nine one what's the today's state of your emergency hey the tech industry got flipped upside down over the weekend i was staring at my phone the whole time i haven't been so so in by any story in like five years my wife might divorce me because i haven't looked up for my phone i've just been on twitter all weekend sam how are you doing right now with this open story it's been awesome i you the real winner through all this is twitter twitter's twitter has been great for this right twitter just thrive through all types of controversy twitter a aka the silicon valley group chat has been awesome awesome all been awesome yeah i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to all in in like a day's zone i thought there was a chance but you were just like out duck hunting and i would come on today and you'd be like what happened so you know i thought there was a small chance i'm a sam alt fan i i've loved this guy we've talked about him for years i'm a big fan of his this is and i love drama i love gossip i read tmz every day and so now i've got tmz on twitter it's awesome of course we're talking about open ai and sam alt getting fired on we're we're recording this monday he was fired like friday but there's like news happening in real time like constantly right exactly like just as of an hour ago there's news so i we don't know exactly where this is gone all land we're gonna try to get this out soon as soon as we can we we had a whole other episode plans we canceled it we just said let's do let's do this right now what's our reaction what is our reaction to the open ai stuff that's going on alright sam where do you wanna start i think we should take this character by character go through all the players that were involved and i think we should give them kind of a a grain and they can get an you know if they get an a or an a plus that means they came out a big winner here you can get a a c you can get an f i think we should grade all the players of how this has turned out for them in the you know forty eight hours so far that this happened but do you wanna first give a little timeline summary recap yeah so i think you should it because you've been paying attention to it more closely but it all started friday at like what three o'clock exactly friday afternoon there's i get a text message from ben levy he just says wow sam alt what the fuck holy shit what and i but he doesn't say the the news yet and then worse what and then he's like sam alt out but he like misspelled out then he like does the stars not out out of what where's is the out of i it was unfathomable of that sam obi would get fired right like in the same way that you know i don't expect to wake up and see that elon musk has been fired from tesla you don't think you don't wake up and think that sam alt is gonna get fired from open ai which is the hottest private company probably the most important startup in the world that has gone from zero to ninety billion evaluation in just a couple of years here yeah it was shocking it started because open ai i don't even know our guy put this in military time so what's this two forty eight at two forty eight open ai i announced a leadership transition they said that sam alt is departing a ceo because he was not consistently candid in his con communications with the board and their cto a lady named mir she was become the intermittent ceo a little over an hour later sam alt said i love my time at open i was transformative for me personally and that he's excited for what's next well let's pause there because the first phase here is wild speculation so speculation is oh my god shock and speculation so i can't believe this happen like a neighbor fools joke it must have been something bad dude you know he must be you know this was a fraud did they unleash ag i was her a huge privacy like leak that is causing him to have to step down because there's was a security issue that he he overlooked is this there's like this accusation from his sister about sexual assault when they were kids is it because of that and everybody assumes it's gotta be the worst until one hour later or when is it a one hour later yeah i think a couple hours later greg who was the the chairman and was essentially his c cofounder founder of open ai the the lead technical guy at the time are the early days sends this message to the team hi everyone super proud of what we built starting in my apartment eight years ago we've been through tough times and great times together accomplishing so much doing what should have been impossible based on today's news comma i quit wishing you all the lowercase it the lowercase case and and and so then now we're we enter phase two phase two is wait greg's on the board wait greg is a stand up god if it was something really bad greg would not have just quit with him there must this must not be as bad is there some kind of power play jealousy a coup that's happening here is sam being wrong and instantly i see the court of public opinion shift and the port of public convenience says look if sam something really f up greg would not have just followed about the door and quit unless greg was in on it so still a possibility but more likely it seems like greg doesn't stand for this reasoning so maybe we don't stand for this reasoning and all of a sudden you see the sam army come forward people who are started from yc when he was the president of yc saying look i don't know what happened here but sam is like he went to bat for me so many stories came out that were all the same variety i know if you saw these they were all the same variety it was a start saying we had a time when we were screwed i emailed sam to be like hey here's what's going on blah blah blah sam quickly replied with just something like hey make sure you know you're communicating or like you know just do your best only what's your control but behind the scenes he went to war for us we found out later that he called all of our investors threatened to dang them over the balcony if they if they screwed us and he saved our ass and didn't even mention it that he was doing that just in the background he went through and like saved us and we found out later that this was true so i don't know what what happened here but you know i ride with with sam well an equally big deal it's one time i had a customer service question and i dm him and he replied and he solved it for me so all a lot of it was he replied fast he replied he didn't have to he vouch for us when he didn't have to man he he did by the way or that was without a joke he did reply to me like i had like a air and i couldn't figure something the i was like was gonna damn say and he replied with like the the the he he solved my problem but yeah the guy seems like a great guy and his brother comes out and says to all the people that are gl hating today please know you're betting against the wrong guy okay so that kind of fore shadows act two act two is the weekend so friday you get the crazy news dump now the weekend you have news that people start even inside the company start to stand with sam because they say if there was something bad tell us what it is you don't have to say it publicly saying it internally what does it mean he wasn't candidly consistent or consistently candid with the board about what did he lie what did he lie about how bad was it you're taking our leader out our two leaders out now and wait who is the board oh the board is like this combination of of of of people who have no they didn't build this they don't even own equity in this but they're deciding our future because the board is basically one legit technologist this guy adam dean angela who who was the c cofounder cto of of facebook back of the day and then he c founded quo after that so you have adam legitimate character in silicon valley and then you have a bunch of other people that nobody's ever heard of one of them is like that actor wife she's like you know an academic somewhere and never had a job justin in gordon love it yeah exactly yeah you know the the guy from inception they know great the guy from inception not lee leonardo to cap that's not even him he's not the one of the board and not even have exactly so you got like you know you got her you got a couple of the characters here but nobody that is again no equity no skin in the game and no track record building or operating you know complex companies so that seems a bit weird they're getting no data and rumors come out sam gonna have a new company by monday sam and greg are gonna create an open ai competitor by monday which is just like a pretty bad ass threat to throw down and so once the team starts to say they start to tweet out these emoji hearts saying i basically i stand with with sam i don't know all the details but if you don't come out with any details explaining why you did this i'm i'm gonna probably leave with sam and so the board starts scrambling and they start trying to renegotiate with sam to maybe bring him back and his conditions are like cool i'll come back y'all all gotta resign click and clear my name you gotta bring back greg and we're gonna put put a new board together that's like the board of my choosing the board doesn't wanna do all that and so they're kind of stalling they're going back and forth he goes back to the office with a guest pass on his badge and he says this is the last time i'll ever enter this office with a guest pass and then at the last minute we hear the news the the news come it looks like sam's coming back and then sunday night it hits there's a new ceo in town emmett sheer my former boss the former ceo of twitch is now suddenly these the the guy for open sam is out he's in shock that that was like you know what i thought was the end and before i went to sleep thinking it okay we're gonna record the spot i thought that was the end and it releases an announcement on twitter saying basically like hey hey i'm here here's my thirty day plan i wake up this morning and there's more news six hundred of the seven hundred employees of open ai have signed a petition saying if you don't bring sam and greg back and all resigned we're all leaving six hundred up seven hundred it was actually five hundred as of three am and then it got to six fifty as of as of right before recording this that's basically a hundred people woke up and also signed the pledge including by the way the guy who was supposedly behind the entire coup il the bain technologist technologists the scientist who was the on the board who who was the guy who sent sam a google meet link and i was like hey could you join this right quick it sounds like sure let me just pop let me just give my microphone and he pops on and then gets fire the whole board is sitting there and they executed the disaster il comes out and signs the pledge and says i'm sorry for what i did what it even tweets out and he goes like i wanna get the band back together and make it right i'm sorry yeah i i regret what i did and you know we'll try to write the wrong and then on top of that before before that that that they happen satya ad the ceo of microsoft comes out and says hey we still support open ai sure look forward to beating the new guy am it which is just a really funny way of putting it because apparently they were not consulted and only told one minute before the firing happened that a one minute before the press release went out that sam fired so they were blindsided and even though they put they've agreed to confront ten billion dollars into this company and own forty nine percent of it and then he says oh and good news sam and greg now worked for microsoft and this is just like the ultimate check mate move because sam i don't if you know this but microsoft not only do they own forty nine percent not only do they provide all of the funding which open have requires to fuck to to exist if they could pull that at any minute now because a lot of that funding is in compute credits so basically server credits but not only that they also have the license to to all the technology they they have the model the weights the they have everything that they need to basically hand sam and greg the new the like all of the code and be like you don't have to start from scratch here you go and so in the end they got everything they got everything they wanted it they got the team the technology the money they they got everything the most interesting part of all this though is the characters because this is everyone keeps saying this is succession in real life and it is it's the it's one of the greatest things that happen to in silicon valley in the last you know fifteen year it's a it's a beautiful storyline we thought sam bank was a was a was a gift from the gods in terms of podcasting this is actually i think more interesting it's not played out yet so the story is still gonna like keep going but let's talk about the characters let's talk what's about sam alt first we talked about him well we've talked about him a ton but this guy basically his background is he's from saint louis my hometown give a shout at saint louis he then he moved to silicon valley to join y comb at the age of like nineteen or twenty he started a company that had like mild success i think it raised a fair amount of money and sold for fifty million dollars of which he walked away with five million dollars at the age of like twenty one and using that five million dollars he part that into hundreds of millions by investing in things like airbnb dropbox things like that because he worked at y comb eventually becomes president of y comb at the age of twenty seven two who quotes from from paul about t remember program is somebody who invested in dropbox invested in the airbnb b invested you know he has seen the founders he knows everybody in silicon valley he's met mark zuckerberg he's met all these guys and so for him to be most impressed by sam alt means something and he says sam alt has it you could parachute him into an island full of cannibal and come back five years later and he'd be the king that's the first one and then he goes the second one he goes i met sam alt many years ago when he was nine years old he was a stanford dropout which by the way harvard stanford dropout is the number one resume stan that that is the number one like item if you go to harvard to stanford and you don't drop out you have intentionally chosen to not have the number one credential you could have which is harvard dropout or stanford dropout so he says with a meeting within three mint minutes of meeting him i remember thinking so this is what bill gates must have been like when he was nineteen in three minutes i don't know what it all the did it three minutes but i would love i would love to know i am fascinated by people who are special they're the kind of the the freaks i love it in sports but you could see it you could see lebron james at age seventeen was like a freak of nature yeah he had like the equivalent of a forty two inch verse you know whatever he did it was like yeah it was like an eighth grader dunking there's another story that's kind of remarkable i thought this is kind tells you about this guy's character so sam mom gay he came out when he was like fifteen or sixteen i think you said something anyway he's from your home hometown saying louis there's some story which is that he came out and not only did he just come out as a teenager which alone takes some bravery he then like hosted like a pep rally or something like that he went to john burrows so in saint louis where i'm from every most all high schools are either catholic or some type of christian whatever and he came out being gay but he like went to up or he i think he created like a club some type of like gay club in that the school they're like no we're not we're not about this and so i think he led like a walk out like a school walk out that takes a lot of like a little leader he's very courageous guy and then but for like the last fifteen years pre open ai he was even though he was president of y comb he was still a little bit behind the scenes and even though that he was running this huge incubator and he's a powerful guy it still felt like why would paul graham say this about this kid who still has yet it still has unfulfilled potential a couple years ago he starts working an open ai and then all of a sudden we're like oh alright the guy was plotting and it's it it's he's played the long game now we understand why everyone like looks up to this guy and open eye open ai has basically taken over the tech industry and be went from zero to you know one of the biggest companies in the world and what five years or something like that yeah exactly so he leaves the most prestigious job in silicon valley which is you know president of of yc he's dean harvard dean r harvard he quits suddenly because the nonprofit research organization he c founded you know he felt like that was the right opportunity you did that suddenly it was surprising i remember at the time i had the thought i think i've said this before here which is that i had the thought like if sam alt me just quit beating the president of l to go join open ai how can i justify coming in to work tomorrow like why would i not also go to open ai whatever open ai is i knew nothing at the time but all i do is if that one of the smartest guys in the world went and did that maybe i should go do that too and honestly that would have been the greatest career move i ever made if i had done that because you know opening eye quickly you know changed its structure from nonprofit to becoming you know like a capped for profit thing and became worth you know nearly a hundred billion dollars in a in a short period of time creating chad gp the fastest growing product of all time to get to hundred million users faster than any and let's go to his two partners because when he started it there's a bunch of weird stories that i don't that aren't entirely out in the open but it seems like there was something where elon musk funded the business or helped to fund the business at first he invested forty million dollars and he also helped to recruit and convince a few of sam's c cofounder to join it is that right that's right so basically the when people say okay great sam just he you dropped on an island of cannibal he comes out okay cool what's his skill what does he do and basically it was like on anything about strategy or ambition but there's what paul said he said if there's if there's ever a question on strategy or ambition i default to what would sam do and you know this program was like twenty years old older than sam i'm saying that so that's kind of impressive so what did he do he basically has a conversation with elon musk and the two of them shared the same belief which was that artificial intelligence was gonna be a big deal that we would be able to one day realize ag which is artificial general intelligence think about it as you know super intelligence when when you know ai is generally smarter than than humans and kind of everything that we you know most of the things that we try to do so the they both said that's also kinda scary because we don't know what's gonna happen on the other side of ag gi so we should fund research in a nonprofit that will study you know fund the research around this so that we could safely create ag instead of having that kills us all like the movies so what sam did was he hosts his dinner in palo alto and you know he gets elon musk there and he gets a few other smart key people one of them was this guy greg who was at the time the cto of stripe which was before open was the most impactful big startup up in the world so he gets the cto of stripe he gets this guy il who's like the lead research scientist in ai at at google essentially he's the kinda like one of the founding fathers of of of ai and deep learning and so they get a bunch of these people around the table and they basically have reid hoffman is there and they basically like we need to do this elon basically just agrees to fund forty million dollars into the nonprofit so elon puts his money where his mouth is sam you know helps recruit put the whole deal together puts brings the people together on the way home sam like hey greg let me give you a ride back to san francisco so they drive back to san francisco and what greg said and what sam says is the first thirty minutes it's an hour long drive from palo alto to san francisco it's the first thirty minutes greg just asked me rapid fire like a hundred fifty questions then the next then at a thirty minute point he goes okay i've decided i'm gonna do this i'll quit stripe and i'll join open ai whatever this thing is that you're creating i will join it so the next thirty minutes they started making their plan like okay what are the first things we need to do which tells you something about greg to do again a crazy career move like that to you know just have independent minded and conviction and something that quickly and tells you something about sam's persuasive and ability to like put this thing together then what elon says is that he recruited il out of google which was very very hard to do and he says it's the reason that him and larry page founder of google don't talk anymore you know he used to be friends with larry he used to famously elon didn't own a house for a period of time and he would just crash at friend's houses and so he would crash at larry paige house all the time he says that they got into arguments about ai and that he was really worried about ai and larry was like tech forward and was like no it's gonna be amazing and and then he says that you know he got pissed when larry called him a spec suspicious but basically like you or you're just all about humans and the elon was like what the fuck else am i supposed to be about are you not that scares me even more i'm gonna create open ai now to like defend against google which owned deep mind than the number one player at the time and so elon basically poach elon and sam poach il out of google which took a lot of money and a lot of persuasion i believe to get him out and that he becomes when he joins open eye the research community who worship this guy basically followed and they got all the top researchers to join and that is the founding story of opening ai it's a that's amazing right i mean the that i just this is like drama movie drama shit of just that that dinner that drive home i mean this is perfect and we're gonna have to have justin timberlake stars is one of these guys and so this brings us to i think the second character that we should talk about this guy greg who i believe is the un son hero in this whole thing because sam alt is kind of like the hero he's the hero right he get he's the the ceo he gets he gets wrong he's the marty he he he had to to suffer people come out and they're all supporting salmon sharing like like a funeral for sam on twitter the other day he's was like oh i remember that once sam responded my customer service request like i was on a bike once and sam you know he he he moved over in the lane so i could go by right like he was just sharing their favorite sam memory and then nobody's really talk about greg now greg in my opinion shifted this whole fucking thing because at first it was like damn i don't know what sam did must've have been horrible blah blah blah as soon as greg came out and was like y on this i quit and they're like greg's is the number two he's on the board he was the chairman of the board i think they're like if greg doesn't think this was right i don't think it's right and so greg single handedly like shifted the perception in the narrative around this whole thing and the board didn't counteract that and so i think greg was the the real ear of this and then what i did was there's some amazing blog posts that anybody who's a real nerd about this stuff if you just really love kinda like the the lore the canon of of silicon valley you gotta go read this greg has blog posts up on his blog about about the early days of open and i think he blog the early days of open ai last week no say years ago this thing started a long time ago and he talks about like they've didn't have an office he's like i just come to my apartment and he's like here's the four of us in our apartment he's like i didn't know anything about machine learning so i did two things number one i asked il what is the number one textbook about machine learning i bought it and i studied it religiously he's like i read everything there was to know about deep learning and machine learning he goes and this is the former cto of stripe he's not like a non technical dude he's known as like this incredible one of these ten x or hundred x engineers and he says i didn't know anything about deep learning so i just dedicated myself to go read you know page one chapter one of the book and i'm gonna take notes and i'm gonna ask a ton of questions he goes two while these guys were setting up their research stuff i did everything else like oh but your back looks a little uncomfortable you need a pillow oh you guys thirsty i'll go get smoothies and he's doing literally all the like intern grunt work those first few months to get them set up a second it basically was an alternating between research would do something then research would get blocked and i would say oh what's blocking and they're like oh it's taking forever to run this training center i have to like organize this data and then greg would stay up all night and basically like do the engineering because people don't realize engineering and coding is very different than ai research and so he's he would do the coding that would make the researchers go faster he built basically all of the infrastructure so that researchers could do great work and and even with gp like there was a story like you know they ran the model and the output was kinda like like it was so so so and then greg like locked himself in a room for two weeks and he came out and suddenly gp worked before like what the hell just happened he's like out and and i did that and so he has these great blog posts and photos of those early days that i thought was kind of amazing so greg was born in eighty nine which puts him around thirty four years old now he joined stripe in two thousand ten it became cto in two thousand thirteen so he was cto of stripe when he was about twenty four twenty five years old and then he go he left stripe to c profound open ai so he was only twenty six twenty seven when he started working on open ai it's pretty amazing these guys are are freaks on while it's unreal and by the way when you give we you forgot to give him grades so sam alt he's gonna win no matter what in all of this i so i think he was gonna get like let's say b plus right he was gonna get b plus why because you got fired you got backs stabbed by your own your own people that not that great not a great thing to happen two they haven't said what you did but you did something right they want you to fire you for nothing so like you did something we don't know what it is unknown okay i can't give you an abe for that it looked like he was gonna get the job back which would have been great but then he didn't so it didn't come it didn't it didn't happen in the end so even though you got some some support from your team didn't happen until the microsoft thing happened which was literally like imagine playing a game of chess and you're like oh i think i got this guy you know i have a five piece to three advantage here his queen is out and then you look up from the board and he's holding you know a gl to your head and that's what happened to il here and then but basically it's like he's now he's at microsoft they have the license to all of the technology they have all the training data in the world because guess what ninety percent of computers are pcs have run mike or something never run you know windows he has all the funding in the world he got paid i'm sure there's you know like satya had to bring sam greg in before the stock market opened on monday just to kind of like not have this be an issue for microsoft that they got screwed here they put a bunch of money into look into a into a lame duck and so he got everything got the tech six hundred of seven hundred people follow are saying they're gonna follow him there so he got the team he got the money he got the funding and he got it all in forty eight hours and he and they were basically like yeah they're gonna lead a new subsidiary of microsoft that's gonna do open that's gonna do great research on ai it's like oh you mean open ai part two so so that now he has to walk away with an a plus right like you can't yeah you can't knock that and well and he's he's got the good guy label unless they come out with some new information that's that shows that he did something messed up which something has to come out there's only three options in my opinion of how the story for sam ends option a is it's a it's an unforgivable sin i think that that is not likely but it is possible that what he's did is just well you're done option b is he goes back to open ai become ceo i think that was more likely than not going to happen i i think but option c is he stays at microsoft and i think in a decade or five years he becomes a ceo of microsoft which is now worth five trillion dollars or something at that point yeah right now today yeah so he's he's gonna turn out okay so now this other guy il he looks like a sc here so he's he's a loser here he looks he looks like it gets an nap he gets an f there's a little bit of like with him where it's like oh you're just a brilliant scientist artist turn who was who was you were you were manipulated in here because you're just a a scientist and you don't understand human interaction so he plays so which should my one thing which is what are the possibilities of what sam did that might put sam on the wrong or il in the right so there is what you're calling the unforgivable send which i would say by the way not a great track record of anything that being unforgivable well let's say the really the bad personal stuff could be the could be one reason why in which case i would say that's a completely fair reason to remove him if they did an investigation found out there that was true that they're in the right for removing him that's def feasible but they just haven't said anything number reason number two is safety concern so il is famously like the reason he's doing this is literally is worried about ag it doesn't want the world to end and what initially people thought was sam says all the right things about safety but also sam is like you know capitalist he's a entrepreneurs he's he he's a he's a hard charging guy and he's running forward here and maybe they're saying slow down he's saying no we don't need a slow down and they're saying sam this is too risky and he's saying no no this is not risky we gotta move forward that's what it looked like the situation was and it was made crazier by the fact that i don't know if he saw this he did an interview the day before and he said something like this he said i've been lucky to be in the room four times now the last one was just a couple weeks ago where i saw something that pushed the veil of ignorance forward and the frontier of techno not technology to us and like it pushed the veil of ignorance away and the front frontier of technology to us so basically he's saying like there's been like three or four mind blowing moments you know about ai i've been lucky enough to be in the room the last one happened a couple weeks ago wait till you see this it's gonna stun people and so some people are like y did they like create the monster super intelligent like did they create ag api you know has ag been achieved internally and he like randomly posts on reddit not long ago ag has been achieved internally as like a joke i guess so some people said maybe they've stumbled into something and this guy's going too fast and it's you know like the scientists you know around the nuclear bomb saying no we gotta like destroy this thing or we gotta like slow down this is getting too crazy that would have been the other reason which would have been again def def especially given that open charter is specifically says we're not about increasing shareholder value we are about you know safely building ag to benefit all of humanity so that is their charter and if they thought this guy's moving too fast putting that at risk i would say they are completely in the right to do so if they believe that to be true the bad part is again they've come out with no evidence that that is the case they haven't explained themselves so nobody believes them that that's true the third reason so you know you have the really bad thing you have the safety argument and the third thing is essentially it's just a power play they're annoyed by him they don't feel like he listens they feel like he's getting all the credit or he wants fame and fortune and power play let's get this guy out of here and we will we get to run it own this thing and that's like a jealousy driven thing and i don't know which of those is the most true i don't know what you think but you know it seems like the you know none of those are perfect explanations i think i'll i'll say what i think maybe later about i it's number three i think i think it's number three let's talk about let's let's come back to the board but let's talk about emmett sheer because you are one of the handful of people or you know however many people who have had a relationship with him and understand and so last night at one am emmett basically said i've been the guy that's been picked he put out this really good tweet where he explained what he was doing the funniest part i thought was he's had the job down for twelve minutes and he did a wonderful job of saying the word r he goes our products are going to be this our team is going to do this we are going and it reminded me of that meme where there's a guy who he goes hey i made this and hands it to a stick figure and the stick figure goes you made this and then the first guy leaves and the stick figure looks at the thing that and he goes i made this and it's the whole point about on the internet where where people steal stuff actually think him emma it's a great guy so i'm i'm just i'm just messing around but i thought it was amazing how he's like twelve minutes later this is our company going to do this what do you think about emma in this role he he's been getting a lot of criticism because he previously shared online that he's like i actually think when has slow things down and and a bunch of people are like this is ridiculous don't slow down whatever but he seems like a really thoughtful great ceo am am i wrong so emmett you're right i worked with a bit for about two years got to sit with them you know in hundreds of meetings and see you know how he thinks and you know hang out with him have beers and just kind of talked to him he came on the podcast i talked to him for an hour there about ai stuff always send you he's really thoughtful he's extremely intelligent in a broadway so most people are not that intelligent that you meet they meet some people that are like you know they're like above average that he meet some people as you say the oven burns hotter and it's just very clear like he's just got more horsepower in his head than most people i think that's great i think you know as much as we like to say that like hard work is what matters like yeah you know what also matters like intelligence is also really real a really strong attribute attributes it's like you know like yeah you know steph curry has got great skills but like lebron is six eight two fifty right like you know size and speed matter i hate when people downplay intelligence and and i'm like guys let's just admit some people are born smarter just like some people are seven feet tall there's a reason why twenty percent of americans who are seven feet tall and below the age of thirty are in the nba you you just you're you're better you're better at that particular thing but and that height helps you with basketball intelligence helps you with running companies right like that that's the thing so emmett is extremely intelligent he's is amongst the most intelligent people i've ever met so that's the that's the first thing second thing is he's got depth and breadth so a lot of people are really really intelligent in one specific domain it seems like this guy il might be one of those where he's just extremely extremely technically intelligent but it seems like in the game of you know soft power and politics and and you know people and and all that he you know had a pretty bone headed way of doing this that didn't didn't work out to his own tweet i deeply regret what i did it was handled very poorly so you know i think he you know some people could really really smart in one technical domain but they're not don't have a breath of of intelligence i would say that emmett is wide and deep so he's technically very strong he was a great engineer they built twitch one of the you know the best live streaming products and it was him in this guy kyle kyle went on to build self driving cars and emmett ran twitch for like whatever in eighteen years or something shit like that so you know between justin tv and twitch and so he's very good technically which is important because it's a deeply technical product he you know he said to me the other thing one thing when i was talking about ai he's like he's like yeah like once you understand how transformers work and i was like well let's stop there because i have no idea how transformers report so like the rest of your sentence because you said it like yeah it's easy i mean just once you once you get our transformers work it's like you know blah blah just anybody could go watch a video we've had a smart a couple smart people in this pod and i'm they've tried to use analog because i'd be like i don't understand what you're saying and they're using an analogy and i'm like can you please use use an analogy for your analogy like i think we had biology on here and he was like referring to the battle of the river of tam in world war two in order to like describe crypto and i'm like guy i don't know what the about battle of obtain was like this doesn't make sense to me right right exactly you know i'm asking for a lunch over here and you're making gourmet yeah i let's let's do this right what what's his soft skills like well his soft skills i i would say when i experienced him which was like you know whatever he's been he'd been running the company for over a decade as ceo i thought he was good not great so for example i think he always knew what to do like if you caught him when he was calm he would give great advice on the people side of how to handle something however in the heat of the moment he was prone to falling it falling into like debates about semantics about words about data that would make people feel like shit and he would like win the battle and lose the war type of thing with people and so i don't think he was great with that but i also think twitch was like a bunch of very like kind of it was a community product with a bunch of very like sort of woke people in the company that were like very touchy feel about stuff you know i think open ai is gonna be his type of people you know like emmett was better in meetings where all the people were engineers and product product people he was worse the more that the people were you know we got legal p cubs you know marketing you know those meetings went worse for him i thought and so i think he'll have less of that here but he also is like apology like he'll reference the battle of the bulge like he'll reference you know well the judicial system in ireland back in the fifteen hundreds what they did was really interesting it's like dude why do you know this he's like well i ran up on all the judicial systems i was very interested upset how how governing has changed over time it's like that's your casual reading he's like yeah like i just i i don't know is that not is that weird and it's like you know somebody really good when they when they don't even realize it's weird when the thing they do is i really fucking weird and so he's has a very very wide set of knowledge now he's getting kind of labeled as a a d i don't know you've seen this like a deceleration this meaning like somebody wants a slow thing down because as soon he's got named suit yeah so kinda like a suit or like a a doom you know like this is this guy's anti technology which is pretty silly and it's like you know if he could be technology would you know like he he he's a technologist threw and through there's the guy who invented twitch of a boomer basically yeah it's stupid so and so you know a friend who a mutual friend described it well they go because people dug up all those old tweets and he said if if an opening if opening has at at a ten right now in terms of speed you know it should probably be at like a one or two because you know you just don't want this cat to get of the bag and so i wanna read you what he i have the transcript of what he said on our podcast which when he came on about ai so i asked him very simply i said is ai gonna kill us all and he goes maybe i i go it's interesting you say maybe it's gonna kill us all because like you're pretty like pro technology and everything you're opt optimistic hey and he goes well it's because i'm an opt that i'm scared if i was pe if i was like this ai things over hyped is technology not that impressive it's just a nice little magic trick it's it's it's nothing real underneath it if i was pessimistic i would be less worried i'm optimistic i am extremely impressed with how these work and i see a pathway where this is gonna get better very fast and at some point it's gonna be able to self improve that's very scary because we don't know what happens on the other side of he's like it's because i'm optimistic and the second thing you said was he goes here's the analogy you know in biology there's like there's now like ways that you can synthetic do things you can we know we can edit genes for example and we can like add an extra leg to a sheep or we can like modify a virus this was like you know covid right like you can modify a virus and make it more spread and we all saw with covid how dangerous that capability is that like distinct you know this lead from a lab that's really really bad like you know that that was a big mistake that technology made that like you know fucked up the world for a few years and so he's like you know we have regulation and i think kind of agrees we should maybe not go super fast and make it easy for somebody like print smallpox in their home right like we should maybe not give that capability to everybody and maybe we should like slow down to make sure there's some oversight to so that we don't do something really bad that like creates a virus he's like people get that when it comes to biology they don't really get that when it comes to ai he's like with ai here's the thing ai is really good at like the one thing you need in order to be really good at ai at developing ai he's like ai can code it can write code it can read everything there is to know about a subject in an afternoon become absolute world expert at it and then it could translate that into action it could it could translate to writing code it could also design chips yeah it doesn't do either of those two things perfectly right now it's not it's not amazing at writing code and it's not amazing at designing chips but it can do them it's within the zone of things that ai can be good at the type of things that ai can be good at which means that over time it's gonna be able to write code that designs ai and right you know and design chips that make ai better and once that thing can improve itself it's gonna get fast it's gonna get really amazing really fast faster than anyone can expect and maybe that's a good thing maybe it all works out but also maybe it doesn't and that's like he's like even if i think the probability of a really bad thing happening is low it's the consequences are so bad we're not just talking about like a virus that's kind of like screws up your computer or like gets like you know even like a pandemic that gets people sick we're talking about this could destroy like he says like we could destroy all of the value with the light code which i don't even know what the light cone is but i don't want that right so he's describing like even if it's low probability we should just be really really careful about that and like make sure we don't screw the whole thing up and a friend reach out to one thing they go they go everything saying like emmett gonna wanna like slow this down and stop it he's like no no i'm it's smart emmett it knows the the game theory of this the prisoners dilemma if you go too slow somebody else will create ag before you because you you slow down to zero so somebody else will get there before you who may not share your moral beliefs around safety so you can't go too slow where other people get there first who don't share your your safety views but you can't go so fast that you don't actually build safely there's a middle ground to seek and so and i think that's the best description of this where people are trying to label him as one thing and knowing what i know about him that's just not true well let's go like the rapid of like some other story points we'll and we'll make that quick and then also we've been there of what we think will is gonna happen one quick story points for you if you like kind final grades before we do stories final grades so the the board would even gonna grade the board oh they're fucking losers so the worst they they look horrible they're gonna get you got an ad like it stands for fucking loser yeah yeah is there an nfl they're the worst i mean it doesn't matter what the truth is it's all about perception and they look like the worst including adam dean the founder of cora right now he looks horrible so f they get f do agree yeah agreed evan what do you give him he's twelve minutes that's out of the job here tb d c he hey he's actually actually it's actually like a d or a c at the moment he's getting dragged i think which isn't fair but no he he looks like he's a loser here because of perception right and when he's taking a the hero's job like it's it's hard to look good and regardless of how amazing he is right right and what about satya microsoft he gets a b he looks pretty good i mean the he he's he's the man i mean he's kinda re made a resurgence for satya or for microsoft i think that i think there's a real world where bing actually catches up to google in terms of search and microsoft is gonna become just an even bigger company than they they already are so yeah i mean he's a he's he him and sam or the mastermind i'm gotta give a plus the dude you know mobilized over the weekend and before the markets opened and could hit microsoft stock he had basically acquired open ai for negative one hundred billion dollars he he aqua hired open ai which is incredible and so now man he he got open ai out of the nonprofit capped profit structure it's just super for profit inside microsoft he got the key talent you know sam greg all of the key people six hundred of the of the key people and now they just own the whole thing instead of forty nine percent look that's that's an a plus he crushed it on this one he he's the man so let's do let's do the storylines yeah here's one quick storyline line have you heard of fair child conductors do you know what that is i've i so i've heard it but i'm not a history guy so what's the store isn't there something like the the traitor is eight or something what what is that yeah so so basically there was the there was a big company called the i think it was called shock conductors and they made conductors computer chips in the sixties in silicon valley people were pissed off at the the guy who owned it william sc i think his was name is he was brilliant but just a pain in the ass and so these eight guys said hey you got a bail or were bailing and the guy the c goes si and so these eight people went and started fair child which was basically the equivalent is like nvidia but back then in nineteen first silicon valley right that was like the that was the seed round of silicon valley yeah and they were their culture was famous because they were casual so it was like where nerds could come and be casual and where like the best actually best ideas is actually won and that was where the whole like culture of silicon valley arguably started there and then the off offs shoot of fair child conductors was basically ibm so ibm was founded by one of the founders of fair child andy grove the guy the famous manager of i think he was the ceo of ibm he came from there the founders of sequoia capital klein perkins i think might have spun i mean like bay basically it was the there's just all these people but the story of the treacherous ate is what they're called is very similar to the story and so if you're interested in this type of like stuff and you and you could actually go and read that book and you could see a lot of similarities between what is going on now so this is like our version of that and so it's gonna end well i think for greg and sam because i ended really nicely for the the treacherous eight so that's an interesting way is that they they unwind this whole thing and they revert back to open by the way that's my like is hasn't happened yet but i think the final step now now that il signed the pledge being like i quit i'm also gonna go work there it's like what is the point of even having the open entity if six hundred of the people including all of the leaders are gone i don't think they want to be inside microsoft necessarily so i think what's no down i think this was the final straw and by the end of i bet by the end of day today they get a whoops c daisy undo on the whole thing and sam is back as ceo of open ai and they just the board quits and they get a new board that's my my prediction i think doesn't make i i believe i believe that that prediction i think is the same i think there's long tail predictions here which is new startups aren't gonna want to have board of directors actually think that's the wrong takeaway brian hall from hubspot he wrote he's like no the takeaway shouldn't be that not have a board the takeaway should be have a good board and i think so but i think that potentially like the governance structure of companies might actually change significantly because people are gonna be like they're gonna they're gonna have ptsd from just hearing the story and that that actually is gonna have downstream effects at are quite large and in in in in a weird way it could even impact like the venture capital industry i think that is a real possibility i totally agree and i think it's so stupid so right now there's so many startups that are reading their their governing documents about the board and thinking through do i need to change my board here's my public service announcement don't worry bro you're not open ai you're not sam alt and your board is also not these sc either and nobody cares and like you know the for a startup up like don't worry about your governance structure right now like you should be doing these standard vanilla things of you know put competent people there and then don't worry about it too much like you need product market fit you don't have this problem in the same way that like when you hear what's going on with like uber or facebook it's like you're not uber and facebook you don't have the same problems that they have don't suddenly start spending your energy over there and take your eye off the actual main problem that you need product market fit you need growth i think the the takeaway here is open ai board was stupid i say that was actually a a strategic mistake it seems like on sam alt part also i think the whole nonprofit stick that was stupid too tb if that if i'm gonna be right on that but as of now it's look it would have been a lot simpler maybe if this is just a board or this is just a normal board would they have an equity started with a good board they started with elon musk you know reid hoffman man and all these like legit players on their board and then one by one they all quit so basically like elon quit because things weren't like they weren't listening to him and he took his ball and tried to run home re hoffman quit because he started a competitor another guy quit because he wants to run for president another person quit yeah it's like there ac five of the original board members quit for different reasons either starting competitors or conflict of interest or running for president or whatever and this is what they got left with yeah so hopefully that gets changed what any other takeaways i think what we're saying about this was the best and the worst of us yeah that was kind of my big picture takeaway like i feel like this was the best of silicon valley and the worst of silicon valley all in the same weekend you know the best i thought was things like you know what greg did when he was like y i'm out too i quit even though they tried to they they wanted to retain him they weren't firing him he's like yeah that's a real cofounder right that's that's a that's a writer die sort of ducks fly together moment and totally thought that was that was badass ass i thought that was the best of us and then i thought the worst of us was like this like stupid board that has no skin in the game that doesn't know how to communicate that didn't like handle this well just fumbling and bumbling and removing a founder from their ruling basically the greatest founder alive you know outside of elon musk from their company that they created for what seems like no reason and if there is a reason you gotta like say it and even if you say it in a way that wasn't like doesn't get you sued like you know maybe that's why they're not saying anything but you have to at least tell your team you have to give more than what they did they handle it better than what they did and if it was so bad and don't negotiate with him to come back right like if it was that bad that he shouldn't have twenty four hours later been in discussions to come back you know so the board i thought was you know the worst of us i thought you know twitter was alive and popping and it really did feel like it was the silicon valley group chat that was kind of the best of us and the worst worst of it was like you know it felt like gossip girls all weekend and that's kinda lame and there's a bunch of you know like speculation wasted energy you know like i saw these twitter spaces going on for hours and hours of people just like discussing like you know it was a real house wise episode and they can't believe that jenna said that right like it just seemed like you know it wasn't seemed like awesome and i thought that was a waste of time you know i thought there was a whole bunch of things that were kind of like the best and the worst showed themselves in the same weekend you know maybe you know the it could be that there actually is a legitimate you know crazy safety concern and like this guy was going too fast and you know this il guy was maybe the hero when was pumping the brakes even though it screwed up their his own economics if he really was standing for something he believed in right like it could be that that it was that or it could be that it was a jealousy power play and and take him out don't know but i just thought there was a whole bunch of best and worse another one was like just this instant labeling like these like tribes like i don't know if you've seen this like e slash acc thing is that the e cell and d cell yeah basically is that basically this there's whole bunch people in the twitter bio that hit e slash acc i've haven't seen this from us i have no way i didn't even know the hell this was but it's except you're you're effective acceleration right so it's basically like kind of a play on the effective a alt of whatever alt that sam banquet was doing that's pretty stupid i think the one is basically like pedal to the metal you know tech forward progress forward technology opt and it's like that's the cool club to be in and then anybody who's like saying hey slow down you're a d cell which is like you know it's the d word basically it's it's a slur it's an insult and to me this was again that's the worst of us it's the it's like people in until silicon valley make fun of politics for like oh i'm not left or right it's not that simple it's not republican democrat i'm not i don't fall into these stupid party you know tribes that are just blindly you know following the earned and it's like we're doing the same thing this e cell d shit is the same thing as democrat republican red blue left right it so over simplification of a massive over overs simplification of what's going on and so i thought so have worst of us too final prediction my prediction is in the next twenty four hours all this is gonna be undone and things will be back to normal that's my prediction is that yours us too maybe we'll give it forty eight hours but i think at this rate twenty four hours when i was in the second grade my class had a field trip and they said they told the parents i said hey you need twenty bucks to come to the field trip so my mom gives me twenty dollars in the morning and go and i'm excited about the field trip i don't think i'd never been on a field doing my first and they're like hey okay put your thing over here sign your give me your side waiver and put your twenty bucks and i'm like looking around i'm like where did my twenty bucks go i was right my this is my desk it's not here i'm looking under the table on the desk i checked my backpack i'm like what the hell somebody took my twenty bucks i can't go in the fields for up now and so i go to the teacher and i'm like man like somebody stole my twenty dollars and she's like oh my god i stealing like this stealing money from the kid like that's not okay and she's like you're sure like yeah i was right there and so she turns the world upside down she starts she's like hey blows the whistle she's like sit down who has the money and it's just silence nobody raises their hand and she's like okay we'll try this a different way i'm gonna put a jar outside and we're gonna walk out one by one and i want the twenty dollars to be in the jar by the time is done no harm no foul everybody walks out walks in she comes back jar empty and she's pissed now she's like okay i gave you a chance to do this clean i gave you a chance to do this publicly now we're not going on the field trip guys guess what and and i'm like oh my god this like getting the field trip canceled this is crazy not just for our class she tells the teacher next door she's like we don't earn we didn't earn this because there's been you know one of our core values have been betrayed here and where was the twenty dollars and then i'm like i gotta go to the bathroom and i get i get up and i'm like this i go the bathroom she's said i get up and i feel this like scratch feeling in my sock and i'm like i reached out and i was like fuck i put how you put the twenty bucks in my sock this morning that's right just remember but here i am wrong dealer dude what he did do hear i am and now i'm like what do i do i'm like the class gonna be so mad at me if they realize this is in my sock all time the teacher's is gonna be so mad at me if she realized realizes that i accidentally did this i didn't mean for all this to happen and so i went to the restroom i took the twenty bucks put it in the toilet and i flush the toilet and i went back to my did you really did you really do that is that really that no it that made for a better but i did hand it to her wow wow then we went on the field trip but i thought it'd be a better story but the other way but that thing did have with the song and it wasted half of the field trip day and that's all i feel il feels right now where or he's like i did not mean for all this stuff like this got way bigger than i thought this is gonna get and whoops can i just like give you this twenty bucks we pretend this never happened and that's what he's trying to do right now and you know more power to i i've been i feel you alright well we're gonna see what happens that's the pod i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back