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We have some breaking news from TBPN.
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Let's go to the printer cam, which I believe. Here it goes.
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Printer cam's readyminal. I see it spinning up.
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We got some breaking news.
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We got some breaking news. What is this? Traded. We got a trade deal.
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He's wanting the timeline is in turmoil.
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Special segment starting now.
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I love this because it's it's so Periq just became famous in the last few hours.
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Not for the reasons that he would necessarily want to be famous. No. No.
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Is this a real picture of him?
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Do we know or is this picture?
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But this is from Var epsilon says breaking meta openai anthropic and Google have signed Sohan Parik as fractional chief AI officer.
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Obviously a joke, but he's been on the timeline all day because apparently he's been working at multiple YC companies, multiple companies at the same time.
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Um, what's funny is that we were we were working on a uh during the show we were working on a post.
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We couldn't decide how to frame the trade deal of Sohom and some fan just did it for us fully.
1:08
So, uh, Matt Parker from Antimal was uh, actually Soh was their first engineering hire in 2022.
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Really smart and likable.
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Enjoyed working with him.
1:21
We realized pretty quickly that he was working at multiple companies and we let him go.
1:24
I can't imagine the amount of equity he's left on the table.
1:26
Uh Matt says hiring Sohom is is a new right of passage.
1:32
DBH any great company should go through it.
1:34
Uh so Su was the first person to call this out.
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Uh he said this morning or actually it was last night.
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So this has been this has been building.
1:44
PSA there's a guy named Sohan Periq in India who works at three to four startups at the same time.
1:47
He's been praying on YC companies and more.
1:49
Gary is not going to be happy about this.
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You do not, you don't want to put up the bat.
1:56
You know, you don't want Gary people to put up the Gary sign.
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N um you don't want to go up to apparent on YC companies.
2:03
I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying, scamming people. Oh, this is fascinating.
2:10
Did you see this from uh Pritika Meta? Tyler put this in.
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You want to read this one first?
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He's been all over the place.
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Roy said, "I interviewed this guy yesterday." No way. That's amazing.
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Tyler, break it down for us.
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What does uh Pritika have to say?
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Okay, so apparently I mean this is still unconfirmed.
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I've actually I've sent him an email.
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Okay, I' I've obtained his email.
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I'm not sure if it's the real one. We'll see.
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Um but she says the dude clears interviews. He's good with that.
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After clearing, he has junior people doing all the work.
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And he has around 20 employees and interns.
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Basically a small dev shop. Wow.
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So he's just figured out the economics of like, hey, if I'm making 200k or 300k, he's basically signing people to a 20k a month retainer.
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He knows he's going to have some churn, but it doesn't matter.
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He's picking up some equity equity comp as well. I wonder if he's vested.
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I wonder if he's wonder at at any of these companies.
2:57
Ken Ken Watana says, "Soh.
2:59
Periq is the Bonnie Blue of YC." Uh, very vulgar.
3:03
Uh, Sar says, "All recruiting must stop until we get Sohham on TBNN to figure out what is going on." Open invite to Sohham. We'll we'll talk.
3:13
Thiago says, "So on TVPN when Daniel growing Daniel says Microsoft just laid out laid off 9,000 workers all of them.
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So humper if you're wondering their inbox it's time to start polishing your resume cuz he hasn't reached out.
3:32
It means he's not bullish on you."
3:34
Austin Allred says, "Must suck being an unemployed software engineer and realizing that so Humper has been hired 79 times in the past four years. this guy.
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And then Matthew Berman says, "Oh, you think AI is killing software jobs?
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Tell that to Sohom Periq."
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Signal says, "Not now, honey.
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There is a Sohoom gate happening on X." Um, it is really funny.
3:56
It's basically say, "I'm going to build a dev shop, but it's going to be my name and I'm, you know, he he probably No, he probably could have had a just very successful dev shop." Yeah. Yeah.
4:09
But but but there's a stigma around hiring dev shops.
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You want to hire founding engineers.
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Like you know the title matters and the idea like okay we have a full-time employee.
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We got somebody who's delivering.
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They're a high performer. Our team is cracked.
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We don't have to outsource.
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The whole thing with Uber remember Uber's initial buildout was all outsourced.
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And it was like it was like a mark on the company.
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Obviously it didn't affect them.
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They went on a generational run. It was fantastic.
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But there's this there's this idea of like if you're building a startup you need the founders need to be coding, the employees need to be coding. needs to be handcrafted. You can't outsource.
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But true, you know, he's proven us all wrong, I guess. True.
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So, we're working on getting him live.
4:45
We got another post here from Growing Daniel.
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Has he gotten back to you, Tyler, on email?
4:52
It seems like he might not come on today, but maybe we can pitch him and try to get him on. Hasn't got back.
4:56
I sent it 20 minutes ago. Okay. Um, yeah.
4:58
No, I think he needs to come out. He's sorry.
5:00
He needs to come out and say he's sorry. Yeah.
5:03
And he needs to say this is the right time to launch uh his his Yeah. Yeah.
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And it should be called the dev shop of Soham Periq. Yes.
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Cuz I mean I don't know maybe he's delivering but uh growing Daniel has a post here.
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Chief of staff brings list of applicants.
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Really likes this one Indian guy.
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Asks if it's a rune or a Sohom. She doesn't understand.
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Pull out illustrated diagram explaining the difference between runes and so she laughs and says it's a good engineer sir. It's a so. Oh that's a wild pest. That's great.
5:39
We believe he's here in the studio with us here.
5:41
So, welcome to the stream.
5:41
Uh, so, uh, good to meet you. How are you doing? There he is.
5:47
Welcome to the man himself.
5:49
Thanks so much for joining.
5:54
Uh, why don't you, uh, why don't you introduce yourself and, uh, just take a few minutes to just, uh, give us what's going on in your world, what's the last 24 hours been like?
6:04
Um, how would you describe yourself?
6:07
describe yourself? what what what do you have to say to people and then I'm sure let's go back to the very beginning who are you where do you come from I mean um I am you know I'm originally from Mumbai I kind of grew up you know here all my life obviously drove into computer
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science like you know coding and everything kind of without a choice kind of process of elimination fell in love with it you know as you're aware at this point I'm like everyone's like favorite founding engineer pretty much or worker 17 or whatever you might call it like AI
6:35
bot or so as a service I don't Um but yeah um don't have much to my story essentially uh you know I've just been always passionate about you know building was your first job uh my first job was actually at a company called Allen it was like a voice assisted like conversational startup uh
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you know this is back in like 2020 2021 2020 and when did you come to the states because I know uh I was talking to Matt and he said you you would go to the anti- metal off sites and and you're very much a part of the team so to be honest and my my uh you know uh I have family in the east coast. The first time
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The first time I ever visited US was in 2018 and then I was supposed to do grad school there.
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Uh you know different financial circumstances couldn't do that.
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Had to kind of like you know not go with that plan.
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Um but obviously you know uh I have visited uh you know America mostly for like offsites and stuff just to catch up with team members and things like that. Um, okay.
7:29
So, the main claim uh that was levied against you on X yesterday uh kind of started with Su Hill over at Playground.
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He accused you of working at multiple jobs simultaneously. Is that true? It is true.
7:46
Um and yeah u I I would you know love to add color to it but you know that is true. Yeah.
7:52
Um, I guess the question is, do you believe that you were in violation of your own employment contracts or do you believe that there was some sort of legal loophole that allowed you to do this without committing any sort of legal violation?
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I mean, honestly, uh, I think going back to like how it even like started to happen and what the motivations were would probably have, you know, obviously I I would want to like preface with saying like I'm not proud of what I've done.
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um you know that's not something that I endorse either.
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that I endorse either. Um but you know financial circumstances essentially like no one really likes to work 140 hours a week right but I had to do this kind of out of necessity like I was in extremely like dire financial circumstances and somehow like you know I don't I'm not a very people person uh uh I I don't share much in terms of like what's going on with my life and kind of in my internal
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thought process you know was kind of like getting more stressed with like hey you know I want to like come out of the situation what should I do so it's more not it was not more so kind of about greed but essentially like necessity and just like thought that if I work like multiple places, you know, like I can basically like help myself like elevate the situation I was in much faster. No, it's very
9:04
No, it's very economically rational.
9:05
Uh what about the uh conjecture that that you had uh a a team of junior developers underneath you helping you actually accomplish the tasks?
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Is there any truth to that?
9:17
I wish I had the money and I wish that was true, but that is not true.
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um any of the founders that uh you know uh I've worked with can watch with that.
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I have multiple locations like pair program with people.
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You know I've written every single inch of the code.
9:33
Uh you know antimatter is one of the companies I worked at.
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You know they have pretty high bar for design as you might know.
9:40
Uh they did a launch recently.
9:40
Uh they did a launch recently. Um you know there were two occasions where you know just before the launch like you know the the contractor who was going to do the front end for us essentially had bailed out and you know we as a team had to figure out and do everything which
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was a team of only three engineers right so so how did it originally happen though you started with one job in 2020 then you realized hey I could add another and then you realized you could just continuously add them did you create any type of financial models to
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kind of model out potential churn as you would get you So uh I'm curious if you were operating this looking at as basically a SAS business the SAS of SOHAM this was this was not a business to me um every company that I have worked with I have deeply cared about like you know
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um and again people who spend you know a lot of time with me can like back that um on multiple occasions the uh and again I did not have any financial model the uh like I said the only motivation for me was hey you know I'm in a financial jeopardy uh you know and so I didn't do this until 2022. 2022 is
10:40
2022 is actually when I was you know running into issues.
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I had deferred my you know grad school uh admit and uh you know did like an online degree but basically you know did not have like enough uh uh uh you know like uh essentially like you know uh just to get out of the situation I was in.
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I don't want to talk like too much deeply about it but No, that's fine. So yeah.
11:03
So that's talk about talk about your own talk about your own uh abilities.
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Every it seemed universal that the that the teams that you worked on said that you were extremely talented that you interviewed incredibly well.
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Um it's you know easy for you know new CS grads to be frustrated because you were probably running laps around them in the interview process.
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But um but yeah uh it's very impressive if you actually didn't have a junior team and you were just you know juggling.
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you know, it seems uh estimates seem to put it at maybe five five companies at once.
11:35
Uh maybe are you just are you just like hyper productive?
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Are you leveraging AI tools and coding assistance?
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Are you just able to move really quickly in a startup environment or are you also like talented like systems engineering and algorithms and like solving really really hard computational pro uh problems.
11:52
So I'll preface with this.
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Um you know some of these companies I worked at was before the co-pilot boom, right?
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There were no AI assisted programming.
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At least three startups have went on the record like saying this.
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People who have pro pair programmed with me can also watch with this.
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But the real truth is you there's this funny line in some of my inter like TLDDR.
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I don't do anything outside coding. That is very true.
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And if you're like spending hours like you know sitting in front of the computer, you will eventually like at least I hope so like get good at it.
12:20
Um I I there's obviously a lot for me to learn in general.
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general. uh you know I wouldn't say like I'm you know like a like a I don't know what they call like uh you know like a platform manager or something like you know top principle or whatever but I I I would like to believe that I was a decent enough a good enough
12:40
engineer to essentially be able to work at three places because that's the only thing I did the entire day so an average day for you an average week for you it feels like basically maybe you sleep for six to eight hours and then you're basically programming for 12 to 14 hours every single day for 7 days a week. But
12:56
But as as some of these, you know, new coding uh codegen tools came out, claude code, cursor, devon, etc.
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were did you feel like you could add maybe a few more jobs?
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Were you getting, you know, more efficient or did you still handcrafted code, farmtotable, organic, you know, handmade?
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I mean obviously like you know having more like uh you know AI assisted tooling like definitely helped but it did not amount to like me working on more jobs.
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Um because like I would still love to spend you know a justifiable hour like working on something and it doesn't have like a measure.
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It's not like hey you know I'm going to split time like four hours for this company for that company.
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Like I was essentially like working until I got something done for that day.
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And um I think people around me will probably say this that I am notoriously known for not sleeping.
13:46
Um I am uh you know I'm a serial like non-sleeper at this point is what I would say.
13:52
But yeah and as far as the interviews go right like so one there there's also been a lot of things around like hey you know I probably used uh you know some sort of like tool like Culy which you know I would love for the founder to essentially go on record and say if I'm a paying customer I'm not.
14:06
um but uh or or some sort of like you know had to game the system.
14:11
The truth is a lot of these companies did not have lead code style problems and if they did I would have bombed the interviews you know because I don't practice lead code as much.
14:19
I'm I know my data structures well I know what to use when but you know like typically a gun well you're also great at cold email.
14:24
I saw some of these cold emails. You got a great format. It pulls people in.
14:28
It it shows your personality.
14:30
It shows that you care about you know coding and I think that helped a lot as well. Totally.
14:37
Yeah, I mean I do care about coding a lot, but again like you know most of these companies essentially had a take-home assessment or a work trial, right?
14:45
So it's very difficult to like game a work trial or game a take-home assessment like you have to do it and then deliver it.
14:52
Um and I I did everything you know on my own like I was also doing the work trials on my own and um yeah like I guess I I'll leave it at there.
15:00
If if they did have lead code I would have bombed the interviews but luckily they didn't.
15:03
like startups usually just like care more about like working talk about uh talk a little bit about the companies that you chose to work for you applied to.
15:10
Do you think you could have pulled this off with Microsoft, Google, Amazon and split three times?
15:19
Or do they have defenses in place that would make this difficult?
15:24
There's a variety of memes around maybe big tech companies it's easier work, maybe startups are harder.
15:29
I'm just kind of curious about it seems like you went for a lot of startups.
15:33
What was the reasoning behind that? Yeah.
15:37
So, it feels counterintuitive like if I was in dire need of money like why would I work for you know startups as opposed to big tech because they clearly pay well.
15:45
They have a 9 to5 schedule.
15:47
For the most part like I would say you know people don't really care about like what you are essentially like doing.
15:50
Um the thing with me is like if you're spending you know multiple hours a week like working on something you would have to at least decently be passionate about it because otherwise you'll just like burn out.
16:03
Um like I said you know each of these companies that I work for and again uh you know founders some of the founders who spent meaningful time with me can vouch um you know would would say that I actually cared about these companies.
16:15
So it wasn't like cold email without context like I deeply read into what a company was doing, what the business model was, you know, who their customers were.
16:23
I had great ideas about like you know what to build for them, what not to build for them, you know, what the platform is like.
16:28
um you know I did deliver like beyond engineering for a lot of these companies and um yeah like it was more kind of like hey if I'm spending like 140 hours like I want to do something that I actually care about like I don't want to like you know do 9 to5 and kind of like send out a div in like 6 hours or something.
16:45
Um you know that's that's just not me because I do like what I do and and and that's kind of cold email hack.
16:51
Send the cold emails from the heart.
16:53
Put some real thought into them.
16:55
Um, talk to me about um other alternatives that you maybe considered or maybe didn't.
17:02
Um, did you ever think about going to a startup and saying like, "Hey, I'm doing a great job.
17:07
I'm working 40 hours a week.
17:09
I need to make more money.
17:11
I'd like to take on a second job.
17:13
Would would would that be amendable to you?
17:15
Do you think that founders might be actually open to that?"
17:18
Or say, "I'm working 18 hours a day.
17:20
Can you pay me three times as much? Pay me.
17:22
three times as much? Pay me. I'm doing the work of three devs because there is a world where you could have allocated all that time and one startup would have gotten three times as much value but they probably should have paid you three times as much maybe to make that balance
17:36
out and so did you ever have those types of decisions like we're seeing this with the AI talent wars the the 10x ent you can think of yourself as like a 3 to 5x engineer I guess no offense but you know the 100x engineers are getting you can maybe be 10x if you just if you really focus Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so and so it Yeah. Yeah.
17:51
And so and so it it's almost a question of like why couldn't you get the money that you wanted from a single job?
17:57
What was what was the what was the stumbling block there?
18:00
Yeah, I think the part where you know I should have basically done is like come clean with my situation.
18:05
Uh you know to be very frank with you like I mentioned like I'm not a good uh you know person with sharing what my internal conflicts are.
18:14
I do like to keep boundaries between my personal and private you know like whatever is like going with me mentally and that's true with any person I'm with as well like you know that's outside of work.
18:21
you know that's outside of work. Um so one there was an embarrassment to essentially like admitting that hey you know I have this struggles mentally uh you know like and talk in open about it and then the second thing is you know I uh really did not like think through
18:36
this because like I said it was an action that was done more out of like desperation to get out the situation I was in rather than like I mean the flip side here is that you you don't necessarily need to have something going on in your family to justify a $10 million salary or a $1 million salary. Like LeBron James doesn't need to say,
18:50
Like LeBron James doesn't need to say, oh, like, you know, I have a Saab story and that's why I need $50 million.
18:54
He's like, I'm delivering this value to you and you should pay me the value that I'm creating.
19:00
And so I'm wondering if you ever considered just coming to a founder and saying like, I can do the job of three engineers, but you got to pay me three times as much.
19:07
Honestly, I it again feels counterintuitive like I don't really care much about the money.
19:14
I was really into it for building.
19:14
So like greed was not like an incentive for me.
19:18
Um again regardless of my financial circumstances in most of these companies I always took the lower uh you know pay higher equity offer.
19:26
Um again like equity for me was not even like vested until I would make the move to US which like I said you know I was based out of India so I had to go through a whole visa process in order to make that happen.
19:38
So I wouldn't even be getting equity as long as my immigration was uncertain which it was. Yeah.
19:47
Basically for me it's like hey you know I have to do something situation I'm in.
19:51
I also want to do spend time like building something meaningful. Mhm.
19:54
You know as long as I like the startup and as long as it's not like handtomouth. Yeah.
19:58
It did not matter too much like you know.
20:00
So what are you going to do now?
20:02
You have the intention of the entire tech ecosystem.
20:08
the and I appreciate how candid you've been. Yeah.
20:10
Uh with us and and I want to talk about dev shop specifically. Yeah.
20:15
I mean there's a few angles here.
20:15
You could do the the dev shop of Soham Periq.
20:19
I think you would be able to get a handful of clients immediately.
20:21
Uh I think you could sign a max out maxed out contract with Clue.
20:26
They would probably pay you uh a pretty penny to to join the team over there.
20:32
And I also it sounds like you're interested in joining uh uh as a founding engineer uh of a new AI startup.
20:40
So how are you thinking about your opportunities right now and and um how can you turn this into a win?
20:46
Yeah, look like I've you know regardless of the situation like I've been privileged to like work with some of these companies like you know um antimatter you know shares m the founders like sink labs you know pratty uh you know rua they're one of the most uh you know crack faces I've been at in general partly because they had me maybe not I don't know uh I guess with that
21:06
but um I think the main thing is like I am really excited about what I'm going to be a part of next so you know working with a company called Darwin they are essentially like building a new like AIdriven like data plat like you know video platform essentially for more kind of like you know uh UGC style media and we're going to release to the market very shortly. Um this is the only thing
21:24
Um this is the only thing I'm going to focus on.
21:27
Um I think you know they've put a bet on me. I have a lot to prove.
21:31
Um and there's there's not a lot for me to say. So yeah.
21:34
H how do you rebuild trust?
21:37
How do you how do you give them the confidence that this isn't just you're focused on it for a couple weeks and then the second job creeps in and then the third job creeps in?
21:47
Um is there something that you see happening down the down the line around um you know worker monitoring or or checking when the GitHub commits are coming in or doing something to understand if someone else is uh is is working multiple places.
22:04
Somebody was saying we like um tech needs a like a some sort of service to see hey are we employing the same company.
22:12
Uh how do you how do you rebuild trust and and guarantee that you won't be working multiple jobs against the will of the current employer?
22:21
So I I think like you know all all of this that has taught me is like you know just coming to Canada like probably makes people understand your situation.
22:29
After all like we all are humans.
22:29
After all like we all are humans. um I don't anticipate like working on multiple gigs again but you know my financial circumstances have not changed so if even if it did came to them which it won't like right now I'm very clear that this is my sole focus um you know I would probably like approach with like being very candid with the founders and
22:46
just letting them know and if that's not a possibility you know that's fine um you know maybe I can uh figure a way out where you know there's like a higher pay or whatever kind of like to your point right um but in in in another spectrum of the Well, I think like what I've really realized is that I just, you know, I just want to be a part of like building something that I can like focus on a longer term. And that's always been
23:08
And that's always been the goal.
23:10
Uh, you know, it is always the goal with any of these companies I worked with.
23:13
So, um, you know, I uh obviously, you know, like I uh I I I believe in actions more than words.
23:20
Like I guess what we'll build and launch in a month would probably be a testament to, you know, what we've been able to build.
23:27
Well, you're certainly going to have a lot of attention around that launch.
23:28
I hope you uh now is probably not the right time to renegotiate your your uh offer letter for the new company.
23:36
You should probably uh you know, stick with it, but uh I think you're going to bring a lot of marketing uh value to to Darwin, the new company you're joining.
23:45
What's the reaction been like uh at home?
23:47
you're getting a lot of messages from from from has this broken tech x and broken containment into kind of your your the world beyond just people asking you about this.
24:00
Yeah, I mean obviously you know reaction is natural like a ton of people have been asking about this.
24:03
Uh what's also funny is like you know some of the memes like um I I am very new to Twitter.
24:07
I joined Twitter yesterday.
24:09
So this was a lesson for me in social media in general like I am not a social media person.
24:13
So you just like I was like you know very overwhelmed with it in general.
24:16
Um obviously you know feeling shitty about it as well like I like I said you know I'm not very proud of what I did.
24:23
I think there was a way where I could have course corrected in in a much different manner.
24:28
Um so there was a lot of like reflection in general but I think friends and family have been strong.
24:31
Uh you know like I said I was lucky to work at some of these places where I had really close relationships with the founders.
24:36
You know a lot of them reached out you know they to essentially be like helpful here kind of give advice on what I should be doing next.
24:42
Um even like you know sometimes like staying through with with me like you know uh just to make sure that I'm like all right.
24:48
Um you know like uh No, I think it says a lot that that a number of the people that that you work for that fired you because you were working multiple jobs still care about you.
24:58
It shows that when you were working for them at least it you know that that it does seem like you really you really did care.
25:03
Are there any uh startups that you've worked for in the past that you were uh working multiple jobs for that you haven't gotten a chance to apologize to yet that you plan to?
25:13
I mean in general like I plan to apologize to everyone.
25:15
Like that's that goes without saying.
25:17
Um any companies that you still need to resign from? None whatsoever.
25:24
Is the only focus I have. That's great. Okay. Okay. He's on the record.
25:28
You're on the right path. On the right path.
25:30
Well, I'm rooting for you.
25:31
I I I hope this is a story of redemption.
25:33
I believe in forgiveness.
25:33
I believe in mistakes and I'm I'm I'm optimistic that this can have a good ending. Me, too.
25:38
So, to be clear, your ex account is at real Periq, right? That's the real one.
25:46
That's the real fake ones floating out there trying to take uh trying to ride the hype wave. Mhm. Yeah.
25:52
I mean, 100% that there's been so many fake accounts um and a lot of fake narratives as well.
25:58
Uh but yeah, that is my real account.
26:01
Um there's there's one person who asked me to post a picture of banana on my head with a fork in my hand and I did not have banana at my home at that point in time but uh I was trying to do that just to show freak. Okay.
26:17
But it's it's been it's been interestingly like uh uh you know while to like notice how people are like taking this in different ways.
26:24
But um yeah that kind of helps like just feel a little bit less less shitty about it. But yeah. Yeah.
26:30
What what what are the uh the questions here?
26:33
Remote versus in office, US versus international AI.
26:37
Yeah, I mean I think we we had this post from Ahmad at Mercury.
26:38
from Ahmad at Mercury. I think I think the reason this s struck such a chord uh is you know again it's this remote angle the international angle the ideas around a 10x engineer uh the potential of new AI tools but uh this has been really
26:55
helpful to get to know you and I think um you were getting uh you provided uh entertainment for a lot of people the last 24 hours so I'm glad to hear that you're going to apologize to everybody that that you misled and uh I I'm excited to follow uh what you do next. Yeah. Thanks for stopping by. Thank you Yeah. Thanks for stopping by.
27:12
Thank you so much for having me. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. We'll talk soon. Bye. How you doing?
27:20
Good to have you back on the show. Yeah. Thanks for having me.
27:24
Redemption isn't possible when people show you who they are. Believe them.
27:25
Uh no, there's plenty of very honest people like what are the odds that someone who's been lying compulsively and being been confronted about it for three years, like two or three years.
27:37
And like look, it's it's a special kind of person too who can do this thing to people who trust them, right?
27:42
That you have a relationship with an employer, you know, and and my understanding is that he basically has been averaging like getting fired once a month for the last three years.
27:53
Like it's a kind of person who can do that.
27:54
So he could have learned his lesson like two years, three years ago. Yes.
27:57
Like the first time he was called out and and and Totally. Sure. totally.
28:02
I I wasn't I wasn't tuning in.
28:04
I did I I didn't hear what he said. Yeah.
28:06
to to me the to me the argument of of sounds sounds like he has some situation that's bad but it's not a justification to go steal money from a bunch of Silicon Valley startups for years and years and years and years and use them as a piggy bank to solve his own problem.
28:22
So really quickly uh how long did he work with you? Two weeks. Two weeks.
28:27
And what was the result of that?
28:29
I mean I imagine you paid him for those two weeks of work.
28:31
Did you get any good results?
28:33
Uh I am literally out of a meeting like an hour ago where the engineer described his impact as negative. Negative. Okay.
28:40
Well, because we we had to we had to on board him. Yeah. You had to on board him. Yeah. Yeah.
28:46
It's wasted our time and money.
28:48
Has he apologized to you? Not yet. Okay.
28:51
He said he would apologize to everyone else.
28:53
He would go on an apology tour.
28:56
We'll see if that actually pans out. Yeah.
28:57
My my big my big question is is somebody like this, you could have them working in your office as a full-time employee and they would probably still there's a good chance they would still keep doing this thing with people on LinkedIn that didn't see the whole Soh So Gate.
29:13
We never we never compromise on ethics.
29:16
Like that's just a thing I don't with. Uh he's gonna apologize.
29:17
Is he gonna give the money back? Yeah. It's a good question.
29:21
I don't know because because stock is cheap. Yeah. That's a higher bar.
29:28
If he wants to make a statement, that's what he would do 100%. Yeah, makes sense.
29:31
How do you prevent this in the future?
29:34
How does Silicon Valley prevent this in the future?
29:37
Obviously, the valley is built on trust.
29:39
This is a violation of trust.
29:41
There's been discussions about like maybe we need a Reddit for are we dating the same man?
29:46
Are we employing the same software engineer?
29:47
software engineer? Uh maybe we need an AI tool to you know check the GitHub commits and see that oh they're coming in at the same time every I was wondering if this could be done at the HIS level like question this employee has accepted why are they in two instances of of rippling that doesn't
30:05
make any sense uh yeah how how are we solving this I I don't want to over rotate on it I think a large part of what makes Silicon Valley tick is it culture of of trust uh you know there's this whole game theory around like hawks and doves, you know, and it's it it turns out there is no stable equilibrium. You're like in a constant
30:22
You're like in a constant state of of of shifting because if if everyone's a dove, then the the returns of being a hawk are very high.
30:27
And vice versa, if everyone's a hawk, then you can have this like clicks of doves that that start emerging.
30:32
So I I'm really careful not to tip Silicon Valley towards this attractor state of like the hawk and like a lot of industries end up in this state of like low trust and I really don't want to do that.
30:42
Like look, you're going to get screwed over ever so often. We had a good laugh.
30:45
You know, the memes all amazing.
30:47
Like I Yeah, I hope I hope your your viral posts at least drove a bunch of new signups and maybe he paid back a little bit by some customer.
30:57
Yeah, I mean I I I completely agree like yes, the handshake deal protocol is built on trust. Do some VCs violate it?
31:05
Yes, every once in a while a team a term sheet falls through.
31:07
Uh it's not the best thing that ever happens, but the alternative is so much overhead on everyone that it's probably worth taking the risk of yeah, occasionally the handshake deal is going to fall through.
31:20
You're going to get screwed over every so often and it's not worth over privating on it and like looking over your shoulder your entire life.
31:26
So it sounds like he is he he's announced that he's taken a new role as a founding engineer at a single startup.
31:32
He says he's not going to work at multiple companies.
31:36
It seems like the jig, even if he even if he is a pathological liar and continues to lie, like people like his his SEO is terrible now.
31:42
Like it will forever like be like very easy when you go to Google search for the person that you're hiring.
31:49
He's like, "Oh, that's a different Sohan Periq.
31:50
There's a lot of there's a lot of people change his name and it's going to be really complicated for him to get away with this longer."
31:55
My question is like if uh we were we were kind of saying like the Sohumper dev shop makes much more sense here.
32:05
Um does that make sense to you?
32:08
Would like if he was saying hey I've been working at all these different startups.
32:11
Um I'm starting a developer shop and yes you can hire me but I'm a contractor.
32:17
Uh why why are dev shops bad for startups?
32:21
Why would this not work for him?
32:25
Um, I actually think for him the real move is to start a course on how to crack coding interviews because he's really good and it's incredible.
32:31
He's he's actually incredible, right?
32:33
So, he can actually make lemonade here.
32:35
Like he should do that and he can make a lot of money. It's very high, right?
32:39
Was that in the cold email strategy was like he had a very dialed in cold email approach where he would be, you know, he'd be like say something nice and really clearly researched the company. I love building.
32:53
The funny thing is in his message he said he said I'm pissed and I it's like about what what are you pissed? You're pissed.
33:01
You got busted and he kind of gave himself away.
33:04
He was saying like oh yeah like I I'm going to put you know there there's going to be a great reversal here and he came on and was likeough the mainstream narrative is basically correct about me but maybe I'm sorry.
33:13
The the redemption of being like I'm going to prove everyone wrong by working at one company.
33:18
It's like you don't get you don't get a medal. Yeah. Yeah.
33:21
We don't give a that's like a second fourth place trophy.
33:27
You worked at one company. That's funny. Um Yeah.
33:29
I mean uh look he's he's not sorry. He just got cut. Like that's it. It's really simple.
33:33
Um and and why do dev shops not work for startups?
33:39
I mean there's like I'm a nerd when it comes to like the the theory of the film because of my experience at Uber and so forth.
33:46
There's a book that's called Managerial Dilemas that explains why dev shops don't work. Okay. It's it's fascinating. Yeah.
33:51
But can you unpack it a little bit more?
33:54
Because Uber is interesting because didn't wasn't the very first version of Uber done by a dev shop and wasn't that part of the early Uber l lore that like the codebase was written in Spanish and so everyone at Uber had like the Spanish to English dictionary there which is hilarious because I'm pretty sure Google translate existed at the time but they still had the dictionary for some reason.
34:13
It's like it's like amazing lore regardless of how real it is.
34:15
Yeah, I think people add a little bit to it.
34:18
This is the first time I hear about it.
34:20
Uh but you know, like next time I hear about it, there's gonna be a guy with like a sombrero in the Exactly. Yeah.
34:26
Travis was was in Tijana pulling random devs off the street. Yeah.
34:29
They really really amp it up.
34:32
The apocryphalenness of the story just needs to grow and grow and grow.
34:35
It's a tall tale at this point.
34:37
The the reason why dev shops don't work is because there's like a complicated there's a complicated game theoretic argument which goes basically the reason why you employ people is because they know things you don't know.
34:47
And so there is a an information asymmetry which always makes it possible for someone to cheat because they can basically their like and and you see it with engineering all the time.
34:55
It's like a this is so complicated.
34:56
You thought it'd be a day but actually it's gonna be a month and you have no clue.
34:58
You have no way to verify and this is ineffable.
35:00
like the reason you hire them is because there is this information symmetry gap because otherwise might as well just do it yourself.
35:06
Um and so um basically it is in a way it is always possible to cheat which is why we are not around and hiring people who do cheat because there is no way you can always prevent them from cheating.
35:19
If he doesn't cheat by doing this he'll cheat by doing something else.
35:22
So there is always a way to cheat.
35:23
So you could say that to some extent not cheating is irrational. You can't cheat.
35:28
You can't get away with it. He's made millions.
35:30
made so much money, right? Like you can cheat.
35:32
You can get away with it.
35:34
And so in a way, you've got to solve for the equation where it's like I can't cheat.
35:38
I can make a lot of money. I can get away with it.
35:39
Nothing is ever going to happen to me, but I'm not going to do it because of X.
35:42
And you have to solve for X.
35:44
That's your job as a founder.
35:46
Like why would you act rationally?
35:48
And the way you do that thankfully um is you we have that that that bit that you can flip in our brains as a humans.
35:56
We have these uh tribal pro-social tendencies uh that are like I don't want to cheat because I like these people or because I'm I'm b into the mission which is why they always say every startup is like a religion like the mission the culture really matter and the camaraderie really matter as a startup and that's what you lose when you have dev shops. Well, yeah.
36:11
That the to be even more specific, the dev shop gives you a scope.
36:15
They say, "It's going to take me xyz time to do roughly this."
36:20
Or maybe they're on a retainer.
36:20
And then if they come back to you the next day and they say, "Well, actually, it's going to take more time and it's going to be more money."
36:26
Well, an employee is going to say, "Well, it's going to take more time maybe, but I'm not going to necessarily charge you astronomically more, right?
36:34
I'm just a salaried team member."
36:36
And because they have that equity compensation as well, they're bought and and and hopefully bought into the mission. It ends up working out.
36:41
Um, thank you for jumping on.
36:44
Give us the update on Lindy.
36:46
Uh, I know you guys moved quickly.
36:48
It's been a couple months maybe. Uh, what's the latest? Uh, it's going well.
36:52
We are currently grinding.
36:54
Uh, to my point about dev shops, like we were at the office last night until like 10 p. m.
36:57
Like you don't get that from a dev shop.
36:58
So, we're currently grinding. Uh, we're growing fast.
37:00
We are making a big launch uh on August 4th.
37:02
You got to come back on the show then.
37:06
We've got some really really exciting stuff coming around.
37:09
I'm I I couldn't be more excited. Amazing. Incredible.
37:11
Uh last last question on So, uh what should he do?
37:18
What what should he do next?
37:18
He should totally start a course and he's raising Z. Start a course. Okay. We'll see.
37:30
Maybe maybe he'll Yeah, that's laugh track.
37:35
Yeah, we've got we've got laugh tracks around here.
37:37
Um but yeah, it is it is the part of why the whole thing was so controversial is you like the average new CS grad, even from elite universities, is not having the easiest time in the job market.
37:48
So, it's such it's such a you know, it's got to be disappointing for them.
37:53
But but clearly So has cracked the the entire flow, the interview code. Yeah. So does it really well. He's figured it out.
38:00
So, he should he should monetize that.
38:02
It is it is a monetizable skill. Interesting.
38:06
Well, thanks for hopping on. This is fantastic.
38:08
Good to get the other side.
38:10
Enjoy the talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye.
38:13
We have to sing her a song. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you.
38:21
Happy birthday, dear Emily.
38:21
We're hitting the size for you. Congratulations. It was yesterday.
38:29
It was yesterday, but July 1st.
38:31
You just didn't come on the show yesterday. So, welcome.
38:34
I would have come on yesterday if you asked. We should have. We should have.
38:38
We could have had a cake.
38:38
We could have had a cake.
38:39
What did you do for your birthday?
38:41
Um, I had a few meetings. I went to the YMCA.
38:44
It was empty, which was nice. Mhm.
38:47
And then my husband took me to dinner. Oh, that's nice. Uh, YMCA underrated.
38:52
You're you're a lot of people. It's nice.
38:55
I this New York weather, it's one of the only places blasting that air conditioning. So Oh, interesting.
39:01
What is the gym tier list look like in New York today?
39:04
Uh, you know, Equinox at a moment. Lifetimes making moves. Lifetimes making moves.
39:09
I So I kind of do a high low thing.
39:12
I live in Park Slope, so the the YMCA makes a lot of sense for me, but I'm also a member at a club called Kasa Chipani, which Okay. Very small members club. Yep. It's fun. The high low. That the high low.
39:27
John John's in favor of that, too.
39:29
We just started going to a new gym, but John is like actively wants to be kicked out so he can go back to Goldy, which I'm like, "No, we're not. We can't do this."
39:38
There aren't um there don't seem to be as many YMCA's on the West Coast.
39:42
No, no, not not that many.
39:42
Lots of 24-hour fitness, lots of Gold's gyms.
39:48
I mean, Gold's gym, it's the it's the staple of Venice.
39:50
It's where Arnold Schwarzenegger works out.
39:52
You know, RFK is out there. It's a good crew.
39:53
John John thought Equinox was like a $75 a month gym while we were actively going there for a brief period.
40:00
And I just loved how out of touch you are.
40:02
You were It felt like premium, you know, but not ultra premium.
40:07
It's not It's not the best all tequila level. Yeah.
40:10
The location matters a lot. Yeah.
40:11
Um what what else is new in your world? Yeah.
40:16
Give us a give us a a Hampton's update.
40:18
I assume no one's in the city right now. Well, yeah.
40:21
I I got out here this morning. I don't want to brag.
40:24
I recently inherited a car from my late grandfather. It's a 2006 Camry. Okay. Very nice.
40:32
Iconic era of really great vintage. Very reliable. Yeah. Awesome.
40:38
So, I drove out here today. Uh it's crowded. It's really crowded.
40:40
I'm hoping that this sort of um level of crowds is due to the holiday weekend, but it might be a mistake that I I rented a house out here, but we'll see.
40:53
Um, what else is new since two weeks ago is the So, the Hamptons broadly, people a month ago were saying that rentals were down massively year-over-year. Does it feel that way?
41:06
Yeah, I I don't know how much of that was because of weather or or or people's finances.
41:12
I think some people were less motivated to like make the move on booking a house because we had really bad weather the past few months in New York.
41:20
It was really rainy and gross and it was sort of a late start to summer.
41:24
Um but I'm sure people's financial situation there was also a trade war that's still ongoing and if your portfolio is down tremendously, you're not exactly saying, "Yeah, I'd love to spend, you know, you know, 100k for two weeks." Yeah.
41:38
I had a friend who was dating a Wall Street uh like hedge fund guy and uh she was like, "Yeah, it's going so great. Like it's amazing."
41:44
And then like a couple weeks later she's like, "Yeah, he's just like really weird.
41:48
Like I don't think it's going to work out."
41:49
And I was like showing her the stock market chart and being like, "So his emotions perfectly mapped to the 10% selloff that we just saw.
41:56
You're telling me that this guy his entire his entire personality is derived from the state of the market." The state of the market.
42:06
and she was like, "Ah, this makes so much more sense now." Okay. Yeah.
42:09
I'm sure there's a lot of women who went through similar situations as her. I'm sure.
42:12
I'm sure the kangaroo market's not good for the dating scene.
42:15
Um, is uh is that is that crazy white party going on?
42:18
That's a Hampton's thing.
42:20
Is that a is that a July 4th thing or is that canceled?
42:22
I thought Michael Rubin was like pulling back from that because it was like maybe too flashy.
42:26
Is there an update thing? Yeah, I I I will see.
42:27
Is that supposed to be 4th of July?
42:31
I think that's She's like wearing She's like white party like what are you talking about? Can't comment. Can't comment. No, not that anyone. Oh, no. Oh, yeah.
42:38
I think that might have been a factor in in in pulling back from that.
42:41
But, but I always see like everyone's like spying the watches, spying like, you know, what cars people showed up in all this. Yeah.
42:48
There's a lot of paparazzi.
42:48
There's a lot of Tik Tockers.
42:50
So, see everything happening in real time. Interesting.
42:54
Nobody can really like leave with another man's wife anymore.
42:57
Like, there's so much uh coverage of these events now.
43:01
It's really takes away the mystique. The mystique.
43:04
Somebody might What's up with uh what's up this with this place drugstore. You were covering it.
43:10
It's trying Oh yeah, this is awful.
43:13
Um Bloomberg broke news yesterday that there's a new movie smoothie popup chain from uh like a Jay-Z invested celebrity chef. Okay.
43:24
Jay-Z invested celebrity chef. Okay. and he's these these like very Instagrammable smoothies which obviously Arowan started but now there's a lot of places that are kind of hopping on the bandwagon of treating like smoothies as a billboard like brands can collab with
43:42
them and then whoever's serving these smoothies is like making extra money from an advertising business which is crazy like I think to get an arrowan smoothie for your brand it's like 200k for a month or something we have to do this yeah we we we say I think that's worth every penny for the TBPN feed me arowan smoothie. You're
43:59
You're telling me it's not going to net out?
44:04
We're No, you should do a drink at like the US Open or something like Don't do the smoothie. Don't do the smoothie. It's played out.
44:09
Yeah, it's play It's played out. Okay.
44:10
Didn't have a collab with like Volkswagen or something or some really funny like car company they did. Yeah, you're right. They did do a car com.
44:20
I think they they also do like beauty brands like sunscreen and stuff like it's not Yeah. Chevrolet.
44:24
They did a Chevrolet drink collab.
44:27
And what the worst part is that I wouldn't have had a problem if they did the ZR1 like the really crazy Chevy sports car, but they did the 2025 Equinox EV. So you're in this movie.
44:39
Uh according to the manufacturer, the collaboration between uh it combines Chevy's commitment to emissionfree vehicles and Arowan's mission to promote sustainability as a merchant of organic foods and wellness products.
44:52
foods and wellness products. The drink called the electric juice consists of cho choo choo choo I don't even know what this is which is the most proteinrich plant source and blue spirulina the super food food that matches the Equinox's EV's blue color
45:09
the drink's ingredients are designed to energize and recharge consumers according the winner the winner here was the ad agency that got paid half a million dollars to set this up for sure I don't know I feel like I feel like everyone's getting the Haley Bieber smoothie I I'm about to rock the Equinox EV smoothie. I think it has a certain
45:24
I think it has a certain badge value.
45:26
They're all like they're like 70 gram of sugar. It's like four Cokes.
45:30
I'm long I'm long sugar though. Four Cokes is a lot. That is a lot.
45:33
But I'm going long I'm going long sugar from here.
45:38
I did I did an experiment.
45:38
Um my my wife was very afraid of this.
45:40
The worst experiment you I continue. Yeah.
45:44
But anyways, people people are very afraid of sugar.
45:46
I to prove a point I drank a soda every single day.
45:48
Yeah, I drank a Coke every single day for 6 months straight.
45:52
I know that's young and you work out every day and like a million ways to offset that. It wouldn't be good.
45:58
No, a lot of a lot of people think No, I agree. It is overboard.
46:02
People think like a single Coca-Cola is terrible. Like Yeah, of course. Of course.
46:05
Everything's in the dose is the poison with all of this stuff. You drink a full gall.
46:09
What about So, so this week on our side, we've been covering the AI talent wars.
46:13
how um basically AI researchers are being comped almost like pro aletes and sort of like you know these sort of nine ninef figureure massive offers.
46:24
The reason I bring it up is because you obviously cover a lot of the uh media landscape and we had Derek Thompson on who left Atlantic.
46:33
I imagine that he's already like run rating well well beyond I I don't know um what what his metrics are but I would imagine he's already watching on Substack. He's catching up to me. Oh, really? Yeah. It's a problem.
46:46
Go subscribe to subscribe to Feed Me right now and uh help help win the race.
46:50
But um but I was curious if you It feels like if if uh legacy media companies, I won't call anyone out, want to want real attention, not just the sort of attention that comes from their logo to some degree and the prestige, but like actually quality content.
47:11
Uh, at some point they'll have to like kind of re-evaluate their comp structures.
47:17
I think the Atlantic was like 300K was being reported as like the kind of range.
47:22
And when you can go on Substack as a superstar writer and immediately be making somewhere in the seven figure range at some point or another, it just becomes really difficult.
47:34
I see uh traditional media companies more likely to start doing like handshakes with Substack writers than starting to completely restructure how they're paying their staff.
47:44
I don't mean so like syndication basically syndication or like I mean I've talked to so many editors from traditional magazines and papers who are like trying to figure out how they can work with Feed Me.
47:58
Is it like a co-publishing thing?
48:00
Is it like creating a podcast together?
48:01
And it's it's been very interesting to experience firsthand like talk to these people because I don't I don't really need that.
48:08
Like Derek doesn't need The Atlantic because the people who are reading him are reading him for him, not the whole surrounding. Yeah.
48:16
I mean, just to set the table for the folks who might be listening, when Emily comes on the show, we pay her $100,000 for her appearance.
48:24
So, just just to say kind of set the bar. Uh just so Yeah.
48:26
And it ramps up over time. Yeah. Yeah. It obviously ramps up.
48:29
Um but uh but yes I am interested in like the dynamic of like you can still go and publish in in traditional media.
48:36
Um is that just like freelance?
48:39
What is the difference between what do you mean like when I write for GQ? Yeah, exactly. Are you a columnist?
48:44
The reason that I'm doing that besides that I adore my editor there and I I think that it's just like it's a it's working like a different part of my brain.
48:51
Like I don't it's like a gift to get to be edited by GQ's editors. That's cool. Yeah.
48:56
Do you uh so are are you a columnist over there or are you a contributor?
49:02
Like how does what's the actual shape?
49:04
Do you get assigned things?
49:05
Like I've had reporters reach out to me and be like, I was assigned a story on nicotine so I need to talk to you as an expert or whatever.
49:11
So, with GQ specifically, my editor Dan um when I wrote the Zen story and when I wrote a story about members clubs last year, both were because I I had written about both of those topics in my newsletter and he was like, I think it would be interesting for you to expand upon this in like a larger feature in a in a print issue.
49:29
Um, and that's how that's happened.
49:33
I I don't really but like I'm at the point now where if I have an idea of a great story that I want to write like it doesn't make sense for me to pitch it to the Times or to New York Magazine because it I can get it done faster on FeedMe.
49:46
I can outsource an editor if I need that.
49:49
I can outsource legal services if I need that.
49:53
And it it's better for me to get to be like breaking those sorts of stories, you know?
49:58
Um I just have like a good thing going at GQ. It's kind of fun. That's cool.
50:02
I want to bounce an idea off you.
50:04
Um there is this narrative that um like when you go direct, when you're on Substack, like it has a different texture, a different uh different vibe, different maybe more objective, maybe more pro tech or pro, you know, creator or pro whatever the topic is being covered.
50:21
Uh I think that it's less about the personalities or the views of the people and maybe just more about the economics that essentially when you're in legacy media you basically have a salary cap and when you're outside of it you have no salary cap and that actually defines the economic terms shape this the type of content more than than anything else.
50:43
Do you think that's reasonable? Do you disagree?
50:47
How how would you wrestle with that?
50:51
Can you keep Can you keep like expanding on that? I I want it.
50:54
So So uh I think that there's there's something where if you if you're working at a at a particular uh outlet and there's some sort of like salary cap.
51:04
It's like imagine if there were two NBA teams playing against each other and one had a salary cap of $300,000 per player and the other had no salary cap.
51:14
Like who would you expect to produce better basketball?
51:18
Who would you expect to produce better content when you have when you have one that where a person can make 10 million or Joe Rogan can make a hundred million?
51:27
Like you're just going to attract the absolute top because that's where the extremely ambitious. Yeah.
51:34
And they're extremely incentivized to just work extra hard because if they work if they work a little bit harder and they compound a little bit more and get that extra guest and write that extra piece, it could not it doesn't mean, oh, here you got a $5,000 Christmas bonus.
51:47
It means Spotify signed you to a $100 million contract and it's the difference between like when LeBron James shows up at midnight to shoot more free free free throws, like that could be the difference between like a $50 million contract and $100 million contract.
52:02
So going that extra thing produces like better content. Yeah.
52:06
It's really interesting to see so many traditional journalists, you know, give Substack a shot and like they just plateau.
52:12
But I'm like I'm an animal.
52:16
Like when my eyes are open, I'm working.
52:18
Like this letter goes out every day. It's I'm marketing it. I'm editing it. I'm pitching stories.
52:23
But I've always had a really high tolerance for being told no.
52:27
like when I was getting paid 60k at a job and when I'm making like 10 times that now, right?
52:32
Like so I think that Substack and these sorts of platforms, even what you guys are doing, also attract personality types that are have less boundaries and rules in the ways that they work.
52:45
Um, and then when people who who don't think like that think that they can find the same success, like they get disappointed or confused or think that it's rigged or something like that.
52:55
something like that. um when really they're just I mean going going above and beyond for a job where the cap might be like what did that New York Magazine story say about the Atlantic 300K that's what they were paying their journalists like okay so like you're you're going to go
53:13
as hard as you can to make 300k and get those benefits and whatever but the other thing that I'll say like is you have to be willing to not have insurance you have to be willing to you know have have months where you're you're not having like the support of a team. Um,
53:27
Um, and it's just like a very specific type of personality.
53:31
Um, but I think you're totally on to something like I think I'm playing a different game than my peers who are working in an office at a at a magazine or a newspaper. Yeah. Yeah.
53:44
also that the insurance thing is real, but it's also a problem that is very quickly overcome and you can quit your job and say, "I'm going to pay out of pocket for insurance for 2 years and if this doesn't work out, then I'll I'll get a roll back."
53:58
get a roll back." I'm curious uh you you were commenting on Vogue partnering with the Neutri Neutri Grain Bars and uh I'm curious if you think um as people are so used to influencer creator advertising like if if you were
54:17
to partner with a brand and people are like wait like what like why did she partner like that makes no sense like that's clearly a cash grab that that feels like it seems like legacy media brands could get away with that kind of thing for a long time. Even though we're
54:31
Even though we're saying, you know, why is Neutrograin needs better marketing?
54:35
Because the first thing I think about can shut down. Yeah.
54:40
I I I I always think about the the the I I think that Nature Valley meme where it's like effing crumbs everywhere.
54:46
I don't know if you've seen that one, but that's not neutrain.
54:48
And so my biggest association with nature fig newton.
54:53
They got to work on that. Yeah.
54:56
Yeah, it's like it's is it a Fig Newton or is it the Crom one?
54:58
Like I just know it's not good.
55:01
So they got to step it up.
55:02
But yeah, the Vogue audience I mean what what do you think that there was ever a pitch where it's like okay we're going to go after the moms that read uh Vogue and get them to buy it for their kids.
55:11
And so it's some sort of like bank shotgun for me.
55:13
What stopped me in my tracks was it wasn't a banner ad in a newsletter.
55:17
It wasn't like one of those it wasn't like somebody writing about uh their wellness routine sponsored by Neutri Neutri Green.
55:24
It was a produced video of a stylist sort of like gallivanting through the streets of New York City.
55:31
And I really like this girl, Michelle. Yeah.
55:32
When I saw her post it and I saw that it was between Vogue and Neutrorain, like there was two I who was in the room, who sold this ad and how much was it for and how much did Michelle get and how much did Vogue get?
55:45
Like it was very confusing to me because there were there were other ways that that could have been executed and made a lot more sense.
55:52
And they probably didn't think that somebody would screenshot it and start that conversation, but unfortunately the conversation was started. Yes. Yeah.
55:59
There's so many media reporters.
56:01
If I didn't pick up on it, somebody else would have.
56:02
Um, but I think that Nast overall right now is on life support.
56:08
Like we had this conversation when Vanity Fair was looking for their next editor.
56:11
Um, unfortunately like it's happening immediately right after that with this new this new Vogue editor.
56:17
Um, it's a lot of it's a lot of pressure for like I don't know what like a few more years of running this magazine.
56:25
It just doesn't doesn't really seem like how um it doesn't Vogue doesn't seem I don't know what I would look to Vogue for right now. Yeah. Yeah.
56:34
It kind of goes back to that idea of like the the independent media creator versus the legacy media creator.
56:40
Like we just released an ad for Wander that they we said they asked us.
56:46
They barely even asked us to make it and we just wrote it, shot it, directed it, like edited it. We just did everything.
56:52
We sent them the final thing and they were like, "Yeah, cool."
56:53
Um, and so I think the brand was like a second that they asked for a tweak, but yeah, they were like, "Uh, actually our font is this one instead of that one and that was it."
57:02
was it." And so and so like that is the type of like you know entrepreneurial energy that I'm sure the particular partner that worked on actually starred in the commercial would bring to a partnership and select and and coordinate with a brand that was actually aligned but there were just
57:19
like too many spreadsheet monkeys in the office that day and so it just wound up like I was like why wouldn't you just hand these to the hungover girls at bar stool and like have them talk about like how this is like the bar like the hangover over snack like that I think would have moved the needle more totally. I don't know. But are are the I don't know.
57:36
But are are the when I when I think of logical Vogue partnerships, I think of like luxury brands.
57:42
Are luxury brands pulling back from that type of partnership?
57:45
Like have you seen anything there?
57:47
Like what are what are the innovative things that you're seeing from like the really top tier uh brands out there?
57:53
Have you seen anything cool?
57:55
You know what I saw today?
57:57
Do you know those David bars? Like the metallic?
57:58
Yeah, we had him on the show. I love them.
58:00
Um, I saw that Balenciaga at their show this week, somebody posted a photo of like Balenciaga bars, like the same sort of metallic Okay. metallic label. I took a photo of it.
58:14
I'll send it to you guys after this. That's very cool.
58:15
Um, so I mean like is that going to move their their hoodies? I don't know.
58:20
But like that's those sort of fun weird moments are more exciting to me.
58:26
Um, if we're talking about nutrition bars, yeah, I mean it certainly shows that like Balenciaga is still on the, you know, hip or just aware because like Peter Rahal, he's kind of, you know, known in consumer package goods world and a little bit in tech and some people know the story of RX of RXAR and then David Bar with the revenue ramp.
58:47
Like the business is doing well, but it's still like a complete insider industry story.
58:51
Like the average person on the street doesn't know that.
58:52
So Balenciaga is kind of signaling a little bit to that like hey we're here with the new business community and I'm sure that that took them like a couple thousand bucks like put together like you know it's not difficult.
59:03
Um as far as what what luxury brands are doing I think it's a lot of events now like they're putting a lot of money into events like I was just at a Chanel event.
59:13
They do a lot of programming with Tribeca Film Festival which is cool because everybody's in the city anyway so they they throw events and make sure that people show up to that.
59:22
Um, I think that a lot of my social calendar in New York right now is dominated by brand events.
59:30
It just seems to be what's moving the needle because people go and they get photos of themselves and they post it and it's like the brand is the background.
59:37
So, you end up being like New York just feels like a billboard every every time you go out now because everything is a brand event.
59:43
It's like dominating how people are organizing their social calendars. I don't go to events. I don't go outside. I just stream.
59:50
Um, what makes for a good brand event?
59:53
Like, is this just a happy hour?
59:54
Is that what we're talking about? Is there dancing? A bad brand.
59:55
It's actually interesting that the thing I'll say, we were talking about SVB earlier.
1:00:02
They they they would throw dinners that like like there's an entire founder dinner industrial complex that are just like financial or you know, companies that that throw these dinners.
1:00:14
The funny thing is that within tech, the compan has historically failed to make them social moments.
1:00:20
So it' be like it'll say the name, it'll say SVB on the menu.
1:00:25
People aren't like taking a picture of the menu as much as they're just like taking pictures.
1:00:29
So I think what the luxury brands do well is it is you're saying, "Hey, we're going to invite 200 people into the space photographer and you're not going to be able if you post any photos at all, we're going to be getting exposure."
1:00:42
We're going to have a moment. Yeah.
1:00:42
Um, I I threw a brand dinner or a feed me dinner with my friend Paul from the infatuation last year and Andrew Ross Orcin was sitting next to me and I gave him a feed me keychain.
1:00:54
That was my brand moment. That's a great moment.
1:00:56
So, that's another thing like at those dinners are Yeah.
1:01:01
How are brands being creative?
1:01:02
Are we seeing like ice sculptures or step and repeats like like how how can brands stand out with one of those?
1:01:11
like the worst possible brand event is a DJ and free drinks.
1:01:13
Like just people standing in front of like a 22-year-old DJ with like free drinks.
1:01:17
And then um more innovative things are like I think when you give people an activity to do like if you are doing like bowling or and making it like glamorous or like um you know now brands are are if they're doing a collab with like an athletic brand they'll they'll take a bunch of women to like tennis courts or a golf club in Connecticut and like that's a photo op for everybody involved. D.
1:01:48
Um, so like these mini expeditions or like J Crew last year took a bunch of people on a gorgeous sailboat in the Hudson River off of like the seapport.
1:01:59
It's basically like take your customers on a date, right?
1:02:05
Give them Instagram photo. Yeah, exactly.
1:02:08
Um, and then if you level up, then you're you're gonna start talking about like brand trips like Hermes took people to Aspen last summer.
1:02:15
And yeah, I mean a ton of VC firms do that all the time.
1:02:20
Come with us and we'll do a track day or movie night or we'll go out to, you know, the some, you know, beautiful place, some ranch, and like shoot shotguns and have dinners and it's a whole weekend. Where's my call? I want to do that.
1:02:33
They should get you on the calls.
1:02:34
We'll we'll introduce you some folks.
1:02:36
Um postmortem on the Democratic primary, but just on the marketing, right?
1:02:42
There was a lot of um coverage of uh Zoron's basically film, you know, vertical video making abilities that seems to have played a key role in the campaign. I'm curious.
1:02:55
Are you talking to any like Tik Tockers or content creators that are like, I want to build a business around this for politicians?
1:03:02
That would be interesting. Yeah.
1:03:04
I had a friend who I used actually used to work with at Kai Nast who worked in the White House for Biden and I think that she helped out with Zoran's campaign.
1:03:12
Like there are people who know I think like you have to be excellent at that job if you're working for um a political camp political campaign especially in the White House cuz the turnaround times are insane and the levels of approvals that they need to go through are crazy as they should be.
1:03:30
Um, so I think there's like a mini network.
1:03:32
I mean, there's there are a lot of people that worked in the White House under Biden who used to work at Instagram.
1:03:37
Like they were recruited straight from Meta.
1:03:39
So that's definitely a thing.
1:03:41
Um, but I think that organizing is a tremendous amount of work and like part of that is digitally now like and and Zoran did that really well. Yeah. Yeah.
1:03:51
Yeah, it's interesting to think about how the presidential election felt like the podcast election and then the the this primary felt like the short form election.
1:04:01
Uh and that sort of it makes sense especially as you're trying to just appeal to younger and younger voters in city.
1:04:08
I mean his team invited me to start covering his campaign back in February.
1:04:13
Like I was I was at a party I think in March for him.
1:04:18
But he's he also went on um like throwing fits and a few other podcasts and he did like a Q&A with me for feed me.
1:04:25
So he his team knew where to where to act. That's good.
1:04:27
Uh we've been talking a ton about uh the AI talent wars.
1:04:33
There's a lot of people in Silicon Valley making $100 million for insigning bonuses.
1:04:39
Uh Silicon Valley notoriously bad at spending money.
1:04:42
New York famously good at spending money.
1:04:44
What are some recommendations that you can give to these PhD researchers that have a hund00 million dollars burning a hole in their pocket?
1:04:53
They want to get in the game.
1:04:56
They want to step up their fashion, their cars, their houses.
1:04:57
What would you recommend?
1:05:00
It's It's funny that you go to fashion and cars because I think there's a real uh a Louis Manion situation on our hands here with this kind of job.
1:05:10
So, I feel like you need a security guard, like a security guard. for sure.
1:05:14
Y um plain clothes, security guard, which means like those tight lacost polos, you know.
1:05:20
Okay, maybe they should be carrying too.
1:05:23
Maybe they should, you know, if you got the you got to be everyday carry now if you're making 100 mill.
1:05:29
California, it's gotten more lenient. Yeah.
1:05:33
So, I I feel like you have to staff up in a in a position like this.
1:05:37
like you want a driver who's trustworthy and isn't going to like leak your information.
1:05:41
A personal trainer who's trustworthy, a fee subscription, um and then I think it's like removing friction from areas of your life with with like staffing up like that.
1:05:52
I recently learned that um this neighborhood in the Hampton's called Sagaponic is a a microclimate and I'm I feel like that's a good place to invest your money.
1:06:03
Um, wait, break that down a little bit be a little bit more.
1:06:06
It's just it's just on an average day, it's nicer there.
1:06:10
I think it's not necessarily nicer.
1:06:13
I think it might be like wetter and more humid than other areas.
1:06:17
Like I am in a different neighborhood than that.
1:06:20
And if you were there right now, it would feel different than here, even though it's not that far away. Yeah.
1:06:25
Yeah, like like you could be like Long Island as a whole is hot today, but psychoponic could could have a different weather report because it's this micro subclimate because the dunes and the tides and the trees and there's different parts of LA that have the same kind of dynamic as well. Yeah.
1:06:39
I mean, isn't San Francisco like that, too? Yes. Famously.
1:06:44
That's why in the summer it'll still be it'll still be foggy and stuff.
1:06:48
Uh but then it's really warm later in the year and so Right. Yeah.
1:06:49
So, I feel like investing in a micro climate is a good way to spend your That just sounds wise. Yeah.
1:06:57
They're not making any more of them. They're not.
1:06:58
And then I I think that you need to use your money to start taking some some experts to dinner because you can't just start buying watches and clothes.
1:07:06
There's a really high chance that you'll miss and go for like trendy items.
1:07:09
So, I would try to hang out with like do you guys know the watch dealer Mike Novo?
1:07:13
like somebody like him or you know like take him out and talk to him and and get some advice.
1:07:21
I bought a watch from him last year and he seems like he knows his stuff. What'd you pick up?
1:07:25
Um I got my husband a nice watch. Okay, let's go.
1:07:29
Let's hear it for the husband. Congratulations.
1:07:35
Two size gongs, one interview.
1:07:38
That's how you know it's a good one. A birthday and a gift. Fantastic.
1:07:41
and maybe like befriend Chris Black or like another stylish guy and get him to advise consult on the closet.
1:07:51
You can Can you get us Can you get us Chris Black on the show?
1:07:53
Because I the only podcast merch I've ever bought was their merch that they released where was the cease and desist from the New York Times because they like copied the cover art and they just printed, made a shirt, sold it.
1:08:05
It was a It was a work of art.
1:08:08
Chris would definitely come on. I'll connect you guys. Um Um, yeah.
1:08:13
I think that the biggest mistake that people who come into a lot of money quickly make is just, you know, doing that automatic Apple Pay on on while they're shopping and then you end up with stuff that doesn't fit you or looks horrible or something. Yeah.
1:08:26
So, stylist, tech, stylist or just like paid friends, you know, take people out to dinner, host parties, like keep them around, you know.
1:08:38
Um, do you do you think it's good to surround yourself with yesmen?
1:08:43
What do you what's how do you So if you surround yourself with yes men, then whatever ideas you have, all your yes men will just tell you yes, that's the best idea ever.
1:08:52
A lot of people say don't do it. But maybe it's not that.
1:08:58
Everyone around me has been saying that it's a good idea. [Music] No, I would not. That's not good. Okay.
1:09:06
So, stay away from the yes men. Yeah.
1:09:08
You want yes people on your team where you say, "I want to do the impossible."
1:09:12
And they just say, "Yes, we're going to do it."
1:09:14
But, uh, there's there's a line, you know, you don't you don't want to cross it.
1:09:17
Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This was fantastic. Thanks, guys.
1:09:22
Send us the invoice for the 100K appearance fee and uh we'll look forward to doing it soon. Yeah. Send the next few. Yeah. Happy 4th of July. Have fun. Uh, we'll talk soon. Bye.
1:09:33
Other news, uh, the Senate passes Trump's mega bill, the big beautiful bill, after an all night session. They went all night. I like that.
1:09:40
And, uh, it's got to get through the House still. But, uh, Elon is fuming.
1:09:44
Play the Ashen Hall sound effect for coming for the bill.
1:09:50
It's absolute war on the timeline.
1:09:53
timeline's in turmoil because Elon Musk said, "Anyone who campaigned on the promise of reducing spending but continues to vote on the biggest debt sealing increase in history will see their face on this poster in the primary next year." Pinocchio mode.
1:10:09
Liar voted to increase America's debt.
1:10:12
It's actually never been easier to make your enemies look like Pinocchio. Yeah.
1:10:15
Wait, but but I feel like if you put like I don't know, I I don't even know who voted for it.
1:10:20
Like let's just say like Ted Cruz or something.
1:10:21
If you put like Ted Cruz's face on here, like are you going to lose the Pinocchioess?
1:10:27
I feel like I feel like it could be a little bit a little bit rough. Uh anyway, Elon's upset.
1:10:31
He's trying to start a new party. Uh he America party.
1:10:36
He said voxula populi vox de he wants to start the American party and he is pissed because poly market is showing that the uh is expecting the reconciliation bill the big beautiful bill to pass uh by 70% by July 5th and 62% yeah 62% by July 4th and almost certainly by the end of the month.
1:10:58
So this will be the one to watch.
1:11:01
They're voting I guess the first vote is tomorrow.
1:11:04
Yeah, we'll be following that. Yeah, be interesting. Lots of pork.
1:11:06
But if you're AGI pilled, it doesn't matter. Yeah.
1:11:12
Uh we are going to be printing at 10% GDP, folks, in just just a few thousand days when super intelligence arrives.
1:11:19
These these debts weeks if not days away.
1:11:22
Many pe many people are saying if you're if you're against this bill, you're just telling yourself about your AGI timelines.
1:11:27
You're like, I don't really think super intelligence is coming. Yeah, it it is.
1:11:31
Um uh I think Teal was pushing uh generally pushing on Elon a bit in the interview he did last week around like, okay, so are are humanoids humanoids are going to be important?
1:11:44
You're obviously making them.
1:11:46
Are they going to impact the economy?
1:11:48
Are they going to accelerate growth? Yeah.
1:11:50
Um you know, this is the post 1970 stagnation.
1:11:53
You know, we've been growing at 2%.
1:11:55
been growing at 2%. Satin Nadella is asking the question of will AI accelerate GDP growth because if if GDP growth accelerates a lot it changes the dynamic around everything like not just this debt which we've been kind of lightly joking about but also
1:12:11
redistribution to credit he's also said when when he initially exited Doge and just stopped being a special employee he did say the only way out is growth so he knows this too but I think he can hold both of these ideas which is we need to grow but he's also frustrated the Hegelian dialectic of course. Um yeah, I mean if if GDP is
1:12:29
Um yeah, I mean if if GDP is growing really really fast, you could even keep tax rates the same or lower them and still pay down the debt and do more redistribution.
1:12:38
Like you could be paying people like you could have like something that feels like a massive social safety net, something that feels like UBI or or socialism but actually attack people less because the growth is so significant.
1:12:50
So it all changes once super intelligence arrives.
1:12:53
Maybe maybe Zoron is just so AGI pled himself. That's true.
1:12:58
That he's like, "Yeah, we're gonna have plenty plenty to go around.
1:13:02
We're gonna have such high levels of production.
1:13:05
Sure, the state can just seize a little bit."
1:13:08
Alternatively, maybe he's a hardcore Bitcoiner.
1:13:09
And so if he wants if he wants there to be no billionaires, no, it is impossible mathematically to be a billionaire in Bitcoin because there's only 21 million of them.
1:13:18
So the richest you could possibly be is a millionaire if you owned over 5% of the Bitcoin supply, right?
1:13:25
So there will never be a Bitcoin billionaire because there aren't a billion of them.
1:13:30
Whereas there are billions of dollars.
1:13:32
Maybe he doesn't want people in the network to vote to expand the supply. Yes.
1:13:35
So he's probably against the expansion of the Bitcoin supply.
1:13:38
But maybe he's a hardcore Bitcoiner.
1:13:40
He's a hardcore Bitcoiner. He's against inflation. Yes. Yes. Exactly.
1:13:44
Is that Koff for having me live from Mr. Washington?
1:13:51
Washington correspondent. Mr. Washington.
1:13:53
I even set up I don't know if you can see that's great.
1:13:55
Oh, that's the uh monument right there. Wow. No way. There we go. Beautiful. That's great.
1:14:02
We'll just have our production team zoom in.
1:14:04
Zoom in just on the monument so you won't be on camera. Perfect.
1:14:08
Just I'll get out of the way, but you can see the good stuff behind me.
1:14:12
That's the important thing.
1:14:12
So, yeah, break it down for us.
1:14:13
The uh the Wall Street Journal has a story.
1:14:15
Senate passes Trump's mega bill bill bill after all night session.
1:14:19
Tax cuts and Medicaid spending reductions head to the House with a July 4th deadline reachable.
1:14:26
What's interesting in the bill?
1:14:26
How likely do you think it is to pass?
1:14:28
What are the major reads on this?
1:14:30
And then we want to get your your takeaway from like where the dividing lines are around the bill.
1:14:36
Yeah, so there's a couple trip lines.
1:14:38
Uh the first trip line I would say you guys have been tracking the moratorium the 10-year moratorum on AI development.
1:14:44
This was the on AI regulation.
1:14:47
This was the first it was in Ted Cruz put it in then it was out then it was back in. There was a compromise.
1:14:53
There was a 5-year agreement instead of a 10-year agreement.
1:14:55
And Blackburn has been sort of a key driver of getting it back out again. It's out now.
1:15:00
It was done 99 to1 in the Senate almost unanimous in the Senate to get this out.
1:15:08
This was a big win for Gaio of Anthropic, probably the number one beneficiary.
1:15:12
And by the way, somebody who certainly used a fair bit of political capital pushing for this.
1:15:18
That's fault line number one.
1:15:18
I would say fault line number two. Stay on that.
1:15:24
It's it's a it's a potential ban on AI regulation that was removed.
1:15:30
And so the current bill does not have a has a does not have a moratorum on regulation.
1:15:35
So it's kind of double double moratorum on federal regulation. That's right.
1:15:40
So you can have California states whatever who want to Marcia Blackburn her home state Tennessee passed last year something called the Elvis Act which uh was cutely named but basically said look if you are building like a you know an AI audio business you cannot use any likeness of a real performer's sound.
1:16:01
So if you want to have uh John singing the blues or Jory singing the blues, I cannot do that without a prior deal.
1:16:09
That's because in Tennessee, Nashville is a dominant industry.
1:16:13
The music industry is a dominant industry.
1:16:15
And so part of Blackburn's opposition to the moratorium, which would have prevented bills like that from taking effect is that it ended up superseding the work that her home state has done to protect its dominant industries.
1:16:26
By the way, net net this moratorum the time that they got to a compromise was so watered down really wouldn't have impacted Tennessee or California anyway, but it was a very dramatic swing from in, out, in, and now out once again for good. Mhm.
1:16:42
And what do you what do you expect uh at at the state level around AI safety going forward?
1:16:52
Is this going to is the fact that this was removed going to inspire certain governors to say, you know, m make this a part of um their platform?
1:17:01
And I guess like I I want to know more about like if I'm 11 Labs and I'm and I'm training a voice agent and I can't be sure that some clip from, you know, Elvis or, you know, some Justin Bieber worked its way in there.
1:17:15
Uh, does that mean that I just turn off Tennessee at like the DNS level or do some geo fencing or or is it more risky than that?
1:17:24
Um, where I I have to I I have to comply kind of at the national level and they're kind of forcing me to comply everywhere or can I just pull back out of that state?
1:17:33
Because we've seen this with with uh Apple intelligence not being available in China, not being available in Europe for example.
1:17:38
But yeah, what what would the impact on something like that be?
1:17:41
Well, think about states in two categories, right?
1:17:45
There are some states that are so large and by the way the analog that I would think about here is what happens in the textbook market.
1:17:50
So if you're a textbook publisher and you want to write some textbook about biology or whatever if the largest states in the country this category one pass a law mandating something needs to be in a textbook suddenly you're going to comply nationally because they are so large they warp the market. Exactly.
1:18:05
You have to That's right.
1:18:07
And so if California tomorrow says, "Look, we're passing a European style bill to severely curtail," which I think would be a disaster, to severely curtail AI development, that would in effect be a national bill.
1:18:20
And part of the, in my view, uh mistake that's happening tactically right now is this self-imposed July 4th deadline is so restrictive that it forces all of these more nuanced negotiating points to fall by the wayside, right? It becomes blanket.
1:18:36
either it's in or it's out.
1:18:38
There's just not time to get to a more nuanced middle ground.
1:18:41
So 11 Labs if Tennessee has the Elvis Act probably says look we just skirt around Tennessee.
1:18:47
I don't I haven't spoken to 11 Labs but if California passes then suddenly you have the whole country warped by this and Gavin Newsome and the California legislature are certainly ambitious enough to try as they did last session uh to try to pass something that would impact the whole country. Yeah.
1:19:02
Wasn't Wasn't there news out of California this week or or last week around some of this stuff? Yeah. Yeah.
1:19:09
There's there was a huge fight which had an unlikely set of bed fellows where you saw Andre and others leading the anti- legislative anti-regulatory brigade against some other folks who are much more pro- cretailing.
1:19:20
By the way, I I will just say the other interesting takeaway for tech, not to totally dovetail away from your question, but the interest other interesting takeaway for us, I think, in this is the deciding vote in the Senate on the overall package, the reconciliation bill was JD Vance.
1:19:36
And so if you're a Vance head looking at 2028, right, you already see that Accaziocortez and others, AOC and others are going to use his deciding vote on this bill, which includes huge amounts of Medicaid cuts that Tom Tillis from North Carolina in particular thought were politically toxic as a wedge against him when he comes and runs for president in four years.
1:19:57
So sorry that was you didn't you asked a question about California and I dovetailed it back to the federal level, but that's the Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:20:04
That's the big uh the big shock.
1:20:06
So, you asked about trip wires.
1:20:08
The AI trip wire was one.
1:20:10
Medicaid cuts, which are politically really toxic, right?
1:20:12
Cuz who wants the idea that you voted for the government to take away your healthcare?
1:20:15
That's another huge trip wire.
1:20:16
And then there's a package of things that maybe we care about that are nuanced, like for example, IRA tax incentives for clean energy, right?
1:20:25
Or new taxes on wind and solar from China.
1:20:28
solar from China. These are all things that might enrage the Republican the the very conservative Republican faction in Viji in the House which now has to still pass the bill and now complicates the negotiating posture because the Senate
1:20:41
watered down the Senate preserved the IRA tax incentives and watered down some of the tax cuts, got rid of some of the tax cuts on Chinese imports, which means basically you have a bill that's actually financially harder to pass because it's less balanced. And at the
1:20:53
And at the same time, you've now alienated a huge faction of the GOP, the super conservative GOP side of the party who still have to vote for the bill to happen.
1:21:03
So, it's up in the air if it passes or not.
1:21:04
Uh, can you tell me about the EV tax credits?
1:21:07
I know Americans are struggling more than ever to buy naturally aspirated V12s.
1:21:12
I'm hoping that there's some move there to subsidize things like the Ferrari 12cylindry, the Dol Trindi. It's a multi00,000 car.
1:21:22
Even if we can't subsidize that, maybe we can just take away the subsidies from electric cars to tilt the to tilt the playing field in favor of the of the larger engines, the supercharged V8s, the twin turbos, the G63s, these types of cars that Americans, you know, deserve to be driving.
1:21:39
So, what's the news on the EV credit front?
1:21:41
I agree with you that the backbone of the American economy is the Ferrari, right?
1:21:46
It's impossible to me to imagine a world.
1:21:48
Thank you for the last track. I appreciate that.
1:21:51
Where a bluecollar factory worker cannot own a sports car is beyond me.
1:21:55
This bill doesn't address that. I wish it did. Be great if it did.
1:21:59
It's not going to solve that huge unsolved problem.
1:22:01
What it will do, by the way, is continue to drive a wedge between Elon and Trump. Right?
1:22:08
Then you saw Elon take the Twitter.
1:22:08
I imagine you guys probably mentioned it earlier.
1:22:11
You saw Elon take the Twitter and start to really crusade against people voting for this.
1:22:15
That is in part because at least the House version of the bill was much worse on a lot of the subsidies for electric vehicles than the Senate version.
1:22:23
The big challenge is going to be going into now the conference committee.
1:22:26
It's going to be how do they reconcile these two challenges so that they can hopefully tilt the market back in favor of course of Ferraris and supercars nonetheless while also not alienating one of the two power centers of the GOP at least today in Elon who could easily primary somebody who votes against.
1:22:42
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
1:22:44
What what about uh how how are the Democrats feeling about EVs these days?
1:22:49
Because it used to I used to feel like it was a Democratic cause to be pro- EV incentive.
1:22:53
Let's save the environment.
1:22:56
Let's get people out of the gas cars.
1:22:58
I'm joking about the V12s, obviously, but um but now it's become maybe let's punish Elon, but is this a cut your nose to spite your face situation for the Democrats?
1:23:07
I think it's a rough spot.
1:23:09
I mean, you guys remember when Elon wasn't invited to the big EV summit under the Biden administration, right?
1:23:14
That's part of what kicked off his political awakening is he he hasn't used unionized labor and so he was excluded from this EV summit.
1:23:22
There's been a huge polarization, negative polarization against EVs among not only Dems in office, but the Democratic base, too, which is to all the points you brought up quite ironic.
1:23:32
You're not going to find many Dems willing to cross the aisle in support of electric vehicles to save this bill.
1:23:38
This is a bill that will live or die by Republican whip count and Republican unity.
1:23:42
If the whip count isn't there, it's going to be really hard to get it done before July 4th. Mhm.
1:23:45
What about uh Elon's America party?
1:23:48
You think that's real or or just uh exciting?
1:23:56
Uh are those my only two options? Real or exciting? There's no door.
1:23:58
There's no door number three.
1:24:00
Yeah, I mean it's obvious like you know we were talking earlier uh third parties haven't haven't historically done well well he has the America pack so when you say Elon could primary someone he could potentially primary a Republican on the Republican ticket with the American pack and he could almost like be kind of like a head fake like oh this is part of the America party but it's not really a third party.
1:24:25
Is that more what we're thinking here how this plays out?
1:24:26
Yeah, maybe maybe one historical analog.
1:24:28
It's not perfect, but think about like a Theodore Roosevelt, like a Teddy Roosevelt with the Bull Moose Party, right?
1:24:33
You think about it's a faction within a larger established party to your point that can serve as an engine to primary people who are in disagreement over Exactly.
1:24:41
Like the Tea Party or frankly what's happening now. Look at Zorona.
1:24:45
MAGA is also like a wing of the Republican party. That's right. That's right.
1:24:50
MAGA, the Tea Party, and now on the left, the polarization from the Zoron and Democratic Socialist world.
1:24:55
All of these folks are new factions in a way that by the way we haven't seen before.
1:25:00
The same way that 50 years ago you basically watched MASH on television.
1:25:03
That was your only option.
1:25:05
And now I tune into TBPN while I play Subway Surfers and have 30 other things hitting me at the same time.
1:25:10
This is the political version of that, right?
1:25:12
Where you say, "Okay, it used to be my options were a platform that I accepted wholesale on the Republican side or the Dem side. Now I can be a MAGA guy.
1:25:19
I can be a techright guy.
1:25:21
I can be a populist guy and I'm a new right guy.
1:25:23
And on the left I can be a democratic socialist.
1:25:25
I can be an abundance bro.
1:25:26
I have an infinite menu of things.
1:25:29
The America party is more likely if it sticks.
1:25:31
One more menu on the side of the right. Sure. Sure. That makes sense.
1:25:35
That makes a lot of sense.
1:25:36
What uh what time what do you expect out of the next 24 hours?
1:25:42
So, tomorrow morning at 9, House Rules Committee votes.
1:25:44
That's going to be a key vote to see how this thing does.
1:25:48
What I would say is if this gets done by July 4th, the thing that you're going to have to look to is that 9:00 am Eastern vote to see how much unity is there in the Republican party.
1:25:56
They can barely lose any votes that this thing goes through the House in its current form.
1:26:01
But I think it's unlikely that it's going to happen immediately. It'll happen. This will get passed.
1:26:04
But on their timeline, I don't know.
1:26:06
In the next 24 hours, if you see more senators like Marowski from Alaska who are saying things like, "The bill is flawed.
1:26:11
Please send it back to the Senate so we can work on it again."
1:26:14
That's a key indicator this thing may not have the legs it needs the next couple days.
1:26:20
Yeah, we heard about I mean everyone's saying like it's the biggest bill, there's all this pork.
1:26:23
Like are there any like green shoots where there's some random startup out there that's just super excited because maybe it's not a headline grabbing, you know, $10 billion thing, but it's like that's a hundred million that I can go after in energy or in defense or in ship building or anything.
1:26:42
Have you seen any of these?
1:26:43
Like they're called riders, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good question.
1:26:46
Um Biden was famous for stacking a lot of these.
1:26:50
Like the inflation reduction act had a million ways you could go participate. This one's got fewer.
1:26:53
I'll say one funny piece of pork and I'll say one actual opportunity.
1:26:57
The real opportunity I would say is for fintech folks who are looking at the Trump accounts, right, which is giving huge amounts of new Americans who were underbanked or not banked before access to capital for the first time.
1:27:08
If I'm Robin Hood, I am loving that's a big change for me.
1:27:12
Funniest piece of pork in the bill.
1:27:15
Marowski, who was the key hold out in the Senate from Alaska, got a tax exemption for uh Alaskan Native Alaskan uh whalers.
1:27:23
She said basically native Alaskan whalers need to be Yeah, that was honestly big delivery for uh her constituency of people who kill whales in Alaska.
1:27:32
Let's give it up for the whalers.
1:27:34
They don't get enough attention in Washington.
1:27:36
I mean, we've we've talked about this before, but you know, energy is really important for the AI data center race.
1:27:41
Whales, they produce oil that you can burn.
1:27:46
Wasn't it Chase who said he would he would burn whale oil?
1:27:48
He didn't say he would do it.
1:27:49
He said that the hyperlas are so desperate for energy right now that they would burn whale oil.
1:27:54
It's more It's more fun to think about Chase.
1:27:58
I'm launching Crusoe for whales. VCs are the new whalers. Yes. Yes. They really are. And the old whalers. And the old whalers. That's true.
1:28:07
Zach, this was so much fun.
1:28:09
We'll have to have you call in tomorrow or Thursday. Yeah.
1:28:11
When there's more news, please. I'll be around.
1:28:14
It's my first wedding anniversary, so I'll be around.
1:28:15
Plenty of time to call in. Thank you very much. Incredible. Incredible. We'll talk to you soon.
1:28:20
Thanks for having me, boys. See you soon. Yeah. Bye.
1:28:24
Next up, we have Matthew Prince from Cloudflare coming in to TBPN. Welcome to the stream.
1:28:31
Some huge news from Cloudflare.
1:28:33
Uh we'll let him tell us the story. How are you doing? Good to meet you. Nice to meet you.
1:28:38
Uh welcome to the stream.
1:28:42
Um I would love to start with um the news today and then I want to go into some of the the history of the company and and uh when you faced similar uh junction points and kind of uh turning points in the past.
1:28:54
Uh so why don't you uh kick us off with uh the big announcement, the big news today from Cloudflare? Sure.
1:29:01
So about 18 months ago, we started getting approached by a number of content creators saying that they faced a new new threat uh online.
1:29:10
Um we spend most of our days, most of our business trying to fight cyber hackers, Iranians, Russians, North Koreans.
1:29:17
And so I was surprised when the new threat was AI companies.
1:29:19
And frankly, I kind of rolled my eyes uh at publishers.
1:29:23
I was like, publishers always complaining about, you know, the next new technology.
1:29:26
uh and and and and they said just pull the data, look at what is is going on.
1:29:31
And it was really striking um that uh over time uh you could watch as the sort of deal that publishers had made with Google, you know, starting 30 years ago, which was you can copy all of my content and in exchange you send us send us traffic.
1:29:47
That deal just didn't hold up anymore.
1:29:49
Uh where they were copying the content, but because they were providing answer boxes, AI overviews, uh they just weren't sending nearly as much traffic.
1:29:56
And and that was the good news.
1:29:56
Uh as you looked at OpenAI, it was about uh uh 750 times harder than with the kind of Google of old to get traffic.
1:30:04
With something like Anthropic, it's 30,000 times harder.
1:30:08
And the reason why is because people are reading the derivatives, they're not reading the content.
1:30:12
It'd be effectively like if I asked an AI system, you know, summarize what happened on the Technology Brothers show today, I have less incentive to actually go and watch your actual show.
1:30:22
And that means that if you're making money through advertising, if you're making money through subscriptions, if you're just, you know, getting value out of the ego of knowing that people are watching your show, uh that's going away in an increasingly AIdriven web.
1:30:32
And and we worried about that um quite a bit.
1:30:37
And more and more as we talked to publishers, we realized there was something that we could do about it because Cloudflare runs one of the world's largest networks.
1:30:42
A huge amount of the internet already sits behind us.
1:30:46
uh we could partner with literally publishers, everyone from Ade to Ze Davis and everything in between uh to say that let's change the the way that that uh the internet works and let's change the sort of model where if you're going to take content, you should actually compensate the content creators for it.
1:31:04
And so starting on July 1st, uh we flipped the script.
1:31:06
We made it as a default that if uh you're using Cloudflare um that you uh can by default for free uh block any crawlers from taking your content without compensating you.
1:31:17
And I think now the hard work be begins where we have to figure out now the business model around how we get compensation back to these content creators and make sure that folks like you who are who are creating real original content can continue to be compensated for the hard work that you're doing. Yeah.
1:31:31
Well, we used to joke saying that uh the the labs are welcome to scrape our content because we want to influence uh the outputs of the of the model.
1:31:41
But no, it's it's a serious it's a serious issue.
1:31:42
We we were covering one of Ben Thompson's pieces about this whole debacle a few weeks ago and it was funny because at the time we were like this is there's so many different stakeholders here who could possibly try to figure out a solution to this problem and I obviously the answer you guys are uh a key player in this and you have the scale in order to kind of make changes happen. Can you Yeah.
1:32:06
Can you I guess like break down more kind of like the the kind of the market structure between and and how you see this actually deals have been done in over the past year because I know uh didn't News Corp do a bespoke deal with OpenAI for that exact thing.
1:32:27
It sounds like you are more equipped to kind of handle like the longer tale but also some of the bigger publishers.
1:32:33
So talk to me about kind of the state-of-the-art of what those deals look like when they're onetoone and then what things might look like going forward.
1:32:41
Yeah, so I think that um first of all uh I I think for some time to come uh large publishers will do deals with large AI companies uh where there might be places that people need help are either small publishers or small AI companies um you know and figuring out what has to happen uh there.
1:32:58
I think even in the case of places where deals have been struck, what the challenge is is, you know, someone like OpenAI is paying a lot of publishers for their content and doesn't actually object to the the basic idea that they should pay for the content that they're using.
1:33:16
Um, but but they do object to the fact that they're paying where all of their competitors are getting content for free.
1:33:22
Any market that exists has to have scarcity.
1:33:25
And the problem, the reason why there hasn't been a market in this place space is that there isn't scarcity.
1:33:32
And so what changed yesterday is scarcity was in introduced really for the first time.
1:33:38
And I I think the closest analogy is if you think back to you know before iTunes launched um we were all downloading music on Napster and you know all the the free um pirate services.
1:33:47
That's effectively how the AI companies are taking data from any content creators today.
1:33:54
And what you need is an iTunes.
1:33:56
you need someone to come in and say, "Okay, let's provide a way where people can pay for that content and they can go back."
1:34:01
Now, now that's evolved over time.
1:34:03
I think our first version of the marketplace will probably be relatively naive and we'll figure it out.
1:34:06
We no one's paying 99 cents for songs anymore.
1:34:10
Uh we've moved to something that's closer to a subscription model like a Spotify.
1:34:13
Um and and and I think that that's what what we will evolve to have over time.
1:34:18
And and if we do it right, you know, I think that we can have a large number of sellers of content obviously, but also a large number of buyers of content.
1:34:25
Both the big sort of general purpose models, but then also very specific models.
1:34:29
And we've got to make sure that new entrance uh can come into this market and have have a vibrant way of of participating and competing.
1:34:37
And so I think that for now, most of the deals will be one-on-one bespoke deals between publishers and AI companies.
1:34:44
you'll need to have some way of enforcing those deals and making sure that if you're charging someone, they can get access, but their competitors can't.
1:34:51
And then over time, I think we'll develop something that looks much more like a robust marketplace where um uh content providers can set sort of what their price is.
1:35:00
There can be a bid for maybe getting that that content exclusively for some period of time or or or whatever else.
1:35:05
And that's going to develop uh over over the next uh over the coming months.
1:35:10
Is that the correct I I is that the correct model to think that the the content producer would set the price?
1:35:16
I mean, that's certainly what happens on Substack and you know the the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal set their price, but I've always thought that this might evolve a little bit more like YouTube or like Spotify where there is a pool of dollars that are going into Chat GPT subscriptions.
1:35:30
I personally pay $200 a month and occasionally I fire off queries that probably land on the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times and I would be happy for them to send 10 cents or a dollar or split off 50% of what I'm paying.
1:35:47
So you have $100 to kind of, you know, parcel out in the pool and then you see how much inference pulled what data from what what sources and and kind of have it all be driven by uh the like kind of the same volume uh uh like the volume algorithm that you see on on uh on YouTube or Spotify.
1:36:06
Does that seem like kind of what the long-term um outcome might look like or do we need to also get to some sort of like ad driven marketplace because that's ultimately where YouTube how YouTube prices these things?
1:36:20
Yeah, you know, I think it's going to be um I I think that we there's there's a lot that we still have to figure out.
1:36:27
I I I last week um traveled up to Stockholm to meet with Daniel A, the uh the founder of of Spotify, and and it was, you know, it was really um it was it was interesting.
1:36:37
He said, you know, the the ultimate model that Spotify settled on.
1:36:39
Uh I think it's I don't want to put words in his mouth, but but it was basically like it was it was sort of the most naive of all of the different options that he had come up with.
1:36:49
And and it is works out it is a pool of funds and then they divide it up based on basically how many minutes of of content you you consume and there are different rates for music versus podcasts versus audio books and um and it was fascinating to to see.
1:37:03
So you could imagine a version where Cloudflare effectively negotiates on behalf of all of the content that sits behind us with the big AI companies.
1:37:14
People can opt in or opt out of being a part of that pool.
1:37:16
The more content that's part of that, the more valuable it is to the AI companies.
1:37:19
And then we would look at how we could split that up across how much crawling is actually um done across that.
1:37:26
I think one of the real keys will be how can we give hints to the AI companies on what is the content which is the most valuable to them.
1:37:35
So for instance, if Taylor Swift releases a brand new song and maybe does an interview about it, that's incredibly valuable content.
1:37:42
If you're a I don't know chatbot for teen lonely teen girls, right?
1:37:47
On the other hand, um it's probably not so valuable if you're sort of a chatbot trying to be the world's best doctor.
1:37:53
you know may maybe there's some value in in sort of bedside manner but but largely you know that's not going to be a big deal in your in your care.
1:38:00
On the other hand, if a research study comes out on acetaminophen's effects on on uh you know different types of chemotherapy, very little value for the chatbot for teen girls, but incredibly valuable for the doctor.
1:38:11
And so what we have to do is actually I think on a on an LLM or a AI model by AI model basis be able to give them signals back that say this is the sort of thing that you should be paying attention to, that you should be indexing, that you should be actually um scraping and paying for.
1:38:27
Um and and the the same way that in you know the music industry we've got reviews, we've got different types of music that that people are you know you might be into country or you might be into classical and and and it kind of allows you to compartmentalize that.
1:38:40
I think that whole ecosystem has to develop but once that does um something very much like Spotify could be the right answer uh long term and again I think we're in a unique position to pull it together.
1:38:52
Talk briefly about stable coins.
1:38:52
I remember in this Ben Thompson piece he was people have been suggesting this idea that stable coins could be some part of the solution to to or backbone for a new uh business model for the internet.
1:39:05
At the same time while I'm bullish on stable coins someone like a cloudflare can set up the infrastructure to just use traditional financial rails to process payments.
1:39:15
So, I'm guessing that it's not part of of of what you're This was Ben's uh reaction to the the the original sin of the internet was advertising and this idea that Mark Andreen when he built the browser didn't build in payments because it was this multi-party discussion to figure out how to actually integrate payments into HTTP didn't happen.
1:39:36
didn't happen. the first MCP spec that's the model context protocol spec for AI agents to interact with each other doesn't include payments but he was kind of saying that it might be on the horizon but would love your take yeah you know I think um the answer doesn't have to be 100% one or or the other uh and so I would guess that there are there are going to be um very
1:39:56
traditional kind of traditional um financial rails that will be ways to pay pay people out but there will also likely be something that is uh blockchain based or or stable coinbased Uh and and again, I think we're looking at um all of the different providers uh that are in this space, including potentially creating our own uh stable coin that would be part of how these these transactions um you know, take place. And I think you're exactly right
1:40:18
And I think you're exactly right that um there's a natural extension from what we're doing here to how we figure out around what the payment rails look like for MCPs because as your agent is going around interacting with things um that's also going to be something that is is either um you know charged for or that you that you actually um pay get paid to do.
1:40:41
Uh and and there's got to be a way for those those transactions to take place.
1:40:45
And to the extent that you can reduce the transaction costs for those transactions as far as possible, uh then that's that's a pretty interesting uh way of of uh of of being able to um process, you know, very high volume, low dollar amount uh uh transactions. So I think that's right.
1:41:03
My only one quibble is that I think that the original sin of the internet is not that it didn't include payments.
1:41:06
It's that it uh was that there was no privacy uh built into it and your IP address reveals far too much about you as and who you are.
1:41:14
We don't even have to get to cookies, but that's a No, we totally can.
1:41:18
What about we we we've talked about content creators, publishers.
1:41:20
What about uh the the apps of the world, the Ubers, the Instacarts that actually have really meaningful advertiser businesses, you know, businesses built on top of them?
1:41:33
Uh do you expect there to be any type of of this functionality rolled out to them over time or or is that something you think they're thinking about quite a bit?
1:41:41
Because if I can go into chat GPT and that's my default daily assistant, let's say in a few years from now and I'm like, "Hey, order me groceries and order me this Uber, uh, you know, I'm not in the app seeing ads potentially, you know, being upsold and and that could be a problem for those types of companies." Yeah, totally.
1:42:00
And I think that I mean um, you know, robots don't click on ads.
1:42:05
uh and and so and so the the sort of model that that part of the um you know revenue stream to support these services uh has to come from from somewhere uh and if today you know Uber is able to um monetize the time where I'm I'm waiting for a car to come by showing me an advertisement um that that means that they can effectively charge me less for the ride.
1:42:31
Um, and so it may be that if that ride is booked through an agent instead and they don't get that that advertising experience, and again, I don't know enough about um, you know, Uber's business model to know how how important that is to them, but if they don't get that, that maybe it is that there's some sort of premium that an agent booked ride receives versus a human booked ride.
1:42:53
And again, I think that that's um that that that's just we've got to figure out what that what that uh what that looks like.
1:43:00
I think that's going to be less up to Cloudflare.
1:43:03
Cloudflare. uh I think it's going to be you know our job will be how do we provide those payment rails how do we provide the systems how do we make it so so that we can have guard rails on as agents interact uh uh with applications that are there that you as the application provider can set those those rules and controls and then and then agents can interact within within that
1:43:24
system and MCP is is sort of the leading candidate uh for providing that but you're you're right that that's a sort of draft version of that that specification and there are a lot of things that have to you know, mature in order for that to be something that is the the real um kind of agent to agent uh system that runs that is likely to run what will be an increasingly AIdriven web. Yeah. Can you talk about Yeah.
1:43:44
Can you talk about any previous crucible moments for either Cloudflare or just like the internet history broadly?
1:43:51
This feels like a moment where you're potentially trying to I mean deal with a shift in the in the overall internet structure or the incentive structure.
1:44:02
Uh but uh it's a reaction but it's also an action that should reshape the the uh the the relationship between different parties on the internet.
1:44:12
Uh are there different moments in the history of Cloudflare or the history of the internet that you think uh we could draw on as historical analogies?
1:44:20
um to learn from to see how this might play out.
1:44:24
You know, I think that um you know that Google really uh 30 years ago defined what was the business model for the web, which was uh you you create content, search drives traffic, and then you monetize that content through advertising or or subscriptions or or ego.
1:44:45
um and ego and monetization not quite the right thing, but you drive value from it in one of those those three ways.
1:44:52
Um and that that's held up for the last 30 years.
1:44:55
I I I I think that this is um the first time that I've I've seen something where I thought, wow, there there are really going to be um very very very fundamental changes to the structure of how the internet works if we move from a searchdriven model to an AIdriven uh model.
1:45:16
And and I think that um what I hope is that we can actually make this something where um what gets rewarded is not what gets rewarded today, which which largely is, you know, who can write the headline that produces the most um you know, uh sort of inflammatory response uh in in all of us.
1:45:37
You know, who who basically drives the most cortisol uh you know, gets the most clicks and and therefore the most ad revenue or the most subscriptions.
1:45:46
That's that's not a that's not a healthy way of looking at the world.
1:45:47
I think you know the alternative is if you imagine that kind of all of the AI models together are a good kind of assemblage of of an approximation on human knowledge.
1:45:58
If we can identify where the holes are and then create incentives for content creators to actually fill in those holes that actually is going to move humanity forward.
1:46:07
It's going to make the AI better.
1:46:08
It's going to it's going to be a much more interesting thing.
1:46:11
And that's I think how we're going to we're going to be um creating it.
1:46:14
I I can't think in the last 30 years of of a a seminal moment.
1:46:17
I think there are some things that are along the way.
1:46:21
I think 2016 was a really a big turning point year um for for a lot of reasons.
1:46:26
It was sort of the year that it went, you know, technology went from being able to do no wrong to being able to do no right.
1:46:31
Uh and and sort of rise in populism um around the world.
1:46:34
You have you have Brexit in the EU.
1:46:36
You have the first Donald Trump election.
1:46:38
And you've got Xi and Modi consolidating power in Asia, the Filipino election.
1:46:42
Um, and I think that that was a point in time where, you know, also driven by um, Snowden uh, shortly before that in 2015, uh, that that a lot of the world lost faith in kind of the US model of internet governance and it wasn't quite ready to adopt the Chinese model.
1:46:59
But that's that's definitely been a shift uh, which is substantial and I think we're still watching that uh, play out.
1:47:07
that's that I think is probably still remains the biggest threat to the overall internet.
1:47:10
But this shift to AI as well um you know again I I think is is is a real challenge but it's also an incredible opportunity if if again we can make the rewards incentives for content creators not be who can produce the most most cortisol but who can produce the biggest sort of incremental improvement in human knowledge.
1:47:29
um that that would be an incredible win and uh and something that that um you know I I don't quite know how to get there yet, but I I think yesterday or today and uh you know we took in July 1st we took a a real step in uh in in moving in in in that direction and making sure they compensate content creators can be compensated for for really producing uh information which is valuable to advance human knowledge.
1:47:55
What do you think about the future of investigative journalism?
1:48:01
Uh there's been a big shift in just content creation into independent creators, but a lot of that is actually downstream or separate from the type of work that investigative journalists do.
1:48:12
I'm thinking of like Seymour Hirs hanging out at a local army bar for a year before he gets one scoop that he can write a book about.
1:48:19
and and he and these investigative journalists, they tend to, you know, John Keroo was on the payroll of the Wall Street Journal for years.
1:48:27
He was writing stuff, but then he blows the Theronos case wide open, eventually a book, and then a movie.
1:48:31
Um, and and I and I imagine that with artificial intelligence, the value of a scoop could actually go up because you could use an LLM to read through the clickbait repurposed version of the article to find, wait, their sourcing actually, this person posted it on the internet earlier.
1:48:50
They're the one that actually did the hard work to get the scoop.
1:48:52
they should get 90% of the value and 10% should go to the repurposed ragebait version as opposed to the economic model now which is maybe you get 90% more clicks on the on the viral you know repurposed content and the scooper actually gets 10%.
1:49:08
Do you think that's possible or or how do you think that investigative journalism will evolve?
1:49:13
Yeah, this I I don't know this is an answer to your question but but it but it's um I thought it was I thought it was interesting.
1:49:19
As I said, I met with Daniel A um up in up in in Stockholm and um and and he told me he said, you know, we were talking about this and he said, you know, one of the things we do at Spotify is we actually surface all of the different queries that are sent to Spotify that we don't feel like we have a really good response for.
1:49:38
Um, so if somebody searches for, you know, I want a a a song to a reggae kind of beat with it's all about how much it sucks when your sister steals your car and your dog.
1:49:51
Um, like not to get too specific, I'm not again I don't know what what what these are, but there are people they're musicians who take this list and they actually write songs based on what people are looking for. No way.
1:50:05
and that that they make tens of millions of dollars a year doing just exactly that.
1:50:13
And there's something about that that I think is really beautiful.
1:50:14
Um as opposed to the alternative of just you know the just trying to do a little of more meto of what everybody else is doing like taking a different twist using signals from the market in order to go find that.
1:50:28
So you know again that's not investigative journalism by any means but I think it is actually advancing kind of the sort of good of humanity.
1:50:36
It's taking what a place where there's a a missing need and it's filling that missing need.
1:50:42
And so I am hopeful um you know and and relative I mean I'm relatively optimistic person and and I'm hopeful that if we get this right that we might be on a golden age of of content creation where people actually are rewarded for doing things that advance human knowledge as opposed to just doing things that produce as much cortisol as possible. Yeah.
1:51:01
The the idea of a knowledge bounty, right?
1:51:03
It's like, hey, there there's there's groups of people or a single entity online that will just pay you to produce really highquality information around this specific topic.
1:51:14
And this the internet always did this sort of organically, but it would just be somebody spinning up a blog or maybe an Instagram account or something like that and they would just start blogging about something that was niche and then an entire network would form around it and other people would contribute to it.
1:51:30
So, I think there's quite a lot of precedent.
1:51:31
Uh but it would be exciting to like put that reward out before and not saying hey you have to do this and then maybe you'll get some ads associated with it later but like basically like the the pool of capital is here and you just have to deliver that knowledge that that people already want and we know it because they're searching it on LLM and things like that.
1:51:51
Can I I think that the um I think I think I'll tell you the sort of black mirror kind of dystopian outcome uh if we don't get this right which is I don't think that I don't think journalism goes away.
1:52:02
I don't think that research goes away.
1:52:04
Um, but you could imagine a world in which we go back to something kind of like the Medachche where there are five big AI companies and they basically employ each of them all of the journalists, all the researchers, all the academics to be able to do the research to feed their systems because you're still going to have to have original content.
1:52:22
People are still going to have to be able to produce that in order for the AI systems to, you know, fill in the holes in their kind of effective block of Swiss cheese or that that is that is their model.
1:52:31
Um, but but I I think that that's that's a bad that's a pretty bad world where where again because you'd then probably have like the conservative AI and the liberal AI and I mean all these things that we've kind of that the internet kind of broke apart.
1:52:44
You could imagine AI as a system that is just this massive consolidator uh in the future.
1:52:49
And I I think that's a bad outcome.
1:52:52
think that's a bad outcome. And I think a better outcome is if we can figure out um how how can we reward people for again driving knowledge um but but but not get to a place where all of them have to be employed by by one of the five you know big yeah I actually talked
1:53:08
to somebody very high up at one of the labs who said that was was saying that like if you take the total uh the total salaries of all the journalists in America it would be a fraction of what the AI labs are spending right now just acquiring ing data and so it it's not a financial question. It is a political
1:53:24
It is a political cultural question. It's interesting.
1:53:29
That's also the argument why I think that and and I've been really positively um surprised as we've talked with because we've talked with all the big tech companies, all the AI companies about this and they and they all like with with maybe one or two very small exceptions um they all say yes, we understand over the long term we have to pay for content. And so they get that.
1:53:50
What what what what's key though is it has to be a fair playing field.
1:53:52
Um and that fair playing field everyone sees that slightly differently.
1:53:56
So if you're a new incumbent you want to say well Google can't be advantaged.
1:54:00
If you're Google you have to say you know well we have it has we have to be respected for the ecosystem that we've helped build and flourish and we should be able to you know do this.
1:54:08
So everyone's got a slightly different take on this.
1:54:10
But I I'm actually encouraged that that the the dollars are there.
1:54:14
Uh that there is an acceptance that this is is uh is something that needs to happen and that if you if you if you ask them, everyone says yes, we need to do this as long as you can create a level playing field.
1:54:29
And again, that's where I think our role comes in is how can we create that level playing field?
1:54:32
How can we create scarcity?
1:54:33
And then how can we make sure that content creators are being compensated for the the hard work that they're doing. Yeah.
1:54:39
Zooming out just for a second, what is the state of how's the internet been for the last few weeks?
1:54:45
It's been a busy uh month in or last month in geopolitics, I'm sure.
1:54:48
And I know that makes your job a bit harder or at least I would imagine.
1:54:53
Uh things get a little bit busier. Keeps it interesting.
1:54:57
I mean, it's whatever whatever you see sort of in in a in the sort of kinetic side, the physical side of a conflict is is usually replicated in the in the cyber um side of the conflict.
1:55:10
And so um you know, we as the hostilities um ramped up between Israel and Iran.
1:55:16
First of all, we saw very clear signals that that something was coming ahead of time, which is it's interesting how there's sort of a digital residue, which shows when uh there's going to be uh kinetic action uh uh taken.
1:55:29
And so, and so we were we were watching uh that that pretty carefully.
1:55:33
Uh big attacks um targeting both um Iran uh one of Iran's largest banks was hacked by what looked like a group of um is Israeli um activists.
1:55:42
um the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Iran uh was hacked and all its funds were drained uh again looking like it was either by the Israelis or or Israeli um sympathetic uh attackers.
1:55:54
Iran is has tried to do the same thing against Israel.
1:55:57
Israel's um cyber uh defenses are much stronger.
1:56:00
Um but we're starting to see that Iran is targeting other um uh other largely US uh financial services firms uh critical infrastructure firms uh to try and see to sort of try and strike back from what what is um you know h how do they strike back against the US in a way that um that that is harmful but doesn't start World War II?
1:56:24
And I think that increasingly um unfortunately cyber will be a big piece of that.
1:56:27
And so we're um you know we're we're doing everything we can to to stay in front of that, make sure that anyone who needs it has has protection and that we can keep keep the lights on everywhere in the world. Last question for me.
1:56:39
Um there's a number of larger overarching tech narratives.
1:56:42
I'm interested in if you're losing sleep over any or tracking any in in particular focus.
1:56:49
Um the AI talent wars and kind of pay inflation for top performers.
1:56:55
Is that an issue or something you've been tracking or uh the difficulty to build larger data centers and infrastructure the GPU short of the chip wars?
1:57:05
Any any of those topics kind of particularly relevant to you or your business or or kind of keeping you up at night?
1:57:12
Yeah, you know, I think we're we're not trying to build a foundational model LLM.
1:57:17
So So we're not we're not as much competing um for the the bleeding edge AI researchers.
1:57:22
I will say that we've I've been um really amazed at at both from an academic side and then also just you know pure talent side how many people are interested in working on that problem of something like how do you score content in order to be able to create a marketplace and so and so that that's something that's been um you know pretty exciting.
1:57:41
We're we're very excited about the uh the the people who are coming to uh apply to work for Cloudflare to to work on problems like that and like today has been a record uh applicant day for us uh on the on the Congratulations. Record.
1:57:53
Sorry, I hit I hit the air air horn for you.
1:57:55
Record applicant day, but it's good. It's good news.
1:57:59
Uh, and then, you know, I think, um, you know, we we've, uh, we tend to put a little bit of equipment in a lot of places and so that we don't tend not to have kind of massive multi- Yeah.
1:58:11
You're not running into like power constraints or rare earth element constraints or water, right, constraints.
1:58:16
We we we do in but in in in kind of a micro way where you know, we put GPUs at the edge of our network.
1:58:21
we have to live with a power envelope that we're given by an ISP.
1:58:24
And so we're doing things to try and figure out how to just get the best power efficiency out of the the GPUs that are there.
1:58:30
The answer to, you know, more and more need of GPUs can't be everyone has to turn up their own nuclear power station.
1:58:36
Um so so I do think the place where we're pushing suppliers and AMD is doing some really interesting things in the space.
1:58:44
Qualcomm is doing some interesting things in the space.
1:58:45
things in the space. the fruit company down in Certino is doing some interesting things in the space or how do you focus on yes performance but performance per watt and and we've seen this game before with with Intel saying oh that doesn't matter like just just get the most performance possible you
1:59:01
can water cool things all kinds of things that that tends to not be the winning strategy over the long term and so we do think that there will be a renewed focus on just energy efficiency around GPUs and and we're really pushing uh that in a way that because because again we can't build our own data centers in the business that we're in. Um, and then and then chip shortage. The
1:59:18
Um, and then and then chip shortage.
1:59:18
The chip shortages are funny.
1:59:21
Like it's there's never been a chip shortage in any time in the history of of silicon that doesn't turn into a glut.
1:59:29
Um because it's Hey, but this time it's different.
1:59:33
Yeah, this time this time is totally different.
1:59:34
So I think that I think you're going to see both um you're going to just see shifting demand uh that's there and and uh and a lot more.
1:59:44
It's Nvidia is not going to be the only chip supplier of GPUs.
1:59:46
Uh there are some really again great great other providers that are out there. Yeah.
1:59:49
Well, thank you so much for stopping by.
1:59:51
Enjoyed the conversation.
1:59:53
Congrats on the launch and come back on again soon. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for coming.
1:59:56
Good luck filtering through all those job applicants. We'll talk to you soon. See you. Bye.
2:00:00
There's no there's no decency anymore.
2:00:03
You can't even take a summer weekend.
2:00:05
You can't even send an email to a 30,000 person organization without it leaking to Wired.
2:00:10
Um, Mark Chen, the chief research officer at OpenAI, sent a forceful memo to staff on Saturday, promising to go head-to-head with social giant in the war for top research talent.
2:00:20
This memo, which was sent to OpenAI employees in Slack and obtained by Wired, came days after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg successfully recruited four senior researchers from the company to join Meta's super intelligence lab.
2:00:33
Uh, I have a visceral feeling right now as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something.
2:00:40
Chen wrote, "Please trust that we haven't been sitting idly by."
2:00:44
I mean, this makes sense.
2:00:44
Like, you need to you need to tell the troops that like, you know, we're prepared to go on the counterattack.
2:00:49
Like, we got attacked, but we're ready to go back.
2:00:52
What's interesting is like is like I don't think that I don't think that Meta is necessarily going to try and go eat chat GPT's lunch.
2:00:58
chat GPT's lunch. Like I was revisiting that conversation that we had with Jeff Huber and he was saying like you know he was kind of reiterating like never bet against Zuck like he's working on open source model but a lot of it is is more of this like uh B2B applied AI
2:01:15
necessarily than trying to go and and and disrupt chat GBT because Google's already running that playbook like Mark can see that and see that like what happens when you're a trillion dollar company and you roll out a basically a direct clone phone of the chat GPT app. It's like yeah, you can get a decent
2:01:31
It's like yeah, you can get a decent amount of users in a num in a notional terms.
2:01:35
Like I'm pretty sure the Gemini app has like a 100,000 user or 100 million users and like lots of fivestar reviews, but it just doesn't have anywhere near the penetration of Chat GBT.
2:01:45
And so when you pull someone off the street and you say, "What do you use for AI?" They say chat.
2:01:47
They don't even say Chad GBT anymore because so dominant.
2:01:51
And so I think Mark knows that he shouldn't necessarily try and go after that, but he should be going after the next thing and the next next thing and have a model that he can pipe into all sorts of different u uh features within the meta ecosystem.
2:02:04
But yeah, the crazy thing is there there's not it doesn't seem like there's clear precedent for a raid of a talent raid of this magnitude, right?
2:02:15
We we covered uh Ken Griffin rating Enron, but it was post the collapse, right?
2:02:19
Um Apple heavily recruited out of Xerox Park in in 1979 in the early 80s, but like kind of a downswing, right? Yeah.
2:02:29
It wasn't it wasn't it wasn't anything of this magnitude, nor was it, hey, we're going to come in and just give you these like nine figure off, you know, packages and things like that. Yeah.
2:02:40
And it's very common for a startup to to be able to pull people from the big legacy company that's kind of sclerotic.
2:02:47
And you know, we've seen a lot of people that were at Apple or Goo or or Microsoft or Xerox and then they went to Google and then they went to Meta and then they went to OpenAI.
2:02:59
I mean, Brett Taylor, who's the who's the chairman of the board at OpenAI, was the CTO of Meta, right?
2:03:03
And it's like, okay, he clearly just wants to be in like the hot thing and he's he's like a startup guy almost.
2:03:09
Um, and I I believe he was at Google before because he worked he Yeah. Yeah. He redid Google Maps.
2:03:15
And so like the like the story of Brett Taylor is really like the default I think for most like startup people.
2:03:21
It's like he's at he's he's early at Google.
2:03:23
He works with Paul Bukite on Gmail. He works on Google Maps.
2:03:27
Then he goes over to Meta CTO there.
2:03:30
Then he goes to OpenAI's chairman of the board there.
2:03:32
And it's like he is a he's a startup guy and so he's always riding like the new wave.
2:03:36
You usually can't poach them back into the older company. That's rare. Yeah.
2:03:40
Uh one one other some other precedent here in 201 in 2010 and 2011 uh Zuck and Facebook went super aggressive poaching from Google.
2:03:51
Y so Facebook had crossed half a billion users.
2:03:56
They were trans in that period of transitioning from a super scrappy startup. Yep.
2:03:59
Um, and they went heavy into Google.
2:04:03
So they went and got high performers from ads, search, mobile on the Android side and and some of the social product people from Google+ and Zach did something similar, not to the same scale, but just went with these sort of heavy heavy heavy uh comp packages and was very successful.
2:04:19
Google had to respond and increase comp in in a number of different roles.
2:04:24
Do they poach any designers?
2:04:25
Any people that use figma. com?
2:04:27
Any people that think bigger, build faster?
2:04:29
anyone that you know because Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.
2:04:34
It would be a different place but but fortunately you can go to figma.
2:04:37
com and you can get started for free.
2:04:39
Um anyway, what do you think of the the the buzzword super intelligence?
2:04:45
This whole they like they really rebranded it.
2:04:46
Is it a gold post shifting? I think it's smart.
2:04:48
I think he he poached the the the word super intelligence like it's mine. It's mine now.
2:04:55
Yes, I know because uh and he's not saying and he's not saying the safe super intelligence team.
2:05:00
He's just saying super intelligence implies reckless implies reckless super intelligence. I like that.
2:05:07
Um but it's funny because uh you know uh everyone was focused on like AI as a buzzword. Then it was uh AGI.
2:05:15
Then it was now it's super intelligence.
2:05:18
But like, you know, within our group, like we all think like super intelligence is kind of the old thing.
2:05:23
Like everyone like me and you like we we know the secrets to this stuff like like it's kind of it's kind of already priced in the real killers.
2:05:31
They're focused on the next thing.
2:05:31
You know what I'm talking about, right? Giga intelligence.
2:05:34
That's the one that people are getting like really like the real killers are like yeah well like a AGI is basically here.
2:05:41
Super intelligence is basically here. a giga intelligence.
2:05:44
That's the one we're working on because we're going to need a new buzzword because we're burning through buzzwords and increasing rate and so we're just uh we we we just steamrolled the touring test completely blasted through uh AGI.
2:05:56
No one talks about AGI anymore. AGI is here. Yeah.
2:05:59
But you got, you know, super intelligence.
2:06:01
We're going to solve this buzzword.
2:06:02
We're going to churn through this in a year or two.
2:06:04
We got to start working on giga intelligence now. Yeah. This is the way.
2:06:07
Anyway, start adopting it.
2:06:09
Uh Chen promised that he was working with Sam Alman, the CEO of OpenAI, and other leaders of the company around the clock to talk to those with offers, adding, "We've been more proactive than ever before.
2:06:19
We're recalibrating comp and we're scooping out and we're scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent."
2:06:25
Still, even as OpenAI even even as OpenAI leadership appears desperate to retain its staff, Chen said that he has high personal standards of fairness and wants to retain top talent.
2:06:36
With that in mind, while I'll fight for to keep every one of you, I won't do it at the price of fairness to others, he wrote.
2:06:43
Um, it's such a brutal dynamic if you're Mark Chen, if you're Sam, because not everybody at OpenAI is getting poached, but presumably Zuck is working with all the people he's poached already to identify who are the best people at OpenAI, who do we really want? Yep.
2:07:01
And then going to them and making the maxed out offers.
2:07:03
Meanwhile, it it you can't like the the team dynamic.
2:07:09
If you have a few researchers on a team and somebody gets, you know, somebody's potentially getting poached by Meta and you say to retain them, you're like, "Okay, we're going to give you this sort of massive incremental grant."
2:07:20
And the other people on their team are going to be like, "Wait, well, is that my market value?
2:07:23
I didn't go talk to Facebook or I I didn't I I turned down I never took the meeting or whatever.
2:07:30
So, you should pay me the same thing, too, right? Yeah, I'm loyal.
2:07:34
Shouldn't Don't you want to pay? I'm a missionary. Yeah, I'm a missionary.
2:07:35
Why are you paying the mercenaries more?
2:07:36
You should pay You should pay the the missionaries the same price just because they're missionaries. Rough for sure. Brutal.
2:07:45
Anyway, let me talk about and no, the the other the other thing is is it creates this like really nasty incentive to basically be like, "Oh, yeah, you know, you maybe got hit up by a Meta Recruiter like many months ago and you can be like, "Yeah, I mean, they reached out to me."
2:08:03
And suddenly they're like hovering around you like being like, "All right, what's it going to take?
2:08:06
We really don't want to lose you."
2:08:08
It is a Yeah, I mean it's crazy game theory.
2:08:13
like every single conversation in a company is like this constant game theory and then timing that um timing that with with this like summer break that I guess opening eye was saying like hey everybody should take the week uh of the fourth off or not the week of the fourth but anyways you wanted to say something
2:08:33
more important well I mean you know if you want to see who your high performers are just look in the linear right linear is purposeuilt tool for planning and building products meet the system for modern software development and streamline issues, projects and product road mapaps. If Zuck were able to gain
2:08:45
If Zuck were able to gain access to OpenAI's linear, it would be it would be illegal, but um it would also tell them tell them a lot.
2:08:52
Yeah, you don't want to do anything illegal, Zuck. You want to be on Vanta.
2:08:55
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2:08:58
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2:09:04
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2:09:09
Uh so the news comes as competition for a for top AI researchers heating up in Silicon Valley.
2:09:15
Zuckerberg has been particularly aggressive in his approach offering $100 million signing bonuses to some open AAI staffers according to comments Alman made on a podcast with his brother Jack Altman.
2:09:25
Oh, this this hund00 million signing bonus.
2:09:28
This just got baked into the lexicon, but I was listening to Dylan Patel on uh Jordan Schneider's China Talk podcast.
2:09:35
It's actually Transistor Radio, but it goes out on China Talk anyway.
2:09:38
Uh and Dylan Patel was saying that that might be that might be a kind of a game of telephone a little bit in the sense that it's possible that you could maybe be making a hund00 million over a number of years in stock based on appreciation.
2:09:56
But he was very skeptical that anyone was getting a hundred million on day one without any sort of strings attached for like a true signing bonus.
2:10:06
So, I don't know how real that was. Yeah.
2:10:09
And remember that the Zur Zurich team came out and said uh the Zurich team explicitly said we said they didn't get but I know I know the way that he phrased it more clearly we're getting No no no I I I I I do think that that the the round numbers are obsess are easy to latch on to.
2:10:26
Like why is mom Donnie talking about billionaires specifically?
2:10:30
He doesn't have a problem with 999 millionaires because like that not that's like not easy to grasp.
2:10:34
Like people latch on to round numbers. 100 million is so much.
2:10:38
A billionaire is so much.
2:10:41
And it's easy to it's easy to quantify.
2:10:43
And so the 100 million, if it was 80 million, it wouldn't be going nearly as viral as 100 million.
2:10:47
Um and so so I I I don't know.
2:10:50
I don't know how real that is.
2:10:52
Maybe that was thrown out as a total package and then it got kind of telephoned into well, you know, they it's basically a signing bonus because they they got the deal on the on the as soon as they signed, but they do have some sort of earnout or the shares are locked up in some way.
2:11:07
But there's a bunch of creative accounting that can go into basically delivering someone what feels like a hund00 million of value, which is not far off from, okay, what what would it take?
2:11:17
you know, Johnny IV got, you know, a huge offer to go to OpenAI and it was structured in an interesting way with like an acquisition and, you know, but he got a few points.
2:11:29
Yeah, we were it was a few it was a few percentage points and when you think about the scale of OpenAI and the scale of Johnny Ives legacy like yeah like what would it take to get someone like that to join your he's a founding designer basically so it's a couple couple percentage points.
2:11:42
Um, so multiple sources at OpenAI with direct knowledge of the offers confirmed the number to wired.
2:11:48
So I don't know because they kind of benefits like both sides to to have that number out there.
2:11:54
It's kind of unclear who would who would really want to confirm that and then what the nature of this.
2:12:00
nature of this. The other thing that's interesting though, the other thing that's interesting is if you're working at OpenAI and let's say their top researchers have on average $100 million in OpenAI shares that they're like the truly top people and then you get an offer that's like a $20
2:12:20
million signing bonus, but it's, you know, it's kind of paid out over time and that or or they can claw it back if you don't stay past a certain and you're kind of looking at it and I'm already a centi and it's unclear like the vision is not quite as clear at meta, right? I'm
2:12:41
I'm joining the super intelligence team.
2:12:47
It's going to be an incredible group of people with a ton of resources. That's exciting.
2:12:51
But it is a big switch if you're already happily vesting out tens of millions of dollars.
2:12:55
So, it would make sense that these $20 million, you know, if it's $20 million, Yeah. I can see that.
2:13:03
If it's $100 million for the for the top top top people, it makes total sense. Yeah.
2:13:08
I mean, like what was the uh I mean, the the deal to bring on Alex Wang was probably like way over $und00 million to him personally based on his ownership in that company which was acquired.
2:13:21
And so like that number doesn't feel impossible.
2:13:26
Uh I would just be surprised if there's not some structure around it.
2:13:30
Um based on based on what Dylan was was talking about, there's just enough precedent here that again going back to uh Zuck rating Google in in 2010 2011.
2:13:42
He was offering tens of millions of dollars in stock packages to mid-level engineers just because he was like, I need a really good ad product.
2:13:47
I want to make my ad product great. Yeah.
2:13:49
I mean, have you seen the why am I even asking this?
2:13:53
Have you seen the Blackberry movie? Of course not.
2:13:54
But the but in the Blackberry movie, there's this whole story about uh they go and and they try and poach someone and then it was controversial because they like backdated some stock options for someone to basically give them more uh like cash but without having like the the the initial impact of that cash.
2:14:10
It's kind of interesting.
2:14:12
Um but yeah, I mean to poach top talent, it's expensive.
2:14:14
Um it kind of benefits both maybe.
2:14:17
I mean, I don't know, like on on the meta side, do they want does Zuck want the idea that he's willing to pay up to $100 million out there?
2:14:27
Like maybe because that that certainly leads to more people taking the phone call of like, oh wow, Mark is really taking this seriously.
2:14:34
I should I should talk to Meta's recruiting team.
2:14:36
I should actually hear them out.
2:14:38
And then if they wind up coming back to me with a $50 million offer or a $10 million offer, like, you know, we can discuss that and I can see and they can evaluate how much I'm worth. They can make an offer.
2:14:50
But, um, at least it got the conversation started. But, I don't know.
2:14:56
There was also the theory that Sam Alman put that $100 million number out in order to kind of like poison the well because if if Mark comes to you and says, "Hey, you're a top a AI researcher. come over here.
2:15:07
And then the top the AI researcher says like, "Yeah, great.
2:15:12
I hear I hear $100 million is the going rate."
2:15:14
And Mark's like, "No, no, no.
2:15:15
That's like fake news that that Sam was spreading.
2:15:17
Like we're actually paying 15."
2:15:18
Then you're like, "Oh, no."
2:15:21
Like I was I was hoping for 100 mlian people.
2:15:24
And yeah, you see it could be like 40 chess on both sides. I don't know. Yeah.
2:15:29
Um, over the past month, Meta has been aggressively building out their new AI effort and has repeatedly and most unsuccessfully tried to recruit some of our strongest talent with with uh comp focused packages, Chen wrote on Slack, a source close to the efforts at Meta confirmed the company has been significantly ramping up its research recruiting with a particular eye toward talent from OpenAI, Google, uh, OpenAI and Google.
2:15:53
Anthropic, while also a top rival, is thought to be less of a culture fit at Meta, one source tells Wired.
2:15:59
They haven't necessarily expanded the band, but for top talent, the sky's is the limit.
2:16:03
Which is funny because yeah, of course, like anthropic is like so missionary driven, like it's going to be very hard to to go to anthropic uh research scientists and be like ads, better ads.
2:16:14
They're like, we're building God here. Yeah.
2:16:16
Anyway, $100 million is $100 million.
2:16:20
Not for not for anthropic guys.
2:16:23
Anthropic guys are true believers.
2:16:25
They don't care what's $100 million in a post scarcity world. doesn't matter.
2:16:27
You want to be on the you want to be on this on the on the post scarcity train.
2:16:32
Uh Chen's no It is so It is so telling though like how how you like sort of like try to you know pinpoint like Zuck's views on AI that he's like I'm not even going to bother with those people andropic. Not a culture pit. Not a culture. Two AGI pill. Yeah, that's great. Senator, we sell ads.
2:16:54
Anyway, if you're looking for sales tax super intelligence, go to numeralhq. com.
2:16:59
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2:17:12
Uh, Chen's note included messages from seven other research leaders at the company where they wrote notes to staffers in an apparent effort to encourage them to stay.
2:17:21
One leader on the research team encouraged staff to reach out if they received an offer for META.
2:17:24
If they pressure you or make ridiculous exploding offers, just tell them to back off.
2:17:29
It's not nice to pressure people in potentially the most important decision.
2:17:32
Wired is not naming the leader as they are not a seuite executive. Um, this is weird.
2:17:39
Where's the where's the end of this quote? That's odd.
2:17:40
I'd like to be able to talk you through it and I know all about their offers.
2:17:45
Uh, the remarks come as OpenAI staff grapple with an intense workload that has many staffers grinding 80 hours a week.
2:17:52
OpenAI is largely shutting down next week as the company tries to give employees time to recharge.
2:17:58
Let's give it up for OpenAI's grind set. It's really fantastic.
2:17:59
Also extremely American to give a full week off right around July 4th.
2:18:05
Like I'm normally pretty anti- taking time off, but if you're going to go really hard on a particular holiday, make it July 4th, you know?
2:18:14
Yeah, give a week off around July 4th. I love it.
2:18:16
Um, I was I I was posting, you know, the over I need a poly market on uh whether or not we get a Zuck American flag video on July 4th.
2:18:26
Do you think it'll happen?
2:18:26
I actually think there 100% should be a polymarket on that, right?
2:18:31
It's kind of 50/50, right?
2:18:33
Like he's definitely locked in, very busy, probably not a lot of time off.
2:18:37
He sees that he knows from this that OpenAI is down this week.
2:18:39
So that's probably like really encouraging to be like, I want to go harder this week. They're off. Yeah.
2:18:45
My my uh at the same time my advice for founders one of the greatest pieces of content he puts out is think about how hard Zach is going right now the week of July 4th and just don't get outworked by him. Yes.
2:18:58
Just don't get outworked by Zach this week. It's going to be tough. He's in year 20.
2:19:02
What excuses do you have?
2:19:05
You're you're three months into your startup. Come on. Go harder. Go harder. I love it. Uh yeah.
2:19:12
Meta knows we're taking this week to recharge and we'll take advantage of it to try and pressure you to make decisions fast and in isolation.
2:19:17
Another leader at the company wrote, "If you're feeling that pressure, don't be afraid to reach out.
2:19:23
I and Mark are around and want to support you."
2:19:26
So, while Opening Eyes leadership is taking Meta's efforts seriously, Chen also said that the company is getting too caught up in the cadence of regular product launches and in short-term comparison with the competition.
2:19:36
The sentiment is backed by a former Open AI stapper who worked closely with Altman and the and said the CEO wanted to see buzzy announcements announcements every few months.
2:19:44
This was a really this was a key to their strategy was like always have a buzzy announcement ready if the competition does anything.
2:19:51
Just drop a Oh, Google IO is happening.
2:19:54
Wouldn't it be crazy if we acquired a company called IO the day before or something like that?
2:19:58
Like we're like, "Oh, there Google's announcing the new Gemini.
2:20:01
Let's just steamroll them in the timeline the 24 hours before."
2:20:05
Yeah, I'd love to introduce you deep research.
2:20:07
Deep research like I mean it's it's masterful and like but that's the game you got to play.
2:20:12
That's the game on the field.
2:20:12
Like I I I I think aggressive but he's not doing anything wrong.
2:20:17
He he um is up there with Elon in terms of creating and riding hype and constantly delivering enough real product value to justify the hype that that was being sold, you know, 6 months ago basically.
2:20:34
So like staying on the bleeding edge.
2:20:37
And this is why the anti people hate hate him and Elon so much because they're like they're like it's overhyped. Uh it's not useful.
2:20:45
And then like a year later it's like there's Tesla cars everywhere.
2:20:46
The rockets are landing and like 90% of people are eating cha every day. Exactly. Okay.
2:20:53
So it was real but also he was overpromising but he delivered at a at a higher level than anyone in human history and that's just like it's it those two things are in in in conflict.
2:21:05
So, someone said this like Elon is both Thomas Edison and Barnaman Bailey or whatever PT Barnum like he's a circusman who can put on a show and put a robot in a a human in a suit acting like a robot, but then he can actually go and deliver the thing.
2:21:20
Um, which is just it just breaks people's brains.
2:21:22
Um, anyway, we need to remain focused on the real prize of finding ways to to compute.
2:21:27
A lot more supercomputers are coming on later this year into intelligence.
2:21:31
Um, uh, Chen wrote, "This is the main quest, and it's important to remember that skirmishes with meta are the side quest.
2:21:39
Last but not least, I'll be around this week, recharged and ready to go pound-forpound. DM me anytime. I love it. He's ready to go. He's fired up. Get him in the ring."
2:21:48
I love talking with Mark.
2:21:48
Yeah, that was a that was a fun conversation.
2:21:50
Also, I mean, guy's in shape.
2:21:52
Let's get him in the Let's get him in the octagon with Zuck. Mark on Mark violence. Let's see it.
2:21:57
I mean, and if if there was a pound-for-pound list for the top AI researcher in the world, he's in the conversation.
2:22:04
He's in the conversation. It's amazing.
2:22:06
It's really been amazing to watch Mark's leadership and integrity through this process, especially when he has had to make tough decisions.
2:22:11
Altman wrote in on Slack in response to Chen's message.
2:22:15
Very grateful to we have him as our leader.
2:22:17
I mean, these it can't be overstated making these decisions, right? Yeah.
2:22:24
one of your best people comes comes to you and says, "It's hard. Hey, yep.
2:22:29
I'm really happy here at OpenAI." Yeah.
2:22:33
I have $80 million of stock. Yeah.
2:22:37
And I was just offered 150 over the next year and it's highly liquid.
2:22:44
Meaning that I can market sell it quarterly forever. Yeah.
2:22:46
And meanwhile, you're going through this for-profit conversion.
2:22:52
Do you think the liquidity thing is real at all?
2:22:53
I mean, obviously, what are you I mean, like, if you want to, let's say you want to buy a $50 million house and you have $100 million in like illquid open AI, like, is that going to be hard at all?
2:23:06
I feel like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, Private Wealth Management, are going to be beating down your doors to give you a loan that's backed by the shares.
2:23:13
You're only going to have to put down 10%. Sure.
2:23:16
But, but meanwhile, the company's failing to go through a for-profit conversion. Yeah.
2:23:20
But I mean, so that Satcha's taking 20% off the top.
2:23:23
I mean, that applies I'm just saying that applies like a small haircut.
2:23:28
I I would say I'm just saying there there is always Yeah, there is always going to be a tension of somebody having massive wealth but not having green backs.
2:23:37
Yeah, there's always going to be that tension. Yeah.
2:23:42
And people seeing that that Meta is one of the most liquid stocks in the world. Yeah.
2:23:51
can constantly trade in and out of it and it's ultimately just it's stable, right?
2:23:56
So, I mean, if you're interested in liquid stocks, go to public. com.
2:24:00
Investing for those who take it seriously.
2:24:01
Multiasset investing, industry leading yield, oldfashioned stocks, trusted by millions.
2:24:05
And who knows, maybe they'll have open AI soon.
2:24:09
Anything's apparently anything's possible.
2:24:11
You Yeah, we should we should, you know, Robin Hood has uh you know, uh the the tokens around private companies.
2:24:19
Maybe we should tokenize nonprofits.
2:24:19
I want to be able to trade, you know, uh uh PETA, you know, let me let me let me go long PETA.
2:24:29
Let me get some let me get some leverage on that.
2:24:31
I want some uh levered options on PETA. Look at Tyler right now.
2:24:38
Tyler Cam, how are we doing on Tyler?
2:24:38
I think I'm I think I'm in the right mission. Oh, you did it. No way. 15 minutes left. Let's see it. Okay. Okay.
2:24:47
I can't believe you got it set up so fast. That's amazing.
2:24:51
Okay, that's honestly he's sitting at he's sitting at 26 minutes so far.
2:24:53
All right, well have fun in there, Tyler.
2:24:56
I just look over and I just I didn't realize he was on VR. That's amazing.
2:25:00
I think he's actually playing it.
2:25:03
This is crazy cuz my number one complaint with uh with the Quest was that it just takes a long time to set up.
2:25:08
And I think that it you intentionally did this challenge and made it seem like oh I'm going to happily give away my my new my VR Xbox and thinking that it there's no way he could finish it in 40 minutes.
2:25:21
But now now he's I think he's going to do speed running speed.
2:25:25
Pillar of autumn it's happening.
2:25:28
Um anyway, uh Swigs has the story. He's breaking it down.
2:25:31
Some good highlights here.
2:25:33
The Mark Mark v Mark war has resulted in going from oh the good people don't leave to someone has broken into our home and stolen something.
2:25:43
One week company shut down question mark question mark.
2:25:47
I mean I I was going back and forth here.
2:25:50
I wouldn't be surprised if the shutdown was somewhat strategic in that hey people already need a break.
2:25:58
We shouldn't have them walking around the office.
2:25:59
it with the way they were writing it, it felt like this had been on the table for months because the company has been working really hard launching a ton of stuff.
2:26:08
Uh, and it seems like if it just seems like an odd an odd choice to if you're in the middle of this Mark Vark war that that would be what you tr choose to do would be a oneweek company shutdown.
2:26:19
But I don't know, maybe um I I I I I just I'm not 100% that like the the the AI talent war has resulted in the shutdown.
2:26:27
It's more just like the shutdown is happening at a weird time.
2:26:31
Uh anyway, uh this third point is very interesting.
2:26:33
Pivoting product launch calendar to AGI race, especially when Stargate comes online.
2:26:37
Uh Dylan Patel says December is when Stargate's coming online and that should be uh a big like the biggest the biggest cluster ever and unlock even even more maybe pre-training scale but there's a question about how important that is and maybe you can do more reinforcement learning in a more distributed way.
2:26:57
So I don't know also like it's not exactly like Zuck is GPU poor so I don't know I don't know how big of a deal it is the Stargate thing. We'll see.
2:27:08
But number four, uh, for some reason, Meta is ignoring anthropic. Don't care about safety.
2:27:13
If this is true, of course.
2:27:15
Uh, the anthropic point was very funny.
2:27:17
Uh, anyway, uh, there's other posts in here that we should cover.
2:27:20
Uh, Satwick Singh says, "What Sam never understood was that Zuckerberg torched 20 billion over VR headsets with Nintendo Wii graphics and didn't even flinch." Didn't even flinch.
2:27:28
You know what's so funny?
2:27:30
Like those the the Nintendo Wii graphics thing, that was like that was like three months.
2:27:34
And then after that it was he was doing that that Lex interview in the metaverse.
2:27:38
Did you ever see that where it's like it is like photoreal immediately?
2:27:45
We got a wild demo at Meta HQ of all the new products and we were blown away.
2:27:50
I'm not even sure I don't think we can say much.
2:27:53
talk about it in like the abstract, but um but yeah, I mean none of that was like Nintendo Wii level graphics.
2:27:59
But um but but I mean that that was that one picture was like iconic and kind of like it felt like oh this is kind of a step back in terms of well many more people saw that picture than actually use the product. Yeah.
2:28:09
And so yeah, because there were plenty of there were plenty of VR games that didn't have Nintendo Wii graphics.
2:28:15
like the hero game for the for the Quest when it came out was Robo Recall, which looked super sci-fi and just looked awesome and it was it was great.
2:28:23
And there were a bunch of other games.
2:28:25
But yes, I mean the point is is that like uh Mark is totally ready to spend $20 billion on a big project if he thinks it's valuable and here he clearly does and so he's going after it.
2:28:34
Um anyway, uh similar founder company that's building amazing AI stuff.
2:28:41
Finn, the number one AI agent for customer service.
2:28:46
We've had OW on the show before.
2:28:47
He's been on number one in performance benchmarks, number one in bank offs, number one on ranking on G2. Let's go.
2:28:54
So, if you're looking to do customer service, head over to Finn.
2:28:57
I'm saying this, they're not saying this, but I'm going to say this is the official the official uh uh uh AI CX tool of a both AI safety and being AGI pilt because anthropic uses Oh, really? No way. There we go. Okay, awesome.
2:29:16
So, um yeah, I'm sure anthropic will love that.
2:29:20
They're like, we said we could put our logo on your website.
2:29:23
We didn't say these the technologist daily these two podcasters go way over their skis on this endorsement the official CX agent.
2:29:33
Anyway, Rune had an interesting uh take here uh diving into the the why the these trade deals are so they're not really trade deals, but these poachings can be so can be so damaging.
2:29:43
And he's trying to put it in broader consumer terms.
2:29:47
We're going to debate whether or not his point is well taken.
2:29:49
uh he of course works at OpenAI and has for a number of years.
2:29:54
Uh Run says intellectual property by default is a market failure.
2:29:58
Single well-informed talented defectors can walk away from organizations with billions of dollars of tacet value of knowing what works and what doesn't.
2:30:07
The athlete me metaphor is somewhat wrong.
2:30:10
In industries where patents and such aren't viable, market particip aren't viable, market participants will drastically underinvest in R&D efforts due to IP seepage.
2:30:20
Just like the I drink your milkshake milkshake effect of oil seepage and land rights, there is a compelling proconsumer case for non-competes. Interesting.
2:30:32
Very rare that you hear a tech person argue in favor of non-competes. Uh interesting.
2:30:36
I mean the the the immediate impact of non-competes in this context would be dramatically lower wages for AI researchers like Rune. Uh which is interesting.
2:30:48
Um the other question is yeah it's interesting you'd have to move AI out of California.
2:30:56
Oh people would then m maybe or they or they would I'm saying I'm saying if you really want to use non-competes go where they can be enforced. Right. Yes.
2:31:06
historically but then as a as an AI researcher you'd say I definitely don't want to leave California because I'm going to get a much better deal here school here. Yeah.
2:31:16
My my my question is like I've always been interested in like why can you know like the consumer packaged goods industry like patent like a tab on a can for 25 years and like Walt Disney can own like the shape of mouse ears for like 80 years but like Google can't own the transformer for like even a minute.
2:31:36
Like I get that it's like some sort of fundamental discovery but I've always been interested in how little IP works in technology.
2:31:42
So I think it just is isn't is a byproduct of hacker culture sort of like positive sum culture of Silicon Valley. Yeah.
2:31:53
But you think that would change if there were billions of dollars on the table, right? Yeah.
2:31:59
I mean there's a culture of you know so I agree with you and I'll give you an example.
2:32:03
So, so, uh, pull to refresh on the iPhone was created by a Twitter employee, like a Twitter UX UI developer, built that, built that user interaction, and then Twitter had a patent on it. Lauren Brier, yes.
2:32:19
An American soft software developer best known for creating refresh the poll to refresh interaction.
2:32:27
So, he created that that design pattern and then he had a patent on it.
2:32:31
Twitter owned the patent and Jack Dorsey and the Twitter crew were libertarian and said, you know, we're not going to enforce this.
2:32:38
And then it got baked into Instagram and it's it's now natively in iOS and it's in in all of, you know, it's basically like one button to like if you're if you're tr if you're truly terminally online, you're using it hundreds of times a day. True. Like a little slot.
2:32:54
Now we've actually moved past that.
2:32:56
We moved into endless scroll uh where you actually don't need like if you're on TikTok, you're never pulling to refresh.
2:33:01
You're just keep you just keep scrolling to the bottom.
2:33:03
So So we're actually post pull to refresh and now we're in the endless scroll.
2:33:07
But endless scroll I believe was developed by Pinterest and they had a patent on it for a while.
2:33:12
I think I might be wrong here but but endless scroll was also something that was not able to be owned.
2:33:18
Uh which is just odd to me.
2:33:18
Um, and then and then there's the other question of like Coca-Cola's been able to keep the the the you know, the formula is a trade secret for like a hundred years or something.
2:33:28
And it's just odd that that tech companies can't seem to do either.
2:33:33
They can't keep the secrets.
2:33:33
You can have trade secrets, right?
2:33:35
It's not like an open AI researcher can go over and say, "Here's here's bunch of code.
2:33:39
Let's roll let's roll it out, right?" Yep.
2:33:42
roll let's roll it out, right?" Yep. it it's basically their the in the the sort of way of doing things that they've internalized from being at a company yeah for a certain amount tacet value of knowing what works and what doesn't and so the my my like naive read on this is
2:33:58
that if you had had a top tier openai researcher at meta during the llama 4 buildout that researcher would have said hey don't focus on pre-training scale as much we need to get a reasoning model out and we need to focus on RL and post training much more much more and and
2:34:17
when you talked to Dylan Patel I was asking him about deepseek and how deepseek was was was doing all these innovations and like moving to floating point 8 like smaller uh smaller basically smaller numbers storing the weights and he was like oh yeah but openai was doing that like two years ago
2:34:32
deepseek just open sourced it and so it's like the world found out if you found out the best practices from deepseek because they open sourced it like you were not on the cutting edge and you should have been poaching AI researchers from the top labs earlier. So, two things could be could be
2:34:46
So, two things could be could be happening here.
2:34:48
One, Zuck is right to just go and overpay and and try to recreate some of the magic and and get a you know leading a leading model or or set of models out of it that he can use in a bunch of different ways that we've discussed or none of this matters and run is is baiting baiting Zuck into just overpaying.
2:35:13
This is like the 4D chess is like, "Oh, yeah.
2:35:15
This is they're getting everything.
2:35:16
They're taking everything." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. No.
2:35:18
I I I I don't I I don't necessarily believe that because I I did talk to Rune like years ago and I was like, "But like is this going to commoditize?
2:35:26
Like is the foundation model layer going to going to commoditize?"
2:35:29
And he was like there like there are like the secret to open AI in many ways is like the Tian secrets like they understand things at a lower level that other that other people just don't.
2:35:40
And so that will compound and stay advantage.
2:35:42
And he hadn't even predicted the uh the the the dominance of the consumer and like the aggregation theory that happens when you're the front end to consumer AI.
2:35:49
That's incredibly valuable.
2:35:50
But just on the research side, just on the research side, like they can stay ahead just by understanding like the secrets of what works and what doesn't. Um but it's interesting.
2:36:00
Anyway, uh let's tell you about Adio customer relationship magic.
2:36:02
Adio is the new is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Next level next level.
2:36:09
Uh it well I mean, you know, we we we have a light guest booking today.
2:36:16
Um but uh you know, we're we're spending an hour talking about one story because it's fun stuff. Uh we can continue.
2:36:23
We can we can do go over to the Wall Street Journal uh because in the exchange section there is a a fantastic article related to this says it's known as the list and it's a secret file of geniuses and I'm looking at this.
2:36:38
It says uh Mishka Baleno Yu Jang uh Mark Zuckerberg's been reviewing this list.
2:36:43
Lucas Buyers on this the new guy says Jordy Hayes John Kugan Tyler Cosgrove Ben Kohler a couple other folks but you know just the usual people that we know.
2:36:52
Uh anyway, it's known as the list and it's a secret file of geniuses.
2:36:58
Only select AI researchers have the skills for the hottest area in tech.
2:37:02
Mark Zuckerberg and his rivals want to hire them, even if it costs ungodly sums. We love ungodly sums.
2:37:06
We should be ringing the gong more this this episode.
2:37:11
All over Silicon Valley, the brightest minds in AI are buzzing about the list.
2:37:16
a compa a compilation of the most talented researchers and engineers in artificial intelligence that Mark Zuckerberg has spent months putting together.
2:37:23
Lucas Byer works in multimodal vision research which Tyler broke down for us.
2:37:28
Can can you imagine if if if Zuck spun up like basically like a hot or not style tool that just like pins pin pins two researchers together and like he makes other researchers like just do the test and then just puts out a list of like these are the this is the the top 50 people. Yep. This is so good.
2:37:48
Um uh so uh Lucas Byer describes himself as a scientist dedicated to the creation creation of awesomeness.
2:37:59
Ejang very Reddit coded but he's a poster on X as well.
2:38:03
E Jang specializes in automatic speech recognition and barely has an online presence besides his influential papers.
2:38:12
Misha Balenko is an expert in large-scale machine learning who also enjoys hiking and hill clim uh hiking and skiing or as he puts it on his website applying hill climbing search and gradient descent algorithms to real world domains. That's very cute.
2:38:29
Uh the recruits on the list typically have PhDs from elite schools like Berkeley and Carnegie Melon.
2:38:33
They also have experience at places like OpenAI in San Francisco or Google DeepMind in London.
2:38:38
They're usually in their 20s and 30s and they all know each other.
2:38:40
They spend their days staring at screens to solve the kinds of inscrable problems that require spectacular amounts of computing power and their previously obscure talents have never been so highly valued.
2:38:51
The chief executives of Tech Goliaths and heavyweight venture capitalists are cozying up with a few dozen nerdy researchers because their specialized knowledge is the key to cashing in on the artificial. It is funny.
2:39:04
Some of the, you know, some of the losers out of this talent war are just VCs because how do you compete?
2:39:07
How do you compete when you know historically you could have gone to some of these and really overpaid to invest?
2:39:17
You could have come to them with a ridiculous what what would be very ridiculous for a VC which is I will spin up a new company. Not ridiculous.
2:39:22
It happens but it is kind of ridiculous in some ways. Spin up a new company.
2:39:26
I'll give you 200 on a billion and you can take 10 million personally in secondary immediately.
2:39:36
Y and that is no longer even that compelling of an offer if the odds of actually winning are low and you just want the most access to compute and be traded. Will is in the studio. Welcome back to TVPN. How are you doing? How's it going?
2:39:56
Congratulations on the trade deal.
2:39:56
So, thanks for having me back. Yeah.
2:39:59
What supercar did you buy?
2:40:01
Did you go Bugatti Chiron or you go F80?
2:40:04
I mean, we we hear that the the numbers are huge right now for folks like you.
2:40:10
I mean, I'm taking a plane more, so like that was a lot of Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
2:40:16
People say, you know, fly, you know, we wanted flying cars.
2:40:19
We got the fact that you would imply that Will drives himself is offensive.
2:40:27
Um I mean, yeah, Whimo for the first time recently.
2:40:31
Like I'd been to like SF, but like I hadn't been around SF proper that much since the the Whimo craze took off.
2:40:39
And so like that's been like the the car experience really is just like sure self-driving cars. Damn. Yeah.
2:40:43
So are you in SF full-time now?
2:40:45
Uh still back and forth New York.
2:40:48
I'm like kind of slowly starting to spend more time in SF. It's on brand. You're decentralized.
2:40:55
You're decentralizing AI.
2:40:55
It's it's it's a perfect fit. Perfect fit.
2:40:58
Uh anyway, did you touch grass at all this weekend or were you locked into the timeline?
2:41:06
It's a lot of stuff was happening on the timeline.
2:41:08
I did I mean I'm in New York right now.
2:41:09
I did some New York stuff uh on Saturday, but yeah, I mean it's been it's been good.
2:41:15
Lots of uh drama intrigue as usual drama. Um the trade deals.
2:41:20
I know I've been tuning in to earlier.
2:41:22
I know you guys have gone over all the the major roster updates.
2:41:24
Um but yeah, it's uh exciting times.
2:41:28
OpenAI, open model soon hopefully, but not this week.
2:41:34
Um yeah, so yeah, I mean the first place I want to start with is um the actual trade deals.
2:41:42
Did do any of these people jump out to you as particularly interesting?
2:41:47
Have they been on your radar?
2:41:48
Have you met any of these folks?
2:41:49
Can you give us more context on uh how how academic are they?
2:41:53
How product oriented are they?
2:41:56
It does it's it feels like this is purely research you know uh beefing up of the research team and Meta kind of has products solved.
2:42:05
Is that the right model to think about this?
2:42:08
What how can you characterize like the shape of the team that sucks even um there's thousands of really great software engineers that work in AI. Sure.
2:42:19
And but what you know even kind of getting a sense of like how many people was was Zuck really going after? Was it 250? Was it a hundred?
2:42:31
The list that came out today is you know somewhere somewhere I don't know there's like 20 people on it something like that. Yeah.
2:42:37
I mean it's a great list.
2:42:39
It's a lot of like very senior senior researchers who know who have like been through some like real product cycles who like I think the goal is people who can bridge the gap from research to product.
2:42:50
Um because like like one thing Meta has a strength of but I think doesn't translate in like this era is they have a lot of really good like academic researchers like Yan Makun's whole or has a lot of very talented very capable researchers who write important papers but it's the kind of stuff that doesn't really turn into exciting products.
2:43:09
It's like more betting five or 10 years out, how do we want to do things eventually versus like going through a pre-training cycle for a Gemini or a Claude or an OpenAI model like that has a different set of considerations.
2:43:23
And so this to me looks like they want like 10 15 great people who have been through those research to product cycles in terms of the model being the product.
2:43:36
Um, and it seems like they probably like they got uh Alex um and then supposedly Nat and or Daniel uh to kind of handle a little more of the not the business side but producty business stuff.
2:43:53
Yeah, it's a management role. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
2:43:55
What what is your take on Yan Lun right now?
2:43:58
How should we think about his position in the AI world?
2:44:05
There's uh I I you know I see these memes of like he's a non-believer.
2:44:11
He doesn't believe in like super intelligence and like AI god.
2:44:13
He's a little more practical.
2:44:16
It seems like he's been he's been right about some things in the sense that like we haven't had we we're not feeling a fast takeoff right now.
2:44:24
So I think you got to give him some credit for that.
2:44:26
At the same time, like there's Ben Thompson's been criticizing Yon Lun a little bit for not driving the the product side of the business.
2:44:36
business. It's like it's one thing to say that hey we're not going to go straight shot to AGI god but then the the the downstream implication of that is that if you believe that we're going to be living in like B2B SAS world of AI implementation and productiz
2:44:53
productization then like go do that and like make sure that the models work really well for business and so uh I don't know what is your take how would you how would you describe Yan Lun in his history and kind of where he sits in the organization to like a layman Sure. Yeah. So, I think people overindex on Yeah.
2:45:07
So, I think people overindex on thinking of Yan as the meta guy like too much. Sure.
2:45:11
Um I think it's a shame that they didn't necessarily have someone in the llama org who was as visible as him because he was not involved with llama at all.
2:45:20
Like fair fundamental air research is like a whole other group that they mostly write papers and do very academic work.
2:45:26
Yan lun's work is very academic.
2:45:29
Um, and it's really like it's I think he's like I think on one hand he like is right in the sense of like we don't have the full picture yet.
2:45:39
Like we don't have fullon AGI that can like do a human's job forever.
2:45:43
And I think that's kind of the drum he's beating is like there's more work to do.
2:45:48
There's more science to do.
2:45:48
It's not just productize the current set of techniques um in terms of like the end of AI forever.
2:45:55
Um, but his goal is not to do the productization.
2:45:58
Like he like the org he's in at Meta is really isolated from product.
2:46:04
Um, he's there to kind of boost the uh reputation of the org academically.
2:46:11
Um, as well as to be able to potentially advise on other stuff that's more producty.
2:46:17
But his job is not to like go train a business model to train a model that is going to be used by businesses.
2:46:22
used by businesses. Like I think people like that or fair, the friends I have who are there like are there because they essentially wanted to be a professor but they want tech company resources and not to not have to teach
2:46:37
and that is essentially what that or is yeah does that lead to better recruiting on campus essentially like you can go get researchers because Yan Lun can come do a a really powerful lecture Maybe, but I think of it more as like the same way that Zuck did Metaverse stuff. Zuck is very willing to make
2:46:56
Zuck is very willing to make 10-year bets. Yeah.
2:46:57
Um and so that org for Meta is not about what product are we releasing next quarter.
2:47:05
It's what are our 10-year bets. Yeah. Um Okay.
2:47:08
Uh I want What about Sorry. Yeah, you can go.
2:47:10
So Meta shares just hit an all-time high. Really?
2:47:13
So the stocks the stock's uh performing.
2:47:15
I'm I'm curious um from your time at Morgan State.
2:47:22
Thank you for that, John. That is incredible.
2:47:25
But but generally up 5% over the last week.
2:47:27
Um what h what how did Wall Street generally sort of like process the like meta AI story?
2:47:37
Cuz now obviously at least the market seems generally excited.
2:47:42
Uh, it may get to the point where we did with VR where people are like, "Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa.
2:47:46
Cool it on the metaverse," you know?
2:47:47
Well, it's funny because like like like you add all you add all this up, even if the hundred million offer number is real, it's like, okay, so now we're at like $1 billion in spend.
2:47:58
It's 5% of the metaverse hole that was burning.
2:48:01
And it's like, you know, from a Wall Street perspective, you're like, I don't care about I don't care about $1 billion.
2:48:07
I care about $20 billion.
2:48:09
because that was what was weighing on the stock during the metaverse buildout.
2:48:12
But this is like AI is so much more productizable.
2:48:15
You can make so much more money from it upfront.
2:48:19
And it seems like even though it's a big number, $100 million offer, it feels like the spend is maybe less, but I don't know. What do you think, Will? Right. Yeah.
2:48:26
I mean, I think the I don't know the context fully of the 100 million.
2:48:30
I know people have all these theories, but like the the scale AI numbers we do know. Yeah.
2:48:33
And like that that's a big chunk of their like I don't know.
2:48:39
They don't do those every day. Yeah.
2:48:42
Um but they've done a handful in the past at that scale.
2:48:44
Like WhatsApp was 20 billion or something like that.
2:48:48
Um and I mean it's hard to read into like the the charts like I Yeah, I think people are generally like expecting that Meta will take AI seriously and are kind of happy to see change.
2:49:03
Um whether that is like justified or not, I mean, we'll see.
2:49:09
Um yeah, it was interesting.
2:49:13
The product side is gonna be interesting because like they're not a B2B SAS company.
2:49:16
Um well, so content, they're an entertainment company and I think that that I I don't I don't think that people are are fully understand the potential of Gen AI around entertainment.
2:49:32
like it gets talked a lot around, oh, you're going to be able to generate, you know, an entire movie or generate video games or things like that.
2:49:39
And I and I think that we haven't seen we've seen some fantastic examples so far, but nothing nothing that that is I I I think like George H.
2:49:50
Hots was on our show and he was talking about how like basically AI is going to be like having five CIA agents follow you around all the time convincing you to buy products.
2:50:00
And like that is like one kind of dark bull case for dark bull case dark bullcase for meta in the context of AI because it's like it's possible that that Facebook is already the best ad advertising product in human history like period hands down there's nothing better and then could you make it like two three times better? It's very possible. Crazy. Yeah.
2:50:22
very possible. Crazy. Yeah. I want to push back on the B2B thing because yes, they don't sell B2B software, but I was thinking about it in this terms like if you if you were running a company where your entire you only had one client and that client was Meta and you sold them CRM and infrastructure and uh LLMs to improve the back office and do uh you know censorship and and uh you know and reality checking and and uh looking for
2:50:55
bad words and looking for improper posts and recommendation algorithms like how much would that company be worth and how much revenue would they be making just from that one client and I think it's in the billions because it's just such a
2:51:07
large organization that it's potent it's potentially like just the B2B applications of AI inside of Meta are like it's a multi-billion dollar like cost center or revenue driver or something like that. I don't know. I I don't know.
2:51:18
I think a company at Metascale has already rewritten all that stuff themselves for the most.
2:51:23
Like they probably have some services. Yeah.
2:51:24
That they're using, but like they like they could they rebuild their own cloud like because they use AWS for a lot of Yeah.
2:51:31
Um can they're not a comput company though.
2:51:35
And in terms of like platform stuff. Yeah.
2:51:36
I feel like those companies once you hit a certain size and you just like have so many engineers that you want everything like Google rewrites all their own stuff. Yeah.
2:51:46
Um, Microsoft rewrites all their own stuff.
2:51:48
Um, and can they is there another like a tale of end of that that has not been done yet that they can squeeze some more money out of? Sure.
2:51:57
Um, entertainment will be interesting.
2:51:59
So, one thing that just I was just reminded of um, have you seen the Italian brain rot videos? Oh, yeah. Love them. Yeah. Yeah.
2:52:04
So to like I know people it's like silly, it's stupid, but it there is something there in terms of this like communal narrative storytelling with a level of vibrancy that we haven't seen so far. It's like Looney Tunes.
2:52:18
Um but people just like come up with these where you could imagine Meta kind of eating a good chunk of the like videog market.
2:52:25
um if they have an answer to like VO3 um where that becomes part of the platform.
2:52:33
It ties into the whole metaverse thing of like creating stories and sharing these stories with your friends.
2:52:38
Um but instead of like Instagram stories, it's like okay, what's what's the evolution of stories? Yeah.
2:52:44
Have you have you seen Higsfield? No. Field AI.
2:52:47
I think it's an ex Snapchat team.
2:52:49
Snapchat team. Their new image model is basically already at a point where it's creating images that are photo realistic but in the photo realistic photo fulltime influencer generated it after spending hours trying to create it and you can't tell that it's not real and so
2:53:11
it it feels like um it feels like meta integrating that kind of thing where it's like y it it'll be interesting to see how this actually plays out because everybody will be able to be a super tasteful creator or like generate these sort of unique styles and I'm sure at that point it'll switch. Everybody will
2:53:28
Everybody will be like, "Well, I only follow organic farmtotable influencers." Who knows? Yeah. Yeah.
2:53:37
I feel like they they're uh AI integrations so far have all been kind of weird.
2:53:42
like there's these like Instagram accounts you can chat with and then there was the whole uh Meta AI homepage disaster where old people were like leaking personal info without realizing it.
2:53:54
But I guess Facebook's always had that.
2:53:56
Um yeah, I think it'll they'll have to thread the needle on product in a way that we'll have they'll have to get creative because they haven't like it's been a while since they had a product innovation that was homegrown that really stuck.
2:54:13
like yeah it it is interesting that they haven't tried to create a studio Giblly moment by you're like going to I was saying this they should just pre-render everyone's profile picture as a Gibli and just when you open the Instagram app it's just like here we did this for you
2:54:32
it would be incredibly expensive from an inference cost but then it's just like you could share it and it's just more virality around it but I don't know and and like even baking that down into a filter No, it can't be so like OpenAI branded now. They have to go away. Yeah, I'm They have to go away.
2:54:44
Yeah, I'm saying like an entire something like that. But yeah. Yeah.
2:54:48
B b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b basically like the the the filters in the Instagram app should be like style transfer or like fully generative instead of just like color grades.
2:54:57
Um that's clearly the next thing and they should just and they should just do that.
2:55:01
Um but what what do you think of uh Sam Alman's ability to get through this?
2:55:06
get through this? like he's had a series of exoduses and seemed to continue to march on the anthropic departures then SSI and thinking machines like XAI like this is not the first time his first rodeo it's not his first rodeo and so
2:55:23
there's this whole narrative like never bet against Zach he's been down on the metaverse came back he's been down on mobile with the HTML 5 thing and he came back from that went native and super dominant and bought Instagram WhatsApp super dominant mobile. Uh, and so never
2:55:36
Uh, and so never bet against Zuck, but then also maybe never get bet get bet against Sam and maybe they both win and maybe like the real loser is like I don't know some some other company or something. I don't know.
2:55:48
I think as long as OpenAI doesn't totally drop the ball on product or research, like they have the center of gravity for the AI world.
2:55:53
Like in the same way that no matter what Android ships, people are not going to switch from their iPhones, like something would have to go very wrong for people to not see OpenAI as the winner, I think, or as the kind of the default. Um, yeah.
2:56:09
I mean the other thing is uh the average chat GBT user is not waking up today being like oh I can't believe OpenAI lost a handful of its top researchers right they're right they're just still using Chat GBT as a Google replacement or they're talking with it as a companion.
2:56:31
So yeah, I think the lead is still very very real and um and I just and again it's going to create opportunities for people to say, "Hey, I want to go work on this product that hundreds of millions and soon billions of people use every single day, right?"
2:56:50
And I do think it'll get to a point, especially with like 2025 into 26 where there's a lot of product stuff that people seem like I think we're early on products and we'll keep getting better versions of the same things in a way that's like kind of predictable.
2:57:07
Like the image models will keep getting better, the agents will mess up less, but like we can already use those things and we can start building proof of concepts around them.
2:57:18
And the question is like okay, what are the winning apps?
2:57:19
Um like I I imagine that like the real time clearly kind of thing someone open is going to do their version of that at some point.
2:57:29
Um other people probably will too.
2:57:31
Like does that become modality that people really want like live overview uh on their screen on their phone?
2:57:38
Like what's the what's the way that people are going to be interacting with AI generally?
2:57:42
Um because a lot of those use cases like it's they're already smart enough.
2:57:47
It's not about making the models like way smarter at whatever.
2:57:52
It's like how do you have the model be useful or fun, engaging?
2:58:00
There's a bunch of paths here going back to the Cluey thing where one Roy is like right about the UX and like wins the market and the other option is like he's right about the UX but like doesn't win the market and then there's like, you know, it's just not the right form factor or whatever.
2:58:17
But and if at least the first two outcomes are hilarious in that in that Roy Lee ushers in the new the new paradigm of uh for for engaging with with language models.
2:58:29
I'm curious any um is all the stuff around every B2B SAS player descending on the sort of like single interface like a a chat interface that generates software.
2:58:43
Was that predictable to you?
2:58:44
Do you think that's do you think that that's like part of a multi-year trend or is that just FOMO?
2:58:52
I mean like C-pilot was early.
2:58:52
It was like 2020 2021 like the first GPT3 copilot came out and like that was already one of the early like LLM applications that people were interested in at all and then it took until cursor for it to really like I think cursor plus like 35 sonnet was when it became a thing that was good enough that people were excited about it.
2:59:13
Um, and it really ushered in the trend because people were starting to find it more useful than a toy and like a thing that actually want to use day-to-day.
2:59:21
Um, and so I think that like that's one path is like and then the more background agent kind of things are like starting to take off now, which I imagine like those will get reliable enough that they're like useful for cranking stuff out.
2:59:36
Um, they already are kind of depending on what you're doing. Yeah.
2:59:42
Like I think yeah, we're about halfway through the year.
2:59:47
What What are What are kind of like the big moments that you're kind of tracking the the OpenAI open source model could be one?
2:59:54
Whatever meta launches next, right?
2:59:56
I'm assuming they're going to be dark until this new team can can really cook and and bring something great.
3:00:03
May maybe they don't do anything this year, but I would assume they they come with with something.
3:00:07
What else are you are you tracking?
3:00:13
Yeah, I mean for me the 03 release in chat GPT was like a pretty like game changer kind of thing where it was like we saw with like deep research that like okay they kind of figured out how to make agents work but it was also just like this one version of an agent and 03 you can kind of get it to be a pretty general agent where it can like do some pretty complex stuff that was kind of new to see from like the geogesser thing was crazy.
3:00:36
Um, and having that as a like vision of like what AGI starts to look like, I think is pretty cool.
3:00:45
Of course, from the like research open source world, there was the Deep Seek as like the RL craze taking off.
3:00:51
But like I mean, I'm I work on RL so I like obsess over it and like think about it a lot.
3:00:55
But I do think we're really starting to see these recipes at least in the broad strokes of like, okay, here's how the LM thing can go.
3:01:04
We figure out what we want it to do.
3:01:06
we give it some tools, we set up these environments, we figure out who how to evaluate it, and then we can just kind of like let it go and these things get better at doing those things via trial and error.
3:01:15
Um, and so like I like I think that is one way to kind of forecast where things are going is just like what are the plausible use cases that people want to use LMS for?
3:01:26
They want an agent to do XYZ.
3:01:28
Um, and then how do you make this a thing that you can help climb?
3:01:31
And I think like you see a lot like there's been a lot of news about OpenAI trying to like sell their RF service.
3:01:37
There's these startups popping up.
3:01:39
There was a service reinforcement. Okay. Yeah.
3:01:43
Um and so like they're pushing this pretty hard.
3:01:47
This is you're spending over $10 million like Palunteer uh OpenAI will also customize a model for you.
3:01:51
So they have like a uh serious heavy like a heavy paying customer one, but they also have like a more like in the thousands of dollars service. Sure.
3:02:03
Where you are getting to essentially do fine-tuning on 04 mini. Yep.
3:02:07
Um and that is a little more self-s served.
3:02:11
Um but they're also like doing consulting around that.
3:02:13
The forward deployed thing around that.
3:02:15
Is that an important strategy for open AI to c to to kind of stay in the game against open-source models like llama? Yeah.
3:02:28
But I think also against other like thinking machines.
3:02:30
There was some report that this is a version of the strategy they're getting is like go to enterprises y talk to them about their problems.
3:02:38
Uh turn these problems into things where you can create really good customized agent models. Mhm.
3:02:43
customized agent models. Mhm. And if the like that's one potential roadmap towards like having more like AI everywhere is just like having services that were whose job is to like come in whether or not it's fine tuning or not just like make them into agent-shaped tasks um
3:03:05
where you can then optimize the model and have someone craft the model experience like for you because like I think a lot of enterprises are still like in the spot where they don't really like there's there's not as you see by the like the talent war there's just not that many
3:03:21
people in the world or in the market who really understand this stuff at a level where they can go make it happen and so like the open source thing on one hand it's cool that you in theory can go do it but it's also like there's not that many hands who can who are equipped to like go make the thing happen actually
3:03:40
fine-tune Llama 4 or whatever yeah We actually talked to a startup that's doing basically that like small models for specific business use cases like okay you just have a ton of CSVs that need to be turned into JSON and we build you an LLM that just does that or whatever. Um interesting. How how do how Um interesting.
3:03:56
How how do how do you after the the scale news and then there's a bunch of players um popping up or you know everyone from uh Merkor to Labelbox uh to Handshake a lot of different people competing for that market.
3:04:14
How do you see that market evolving over the next one to two years?
3:04:19
I think there were certain people saying scale got out at the perfect time in many ways.
3:04:25
Um but clearly there's a lot of at least gross revenue up for grabs right now in in the near term. Yeah.
3:04:30
I mean I think like the t the broader sphere of like creating stuff to train models on with humans in the loop to do that curation is going to be important especially for these uh domain specific applications.
3:04:48
Um, I think it's going to be less like, oh, we just need more tokens and it's more about we need uh curation of goals and objectives.
3:04:57
Um, because like tokens, you kind of hit diminishing returns pretty quick in terms of just like more internet text or more like human written math solution examples.
3:05:13
Um, and it doesn't scale super well.
3:05:17
But the thing nice thing about the task specification is you can kind of like pour in more compute without necessarily needing more data.
3:05:24
Um it scales much better with compute.
3:05:26
Um whereas we don't really have like a great way of like spending 100x more compute per pre-trained token other than make a giant model. Yeah.
3:05:35
Do you think uh Llama will stay open source for the foreseeable future? We'll see.
3:05:43
I it wouldn't surprise me if they go kind of the Google route where like they are still they still do open source.
3:05:48
They still have the llama brand but it isn't like their flagship thing where they start doing whether it's for internal products or it's they really want to show that they're the winner um releasing closed models uh via API or other services where Yeah.
3:06:03
Do they do they have the infrastructure to serve a closed model?
3:06:08
I mean you mentioned that they use AWS so it'd be kind of awkward, right? Yeah.
3:06:12
I mean, I don't know that they really want to that much.
3:06:15
I I think that it'd be something that comes in a product. Sure. Yeah, that makes sense.
3:06:21
Or maybe they partner with like you could see them partnering with someone like a core weave. Yeah. Um or Nvidia directly.
3:06:28
Um Nvidia's hoping to get into the inference serving game it sounds like. Um yeah.
3:06:35
Do you think uh so so uh one of Swix's takeaways from the the Wired article was that um like one big development that's coming is when Stargate comes online, OpenAI will have the largest single cluster for pre-training, but it feels like we might be at the end of that game and we might be doing more compute inensive work in a distributed fashion.
3:07:01
And so maybe having it all in one place is a little bit less relevant to just, you know, oh, Trump card, Stargate, boom, I win.
3:07:10
I have the best model by far.
3:07:12
Um, how how do you think about the impact of Stargate on like the AGI race?
3:07:20
I mean, I think the biggest experiment that they're definitely going to do is take a pretty big model.
3:07:24
I don't know if it'll be like quite as big as like a 4.
3:07:27
5, but like a big model and do way more RL on it than anyone's done yet.
3:07:32
Like what does like an05 level of RL look like? Okay. See how good that is.
3:07:37
See what new task that do that though or could you do that just across a bunch of data centers?
3:07:43
Because I've heard like a lot of RL is like you're generating you're doing verifiable rewards, you're generating in a bunch of different data centers.
3:07:49
You could do it completely distributed and you don't necessarily need a Stargate to do that.
3:07:51
You can do it distributed like it is very inference heavy.
3:07:56
There is still like a lot of weight updating.
3:07:57
You have to sync the model across.
3:07:59
You have to keep sending the training model to your inference workers. Okay.
3:08:02
Um and so having it colloccated certainly makes it easier.
3:08:06
You easier to do it in a distributed way if you want to versus pre-training.
3:08:09
Um but it's not like trivial. Mhm.
3:08:12
Um, but I think like a lot of this is just data people are building the data centers without necessarily knowing exactly what experiments they're going to run.
3:08:24
They just know more stuff is coming.
3:08:25
But also a lot of this is going to be inference where like they want to be able to do like Meta has a ton of GPUs that they just use for Instagram ads um recommendations.
3:08:32
Um, a lot of Stargate will probably be serving Gibli.
3:08:40
Like I mean that makes a ton of sense.
3:08:42
Like I'm I'm running into rate limits. I haven't seen one.
3:08:44
Literally everything like like Google it's like how how do they run out of TPUs?
3:08:49
They spend 60 billion on capex every year at least. Um and 03 Pro too.
3:08:54
I I mean I I get timeouts on this stuff. Last question.
3:08:58
Uh I'm guessing you weren't surprised to see OpenAI leveraging the TPU for for inference or reporting to be starting to use it.
3:09:08
Was was that kind of I mean it makes sense that they are considering all options given the friction with Microsoft um like they don't have a a core cloud that they're super close with.
3:09:19
they're not like there's they need to both try to lower their cost for infrance um as well like that maybe was a factor behind the because the 03 had a big price drop that might have been TPU related I don't know um pure speculation but like Google has TPUs and they can serve Gemini really cheap and really well really fast um if OpenAI wants to compete at that level they kind of have to consider all options Yeah, makes sense.
3:09:48
Well, great day to have you pop on.
3:09:52
Yeah, thanks so much for hopping out.
3:09:54
Knowing knowing how things are unfolding, we'll probably we'll probably ping you to jump on again later this week. So, stay ready. Great to have you. Hot topic. Cheers. Yeah. Bye.
3:10:06
Talent wars continue to rage on.
3:10:06
Sam Alman slams Meta AI's uh talent poaching spree.
3:10:11
Missionaries will beat mercenaries.
3:10:13
He says, quote, "What Meta is doing will in my opinion lead to very deep cultural problems," said Sam Alman in leaked memo sent to OpenAI researchers. So big big question.
3:10:22
Uh Paula says, "Uh, with all the AI labs in SF being in the mission, who called them members of technical staff and not missionaries?" It's funny. Oh, wow. This is an old post. Yeah.
3:10:36
From uh from over six months ago.
3:10:39
Um, and there's a bunch of other new details emerging from uh the new Meta Super Intelligence team.
3:10:45
DD, who's coming on the show, wait in like three minutes. Okay. Wow.
3:10:47
Yeah, we've highlighted a lot of his posts.
3:10:51
Uh, every single one of the 11 meta int Meta super intelligence hires has an is an immigrant who did their undergrad abroad.
3:10:58
Uh, seven from China, one from India, one from Australia, one from UK, one from South Africa, eight are PhDs or PhD dropouts in the US.
3:11:05
Immigration is key to US AI innovation.
3:11:07
Um Jeff Be Jazos uh has a hilarious post here.
3:11:11
The foreshadowing here was insane.
3:11:15
Uh and it's Sam Alman interviewing Mark Zuckerberg and Mark Zuckerberg says uh the thing that I think Facebook has done exceptionally well is hiring.
3:11:28
This is this is an incredible series.
3:11:30
The startup school series that Sam did while he was at YC.
3:11:32
He interviewed uh Zuck, Elon, a ton of really interesting folks and got these really definitive interviews from the top tech leaders of the next generation like right as they were uh kind of on the on the biggest uh moment in their comeup. Why are you laughing?
3:11:49
It's just I love I love this business.
3:11:54
You're like tearing up looking how happy how happy you No, it's just it's um watching this great power conflict play out in real time is is wildly entertaining.
3:12:08
It's entertaining and the consumer is going to be the net winner. I was about to say that.
3:12:14
And also America, yeah, it's extremely this is a pressure cooker of the highest.
3:12:18
It's it's so competitive.
3:12:21
But the good thing is that at the end don't like we aren't playing this game where someone goes to jail or someone gets you know like goes to the goolog if they don't perform or they get locked up like this is this is you know the difference between being a having $10 billion or hundred billion.
3:12:40
It's like it's kind of all fake but it's all it's all like it's super high stakes but it's still capitalism and it's still like the consolation prize is still being able to build something cool even if you get beaten.
3:12:50
But the end result is that we have this hyper competitive race to build the best thing with like kind of a safety cushion so that you're not like it's not like the government's putting a gun to your head. It's global.
3:13:03
It's greatest minds from all over the world coming to compete in this market. [Music]