very sensational about things. It's not really oriented around truth. It's oriented around attention. Yep. And, uh, poly market is, it lets you know, like what's actually important.

1:23:53Like I was talking to Shane about this. I was like, I want a newsletter from poly market and maybe we should kind of use our show as an, as like a version of this is like, I want to, when a market moves significantly in the polymarket tech markets when there's a big jump in the prediction. Like there was recently a big change in the expected best LLM by the end of May. And I think it flipped from OpenAI to Google really quickly, really suddenly. When something like that happens and the odds shift all of a sudden, that's when I want to read the news story. That's when I want the deep dive. That's when I want to go deeper on that story.

1:24:31If we're just seeing everything's humming along at 50-50, I don't need another breaking news story about it because that's probably just a press release that's pitched by some PR person, right? It's not really news. And so I say it's not news unless it's moving the market. And that's my thesis. But you know what else is moving the market? Horses. That's right. This story has shaken the world of technology journalism to its core. And I think a lot of tech journalists are going to be very excited to hear this. So, the horse wore Hermes inside a luxury show jumping competition. If you're a technology journalist and you grew up doing jessage or show jumping, you are going to want to pay attention to this because it's a really big deal.

1:25:12There was an annual equestrian event in Paris and the French brand has been keeping in touch with its saddle making roots. This is a big deal for everyone who follows horses and show jumping, obviously, pretty much everyone in tech journalism. Yeah, and for those that don't know, Hermes has always said the horse was the first client. Yes, the former chair of Hermes, Jean-Louis Dumas, used to say, the horse is the first client. And that's because horses were for the French luxury brand's first market in 1837. They're not starting new companies that have that much of a lineage today. When it opened as a harness maker.

1:25:50They hopefully will. We don't get paper clipped. Yeah. They are also its original muse inspiring stirrup inspired closures on bags, designs on silk scarves, and in the company's horse and carriage logo. Last week, that connection was on vivid display under the Grand Palais glass ceiling, where some of the top show jumpers in the world competed for branded rosettes and a 400 ,000 euro grand prize. The Saat Hermes is among the most challenging equestrian competitions in the world, with hurdles reaching 1.6 meters or just above 5 feet. Saat is French for leap. The three-day event is also a display of everything Hermes, a reminder that in addition to selling bags, scarves, and coats, the brand still outfits top riders.

1:26:40In a luxury downturn, when many brands are cycling through executives and creative directors. Hermes posted a 13 % increase in sales in 2024 compared to 2023. And I think it's probably entirely driven by 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. 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 hermes's equestrian category or metier as the brand calls it 110 horses with names such as hello chandora lady al capone de carmel and cocaine duval traveled to the to the temporary stables along shot the champs elisee uh their white taint their white tented enclosures were lit with the same round chandeliers that decorated the palais.

1:27:43They could warm up in an enclosure right near the intersection on view for passers-by who didn't get one of the almost 17 ,000 tickets sold for the weekend. Even the most technical elements were decidedly fashionable. Equestrians leapt over obstacles resembling the brand's H signature in the house colors orange and brown or the facade of the brand's flagship on the Rue de Faubourg I can't even pronounce that. Less than a mile away. Anyway, very fun story. A little bit of more information that I liked. Best known for its colorful scarves and leather handbags. Hermes famously makes the Birkin bag, but they also sell equestrian accessories.

1:28:23And these are some things that tech journalists in the audience are going to want to pick up. They sell$1 ,200 breaches and$460 for a felt sugar box. And that's a box that's$460. You open it and you store your sugar cubes in there. So when you want to give your horse a sugar cube, you have it in a nice presentable box. Yeah, and for those that don't, horses are highly opinionated about this type of thing. You try to give them sugar out of a regular old plastic Tupperware, they are going to be pissed. Well, that's just a microplastics thing. You don't want to be giving a horse microplastics. You're not going to have an enjoyable ride if you're giving them a Tupperware sugar box.

1:29:03Definitely not. uh anyway speaking of someone with as relentless as a drive as a horse we got david senra in the building he actually has a he told us uh just before joining he's got a good horse story so why don't we start there okay tell us the horse story uh what's up guys good to see you what's up good to see you can you did you get some more book did you get some more books since last time or is this just a different angle no i'm using a different camera looks good so i absolutely love the horse story. I was talking to one of the most successful tech company CEOs a few months ago. He was telling me how stupid he thought it was that his wife picked up a horse habit.

1:29:45I guess there's a famous horse training facility in Wellington, Florida, which is the middle of nowhere, kind of by West Palm. He goes, I thought it was the biggest waste of time. Then he shows up at this event and Michael Bloomberg's there and like the guy from Goldman Sachs is there and like all these essentially like fadmously wealthy and successful. Yeah. Like, oh, maybe this isn't a giant waste of time. If the horse, even if the horse costs a million dollars, you get one deal done at that equestrian event and it pays for itself. So I read two books last week. One was Terrible White, which I told you about.

1:30:20And 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 and he made his money probably 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 onassis and all the the other greek shipping magnets would build the most the biggest yachts in the world and then they would invite the people they want to sell onto the yacht and they got all of the contracts so daniel's like okay i'm gonna 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 should we talk about the ken griffin episode that's coming up are we leaking that no no i just finished it this morning.

1:31:19Fantastic. I can't wait. I haven't eaten anything and I'm on like 600. I had three commenteers so far today. So it's like just like I'm shaking right now. Lots of caffeine. I like a caffeinated center to match your energy. But I got it out. So what happened is like the inspiration. Tell us about why you did the episode. Obviously, everyone knows Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel. But what inspired you? Because I study psychos for a living and I love them. And they're the most interesting, fascinating people to me and so you guys actually made a video on this tweet that got like a million and 1.5 million views right it's john arnold talking about hey what did ken griffin do when enron blew up and he talks about just like you know a lot of people like oh yeah i know enron was making money uh like all these this talent is gonna like you know essentially go to the wind uh you know some people recruit maybe they'll build like a good commodities business and uh He tells a story where the day it blows up.

1:32:16And keep in mind, in this story, Ken Griffin's like 33. He's like really, really young. And he immediately charters Gulfstream Jet, goes to Houston, and interviews every single person that was important in the Enron trading business. And then he winds up hiring all the best talent. And in the talk that I used for the basis of the episode, because there's no biography written on Ken, he goes, and since then, we've made about$30 billion trading commodities. so the main reason i i i wanted to to profile him is because um i get to meet a lot of really interesting people because the podcast and i always ask the same questions it's like who's the smartest person you know who has the best business you know and if they're into finance even if they don't know each other they 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 they might be in other books of just him taking something you He just took it to the next level.

1:33:13And then John Arnold, the one thing where I knew as soon as I read that line, I was like, oh, I'm going to do an episode immediately, is John's like, listen, I'm not going to take a job, but I respect Ken. So, yeah, I'll talk to him. I'm headed to Aspen for an event. Tell him he can call me when I get back to Houston next week. And then Ken's assistant calls back like two minutes later and is like, hey, would you talk to Ken if he flies to Aspen tomorrow? And he's like, yeah, I'll do that. So it's just like there's this reoccurring theme through all these biographies of history's great entrepreneurs.

1:33:41is like how bad do you want it and i think reading these stories like really stretches like what's possible did ken have a jet at that point because you've got to discount the like quick flight a little bit if he already had a tj and it was just more he flew southwest actually standby it was yeah yeah if he didn't own the jet he was definitely chartering the jet so i don't know if he owned it but yeah he was not uh still meaningful did you find the story of ken griffin in college getting the stock tips from State Street? Did you cover that? No. The one thing I heard was that he convinced Harvard to let him install a satellite dish so he could get real up-to-the-minute data.

1:34:21He was the only person at Harvard that had this data flow. That was true for the publicly traded companies that he needed stock prices for, but he also had this interest. He was trading convertible debt at the time. And convertible debt, it doesn't just have a ticker that you can just look up online or call someone. You actually have to go to a trading desk and talk to a sales and trading guy to get like, hey, what's the market trading that particular bond at? Because it's not incredibly liquid. And so what he would do is he would take 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.

1:34:58Um, he would bring flowers for the ladies at the front desk and sweet talk them and kind of just be like, Oh, like so good to see you, Susan. Like you're the best. Like, and then he would walk through and then just walk the desk. I don't know if this is a proctor. They just kind of told this story at Citadel. 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 back run his pricing model and then decide whether or not he should actually put it in order it's like everything he does everything he does is like that that's why i was just so fascinating because like he just takes the extreme this idea of like buttering up you know the gatekeepers inside of a business like oh yeah that david geffen's biography he talks about he had a huge advantage doing that michael ovitz i just did two episodes on michael ovitz same situation like they're always able to obtain information that other people can't because there's somebody in the way and they just figure out how to get around that person and it's usually through like 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 well basically there's no biography of ken 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 sure sure and so it's like they're like hey what do you think about this political candidate or what do you think about the market now and so the only thing the best thing i found was this talk at yale sure the guy interviewing them kind of horrible but i transcribed that talk at yale and then went through the transcription just like 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 fun to 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 to their personality, right?

1:36:57And that, that book is literally the subtitle is, are you playing to play? Are you playing to win? And think about the tweet from John Arnold, like, was he playing to play? Or is he playing to win? He was playing to win. And so I think there's a lot of analogies in the Yale talk that he gives, where he gives a brief overview of his career, and then he gives a bunch of like principles for you to apply to your career, which I thought was more of like a founder's episode. can you talk about what what it means for ken to be a killer like really getting into like your definition of that because you described him as like a winner and a killer but i think killer can have plenty of different definitions 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 lyman as like a killer but he's also extremely kind and so it's possible to be like kind and a killer how do you describe ken griffin i i think every single person that i've profiled on founders is a killer and i mean it is not a pejorative i mean this is like they take what they're doing very seriously the greatest uh i this idea really stuck in my mind because there's this biography of bernard arnol it's called like the taste of luxury it's like really hard to find i think it's like three thousand dollars online and because very few biographies of them in English right and this one ends when Bernardo is like 40 and at the end of the book he calls his shot you guys were just mentioning earlier I heard you on the show it's like well if you want to like do a competitor Rolex or some kind of luxury brand like you had to start 100 years ago and Bernardo had that insight you know 40 years ago 35 years ago and he's just like oh these things are very valuable I think they're going to get more valuable in time and I had 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 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 fucking ken stories and one thing that he told me that this is an example of like a killer away from like your competitors right is that there's like a there was like a a tiny business inside of citadel that had something to do with like the new technology they were developing and it's he essentially ken sat and talk to the guy for like a few hours about like tiny details like where are the servers like what are we doing with him like he was just completely obsessed he has no other hobbies than just building this massive empire 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 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 as this is not just how ken thinks there's a great line in this book called invent and wonder which is the collected writings of jeff bezos so somebody walter isaac collected all of jeff bezos to share whole letters and then transcribed and edited all of jeff's important speeches and jeff has a great line in there he's like do you really want to prepare for a future where you might have to fight somebody as good as you and he goes i don't and so the same thing it's like i don't want to win two to one there's a line in hardball it's like you need to fuck winning two to one you need to win nine to two you need to stomp them um i just had dinner with uh i could say this because it's public uh mark lorry and he was the one that founded diapers.com and you know and then he went on to sell jet and all this other stuff but i was lighting him up with questions i was like i want to know what it was like competing against Jeff Bezos at that time.

1:40:56And he was just like, you can't. There is no company. He's going to steamroll you. I had no choice. That's amazing. I mean, the killer mindset with Ken Griffin just takes me back to 2012. This trader on the quant team stole code for, they call them alphas, basically code. No matter who runs it, they're going to generate return. Stole a bunch of stuff on like a hard drive. Citadel finds out, realizes they're stealing the IP, the code. The guy freaks out. He dumps the hard drive into the river in Chicago. And Ken Griffin and the Citadel team get scuba divers to go into the river and bind the hard drive just to send it to the FBI to get this guy busted.

1:41:44And I was like, yeah, he's not going to let you just take his alpha. He's just not going to happen. We're flying in scuba divers. Yeah, flying in scuba divers. He talks about that in the talk. I didn't include in the podcast, but he's like, listen, if somebody's going to leave because you work at Citadel and then you want to be a doctor, I'm going to write you a letter of recommendation. I'm going to support you in every way. You leave for a competitor and that just brings up very different feelings within me. And so that's what I mean. He's just like he's completely bought in. I think the important point here is like – go ahead.

1:42:16on that note and maybe you can just wrap this into story you're about to tell but how does he think about investing in other funds right because in many ways funds may start with a singular strategy but in a long enough time horizon the manager says well okay i'm going to run an empire now i'm going to do the ken griffin playbook we're going to have a bunch of different verticals he's invested in some venture funds he's invested okay so um i think maybe it was on your show i forgot Yeah, who told me? Oh, no, no, no. I know who told me. Like, you'll see this over and over again. When people start to understand how valuable their industry is, they essentially get in all the good deals.

1:42:54So, like, think about, you know, NVIDIA is in every single AI anything right now. I just did an episode on Jerry Jones. And I talked to a bunch of people that live in Texas, a bunch of people that are around him. And they're like, yeah, yeah, the Cowboys is one thing. His early oil and gas stuff. He's like, you don't understand what he's been doing, the investment he's been doing since then. He's in every single thing. I don't know. I didn't track like how I just hear over and over again that he's got money everywhere. And again, these are private companies, so you never know. But what I was told, and you kind of see this because if you come to Miami, he's like buying everything.

1:43:25Like every like not just like literally everything. He's building, I think, what's going to be the most expensive house in history and Palm Beach. And so what I was told is forget the enterprise value of the companies, which is, you know, 80 billion, whatever the number is. Right. He's like the guy's been pulling out billions and billions and billions in cash. He just doesn't know what to do with it. So yeah, I'm sure he's invested in everything. I heard stories about Bloomberg. I went up talking to somebody that knows a lot about his family office. And I was asking questions around this trying to get a sense of how large his fortune is.

1:43:56And he was like, well, I can give you a little hint. Like look how much we spent X on charity. We have this many people in the fucking family office. And you kind of like piece this together. It's like, oh, well, what are you going to do if you're making$5,$7,$10 billion in cash year after year after year? Like eventually fight for Mercedes AMG one allocation, of course. I mean, it is crazy how, like how diverse the Citadel team has become because they have this high frequency trading arm. I mean, they started with convertible debt. They kind of like the story of Citadel is like he got so good at trading convertible debt that he just straight up maxed out the market size.

1:44:31Like he was Tam constrained on that and then went into high frequency trading and then got the global equities team up and running. And the equities team, when I was there, they were doing like 2 ,000 CEO interviews a year or something. Just like interviewing every single person that runs a public company, getting the temperature, figuring out, oh, do we like this manager? Do we like this leader? Should we invest? And then on the other side, you have the high frequency guys who are like, I haven't talked to a human being in months. It doesn't matter. And they're both printing. They're both absolutely printing.

1:45:01Yeah. What I love, too, about like, you know, him maxing out markets earlier in his career. That's something he takes Q &A from the Yale students at the end. They're like, how do you decide what business to go in? And he's like, you have to think about total addressable market. We have to be in deep, liquid markets because we're going to do the best research on the planet and we need to be compensated for this research. Another thing that I absolutely love that I think is really important too is he talks about how much of an influence that mentorship and apprenticeship is going to have on your career as a young person and as you continue to go.

1:45:31And this is something I see over and over again. There's this book on my desk that's impossible to find. And it's called, you actually like this, it's Autopsy of a Merger. And it's this deal that Jay Pritzker did, one of his most infamous deals. And what I thought was interesting is like, I remember reading Sam Zell's autobiography and then getting to speak to Sam. And Sam, Jay Pritzker was like Sam's older brother and mentor. And so he 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.

1:46:03But I want to go back to the point I was about to make. It's like, you know, think about every single person covered in founders. It's like they were so good at their job that somebody wrote a book about them. This is like the smallest percentage of the people that have ever lived. But there's so many, like if you take all these lessons as abstractions, you can apply them even to like businesses far afield. This is actually advice that Ken gives where he's like, as an entrepreneur, you need to be looking for edges. So obviously you study inside your company, you study your competitors, but then you study businesses that are far afield.

1:46:34So he talks about he had he had he built this thing called a risk wall in Citadel. It's 30 feet by 10 feet. It's a giant screen. And he says before they were they were getting like a B, B plus on how well they were managing risk. And, you know, Ken's not going to be satisfied with be anything. And so he actually is in the office of Saudi Ramco in Saudi Arabia. and he sees that they have this giant fucking board that's like 30 feet long 10 feet wide and has all the important metrics like where the ships are how much they're producing everything else he's like oh i'm gonna take that idea and i'm gonna 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 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 at 5 45 i get a text today and it's all i see is the back of john jordy and i think the rest of the tpbn crew and they're going they're doing uh they're doing curls till failure and then this is the the caption they're like tpbn coming for your neck it was a good time this morning i mean that's every morning yeah i mean podcasting never sleeps podcast yeah but you guys are taking it you know to a completely different level no it's the chicken finger dream our killer mindset is it's not enough for us to be the biggest other people need to quit uh we like to say never podcast weekly always podcast strongly i love that line and that's why we train every morning uh we'll talk about like just frameworks for focus you you covered a little bit of this but is there any as ken put anything out there around like how he's evaluating like you know they're running all these business lines and then he's got somebody that comes to him with an opportunity you know internally he's evaluating it based on the market potential but is there anything like you know he didn't roll out every business line in the same two years it was sort of staged right okay you just accidentally hit on like something that's very important i put in the episode description is like one of the other reasons in addition to like all these crazy stories uh i 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 tpvn but i'm reading you don't need a fantastic liquidity provider like uh securities no on the market um you gotta get your size up this is one of my favorite books okay uh i think it's episode 222 of founders i think it maybe did an episode like in the 80s like you know six years ago whatever it's ed thorpe's biography of man of all markets and ed thorpe is a fascinating character legit genius and he was the first person the person that made the first quantitative hedge fund ever uh he built the world's first wearable computer with claude channon um he was the first lp in citadel so the first way i came across ken griffin the way i was exposed to him was at the end of the uh the book ed thorpe's like he closed down his his hedge fund right he already made more money he could ever possibly uh spend it's called princeton newport partners and what happened is ken griffin was 19 years old comes to ed thorpe's house and then ken griffin's uh mentor is with him and essentially he's like i always wondered how far ed ed 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 put the point you were making earlier john um and then he's like i wind up being the first LP and then you fast forward and look like you know I think the book ends Ken's network is like 6 billion and they have like 15 billion of SSR management or something and now it's like you know multiples of that but I think like one of the I guess the way I think about this is just like I'm obsessed with people who 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.

1:51:07And he talked about how this maybe give you insight on how he's able to scale up all these different businesses. One, they take a long time to do. But also he said he had last year, he had over 100 ,000 people apply to work for him. And so you just have a huge labor, like you have all the talent in the world. Now you have all these resources and you just build it slowly, like slow over time over many, many decades. Yeah. Citadel Securities, I originally, I think Ken was thinking about doing an investment bank and then eventually spun that out and sold that arm of the business. And now it's morphed into a market maker.

1:51:38And it's a very, the business itself has been through pivots, much like the core hedge fund. I do have a question about the core hedge fund. There's always the question of, as you scale up a fund, size and outside LPs, you put up some amazing numbers, 20 % returns, everybody wants in. Is that sustainable when you take it on order magnitude bigger. Did you get any insight into how Ken Griffin thinks about scale and outside investors? Because at the end of the day, it's his fund. He wants to grow it, but sometimes having a bigger fund is advantageous. No, I didn't get it. There was a couple things where I was getting frustrated with the interviewer because it's like, Ken says he's the most successful hedge fund of all time, which one I asked a friend of mine who knows about this.

1:52:23I thought Renaissance, and he's like, yeah, but most of that was their own money. Like they closed the medallion fund. They closed off to outside investors a long time ago. Jane Street's same thing. Yeah. And then the other thing Ken said that they like, please ask. I heard you earlier when you guys were going over the Wall Street Journal article on OpenAI. You're like, follow up. God damn it. Why aren't you following up? Isn't it frustrating? It drives me crazy. Like I'm going to have to do an interview show now just so I can get these questions out of it. But he mentions this that like he made more money than anybody else.

1:52:52But there's also years where he says, I lost over a hundred billion dollars. I was there. When I came in, during my training seminar, the guy's like, oh yeah, we had a really rough go during the financial crisis, during the housing crisis. Our fund lost 50 % of 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 next year or than last year when you lost 50 %? He's like, actually, we're having a great year. We're up 50%. And the next door neighbor was like, oh, that's great. You're back to where you were.

1:53:26And the guy was like, no, that's not how it works. Like you have to go up a hundred percent. And he was just like kind of exposing like basic math, that's basic math, illiteracy and like the pop 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 because like, you know, likely most of us three and people listening are not going to have, you know, a hundred billion dollar loss in a year. Um, unless Masa is listening. Um, just, but everyone should hope to have the opportunity to lose 100 billion exactly 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 proverbial scene of accidents so when other funds or other companies blow up well there was a yeah but the end run happened in 2001 yeah there was a story in 98 so keep in mind at 98 ken is 30 okay 2008 when when you're describing when he loses half of equity almost goes out of business, which he talks about in the, uh, I talked about in the episode, he talks about the talk at Yale as well.

1:54:24He was 40, but he says what saved him from going out of business in 2008 is when he was in 98, he, when long-term capital management broke out, he went and he's like, how that he's like, you guys lost 90 % of your equity before, like once they crossed the 90 % threshold, then they lost control of the business. Like how the hell did you not lose control before then? He's like, most like it shouldn't have happened. yeah he said and then this is another thing where the the the 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 not to go to business and it's like okay well the follow-up question is like what did you learn but he never he just talks about going to the scenes of the crime he didn't actually specifically say hey this is i learned x y or z uh do you think that ken has another 40-ish years in him uh in the same way that the the Warrens and the and the Charlies yeah or is he building his is he building the biggest house the most expensive house ever and he's like you know gonna post up there and and write it out one of the things again like I I picked the people I cover very carefully because like I want to be inspired by them and one of the things that I really loved at the beginning of the research um was I would watch some interviews and for hours and literally only and 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.

1:55:53That's the line. He doesn't even understand. He's like this. There's a great line that Jeff Bezos says that I believe in where it's like we don't choose our passions, our passions choose us. And Ken clearly is like completely obsessed with this. So where he was even saying, he's 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 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 biggest, hardest problems to solve.

1:56:19So that's what I'm addicted to. Usually people like that, I don't think they ever stop. Yeah. Makes sense. Did you get a chance to read Good to Great Jim. No, I read a long time ago. Yeah. It's the book that it was like, it's on your desk when you joined the firm. Like he requires everyone to read it. I think he's like grown the library now, but it's an interesting framework. I thought you would have a good take on, on this takeaway from the book, uh, which I think can probably embrace. He says, uh, the culture of discipline, when you can, can you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results and it's focused on technological accelerators good to great companies think differently about the role of technology and i wanted to get your your feedback on that so i'm going to answer that question one second there's other three other books that he says he says good to great hardball which is on my desk which i read and then another one what was the i can't remember the other well it was like i went to buy i think it was like published in like the 1960s the problem with these books is you go and read them like even hardball hard there's nothing wrong at hardball but I felt I had better examples of the principles based on like the reading I've done because a lot of the principles are just like this company's so great and then you look up and the company's gone like and same and same thing in good to great so yeah yeah I think it's like less tying them to specific companies uh and just saying hey does that like does that idea make sense and like what in your business and what you're doing even if you only use idea temporarily but 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 you know such a focus on like the market economy maybe like 200 to last 200 250 years mostly taking place in america at this time um there is one principle that reoccurs over and over again and i it popped my mind when i read andrew carnegie's autobiography like years ago and that's uh they all have in common that they invest in technology the savings compound and it could be gives you an advantage of your slower moving competitors and it could be a 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 cases like they invested in better technology at a faster rate than their competitors like say you know nobody thinks of walmart as a fucking tech company right but if you go and read there's this great hard to find book that i did an episode on it's called sam walton richest man in america published the year two before sam wrote his own autobiography and And there's a story in the book where in like the 1970s, Sam is in his 60s.

1:58:53And these guys come to him, and I think it's 1979, and they're like, hey, we need to invest $500 million in this new computer system for inventory. Computers in 1979. And at first, Sam said no. He thought computers were overhead. And slowly over time, his top guys convinced him like, no, this is an advantage. And then they spent so much more on computerized logistics and inventory management, everything else. they just had an unfair advantage that compounded decade after decade after decade i love it last two small questions ken owns 80 of citadel llc who owns the other 20 i don't know but i i talked to the guy i talked to one of the guys that that owns part of citadel securities i can't say who but that business is a monster from what i hear yeah it's huge uh yeah what is it about great investors that make them maybe not so great at picking spouses is it just the intensity

1:59:56no it's not funny it's sad 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 costs matrimony that's so brutal high frequency high frequency trader high frequency matrimony it has nothing it's not just investors it's entrepreneurs I remember I think the best episode I've ever done is on actually on James Cameron which is hilarious and I start that episode where I'm reading from this like 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 and it's just like What kind of personality type do you think that person is like easy to deal with?

2:00:40They're flexible. They get along easily with other people. I think in many cases, and I think I'm definitely at risk for this. I don't know. Well, I mean, you guys are grinding hard as hard as hell right now. I am curious, like your personality types. I think you're a little bit more guarded. Like you would you would avoid this. 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 thorpe is one of the few people you know i've covered almost 400 of history's greatest entrepreneurs and it's just like in many cases they're fucking 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 it's a lot of that is internal um and so i always look for positive examples him being one sole price is another one where it's just like i don't i want to learn from what they did where ed thorpe took care of his health if you look you You can Google him and I've showed pictures of him.

2:01:57He's 93 and I'm like, how old do you think this guy is? And they're like, he's 60. He worked out, he started picking up a physical fitness habit like 70 years ago when no one was working out because he's taught, again, he's brilliant. He's like, oh, I think of every hour I spend on fitness as one less day I'll spend in the hospital at the end of my life. He made more money he could ever 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 comes from, he's like, no, I'm not interested. his kids are in the book they talk about how great a father he was he was present his wife had just died but they were happily married you know for 50 years I mean the guy just nailed it he was like super smart, had fun, great dad great father you know lived a life his book I say in the Ken Griffin episode his book reads like a thriller but yeah I think that's like there's a ton, I mean I would say most of the great entrepreneurs you're not going to see a large overlap unfortunately personally between like, you know, we're going to go read that book because, uh, my wife who's watching live with kids just texted me.

2:03:00Yikes. I love you, Sarah. And, uh, we'll, we'll go. I just, I just had this, we have another guest. We got to get you out of here. Yeah. I just had, I just, I just had this example last week because in the, in the Ovid's episode, he talks about if I could do things over again, I should have worked 10 % less and I wouldn't have it 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 Ovid said you should work 10 % less so I'm like you're saying this against me well thanks for stopping by this is fantastic as of course great I love you guys we'll talk to you soon all right bye great we are over time to get into that episode yeah me too let's get let's get Samir in here yeah in the temple of technology welcome to the stream Samir are you here hey great to see you sorry we're running a little late and look at the lighting the 4k yeah beautiful it's looking great I would expect nothing less this is a professional you've got the best setup of any we've had 70 guests in a month and knocking them all out of the park can we start can we start with the latest interview you did uh Zuck and Jimmy Mr.

2:04:14Beast the biggest tech god, the biggest creator god. You're putting them together now. What'd you learn from that? And how'd that come together? Yeah. Well, first of all, what's up, guys? Thanks for having me on. What did I learn from that? I mean, I think actually, first and foremost, it was fascinating to talk to someone who we consider to be the auteur of this generation of human connection. If you really take a step back and you go, the way we're all connecting, even what we're doing right now, there was this era that happened that pushed the way that we as humans engage with each other and how information travels.

2:04:53And I think Mark was obviously heavily involved in that and arguably the auteur of that, this era of human connection. So I find that to be super fascinating. We met Mark up at Meta a while ago to do an Orion demo. You guys know what Orion is? like his new glasses. Yeah. I'm super jealous. It sounds amazing. So that was one of the craziest, like 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 guest like that, it takes time.

2:05:28Yeah. 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, us talking about creators on Facebook. And it felt like, you know we only have a handful of friends who have found success on Facebook Jimmy's one of those people so felt like having him be a part of the conversation when you say Facebook do you mean actual face 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 cultural nuance you have to dub which was one of the main things Jimmy talked about was like you actually have to dub content for other cultures to understand it sure sure uh 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 i remember you can understand that no matter what um but i think that the main thing that we talked about that i I couldn't stop thinking about was around the premise that maybe a lot of the engagement of the internet in the future is going to happen in the context of messaging and DMs.

2:06:39A lot of the human engagement in the future as compared to probably us engaging with a lot of bots and AI agents and, you know. Yeah, I kind of noticed that on Instagram. I'm seeing more and more reels where the number of shares is higher than the number of likes, which means that people are not going to the comments to have the discussion. They're sending, oh, you got to watch this and that starts a conversation in a dm well i think as creators we think about that quite a bit that a short form piece of content is a unit of conversation yep and thinking about that and through that lens you actually create differently right like your thought is okay i'm 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 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.

2:07:31Yeah. Can we go back to the Orion demo? It sounded amazing. Everyone's review was unanimously. It's incredible. Put it in the context of the vision. Exactly. The vision pro had the same thing where people tried it for an hour and they were like, this is incredible. And then it had this churn curve, churn curve where people were returning them and they were collecting dust. And that seems to be like the classic VR problem. Are you convinced that this is the one that i'll be wearing for six months straight no but i find it i find it fascinating we've sat with a lot of you know tech ceos most most recently evan spiegel and mark zuckerberg and you know both are very focused on ar 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.

2:08:28Or like if you've ever worn the Ray-Ban Metas, I think the Ray-Ban Metas and Orion, like they're tangibly different in weight and size. But if you take what the Orion can do and put it into the Ray-Ban Metas, that's the most compelling product I could think of because it's lightweight. It looks cool. You can still look someone in the eyes. But the thing that was really unique about the Orion glasses that you wear this like neural wristband and before we did the demo you start to like they ask you to do some movements like click your finger like this each finger is a different function and these your brain waves and like your neural waves are fed into this computer and basically it learns what it looks like when you go like this 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 ray-ban metas or you know something that looks cool i think we're too aware of our own image as humans to walk around wearing apple vision pros yeah um i mean i've got a bunch of questions what's going on with tiktok do you have an update there.

2:09:46There's supposed to be some decision made or like early April is what we've been hearing, but it's been radio silent. I've been looking at Polymarket and trying to figure out, you know, what's going on. It doesn't seem like Mr. Beast is in the lead to buy it at the moment, but do you have any, do you have any insight there? I mean, look, look, I know I've, I've seen probably similar things that you guys have seen. I've had some conversations, you know, around the industry about it. My perspective is I don't think, I think it'll keep getting punted. That conversation will keep getting punted. You know, I think TikTok is a dramatic economic driver in the US.

2:10:26I think it had a lot of sway in the, you know, in the election. I think it's a way that like politics is getting communicated. I think it's the way news is getting communicated. I think it's like probably the biggest search engine for Gen Z right now. Even for me, I'm like, you know, going on a trip this summer. I'm searching stuff on TikTok. It's a crazy platform. We started with a dry account. We got 300k views on like the first video we posted. It's like just the opportunity is like staring you in the face no matter what you think about the politics. Yeah. Do I know if it's actually going to sell to you as company?

2:11:01I have no idea. Like I saw that Marc Andreessen and Andreessen Horowitz is putting their name in the hat. I know what Alexis Ohanian's doing and Project Liberty is super interesting in terms of trying to reshape what it looks and feels like. But right now, it is the most powerful for you algorithm that we have access to. A lot of American businesses are powered by TikTok, meaning young startups, young media entrepreneurs are powered by TikTok. There's a lot of brand dollars that are exchanged through there. you know when we sat with adam masseri when we sat with evan spiegel obviously like the maybe the ideal scenario even the conversation with zuck is like those ad dollars shift to u.s companies um versus tiktok but like i don't know we haven't we haven't really seen or we don't really have precedent for it uh in the u.s unless you guys know that we do but like i don't know that we have precedent for something like this what about creator businesses well you want to follow up on that yeah we could start there i wanted to get your take on ai and creators buddy of mine trevor had brud that was like super super early and ahead of its time yeah yeah doing doing doing little mikaela was like yeah 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 e-com style info product was like everybody should have an ai creator that makes like five thousand dollars a month for them you know like doing brand deals and like obviously that's not actually like happening at a wide scale or it's certainly not easy to do are you seeing instances yet of ai like fully ai generated creators that are actually building loyal followings meaningful ad businesses or digital products etc so i mean look like what you're talking about with little michaela is like considered vtuber right and i think vtubers are picking up like the at the end of last year the most subscribed 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.

2:13:24Like we're, we're, we're into animation. Um, fully AI generated is not something I've seen. I think AI enhanced is like, uh, 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 have not seen an instance of like a fully AI generated, um, creator. Yeah. And that's, I mean, probably the most, I was going to say probably the most compelling fully AI generated content is the podcasts that have been created through Notebook LM. Yeah, Notebook LM, for sure. That's the most compelling to me. Like audio, I think, is where it'll happen first before it happens in video.

2:14:03I think we're too aware of video for it to happen through like true human. Yeah. I mean, Loma Kayla proves otherwise, but I think audio, it could happen because what notebook lm showed me was hey if i have like a 20 minute drive couldn't i just customize like hey i want to know about what's happening in the world of politics what's happening in the world of the creator economy and the nba scores from last night yeah and just tell notebook 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 in audio yeah last question uh do you think that create some creators have moved on from this idea of the goal is scale, right?

2:14:51Like 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, curse, or doesn't even necessarily help with like building a sort of sustainable business. Cause there's some creators that can get 10 ,000 views a video. And they can have a fantastic lifestyle and sort of pursue their creative passions. And that's like the right size for whatever niche that they're in. But, you know, and we see this like we like the video John's referencing, like we got a video that gets 300 ,000 views on TikTok and it like doesn't do anything.

2:15:29We didn't get my text messages about it. Nobody saw it. Like it's fine. but I'm curious if you see sort of a broader sort of systemic shift where people are like, you know, really orienting around like quality of audience and sort of the business side as well. I think you guys are an example of that, right? Like I think you guys have built a really cool brand and I think brand is really hard to build. I think what people have learned is that views are available across platforms, right? If you solve the math equation, like you can get viewership. That's not very exciting. Brand is exciting. I think brands are timeless.

2:16:03Brands give a feeling to people. And I think we're just maturing to that point where like brand matters. Views are somewhat interesting, but we're also in a world where like you could spend an hour on TikTok and not remember what you watched. So Colin and I always think about this concept of memorable views versus forgettable views. And you want to be producing memorable views. And oftentimes that means you're actually targeting a smaller group. I think our world has gotten increasingly fragmented, right? Like 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.

2:16:43Whoa. And that is one of the most, that's from YouTube, is one of the most interesting stats I've seen about the internet. That will only increase over time. Wow. And so if we play that out and explore like how fragmented attention is getting, how bespoke our online experiences are, we're moving away from monoculture. We're moving into a world of like smaller tribes, right? Smaller ideologies across the internet. And I think the opportunity is to build a really meaningful brand for one of those small groups of people. I think the challenge to be like the next Mr. Beast, to be like a massive monocultural brand, I find that to be not even exciting to me.

2:17:24I like meeting our audience and meeting them out in public and being like, oh yeah, these are my people. This is people like me. That's exciting to me. And I think as the internet gets more and more fragmented, that will continue to happen. Yeah. Well, that's fantastic. I wish we had more time. We got to have you back. Next time we'll block a full 30 minutes. I mean, really, we're sending our best for the entire Palisades rebuilding effort. Thanks, man. I mean, I know most of the fans will probably know that you were affected and we really hope that everything's going well there. And if there's anything that folks can do to help, yeah, we'd love to be supportive of that.

2:17:59Appreciate it. I love what you guys are doing. Thanks so much. It's super cool. It's unique. So yeah, keep it going. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Thanks for coming on. Thanks so much. Bye. That's great. Yeah, I mean, we could have talked to him for like two hours. It's like, you know, it's like our business. There's so much there. We didn't even get to like, I wanted to hear the Doug DeMuro strategy versus what Mr. Beast is doing versus what other folks are doing on the monetization side, slow ventures and stuff. I know he'll have some great takes there, but of course we will have him back in the temple of technology any day now.

2:18:31Let's hopefully bring in our next guest, Will from OpenA. Any day now. Let's see. Will, how are you doing? How are 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 hand built yeah he's on that he's an author of that paper artificial intelligence yeah how it's done invented the transformer yeah yeah yeah yeah we appreciate you being here do you want to give a little bit of overview of like what you actually do day to day i think that'd be interesting yeah Yeah, yeah, totally.

2:19:11I mean, I joined OpenAI like two years ago, have like a startup background, but worked on like Videogen for a while, worked on Sora for about a year. And then I work on like RL post-training, ChatGPT stuff. Cool. How did you process the Studio Ghibli moment? Was that expected? And I really want to know, did you, how internally did you think that images and ChatGPT was going to go viral and you didn't know what the prompt would be or were you like there everyone's going to give yeah i want to know i want to know we're ghibli's flying around yeah 48 hours ahead of ahead in slack give us some secrets here well i mean i've honestly like i was very bullish on this i think we like definitely under provisioned gpus i was surprised our team predicted like less traffic than we should have expected um yeah i think the thing that i was thinking about the whole time is that like i mean i was walking around uh sf and some of these like nail salons have like clearly w3 generated like image fronts or whatever that is right and i think it's just clear to me that like pretty much every business in the world very soon is just going to use this to like you know pick logos and you know we can do transparency we can do controllability i think like my favorite eval is the fiber eval just go on fiver and count how many of these things you've been automated 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 ghibli in like precisely because you could do simpsons you could do south park but there was something about the anime style of studio ghibli that was like it kept enough of the human in there it didn't just become a completely generic stick figure but it also wasn't it's like it was a magical experience you needed no you needed to do nothing to prompt it just you could i love that you could misspell ghibli It's still got a perfect output.

2:20:56It's great. And then the output was just magical. I would generate the same image with four different styles of art and the Ghibli one every single time. It just felt magical. What was your take on it? No, yeah, that sounds about right to me. I don't think I predicted Ghibli specifically. Last time for the Dolly 3 launch, we made a bunch of Pepe's and that was the thing that really went off. Interesting. Yeah, I remember. I mean, for a while, the version one of Image Generation, it felt very art station informed. It felt very like sci-fi dystopia. Like it was really good at those, but people weren't really doing.

2:21:32I mean, there were certain like, you know, anime styles, but this one was just was just everywhere. What else? Can you talk about, to me, the thing that's most exciting for me is the Ghibli-ification of everything. It's like on a long enough time horizon, everything is Ghibli. It's just sort of abundant and very free. And if you thought even a year ago that you would have this sort of like anybody could instantly, basically for free get this sort of beautiful hand-drawn anime style artwork that historically and you know somebody else posted about this but you know there'd be like a four second scene in Spirited Away that was like that took a year and a half to generate right and so like to take something that's just so time intensive so expensive and then make it free and abundant is so powerful and and to me that is that's why when when I think about everything that's happening and sort of politics and tech drama and everything like that.

2:22:36And then I think about like, we're moving towards like everything being Ghibli. It's like everything today feels like a distraction. Is that sort of like how you guys, like as a team stay focused within OpenAI, which is just like, hey, there's gonna be a lot of noise. There's gonna be like, you know, this benchmark today, that release over here. And it's like, we're sort of moving towards this like future target. Yeah, that's sort of a ramble, but I'm curious how you think about sort of focus. Yeah, I think OpenAI is extraordinarily focused on like real progress. I think, you know, I mean, like for so long, like, you know, you see the diffusion models, they can't spell and like it takes us like two years.

2:23:13There's no Dolly update. And then finally we come out with this and it's not for no reason, right? I think like people who are focused on like really, like what is pushing the frontier forward and like what's actually the next evolution of this technology? Yeah, I don't know. I think there's a lot of potential here. I think I'm actually not sure what the ImageGen team thinks about like what the next steps are here. I think their view is mostly about making this truly useful. Can we go from diffusion is a fun toy to this is a truly useful tool in the world? And clearly it's already having that impact.

2:23:40Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you said your backgrounds in startups. Can you talk a little bit about just being a consumer tech company now and the focus on product and some of the product decisions like images and chat GPT? It's not a separate app like Sora. That seems intentional. How are you thinking about product development? What are the strategies? How much feedback are you doing? Are you just testing stuff internally? Are there A-B tests running? Is this secretly running in India six months before we get it here? Like how do you inform product decisions? Totally. I mean, I think it's hard to pre-launch models because they create so much noise, but so we don't really test them.

2:24:15But I guess like they moved from being a research company to a deployment company over time. And we're still in the middle of that kind of, you know, we're doing both. And I think we're just doing a lot more deployment than they ever had in the past. I think people are very motivated around like, how do you actually make this thing useful? How do you deploy into the world? I think it's really cool to be in a position where like we can launch new products that are completely unlike anything people use ChatGPT today for and people are so receptive to them like it's so like you know I don't know I think it's hard to 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 can throw out image in 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 like one of the things that I felt like really worked with images in chat gpt was like i could go to my camera roll click share share it into chat gpt type studio give these style and boom it gets it and it takes the the it takes the the pain of inspiration out of the process and i'm wondering if you're looking at ways to create those magical easy to generate moments i remember mid journey was talking about this too where like part of why mid journey worked was if you just give someone a text box they'll just be like cat and it'll be like okay that's a picture of a cat but if you show the mid journey and it's like the discord and it's all these different ideas then they can spin off that 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 it's one of the most biggest things we're thinking about right now which is like when you open chat 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 i think i'm most excited about is that like, I think the, if we're talking about like, what is the like dolly to image gen, what is the like, you know, kind of whatever each evolution of like the next kind of order of magnitude.

2:26:02I do think the long-term thing that's extremely exciting is just like maximizing personalization, super long context, the model knows who you are, the model can follow up being like, hey, by the way, I've seen you doing this. Do you want to try a anime style image or, you know, like maybe create things for you with 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 five years when i when people were saying oh the timeline's all slop on the ghibli moment i was like this is not slop everybody this is this is fantastic yeah in fact i would argue that the raging politics was slop yeah yeah 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 yeah and it's like yeah they've got six fingers and it's the hand is connected to the body i want a vintage dolly one give me the dolly one but like what happens like i i feel like we're in the slop the slop era feels like it's coming to an end it's like 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 yeah that's a good point you have like a new bar has been set depends what you mean by slop i feel like i went to the i went to the sf moma recently and like half of it felt like slop and i think this like i mean half of it did not to be clear but i think a friend of mine always quotes that like you know art is like the search for the periphery like you're kind of like constantly looking you know kind of editing or things forward or whatever that is and you know i don't know like when things get played out they get boring.

2:27:42Like they get cringe, they get slop, right? Like, I don't know. Maybe the problem is that humans are slop and not that the models are slop, right? That's a good point. Are you worried for college students today that have access to these tools and making sure they actually learn how to do things like writing, which is, as we know, associated with thinking, you know, if you can't write well, then I just, you know, the models are getting better. It's less obvious that I'm seeing something that's output when i was in college if i had this tool i would have aced my studio ghibli animation course yeah yeah and ap bio and ap bio yeah which i did no i'm curious like you know how how do you think universities like and just curriculum the future learning yeah i'm extremely worried i think the world just gets a lot more extreme and i think this is just true with ai across the board where like i think the bottom percentile students are just going to get a lot they're going to fall behind and i think the top percentile students are just going to get like extremely overpowered 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 talked to josh pd 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 i'm like i don't know this is like i think it's like an incredible tool for learning but yeah i think it's like it's kind of bimodal right i think like a lot of people are going to a lot dumber i think a lot of people are going to get smarter um i don't know what to do about that but yeah fine-tuned on gorm 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 uh are you gonna would you recommend it to someone fighting brain rot yeah totally i mean i think also like it i think the problem with tweeting nowadays is it's not not as fun once you have more than like 3 000 followers within this risk and then you're like oh no i don't care if people are mad at me or something and yeah or even just seeing the numbers and being like oh like this one didn't do as well as the right like it's no you know you know from the first 60 impressions if it's a banger yeah and then you have this desire i had a i had a post last night that like i like john and i both thought was like hilarious but like i i realized that like nobody like really got it you needed to know you needed to have like read ben thompson's like friday article to like get the joke it was this tam was too small yeah low tam um but but anyways uh you got anything else john this is no no no congrats it was fun we you know for the record 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 cool milestone and job's not finished job's not finished uh 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 yeah this is customer we enjoyed it anyway okay sounds good see you guys cheers see ya talk to you soon yeah a 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 fingers crossed double double message We got Aiden coming in.

2:30:50We got a guest coming in. How are you guys? Good to see you both. We're great. How are you? Good, good. Good to be on. I love this show. Are you celebrating today? Dude, it's fantastic to have you. And if so, what? Over the fundraise? A fundraise or just the Studio Ghibli moment. I mean, it was a massive moment for like crossing the chasm again. That's so last week, John. Yeah, you're over it. Yeah, yeah. That's like a million years ago here. You know, time moves differently inside the lab, right? Yeah. Yeah, we're excited. The team morale is like really, really good. That's awesome. And it's like awesome to see like my colleagues.

2:31:18have 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 yeah i'm so you guys i guess talk about like evaluating like 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 yeah but they know that this filter exists and they want it and that's a very very good sign i do wonder if there's like this interim moment where people are like wow snapchat's gotten really good yeah totally like what's going on here like you know i haven't used this app for a while yeah spiegel's been cooking yeah this must be tiktok yeah i mean i got a couple cold dms from people saying like hey i i ran out of images can you make one for me clearly you're making a lot of these it was like yeah i got a lot of those too people would be a good Samaritan.

2:32:17Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Uh, but I mean, uh, how did you process the moment? Did you, did you predict this and what, what was the shape of your expectation versus what wound up happening? Yeah. So I, I did not predict this to be candid. Um, you know, like we had a tool internally, um, you know, like I played around with him like, oh, 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. 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?

2:33:22And is that just a function of your development in like the product cycle or is there some deliberate strategy there? Yeah, I think, you know, I can't speak for too much in terms of like, you know, deliberate strategy but uh it is interesting where like you know to your point like for these text models we update them pretty often right like every two months or so like you know they're getting better like people are always kind of you know seeing these steady improvements um but the funny thing was like the you know when deep seek 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 i've been using like you know 4.0 from like you know uh earlier this year i use this new reasoning model like holy shit this is amazing right um 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 uh to like outsiders right yeah um or to let people that aren't as new to the product um but like you know uh 4-0 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 virality 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 so it's just like not uh because like if you were like you know listening to customers you'd be like you know providing more basically like more information for the average user in the product to be like well you should really use this for that or maybe try it again with this other thing so 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 ai is so bad at naming that I, you know, I think we've like dug our own grave here, right?

2:35:23Like internally things are even worse, right? Where like, what 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, two, restart for real. Yeah, I mean, I was laughing at it. Like, is it 4D chess? But at the same time, like you could imagine that you gave every model, like strawberry, ice cream, and like you give them cute names and then it makes even less sense. Like at least I know like 03 is a higher number than 01. so like it's probably better no you're right like yeah sometimes we don't number things like in order yeah that is odd it's like you're like it's like blueberry and up through the strawberry like i have no idea right 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 do plan to start unifying um like you know our model selection right yeah um so i think like you know soon we will have like a much simpler easier to grasp thing and even for me like you know i'm with one like testing these models all day designing them and such.

2:36:18It still looks like unclear. Can you talk a little bit about your day-to-day? What do you actually do? Yeah, I work on model design here. So I work on behavior, the way the models act, the way people experience behind use. But I also just work on general capabilities, so making the model smarter in many domains, not just narrow areas. Talk about making the model, and I don't know if you touched this, but you posted, I think it was a couple days ago you said nowadays i don't spend money without first deep researching everything i buy hand soap toothpaste lunch house plants it's just better now sure waiting five minutes for paper towel recommendations is weird but in retrospect the state makes and you and you specifically called out amazon and amazon choice here because i've wanted for a very long time to just have an amazon where every i only products that appear are companies that have existed for like a hundred years or more because like I don't want like a drop shipper who's like yeah I found the way to make this like 10 % cheaper and we can spend you know that extra margin back on ads and suddenly it's a business and so I can totally imagine a world in the future where I just go to you know chat GPT and say that I want to buy paper towels and then you guys are routing that basically based on my what you know about me as a consumer which I will pay 10 % more to get 50 % better operator buy me paper towels from a company that's been in business for 200 years

2:37:46ben franklin's paper towel but that's been but that's been you know you know people that are you know the critique has been like okay you're using this to like it's not being used for commercial search it's just being used to like generate answers to questions but then yeah obviously and i'm saying this you're not saying this but it's obviously a threat to google and to Amazon and other marketplaces when I'm going there and I'm saying, this is what I want to buy, like help me buy the best version. And it can be more aligned with my interests than an ads-based business model. I'm like, you know, kind of an extreme libertarian when it comes to like sales and such, right?

2:38:24I do think there's going to be this like really, really cool world that we move into the next like year or two here, whereas our tools for selecting like products like become like super, super smart, right? Like way smarter than me. Like they're going to be so much better than I or any other human I've ever met will be at like knowing exactly what I want, exactly like what other people love. It's just going to like increase competition, right? It's going to increase like selectivity, right? Like, you know, truly great companies who build like actual products that people love are going to like float to the surface way easier.

2:38:51And then like kind of all the like shit, like the dropshipping, 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 because 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 gibbify your dog everyone knows that you can ask it to explain like ap bio questions but uh yeah 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 the 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 where i'm 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 et cetera.

2:39:36But I think the opposite is kind of interesting too. It's like when I don't use these tools or where like, I did not have something previously in my life that would have demanded use. And I think like an example of this is like, now that I have, you know, something that like can give me a McKinsey style report and like, you know, minutes, right? Like I shouldn't be using this all the hell, like every single day, right? Like, so before I go to bed, like I like generate like a deep research. I like to remind myself, like, you got to read the deep research tonight. Like I got to like, you know, it's just like brushing your teeth or something, right?

2:40:00Yep. Totally. But remembering to use these systems is like such an important thing to me. Yeah. If you're very intentional about using them, they can make you smarter. And if you're unintentional about them and you're just like last second, like I got to send this email, like, you know, just do it for me. Like maybe that's, you know, making you. I mean, even for silly stuff, I was I was like, yes, I would like a 50 page report from a McKinsey analyst on the on the Metal Gear Solid fandom or like the history of sword art online. Yeah. Stuff that I would normally like have to puzzle together from like Wiki and YouTube videos.

2:40:31I'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. Oh, my gosh. It's just like available at your fingertips. It's amazing. As a kid, I remember like all those like, you know, like kind of fan fiction wikis or whatever. And I like dive through and they're like terrible, right? Like ads everywhere. Yep, totally. Like I'm so excited to just like remember that I can like use these things now, right? Exactly. Oh, yeah. It's amazing. Talk about how we figure out. I feel like the way people disrespect robots.

2:41:03You saw this with bird scooters. You remember there was the whole bird era where like, you know, in LA at least, like there was just entire fan pages dedicated to like throwing birds off of, you know, buildings. You posted last week, you said, I suspect in six months it'll be safer to Uber than Waymo. And going into this, you're basically saying like people are just like messing with the cars like on purpose. like is there when when are humans going to learn to respect uh respect robots and like do you have a sort of solution for this or i say thank you at the end of my prompts i love my way yeah always i like my way most like a dog right i'm like oh good boy thank you for the ride good boy 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 all a concern um but we could imagine though that as these systems get quite complex um you know we kind of care about like their internal state you know we want them to like be 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 know 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 mutually beneficial here um and i you know to be candid like i am a bit disturbed i like you know that like people throwing fruit at my waymo but i'm you know maybe even more disturbed by like watching videos of people like kicking robot dogs 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 ten 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 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?

2:43:47I certainly do. Yeah. Like, I think, you know, like, man, this is a great example, right? Like, you know, we have, like, deep research as a product. We have, like, operator. And, you know, they put it out and people still loved it. Like, and it did, like, still feel like some area that was kind of, like, you know, left uncovered. I also, you know, before I joined OpenAI, I was, like, a founder. And I was working, you know, a lot with these APIs and such. And there really was this, like, sentiment, I think, in the community where people were, like, so scared of the wrapper company label that they really did leave, like, you know, kind of low-hanging fruit, like, unpicked.

2:44:14right are they like so scared of like you know like not even of like open ai or anthropic steam rolling them um but more of just like people being like ah it's just like wrapping a language model like it's you're adding no value like no like the right rapper is a ton of value i completely agree yeah i i thought the whole rapper meme was like a vc psyop 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.

2:44:46Like that's life-changing and sets you up for so many different opportunities. So much experience with product development. I thought the rapper thing was a little annoying. Talk about humor. John has this thing where every week or so he'll say like, you know, write me a joke and he'll kind of prompt it in a way around kind of the stand-up comedians. And it's not consistently hitting yet. It's sort of like, it's structured like a joke. So you keep waiting for the, you know. It's unintentionally funny because if you read it like you're a standup comic, it will sound like you're bombing intentionally.

2:45:18And that's funny. But I'm still the one that's making it funny. The punchline gives crickets, right? Oh, yeah. Totally. But when I think about the next Ghibli moment, it would be being able to consistently generate something that makes the user laugh. And think about the magic of that experience. Incredible. I can't wait. people are i mean it's actually you know bear case for humanity is we're all just like you know generating like perfect jokes over and over and over just laughing that's when we all wirehead for sure we all go crazy yeah it turns out like the ultimate addiction is like you know humor right yeah yeah we're just laughing ourselves to death entertaining ourselves to death i will say uh you know gpt 4.5 was like a really interesting moment uh for humor for me right we're like you know i was testing this model internally a lot um like one of the ways i like kind of realized I was like, wow, this actually is like an interesting step change above like our existing models.

2:46:08It's always funny sometimes. Like the green texts were like great. You know what I mean? Like, you know, like it's long form jokes, like maybe left a little bit of desire, you know, to your point. Like sometimes it would construct something that looks a lot like a joke. And we get to the punchline and I would just like cock my head like, what? I have like no idea what you mean there. But to be fair, though, like, you know, if you asked me to like write a good long form joke and you only gave me like 500 words to do it and like 500, like, you know, words worth of thinking, I could not do it. Right.

2:46:33Actually, I would do much worse, I think, than these models. Totally. In fact, I actually don't know if I've written any great long-form jokes. You know what I mean? This is one of those things where we hold these models to a crazy standard. But I am so excited for them to get great at this. Because I do think that, to your point, this could be the next Imogen moment where people do this. It just brings joy into the world. They're having a lot more fun. Yeah. Yeah, I want that. It might also kind of solve your issue of beating up on the Waymo. If there's a friendly robot and he's telling you a joke, 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, oh like you know you smile to yourself thinking about 3.5 da vinci they just don't make them like they used to i would actually have like the bottomless pick jokes you know i mean like that yeah yeah yeah but not even in just humor but but uh generally yeah yeah you're so the temperature close you know working 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 because Sidney 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 Sidney my Sidney is easy answer for me is it was Claude Thoriopis that was like such a great model and you know an open AI model too so I know you yelled at her same man but you know ton of life to it it was I think like I coined this like phrase big model smell when it came out I was like this model like You know, if you gave me like a blind test between this model and like, you know, other models that score as well in it at like, you know, academic benchmarks, I'm pretty certain that like much better than chance I could pick a cloth three opus.

2:48:35It just was like soul to it. Right. And it's a bit hard to see these things. Like when you do regular day to day prompts, I'm just asking it for like a recipe or something. It's not going to be like, oh, my God, it's a big model. But I do think, though, it's easier to tell the difference in like model capabilities in kind of like character when you push them to extremes. Right. when you deploy them into agents that are doing crazy things, when you give them tons of context, when you have them tackle really out-of-distribution hard problems, then you start to see the creativity emerge. And this is a really fun thing.

2:49:03And I think that it's a good lesson for playing with the models. It's a good lesson also for designing benchmarks and evaluating the models too. But yeah, 3Opus is pretty great. And I think my daily driver right now outside OpenAI is Gypti 4.5. It's just such a fun model. I do feel closer to it than I do for previous models. It also feels like it is more live, if that makes sense. And are you using GPT 4.5 in a different way because it doesn't interface with, it doesn't have some of the functionality that you get from an O3 high deep research product? What does an interaction with 4.5 look like for you?

2:49:37Is that just random questions throughout the day? Yeah, yeah. Just like chatting, casual stuff, right? These models are like, you know, like great, you know, colleagues, great therapists, right? Like, you know, it's good to talk about. like this is one of those things just like you know you can generate like a deep research report you know before bed every night and just become like a way smarter person right yeah um you can also just like check these models about your life and i think become like a really well-adjusted person you know like there are like some people i talk to in sf who are like really really plugged into like you know uh 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 used i don't know who the therapist is it must be like you know 4.5 or 3.5 sonnet or somebody right um but like you know they're 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 somebody asks you like you know hopefully they don't ask you this too much but if somebody asks you like oh what do you think about the tariffs like do your eyes just like glaze over because like none of this stuff matters on like a 10-year time horizon like i was talking to john the other day and and i like sounded like so just agi pilled like as i was saying it out loud john was like you sound ridiculous but like i agree and it was this basic sense that like there's just so much chaos in the world right now politics tariffs all this stuff every you know people burning down you know teslas or whatever and then you kind of zoom out a little bit and and you sort of like understand you just sort of like look at this sort of adoption of this technology and sort of understanding the potential and it's almost like yeah none of this stuff matters because the world is going to look so so different 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 be like more locked in than i am right like maybe i should be like in a dark room like just talking to models and like you know like feeling it out but um maybe we're models maybe maybe we're maybe Maybe the OpenAI team is generating us to test on you.

2:51:41You know? Simulation goes deep, man. Like, I was going to tell you, but you know, you found out too quick. I think, you know, like when I joined OpenAI, I like tweeted this thing where when you like shoot an arrow and like, let's say you're like in outer space, right? There's no gravity and you like shoot an arrow, right? You know, the arrow is going to go forever unless it like runs into some black hole or something. And like, you know, the little degree difference 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?

2:52:12Like, and in some sense, like, you know, if I like shoot this arrow from like earth without gravity or something, and I like move my hand to the left a bit, it's like half the universe away, right? That's crazy. And I kind of, you know, believe in the same thing because we like push these models to like crazy limits, right? That like little, little differences in the initial conditions kind of like of, you know, AGI being born or like of the politics of the time or like of the like capital distribution or whatever, I think can compound to incredible differences in London. And I think that while it seems that these systems will be incredibly powerful and very robust to maybe human will at some point, I don't think that is an argument for the initial conditions not mattering, if that makes sense.

2:52:51Great. How are you thinking about just safety AI doomers in these days? It feels like the conversation kind of moved past. It feels like the doomers low-key fell off. Where are they? I don't know if people are working on, like, less wrong with Twitter as much now, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, they were telling me I was going to be paperclipped for, like, 24 months straight, not paperclipped yet. And so I'm like, okay, yeah, move on. But what's it like internally? What is it like internally? I can't say too much about, like, kind of, you know, that. Just, like, your vibe in SF, maybe. Yeah, like, I think there are a lot of sharp people that, like, care a ton about, like, this going well, right?

2:53:28Yeah, it makes sense. There's this, like, great quote, I forgot, like, that name, with a NASCAR driver, I'm going to butcher it, Mario something, right? But it's crazy at the Formula 1 level how many people think the brakes are for slowing down. And sometimes to go as fast as possible, to get this out into the world as quickly as possible to make the most economic impact, you do have to do a bit of safety. You do have to do a bit of testing. I think this should increase over time as the expected impact also increases. I think OpenAI is incredibly good at managing this. I think that our leadership have done it for a while.

2:54:02They will continue to get better at it too. And I think it's kind of a cool thing to build systems that have unexpected behaviors and can do things that maybe we weren't aware of originally. And it's an important science to figure this out before release and to build things that get safer. Yeah, I completely agree. Last question for you. do you see us having a Ghibli style moment around agents this year? Not, not necessarily at open AI, but just potentially broadly, because we've, we've talked about this on the show a bunch, but you know, people have just been promising for decades now. You're going to be able to talk to this, you know, talk to the computer and it'll book you the flight in the hotel and make your restaurant reservation.

2:54:46And we haven't had that magic experience yet. 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 on or whatever right there's some sense too where like you know ghibli is awesome because it takes three seconds to look at like an image right and be like oh wow like that's beautiful like i've 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 it in three seconds to 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 slightly harder in the limit to tell the difference between like you know capable systems and very very capable systems right just as as models get better 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 nines of reliability scaling problem that as you like kind of like push these nines out and as you like make them more reliable in many more contexts at some point they are just doing like a sizable chunk of economic labor right um so you know do i expect a ghibli moment i'm not sure um but i do expect like you know these things to to just provide a lot a lot of economic value if that makes sense yeah that makes a lot of sense beautiful well thanks for joining this is fantastic yeah this is great we gotta have you back soon those are awesome 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 keep it up.

2:56:18Yeah. Thanks. Likewise, guys. Talk to you. Boom. Psy's gone. Bye. um fantastic yeah yeah great conversations the opening night team ah good guys um and and and fun that they can talk as freely as they can given their role you know obviously it's very important and valuable company and yeah it's actually if you think about it 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 stream a live show high stakes that's you know high stakes but it's fun it's great but it's And I thought they had fantastic answers. It makes me very optimistic.

2:57:03Let's go through another autopilot, Numeral, which puts sales tax on autopilot. They do. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Backed by Benchmark. Numeral's a new sponsor on the channel. And we want to give a shout out to Numeral. Shout out to Nate, Sam, and Matt. For those that don't know, Numeral works with over a thousand different e-commerce and SaaS businesses, including a few of our favorites. Ridge and Graza and many, many more. Um, if you're running an e-commerce business or SAS company, and you would be absolutely silly to be on 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.

2:57:49Yeah. Yeah. No, it's actually insane. It can be extremely expensive to do sales taxes pre numeral. So, uh, big shout out to new and a lot of go check it out yeah you want to get ahead of this early i think a lot of founders both in e-com and sass aren't really taking this yeah seriously until they're at scale totally there's real money on the line so start early start often and uh when 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 Newsmaxing. So Newsmax is up 110 % today. It IPO'd yesterday. It's up 1 ,900 % in two days from a$10 price.

2:58:31It's over$200 now. The price is all over the place. It's a 26-year-old company, digital media company founded by Christopher Ruddy in 1998. It has been variously described as conservative, right-wing, and far-right. Newsmax media vision include cable and broadcast channel Newsmax TV. and I can't even keep track of all these right-wing media companies because there's so many. Like the Truth Social, there's Parler, there's Gab and Newsmax and a whole bunch of these. I'm so happy we never discuss politics. But we will discuss an IPO. We will discuss an IPO. Especially one that's popping. I saw some funny jokes about how CoreWeave priced exactly at$40, which is what you want to do to not leave any money on the table.

2:59:16Newsmax obviously left a ton of money on the table by pricing the IPO so much lower than the price that it's floated at now. They could have, in theory, sold shares and put a lot more money on the balance sheet at a lot lower dilution. So it's being valued beyond$30 billion right now, which is about 1x. That's great. Well, if they hit a stumbling block, maybe Jeremy Giffon will have to come bail them out. He's hiring an investor, and we want to highlight it here on the show. He says, you'll be the first hire working with him on the most interesting, complex, and asymmetric special situations in tech.

2:59:51You'll be a good fit if you, one, trade annual letters like Pokemon. Two, are high-paced and biased to action. Three, are unapologetically money-motivated. Four, have created and sold a product. Ideological minority at a top 10 school. Debated risking it all with an SBA loan. Bought stock before you could drive. Work in PE but long for hire MOIC. work in VC but long for hire 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 Schwartzman defines 8s as those who can follow marching orders 9s as those who can execute and strategize and 10s as those who can sense problems design solutions explore new directions and make it rain 8s and 9s 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 absolute dogs at an exceptionally high standard so go hit up uh jeremy

3:01:08and switch your business to ramp.com and go hit up Jeremy and let him know that the technology brother sent you, the TVPN sent you. This undoubtedly a dream job and working for Jeremy will change your life. Yeah. He used to be a tiny man, but now he has big aspirations. That's true. He worked for Tiny. He worked for Tiny. um always been a size lord yeah um but uh some of the smartest people in the world call jeremy to get advice before they make important decisions that's true and so being able to work for him is like uh many people have said it'd be like getting 2 000 mbas at once yeah so it's like buying shares in core weave in 2004 yeah right yeah it's like buying solana in 98.

3:01:59Yep, 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 Giffon obviously does special situations. If the, if your company raises too much money from VCs, you get, you build a decent business, but you're just underwater on the pref stack. Uh, he will come and unstuck, unstick your business. And it's somewhat adjacent to kind of injury lawyers if you have a cap table accident. So we put up a fake billboard on the 101 that said cap table accident called Jeremy Giffon.

3:02:37Put his real phone number on there. He didn't like that. So he censored it out before he posted it. But if you're looking to buy a billboard, go to AdQuick, adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. So you can be a startup, an agency, anybody can go and leverage ad quick. And you'd be silly not to. Yep. And did you, I think you threw this in the chat. Angry Tom says, it's over. Meta just announced Mocha, a new model that turned text or voice into super realistic talking characters.

3:03:13There's no way to tell anymore. And we actually saw a fan of the show turn us into Lego characters, which is very cool. And I think this like repurposing and gibbification, we've only seen the very beginning of it. And it is interesting. We talked to Samir about the VTuber thing. This type of model, obviously it's very expensive, very slow right now. But in the future, you could have a model that's running on your live stream and we could be Lego characters the whole show one day if we wanted to. There's going to be people that watch the whole show Ghibli mode. Ghibli mode. You'll be able to toggle it in the sidebar.

3:03:46Yeah, just like a color filter. Yeah, I thought this was interesting. I think Meta is struggling from a lack of quality posters on their team. Yeah, they don't really have a... Nobody's pumping this in the timeline. Well, they're probably over on threads, and Zuck is posting on Instagram. He's actually very good at going direct. He posts the direct-to-camera videos when he launches new stuff. But I want more. I thought some news that was interesting. So Brett Goldstein launched a new all-in-one CRM today on the anniversary of Gmail launching. They launched on April 1st. oh yeah april 1st so apparently back in the day uh they launched and nobody actually believed them because 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 fools joke today very sad which i fell for trays yeah 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 all he was just teeing himself up for a joke that he wanted to be a serial serial entrepreneur with a moat yeah 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 email everything from like to-do lists 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 launching products in general on april 1st when every company is doing fake product launches is I get the, you know, sort of like launch on.

3:05:38Underrated, you think? I don't think it, I think potentially, you know, you just got to keep launching, right? So like Brett should just keep launching over and over and over. Notion should figure out, you know, how to launch new features, things like that. But anyways, cool to see these two launches. You know, Superhuman was fantastic when it launched. I remember the FOMO from everybody of like, how do I get an invite or whatever? I really want a new AI first email client. And I know that, yeah, everyone's going to say like Gmail will kill it. Google will kill this in a few years. But like I'll pay you$100 a month for two years straight.

3:06:16And like I think that's a reasonable business because I'm drowning in email. They're not filtered properly. Like there's like these buttons now where it's just like, do you want Gemini to summarize this? Like it's crazy. No, I can scan. That's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for a better spam filter. Yeah, it's crazy that Gmail values a newsletter in the same way as like, you know, some critically important thing. It's crazy. I mean, they do put it in like a separate box sometimes, but it's very tricky. It's not good. And yeah, I mean, I want to almost find a product. I bet it exists. I want to find like a new RSS reader that I can basically take all my newsletters and just put there.

3:06:55So it's like a different app essentially because like I don't want it in my email inbox at all. And then I want a proper unified inbox because Gmail and Chrome now want me to use like different Chrome profiles with different log. And it's like, it's just getting so confused. I just want all my email in one place. Anyway. Yeah. How'd you sleep last night? I slept. You went to bed at. I just accidentally. I like that. That's good. That's drama. That's drama. Hopefully that's not copyrighted. No, no, no, no, no. Vivaldi's 300 years old. We're good. We're good. How did you sleep? Tell me, Jordy. 88 oh how do you sleep john i slept 75 nights that fuel your best days turn an e-bed into the ultimate sleeping experience folks go to eightsleep.com use code tbpn use code tbpn get 350 off uh i'm very excited we're going to be having mateo uh yeah co-founder of eight sleep on the show soon i'm gonna break it down we're gonna make him our official sleep coach yeah not just a sleep expert for the show you You know, the eight sleep's so helpful, but at this point it's doing everything it possibly can.

3:08:04And clearly I need to do more. 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 uphill. It's pushing you harder. It's 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 long. up uh between four and five daily yep 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 whatever it takes anything for the show yeah anything for the show should we close out with this uh this duarkesh patel post i thought I thought this was interesting.

3:08:48It's a long one, but I thought it'd be good to read through. He says, that feeling when Guern casually articulates a more insightful framework for thinking about your life's work than you ever sketched out yourself. Guern writes six days ago, and there's a screenshot. You can see it as an example of alpha versus beta. When someone asks me about the value of someone as a guest, I tend to ask, do they have anything new to say? Didn't they just do a big interview last year? And if they don't, but they're big, can you ask them good questions that get them out of their book? Big guests are not necessarily as valuable as they may seem because they are highly exposed, which means both that one, they probably have said everything they will say before, and there's no news or novelty.

3:09:31This is really important when you're doing interviews. You need to get people off their book, and I think you're very good at that with asking people about the current thing, essentially, because there's a 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 their book. Nobody's asked Senra why our great allocators cannot invest in the right life partner. That's true. Good point. In this analogy, alpha represents undiscovered or neglected interview topics, which can be extracted mostly just by finding it and then asking the obvious question.

3:10:10Usually by interviewing new people, beta represents doing standard interview topics slash people, but much more so harder, faster, better, and getting new stuff that way. That's us. Lex Friedman podcasts are an example of this. He often hosts very big guests like Mark Zuckerberg, but nevertheless, I will sit down and skim through the transcript of two to four hours of content and find nothing even worth excerpting for my notes. Friedman notoriously does no research and asks softball questions. Going hard on legs. Oh, it's rough. And invites the biggest names, he can get regardless of overexposure.

3:10:41And so if you do that, you will get nothing new. He has found no alpha and he doesn't interview hard enough to extract beta. So he's sort of the high expense ratio index fund of podcast interviews. I think that there is, I think this misses the fact that like for a lot of Lex Rieson's audience, like you might not have heard that Mark Zuckerberg and it's fun to just listen to him for a couple hours. So I still think there's value there. Anyway, Sarah Payne on the other hand, which was a guest on DoorCash and blew up, seems to have been completely unknown and full of juicy nuggets and is like winning the lottery.

3:11:10You can make your career off a really good trade like Payne before it gets crowded. Great trade. And we got to have her on. We're taking her. She's coming on our show next to our cash. Just kidding. But you're welcome to come opine on the current thing, Sarah, if you'd like to join. But we're not going to do anywhere near as deep as to our cash. I want to hear what Sarah Payne thinks about Unitree, robotics. Yeah, break it down for us. Break it down. What's your P do? However, if another successful podcaster has her on, they will probably not discover pain is their most popular or growth productive guest ever.

3:11:41The well is dry. Pain may have more to say someday, but that day is probably closer to five years from today than tomorrow. And that's a very good point. So a good interviewer adopts a optimal foraging mindset. Once you have harvested a patch of its delicious food, you have to move on to another patch, which hasn't been exhausted yet and let the original patch slowly recover. So a great guest for Dwarkesh's blog would be, say Hans Moravec or Paul J. Warbus. Moravec hasn't done anything publicly in at least a decade and is fallow. While Warbos has been more active and in the public eye, but still not much and is such a weird guy that just about any question will be interesting.

3:12:17Reich was also a good guess because while Reich is very public in some senses, he's written popularizing books even, he is still obscure. Almost none of what he has published is well-known and he is involved in so much fast-paced research that even the book is now substantially obsolete and he has a lot of new stuff to say. And Reich will have more stuff to say if revisited in, say, two years for an update. So a harvester will be making a note to revisit him if the current crop of interview candidates in the pipeline is looking marginal. A difficult and mediocre guest would be Tony Blair. He can surely say many interesting things about the current geopolitical context in his work since being PM, but he is super experienced career politician who has survived countless question times and may eat you for breakfast and exploit you for ulterior purposes rather than vice versa.

3:13:03Similarly, Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella are tough nuts. There's meat there, but are you willing enough to bring down the hammer or will you settle for a mediocre result that mostly just fills space and is not a must watch? A bad guest might be someone controlling and extremely PR savvy like Mr. Beast. This is the sort of guy who will give you a bad interview pushing his book shamelessly and then might wind up spiking the interview anyway if he felt he wasn't getting enough out of it and just drops it as sunk cost. Though it was weeks of work on your part and blows a hole through your schedule and that's not his problem.

3:13:37That's why we only spend two minutes texting guests and then no minutes prepping so that we just have them on for 15 minutes and try and get some - We do it live. Throw them off. No, I mean, I - It's interesting feedback. No, we try to, it's less interesting to talk to a founder and have them only talk about their business because it's just like, you sort of know - And you've heard it elsewhere. Yeah, you've heard it elsewhere. It's on their website, et cetera. It's much more interesting to kind of get their opinion on the market broadly. But this is great. In other news, Circle has officially filed for an IPO.

3:14:11Oh, that was on the Polymarket ticker. Yeah, so this was cool. So I actually have the Polymarket pulled up right now. Yeah, did you jump? And it had been sitting at a week ago. Is that yes, was that 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 breakdown tomorrow cool and uh 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 Perrion.

3:14:58Give us five stars on Apple Podcasts. Be creative. You can put an ad. You can do whatever you want. Send it to us. Tweet it at us. We will send you this delicious bottle of Dom Perrion. We are going to make a decision by the end of day tomorrow. We will also send you this Z-Biotics to go with it. There you go. Today was fantastic. It was great. I can't wait for tomorrow. I'm so happy it's only Tuesday. Yeah, me too. We've got three more days. big shows thanks for watching thank you folks have a great day bye