SHOTS FIRED!! OPEN AI Explodes

Episode 520: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) are dropping an EMERGENCY POD. They’ve been on Twitter all weekend–ignoring their families–just to bring you this breakdown of the chaos going down at OpenAI. No more small boy spreadsheets, build your business on the free HubSpot CRM: https://mfmpod.link/hrd — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (2:00) Act One - Sam Altman gets fired from OpenAI (6:30) Act Two - The Board vs The Team (9:30) Act Three: A new CEO is crowned (12:30) Sam Altman: the man, the myth (18:00) Who is Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever? (32:30) Emmett Shear enters the chat (48:00) The boys make predictions (50:00) Takeaway: The best and worst of Silicon Valley in 48 hours — Links: • Sam Altman’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/sama • Greg Brockman’s Blog - https://blog.gregbrockman.com — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ • Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant • Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing • Small Boy Newsletter - https://smallboy.co/ • Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/ Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com/ Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. — Other episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  911, what's the state of your emergency? Hey, the tech industry got flipped upside down over the weekend. I was staring at my phone the whole time. I haven't been so invigorated by any story in like five years. My wife might divorce me because I haven't looked up for my phone. I've just been on Twitter all weekend. Sam, how are you doing right now with this OpenAI story?

• 0:21Sam Parr?

  It's been awesome. The real winner through all this is Twitter. Twitter's been great for this, right? Twitter just thrives through all types of controversy.

• 0:29Shaan Puri?

  Twitter, AKA the Silicon Valley group chat, has been awesome. Awesome all weekend.

• 0:35Sam Parr?

  It's been awesome.

• 0:46Shaan Puri?

  I thought there was a chance that you were just like out duck hunting and I would come on today and you'd be like, what happened? So, you know, I thought there was a small chance.

• 0:54Sam Parr?

  I'm a Sam Altman fan. I've loved this guy. We've talked about him for years. I'm a big fan of his. This is, and I love drama. I love gossip. I read TMZ every day. And so now I've got TMZ on Twitter. It's awesome. Of course, we're talking about OpenAI and Sam Altman getting fired on. We're recording this Monday. He was fired like Friday, but there's like news happening in real time, like constantly, right?

• 1:15Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. Like just as of an hour ago, there's news. So we don't know exactly where this is going to all land. We're going to try to get this out as soon as we can. We had a whole other episode planned today. We canceled it. We just said, let's do, let's do this right now. What's our reaction? What is our reaction to the OpenAI stuff that's going on? All right, Sam, where do you want to start? I think we should take this character by character, go through all the players that were involved. And I think we should give them kind of a grade and they can get it, you know? If they get an A or an A+, that means they came out a big winner here. You could get a C, you can get an F. I think we should grade all the players of how this has turned out for them in the, you know, 48 hours so far that this happened.

• 1:58Shaan Puri?

  Oh, do you want to first give a little timeline summary recap?

• 2:01Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so I think you should do it because you've been paying attention to it more closely. But it all started Friday at like, what, 3 o'clock?

• 2:07Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. Friday afternoon.

• 2:10Shaan Puri?

  There's, I get a text message from Ben Levy. He just says, wow, Sam Altman, what the fuck? Holy shit. What? And I, but he doesn't say the, the news yet. And then I'm like, what? And then he's like, Sam Altman, out. But he like misspells out. Then he like, does the stars not out? Out of what? Where, where is he out of? It, it was unfathomable that Sam Altman would get fired, right? Like, uh, and the same way that, you know, I would don't expect to wake up and see that Elon Musk has been fired from Tesla. Uh, you don't think, you don't wake up and think that Sam Altman's going to get fired from OpenAI, which is the hottest private company, probably the most important startup in the world that has gone from zero to 90 billion in valuation in just a couple of years here.

• 2:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it was shocking. It started because, uh, OpenAI, uh, uh, I don't even know. Our guy put this in military times. So what's this 248? At 248, OpenAI announced a leadership transition. They said that Sam Altman is departing as CEO because he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board and their CTO, a lady named Mira. She was become the intermittent CEO. A little over an hour later, Sam Altman said, I loved my time at OpenAI. It was transformative for me personally and that he's excited for what's next.

• 3:22Shaan Puri?

  Well, let's pause there because the first phase here is wild speculation. So speculation is, oh my God, shock and speculation. So I can't believe this happened.

• 3:32Sam Parr?

  Like an April Fool's joke.

• 3:33Shaan Puri?

  It must have been something bad, dude. You know, he must be, you know, this was a fraud.

• 3:40Shaan Puri?

  Did they unleash AGI? Was there a huge privacy like leak? Uh, that is causing him to have to step down because this was a security issue that he, he overlooked. Is this, there's like this accusation from his sister about sexual assault when they were kids? Is it because of that? And everybody assumes it's gotta be the worst. Until one hour later, or when is it? One hour later? Yeah, I think, uh, a couple of hours later, Greg, who was the, the chairman and was essentially his co-founder, uh, of OpenAI, the, the lead technical guy at the time, uh, at the early days, sends this message to the team. Hi, everyone. Super proud of what we built, starting in my apartment eight years ago.

• 4:22Shaan Puri?

  We've been through tough times and great times together, accomplishing so much, doing what should have been impossible. Based on today's news, comma, I quit. Wishing you all the best.

• 4:30Sam Parr?

  The I lowercase, a lowercase I.

• 4:34Shaan Puri?

  And um, and so then now we're we enter phase two. Phase two is wait, Greg's on the board. Wait, Greg is a stand up guy. If it was something really bad, Greg would not have just quit with him. There must, this must not be as bad. Is there some kind of power play jealousy coup that's happening here? Is Sam being wrong? And instantly I see the court of public opinion shift. And the court of public opinion says, look, if Sam did something really effed up, Greg would not have just followed him out the door and quit. Unless Greg was in on it. So still a possibility, but more likely, it seems like Greg doesn't stand for this reasoning.

• 5:15Shaan Puri?

  So maybe we don't stand for this reasoning. And all of a sudden, you see the Sam army come forward. People who are startups from Y C when he was the president of Y C saying, look, uh, I don't know what happened here. But Sam is like, he went to bat for me. Uh, so many stories came out that were all the same variety. I don't know if you saw these, they were all the same variety. It was a startup saying, we had a time when we were screwed. I emailed Sam to be like, hey, here's what's going on, blah, blah, blah. Sam quickly replied with just something like, hey, make sure you, you know, you're communicating or like, um, you know, just do your best. There's only what you can control. But behind the scenes, he went to war for us.

• 5:55Shaan Puri?

  We found out later that he called all of our investors, threatened to dangle them over the balcony if they, if they screwed us. And he saved our ass and didn't even mention it that he was doing that. Just in the background, he went through and like saved us. And we found out later that this was true. So I don't know what, what happened here, but you know, I ride with, with Sam.

• 6:15Sam Parr?

  Well, an equally big deal is one time I had a customer service question and I DMed him and he replied and he solved it for me. So.

• 6:23Shaan Puri?

  And a lot of it was, he replied fast. He replied when he didn't have to. He vouched for us when he didn't have to.

• 6:30Sam Parr?

  Man, he, he did. By the way, that was out of joke. He did reply to me like I had like a error. I couldn't figure something out. I was like, I'm just gonna DM Sam and he replied with like the, the, he, he solved my problem. But yeah, the guy seems like a great guy.

• 6:42Shaan Puri?

  And his brother comes out and says, to all the people that are gleefully hating today, please know you're betting against the wrong guy. Okay. So that kind of foreshadows act two. Act two is the weekend. So Friday, you get the crazy news dump. Now the weekend you have news that. People start, even inside the company, start to stand with Sam because they say, if there was something bad, tell us what it is. You don't have to say it publicly, say it internally. What does it mean? He wasn't candidly consistent or consistently candid with the board about what? Did he lie? What did he lie about? How bad was it? You're taking our leader out, our two leaders

• 7:22Shaan Puri?

  out now. And wait, who's the board? Oh, the board is like this combination of, of, of people who have no, they didn't build this. They don't even own equity in this, but they're deciding our future because the board is basically one legit technologist, this guy Adam D'Angelo, who, who was the co-founder, CTO of, of Facebook back in the day. And then he co-founded Quora after that. So you have Adam, legitimate character in Silicon Valley. And then you have a bunch of other people that nobody's ever heard of. One of them is like that actor's wife. She's like, you know, an academic somewhere, never had a job. Justin Gordon Levitt. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You know, the, the guy from Inception. You know, like, great.

• 8:07Shaan Puri?

  The guy from Inception, not Leonardo DiCaprio.

• 8:11Shaan Puri?

  Not even him. He, he's not the one on the board. And not even him. Exactly.

• 8:17Shaan Puri?

  So you got like, you know, you got her, you got a couple of the characters here. But nobody that is, again, no equity, no skin in the game and no track record building or operating, you know, complex companies. So that seems a bit weird. They're getting no data and rumors come out. Sam's going to have a new company by Monday. Sam and Greg are going to create an OpenAI competitor by Monday, which is just like a pretty badass threat to throw down. And so, once the team starts to say, they start to tweet out these emoji hearts saying, I basically, I stand with, with Sam. I don't know all the details, but if you don't come out with any details explaining why you did this, I'm, I'm going to probably

• 9:00Shaan Puri?

  leave with Sam. And so the board starts scrambling and they start trying to renegotiate with Sam to maybe bring him back. And his conditions are like, cool. I'll come back. Y'all all got to resign and clear my name. You got to bring back Greg and we're going to put a, put a new board together. That's like the board of my choosing. The board doesn't want to do all that. And so they're kind of stalling, they're going back and forth. He goes back to the office with a guest pass on his badge. And he says, this is the last time I'll ever enter this office with a guest pass. And then at the last minute, we hear the news, the news come out. It looks like Sam's coming back. And then Sunday night it hits.

• 9:43Shaan Puri?

  There's a new CEO in town, Emmett Shear. My former boss, the former CEO of Twitch is now suddenly these, the guy for OpenAI. Sam is out. He's in shock that that was like, you know, what I thought was the end. And before I went to sleep thinking, okay, we're going to record this pod. I thought that was the end. Emmett releases an announcement on Twitter saying basically like, hey, hey, I'm here. Here's my 30 day plan. I wake up this morning and there's more news. 600 of the 700 employees of OpenAI have signed a petition saying, if you don't bring Sam and Greg back and all resign, we're all leaving. 600 of 700.

• 10:28Shaan Puri?

  It was actually 500 as of 3am. And then it got to 650 as of, as of right before recording this. That's basically 100 people woke up and also signed the pledge, including, by the way, the guy who was supposedly behind the entire coup. Ilya, the main technologist, the scientist who was on the board, who, who was the guy who sent Sam a Google Meet link and was like, hey, can you join this right quick? And Sam's like, sure, let me just pop on, let me just get my microphone. And he pops on and then gets fired. The whole board is sitting there and they executed his ass. Ilya comes out and signs the pledge and says, I'm sorry for what I did.

• 11:06Sam Parr?

  What? And even tweets out, he goes like, I want to get the band back together and make it right. I'm sorry.

• 11:11Shaan Puri?

  Oh yeah, I regret what I did and you know, we'll try to right the wrong. And then on top of that, before, before that, that, that they happened, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft comes out and says, hey, we still support OpenAI. Um, sure.

• 11:30Shaan Puri?

  Look forward to beating the new guy Emmett, which is just a really funny way of putting it. Uh, cause apparently they were not consulted and only told one minute before the firing happened that, uh, one minute before the press release went out that Sam was fired. Um, so they were blindsided, even though they put, they've agreed to confund $10 billion into this company and own 49% of it.

• 11:51Shaan Puri?

  And then he says, oh, and good news. Sam and Greg now work for Microsoft.

• 11:57Shaan Puri?

  And this is just like the ultimate checkmate move. Uh, because Sam, I don't know if you know this, but Microsoft, not only do they own 49%, not only do they, uh, provide all of the funding, which OpenAI requires to fuck to, to exist. They could pull that at any minute now, uh, cause a lot of that funding is in, uh, compute credits. So basically server credits. But not only that, they also have the license to, to all the technology. They, they have the model, the weights, the infra, they have everything that they need to basically hand Sam and Greg the new, the like, all of the code and be like, you don't have to start from scratch. Here you go. And so, uh, in the end, they got everything. They got everything they wanted.

• 12:41Shaan Puri?

  They got the team, the technology, the money. They got everything.

• 12:45Sam Parr?

  The most interesting part of all this though, is the characters because this is, everyone keeps saying this is succession in real life and it is. It's the, it's one of the greatest things to happen to, in Silicon Valley in the last, you know, 15 years. It's a, it's a beautiful storyline. We thought Sam Bankman was a, was a, was a gift from the gods in terms of podcasting. This is actually, I think, more interesting. It's not played out yet, so the story is still gonna like, keep going. But let's talk about the characters. Let's talk about Sam Altman first. We talked about him, well, we've talked about him a ton, but this guy, basically his background is he's from St. Louis, my hometown. Give a shout out to St. Louis. Then he moved to Silicon Valley to join Y Combinator at the age of like 19 or 20. He started a company that had like mild success.

• 13:27Sam Parr?

  I think it raised a fair amount of money and sold for $50 million, of which he walked away with $5 million at the age of like 21. And using that $5 million, he parlayed that into hundreds of millions by investing in things like Airbnb. And B Dropbox, things like that because he worked at Y Combinator eventually becomes president of Y Combinator at the age of 27.

• 13:46Shaan Puri?

  Two, two quotes from, uh, from Paul Graham about Sam Altman. And remember Paul Graham is somebody who, uh, invested in Dropbox, invested in Airbnb, invested, you know, he has seen the founders. He knows everybody in Silicon Valley. He's met Mark Zuckerberg. He's met all these guys. And so for him to be most impressed by Sam Altman means something. And he says, Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back five years later and he'd be the king.

• 14:17Shaan Puri?

  That's the first one. And then he goes, the second one he goes, I met Sam Altman many years ago when he was 19 years old. He was a Stanford dropout, which by the way, Harvard or Stanford dropout is the number one resume. Stan, that is the number one, like item. If you go to Harvard or Stanford and you don't drop out, you have intentionally chosen to not have the number one credential you can have, which is Harvard dropout or Stanford dropout. Um, so he says, within meeting, uh, within three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking, ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19. In three minutes. I don't know what Sam Altman did in three minutes,

• 14:57Shaan Puri?

  but I would love, I would love to know. I am fascinated by people who are special. They're the kind of the freaks. I love it in sports, but you can see it. You could see LeBron James at age 17 was like a freak of nature.

• 15:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah. He had like the equivalent of a 42 inch vert. You know, whatever he did, it was like, yeah, it was like an eighth grader dunking.

• 15:16Shaan Puri?

  There's another story that's kind of remarkable. I thought this is kind of tells you about this guy's character. So, uh, Sam Altman's gay. He came out when he was like 15 or 16, I think. You said something about he's from your hometown of St. Louis. There's some story, which is that he came out and not only did he just come out as a teenager, which alone takes some bravery, he then like, Hosted like a pep rally or something like that.

• 15:36Sam Parr?

  He went to John Burrows. So in St. Louis, where I'm from, every, most all high schools are either Catholic or some type of Christian, whatever. And he came out as being gay, but he like went to a, or I think he created like a club, some type of like gay club. And at a Catholic school, they're like, no, we're not, we're not about this. And so I think he led like a walkout, like a school walkout.

• 15:55Shaan Puri?

  That takes a lot of like a little leadership.

• 15:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he's a very courageous guy. And then, but for like the last 15 years, pre-open AI, he was, even though he was president of Y Combinator, he was still a little bit behind the scenes. And even though that he was running this huge incubator and he's a powerful guy, it still felt like, well, why would Paul Graham say this about this kid who still has yet, it still has unfulfilled potential? Couple of years ago, he starts working on OpenAI and then all of a sudden we're like, oh, all right. The guy was plotting and it's, it's, he's played the long game. Now we understand why everyone like looks up to this guy. And OpenAI, OpenAI has basically taken over the tech industry and went from zero to, you know, one of the biggest companies in the world in what, five years or something like that?

• 16:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. So he leaves the most prestigious job in Silicon Valley, which was, you know, president of YC. He's dean of Harvard, dean of our Harvard. He quits suddenly because the nonprofit research organization he co-founded, you know, he felt like that was the right opportunity. And he did that. Suddenly it was surprising. I remember at the time I had the thought, I think I've said this before here, which is that I had the thought like, if Sam Altman just quit being the president of YC to go join OpenAI, how can I justify coming into work tomorrow? Like, why would I not also go to OpenAI? Whatever OpenAI is, I knew nothing at the time. But all I knew is if that one of the smartest guys in the world went and did that, um, maybe I should go do that too.

• 17:21Shaan Puri?

  And honestly, that would have been the greatest career move I ever made if I had done that. Because, uh, you know, OpenAI quickly, you know, changed its structure from nonprofit to becoming, you know, like a capped for-profit thing and, uh, became worth, you know, nearly a hundred billion dollars in a, in a short period of time, creating ChatGPT, the fastest growing product of all time to get to a hundred million users faster than anyone.

• 17:43Sam Parr?

  And let's go to his two partners because when he started it, there's a bunch of weird stories that I don't, that aren't entirely out in the open, but it seemed like there was something where Elon Musk funded the business or helped fund the business at first. He invested $40 million and he also helped to recruit and convince a few of Sam's co-founders to join. Is that right?

• 18:03Shaan Puri?

  That's right. So basically, when people say, okay, great, Sam's this, you drop him on an island of cannibals, he comes out, okay, cool. But what's his skill? What does he do? And basically, it was like on anything about strategy or ambition. But this is what Paul Graham said. He said, if there's, if there's ever a question on strategy or ambition, I default to what would Sam do? And, you know, this Paul Graham is like 20 years older than Sam saying that. So that's kind of impressive. So what did he do? He basically has a conversation with Elon Musk and the two of them shared the same belief, which was that artificial intelligence was going to be a big deal, that we would be able to one day realize AGI, which is artificial general intelligence. Think about it as, you know, super intelligence

• 18:47Shaan Puri?

  when, when, you know, AI is generally smarter than, than humans and kind of everything that we, you know, most of the things that we try to do. So the, they both said, that's also kind of scary because we don't know what's going to happen on the other side of AGI. So we should fund research in a nonprofit that will study, you know, fund the research around this so that we could safely create AGI instead of having AGI that kills us all like the movies. So what Sam did was he hosts his dinner in Palo Alto and, you know, he gets Elon Musk there and he gets a few other smart key people. One of them was this guy, Greg, who was at the time the CTO of Stripe, which was before OpenAI, was the most impactful

• 19:29Shaan Puri?

  big startup in the world. So they gets the CTO of Stripe, he gets this guy Ilya, who's like the lead research scientist in AI at, at Google. Essentially, he's the, kind of like one of the founding fathers of, of AI and deep learning. And so they get a bunch of these people around the table and they basically, Reid Hoffman is there and they basically are like, we need to do this. Elon basically just agrees to fund forty million dollars into the nonprofit. So Elon puts his money where his mouth is. Sam, you know, helps recruit, put the whole deal together, puts things, the people together. On the way home, Sam's like, hey, Greg, let me give you a ride back to San Francisco. So they drive back to San Francisco and what Greg says, what Sam says is the first thirty minutes, it's an hour long drive from Palo Alto to San Francisco.

• 20:12Shaan Puri?

  He says, the first thirty minutes, Greg just asked me rapid fire, like a hundred fifty questions. Then the next, then at the thirty minute point, he goes, okay, I've decided I'm gonna do this. I'll quit Stripe and I'll join OpenAI. Um, whatever this thing is that you're creating, I will join it. Um, so the next thirty minutes, they started making their plan, like, okay, what are the first things we need to do? Which tells you something about Greg, uh, to do, again, a crazy career move like that, to, uh, you know, just have independent mindedness and conviction in something that quickly. Um, and tells you something about Sam's persuasiveness and ability to like, put this thing together. Then, uh, what Elon says is that he recruited Ilya out of Google, which was very, very hard to do. And he says it's the reason that him and Larry Page, founder of Google, don't talk anymore.

• 20:56Shaan Puri?

  Uh, you know, he used to be friends with Larry. He used to famously Elon didn't own a house for a period of time and he would just crash at friends' houses. And so he would crash at Larry Page's house all the time. He says that they got into arguments about AI and that he was really worried about AI and Larry was like tech forward and was like, no, it's gonna be amazing. And, um, and then he says that, you know, he got pissed when Larry called him a specist, but basically like you are, you're just all about humans. And Elon was like, what the fuck else am I supposed to be about? Are you not? That scares me even more. I'm gonna create OpenAI now to like defend against Google, which owned DeepMind, the number one player at the time.

• 21:35Shaan Puri?

  And so, uh, Elon basically poaches, Elon and Sam poach Ilya out of Google, which took a lot of money and a lot of persuasion, I believe, to get him out. And that he becomes, when he joins OpenAI, the research community who worships this guy basically followed and they got all the top researchers to join. And that is the founding story of OpenAI.

• 21:55Sam Parr?

  It's that's amazing, right? I mean, I just, this is like drama, movie drama shit of just that that dinner, that drive home. I mean, this is perfect. And we're gonna have to have Justin Timberlake stars, one of these guys.

• 22:09Shaan Puri?

  And so this brings us to, I think, the second character that we should talk about, this guy Greg, who I believe is the unsung hero in this whole thing, because Sam Altman is kind of like the hero, he's the hero, right? He get, he's the CEO, he gets backstabbed, he gets wronged, he's the martyr, he had to suffer. People come out and they're all supporting Sam and sharing, like, it's like a funeral for Sam on Twitter the other day. He's like, oh, I remember that once Sam responded to my customer service request, like, oh, I was on a bike once and Sam, you know, he moved over in the lane so I could go by, right? Like, everybody was just sharing their favorite Sam memory. And then, nobody's really talking about Greg. Now Greg, in my opinion, shifted this whole fucking

• 22:52Shaan Puri?

  thing. Because at first, it was like, damn, I don't know what Sam did, must have been horrible, blah, blah, blah. As soon as Greg came out and was like, yo, on this, I quit. And they're like, Greg's the number two, he's on the board, he was the chairman of the board, I think. They're like, if Greg doesn't think this was right, I don't think it's right. And so Greg, single-handedly, like shifted the perception, the narrative around this whole thing. And the board didn't counteract that. And so I think Greg was the real hero of this. And then what I did was, there's some amazing blog posts that anybody who's a real nerd about this stuff, if you just really love kind of like the lore, the canon of Silicon Valley, you gotta go read this. Greg

• 23:34Shaan Puri?

  has blog posts up on his blog about, about the early days of OpenAI. And I think he blogged-

• 23:43Sam Parr?

  The early days of OpenAI last week.

• 23:47Shaan Puri?

  No, this is eight years ago. This thing started a long time ago. And he talks about like, they didn't have an office. He's like, all right, just come to my apartment. And he's like, here's the four of us in our apartment. He's like, I didn't know anything about machine learning. So I did two things. Number one, I asked Ilya, what is the number one textbook about machine learning? I bought it and I studied it religiously. He's like, I read everything there was to know about deep learning and machine learning. He goes, and this is the former CTO of Stripe. He's not like a non-technical dude. He's known as like this incredible, one of these 10x or 100x engineers. And he says, I didn't know anything about deep learning, so I just dedicated myself to go read, you know, page one, chapter one of the book, and I'm gonna take notes and I'm gonna ask a ton of questions.

• 24:31Shaan Puri?

  He goes, two, while these guys were setting up their research stuff, I did everything else. Like, oh, your back looks a little uncomfortable. You need a pillow? Oh, you guys thirsty? I'll go get smoothies. And he's doing literally all the like intern grunt work those first few months to get them set up. He's like, and it basically was alternating between research would do something, then research would get blocked. And I would say, oh, what's blocking you? And they're like, oh, it's taking forever to run this training center. I have to like organize this data. And then Greg would stay up all night and basically like do the engineering, because people don't realize engineering and coding is very different than AI research. And so he's, he would do the coding that would make the researchers go faster. He built basically all of the infrastructure so that researchers could do great work.

• 25:14Shaan Puri?

  And, and even with GPT, like there was a story of like, you know, they ran the model and the output was kind of like, ah, like it was so-so. And then Greg like locked himself in a room for two weeks and he came out and suddenly GPT worked. And people were like, what the hell just happened? And he's like, yo, I blacked out and I did that. And so he has these great blog posts and photos of those early days that I thought was kind of amazing.

• 25:38Sam Parr?

  So Greg was born in 89, which puts him around 34 years old now. He joined Stripe in 2010, became CTO in 2013. So he was CTO of Stripe when he was about 24, 25 years old. And then he go, he left Stripe to co-found OpenAI. So he was only 26, 27 when he started working on OpenAI. It's pretty amazing. These guys are freaks. It's wild. It's unreal. And by the way, what did you give? You forgot to give a grade. So Sam Altman, he's gonna win no matter what in all of this.

• 26:10Shaan Puri?

  So I think he was gonna get like, let's say a B plus, right? He was gonna get a B plus. Why? Because you got fired. You got backstabbed by your own, your own people. That not, not great. Not a great thing to happen. Two, they haven't said what you did, but you did something, right? They weren't just gonna fire you for nothing. So like, uh, you did something. We don't know what it is. Unknown. Okay. Can't give you an A for that. Uh, it looked like he was gonna get the job back, which would have been great, but then he didn't. So ah, didn't come, it didn't, didn't happen in the end. So even though you got some, some support from your team, didn't happen until the Microsoft thing happened, which was literally like, imagine playing a game of chess.

• 26:52Shaan Puri?

  And you're like, oh, I think I got this guy. Uh, you know, I have a five piece to three advantage here. His queen is out. And then you look up from the board and he's holding, you know, a Glock to your head. And that's what happened to Ilya here. Basically, it's like, he's, now he's at Microsoft. They have the license to all of the technology. They have all the training data in the world. Cause guess what? 90% of computers are PCs that run Microsoft, that run, you know, Windows. Uh, he has all the funding in the world. He got paid. I'm sure there's, you know, like Satya had to bring, uh, Sam and Greg in before the stock market opened on Monday, just to kind of like, not have this be an issue for Microsoft, uh, that they got screwed here. They put a bunch of money into the,

• 27:35Shaan Puri?

  into a, into a lame duck. And so he got everything. He got the tech, 600 of 700 people follow, are saying they're gonna follow him there. So he got the team. He got the money. He got the funding. And he got it all in 48 hours. And he, and they were basically like, yeah, they're gonna lead a new subsidiary of Microsoft. That's gonna do open, uh, that's gonna do research on AI. It's like, oh, you mean open AI part two? So, so that now he has to walk away with an A plus, right? Like you can't, you can't knock that. And, and he's, he's got the good guy label unless they come out with some new information that's, that shows that he did something F'd up, which something has to come out.

• 28:12Sam Parr?

  There's only three options, in my opinion, of how the story for Sam ends. Option A is it's a it's an unforgivable sin. I think that that is not likely, but it is possible that what he's did is just, well, you're done. Option B is he goes back to OpenAI, becomes CEO. I think that was more likely than not going to happen. I think. But option C is he stays at Microsoft, and I think in a decade or five years, he becomes the CEO of Microsoft.

• 28:39Shaan Puri?

  Which is now worth $5 trillion or something at that point.

• 28:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 28:42Shaan Puri?

  2.7 trillion today.

• 28:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so he's he's gonna turn out okay. So now this other guy, Ilya, he looks like a schmuck here. So he's he's a loser here. He looks he looks like.

• 28:54Shaan Puri?

  Ilya gets an F.

• 28:55Sam Parr?

  He gets an F. There is a little bit of likability with him where it's like, oh, you're just a brilliant scientist, artist turned, who was who was you were you were manipulated in here because you're just a scientist and you don't understand human interaction. So if he plays.

• 29:11Shaan Puri?

  So we should explain one thing, which is what are the possibilities of what Sam did that might put Sam in the wrong or Ilya in the right? So there is what you're calling the unforgivable sin, which I would say, by the way, not a great track record of anything being unforgivable. But let's say the really bad personal stuff could be the could be one reason why. In which case, I would say that's a completely fair reason to remove him. If they did an investigation, found out that was true, that they're in the right for removing him. That's defensible, but they just haven't said anything. Reason number two is safety concern. So Ilya is famously like, the reason he's doing this is literally he's worried about AGI. He doesn't want the world to end.

• 29:54Shaan Puri?

  And what initially people thought was Sam says all the right things about safety, but also Sam is like, you know, capitalist. He's a entrepreneur. He's he's he's a he's a hard-charging guy and he's running forward here. And maybe they're saying, slow down. He's saying, no, we don't need to slow down. And they're saying, Sam, this is too risky. And he's saying, no, no, no, this is not risky. We gotta move forward. That's what it looked like the situation was. And it was made crazier by the fact that, I don't know if you saw this, he did an interview the day before, and he said something like this. He said, I've been lucky to be in the room four times now. The last one was just a couple of weeks ago.

• 30:36Shaan Puri?

  Where I saw something that pushed the veil of ignorance forward and the frontier of techno- technology to us. And like it pushed the veil of ignorance away and the frontier of technology to us. So basically he's saying like, there's been like three or four mind blowing moments, you know, about AI. I've been lucky enough to be in the room. The last one happened a couple of weeks ago. Just wait till you see this. It's going to stun people. And so some people are like, yo, did they like create the monster? Super intelligent? Like, did they create AGI? You know, has AGI been achieved internally? And he like randomly posted on Reddit not long ago. AGI has been achieved internally as like a joke, I guess. So some people said, maybe they've stumbled into something and this guy's going too fast.

• 31:20Shaan Puri?

  And it's, you know, like the scientists, you know, around the nuclear bomb saying, no, no, no, we gotta like destroy this thing or we gotta like slow down. This is getting too crazy. That would have been the other reason, which would have been again, defensible, especially given that OpenAI's charter is specifically says, we're not about increasing shareholder value. We are about, you know, safely building AGI to benefit all of humanity. So that is their charter. And if they thought this guy's moving too fast, putting that at risk, I would say they are completely in the right to do so if they believe that to be true. The bad part is again, they've come out with no evidence that that that is the case. They haven't explained themselves. So nobody believes them that that's true. The third reason, so you know, you have the really bad thing. You have the safety argument.

• 32:03Shaan Puri?

  And the third thing is essentially it's just a power play. They're annoyed by him. They don't feel like he listens. They feel like he's getting all the credit or he wants fame and fortune and power play. Let's get this guy out of here and we will, we get to run and own this thing. And that's like a jealousy driven thing. And I don't know which of those is the most true. I don't know what you think, but uh, you know, it seems like.

• 32:27Shaan Puri?

  None of those are perfect explanations.

• 32:30Sam Parr?

  I think I'll say what I think maybe later, but it's number three. I think I think it's number three. Um, let's talk about let's, let's come back to the board, but let's talk about Emmett Shear because you are one of the handful of people or, you know, however, many people who have had a relationship with him and understand. And so last night at 1am, Emmett basically said, I've been the guy that's been picked. He put out this really good tweet where he explained what he was doing. The funniest part I thought was he's had the job now for 12 minutes and he did a wonderful job of saying the word are. He goes, our products are going to be this. Our team is going to do this. We are going, and it reminded me

• 33:12Sam Parr?

  of that meme where there's a guy who he goes, hey, I made this and he hands it to a stick figure and the stick figure goes, you made this? And then the first guy leaves and the stick figure looks at the thing and he goes, I made this. And it's the whole point about on the internet where where people steal stuff. I actually think Emmett's a great guy. So I'm just, I'm just messing around, but I thought it was amazing how he's like 12 minutes later, this our company is going to do this. What do you think about Emmett in this role? Um, he's been getting a lot of criticism because he previously shared online that he's like, I actually think we need to slow things down and a bunch of people are like, this is ridiculous. Don't slow down, whatever. But he seems like a really thoughtful, great CEO. Am I wrong?

• 33:54Shaan Puri?

  So Emmett, you're right. I worked with Emmett for about two years, got to sit with him, you know, in hundreds of meetings and see, you know, how he thinks and, you know, hang out with him, have beers and just kind of talk to him. He came on the podcast. I talked to him for an hour there about AI stuff.

• 34:10Sam Parr?

  You always said he was really thoughtful.

• 34:12Shaan Puri?

  He's extremely intelligent in a broad way. So, uh, most people are not that intelligent that you meet. You meet some people that are like, you know, oh, they're like above average. Then you meet some people, as you say, the oven burns hotter. And it's just very clear. Like he's just got more horsepower in his head than most people. I think that's great. I think, you know, uh, as much as we like to say that like hard work is what matters. Like, yeah, you know what also matters? Like, uh, intelligence is also really, really strong attribute. It's like, you know, like, um, you know, Steph Curry's got great skills, but like LeBron is 6'8", 250, right? Like, you know, size and speed matter.

• 34:49Sam Parr?

  I hate when people downplay intelligence and I'm like, guys, let's just admit some people are born smarter, just like some people are seven feet tall. There's a reason why 20% of Americans who are seven feet tall and below the age of 30 are in the NBA. You just, you're better. You're better at that particular thing.

• 35:04Shaan Puri?

  And then the same way that height helps you with basketball, intelligence helps you with running companies, right? Like that, that's a thing. So Emmett is extremely intelligent. He is amongst the most intelligent people I've ever met. So that's the, that's the first thing. Second thing is he's got depth and breadth. So a lot of people are really, really intelligent in one specific domain. It seems like this guy Ilya might be one of those where he's just extremely, extremely technically intelligent. But it seems like in the game of, you know, soft power and politics and, and, you know, people and all that, he, you know, had a pretty boneheaded way of doing this that didn't, didn't work out. To his own tweet, "I deeply regret what I did. It was handled very poorly." So, you know, I

• 35:48Shaan Puri?

  think, you know, some people can really, really smart in one technical domain, but they're not, don't have a breadth of, of intelligence. I would say that Emmett is wide and deep. So he's technically very strong. He was a great engineer. They built Twitch, one of the, you know, the best live streaming products. And it was him and this guy Kyle. Kyle went on to build self-driving cars and Emmett ran Twitch for like, whatever, 18 years or some shit like that. So, you know, between Justin TV and Twitch. And so he's very good technically, which is important because it's a deeply technical product. He, you know, he said to me, the other thing, one thing when I was talking about AI, he's like, he's like, yeah, like, once you understand how transformers work. And I was like, well, let's stop there because I have no idea how transformers work. So like, the rest of

• 36:31Shaan Puri?

  your sentence, because he said it like, yeah, it's easy. I mean, just once you, once you get how transformers work, it's like, you know, blah, blah, blah. Just anybody could go watch a video.

• 36:39Sam Parr?

  We've had a smart, a couple of smart people in this pod and they've tried to use analogies because I'd be like, I don't understand what you're saying. And they'd use an analogy and I'm like, can you please use, use an analogy for your analogy? Like, I think we had Balaji on here and he was like referring to the Battle of the River of Thames in World War II in order to like describe crypto. And I'm like, guy, I don't know what the Battle of Thames was. Like this doesn't make sense to me.

• 37:02Shaan Puri?

  Right, right. Exactly. You know, I'm asking for a Lunchable over here and you're making gourmet.

• 37:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Shaan Puri?

  Let's, let's do this right.

• 37:10Sam Parr?

  What, what's his soft skills like?

• 37:12Shaan Puri?

  Well, his soft skills, I, I would say when I experienced him, which was like, you know, whatever he's been, he'd been running the company for over a decade as CEO. Uh, I thought he was good, not great. So for example, I think he always knew what to do. Like if you caught him when he was calm, he would give great advice on the people's side of how to handle something. However, in the heat of the moment, he was prone to falling it, falling into like debates about semantics, about words, about data that would make people feel like shit and he would like win the battle and lose the war type of thing with people. And so I don't think he was great with that. But I also think Twitch was like a bunch of very like, kind of, it was a community product with a bunch of very like,

• 37:56Shaan Puri?

  sort of woke people at, in the company that were like very touchy feel about stuff. Uh, you know, I think Obin AI is gonna be his type of people, you know, like, Emmett was better in meetings where all the people were engineers and product, product people. He was worse the more that the people were, you know, um, we got legal, PR, Cubs, you know, marketing, you know, those meetings went worse for him, I thought. And so I think he'll have less of that here. Uh, but he also is like biology, like he'll reference the battle of the bulge. Like he'll reference, you know, uh, well, the judicial system in Ireland back in the 1500s, what they did was really interesting. It's like, dude, why do you know this? He's like, well, I've read up on all the judicial systems. I was very interested in how, how governing has changed over time.

• 38:40Shaan Puri?

  It's like, that's your casual reading? He's like, yeah, like, uh, I'll just, I, I don't know. Is that, is that weird? And it's like, you know, somebody's really good when they, when they don't even realize it's weird, when the thing they do is like really fucking weird. And so, uh, he's, has a very, very wide set of knowledge. Now, he's getting kind of, uh, labeled as a, uh, a decel. I don't know if you've seen this, like a decelerationist, meaning like somebody wants to slow things down. Cause as soon as he's got named.

• 39:05Sam Parr?

  Basically a suit.

• 39:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so kind of like a suit or like a doomer, you know, like, oh, this is this guy's anti-technology, which is pretty silly. And it's like, you know, if he could be technology, he would, you know, like, he's a technologist through and through.

• 39:20Sam Parr?

  They're calling the guy who invented Twitch a boomer, basically.

• 39:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's stupid. And so, you know, a friend who a mutual friend described it well, they go, because people dug up all his old tweets. And he said, if if it open it, if opening is at a 10 right now in terms of speed, you know, it should probably be at like a one or two, because, you know, you just don't want this cat to get out of the bag. And so I want to read you what he, I have the transcript of what he said on our podcast, which when he came on about AI. So I asked him very simply, I said, is AI going to kill us all? And he goes, maybe. I go, it's interesting. You say maybe it's going to kill us all because like you're pretty like pro technology and everything. You're an optimist. And he goes, well, it's because I'm

• 40:06Shaan Puri?

  an optimist that I'm scared. If I was pessimist, if I was like, oh, this AI thing's overhyped. It's technology is not that impressive. It's just a nice little magic trick. It's nothing real underneath it. If I was pessimistic, I would be less worried. I'm optimistic. I am extremely impressed with how these work. And I see a pathway where this is going to get better very fast. And at some point, it's going to be able to self-improve. That's very scary because we don't know what happens on the other side of that. He's like, it's because I'm optimistic. And the second thing he said was, he goes, here's the analogy. You know, in biology, there's like, there's now like, ways that you can synthetically do things. You could, we know we can edit genes, for example, and we could like, add an extra leg to a sheep, or we could like, modify a virus. This was like, you know, COVID, right? Like, you could modify a virus and make it more spreadable.

• 40:51Shaan Puri?

  And we all saw with COVID, how dangerous that capability is that like, this thing, you know, if this leaked from a lab, that's really, really bad. Like, you know, that was a big mistake that technology made that like, you know, fucked up the world for a few years. And so he's like, You know, we have regulation. I think everybody kind of agrees. We should maybe not go super fast and make it easy for somebody to like print smallpox in their home, right? Like, we should maybe not give that capability to everybody. And maybe we should like slow down to make sure there's some oversight to we so that we don't do something really bad that like creates a super virus. He's like, people get that when it comes to biology? They don't really get that when it comes to AI. He's like with AI. Here's the thing. AI is really good at like, the one thing you need in order to be really good at AI,

• 41:36Shaan Puri?

  at developing AI. He's like, AI can code. It can write code. It can read everything there is to know about a subject in an afternoon, become absolute world expert at it. And then it could translate that into action. It can translate to writing code. It can also design chips. Yeah, it doesn't do either of those two things perfectly right now. It's not, it's not amazing at writing code. And it's not amazing at designing chips. But it can do them. It's, it's within the zone of things that AI can be good at, the type of things that AI can be good at, which means that over time, it's going to be able to write code that designs AI and write, you know, and design chips that make AI better. And once that thing can improve itself, it's going to get fast. It's going to get

• 42:17Shaan Puri?

  really amazing, really fast, faster than anyone can expect. And maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it all works out. But also, maybe it doesn't. And that's like, he's like, even if I think the probability of a really bad thing happening is low, it's, the consequences are so bad. We're not just talking about like a virus that's kind of like screws up your computer, like gets like, you know, even like a pandemic that gets people sick. We're talking about this could destroy like, he says, like, it could destroy all of the value with the light cone, which I don't even know what the light cone is, but I don't want that. Right? So he's describing like, even if it's low probability, we should just be really, really careful about that. And like, make sure we don't screw the whole thing up. And a friend.

• 43:00Shaan Puri?

  Reshot on one thing, they go, they go every saying like Emmett's gonna wanna like slow this down and stop it. He's like, no, no, Emmett's smart. Emmett knows the, the game theory of this, the prisoner's dilemma. If you go too slow, somebody else will create AGI before you because you, you slowed down to zero. So somebody else will get there before you who may not share your

• 43:20Shaan Puri?

  moral beliefs around safety. So you can't go too slow where other people get there first, you don't share your, your safety views. But you can't go so fast that you don't actually build a safely. There's a middle ground to seek. And so I think that's the best description of this where people are trying to label him as one thing and knowing what I know about him, that's just not true.

• 43:38Sam Parr?

  Well, let's go like through rapid fire of like some other story points. Well, and we'll make that quick. And then also we've been there of what we think will is gonna happen. One quick story point for you, if you like.

• 43:50Shaan Puri?

  We gotta do final grades before we do stories. Final grades. So the, the board, what do you, what do you grade at the board?

• 43:55Sam Parr?

  Oh, they're fucking losers. They're the worst. They, they look horrible. They're gonna get,

• 43:58Shaan Puri?

  You got an F.

• 43:59Sam Parr?

  Like.

• 44:00Shaan Puri?

  If it stands for fucking loser.

• 44:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Yeah. Is there an FL? They're the worst. I mean, it doesn't matter what the truth is. It's all about perception and they look like the worst, including Adam D'Angelo, the founder of Cora. Right now, he looks horrible. So F. They get an F. Do you agree?

• 44:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, agreed. Emmett, what do you give Emmett? He's 12 minutes on to the job here.

• 44:22Sam Parr?

  TBD. C. He, he's actually, actually, it's actually like a D or a C at the moment. He's getting dragged, I think, which isn't fair. But no, he, he looks like he's a loser here because of perception.

• 44:35Shaan Puri?

  Right. And what about?

• 44:36Sam Parr?

  He's taking the hero's job. Like it's, it's hard to look good regardless of how amazing he is, right?

• 44:42Shaan Puri?

  Right. And what about Satya, Microsoft?

• 44:45Sam Parr?

  Um, he gets a B. He looks pretty good. I mean, he, he's, he's the man. I mean, he's kind of made a resurgence for Satya or for Microsoft. I think that, um, I think there's a real world where Bing actually catches up to Google in terms of search and Microsoft is going to become just an even bigger company than they, they already are. So yeah, I mean, he's a, he's a, he, him and Sam are the masterminds.

• 45:08Shaan Puri?

  I gotta give him an A+. The dude, you know, mobilized over the weekend and before the markets opened and could hit Microsoft's stock, he had basically acquired OpenAI for negative $100 billion.

• 45:25Shaan Puri?

  He aquihired OpenAI, which is incredible. And so now he got OpenAI out of the nonprofit capped profit structure. It's just super for profit inside Microsoft. He got the key talent, you know, Sam, Greg, all of the key people, 600 of the of the key people. And now they just own the whole thing instead of 49%. That's that's an A plus.

• 45:52Sam Parr?

  He crushed it on this one. He's the man.

• 45:55Shaan Puri?

  So let's do let's do the storylines.

• 45:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, here's one quick storyline. Have you heard of Fairchild Conductors? Do you know what that is?

• 46:01Shaan Puri?

  I've I've heard of it, but I'm not a history guy. So what's the story? There's isn't there something like the the traitorous eight or something? What is that?

• 46:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so so basically, there is the there's a big company called, I think it was called Shockley Conductors, and they made conductors computer chips in the 60s in Silicon Valley. People were pissed off at the guy who owned it, William Shockley, I think his name is. He was brilliant, but just a pain in the ass. And so these eight guys said, hey, you got to bail or we're bailing. And the guy, the CEO goes, see you. And so these eight people went and started Fairchild, which was basically the equivalent is like Nvidia. But back then in 1960.

• 46:38Shaan Puri?

  First Silicon Valley, right? That was like the that was the seed round of Silicon Valley.

• 46:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and they were fame. Their culture was famous because they were casual. So it was like where nerds could come and be casual and where like the best actually best ideas actually won. And that was where the whole like culture of Silicon Valley arguably started there. And then the offshoot of Fairchild Conductors was basically IBM. So IBM was founded by one of the founders of Fairchild. Andy Grove, the guy, the famous manager of, I think he was the CEO of IBM. He came from there. The founders of Sequoia Capital, Kleiner and Perkins, I think, might have spun out. I mean, like, basically, it was there's just all these people. But the story of the treacherous eight is what they're called, is very similar to this story. And so if you're interested in this type of like stuff, and you and you could actually go and read that book,

• 47:28Sam Parr?

  and you could see a lot of similarities between what is going on now. So this is like our version of that. And so it's going to end well, I think, for Greg and Sam, because I it ended really nicely for the the treacherous eight. So that's an interesting.

• 47:41Shaan Puri?

  By the way, my prediction is that they they unwind this whole thing and they revert back to OpenAI. By the way, that's my like, it hasn't happened yet, but I think the final step now, now that Ilya signed the pledge being like. I quit and I'm also gonna go work there. It's like, what is the point of even having the OpenAI entity? If 600 of the people, including all of the leaders, are gone? I don't think they want to be inside Microsoft necessarily. So I think what's

• 48:06Sam Parr?

  No, no, no.

• 48:08Shaan Puri?

  I think this was the final straw and by the end, I bet by the end of day today, they get a whoopsie daisy undo on the whole thing and Sam is back as CEO of OpenAI. And they just, the board quits and they get a new board. That's my prediction, by the way.

• 48:24Sam Parr?

  And I think, I believe, I believe that that prediction, I think, is the same. I think there's long tail predictions here, which is new startups aren't gonna want to have board of directors. I actually think that's the wrong takeaway. Brian Halligan from HubSpot, he wrote, he's like, no, the takeaway shouldn't be to not have a board. The takeaway should be have a good board. And I think so, but I think that potentially like the governance structure of companies might actually change significantly. Because people are gonna be like, they're gonna, they're gonna have PTSD from just hearing this story. And that actually is gonna have downstream effects that are quite large and in a weird way, it could even impact like the venture capital industry. I think that is a real possibility.

• 49:06Shaan Puri?

  I totally agree, and I think it's so stupid. So right now, there's so many startups that are reading their, their governing documents about the board and thinking through, do I need to change my board? Here's my public service announcement. Don't worry, bro. You're not OpenAI. You're not Sam Altman. And your board is also not these schmucks either. And nobody cares. And like, you know, for a startup, like, don't worry about your governance structure right now, like, you should be doing the standard vanilla things of, you know, put competent people there and then don't worry about it too much. Like, you need product market fit. You don't have this problem. In the same way that like, when you hear what's going on with like Uber or Facebook, it's like,

• 49:50Shaan Puri?

  you're not Uber and Facebook. You don't have the same problems that they have. Don't suddenly start spending your energy over there and take your eye off the actual main problem that you need product market fit. You need growth.

• 50:01Sam Parr?

  I think the takeaway here is OpenAI's board was stupid. I say that was actually a strategic mistake, it seems like, on Sam Altman's part. Also, I think the whole nonprofit shtick, that was stupid too. TBD if I'm gonna be right on that, but as of now, it's look, it would have been a lot simpler. Maybe if this is just a bore, or this is just a normal board where they have equity in the company.

• 50:23Shaan Puri?

  They started with a good board. They started with Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and all these like legit players on their board. And then one by one, they all quit. So basically like Elon quit because things weren't like, they weren't listening to him. And he took his ball and tried to run home. Reid Hoffman quit because he started a competitor. Another guy quit because he wants to run for president. Another person quit, it's like, they're basically five of the original board members quit for different reasons. Either starting competitors, or conflict of interest, or running for president, or whatever. And this is what they got left with.

• 50:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so hopefully that gets changed. What are any other takeaways? I think what we're saying about this was the best and the worst of us.

• 51:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that was kind of my big picture takeaway. Like, I feel like this was the best of Silicon Valley and the worst of Silicon Valley all in the same weekend. You know, the best I thought was things like, you know, what Greg did when he was like, yo, I'm out too. I quit, even though they tried to, they wanted to retain him, they weren't firing him. It's like, yeah, that's a real co-founder, right? That's, that's a, that's a ride or die, sort of ducks fly together moment. And I thought that was, that was badass. I thought that was the best of us. And then I thought the worst of us was like, this like stupid board that has no skin in the game, that doesn't know how to communicate, that didn't like handle this well, just fumbling and bumbling, and removing a founder from their, removing basically the greatest founder alive, you know,

• 51:45Shaan Puri?

  outside of Elon Musk, from their company that they created for what seems like no reason. And if there is a reason, you gotta like. Say it, and even if you say it in a way that wasn't like, doesn't get you sued like, you know, maybe that's why they're not saying anything, but you have to at least tell your team, you have to give more than what they did. They handled it better than what they did. And if it was so bad, then don't negotiate with him to come back. Right? Like, if it was that bad, that he shouldn't have 24 hours later been in discussions to come back. You know, so the board, I thought was, you know, the worst of us. I thought, you know, Twitter was alive and popping, and it really did feel like it was the Silicon Valley group chat. That was kind of the best of us. And the worst, worst of it was like, you know, it felt like

• 52:26Shaan Puri?

  Gossip Girls all weekend. And that's kind of lame. And there's a bunch of, you know, like speculation and wasted energy. And, you know, like, I saw these Twitter spaces going on for hours and hours of people just like, discussing like, you know, it was a Real Housewives episode, and they can't believe that Jenna said that. Right? Like, it just seemed like, you know, it wasn't, it seemed like gossip. And I thought that was a waste of time. You know, I thought there was a whole bunch of things that were kind of like, the best and the worst showed themselves in the same weekend. You know, maybe, you know, it could be that there actually is a legitimate, you know, crazy safety concern, and like, this guy was going too fast. And, you know, this Ilya guy was maybe the hero, and was pumping the brakes, even though it screwed up that his own economics. If he really was standing for something that he believed in, right? Like, it could be that

• 53:10Shaan Puri?

  it was that. Or it could be that it was a jealousy power play and take him out, right? We don't know. But I just thought there was a whole bunch of best and worst. Another one was like, just this instant labeling, like, these like, tribes, like, I don't know if you've seen this, like, E slash ACC thing?

• 53:25Sam Parr?

  Is that the Ecel and Dcel?

• 53:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 53:28Sam Parr?

  What is that?

• 53:28Shaan Puri?

  Basically, there's, there's a whole bunch of people in the Twitter bio that had E slash ACC. And I've been seeing this for months. I have no way, I didn't even know what the hell this was. But it's, you're an effective accelerationist, right? So it's basically like, kind of a play on the effective altruism.

• 53:45Sam Parr?

  Altruism.

• 53:45Shaan Puri?

  Or whatever altruism that Sam Bankman Fried was doing.

• 53:47Sam Parr?

  That's pretty stupid, I think.

• 53:49Shaan Puri?

  One is basically like pedal to the metal, you know, tech forward, progress forward, technology optimist. And it's like, that's the cool club to be in. And then anybody who's like saying, hey, slow down, you're a D cell, which is like, you know, it's the D word, basically, it's a slur, it's an insult. And to me, this was, again, it's the worst of us. It's the, it's like, people in Silicon Valley make fun of politics. It's like, oh, I'm not left or right. It's not that simple. It's not Republican, Democrat. I'm not, I don't fall into these stupid party, you know, tribes that are just blindly, you know, following the herd. And it's like, we're doing the same thing. This E cell, D cell shit is the same thing

• 54:27Shaan Puri?

  as Democrat, Republican, red, blue, left, right. It's an oversimplification of a massive oversimplification of what's going on. And so I thought that was kind of the worst of us, too.

• 54:40Sam Parr?

  Final prediction. My prediction is in the next 24 hours, all this is going to be undone, and things will be back to normal. That's my prediction. Is that yours, too? Maybe we'll give it 48 hours, but I think at this rate, 24 hours.

• 54:53Shaan Puri?

  When I was in second grade, my class had a field trip. And they said, they told the parents, I said, hey, you need 20 bucks to come to this field trip. So my mom gives me $20 in the morning, and I go, and I'm excited about the field trip. I don't think I'd ever been on a field trip. This is my first. And they're like, hey, okay, put your thing over here, sign your, give me your signed waiver, and put your 20 bucks. And I'm like, looking around, I'm like, where did my 20 bucks go? It was right, this is my desk, it's not here, I'm looking under the table on the desk, I check my backpack, I'm like, what the hell, somebody took my 20 bucks. I can't go on the field trip now. And so I go to the teacher, and I'm like, miss, like, somebody stole my $20. And she's like, oh, my God, stealing,

• 55:36Shaan Puri?

  stealing money from a kid? Like, that's not okay. And she's like, you sure? I'm like, yeah, I was right there. And so she turns the world upside down. She starts, she's like, hey, blows the whistle, she's like, everybody, sit down. Who has the money? And it's just silence. Nobody raises their hand. And she's like, okay, we'll try this a different way. I'm gonna put a jar outside and we're gonna walk out one by one. And I want the $20 to be in the jar by the time this is done. No harm, no foul. Everybody walks out, everybody walks in. She comes back, jar's empty. And she's pissed now. She's like, okay, I gave you a chance to do this clean. I gave you a chance to do this publicly. Now we're not going on the field trip, guys. Guess what?

• 56:19Shaan Puri?

  And, uh, and I'm like, oh, my God, this is like getting the field trip canceled. This is crazy. Not just for our class, she tells the teacher next door. She's like, we don't earn, we didn't earn this because there's been, you know, one of our core values has been betrayed here.

• 56:33Sam Parr?

  And where was the $20?

• 56:36Shaan Puri?

  And then I'm like, I gotta go to the bathroom. And I get, I get up and I'm like, can I go to the bathroom? She's like, yeah, sure. I get up and I feel this like scratchy feeling in my sock. And I'm like, I reached out and I have like, I put the 20 bucks in my sock this morning. That's right.

• 56:55Shaan Puri?

  But here I am.

• 56:56Sam Parr?

  Drug dealer, dude, what are you doing?

• 56:57Shaan Puri?

  Here I am. And now I'm like, what do I do? I'm like, the class is gonna be so mad at me if they realize this is in my sock the whole time. The teacher's gonna be so mad at me if she realizes that I accidentally did this. I didn't mean for all this to happen.

• 57:14Shaan Puri?

  And so I went to the restroom. I took the 20 bucks, put it in the toilet and I flushed the toilet. I went back to my seat.

• 57:22Sam Parr?

  Did you really? Did you really do that? Is that really how that ended?

• 57:27Shaan Puri?

  No, that made for a better, better story. But I did hand it to her and she laughed it off. And then we went on the field trip. But I thought it'd be a better story if I went the other way. But that thing did happen with the sock and it wasted half of the field trip day. And, uh, that's all I feel, Ilya feels right now, where he's like, I did not mean for all of this to happen. Like, this got way bigger than I thought this was gonna get. And, uh, whoops, can I just like, give you this 20 bucks? We pretend this never happened? And that's what he's trying to do right now. And, uh, you know, more power to him. I've been, I feel you.

• 58:01Sam Parr?

  All right, well, we're gonna see what happens. That's the pod.