00:00 Speaker A
I’m talking about TVPN and it’s worth talking about, which is the very niche uh tech podcast that is listened to by most cognitti of the tech world that just got bought by Open AI.
00:09 Speaker B
I don’t know. I think the open AI like, I’m kind of on Ben Thompson’s side. I don’t know what Open AI is doing here, but like that’s not the conversation that I was thinking about with this. Or like that wasn’t my first thought was what’s Open AI doing? I was like, oh, it’s good for them.
00:21 Speaker A
Good for the guys.
00:22 Speaker B
Good for John and Jordy. Yeah, they did their thing their way and they got rewarded.
00:26 Speaker A
I I don’t have any feelings about that whatsoever, not being a particular fan or not of the show.
00:34 Speaker A
My question was like, what? Why?
00:37 Speaker A
Why is this happening? I mean, and it’s happening at a time when I think, you know, there’s only going to be increasing scrutiny of Open AI’s business as it prepares to go public. And so making a move like this is just one more step in that direction of like, okay, I mean, listen, they got a lot, they got a lot of cash. They can use it to build data centers or they can use it to a tiny sliver of it to buy this podcast. Fine, whatever.
01:05 Speaker A
I mean, but I guess it it raised it does it’s just part of the bigger story of like, what is Open AI doing here from a business perspective with everything. Like are, you know, and and once they finally do go public, is anyone I mean, yes, lots of people are going to want to invest in them, but should they?
01:23 Speaker B
I will outsource my opinion on the state of Open AI kind of peg to this to Ben Thompson, who writes the Stratechery newsletter, very well regarded in the tech community. I’ve previously wondered if Open AI might be like Twitter, another techcentric company that fell backwards into a huge market and never developed into a functional business because of it.
01:43 Speaker B
Uh so on and so forth, couple of analogies. So he goes, Open I said like, ads are bad until they’re the plan. Meta execs are hired in mass and the ads that launch are low effort, keyword driven offerings. Apple’s a partner until Johnny Ive is hired, but he’s still doing projects for Ferrari. Meanwhile, Anthropic is focused on enterprise and shipping, Google is encroaching. The answer to that is to buy a podcast? And I do feel like watching Open AI and story the information over the weekend about potential disagreements between Sam Altman and Sarah Fryer around how to run the IPO, when what that’s going to look like.
02:18 Speaker B
I mean, I recall, was it less than two years ago? Remember it was a Friday afternoon and it’s like Sam Altman has been fired at Open AI. This is the same company. And it just is starting to look like there’s something that isn’t fully aligned, let’s say, from the business, which is fine, except when you’re worth $852 billion, the stakes just get a little bit higher.
