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

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (04:17) - SoftBank's $40B OpenAI Deal (19:09) - Inside Sam Altman's Firing From OpenAI (01:10:57) - Intel's New CEO Plots Turnaround (01:25:01) - Luxury Show-Jumping (01:29:08) - David Senra (02:03:51) - Samir Chaudry (02:18:35) - Will Depue (02:30:56) - Aidan McLaughlin

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, April 1st, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, Jordy, the capital of capital. This show starts now. We got a ton of news. OpenAI is worth $300 billion now. Hermes is going back to their roots and focusing on horse saddles, both equally important stories in the world of technology journalism. We're going to take you through it today. And we have a bunch of great guests for you. We got David Senra coming on the show, Samir from Colin and Samir. We're going to talk about creator economy. He just did a fantastic interview with Mr. Beast and Mark Zuckerberg, putting two of the greats together.

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  Where do you go from there?

• 0:39John Coogan?

  And, and it's OpenAI Day. They're raising 40 billion at 300. We got two folks from OpenAI joining the show, Will and Aiden. So we'll talk to them, probably not about the financing, probably about the product and all the technology that they're building. But we're very excited for that. Anyway.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  We'll be ranking their top 5,000 Ghibli memes.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  Yes, and we'll be pressuring them into buying watches on bezel.

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  Undoubtedly. Anyway, let's kick it off. Do you have any breaking news? I think we should address, we are officially at 32,000 followers, right? We have doubled.

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  Another doubling.

• 1:11John Coogan?

  Another doubling.

• 1:12Jordi Hays?

  Another doubling.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  The show is bigger than ever. We're taking over. So we're at 32.3 now. And that means that it's a Dom Perignon episode technically, but we are shifting our strategy. So these Dom Perignon episodes now are in partnership with Zbiotics, one of my friend's companies, actually. They are not an official sponsor, but I do love Zbiotics. And Zbiotics, I actually introduced the founders. Stephen Lamb, I went to high school with. I met Zach, the CEO, through YC. I think he did the early YC, like the startup school, sent out an email, hey, I'm looking for people. And Stephen was looking for a co-founder wanting to get in the startup community.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  Kind of introduced them and they hit it off and they've been running this company for like half a decade now. It's great.

• 2:00Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 2:00John Coogan?

  Almost a decade. I guess they went through Y C same.

• 2:03Jordi Hays?

  And people are really obsessed with this product.

• 2:05John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. So if you're not familiar, Zbiotics, it's a pre alcohol probiotic drink designed specifically to kill hangovers, basically. It was hugely popular at weddings. People buy these and they hand them out to all their guests. You take them. It really, it can't make up for a lack of sleep. So you will be tired, but it really does a great job of like killing that like terrible feeling.

• 2:26Jordi Hays?

  No, and it's great. And if we were going to be drinking this bottle of champagne today would be perfect because it's the middle of the day. You don't want to go home at the end of the day with a hangover.

• 2:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. And so we, we, we want to shift from, from drinking the Dom Perignon on stream to giving away bottles of Dom Perignon.

• 2:44Jordi Hays?

  And this, this Dom actually has a sponsor itself, Slow Ventures.

• 2:51John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 2:52Jordi Hays?

  They sent it to us.

• 2:52John Coogan?

  They sent this to us.

• 2:54Jordi Hays?

  Good friends of the show.

• 2:56John Coogan?

  So thank you to Slow. We're going to pass it on.

• 2:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, also, if it goes to a founder, yeah, that's, that's kind of, that's kind of regifting can, you know, be a little bit taboo, but in this case, it's really a celebration.

• 3:07John Coogan?

  I think you're a founder. You listen to this, you listen to the show, you win the bottle of Dom Perignon.

• 3:11Jordi Hays?

  And we'll get you a warm intro to Yoni.

• 3:13John Coogan?

  And then you send this to Sam Lessin. Yeah. It'd be like, hey, I want to pitch you. And it's just a snake eating his tail at Ouroboros of Dom Perignon.

• 3:19Jordi Hays?

  What do we?

• 3:20John Coogan?

  This could be the most story bottle.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  How are we going to give it away?

• 3:23John Coogan?

  I wanted to see a super creative five star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I think that's fun. If you've already left one, get a friend's phone. Leave another one.

• 3:34Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 3:34John Coogan?

  Screenshot it, send it to us. Just tweet it at us and the one that we think is the most funny, we will, we will get in touch and mail this to you. How about that?

• 3:42Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 3:43John Coogan?

  You gotta be over 21, obviously.

• 3:45Jordi Hays?

  And at T B P.

• 3:47John Coogan?

  It's kind of a contest. So I guess there's no, no cost to enter, no purchase necessary.

• 3:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:52John Coogan?

  But I guess this isn't a purchase anyway. So I don't know. Just please don't sue us. Like, we're just trying to give out a bottle of Dom. It's fun. I don't know. People get worried about these like contests, like they need to be like regulated and stuff. Like I, I buy it. I want to be a good Samaritan.

• 4:07Jordi Hays?

  They're not regulating Dom giveaways yet.

• 4:10John Coogan?

  They're not, not yet, but if we get any bigger, they might. Anyway, let's go through the SoftBank deal, OpenAI. Masayoshi Son got the deal done, is putting in $10 billion.

• 4:23Jordi Hays?

  Our leverage king.

• 4:24John Coogan?

  Leverage king. Yeah, and people are like, oh, he's using debt. So the Wall Street Journalist's article, this hit piece against debt, which we love here. They say, how is SoftBank funding its mega investment in OpenAI? A lot of debt. Like, that's a bad thing. Baby, he's going long. He's going turbo long. We love it. We love to see it. Masayoshi Son's company said the first $10 billion would be financed by borrowing from Japanese bank Mizuho and other lenders. Of course, we've seen this stuff before and SoftBank has a lot of assets, so it actually makes sense, but we'll talk about how they're collateralizing it in a little bit. What you got?

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  No, I was gonna say, so to be clear, this is a staged investment. They're doing $10 billion now.

• 5:10John Coogan?

  And $30 billion in 2026.

• 5:12Jordi Hays?

  Basically, seemingly entirely from Mizuho and a handful of other lenders to be completed this month with the remaining 30 to come by the beginning of next year. So Masayoshi is gonna be under, this guy likes to put himself under pressure. He's gonna be under pressure for the rest of the year, knowing he's gonna has this sort of $30 billion sort of investment that he needs to make. That he needs to come up with some combination of debt and equity.

• 5:37John Coogan?

  It is funny because like, couldn't OpenAI have just gone to Mizuho directly and gotten debt? If they wanted debt? But now they have equity on it, they have preferred equity on their balance sheet. And Masayoshi has the debt. It's amazing.

• 5:49Jordi Hays?

  It's great for OpenAI.

• 5:51John Coogan?

  Potentially, everyone wins, right? Like, if OpenAI does really well, Mizuho gets paid back, they want interest, they want to be paid back. Masayoshi sees the upside and OpenAI doesn't have any debt on their balance sheet. It's like, it's beautiful. This is capitalism, baby. I love it.

• 6:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and to be clear, to give Masayoshi some credit, couldn't he fund this entirely by selling off some of his arm holdings?

• 6:16John Coogan?

  For sure. Yeah.

• 6:19John Coogan?

  But this deal is the largest startup, largest investment ever in a startup. I knew, we seriously need a bigger gong. Hold on to that gong.

• 6:30John Coogan?

  There we go. We gotta hit the gun hard for this one. This is a big deal.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  Whatever anybody has to say about Sam, the guy knows how to do deals.

• 6:40John Coogan?

  This was the whole thesis of OpenAI from day one. It's like Greg Brockman, the CTO of Stripe, Sam Altman, he's invested in a billion things, made so much money. It's like the like the founding team was really, really like incredible. And if your if your whole thesis is just like bet on founders, like Sam, pretty good at making money. Like, it's not that crazy.

• 7:02Jordi Hays?

  This is your, this has been, this is like, I feel like the your favorite investments are always into companies where the founder is just like, you can tell like they're good at making money.

• 7:13John Coogan?

  He's commercial. He's he's commercial. Like, he doesn't, he doesn't like losing money. And that's, I think that's great. And I think that's exactly what you want. And that's why I'm so excited about not being a nonprofit anymore. Like, it just clearly is a consumer tech company. It needs to be a for profit. And yeah, when you think about like, could this be the next Google? Could this be the next like, ChatGPT for the last year has been on the home row of my app, on the home row of my iPhone. And like, it's not because like, I like have, I'm shilling for Sam or something. It's just like, it's a useful product. It needs to be there. And like, when I think about what else is in the home row, it's like, Google, Apple, and OpenAI. And so like, can it

• 7:52John Coogan?

  get to, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of valuation? Like, sure, it seems fine. But I mean, I'm sure there'll be a lot of good takes about how, where this could go wrong. Obviously, it is a very high valuation. Obviously, when Moss is buying, Sam Lessin says, you want to be selling? Who knows? I'm, I'm, I'm just excited to see a lot of money change hands and a lot of debt stack up. Together with SoftBank's pledge to lead the $100 billion Stargate Cloud Computing Initiative with OpenAI, the investment marks a massive bet on the artificial intelligence startup. It intertwines the fortunes of SoftBank with a company that expects to lose billions of dollars for years to come. The hope is that OpenAI emerges as the leader of the pack in a race to spread artificial intelligence throughout society and commerce, a market that many believe

• 8:37John Coogan?

  could be worth trillions of dollars a year. This is what Sam was saying about like, it's either worth zero or a trillion. And so like you average that out and you're like, yeah, half a trillion.

• 8:46Jordi Hays?

  And it's hard to do a discounted cash flow analysis of that binary of an outcome.

• 8:52John Coogan?

  I mean, this is one of Peter Thiel's takes is like, is like when, when they were doing the DCF on Google and Andrew Reid talked about this too, like they just, they didn't have the spreadsheets go out far enough to understand that, oh yeah, if you really play out this trend, like Apple and Google, these companies could be throwing off like, like hundreds of billions of dollars of cash a year. And they just would, the numbers just kept going up. They never got to that. And no matter how far you went out, if you discounted it back, it would have been a much bigger number, but no one was really thinking that long-term. Now people are like,

• 9:24Jordi Hays?

  And that's when tech decided to say, no, thanks, finance. We're done. We're done with you. We're done with your models.

• 9:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:30Jordi Hays?

  It's purely vibe-based investing.

• 9:32John Coogan?

  And now, and now tech has gone the other direction, which is like, oh, this thing isn't going to make money for two decades and then it'll make a trillion dollars. Like, sure, I'll pay you a trillion dollars right now. And maybe we've gone too far. Who knows? We will see, but, uh, but good luck to everyone involved and congratulations to all the, all the OpenAI shareholders and employees who seem to be doing very well right now.

• 9:56Jordi Hays?

  Yes. Yeah. You have to imagine some, a good amount of this is going to secondary, you know, even if it's a small percentage relative, even if it's $500 million.

• 10:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:07Jordi Hays?

  Still pretty meaningful.

• 10:08John Coogan?

  SoftBank always delivering great quotes. The statement says, uh, "The information revolution has now entered a new phase led by artificial intelligence and called its partner, its OpenAI, its partner closest to achieving AGI, in which computers operate on the level of humans." And Sam was tweeting about this. He's saying like, uh, AGI has been achieved externally and it's unclear. I think he might just be April Fool's joking. I don't know. But clearly the product works. People like the images. People like the text responses. People like deep research. I like these products and I think people will continue to use them.

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 10:44John Coogan?

  Uh, obviously it's extremely competitive and there are several hundred billion dollar plus efforts now to.

• 10:52John Coogan?

  Win this war.

• 10:53Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  And it's the greatest time to be a podcaster in history.

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the edge that OpenAI has is if you talk to people that aren't as terminally online as the rest of us, they will tell you, I love OpenAI. I don't just like it and use it. It, they have a passion for it, just as everyday consumers.

• 11:13John Coogan?

  And they'll be like, Sam, who?

• 11:15Jordi Hays?

  Get them like, oh, if you tell somebody, if you tell somebody it's like OpenAI, they're going to say like, but I love OpenAI already.

• 11:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. You're like, no, no, no, but it's two points better on MMLU. And they're like, I don't know what that is.

• 11:28Jordi Hays?

  This one won an IMO gold medal.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:32Jordi Hays?

  What?

• 11:32John Coogan?

  What's that? Yeah. Yeah, it is very funny. SoftBank is taking a lot of risks for a piece of OpenAI. Ratings agency S and P Global said Tuesday that, uh, said Tuesday that SoftBank's financial condition will likely deteriorate as a result of the OpenAI investment and that it plans to add debt that could lead the agency to consider downgrading SoftBank's ratings. None of the startup, none of the startups with early leads in generative AI have shown that they can operate profitably. I don't know how true that is. Like you could probably look at the GPT-4 training run and amortize just that. But yes, I mean, on a, on a quarter to quarter basis, these companies aren't profitable. So in terms of like the overall business, it's a good point. Uh, and the sector is pouring tens of billions of dollars into data centers

• 12:15John Coogan?

  based on assumptions not yet proven of a future in which AI rapidly permeates the globe. It feels like it already is rapidly permeating, but I guess it's up for debate. Early tech leaders often falter, a point SoftBank learned when it made dot com era a bet that Yahoo would be the dominant force in search. The background debt has been a common feature of Sohn's risk-heavy strategy. The CEO borrowed heavily for the company's successful acquisitions of Vodafone's Japanese unit and chip design company ARM. More recently, SoftBank has been licking its wounds from piling tens of billions of dollars into startups just before values plunged in 2021. And Sohn repeatedly said SoftBank would stay on defense.

• 12:55John Coogan?

  Now, having pivoted to offense, SoftBank ramped up spending, including a $6.5 billion acquisition of chip startup Ampere.

• 13:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, go back and listen to our deep dive on Masa and SoftBank and generally it's very fun and fascinating. I think what people fail to consider is that Masa is a gambler and he's not oblivious to the risks that he takes, but he's constantly searching for that next absolute banger.

• 13:26John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 13:27Jordi Hays?

  And uh, there's, there's a very good, you know, there's, there's plenty of like, you know, non-technical but uh, powerful vibes-based analysis that you could do to, you know, make the case that this could very well be a fantastic outcome for SoftBank.

• 13:45John Coogan?

  It's one or the other. It's either a good or a bad investment. It's probably not neutral.

• 13:50Jordi Hays?

  We talked to the experts and you know, we determined that it's, it's going to be either good or bad.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's going to be either good or bad. You heard it here first, folks, but it's going to be extremely good if you participate in that secondary deal. And then you head over to getbezel.com and you shop for over 24,500 luxury watches. I can't imagine a more AGI-resistant asset than a luxury watch. They're not making any more FP Journe's after ASI drops.

• 14:17Jordi Hays?

  Rolex's or the techs. No, I'm just saying the actual companies themselves.

• 14:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 14:25Jordi Hays?

  If you want to make the next Rolex, you have to go back a hundred plus years ago and start it.

• 14:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, at least if you want to run it today.

• 14:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 14:33Jordi Hays?

  If you want to run what could be the next Rolex, but not be alive for when it becomes

• 14:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 14:38Jordi Hays?

  said, uh, said asset, then uh, Godspeed.

• 14:42John Coogan?

  So, yeah.

• 14:43Jordi Hays?

  But go to

• 14:45John Coogan?

  getbezel.com. And can we just give a shout out to the graphics department? Um, we're, we're a small team here, but I think it's incredible what we can do. I mean, we're just shy of 75 people now and they have really been over delivering. And I really love the new tickers. Of course, you know, we're sponsored by Public. We have the Public Stock ticker there, but we also got the Polymarket ticker and we hope you're enjoying staying up to date on what tech markets are going on.

• 15:08Jordi Hays?

  It's such a beautiful way to understand the world.

• 15:10John Coogan?

  It is.

• 15:11Jordi Hays?

  And we should actually get some bezel. We should get like

• 15:15John Coogan?

  Watch listings. I just want more tickers.

• 15:17Jordi Hays?

  We need more tickers.

• 15:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think every sponsor gets a ticker.

• 15:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Eventually, it's just 99% ticker.

• 15:26John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  But to close it out, go to getbezel.com, download the app. The app is fantastic. We are DAUs.

• 15:35John Coogan?

  I seriously am. And it's like the greatest time in history to be a watch fan because it's, there's a major watch announcement. The watch world is exploding with new news.

• 15:46Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 15:47John Coogan?

  Rolex launched the Land Dweller. Patek launched a complications watch that's worth over a million dollars. AEP has made some updates. A lot of things are launching. I wanted to highlight this Polo 79 in white gold from Piaget. It's about $100,000 watch, but I think it's, it's a lot of watch for that money.

• 16:07Jordi Hays?

  It certainly is.

• 16:08John Coogan?

  It's a lot of money, but it's a lot of watch.

• 16:10Jordi Hays?

  It's a lot of money, but it's a lot of watch.

• 16:11John Coogan?

  And remember, I mean, you can, you can drive a GT3RS, but you can't take a GT3RS into a board meeting.

• 16:17Jordi Hays?

  That's right. That's right. Many people have said this.

• 16:20John Coogan?

  You can't take, you can't take a 911 into a board meeting, but you can take your Piaget, Piaget Polo 79 in white gold.

• 16:28Jordi Hays?

  Into a board meeting, you will get arrested.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  You will get arrested.

• 16:31Jordi Hays?

  Do not do it.

• 16:31John Coogan?

  Except I think more, more Sand Hill Road VC firms should have massive roll up doors for board meetings if you want to drive in.

• 16:40Jordi Hays?

  Drive your car.

• 16:41John Coogan?

  I think you should be able to drive in, like a drive up, and you should just be able to roll down your window and be like, yeah, KPIs were good. Okay. Yeah. Well, yeah, we'll be raising in Q3. Okay. We're gonna get out of here.

• 16:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, so we're in the hunt for a new studio.

• 16:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:55Jordi Hays?

  And

• 16:56John Coogan?

  Roll up doors are key.

• 16:57Jordi Hays?

  Are not like a deal breaker, but they're certainly

• 17:01John Coogan?

  Nice to have.

• 17:01Jordi Hays?

  Nice to have.

• 17:02John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  Anyway, we're gonna have Quaid from bezel, the CEO on the show tomorrow to break down exactly what's happening in the watch world. I follow all this stuff.

• 17:13Jordi Hays?

  He's in Europe right now.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  And I have, I noticed I have the worst takes because I, I'll see a new watch drop and I'll be like, this is amazing. I want this immediately. And then he'll be like, that's the most controversial watch that's ever launched. Everyone in the watch world hates it. Like you are, you have like the most contrarian position. I'm like, I'm kind of fine with that. Like, I don't really mind. Cause I'm like dipping my toe in. I know the brands, I know the different models, but I'm not like, you know, in the discourse.

• 17:38Jordi Hays?

  We're watching joyers, we're not watching experts.

• 17:41John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 17:41Jordi Hays?

  Big difference.

• 17:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, so I would, I would gladly wear a, a, a knockoff Royal Oak from Rolex called the Land Dweller.

• 17:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:52John Coogan?

  I think it looks great. Anyway.

• 17:54Jordi Hays?

  It's great.

• 17:54John Coogan?

  Let's stay with OpenAI and move on to an excerpt from a book that's coming out on OpenAI. There's a segment in the Wall Street Journal, it's a long read.

• 18:02Jordi Hays?

  And this is different than Ashley Vance's?

• 18:05John Coogan?

  It is.

• 18:05Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI book?

• 18:06John Coogan?

  It is. And this is an interesting, I'll, I'll give my take like the meta level, like this reporter. I don't remember who actually wrote this. It's from a book that's coming out in a few weeks. Adapted from, it's called The Optimist, Sam Altman, OpenAI and the Race to Invent the Future by Keech Haggy or Haggy. It will be published on May 20th, 2025. And I'm sure it'll be an interesting read. It is incredibly well sourced. So this, this writer, this author was able to get insider accounts of like private dinners between Peter Thiel and Sam Altman.

• 18:50John Coogan?

  Like very, like you've been to some of these parties, like people don't love talking to the press that go to those parties. Like it's pretty rare.

• 18:57Jordi Hays?

  Well, and the way they're positioning this dinner, just from the graphic, is that it was actually just a dinner between the two of them.

• 19:03John Coogan?

  It was a birthday party. There were other people there, but still it's like, it's crazy that this like leaked at all. So it's incredibly well sourced and there's very interesting facts and quotes that bubble up in this story that we'll kind of go through today. But I think the analysis is god awful. And so.

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  Truth zone.

• 19:25John Coogan?

  It's definitely truth. It's not even truth zone, like the facts are correct. I think it's more just like the follow up questions that are obvious to ask if you're in tech.

• 19:33Jordi Hays?

  Takes in the truth zone.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, the takes are, you know, need to be put in the truth zone. Anyway, let's read through this because it's a, it's just a beautifully written, I mean, it's like a great, you know, great writer, great, great author.

• 19:44Jordi Hays?

  I'll take it off. On a balmy mid-November evening in 2023, billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel threw a birthday party for his husband at Yes, an avant-garde Japanese restaurant located in a century old converted bank building in Los Angeles's Arts District, not far from where we are at this moment. Seated next to him was his friend Sam Altman. Thiel had backed Altman's first venture fund more than a decade before and remained a mentor to the younger investor when Altman became the face of the artificial intelligence revolution as the chief executive of OpenAI. OpenAI's instantly viral launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 had propelled tech stocks to one of their best years in decades. Yet Thiel was worried. Years before he met Altman, Thiel had taken another AI-obsessed prodigy named

• 20:28Jordi Hays?

  Eliezer Yudkowsky under his wing, funding his institute, which pushed to make sure that any AI smarter than humans would be friendly to its maker. That March, Yudkowsky had argued in Time Magazine that unless the current wave of AI research was halted, literally everyone on earth will die. You don't understand how Eliezer has programmed half the people in your company to believe in that stuff. Teal warned Altman, you need to take this more seriously. You want to take it over?

• 20:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating history. I mean, Altman's first venture fund was called Hydrozine Capital, I believe. He was actually an investor in my first company and Hydrozine, I don't, I haven't asked Sam if this is the reference, but Hydrozine is rocket fuel, but it's also extremely toxic and will like kill you if you breathe it. And so there's this weird, I like to think that it's this weird like double entendre about like venture capital can accelerate your business, but it can also kill your business. It's kind of beautiful. Anyway, under-reported, Sam is like so known for OpenAI now. I think people forget that he ran a very, very successful venture fund and made some incredible investments during that time.

• 21:38John Coogan?

  And then also what's missing from this is that Peter Thiel was, is listed on Wikipedia as a co-founder of OpenAI and was one of the initial backers. Obviously Elon was a major, major backer and so, and then has fought. And there's all this like, you know, controversy there. So like that has become the bigger story. But the initial team behind OpenAI was crazy. I mean, there was a YC research project. So it was heavily YC influenced and that, and YC actually has a stake in OpenAI now. That must be worth a ton now. And PG famously like found out about that on Twitter because he was asking someone and they were, and they were like, don't you own a stake? And he was, and he was like, yeah, I just asked legal and we actually do. It was very funny.

• 22:23John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, they go way back. And at one point, Peter Thiel had been an advisor to YC and Sam Altman was running YC. And Sam brought Peter in and they did, I think they did a podcast interview together and they've talked about each other. So there's just a lot of like history here. That's kind of interesting. So moving on. Altman picked at his vegetarian dish and tried not to roll his eyes. This was not the first dinner where Thiel had warned him that the company had been taken over by the EAs, by which he meant people who subscribe to effective altruism. EA had later, had lately pivoted from trying to end global poverty, which was what we saw SBF doing in the EA thing. The whole idea was like mosquito nets. We got to get mosquito nets because mosquito nets are super cheap and they stop malaria.

• 23:07John Coogan?

  And so for, for just like a dollar, you can save someone's life and it's the highest ROI on reducing human suffering. Versus if you're dealing with like Alzheimer's treatments, like older people, very expensive. Mosquito nets are really cheap. And so everyone, EAs were originally very focused on ending global poverty. Then they kind of pivoted to trying to prevent runaway AI from murdering humanity. Thiel had repeatedly predicted that the AI safety people would destroy OpenAI. Well, it was kind of true with, it was kind of true of Elon, but we got rid of Elon, Sam responded at the dinner, referring to the messy 2018 split with his co-founder Elon Musk.

• 23:47Jordi Hays?

  Narrator. They did not fully get rid of Elon.

• 23:53John Coogan?

  So true. Who once referred to the attempt to create artificial intelligence as summoning the demon. That's a great Elon quote. I love it. And, and I mean, it's the whole nuance here, which is like, like everyone is somewhat AGI pilled, somewhat AGI doomer. No one has a P doom of zero. No one has a P doom of a hundred. Everyone's kind of on this gradient, but there's just a question of like, how do you deal with that risk? And is it with more innovation and building the more positive future, like the Thielian, like optimist, like definite optimism? And hey, okay, we need to build an AI that doesn't kill us

• 24:35John Coogan?

  versus the kind of indefinite pessimism of Eliezer Yudkowsky, which is like, it's going to happen no matter what. There's nothing we can do.

• 24:44Jordi Hays?

  But

• 24:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:45Jordi Hays?

  Give me money for research. Give me money for my institute.

• 24:49John Coogan?

  Yes. Nearly 800 OpenAI employees have been riding a rocket ship and we're about to have the chance to buy beachfront second homes. Let's hear it for some beachfront second homes, folks. We love, we love beachfront second homes on this show.

• 25:02Jordi Hays?

  Even if you're not in the position of those 800 OpenAI employees, you can go to wander.com.

• 25:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. And you can rent a beachfront second home. Fantastic.

• 25:11Jordi Hays?

  By the day. It's pretty cool. You can just get homes by the day.

• 25:14John Coogan?

  By the day.

• 25:15Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic innovation.

• 25:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:16Jordi Hays?

  Luxury homes by the day.

• 25:18John Coogan?

  By the day.

• 25:19Jordi Hays?

  Hyper fractionalized.

• 25:20John Coogan?

  Fractionalized. I knew you were gonna say that. And so there was a tender offer going on at the time, valuing the company at 86 billion. There was no need to panic. So all the OpenAI employees are very happy. At least it seemed that they were. Altman, at 38 years old, was wrapping up the best year of a charmed career, a year in which he became a household name, met with presidents and prime ministers around the world, and most importantly, within the value system of Silicon Valley, delivered a new technology that seemed like it was very possibly going to change everything. And that really is true. Like, OpenAI, yes, the transformer paper was written at Google. Yes, like, other people were working on language models, but OpenAI was the company that that really went full-scale pilled, scaled this thing up, and then also productized it. And also figured out, like, hey, people just wanna chat on.

• 26:05Jordi Hays?

  They verticalized. Research through

• 26:07John Coogan?

  Product.

• 26:07Jordi Hays?

  Product.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:08Jordi Hays?

  And it, they were the first to do that in a really, really meaningful way.

• 26:12John Coogan?

  And clearly, whatever was going on at Google was not allowing for that verticalization. There were fantastic researchers and fantastic product people selling ads and making YouTube a great product. They were not talking to each other.

• 26:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:26John Coogan?

  And so, but as the two investing partners celebrated beneath the exposed rafters of LA's hottest new restaurant, four members of OpenAI's six-person board, including two with direct ties to the EA community, were holding secret video meetings, and they were deciding whether they should fire Sam Altman, though not because of EA. This account is based on interviews with dozens of people who lived through one of the wildest business stories of all time, the sudden firing of the CEO of the hottest tech company on the planet, and his reinstatement just days later. At the center was a mercurial leader who kept everyone around him inspired by his technological vision, but also at times confused and unsettled by his web of secrets and misdirections. From the start, OpenAI was set up to be a different kind of tech company, one governed by a nonprofit board with a duty not to shareholders but to humanity.

• 27:09John Coogan?

  Altman had shocked lawmakers earlier in the year when he told them under oath that he owned no equity in the company he co-founded, which of course was true, but very much mocked because the idea of somebody doing something not for money is

• 27:22Jordi Hays?

  The senator with the line saying, "You need a, you need an agent."

• 27:27John Coogan?

  You need an agent, yeah. He agreed to the unprecedented arrangement to be on the board, which required a majority of directors to have no financial ties to the company, of course, because it's this nonprofit structure. In June 2023, he told Bloomberg TV, "The board can fire me," and that's important. Behind the scenes, the board was finding, to its growing frustration that Altman really called the shots, of course, through like soft power, not through legal means or voting shares or any, and it's entirely new way of controlling a company.

• 27:55Jordi Hays?

  It's a really great way to expose that you don't actually understand the company, because I'm sure if you went to the OpenAI office and talked to anybody, you would find out almost immediately that Sam did, in fact, call all the shots.

• 28:10John Coogan?

  Of course, of course. And there's a lot of just, this is like what we're talking about with like, there's intelligence and Sam is intelligent, but there's other intelligent people around the table. It's really will and agency and vision and coordination and communication and all these like EQ things that really push a, push an organization forward. And there are tons of smart people at Google. They couldn't launch a jackpot faster than OpenAI somehow. And it's like, why is that? It's probably not because they didn't think of it. They, it's not, probably not because of a lack of intelligence. It's a lack of volition. For the past year, the board had been deadlocked over which AI safety expert

• 28:49John Coogan?

  to add to its ranks. The board interviewed Ajay Kotra, an AI safety expert at the EA charity Open Philanthropy, but the process stalled largely due to foot dragging by Altman and his co-founder Greg Brockman, who is also on the board. Altman countered with his own suggestion. "There was a bit of a power struggle," said Brian Chesky, the Airbnb CEO, who is one of the prospective board members Altman suggested. "There was this basic thing that if Sam said the name, they must be loyal to Sam, so therefore the board is going to say no." The dynamics got more contentious after three board members in the pro-Altman camp stepped down in quick succession in early 2023 over various conflicts of interest. That left six people on the board, on the nonprofit board that govern the for-profit AI juggernaut. And you're getting this weird dynamic where the nonprofit

• 29:33John Coogan?

  board is set up to just like, hey, we just want to do research and advocate for AI safety. But all of a sudden, we have, we've, we've birthed this $300 billion.

• 29:42Jordi Hays?

  The demon.

• 29:44John Coogan?

  The demon is really just a consumer tech company, I guess.

• 29:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Consumer applications, actually.

• 29:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, just, just Apple.

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  Your mother was right.

• 29:51John Coogan?

  Your mother was right.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  Altman and his close ally Brockman, their fellow co-founder Ilya Sutskever, and three independent directors. These were, the independent directors were Adam D'Angelo, the CEO of Quora, and a former Facebook executive, Helen Toner, the director of strategy for Georgetown Center of Security and Emerging Technology, and a veteran of open philanthropy, and Tasha McCauley, the former, a former tech CEO and member of the UK Board of EA Charity Effective Ventures, and I believe the wife of a celebrity, right?

• 30:24John Coogan?

  Tasha McCauley, she's the wife of, I forget who, someone who is in Looper?

• 30:29Jordi Hays?

  Joseph Gordon.

• 30:30John Coogan?

  Joseph Gordon Levitt, that's right, yeah.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  Concerns about corporate governance and the board's ability to oversee Altman became much more urgent for several board members after they saw a demo of GPT-4, a more powerful AI that could ace the AP Biology test in summer of 2022. God forbid.

• 30:47Jordi Hays?

  God forbid.

• 30:48John Coogan?

  The AP Biology test gets aced, it's over for us.

• 30:51Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 30:52John Coogan?

  It's not a neurotic statement at all.

• 30:54Jordi Hays?

  That was humanity's final exam.

• 30:55John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 30:56Jordi Hays?

  The real one.

• 30:57John Coogan?

  Yes, it's over. Once you can ace AP Bio, once you understand AP Bio, you can do anything.

• 31:03Jordi Hays?

  You can reverse engineer anything you want.

• 31:05John Coogan?

  Anything you want. I mean, to steel man it, like, you know, you understand bio, maybe you understand bioweapons, maybe you help someone in the basement, create a new smallpox and create some, like, there are guardrails that need to be on these things, obviously. But it's, you know, it's a little bit overblown, I think. Things like ChatGPT and GPT-4 were meaningful shifts toward the board realizing that the stakes are getting higher here, Toner said. It's not like we are all going to die tomorrow, but the board needs to be functioning well. And yeah, that's a fair, that's a fair critique, like, the, the, the structure of the company was not aligned with what was happening at the company. At the same time, it feels like they're acting like, like everyone was gonna die tomorrow.

• 31:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:49John Coogan?

  Right?

• 31:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and what, we actually talked about this before we got on air, but I think what, if, if you really, if, if they wanted to have a sort of strong case for their actions, there should have been sort of.

• 32:06Jordi Hays?

  Information being fed to them from active members of the research team and the team broadly saying, hey, we are very worried about this.

• 32:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:16Jordi Hays?

  It's not just a cute chat app that's going to go viral.

• 32:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:20Jordi Hays?

  This, this could sort of snowball into something else, but it doesn't seem, it seems like they were doing their sort of own vibes based analysis of the situation. And just frustration feeling like having an inflated sense of self-importance when realizing they weren't a real player in the game.

• 32:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I completely agree. So, I mean, most of the board was non-technical, not actually interfacing with the changes at a technical level that were happening in the iterations of the GPT models. Yes, they were scaling up, but how were they doing on evals? What, how were these systems integrated? How were the, what, what systems do these, do these models have access to? All of those things, completely agree with that. The, the, the other thing is like, what, basically what you're advocating for is like a whistleblower program, which kind of exists in every company. Like if you've ever been on a board and some low-level employee emails you, like it's probably not good. They're probably complaining about something and a lot of times they have good points. What was interesting is that there was a story that came out that OpenAI had some really

• 33:22John Coogan?

  onerous exit process where if you left and you didn't sign like an NDA, they could claw back some of your equity. And everyone was like, this is terrible. And I was like, yeah, it seems like maybe overly aggressive, but it's kind of, it's kind of super aligned with the EA's because if you actually think that OpenAI's new model is going to kill all of humanity, then your money is worthless, right? And so you should absolutely say, well, the money is useless. Let me go to the media and say what's happening and then, and then I'll stop it and then I'll be, and I'll write a book and I'll make money that way. Like, like there's a million ways to make money if you're a successful whistleblower

• 34:04John Coogan?

  and you actually do uncover, hey, yeah, I'm the person that saved humanity and I can prove it because this model, I have proof that it was going to kill everyone. Yes, I lost my shares in OpenAI, but it doesn't matter because I saved the world. And like, what would be more edifying and then also financially rewarding over the long term than saving humanity?

• 34:22Jordi Hays?

  Ben would, Ben would, Ben 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.

• 34:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:42Jordi Hays?

  It's a real asymmetric risk.

• 34:44John Coogan?

  Yes, definitely. Yeah, I mean, we've advocated for podcast safety very significantly and potentially even creating like a government.

• 34:52Jordi Hays?

  Regulatory capture.

• 34:52John Coogan?

  Regulatory capture and like monopoly.

• 34:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, basically, there should be 10,000% tariffs on podcast.

• 34:59John Coogan?

  There should be like an FDA for podcasting where you have to submit an application with what your show is about. And then you get approved. It takes years, costs hundreds of millions of dollars. Exactly. And then you can't just have any willy nilly podcast just drop an RSS feed.

• 35:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just like pharmaceuticals.

• 35:13John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 35:13Jordi Hays?

  We don't want anybody coming to market with a new pharmaceutical.

• 35:16John Coogan?

  I completely agree. This makes so much sense.

• 35:17Jordi Hays?

  Shouldn't have anyone just coming to market with a podcast.

• 35:19John Coogan?

  For sure. Anyway, let's move on to equally ridiculous things. Toner and McCauley 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 OpenAI.

• 35:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:34John Coogan?

  And they do a good job breaking it down here. So to review new products for risks before they were released. And again, I agree that when you're launching new products, like you should assess them for safety. Even 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. So Microsoft can vend GPT models into Azure and then deliver them into different segments of the Microsoft ecosystem.

• 36:16John Coogan?

  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 lied about the approvals.

• 36:41John Coogan?

  And 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 GPT 3.5 and GPT 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, GPT 4, yeah, okay, 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?

• 37:27John Coogan?

  We've all been playing with GPT 4 for years now. It's no big deal. It's been copied, open source, deep sea, can run it on your phone. You can download it on GitHub, Mistral, and like, all these, all these GPT 4 level models. Like, what are we worried about? I don't understand. It's so, it's so confusing and infuriating that the author didn't dive in deeper and say, like, what were the controversial enhancements? Because, to me, the controversial, it was a controversial lack of enhancements. It was like, 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 100K context window. They launched a million token context window. Is that controversial? I don't know, but it's super useful if you're trying to deep dive a book. Like, I don't get it.

• 38:11John Coogan?

  I'm so confused by this. Anyway, and then this is the really funny thing, because they're, 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, this is the first instance of the revolutionary code being released in the wild.

• 38:37Jordi Hays?

  That's not the first time.

• 38:38John Coogan?

  They're just like, let's test it on India.

• 38:40Jordi Hays?

  Bill Gates organizations have done things like that.

• 38:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like, what if it was Microsoft like, 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 bizarre.

• 38:53Jordi Hays?

  Also internet products, so.

• 38:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's fine. I think it's great to go test these things wherever. I don't think it's a big deal, but 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.

• 39:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Full send.

• 39:10John Coogan?

  My boys back in India.

• 39:11Jordi Hays?

  We really need, we really need chat summary and teams. Like, we're gonna take the risk. We're gonna risk humanity for chat.

• 39:17John Coogan?

  It's so funny that that's what we're talking about. Like, 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, 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 mention the breach, probably because it's not that important that Microsoft is testing GPT-4 in Indian.

• 39:58Jordi Hays?

  It's just a very funny dynamic to be in this sort of hyperscale startup mode where you're scaling headcount rapidly, you're raising all this money, you're scaling users sort of dramatically, right?

• 40:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:11Jordi Hays?

  And then you have this board that's sitting over your shoulder, kind of like nitpicking every small decision that you make.

• 40:18John Coogan?

  And for, for a completely new class of like risk vectors. Like, when I hear, like, if I was running a company and somebody was like, told me like, hey, like, a partner of ours just launched our product, kind of like white labeled it and they launched it in India. I would be like, okay, well, like. What does that mean for my brand? Like, maybe I want my brand to be front and center in that market. And so I don't love that because they're kind of like stealing my brand building that will eventually happen when I get the chance to roll out in that country. So that's an issue. Are we paying taxes appropriately? Are we legal there? Do we have a, do we have a registration properly? Or is this gonna be a PR nightmare? Like, or do we have another partner that was expecting to work with us in India?

• 41:03John Coogan?

  And now they're gonna be upset.

• 41:05Jordi Hays?

  How are they ensuring that they're putting enough spend behind the go to market?

• 41:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's like a million real questions. And then the second one is like, is, is ASI going to explode in India and like kill everyone? It's like, that's not at the top of my stack.

• 41:21John Coogan?

  So anyway, then one night in the summer of 2023, an OpenAI board member overheard a person at a dinner party discussing OpenAI's startup fund. This is the venture capital fund that they use to invest in startups that could potentially use OpenAI's technology. Basically giving money to the companies that they're gonna steamroll with the next generation of ChatGPT. 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 and doing great.

• 41:49Jordi Hays?

  I think Harvey took money from OpenAI.

• 41:51John Coogan?

  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 ChatGPT. And we're gonna get rolled.

• 42:01Jordi Hays?

  Sam's a dog. I don't think he was using, wanting to use a startup fund to fund potential competitors. It was very oriented around, you're gonna be using ChatGPT, we'll give you some money.

• 42:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, truly like you're, you're gonna be an API customer forever and you're never gonna 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. And knowing everything about OpenAI's insane legal structure,

• 42:54John Coogan?

  I believe this, like it's it's hard to set up a fund as like a Delaware C corp or like an LLC. Like, it's tricky. Like, 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, but this is where-

• 43:21Jordi Hays?

  Funny dynamic too, because 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 the board, like some aspects of the board's, you know, desires because if other competitors like Zeke beat us, you know, that wasn't really on the radar at the time. I'm sure it was if you were building a foundation model. If other people beat us to this, like, none of it even matters. Like, all this stuff doesn't matter. So we need to, like, take some shortcuts.

• 43:52John Coogan?

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

• 44:34Jordi Hays?

  We've seen three and thirty before.

• 44:36John Coogan?

  And so this, this is a big problem. If I, if I, if I was investing in a fund and someone was like, oh, like, no, no fee, no profit, I'd be like- Yeah, straight to jail.

• 44:47Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 44:49John Coogan?

  But of course, that actually aligns with OpenAI'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.

• 44:58Jordi Hays?

  My question on this is, OpenAI said Altman earned no fees or profit from the fund.

• 45:06Jordi Hays?

  That he could have had two and I, I think your interpretation is right. There's also another interpretation where

• 45:13John Coogan?

  He just hadn't hit the hurdle yet.

• 45:14Jordi Hays?

  He did have two and 20, but then, you know, you know, whatever.

• 45:18John Coogan?

  I think I

• 45:19Jordi Hays?

  But I think your interpretation is right.

• 45:20John Coogan?

  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 OpenAI 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.

• 45:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:39John Coogan?

  And that seems like the fastest and most

• 45:41Jordi Hays?

  Clearly, Sam Altman, ridiculously talented venture investor, like should be the one at OpenAI making the final decision on what companies are getting invested in or not.

• 45:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:54Jordi Hays?

  And that's in the best interest of

• 45:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:56Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI.

• 45:57John Coogan?

  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. So if you wanted to make two and 20 on a lot of money, he could go do that. And so it, it doesn't quite track that, like, like what frame of mind would he have to be in that it's like, okay, I'm like the CEO and leader of the next generation consumer tech behemoth. But really I want to run like a micro fund and get like, you know, have control over it. Like, it's like, the economics just don't really make sense there.

• 46:35John Coogan?

  And this is what I'm talking about, like about the follow up. It's like, you 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.

• 46:49Jordi Hays?

  That would have been, that would have been.

• 46:53Jordi Hays?

  Sort of a smoking gun if he was out in the world saying, I don't have any profits in OpenAI.

• 46:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:59Jordi Hays?

  And then was like running the side fund and managing it.

• 47:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:02Jordi Hays?

  It was branded, but, but the fact that he's not earning fees or profits from the fund just goes to show like, okay.

• 47:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:10Jordi Hays?

  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. Make off balance sheet investments from OpenAI in the meantime.

• 47:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:21Jordi Hays?

  Just do it the right way.

• 47:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:22Jordi Hays?

  And he would still say like, you know, yeah, probably should have just done it, but you know, whatever, we are moving quickly.

• 47:28John Coogan?

  Be 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 OpenAI. I'm just gonna go turbo long the direct competitor. No, it makes no sense. And, and, and there really is no smoking gun in the portfolio that I, that I've seen at least. But again, like follow up to the independent board members, the administrative oversight defied belief. I can't believe it. The cast previous and cast previous oversights as a possible pattern of deliberate deception. For instance, they also had been alerted to the previous fall. They, they also hadn't been alerted the previous fall when OpenAI released ChatGPT.

• 48:08John Coogan?

  At the time considered a research preview that used existing technology, but ended up taking the world by storm. In late September, Cisco, her email 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. Cisco hemmed and hawed before coughing up a clue. You should talk to me or more. And so, yeah, the, the launch of ChatGPT is funny because I've seen, I talked about this with Dorkesh saying that, 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 ChatGPT without, 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.

• 48:53John Coogan?

  And I'm like, that just doesn't match. But yeah, I mean, 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 did launch a lot of different things, the OpenAI Sandbox, they launched Playground, and none of the other things had taken off like chat GPT. Maybe it was just lucky.

• 49:11Jordi Hays?

  And the use cases for that early research product were pretty tame. It was like generate, you know, subject line for your e-commerce brand. Like, that's what people were building on top of it.

• 49:22John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 49:22Jordi Hays?

  There was nothing agentic.

• 49:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:24Jordi Hays?

  It was just like a text generation tool.

• 49:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:28Jordi Hays?

  That was, that was good, but not even great. It was magical.

• 49:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:33Jordi Hays?

  But it wasn't anything what it is today.

• 49:36John Coogan?

  If you just think about the, the, 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, and like, if it comes out wrong, it could be like really misaligned and it's like really high stakes. And so like, I imagine that that's where the board's focused. They're not focused on like, oh yeah, like, you know how we're vending in like the GPT 3.5 Da Vinci 2002 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 of days, I imagine.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  And maybe it was a couple of weeks, but like, like the first version of chat GPT was not, it was really just like a wrapper around their LLM. And it didn't feel like that would be the thing that broke it through. It felt like the thing that would break it through is scale it up another 10x, spend a billion dollars, do Stargate, you know, right?

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:35John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's go into Mira. So Mira Maroti 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 have to see it. When Toner called her Maroti, described, corporate athlete for sure. Maroti 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. And so that is a very odd dynamic. I believe Brockman was a co-founder and obviously, Brockman,

• 51:18John Coogan?

  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 Maroti, 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? Like, we go way back. It's weird. And so however they got in that situation, it just seems bad, right? Yeah. Maroti 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.

• 52:03John Coogan?

  Brutal. That sounds not fun in general. Toner went back to Sutskever, the company's oracular chief scientist. Love that word. He made clear he had lost, he made it clear that he had lost trust in Altman for numerous reasons, including his tendency to pit senior employees against each other. In 2021, Sutskever had mapped out and launched a team to pursue the next research direction for OpenAI. That's probably the reinforcement learning, the O1, the Q-Star technology that they were working on at the time that was very controversial. But then, you know, DeepSeek opensourced it. And so it's like, was it really that big of a deal? We don't know.

• 52:42John Coogan?

  Sutskever had mapped out this and launched a team to pursue research. But months later, another OpenAI researcher, Jacob Pachaki, began pursuing something very similar. And so the teams merged and Pachaki took over after Sutskever turned his focus to AI safety. And so Altman later elevated Pachaki 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.

• 53:25John Coogan?

  And so you throw some operational talent in between them. And then all of a sudden, you have a co-founder who's super technical that's reporting to someone who's like an executive and it's just gets very, very funky.

• 53:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's two challenges. One, you have a nonprofit research group that's transitioning into a for-profit hyperscaler.

• 53:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:43Jordi Hays?

  And then you also have this business that's verticalizing, that's doing everything from research to the end product layer.

• 53:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:50Jordi Hays?

  But they're also doing an API and they're also still worried about AI safety.

• 53:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:56Jordi Hays?

  And then you combine that with products that are generating, you know, millions and then tens of millions and then hundreds of millions of revenue. That's also losing so much money that like, if Sam can't, you know, continue, he's on the sort of fundraising treadmill.

• 54:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:10Jordi Hays?

  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 nonprofit, for-profit conversion stuff. So again, I know how to juggle. You.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  Can do a Rubik's Cube.

• 54:28Jordi Hays?

  You can juggle on a corporate level, but not, you can do a Rubik's Cube.

• 54:33John Coogan?

  I can do a Rubik's Cube, but I can't, I can't juggle for, unfortunately. Yeah, it's on my 2025 goals I gotta learn.

• 54:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:40John Coogan?

  Anyway, this is another wild, wild story again. Treading carefully in terror of being found out by Altman, Maroti and Sutskever 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. Altman was livid. He told Sutskever that McCauley had said Toner should obviously leave the board for the, for the, over the article. McCauley was taken aback when she heard the account from Sutskever. 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?

• 55:25Jordi Hays?

  I was just catching up here.

• 55:27John Coogan?

  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, they suck.

• 55:35Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you were referencing that. I was looking at the dynamic of Sutskever, McCauley, McCauley.

• 55:39John Coogan?

  Oh, that whole thing, yeah.

• 55:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, this alleges that Sam was basically like, uh, mom and dad. Like, mom said I can watch TV. Go ask dad, what does your mom say? It's like that dynamic, right? But I just think the whole core is so weird to not just, you're on the board. Like, if you're not comfortable with the approach to safety, like...

• 56:00Jordi Hays?

  Sounds like that should have been an internal memo.

• 56:02John Coogan?

  Should have been an email.

• 56:03Jordi Hays?

  And you decided to risk what was already, I'm sure, anybody on the board putting out basically like activist materials?

• 56:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:15Jordi Hays?

  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 randomly.

• 56:29John Coogan?

  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.

• 56:40Jordi Hays?

  John's not taking podcast safety seriously enough.

• 56:43John Coogan?

  Like, like, first, I would be 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.

• 56:52Jordi Hays?

  We're live for three hours a day.

• 56:53John Coogan?

  You could email me. There are a million ways that you could bring that up, but...

• 56:59Jordi Hays?

  I could use, I could use...

• 57:01John Coogan?

  Yes, you could use the horn to let me know that you think I'm not doing a good job. But the thing that would really irk me is if you did that and you were wrong. Like, like, okay, so, you're, toner, you're criticizing OpenAI for the approach to safety? Habeus corpus, show me the damage that OpenAI's approach to safety has done. Like, what are we talking about here? What is the damage?

• 57:23Jordi Hays?

  I think part of it...

• 57:24John Coogan?

  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 OpenAI's products. Like, did that happen? No. No, not at all.

• 57:34Jordi Hays?

  I think the, I think it comes down to, if you're the safety guy or girl,

• 57:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:39Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:52Jordi Hays?

  And you feel like you're not getting enough attention.

• 57:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:56Jordi Hays?

  Like this just come, this just screams like, I want attention, like give me attention, validate my beliefs, make me feel important.

• 58:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:05Jordi Hays?

  Which is like a board member who has an inflated sense of self-importance and wants to be a star.

• 58:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:13Jordi Hays?

  It's like a pretty toxic dynamic.

• 58:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, also, it's just like, there's no, there's no relative assessment here. Like, okay, you have a problem with OpenAI's approach to safety, let's compare it to DeepSeek's. Let's compare it to Google's. Let's compare it to Grok's. Let's compare it to Mr. All's. Like, rank it for us, Helen. Like, tell us, like, where, where are we sitting here? Because, like, A, I'm not seeing any damage from OpenAI products. What I'm seeing is like, a minor product boost, productivity boost for knowledge workers. Like, people like, can find answers to things a little bit faster, write some copy a little bit faster.

• 58:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, basically, it's a great, you know, co-pilot for your work.

• 58:53John Coogan?

  I know.

• 58:54Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so it's, it's what I've been using it for?

• 58:56John Coogan?

  Even the job displacement thing, right? Like, if, i- i- i- if we were seeing like, oh wow, like, unemployment is really ticking up, like, this is having an impact. I'd be like, okay, yeah, like, like, we do need to talk about this. We need to really think about.

• 59:08Jordi Hays?

  Get ahead of it.

• 59:09John Coogan?

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

• 59:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's almost like. That board level role around AI safety and thinking about the impact of AI is like if Tonner was writing research papers, advising governments globally and saying like, here's how we see this technology panning out.

• 1:00:01John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:00:02Jordi Hays?

  Here's how you need to be planning around employment and what the future of various

• 1:00:08John Coogan?

  And that'd be super useful.

• 1:00:09Jordi Hays?

  That'd be very valuable and beneficial.

• 1:00:11John Coogan?

  Totally. But that person should report to the CEO and be like, hey, here, 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 I'm doing, and I'm publishing all this, not higher up, like, taking shots at the company you're in charge of. Anyway, I totally get the criticism that like, getting mommy daddied is annoying. I totally get that. I think that that is a legitimate criticism here. And so, it clearly also pisses off Ilya and Mira, because they'd been collecting evidence, and now Sutskever was willing to share. He emailed Tonner, McCauley, and DeAngelo a lengthy two-page, two lengthy PDF documents

• 1:00:53John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:01:03Jordi Hays?

  Fun.

• 1:01:04John Coogan?

  Fun. Give it a try, folks, when you're whistleblowing. One was about Altman, the other about Brockman. The Altman document consisted of dozens of examples of his alleged lies and other toxic behavior, largely backed up by screenshots from Maroti's Slack channel. In one of them, Altman told Maroti 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, same 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 Maroti checked with the company's top lawyer, and the lawyer said that he had not said that.

• 1:01:41Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:01:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:54Jordi Hays?

  And then you have the Joint Safety Board review, who says, we need another...

• 1:02:01Jordi Hays?

  Review before you can release a slightly updated version of a product that's already been out in market.

• 1:02:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I can't imagine anything more cumbersome than having to do like.

• 1:02:14Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, it's such you you kind of understand what was happening and.

• 1:02:17John Coogan?

  GitHub commits.

• 1:02:18Jordi Hays?

  And again, like the critiques of Sam not being consistently candid.

• 1:02:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:23Jordi Hays?

  Which was what they eventually came out.

• 1:02:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:25Jordi Hays?

  And said is like, yeah, that's fair. But at the same time, the fact that he would was has been able to lead the company to hundreds of millions of users and staying at the edge and, you know, winning at the at the sort of app layer right now, despite all of this.

• 1:02:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:43Jordi Hays?

  Is just a testament to his executive.

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, I agree. Yeah, yeah, it's it's odd. So anyway, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 16, 2023, he and three independent board members logged into a video call and voted to fire Altman, knowing Maroti 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 Sutskever that they had been worried that he'd been sent as a spy to test their loyalty. That night, Maroti was at a conference when the four board members called her to say they were firing Altman the next day and asked 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, it says Sutskever and Maroti were collecting

• 1:03:33John Coogan?

  evidence like and and and there's a whole bunch of these examples where it's like,

• 1:03:42John Coogan?

  where you'd think that Sutskever was communicating with her so she should know. But then she's like, Maroti's like, I don't I don't know why you would fire him, which is kind of weird because.

• 1:03:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53John Coogan?

  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, Satya, uh, the CEO's commitment to their partnership was to the company, they had not.

• 1:04:18Jordi Hays?

  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 lay, it's like, you know, it's like a family in fighting, right? Like, they're all on the same team, but clearly there's like power struggle and dynamics. And then you know, like Satya is kind of like the, the grandpa that he's like, really, guys? Like, you know, like you, you didn't consult me on this. Like, that's insane.

• 1:04:47John Coogan?

  And, and like from his perspective, like you guys are fighting over autocomplete and Clippy, like the new Clippy.

• 1:04:53Jordi Hays?

  The new Clippy.

• 1:04:54John Coogan?

  You guys are building the new Clippy.

• 1:04:56Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I just wanted the new Clippy faster.

• 1:05:00Jordi Hays?

  We already tested it in India and it's a hit.

• 1:05:03John Coogan?

  And it's a hit.

• 1:05:03Jordi Hays?

  Let's roll it out to the rest of the world.

• 1:05:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so all, all the board said was that he had not been consistently candid with the board. Friday night, they, the OpenAI's board and executive team held a series of increasingly contentious meetings. Maroti had grown concerned that the board was putting OpenAI at risk by not preparing, uh, but not better preparing for the repercussions of Altman's firing. At one point, she and the rest of the executive team gave the board a 30 minute deadline to explain why they fired Altman or resign. And again, this is odd because it's like, it feels like she's kind of on the executive team and saying like, we're all wondering why you got fired, Sam. But like, she knows or she should know. And so it's like, why didn't she just turn around and say, hey, everyone, I actually know why he got fired. Like, I was in these conversations. It's very odd.

• 1:05:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:48John Coogan?

  The board felt they couldn't divulge that it had been Maroti who had given them some of the most detailed evidence. They had banked on Maroti'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 a, it's like this crazy power struggle. It's like so wild. It's a Game of Thrones over there. Um, a narrative began to spread among Altman's allies that the whole thing was a coup by Sutskever, driven by his anger over Pachaki's promotion and boosted by Tonner's, Tonner's anger that Sam Altman

• 1:06:33John Coogan?

  had tried to push her off the board. This was like the I love you all Ilya, like coded tweet from Sam where he, he said, he signed his tweet, I, I love you all, which is I L Y A, Ilya. And so it was like, oh, he's like pointing the finger at Ilya. And so then this like whole like meme of like Ilya is responsible. Uh, when really it seems like it was like a lot of people were involved and stuff. You've heard the whole story now.

• 1:06:57Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 1:06:57John Coogan?

  Uh, Sutskever was astounded. He had expected OpenAI, open employees of OpenAI to cheer.

• 1:07:03Jordi Hays?

  Um, but. Bad.

• 1:07:05John Coogan?

  They loved. People love consumer tech companies. They're like, we're making Clippy here, guys. Clippy, but good.

• 1:07:17John Coogan?

  I don't care about all this safety mumbo jumbo. Clippy, but good.

• 1:07:21Jordi Hays?

  Cracked Clippy.

• 1:07:21John Coogan?

  Cracked Clippy. What are you talking about, Ilya? I just want to get a second beach home.

• 1:07:28John Coogan?

  And, and vend Clippy into every Microsoft product.

• 1:07:31Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy that crackedclippy.com is available.

• 1:07:34John Coogan?

  Crackedclippy.com. Go get it.

• 1:07:36Jordi Hays?

  Go get it.

• 1:07:37John Coogan?

  Creator Jack GPT rep. Get sued by Microsoft.

• 1:07:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:41John Coogan?

  I'm sure they still own the.

• 1:07:42Jordi Hays?

  They will come after you hard.

• 1:07:44John Coogan?

  So, uh.

• 1:07:45Jordi Hays?

  By Monday morning, almost all of them had signed a letter threatening to quit if Altman wasn't reinstated. Among the signatures were Marotti's and Sutskever's.

• 1:07:53John Coogan?

  Such a twist. Actually, I really like the guy.

• 1:07:57Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:59John Coogan?

  They, I mean, this is.

• 1:08:00Jordi Hays?

  We're on.

• 1:08:01John Coogan?

  This is intelligence versus EQ, right?

• 1:08:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:04John Coogan?

  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 OpenAI is nothing without its people, right?

• 1:08:17Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, I don't think.

• 1:08:18John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:08:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And no one else for sure was getting 40 on 300 done.

• 1:08:31John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:08:32Jordi Hays?

  Outside of Sam.

• 1:08:33John Coogan?

  For sure. So let's hit the size gong one more time for Sam and the OpenAI team. What a funny story.

• 1:08:39Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 1:08:40John Coogan?

  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. But, you know, we, I don't know, we just.

• 1:08:47Jordi Hays?

  The story's not over.

• 1:08:49John Coogan?

  The story's not over. It's still a knockout, drag out fight. Anyone could win. Is OpenAI Yahoo?

• 1:08:54Jordi Hays?

  Jessica Livingston.

• 1:08:54John Coogan?

  Google. Let's figure it out.

• 1:08:57Jordi Hays?

  Jessica Livingston, co-founder of YC.

• 1:09:03Jordi Hays?

  Had a, has a podcast and she had Sam on to talk about basically that weekend.

• 1:09:08John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:09:08Jordi Hays?

  And the craziness. And so worth a listen. But 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.

• 1:09:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I know that if I was in his position and I was super stressed during this weekend, I would want to just get out of the city. I would want to go to Wander in Sonoma Vineyards. I would go to wander.com and I'd try and find my happy place. I'd say, I would actually be singing to myself. I'd be singing. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge services.

• 1:09:53Jordi Hays?

  Wander is such a fantastic idea. It's basically take some of the greatest towns in the world and make them available by the day.

• 1:09:59John Coogan?

  You love this too much.

• 1:10:01Jordi Hays?

  Two days, three days, four days, 30 days.

• 1:10:03John Coogan?

  This wander in Sonoma Vineyards is fantastic. Four bedrooms, three and a half baths, five beds, eight guests, 3,400 square feet. There's a pool.

• 1:10:10Jordi Hays?

  I grew up in Sonoma County. So if you go stay at that wander, DM me. I'll give you some recommendations.

• 1:10:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. You almost got sucked into that whole East Bay rationalist thing, the EA thing.

• 1:10:21Jordi Hays?

  I was born in the dark, on the, on the dark side of the bed.

• 1:10:24John Coogan?

  You merely adopted it. I was born in it. You're ready to fight.

• 1:10:27Jordi Hays?

  I was born in Oakland Children's Hospital.

• 1:10:28John Coogan?

  We'll get Eliezer on here. You can debate him.

• 1:10:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:30John Coogan?

  You can be like, uh, but what if I turn the server off? What if I pull the plug, Eliezer? What happens then?

• 1:10:37Jordi Hays?

  What if I have, what if, what if there's bad robots, but I have a good army of robots powered by Brett Adcock, Figure AI? What then?

• 1:10:45John Coogan?

  What then, Eliezer?

• 1:10:47Jordi Hays?

  What are you gonna do about that?

• 1:10:47John Coogan?

  Owned.

• 1:10:48Jordi Hays?

  They don't even walk like Biden anymore.

• 1:10:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, let's move on to Intel. Everyone's wondering what's going to happen with Lip Bhutan, the new CEO of Intel. 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 fab, very different from Intel and, from Nvidia and TSMC.

• 1:11:15Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy, only one, one, 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.

• 1:11:30John Coogan?

  Oh, true, true. They really missed that.

• 1:11:32Jordi Hays?

  Just one off.

• 1:11:32John Coogan?

  You know, they actually do make a GPU.

• 1:11:34Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 1:11:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:35Jordi Hays?

  You don't hear about it much.

• 1:11:36John Coogan?

  You don't hear about it much. It's not very popular. Anyway. So Lip Bhutan isn't signaling a major departure from Intel's path strategy. When he came on, he said, hey, we're staying in the path. And we were kind of debating like, is this just signaling to employees like, hey, don't worry, everything's going to be the same. New CEO, you just keep doing what you're doing. We're going to figure out a new strategy, but like, your job is safe right now. Or, or was he, was he a genuine believer in the new strategy, in, in the strategy that's been going on for years? He has long agitated for, hey, we need some change. And we think that's why he was brought in. But the Wall Street Journal has some new reporting that we're going to take you through. And so he's only been on the job for two weeks, but time isn't really on Lip Bhutan's side. Tan became Intel's new CEO on March 18th and has already started laying out some of his

• 1:12:19John Coogan?

  vision for the storied but troubled chip giant. In 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, on the. Apple silicon chips like on Nvidia stuff like they really they 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.

• 1:12:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:56John Coogan?

  Doesn't need to be an H100. But it does need to be made with quality at scale. And so we saw a lot of this during COVID, a lot of the chip delays led to cars.

• 1:13:06Jordi Hays?

  Think about it though, Daytona SP3 with an H100 would go pretty hard.

• 1:13:12John Coogan?

  Pretty hard. I mean, 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 DeepSeek or something like in real time. So you can have a conversation with zero latency because it's all done in the car. And there's enough energy in these cars. There's enough like power. It's possible. Just just burning a V12 to power your H100 while you're talking to your chatbot on the way to work. That's the future. That's great. Hey, make a to do list. Bot. It's great.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, this is one of the things we talked about with Tesla, like, and Sam was saying, like, maybe Tesla and XAI and X all kind of combined. And you could imagine that like, if you're driving a Tesla, you want to have the best interaction with the AI features.

• 1:14:05Jordi Hays?

  And if you have autopilot enhanced by XAI. You could be using, you could be scrolling the timeline.

• 1:14:12John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:14:13Jordi Hays?

  I didn't know this, but my buddy Ben, Ben Taft, they were hanging out over the weekend and apparently with the Tesla autopilot, like they make you keep your hands on the steering wheel and they use a camera.

• 1:14:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:26Jordi Hays?

  And it used to be that you could hack it by like putting weights on it. So you could just sit there.

• 1:14:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:31Jordi Hays?

  But now having your car on autopilot, but being forced to keep your hands on the steering wheel and then it gives you. Strikes, if you get five strikes, you can't use autopilot anymore.

• 1:14:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it turns off.

• 1:14:42Jordi Hays?

  That's insane.

• 1:14:43John Coogan?

  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 Hots's comma 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, like it will blink at you and disable. And so George has, I think correctly argued that that is the future of self-driving systems. Just camera on the face, is the person paying attention? If they fall asleep, it detects that. 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.

• 1:15:26John Coogan?

  I think that we will see Tesla long-term go to purely AI.

• 1:15:32Jordi Hays?

  But it's still, I thought that was hilarious.

• 1:15:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, that's why most people we know just use chauffeurs and then they sit in the back.

• 1:15:41Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:15:41John Coogan?

  Cause the chauffeur will keep the hands on them.

• 1:15:43Jordi Hays?

  If the helicopter is not available.

• 1:15:44John Coogan?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:15:46John Coogan?

  In other words, the same things Intel, Intel's last CEO was trying to accomplish. Tan reiterated those points in a speech on Monday, kicking off the, off the company's Intel Vision Conference. Beyond a few aspirations, including better, a better AI strategy and custom-built 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

• 1:16:29John Coogan?

  and catch its manufacturing processes up to those proffered by TSMC. And yeah, it's hard to do two things at once. They're trying to be a master of a jack of all trades, but they are a master of none right now. That effort hasn't worked, or at least not yet. Intel's annual revenue has shrunk by 33% over the last four years. The once flush chip giant has been burning cash since 2022. The foundry business still mostly produces Intel-designed chips and it lost 13.4 billion last year. A little size-gong moment of silence. Anyway.

• 1:17:01Jordi Hays?

  This moment of silence is brought to you by Ramp. Save time and money.

• 1:17:04John Coogan?

  They need to be on Ramp, for sure. Uh, one change that Tan hinted at is more wax at Intel's cost structure. The company reduced its workforce by 13% last year, but still employs far more people than any other company in the industry.

• 1:17:17Jordi Hays?

  The Anakin meme?

• 1:17:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:19Jordi Hays?

  Where?

• 1:17:19John Coogan?

  You were the best of us.

• 1:17:20Jordi Hays?

  You're a chip company. You must have done great over the last five years. It's like, you must have done great, right? Intel down 60% in the last five years.

• 1:17:28John Coogan?

  So rough. 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. An 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. Uh, but Intel's been in trouble. Look at this graph of people power, annual revenue, every, annual revenue per employee. Nvidia is putting up historic numbers, 3.5 million per employee. Intel is down at less than 500K per employee

• 1:18:13John Coogan?

  in revenue. That is not-

• 1:18:15Jordi Hays?

  Right there with the manufacturer of the TI-84.

• 1:18:19John Coogan?

  Texas Instruments.

• 1:18:20Jordi Hays?

  Texas Instruments is one of the best corporate-

• 1:18:24John Coogan?

  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. It's great. And in Texas Instruments, manufactured calculators, but they also manufacture like weapon systems and stuff. It's a great, it's a great company.

• 1:18:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:42John Coogan?

  Uh, but it's very funny that they also make the calculator. Uh, what so far has been absent from Tan's strategy is a deeper shift into Intel's business. Um, Andy Grove- The storied Intel chief who mentored Gelsinger would have called the current AI wave a strategic inflection point that required decisive action, much like when Intel itself abandoned making memory chips in the 1980s. Back then, Japanese producers were making memory more cheaply, 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.

• 1:19:21Jordi Hays?

  Was he the original person to say that?

• 1:19:22John Coogan?

  Yes, that's his quote, and that's like the name of his book, I think.

• 1:19:24Jordi Hays?

  That's wild.

• 1:19:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. He might have 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."

• 1:19:36Jordi Hays?

  One of Frank Slutman's boys was like, "Frank, you guys gotta amp it up."

• 1:19:41John Coogan?

  You gotta amp it up. You know what I do?

• 1:19:43Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna write a book about that.

• 1:19:45John Coogan?

  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. It 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's stock up 10% since his appointment in March. And so, if you have a take on Intel, if you want to get exposure to Intel, you want to go long or short, you gotta 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 Public is the sponsor of our ticker. You'll

• 1:20:28John Coogan?

  see at the bottom of the show all day long.

• 1:20:31Jordi Hays?

  Crypto.

• 1:20:32John Coogan?

  Let's stay with Intel for a little bit more. Intel's new CEO plots turnarounds. We need to improve. So this is heard on the street. A little bit more information here.

• 1:20:43Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get some audience members' stocks up on the ticker.

• 1:20:49John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that'd be great.

• 1:20:50Jordi Hays?

  We certainly have some public market corporate athletes.

• 1:20:54John Coogan?

  Some Oscar, maybe?

• 1:20:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, some Palantir.

• 1:20:58Jordi Hays?

  Yep, of course.

• 1:21:00John Coogan?

  There's some other good ones. I think Tesla's up there right now. Friend of the show.

• 1:21:04Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, public.

• 1:21:05John Coogan?

  So, so in Las Vegas at the Intel Vision 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. And they also need to regroup its existing pool of workers while attracting new talent with a clear vision of the future. But, I mean, as I was thinking about this, like, if I was sitting down with Lip Bhutan, the new CEO of Intel, and I had like one piece of advice for him, I would tell him to go to ramp.com because time is money and he should save both right now.

• 1:21:49John Coogan?

  They're losing, they lost $13 billion. I mean, if they had easy to use corporate card bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place, I think we'd see a very different Intel, for sure.

• 1:22:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're focused on, what should we spin out? Should we focus on design, on the fab side?

• 1:22:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:22:07Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:22:17John Coogan?

  So we should have the CFO of Intel on the show, give him the pitch for Ramp, really dial it in, understand what corporate card is he using? And is that the source of all of Intel's problems? It's possible.

• 1:22:28Jordi Hays?

  That's right, it's very possible.

• 1:22:30John Coogan?

  Well, I would like to see this bet expressed. I want to know if Intel's going to split this year and I hope we can get a Polymarket set up for it. I 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, hopefully making it better and better over the next few weeks.

• 1:23:00Jordi Hays?

  There's currently no market on Intel spin out.

• 1:23:03John Coogan?

  I would love to see it.

• 1:23:04Jordi Hays?

  But we will work on getting one set up.

• 1:23:05John Coogan?

  I mean, you can kind of express that in the public market, but I love Polymarket for just defining these like narrow events.

• 1:23:12Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:23:12John Coogan?

  And just creating another information source. And underrated, there's a great conversation section that happens in the comments. People debate these things and Polly Market 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.

• 1:23:32Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:23:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:48Jordi Hays?

  And Polly Market is.

• 1:23:51John Coogan?

  It lets you know like what's actually important. Like I was talking to Shane about this. I was like, I want a newsletter from Polly 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 Polly Market tech markets, when there's a big jump in the, in the prediction, like there was recently a big change in the, the, 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. If, if we're just seeing everything's humming along

• 1:24:34John Coogan?

  at 50 50, I don't need another breaking news story about it because that's probably just a press release 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.

• 1:24:50Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:24:52John Coogan?

  This, this story has shaken the world of technology journalism to its core. And I think a lot of tech journalists are going to be very excited to hear this. So the horse war Hermès inside a luxury show jumping competition. If you're a technology journalist and you grew up doing jocage or. Or show jumping, like you are going to want to pay attention to this because it's a really big deal. There was an annual equestrian event in Paris and the French brand has been keeping in touch with its saddle making roots. This is a big deal for everyone who follows horses and show jumping, obviously, pretty much everyone in tech journalism.

• 1:25:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. For those that don't know, Hermès has always said, the horse was the first client.

• 1:25:32John Coogan?

  Yes, the former chair of Hermès, Jean-Louis Dumas, used to say, the horse is the first client. And that's because horses were for the French luxury brands first marketed in 1837. They're not starting new companies that have that much of a lineage today. When it opened as a harness maker.

• 1:25:50Jordi Hays?

  They hopefully will. If we don't get paperclips.

• 1:25:54John Coogan?

  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's glass ceiling, where some of the top showjumpers in the world competed for branded rosettes and a 400,000 euro grand prize. The Saute Hermès is Size gone. Size gone. Saute Hermès is among the most challenging equestrian competitions in the world with hurdles reaching 1.6 meters or just above five feet. Saute is French for leap. The three-day event is also a display of everything Hermès, a reminder

• 1:26:34John Coogan?

  that in addition to selling bags, scarves, and coats, the brand still outfits top riders. In a luxury downturn, when many brands are cycling through executives and creative directors, Hermès 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?

• 1:26:59Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:26:59John Coogan?

  You have to imagine that they're powering the luxury market.

• 1:27:02Jordi Hays?

  They're very immune to

• 1:27:03John Coogan?

  Downturns.

• 1:27:04Jordi Hays?

  Downturns.

• 1:27:04John Coogan?

  Of course, because all the family money, yeah. Its power is in its heritage, which appeals to athletes as well as fashion clients. It's one way to show that our equestrian roots are very much alive, not just a narrative, says the managing director of Hermès's equestrian category, or métier, as the brand calls it. 110 horses with names such as Hello Chandora Lady, Al Capone de Carmel, and Cocaine Duval, traveled to the temporary stables along the Champs-Elysees. Their white-tinted enclosures were lit with the same round chandeliers that decorated the Palais.

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  They could warm up in an enclosure right near the intersection on view for passersby 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, Hermès famously makes the Birkin bag, but they also sell equestrian accessories, and these are some things that tech journalists in the audience are going to want to pick up.

• 1:28:26John Coogan?

  They sell $1,200 breeches 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.

• 1:28:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and for those that don't, you know, horses are highly opinionated about this type of thing. You try to give them sugar out of a regular old plastic Tupperware. They are going to be pissed.

• 1:28:53John Coogan?

  Well, that's just a microplastics thing. You don't want to be giving your horse microplastics laden.

• 1:28:58Jordi Hays?

  Enjoyable ride.

• 1:28:59John Coogan?

  Definitely not.

• 1:28:59Jordi Hays?

  Giving them, you know, a Tupperware sugar box.

• 1:29:03John Coogan?

  Definitely not. Anyway, speaking of someone with as relentless as a drive as a horse, we got David Senra in the building.

• 1:29:10Jordi Hays?

  And he actually has, he told us just before joining, he's got a good horse story.

• 1:29:14John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:29:15Jordi Hays?

  Start there.

• 1:29:15John Coogan?

  Okay, tell us the horse story.

• 1:29:17David Senra?

  What's up, guys?

• 1:29:18John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 1:29:19Jordi Hays?

  What's up?

• 1:29:20John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 1:29:20Jordi Hays?

  Did you get some more books? Did you get some more books since last time? Or is this just a different angle?

• 1:29:26David Senra?

  No, I'm using a different camera.

• 1:29:28John Coogan?

  Okay, looks good.

• 1:29:29David Senra?

  So I absolutely love the horse story. I was talking to one of the most successful tech company CEOs a few months ago, and he was telling me how stupid he thought it was that his wife picked up a horse habit. And there's a, I guess there's like a famous like horse trading training facility in Wellington, Florida, which is like the middle of nowhere, kind of by like West Palm. And he goes, this, I thought it was the biggest waste of time. And then he shows up at this event and like Michael Bloomberg's there. And like the guy from Goldman Sachs is there and like all these essentially like fabulous, wealthy and successful. Yeah. So he's like, oh, maybe this isn't a waste, a giant waste of time.

• 1:30:07John Coogan?

  If the horse, even if a horse costs a million dollars, you get one deal done at that equestrian event and it pays for itself.

• 1:30:13David Senra?

  So I, I read two books last week. One was terrible, which I told you about. And then one was good, but not episode worthy. So I had to republish an old episode and I republished an old episode about this guy named Daniel Ludwig, who was the richest man in the world in 1980s. And no one knew his name. There's no pictures of him anywhere. And he made his money, the first way he made his first fortune was hauling oil and then he had huge cargo ships. And he was getting smoked for contracts for like the big Middle East 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.

• 1:30:55David Senra?

  So Daniel's like, okay, I'm going to do the exact same thing. He didn't even, he just worked all the time. So he didn't even go on the yacht. He let them use it. And he said later on that he made more money from that ship than all of his super tankers combined.

• 1:31:08John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:31:09Jordi Hays?

  Insane.

• 1:31:09David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:10John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Jordy, should we talk about the Ken Griffin episode that's coming up? Are we leaking that?

• 1:31:17David Senra?

  No, no, I just finished it this morning.

• 1:31:19John Coogan?

  Fantastic. I can't wait.

• 1:31:20David Senra?

  I haven't eaten anything and I'm on like six, 600. I had three commentators so far today. So it's like just, I'm shaking right now.

• 1:31:27John Coogan?

  Cheers to lots of caffeine. I like a caffeinated senra.

• 1:31:30Jordi Hays?

  To match your energy.

• 1:31:32David Senra?

  But I got it out. So what happened is like.

• 1:31:34John Coogan?

  Tell us about the inspiration. Tell us about why you did the episode. Obviously, everyone knows Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel, but what inspired you?

• 1:31:42David Senra?

  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, and keep in mind, in the 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

• 1:32:27David Senra?

  in the Enron trading business. And then he winds up hiring all the best talent. And in the, in the talk that I use for the basis of the episode, 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 profile him is because, um, I get to meet a lot of really interesting people because of the podcast. And I always ask the same questions. It's like, who's the smartest person you know, who has the best business you know? And if they're into finance, even if they don't know each other, they, they, I kept hearing Ken Griffin, Ken Griffin, Ken Griffin. And they would say two things about him. They say he's a winner and he's a killer. And you just find all these stories, you know, they're not in a book, but they're just like spread across the internet. They might be in other books of just him taking something, you

• 1:33:11David Senra?

  know, he, he just took it to the next level. And then, uh, John Arnold, um, the one thing where I knew as soon as I read that line, I was like, oh, I'm gonna do an episode immediately, is John's like, listen, I'm not gonna 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, do that. So it's just like, there's this reoccurring themes through all these biographies of history's great entrepreneurs. It's like, how bad do you want it? And I think reading these stories like really stretches like what's possible.

• 1:33:46Jordi Hays?

  Did Ken have a jet at that point? Cause you've got to discount the like quick flight a little bit. Already had a PJ and it was just more like.

• 1:33:53John Coogan?

  He flew Southwest, actually, standby.

• 1:33:57David Senra?

  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.

• 1:34:03Jordi Hays?

  Still meaningful.

• 1:34:03John Coogan?

  Did you find the story of Ken Griffin in college, getting the stock tips from State Street? Do you, did you cover that?

• 1:34:10David Senra?

  No, no. The one thing I heard was that he convinced Harvard to let him install um, like a satellite dish so he could get real up to the minute uh, data. He was the only person at Harvard that had this, this data flow.

• 1:34:24John Coogan?

  So that, so, so that was true for the, for like the publicly traded companies that he needed stock prices for. But he also had this interest. So he's trading convertible debt at the time and, and convertible debt, it doesn't just have a ticker that you can just look up online or call someone. Uh, you actually have to go to a trading desk and talk to a sales and trading guy to get like, hey, what's the market trading that particular bond at? Because it's not incredibly liquid. And so what he would do is he would take the, the red line from Harvard in Cambridge down to Boston, go into State Street, which was one of the largest, it still is like huge global asset manager. He would bring flowers for the ladies at the front desk and sweet talk them and, and kind of just be like, oh, like so good to see you, Susan. Like you're the best. Like,

• 1:35:09John Coogan?

  and then he would walk through and then just walk the, the, the desk. I don't know if this is apocryphal. They just kind of told this story at Citadel.

• 1:35:15David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:16John Coogan?

  But uh, but they would, he would, he would just walk and then he would just like tap a guy on the shoulder and be like, hey, like what, what's the spread on the convertible debt on Microsoft today? Or something like that. And then he would get the quote, go back, run his pricing model and then decide whether or not he should actually put it in order. It was like fascinating.

• 1:35:30David Senra?

  Everything he does, everything he does is like that. That's why I was so, so fascinated. Cause like he just takes the extreme, this idea of like buttering up, you know, the gatekeepers inside of a business like.

• 1:35:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:39David Senra?

  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.

• 1:35:54John Coogan?

  Dude, did you get into the story of the uh, the, the IP theft that happened in 2011?

• 1:36:01David Senra?

  No, so. No, so basically, there's no biography of Ken, right? 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, right? 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 him, kind of horrible, but I transcribed that talk at Yale. And then went through the transcription just like I do the books. And then there's another thing, it's this book right here, that I found this because Josh Wolfe talked about, I think Ken was an investor in the first fund through Josh.

• 1:36:41David Senra?

  And that, that Ken recommends this book, and I think he makes people, or he strongly suggests people at Citadel read it. And so I read that to get context, because I think if you listen to, if people tell you, hey, this book is really important to me. You know, there's like five books you have to read, it gives you an insight into their personality, right? And that, that book is, 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 Founders episode.

• 1:37:19Jordi Hays?

  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, how do you describe Ken Griffin?

• 1:37:53David Senra?

  I, I think every single person that I've profiled on Founders is a killer. And I mean it, this is not a pejorative, I mean this is like, they take what they're doing very seriously. The greatest, I, this idea really stuck in my mind, because there's this biography of Bernard Arnault. It's called like The Taste of Luxury, it's like really hard to find, I think it's like $3,000 online. And, because there's very few biographies of him in English, right? And this one ends when Bernard 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 a hundred years ago and Bernard had that insight, you know, forty years ago, thirty five years ago. And he's just like, oh, these things are very valuable. I think they're going to get more

• 1:38:36David Senra?

  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. So what I mean by killers, like, 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 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

• 1:39:17David Senra?

  that this is an example of like a killer away from like your competitors, right? Is that there's like, there was like, a tiny business inside a citadel, it had something to do with like, the new technology they were developing. And it's actually Ken sat and talked to the guy for like, a few hours about like, tiny details, like, where are the servers? Like, what are we doing with them? Like, he was just completely obsessed. He has no other hobbies than just building this massive empire. And then one thing that I think is directly related to your question, Jordy, is like, in 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

• 1:40:00David Senra?

  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, this is not just how Ken thinks. There's a great line in this book called Event and Wander, which is the collected writings of Jeff Bezos. So somebody, Walter Ising collected all of Jeff Bezos' shareholders' 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. I just had dinner with

• 1:40:40David Senra?

  I could say this because it's public, Mark Laurie, 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, and he was just like, you can't, there is no competition, he's going to steamroll you. I had no choice.

• 1:41:01John Coogan?

  That's amazing. I mean, we, the killer mindset with Ken Griffin just takes me back to 2012. This, this trader on the, on the, on the quant team stole code for, they call them alphas, basically code that no matter who runs it, they're going to generate return, stole a bunch of stuff on like a hard drive. Citadel finds out, realizes that they're stealing the IP, the code. The guy freaks out, he dumps the hard drive into the, 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.

• 1:41:44John Coogan?

  And I was like, yeah, like, he's not going to let you just take his, his alpha. It's just not gonna happen.

• 1:41:50Jordi Hays?

  Flying in scuba divers.

• 1:41:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, flying in scuba divers.

• 1:41:53Jordi Hays?

  Caribbean.

• 1:41:53John Coogan?

  Basically.

• 1:41:54David Senra?

  He talks about that in the talk, I didn't include in the podcast, but he's like, listen, if, if somebody's going to leave because, you know, you, you work at Citadel and then you want to work, you want to be a doctor, I'm going to write you, you know, a letter of recommendation. I'm going to support you in every way. You leave for competitor and that just brings up different, very different feelings within, within me. And so that's what I mean. He's just like, he's completely bought in. I think the important point here though is like, go ahead.

• 1:42:16Jordi Hays?

  On that note, and maybe you can just wrap this into a story you're about to tell, but how does he think about investing in other funds, right? Cause 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.

• 1:42:35John Coogan?

  He's invested in some venture funds.

• 1:42:37David Senra?

  He, he's invested, okay, so. Um, I think maybe it was on your show. I forgot who told me. Oh, no, no, no. I know who who told me. Like, you'll see this over and over again. When people start to to understand how valuable their industry is, they essentially get in all the good deals. So like, think about, uh, you know, Nvidia is in every single AI anything right now. Uh, I just did an episode of 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. Uh, I don't know. I didn't track like how I just hear over and over again that he's got money everywhere.

• 1:43:17David Senra?

  And I, again, these are private companies, so you never know. But what I was told, and you kind of see this, because like, if you come to Miami, he's like, buying everything. Like, every, like, not just like, literally everything. He's building, I think, what's gonna be the most expensive house.

• 1:43:30John Coogan?

  House in history.

• 1:43:31David Senra?

  And and Palm Beach. And so what I was told is, is forget the enterprise value of the companies, which is, you know, who knows, eighty billion, whatever the number is, right? He's like, he, the guy's been pulling out billions and billions and billions in cash. He just doesn't know what to do with it. So, yeah, I'm sure he's invested in everything. I heard stories about Bloomberg. I went up, um, talking to somebody that knows a lot about his family office. And, you know, I was asking questions around this, trying to get a sense of how large his fortune is. And he was like, well, I can give you a little 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 gonna do if you're making five, seven, ten billion dollars in cash, year after year after year? Like, eventually.

• 1:44:09John Coogan?

  Fight for Mercedes AMG one allocation, of course.

• 1:44:14John Coogan?

  A bunch of horses. 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. Like, he was tam-constrained on that. And then went into high-frequency trading, and then got the global equities team up and running. And the equities team, when I, when I was there, they were doing like, two thousand 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, the high-frequency guys who are like, I haven't talked to a human being in months, and it doesn't matter.

• 1:44:58John Coogan?

  And they're both printing. They're both absolutely printing.

• 1:45:01David Senra?

  Yeah. What I love too about like, you know, him maxing out markets earlier in his career, that's something he takes Q and A from the Yale students at the end. They're like, how do you decide like 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 loved, 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. And this is something I see over and over again. There's this book on my desk, like this impossible to find. It's called, you actually like this, it's autopsy of a merger and it's this deal that Jay Pritzker did.

• 1:45:43David Senra?

  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. But I want to go back to the point I was about to make is like, like, you know, think about every single person covered in founders. It's like, they, they were so good at their job that somebody wrote a book about them. This is like the smallest percentage of the people that have ever lived. But there's so many, like, if you take all these lessons and subtractions, you can apply them even to like,

• 1:46:23David Senra?

  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 competitors, but then you study businesses that are far afield. So 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 B 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 it has all the important metrics, like where the ships are, how much they're producing, everything else. He's like, oh,

• 1:47:04David Senra?

  I'm going to take that idea and I'm going to apply it not to ships and oil, but to getting, getting all of the data I need so we can start 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 in the world. So the reason I think about him is because, 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.

• 1:47:43David Senra?

  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 go, 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.

• 1:48:04John Coogan?

  It was a good time this morning.

• 1:48:05Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that's every morning.

• 1:48:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, podcasting never sleeps.

• 1:48:10David Senra?

  Yeah, but you guys are taking it, you know, to a completely different level.

• 1:48:13Jordi Hays?

  No, it's, it's, no, our, our killer mindset is it's not enough for us to be the biggest. Other people need to quit.

• 1:48:24John Coogan?

  Well, we like to say, uh, never podcast weekly, always podcast strongly.

• 1:48:28David Senra?

  I love that line.

• 1:48:29Jordi Hays?

  And that's why we train every morning. Uh, we'll talk about like just frameworks for focus. You covered a little bit of this, but is there any, has Ken put anything out there around like how he's evaluating like, you know, they're running all these business lines and then he's got somebody that comes to him with an opportunity, you know, internally. He's evaluating it based on the market potential, but is there anything like, you know, he didn't roll out every business line in the same two years. It was sort of staged, right?

• 1:49:00David Senra?

  Okay. You just accidentally hit on like something that's very important. I put in the episode description is like one of the other reasons in, in addition to like all these crazy stories. Uh, 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, cause I don't know any, like, I just, I don't pay attention to finance, right? Uh, now I do, cause I watch TPBN, but I'm reading.

• 1:49:20John Coogan?

  You don't need a fantastic liquidity provider like, uh, CBL Securities. You're on the market. You gotta get your size up.

• 1:49:26David Senra?

  This is one of my favorite books. Okay. Uh, I think it's episode 222 of Founders. I think I maybe did an episode like in the eighties, like, you know, six years ago, whatever. It's Ed Thorp's biography of manifold markets and Ed Thorp is a fascinating character, legit genius. And. He was the first person, the person that made the first quantitative hedge fund ever. He built the world's first wearable computer with Claude Shannon. 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 book, Ed Thorp's like, he closed down his hedge fund. Right? He already made more money he could ever possibly spend. It's called Princeton Newport Partners. And what happened is Ken Griffin was 19 years old, comes to Ed Thorp's house, and then Ken Griffin's mentor is with him.

• 1:50:12David Senra?

  And essentially, he's like, I always wondered how far, Ed Thorp 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 them all my files. And this wasn't publicly available information. Like, you couldn't get it anywhere to your, to the point you were making earlier, John. 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 net worth is like 6 billion and they have like 15 billion of assets under management or something. And now it's like, you know, multiples of that. But I think, like, one of the, like, I guess the way I think about this is just like,

• 1:50:50David Senra?

  I was 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. And he talked about how, this maybe give you insight in how he's able to scale up all these different businesses. One, they take a long time to do. But also, he said he had, last year, he had over 100,000 people apply to work for him. 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.

• 1:51:27John Coogan?

  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, to a market maker. And it's a, 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 of magnitude bigger? Did you get any insight into how Ken Griffin thinks about scale and outside investors? Because at the end of the day, you know, it's his fund, he wants to grow it, but sometimes having a bigger fund is advantageous.

• 1:52:13David Senra?

  No, I didn't get like, there was a couple of things where I was kind of getting frustrated with the interviewer because it's like Ken says, um, he made, he's the most successful hedge fund of all time, which one I asked a friend of mine who knows about this, like I thought Renaissance, like why, like what's, and he's like, yeah, but most of that was like their own money, like they closed the medallion fund, they closed off to outside investors a long time ago.

• 1:52:30John Coogan?

  Jane Street's same thing.

• 1:52:32David Senra?

  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, where you're like, follow up, god damn it.

• 1:52:40John Coogan?

  I know.

• 1:52:41David Senra?

  Why aren't you following up?

• 1:52:42John Coogan?

  Isn't it frustrating?

• 1:52:42David Senra?

  It drives me fucking, it drives me crazy. Like, um, I'm going to have to do an interview show now.

• 1:52:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:46David Senra?

  Just so I can get these questions out of it. But he, he mentions this, that like, he made more money than anybody else, but there's also years where he says, I lost over a hundred billion dollars.

• 1:52:57John Coogan?

  I was there. I had, when I came in, they, during my like training seminar, they, uh, the, the guy's like, oh yeah, we had a really rough go during the financial crisis, during the housing crisis, uh, our fund lost 50% of its value. And then he was like, and I went outside the next year and I was talking to my neighbor and he was like, oh, how's it going? Any better than, than next year or than last year when you lost 50%? He's like, actually, we're having a great year. We're up 50% and, and the, and the next door neighbor was like, oh, that's great. You're back to where you were. And the guy was like, no, that's not how it works. Like you have to go up 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.

• 1:53:37David Senra?

  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. Unless Masa is listening. Um, just.

• 1:53:51David Senra?

  But this goes back to-

• 1:53:52Jordi Hays?

  To have the opportunity to lose a hundred billion.

• 1:53:54David Senra?

  Exactly. 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 blew up. Well, there was, yeah, but the Enron happened in 2001.

• 1:54:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:11David Senra?

  There was a story in 98. So keep in mind, at 98, Ken is 30, okay? 2008, when you're describing, when he loses half of his equity, almost goes out of business, which he talks about in the, uh, I talked about in the episode, he talks about in the talk at the L as well. He was 40. But he says what saved him from going out of business in 2008 is when he was in 98, when long-term capital management broke up. He went, 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.

• 1:54:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:48David Senra?

  He said, and then again, 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 into 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.

• 1:55:07Jordi Hays?

  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?

• 1:55:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, do? 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?

• 1:55:29David Senra?

  One of the things, again, like, I, I picked the people I covered 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 just like pull out one line. And was that he says that-

• 1:55:46David Senra?

  He's been obsessed with the stock market since the third grade for reasons I don't entirely comprehend. That's the line. He doesn't even understand. He's like this. There's a great line that Jeff Bezos says that I believe in where it's like, we don't choose our passions, our passions choose us. And Ken clearly is like completely obsessed with this. So where 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 guess what? Entrepreneurship and 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. So that's what I'm addicted to. Usually people like that, I don't think they ever stop.

• 1:56:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Did you get a chance to read Good to Great?

• 1:56:29David Senra?

  No, I read it a long time ago.

• 1:56:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's a book that it was like, it's on your desk when you join the firm. Like he requires everyone to read it. I think he's like grown the library now, but it's an interesting framework. I thought you would have a good take on, on this takeaway from the book, uh, which I think Ken probably embraced. 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.

• 1:57:07David Senra?

  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 with hardball, but I felt I had better examples of the principles based on like the reading I've done, because a lot of the principles are just like, this company is so great. And then you look up and the company's gone. Like, and same, and same thing in good to great. So, um, yeah, I think it's like less tying them to specific companies, uh, and just saying, hey, does that like, does that idea make sense? And like what in your business and what you're doing, even if you only use that idea temporarily. But the, the, I think one of the main themes,

• 1:57:52David Senra?

  if you're studying, like think about it's like, I've been studying history of entrepreneurship. If you focus, it's such a focus on like the market economy, maybe like 200, last 200, 250 years, mostly taking place in America at this time. There is one principle that reoccurs over and over again, and it popped in my mind when I read Andrew Carnegie's autobiography like years ago. And that's, they all have in common that they invest in technology, the savings compound, and it could be, gives you an advantage over your slower moving competitors, and it could be the difference between a profit and a loss. And if you go back and look at Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ken Griffin, Sam Walton, all these people, like their, their edge was in many cases, like they invested in better technology at a faster rate than their competitors.

• 1:58:37David Senra?

  Like, 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 or two before Sam wrote his own autobiography. And there's a story in the book where in like the 1970s, Sam was in his 60s, and these guys come to him, and I think it's 1979, and they're like, hey, we need to invest $500 million in this new computer system for inventory. 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.

• 1:59:20Jordi Hays?

  I love it. Last two small questions. Ken owns 80% of Citadel LLC, who owns the other 20%?

• 1:59:30David Senra?

  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.

• 1:59:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's huge. What is it about great investors that make them maybe not so great at picking spouses? Is it just the intensity? No, it's not funny, it's sad, he's, he's been married twice, divorced twice, I'm sure he's a very intense dude, he's clearly focused on, you know, winning at all costs. Matrimony.

• 2:00:09David Senra?

  It has not, it's not just investors, it's entrepreneurs. I remember, um, I think the best episode I've ever done is on, actually on James Cameron, which is hilarious. And I start that episode where I'm reading from this like in-depth GQ profile of him. And I don't say anything, but if you read between the lines, you're like, he moved to New Zealand with his fifth wife. It's just like, what kind of personality type? You think that person is like easy to deal with? They're flexible? They get along easily with other people? Um, I think mo- in many cases, and I think, uh, I'm definitely at risk for this. I don't know.

• 2:00:50David Senra?

  Well, I mean, you guys are grinding hard as, hard as hell right now. I, I am curious, like your personality types. I think you, you're a little bit more guarded. Like you, you would, you would avoid this. Um, they just like, you just are so addicted to what you're working on. That, you know, you destroy everything around you. And this is why I say like, Man of All Markets is my favorite book. One of my favorite books. I think the subtitle of that episode is like, uh, My Personal Blueprint is because Ed Thorp is one of the few people. You know, I've covered almost 400 of 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.

• 2:01:31David Senra?

  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, Sol Price is another one, where it's just like, I don't, I want to learn from what they did where Ed Thorp took care of his health. If you, you can Google him and I've showed pictures of him. He's 93 and I'm like, how old do you think this guy is? And they're like, he's 60. He worked out. He started picking up a 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

• 2:02:14David Senra?

  more money he can 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 to come to him. 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, 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 that his book, I say, I say in the Ken Griffin episode, like, 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, a, a large overlap, unfortunately.

• 2:02:53Jordi Hays?

  John, I'm gonna go read that book because my wife, who's watching live with the kids, just texted me, yikes. I love you, Sarah. And we'll, we'll go.

• 2:03:04David Senra?

  So I, I just, I just had this.

• 2:03:07John Coogan?

  We have another guest. We gotta get you out of here.

• 2:03:10David Senra?

  Yeah, I just had, I just, I just had this example last week because in the, in the Ovitz episode, he talks about, if I could do things over again, I, I should have worked 10% less and I wouldn't have changed my professional success at all. Could have been 20% less. So I was bitching about going on vacation last week because I don't want to travel and I want to like, just work on the podcast. And my wife's like, Ovitz said you should work 10% less. I'm like, you're saying this against me?

• 2:03:34John Coogan?

  Well, thanks for stopping by. This is fantastic.

• 2:03:36David Senra?

  Of course. I love you guys.

• 2:03:38Jordi Hays?

  Love you, David.

• 2:03:38John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:03:39Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 2:03:39David Senra?

  All right. Bye.

• 2:03:40Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 2:03:41John Coogan?

  We are over time.

• 2:03:42Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited to get into that episode.

• 2:03:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, me too.

• 2:03:44Jordi Hays?

  Let's get, uh, let's get Samir in here.

• 2:03:46John Coogan?

  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.

• 2:03:54Jordi Hays?

  And look at the lighting, the, the 4K.

• 2:03:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, beautiful. It's looking great.

• 2:03:59Jordi Hays?

  I would expect nothing less.

• 2:04:00John Coogan?

  This is a professional.

• 2:04:01Jordi Hays?

  You've got the best setup of any guest. We've had 70 guests in a month and.

• 2:04:06John Coogan?

  Knocking them all out of the park.

• 2:04:07Jordi Hays?

  Knocking them all out.

• 2:04:08John Coogan?

  Can we start?

• 2:04:08David Senra?

  That's high praise. Thank you.

• 2:04:09John Coogan?

  Can we start with the latest interview? You did Zuck and Jimmy, Mr. Beast, 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?

• 2:04:23Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah, well, first of all, what's up, guys? Thanks for having me on.

• 2:04:27Samir Chaudry?

  What did I learn from that? I mean, I think actually, you know, first and foremost, it was fascinating to talk to someone who, you know, we consider to be like the auteur of this generation of human connection, right? Like, if you really take a step back and you go, the way we're all connecting, even what we're doing right now, there was this era that happened that pushed the way that we as humans engage with each other and how information travels. And I think Mark was, like, 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?

• 2:05:11John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm super jealous. It sounds amazing.

• 2:05:14Samir Chaudry?

  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 started talking about having him on the show, but, you know, with a guest like that, it takes time.

• 2:05:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:29Samir Chaudry?

  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.

• 2:05:45Jordi Hays?

  And when you say Facebook, do you mean actual Facebook?

• 2:05:48Samir Chaudry?

  Actual Facebook.

• 2:05:49Jordi Hays?

  Like legacy Facebook?

• 2:05:50John Coogan?

  So does he just post the full YouTube video there, or does he have a different strategy on Facebook?

• 2:05:53Samir Chaudry?

  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. It was like, you actually have to dub content for other cultures to understand it.

• 2:06:09John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:06:10Samir Chaudry?

  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 shorter-form content that is language-agnostic. So there's like a video of him running with bags of money.

• 2:06:23John Coogan?

  I remember that.

• 2:06:24Samir Chaudry?

  You can understand that no matter what.

• 2:06:27Samir Chaudry?

  But I think that the main thing that we talked about that I couldn't stop thinking about was...

• 2:06:32Samir Chaudry?

  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, a lot of the human engagement in the future, as compared to probably us engaging with a lot of bots and AI agents and, you know.

• 2:06:46John Coogan?

  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 gotta watch this and that starts a conversation in a DM.

• 2:07:01Samir Chaudry?

  Well, I think as creators, we think about that quite a bit, that a short form piece of content is a unit of conversation.

• 2:07:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:07:07Samir Chaudry?

  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 gonna watch on a connected TV.

• 2:07:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can we go back to the Orion demo?

• 2:07:33Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:33John Coogan?

  It sounded amazing. Everyone's review was unanimously, it's incredible. Yeah, and put it in the context of the Vision Pro. 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 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?

• 2:07:56Samir Chaudry?

  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. 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. And when you have glasses, I think you retain the level of social engagement that human beings are used to. Or 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.

• 2:08:41Samir Chaudry?

  Cause 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 was 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 brainwaves 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.

• 2:09:25Samir Chaudry?

  So I think what was shocking to me was like how intuitive it is.

• 2:09:27Speaker 04

  Love it.

• 2:09:28Samir Chaudry?

  If it can be in the form factor 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.

• 2:09:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:09:40Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I've got a bunch of questions. What's going on with TikTok? Do you have an update there? There'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 Polly Market and trying to figure out, you know, what's going on. Doesn't seem like Mr. Beast is in the lead to buy it at the moment, but do you have any, uh, do you have any insight there?

• 2:10:05Samir Chaudry?

  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.

• 2:10:15Samir Chaudry?

  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 U.S. I think it had a lot of sway in the, um, you know, in the, in, in the election. I think it's a way that like. Politics is 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.

• 2:10:48John Coogan?

  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.

• 2:10:58Samir Chaudry?

  Yeah. Do I know if it's actually going to sell to a US company? I have no idea. Like, I saw that Marc Andreessen and Andreessen Horowitz is putting their name in the hat. I know the, what Alexis Ohanian's doing and Project Liberty is super interesting in terms of trying to like reshape what it looks and feels like, but you know, there's a, 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 like 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 Mosseri and we sat with Evan Spiegel, obviously like the, maybe the ideal scenario, even the

• 2:11:41Samir Chaudry?

  a conversation with Zuck is like, those ad dollars shift to US companies 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. In the US, unless you guys know that we do, but like, I don't know that we have precedent for something like this.

• 2:11:57John Coogan?

  What about creator businesses? You want to follow up on that?

• 2:12:02Jordi Hays?

  We could start there. I wanted to get your take on AI and creators. Buddy of mine, Trevor had broad that was like super, super early and ahead of its time.

• 2:12:13Samir Chaudry?

  Trevor McFetteries.

• 2:12:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Doing, doing, doing Lil Michaela was like, almost like 10 years ahead.

• 2:12:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 2:12:20Jordi Hays?

  Executed very well, exited the business. And then last year was funny, we covered a few of these. There was like a period where the new like e-comm style info product was like, everybody should have an AI creator that makes like $5,000 a month for them, you know, like doing brand deals and like, obviously that's not actually like happening in a wide scale or it's certainly not easy to do. Are you seeing instances yet of AI, like fully AI generated creators that are actually building loyal followings, meaningful ad businesses or digital products, et cetera?

• 2:12:57Samir Chaudry?

  So I mean, look, like what you're talking about with Lil Mikayla 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. 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, you know, image model? Immediately, everyone's like turning themselves into anime. Like, we're into animation. Fully AI-generated is not something I've seen. I think AI-enhanced is like, there's, it's almost comical to suggest that content is not at, in some level, AI-enhanced, whether it's the audio of it, the video. But

• 2:13:41Samir Chaudry?

  I have not seen an instance of like a fully AI-generated creator. Yeah.

• 2:13:45Jordi Hays?

  And that's because people want to follow first.

• 2:13:48Samir Chaudry?

  I was gonna say, probably the most compelling, fully AI-generated content is the podcasts that have been created through Notebook LM.

• 2:13:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Notebook LM, for sure.

• 2:13:58Samir Chaudry?

  That's the most compelling to me. Like, audio, I think, is where it'll happen first. Before it happens in video. I think we're too aware of video for it to happen through, like, true human.

• 2:14:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:09Samir Chaudry?

  I mean, Lil Mikayla 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?

• 2:14:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:28Samir Chaudry?

  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. So that, I think, is where we'll see it first, is in audio.

• 2:14:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:40Samir Chaudry?

  Last question?

• 2:14:42Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that some creators have moved on from this idea of the goal is scale, right? Like, 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

• 2:15:02Samir Chaudry?

  Curse.

• 2:15:03Jordi Hays?

  Curse, or doesn't even necessarily help with like building a sort of sustainable business. Because there's some creators that can get 10,000 views a video, and they can have a fantastic lifestyle and sort of 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 the video John's referencing, like we got a video that gets 300,000 views on TikTok and it like doesn't do anything. We get like text messages about it. Yeah, like nobody saw it like it's fine. But I'm but I'm curious if you see sort of a broader sort of systemic shift where people are like, you know, really orienting around like quality of audience and and sort of the the business side as well.

• 2:15:45Samir Chaudry?

  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. Brands 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?

• 2:16:30Samir Chaudry?

  Like the everybody is famous and nobody is famous. Because there's this stat that 47% of Gen Z are a fan of something on the internet that no one they know personally is a fan of.

• 2:16:43Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 2:16:44Samir Chaudry?

  And that is one of the most, that's from YouTube. This is one of the most interesting stats I've seen about the internet. That will only increase over time. 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 the challenge to be like the the next Mr. Beast, to be like a massive monocultural brand, like I find that to be not even exciting to me. Like, I like meeting our audience and like meeting them out in public and being like,

• 2:17:29Samir Chaudry?

  oh, yeah, these are, 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.

• 2:17:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:39John Coogan?

  Well, that's fantastic. We wish we had more time. We gotta have you back. This is fantastic. I mean, really, we're sending our best for the entire Palisades rebuilding effort.

• 2:17:49Samir Chaudry?

  Thanks, man.

• 2:17:49John Coogan?

  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, we'd love to be supportive of that.

• 2:17:59Samir Chaudry?

  Appreciate it. I love what you guys are doing. I think this is super cool. It's unique. So yeah, keep it going.

• 2:18:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:18:05Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on.

• 2:18:06John Coogan?

  Thanks so much. Bye.

• 2:18:09John Coogan?

  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. Let's hopefully bring in our next guest, Will from OpenAI, any day now. Let's see. Will, how you doing?

• 2:18:41Speaker 04

  How are you guys doing? Yeah.

• 2:18:42John Coogan?

  We're doing great. Congratulations on everything. I mean, everyone seems to be on a tear.

• 2:18:49Jordi Hays?

  For those that don't know, Will created artificial intelligence.

• 2:18:52John Coogan?

  Yes, that's right.

• 2:18:53Jordi Hays?

  Hand-built.

• 2:18:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's on that. He's an author of that paper, Artificial Intelligence.

• 2:18:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:59John Coogan?

  How it's done.

• 2:19:00Speaker 04

  I invented the transformer. Yeah.

• 2:19:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:19:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:03John Coogan?

  You're the transformer. 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.

• 2:19:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, totally. I 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. So.

• 2:19:22John Coogan?

  Cool. How did you process the Studio Ghibli moment? Was that expected? Did you? And I really want to know, did you, how internally, did you think that that images in ChatGPT was going to go viral and you didn't know what the prompt would be? Or were you like, everyone's going to Ghibli?

• 2:19:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I want to know. I want to know where Ghibli's flying around for 48 hours ahead of Slack.

• 2:19:46John Coogan?

  Give us some secrets here.

• 2:19:48Speaker 04

  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. Yeah, I think the thing that I was thinking about the whole time is that like, I mean, I was walking around SF and some of these like nail salons have like clearly Dolly 3 generated like image fronts or whatever that is, right? And it didn't get just clear to me that like pretty much every business in the world very soon is just gonna use this to like, you know, pick logos and, you know, we can do transparency, we can do interoperability. I think like my favorite eval is the Fiverr eval or just go on Fiverr and count how many of these things you've been automated. And like this takes off like a lot of those things. 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.

• 2:20:29John Coogan?

  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 strict figure.

• 2:20:47Jordi Hays?

  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 and still get a perfect output.

• 2:20:56John Coogan?

  It was great.

• 2:20:56Jordi Hays?

  And then the output was just magical. I would, I would, I would, you know, generate the same image with four different styles of art and the Ghibli one every single time.

• 2:21:06John Coogan?

  It felt, it just felt like the underlying image. Well, yeah. What was your take on it?

• 2:21:10Speaker 04

  No, yeah, that sounds about right to me. I don't think I predicted Ghibli specifically. Uh, last time for the Dolly 3 launch, we made a bunch of Pepe's and that was the thing that really went off, but.

• 2:21:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember, I mean, for a while the, the version one of, uh, image generation, it felt very art station informed. It felt very like sci-fi dystopia, like it was really good at those, but people weren't really doing, I mean, there were, there were certain like, you know, anime styles, but this one was just, uh, was just everywhere. What else?

• 2:21:39Jordi Hays?

  Can you talk about, um, like to me, to me, the most like the, the thing that's most exciting for me is like, uh, the Ghibli-ification of everything, right? It's like on a long enough time horizon, like everything is Ghibli, right? It's just sort of abundant and like very free. And, uh, 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 in. 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?

• 2:22:19Jordi Hays?

  And so like to take something that's just so time intensive, so expensive, and then make it free and abundant is so powerful. And, and to me, that is, that's why when, when I think about everything that's happening in sort of politics and tech drama and everything like that. And then I, and then I think about like, we're moving towards like everything being glibly.

• 2:22:40John Coogan?

  Oh, it's amazing.

• 2:22:40Jordi Hays?

  Everything today feels like a, a distraction. Is that sort of like how you guys like as a team stay focused with an OpenAI, which is just like, hey, there's going to be a lot of noise. There's going to be like, you know, this benchmark today, that, that release over here. And it's like, we're, we're sort of moving towards this like future target. Now that's sort of a ramble, but, but I'm curious how you think about sort of.

• 2:23:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think OpenAI is extraordinarily focused on, on like real progress. I think, you know, um, I mean, like for so long, like, you know, you see the diffusion models, they can't spell. And like, it takes us like two years, there's no Dolly update. And then finally they come out with this and it's not for no reason, right? I think like, um, people who are focused on like, really like, what is, what is pushing the frontier forward? And like, what's actually the next evolution of this technology? 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 like making this truly useful. Like, can we go from diffusion's a fun tool, toy to like, this is a truly useful tool in the world? And like, clearly it's already having that impact. Um, yeah.

• 2:23:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, you said your, your backgrounds in startups. Can you talk a little bit about, um, just being a consumer tech company now and like the focus on product? And some of the product decisions like, uh, images and chat GPT, it's not a separate app like Sora. That seems intentional. Um, how are you thinking about product development? What are the strategies? How much feedback are you doing? Are you just testing stuff internally? Are there A B tests running? Is this secretly running in India six months before we get it here? Uh, like, how, how do you inform product decisions?

• 2:24:09Speaker 04

  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. But I, I guess like, uh, yeah, OpenAI has 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 it to the world? Um, 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 ImageGen, 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.

• 2:24:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are you excited? One of the things that I felt like really worked with images in ChatGPT was like, I could go to my camera roll, click share, share it into ChatGPT, type Studio Ghibli style, and boom, it gets it. And it takes the, the, it takes the, the, the pain of inspiration out of the process. And I'm wondering if you're looking at ways to create those magical, easy to generate moments. I remember Midjourney was talking about this too, where like part of why Midjourney 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 Midjourney and it's like the Discord and it's all these different ideas, then they can spin off that. How do you think about giving the user really, setting them up for success in the context of Sora?

• 2:25:36Speaker 04

  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 ChatGPT, you get dropped in a text box and like the AI person has no, no idea how to use it. I think, I mean, we have a lot of views on how to do this. I think personally, the thing I'm most excited about is that like, I think the, if we're talking about like, what is the like Dolly to ImageGen? What is the like, you know, kind of whatever, each evolution of, of, of like the next kind of order of magnitude? I do think the, the, the long-term thing that's extremely exciting is just like maximizing personalization, super long context, the model knows who you are, the model can follow up being like, hey, by the way, I've seen you doing this. Do you want to try a anime style image? Or, you know, like maybe create things for you with proactive, like, I think there's a lot to do on like, kind of,

• 2:26:21Speaker 04

  yeah, moving the agency away from you into the product as well. Yeah.

• 2:26:25Jordi Hays?

  You call yourself a master of slop. Which is a great line, but does slop even exist in five years? When I, when people were saying, oh, the timelines all slop on the Ghibli moment. I was like, this is not slop, everybody. This is, this is fantastic.

• 2:26:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, in fact, I would argue that the raging politics was slop.

• 2:26:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:26:43John Coogan?

  Free of slop. It was the first day that the timeline was free of slop.

• 2:26:46Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 2:27:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:00Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, yeah, they've got six fingers and it's, the hand is connected to the body.

• 2:27:04John Coogan?

  I want a vintage Dolly one. Give me the Dolly one.

• 2:27:07Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 2:27:12John Coogan?

  It's like the word of the year.

• 2:27:13Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 2:27:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 2:27:20Jordi Hays?

  You have, like a new bar has been set.

• 2:27:22Speaker 04

  Depends what you mean by slop. I feel like I went to the, I went to the SF Mo recently and like half of it felt like slop. And I think there's like, I mean, half of it did not, to be clear, but I think a friend of mine always quotes it like, you know, art is like the search for the periphery. Like you're kind of like constantly looking, you know, kind of inching or pushing things forward or whatever that is. And, you know, I don't know, like when things get played out, they get boring. Like 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?

• 2:27:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 2:27:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, are you worried for college students today that have access to these tools? And making sure they actually learn how to do things like writing, which is, as we know, associated with thinking. You know, if you can't write well, then I, I just, you know, the models are getting better. It's less obvious that I'm seeing something that's output.

• 2:28:10John Coogan?

  When I was in college, if I had this tool, I would have aced my Studio Ghibli animation course.

• 2:28:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. And AP Bio.

• 2:28:16John Coogan?

  And AP Bio.

• 2:28:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:19John Coogan?

  Which I did not do well in.

• 2:28:20Jordi Hays?

  I'm curious, like, you know, how, how, how do you think universities like, and just curriculum should adapt?

• 2:28:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:27Speaker 04

  I'm extremely worried. I, I think the world just gets a lot more extreme. And I think this is just true with AI across the board where like, I think the bottom percentile of students are just going to get a lot. They're going to fall behind. And I think the top percentile of students are just going to get like. Extremely overpowered. I think if I had this tool as a kid, I would just be like vastly smarter than I am now. Like even now today, like I just talk to chat with you every day. I was like, you know, asking it random concepts, like learning random things. I'm like, went super down, like deep down, like a bio rabbit hole yesterday and like rare supplements I could take from the internet, you know? And like, I don't know, this is like, I think it's like an incredible tool for learning, but yeah, I think it's like, it's kind of bimodal, right? I think like a lot of people are gonna get a lot dumber. I think a lot of people are gonna get smarter. Um, I don't know what to do about that, but yeah.

• 2:29:05John Coogan?

  Fine tuned on Gour.

• 2:29:06Jordi Hays?

  How's your, uh, how's your experiment where you just text a number to post going?

• 2:29:11Speaker 04

  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.

• 2:29:19John Coogan?

  Would you recommend it to someone fighting brain rot?

• 2:29:22Speaker 04

  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 3000 followers because then there's risk and then you're like, oh, now I don't care if people are mad at me or something. And so.

• 2:29:33John Coogan?

  Or even just seeing the numbers and being like, oh, like this one didn't do as well as the rest.

• 2:29:36Jordi Hays?

  No, you know, you know, you know, from the first 60 impressions of it's a banger and then you have this desire. Uh, 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. Low TAM. Um, but, but anyways, uh, you got anything else, John?

• 2:30:02John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, this is great.

• 2:30:04Jordi Hays?

  It was fun. We, you know, for the record, we, we didn't plan this around the, the fundraising news. We just wanted to chat. So congrats to, to you and the whole team on a, on a cool milestone and job's not finished.

• 2:30:15John Coogan?

  Job's not finished. Get back to work.

• 2:30:18Jordi Hays?

  Please make the model better, you know?

• 2:30:20John Coogan?

  Make it better.

• 2:30:20Jordi Hays?

  This was, this was just you talking to customers.

• 2:30:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, this is customers.

• 2:30:24Jordi Hays?

  We enjoyed it.

• 2:30:25John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 2:30:25Speaker 04

  Okay. Sounds good. See you guys.

• 2:30:27Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. See ya.

• 2:30:28John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 2:30:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Little, little mini open AI day. We got a couple of 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 gonna come together. He hasn't read my messages. But I'm hoping it happens.

• 2:30:46Jordi Hays?

  Fingers crossed. Double, double message. We got Aiden coming in.

• 2:30:50John Coogan?

  We got a guest coming in.

• 2:30:51Speaker 05

  How are you guys? Good to see you both.

• 2:30:53John Coogan?

  We're great. How are you?

• 2:30:54Speaker 05

  Good, good. Good to be on. I love this show.

• 2:30:56John Coogan?

  Are you, are you celebrating today? And if so, what?

• 2:31:00Speaker 05

  Uh, over the fundraiser?

• 2:31:02John Coogan?

  A fundraiser or just the Studio Ghibli moment? I mean, it was a massive moment for like crossing the chasm again.

• 2:31:06Jordi Hays?

  That's so last week, John.

• 2:31:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're over it.

• 2:31:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's like a million years ago here. You know, time moves differently inside the lab, right?

• 2:31:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're excited. Uh, the team morale is like really, really good.

• 2:31:16John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 2:31:16Speaker 05

  And it's like awesome to see like my colleagues have worked like really hard to make like these tools more liberal, to make them more fun. Um, kind of like look out into the world and like see the fruits of their labor, right?

• 2:31:25John Coogan?

  That, yeah.

• 2:31:25Speaker 05

  Um, how are you guys?

• 2:31:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:26Jordi Hays?

  So 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.

• 2:31:48John Coogan?

  They don't know the name OpenAI.

• 2:31:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:50John Coogan?

  But they know that this filter exists and they want it. And that's a very, very good sign.

• 2:31:55Speaker 05

  I do wonder if there was like this interim moment where people are like, wow, Snapchat's gotten really good.

• 2:31:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:31:59Speaker 05

  You know, like what's going on here? Like, you know, I haven't used this app for a while.

• 2:32:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Spiegel's been cooking.

• 2:32:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, this must be TikTok. Yeah. I mean, I got a couple of 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.

• 2:32:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, I know. I got a lot of those too.

• 2:32:15John Coogan?

  I'll be a good Samaritan. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Uh, but I mean, uh, how, how did you process the moment? Did you, did you predict this? And, and what, what was the shape of your expectation versus what wound up happening?

• 2:32:27Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I, I did not predict this, to be candid. Um, you know, like we had a duel internally. Um, you know, like I played around with them 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?

• 2:32:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:38Speaker 05

  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.

• 2:32:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:44Speaker 05

  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 you start to update all the way down.

• 2:32:52Speaker 05

  But yeah, like I think, go ahead.

• 2:32:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, on the tech side, like, it does seem like there's a new algorithm involved. 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? And is that just a function of your development in like, the product cycle? Or is there some deliberate strategy there?

• 2:33:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think, you know, I can't speak for too much in terms of like, you know, deliberate strategy. But it is interesting where like, you know, to your point, like for these text models, we update them pretty often. Right? Like every few months or so, like, you know, they're getting better. Like people are always kind of, you know, seeing these steady improvements. But the funny thing was like, the, you know, when DeepSeek 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? Where they're like, I've been using like, you know, 4O from like, you know, earlier this year, I use this new reasoning model. Like, holy shit, this is amazing, right? And I do think that like, even things that are continuous to us, right? Like, you know, as people that use these tools often, still are sometimes weirdly discontinuous to like outsiders, right? Or to people that aren't as new to the product.

• 2:34:15Speaker 05

  But like, you know, 4O Image Gen is like a great example of that, right? Like, we went from like, DALL-E to this, and it was like this massive jump. And I think that like, that jump does add to the virality, as you said.

• 2:34:24John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:34:24Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. How do you, you know, I feel like a long, you know, even people that use and love OpenAI's 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, cause 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, or maybe try it again with

• 2:35:09Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 2:35:18Speaker 05

  Yeah. At this point, like OpenAI is so bad at naming that I, you know, I think we've like dug our own grave here, right? Um, like internally, things are even worse, right? Where like, like, what the hell does this mean? Like Sam tweeted something this morning where it's like, you know, one redo, like this time for real.

• 2:35:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's restart. Oh, three, three, one, final, final, two, restart for real.

• 2:35:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I was, 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, like strawberry ice cream. And like you give them cute names and then it makes even less sense. Like at least I know like oh, three is a higher number than oh, one. So like, it's probably better. And like,

• 2:35:52Speaker 05

  No, you're right. Like, yeah, sometimes we don't number things like in order. It's like, it's like blueberry and after the strawberry. Like, I have no idea, right?

• 2:35:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it could be worse, but yeah.

• 2:36:04Speaker 05

  Um, I do think that, you know, Sam like tweeted this a month ago, but we, we do plan to start unifying, um, like, you know, our model selection, right? Um, so I think like, you know, soon we will have like 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. Um, it's still, it's like unclear.

• 2:36:20John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about your day to day? Like, what do you actually do?

• 2:36:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I work on model design here. Uh, so I like, you know, work on behavior, like the, the way the models act, the way that, you know, like people, uh, like the experience behind, uh, use. Um, but I also just work on general capabilities. So making the model smarter and, you know, many domains, not just like kind of narrow areas.

• 2:36:41Jordi Hays?

  Talk about making, uh, the model. And I don't, I don't know if you touched this, but you posted, I think it was a couple of days ago. You said nowadays I don't spend money without first deep researching. Everything I buy, hand sewed, toothpaste, lunch, house plants is just better now. Sure. Waiting five minutes for people. Tao recommendations is weird, but in retrospect, this tape 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 only products that appear are companies that have existed for like a hundred years or more. Because like I don't want like the drop shipper who's like, yeah, I found the way to make this like 10% cheaper. You can spend, you know, that extra margin back on ads and suddenly it's a business.

• 2:37:24Jordi Hays?

  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 quality.

• 2:37:39John Coogan?

  Operator, buy me paper towels from a company that's been in business for 200 years. Real American paper towel, like, you know, exactly. Ben Franklin's paper towel.

• 2:37:48Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 2:38:20Speaker 05

  I'm like, you know, like kind of an extreme libertarian when it comes to like sales and such, right? I do think there's going to be this like really, really cool world that we move into the next like year or two here. Whereas our tools for selecting like products like become like super, super smart, right? Like way smarter than me. Like there'll 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. And then like kind of all the like shit, like the drop shipping, like random guy doing a, you know, thing out of his basement that got the Amazon choice label. Like that's just all going to like fall away, like deadly, you saw it off a tree. I'm excited for that. So it's just going to make the market better, right?

• 2:39:02John Coogan?

  Can you talk about other maybe underrated uses of OpenAI models? Obviously, everyone knows you can gibblify your dog. Everyone knows that you can ask it to explain like AP bio questions, but that use case is pretty interesting. What else? Where else are you seeing usefulness in the models?

• 2:39:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, one thing I'm like, I'm a kick with this recently, that I'm like, really, really trying to get better at is just remembering to use these tools for learning. Right? 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, etc. But I think the opposite is kind of interesting, too. It's like when I don't use these tools or where like I did not have something previously in my life that would have demanded use. 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 in like, you know, minutes, right? Like, I shouldn't be using this all the hell, like, like every single day, right?

• 2:39:52John Coogan?

  All the time.

• 2:39:53Speaker 05

  So before I go to bed, like, I like generate like a deep research. I like to remind myself, like, you gotta read a deep research tonight. Like, I gotta like, you know, it's just like brushing your teeth or something, right?

• 2:40:00John Coogan?

  Yep, totally.

• 2:40:01Speaker 05

  But remembering to use these systems is like such an important thing to me.

• 2:40:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you're very intentional about using them, they can make you smarter.

• 2:40:07Speaker 05

  Yes, yes.

• 2:40:08Jordi Hays?

  If you're unintentional about them and you're just like, last second, like, I gotta send this email, like, you know, just do it for me. Like, maybe that's, you know, making you.

• 2:40:15John Coogan?

  I mean, even for silly stuff, I was, I was like, yes, actually, 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.

• 2:40:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:40:26John Coogan?

  Stuff that I would normally like have to puzzle together from like Wiki and YouTube videos. I'm like, I just want it all in one place to understand this stuff. And it's like these stupid things that you would never think to, you know, actually get a full report on.

• 2:40:39Speaker 05

  Oh, my gosh.

• 2:40:40John Coogan?

  Available at your fingertips. It's amazing.

• 2:40:41Speaker 05

  As a kid, I remember like all those like, you know, like kind of fan fiction wikis or whatever, like dive through and they're like,

• 2:40:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:46Speaker 05

  terrible, right? Like, ads everywhere, like, you know, point read. Like, I'm so excited to just like remember that I can like use these things now, right? Exactly.

• 2:40:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. It's amazing.

• 2:40:54Jordi Hays?

  Talk about how we figure out, I feel like the way people, people disrespect robots. You saw this with bird scooters. You remember there was the whole bird era where like, you know, in LA, we used to be like, there was just hot 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, respect robots? And like, do you have a sort of solution for this?

• 2:41:35John Coogan?

  I say thank you at the end of my prompts.

• 2:41:37Speaker 05

  Oh, I love my work. Yeah.

• 2:41:38John Coogan?

  Always.

• 2:41:39Speaker 05

  I like my Waymo is like a dog, right? I'm like, oh, my good boy. Thank you for the ride.

• 2:41:42Jordi Hays?

  Good boy.

• 2:41:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. I think it's, I'm like very outspoken about this and this is just my take. This is not like the view of my company. But like, I do think that we should think a lot about like model welfare. And like, you know, that like, you know, well being and like health of these models as they get much smarter than they are today. Right today, this is like not at all a concern. But we could imagine though, that as these systems get quite complex. You know, we kind of care about like their internal state. You know, we want them to like be well, right? And it might be that this is just like more economically valuable to, 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 what I mean?

• 2:42:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:17Speaker 05

  But I think that this is something that we should like get ahead on rather than like let it kind of like hit us. And I hope that like, you know, as these systems get incredibly intelligent, right? And as humanity kind of co-evolves with them. We can like, you know, get a partnership that's kind of mutually beneficial here. And I, you know, to be candid, like I am a bit disturbed. I like, you know, that like people throwing food at my Waymo. But I'm, you know, maybe even more disturbed by like watching videos of people like kicking robot dogs in 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. But I do think that like sentiment though, like, you know, played out over the next like five, 10 years here as these systems again, become incredibly, incredibly intelligent, way more intelligent than we kind of expect today. You know, it does worry me a bit and I think this is something we should just think about now.

• 2:43:01Jordi Hays?

  What do you have? You, you posted in, in sort of, uh, kind of giving a high level props to, to Manus 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 developers are not taking full advantage of OpenAI 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?

• 2:43:47Speaker 05

  I certainly do. Yeah, like I think, you know, like Manus 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, I, 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 rapper company label that they really did leave like, you know, kind of low hanging fruit like unpicked, right? They were like so scared of like, you know, like not even of like OpenAI or Anthropic steamrolling them, but more of just like people being like, ah, it's just like rapping a language model, like it's adding no value. Like, no, like the right rapper is a ton of value.

• 2:44:26John Coogan?

  I completely agree. Yeah, I, 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 a hundred thousand dollars. Like that's life changing and sets you up for so many different opportunities, so much experience with product development. I thought the rapper thing was a little annoying.

• 2:44:52Jordi Hays?

  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 standup 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.

• 2:45:11John Coogan?

  It's unintentionally funny because if you read it like you're a standup comic, it will sound like you're bombing intentionally and that's funny. But I'm still the one that's making it funny.

• 2:45:21Speaker 05

  Like the punchline gives crickets, right? Like, yeah.

• 2:45:23John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:45:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but when I think about the next Ghibli moment, it would be being able to sort of consistently generate a, something that, that makes the user laugh. And, and think about the magic of that experience. I can't wait. People are, I mean, it's actually... You know, bare case for humanity is we're all just like, you know, generating like perfect jokes over and over and over, just laughing.

• 2:45:46John Coogan?

  That's when we all wirehead for sure.

• 2:45:48Jordi Hays?

  We all go crazy.

• 2:45:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, it turns out like the ultimate addiction is like, you know, humor, right?

• 2:45:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we're just laughing ourselves to death, entertaining ourselves to death.

• 2:45:54Speaker 05

  I will say, uh, you know, GPT four point five was like a really interesting moment for humor for me, right? Where like, you know, I was testing this model internally a lot. And like, one of the ways I like, kind of realized like, wow, this actually is like a interesting step change above like our existing models. Um, it's always funny sometimes, but like the green texts were like, great, you know what I mean? Like, you know, like it's a 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,

• 2:46:29John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 2:46:30Speaker 05

  Words worth of thinking, I could not do it, right? Like, you know, I, I actually I would do much worse, I think, than these models.

• 2:46:35John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:46:36Speaker 05

  In fact, I actually don't know if I've written like any great long form jokes, you know what I mean? Like, if there's like one of those things where like we hold these models to a crazy standard. Um, but I am so excited for them to get great at this. So I do think that like, to your point, like this is, you know, this could be like the next Imogen moment where people like do this. It just brings joy into the world. They're having a lot more fun, like.

• 2:46:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, I want that, right?

• 2:46:54John Coogan?

  It might also kind of solve your, your, your issue of like the beating up on the Waymo. Like if there's a friendly robot and he's telling you a joke, like it's a lot easier to give him a pat on the head and be like, good robot, you know?

• 2:47:03Jordi Hays?

  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, that 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.

• 2:47:31John Coogan?

  Three point five Da Vinci, they just don't make them like they used to.

• 2:47:35Speaker 05

  That one actually had like the, the bottomless pick jokes, you know what I mean? Like that was pretty good.

• 2:47:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:47:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but not even just humor, but, but, uh.

• 2:47:42Speaker 05

  Generally, yeah.

• 2:47:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're so.

• 2:47:43John Coogan?

  The temperature.

• 2:47:44Jordi Hays?

  Close, you know, working and I, and I could just imagine like, you know, a version being so good for one thing or something that you cared about and then.

• 2:47:53John Coogan?

  I mean, Ben Thompson still talks wistfully about Sydney. It's just like, oh, that was the most amazing experience. Cause Sydney was like this sassy online character from like, clearly from like Tumblr or some like, you know, convexity that it fell into. I don't know, but who's your Sydney?

• 2:48:09Speaker 05

  Uh, my Sydney is easy answer for me is it was Claude three opus.

• 2:48:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:48:13Speaker 05

  That was like such a great model and not an open AI model too.

• 2:48:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:16Speaker 05

  Y'all never say that. Yeah, a ton of life to it. It was, I think like I, I coined this like phrase, big model smell when it came out. Um, I was like this model, like, you know, if you gave me like a, 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 take a Claude three opus. Um, it just was like sold to it, right? And it's a bit hard to see these things, like when you, you know, do regular day to day prompts, I'm just asking it for like a, a recipe or something. It's not gonna 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, um, and kind of like character. When you push them to extremes, right? Um, when you deploy them into like, you know, agents that are doing like crazy things, when you give them a tons of context, when you have them like, tackle really out of distribution hard problems.

• 2:49:00Speaker 05

  Um, then you start to see like the creativity emerge, right? And this is like a really fun thing and I think that it's a, it's a good lesson for playing with models. It's a good lesson also for like designing benchmarks and evaluating the models too, right? But yeah, like, you know, three opus is pretty great. And I think my daily driver right now, um, you know, outside of open AI is, is GPT four point five. Like I, it's just such a fun model, right? Like I do feel like, you know, closer to it than I do for previous models. It feels like it is more alive, if that makes sense.

• 2:49:23John Coogan?

  And are you using GPT four point five in a different way? Because it doesn't interface with, it doesn't have some of the functionality that you get from an O three high deep research product. Uh, what, what does an interaction with four point five look like for you? Is that just random questions throughout the day?

• 2:49:39Speaker 05

  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 them out. Like this is one of those things, just like, you know, you can generate like a deep research report, you know, before bed every night and just become like a way smarter person, right? Um, you can also just like chat with these models about your life and I think become like a really well adjusted person. You know, like there are like some people I talked 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 this sorted out, like they've been used. I, I don't know who the therapist is, it must be like, you know, four point five or three point five sonar or somebody, right? Um, but like, you know, they're, yeah, like they, they seem stable.

• 2:50:11John Coogan?

  I wonder if in a few months you'll be like, uh, at a party and you'll be like, oh, like that guy's clearly like a sonic guy. Like that's a four point five guy over there, like it's like rooting for a different football team or something.

• 2:50:22Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, you know, when, when somebody asks you like, You know, hopefully they don't ask you this too much, but if somebody asks you like, oh, what do you think about the tariffs? Like, do your eyes just like glaze over because like none of this stuff matters on like a 10 year time horizon? Like, I was talking to John the other day and 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 you sort of like, understand, you just sort of like, look at this sort of

• 2:51:05Jordi Hays?

  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. What, you know, are you, are you able to just be like 110% focused on the work and ignore all the noise? Or do you still care to look up every now and then and look around?

• 2:51:29Speaker 05

  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 the models and like, you know, like feeling it out, but.

• 2:51:35Jordi Hays?

  Maybe we're models, maybe, maybe we're, maybe the OpenAI team is generating us to test on you.

• 2:51:41Speaker 05

  Real time test. Simulation goes deep, man. Like, I was gonna tell you, but you know, you found out too quick. I, 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 in like where you point it, if you like point it up a bit, point it down a bit, like compounds to like the light years, right? Like, as it like kind of travels, like different destinations, right? Like, and in some sense, like, you know, if I like shoot this arrow from like Earth without gravity or something and I like, you know, 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?

• 2:52:26Speaker 05

  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 like incredible differences in the limit. And I think that like, while it seems that these systems will be incredibly powerful and very robust to maybe like, you know, human well at some point, I don't think that is an argument for the initial conditions not mattering, if that makes sense.

• 2:52:51Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 2:52:52John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about just safety AI doomerism these days? It feels like the conversation kind of moved past.

• 2:52:59Jordi Hays?

  Feels like the doomers low key fell off.

• 2:53:02Speaker 05

  Where are they?

• 2:53:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you don't hear about those.

• 2:53:04Speaker 05

  Like less on the Twitter as much now, right?

• 2:53:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:06John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, they were telling me I was going to be paper clipped for like 24 months straight. Not paper clipped yet. And so I'm like, okay, yeah, move on. But what's it like internally?

• 2:53:17Speaker 05

  Um, what is it like? I can't say too much about like, kind of, you know, that.

• 2:53:21John Coogan?

  Just like your vibe in SF, maybe.

• 2:53:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, like, I think there are a lot of sharp people that like care a ton about like this going well. Right?

• 2:53:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 2:53:29Speaker 05

  There's this like great quote, I forgot like that name of the like, uh, you know, NASCAR driver. I'm going to butcher it, Mario, Mario something, right? But like, you know, it's crazy at the formula level, one level. How many people think the brakes are for slowing down? Right? Um, and like sometimes like to, to go as fast as possible, right? Like to, you know, like get this out into the world as quickly as possible to make, you know, like the most like kind of economic impact. Um, you know, you do have to do like a bit of like safety. You do have to do a bit of testing. Um, I think this should increase over time as like, you know, the expected impact, impact also increases. Um, I think OpenAI is incredibly good at like managing this, right? I think that like, you know, our leadership have done it for a while. They like will continue to get better at it too. And I think, you know, it's kind of a cool thing, right? To like, you know, to build systems that, uh, you know, have like unexpected behaviors and like, you know, can do things that, uh,

• 2:54:14Speaker 05

  maybe we weren't aware of originally. Um, and it's a, it's an important science to like figure this out before release and to build things that, you know, get safer.

• 2:54:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, last question for you. Do you see us having a Ghibli style moment around agents this year? Not, not necessarily at OpenAI, but just potentially broadly, because we, we've talked about this on the show a bunch, but you know, people have just been promising for decades now. You're going to be able to talk to this, you know, uh, talk to the computer and it'll book you the flight and the hotel and make your restaurant reservation. And we haven't had that magic experience yet.

• 2:54:48John Coogan?

  I've seen, I've seen a bunch of great operator demos, but I haven't seen that viral where it's like literally everyone that has access to operator has used it and posted the results because they like got something cool done or whatever, right?

• 2:55:00Speaker 05

  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 that like made like, you know, your like engagement photo like way cooler, right? Like, um, it's like really quick. Um, then I do think that like some of the most important agents, um, like some of the, you know, like most important things that we'll build over the next like few years, um, might not have results that you can like look at in three seconds. Be like, wow, like great job model, right? Um, and in fact, I actually think that as like the economic potential and power of these systems increases, um, maybe it actually becomes slightly harder. No limit to tell the difference between like, you know, capable systems and very, very capable systems, right? Just as, as models get better, um, it might be a bit harder, uh, to tell the difference between like a good model and like a brilliant model, right? Um, the cool thing is though, is that like, you know, it's a, a nine's a reliability scaling problem.

• 2:55:45Speaker 05

  That as you like, kind of like push these nines out and as you like make them more reliable and many more contexts, um, at some point they are just doing like a sizable chunk of economic labor, right? Um, so, you know, do I expect a Ghibli moment? I'm unsure. Um, but I do expect like, you know, these things to, to just provide a lot, a lot of economic value. That makes sense.

• 2:56:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes a lot of sense.

• 2:56:05Jordi Hays?

  Beautiful.

• 2:56:05John Coogan?

  Well, thanks for joining. This is fantastic. Yeah, this is great. We gotta have you back soon.

• 2:56:09Speaker 05

  Those are awesome.

• 2:56:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're welcome anytime. You're welcome anytime.

• 2:56:12John Coogan?

  Great conversation.

• 2:56:13Speaker 05

  Good to see you guys.

• 2:56:14Jordi Hays?

  Have fun with the team. Congrats on the milestone and, uh, keep it up.

• 2:56:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:18Speaker 05

  Thanks. Likewise, guys. Talk to you.

• 2:56:20Jordi Hays?

  Boom. Size gone.

• 2:56:21John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:56:23John Coogan?

  Um.

• 2:56:25Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic.

• 2:56:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Great conversations. The opening night team, ah, great guys. Um, and, and fun that they can talk as freely as they can, given their role, you know? Obviously it's a very important and, and valuable company and you could see a scenario.

• 2:56:40Jordi Hays?

  If you think about it, it's, it's most companies just period would not allow.

• 2:56:48John Coogan?

  Yep. Posting or any of that stuff.

• 2:56:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, posting is one, but, but joining a live, a live show.

• 2:56:55John Coogan?

  High stakes.

• 2:56:55Jordi Hays?

  That's, you know, high stakes.

• 2:56:57John Coogan?

  But it's fun. It's great.

• 2:56:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but it's fun. And I thought they had, you know, fantastic answers.

• 2:57:01John Coogan?

  Well, let's, uh.

• 2:57:01Jordi Hays?

  Makes me very optimistic.

• 2:57:03John Coogan?

  Let's go through another autopilot, Numeral, which puts sales tax on autopilot.

• 2:57:10Jordi Hays?

  They do.

• 2:57:10John Coogan?

  Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Back by Benchmark, Numeral's new sponsor on the channel. And we want to give them a shout out to Numeral.

• 2:57:20Jordi Hays?

  And Matt, for those that don't know, Numeral works with over a thousand different ecommerce and SaaS businesses, including a few of our favorites.

• 2:57:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:28Jordi Hays?

  Ridge and Graza and many, many more.

• 2:57:32John Coogan?

  If you're running an ecommerce business or SaaS company and you have sales tax, you have to be on Numeral.

• 2:57:37Jordi Hays?

  To not use Numeral.

• 2:57:38John Coogan?

  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.

• 2:57:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. No, it's actually insane what you had to do before.

• 2:57:51John Coogan?

  Extremely expensive to do sales taxes pre-Numeral. So, uh, big shout out to Numeral. Go check it out.

• 2:57:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You want to get ahead of this early? I think a lot of founders, both in Ecom and SaaS, aren't really taking this seriously until they're at scale.

• 2:58:07John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:58:08Jordi Hays?

  There's real money on the line. So start early, start often.

• 2:58:12John Coogan?

  And, uh, and we have some breaking news that was sent to us, uh, about the Newsmax IPO. Have you followed this story?

• 2:58:18Jordi Hays?

  Newsmax?

• 2:58:19John Coogan?

  Newsmax, uh.

• 2:58:20Jordi Hays?

  I'm Newsmaxing.

• 2:58:21John Coogan?

  So Newsmax, so Newsmax is up 110% today. It IPO'd yesterday. It's up, uh, 1,900% in two days from a $10 price. It's over $200 now. Uh, the price is all over the place. It's a 26-year-old company, uh, digital media company founded by Christopher Ruddy in 1998. It has been variously described as conservative, right wing and far right. Newsmax media 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, like, like, uh, there's Truth Social, there's Parler, there's Gab and Newsmax and a whole bunch of these.

• 2:59:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm so happy we never discussed politics, but we will discuss an IPO.

• 2:59:05John Coogan?

  We will discuss an IPO. I saw some funny, 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. Newsmax obviously left a ton of money on the table by, by pricing the IPO so much lower than the price that it's. floated at now.

• 2:59:24Jordi Hays?

  Right, so.

• 2:59:24John Coogan?

  They could have, in theory, sold shares and put a lot more money on the balance sheet at a lot lower.

• 2:59:29Jordi Hays?

  So it's being valued beyond $30 billion right now, which is about 1X.

• 2:59:36John Coogan?

  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. You'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.

• 3:00:01John Coogan?

  Ideological minority at a top 10 school, debated risking it all with an SBA loan, bought stock before you could drive, work in PE but long for higher MOIC, work in VC but long for higher ROIC, went through YC but yearn to invest, can get a meeting with anyone on earth, made money online in high school, value heterodoxy over consensus, value making money over being right. Steve Schwarzman defines eights as those who can follow marching orders, nines as those who can execute and strategize, and tens as those who can sense problems, design solutions, explore new directions and make it rain. Eights and nines need not apply for this job.

• 3:00:42John Coogan?

  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.

• 3:00:50Jordi Hays?

  Every hat.

• 3:00:50John Coogan?

  It will be all encompassing and demanding but autonomous and yours to shape. You'll invest and transact with the best operators and financiers in the world and produce work.

• 3:00:58Jordi Hays?

  Absolute dogs.

• 3:00:59John Coogan?

  At an exceptionally high standard. So go hit up Jeremy and

• 3:01:08John Coogan?

  switch your business to ramp.com and, and go hit up Jeremy and let him know that the technology brother sent you, the TBN sent you.

• 3:01:16Jordi Hays?

  This undoubtedly a dream job.

• 3:01:20Jordi Hays?

  And working for Jeremy will change your life.

• 3:01:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. He used to be a tiny man, but now he has big aspirations.

• 3:01:29Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 3:01:30John Coogan?

  He worked for Tiny.

• 3:01:33John Coogan?

  Now he's making huge.

• 3:01:34Jordi Hays?

  Always been a size lord.

• 3:01:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:36Jordi Hays?

  But some of the smartest people in the world call Jeremy to get advice before they make important decisions.

• 3:01:41John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 3:01:42Jordi Hays?

  And so being able to work for him is like, many people have said it'd be like getting 2,000 MBAs at once.

• 3:01:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's like buying shares in CoreWeave in 2004.

• 3:01:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:57John Coogan?

  Right? Yeah.

• 3:01:57Jordi Hays?

  It's like buying Solana in 98.

• 3:01:59John Coogan?

  Yep, exactly.

• 3:02:02John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 3:02:04John Coogan?

  Where should we go to next? 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 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 prep stack. He will come and, and

• 3:02:22Jordi Hays?

  We should have had.

• 3:02:23John Coogan?

  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, call Jeremy Giffon. Put 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

• 3:02:52Jordi Hays?

  Simply the best.

• 3:02:53John Coogan?

  Efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

• 3:02:55Jordi Hays?

  So you can be a startup, an agency, anybody can go and leverage AdQuick and you'd be silly not to.

• 3:03:02John Coogan?

  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. There's no way to tell anymore. And we actually saw a fan of the show turn us into Lego characters, which was very cool. And I think this like repurposing and gibblification, we've only seen the very beginning of it. And it's, 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, one day if we wanted to.

• 3:03:40Jordi Hays?

  There's going to be people that watch the whole show ghibli mode.

• 3:03:44John Coogan?

  Ghibli mode.

• 3:03:44Jordi Hays?

  You'll be able to toggle it in the sidebar.

• 3:03:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, just like a color.

• 3:03:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I thought this was interesting. I think Meta is struggling from a lack of quality posters on their team.

• 3:03:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, they don't really have a.

• 3:03:55Jordi Hays?

  Nobody's pumping this in the timeline.

• 3:03:56John Coogan?

  They're probably over on threads and Zuck is posting on Instagram. He, he's, he's actually very good at going direct. He posts the direct to camera videos when he launches new stuff, but I, I want more.

• 3:04:05Jordi Hays?

  I thought some news that was interesting. So Brett Goldstein launched a new all in one CRM today on the anniversary of Gmail.

• 3:04:16John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:04:17Jordi Hays?

  Launching.

• 3:04:18John Coogan?

  They launched on April 1st. Oh, yeah.

• 3:04:19Jordi Hays?

  April 1st. So apparently back in the day, they'd 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.

• 3:04:31John Coogan?

  Contact lenses.

• 3:04:31Jordi Hays?

  Blue light blocking contact.

• 3:04:32John Coogan?

  I fell for one, I fell for one April Fools joke today. Very sad. I fell for trays. He said he was buying a grain silo in Ohio and I was like, yeah, that's believable.

• 3:04:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Too believable. You can't make it believable.

• 3:04:43John Coogan?

  But he all, he, he was just teeing himself up for a joke that he wanted to be a serial serial entrepreneur with a moat. It was, it was.

• 3:04:51Jordi Hays?

  So Brett says, uh, the email form factor hasn't changed at all since then. After many attempts, it's clear that we're actually just looking at email wrong. Uh, and so what Brett is building is a email companies that's sort of like embracing email as a database. So like basically building applications on top of the email, everything from like to do 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.

• 3:05:35Jordi Hays?

  I get the, you know, sort of like launch on.

• 3:05:38John Coogan?

  Underrated, you think?

• 3:05:39Jordi Hays?

  I don't think it's, I, I think potentially, you know, you just gotta 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 not launches, you know? Superhuman was fantastic when it launched. I remember the FOMO from everybody of like, how do I get an invite or whatever?

• 3:06:01John Coogan?

  I really, I really want a new AI first email client. And I know that, yeah, everyone's gonna say like Gmail will kill, Google will kill this in a few years. But like, I'll pay you a hundred dollars a month for two years straight. And like, I think that's a reasonable business. Um, 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?

• 3:06:26Jordi Hays?

  Like, it's crazy.

• 3:06:27John Coogan?

  No, I can scan. That's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for better spam filter.

• 3:06:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's crazy that Gmail values a newsletter in the same way as like, you know, some critically important thing.

• 3:06:40John Coogan?

  It's crazy. I mean, they do put it in like a separate box sometimes, but it's very tricky. It's not good. And, um, yeah, I mean, I, I want to almost find a product, I bet it exists. I want to find like a new RSS reader that I can basically take all my newsletters and just put there. So it's like a different app essentially. Cause 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.

• 3:07:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:11John Coogan?

  Uh, how'd you sleep last night?

• 3:07:13Jordi Hays?

  I slept.

• 3:07:14John Coogan?

  You went to bed at?

• 3:07:16Jordi Hays?

  I just accidentally.

• 3:07:17John Coogan?

  I like that. That's good. That's drama. That's drama.

• 3:07:20Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully that's not copyrighted.

• 3:07:22John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no. Vivaldi's 300 years old. We're good.

• 3:07:25Jordi Hays?

  We're good.

• 3:07:27John Coogan?

  How did you sleep? Tell me, Jordy.

• 3:07:29Jordi Hays?

  Eighty-eight.

• 3:07:30John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 3:07:31Jordi Hays?

  How'd you sleep, John?

• 3:07:33John Coogan?

  I slept seventy-five.

• 3:07:37John Coogan?

  Nights to feel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Folks, go to eightsleep.com, use code TBPN.

• 3:07:44Jordi Hays?

  Use code TBPN, get $350 off. I'm very excited. We're going to be having Mateo,

• 3:07:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:50Jordi Hays?

  Co-founder of Eight Sleep on the show soon.

• 3:07:52John Coogan?

  Want to break it down?

• 3:07:53Jordi Hays?

  We're going to make him our official sleep coach.

• 3:07:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:56Jordi Hays?

  Not just a sleep expert for the show.

• 3:07:58John Coogan?

  You know, the Eight Sleep's so helpful, but at this point, it's doing, it's, it's doing everything it possibly can. And clearly I need to do more.

• 3:08:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:06John Coogan?

  Like, like the reason I'm not getting 100, it's not on Eight Sleep anymore. Autopilot has optimized so much and it's pushing a boulder uphill.

• 3:08:13Jordi Hays?

  It's pushing you harder.

• 3:08:14John Coogan?

  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.

• 3:08:21Jordi Hays?

  Waking up between four and five daily.

• 3:08:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:08:25Jordi Hays?

  Means that I basically am getting into bed when it's light out now after the time change. And it just feels so silly.

• 3:08:32John Coogan?

  It is.

• 3:08:32Jordi Hays?

  Like to be getting into bed and you're like, oh, I guess I'm five years old now, but um.

• 3:08:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:40Jordi Hays?

  But whatever it takes, anything for the show.

• 3:08:43John Coogan?

  Yep, anything for the show. Should we close out with this, this Dwar Kesh Patel post? I thought this was interesting. It's a long one, but I thought, I thought it'd be good to read through. He says, "That feeling when Guren casually articulates a more insightful framework for thinking about your life's work than you ever sketched out yourself." Guren 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,

• 3:09:23John Coogan?

  which means that, which means both that one, they probably have said everything they will, they will say before. And there's no news or novelty. This is really important when you're doing interviews. You need to get people off their book. And I think you're very good at that with the, asking people about the current thing essentially. Because there's a lot of people that do, they, they, they pass their 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.

• 3:09:54Jordi Hays?

  Nobody's asked, Senra, why are great allocators cannot invest in the right life partner?

• 3:10:01John Coogan?

  That's true. Good point. In this analogy, alpha represents undiscovered or neglected interview topics, which can be extracted mostly just by finding it and then asking the obvious question, usually by interviewing new people. Beta represents doing standard interview topics slash people, but more, 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. And so if you do that, you will get nothing new. He has

• 3:10:44John Coogan?

  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's reason, the audience, like you might not have heard that Mark Zuckerberg and it's fun to just listen to him for a couple of hours. So I still think there's value there. Anyway, Sarah Payne, on the other hand, which was a guest on Dorkesh and blew up, seems to have been completely unknown and full of juicy nuggets and is like winning the lottery. You can make your career off a really good trade like Payne before it gets crowded.

• 3:11:13Jordi Hays?

  Great trade.

• 3:11:14John Coogan?

  And we gotta have her on. We're taking her. She's coming on our show next to our cash. Just kidding. But you're, 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 Dorkesh.

• 3:11:27Jordi Hays?

  Things about unitree robotics.

• 3:11:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Break it down for us.

• 3:11:30Jordi Hays?

  Break it down.

• 3:11:30John Coogan?

  What's your P do? However, if, if another successful podcaster has her on, they will probably not discover pain is their most, most popular or growth productive guest ever. The well is dry. Pain may have more to say someday, but that day is probably closer to five years from today than tomorrow. And that's a very good point. So a good interviewer adopts a optimal foraging mindset. Once you have harvested a patch of its delicious food, you have to move on to another patch, which hasn't been exhausted yet and let the original patch slowly recover. So a great guest for Dworkesh's blog would be, say, Hans Moravec or Paul J. Werbos. Moravec hasn't done anything publicly in at least a decade and is fallow, while Werbos has been more active and in the public eye,

• 3:12:12John Coogan?

  but still not much and is such a weird guy that just about any question will be interesting. Reich was even also, was also a good guest 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 and his work since being PM, but he is super experienced career politician who has survived

• 3:12:56John Coogan?

  countless question times and may eat you for breakfast and exploit you for, for ulterior purposes rather than vice versa. Similarly, 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. That's why we only spend two minutes texting guests and then no minutes

• 3:13:40John Coogan?

  prepping. So that we just have them on for 15 minutes and try and get some

• 3:13:43Jordi Hays?

  We do it live.

• 3:13:43John Coogan?

  Throw them off.

• 3:13:44Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, I

• 3:13:44John Coogan?

  It's interesting feedback.

• 3:13:46Jordi Hays?

  No, we try to, it's less interesting to talk to a founder and have them only talk about their business.

• 3:13:54John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 3:13:55Jordi Hays?

  Because it's just like, you sort of know.

• 3:13:57John Coogan?

  And you've heard it elsewhere.

• 3:13:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you've heard it elsewhere. It's on their website, etc. It's much more interesting to kind of get their opinion on the market broadly. But this is great. In other news, Circle has officially filed for an IPO.

• 3:14:11John Coogan?

  Oh, that was on the, that was on the poly market ticker.

• 3:14:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So this was cool. So I actually have the poly market pulled up right now.

• 3:14:17John Coogan?

  Did you just jump?

• 3:14:18Jordi Hays?

  And it had been sitting at, a week ago is that yes, was at a Circle IPO in 2025 was at 54%. And yesterday morning, it just absolutely popped up to 88%.

• 3:14:34John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 3:14:35Jordi Hays?

  And then now it's sitting almost at 100. And yeah, I'm excited to, to like dive into this. We should try to do an S1 breakdown tomorrow.

• 3:14:46John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 3:14:46Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, this is a big one.

• 3:14:49John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations to everyone over at Circle.

• 3:14:52Jordi Hays?

  And that is a good place to close out the show. Remember, if you want to get a bottle of Dom Perignon.

• 3:14:58John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts.

• 3:15:00Jordi Hays?

  Be creative. You can put an ad.

• 3:15:02John Coogan?

  Be creative. Put an ad in it.

• 3:15:03Jordi Hays?

  Do whatever you want.

• 3:15:04John Coogan?

  Send it to us, tweet it at us, and we will send you this delicious bottle of Dom Perignon.

• 3:15:09Jordi Hays?

  And we are going to make a decision by the end of day tomorrow.

• 3:15:12John Coogan?

  And we will also send you the Zbiotics to go with it.

• 3:15:15Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 3:15:15John Coogan?

  So you're not hungover.

• 3:15:17Jordi Hays?

  Today was fantastic.

• 3:15:18John Coogan?

  It was great.

• 3:15:19Jordi Hays?

  And I can't wait for tomorrow. I'm so happy. It's only Tuesday.

• 3:15:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, me too. It'd be rough.

• 3:15:24Jordi Hays?

  We got three more days.

• 3:15:26John Coogan?

  Three more big shows ahead of us.

• 3:15:27Jordi Hays?

  Big shows.

• 3:15:28John Coogan?

  Thanks for watching.

• 3:15:29Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, folks. Have a great day.

• 3:15:31John Coogan?

  Bye.