Elon Musk SUES Sam Altman
All right everyone, we just finished recording this pod and we wanted to come back and give a little bit of an intro because I feel so many different emotions and here's why. The stakes of this are super, super, super high.
Yeah, we're talking about what's going on with robots in the real world. So robots that are being used, we have specific examples of really cool businesses that are doing robots for, you know, lawn care, restaurants, all different types of things. But then we go over the Elon Musk versus Sam Altman lawsuit. What is this lawsuit between two of the power players? Silicon Valley and what's our take on it, which might surprise you, as well as some of the brilliant, the nuance, the marketing and PR that's going on here. We kind of call it out.
This is actually, we have fun while doing it, but this is actually really, really important in my opinion. Listen to the entire thing and you have to listen to the first half to build up the story and the stakes for the second half. Trust me, you're going to understand exactly what I'm talking about when you get through the whole thing. So enjoy it. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off.
All right, what up, Sam?
Hey, what's going on?
Sam, I gotta tell you something. When it comes to kissing, eating ice cream before bed, or business, timing is everything, my friend. And I think, I think that timing is important in all aspects of business. And in technology, there's a moment happening right now. I could feel it. I could feel it. It's like when you hit your funny bone and your whole arm gets hot. I can feel it right now. Shit's about to change. Robots are going wild. I got to talk to you about robots.
And they've like been around for a minute, but now it actually feels like it's a reality.
Exactly. So right now a lot of people are talking about Tesla because Elon Musk came out and he said the future of Tesla is this humanoid robot. And I forgot what they call them, like Optimus or some shit like that. So it's like, uh, he's like, hey, we got this robot that can walk around, pick up stuff. Do tasks is going to change the workforce. And, um, your boy Brad Adcock, he's got a company called Figure, which you're an investor in. They have their robot. I think they just raised like a billion dollars or something, right?
Nice little investment there for you.
I know, I was in the first— I was in on the first round. I doubled down and did on this round. Is this going to be my, my Mona Lisa? Is this going to be my, my big win?
Well, it could have been anybody's because you had him come on the podcast and tell the world what he was doing. So, uh, good on you. You multi-billion dollars, uh, valuation right now. So that's a big deal. And people are really excited about that. I think there's these stats that say if, uh, basically labor is 50% of the GDP, the labor market is a 10 times bigger market than transportation, which makes sense why Elon is like, hey, forget cars. It's all about these robots. We're just, we're an AI company. We're doing robots. He's very good at repositioning and reimagining the vision of the company over and over and over again. Right. And went from affordable electric cars to self-driving autonomous vehicles, robo taxis that will just drive people everywhere. Your car will become an appreciating asset instead of a depreciating asset. And then now it's actually, it's not even about cars. It's about AI robots. And that's, that's the future. But I want to tell you about something that's less fancy than that. Because I think it's going to come first, and that is single-purpose robots, aka Roombas on steroids. And Roombas on steroids, the Roomba was a, it's a single-purpose little vacuum robot that just goes around your house, but it's in the wild today. It actually works. It's actually useful for people. An even better example, I think, is the dishwasher, which is in pretty much every home in the United States right now. And it saves you a ton of time. Like, when you're— like, my dishwasher broke last week. Terrible experience when your dishwasher breaks. The dishwasher is a single-purpose robot that's actually out there in the wild. We should be striving to create something as useful as the dishwasher. That should be the North Star right now for a lot of companies. And there are. So I went on Twitter today, and I saw this great video that was about a company called Electric Sheep. Have you seen this?
No. Electric Sheep. That's Electric Sheep. I don't know what it is. That's a great name, I think. And I think it's a lot—
a lawnmower. It is. Imagine if you took the Roomba and you put it in the lawn. That's what it is.
It's a— that's a great name.
It is a robot that mows your lawn, does all kind of landscaping. What's interesting about these guys that I found pretty fascinating is not only are they a company that's like a bunch of guys in a garage building a robot, like a lawnmower that's got camera on it that can go around your lawn. They're actually buying up and rolling up landscaping services. So it's a combination of a sweaty startup and a moonshot startup together. So these guys are going out and they're buying all these landscaping businesses in the Bay Area because they're like, well, we need a testing ground for robots. Like, you have to actually— like, in their office, it's just like an AstroTurf. And they're like, yeah, well, it can do this square AstroTurf pretty easily. It's not so bad. But in the real world, your lawn has got all kinds of different lumps and dips and divots and trees and rocks, and it has to be able to work. How are we going to get the best data, right? Just same way that Tesla is putting all like the cars on the road collecting data at all times, and they're collecting like whatever, 100 times more data than the next biggest self-driving car company. These guys are trying to do that with their lawn care robots. So they're buying these landscaping businesses, then they use them for as a sandbox. They take their robots out and they try to use them. They mow your lawn normally, but they'll try to test the robots as well. They gather the data, and then over time they're like, well, we're buying these landscaping businesses at one valuation, but then what we'll do is we'll slowly start to replace the workers in the landscaping business with the robots and actually have improved margins. Um, and so we're going to like, it's like a private equity play as well. And so I thought that was a pretty fascinating approach that I hadn't heard before. I can't decide if that's just overkill, like Maybe that's not actually necessary to do two hard things at once, but I did find it very interesting. What do you think of that strategy?
I'm looking at their website. All right. So it's slick. This is cool. I agree with you. The whole overkill thing that bothers me, that could be true.
Well, the problem is like the founders, like founder, like went to Stanford and like you're smart enough to build a robotics company. That's almost, you're smart enough where you can get yourself into trouble. You could, you could be like, oh, we'll vertically integrate. And it's like, Anytime you use the words vertically integrate, be real careful. You might be midwitting the shit out of your plan right now.
Basically, like for him, there needs to be a Venn diagram of this guy, this founder of Sheep Robotics. He's like the dumbest smart person and he needs to hang out with the smartest dumb person. And we need that, like, we need that like a Venn diagram overlap to, to make this the perfect business. That's, that's kind of like what he's doing. This is awesome. This is awesome. This is cool. Another thing that I worry about, this is badass, but is it a badass team and a badass execution on like a small opportunity? Yeah.
Like lawn.
I mean, I guess, I don't know. Is lawn mowing a big, big, I mean, is it as grand of a plan as what these people are actually capable of doing?
I think so, because I, you know, I don't know how big the landscaping industry is, but I know that. Anytime private equity is going and rolling up things, there's a lot of money to be made. They wouldn't— private equity doesn't roll up, you know, like, uh, lemonade, you know, small lemonade stands, for example. Like, they go into things that are, that, that are cash flowing, you know, industries. And so I do think if you added up all the landscaping businesses and you're like, well, you know, either what they're going to do is they're going to use them in their own business to get it right, and then they're going to go lease or sell these robots to every landscaper in the country and be like, hey, would you like to improve your your operating margins by, you know, 10%, 20%, use these robots. And so that either that's what they're going to do or they're going to go try to outcompete them somehow on price. I don't really love that idea. So, so I think it has to be they're just using this to prove their own tech to then go lease these out to every other landscaper.
So on their about page, they list their team and I guess their advisors include this guy named Dan Foley. It says Dan Foley was a CEO of a company that sold to Brightview. I Googled Brightview. Brightview is a commercial landscaping company that did roughly $3 billion last year in revenue. And publicly, it's publicly traded. It has a shit market cap.
So what you're saying is the newsletter guy is calling the land guys small?
No, what I'm saying is I, yeah, I did call it small. And then I looked up Brightview and it just shows I'm, I'm an idiot. I don't know anything.
Like every great man, you're willing to change your mind. Congratulations.
So check this out. Okay, so that's the first one. Now I have a similar, you know, where else are robots being used? Again, these single-purpose robots, not the general robots, but single-purpose robots. In the same way that we got specific AI before we're getting AGI, artificial general intelligence, we got specific AI where it's like, you know, I don't know, it's been like 20 years since DeepMind could just beat Garry Kasparov at chess, right? Like we, we solved chess, then we solved Go, then we solved math, then we solved route planning. You could do these single-purpose AIs that way before you can get to general AI. So similarly, I think the timing of the opportunity is not in the Tesla robot or even, sorry, the Figure robot, which is like just a human robot that could do everything. Uh, you know, that is the big, biggest win, obviously. But I think before then, almost by definition, we have to see these specific single job, one job robots, because it's going to be easier to build a one job robot than it is going to be to build a general robot that could do all jobs. And so, um, here's some other ones. So I don't know if you know this, Sam, but this podcast is not only listened to by people who are trying to make their first million, but maybe by people trying to make their, their 100th million, their, their next million. There's more millions to go. And one of those people is the CEO of a restaurant called Sweetgreen. And so the CEO of Sweetgreen is a listener of the pod. And I was looking up where else are robots being used. And I saw that Sweetgreen actually now has a, what they call their infinite kitchen, which is a like robot-driven version of Sweetgreen. So Sweetgreen is like a salad bowl type of concept. You normally go in there and there's like, you know, whatever, 4 people working the line. And then there's like 4 people in the back kitchen doing prep, just like most fast casual restaurants. And what they've done is they basically went in and they were like, hey, what if we— first, I think they bought a robotics company for $50 million. And then they use that technology to build a concept where you basically have like one person in the store and the rest of it is all done by robots. And so click this link that, um, I put in our sheet. We could show this on YouTube.
Yeah.
I know that he's a listener. You want to know how I know he's a listener?
Don't tell me you're getting free sweetgreen and I'm not.
No, even better. He emailed me and he took a screenshot and he showed that he subscribed to My First Million on both YouTube podcast for Apple and Spotify. So if you wanna be like John and start a multi-billion dollar company, you gotta subscribe. That, that's all you have to do.
I don't think there's been anyone who subscribed that isn't rich and famous and successful and desired by many people of the opposite sex or the same sex if that's what they're into. It's just a thing that works. All right. Um, okay, so, so Sweetgreen, uh, so check this, this video out. So basically what they did was they made these, like, this kitchen. It's just like a giant wall where all the ingredients are in these, like, awesome little robotic kind of dispenser arm type things. And whatever you order, the bowl goes across the conveyor belt, and then it's like the bowl is spinning. It's like rotating so that it drops in all the ingredients at the right spots. And again, they have all kinds of ingredients, right? So like, this sounds pretty simple. It's just like dispensing. But like maybe dispensing almonds is really easy, but feta cheese, which is really crumbly, you got to be careful with it, right? Like, so you said they basically fine-tuned this thing and now this concept can do 500 bowls per hour. And I DM'd him and I was like, how much does like the human, like a human, like your normal restaurant line do? He's like, maybe like 170 to 200. Wow. So you get basically like more than 2x the speed and now You have a robot that does work, that can work 24/7, never calls in sick, never, uh, you know, always puts the right proportion into, into every bowl. You know, you have perfect food control costs. And so you end up with a better version of an employee. And the strategy, the way that I think about this is you trade OpEx for CapEx. And trading OpEx for CapEx is actually a pretty good idea.
Um, I think you should further explain what that means.
So today all restaurants work with human labor. Your human labor is your operating expense. It's the OpEx. And so And what that means is that for every hour that you're operating, every bowl that you're selling, you need to pay a certain amount in wages to employees. And so let's say today you're paying $20 an hour to people that work in these restaurants. You got 10 people working in the restaurant at any given time, blah, blah, blah. You can add it up. And let's just pretend that your labor costs come out to 33% of your revenue. And so the opportunity here, which is, I would say, normal for a restaurant— food costs usually 30%, labor costs usually 30%. Um, and so you, you, you add these up, you're right, you can't change the food cost, but could you change the labor cost? And so what the, what he did with these restaurants is every restaurant to put in these robots costs more money. It costs more CapEx, which is like the initial upfront investment. And I think in their last earnings call, they said it's about $500K to put the robot in. So you put an extra $500K to build the store. But again, this is $500K of CapEx, which means you can depreciate it, which is good for your, you know, tax purposes and whatnot., and it's a one-time cost versus your OpEx is a everyday of operation. And what they found was for that extra $500K investment, they get at least an extra 7% of, you know, of net margin from, from those restaurants that because they have less OpEx. And so you would take that, that basically creates, you know, some break-even point where you say, okay, cool, 2 years in, we're going to have paid off, you know, the cost of this robot or whatever., and also he's like, you know, the $500K capex, that's today. And this is the most expensive it's ever going to be. Like the costs are only going to drop as we scale up, as we refine the, as we simplify the design, like every version we come out with is just going to be lower cost than this one. And I asked him, I go, in 10 years, what are the odds that, um, your restaurants are basically robot, robot driven, not human labor?
Is this guy, Sweetgreen's publicly traded, right? Yes. Are you allowed to say what he's going to say right now?
I told him, I said, is there anything that I can't share in this? And he goes, no, I've shared all this. But he was basically like, it's very high, right? Like, and just thinking about that a little bit out loud, it's like, man, that means that the next 10 years in my, you know, very easily, hopefully in our lifetime, restaurants are just going to go from, you know, a lot of restaurants are going to go from you walk in and there's just like a bunch of people who are sort of disgruntled people who would rather just be checking their phone right now and then, you know, sitting there with this like stupid uniform on., and it's just going to go where you go in, you push a button, and then your bowl gets made by a robotic arm, and then you walk out. Like, that's going to be the end. There's going to be one human in the loop, one human whose job is now called, you know, robot maintenance, robot operations. And they're basically the guys like, oh, the carrots machine got a jam. Let me go and take a little fork and unjam that thing. Or, hey, I got to refill the container of apples. And so what these guys do with the Sweetgreen restaurant is the humans are all in the back doing the fresh prep of ingredients. And then the robots are serving the customers and that's how they split it today.
So you and I are, are fairly optimistic. Uh, you know, we try to see the, the bright side of most things. You in particular do that, but let's try to be pessimistic right now a little bit. So the argument that you're going to see from a lot of, actually most people, I would think, but particularly pessimists, but most people I think are going to be pessimistic on this. They're going to say, but this is going to ruin the economy. This is going to ruin jobs. And let me ask you a question before you actually give your opinion. You have, Sean, you own a business that employs warehouse workers. Roughly, what's your annual turnover for your warehouse workers? Like, how often do they quit?
Well, we use a 3PL now, but before, when we, when we had it in-house, it was, I would say, every year we're going to replace 90% of the team.
So I was reading, I think it was Amazon, I forget, someone who employs tens or hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers. For them, it was It was 100%. So it was 100% turnover rate. And I remember talking to Brett, uh, from Figure and I go, Brett, are you going to like, are you preparing to like be the most hated man in America right now? And he was like, well, why? And I said, well, because like you're going to be, you're getting, you're taking jobs. And he was like, well, I'm not actually taking jobs. In fact, there's all these warehouses that no one will, no one's going to work there. They just literally cannot, they cannot convince people to work there, whether they can't afford it or if it's just a. People, uh, aren't interested in that type of work. And then, and then he goes, plus the average turnover on a lot of warehouses, it is 100%. So like they just can't keep people like in these jobs for a long time. And so my question to you is, are you pessimistic at all of what's going to happen in 15 years, 20 years? You know, my first job, I was a laborer and then a dishwasher. I bet, I think you've probably have done similar things like that. What's going to happen?
My first business was a restaurant business. I was the guy chopping tuna and doing all that stuff in the back, doing dishes, you know, every, every night. I think there's two versions of pessimism. The first version is it's not going to work. The second version is it's going to work, and that's a bad thing. You're talking about the second version.
I think it's going to work. It 100% is going to work.
I think I asked the guy, I was like, how? He's like, what's the non-obvious? Like, only when you're in the weeds doing it is it really obvious about this. But to the outside person, they maybe gloss over it. I was like, what's that insight?
That's a great question.
He goes, Well, it's like most things in technology. He goes, the first 90% is easy, which makes it really easy to have a sweet demo and everybody just immediately is like, oh man, this is going to change everything. And it's like, it will eventually and probably a lot longer than we want because he goes, so the 90% is easy. The next 9% is 10 times harder. So it's like the simple stupid example of this would be dispensing almonds, easy. Dispensing the right amount of crumbly feta cheese. It is literally 10 times harder than the almonds problem, right?
Or like on a Tesla, like my Tesla self-drives and it's the autopilot is mostly good unless it's a flashing yellow light, then it like freaks out and I almost die, right?
Or it's like if it's a dewy morning or it's a foggy this, whatever, or it's rainy here or there's construction there, right? There's like all these edge cases. And then that's what he said is like the last 1% is this even 10 times harder than that first one. And he's like, so with self-driving cars, the problem is nobody wants a 99% good self-driving car, even if that's actually 5 times better than a human. Yeah. It's like, if I'm going to die, I'm going to die at my own hands, not at the hands of this, you know, this piece of software. And so that makes it really hard to roll out these things and get and deal with the PR backlash anytime there is a crash or a bad result. Even if it's a better probability than humans driving. But I don't think you have the same problem with restaurants, right? Size of the prize is smaller, but also the barrier to entry is— the barrier to deployment is much smaller where it's like, oh man, I asked for light sauce. This is medium sauce, right? It's like, whatever, it's okay. It's not a self-driving car crash. And so I do think that that's the case here where a lot of people can get 90% of the way there, getting the next 9%, 10 times harder, getting the final 1%, 10 times harder than even that. In software development, we used to say this where I would always be, because I'm the non-engineer, I worked at a company of all programmers and I'd just be like walking around, you know, eating cashews and just walking around just like, hey guys, how's it coming? When do you think it's going to be done? And they're like, well, we're about 90% of the way there. We got like 90% of the things done. So we're about halfway done.
You're like, great, 10 minutes, we'll be done.
I was like, wait, 90% done. So you're halfway done. So like, yeah, the last 10% always takes at least double the time that you've already spent.
I was like, all right, cool. That's how math works.
I, uh, coffee. I'll go get some.
Like 10 years ago, universal, uh, income or, you know, universal wages was like a thing.
UBI.
UBI. We're going to, you're going to, we're going to give everyone in America a bunch of money. And like, I'm a capitalistic guy. And I was like, what? F that. That's the worst. And then I learned two things. One, do you know in Alaska, in Alaska, I've had a friend, I've had friends move to Alaska. You know, they do that. They've been doing that for decades. They give you $5,000. The oil, oil Dividend, right?
It's like you get a share of the money that they were making from having so much natural resources.
I think I don't, yeah, maybe I don't know where it's from. And I believe if I'm not mistaken, I think sometimes it's a tax credit where like you just pay less in taxes or if you don't owe any tax money, you literally get a check of like $4,800 or $5,500, something like that. And then the second thing that I learned was I started researching UBI and I was like, wait, why is Sam Altman advocating for UBI? Like, why are all these like really smart robot makers advocating for it? And I'm like, shit, they know.
When my wife comes home and like, why is the kitchen clean? What did you do? Why are you cleaning up this mess? You did something else. That's what he's doing by starting UBI.
Which he has, he has, uh, you know, I think Sam Altman along with a few other guys are doing experiments in San Francisco where I think they're giving $800. I forget. I don't even want to say, cause I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but it was like a fairly small sum.
They stopped now. They, I think they did it for like some number of years. And that was the experiment. And then they stopped. And we should go look up actually what actually happened. But I remember reading something that was like, not like entirely positive. It wasn't like, oh my God, this is great. We— this is the program we need to roll out nationwide. It was like, well, no, that's not— that's not what the takeaway was.
But it's still an interesting concept to me that I'm open to learning more about, because when I learn more about these robots, I actually do think I'm like, I'm just old enough where I think this isn't going to impact me, but for most Americans who are born, who are young now, it's going to have a massive impact on their future.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and so that second concern of like, oh wait, this is the, this is the real version of they took our jobs. Like, hey, it wasn't the immigrants. It was the dorks building robots that took all your jobs. Um, yeah, I do think that's true. In fact, it's kind of a paralyzing thought because it's not just labor jobs. Actually, it seems like The knowledge jobs are going first. Like, for sure, every 2 weeks it's like, oh, video editors out of a job. Oh, Photoshop, the useless skill now. Okay, well, lawyers don't need them, right? This is like, it's like clearly the breadcrumb starts to get laid where you're like, okay, today they haven't replaced all these, but what's going to happen in V12 of this, like, of this product? Like, this V12 is just going to do the job for doctors, for for everybody, for all these designers, for video editors, for all these things. And so it's kind of a paralyzing thought. And it reminds me, they did this interview with Elon Musk and he was like, they're like, you're really worried about AI, right? And he's like, yeah, I'm extremely concerned about AI. It stresses me out. I lose sleep over AI. And they were like, so why are you working on AI then? Why are you developing it? He's like, well, basically, I think this is going to happen either way. It is inevitable. My mind told me that. He goes, and then I just had to decide, do I want to see the AI apocalypse in my lifetime, or do I want to die and then not get to witness it? He's like, I decided I'd like to witness it, which is just a hilarious thing because I thought he was going to say something else. I thought he was going to say, I can use this for good. And instead he's like, I'd just rather see it in my lifetime than not see it. And then he's like, then I felt good and I just operated. I just continued on. That's kind of how I feel when I see the AI like getting so much better. I'm like, dude, I don't know if any of my businesses will even make sense in 10 years. Well, all right, carry on then. Now, what am I going to do about this? Like, am I really going to go stop the progress of technology? No. Am I going to anticipate this now and like change everything that I'm doing now? Also doesn't really make sense. Let me just make hay while it's possible and see what happens.
I think that when it comes to AI and these robots, I think what it is, it's sort of like a squirrel preparing for winter, where between now and the next, like, 10 years, the name of the game is just pile away as much as you can to get above this certain threshold to where you can make it through this winter that is never going to end. And so it's like, between now and whenever this moment happens, if it's going to be in 5 years or 20 years, the name of the game is just hurry up and, like, board up your home for the storm to come. So just that way you're safe for it and that you're just, you're independent and you're all right. But once that, once it, like, once ever that threshold or that time comes, a lot of people I think are actually going to be screwed. I'm not going to predict what's going to happen because I have no, no idea. But I just think that between now and then, the name of the game is just to make as much money, set up your life in such a way where you can pile away all these nuts and you're just good and you're just good for the winter. That's like basically how I've been living.
I don't know what the right mindset is. I think that's for, for right or wrong. That's also my mindset is just like, Do it while it's hot. Get it while it's hot. Do good while the getting's good, right? And it's like, well, I, but I also am not like blinders on about this stuff. In fact, one of the name, the name of my original holding company was Inevitable Outcomes. And I was like, well, why don't I just figure out what is inevitably going to happen and then go invest in that? Because that's just a better thing to work backwards from. If you realize that something is inevitable, that's way different than speculating of like, well, maybe this could be the case. It's like, once you know something is inevitably going to happen, then you just have to figure out which company is going to win, which is actually like you've reduced the problem set down into which company is going to win and when is the right time for a business like this to exist. I started this episode talking about timing because I think that these single-purpose robots is going to be the big winners in the next cycle here where like you have the knowledge work, like LLMs, ChatGPT type of stuff., but then I think you're going to see these specific robots. I think both of those are going to be really, really successful. What you're not going to see is that I don't, I think the human robot, I think it has to be further out than, um, than this. That's just my, my opinion. You know, there's also other versions of this. So we talked about the Sweetgreen one. You know, the founder of Chipotle has a new restaurant concept that's all robotic first.
What is it?
And by the way, one other insight the Sweetgreen guy said, he goes, the key is not to retrofit the restaurant. He goes, uh, what everybody tries to do is they have their existing restaurant, then they try to install a robotic arm that can try to use the existing restaurant layout because it's cheaper, right, to not rebuild a restaurant. And his quote was, everybody's trying to retrofit. I'm different. I'm willing to blow the whole thing up. Quote, I'm willing to blow the whole thing up. And he was basically saying like, we just thought through from first principles. If this was a restaurant that was not going to have humans working on the line, it was going to have robots. How would you design every part of this restaurant? And then let's build those. And so they did 2 this year. They were up and running and now they're doing like 10 more in the, uh, to scale this up.
What's it called and what do they serve? So is it called Colonel?
So now, uh, what's his name? Um, Steve Ells, Steve Ells, the guy who created Chipotle. He's got a new one called Colonel and Colonel is basically like some kind of like vegan bowl type of concept. And so you can see videos of it, uh, where it's basically like Dispensing stuff into a bowl and then it's like shaking. There's like an arm that's just shaking the bowl just to mix it for you. It's pretty hilarious.
The crossover of vegans and, uh, apocalyptic, uh, like AI people. I don't, that Venn diagram, I don't think it's going to cross over nicely. Like, you know what I mean? Like, like, hey, do you want to go to this, uh, restaurant that has no humans working ever? Cause fuck people. Yeah. Do they, do they sell hummus?
You know what I mean?
Like that conversation is not going to be as plant-based.
Plant-based machine-operated baby.
Yeah.
Who's got that tattoo?
Nobody. That's not a huge crossover, but it looks cool. So he has 2 or 3 of these locations.
Yeah. So I don't think this one's like as figured out. It doesn't seem like it's as promising, but, uh, there's a bunch of people doing this. Just SoftBank had poured like hundreds of millions into a pizza bot that I've talked about a lot, which is pizza is the big prize here. Pizza is a much simpler dish. Like, uh, it's a single, single item. It's the most popular kind of like fast casual type of, type of food. And if you could, and it's also owned by chains. And so you can get, if you can get Domino's as a customer, you're going to get to go in whatever, like, you know, 5,000 Domino's locations. And so whoever can build a pizza bot that can make a perfect pizza every time, perfectly circular, perfect ratio of ingredients, never calls in sick, can work 24/7, um, consistent. It doesn't matter if that thing costs like, you know, $500,000. You'll be able to sell into all the Domino's, all of the Pizza Huts, all of the chain, chain pizza shops in order to, um, uh, to do this. Um, so I think the pizza bot is like, you know, the big opportunity here.
I, uh, I'm, I like to think of myself as an independent thinking person. I like to live my life somewhat independently and I don't want to rely on other people. That's why I like to start my own companies. When I went to Brett Adcock's warehouse or factory, whatever you call it. And he showed me, he was like, check this out. We're learning how the Achilles on a human works. And we just got our humanoid to move its foot, like in a dorsiflexion way. And like, we also like, here's like this human knee that we're studying. Now our guy over here is making the knee so we can like move. I saw this stuff and I was like, Dad, can I come? It's like, I was like, can I, should I drop everything and just come and join you? Like it felt like, Yeah, sounds great. It felt like I was in a cult. Like I was meeting like Charlie Manson and I was like, yes, sir. Who would you like me to kill? Like, I was just like so into this. I remember going to my wife. I was like, you should quit your job. I was like, Sarah, I don't, I'm not smart enough, but will you quit your job and go work here? I was like, I just was so into it when I saw this stuff. This is, and the cool thing about this topic. Is that it's happening this second, right now. And this isn't far away enough to say one day in the future. It's like, it's happening now. And over the next couple months and couple years, we're going to see it in play. And I think that's why this topic is very, really fascinating.
By the way, this is also the magic of Silicon Valley. Like one of the reasons to be in the Bay Area is you will, because he's, his factory's in the Bay Area, right?
Yeah, it's in, uh, it's South San Francisco. Uh, uh, It's just north of Palo Alto.
So you will go, you will either meet somebody, you'll be at a dinner and hear something, or you'll drop by somebody's office and you'll see what they're working on and how they're approaching it. And then you will walk out being like, my life is meaningless. Everything I do is absolutely meaningless. I am a small, small pale dot on a giant rock and I mean nothing. And what I'm doing is nothing. Most people, that's a pretty disempowering feeling. But for me, I wanted to be in situations like that. I wanted people who could basically blow the ceiling off of what I thought was possible, what I thought was cool, what I thought was interesting, and be like, no, no, no, you thought that was interesting? This is interesting. And that happened the other day. I don't know if you saw these videos that were going viral. Some people were at a hackathon down in also in Sunnyvale or Mountain View somewhere doing like a— there's like something called like the AI House or some shit like that. And during the hackathon, during the hackathon, this guy walks in with this cool looking jacket and like disheveled hair. Like he's been in like a cryogenic freezing tube for the last 10 years. And it's Sergey Brin. It's the founder of Google just showing up at the hackathon and he gave an impromptu talk. Did you see this? No. What did he say? Well, he goes up there and he just gets really into details about Google's Gemini thing, like about like bugs that they're fixing and stuff like that. Not like some grand visionary talk. He was just like, yeah, here's what it could do. Here's how it works. Here's how we're thinking about this. And he's just talking to a bunch of guys and all of them— this is hilarious. It went viral because there's a guy sitting there, the guy who asked the question in the clip, and his shirt is just a shirt that looks like someone's body flesh with boobs. And he asked him a serious question. He's like, what is it about the Gemini got in trouble for being too woke or whatever. The thing wouldn't generate images of white people. And he's like, how come the LLM is not generating images? What's your views on the policy of that? And nobody even calls out— nobody like Sergey Brin doesn't point at it and be like, dude, can we get a different question? Not the guy with the boobs shirt.
I'm looking at him now. It's just like a guy who looks like me, just like a normal looking dude, but he's got a a flesh cover, but it's tits. It's a, he's got boobs on his shirt and nobody references it.
Nobody acknowledges it. It's just like, yeah, carry on. What? Live and let live, baby. That's the San Francisco way. And so it's a very strange place, but it's strange in a way where kind of amazing things happen. Like the founder of Google just showing up at your hackathon and, uh, and answering some questions. This is pretty wild.
I exp— so I experienced this all the time in San Francisco when I lived there. There'd be so many times where it was like, I've told many stories about this, where I'd go to someone's office and there's just like huge screens with porn playing. And it's like, well, they're just working on this, this website and it's a, and it's like they make porn. And so just like normal, we like normalize it. Or there's been other times where like I've seen, like I've come into the office and there's people sleeping under desk and stuff like that. And just like weird shit that we would make fun of or Things on that TV show Silicon Valley where they like have Nipple Alert and like, like I've experienced this in real life and it's fun to make fun of, but honestly, it's awesome. It is so awesome to like be around these freaks. Remember when hacker houses were like just getting going? I would go to these, these houses and you would see that they'd have shared kitchens and like half the time it was like just powders. It's like, well, these guys just live off these powders. They just live off powders. That's all they eat.
Those guys were just living in a house together where they were supposed to be working on other stuff. And then one of the guys was just eating only— he's like, I'm just going to create like baby formula for adults, basically. And he's just— that became Soylent.
And that same guy, when like, I forget what type of chip it is, when it came out, like, you know, like these credit cards that we use now where you touch your credit card on a machine instead of inserting it and you could read the credit card, he inserted all of that into a small chip and he surgically put it into his hand. And so he could just like touch his hand. So like being around freaks like that, it's fun to make fun of them because it is silly. It is awesome. I loved, I loved being around that. I would see this stuff all the time and I was just like, I'm so happy you freaks exist. This is the coolest thing I've seen. I felt like that all the time. Did you ever experience that where you'd go to these like hacker houses and they would be disgusting?
These guys are just, well, it's just like triple bunk beds.
Yeah, they're filthy.
But, you know, like, goddamn it, I can't even look down on this because one out of the— one out of 18 of you guys is about to become a billionaire in the next 5 years. I just don't know which one. Like, you know, whose neckbeard is the longest? Is like, you know, who's showered the least in this room? Like, I gotta guess, I guess write you a check. I think that's the optimal strategy here. Like, I had a buddy who worked at my company that would just do these things, these experiments, like his guy Quinn. And Quinn had this crazy Sideshow Bob style haircut. And Quinn would be like, he was really into games. And so he's playing this little word scramble game on iPhone. And I think his girlfriend had beat him in the, like, they were, him and his girlfriend would play, or this girl he was flirting with or whatever would play. And she beat him. And so he stayed up all night programming a robotic finger and a camera to solve this word scramble thing so that he would never lose again. And I was like, it's like these stories you hear about Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan with like this, like fierce competitiveness, but applied in the absolute nerdiest way. And it results in kind of amazing things. And it's amazing energy to be around.
I've been around a bunch of those people and I love it. And it always makes me feel like the first feeling I originally, what I felt is you're stupid. That's stupid. And then it's like, oh, I'm stupid. You're better than me. And this, like, this is awesome. Uh, yeah, I feel like that on a regular basis when I, when I would go around these weirdos and I love them.
So we got to also talk about this lawsuit. So Elon Musk sued Sam Altman and there's probably, there's a good analysis out there about this lawsuit, but I want to point out a couple of things. So here's my frame of this. Elon is good at PR. He's not just good at engineering. He's not just good at business. He's not just a technologist. He's also kind of a master of PR. And I should have known this because Tesla runs, basically spends nothing on TV commercials. Every other car company spends like billions of dollars on, you know, like all other car companies in total will spend like over a billion dollars on marketing. Whereas Tesla runs no commercials, yet Tesla's brand is huge. And it's because Elon is kind of a master of marketing, is a master of PR. And he does this with Twitter. He does this with with Tesla and he's doing it with SpaceX. And now seeing him do this with this lawsuit, it's the first time that I've ever seen him do this in public, but it's basically, he's going to lose the legal battle, but he's going to win the PR war, I think.
Uh, have you ever been through a lawsuit? Do you know what the discovery phase is?
Uh, no, I haven't, but I'm familiar with the idea of discovery.
So basically, I don't exactly know, uh, what all the rules are, but I've like, I remember there was a time I was going to sue someone. Uh, cause I thought something didn't work out and I, I thought they had violated a contract and I'd lost money because of it. And I was going to sue them.
Some guy didn't rack his weights.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's salty.
Pro code has been broken.
I can't let this stand. Uh, and so I, uh, I was going to do it. I hired a lawyer and they're like, all right, but they're like, you're probably going to win this thing. You're not going to win that much money. And I'm like, but it's the principle of the thing, whatever. And they're like, okay, cool. But do you know what discovery is? I was like, no, tell me more. And they're like, we're going to get access to your email, to your phone records, to your text messages, and they're going to be able to see all of it. And in many cases, and this is where I don't entirely understand how it works, but in many cases, that's completely public record. So if I file a lawsuit, that part is public record. And oftentimes the things they discover will be in public record. And I was thinking about it. It's like. Did I just text my wife the other day to let her know that I farted, but a little something came out? Because I think I did text that and I don't want that in public. And that's like a 3 out of 10 on the PC meter. Like, what's the 9 out of 10? And would I be okay with them seeing that? And that's when it finally hit me. Of all the years of people telling me, don't write like offensive or crazy stuff on text messages or email. That's why. It's because I just didn't want that embarrassing stuff to be seen. So I didn't end up going through with it just for that reason. And so in this lawsuit, we're going to see all types of private conversations that these people have. I think Elon doesn't give a shit, but I think the average Joe would, including me.
Well, yeah, I don't know. We should know more about this. I don't know how discovery works of like what parts get, because not everything goes public, but not everything. No. So it's like, what, what's, what's the, where's the line and how does that work? Because I think Elon has a lot to lose too with that. Like nobody wants their shit out there in the public.
And so, but he does like when he, when he, when he texted that guy, the, the former CEO of Twitter, he replied with all this stuff. I'm like, can we talk about this? And his reply was, what have you done this week?
Like, I feel like in his mind, he thinks, yes, he wants to do that.
But in his mind, he's like, I'm going to say stuff that I want the world to see. You know what I mean? It's like all part of the game.
In this lawsuit, there's actually some stuff that's in there that I thought I found pretty interesting. So can I just like tell you what I thought was interesting in this? So he, um, so it starts off basically the whole lawsuit starts off the document. And it says, well, humans have transitioned from a labor economy to a knowledge-based economy, and now knowledge is basically getting wrecked by AI. So first AI got so good it could beat the best human chess players. Then it could find the best routes between two points, like two best streets to take, fastest route. Then it could beat more complicated games like poker and Go. And what it talks about is that Elon Musk saw this happening, and he was, I think, on the board of or an advisor to a company called DeepMind. And he's like, oh, DeepMind's really interesting. He meets the founder of DeepMind, this guy, Denis. I don't know how to pronounce his last name. And he's basically like, what are your views on AI safety? Because Elon for a long time had been worried about AI safety. And he walks away like, I don't think this guy's really concerned with AI safety. I think he's just trying to build really powerful AI. Okay, whatever. But he gets pretty worried because he finds out that Google is going to try to buy DeepMind. And he's like, well, Google has the most data because they have emails, they have search, they have YouTube. So he goes, Google has the most data. DeepMind has a monopoly on AI talent, and so they have the best AI talent. And what the result will be is that AGI, when it eventually gets done, artificial general intelligence, will be in the hands of the biggest monopoly, a private company out there. And he's like, Okay, that's a little bit worrisome. And he goes and he hangs out with Larry Page, the founder of Google, and he's telling him, like, Larry, I'm worried about AI. What are you guys doing about AI safety? And he's like, basically, kind of the way Elon describes it, he kind of pats him on the head. He's like, oh, don't worry about that. We're not worried about that. He's like, well, AI could take over and basically eradicate the human race if there's a path where this goes wrong. And he's like, well, that'll just be evolution. And he's like, don't be such a speciesist, Elon. And he's like, speciesist? He's like, yeah, you're favoring the human species.
Oh my God.
Yeah, I'm pro-human. And so he gets really pissed about this. And he says that this is when he stopped talking to the CEO of Google. So he, after that, that's like the trigger according to Elon. And again, I think a lot of this is Elon crafting a narrative. I'm not sure. I'm not saying that these things didn't happen, but I think he's very good at creating an origin story. And creating a bad guy and then painting himself, oh, what do you know, as the hero. And so here he goes. So now what he does is he teams up with Sam Altman. So Sam Altman, who's the CEO of OpenAI, in 2015 wrote the following. He goes, the development of super machine intelligence at the time, that's what he's calling it, SMI, super machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats, but they are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe the way SMI could.
What a great, what a great opening sentence. Yeah. All right. Continue, Sam.
So Sam is worried about this. Elon's worried about this. They get together because, oh, then there's the trigger. Google's buying DeepMind. I didn't know this. Uh, the, in the lawsuit, it shows that, uh, Elon then went to the PayPal co-founder, this guy Luke Nosek, and tried to quickly like emergency raise $500 million to buy DeepMind instead of Google. Just to keep it out of the hands of Google. And he fails. He can't pull the deal together in the last minutes. DeepMind gets bought by Google. And now Elon's really worried. And so Sam Altman then goes to Elon and says, hey, why don't we create a nonprofit AI lab to catch up with Google? And actually, the origin of this was to do it inside Y Combinator, where Sam was currently the president. So did you know that the origin of OpenAI was actually supposed to be inside of YC? And he called it, what if we created the Manhattan Project for AI? And he's like, what if YC did a call to arms and was like, hey, we need to develop this technology to— basically, we need the anti-Google. Like, we need to get the best people we can to start working on this as a research project. What he said originally was, we'll give them equity in YC as their upside. And so they can work on this as a nonprofit. That was the original idea.
I think he said that like, no person will have control over this thing that we're making and and said they were going to get equity in YC. That's how they'll—
He's like, it'll be a nonprofit. How do we pay these top AI researchers? Because Google's going to pay them a shit ton. Well, we'll give them equity in YC. YC is our huge cash cow. And so that'll solve that problem. And he's like, we'll have a board of directors, me, you, Elon, and then we'll pick 3 others. And he says, this is the initial email. He goes, if it's not obvious what the right thing to do is, then the 5 of us will decide. Like that's the governance idea. Okay. So that was the original idea. It evolves a little bit.
By the way, Elon's reply to that email was great. And so Sam wrote like a fairly casual, I mean, he used the verbiage, like you said, those sentences that are like a big deal, but it was like a casual almost email with like 5 points. And Elon's reply was agree on all. Like that was it.
Right. I have moved straight to the end. Um, so yes, agree on all. So they start and they're like, cool, we're making this nonprofit., and it'll be open source. Elon comes up with the name OpenAI. He's like, let's just put it in the name. This is open source AI. And in the next 5 years, Elon contributes $44 million to this nonprofit, and they develop some pretty interesting tech. So ChatGPT now, GPT-4, it's in the 90th percentile at the lawyers, like the bar exam. It's in the 99th percentile for the GRE, the verbal section. It's even a 77% at the advanced sommelier test, which I don't even know how that would work. It's like the sommelier, like the wine test. And so he's trying to, in the lawsuit, argue that it's already AGI, which it's not. But he's trying to make that argument because his whole legal case rests on this idea that there's been a breach of contract and they breached the Founding agreement, but there is no actual founding agreement. What he's calling the founding agreement is like what we call the gentleman's agreement. It's basically like a handful of conversations, emails, and then just like the initial founding, like articles of incorporation of the, of the company. He calls all of that together the founding agreement. He says they breached that, but it's not actually an agreement.
I'm a moron and I don't know anything about legal stuff, but I think that that actually counts as something. I mean, there's been, I think there's precedent where that matters..
So, but in this case, basically he has to establish that there is a founding agreement and that it's been breached. But if you go look at the founding agreement, like those emails, like one time they're talking about we could give equity in YC. That's just like brainstorming. That's not like the agreement. Then later they do have a little bit more formal of like, okay, it's going to be a nonprofit, it's going to be whatever. But in the articles of incorporation, it specifically says like, um, we will open source this, you know, whenever, um, you know, whenever we deem appropriate.
Yeah, vague stuff.
It's vague, right? It's like, we will develop this for the benefit of humanity.
We're definitely doing this.
Maybe someday.
Exactly.
When we want. And so they basically left themselves complete latitude to do whatever the hell they want. And that's what they did. Now, what I think is interesting, so Elon says a couple other things. So one, he says GPT-4 is already so good at those test scores. He goes, and now they're developing this thing called Q*. Have you heard about Q*?
No. What is it?
So Q* is reportedly like the new, not reportedly, rumored to be the thing that OpenAI is working on that is like next, next level after GPT-4. So it's like instead of GPT-5, they're using some method called Q*, which they think is like a leap in the intelligence, which is really exciting because even GPT-3 to GPT-4, GPT-2 to GPT-3, Those were like pretty substantial improvements, but not like a huge leap. Whereas Q* reportedly is like what the huge leap is. There's rumors where Sam Altman came out and said, you know, like, uh, I was in a meeting, like a demo, we did a demo or we had an internal meeting the other day. And I, you know, I saw something that like blew my mind. Like basically saw something that just like was awe-inspiring. And I was like, what? Well, what is it? And he hasn't shared any details. This is also right when the that big coup happened. They fired Sam Altman. One of the rumored reasons was, and this could be total bullshit, we don't know, but this is one of the rumored reasons was the board saw how powerful Q* is and they were worried Sam is way too fast and way too loosey-goosey, way too aggressive. And now this weapon is getting too, too powerful. It's kind of that idea there. So anyways, Elon talks about that in the lawsuit, that they're developing Q* and whatever. So it's kind of like, confirmation that this thing exists. Although the legal language he uses in all this, he goes at the start of every sentence, every paragraph, it says, using knowledge and belief. And basically it's like saying, we don't have evidence, but I know some things and I believe this to be true. And then it says all of the claims. So who knows? It's kind of like Elon's claims. A couple other big pieces of this. So I want to read you some Elon emails that that did get surfaced in this. So one of the key things that happened early on was they had this dinner. And at the dinner, it's Sam Altman, it's Greg Brockman, it's Elon, and then it's this guy Ilya. Ilya was one of the leading deep learning researchers at Google. And he became the chief scientist of OpenAI. The big turning point was Elon recruited Ilya away from Google to OpenAI. This is when Larry Page stopped talking to him because he was so pissed that you recruited my top guy. And you declared war basically. And recruiting him was like a Herculean effort, basically getting him to leave Google and Google was offering him like a blank check.
This is a fucking movie.
And exactly, this will be a movie for sure. Um, so then Google starts offering all of their talent like crazy lavish offers. They just upped the ante like crazy. They're like, we're going to price anyone out of this market.
How much do you know?
Uh, million, like, I don't know, like millions of dollars per employee minimum for some people, $10, $15 million., a pay package annual. And so it was like, okay, well, uh, Sam and Greg email Elon saying, hey, it's getting really hard to recruit. Um, you know, we have to think of a strategy here. Google is doing this. Elon replies, he goes, we need to do what it takes to get top talent. Let's go higher. If at some point we have to revisit what our current people are getting paid, that's fine. Either we get the best people in the world or we will get whipped by DeepMind. Whatever it takes to bring on the ace talent is fine by me. DeepMind is causing me extreme mental stress. If they win, it will be really bad news with their one mind to rule the world philosophy. They are obviously making major progress and they should, given the talent, uh, level of talent over there. And so he basically gives them the green light, like, I'll keep funding more, go get the best talent. And so in 2016, he gives them $15 million. In 2017, he gives them $20 million. In that 5-year period, he gives them $44 million in total. Now the problem is Elon, the biggest backer and the original backer, says he doesn't own anything in OpenAI, the for-profit company. And this is the strongest part of his case. Here's what he says. He goes, how is it that you can create a nonprofit company that is supposed to be nonprofit and open source, raise millions of dollars from people? You take $50 million from me, you hire the best people in the world, and you write down that this is your charter, and then you end up a closed-source, maximum for-profit company owned by the most valuable company in the world, Microsoft, owned 49% by them. How is that possible? And he's like, two things. He goes, if it is possible to create a nonprofit, hire people, and basically fund all of the research on, basically like in a tax donation way where you, for every dollar you're putting in, you get 50-cent rebate back from the government. He's like, if that's possible, and then you could just flip to a for-profit when you make breakthrough technology, Why is everybody not doing that? Why is that not just the default for every single technology company in the world? Either it's illegal or everybody should be doing it. It can only be one of those two things. And I love this argument from Elon. I think this is a tremendous argument. And there's no answer to that question yet of either this is illegal or every single company in the world is going to do this.
Why would you not? We, you and I are not, I wouldn't, I'd say we are fans of Elon's work, but we're lukewarm on him as a human being. And we are only hearing one side of this story, but in the last 10 minutes, only knowing what I know just from those 10 minutes, he's right.
Yeah. So then he gives this analogy again, master of PR. He goes, it's like if I donated to a nonprofit charity that said, we're going to save the Amazon rainforest. And then that charity took all our money and then they created a for-profit logging company that was just cutting down trees in the rainforest and selling the lumber. That's what's happened. That is OpenAI. And so he says it is a de facto subsidiary of Microsoft. And he goes, he includes this quote, and this quote I think is going to become very problematic. I predict it's going to become very problematic for Microsoft in the future. So it's the Microsoft CEO saying, remember when all the OpenAI drama was going down and Microsoft stock price started to tank because they were like, oh shit, you've given $10 billion or whatever to OpenAI and they're about to collapse. This is bad for Microsoft and they're going to go create a new company that you don't own. That's bad. And so then he came out and he said this publicly. He goes, if OpenAI disappeared tomorrow, we have all the IP rights, all the capabilities. We have all the people, we have the compute, we have the data. We have everything. We are below them, above them, around them.
Wow. Yes, exactly. And so that also weakens the case that OpenAI is this like nonprofit, non-controlled by Microsoft entity. When he came out and said that we are below them, above them, and around them. Goddamn. What a phrase.
Dude, this is riveting. This is riveting.
That's me when I, if I go to Chick-fil-A and I order nuggets, I'm below them, I'm above them, I'm around them, I have them, they are mine. Like, dude, that's it. What a phrase.
The, uh, by the way, the way they call this the Manhattan Project, the best. That is the best. That is so good. All of this is just epic. Can you imagine these nerdy, uh, AI engineers who were probably like bullied and were dorks throughout all the years? Now they're like, oh, me? You want me? No, boys, come on. Let's be civil about this. They're just getting fought over and we're talking about $15 or $20 million a year packages. That's insane. Everything about the story is insane.
You're right. This needs to be a movie. If you're making the movie or you want to make the movie of this, get in touch with me. Let's, let's create the movie of this. This is going to be like the Social Network movie all over again.
Uh, an epic photo collage or something like that would also suffice too. Like just like some, some neat photos with captions that tells a story. I'm into that. Um, I want to leave it with this. So Dharmesh Shah, Dharmesh is the founder of HubSpot, and you and I have talked to him a bit. He's on this podcast all the time. He's doing this thing on AI that I want him to come talk about. Hopefully he will. He told me something that I tell myself all the time when thinking about this, which was basically Dharmesh is super into AI. He goes to a lot of conferences on it, like insider conferences. I would think that he has a good grasp of it. He has said, It's not probably going to be as good or as bad as you think it's going to be. And him saying that in a calm, like fatherly voice to me, that's like been the one thing that I've been thinking about of like Sam Altman. I think he's a great guy and I love Sam. I don't know him, but just as like a fan of his, I think that all these guys in this game are also brilliant marketers and brilliant business people and brilliant at the skill of programming and making this stuff., but I also think that they're brilliant at PR and marketing. And I have to remind myself constantly that it could be good, it could be bad. It's probably going to be right in the middle though, of, uh, of what the reality is going to be in the middle. And these guys are just excellent at telling their story. Do you agree?
Yeah. And we should say, uh, you know, Elon is creating a direct competitor to OpenAI, right? Like Grok, uh, he has, he has xAI, which is, uh, like his, uh, his AI company. It's his AI competitor to OpenAI. And he has Grok, which is the competitor to ChatGPT. That's like the product name. So he obviously has, you know, interests in this. And I think, you know, one thing that's clear out of this is it's definitely mission-driven. Like in the same way that I used to think when it was like, oh, Jeff Bezos is doing a rocket company. It's like, oh, is this just like a giant dick measuring contest between like billionaires? Like just the last level of the game. Is you say, I win Earth. Okay, let me go win Mars now. Right? Like, that's kind of what it seemed like was, oh, I'm going to build a bigger rocket than you. But then you read that, like, even 25 years ago, Bezos was, like, really obsessed with the idea of space travel and has been a giant fanatic about it and been trying to donate to it and trying to advance the cause in that. And that now, like, even with these companies, he's in all the engineering meetings, the planning meetings every week. It's like, Oh, okay. This wasn't what I thought it was.
In the same way, by the way, it could still, it could be that, and that's okay. It could be mission-driven and ego-driven and profit-driven, and that is okay to have all those things.
That's a better way of putting it. Yeah. Like most things, uh, it's accelerating because of multiple causes, multiple, there's multiple things, multiple tailwinds pushing it. But I would say like the hater in me wanted to discredit it, but the realist in me, when I go back and read old interviews or watch old videos before Amazon was super successful. Becomes clear that actually it was a deep interest. So similarly here, even though I think it's part of it is he's trying to bog OpenAI down with a lawsuit and spin the PR battle in his favor, and he has a direct competitor, it's clear that OpenAI wouldn't have even— would not have existed and would not have been successful had he not genuinely had this fear and concern and belief about what needs to happen with AI a long time ago. So I think that comes out very true in this. There's a paper trail of evidence.
What a fucking pod. I feel amped and scared, excited, nervous. I feel all types of emotions.
Great job. It's like a great first date. It's like, right, you aren't you supposed to like trigger like adrenaline or like the fight or flight response in people, and that's like what bonds you? I feel like that just happened to us.
Yeah, except my version of that was like on our first date we went on a motorcycle, but, uh, now we're talking about like the world may be ending in 20 years. Uh, good job. This is, you did a good job.
I've got a court case to tell you about. Dinner? No, we're not doing dinner.
I, okay. So you made it this far to the folks listening, go to the YouTube and tell us in the comments, do you actually think this is going to be horrible? Do you think it's going to be great? Or is it what Dharmesh said, where it's somewhere in the middle where it's not going to be as good or bad as we think? But Sean, bravo. You did a good job. This was a good, good pod. And we'll end it there. That's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.