Elon Musk SUES Sam Altman

Sam Parr

Everyone, we just finished recording this podcast, and we wanted to come back and give a little bit of an intro. I feel so many different emotions, and here's why: the stakes of this are **super, super, super high**.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, we're talking about what's going on with robots in the real world. We have specific examples of really cool businesses that are using robots for lawn care, restaurants, and all different types of things. Then we go over the Elon Musk versus Sam Altman lawsuit. What is this lawsuit between two of the power players of Silicon Valley? What's our take on it, which might surprise you? We also discuss some of the brilliant nuances, the marketing, and PR that's going on here. We kind of call it out.

Sam Parr

This is actually... we have fun while doing it, but this is really, really important in my opinion. Listen to the entire thing. 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!

Shaan Puri

Alright, what up, Sam?

Sam Parr

Hey, what's going on?

Shaan Puri

Sam, I gotta tell you something. When it comes to kissing, eating ice cream before bed, or business, **timing is everything**, my friend. I think that timing is important in all aspects of business and technology. There's a moment happening right now; I can 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 gotta talk to you about robots.

Sam Parr

And they've been around for a minute, but now it actually feels like it's a reality.

Shaan Puri

Exactly. So right now, a lot of people are talking about Tesla because Elon Musk came out and said the future of Tesla is this humanoid robot. I forgot what they call them, like "Optimus" or something like that. So it's like he's saying, "Hey, we got this robot that can walk around, pick up stuff, and do tasks. It's going to change the workforce." And your boy Brad Adcock has a company called Figure, which you're an investor in. They have their robot, and I think they just raised like $1,000,000,000 or something, right? Like last week.

Sam Parr

I think they raised $600 million at a $2.5 billion or $3 billion valuation, I think.

Shaan Puri

Nice little investment there for you.

Sam Parr

I know I was in on the first round. I doubled down and did on this round. Is this gonna be my *Mona Lisa*? Is this gonna be my big win?

Shaan Puri

Well, it could have been anybody's because you had him come on the podcast and tell the world what he was doing. So, good on you! Multibillion-dollar valuation right now, so that's a big deal, and people are really excited about that. I think there are these stats that say if labor is 50% of the GDP, the labor market is a ten times bigger market than transportation. This makes sense why Elon is like, "Hey, forget cars. It's all about these robots. We're just an AI company; we're doing robots." He is very good at repositioning and reimagining the vision of the company over and over again. He 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 now, it's not even about cars; it's about AI robots. 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." You know, the Roomba is a single-purpose vacuum robot that just goes around your house. It's in the wild today; it actually works and is 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. It saves you a ton of time. When my dishwasher broke last week, it was a terrible experience. 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. So, I went on Twitter today and I saw this great video about a company called Electric Sheep. Have you seen this?

Sam Parr

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 like a lawnmower.

Shaan Puri

It is... imagine if you took the Roomba and you put it in the lawn. That's what it is.

Sam Parr

That's a great name.

Shaan Puri

It is a robot that mows your lawn and does all kinds of landscaping. What's interesting about these guys, and what I found pretty fascinating, is that not only are they a company that's like a bunch of guys in a garage building a robot—a lawnmower that's got a camera on it that can go around your lawn—but they're actually buying up and rolling up landscaping services. So, it's a combination of a sweaty startup and a moonshot startup together. These guys are going out and buying all these landscaping businesses in the Bay Area because they're like, "Well, we need a testing ground for robots." In their office, it's just like astroturf, and they're like, "Yeah, well, they can do this square astroturf pretty easily. It's not so bad." But in the real world, your lawn has all kinds of different lumps, dips, divots, trees, and rocks. It has to be able to work. How are we going to get the best data? Right? The same way that Tesla is putting all the cars on the road, collecting data at all times, and they're collecting like whatever, a hundred 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 as a sandbox. They take their robots out and they try to use them. They mow your lawn normally, but they'll also try to test their 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." So, it's like a private equity play as well. 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?

Sam Parr

I'm looking at their website. Alright, so it's slick. This is cool. I agree with you; the whole overkill thing bothers me. That could be true.

Shaan Puri

Well, the problem is, like, the founders... like, the founder went to Stanford. You're smart enough to build a robotics company. That's almost... you're smart enough where you can get yourself into trouble, right? You could be like, "Oh, we'll vertically integrate." And it's like, if I use the words "vertically integrate," be real careful. You might be midwitting the shit out of your plan right now.

Sam Parr

Basically, for him, there needs to be a Venn diagram of this guy, the founder of Sheep Robotics. He's like the dumbest smart person, and he needs to hang out with the smartest dumb person. We need that overlap in the Venn diagram to make this the perfect business. That's kind of like what he's doing. This is awesome! This is cool. Another thing that I worry about is, is it a badass team and a badass execution on a small opportunity? Yeah, like lawn mowing. I mean, I don't know, is lawn mowing a big deal? Is it as grand of a plan as what these people are actually capable of doing?

Shaan Puri

I think so because, 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 roll up, you know, small lemonade stands, for example. They go into things that are cash flowing industries. So, I do think if you added up all the landscape businesses, you're like, "Well, either what they're gonna do is use them in their own business to get it right, and then they're gonna go lease or sell these robots to every landscaper in the country." They might say, "Hey, would you like to improve your operating margins by, you know, 10% or 20%? Use these robots." So, either that's what they're gonna do, or they're gonna try to outcompete them somehow on price. I don't really love that idea. So, I think it has to be that they're just using this to prove their own tech to then go lease these out to every other landscaper.

Sam Parr

So, on their about page, they list their team. I guess their advisers include this guy named Dan Foley. It says Dan Foley was the CEO of a company that sold to BrightView. I googled BrightView. BrightView is a commercial landscaping company that did roughly **$3,000,000,000** last year in revenue, and it's publicly traded. It has a significant market cap.

Shaan Puri

So what you're saying is the newsletter guy is calling the land guy small?

Sam Parr

No, what I'm saying is, I did call it... what's that? Dead boy? I did call it small, and then I looked at Brightview. It just shows I'm... I’m an idiot. I don't know anything.

Shaan Puri

Like every great band, you're willing to change your mind. Congratulations!

Sam Parr

I'm only one Google away from saying sorry. Alright everyone, a quick break to tell you about HubSpot. This one's really easy for me to talk about because I'm going to show you a real-life example. So, I've got this company called Hampton, joinhampton.com. It's a community for founders doing between $2,000,000 all the way up to $250,000,000 a year in revenue. One of the ways that we've grown is by creating these cool surveys. We have a lot of founders who have high net worth, and we'll ask them all types of questions that people typically are embarrassed to ask but that provide a lot of value. So, things like how much the founders pay themselves each month, how much money they're spending each month, what their payroll looks like, and if they're optimistic about the next year in their business. All these questions that people are afraid to ask, but we ask them anyway, and they tell us in this anonymous survey. What we've done is create a landing page using HubSpot's landing page tool. It basically has a landing page that says, "Here are all the questions we asked. Give us your email if you want to access it." I shared this page on Twitter, and we were able to get thousands of people who gave us their email and told us they wanted this survey. I could see if they came from social media; I can see if they came from Twitter, from LinkedIn, basically everywhere else that they could possibly come from. I'm able to track all of that, and then I'm able to see over the next handful of weeks how many of those people actually signed up and became a member of Hampton. In other words, I can see how much revenue came from this survey and how much revenue came from each traffic source, things like that. But the best part is I can see how much revenue came from it. A lot of times, it takes a ton of work to make that happen, but HubSpot made that super, super easy. If you're interested in doing this, you could check it out at hubspot.com. The link's in the description, and I'll also put the link to the survey that I did so you can actually see the landing page and how it works and everything like that. I'm just going to do that call to action then, and it's free! Check it out in the description. Alright, now back to MFM.

Shaan Puri

So, check this out. Okay, that's the first one. Now, I have a similar question: where else are robots being used? Again, these are single-purpose robots, not general robots. In the same way that we got specific AI before we get to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), we have specific AI. It's been like 20 years since DeepMind could just beat Garry Kasparov at chess, right? We solved chess, then we solved Go, then we solved math, then we solved route planning. You can create 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 just a human robot that could do everything. That is the biggest win, obviously. But I think before then, almost by definition, we have to see these specific single-job robots. It's going to be easier to build a one-job robot than it is to build a general robot that could do all jobs. Here are some other examples. 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 who are trying to make their $100 million, their next million. There are more millions to go. One of those people is the CEO of a restaurant called Sweetgreen. The CEO of Sweetgreen is a listener of the pod, and I was looking up where else robots are being used. I saw that Sweetgreen actually now has what they call their "infinite kitchen," which is a robot-driven version of Sweetgreen. Sweetgreen is like a salad bowl concept. You normally go in there, and there are about four people working the line and then four people in the back kitchen doing prep, just like most fast-casual restaurants. What they've done is they basically went in and said, "Hey, what if we..." First, I think they bought a robotics company for $50 million, and then they used that technology to build a concept where you basically have one person in the store, and the rest of it is all done by robots. So, click this link that I put in our sheet; we could show this on YouTube.

Sam Parr

By the way, is this Jonathan Newman? Yeah, I know that he's a listener. You want to know how I know he's a listener?

Shaan Puri

Don't tell me you're getting...

Sam Parr

Free sweet greeting! I'm not... no, even better. He emailed me and took a screenshot showing that he subscribed to my podcast, "My First Million," on both YouTube and Spotify. So, if you want to be like John and start a multibillion-dollar company, you gotta subscribe. That's all you have to do!

Shaan Puri

I don't think there's been anyone who subscribed that isn't rich, famous, 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. Alright, okay, so Sweetgreen. Check this video out. Basically, what they did was create a kitchen with a giant wall where all the ingredients are in these little robotic dispenser arm type things. Whatever you order, the bowl goes across the conveyor belt, and the bowl is spinning, rotating so that it drops in all the ingredients in the right spots. They have all kinds of ingredients, right? This sounds pretty simple; it's just dispensing. But maybe dispensing almonds is really easy, while feta cheese, which is really crumbly, you have to be careful with it. So, they basically fine-tuned this system, and now this concept can do 500 bowls per hour. I DM'd him and asked, "How much does a normal restaurant line do?" He said maybe 170 to 200. Wow! So, you get basically more than 2x the speed. Now you have a robot that can work 24/7, never calls in sick, and always puts the right proportion into every bowl. You have perfect food control costs, and you end up with a better version of an employee. The strategy, the way I think about this, is you trade operating expenses (opex) for capital expenditures (capex). Trading opex for capex is actually a pretty good idea.

Sam Parr

I think you should further explain what that means.

Shaan Puri

So today, all restaurants work with human labor. Your human labor is your operating expense; it's the OPEX. What that means is that for every hour you're operating and for every bowl you're selling, you need to pay a certain amount in wages to employees. Let's say today you're paying $20 an hour to people that work in these restaurants. You have about 10 people working in the restaurant at any given time. You can add it up, and let's just pretend that your labor costs come out to 33% of your revenue. The opportunity here, which I would say is normal for a restaurant, is that food costs usually account for 30% and labor costs usually account for 30%. You can't change the food cost, but could you change the labor cost? What he did with these restaurants is that every restaurant that put in these robots costs more money. It costs more CAPEX, which is like the initial upfront investment. I think in their last earnings call, they said it's about $500,000 to put the robot in. So you put an extra $500,000 to build the store. But again, this is $500,000 of CAPEX, which means you can depreciate it, which is good for your tax purposes and whatnot. It's a one-time cost versus your OPEX, which is an everyday cost of operation. What they found was that for that extra $500,000 investment, they get at least an extra 7% of net margin from those restaurants that had robots because they have less OPEX. So, you would take that, and that basically creates some breakeven.

Shaan Puri

Where you say, "Okay, cool. Two years in, we're gonna 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 gonna be. The costs are only gonna drop as we scale up, as we refine the design. Every version we come out with is just gonna be lower cost than this one." I asked him, "In 10 years, what are the odds that your restaurants are basically robot-driven, not human labor?"

Sam Parr

Is this guy Sweetgreen? Is it publicly traded right?

Shaan Puri

Yes.

Sam Parr

Is he... are you allowed to say what he's going to say right now?

Shaan Puri

I told him, I said, "Is there anything in that I can't share in this?" He goes, "No, I've shared all this." But he was basically like, "It's very high." Just thinking about that a little bit out loud, it's like, man, that means that the next 10 years in my... you know, hopefully in our lifetime, restaurants are just gonna go for... you know, a lot of restaurants are gonna go from you walk in and there's just a bunch of disgruntled people who would rather just be checking their phone right now than, you know, sit there with this like stupid uniform on. It's just gonna go where you go in, you push a button, and then your bowl gets made by a robotic arm. Then you walk out. Like, that's gonna be... there's gonna be one human in the loop. One human whose job is now called, you know, robot maintenance or robot operations. 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 gotta refill the container of apples." 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. That's how they split it today.

Sam Parr

So you and I are fairly optimistic. You know, we try to see the bright side of most things. You, in particular, do that. But let's try to be pessimistic right now a little bit. The argument that you're going to see from a lot of, actually most people, I would think, but particularly pessimists, is that they’re going to say, "But this is going to ruin the economy. This is going to ruin jobs." 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 call?

Shaan Puri

We use a 3PL now, but before, when we had it in-house, I would say every year we were going to replace 90% of the team.

Sam Parr

So, I was reading, I think it was about Amazon. I forget, but it was someone who employs tens or hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers. It was a 100% turnover rate. I remember talking to Brett from Figr, and I said, "Brett, are you preparing to be the most hated man in America right now?" He was like, "Well, why?" I said, "Well, because you're taking jobs." He responded, "Well, I'm not actually taking jobs. In fact, there are all these warehouses that no one will work at. They literally cannot convince people to work there, whether they can't afford it or if people just aren't interested in that type of work." Then he mentioned that the average turnover in a lot of warehouses is 100%. They just can't keep people in these jobs for a long time. So, my question to you is: Are you pessimistic at all about what's going to happen in 15 years, 20 years? You know, my first job was as a laborer and then a dishwasher. I bet you've probably done similar things. What's going to happen?

Shaan Puri

My first business was a restaurant. I was the guy chopping tuna and doing all that stuff in the back, doing dishes, you know, every night. I think there are two versions of pessimism. The first version is, "It's not gonna work." The second version is, "It's gonna work," and that's a bad thing. You're talking about the second version.

Sam Parr

I think this... I think it's going to work. It 100% is going to work, I think.

Shaan Puri

And so I asked the guy, I was like, "How... what's the non-obvious insight? You know, only when you're in the weeds doing it is it really obvious. To the outside person, they maybe gloss over it." I was like, "What's that insight?"

Sam Parr

That's a great question.

Shaan Puri

He goes, "Well, it's like most things in technology. The first 90% is easy, which makes it really easy to have a sweet demo. 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." He goes, "So the 90% is easy. The next 9% is 10 times harder." So it's like, you know, the simple, stupid example of this would be like, dispensing almonds is easy. Dispensing the right amount of crumbly feta cheese is literally 10 times harder than the almonds problem, right?

Sam Parr

Or, like, on a Tesla. My Tesla self-drives, and the autopilot is mostly good. Unless it's a flashing yellow light, then it freaks out, and I almost die.

Shaan Puri

Right, or it's like if it's a dewy morning, or it's foggy, or it's rainy here, or there's construction there. There are all these edge cases. Then, that's what he said. He's like, "The last 1% is 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."

Sam Parr

Yeah.

Shaan Puri

It's like, if I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die at my own hands, not at the hands of this, you know, this piece of software. That makes it really hard to roll out these things 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, it still creates issues. But I don't think you have the same problem with restaurants. The size of the prize is smaller, but also the barrier to entry and the barrier to deployment is much smaller. It's like, "Oh man, I asked for light sauce, and this is medium sauce." Right? It's like, whatever, it's okay. It's not a self-driving car crash. I do think that's the case here, where a lot of people can get 90% of the way there. Getting the next 9% is ten times harder, and getting the final 1% is ten times harder than even that. In software development, we used to say this. I would always be, because I'm the non-engineer, I worked at a company of all programmers. I'd just be walking around, you know, eating cashews and just like, "Hey, hey guys, how's it coming? When do you think it's gonna 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."

Sam Parr

They're like, "Great! 10 minutes, we'll be done."

Shaan Puri

And I was like, "Wait, 90% done? So you're halfway done?" It's like, "Yeah, the last 10% always takes at least double the time that you've already spent." I was like, "Alright."

Sam Parr

Cool, that's how math works.

Shaan Puri

I do. You remember coffee? I'll go get some.

Sam Parr

Universal income, or universal wages, was a topic of discussion about 10 years ago.

Shaan Puri

Ubi

Sam Parr

Ubi, we're going to give everyone in America a bunch of money. I'm a capitalistic guy, and I was like, "What? That's the worst!" Then I learned two things. 1. Do you know in Alaska? I've had friends move to Alaska. You know what they do? They've been doing that for decades. They give you, right, $5,000.

Shaan Puri

The 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.

Sam Parr

I don't... yeah, maybe. I don't know where it's from. I believe, if I'm not mistaken, I think sometimes it's a tax credit where you just pay less in taxes. Or if you don't owe any tax money, you literally get a check of like $4,810 or $5,510, something like that. The second thing that I learned was I started researching UBI. I was like, "Wait, why is Sam Altman advocating for UBI? Why are all these really smart robot makers advocating for it?" And I'm like, "Shit, they know."

Shaan Puri

When my wife comes home and asks, "Why is the kitchen clean? What did you do?" I respond, "Yeah, why are you cleaning up this mess? You did something else." That's what he's doing by starting UBI (Universal Basic Income).

Sam Parr

Which he has. 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 it because I'm going to get the numbers wrong, but it was like a fairly small cell.

Shaan Puri

Now, I think they did it for a number of years, and that was the experiment. Then they stopped. We should actually look up what happened. I remember reading something that was not entirely positive. It wasn't like, "Oh my god, this is great! This is the program we need to roll out nationwide." It was more like, "Well, no, that's not what the takeaway was."

Sam Parr

But it's still an interesting concept to me that I'm open to learning more about. When I learn more about these robots, I actually do think I'm just old enough where I believe this isn't going to impact me. However, for most Americans who are young now, it's going to have a massive impact on their future.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, yeah. And so that second concern of, "Oh wait, 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. 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. Every two weeks, it's like, "Oh, video editor's out of a job." Oh, "Photoshop is a 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 gonna happen in version 12 of this product?" Like, this version 12 is just gonna do the job for doctors, for, you know, for everybody, for all these designers, for video editors, for all these things. So it's kind of a paralyzing thought. It reminds me of an interview with Elon Musk. They were 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." 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 gonna happen either way. It is inevitable, my mind told me that." He goes, "And then I just had to decide: do I wanna see the AI apocalypse in my lifetime, or do I wanna 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 gonna say something else. I thought he was gonna say, "You know, I can use this for good." Instead, he's like, "I'd just rather see it in my lifetime than not see it." He's like, "And then I felt good. I just operated. I just continued on." That's kind of how I feel when I see AI 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, alright, carry on then. I know... what am I gonna do about this? Am I really gonna go stop the progress of technology? No. Am I gonna anticipate this now and change everything that I'm doing now wholesale? Doesn't really make sense. Let me just make hay while it's possible and see what I...

Sam Parr

I think that when it comes to AI and these robots, it's sort of like a squirrel preparing for winter. Between now and the next ten years, the name of the game is just to pile away as much as you can to get above a certain threshold, so you can make it through this winter that is never going to end. So, it's like between now and whenever this moment happens—whether it's going to be 5 years or 20 years—the name of the game is just to hurry up and board up your home for the storm to come. That way, you're safe and independent, and you're alright. But once that threshold or that time comes, a lot of people, I think, are actually going to be screwed. I'm not going to predict what's going to happen because I have no idea, but I just think that between now and then, the name of the game is to make as much money and set up your life in such a way that you can pile away all these nuts. You're as good as you can be for the winter. That's basically how I've been living.

Shaan Puri

I don't know what the right mindset is. I think that's, for right or wrong, also my mindset. It's just like, "Do it."

Sam Parr

While it's hot.

Shaan Puri

Get it while it's hot. Do good while the game's good, right? But I also am not blind to this stuff. In fact, the name of my original holding company was "Inevitable Outcomes." I thought, "Why don't I just figure out what is inevitably going to happen and then go invest in that?" That's just a better approach to work backwards from. If you realize that something is inevitable, that's way different than speculating, like, "Well, maybe this could be the case." Once you know something is inevitably going to happen, you just have to figure out which company is going to win. You've essentially reduced the problem set down to 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 are going to be the big winners in the next cycle. You have the knowledge work, like LLMs and ChatGPT-type stuff, but I think you're also going to see these specific robots. I believe both of those will be really, really successful. What you're not going to see is the human robot. I think it has to be further out than this. That's just my opinion. You know, there's also other versions of this. We talked about the Sweetgreen one. The founder of Chipotle has a new restaurant concept that's all robotic-first.

Sam Parr

What is it?

Shaan Puri

And by the way, one other insight: the Sweetgreen guy said, "The key is not to retrofit the restaurant." He goes on to explain that what everybody tries to do is take their existing restaurant and then install a robotic arm to fit their current layout because it's cheaper than rebuilding a restaurant. His quote was, "Everybody's trying to retrofit. I'm different. I'm willing to blow the whole thing up." He was basically saying that they thought through it from first principles. If this was a restaurant that was not going to have humans working on the line and was going to have robots, how would you design every part of this restaurant? Then, they built those designs. So, they did two this year; they were up and running, and now they're doing like ten more to scale this up.

Sam Parr

What's it called and what do they serve? So, is it called Kernel?

Shaan Puri

So now, what's his name?

Sam Parr

Steve Ells

Shaan Puri

Steve Ells, the guy who created Chipotle, has a new venture called Kernel. Kernel is basically a vegan bowl concept. You can see videos of it where it's dispensing ingredients into a bowl. Then, there's an arm that shakes the bowl just to mix it for you. It's pretty hilarious.

Sam Parr

The crossover of vegans and apocalyptic AI... like AI people. I don't think that Venn diagram is going to cross over nicely. You know what I mean? Like, "Hey, do you want to go to this restaurant that has no humans working ever because... forget people?" Yeah, do they sell hummus? You know what I mean? Like, that conversation is not going to happen.

Shaan Puri

**Plant-based, machine-operated, baby!** Yeah, who's got that tattoo?

Sam Parr

Nobody... that's not a huge crossover, but it looks cool. So, he has 2 or 3 of these locations.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so I don't think this one's as figured out. It doesn't seem like it's as promising, but there's a bunch of people doing this. Just to mention, SoftBank had poured like $100 million into a pizza bot that I've talked about a lot. Pizza is the big prize here. It's a much simpler dish; it's a single item and the most popular kind of fast casual food. If you can get Domino's as a customer, you're going to get to go into whatever, like, you know, 5,000 Domino's locations. 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 consistently—it doesn't matter if that thing costs like $500,000. You'll be able to sell into all the Domino's, all of the Pizza Huts, all of the chain pizza shops in order to do this. So, I think that the pizza bot is the big opportunity here.

Sam Parr

I like to think of myself as an independent thinker. I prefer 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 Adcox's warehouse or factory, whatever you call it, he showed me some fascinating things. He said, "Check this out! We're learning how the Achilles tendon in a human works." They had just gotten their humanoid to move its foot in a dorsal flexion way. He also showed me a human knee that they were studying. Our guy over here is making the knee so it can move. I saw this stuff and I thought, "Dad, can I come? Should I drop everything and just join you?" It felt like an ad talk.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, sounds great.

Sam Parr

It felt like I was in a cult, like I was meeting Charlie Manson. I was like, "Yes, sir! Who would you like me to kill?" I was just so into this. I remember going to my wife and saying, "You should quit your job." I told Sarah, "I don't think I'm smart enough, but will you quit your job to come work here?" I was just so invested in it. The cool thing about this topic is that it's happening this second, right now. This isn't far away enough to say "one day in the future." It's happening now, and over the next couple of months and years, we're going to see it in play. I think that's why this topic is really fascinating.

Shaan Puri

By the way, this is also the magic of Silicon Valley. One of the reasons to be in the Bay Area is because his factory is in the Bay Area, right?

Sam Parr

Yeah, it's in South San Francisco. It's just north of Palo Alto.

Shaan Puri

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 see what they're working on and how they're approaching it. Then, you will walk out feeling 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. What I'm doing is nothing." For most people, that's a pretty disempowering feeling. But for me, I wanted to be in situations like that. I wanted to be around people who could basically blow the ceiling off of what I thought was possible, what I thought was cool, and what I thought was interesting. I wanted them to say, "No, no, no. You thought that was interesting? This is interesting." 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 Sunnyvale or Mountain View, somewhere doing something called the "AI House" or some shit like that. During the hackathon, this guy walks in with this cool-looking jacket and disheveled hair, like he's been in a cryogenic freezing tube.

Sam Parr

For the

Shaan Puri

Last 10 years, and it's Sergey Brin, the founder of Google, just showing up at the hackathon. He gave an impromptu talk. Did you see this?

Sam Parr

No, what did he say?

Shaan Puri

Well, he goes up there and he just gets really into the details about Google's Gemini thing. He talks about bugs that they're fixing and stuff like that. It's not 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." 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 one who asked the question in the clip, and his shirt looks like someone's body with flesh... yeah, with boobs. He asks a serious question, like, "What is it about the... because, you know, Gemini got in trouble for being too woke or whatever. The thing wouldn't generate images of white people. How come your, you know, the LLM is not generating images? What's your view on the policy of that?" And nobody even calls it out! Nobody, like, Sergey Brin doesn't say anything and be like, "Dude, can we get a different question? Not from the guy with the boob shirt."

Sam Parr

I'm looking at him now. It's just like a... the guy looks like me, just like a normal-looking dude. But he's got a flesh cover. But it's... it's tits. He's got boobs on his shirt.

Shaan Puri

And nobody references it. Nobody acknowledges it. It's just like, "Yeah, carry on. What? Live and let live?" Maybe that's the San Francisco way. It's a very strange place, but it's strange in a way where kind of amazing things happen. Like the founder of Google just showing up at your hackathon and answering some questions. This is pretty wild.

Sam Parr

I experienced this all the time in San Francisco when I lived there. There were so many times where, like, I've told many stories about this. I would go to someone's office and there would be huge screens with porn playing. It's like, well, they're just working on this website, and they make porn. So, we just normalize it. There have been other times where I've come into the office and there are people sleeping under desks and stuff like that. Just weird things that we would make fun of, or things from that TV show *Silicon Valley*, where they have "Nipler." I've experienced this in real life, and while it's fun to make fun of, honestly, it's awesome. It is so awesome to be around these freaks. Remember when hacker houses were just getting going? I would go to these houses and see that they had shared kitchens. Half the time, it was just powders. It's like, well, these guys just live off these powders. That's all they eat, and it's really...

Shaan Puri

How Fallout started.

Sam Parr

You know, that's how Fallout started.

Shaan Puri

Those guys are just living in a house together. They’re supposed to be working on other stuff, and then one of the guys was just eating. He’s like, “I’m just gonna create like baby formula for adults, basically.” And that became Soylent.

Sam Parr

And that same guy, when... I forget what type of chip it is, but when it came out, you know, like these credit cards that we use now where you touch your credit card on a machine instead of inserting it. He inserted all of that into a small chip and surgically put it into his hand. So he could just touch his hand. Being around freaks like that is fun. It's fun to make fun of them because it is silly, but it is awesome. I loved being around that. I would see this stuff all the time and I was just like, "I'm so happy you freaks exist. This is the coolest thing I've seen." I felt like that all the time. Did you ever experience that when you'd go to these hacker houses? They would be disgusting, these guys.

Shaan Puri

Just... it will... it's just like triple bunk.

Sam Parr

Beds? Yeah, they're filthy.

Shaan Puri

But you know, like, goddamn it, I can't even look down on this because one out of the 18 of you guys is about to become a billionaire in the next 5 years. I just don't know which one. Like, yeah, you know, whose neck beard is the longest? It's like, you know, who showered the least in this room? I gotta guess. I guess I should write you a check. I think that's the optimal strategy here. I had a buddy who worked at my company that would just do these things, these experiments. His name was Quinn, and Quinn had this crazy, like, Sideshow Bob style haircut. He was really into games, and so he was playing this little word scramble game on his iPhone. I think his girlfriend had beaten him in it. They would play together, or this girl he was flirting with would play, and she beat him. 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. I was like, it's like these stories you hear about Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan with this fierce competitiveness, but applied in the absolute nerdiest way. It results in kind of amazing things, and it's amazing energy to be around.

Sam Parr

I've been around a bunch of those people, and I love it. It always makes me feel like the first feeling I originally had was, "You're stupid. That's stupid." Then it's like, "Oh, I'm stupid. You're better than me." This is awesome! Yeah, I feel like that on a regular basis when I go around these weirdos, and I love them.

Shaan Puri

So, we gotta also talk about this lawsuit. Elon Musk sued Sam Altman, and there's probably a good analysis out there about this lawsuit, but I want to point out a couple of things. 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 at PR. I should have known this because Tesla basically spends nothing on TV commercials. Every other car company spends like $1,000,000,000 on marketing. In total, all other car companies will spend over $1,000,000,000 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. He's a master of PR, and he does this with Twitter, he does this with Tesla, and he's doing it with SpaceX. Now, seeing him do this with this lawsuit, it's the first time that I've ever seen him do this in public. But basically, he's gonna lose the legal battle, but he's gonna win the PR war, I think.

Sam Parr

Have you ever been through a lawsuit? Do you know what the discovery phase is?

Shaan Puri

No, I haven't, but I'm familiar with the idea of discovery.

Sam Parr

So basically, I don't exactly know what all the rules are, but I remember there was a time I was going to sue someone because I thought something didn't work out. I thought they'd violated a contract and I had lost money because of it. I was going to sue them.

Shaan Puri

Some guy.

Sam Parr

Didn't rack his weights? Yeah, yeah, it's all good.

Shaan Puri

Code has been broken.

Sam Parr

I can't let this stand. So, I was going to do it. I hired a lawyer, and they said, "Alright, but you're probably going to win this thing. You're not going to win that much money." I replied, "But it's the principle of the thing, whatever." They said, "Okay, cool. But do you know what discovery is?" I was like, "No, tell me more." They explained, "We're going to get access to your email, your phone records, and your text messages. They're going to be able to see all of it. In many cases—and this is where I don't entirely understand how it works—those records are completely public." So, if I file a lawsuit, that part is public record. Oftentimes, the things they discover will also be in public record. I started thinking about it. Did I just text my wife the other day to let her know that I farted, but a little something came out? I think I did text that, and I don't want that in public. That's like a 3 out of 10 on the PC meter. What's the 9 out of 10? Would I be okay with them seeing that? That's when it finally hit me. All those years of people telling me not to write offensive or crazy stuff in text messages or emails—that's why! 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. 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.

Shaan Puri

Well, yeah, I don't know. We should know more about this. I don't know how discovery works, like what parts get... because not everything goes public, but...

Sam Parr

Not everything, no.

Shaan Puri

What's the line, and how does that work? Because I think Elon has a lot to lose too. Nobody wants their stuff out there in public.

Sam Parr

But he does. When he texted that guy, the former CEO of Twitter, he replied with all the stuff. I'm like, "Can we talk about this?" His reply was, "What have you done this week?" I feel like in his mind, he thinks...

Shaan Puri

Yes, he wants to do that.

Sam Parr

But in his mind, he's like, "I'm gonna say stuff that I want the world to see." You know what I mean? It's like all part of the game, but it...

Shaan Puri

In this lawsuit, there's actually some stuff that's in there that I found pretty interesting. Can I just tell you what I thought was interesting? So, it starts off basically with the whole lawsuit. The document states that humans have transitioned from a labor economy to a knowledge-based economy, and now knowledge is basically getting wrecked by AI. First, AI got so good it could beat the best human chess players. Then it could find the best routes between two points, like the best streets to take for the fastest route. After that, it could beat more complicated games like poker and Go. What it talks about is that Elon Musk saw this happening. He was, I think, on the board of or an adviser to a company called DeepMind. He thought, "Oh, DeepMind's really interesting." He meets the founder of DeepMind, this guy Dennis [I don't know how to pronounce his last name], and he asks him about his views on AI safety. Elon had been worried about AI safety for a long time. He walks away thinking, "I don't think this guy is 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. He's like, "Well, Google has the most data because they have emails, they have search, they have YouTube." So he thinks, "Google has the most data, DeepMind has a monopoly on AI talent, and they have the best AI talent." The result will be that AGI, when it eventually gets done—artificial general intelligence—will be in the hands of the biggest monopoly, you know, a private company out there. He's like, "Okay, that's a little bit worrisome." He goes and hangs out with Larry Page, the founder of Google, and he's telling him, "Larry, I'm worried about AI. What are you guys doing about AI safety?" Basically, the way Elon describes it, Larry kind of pats him on the head and says, "Oh, don't worry about that. We're not worried about that." Elon responds, "Well, you know, AI could take over and basically eradicate the human race if it goes wrong." Larry replies, "Well, that'll just be evolution." Elon is taken aback and says, "Don't be such a speciesist." Larry responds, "Speciesist? You're favoring the human species."

Sam Parr

Oh my god.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I'm pro-human. He gets really pissed about this and he says that this is when he stopped talking to the CEO of Google. So, 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 as the hero. So, here he goes. Now, what he does is he teams up with Sam Altman. Sam Altman, who's the CEO of OpenAI, in 2015 wrote the following: > "The development of super machine intelligence, at the time that's what he's calling 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."

Sam Parr

What a great opening sentence! Yeah, jeez. Alright, did you say I'm...?

Shaan Puri

So, Sam is worried about this. Elon is worried about this. They get together because, oh, then there's the trigger: Google is buying DeepMind. I didn't know this, but in the lawsuit, it shows that Elon then went to the PayPal co-founder, this guy Luke Nosek, and tried to quickly, like, emergency raise $500,000,000 to buy DeepMind instead of Google, just to keep it out of the hands of Google. He fails; he couldn't pull the deal together. In the last minutes, DeepMind gets bought by Google, and now Elon is really worried. So, Sam Altman then goes to Elon and says, "Hey, why don't we create a nonprofit AI lab to catch up with Google?" Actually, the origin of this was to do it inside Y Combinator, where Sam was currently the president. I don't know if you knew that the origin of OpenAI was actually supposed to be inside YC. He called it, "What if we created the Manhattan Project for AI?" He said, "What if YC did a call to arms and was like, 'Hey, we need to develop this technology to basically create the anti-Google?' 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," so they can work on this as a nonprofit. That was the original idea.

Sam Parr

I think he said that no person will have control over this thing that we're making. Instead, they were going to get equity in Y Combinator. That's how they'll...

Shaan Puri

He's going to get a nonprofit. How do we pay these top AI researchers? Because Google's going to pay them a ton. Well, we'll give them equity in Y Combinator (YC). YC is our huge cash cow, and so that'll solve that problem. He's like, "We'll have a board of directors: me, you, Elon, and then we'll pick three others." He says, "If it's not obvious what the right thing to do is, then the five of us will decide." That's the governance idea. Okay, so that was the original idea. It evolves a little bit by the...

Sam Parr

Way, Elon's reply to that email was great. Sam wrote a fairly casual email. I mean, he used the verbiage, like you said, those sentences that are like a big deal. But it was like a casual, almost informal email with like five points. Elon's reply was simply, "Agree on all." That was it.

Shaan Puri

Right, I have moved straight to the end, so yes, I agree on all. 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." In the next five years, Elon contributes $44,000,000 to this nonprofit, and they develop some pretty interesting tech. So, ChatGPT, now GPT-4, could do it. It's in the 90th percentile at the lawyer's bar exam. It's in the 99th percentile for the GRE 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. So, he's trying to argue in the lawsuit 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. However, there is no actual founding agreement. What he's calling the founding agreement is like what we call a **gentleman's agreement**. It's basically a handful of conversations, emails, and then just like the initial founding articles of incorporation of the company. He calls all of that together the founding agreement, and he says they breached that, but it's not actually an agreement.

Sam Parr

I'm a moron and I don't know anything about legal stuff, but I think that actually counts as... I mean, there's been precedent where that matters.

Shaan Puri

So, in this case, he has to establish that there is a founding agreement and that it's been breached. If you go look at the founding agreement, like those emails, one time they're talking about, "We could give equity in NYC." That's just brainstorming; that's not like the agreement. Then later, they do have a little bit more formal discussion of, "Okay, it's going to be a nonprofit; it's going to be whatever." But in the articles of incorporation, it specifically says, "We will open source this whenever we deem appropriate."

Sam Parr

Yeah, it's vague stuff.

Shaan Puri

It's vague, right? It's like, "We will develop this for the benefit of humanity."

Sam Parr

We're definitely doing this... maybe.

Shaan Puri

Someday, exactly when we want. They basically left themselves with complete latitude to do whatever the hell they want, and that's what they did. Now, what I think is interesting is that Elon says a couple of other things. One, he says GPT-4 is already so good at those test scores. He goes, "And now they're developing this thing called Q*Star." Have you heard about Q*Star?

Sam Parr

No, what is it?

Shaan Puri

So, QStar is reportedly like the new... what? What? What? Not reportedly, but rumored to be the thing that OpenAI is working on that is like the next level after GPT-4. Instead of GPT-5, they're using some method called QStar, which they think is like a leap in intelligence. This is really exciting because even the improvements from GPT-3 to GPT-4 and from GPT-2 to GPT-3 were substantial, but not like a huge leap. Whereas QStar reportedly represents a huge leap. There are rumors that Sam Altman came out and said, "You know, I was in a meeting... we did a demo or we had an internal meeting the other day, and I saw something that blew my mind." Basically, he saw something that was awe-inspiring, and he was like, "What? What is it?" He hasn't shared any details. This is also right when that big coup happened, and they fired Sam Altman.

Sam Parr

I saw that.

Shaan Puri

The one of the rumored reasons was... and this could be total bullshit. We don't know. One of the rumored reasons was that the board saw how powerful Q Star is, and they were worried Sam is way too fast, way too loosey-goosey, and way too aggressive. Now this weapon is getting too powerful. That's kind of the idea there. So anyway, Elon talks about that in the lawsuit that they're developing Q Star and whatever. So it's kind of like confirmation that this thing exists. Although the legal language he uses in all this, he goes at the start of every sentence, every paragraph, it says "using knowledge and belief." It's basically like saying, "We don't have evidence, but I know some things and I believe this to be true." Then it says all of the claims. So who knows? It's kind of like Elon's claims. A couple of other big pieces of this... So I want to read you some Elon emails that did get surfaced in this. One of the key things that happened early on was they had this dinner. At the dinner, it's Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon, and then 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...

Shaan Puri

Was Elon [Musk] recruiting Ilya [Sutskever] 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." Recruiting him was like a herculean effort. Basically, getting him to leave Google, and Google was offering him like a blank check.

Sam Parr

This is a fucking movie.

Shaan Puri

And exactly, this will be a movie for sure. So then Google starts offering all of their talent crazy lavish offers. They just up the ante like crazy. They're like, "We're gonna price anyone out of this market."

Sam Parr

How much do you know?

Shaan Puri

A million... like, I don't know, like $1,000,000 per employee minimum for some people. $10 to $15 million a pay package annually. So it was like, okay, well, Sam and Greg email Elon saying, "Hey, it's getting really hard to recruit. We have to think of a strategy here. Google is doing this." Elon replies, "We need to do what it takes to get top talent. Let's go higher. If 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're obviously making major progress, and they should, given the talent level over there." So he basically gives them the green light, like, "I'll keep funding more. Go get the best talent." In 2016, he gives them $15 million. In 2017, he gives them $20 million. In that five-year period, he gives them $44 million in total. Now, the problem is Elon, the biggest backer and the original backer, says he doesn't own anything in OpenAI, the for-profit company. This is the strongest part of his case. Here's what he says: "How is it that you can create a nonprofit company that is supposed to be nonprofit and open source, raise $1,000,000 from people, take $50 million from me, hire the best people in the world, and write down that this is your charter, and then end up a closed-source, maximum for-profit company owned by the most valuable company in the world, Microsoft, which owns 49% of them? How is that possible?" He's like, "Two things. If it is possible to create a nonprofit, hire people, and basically fund all of the research in a tax-deductible way, where for every dollar you're putting in, you get 50 cents 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." I love this argument from Elon. I think this is a tremendous argument, and there's no answer to that question yet. Either this is illegal, or every single company in the world is going to do this. Why would you not?

Sam Parr

We, you and I, are not... I wouldn't say we are fans of Elon, Elon's work, but we're lukewarm on him as a human being. We are only hearing one side of this story. However, in the last 10 minutes, only knowing what I know just from those 10 minutes, he's right.

Shaan Puri

So then, he gives this analogy again: the master of PR. He goes, "It's like if I donated to a nonprofit charity that said we're gonna save the Amazon rainforest, and then that charity took all our money and 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. He says it is a de facto subsidiary of Microsoft. He includes this quote, and I think this quote 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’s stock price started to tank? Because they were like, 'Oh shit, you've given $10,000,000,000 or whatever to OpenAI, and they're about to collapse. This is bad for Microsoft, and they're gonna go create a new company that you don't own. That's bad.'" Then he came out and said this publicly: "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."

Sam Parr

The CEO of Microsoft said that.

Shaan Puri

Wow, yes, exactly. And so that also weakens the case that OpenAI is this 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!

Sam Parr

**Dude, this is riveting.**

Shaan Puri

That's me. When 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.

Sam Parr

The, by the way, the way they call this the Manhattan Project... that is the best! That is so good! All of this is just epic. Can you imagine these nerdy AI engineers who were probably bullied and were dorks throughout all the years? Now they're like, "Oh, me? You want me?" No, boys, come on, let's be civil about this! They're just getting fought over, and we're talking about $15 or $20 million a year packages. That's insane! Everything about the story is insane.

Shaan Puri

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 create the movie of this. This is going to be like "The Social Network" all over again.

Sam Parr

An epic photo collage or something like that would also suffice. Just some neat photos with captions that tell a story. I'm into that. I want to leave it with this: 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 gonna be as good or as bad as you think it's going to be." Him saying that in a calm, like fatherly voice to me has been the one thing that I've been thinking about. Sam Altman, I think he's a great guy, and I love Sam. I don't know him, but just as a fan of his, I think that all these guys in this game are also brilliant marketers, 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. I have to remind myself constantly that it could be good, it could be bad; it's probably gonna be right in the middle, though, of what the reality is. These guys are just excellent at telling their story. Do you agree?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, and we should say, you know, Elon is competitive. He is creating a direct competitor to OpenAI, right? Like, Grok. He has XAI, which is his AI company—it's his AI competitor to OpenAI. He also has Grok, which is the competitor to ChatGPT; that's the product name. So, he obviously has interests in this. I think the one thing that's clear out of this is it's definitely mission-driven. In the same way that I used to think, when it was like, "Oh, Jeff Bezos is doing a rocket company," I thought, "Is this just like a giant dick-measuring contest between billionaires? Like, just the last level of the game is you say, 'I win Earth. Okay, let me go win Mars now,' right?" That's kind of what it seemed like. "Oh, I'm going to build a bigger rocket than you." But then you read that even 25 years ago, Bezos was really obsessed with the idea of space travel. He has been a giant fanatic about it and has been trying to donate to it and advance the cause. Now, like, even with these companies, he's in all the engineering meetings and planning meetings every week. It's like, "Oh, okay, this wasn't what I thought it was," in the same way.

Sam Parr

By the way, it could still be that, and that's okay. It could be mission-driven, ego-driven, and profit-driven, and that is okay to have all those things set.

Shaan Puri

That's a better way of putting it. Yeah, like most things, it's accelerating because of multiple causes. There are multiple things, multiple tailwinds pushing it. But I would say, like, the hater in me wanted to discredit it. However, the realist in me, when I go back and read old interviews or watch old videos from before Amazon was super successful, it becomes clear that there was actually a deep interest. So similarly here, even though I think 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 existed and would not have been successful had he not genuinely had this fear, concern, and belief about what needs to happen with AI a long time ago. So, you know, I think that comes out very true in this. There's a paper trail of evidence.

Sam Parr

What a fucking pod! I feel amped and scared, excited, and nervous. I feel all types of emotions. Great job!

Shaan Puri

It's like a great first date, right? You aren't just supposed to trigger adrenaline or the fight or flight response in people. That's what bonds you. I feel like that just happened to us.

Sam Parr

Yeah, except my version of that was like on our first date we went on a motorcycle. But now we're talking about like the world maybe ending in 20 years. Good job! This is usually the good job.

Shaan Puri

I've got a court case to tell you about. Dinner? No, we're not doing dinner.

Sam Parr

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 this would 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 great pod, and we'll end it there. That's the pod.