What a time to be live. We are back. It's Friday, 9th of October. It's 12 on the dot. There's breaking news flying all over the place.
The UK is staying alive because 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 fighting and we are winning. You love to see it. We've got Dom calling in live. He is at the innovation, I think it's—
No, the Innovation Nation Fund summit.
Innovation Nation summit. Okay. And it's going very well. It's in my hometown, Manchester, which I 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 great day to drop.
Friday. Friday feeling. I'm in my— I'm in my low dress Friday. What is it? Down dress.
That's the one. Dress down Friday.
You're still in a suit. I'm boring. And we did put a post out, like an honorary post for Rebecca Black for her song. Is it called Friday, the song?
Yeah, it is. Or is it 'It's Friday' or is it just 'Friday'?
Called Friday. It's just called Friday.
We put that out honoring Rebecca Black for her great work, her musical work, with our lineup on LinkedIn. It's one of the strongest lineups we've had in a while. 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 agenda right now. You can see the gargantuan lineup we have today. Robert Vis, founder and CEO at Bird, is joining the show for the first time to talk about Bird's new agentic harness. It lets AI agents send SMS, emails, make calls. They have their own SIMs 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? He is going to break it down for us. We've then got Anthony Pompliano, Pomp, 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 three days ago. 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.' There's also a page or the sort of like letters, the way that the information is distributed. 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 not— 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 Renato and Raphael tuning in, co-founders and co-CEOs of Sava. They've just announced a $36 million Series B. We love these guys. They do great work. They're going to be tuning in, breaking it down for us. That was literally announced this morning. Dom Hales, as we mentioned, exec director at Startup Coalition, 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. It's going to be great. 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 youngest ever Apple employee. And Dub is like a social copy trading app. It's got over two million downloads, 1.6 billion traded on it. That's going to be a great conversation. He's also a Harvard dropout, so hitting all the right notes. And we've then got Nate Sorz, president at MI. That is Machine Intelligence Research Institute. We're going to talk about AI, AI risk, and AI risk associated with voice. He's also co-authored 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.
Okay, we can put up the L. Thank you so much.
Let's go back to the— yeah, there was J back. You can imagine the conversations we've been having with Nate. 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 their cries for, hey, this wasn't right. 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. Anastasia is the co-founder and CEO of Arena. They are fresh off a $200 million Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation. 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. But that is the lineup. It's pretty—
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It was a big night in the news. SpaceX has acquired a nationwide low-band spectrum license. 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, I think it's like $30 billion bigger than potentially $30 billion bigger than the biggest restaurant 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 a takeover. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, they're sitting on a serious war chest of cash.
Yes, but not actually. They will be eating. Good pun.
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 yesterday, making a big play. SpaceX, big play to become a wireless carrier. 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 are asking like, why is he going to do this? The simple answer I think is because he can. Why not? They reached a deal to buy cellular spectrum licenses from investment firm Grain Management. It's the biggest move yet into the 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.
He's on their lawn. Why is this guy here? And we saw that with the stock prices of some of these traditional telecom services. They were down 8% on the news. So the market has responded. It's bearish for traditional providers, and I was going to 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.
But I think 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 the next natural move. And obviously, like, look, they're a public company. They need a growth story. 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 a bunch of dependence on partners like T-Mobile. I think like their whole phone service runs through T-Mobile service, right? So they have huge dependencies on these telecom companies. So now obviously they bought this like deal, they've done this deal, and it's basically given them just like their own satellite frequencies, 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. So it's just like a step in the right direction. Adds to their public growth story of like, 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? And 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 this is threatening like, who, you know, who's this like— the stock prices were down, it was AT&T and also Verizon that took a dip between 7 and 9% on the day on the news. And I saw some sort of takes online from a few of like those connected to these legacy institutions, I say legacy but these original telecom providers, and it was like, 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.
And yeah, everyone's like, yeah, they can.
Yeah, yeah. They buy the physical stuff on ground. They buy stuff on roofs. They buy everything. They basically bought their own thing.
When Musk steps into your yard, that's panic time. Musk's on their lawn. What can you do, buddy?
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 quickly switch to Musk. Let's not go down that route.
Sam, if you pull my screen up, this is Musk's tweet. This was yesterday when they kind of announced 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.' Who knows what that means.
So Beth came in straight away 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. Just in terms of numbers, what we're discussing right now, $126.3 trillion in 2026 is the—
The total size of Earth's economy. You have to work like— 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 multi-planetary systems. He's thinking like multi-galaxy types of economies type of thing.
Yeah. Well, look, he has to conquer terrestrial connectivity, right? And like, what's the best way to go and do that? You go and buy terrestrial connectivity.
And he has just done that. What was it, $8 billion deal?
Yeah, something around.
All cash as well, not— you know, all cash. So let me just go through the— there was a good tweet here from Sawyer basically explaining like what the plan is and like why he's kind of done this. So SpaceX has just officially announced two major milestones for Starlink mobile, bringing it one step closer to becoming a full-fledged mobile carrier in the US. Number one, SpaceX has reached an agreement to acquire nationwide 800 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're buying pylons, you're buying stuff on roofs, everything like that. 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, 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 atmos—
And yeah, see what you can do.
But how do you like price a— like satellites in orbit than like a nation? How do you even do that? 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 175.
It's like 163 now. It took a little—
Oh god, I'm not having a look at my investment again.
The veins in my forehead are getting quite large.
Well, interesting. I mean, look, he's kind of just like taking markets and just doing these things, a little bit like Thanos. Next tweet was this from Dan Primack. He said, 'Was just speaking to a room of 30 Bay Area tech founders, asked 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 would have assumed that spread— like if I didn't know the answer and I just read the first bit of that tweet, I think I would have assumed that. I think obviously huge hype around Anthropic, and you know, it's either like one wins and 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 over the fence faster than OpenAI, and therefore OpenAI just loses and gets no votes, like just nothing. So it's literally like 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 AI talent that's sat on the sidelines. 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.
Boss, 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 Manchester, where I'm from.
We should talk about that a little bit just quickly. Maybe you can pull up your screen. Pull up the Dom Hales tweet.
Yeah, 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.
Yeah, sorry, this wasn't planned. We can just go back to the dates at the bottom instead of the timeline reactions to the SpaceX license, because Dom does not work at SpaceX.
If he did, I'd be putting way more money in.
He is— he's a stock mover, to be fair. So he is on the ground at the Innovation Nation Summit, whatever that is, in Manchester, where this has come from. So like some timeline, maybe like we had the Inherent Labs co-founder on, I think maybe last week or the week prior, around their open letter that 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, hey, this sucks, like a load of the amazing AI talent that we have in the country, in the city, we are screwed, because if we leave, you know, a 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, 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, given that we are maybe one of the potential superpowers for AI just given the amount of talent that we have here and our roots to DeepMind and the overspill from that.
Open letter. Yeah. And all the cash. 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 a bit of juice here. It's a pretty easy lever to pull. We got loads of great individuals on the sidelines. Let's get them back in the game. Look, if they're back in the game, they can come out, they can start raising rounds, they can start building companies, they can fight and win, and it's just a blindingly obvious thing to do.' So respect to— putting some respect on Burnham's name here. Respect to the 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 Inherent 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—
There's direct— he's in the conversation. Yeah, he's in the conversation. 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 Google features for us as well. It was a hilarious tweet on this that we can get up in a bit. That's great. But did you see the reaction where it's like the map with 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 pointless. Yeah, that was pretty dumb. But anyway, yeah, 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. 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 gardening leave. I saw someone quote tweet this with 'justice for John Jumper', 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.
We should definitely do that, by the way. That's a really good idea.
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 legislation in the coming months. Yeah, and he goes on to say like, 'Hey, this is big.' We've got a lovely photo here of Burnham looking all great there at the Innovation Nation Summit. And 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? What's it like there? And yeah, 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 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.
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.' I agree with that. You don't have to share my screen. All good.
Do you want me to share my screen very quickly, just the Burnham funny timeline thing I saw? Just because 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. But that is the end of our Burnham segment. We will have Dom Hales, 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 researchers last night and it's always quite fun when you—
Did it? Did Makita break it?
It's a tweet from Makita. He, I think, was AI alignment at OpenAI and is part of the researchers that left. And they put out this kind of not open letter but just like letter of hey to OpenAI, to be like, you guys need to change your vibe.
But it's also in the way that they were let go.
For I think her name is Justine, who we will also bring up.
It was pretty nuts. It's like not that chill.
No, no, it's not. Well, I mean, so the letter— it's like OpenAI's safety oversight bodies argue the dismissal and internal communications making employees afraid to raise concerns or collaborate with external experts on issues like model monitor and the recent Hugging Face investigation. They basically like— they've called for written clarity on like all the allegations that have been said. Reaffirmed their third-party evaluator access with like 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 model monitor to support the safe AGI development. So it feels like it's almost like an internal revolt in the system where, you know, they used to be in a place where they're super happy and, you know, it's a great company to work, but now it feels like the culture has shifted into this pretty closed system with some strange kind of things going on. And we'll get the tweets up from some of the examples.
There's a really good thread you just mentioned explaining why these things are happening. Well, let's read this: 'OpenAI cannot make AI safe on its own.' This was the kind of start of the letter that Makita posted. He said, 'Dear safety 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 Bellisini. 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. We have become concerned internal and 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 and disagree openly, and were encouraged to draw on the expertise of independent safety organizations. This was— 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 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 with each other and with third parties. It is that culture we are writing to defend.' So it's a huge culture shift and hence why all of these people are leaving. Examples, please.
So Jasmine Wang, I saw her break this last night. I checked it. It had been up for 18 minutes. This is on my screen. In 18 minutes it was at 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 five 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 literally five minutes later. Insane.
This is an absolute rocket ship. 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 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 she explains kind of, you know, OpenAI history smoke and 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. But yeah, big moment. So Jasmine says it: 'I had delegated access to me for recruiting. When I no longer needed it, I asked it to remove it. That did not act on 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 again. None of this was hidden.' So, she feels like she's kind of been wronged here.
I still don't understand how that's possible. What, how 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 like that very 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.
Or like there's an old TV with 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 HDMI?
I'm such a genius. This boy, such a tech boy, this guy. Anyway, the reasons that we were provided for our terminations are simply not adding up. 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 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. 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 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. And we can pull this down and I can get up 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, '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.'
I'd be interested to know who—
We're chill with that. We're chill with firing them. Yeah. Who, like, from OpenAI's side?
It's probably coming from the top, this one.
Yeah. It's kind of got to, but—
I mean, they'll have like a crisis team, right? And like the crisis team is like, 'Hey, we need to formulate a messaging— a comms narrative here to address this very quickly. Phones are ringing. It's late. Like let's all get on together and, you know, make something happen.' But yeah, their position is basically like, yeah, they breached conduct. They were not working.
Can we just step back for a hot minute? I know we sit in at the cold face every single day. It's just like rewind, set back—
This is a potentially like one to two trillion dollar company—
And they're just like having public spats like daily.
It's incredible. It's actually like how can you fathom this? Potential public company, you know, valued at almost a trillion at the moment and potentially will IPO, you know, within the window of one to two trillion. And you're having people leaving being like the culture has changed and it's awful. Kind of, you know, clear examples of kind of huge misunderstandings and, you know, a little bit of manipulation going in there. It feels— it's actually, yeah, it's pretty mind-boggling.
There's quite a lot coming out.
You don't see any of this at Deliveroo.
No, that's what I mean. It's probably just yeah, another day, like whatever. It would be quite mad to be in, you know, 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 the AI race and that is everything—
But if you step back, really, has there actually ever in history been this amount of—
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're all kind of like internal, but obviously like public— public internal.
That's the beauty of X, like it gives you an 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 because we're pushing the frontier of like modeling.'
So it doesn't really happen, but I just think yeah, stepping back now we can go back in and forget about that whole thing because it's interesting. So that's great. Issue Maridi says, if the violated policies are so clear, why don't you tell us what they are? I didn't feel like they have a—
You know they're taking— let's just— well, I was going to say let's forget they're OpenAI, but I do think we should just hold them to different standards than other companies because they are playing with some pretty high stakes stuff here. But I'm going to maybe stand on the ground here was like, look, if you want to fire someone, like you can just fire them.
You know, like yes, maybe there could be like wrongful— wrongful dismissal or whatever the term is.
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 I guess that just wouldn't work with OpenAI, be like, yeah, whatever, see you later. 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're all post-money, so you know—
The next thing is social status and they don't want to be seen as being fired from one of the biggest, fast-growing companies in the world.
They want to be seen as like, hey, these guys have done the bad thing, not taking this package because I'm already post-money anyway, so I'm just going to go and—
Jacob Cotton's kind of written the playbook for like if you do speak out and leave, you're going to get a world tour of, yeah, you're going to become famous basically. So maybe—
Famous is probably not a good word.
Yeah, true, true. But maybe we'll see Jasmine, Makita, and Tomic do the rounds on some—
Jacob Cotton's not like sitting courtside at the Knicks, you know what I mean? 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. Let me just quickly tell you about Chargebee. Chargebee is the billing and monetization infrastructure built for the AI era. Scale pre-revs, credits, complex enterprise contracts, and all other modern commercial contracts all in one system. Go to chargebee.com to monetize your intelligence.
Yeah. So that is the OpenAI saga. It's unfolding before our eyes, I have to say. Did we find— so there was some pretty interesting stuff about Tomk who was also— he's mentioned in that article. If we pull my screen up, this is actually quite hilarious. This is a tweet of his in September 12th. So literally, what, last month, he tweets out, 'I'm quite 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—
Aged like milk. I know because he's just been fired for speaking his mind. Yeah, thought that was like— it's literally cinema. It's just like the jokeyest 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. But yeah, he was one of the people who was dismissed. That is one of the conversations that's happening right now. See this all unfold. Like what an amazing place to be on X watching all this unfold right now.
Let's move on to Paddle. Paddle's $300 million British bubble shows signs of bursting. This is the real story, to Bloomberg: the sports boom lured investors in the UK, but the race to build courts has them bracing for bankruptcies. Bankruptcies is not good. Simon Wood launched his first venture in August, a four-court paddle centre under Victorian railway arches in Birmingham, armed with £700,000— just under a million dollars. It's his Neighborhood Paddle's debut venue, with expansion plans already in motion, including an eight-court site in Manchester. Wood and his co-founders' 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 and angel investors, 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 Game4Paddle. In total, investors have poured in at least $300 million into UK paddle companies in recent years, according to Bloomberg's calculations based on public announcements and company responses. But while the sport 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. Gareth Bolt, who's CEO of sports advisory firm Two Circle, says there's people who are swimming with their trunks down. They will get caught out. Very sports related, I like that. The cracks are beginning to appear. Social Sports Society, one of the largest paddle operators in Britain with five sites, is going through an administration process, a form of insolvency. Founder Jesper said its financing partner, 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.
proposition. 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 about Paddle.
What's — I can't get my head around is surely build paddle courts. 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 them being built right now.
But have they just seriously over-financed or over-...
Well, everyone's just building paddle courts.
Yeah, but every paddle court is taken.
So 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 courts...
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 calculated 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 sports, 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 hearsay. These are all the little paddle people that don't have any exposure to the paddle boom, you know.
Like, yeah, they're just sad that they don't have a bag.
They just — yeah. They have no FUD. Loom.
Loom, 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. Well, I mean, in terms of the margin, 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 it 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.
We should have like, you know, they have like the fear index for the market.
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.
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've 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 whites, play, man.
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 court.
That could be my extra thing. You know, instead of a matcha bar, instead of an 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. 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,' than when they said, 'Would you be so kind as to solve the following question?'
That's you. That's what you write.
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 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%, you know, lower accuracy.
Yeah. For life, to survive the Skynet situation.
Makes sense. Fair. 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 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.
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.
