OpenAI Can’t Hold a Lead, Stripe Buys OpenRouter & AI Hits a Wall

Open Router was in acquisition talks way back when Stripe bought Open Router. For less than we thought. We thought it was good, though. Seven and a half. I think this is actually the beginning of Grok being the third foundation lab that is truly in the game. Jason Kelsey teamed up with Liquid Death on a very funny ad, which begins with the premise that data centers are sucking all the water, therefore drastically harming society. I don't think we're going to ban construction of data centers in this country, but we might. I think the backlash is way more of an issue. But what I'm trying to say, Jess, is that the backlash is not about the data centers.

The backlash is about AI sucks. It plus Sam and Jess, put it all right to the test, more or less. Why hello, friends.

Welcome to More or Less OG Audition.

The OG gang is here. We're back. But can we start by applauding Sam for his episode last week? Way to go, Sam. I had a lot of fun with the replacement killers. You prepared. I was so proud of you. No, I didn't prepare. First of all, he prepared maybe too much. There were six people or something on this pod. It was the most people I've ever heard on a pod. I will do that six-person rapid fire in a wet. I literally was soaking wet and covered in sand because I literally had a boating mishap on the way to record the pod. I had a lot of fun. My only complaint was I didn't get to do any internet shopping because I actually had to pay attention. It's hard to host.

Can I give you a really genuine compliment? I'm going to give you one, and then all bets are up. Well, after you give a compliment, I want to give one complaint, but go ahead. I interview people for a living, which honestly also involves introducing them. And I hate introducing people because you're either in resume zone or it's so hard to find a concise way that expresses both their significance, their title, but also your relationship to them, which will then inform this entire conversation. And you nailed it with all six of them. I really was very impressed.

I always prepare for these interviews, and then I'm like, shit, how am I going to introduce this person in a way that isn't boilerplate, but isn't pretending we're best friends? And even though you're very close to some of those people. The key is to actually just have your best friends on. Yes, it was great. He introduced them quickly because there were six of them. Yes. And you were concise. It turns out when I try, I'm not so bad at this. My only complaint, Sam, is that you can't have people with the same name on the same pod. It gets very confusing. I'm like, Scott who? And all men's voices are sounding the same to me. And I'm like, who's saying what? It's crazy.

There's six people. Everyone's called Scott. Here's the funny thing. So I now have my Sam bot infrastructure has the ability to run Twitter ads for me. So I messaged it. It's like, hey, I had all these guests on, pull some good quotes from them and spend 500 bucks and promote it on Twitter. And it's really funny because my totally automated pipeline for doing this did a very good job, but it actually confused the Scotts. Right. So it basically put the picture and a quote from Scott Belsky, and then had a quote from Scott Stanford. So you're not alone. That is also a Claude shortcoming when you have guests with the same name. Yeah.

Also, I listened to it on 2X, which just really changes everyone's voice. And so I was like, I think that's a modified Belsky. I think that sounds wolf-esque. So anyway, great job, Sam. You're up every four weeks now. No, just kidding. Great. Happy to do it. Guys, we are back in the Bay, back to school, back to big headlines and news. We have a jam-packed episode. Back to wearing sweaters. I know. It's August and I'm in a sweater. This is the worst. I got on a Zoom today in a sweater, and someone said, oh, you're back in San Francisco. I'd say yes. So depressing. We've got the Stripe Open Router deal. We have major AI updates.

We have a venture capitalist getting probed for conflicts of interest story. Wow. Can you even call them a venture capitalist? No conflict, no interest. Oh my goodness. Okay. We'll preview that. We also just have the usual smattering of updates, including Jason Kelsey's newest ad. We need to talk about that as well. Yeah. So some pop culture meets tech updates at the end. But guys, this is it. This is it. Pop culture corner is really AI corner is really data center corner. It's happening. We've reached the convergence. Okay. Speaking of reaching things, I'm not sure if you caught Stripe has declared we have reached AGI. Did you guys see it? I did. Well, the singularity.

The singularity. So different, Jess. They declared that in January. But they brought it up again. Yeah. They had to lick the cookie, right? Upon a deal that close listeners to this podcast may have heard some things. But as The Information was the first to report that Open Router was in acquisition talks way back when, Stripe has bought Open Router. For less than we thought. We thought it was good, though. Seven and a half. For seven and a half billion. The Information has their revenue, which I meant to pull up before this pod. But sometimes you got to work.

Well, the story I heard is that once the Stripe thing got, people started talking about the deal, Open Router volume tripled because basically no one had heard of it. But literally just talking about the deal was the greatest marketing they ever had. And so there's a funny dynamic around that. That actually explains a little bit. It's going to be really interesting how this happens. Everyone's got a router. Ramp's got a router. Everyone's got a router. It's too easy to make a router. Yeah. I already started building a new router because I don't want my tokens going through Stripe now.

For what it's worth, Dave, I got a router for you that actually is both open source and fully private. We just put a little bit of money into it. So they can't really call it Open Router anymore. Closed Router. I want to invest. Yeah, you actually totally can. I just put an angel check in. All right, cool. Okay. I want this brilliant hive mind. I'm getting deals done here, Jess. If they're done here, I get to at least write about them. And do I get any credit at all for raising Open Router's price by hearing about it first? But I think the price went down. You reported it was 10 billion, Dave, and it ended at seven and a half. Guys, the devil is in the pricing details.

Open Router was bought, a young, fast-growing AI startup, for a shit ton of money. Seven times the Instagram acquisition price. That's where we've come. That's actually the real story here, which is that this stuff just clears the deck and everyone's like, eh. Eh. Seven billion acquisition. Just another seven billion. Don't you think there's going to be a million more of these, especially once we have the IPOs running from Anthropic and OpenAI? Yeah. I mean, that's the only way that these guys can grow. Well, they also just like, it's just a percentage of valuation. There's no sense to any of these numbers. It just drags it all around at the same time. Yeah.

How much cash is involved in this? Do we know? Six billion to the investors. No. Cash or stock? Oh. I thought it was cash. It's a mix. It's a mix. It doesn't matter. Stripe is effectively liquid. Well, it is interesting that Stripe is private. And we had a very smart episode that examined that in depth a couple episodes back. I want winners and losers from you guys. You're already jumping ahead by talking about the fact that there's so much competition that could render them, in this acquisition, looking stupid. But who wins? Who loses for this? What does this mean for Anthropic and OpenAI?

For those, if you are listening to this pod and you don't know what Open Router is, I don't know what you are. But basically, it is a gateway to helping you pick the right model for the right task, thereby potentially weaning any one frontier model off monopoly power. Well, and cutting your costs. It's not even that. It's just this very simple way to use any model. Sam's right. It's not even that complicated. All it is, is you take the key and replace the key with their key, and they can multiplex it to multiple backends. I want winners and losers from you guys.

You're already jumping ahead by talking about the fact there's so much competition that could render them in this acquisition looking stupid. But who wins? Who loses from this? What does this mean for Anthropic and OpenAI? Right? For those, if you are listening to this pod and you don't know what Open Router is, I don't know what you are. But it is a gateway to helping you pick the right model for the right task, thereby potentially weaning any one frontier model off monopoly power. Well, and cutting your costs. It's not even that. It's just this very simple way to use any model.

That's what Sam's right. It's not even that complicated. All it is, is you take the key and replace the key with their key, and they can multiplex it to multiple backends. It's incredibly simple. Guys, we need to think of the listener here for a second and stop talking over each other and start putting some structure to this, right? So what I'm hearing, Sam and Dave, is you think this technology is commoditized and this is a bad acquisition for Stripe? Good or bad for Stripe? Sam and Dave and Brett. It's fine. But why are you saying that? You just poo-pooed this technology.

There's no technology. It's not technology. It's just a marketing and endpoint that got popular. And for instance, OpenClock etc. helped get popular. And that's useful. It's distribution in a very technical zone. There's no technology that matters. Is this the equivalent of a TBPN acquisition where someone paid a lot for something that's not really worth that much? Guys, I just want to point out TITB has more followers than TBPN on YouTube. Okay, I said it. Now I'm moving on.

Look, here's the way I would think about it, which is, technologically, there's nothing important. It's actually funny and scary because they're centralizing all the data. They get a look at all the requests. So you get a huge request pile coming through, which is actually quite valuable from a data acquisition perspective. But distribution is hard. Ramp announced a router, right? Everyone's going to announce a router. Stripe could have done their own router from zero, and it'd be fine. People already use Stripe infrastructure for lots of stuff. They probably built a pretty good one. It's not a hard thing to build.

But honestly, just turning on a bunch of volume from zero is useful. I said this when we first brought up the Open Router Stripe thing. I was like, I actually really like this. I think Stripe kind of missed an opportunity to be a much more important company with a bunch of these types of things. And the idea that, yeah, we'll route a bunch of money payments and now we'll route a bunch of tokens around and we can be infrastructure light, but kind of the key layer, it makes a lot of sense for them.

So I think it's a good move by them. And I don't think the price matters. The price, I'm sure, is just driven by what other people would pay for it. So it's a good move in terms of distribution, but they should expect a lot of competition.

Sam, I think you say this a lot and I think it's true. Investors will always come up to me and they're like, you and I are in the same business. We just monetize it differently. Finance is about information. Media is about information. And I think AI is just illustrating this to the next level. And if you have Stripe as a payments infrastructure layering on, literally AI intelligence, but also information about how to optimize those payments, I don't know. I think it makes sense. I also think they communicated it very well, to be honest. Their blog posts were good.

Look, the mere narrative of we're Stripe and in this AI age, we do more than clear credit card transactions is a very good narrative expansion for them. And they're super profitable, so why not? Well, clearly this is just the first of many moves Stripe's going to make. Agentic commerce is going to be a really huge deal the next few years. So I would expect them to make more moves in the agentic direction, especially in infrastructure.

We're going to need the agentic commerce heat map because I understand the potential of agentic commerce. I also think that I'm going to be assigning stories on agentic commerce until I die. That's pretty much how it is. It's like micropayments. Or it's like VR. I don't think it's VR. I'm way more bullish on agentic commerce than VR. Look, at the end of the day, I will say that one thing my bot does not do is I'll be like, I want to buy this book, and I don't let it yet clear the transaction. Right. Just buy it for me. I could easily do that. I didn't give it my Amazon credentials, but if there was a better way to do that, right?

Well, I had an interesting payment experience today, which is this question, which I think is ripe in the consumer world of, is the chatbot going to be the one interface for everything, for all our services, all our commerce, all our information, or does AI diffuse, if you will, into these products in very different ways and enhance them and build these experiences, but the chatbot isn't the gateway? And obviously, OpenAI wants the chatbot to be the gateway and Google doesn't. That game is over.

Well, I think it is because I had a really interesting experience, and this is topic two that I want to get to, but I don't know, someone sent me a bill for something, the extra gas from my rental car or something. And I saw for the first time a just pay button in the email. And I don't know exactly where it was, but I opened an email, clicked pay, and was in my Apple Pay. And that is such a world of, I don't, it's not even an AI experience per se. It isn't. But it's so much different. When I see an invoice come in, I'm like, I'm gonna have to log in. I'm gonna have to put my credit card information in.

So it was a great example. I don't know exactly who was enabling that in the stack, but there are so many ways to go more seamless in the stack that are different. I've taken over our home economics recently because we had some PA turnover. What does that mean? List out what you do now, Sam. This is also why I was paying a bill in my email. Maybe this feature has existed for four years. I don't know. I have a general rule, which is I don't pay medical bills because I'm not sure they're real. So I generally just don't pay them because I'm like, I can't be bothered to understand if this is real or spam. So it's just not worth it until they really bug you.

But I saw a bill for a child medical visit and I was like, maybe I should pay this. I went to pay it. Right. And I literally was standing in the kitchen on my phone. And of course you put in their stupid account number and then a last name, and it's like, no. And I'm like, you know what? It was 20 bucks, and you didn't make this easy enough for me, so you're not getting paid the 20 bucks. Deal with it. Right. Oh my God, Sam. I'm going to be at some doctor that's not going to see a child because we have an outstanding payment for 20 bucks. Okay. Pay it.

No, that's not accurate. But the basic point is, I do think in the PA transition world, you're taking back over accounts and you're figuring out it's a wildly fucked up world. And there is no reason that this can't be massively fixed at this point. Right. If you need money from the lessons, you may or may not get it for a while. Guys, do you guys use CC by Gemini? Because it's getting better and better. And I think it's just going to handle this. Right? Give us the CC update.

Okay. I mean, I use all the tools. Right. So I also get, I have a lot of things connected to my email. But CC from Gemini, which is literally obviously plugged into Gmail, has gotten better and better and better over the last year. It's bracketing things into urgency. I can imagine a simple pay button in my CC emails every day where it's just like, do you want me to take care of these five things? Yes. And it's just done. It does all the calendaring for you. There's this whole market of family tech startups doing AI. But they're going to get killed by Google is what I'm hearing.

That are all going to fail. It's just like when you don't own the calendar and own the inbox. They're all going to die. And I think it's just going to handle this. Right. Give us the CC update. Okay. I use all the tools. Right. So I also have a lot of things connected to my email, but CC from Gemini, which is literally plugged into Gmail, has gotten better and better and better over the last year. It's bracketing things into urgency. I can imagine a simple pay button in my CC emails every day where it's just like, do you want me to take care of these five things? Yes. And it's just done. It does all the calendaring for you.

There's this whole market of family tech startups doing AI. But they're going to get killed by Google, is what I'm hearing. That are all going to fail. It's just like, when you don't own the calendar and own the inbox, they're all going to die. They're all going to die. And then also the drive. You have all your kids' information probably stored on Google Drive somewhere. It's game over for the little guys, but I would pay attention to CC or try using it. Because I do think agentic commerce in Gmail is going to happen. I don't even know what you're talking about. What is CC? Like a person's name? Like CC? Like you CC someone on an email.

You haven't followed CC. You should plug in CC. No, what are you guys talking about? It's like a Google test of their version of a personal assistant. Yeah. Sam, do you know what they're talking about? I think it must have been only marketed to women. All moms know what CC is, Dave. I have all the other agents doing my work inboxes, my personal emails. This is so funny. I've built my own versions of this. It's my exercise, acute workload. I don't think it's as good as CC. No, it's so much better. You don't know. I want to compare my CC versus your agent.

Britt, my agent is looking at my planned workouts. It's looking at the weather. It's looking at my Garmin and my Oura. It's adjusting the workouts based on my heart rate response. I get that that serves Sam. What is serving your family? Because that's what CC does for me. That is serving my family. Britt, let's move on from this topic. This won't go well. So let's keep going here. I'm pro CC. We haven't directly addressed. Let's keep this a minor topic. Is everyone here feeling as bearish on Google as the markets are at this moment? No, the market today is another buying opportunity for Google. Yeah, Sam. Actually, Sam, your buying opportunity is back.

I love opportunities for buying Google that I then don't take and feel bad about later. I'm actually pretty excited, guys. When I agreed to interview Corey of Google, he was not in charge of all of Google's AI. He was just in charge of most of Google's AI. And I'm going to be interviewing AI Agenda Live September 23rd in Information. And he got a bigger job. So I have to prepare more for that interview. Oh, by the way, speaking of which, I'm wearing my No Queens T-shirt for our protests of WTF. Oh, that's amazing. I actually am only wearing this because I ran out of clothes. But I found this, and I had made this for last year's WTF concert for our men's protest.

Yeah, come on, Sam. The problem is I have to be in New York. So I'm going to have to find other people to know Queens protests. Yeah, good luck. All the Queens are going to be in Napa October 27th and 28th for the Information WTF. Don't wear windows. We got to fix the Queens and AI situation. There's a new report that launched today that only 26% of AI hires are women. And women are literally not getting interviews for shit. It's not great. It's not great, Britt. But you know what? The men don't care to hear us talk about that. So we'll... I know. We're in the post-woke era, so we'll just complain to ourselves.

How about this one, guys? I don't know if you saw. The Department of Justice of the United States of America is investigating Andreessen Horowitz for conflicts of interest. What? No, Dave's actually surprised. Dave, I put this on the docket. Dave doesn't read things. It's like they don't understand how venture capital works. Yeah, it's like, what's the famous John Doerr-ism? No conflict, no interest. Dave, you are the only one who reads my docket, so now my heart is broken. This is true. They are particularly scrutinizing a deal, as first reported in The Information. What is the point of a private market if you can't have conflicts of interest?

No, I knew we were going to talk about it. I just don't understand. Why? They're very angry. The sky is blue. They're going to like... Venture capitalist has board seats on two competitive companies. What do we do? Databricks, Fivetran. Two competing companies. What does the Justice Department have to do with this? The Justice Department is in charge of justice, Dave. So who got mad? Was it Fivetran or Databricks? How did this happen?

Databricks bought DBT Labs, as first reported in The Information, which sparked this inquiry. And I don't know exactly what happened from there. Reporting forthcoming. But also, guys, Andreessen is pretty close to the Trump administration. I got to say, I don't think this is going anywhere. No, that's what I'm trying to figure out. What's the point of this? It is unusual. Someone's trying to make a statement. It's like some intern needed something to do at the Justice Department. I'm just speculating here, but it's unusual. We haven't seen one of these since Eric Schmidt had to get off the Apple board with the FTC. Do you guys remember this?

I mean, we used to have... There's also the Apple Disney thing. But these things are handled by gentlemen in private. You don't bring the government into these things. That's what I'm saying. These are not Justice Department problems. Well, someone wants to send a statement then. That would be my conclusion. But Jess, what statement? I guess what's the claim here? Is it an antitrust claim, or what is it? It is an anti-competitive claim. That Andreessen Horowitz is a monopoly? Did Sequoia do this? Ooh, that would be a good story. There is no way this came from another venture capital firm because...

Oh, you'd be surprised, Jess. All venture capital firms do is talk shit about each other. I want someone to declare Slow Ventures an unfair monopoly in venture capital. This is the greatest marketing you can... I declare it. I will call the Justice Department. Occam's razor says the only plausible answer is that Marc Andreessen actually planted this because it's great marketing. You're such a great venture capital firm that it's a competition issue. That's got to be it. 100%. I would not put that at zero. The man does consider himself a modern industrialist. It's kind of brilliant. Sequoia is probably going to be like...

It's kind of like the AI thing. Sequoia is like, well, we're a monopoly too. They're going to be trying to figure out something. They're going to be like, wait a minute. It's kind of like the AI companies and security breaches. All the firms are going to be like, no, no, no, look at us. We're definitely anti-competitive because we're so good. It's like, no, our cyber also hacked the world. And we're also stopping training because alignment is in jeopardy. Like that too. That's what we're hearing across the industry.

What is the marketing plan that comes after this? Because the current marketing plans are hilarious. We're so powerful, regulate us. Or we're so powerful. The government is hilarious marketing. What comes next? What could the seed funds do, Sam, is my question. Can we get AOC mad? By talking about egg freezing. That's how you get an AOC controversy. Oh, I'm involved in a lot of those companies. Wait, why does that make her mad? An egg-freezing monopoly that's jacking up prices. Well, doesn't Trump want to kill all the eggs in embryo freezing? She's been posting her process publicly.

Yeah, and she also got divorced from her 30-year fiancé. What's going on in the wokeosphere? I don't think she has a 30-year fiancé. You can't get divorced from a fiancé. Isn't she 30? I want to know more about the fiancé. Well, guys, I just want you, all you VCs, sleep with one eye open, because you're not safe. No, this is why we don't do boards. Boards are the worst. Can we get AOC mad? By talking about egg freezing. That's how you get an AOC controversy. Oh, I'm involved in a lot of those companies. Wait, why does that make her mad? An egg-freezing monopoly that's jacking up prices. Well, doesn't Trump want to kill all the eggs in embryo freezing?

She's been posting her process publicly. Yeah, and she also got divorced from her 30-year fiancé. What's going on in the wokeosphere? I don't think she has a 30-year fiancé. You can't get divorced from a fiancé. Isn't she 30? I want to know more about the fiancé. Well, guys, I just want all you VCs to sleep with one eye open. Because you're not safe. No, this is why we don't do boards. Boards are the worst. You should never have any formal control of anything. Yeah, it does come down to boards. Okay, let's do an Anthropic/OpenAI update. We don't have to stay here long, but the clock is ticking down to the $2 trillion Anthropic IPO. Well, Jess, everyone, what happened?

How fucked is OpenAI? Well, we're going to get to that. But first, I want you guys to know, there's been a lot of attention on OpenAI's weird nonprofit structure. But do you guys know that Anthropic has this separate trust that picks the board and holds special powers? We should bust that trust. Whose trust is it? It's the Anthropic Trust. It's just a group of, I think, five, but they've only filled three people who pick the board members. And one of them is Ben Bernanke, fun fact. And this trust is also going to maintain some of that power in an IPO, which will also give the co-founders super-voting shares. Bernanke must really piss off Larry Summers.

Because it's like he is their Larry Summers. You had Larry in OpenAI, and then you had Bernanke on, yeah. Okay. But also, guys, if I told you Dario owned 2% of Anthropic, would you say that was a lot or a little? It's $40 billion. It's $40 billion, but I would expect him to own more. What about Daniela? Do we have reporting on Daniela? Was it really that expensive? I guess they really did have to raise that much capital. That's what it comes down to. Yeah. Also, their revenue is up. The Information reported 14x in Q2 compared to last year. So they are at a 14x. Q2 was $11.5 billion. There are a lot of co-founders. Eight, nine, ten.

What's it going to be like to have 50 people running around San Francisco with $40 billion each? It's one thing when there's one person. But this is actually a weird egalitarian wealth play. No, it's not just Anthropic, guys, either. Now the OpenRouter founder, everyone is going to have $40 billion. There's just so many people that are going to have tens of billions of dollars. Guys, it's almost like The Information should have a wealth conference. It's almost like that. Although, here's a funny thing. There's something very funny about, if you want to talk about relativity. So Dario, in a lot of ways, is one of the most important people in AI, right? Yeah.

Banks $40 billion out of the IPO. Who cares where it trades in five years? It's going to be liquid $40 billion before it goes wherever it goes. OpenRouter dude, I don't know who it is. What is he going to bank? A few billion? Three? Four? They profited 1.5 for the company. Six of the seven and a half went to investors. One and a half was to the company. Oh, so they actually didn't own that much of the company. Or that's just how the deal was constructed. But if you imagine, he probably still owns at least half the company, don't you think? OpenRouter has only been around for a couple of years. My point is it's incredibly capital-efficient.

So you have the guy who is one of the most important characters or whatever, maybe gets 10 to 20 times as much money as the guy who very smartly takes no infrastructure and wraps a router on top, which is not that technical, but did a great job marketing it. That's kind of a funny 10xer, right? 10x, 20x difference. What Dario did is a lot harder. Okay. Or compare it to Taylor Swift. She's worth $2 billion, and she's been at this for 20 years. The best is that the founder of OpenRouter was the CTO of OpenSea. I love it. The guy loves tokens. Yeah, it's tokens to tokens. It's just all tokens. We just change what tokens mean.

Okay, Sam asked a question, which we're going to get to. But before we finish on Anthropic, I've got to plug the awesome profile. I helped the team, but we did a fabulous first-ever story of Dario's wife. And you got it out first. Oh, I saw that. You have to read it in The Information. The Wall Street Journal copied us later, but we were first with the definitive story, including her entrepreneurial history, her romantic-turned-business relationship with Eric Schmidt that led to his investment in Anthropic, to crossing paths briefly with Jeffrey Epstein in terms of pitching him on her company. But that is that.

And I highly recommend it because Cammie is one of those people. Claude doesn't even know she exists. That's probably a special case. Yes. But was, by my reporting, growing in influence internally as well. What does GPT say about Cammie? Check it out. That's a great question. Okay. Sam, you referenced OpenAI and the fact business doesn't seem to be growing so well. I'm curious what you guys think. Dave, you might have some proprietary info or not. I think enterprise is proving tough for them. It's not like they're at a standing start in enterprise. It's not like they have no business there.

But I keep hearing anecdotally that they're having trouble getting customers to switch from Anthropic, even on credible terms. But what is everyone else hearing? This is a big issue. The truth of the two strategies is straightforward. If you look at both companies, Anthropic decided to be Microsoft and to become an enterprise company. My understanding is that they focus entirely on their largest enterprise customers and that they don't care about press. They don't care about smaller enterprise customers or small businesses. Nothing. They care about press. I don't think they do. I mean, my text messages, Dave, they are deeply engaged in their press.

They are deeply engaged. In the last two months, because they had such a bad brand, they're trying to turn it around. Maybe. The point is, they decided to be Microsoft, build an enormous enterprise business, and have done a great job doing that. OpenAI chose a consumer strategy. They were a consumer company all the way from the beginning. And so they're two completely different bodies with different organs. And I think it seems like OpenAI is trying to get into the enterprise game. It's not the core business. It's not what they started out being good at. It's kind of like Meta trying to get into hardware. They're just never going to be good at hardware.

I want to go to Britt and then Sim. Britt, what is your take? Then Sim. Well, the revenue is still growing, right? I was reading it was $40 billion is the latest. And so while it's discounted from Anthropic, it's not stagnant. And so I do think $40 billion is a big number. And I'm not counting them out. I think there's been a ton of shifts over there in our company with various people. They're still on the track to go public. I think it's not reported by 2027 is the latest, right, Jess? Sarah Fryer was signaling earlier today in the press. She was on CNBC. They change their signaling biweekly. I understand.

But her statement as of today, they will be in the public markets by 27. So that means before the end of the year is what they're talking about. No, no. I think that means before the end of 2027. They're not going to go public this year, Sam. I mean, Sam did. They're not. There's no guidance that they're giving that said that. I think what they're saying is in 2027, we will be a public company at some point. I don't think we talked about how they pushed out their head of revenue, the woman who's doing the corporate business, and just replaced her. Look, I did CNBC earlier today on this topic, and here's the basic way I would look at it.

The real story here is the variance quarter to quarter and year to year on how you project these things is God knows what, right? They changed their signaling biweekly. I understand. But her statement as of today, they will be in the public markets by 27. So that means before the end of the year is what they're talking about. No, no. I think that means before the end of 2027. They're not going to go public this year, Sam. Sam did. They're not. There's no guidance that they're giving that said that. I think what they're saying is in 2027, we will be a public company at some point. I don't think we talked about they pushed out their head of revenue,

the woman who's doing the corporate business, and just replaced her. Look, I did CNBC earlier today on this topic, and here's the basic way I would look at it. The real story here is the variance quarter to quarter and year to year on how you project these things is God knows what, right? It's an enormous variance, right? And the problem is that's a problem for everyone. People want to pattern match Anthropic and OpenAI to the rollout of the internet and Google and Facebook. We have to pattern match if you're talking valuations like this. That's your job if you're an investor. That's what they've grafted to.

They said, well, we're an internet company, and internet companies that are working grow like this. But that was a very, very different age. Companies that could control their growth. Now, look, Facebook had a period when it stalled out and had to be restarted and whatever. It's not perfect. But I think the real issue here is people, well, the ARR this year is this and we're going to hit this. No one has any idea, right? And the fact that you can accelerate and then decelerate and then reaccelerate. These are things that are acting like early-stage companies still trying to find ignition.

But they're just so big and went so quickly that they were having these IPO-style conversations about things that aren't. Now, how does it all play out? Look, anything where you can accelerate and decelerate and miss is a huge problem for the whole industry, right? Because it just means that we don't know, right? And that doesn't mean you still don't buy it or you do the Kushner barbell thing, buy some sports teams that you pay attention. Oh, that was going to be our last topic. Yes, you got to bear about it. Look, if this AI stuff works, we might as well have our hat in the ring here. It doesn't mean they're not.

And so I think they'll be able to raise capital and get out on a meme. But these are going to be stocks that wildly hit and then wildly miss their quarters. Now, OpenAI, I think if you unwound the real story of OpenAI, which I give Sam Altman a lot of credit for, it's the greatest fundraising story in the history of the world, right? And to do that, right, the narrative was AI scary. It wasn't always consumer. It was enterprise and it was consumer. Then it was floating, figuring it out. It was get all the talent and tell the story. There'll be one winner in AI and it will be us because we will compound to be so far ahead we're uncatchable. That's clearly not true.

And Anthropic did a different strategy, which was just focused on the part that was working, which is coding and business applications. There's people like, there's a lot of spend, da, da, da, da. They're crushing it with that strategy. Will that last forever? Who knows? Technical people like Codex more now, right? But it doesn't actually matter. It doesn't matter who's in the lead right now. What matters is that no lead is secure and projections don't mean anything, right? And so I think that's the real story. It's too easy to switch. Leads don't matter. It's going to be impossible to financially price any of this stuff.

And I think OpenAI missing massively on quarter and getting so eclipsed is just, it's like if Uber got hit by Lyft, right? That wasn't supposed to happen. It doesn't tell the story of how growth is supposed to work in these things. I think that's well put. I'm sure you guys might have this experience, but if I run into a random hedge fund person or investor, before they say, hi, Jessica, they're going to ask me if Anthropic's ARR is slowing. That is basically, oh, it's nice to see you, because it is the question and no one has any idea. Well, and here's the thing, it might slow and then re-accelerate, which is a mess for any investor, right?

That's the problem, is you can't price this stuff because you don't know. I was saying to someone, look, obviously anyone on this call would be an idiot not to have wanted to seed invest in Anthropic. It doesn't matter the dilution. For the people who did it, they make a ton of money. I would love to hold Anthropic stock right now. If you said, hey, Sam, do you want to hold Anthropic stock, but you can't sell it for five years? What price do you pay? I have no idea, right? I don't think anyone does because the variance is just so massive on these things. But the lockup is not going to be five years. No, but I'm saying hypothetically. I see. I see.

People will make a lot of money on the narrative of these things, and they're clearly quite useful. We all consume a lot of them. They're just, it is not like a social networking platform or a traditional internet platform where there's return on scale the same way and where once you're plugged in, you're there forever. It's much more like it's a great service as a utility. It's way easy to swap them around. And that means you're going to have these wild swings in growth rate and revenue and everything else. I mean, literally you can ask the bot which bot I should. And also, I think what you see from people like Sarah Friar, the CFO, or other executives

there is they know they have to make these comparisons because you need comparisons to sell. So they compare to electricity or something. I've done this comparison. The electricity comparison sucks for them. Electricity, it's very, very useful. It's ubiquitous. That's true. The actual value of it, though, right, from an efficiency perspective, from how much you consume. The investors made money with the rollout of electricity. I asked ChatGPT this question. If you look longitudinally over time, I actually did this comparison recently, and I'll pull up the data. We can stick it in the show notes. It's not a great story to have invested in.

Now, it's true that you can make money. You get there first pre-regulation, ride the IPO wave, you get out, you don't know. But if you just held electricity from the beginning to now, it turns out it's a great utility. And by the way, that's a regulated utility with regulatory capture. It's hard to transport. AI is globally liquid with no borders and is easy to transport. So you're going to get the lowest-cost provider. There's no money to make. Yeah. This is why it's going to be so fascinating. So people will make a lot of money trading. This is the thing you just have to be honest about. It's a great trade. It's a great trade right now.

It's been a great trade for the last few years, and it might still be for a little while longer. And the irony is they've done a really good job of getting people to give them really cheap money and then buying infrastructure, which will have some residual value, right? But I don't understand how things that are this lumpy, where you can't be the winner and compound your winning as OpenAI just demonstrated, is a thing you can own long term. I mean, it's going to be crazy to see. You know what my good analogy is for this is, have you guys seen the Moderna stock? Yeah. Well, because they're curing skin cancer now. But here's the thing that's really interesting.

There's a guy who works at Sloan and Yoni who put his life savings a while ago into Moderna on the theory that this would happen. And I told him at the time, if you actually believe that, you need to lever it all to hell, you'll make a ton of money, which he didn't do. Didn't your grandfather also do the same? I hope I'm not betraying any privacy. He did or did not lever it. He didn't lever it. And so I'm sure he made some money, but he didn't make, I mean, this is a generational wealth moment. He levered the crap out of it, right? But he was like, well, I'm holding it forever. That's insane. And Moderna is an IP company. Yeah.

Well, because they're curing skin cancer now. But here's the thing that's really interesting. There's a guy who works at Sloan and Yoni who put his life savings, a while ago, into Moderna on the theory that this would happen. And I told him at the time, if you actually believe that, you need to lever it all to hell. You'll make a ton of money, which he didn't do. Didn't your grandfather also do the same? I hope I'm not betraying any privacy. He did or did not lever it. He didn't lever it. And so I'm sure he made some money, but he didn't make— I mean, this is a generational wealth moment. He levered the crap out of it. Right. But he was like, well, I'm holding it forever.

That's insane. And Moderna is an IP company. It's the same thing as publishing. The stock is going to go down. The innovations might be amazing. But unlike Lilly, they don't have any angle other than publishing, which is not a good business. And the stock can go down. You can have these moments. It's a great thing to trade because there's a great narrative. Hooray, new, very cool vaccine thing. People are going to love that. They're going to buy it in that moment. But it's not a long-term hold. Wait, what happened? It went from 50 to 150 or 175 in one day. They announced a skin cancer vaccine.

Which, by the way, again, there's a lot of people with $80 calls on that thing that it just made insane money. But it is just really interesting, this whole vibe, which, by the way, relates to Calci and all this gambling stuff. It's like people are so deeply making money and trading stories that are not owning assets. It's not about owning Moderna. I don't think you want to own Moderna, right? But you sure as hell can pay attention to a positive press thing that can swing the stock wildly quickly. That's how you make all the money. Sam, before I even had coffee this morning, Sam was like, what percentage of one's net worth should be in memes?

And I was like, well, that's a deep question, Sam. I didn't understand that question, Sam. Well, look, I just think if you think about it, we all have assets that are financial assets. They have cash flows. They're valuable companies. And then we have a lot of things that we own that trade at one billion times their cash flow. They're not financially priced. Okay, so narrative. Yeah, so those are memes. SpaceX is a meme. It's a great meme. It's an awesome meme. SpaceX, like Moderna, has every ability to pop out headlines that people are going to go nuts for. But it isn't that dissimilar from a GME.

Not in that they don't do amazing things, but just in terms of how it's priced. You know what's so weird is that I've been playing with GrokBot now for the last week. And it said I was signing into something with SpaceX AI. And then I'm signing into another thing with Cursor. And there are so many brands confused within GrokBot. And I'm like, what is going on here? But to the Anthropic and OpenAI point, I think it's also these things Elon just launched can come out of nowhere and also threaten the market. This game is so early still. And there are so many people in the world who have not adopted AI or any of these models.

And so I agree with your point, Sam, about the five-year trend being incredibly lumpy and unpredictable. And the six-month outlook seems the sharpest. Which is, again, completely fine as a seed investment. We're used to this as seed investors. Things have an incredible quarter, but then a shit quarter, and then a great quarter, and then this happened. That is what we're used to. And by the way, if you tell me, hey, I have a company three years in, they're doing really well, revenue is still super lumpy, hard to predict, that makes all the sense in the world. The only difference here is that these things are at a scale that's never been seen before so quickly.

And everyone wants to tell a going-public, projectable-cash-flow public market story about them. That's really hard to tell, right? Because they're still, for anyone in this industry and what's playing out, operating in a lot of ways like the biggest seed companies in the history of the world. Oh, Britt, tell me about GrokBot. Well, I would like Sam and Dave to weigh in. I was off last week, so I didn't really install it until a few days ago. GrokBot is another agentic harness that connects all your things. It does have a simplified user interface, which is great.

However, it's made by Elon as part of the Cursor acquisition within xAI, SpaceX, blah, blah, blah, eventually Tesla umbrella. It's made by Cursor. I know, but it also says all the other brands everywhere I click. Every time I have to log into X, I cancel my meetings because it's going to take me that long to figure out how to do it. Again, a really good job onboarding you. You can connect all your apps really simply. Just like everything, you have to feed it all your data. You have to get it to know about you. Theoretically, you can set up multiple agents with different vertical ways of expertise. So I have my research agent and my whatever agent. And it's fine so far.

It's good. It's fast. It's better designed than everything else. Again, this all feels like it's table stakes. It's definitely the best design so far by a long shot. I have serious respect for the product work and design work done here. In what way? Because I think of just a prompt field. It's by far the best version for a consumer. Just being able to boot up one agent, two agents, three agents, four agents. Each one has a different job. They will do things in the background. They can all use a computer in the background. It's genuinely well done. I think this is actually the beginning of Grok being the third foundation lab that is truly in the game. That's my take.

This is a good product. Now, to Sam, to the conversation about OpenRouter earlier, distribution is not easy on these things. It doesn't matter how well designed an agent product or a social network is. Distribution is very, very difficult. Now they've got the advantage of X and things like this, but nonetheless, it'll be interesting to see how far this thing distributes itself based on the quality of the product. There's a lot of people talking about it. I do think they moved the bar forward. I have to actually start playing with these things again because I have gone down my own crazy version of this where I don't use any of the software. I feel like I should.

If you guys think it's this good, I'll actually spend time going back to use some of the software. It's worth checking out. I think they did a good job. Well, the irony is it's the most consumer-friendly. If I had a normie friend in Texas who wanted to play with an agentic harness, I would just send it to them. And yet it's tied to Elon and it's named Grok. And I'm not sure how people feel about all that, much less AI in general. I mean, in Texas, they'll love it. Well, I guess in some parts of Texas, they'll love it. A lot of people hate Elon in Texas.

The thing that's wild to me about the moment we're in, and understanding this, is I think they also launched XII recently, a code repo thing to compete with GitHub. They did. Which has been hilariously down constantly because he can't keep up with all the bot traffic. Here's the funny thing to me about that. It's a great example. If you said, hey, I'm going to launch a GitHub competitor, that used to be a hard thing to do. Now it's like three people sitting somewhere in Elon's office or something, or some office around. They're just like, yeah, we're just going to— I'd say that just changes the world so dramatically when all this stuff, you're just like, I don't care.

There's no software lock-in, right? It can be distribution. It can be anything about you. But you're like, oh, I'm angry that GitHub is down. It doesn't matter. It's so easy to replace. This is a really good point, Sam. And I was thinking about that last week. We were off the grid entertaining some friends, and I wasn't paying that close of attention to what was going on with GrokBot. But that was my exact take, that wow, you can kind of just build this.

If you said, "Hey, I'm going to launch a GitHub competitor," that used to be a hard thing to do. Now it's three people sitting somewhere in Elon's office or something, or some office around. They're just, "Yeah, we're just going to..." I'd say that just changes the world so dramatically when all this stuff, you're just like, "I don't care." There's no software lock-in, right? It can be distribution. It can be anything about you, but you're like, "Oh, I'm angry that GitHub is down." It doesn't matter. It's so easy to replace.

This is a really good point, Sam, and I was thinking about that last week. We were off the grid entertaining some friends, and I wasn't paying that close of attention to what was going on with GrokBot. But that was my exact take, that wow, you can just build this. You could have started a month ago, and it comes out pretty good now. Yeah, it's fine. It works. I've got this company we're investors in called BitRig. This is the former Swift UI team from Apple, and it has built a really amazing iPhone app development environment. I know these guys. Aaron Sitzig is all fired up about this.

It's gotten so good. You can build any iPhone app for yourself now, and it's truly amazing. I'm building front ends for things fully in Swift on my iPhone, from my iPhone, and then sending them out on TestFlight. And it's so good. I thought you can't build from iPhone. You have to do it from your desktop.

Well, they did. But BitRig went back around and they created a server-based development environment that you can talk to from a Mac app or from an iPhone app. So there's no actual code changing on the iPhone. That was Apple's problem with these apps, that if you ship an app to the iPhone, it should not be able to change itself while it's on the phone. And so this is basically using a server to develop a new iPhone app that you can then push to TestFlight and have your users download it that way. And it's pretty amazing.

I'm building iPhone apps, which, I mean, the amount of money you and I spent investing in these things in the 2010s. I'm building entire startups, iPhone apps, just for fun. I have my own portfolio app, my own health app. I have six apps. Most of my home screens have apps that are just for me. Yeah, it's amazing. Almost like if there were a new OpenAI hardware device, you could make it. But is it just a puck? I don't think there ever will be an OpenAI hardware device. No, there will be. And did you hear all of Apple's new devices leaked? There's a bunch of leaks that Apple has had out. That usually means they did it on purpose. Oh, 10 things leaked.

I do think there is something with the devices, though, Britt, to your point with OpenAI, because, again, they're great narrative capitalists. It's a classic buy the narrative, sell the news, right? Which, again, makes these things hard to be public, which is the argument that they will never release a device, because it will only hurt their stock price if they're public. It's hard to imagine a world, which is very, very different than Elon pulling off some rocket. He has the downside of rocket blow-up.

I agree with that narrative. Do you think, therefore, that the impetus to just launch things to keep your highly paid researchers and engineers happy no longer exists? Because that used to be another reason.

Well, that was how they got all the talent, for sure. And the strategy was get all the people and pay whatever, and then give them their own fiefdoms and let them do whatever they want. It was basically about talent acquisition. But there was this era that I think we're now past of the labs playing a game where they would be valued on talent acquisition and narrative. That works great until the numbers show up, right? And the problem is now that there are numbers, those types of pure-play narrative games become a lot harder, right? It's the classic Silicon Valley thing: don't ever have revenue. It destroys your story. There's nothing like data to screw up a good story.

Sam, by the way, I'm surprised. Maybe you have them and I just have not seen them. Do you have narrative capital T-shirts? Because what kind of meme lord are you without? Oh, that would be a good fund name. There should be a venture fund that is just called Narrative Capital. There has to be one. Only invests in narrative companies. Yeah. Fact-free zone. Okay, guys, we have not gotten to sending your pee to data centers yet, which really was one of the more surprising things I've seen on the internet.

Okay, so I'm browsing the internet, as one does, and I see something. I'm like, this is surely a joke. And then I watch it. I'm like, don't think it's a joke. Jason Kelsey teamed up with Liquid Death. Oh, the Jason Kelsey ad. Yeah, on a very funny ad, which basically begins with the premise that data centers are sucking all the water, therefore drastically harming society, which, hilariously, they don't do. Well, it's nuanced. The Lake Mead thing is a real problem.

And so this ad urges you to pee in a jar and send it to cool the data centers and spare our water. This is kind of shocking, guys. I mean, we think AI shapes pop culture and tech, but this is wild. Britt, what was your take, Wingson? The funniest comment I saw was this girl saying, "No fucking way I'm sending my pee with my DNA to that data center. I don't want AI all up on me like that. I'm going to send my cat's pee instead." And I was like, that's so funny.

Well, I can tell you that after having been in real rural America for the last six weeks, no one gives a fuck about AI. No one uses AI. People don't care. They dislike it. Not only that, they actively do not care. And these issues are not actually the issues. That's the main thing we learned being in Montana most of the summer, is no one cares. And everything that Silicon Valley thinks is the issue is not actually the issue. The data centers, no one cares. What people actually care about is they're sick of people sending them AI slop in email for work. They don't want to read AI. They don't want to. Oh, hat switch, hat switch.

Yeah. I mean, they're just sick of it. They're sick of it actually being in their life more than anything. And I think that's pretty interesting. The main use of AI we saw while in Montana was some real estate posting. No, real estate redesigns. That's the main place that you saw it. See the house before and after. Oh man, AI better cure cancer quick. I don't know that it's going to roll out as quickly as AGI 2027, whoever Larry and Sergey called. We're going to wrap this Sterling episode, but I don't think we're going to ban construction of data centers in this country, but we might. I think the backlash is way more of an issue than...

But what I'm trying to say, Jess, is that the backlash is not about the data centers. The backlash is about that AI sucks and it is inhuman. No one has ever seen an AI video or read an AI essay. They intuitively dislike this experience. There's a visceral feeling to this. And so trying to stop the data centers, I think, is about that. It is not about water or any of this stuff. It's about this feeling that people have that AI just sucks. It's not that great to interact with, reading one of these essays or watching a video, or even the apps that get created. A lot of them, they're slop. There's even a word that's been invented for this. And so I think that's actually where the energy of this is coming from.

And I guess one thing I'll say that's back to the prior topics that I think is interesting: human metabolism of technology is much slower than we intuitively think, especially when we're on the rise of one of these new technologies. We are on the absolute ramp of hype right now. And we're going to see all these things go public. I do think at some point these companies are going to run into real growth problems, which is that they have to figure out how to grow into verticals that they're not currently in, because technology itself just has not taken a form yet that can move its way through certain types of enterprises. I keep hearing this on the front lines, open claw world and being directly at the front lines, that enterprises are not ready to adopt this stuff we're talking about. Even the best of the best sales teams are having problems convincing the human factor in all of these organizations to adopt this stuff.

And I guess one thing I'll say that's back to the prior topics that I think is interesting. Human metabolism of technology is much slower than we intuitively think, especially when we're on the rise of one of these new technologies. We are on the absolute ramp of hype right now. And we're going to see all these things go public. I do think at some point these companies are going to run into real growth problems, which is that they have to figure out how to grow into verticals that they're not currently in because technology itself just has not taken a form yet that can move its way through certain types of enterprises.

I keep hearing this on the front lines, open claw world and being directly at the front lines, that enterprises are not ready to adopt this stuff we're talking about. Even the best of the best sales teams are having problems convincing the human factor in all of these organizations to adopt this stuff. And so I think we're going to see, in 2027, 28, this come home to roost for real. In what way? What's going to happen? I think you're going to see a retraction in the market. You're going to see we've built out a dramatic amount of infrastructure. A huge $3 trillion, $4 trillion of CapEx has gone into this.

And everyone rushed in and they're trying to make the same money that Anthropics making. And the use cases and the things that are going to metabolize this further into society have not appeared yet. And so you're going to see a correction happen where we've got too much infrastructure, not enough use cases. And then there's going to be a bunch of money made over the next 20 years. But there's going to be a pullback at some point here. And it's going to happen after the IPO's unknown time period. This is the whole pensioners always get fucked, right? This is the NVIDIA BlackRock deals where the bag holders are the pension funds.

A bunch of people are clearly getting a lot of money on these IPOs, right? That are the tech insiders. But ultimately someone gets hurt, right? Someone number go down, if you believe that. I think so. Just look at the SpaceX IPO. The SpaceX IPO is telling the story right now. The exact same thing is going to happen. Well, but SpaceX is fine. We'll see. It's just sideways. It's supported by a meme, right? It's a narrative story. This is the thing I think is unclear that I think SpaceX, to your point, is a good example of. It's like who has an incentive for number go down, right? The problem with some of these things are so big and the country wants them.

From a financial perspective, the money has to go somewhere, is you kind of need either someone to come back to first principles on economics. Or you need someone who has a real incentive for a number to go down to build the narrative. Otherwise, people will just not on purpose, but implicitly collude to let these things drift along and be very valuable. Yeah, totally. So the question is, there has to be a shock. You need something. You need either a better narrative, which sucks the wind out of the old narrative, which can happen. But it's super hard when the narrative of AI is everything. What's more than everything, right?

Or you need something to go very badly, that then people start having to rationalize, which is unclear how that plays out. So I'm with you. I think it's very difficult to defend stock prices that you'll never see financially make sense in numbers and profit. So you either believe that we're just holding onto the chip because there's a one in three chance it pays out, which is very venture capital, by the way. But you still value the chip because it still might pay out. It's not impossible, right, that it pays out. I think that it likely will, but it's going to be a long time. 20 years later. 20 years later. You can look at 99, right? For this, right? In the internet era.

In 99, pets.com was the ultimate, right? That was the hard beginner of the apocalypse. It did end up happening. Everyone does buy their pet food online, but it was fully 20 years later. But it's just interesting. The question I think socially is going to be this happened a little bit with the internet boom. But at this level, the richest people in America, all of a sudden most of them, are going to be people who secure the bag, so to speak, in this cycle. And then if you really think stock numbers goes down a lot, pensioners are the holders on them. The biggest problem is it's going to be people who are going to be really pissed.

All of a sudden the Montana people are going to be like, not only does AI suck, but our economy is dominated by a bunch of people who didn't actually deliver any value. That's very different than the Google and the Metastory, things like that, where you're like, okay, people did really well. They were super lucky, but they also did things that had permanent financial value. I think that the thing is going to be second and third order effects of all this in the coming years, how the society refactors itself and responds to what's clearly a major distortionary event. Yeah, no question. And that's how AOC becomes president. And then we all get guillotined. Guillotined.

Oh my God, guys. Okay, I think we need to wrap. We need to give a nod to Josh Kushner buying the Lakers. Big deal. Although I heard it was maybe not happening. Did it happen? I thought there was a lot of not happening. No, guys, you cannot believe everything you read in CNBC. Sadly reported this story. Well, that's why we're asking you. Yeah, you're the authoritative source. Yeah, you tell us what's going on. Not only has the sale happened, but the Bus Family Trust also sold their remaining position over the objection of Jeannie Bus. But unfortunately, her objection does not carry weight based on the structure of the trust. I do love that. The winning time was awesome.

Winning time was great. It was a TV show. No, the show Running Point with Kate Hudson is all about her. No, that show sucks, Britt. I'm sorry. Running Point is so bad. No, are you joking? No. Season three is going to be so good because they're going to fold this all in. Watch. I couldn't even finish season two. I just started it, and this show, it's just goofy. It's not my gym. But winning time is great. I learned a lot about amortizing depreciation of owning sports teams for tax. It seems great. Seems exactly what Josh should be doing right now, is buying a sports team. Yeah, it turns out that owning sports teams is one of the greatest grifts ever from a tax perspective.

I also love that Josh is clearly doing the deal. But it's Thrive. It's not Josh. No, it's both. They're letting Bob do all the press. I'm like, come on, guys. It's just he loves the press. Until recently, funds couldn't own any sports team pieces. Yeah, there's very hard caps on that. What happened was in the NFL and a few other leagues, no individuals could afford them anymore. They ran out of people who had enough money who could buy them. And so they started lifting the rules that private equity could buy in because they just wanted numbers to go up and they couldn't find. It's like they were just out of individuals who could afford them.

Also, did you see Travis Kelsey is partnering with Publicis Sports and his talent agency to launch Tecta Publis, which is connecting major brands with college student athletes? He's agenting all the NIL deals now. What, to do NIL? Yeah. So a little bit of Travis Kelsey business. Not that big of a business. I don't know. I think it's something he's interested in and passionate about, and he's retiring soon. Yeah, that's fair. All right, I got to go. What are we doing? Okay, dear friends. Bye. We're ending. So with that, Sam needs to go take a suit of fed, and we will thank you all for listening to another episode of More or Less. We'll be here again next week. Until then.

Whether you want us to or not. Farewell. Bye. Bye, guys. If you enjoyed this show, please leave us a virtual high five by rating it and reviewing it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Find more information about each episode in the show notes and follow us on social media by searching for @moreorless, @DaveMorin, @Lesson, @JayLesson, and as for me, I'm @Britt. See you guys next time. Which has been like hilariously down constantly because he can't keep up with all the bot traffic. Here's the funny thing to me about that. It's a great example. If you said, hey, I'm going to launch a GitHub competitor.

That used to be like a hard thing to do. Now it's like three people like sitting somewhere in Elon's office or something or some office around. They're just like, yeah, like we're just going to like. I'd say that just changes the world so dramatically when all this stuff you're just like, I don't care. There's no software lock in, right? Like it can be distribution. It can be anything about like you, but you're like, oh, I'm like angry that GitHub is down. It doesn't matter. It's so easy to replace. This is a really good point, Sam. And I was thinking about that last week.

We were off the grid entertaining some friends and I wasn't paying that close of attention to what was going on with GrokBot. But that was my exact take that, wow, you can kind of just build this. You know, you could have started a month ago and it comes out pretty good now. Yeah, it's fine. It works. I've got this company we're investors in called BitRig. This is like the former Swift UI team from Apple has built like a really amazing iPhone app development environment. I know these guys. Aaron Sitzig is all fired up about this. It's gotten so good. You can build any iPhone app for yourself now. And it's like truly amazing.

I'm building front ends for things in fully and swift on my iPhone from my iPhone and then sending them out on test flight. And it's so good. I thought you can't build from iPhone. You have to do it from your desktop. Well, they did. But BitRig went back around and they created a server based development environment that you can talk to from a Mac app or from an iPhone app. So there's no actual code changing on the iPhone. That was Apple's problem with these apps is that if you ship an app to the iPhone, it should not be able to change itself while it's on the phone.

And so this is basically using a server to develop a new iPhone app that you can then push to test flight and have your users download it that way. And it's pretty amazing. I'm building iPhone apps, which I mean, the amount of money you and I spent investing in these things in the 2010s, like I'm building entire startups, iPhone apps, just for fun. I have my own portfolio app, my own health app. I have like six apps. Most of my home screens have apps that are just for me. Yeah, it's amazing. Almost like if there were a new open AI hardware device, you could make it. But is it just like a puck? I don't think there ever will be an open AI hardware device. No, there will be.

And did you hear all of Apple's new devices leaked? There's a bunch of leaks that Apple has had out. That usually means they did it on purpose. Oh, like 10 things like leaked. I do think there is something with the devices, though, Britt, to your point with open AI, because again, they're great narrative capitalists. It's like it's a classic buy the narrative, sell the news. Right. Which again, it makes these things hard to be public, which is like the argument that they will never release a device is because it will only hurt their stock price if they're public.

It's hard to imagine a world like which is very, very different than like I think Elon pulling off some rocket like he has the downside of rocket blow up. I agree with that narrative. Do you think, therefore, that the impetus to just launch things to keep your highly paid researchers and engineers happy no longer exists? Because that used to be also another reason. Well, that was how they got all the talent for sure. And like the strategy was get all the people and pay whatever and then give them their own fiefdoms and let them do whatever they want. It was basically about a talent acquisition.

But there was this era that I think we're now past of like the labs playing a game where they would be valued on talent acquisition and like narrative. That works great until the numbers show up. Right. And the problem is now that there are numbers, those types of pure play narrative games come a lot harder. Right. It's like it's the classic like Silicon Valley thing. Don't ever have revenue. It destroys your story. There's nothing like data to screw up a good story. Sam, by the way, I'm surprised maybe you have them and I just have not seen them. Do you have narrative capital T-shirts? Because what kind of meme lord are you without? Oh, that would be a good fun name.

There should be a venture fund that is just called narrative capital. There has to be one. Only invests in narrative companies. Yeah. Fact free zone. Okay, guys, we have not gotten to sending your P to data centers yet, which really was one of the more surprising things I've seen on the Internet. Okay. So I'm browsing the Internet as one does and I see something. I'm like, this is surely a joke. And then I watch it. I'm like, don't think it's a joke. Jason Kelsey teamed up with Liquid Death. Oh, the Jason Kelsey ad. Yeah. On a very funny ad, which is basically begins with the premise that data centers are sucking all the water, therefore drastically harming society.

Which hilariously they don't do. Well, it's nuanced. The Lake Mead thing is a real problem. And so this ad urges you to pee in a jar and send it to cool the data centers and spare our water. This is kind of shocking, guys. I mean, we think AI shapes pop culture and tech, but this is wild. Britt, what was your take, Wingson? The funniest comment I saw was this girl saying, no fucking way I'm sending my pee with my DNA to that data center. I don't want AI all up on me like that. I'm going to send my cat's pee instead. And I was like, that's so funny.

Well, I can tell you that after having been in like real rural America for the last like six weeks, no one gives a fuck about AI. No one uses AI. People don't care. They dislike it. Not only that, they actively do not care. And these issues are not actually the issues. Like that's like the main thing we learned being in Montana most of the summer is like no one cares. And everything that Silicon Valley thinks is the issue is not actually the issue. The data centers, no one cares. What people actually care about is they're sick of people sending them AI slop in email for work. They like don't want to read AI. They don't want to. Oh, hat switch, hat switch. Yeah.

I mean, they're just sick of it. They're like sick of it actually being in their life more than anything. And I think that's pretty interesting. The main use of AI we saw while in Montana was like some real estate posting. No, real estate redesigns. That's like the main place that you saw it. See the house before and after. Oh man, AI better cure cancer quick. I don't know that it's going to roll out as quickly as like AGI 2027, whoever Larry and Sergey called. We're going to wrap this Sterling episode, but I don't think we're going to ban construction of data centers in this country, but we might. I think the backlash is like way more of an issue than.

But what I'm trying to say, Jess, is that the backlash is not about the data centers. The backlash is about that AI sucks and it is inhuman. No one has ever seen an AI video or read an AI essay. They like intuitively dislike this experience. There's like a visceral feeling to this. And so trying to stop the data centers, I think is about that. It is not about water or any of this stuff. It's about this feeling that people have that AI just sucks. It's not that great to interact with reading one of these essays or, you know, watching a video or even the apps that get created. A lot of them, they're slop. There's even a word that's been invented for this.

And so I think that's like actually where the energy of this is coming from. And I guess one thing I'll say that's kind of back to the prior topics that I think is interesting. Human metabolism of technology is much slower than we intuitively think, especially when we're on the rise of one of these new technologies. Like we are on the absolute ramp of hype right now. And, you know, we're going to see all these things go public.

I do think at some point these companies are going to run into real growth problems, which is that they have to figure out how to grow into verticals that they're not currently in because technology itself just has not taken a form yet that can move its way through certain types of enterprises. Like I keep hearing this on the front lines, you know, open claw world and kind of being directly at the front lines that enterprises are not ready to adopt this stuff we're talking about. Even the best of the best sales teams are having problems convincing the human factor in all of these organizations to adopt this stuff.

And so I think we're going to see, you know, in 2027, 28, I think you're going to see this sort of come home to roost for real. In what way? What's going to happen? I think you're going to see a retraction in the market. Like you're going to see we've built out a dramatic amount of infrastructure, a huge, you know, $3 trillion, $4 trillion of CapEx has gone into this. And everyone rushed in and they're trying to make the same money that Anthropics making. And the use cases and the things that are going to metabolize this further into society have not appeared yet. And so you're going to see a correction happen where we've got too much infrastructure, not enough use cases.

And then there's going to be a bunch of money made over the next 20 years. But there's going to be kind of a, I think, a pullback at some point here. And it's going to happen after the IPO's unknown time period. I mean, this is the whole like pensioners always get fucked, right? This is like the NVIDIA BlackRock deals where like the bag holders are the pension funds. A bunch of people are clearly getting a lot of money on these IPOs, right? That are the tech insiders. But like ultimately someone gets hurt, right? Someone number go down if you believe that. I mean, I think so. Just look at the SpaceX IPO. Like the SpaceX IPO is telling the story right now.

The exact same thing is going to happen. Well, but SpaceX is kind of fine. We'll see. It's just sideways. It's supported by a meme, right? Like it's a narrative story. This is the thing I think is unclear that I think SpaceX, to your point, is a good example of. It's like who has an incentive for number go down, right? The problem with some of these things are so big and like the country wants them. From a financial perspective, the money has to go somewhere is you kind of need either someone to like come back to first principles on economics. Or you need someone who has a real incentive for a number to go down to like build the narrative.

Otherwise, people will just kind of like not in purpose, but like implicitly collude to like let these things drift along and be very valuable. Yeah, totally. So the question is, there has to be a shock. You need something. You need either a better narrative, which sucks the wind out of the old narrative, which can happen. But it's super hard when the narrative of AI is everything. Like what's more than everything, right? Like or you need like something to go very badly that then people start having to rationalize, which is unclear how that plays out. So I'm with you.

I think it's very difficult to defend stock prices that you'll never see financially make sense in numbers and profit. So you either believe that like we're just holding onto the chip because there's a one in three chance it pays out, which is very venture capital, by the way. But you kind of still value the chip because it still might pay out. It's not impossible, right, that it pays out. I think that it likely will, but it's going to be a long time.

20 years later. 20 years later. You can look at 99, right? For this, right? In the internet era. In 99, like pets.com was the ultimate, right? That was like the hard beginner of the apocalypse. It did end up happening. Everyone does buy their pet food online, but it was fully 20 years later. But it's just interesting. The question I think socially is going to be like this happened a little bit with the internet boom. But at this level, the richest people in America, all of a sudden most of them, are going to be people who secure the bag, so to speak, in this cycle. And then if you really think stock numbers goes down a lot, pensioners are the holders on them.

The biggest problem is it's going to be people who are going to be really pissed. Like all of a sudden the Montana people are going to be like, not only does AI suck, but our economy is dominated by a bunch of people who didn't actually deliver any value. That's very different than like the Google and the Metastory, things like that, where you're like, okay, people did really well. They were super lucky, but they also did things that had permanent financial value. I think that the thing is going to be second and third order effects of all this in the coming years, how the society refactors itself and responds to like what's clearly like a major distortionary event.

Yeah, no question. And that's how AOC becomes president. And then we all get guillotined. Guillotined. Oh my God, guys. Okay, I think we need to wrap. We need to give a nod to Josh Kushner buying the Lakers. Big deal. Although I heard it was maybe not happening. Did it happen? I thought there was like a lot of like not happening. No, guys, you cannot believe everything you read in CNBC sadly reported this story. Well, that's why we're asking you. Yeah, you're the authoritative source. Yeah, you tell us what's going on. Not only has the sale happened, but the Bus Family Trust also sold their remaining position over the objection of Jeannie Bus.

But unfortunately, her objection does not carry weight based on the structure of the trust. I do love that. The winning time was awesome. Winning time was great. It was a TV show. No, the show Running Point with Kate Hudson is all about her. No, that show sucks, Britt. I'm sorry. Running Point is so bad. No, are you joking? No. Season three is going to be so good because they're going to fold this all in. Watch. I couldn't even finish season two. I just started it and this show. It's just goofy. It's not my gym. But winning time is great. I learned a lot about amortizing depreciation of owning sports teams for tax. It seems great.

Seems exactly what Josh should be doing right now is buying a sports team. Yeah, it turns out that like owning sports teams is one of the greatest grifts ever from a tax perspective. I also love that like Josh is clearly doing the deal. But it's Thrive. It's not Josh. No, it's both. They're letting Bob do all the press. I'm like, come on, guys. It's just he loves the press. Until recently, you couldn't funds couldn't own any sports team pieces. Yeah, there's very hard caps on that. What happened was in the NFL and a few other leagues, no individuals could afford them anymore. Like they ran out of people who had enough money who could buy them.

And so they started lifting the rules that private equity could buy in because they just wanted numbers to go up and they couldn't find. It's like they were just out of individuals who could afford them. Also, did you see Travis Kelsey is partnering with Publicis Sports and his talent agency to launch Tecta Publis, which is connecting major brands with college student athletes. He's like agenting all the NIL deals now. What to do NIL? Yeah. So a little bit of Travis Kelsey business. Not that big of a business. I don't know. I think it's something he's interested in and passionate about and he's retiring soon. Yeah, that's fair. All right. I got to go. What are we doing?

Okay, dear friends. Bye. We're ending. So with that, Sam needs to go take a, you know, a suit of fed and we will thank you all for listening to another episode of More or Less. We'll be here again next week. Until then. Whether you want us to or not. Farewell. Bye. Bye, guys. If you enjoyed this show, please leave us a virtual high five by rating it and reviewing it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Find more information about each episode in the show notes and follow us on social media by searching for at more or less, at Dave Morin, at Lesson, at Jay Lesson, and as for me, I'm at Britt. See you guys next time.