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

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You're watching TBPN. Today's Monday, July 13th, 2026. We are live from the TBPN 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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Well, huge news over the weekend. Mark Gurman dropped a massive scoop right after we got off on Friday night, Friday afternoon. Mark Gurman broke the news that Apple is suing OpenAI. Apple and OpenAI are going to war. The Wall Street Journal called it thermonuclear, echoing past attacks, calling back to the Jobs era. We'll get to that, but first the accusations. Apple is suing OpenAI, accusing it of stealing Apple's trade secrets. 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? Part of efforts by the AI company, the lamp, yeah, smart, the Cobra. 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 headphones? Is it something else? A pin? We're having Mark Gurman on the show today to break it down for us. He's coming on at 12:45.

The funny thing is I bet Gurman 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, 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 remembering back to, I mean, we had a very graceful transition to this business from Founders Fund, but 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 their information independently. Just don't take any files, leave them with the other standard practice.

Yeah, it is standard practice. 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 sort of set 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 Cupertino happy. They hate poaching. There's the famous Steve Jobs Adobe back and forth. Tang Tan left Apple in 2024 to co-found the AI hardware startup IO with Jony Ive, 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 systematically 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 Rolf Winkler in the Wall Street Journal both had interesting angles here. 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. Had interesting angles here. We can read a little bit of what Rolf said in the journal. He says, 'Apple's OpenAI suit echoes past attack. Steve Jobs declared thermonuclear war,' which is 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 stats. So he declared, Steve Jobs declared thermonuclear war on Google's Android operating system in 2010, calling it a stolen product. Now, his successor is going to battle against Apple's most dangerous rival. In one of his last acts as Apple's chief executive before successor John Ternus takes over, Tim Cook fired a missile at OpenAI. In a lawsuit filed Friday, Apple alleged that a senior OpenAI executive who once sat atop Apple's own product design team was involved in a months-long campaign to steal Apple trade secrets. OpenAI replied at this point and said, 'We have no interest in Apple's trade secrets.' But Rolf 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. There's a whole debate over what the future of devices is: more devices and different devices, or is it just no devices? But OpenAI has clearly been working on devices as we know from the IO acquisition. 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.' Quote, 'I am not afraid of Apple, but I have tremendous respect for them.' OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X Saturday.

And he said S-tier company. Yeah. He said, 'Oh, that didn't make it into the paper. Maybe 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.' 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 Fire Phone and we're going to win. And then Microsoft had the whole Microsoft phone and they were really pushing that. And Facebook, Chamath was at Facebook working on the Facebook phone.

Sort of a rite of passage. It is a rite of passage. It's an ultimate long shot as an up-and-coming hyperscaler to every, it's a rite of passage to go and challenge Apple. Now OpenAI is emerging as a new threat. It has built powerful AI models and is working toward an unspecified family of devices. Interesting to hear that, devices that could supplant Apple's. Apple's innovation engine failed to develop hit AI products and features, leaving it vulnerable to new entrants. 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. Company observers say this to slow poaching of Apple staffers, for instance. So, this could just slow the poaching that's happening. Friday's lawsuit has echoes 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. 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.

At the center of each case Apple has pursued was a perceived breach of 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 on the board of Apple saying, 'Yeah, we should definitely launch.' Kind of similar to the Krieger-Figma dynamic. Yeah. Very, very tricky. 'I'm going to destroy Android because it's a stolen product,' Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson. 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 employee's 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. It does feel unusual to me, but I mean, I guess people would bring... I don't know if something's public, like if you're bringing, like 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 if it's like actual secret parts, that would be really, really bad. Interviewers want candidates to talk through their work. The question is whether the parts were sensitive, something Apple doesn't offer evidence of and is seeking discovery to determine. A spokesperson for OpenAI said, quote, 'We have no interest in other companies' trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers everyday people everywhere.' Tan and a more senior employee, Changlu, didn't respond to a request for comment. At Apple, Tan worked very closely with Jony Ive, its famous industrial design chief. Ive left Apple to build his own design firm, later poaching Tan. OpenAI bought that company, IO Products, in 2025 to spearhead its own device development efforts. Bad fellows can quickly become enemies in tech. OpenAI made the IO acquisition, revealing its intention to wean customers off smartphone screens a year after announcing a partnership with Apple to integrate ChatGPT into some parts of the iPhone. The Wall Street Journal has a content licensing partnership with OpenAI. Of course, bigger companies have so far failed to dent Apple's dominance. 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 OpenAI is that Apple itself has so frequently been accused of stealing other companies' ideas that it has spawned a new verb, 'sherlocking,' which is a reference to 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 eventually became the Spotlight feature baked into Apple, but it was not very good for the company that was running Sherlock. And so, Apple, this is the same, like, you know, the labs will steamroll this or 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. Apple recently tried to sherlock Particle, but it seems like Particle is doing fine. 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 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 like $5 to turn the light on and then $129 to turn it off. Mhm. That's great. Genius. I like those. I also like the ones that are like 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 like easy money.

Ben Thompson read through the filing as he would. 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 two recounts how Apple has spent a lot of time and money building products that delight customers. Paragraph three basically says that everything they do is a trade secret. And paragraph four introduces Changlu and spends the next page and a half recounting his crimes. Ben Thompson says Lu is almost certainly guilty and an idiot to boot. Not mincing words there. Apple has a lot of details about Lu's behavior, including downloading dozens of proprietary Apple hardware-related files and encouraging other Apple employees to do the same because he did it on his Apple-issued laptop and furthermore logged onto Apple servers for weeks after he had already left the company. Ben says Apple security, as depicted in this case, is shockingly poor. First, the company lost track of the fact that Lu didn't return one of his laptops or disable it remotely. Second, due to what Apple claimed was a bug, Lu continued to have access to the company's internal servers for weeks. And Ben has like a bunch of other context on here.

Yeah. He talks about how Tan 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. And I'm trying to think if anything... 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, that the company could and would go through everything if you ever crossed them. And so it's, yeah, everyone should know this, but somehow it, at least Apple alleges that it was not known or just a terrible mistake or brazen, you know, brazen mistake. He does talk about a little bit of 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. OpenAI 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 totally embarrass themselves with the 2024 new Siri introduction. Had their most prominent blogger declare that something is rotten in the state of Cupertino. 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 mid-cycle 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 lose 400 of their best employees 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 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 two-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 circling back to something is rotten in thermonuclear Cupertino, but it's not the first. Go sign up for Retool. Read the whole article. There's a bunch of context. And we're going to come back to the story at 12:45 Pacific with the Germinator.

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. It's not the first thermonuclear war between hyperscalers, Mag 7 companies. You go back to Apple versus Microsoft. They had a massive copyright war over the look and feel of the desktop. So, Apple sued Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard actually back in 1997 when they reset the relationship, saying that Windows 2.03 and Windows 3.0, oh, and the HP NewWave, I don't know what happened with that, copied the Mac's graphical interface. The courts concluded that the similarities were already licensed, functional, standard to graphical user interfaces and otherwise unprotectable. In 1994, the Ninth Circuit affirmed that Apple's GUI deserved only relatively thin copyright protection against virtually identical copying. Of course, we talked a little bit about the Android proxy patent war 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, software patents. There was a whole era where you would see Apple launch something 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 comprehensive cross-license. But the broader war continued through Apple's seven-year Samsung battle. In 2018, the jury awarded Apple a $539 million damage 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. Amazon and Apple, Apple and Amazon have also gone at it over ebook pricing conspiracy aimed at Amazon. This was in 2009. 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 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 played out in the courts, but it did create basically a $10 billion revenue headwind for Meta in the short term, which they ultimately overcame. There's a whole bunch of others. The two MAG7 participants who have never really fought, Microsoft and Meta have never really had a company-level feud. Microsoft and Tesla also have never really had a corporate battle. Tesla sort of stays out of a lot of this because they're not in as many of the same markets. Of course, the big one that people are pointing to these days is Uber versus Google. Where is this? So this is the most dramatic corporate espionage-style case in modern technology. Anthony Lewandowski, 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. He founded an autonomous truck startup, Otto, which Uber then acquired, bringing Lewandowski and his team inside Uber's autonomous vehicle organization. Waymo alleged that Uber had obtained and was using its LIDAR and autonomous driving trade secrets. The case exposed internal Uber communications, raised questions about what then CEO Travis Kalanick knew, and threatened to derail Uber's already expensive autonomy program. Days into the February 2018 trial, Uber settled. Waymo 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 Waymo held on to that, but sort of a financial civil settlement. And interestingly, Uber promised not to incorporate Waymo'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 Waymo 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 very tricky situation. And Lewandowski, so there were actually two suits in the Uber-Waymo battle. There was the civil suit which settled, of course, as I mentioned, but Lewandowski separately pled 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. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison, 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 2017, way of the future. Way of the future. That is crazy, crazy. So Uber eventually sold the Advanced Technologies Group, which was their self-driving unit, to Aurora in 2020. And it valued that unit at $4 billion. So like pretty substantial progress for something that was sort of beaten up. And there were a few different reasons. The Waymo litigation cost, 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 cars internally, Cybercab and Waymo and all the different... There was recent reporting that Uber's like actually trying to block the rollout 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 one tweet I saw. I think it's in the timeline somewhere. We can get to it at some point. But what's going on with Paramount? Let's... And remember, we're going to come back to this with Mark Gurman himself, who broke the actual story on Friday. So, we'll have another 30 minutes to talk about this story. We will. 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.

Rohan in Semaphore says, 'Paramount weighing leaving California over Warner Brothers rift.' What's going on here, John? So this is on the basis that California is trying to block 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 $600 million to $1.2 billion in ticking fees would potentially be paid out to state taxpayers. So if they leave, those fees would not be paid to the state.' Paramount just issued this response to the state AG lawsuit. Brian Stelter is breaking it down, saying the complaint distorts settled antitrust law and is based on misrepresentation of competition in the entertainment industry today. So, Paramount is weighing whether to shift major operations out of California after Attorney General Rob Bonta and 11 other state attorneys general 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 Zaslav over at Warner Brothers Discovery. But a very controversial acquisition. All the shareholders. Yeah, everyone did very well. But people were very worried because they owned two historic studio lots in Los Angeles. Would they need both of those? Would they convert one to apartment buildings? This was sort of the nightmare case for fans of Hollywood filmmaking that it would become a more agile, lean, globally distributed studio. Would they be making less films? Would they change 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 industry becomes more monopolistic and there's less buying activity. So the proposed deal is the largest merger in Hollywood history. 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. Of course, 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. 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. We saw this play out with the Shutterstock-Getty Images question where you have immense pressure in the stock image market from an entirely new outsider technology. Consolidation makes a lot of sense usually in those scenarios. But if you're just looking at it, if you're just defining the industry as only Hollywood studios, then yes, this does represent more consolidation. 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. But executives have privately complained that Bonta refused to negotiate. Worth noting that the Justice Department has already cleared the merger while China and other international regulators have raised no comparable objections thus far. So from an 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 movement to Texas and Florida, but in terms of filmmaking, Toronto, London, Atlanta. Exactly. So maybe Georgia. I don't know. I'm sure every other state is gunning for this because bringing an industry to town is almost always a good move. More jobs for your local economy, more tax dollars going around. There will probably be a competition, but we'll see. We'll see where this develops and we might have someone from the media analysis industry 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 we got another letter. More than 200 researchers and economists, including Jack Clark, Jeff Dean, Noam Brown, Tyler Cowen, Sholto, John Schulman, Eric Schmidt, Dean Ball, Yoshua Bengio...

Joshua Bengio.

Signed a statement urging governments and institutions to act now to prepare for AI's economic impact. They start the 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 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 useless, you know. No one's really saying that.

Ed Zitron's saying that and like 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 not useful, it's going to go away.

People out of billions.

Go away. I'm just saying there are people that don't believe this. But yes, this does feel like actually an easier statement to agree with than the short timelines of fast takeoff in two years, 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... 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...

So three is really 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 the actual top leaders, interestingly. So, if you look at who signed this, you have a ton of people from OpenAI, Anthropic, Stanford, METR, like every Harvard... like every lab...

Bam Margera, I think you said.

No, no, no. Google, Jeff Dean, like you have people from top... from top institutions, but not the CEOs, not the investors. Like there's been other... there's been other... I mean I guess Reid Hoffman and Jaan Tallinn and who else is... I mean Eric Schmidt's on here, but notably absent are Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, I don't believe Demis is on here. Is he on here?

Yeah, but you have Jack Clark, Sarah Frier.

Yeah. So, but what's interesting is that it's sort of like the proxies. It's the right-hand men and women of the AI leaders that are signing. And so you have to imagine that Dario, Sam, Elon, Demis, Sundar, Satya, 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 Sholto 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... like that big pause letter that Elon did sign at one point?

A lot of people signed it. 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... 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 Dario or Demis or Elon. They just said that it could bring large-scale job displacement. So 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 think this still feels much more like the AI doc than like AI 2040, right? And that like 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 2040 is like, okay, we have this, this is our plan A. We should be doing this specific set of, you know, policies, tasks, 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 a global slowdown of large-scale AI training runs essentially. And this is very... yeah, this is very, very different. So much easier to sign, but AI 2040 didn't have like signatories. I mean it had people that like helped out with it in general and then they did poll them as to... they polled some of the authors to say like which one do you think is most likely to play out. But I guess by any... I guess everyone implicitly in the AI 2040... 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? Is it plan D?

I think plan A is... they have a 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 like this. I like the idea of more economic research, more policymaking research to understand these things. It's not like it's hard to get wrong because the end result is just more information, more studies, more, you know, conversation and proposals. It's not anything specifically like if it was like, 'We like large-scale job displacement is coming next month, we need to, you know, print money and do economic stimulus broadly like we did during COVID,' 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 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 think we do with where interest rates are and with the history of how we've dealt with employment shocks in the past. 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. Like it's kind of just a 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. But 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. One of them is an account called Collected Bands, who's a Porsche enthusiast, a BMW enthusiast, likes to drive fast, younger... 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 out 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. And so he hangs out in places like the Angeles Crest Highway in the Santa Monica Mountains, you know, around Malibu. And which is near you. Yeah.

And so he likens himself to kind of the sheriff or the mayor. He calls himself the Batman. He claims to be the original Meta Ray-Bans guy. I don't know how true that is, but over the weekend these two crossed 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, like 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? 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 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 like 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 like the millennial against the brain-dead sort of zoomer and they just couldn't even have a conversation. They were just sort of speaking past each other, you know, 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 probably 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, like 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, you know, if you're not driving them a lot, it would probably at least track T-bills, right? 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, very careful. I didn't realize that bison roamed so freely and were 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 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 the tourist was seriously injured, but I guess the man did recover, which is very, very good to hear. You never want to see someone injured on the timeline, but he really does get thrown way, 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'm so glad he's okay.

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 TBPN Ultra Dome. Alexis, how you doing? Welcome to the show.

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

There you go. Yeah. I want your current thesis on premier IRL 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. Revenue is 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. Hyrox went from 650 athletes in 2017 to 1.5 million. World music tours top 100 tours grossed 8.9 billion. How are you thinking about this? Is this an opportunity as a fan or as an investor or as a businessman? Like what's your overall thinking on live events in the future?

I've asked every time an athlete comes on here, I'm expecting them to have some like, you know, basically performance super intelligence. Yeah. Oh, I have a database with every lift I've done. It tells me exactly what to lift and where to ice. And it's like, no, I just have a guy that, you know, tells me if it hurts, I walk it off or something.

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. I got one for you. Yeah. I think you should incubate a robot circus, an event that you can go to. And I think in about two years you will have robots capable of feats that will be wildly impressive. You can imagine like a drone show where the drones fly up to within, you know, a foot from your face. You've got humanoids going crazy. French Canadians right now running Cirque du Soleil who are very mad. I think I'll give you this. Yeah, it's robot Cirque du Soleil.

Really quickly, so 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 you're sort of there's like 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?

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

Do any of the athletes turn it down?

Are you have you have you bid yet? You know, you know the Jensen jacket now. The you know the Jensen jacket's going to a good cause. It's our friend Justin Mar's inflection grants. So all the money, all the proceeds are going to be given to you know founders. No strings attached, no equity, just love the game. How much do you think the boom in live events is driven by social media and flexing like these are these you know very exclusive basically you know you can call them like one of 10,000 assets right or they're these like ephemeral you're buying a ticket but it's also you know there was a very viral post over the weekend.

Yeah. And I almost... how did you process given your work with Alo, how did you process the Enhanced Games? It felt like to me it was like one of those ideas that sounded so cool in theory, but then as I was watching it, I realized like how much of the Olympics is about the pain and the glory and the sacrifice and representing your country and like 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. Mhm. And so when I was watching it, it just felt like drinking a flat soda, you know, where it's like you get a little bit of the taste, but it doesn't hit. And 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. Mh. And so yeah, it's like I've never had like the sports betting bug. I've at points been like, I got to give this a good shot. Like 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, a hell of a parlay. Like 20 different legs.

It's starting it's starting there's... well I think Saturday's event could be somewhat of a turning point with the UFC because you know there's at least some potential... there's an idea that maybe there was people that knew there was a major injury going into that and there was too much money on... I think we will have a national conversation about this I'll give you 10 to 1 odds that it happens this year by the end of the year. You guys are good. I also heard an interesting stat 99% of gamblers quit right before they hit it big so if that really goes national and people embrace the statistic I mean it's just math like you know anyway We had a bet. We had a bet running through that this interview would go over cuz we always love talking to you. Sorry it's been so long. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll do it again soon. Great to see you and congratulations. I congratulate you all on Twitter, but congrats on the exit. I will still point out as soon as I saw you. I know. I know. I need to apologize. I need to apologize. You're like, 'Yeah, we're a bunch of you're a bunch of like why would you want to invest in I saw the potential. You guys deserve every bit of it though. Thank you. I appreciate that. Great to see you, dude. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Cisco critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is Morgan Housel. He's been on the show once, twice. I think this is his third time. Fourth time, maybe fourth time back. Well, we got a bet going now. Okay. How are you? Yeah. Can we start with sports betting? Is it an epidemic? How do you think I how how has the sports betting boom and the gambling boom and the hyper-financialization worked its way into your thought process and your work generally?

Yeah. It's such a classic when like the image of like a boomer at in the Vegas like airport just, you know, hitting hitting the button over and over and over is like sort of like an iconic image in my mind. And I think that's proof to what you're saying, which is like, you know, if everyone had a casino in their pocket for the last hundred years and probably every generation would have been gambling at a pretty high rate.

How do you think about loss aversion in the gambling in the world where you're doing these like crazy parlays? Because there's been all these studies that show that people have more negative feelings about losing money than the good feelings that come from making money. This general idea of loss aversion. If you lose $10, you're going to feel more pain than the joy that you would equivalently feel from gaining $10. So people are generally loss averse. And yet gambling seems like a formula for endlessly triggering that loss aversion. And yet we don't see that actually play out. And then you also have this other concept of house money where like if you do win, it's not your money that you earned from your paycheck and you're much more likely to take higher risk from there. And you see it with loss aversion in people's lifestyles as well. If you go from a Honda Civic to a BMW, it feels pretty good. If you are forced to go from the BMW back to the Civic, it's the worst feeling you could ever possibly imagine. Will Smith talked about this with fame. He was like, becoming famous is amazing. Being famous is okay. Losing fame is the hardest pain you could ever experience. And so I think there's a lot of things in life that are like that where you're taking risks and particularly like investing when you know as a matter of fact that you're going to have losses that's just coming with it. And if the losses are going to feel 10 times worse than your gains it's going to be tough. There's so many of like the best hedge fund managers, stock traders, the people who've actually done extraordinarily well over years and decades and you look at their track record and they might be right 55% of the time. Maybe like 65% of the time if they're incredibly good at what they do. And so really what their skill is is they became very comfortable and level-headed losing money. That was how they made money over time was paying the cost of admission of just dealing with that volatility and loss.

Yeah. I've been disappointed that a lot of the folks that I know that participate in gambling refuse to take my advice and invest in the gambling companies. Just buy the house. Because some of the gambling stocks you know you like the industry, hate the industry, but some of the gambling stocks have been very performant. And it feels like it should be the solution and yet it doesn't have the same psychological impact of the quick wins that come from actually playing. Shifting gears a little bit, I wanted to ask you about the publishing industry, the non-fiction industry. Tim Ferriss put out a blog post asking the question, has AI already killed how-to non-fiction and he tells a story about his books. And he says that on the 2026 run rate he's down 57% on sales of books and he sort of attributes that to some of his books being substitutable with LLMs. Just the idea that if his 4-Hour Chef book was a bunch of recipes and you can get those directly and I'm wondering about how you think the publishing industry, the book landscape, there's also this piece in the Atlantic about people just not reading at all anymore. What are you thinking about where we are right now in terms of the publishing industry and where we're going?

Yeah. It's crazy how captured audiences were 30 years ago. Like, pre-internet, if there's nothing on TV that you're excited about, there's nothing on radio that you're excited about, and you don't have a book physically in your home, and it's like 8:00 p.m., you're kind of just choosing between options that you're not that excited about. But now it's like truly infinite possibility. I don't feel like people are bored anymore, right?

Interesting. Yeah. I was in a bookstore recently and the power law of publishing is fully on display because you walk in and the Mel Robbins book, for example, will be shoved in your face with a massive display and tons of copies. And then if you're actually looking for a book, you have to find the section and it's much harder to dig through and it might not even be in stock. And I would have assumed that the internet would sort of flatten that and lift the tail, but I guess there are power laws everywhere and so certain books go viral. What I'm interested in is this idea of there are certain authors that publish a book every year and they sort of just base hit, base hit, base hit, and then there's another version of that playbook which is have one really defining book but then continue to franchise it, promote it, add on to just continue to drive sales. And I think that's what Jordi was alluding to a little bit about you have a podcast and you can drive sales to your existing catalog even if you're not publishing new books.

Yeah. I think it's the same thing with podcasts. I think Rogan is like an order of magnitude bigger than everybody else, at least on Spotify. Jordi can't name a single Matt Damon movie.

Bourne Identity.

There you go. Oh yeah, that is the series that you like. Matt Damon also famously passed on Avatar and he was like, you would have made so much money from that. But James Cameron said the movie, it's not a Matt Damon vehicle. It's just a movie that the idea exists regardless of.

Has there been a book written on the power law? Not the venture book, the power law, but the book on just like every single place at the power law? Because I'm wondering, does power law apply to marriages where like the best marriages are actually 10 times better than, you know,

But couldn't you make the argument that no, the difference between you and LeBron is actually... I guess the difference still could be bigger, but it could be.

Because what you're thinking of is Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. It takes well-known computer algorithms and then applies them to everyday life. So a good example is the 37% rule for choosing... this is like known as the secretary problem. But when selecting amongst a fixed number of options, apartments, job candidates, even potential partners like marriages, spend the first 37% of your search observing without committing and then choose the next best option that is better than everything you've seen before. And you'll be mathematically optimal. And it takes all these different algorithms and applies them to everyday life. It's a fun book.

With parenting, do you spend any time thinking about or trying to identify where your children might be 10 times better or have the potential to be 10 times better at something than their peers? Because I look at this between my children, even looking at athletic abilities. I think it's already completely noticeable who's the better, at least natural athlete. And I believe that will probably carry through throughout their whole life, is my intuition. Not to say... here's my... not for my kids. Let me tell you a story. So I was a skier growing up and for my generation there were two skiers who became head and shoulders above everyone else. Lindsey Vonn and Ted Ligety. They both won Olympic gold medals. Everyone knows Lindsey Vonn now. When Lindsey Vonn was 6 years old, she was in a different universe of everyone else of talent. It was so obvious from the time she was a small kid that she was just the best out of anyone. Ted Ligety was not that. He didn't hit his stride till he was like 18, which was so rare. And so I always... it's always interesting that yes, there are some people from a very early age. Tiger Woods was on TV golfing when he was like two as a talented golfer. And so there's that, but there's also these people that just don't hit it until late in life. And those are always interesting. A lot of entrepreneurs like that that don't really find their stride until they're older.

Is it possible that he just didn't care enough until he was late in his teenage years? And prior to that, he was always that good, but just never put the effort in or the time? I think this might bore some of you, but I think it's so fascinating. One of the things with Ted is that there are rules about the kind of ski gear that you can use for racing. Like they have to meet these sizes and whatnot. And they changed the rules at one point so that your skis had to have a certain side cut. Ted was the first person in the world who figured out how to ski on the new skis and he just completely dominated everyone else for several years after that before they kind of caught up. So there was some of that that was interesting. But I think that's the rare one. I think to your point, the Lindsey Vonn story is more common when from a young age they are just so preposterously better than everyone else.

Yeah. I want your reaction to this chart that Joe Weisenthal, friend of the show, shared and we'll have the team pull it up. It's the percentage of US household net worth over time. And for a long time, real estate was the dominant place where American households held their net worth. But for the first time we are seeing that households are increasingly holding equities. Cash and cash equivalents peaked in the 80s and is sort of declining around 10% of household net worth but equities have been completely up and to the right. Maybe it's just a temporary dislocation in the stock market. The stock market's doing very, very well. Houses are more expensive so households are preferencing that. But I'm interested in your take on what this says about US households, but also the psychology of what it means to hold a larger percentage of your wealth in equities versus your house.

Now, and part of that, if you're an investor for the long term, the odds that you're going to experience a 30% decline or even a 50% decline are almost 100%. That's just how markets work over time. And does the general population of just ordinary Americans who are not watching this and listening to finance podcasts and reading finance books, do they have the stomach for that? Or do they even know that that's the game that they signed up for?

Yeah, I am interested about... I know some people who bought in Mill Valley like years ago, decades ago, just because that was a logical place to buy and it was a nice community and of course the house prices are insanely high with the AI boom with San Francisco booming. But there isn't a logical like, oh yeah, of course they'll move to Florida at some point because that's not really what people do culturally if you are in California. You sort of just retire in the town that you grew up in or live in, raised your kids in. If you can do that, if you can sell a Mill Valley and move to Oklahoma, that's great. That's real wealth. But if you sell a Mill Valley and buy a Mill Valley, you can't make anything.

You're not doing anything. What... how do you... do you ever think about the different prescriptions for solving the housing crisis? We're having Sager and Jetty on the show tomorrow to talk about it, but I'm interested if there's anything that you've dug into, whether it's through the abundance or permitting or anything that stuck out to you as particularly exciting around the way America deals with housing broadly.

Yeah. And so I think the idea that, you know, there's a great saying by Connor Sen who's a great thinker around these topics and he says the future is a policy choice and the reason that home building is so scarce and we don't have enough homes is because we've made a choice to be in that situation. If you were to leave it to its own devices it would be solved in due time. We did this similar situation at the end of World War II when you had 16 million soldiers come home. There were not nearly enough homes for them, but at the time it was much easier to build than it is today. And so you had things like Levittown that sprung out of the middle of nowhere and they were building 25,000 homes in a year and you solved the problem in due time. And so it's simple but just politically much more difficult to say like yes, I think by and large it's permitting. It's not an exciting answer, but we've made the choice to make it difficult to build where people want to live.

Yeah. For those who don't know, what is the actual story of Levittown and can that be replicated today? I was in Irvine and it feels like a very planned community. Of course, most of that town was built maybe a hundred years ago, but just driving around and seeing so many apartments and houses, it felt like this could be replicated, but I'm not exactly sure how far it would.

Yeah. I've been surprised that we haven't seen more spreading out of basically longer commutes or longer distance commutes because we're on the cusp of self-driving cars. Even just a basic Tesla Model 3 has self-driving that can make an hourlong commute much more durable, palatable. And then you also have telecommute and a lot of companies have like a work from home Friday policy or some flexibility around that. And I was expecting that there would be some alleviation from the pressure. Like when I look at the home prices in San Francisco and then I compare them to the rental prices in San Francisco, $4,000 for one bedroom, and then I look over in Oakland and I'm surprised that we're not seeing more flattening out. But I think that there's still a huge demand for being in the action in a particular area, in a particular town and even in a neighborhood. And so there's been a lot of pressure on the highest value areas. I don't know.

Yeah, Jordi,

I do too. But at the same time, when I moved to the city that we're in now, I had an extremely long commute and a terrible apartment. And I had a real roommate in the same room as me.

Yes. I was just going to bring up MTV Cribs which had such a profound cultural impact on me because that was the only view into how the other half lives. And I watched every episode of that show when I was younger. But what was so important about it is that you did not consider those people peers. You're like that's Master P. Of course his bathroom is made out of marble. That's not a peer of mine. Whereas today on social media you see the yacht and you see the person and you're like that guy, he's supposed to be a peer. Like I'm supposed to be there. And so the fact that it was an obvious celebrity or an athlete and that Shaq had a 12 foot bed, you didn't expect to have that yourself.

My favorite example is like the GT3 RS is like the most, you know, if you ask like a 21-year-old guy, what car do you want? If you could just get any car right now, a lot of them would say GT3 RS. And so that's my favorite example when talking about personal finance with people that I know in my life that are just starting their careers is I say like, you know, that car that you see and you just assume like if you work hard you'll be able to, you know, get a GT3 RS because that's a car you want to drive on the weekend? Well, if you want to buy that car, you basically need to make $850,000 in one year in California and be willing to spend the entire amount after taxes that you make just on that car and not have any other expenses for the year. So that is the actual cost of that car, but it's just put into their face all day long to the point where people just assume like, okay, if I work hard and I do a good job in life, I should be able to get a GT3 RS. And it's like...

It's just so normalized. I just found one for 50k. It says it's on a salvage title. It has six owners. Florida. It has aftermarket wheels, but it's doable. It's doable.

You have to pull it out. So, if you make six figs and then you spend your entire...

It's only had four accidents. Only four accidents.

Anyways, still runs. No, I was going to say I think tech has done so much to expectations over time. I was in Tahoe this week with my family where I grew up and we were driving past and the biggest most beautiful house in town, this mansion, it's so beautiful and I told my wife I said you know the people who lived there when I lived here back in the '90s that was an orthopedic surgeon and we're like there is no way an orthopedic surgeon could afford that house today. That house would be a tech CEO's house but back then orthopedic surgeon was the highest earner in town. There were no product managers at Google making 850 back then. And so it created what we used to think of like jobs that every town has. Dentists, doctors, lawyers, those kind of things used to be number one. Now they're number 47 on the earners in town.