Apple vs OpenAI, Mustard Controversy, Mark Gurman, Alexis Ohanian, & Morgan Housel Join

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You're watching TVPN. Today's Monday, July 13th, 2026. We are live from the TVP Ultra on the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. I like the bell, Ben. That's a good one. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy. Use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

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Excellent edit. We said ramp so many times in the first couple episodes of this show. We turned it into a song. It's on the soundboard now. Um well, uh huge news over the weekend. Dropped, uh Mark German dropped a massive scoop, uh right after we got off on Friday night, uh Friday afternoon. Mark German broke the news that Apple is suing OpenAI. Apple and Open AAI are going to war. Uh the uh the Wall Street Journal called it thermonuclear echoed uh past attacks uh calling back to the jobs era. We'll get to that, but first the accusations. Uh Apple is suing OpenAI, accusing it of stealing Apple's trade secrets. Uh Apple Inc. sued OpenAI for trade secret theft, accusing the artificial intelligence startup and its hardware chief of engaging in a coordinated campaign to steal information about upcoming products. The iPhone maker said in a suit Friday that OpenAI encouraged Apple employees to share information, components, drawings, and other materials related to upcoming products. So like the robot, what are the upcoming products from Apple right now? Uh

part of the uh part of efforts by the AI company, the lamp, yeah, smart, the Cobra.

Um by the AI company to develop its own suite of devices. I feel like rumors around the devices have gone back and forth. Is it a phone? Is it is it headphones? Is it something else? A pin? Uh we're having Mark German on the show today to break it down for us. Uh he's coming on at 12:45.

The funny thing is I bet German knows more about OpenAI's devices than we do because we specifically

didn't want to be read in on anything device related because we knew there was going to be so much speculation that we just said like yeah we're going to be in the dark. We'll find out like everyone.

So, at the center of the lawsuit is a former Apple employee named Changlu, uh, who left for OpenAI and allegedly kept his Apple laptop for weeks after he left the company, downloaded proprietary Apple files, and encouraged other Apple employees to do the same. Yeah, if that happened, that's a big no no. When you leave a company, you got to leave your device on the day you leave. Usually, I mean, I was uh remembering back to I mean, we had a very graceful transition to this business from uh from Founders Fund, but uh you know, I had like emails from in Founders Fund from like people that went to Hereticon, people that make a good guess, and I was like, I'm not even going to export that. I'm just going to like leave that and I'll reestablish those connections to people, cold email them, find find their information independently. Just don't take any files, leave them with the other standard practice.

Yeah, it is standard practice. uh you know some people can make mistakes. Also these are just allegations. None of this is confirmed and this lawsuit will be going on for like months if not years. We can go through some of the other historical examples that are sort of interesting to uh sort of set the the the table on what might play out here. So Apple's filings also spends quite a few words on the fact that OpenAI has poached more than 400 employees from the company in recent years. That's not going to make anyone in Certino happy. Uh they hate poaching. There's the famous Steve Jobs Adobe back and forth. Uh Tang Tan left Apple in 2024 to co co-found the AI hardware startup IO with Johnny IV uh which OpenAI acquired in 2025 as part of its consumer AI device effort. Tan is now OpenAI's chief hardware officer and he's leading the consumer device effort there. In his lawsuit, Apple says TAN systemically solicited sensitive information from Apple employees who were interviewing for roles at OpenAI. A lot of perspective on this flying around the timeline, but Ben Thompson and Ralph Winkler in the Wall Street Journal both had interesting angles here. Uh Winkler, wait, they have a Ben Thompson at the Wall Street Journal. No, no, no. Ben Thompson attempt. Brandon got it correct in that newsletter. Um had interesting anguh angles here. We can read a little bit of what Ralph said in the journal. He says, "Open uh Apple's open AI suit echoes past attack. Steve Jobs declared thermonuclear war, which is a great if you're trying to fire up your staff and you're going to battle, even if it's mundane. Even if it's just for like will the next device have 12 gigs of RAM or 32, that's boring. Thermonuclear war is exciting. You got to fire up the the the stats. Uh so he declared Steve Jobs declared thermonuclear war on Google uh on Google's Android operating system in 2010, calling it a stolen product. Now, his successor is going to battle against Apple's most d new most dangerous rival. Uh, in one of his last acts as Apple's chief executive before successor John Turnis takes over, Tim Cook fired a missile at OpenAI. In a lawsuit filed Friday, Apple alleged that senior OpenAI executive who once sat a top Apple's own product design team was involved in a monthslong campaign to steal Apple trade secrets. uh open eyes uh replied at this point and said, "We have no interest in Apple's trade secrets." But uh Ralph continues. He says, "Although it isn't clear yet what evidence the company has to back up all of its claims, the suit lands before OpenAI has released a product and as the technology industry races to build artificial intelligence powered devices that can move society beyond the smartphone era. And there's a whole debate to be had for, you know, where that goes and the value of devices in a world where the agents are just kind of off working and you can maybe just text them or send them a message on Telegram. Uh the the the there's a whole debate over what the is is the future of devices more devices and different devices or is it just no devices? Um but uh OpenAI has clearly been working on devices as we know from the IO acquisition. Um, and the Wall Street Journal says, "The winner could dominate the future just as Apple's iPhone ruled the consumer market for the last 20 years." Uh, quote, "I am not afraid of Apple, but I have tremendous Got to flip to A6. Let's see. Tremendous respect for them." OpenAI CEO Sam Alman posted on X Saturday.

And he said S tier company.

Yeah. He said, "Oh, that didn't make it into the paper. Maybe uh the Wall Street Journal readers aren't familiar with the proper tier list. They think S is down at the bottom when in fact it is above A. Um big tech rivals have long tried to supplant Apple but so far Google, Samsung, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Amazon.com have all failed. It is crazy. People think you know okay Android was successful but captured like one tenth of the actual value because the margins on Android devices are so much lower. But you forget that Jeff Bezos stood on stage and said we're launching the Amazon Firephone and we're going to win. And then Microsoft had the whole Microsoft phone and they were really pushing that. And Facebook Chamoth was at Facebook working on the Facebook phone.

Sort of a right of passage.

It is a right of passage. It it it's a it's an ultimate long shot as a as an up and coming hyperscaler to every it's a right of passage to go and uh and challenge Apple. Now OpenAI is emerging as a new threat. It has it has built powerful AI models and is working to uh toward an unspecified family of devices. Interesting to hear that uh to run them devices that could supplant apples. Apple's innovation engine failed to develop hit AI products and features leaving it vulnerable to new entrance. Its suit could be an attempt to throw sand in the gears at OpenAI. I mean, a lawsuit is always a little bit of sand at the very least. Even if everything gets dropped quickly, it can still drag on for at least a year. Uh company observers say uh this to slow poaching of Apple staffers, for instance. So, this could just slow the the poaching that's happening. Friday lawsuit. Friday's lawsuit has echoes of one of Apple's fi uh of the ones Apple's filed against various Android ecosystem players beginning in 2010. A legal battle royale with hardware makers producing rival phones that played out over eight years. Um the central allegation then as now was a rival stole Apple's innovations. Apple said Samsung slavishly copied the iPhone with smartphones it was already selling by the millions which Samsung denied. The company settled in 2018 after a long costly battle, eight years. In AI years, that's like a million decades. Wow. Um,

uh, at the center of each case Apple has pursued was a perceived breach of trust. Trust. So, Google's then chief executive, Eric Schmidt, sat on Apple's board as his company developed Android. So, there was like you're you're on the board of Apple saying, "Yeah, we should definitely launch."

Kind of similar to the Kreger Figma dynamic.

Yeah. Very very tricky. Uh, I'm going to destroy Android because it's a stolen product. Jobs told biographer Walter Isacson. Uh, Apple alleges in its new suit that quote, "At every level, OpenAI has been stealing Apple's trade secrets. A more junior employee appeared to cross the line by using an Apple employees login to access Apple servers." But Apple has also accused OpenAI's hardware chief, Tang Tan, of soliciting trade secrets from its employees in interviews for jobs and encouraging them to bring quote actual parts from Apple for show and tell sessions at OpenAI. Tan worked at Apple for 24 years, rising to vice president of product design. But bringing parts to an engineering interview isn't unusual, say people familiar with the tech hiring process. That was shocking to me. I it does feel unusual to me, but I mean I guess people would bring

I don't know if if something's public like if you're bringing like if you're if you just went to the app store on a recent iPhone.

Yeah. And you're just bringing that and you're like I did the button. You see how it clicks this way? Maybe that's okay. But uh if it's like actual secret parts, that would be really really bad. Uh interviewers want candidates to talk through their work. Uh the question is whether the parts were sensitive, something Apple doesn't offer evidence of and is seeking a uh is seeking discovery to determine. A spokesperson for OpenAI said, quote, "We have no interest in other companies trade secrets. We re we remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers everyday people everywhere." Uh Tan and a more senior employee, Chang Leu, didn't respond to a request for comment. Uh at Apple, Tan worked very closely with Johnny IV, its famous industrial design chief. I've left Apple to build his own design firm, later poaching tan. Apple uh OpenAI bought that company, IO products, in 2025 to spearhead its own device development efforts. Bad fellows can quickly become enemies in tech. Open AAI made the IO acquisition, revealing its intention to wean customers off smartphone screens a year after announcing a partnership with Apple to integrate ChachiT into some parts of the iPhone. The Wall Street Journal has a content licensing partnership with OpenAI. Of course, uh bigger companies have so far failed to dent Apple's dominance. Uh and they talk about Amazon's Fire Phone, Microsoft Windows phone. Mark Zuckerberg also tried to do an end run around the iPhone with the metaverse that never fully disrupted the iPhone. Of course, Elon Musk has also chafed at Apple's control of the digital economy. A unit of SpaceX is suing Apple for disadvantaging its AI app. And the company is now prototyping its own smartphone like AI device. Apple has said that its app store relies on algorithms and expert curation and doesn't suppress rivals. The irony of Apple's case against o open AI is that Apple itself has so frequently been accused of stealing others companies ideas that it has spawned a new verb sherlocking uh which is a reference to a an app for the Mac that allowed you to hit I think command space and get a finder window to search everything across your entire desktop. that that thata that eventually became the spotlight feature baked into Apple, but it was not very good for the company that was running Sherlock. And so, uh, Apple, this is the same like, you know, uh, the the labs will steamroll this or this these many companies just got put out of business by this company. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It just sort of depends. Uh, Apple recently tried to sherlock Particle, but it seems like Particle is doing fine. Um, and so it sort of depends on the actual product. I've not gotten a single Haven't gotten a single invite from Apple's

true invite system.

At the same time, when was the last time you paid for a flashlight app? Probably never, right? Because all of that stuff's baked in. Apple's trying to catch up.

I saw someone actually go pretty viral on Instagram with the world's most expensive flashlight app. I think it was like a hundred. It was It was like $5 to turn the light on and then $129 to turn it off.

Mhm. That's great. genius. I like those. I I also like the ones that are like uh vibe coding a calculator and you type in whatever you want to multiply and then it's like $200 to unlock the answer. It's easy money.

Uh Ben Thompson read through uh the filing as as he as he would. Uh he says you can read Apple's filing here and almost everything you need to know is actually on the first page in the first four paragraphs. Paragraph one is a succinct introduction to the case. This case is about Apple's former employees stealing trade secrets for the benefit of OpenAI. Apple brings this suit to put a stop to it. Paragraph 2 recounts how Apple has spent a lot of time and money building products that delight customers. Paragraph 3 basically says that everything they do is a trade secret. And uh paragraph 4 introduces Chang Lou and spends the next page and a half recounting his crimes. Uh Ben Thompson says Lou is almost certainly guilty and an idiot to boot. Not mincing words there. Uh Apple has a lot of details about loose behavior, including dozens uh downloading dozens of proprietary Apple hardware related files and encouraging other Apple employees to do the same because he did it on his Apple sued laptop

and furthermore logged onto Apple servers for weeks after he had already left the company. Um uh Ben says Apple security uh says as depicted in this case is shockingly poor. First, the company lost track of the fact that Lou didn't return one of his laptops or disable it remotely. Second, due to what Apple claimed was a bug, Lou continued to have access to the company's internal servers for weeks. Um,

Yeah. Um they he talks about how uh you know Tan is is the point person for the 400 people that Apple says that OpenAI has hired away from the smartphone maker. That is no crime of course although one does get the sense Apple sure thinks it is.

Um and I'm trying to think if anything

the funny the funniest moment in here is where he says a couple quick points. A few weeks ago there was a bit of hubbub about meta capturing keystrokes from employees in order to train AI. What confused me was people's surprise that a company had this level of access to company issued hardware in the first place. Moreover, while that access may very well be theoretical for a lot of companies at Apple, it has always been a well-known fact going at least as far back as when I was an intern there. Ben Thompson was an intern there 16 years ago, uh that the company could and would go through everything if you ever cross them. And so it's it's uh yeah, everyone should know this, but somehow it uh it at least Apple alleges that it was not uh known or or just a terrible mistake or brazen uh you know brazen mistake. Uh he does he does talk about a little bit of the uh the the motivations for why you're going to thermonuclear war. He says AI era has sucked for Apple.

Yeah. So he says Tan is a face of Apple betrayal. Open AI is the face of AI generally, and it's hard to escape the sense that Apple just really hates AI. And why shouldn't they? Go back to 2022. Apple had it all figured out. They had a lock on the premium end of the smartphone market, which they continued to slowly expand, even as they had figured out how to earn services revenue from every iPhone user basically forever. Business was good. AI has ruined all of that. Suddenly, Apple has to make existential decisions about whether or not to compete in the model game. Then they then they totally embarrass themselves with the 2024 new Siri introduction. Had their most prominent blogger declare that something is rotten in the state of Certino. Had to completely overhaul their software and services teams. Lost their position as kings of the supply chain and most favored customer of TSMC to the point where they had to enact an emergency midcycle price rise. And then worst of all have to actually wrestle with the possibility that AI is such a paradigm shift that it might actually threaten the iPhone. And then on top of all that, they lost they lose 400 of their best employees recruit recruited by the lead hardware engineer for the iPhone in partnership with their most famous executive outside of Steve Jobs and have to know that all 400 of those employees are getting hit up by their former colleagues looking for a job as well. The AI era has sucked for Apple. Even if they aren't necessarily doomed and even if they relaunch new Siri ends up working out, their position is still more fragile than it was. And everything about life is worse. Given that, how sweet it must feel to suddenly have a smoking gun in the form of a seriously dumb employee blatantly lifting documents and to use it as a cudgel to ex exact revenge on the company that represents everything that is making your life miserable. The perspective does make one wonder if that phrase run to its core was projection in the end. AI is changing the world and Apple's contribution is to deliver 2-year-old technology differentiated by exclusive access to data it won't share. It certainly has no interest in delivering on a new AI driven paradigm that endangers its iPhone franchise in any way. Any of its employees who wish to do exactly that, meanwhile, are being told loud and clear that Apple doesn't just think it owns your laptop, but also your mind and knowledge. I think it mostly stinks. But then again, rotten things usually do. So s circling back to something is rotten in thermonuclearno,

but it's not the first. Go sign up for retrie. Read the whole article. There's a bunch of context. Um, and we're going to come back to the story at 12:45 Pacific

with the Germinator.

Uh, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is an all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more. While Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, security. Uh, it's not the first thermonuclear war between uh hyperscalers, Mag 7 companies. you go back to Apple versus Microsoft, uh they had a massive copyright war over the the look and feel of the desktop. So, Apple sued Microsoft and Huelet Packard actually back in uh 19 uh what was it 1997 when they reset the relationship um saying that Windows 2.03 and Windows 3.0 Oh, and the HP new wave, I don't know what what happened with that, copied the Mac's graphical interface. The courts concluded that the sim similarities were already licensed, functional, standard to graphical user interfaces and otherwise unprotectable. In 1994, the Ninth Circuit uh affirmed that Apple's guey deserved only relatively thin copyright protection against virtually identical copying. Of course, we talked a little bit about the Android proxy patent war uh between Apple and Google. Apple rarely attacked Google head-on. Instead, it sued the manufacturers that were distributing Android. So, HTC, Samsung, Motorola over smartphone design, smart uh software patents. There was a whole era where you would see Apple launch something and then and then Samsung, Motorola, HTC would sort of conform to that norm. and how much of that is just the standard industry practice, what consumers want, and how much of it is a direct infringement. In 2014, they agreed to dismiss all of their direct smartphone patent cases without entering a c comprehensive uh cross license. Uh but the broader war continued through Apple's 7-year Samsung battle. In 2018, the jury awarded Apple a $539 million uh damage uh in a retrial after which Apple and Samsung reached an undisclosed settlement. So Apple won meaningful verdicts and established that industry design could carry real patent value. Um Amazon and Apple uh Apple and Amazon have also gone at it over ebook pricing conspiracy aimed at Amazon. This was in 2009. Uh, Amazon had established $9.99 as the highly visible price for many new Kindle bestsellers. As Apple prepared the iPad and the iBookstore, it arranged agency agreements under which publishers rather than retailers set consumer prices. The Justice Department proved that Apple could help coordinate publishers to eliminate retail price competition and raise ebook prices above Amazon's $9.99 uh standard. And so, Amazon won this one. Apple briefly changed the economics of the market, but lost the antitrust case. Of course, there's Apple app tracking transparency. Apple versus Meta, another thermonuclear war, not fully uh played out in the courts, but uh it did create basically a $10 billion revenue headwind for Meta in the short term, which they ultimately uh overcame. Uh there's a whole bunch of others. The the two the two MAG7 participants who have never really fought uh Microsoft and Meta have never really had a company level feud. Uh Microsoft and Tesla also have never really had a corporate battle. Tesla sort of stays out a lot of a lot of this because they're not in as many of the same markets. Uh, of course, the the big one that people are pointing to these days is uh Uber versus Google. Uh, where is this? Uh, so this is the most dramatic corporate espionage style case in modern technology. Anthony Lewendowski, he was a central engineer in Google's self-driving car program. And as he prepared to leave, he downloaded thousands of confidential files. That's a huge no no. Uh he founded an autonomous truck startup auto which Uber then acquired bringing Leandowski and his team inside Uber's autonomous vehicle organization. Whimo alleged that Uber had obtained and was using its LAR and autonomous driving trade secrets. The case expo exposed internal Uber communications, raised questions about what then CEO Travis Kalanick knew and threatened to derail Uber's already expensive autonomy program. Uh days into the February 2018 trial, Uber settled. Whimo received 0.34% of Uber's equity, which was worth $245 million at the time. It's actually worth more now. I don't know if Whimo held on to that, but uh sort of a financial civil settlement. Uh and interestingly, Uber promised not to incorporate Whimo's confidential information into its systems. So, they agreed, hey, like we might have seen some of that confidential trade secret information from that company that we acquired. we won't use any of that. And it feels like that sort of derailed Uber's self-driving program pretty substantially because you're always walking on eggshells. And then there's probably things that you could have potentially independently discovered. But if you know that Whimo has independently discovered them separately, you can't use it. And so there's all these different techniques and tricks that then are off limits even if they are just best practices that you can principles. Exactly. Yeah. So um very tricky situation and Leandowski. So there were actually two two suits in the Uber Whimo battle. Uh there was the civil suit which settled of course as I mentioned, but Leavenowski separately plead guilty to trade secret theft in a criminal trial. The Justice Department said he admitted downloading thousands of Google files with the intention of benefiting himself and Uber. Uh he was sentenced to 18 months in prison uh fined and ordered to pay restitution, but he was pardoned before he actually entered prison. And then I believe he started a religion. I think he was starting like an AI church which was way ahead of the curve because it feels like people are like in AI psychosis as of like 2024 and he sort of had it back in 2021 2022. He was like leading to this idea that like AI was God.

It was uh 2017 way of the future.

Way of the future. That is crazy crazy.

Uh so Uber eventually sold uh the Advanced Technologies Group, which was their self-driving unit, to Aurora in 2020. Uh and it valued that unit at $4 billion. So like pretty substantial progress for something that was sort of beaten up. Um and uh there were a few different reasons. The Whimo litigation cost, uh technical difficulty, and then there was this fatal 2018 Uber autonomous vehicle crash that really made it difficult for them. And Uber has sort of shifted their strategy now. They're much more of like this platform and they want and they don't want to develop uh cars internally cyber cab and Whimo and all the different

there was recent uh reporting that Uber's like actually trying to block the roll out of self-driving cars in some markets and there's a whole bunch of interesting stories about

Oh, I didn't know Uber was

potentially. It was it was one tweet I saw. I think it's in the timeline somewhere. We can get to it uh at some point. But um

what's going on with Paramount? Let's

And remember, we're gonna come back to this with Mark German himself, who broke the actual story

on Friday. So, we'll have another 30 minutes to talk about this story.

We will. Uh, but first, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market, your business on MongoDB? Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Um,

uh, Rohan in Semaphore says, "Paramount Ways leaving California over Warner Brothers Rift." What's going on here, John?

Um, so this is uh on the basis that California is trying to block the Paramount uh the Paramount acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. Rohan says, "I'm told that if the states do choose to sue, they would have to assume the damages stemming from that action chiefly uh 600 million to 1 billion 1.2 billion in ticking fees would potentially be paid out to state state taxpayers. So if uh if they leave those uh those fees would not be paid to the state. Um Paramount just issued this response to the state AG lawsuit. Brian Stelter is breaking it down. Uh saying the complaint distorts settled antitrust law and is based on uh misrepresentation of competition in the in the entertainment industry today. So, uh, Paramount is weighing whether to shift major operations out of California, uh, after Attorney General Rob Bont and 11 other state attorneys general filed, attorneys general, I always get that wrong, uh, filed today to block its 110 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. This story was back and forth. Will Netflix get it? Paramount wound up with the highest bid, the most cash offer. It got approved. huge windfall for David Zazlov over at Warner Brothers Discovery. Uh but a very controversial acquisition.

All the shareholders.

Yeah, everyone did very well. Um but people were very worried because they owned two uh two historic um studio lots in Los Angeles. Would they need both of those? Would they convert one to apartment buildings? This was sort of uh the the the the nightmare case for fans of Hollywood film making that it would become a more uh agile, lean, globally distributed uh uh studio that would they be making less films would they change their uh their pattern because as they are two separate buyers of intellectual property and scripts that come to Hollywood, they can pay higher prices. there's less competition potentially the the price of the the that the uh uh the the industry becomes more monopolistic and there's less buying activity. So the proposed deal was the and is the largest merger in Hollywood history. Uh it would combine two of the five major film distributors and give the resulting company control of roughly 27% of US film distribution and basic cable channels. Uh, of course, uh, anyone who's in favor of this was arguing that, well, people are watching Instagram and YouTube all day long and listening to podcasts and live streams. Um, you can't look at Hollywood in isolation. It's okay if there's a little bit of consolidation in an industry that's facing incredible pressure from a new disruptive industry. Uh we saw this uh play out with the shutter stock Getty Images question where you have immense pressure in the stock image in market from an entirely new outsider technology consolidation makes a lot of sense usually in those scenarios. Um but if you're just looking at it if you're just defining the industry as only Hollywood studios then yes this is this does represent more consolidation. uh friends and advisers to Paramount CEO David Ellison had reportedly been urging him to reconsider the company's California footprint in the event that California sued over the deal. Previously, Paramount had offered to keep both of its historic studio lots in California open and release 30 films annually, which was basically just adding the 15 and 15 that were made from both studios, I believe, something like that. Um uh but executives have privately complained that Bontto refused to negotiate. Worth noting that the Justice Department has already cleared the merger while China and other international regulators have raised no comparable uh uh comparable objections thus far. So from a antitrust perspective, it looks like the merger can go through, but the state of California is potentially trying to block it now. So Paramount says California's complaint distorts settled antitrust law and is based on misrepresentation of competition in the entertainment industry today. It'd be very interesting to see where they actually go if they do leave California because there's been so much so much movement to Texas and Florida, but in terms of film making, Toronto, London, Atlanta. Exactly. So maybe Georgia. I don't know. I'm sure every other state is uh gunning for this because uh bringing a bringing an industry to town is is almost always a good move. More jobs for your local economy, more uh more tax dollars going around. Uh there will probably be a uh a competition, but we'll see. We'll see where this uh where this develops and uh we might have someone uh from the uh media analysis industry uh come on the show later this week to discuss.

There is a new letter new letter just dropped. We are hoping for a new billion-dollar PDF,

but uh we got another letter. uh more than 200 researchers and economists including Jack Clark, Jeff Dean, Nome Brown, Tyler Cohen, Scholto, John Schulman, Eric Schmidt, Dean Ball, uh Yoshua Benio,

Joshua Benjio,

signed a statement urging governments and institutions to act now to prepare for AI's economic impact. They start the uh pretty simple

letter by saying AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years. They don't. This isn't like the start. It's just three statements. The entire

So they're signing but they're signing

they're saying we all agree with these three statements.

They they agree that AI could possibly become radically more powerful over the next 10 years,

which feels very conservative.

That's like an incred you're not committing to anything at all.

Uh no, I mean there are plenty of people that are saying that AI will go away in the next 10 years. Like it's it's useless, you know. No one's really saying that.

Ed Zitron's saying that and like a 100,000 people are liking his post when he says that.

So like there are 100,000 people out there that are like it hallucinates. It's dumb. It's it's not useful. It's going to go away.

People out of billions go away. I'm just saying there there are people that don't believe this. But yes, this does feel like a like a like actually an easier statement to agree with than the short timelines of fast takeoff in two years. uh recursive self-improvement, anything that's coming out of basically any lab is much more aggressive than this. Elon's timelines have been solving new physics in two years, stuff like that.

Yeah. Okay. So, point one, AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.

Point two, this could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy larger than the industrial revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks including large-scale job displacement as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards. And three, economists, policy makers, and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guard rails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society. So,

so that last one's not a probability. Yeah. The first one it feels like you can sign if you're at 1% 1% chance that it gets more more radically more powerful over the next 10 years. 1% chance that it drives an unprecedented transformation of our economy. But as long as you agree that economists, policy makers, and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI, you sign this. So three is really the strongest the strongest the most strongly worded bullet point. Well, and it's interesting because the people signing this are technology leaders.

So, they're really saying

not not the actual top leaders interestingly. So, if you look at who signed this, you have a ton of people from OpenAI, Anthropic, Stanford, uh, Meter, uh, like every Harvard like every lab,

BAM Margera, I think you said.

No, no, no. uh Google, Jeff Dean, like you have people from top uh from top institutions, but not the CEOs, not the investors. Like there's been other there's been other I mean I guess Reed Hoffman and uh Yan Talin and um who else is I mean Eric Schmidt's on here, but notably absent are Sam Alman, Daria Amade, I don't believe Demis is on here. Is he on here?

Yeah, but you you have Jack Clark, Sarah Frier.

Yeah. So, but what's interesting is that it's it's sort of like the proxies. It's the it's like the right-hand men and women of the AI leaders that are signing. And so you have to imagine that that Dario, Sam, Elon, uh Demis, Sundar, Satia, like they got the message. This was received to them and they were like, "You guys can solve this, but you can sign this, but we're not signing it because this doesn't feel like something that happens behind the scenes where Sarah Frier doesn't go to Sam or or Shalto doesn't bring this up to Dario. Oh, there's a new letter. I'm thinking of signing it. Like, it feels like it's

So, was the um like that that big pause letter that Elon did sign at one point?

A lot of people sign it. And and that one every lab leader actually did sign. And this one isn't even a pause, but somehow didn't rise to the aura level. And maybe that's deliberate because then it gets clipped and turned into headlines where it's like, you know, blank lab leader, fill in anyone. It's gonna be a It's gonna be leaders at XYZ lab. It's gonna be head of blank lab if you're the first one to jump if you're Sam or Daario or Demis or Elon. Uh they just said uh that um it could bring largecale job displacement. So you you're gonna have that headline tag next to you as opposed to if it's like someone at a lab who is not the CEO of that lab says it can bring large scale job displacement because right now it seems like at the very top a lot of the lab leaders are sort of backing off of the near-term job displacement worries.

Yeah. But I I think this still feels much more like the the AI doc than like AI 2040, right? And that like the the message I got from the AI doc was like we all got to talk about this, you know, let's get everyone in a room and like figure something out. We don't know at all what it's gonna be. We got to figure something out where AI 240 is like okay, we have this this is our our plan A. We should be doing this specific set of of you know policies, task, whatever.

Yes. It's like this is much more like we all got unifying rules with China like US and China like nuclear level negotiations on how things slow down. It's it's it's a global slowdown of largecale AI training runs essentially. Uh and this is very yeah this is very different. So much easier to sign but a AI 2040 didn't have like signitories. I mean it had people that like helped out with it in general and then they did poll them as to they pulled some of the authors to say like which one do you think is most likely to play out. Um but uh I I guess by any I guess everyone implicitly in the AI 2040 uh if you contributed to that document you're sort of alongside advocating for is it plan A because it's the fourth one that they offer I is it plan D

I think plan A is is what they bunch of plans and then I think like in the order on the website I think it is the fourth one but that's just like the arbitrary

AI 2040 I'm trying to load the site but it's not loading Anyway, we can come back to that. We must act now. I I like this. I like I like the idea of of more economic research, more policymaking research to understand these things. It it it's not like it's hard to get wrong because the end result is just more information, more studies, more uh you know, conversation and proposals. It's not anything specifically like if it was like we like large scale do job displacement is coming next month we need to you know print money and do economic stimulus broadly like we did during co I would be like I don't know that the like what if the job displacement doesn't come up and we just create a bunch of inflation like I don't I don't know if we should do that but we should be ready for if we hit 10% unemployment 15% unemployment that we do have stimulus in the back pocket and I we do with where interest rates are and with the with the history of how we've dealt with employment shocks in the past. Uh so I think we are like set up pretty well if that happens. Doesn't seem like it's happening at this moment. But

yeah,

tell us about

I think the critical the critical view on this is

the people building the technology say that we got to do something about this. Mhm.

Like like it's kind of just continuation of like that we got to do something about this and maybe you just need to do a new letter every single month forever.

Maybe

um but uh

I don't know. Let me tell you about Figma agents. Meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. I want that for the next ad read. I want the ship horn. The ship horn is where it's at.

That one is so underrated. So, I wanted to talk about the mustard controversy over the weekend, but the original video was deleted

and it's now really hard to

just describe it to me.

We have audio listeners.

So, there's two car content creators in the LA area.

Okay.

One of them is an account called Collected Bands, who's a Porsche enthusiast, a BMW enthusiast,

likes to drive fast,

younger, uh, on the younger side. And then you have a guy named Canyon Carver who's effectively like a vigilante of the canyons. So he hangs up in a lot of the popular driving areas

and he doesn't like to drive fast. Canyon Carver. That's

he likes to drive like pretty I would say close to the speed limit.

Okay.

Um, and so he hangs out places like AC in the Santa Monica Mountains, you know, around Malibu.

A

Uh, Angelus Crest Highway.

Okay.

And uh, which is which is near you. Yeah.

And so he likens himself to kind of the sheriff or the mayor. He calls him the Batman. He uh claims to be the original Meta Ray-Ban's like car guy.

Oh, interesting.

I don't know how true that is, but over the weekend these two cross paths and there was a video that ran up to hundreds of thousands of likes before being deleted where the Canyon Carver is driving and he gets passed by this other car influencer and then they end up in the same parking lot and they have a very funny exchange where they're just talking past each other perfectly. The younger guy is accusing the Canyon Carver of just being 40, which is kind of funny. And the Canyon Carver is accusing the younger guy of his dad buying the car for him, to which he immediately says, just because my dad bought me this car doesn't mean I can't afford it. Which is a funny line. But anyways, this is so inside baseball, LA, Southern California car enthusiast drama that I think it's time to move on because without the original video, it's really tough.

What is your stance on cutting the mustard?

Yeah. So, I'm very against cutting the mustard. Okay. Um, you like a safe highway, a safe canyon to be carved safely.

Yes.

So, cutting the mustard is when someone's driving fast on a canyon backcountry road and they're using the entire road, right? They're sort of disregarding the lanes.

Double yellow line.

Yeah. Double yellow. They're crossing it because —

Which is a moving violation. That's illegal, right?

Yeah. No, it's objectively against the law. Yeah.

And then it's very dangerous because you're coming around a tight corner and if somebody's in your lane, it can be over really quickly.

Maybe we should have a sort of an autobahn style rule where the yellow line doesn't apply. There's certain highways in America. It's like we can't get over the speed limit thing. We got to have the speed limit. There's still a hard speed limit, but you can drive wherever you want.

Absolutely.

That'd be crazy.

Absolutely. I mean the problem is like Willow Springs is 45 minutes away. Just go to the track and it's a public course. You can pay and go and drive as fast as you want and there is no traffic coming the other way. It's much safer. So, if you're trying to push your car to the limit, there is a way to do that legally and safely. And so, you should probably just do that.

I thought it was interesting because it was very generational. You had the millennial against the brain sort of zoomer and they just couldn't even have a conversation. They were just sort of speaking past each other, doing various ad hominems.

Okay. Well, last car question from Reddit r/wealth. If I inherit $4 million USD and a home at 35 years old, would it be responsible for me to just buy a Ferrari? Why just? It's a funny way to put it. I think yes. I mean, you're not going to beat the S&P, but a lot of the cars hold their value. Might be fun. I don't know. It depends on your lifestyle. If you have five kids in private schools or something, $4 million probably isn't enough. Depends on where that home is. Do you live in Manhattan?

It comes down entirely to what car you select.

Yeah.

Because there's a lot of cars that, if you're not driving them a lot, it would probably at least track the bills from a certain appreciation standpoint. I live in Manhattan. I'm trying to send my kids to the most elite boarding schools. I have seven kids and I'm considering a Luch. That would be a rough go. But if you're out in an affordable town, plenty of space, you're not going to spend that much money. The four million is going to last you a long time. Maybe pick up a —

There was a powerful omen in Yellowstone National Park.

Why was this Friday evening?

Oh, yes, this bison. We got to play bull bison. A tourist was seriously injured Friday evening after being thrown 8 feet into the air by a bull bison in Yellowstone National Park. If you're in Yellowstone, be very careful. I didn't realize that bison roamed so freely and could be so aggressive. Professional photographer Mike McClode filmed the incident and said the bison was angry, agitated, and charging anything and everything. And the scale of this beast is really massive. It looks absolutely huge. And it goes all around chasing this poor elderly tourist who —

Who ended up being totally okay.

Oh, really?

And when you see this, it's almost unbelievable.

That's remarkable. It said Cowboy State Daily says tourist was seriously injured, but I guess the man did recover, which is very good to hear. You never want to see someone injured on the timeline, but he really does get thrown way in the air and he's running around. I was wondering, he should have gone for the car right there, right? But there you go. He's thrown in the air. Absolutely insane.

I like that people are already remixing this. Wild Spicy says, if it was me out there, we got it different. Throw the bison in there.

Yeah. If Alexis, if that was Alexis being chased, this is what would happen.

Let's bring Alexis in. But first, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Look at that fog horn for me.

Well, we have Alexis Ohanian from 776. He's the founder and GP with us here in the TBP Ultra Dome. Alexis, how you doing? Welcome to the show.

I thought that was crocodiles and alligators you want to zigzag. Is zigzag. Oh, that's a fart.

Yes, that's the move.

Absolutely. Good to know. Good to know.

Absolutely. Wild. Uh, how is your summer going? Are you engrossed in World Cup? What's your summer been like? Give me a little —

Yeah, given my Chelsea women's connection, but we'll see. There you go. Um, yeah. I want your current thesis on premier in real life events. Maybe in the age of AI, maybe there's some other boom happening. But I have some stats here that are crazy that were on the timeline from Adam Miller. UFC sold for 4 billion in 2016, worth 15 billion today. F1 revenue is up 115% since 2017. Team values are up 276%. FIFA World Cup viewership is on track to pass 2022's 5 billion. Revenues up 56%. NBA media rights tripled in a decade. NFL 110 billion in media rights through 2033. Broadway is up. Live comedy tours gross more. 6 billion.

I've asked every time an athlete comes on here, I'm expecting them to have some like basically performance super intelligence.

And it's also on the business side of the house, right? Even if you ask a question like, what CRM do you use? You're going to get some weird looks and maybe it's Salesforce or like, oh, we've been trying this new thing called HubSpot. And so all across the stack there is tremendous opportunity for efficiency for software. The smart money is investing and they're also figuring out how to invest in the tools that'll make these even more profitable enterprises.

Pull the tweet. I think it was a year and a half ago. I'm still trying to find the venture-backed model for it, but my bet was because anyone will be able to sort of dream up their version of Iron Man where they're Iron Man and obviously with making sure Daddy Disney gets their check, but like you're going to have this dispersion of culture and acting at the end of the day is way more normal for our species in person than it is going into a dark theater and watching on a screen.

I found the tweet. I found the tweet. Bonus hot take. I think we'll see live theater make a comeback in the next 10 years. And you said this July 7th.

Yeah.

French Canadians right now running Cirque who are very mad. I think I'll give you this.

I think there is. So part of the why at least for me with those things and maybe this is just exposing myself as a bad person is the fact that you're again not hoping anyone gets hurt but it's this anxiety of like what's going to happen? Is this person going to survive this death-defying act?

It's a drone. It's a drone that flies. You're strapped in like a roller coaster seat and the drone flies two feet from your face.

Yeah.

But I had not considered making it an experience for the fans. So really quickly, as live events are growing, I feel like a lot of collectibles come out of the live event. It's like the game ball, the card of the player who played in the live event, and there's this chain of custody, chain of authenticity. This thing happened. This human was great at this thing. There was lore. You could have gone and saw it with your own eyes and now there's a card that commemorates it. What's going on in the collectible space? Is there as much of a boom there? What do you expect happening over the next couple years? And what are you doing specifically?

You're like, no one's going to make money on these cards, but me.

No, no, but also you drive up the price by taking all of those cards into the treasury and so everyone's like, oh, the lore is growing.

Wow.

Yeah, explain that. Normal firm is it within the firm? Very interesting strategy.

And so, it's focused on a part of sports that I obviously love. I think college is obviously a huge and booming opportunity. And these companies all need software now. They all have an opportunity to —

No, it's amazing. We're playing at a level where some of these guys are making so much money in NIL deals that the kind of deal we're striking with them is not —

No, that's the amount that they're making all year. That's not what I'm paying them for. These card deals are still pretty small ball relative to the deals they're getting from big brands. And what's dope is, most of these guys are thinking big picture and if they make a little less money doing an audit deal, but every other guy on their team is getting a card.

They're not mad sharing that.

And the athletic directors love it because we're also working with the women athletes just as much as we are with the men. So, that's the focus. I'm inspired by so much of the motion and creativity happening here. Even Jensen Wong's leather jacket going on sale. I think it's only the second one that's been auctioned. These are cultural moments and I know we live in a weird little myopic tech world, but like the kind of things I know I want to bid on.

Are you have you bid yet? You know, the Jensen jacket now.

Love the game. How much do you think the boom in live events is driven by social media and flexing like these are very exclusive basically one of 10,000 assets or they're these ephemeral —

I look, I don't disagree. I would also think of it as sort of just that K-shape happening in the economy. I think you're going to see, right, the Wimbledon ticket is going to continue to be even more exclusive, even more scarce because there's just a finite amount of access to it. But I also wouldn't discount growth on the other end, which is I think a bigger culture shift. In building AFL, one of the things that's been really eye opening for me is we partner with run clubs in order to build our fan base. Just because you run doesn't necessarily mean you're a fan of track and field, but it's very easy to get you to be one because these are the best in the world doing what you like doing for fun. The average soccer fan doesn't play soccer very often, right? By learning about run clubs the last two years, not firsthand, but I have learned that it is a way for Gen Z to push back on the toxicity of online dating culture, it is a way to push back and almost break the sort of jaded narrative of online life to actually meet with people, decide if you want to spend more time with them or not, platonically or romantically. I think there's a culture shift happening among Gen Z in particular who have kind of lived through the dark parts of social and have just said fuck the algorithm. Not all of them, but a material majority, and said I crave IRL. It doesn't cost a Wimbledon ticket to go join a run club, but it's an experience that is verifiably human, which is harder and harder on this dead internet. It's a chance to get laid. It's a chance to meet someone who could be a lifelong friend. That part of the barbell gets me excited, the side of things we've done as a species way longer than this modern age. This is such a dumb thing, but I think if we get the AI utopia we all want, this gets cheaper and easier and better to make and it's healthier for you, it's more accessible to more people. There are so many things that are still going to be invaluable that will still give us and I hope give us even more of a purpose to live. Whether it's getting food together or going for a run together, shouting at a soccer game or screaming with our favorite singer or laughing at a stand-up comedian's jokes. I'm actually very bullish on humanity for if this goes right, us actually having even more appreciation for the shit that our great great grandparents would actually recognize as being the sort of fundamental parts of humanity.

Yeah. And I almost how did you process, given your work with Alo, how did you process the Enhanced Games? It felt like it was one of those ideas that sounded so cool in theory, but then as I was watching it, I realized how much of the Olympics is about the pain and the glory and the sacrifice and representing your country and the every four years dynamic and just how different a gold and a silver are even though they're right next to each other on the podium. And so when I was watching it, it just felt like drinking a flat soda, you know, where you get a little bit of the taste, but it doesn't hit. I'm curious how you felt.

How are you, last question since we're out of time. How are you processing just the explosion of sports betting as I was, and kind of how it's driving sports and live events and providing a lot of funding. But at the same time, I was watching the McGregor fight, if you could call it that, on Saturday and like they don't even do betting exclusives anymore. It's every single ad is for a different sports book or prediction market. And so yeah, it's like I've never had the sports betting bug. I've at points been like, I got to give this a good shot. It seems like a lot of people really like doing this.

I gave it a shot. I could —

I watched you lose $200 and it was one of the most entertaining things.

Yes. It was wildly entertaining. It was wildly entertaining for John, but for me I was like —

I was like that's it. Maybe —

He's down to his last four cents. Let's see what he'll do now. Will he make a play?

I did get out to I did get down to four cents and then I was like, I'm going to make it all back in one trade. And that's man —