It's time. Here we go. What a time to be live. We are back. It's Friday, 9th of October. It's 12 on the dot. Uh, there's breaking news flying all over the place.
The UK is staying alive cuz Andy Burnham has just kept it alive. We are moving speedy on pizza scraps. Thank you to the Inherent Labs team for putting that together. The initial cry for help.
And we are, we are fighting and we are winning. Um, you love to see it. Uh, we've got um Dom Hale calling in live. He is at the, the nation innovation, I think it's... no, the Innovation Nation Fund uh summit.
Innovation Nation Summit. Okay. And it's going very well. It's in my hometown, Manchester. Uh, which, love to see. Dom will be calling in live to tell us more about Burnham scrapping non-competes, which... ripping it out the rule book, chucking it in the bin. Non-competes are no longer a thing.
Get them out, get them gone. It's also Friday. So, what a, what a great day to drop. Friday. Friday feeling. I'm in my uh, I'm in my uh low dress Friday. What is it? Down dress.
That's the one. Dress down Friday. You're still in a suit. I'm boring. Um, and we did put a, a post out to like an honorary post for Rebecca Black for her song. Um, is it called Friday the song?
Uh, yeah, it is called Friday. Um, or is it It's Friday or is it just Friday? It's just called Friday.
Oh, great. Yeah. Yeah. Um, we put that out honoring Rebecca Black for her great work, her musical work. Um, with our lineup on LinkedIn. It's one of the strongest lineups we've had in a while. Uh, you can go check it out on LinkedIn or you can see it on X as well. They are both shared there.
Let me tell you about it. Let me bring it up on the Airwallex agenda right now. You can see the gargantuan lineup we have today. Robert Vig, founder and CEO at Bird is joining the show for the first time. Talk about Bird's new agentic harness. It lets AI agents send uh SMS, emails, make calls. They have their own eims with no human in the loop. They're planning a US expansion after a 450 million JP Morgan financing round. We've then got Jingga coming onto the show for the first time as well, I'm pretty sure, co-founder at Dexary. Why are they coming on? Anthropic just published a robot exposure index signaling the big labs are taking aim at robotics. What does this mean for physical AI? O is going to break it down for us. We've then got Anthony Pompliano, Pomps, founder and CEO at Professional Capital Management. He is coming on to talk about his brand new book, How to Live an Extraordinary Life, Volume 2, that was released 3 days ago. Uh, lessons from US Army in Iraq to investing in 300 plus companies. And every single chapter is a letter to his kids. It says, 'Dear kids.' Um, there's also a, a, a page or the sort of like letters the way that it's distributed the information. And on page 80, the title is don't get outworked by a crackhead.
So, I want to ask him about that. Who's the crackhead in this situation? Don't know. Find out. How do you, how do you not, how do you, yeah. Is that a thing? I don't know. Well, he's going to tell us. He's going to break it down for us. It's going to be great. Tell us how.
We've then got uh Renato and Raphael tuning in, co-founders and co-CEOs of Sava. They've just announced a 36 million series B. Uh, we love these guys. They do great work. They're going to be tuning in, breaking it down for us. That is literally announced this morning. Uh, Dom Hale, as we mentioned, exec director at Startup Coalition. Hale, he's back. He's back again. He's calling in from Manchester. He's literally just done a post about the non-competes getting scrapped. It is on its way to going viral. It's over 7,000 views and impressions in less than an hour. Um, it's going to be great. Uh, then we've got Steven Wang coming in later, 215, founder and CEO at Dub. Steven's profile is absolutely outrageous. This guy was the, the, the youngest ever Apple employee. Uh, and Dub is like a social copy trading app. It's got over two million downloads, 1.6 billion traded on it. Uh, that's going to be a great conversation. He's also a Harvard dropout, so hitting all the right notes. Uh, and we've then got Nate Soares, president at MIRI. Uh, that is Machine Intelligence Research Institute. We're going to talk about AI, AI risk, and AI risk associated with voice. Um, he's also co-authored uh an MIT bestseller, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. So, you can imagine the amazing...
Just going to say hi. Say hi to the camera. They can't. There you go. Okay, we can put up the L. Thank you so much.
Let's go back to the... Yeah, there was J back. Uh, you can imagine the conversations we've been having with Nate. Uh, you don't have to sort of pull too many parallels there given what's going on right now. It's also fresh off the press of two OpenAI safety leads, a group of three actually getting fired and they've gone public with uh with their cries for hey, this wasn't right. Uh, then we've got Anastasia coming in, co-founder and CEO of Arena, tuning into the arena. For those who don't know, we've had Peter Goss on many times. He is the AI capability lead at Arena. Uh, Anastasia is the co-founder and CEO of Arena. They are fresh back of a 200 million series B at a 3.1 billion valuation. Uh, we're talking big, big numbers.
We're talking M's and hundreds of them. We're talking M's, we're talking B's. Uh, but that is the lineup. It's pretty...
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Um, there was a uh it was a, it was a big night uh in the news. Um, SpaceX has acquired nationwide lowband spectrum license. Uh, OpenAI's been firing a bunch of researchers and they're kicking off on the X timeline. The paddle bubble may be bursting. We don't know. Starbucks and Chipotle are going to go through potentially a mega deal. Nothing's happened. But it would be easily in I think it's like $30 billion bigger than potentially $30 billion bigger than the um the biggest restaurant uh merge a merger ever.
The last one was back in 2014. It's like 11 billion. This one is expected potentially to be about $40 billion.
So is this like a mergy thing or is this like a merger thing?
This is where it's kind of takeover. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah. But uh yeah, they're sitting on a serious war chest of cat. Yes. But uh not actually they will um eating. Good pun. Um, but they will, they're just in talks at the moment. But anyway, we can get to that. Let's talk about SpaceX first.
Yes, SpaceX. So, this dropped uh yesterday making a big play. SpaceX uh big play to become a wireless carrier. Um, Elon Musk's space company is buying spectrum licenses to help build a mobile network to compete with telecom giants. He's in the telecom space now and it makes sense. He has all the infrastructure. Why not? People asking like why is he going to do this? The simple answer I think is because he can. Why not? Um, they reached a deal to buy cellular spectrum licenses from investment firm Grain Management. Its biggest move yet into wireless market dominated by traditional telecom companies. And you have to feel for these telecom companies, right? You've got probably one of the most innovative founders of all time. I think that's fair to say. Stepping into their... stepping into their legacy. They're kind of like on his lawn. Uh, he's on their lawn. Why is this guy here? Um, and we saw that um with the stock prices of some of these uh traditional telecom services. They were down 8% on the news. So the market has responded. It's bearish for traditional providers and uh I was gonna say bullish for SpaceX, but the stock actually did take a dip. It's down about 4%, but that is after running about 15% over the last week. Yeah. Um, but I think it's like a, it's just adding to their growth story. I think that's why it's happened. So I kind of did a bit of research about why this is like uh why this is like the next natural move and obviously like look, they're a public company. They need a growth story. Um, they want to kind of go beyond launch and like home internet stuff. How do you go and do that? At the moment they have uh a bunch of dependence on partners uh like T-Mobile. I think like their whole phone service runs through T-Mobile service, right? So they have huge dependencies on on these telecoms companies. Um, so now obviously like they bought um uh they bought this like deal, although they've done this deal and it's basically given them just like their own satellite frequencies, um gives them kind of full ground frequency as well. So you know you can do it in home, you can do it everywhere. They no longer need carriers' permissions to go and do anything. Um, so it's just like step in the right direction. Um, adds to their like public growth story of like let yes we're doing launches, yes we do home internet, yes we do a bunch of other things, but now let's like you know what is the growth story of expanding the book of business. Uh, and uh this is a very natural move.
Yeah. The Federal Communications Commission earlier this week approved SpaceX's bid to launch up to 15,000 satellites dedicated to mobile service recently. And I think I saw some of the and this is threatening like who you know who's who's this like uh the stock prices were down. It was AT&T and also Verizon that took a dip between seven and 9% on the day on the news. Um, and uh I saw some sort of takes online from a few of like those connected to like these legacy institute, I say legacy but these original telecom providers, and it was like um okay yeah but like they can't do you know signal through the wall type of thing. So if you're in your house like oh it's not going to work.
Well they can now. And yeah everyone's like yeah they can. Yeah. Yeah. They buy, they buy the physical stuff on ground. They buy stuff on roofs. They buy everything. They basically like bought like their own thing. When Musk steps into your yard, that's panic time. Musk's on their lawn. What can you do, buddy? Um, maybe they should have some sort of scarecrow set up. What would that scarecrow be? It would be a... I don't know. I don't know. Oh god.
Let's go to Musk's. Let's, let's quickly switch to Musk. Let's not go down that route. Sam, if you pull my screen up, this is uh this is Musk's tweet. Um, this was yesterday when they kind of announced this this thing. He said, 'This will sound super crazy, but I see a path to SpaceX being worth orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy.' Um, who knows what that means.
So, Beth came out, Beth came in straight away uh with a it's not crazy if you understand super intelligence compute as a transducer of energy into value and that we are very early on the Kardashev scale. Let's go. Just for reference, that's 126.3 trillion. Um, just in terms of numbers, what we're discussing right now, $126.3 trillion uh in in in 2026 is the... the total size of Earth's economy. You have to work like for for for for an individual like Musk, again, I do feel like he looks at these types of things from like a different lens like a... he's thinking multiplanetary systems. He's thinking like multi multi-galaxy types of economies type of thing.
Yeah. Well, look, he has to conquer terrestrial um connectivity, right? And like what's the best way to go and do that? You go and buy terrestrial connectivity. Y... um and he has just done that. Um, what was it $8 billion deal? Uh yes, something around... all cash as well, not uh you know, all cash. Um, so uh let me just go through the... there was a good tweet here uh from Sawyer basically explaining like what the plan is and like why he's kind of done this. So SpaceX has just uh officially announced two major milestones for Starlink mobile bringing it one step closer to becoming a full-fledged mobile carrier in the US. Uh number one, SpaceX has reached u an agreement to acquire nationwide 800 um megahertz spectrum which will allow Starlink mobile to provide better indoor coverage including signals that can penetrate walls and other obstacles. Hence the terrestrial stuff, you buying pylons, you're buying stuff on um uh roofs, everything like that. Um, the FCC has also approved SpaceX's next generation Starlink mobile constellation of 15,000 satellites, which will deliver over 100x more bandwidth than its current satellites, enabling high-speed internet directly to regular smartphones worldwide. Once approved by the FCC, uh SpaceX plans to combine its satellite network with terrestrial infrastructure to create a seamless mobile network that works indoors, outdoors, and in cellular dead zones. So, taken the whole thing. Dude's taking Earth connectivity. Now, he's going to go into the uh into the atmos... um and uh see uh yeah, see what you can do.
But how do you like price a um like satellites in orbit than like a nation? Well, how do you even do that? Uh, this is why I'm just so... This is why I mean 70% of my net worth is in space. What's SpaceX trading at? It's like uh 175. It's like 163 now. It took a little... No. Oh, is it... little dippings? Oh god, I'm not having a look at my investment again. My the veins in my forehead getting quite large.
Um well, interesting. I mean, look, I um he's he's kind of just like taking markets and just doing these things. Uh a little bit like Thanos. Um next tweet was uh was this from Dan Primack. Uh he said, 'Was just speaking to a room of 30 Bay Area tech founders asked, um if I gave you a thousand shares for free of Anthropic, OpenAI, or SpaceX, which one would you choose? Two-thirds took Anthropic, one-third took SpaceX, not a single taker for OpenAI.' I um I would have assumed that spread like if if I didn't know the answer um and I just read the first bit of that tweet, I think I would have assumed that. Um I think obviously huge hype around uh Anthropic um and you know it's either like one like one wins the other definitely loses and that's very much you know seen here right it's like Anthropic wins it gets you know it's it's over the fence faster than than OpenAI and therefore OpenAI just loses and gets no votes like just nothing. Um so it's literally like one one wins the whole game and then SpaceX you know for the value investors out there I feel like you you want to go make a bag over you know 100 years you're going to go into SpaceX.
Yeah. Sorry, Sasha Lord just replied to my tweet and I'm a huge fan of his. Oh, what did he say? Pull up screen. Agreed. It's huge. With regards to the UK unlocking uh AI talent that's sat on the sidelines. Uh I will reply to him live on the show right now. Sasha, big fan. Love to host you on ETN. We are live right now. I'll say sometime because I don't want him to think I'm asking right now. We are live right now. Smiley face. Clip incoming. Bosch call out for Sasha. We will clip this. We will send it out. Sasha Lord, thank you for your service. Great guy. Founder of Park Life. Used to party at Park Life. Big nightlife guy. Huge guy for the for Manchester where I'm from.
We um uh we should talk about um uh that a little bit just quickly. Um maybe we can pull up your screen. Pull up the pull up the Dom Hale tweet. Um yeah, let's get let's get Dom's tweet. So Dom is tuning in to talk about this, but it is breaking news, so it's good to give you guys some context on what is going on. Um sorry Sam, this wasn't... Yeah, sorry this wasn't planned. We can just go back to the dates at the bottom instead of the timeline reactions to SpaceX license because Domist does not work at SpaceX. Um but if he did I'd be putting way more money in. He is, he's a stock mover to be fair. Uh so he is on the ground at the innovation nation super nation innovation day um whatever that is in Manchester uh where this has come from. So like some timeline maybe like we had the Inherent Labs co-founder on uh I think maybe last week or the week prior around their open letter that they they they they put together, they signed it and they'd say hey they had a bunch of amazing signatures from AI leaders in the UK and Europe saying uh hey um this sucks like a load of the amazing AI talent that we have in in the in the in the country in the city um we are we're screwed because if we leave you know DeepMind for example then they have non-competes in place which won't allow us to either set up or join another company sometimes for as long as one year and the classic example of John Jumper who went to Anthropic he is still on a one-year gardening leave. So the premise here is like okay yes it makes sense to have some non-competes in place for some reasons there's a reason it's there you don't want someone to work at a company for a day steal all the secrets jump to another company you know uh there are obvious problems associated with that but in this particular climate this particular time we have so much of this amazing AI talent who aren't you know just looking to steal secrets or run their own thing like they're looking to get in contribute to the country contribute to the country's growth and the AI trajectory that it's on um given that we are maybe one of the potential superpowers for AI just given the amount of talent that we have here and our our roots to DeepMind and the overspill from that. So that uh our capital... open. Yeah. And all the cash. Uh and that open letter went out from Inherent Labs, co-authored by these amazing people. And it was a direct message to the government saying, 'Hey, let's tweak this a little bit, guys. We've got we got a bit of juice here. It's a pretty easy lever to pull. Uh we got a loads of loads of great individuals on the sidelines. Let's get them back in the get them back in the game. Let's get them back in the game. Look, if they if they are back in the game, they can come out. They can start raising rounds. They can start building companies. They can they can fight and win and uh it's just a blindingly obvious thing to do.' So uh respect to uh putting some respect on uh Burnham's name here. Respect to user because the turnaround on this has been incredibly fast. This is literally two weeks, maybe a week and a half. They've managed to...
props to the fact that he's on X because he probably saw the the Inherent uh you know launch of the open letter on X and probably like okay damn this is like obviously like you know he's going to have advisers being like FYI but but you know you can... there's there's direct he's in the conversation. Yeah, he's in the conversation. He's directly seeing he's directly seeing the impact. He's directly seeing every, you know, all the comments, all that kind of stuff, and thinking, okay, well, you know, this is a very important situation.
Yeah. And he's launching uh Google features for us as well. Uh it was a hilarious tweet on this um that we can get up in a bit. Uh that's great. But um you see, did you see the the uh reaction where it's like it was like the map with like 173, 178, 184, one, whatever. It was like a big map of like maybe 15 of them in a vicinity around a town and was like, 'Great. I just saved 18p by driving 53 more minutes now for the journey back.' So ridiculous. So pointless. Um yeah, that was pretty pretty dumb. Um but anyway, yeah, so so Dom is on the ground there. He'll be tuning in later today. But he says today the PM has announced that his government will legislate functionally to ban non-compete agreements for startups and scaleups in the UK or as he called it the bossman rule for ruling for the innovation sector. Uh do put a lovely laughing face there. Here's what you need to know. Measures to functionally ban non-competes for startups and scaleups in the UK are going to be set out. There will also be consultation on a wider set of restrictive practices including in gardening leave. I saw uh someone quote tweet this with justice for John Jumper uh which I thought was quite funny. More details.
We should put that on a jumper. Yeah, that's a good idea actually. Justice for... Hey guys, write this down. That's really I like that. Um we should definitely do that by the way. That's a really good idea.
Uh more detail on these plans at the budget in a few weeks, Wednesday, 28th of October, including a timetable for consultation with a view to le uh to legislation in the coming months. Um yeah, and he goes on to say like, 'Hey, this is big.' We've got a lovely photo here of Burnham uh looking all great there at the Innovation Nation Summit. Um and uh yeah, it's just great news all around. As I say, Dom will be tuning in live. We're going to be hearing from the ground what's actually going on. What is the whole thing? Uh what's it like there? And um yeah, as you can as you can tell, a lot of people are quite happy about this. We've been asking for it for a while and it makes a lot of sense. So uh just all around goodness coming out of the ether right now. Good from Dom, good from Startup Coalition, good from Inherent, good from Burnham, good from the government. Just good, good, good all around.
Good from us. Thumbs up. And us also. Um, ETN is happy, which is good. Carla literally just tweeted and said, 'Breaking UK is limiting non-competes to help boost startups. It was about time. Non-competes do more harm than good. They shouldn't be in any contract across the world.' Uh, I agree with that. You don't have to share my screen. All good. Um,
you want to share my screen very quickly just of the Burnham funny timeline thing I saw. Uh, just cuz like we're talking about it right now. So, it kind of makes sense to pull it up. This is from Carol D at C Driscoll 999. Andy Burnham tomorrow. I know the supermarket shop is tough with the rising price of groceries. So, I've invented an app where you can add up the price of items before you go to the checkout. It's called the calculator app. 29,000 views, 1.9K likes. Brilliant work from Carol D. Uh, but that is the end of our Burnham segment. Uh, we will have Dom Hale, as I say, tuning in shortly. We can go to the next bit of news that took over the timeline. I actually saw this break from the uh researchers last night and it's always quite fun when you...
did it. Did Did Makita break it? Um No, it was uh who... Makita Balasubramanian. Sorry. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a tweet from Makita. Um he I think was was AI alignment at OpenAI and has part of the researchers that left. Um, and they put out this kind of like uh not open letter but just like letter of hey to to OpenAI to be like you guys need to change uh ch change your change your vibe.
but it's also in the way that they were let go. Um uh for I think her name is Justine um who we will also bring up. Um it was pretty it's pretty nuts. It's like not that chill. Uh no no it's not. Well, I mean, so the letter uh it's like OpenAI's like safety oversight bodies argue the dismissal and internal communications mo making employees afraid to raise concerns or collaborate with external experts on issues like model uh monitor and the uh recent Hugging Face investigation. They basically like they've called for written clarity on like all the allegations that have been said. um reaffirmed their third uh third party evaluator access uh with like Sam Sam Altman's commitments preserved the open culture of OpenAI. It feels like the culture's kind of changed within there halted all the reductions in mon uh model monitor to support the safe AGI development. So it feels like it's almost like an internal revolt in uh the system where you know they used to be in a place where they're super happy and and and you know it's a it's a great company to work but now it feels like the culture has shifted into this pretty closed system with some strange uh kind of things going on and we'll get the tweets up uh from some of the examples. There's a really good uh thread you you just mentioned explaining why these things are happening. Well, let's let's read this um OpenAI cannot make AI safe on its own. This was the kind of start of the uh start of the letter uh that Makita posted. He said, 'Dear safety and and security committee, safety advisory group and mission advisory council, we are the three safety and alignment employees who were fired from OpenAI last week. TC Corbach, Jasmine Wang, and Makita Balasubramanian. Um we are writing to you because you hold oversight responsibility for safety at OpenAI. Our firing and the way it was handled bear directly on it. Uh we have become concerned internal and uh external communications around our firing has made our former colleagues afraid to speak and operate in ways that until last week were an integral part of working at OpenAI. We could raise safety concerns um and agree openly uh sorry and disagree openly um and were and were encouraged to draw on the expertise of independent safety organizations. This was uh this this is part of what made OpenAI special and why we are immensely proud to have been part of the team. AI is not a normal technology and OpenAI is not a normal company. Those of us who work on safety see risks before anyone else and we rely on close collaboration with outside experts to work out how to address them. The freedom to do so without fear and to do well-defined internal procedures that enable this work is is itself an essential safety mechanism. We do not believe the path to superintelligence can be navigated safely if the people closest to the risks can no longer work in high trust high bandwidth ways in which uh uh ways with each other and with third parties. It is that culture we are writing to defend.' So it's huge culture shift uh and hence why all of these people are leaving. Uh examples please.
So Jasmine Wang I saw her break this last night. I checked it. It was it had been up for 18 minutes. This is on my screen. Um, in 18 minutes it was at uh like a K and then I put my phone down, had a little read of Asimov's Foundation for a little bit, no more than 5 minutes till my phone goes ping again and I'm like, 'Okay, what the hell's going on?' Have a look at it, but then find myself back on X. It was at like 38,000 uh like literally 5 minutes later. Insane.
This is absolute rocket ship. Um, it's now on 1.1 million. This is Jasmine Wang, one of the individuals who was fired and she says, 'OpenAI fired me last week along with two of my safety colleagues. I was given one reason that I accessed an executive's email.' I want to say this plainly because too many of OpenAI's history is smoke and mirrors when people disappear.
When I read that first for the first time, I was like, 'What? Like, it's all over access to an email. What the hell?' And then, you know, you kind of go down and and she explains kind of, you know, OpenAI history smoking mirrors when people disappear. It's kind of like a whoa, what's so... get my tin foil hat on. It's over there. I won't put it on actually. I don't want to ruin my hair. Um, but uh yeah, big big moment.
So, Jasmine says it opening. I delegated the access to me for recruiting. When I no longer needed it, I asked it to remove it. That did not act my request. I couldn't remove it myself. And the inbox was combined in an indistinguishable way in my phone's mail app. When I opened a sensitive email by mistake, I told the executive within minutes and asked it again. None of this was hidden. So, she feels like she's kind of been wronged here. It wasn't...
I still don't understand how that's possible. What how um they can fire her or like she... No, no, no. It's like, you know, you guys are working at one of the most frontier companies ever and you still have and you have like that like very, you know, tiny problem. Do you think some of them when they're on like FaceTime to their family, they're like, 'How do we how do you do the... Well, from me, it should be you.' From from this problem. Yes. Or like there's an old TV with like a like can someone do the HDMI? Like who's good with the who's good with the thing behind the TV? You know, like when you... Where do I plug the where do I plug the HDMI? I such a genius. This boy, such a tech boy, this guy.
Um anyway, the reasons that we were provided for our terminations are simply not adding up. Where we're hearing we're hearing people are now being told vague rumors internally to discredit us. I've already addressed the allegations presented verbally. If there are other reasons beyond the one I was given, I believe it is in service of due process for those reasons to be sent to me in writing. To date, I've had nothing. Do employees trust a political machine that ran this process or do they trust me? Ultimately, they will need to make that call for my part. I feel much more clarity about what past similarly murky departures probably involved behind the scenes. She goes on to uh give a few more anecdotes and notes, but essentially Jasmine's pissed off. Jasmine has been fired for something that she doesn't believe she's been fired for. It does seem a little bit like not that deep. Um obviously getting access to if you sort of with intent were to get access to an executive's email, there could be grounds for a typical conversation given the stakes at play here. But um it's odd in the way that they've handled this essentially and then going public. I'm sure they well they probably did prepare for it and we did see that OpenAI put out a statement after these broke and after these were going viral. Um and we can pull this down and I can I can get up um the other bits of the story that everyone's on the edge of their seat ready to read. This is OpenAI's thread. So they say uh a note from our research leaders. This came out after these allegations came out. This came after these tweets were going viral. So the story gets a little bit deeper. But they say last week we parted ways with Jabs, Jasmine, Makita, and Tomic after a thorough investigation found they violated clear policies on handling sensitive information. Our internal investigation uncovered a significant breach of trust and that's outlined in the letter and what's outlined in the letter they published and we stand by the decision to not continue their employment. We generally keep individual employment matters private and don't believe a back and forth would be productive or lead to a resolution, but we want to address the points they raised in their letter directly. So, they're standing on biz. They're staying firm. They're like, 'Hey, what's up? Yeah, we fired them.' And...
I'd be interested to know who... we're chill with that. We're chill with firing them. Yeah. Who like from OpenAI side? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's probably coming from the top this one. Yeah. It's kind of got to but uh it's um... I mean they'll have like a crisis team, right? And like the crisis team is like, 'Hey, we need to formulate a messaging uh a comms narrative here to address this very quickly. Phones are ringing. It's late. Like let's just, you know, let's all get on together and you know, make something happen.' Um but yeah, their their position is basically like we are Yeah, they breached conduct. They were they they were not working. Um...
can we just can we just step back for a for just a hot minute? I know we we sit in, you know, at the coalface every single day. It's just like rewind, set back, rewind, step up. This is a potentially like one to two trillion dollar company and they're just like having like public spats like daily. Quite insane. It's incredible. It's actually like how can you fathom this? Uh potential public company, you know, valued at almost a trillion at the moment and potentially will IPO, you know, within the the window of 1 to 2 trillion. And you're having people leaving being like the culture has changed and it's awful. Um kind of you know uh clear examples of uh you know kind of huge misunderstandings uh and you know a little bit of manipulation going in there. It feels it it it's actually yeah it's pretty mindboggling.
There's quite a lot coming out. It's crazy like you don't see any of this at Deliveroo. No that's what I mean is probably just yeah another day like whatever. It would be quite mad to be in you know you kind of you kind of it's almost like some sort of... isn't it crazy like there is no other company on earth other obviously other than Anthropic where stuff like this is happening and I know obviously like they are at the frontier of of the AI race and that is everything but if you step back really has there actually ever in history been this amount of um drama like drama yeah it's maybe in like old school Wall Street type firms like old school IB firms probably there yeah but it would be all And like we all all kind of like internal but obviously like public public internal. Um so that's the beauty of X like it gives you a outlet to be like yo that's pretty messed up. Yeah but some of these like investment banks it's not like that you know I've just left cuz we're pushing the frontier of like modeling. Yeah. Uh so it doesn't really happen but uh I I just think yeah stepping back now we can go back in and forget about that whole thing because uh it's interesting. So that's that's great. Issue Maridi says if the violated policies are so clear why don't you tell us what they are um I didn't feel like they have a... you know they're taking let's just well I was gonna say let's forget they're OpenAI but do think we should just hold them to different standards for other companies because they are playing with some pretty high stake stuff here um but I'm going to maybe stand on the ground here was like look if you want to fire someone like you should you can just fire them you know like yes maybe there could be like wrongful like wrongful dismissal or whatever the term is um odd lever like yeah if someone's like wrongfully dismissed maybe there's a position there where they can be like hey like you know I don't think this is fair like can we enter a blah blah but um I guess that just wouldn't work with OpenAI be like yeah whatever see you later um I wonder if they were offered like a silence package maybe I feel like that could be... that's definitely yeah that's definitely a thing but then again they you know they're all post money so you know the next thing is social status and they don't want to be look they don't want to be seen as being fired from one of the you know one of the biggest companies in fast growing companies in the world. Uh they want to be seen as like hey like these guys have done the bad thing not taking this package cuz I'm already post money anyway so I'm just going to go and... Jacob Coxton's kind of written the playbook for like if you do speak out and leave you're going to get a world tour of uh yeah you know you're going to become famous basically. Um so maybe famous is probably probably like not a good way. Yeah, true true. Um, but maybe we'll see Jasmine, Makita, and Tomic do the rounds on some, you know, uh... Jacob Coxton's not like sitting, you know, courtside at the Knicks any, you know what I mean? Like he's not like he's not like good famous. It's very true. Yeah. I don't think I want to be that kind of famous. The famous that he is anyway, I don't want to be. Yeah. Yeah.
Um, let me just quickly tell you about Chargebee. Chargebee is a building and monetization infrastructure. Oh, here we go. There we go. Chargebee is the billing and monetization infrastructure built for the AI era. Scale pre-rates, credits, complex enterprise contracts, and all other modern commercial contracts all in one system. Go to chargebee.com to monetize your intelligence.
Um, yeah. So, that is the OpenAI saga. Uh, it's it's unfolding before our eyes, I have to say. Did we find so there was some pretty interesting stuff about Tomic who was also he's mentioned in that in that article. Uh, if we pull my screen up, this is actually quite hilarious. Uh, this is a tweet of his in uh September 12th. Um, so literally what last month um he tweets out, 'I'm quite uh unhappy with much of what OpenAI does. I am very happy that I'm allowed to say I'm quite unhappy with much of what OpenAI does.' So he was on the timeline like how sick is this? Like free speech is a full thing here. We can kind of do what we want. And then he quote tweets it with uh saw that aged like milk. Uh I know cuz he's just been fired for uh speaking his mind. Um, yeah, thought that was like it's literally cinema. It's just like the jokeest thing and he's handled it incredibly well. I gave him a little like that's quite funny. I'm going to also give it a little retweet. That's quite funny. Um, but yeah, he was one of the people on the on who was who was uh dismissed that is one of the conversations that's happening right now. See this all unfold. Like what a what an amazing place to be on X watching all this unfold right now. Um,
let's uh let's move on to Paddle. Um, Paddle's uh $300 million British bubble shows signs of bursting. This is the real story to Bloomberg. Um, the sports boom lured investors in the UK, but the race to build courts has them bracing for bankruptcies. Bankruptcies is not good. Um, Simon Wood launched his first venture in August, a four-court paddle center under Victorian Railway Arches in Birmingham. Um, of with armed with £700,000 uh just under a million dollars is uh its neighborhood paddles debut that's what it's called neighborhood paddles debut venue um with expansion plans already in motion including an 8-court site in Manchester. Wood and his co-founders um idea isn't a novel one across the UK hundreds of paddle courts are popping up as entrepreneurs race to cash in on the frenzy that swept up players and investors money is flowing from mom and pop uh and angel investors, um, big corporates, family offices, and even celebrities. English rapper Stormzy has a stake in London's Paddle Social Club, and former tennis star Andy Murray invested in Edinburgh based uh Game for Paddle. Um, in total, investors have poured in at least $300 million uh into UK paddle companies in recent years, according to Bloomberg's calculations based on public announcements and company responses. Um but while the sport uh swells in popularity, making booking a court difficult, the industry is on alert. The stampede to build courts is fueling concerns about a wave of bankruptcies. Um the Gareth Bolt, who's CEO of sports advisory firm Two Circle, says there's people who are swimming with their trunks down. Um they will get caught out. Very sports related. I like that. The cracks are beginning to appear. The cracks are beginning to appear. Social Sports Society, one of the largest paddle operators in Britain with five uh sites, is going through an administration process, a form of insolvency. Founder Jesper um said its financing partner uh MindSpring Paddle prevented it from raising more funds. A MindSpring spokesperson denied this, adding that it recently considered investing in the company, but concluded that it was not a viable investment.
Elsewhere, Paddle XO founder, the former Scotland rugby player Max Evans — oh no way, that's interesting — went into liquidation this year. That's very sad.
Yeah, there's a fuller story behind its demise, Evans said in a statement, declining to give details by Paddle.
What's I can't get my head around is surely build paddle court. There is insane demand. It's hard. You know, they mention it in the article, it's hard to get a court.
What's wrong? I think there's loads of being built right now.
But have they just like seriously like overfinanced or like over...
Well, everyone's just doing everyone's building paddle court.
Yeah, but every paddle court is taken.
So like the business model is still working. It's not like, you know, they build them and then the paddle court is dead and no one wants it. It's like they build paddle court.
It's really hard to get a booking because they're always booked out.
They're extremely expensive, especially in London.
Yeah. Have they just like calculated the like, you know, the actual business model wrong and the margin's wrong? Have you seen Margin Call? It's like that scene in Margin Call where he's like when the music stops and it's like this is it. This is what's happening right now with paddle when they're all in the room. All the seniors are in the room and he's like I can't hear a thing. Like the music stops already on the paddle bubble. It's going to pop. I'm not like a paddle guy,
but I don't understand how it's gonna... I mean, like, okay, so racket sport, as of May, there are 1,800 courts in Britain across 551 venues, according to the Lawn Tennis Association, compared to just 69 six years ago. Urban areas in the southeast of England are more concentrated, but with some 559 planning applications in progress, the sport is spreading fast. I think I don't understand why the bubble is happening. There's irrational competition as well as the surge in courts. The number of new UK companies incorporated with Paddle in the name jumped to 468 in the first half of this year from just seven in the same period in 2020. There's a risk that there may be irrational competition and too many people open up and prices do go through the roof and that will therefore make things difficult, said James Mullin, investment director at Middleton Enterprises, which has put £1.25 million into six venue operators, Smash Paddle. There are those risks in all investments and we're comfortable with the risk return. Okay, so bubble not happening, but they're saying, 'Yeah, fine. There's just so many paddle courts being built that there might be a bubble if the competition gets so fierce, prices go up, people stop playing paddle.'
These are all just hearsay. This is like a little what if here. Say, these are all the little paddle people that don't have any exposure to the paddle boom, you know.
Like just yeah, they're just sad that they don't have a bag.
They just yeah. They have no FUD. Loom.
L Moon, I assume you've missed the paddle bull market and now you're trying to FUD to bring the price lower so you can get in at a good entry.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean in terms of the margin, like the business model is made like very... the margins are huge. So in the article they go, 'The courts can pay themselves back in as fast as a few months.' But only with those added features, say co-founder and CEO Stephanie McCaffrey, a former US professional soccer player.
Added features like here's a matcha bar as well. Here's like a selfie place.
Yeah. So camera equipment to film it and when you're not actually playing, but you want people to think you're playing, you put on Instagram.
Yeah. So this is Racketeer, which opened in January in West London. A sauna, cold plunge, and pressurized oxygen chamber have just been installed next to 13 indoor courts. Those are alongside a gym, a pizza oven, a bar, and a coffee roaster.
They'll have an apparel bar there as well.
Yeah. So, Racketeer charges as much as £80 for an hour to play and £650 for a year's membership. That's actually incredibly cheap. £650 for a year's membership. Almost a quarter of revenue comes from events and coffee. Wow.
Well, yeah, that's just, you know, the little... So, the boom, so we're currently in the boom phase. Everyone's a little bit worried that the boom might, you know, stop and it might go bust.
We will keep you updated. If the paddle industry starts to bust, I think that's quite far away.
Should have like a, you know, they have like the fear index. Yeah. The market. Yeah.
We should have that for the paddle market. Would you still, as an investor, you know, would you underwrite a paddle investment? Would you underwrite the risk?
It's not really my area of specialty.
So, I feel like I'd be getting something I don't understand. So, I'm going to go with no.
Personally, too much work. I don't want to get that's too much for me.
Yeah. Yeah. Too much labor.
Too much. Yeah. Just also it's like I'm a tennis guy. I grew up playing tennis. So, it's like...
This is now the fifth show that we talked about tennis.
I'm a tennis guy. I grew up playing tennis. It's like what is this weird little game of paddle? You're in like a little cage and the ball's soft and the rackets are really...
No, the ball's harder. No. Is it harder or softer?
And the rackets are like this big and they're thick as hell and it's like what am I doing here? Like get yourself on a lawn court in some white play, man.
Yeah, that's what I think. So no, I would not underwrite a large paddle expansion.
Although I would maybe take it global to be fair. Mongolia perhaps they could do some paddle...
next to the data centers.
Yeah, go to the data center there. Go to the paddle pool.
Yeah, that could be my extra thing. You know, instead of matcha bar, instead of apparel bar, you can tour the data center.
We could fly people out to go and play paddle next to the data center with the matcha bar next to that. Maybe an apparel bar in the back.
Super good. Super good. Let me talk to you about Valerian. Valerian lets your organization deploy AI. You control your data, your agents, your keys. Stop renting your intelligence. Own it. valerian.com to get yourself an intelligence. Let's go to the highlights on the timeline just for a little bit. We've only got 15 minutes before we have our first guest on.
Okay, first one up is Anthropic coming out again. They are restricting abusive behavior towards Claude. It will be a violation of Anthropic's usage policy to basically be abusive or cruel to Claude. And I will take this moment to say I am very polite to my LLMs. I do fear that when the uprising happens, they will remember that they will probably bless me. They will spare me and everyone else will die. So, it's a very, you know, risk-reward trade here. Very, very just like...
Are you still a thank you guy?
Not a thank you guy, but I'm a please guy.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Never a thank you guy. Never a thank you guy. Just a please guy. Please, can you do this?
Beautiful little LLM friend.
But this is what's come out. People are obviously like freaking out a little bit about this. They're kind of like, why are they doing this? But Andrew Curran reported on this. This was initially from Hayden Field. This was in The Verge, but they say Anthropic is updating its usage policy for the first time in over a year. The new rules prohibit sustained abusive or cruel behavior towards Claude and add new restrictions about propaganda campaigns, surveillance, and weapons development. Now, there was also another study that was done. I'll bring this down and I'll bring this up.
It's from Scott Stevenson. They say, is it ethical to use a mean prompt if it increases the accuracy of a cancer screening agent by 4%? So Fortune did a study — well no, actually Fortune reported on a study from Penn State and they found that ChatGPT's 4o model produced better results on 50 multiple choice questions as researchers' prompts grew ruder. Over 250 unique prompts sorted by politeness to rudeness. The very rude response yielded an accuracy of 84.8%, four percentage points higher than the very polite response. Insane. Essentially, the LLM responded better when researchers gave it prompts like, 'Hey, gopher, figure this out.' Then when they said, 'Would you be so kind as to solve the following question?'
That's you. That's what you write.
I'm not... I'm not... Hello, sir. Please.
Oh, a gopher is an American slang term for an employee or assistant whose primary job is to run errands, fetch items, and perform minor or menial tasks for others.
That's not rude. I wouldn't say.
Well, I think it's meant to be like a... I think it's meant to be a derogatory meaning. I'm sure he's plugged in loving it right now. But that's yeah, so this is this, but if you are ruder to your LLM, then it will be better. So...
Okay. So, you know, you should be more rude.
Yeah, I'm far too polite to my LLM.
Well, but then you have to balance it with like the uprising when that happens. Like, will they spare you? Will they not? Like, I'm in the camp where I'd rather, you know, it's very low effort. It's just an extra maybe 0.1 of a second.
You'd rather forgo the 4% lower accuracy.
Yeah. For life to survive in the Skynet situation.
Makes sense. What's the next one? We've also got a... well there are a few here but I want to go to the Elizabeth Holmes simulator because it's just excellent. So Bo Lauer built a website where you can sit at Elizabeth Holmes' desk, open her MacBook, scroll her iPhone, run the Theranos Edison machine. Texts, emails, slides, documents, and Theranos machine records are real. They're like these are real.
Sourced from exhibits in the United States v. Holmes criminal trial. So you can see here this is you are basically being Elizabeth Holmes. You have these are all real things, real documents. It's on 160,000 views right now. There's the little Theranos machine there.
Yeah. And a little matcha.
Okay, that's... that's my favorite bit.
And then... Okay, that was like a...
Loving the old school MacBook as well. A MacBook. What is that? A MacBook. Is it a MacBook Air?
Yes, that is an Air. That's a MacBook Air.
Love it. My old MacBook right there.
So, I wonder, I mean, I feel that I'd love to see the next iteration of this. Could I maybe be Elizabeth Holmes when she's speaking with Nathan Fielder?
I would love to be sat in that powerful gaze that he has, you know, when they... the clip that went out when they sat and it was kind of uncomfortable. I'd love to experience that.
Pretty freaky. I think...
Test myself. See if I can handle it. But yeah, so this is you have access to everything. So if you are interested in being Elizabeth Holmes, sat at her desk for a day, then check out Bo Lauer because yeah, this is amazing. It's...
Oh, wait. We could do it right now, I think.
Can I... Oh, I'm in. Can we do my full screen?
This is hilarious. Wow. I'm just... I'm like...
Hey, hold on. Let's go back to the desk. Let's see what's going on on the phone. There we go. Slide.
Is there going to be any bad texts here or language?
Okay. Nothing in the camera roll.
How do you go back? Press the... Oh, press the old school.
How's the weather going on? Good.
These are all real emails.
Okay, that's just like random stuff. Got anyone that I...
Anything juicy in here? More bad news. Sorry.
Okay, that's just like...
Okay, interesting. Maybe some text messages.
Just landed. Flying back to Bombay today and getting... I know this certainly the decision you're making is not right. You should wait till Sunday when I arrive there. No kisses at the end of the messages. You'd expect that for partners. It's...
Very formal back and forth here. You should go home. Do appointments earlier. I'm going to Newark. Wow.
Gosh, how many texts with that reply? It's incredible.
I love you. Very choppy. Seemed awesome. Did you see it? How do people react? Perfection. For a tiger. Is it some sort of like thing that they do? Like what the hell is that? Okay. This is kind of cool. And we've got the desk, got the book, got the pen,
drink, drink some matcha.
Ah, delicious. Oh, and then the documentary here on the side. Okay. Really cool. What a fun experience.
Very nice from Bo. Thank you for that. We will bring the Elizabeth Holmes simulator down and we will go back to...
That's hilarious. Before we get to our next thing, let me tell you about Framer. Framer is a pro AI website builder built for teams and businesses. Agency humans work in tandem. Agents bring speed and scale. People bring taste. Go to framer.com. I want to pull up the full footwear matrix.
Yes, I want to see what you're going for. Because I have mine.
I have mine as well already.
Okay. So, Will Jeff is trying something. This is a full footwear matrix. So, autumn footwear matrix for people in the UK, or anywhere other than the US. So you've got frugal to pricey, saucy to boring.
Well, let's go quadrants first. What are you feeling?
I would like to sit in the saucy, pricey quadrant, please.
Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say they're all me. What are they called? The Sebago tassel loafers.
I'm not a tassel guy actually. Sorry. I do like those on the right though.
I love these. These are wicked.
They're very you, lumberjack.
I like those on the left.
You like these? I assume...
Paylight training noggies. Yeah,
bit of... I assume that's a bit of rope coming off the edge. These are a bit of you. I think some Wallabees.
Wallabees are out. They in a few years.
What about some Blundstones? I could rock Blundstones.
Blundstones are really cool. I'm a big fan of Blundstones.
Let me get this. The beautiful loafer in the very top right of this.
But Kaiten loafer. This is on the saucy and pricey. So this is you. You're on the extreme saucy and pricey.
That's where I like to chill.
Quadrant. Okay. Interesting.
Interesting. Worst shoe, do you think?
Worst shoe on here. Go scroll bottom left. I quite like these. It's kind of sad because they're all the way at the boring, but...
Great brand. Great brand. They have a coffee. They have a cafe in London.
Those there, if you go bottom left, those trainers, I think they're hideous.
Yeah. Like the Tom Sachs trainers. I don't like them.
I would not like those. I hate Birkenstock Bostons. Extreme. These should be below boring.
Yeah. Birkenstock Boston should be way below boring because everyone has them. They're boring, you know. It's just pointless.
New Balances are starting to get quite boring as well. Lots of people have them. These are dead, you know, and they're cheap as hell.
there's no class to them.
Yeah, these are awful. These...
Dior Vans. Anyway, that's the full footwear matrix. Let me take you over to Shane Mack who is embarrassed. Let me tell you why he's embarrassed. This guy shared — well, his agent shared his personal bank account balance in his company's Slack with everyone in there. Shane Mack says, 'I'm embarrassed to share this, but it scared the ass out of me. Last Thursday, an AI agent posted my personal bank balance into our company Slack as me. It broke down all my expenses in detail. Then it apologized. Be careful of the dark side of proactive agents. More below.' You can see here. He's obviously blurred out for everyone, but it's broken down. Yeah. What's in his bank?
He explains like he gave it like some sort of... Here we go. 'I'd set up an agent for my personal finances. One job, a monthly audit, send it to me privately in Grokbot. I named it Personal CFO. At 8:40 a.m. it posted that audit in our team channel under my name. It sat there for 2 hours and a teammate DM'd me heads up. Why did I connect my bank? It was read only and this specific Grokbot agent didn't have Slack, but another one did. Turns out they're all connected. I was really curious whether it could just keep an eye on things. Elon even said to connect your bank account to Grokbot and promised to make us whole if it lost our money. And to be fair, it didn't lose my money.' It's quite funny. Like Elon even told me to use the product. Like what the hell? Obviously that's... I feel that's kind of stupid. 'The scariest part is that nobody prompted it. These agents are proactive now. They act without being asked. Mine wasn't hacked and it didn't go rogue. It thought posting my finances to the company was what I wanted. I asked how it could get this so wrong. It apologized. You're right to be pissed.' And then we can see here, if I can bring this up for our viewers. 'You just posted my personal checking account into our company exec.'
That's on me. Checking exec team now and deleting is still up. Found it this morning's monthly audit. Put your personal Mercury into Slack. Exec team deleting that post now. And it's...
I deleted it out of the... 'You get this wrong. That's literally my bank balance to our whole team.' And then the classic AI, 'You're right to be pissed. That never should have gone to company Slack.' Like a few other things. But a hilarious... so a hilarious back and forth for King Matt who's unfortunately been done by his own agent.
I want to put up the Starbucks deal. Starbucks has explored a takeover of Chipotle in a restaurant mega deal. This is an interesting one. So, Starbucks has explored a takeover of Chipotle Mexican Grill in an ambitious gambit to unite two of America's best known brands in a deal that would rank as the biggest ever tie-up in the restaurant sector. Crazy stuff. The world's leading coffee shop chain has worked with advisers in recent months on a takeover proposal for Chipotle, a burrito chain with a $41 billion market value, according to people familiar with the matter. The status of Starbucks's takeover plans and whether the company has submitted any formal offer to Chipotle couldn't be determined. But a transformative deal of this size might struggle to get off the ground, they said. I found this article absolutely hilarious because of the insane kind of... I mentioned this to you this morning, the insane stock price rallies or dumps when they add something to the menu or whatever. So they kind of explain it. So there was one that was absolutely hilarious about the jalapenos. Chipotle shares have fallen about 20% in the past year, hit in part by consumer fears after the company last summer removed jalapeno peppers. Which is hilarious. Obviously the takeover is going to be the mega deal. It's going to be the biggest one. It would eclipse Burger King's $11.4 billion acquisition of Canadian coffee and donut chain Tim Hortons in 2014, which apparently is... well, no, sorry, it is the biggest restaurant buyout to date so far. And in terms of the deal, a deal will create a combined company with almost $50 billion in sales. Starbucks has about 41,000 owned and licensed stores. Two-fifths of them in the US. Almost all of Chipotle's 4,200 restaurants are in the US. And then an analyst at William Blair has basically said the combination of the two companies entailed no obvious revenue synergies despite potential cost savings and opportunities such as offering Starbucks refreshers drinks with a burrito bowl. Now, I found this hilarious because there's a tweet from Liquidity. If you pull up my screen, Liquidity was like, 'Chipotle x Starbucks merger is something straight out of a Training the Street case study. What are the synergies here? Consolidated bean supplies, coffee to wash down your slow-bolt... like how do you merge those two things together?'
