TBPN Live - Weekly Recap: The Soham Parekh Drama, Meta Attacks OpenAI, The AI Talent War, Trump's Mega Bill

Episode Date: July 5, 2025

(00:03) - The Soham Parek Drama (05:39) - Soham Parek Interview (27:20) - Flo Crivello (Lindy) (38:13) - Emily Sundberg (Feed Me) (01:09:33) - Senate Passes Trump's Megabill (01:13:46) - Zak Kukoff (Lewis-Bruke Associates) (01:28:23) - Matthew Prince (Cloudflare) (02:00:03) - Meta Poaches OpenAI Engineers (02:39:51) - Will Brown (Prime Intellect) (03:10:05) - Sam Altman Slams Meta TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TBPN! We have some breaking news from TBPN. Let's go to the printer cam which I believe The timeline. Here it goes. Printer cams ready. Terminal. I see it spinning up. We got some breaking news. We got some breaking news What is this? Traded! He's wanted. The timeline is in turmoil, special segment starting now. I love this because it's... Soham Perique just became famous in the last few hours.

Not for the reasons that he would necessarily want to be famous. No, no, is this a real picture of him? Do we know? I don't know. But this is from VAR Epsilon. It says, breaking meta, OpenAI, entropic and Google have signed Soham Parikh as fractional chief AI officer. 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. What's funny is that we were we were

working on a during the show we were working on a post we couldn't decide how to frame the trade deal of Soham and but some fan just did it for us It got a thousand stance fully scented. So uh matt parkers from anti-metal was uh, actually So hom was their first engineering hire in 2022 really smart and likable enjoyed working with him We realized pretty quickly that he was working at multiple companies and we let him go. I can't imagine the amount of equity he's left on the table. Matt says hiring Soham is a new rite of passage, TBH. Any great company should go through it.

So Suhail was the first person to call this out. He said this morning, or actually it was last night. So this has been building. PSA There's a guy named so hamper reek in India who works at three or four startups at the same time He's been preying on YC companies and more Gary is not gonna be happy about this You do not you don't want to put up the bat, you know You don't want Gary people to put up the Gary sign. No, you don't want to go up to against it

Apparently door right YC companies. I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying scamming people This is fascinating. Did you see this from Pratika meta Tyler put this in that you want to read this one first? It's been all over the place Roy said I interviewed this guy yesterday That's amazing Tyler break it down for us. What is Pratika? Okay, so apparently I mean, this is still unconfirmed I've actually I've sent him an email Okay, I attained his email. I'm not sure if it's the real one. Yes, see But she says the dude clears interviews. He's good with that after clearing. He has junior people doing all the work

Yeah, and he has around 20 ways and interns basically a small dev shop Wow So he's just figured out the economics of like hey if I'm making 200k or 300k He's basically signing people do a 20K a month retainer. He knows he's going to have some churn, but it doesn't matter. He's picking up some equity. This is fascinating. Equity comp as well.

I wonder if he's vested. I wonder if he's vested. He's got some shares on the balance sheet. At any of these companies. This is crazy. Ken Watana says, Soham Perik is the Bonnie Blue of YC. Very vulgar SAR says all recruiting must stop until we get so hum on

TBPN to figure out what is going on. Well open invite to so hum. Well, Santiago says so hum on TBPN when Daniel growing Daniel says Microsoft just laid out, here we go. Laid off 9,000 workers, all of them. So if you see here, if you're picking up so home for the thing in their inbox It's time to start polishing your resume because he hasn't reached out It means he's not bullish on you Austin

Allred says must suck being an unemployed software engineer and realizing that so hamper eek has been hired 79 times in the past four years And then Matthew Berman says, Oh, you think AI is killing software jobs? Tell that to Soham Perique. Signal says, not now, honey. There is a Soham gate happening on X. It is really funny. It's basically say, I'm gonna build a dev shop,

but it's gonna be my name. And I'm, you know, he probably, no, he probably could have had a just very successful dev shop. Yeah. Yeah. But, but, but there's a stigma around hiring dev shops. You want to hire founding engineers. Like, you know, the title matters. And the idea of like, okay, we have a full-time employee. We got somebody who's delivering their high performer. Our team is cracked. We don't have to outsource the whole thing with Uber. remember Uber's initial build out was all outsourced and it

was like a mark on the company. Obviously it didn't affect them, they went on a generational run, it was fantastic. But there's this idea of like if you're building a startup, the founders need to be coding, the employees need to be coding, needs to be handcrafted, can't outsource. But he's proven us all wrong I guess true so we're working on getting him live we got another post here from growing Daniel has he gotten back to you Tyler on email it seems like he might not come on today but maybe we can pitch him and yeah hasn't got back I sent it 20 minutes ago okay he's sorry he needs to come out and say he's sorry. He needs to come out and say he's sorry. Yeah. And he needs to say this is the right time

to launch his dev shop. Yeah. And it should be called the dev shop of Soham Parikh. Yes. Because I mean, I don't know. Maybe he's delivering. Growing Daniel has a post. Your chief of staff brings list of applicants.

Really likes this one Indian guy. Asks if it's a rune or a Soham, she doesn't understand. Pull out illustrated diagram explaining the difference between runes and Soham. She laughs and says, it's a good engineer, sir. It's a Soham. It's a Soham. Oh, that's a wild best. That's great. We believe he's here in the studio with us here. So welcome to the stream So hum good to meet you. How are you doing? There is Welcome man himself Thanks so much for joining Why don't you

Why don't you introduce yourself and Just take a few minutes to just give us What's going on in your world? what's the last 24 hours been like? How would you describe yourself? What do you have to say to people? And then I'm sure we'll have to answer the questions. Let's go back to the very beginning. Who are you?

Where do you come from? I mean, I'm originally from Mumbai. I kind of grew up here all my life. Obviously, drove into computer science, like coding and everything, kind of without a choice, kind of process of elimination.

Fell in love with it. As you're aware, at this point, I'm everyone's favorite founding engineer pretty much or worker 17 or whatever you might call it, AI bot or SOHOM as a service. I don't know. Don't have much to my story, essentially. I've just been always passionate about, you know, building things. What was your first job?

My first job was actually at a company called Allen. It was like a voice assisted, like conversational startup. You know, this is back in like 2020, 2021. 2020. And when did you come to the States? Because I know I was talking to Matt and he said you, you would go to the anti-metal off sites and you're very much a part of the team.

So to be honest, I have family in the East Coast. The first time I ever visited US was in 2018 and then I was supposed to do grad school there. Different financial circumstances, couldn't do that. Had to kind of like not go with that plan. But obviously, I have visited, you know, America mostly for like offsites and stuff, just to catch up with team members and things like that.

Okay, so the main claim that was levied against you on X yesterday kind of started with Suhail over at Playground. He accused you of working at multiple jobs simultaneously. Is that true? It is true. Um, and yeah, uh, I, I would love to add color to it, but that is true. Yeah. 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? I mean, honestly, uh, I think going back to like how it even like started to happen and what the motivations were, you know, obviously I would want to like preface with saying like, I'm not proud of what I've done. Um, you know, that's not something that I endorse either. Um, but you know, financial's not something that I endorse either.

But you know, financial circumstances essentially like no one really likes to work 140 hours a week, right? But I had to do with 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. I don't share much in terms of like what's going on with my life. And kind of in my internal thought process, you know, it 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 out of 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 alleviate the situation.

I wasn't much faster. No, it's very economically rational. What about the conjecture that you had a team of junior developers underneath you helping you actually accomplish the tasks? Is there any truth to that? I wish I had the money and I wish that was true, but that is not true.

Any of the founders that I worked with can watch with that. I have multiple locations like pair program with people. You know, I've written every single inch of the code, you know, Antimetal is one of the companies I worked at. You know, they have pretty high bar for design, as you might know. They did a launch recently. You know, there were two occasions where just before the launch, like the contractor who was going to do the front end

for us essentially had bailed out. And we as a team had to figure it out and do everything, which was a team of only three engineers, right? 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 kind of model out potential churn as you would get? I'm curious if you were operating this looking at it as basically a SaaS business, the SaaS of Soham. This was not a business to me. Every company that I've worked with, I've deeply cared about. And again, people who spend a lot of time with me can like back that on multiple locations.

The, and again, I did not have any financial model. The, like I said, the only motivation for me was, Hey, you know, I'm in a financial jeopardy, you know, so I didn't do this until 2022. 2022 is actually when I was running into issues. I had deferred my grad school, admit, and did an online degree, but basically did not have enough, essentially just to get out of the situation I was in.

Don't wanna talk too much deeply about it, but. No, no, that's fine. Yeah, so that's kind of why. Talk about your own abilities. It seemed universal that the teams that you worked on said that you were extremely talented, that you interviewed incredibly well. It's easy for new CS grads to be frustrated because you're probably running laps around them in the interview process.

But yeah, it's very impressive if you actually didn't have a junior team and you were just juggling. It seems estimates seem to put it at maybe five companies at once, maybe well beyond that. Are you just hyper productive? Are you leveraging AI tools and coding assistants? Are you just able to move really quickly

in a startup environment? or are you also talented like systems engineering and algorithms and solving really, really hard computational problems? So I'd preface with this. Some of these companies I worked at was before the copilot boom, right? There were no AI-assisted programming. At least three startups have went on the record

like seeing this. People who've programmed startups have went on the record saying this. People who have programed with we can also watch with this. The real truth is there's this funny line in some of my interviews, like TLDR, I don't do anything outside coding. That is very true. And if you're spending hours sitting in front of the computer, you will eventually, at least I hope so, get good at it.

There's obviously a lot for me to learn in general. Uh, you know, I wouldn't say like, I'm, you know, like, uh, uh, uh, like, uh, uh, I don't know what they call like, uh, you know, like a platform manager, something like, you know, top principle or whatever, but I would like to believe that I was a decent enough, a good enough engineer to essentially be able to work at three places because that's the only thing I did the entire day. So, so an average day for you, an average week for you, it feels like engineer to essentially be able to work at three places because that's the only thing I did the entire day. So 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 seven days a week. But as some of these new coding code gen tools came out, Claude code, cursor, Devin, et cetera. Did you feel like you could add maybe a few more jobs? Were you getting more efficient or do you still handcrafted code, farm to table, organic,

handmade? Obviously, having more AI assisted tooling definitely helped but it did not amount to me working on more jobs because I would still love to spend, you know, a justifiable hour like working on something and it doesn't have like a measure. It's not like, hey, you know, I'm going to split time like four hours for this company, for us, for that company. Like I was essentially like working until I got something done for that day. And I think people around me will probably say this, that I am notoriously known for not sleeping. I am, you know, I'm a serial like non-sleeper at this point is what I would say.

But yeah, and as far as the interviews go, right? So there's also been a lot of things around like, hey, you know, I probably used, you know, some sort of like tool like Clueli, 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. Or some sort of hack to game the system. The truth is, a lot of these companies did not have lead code style problems.

And if they did, I would have bombed interviews, because I don't practice lead code as much. I know my data structure as well. I know what to use when, but typically a gun to my head. Well, you're also great at cold email. I saw some of these cold emails. You got a great format, it pulls people in, it shows your personality, it shows that you care

about coding, and I think that helped a lot as well. Totally. Yeah, I mean, I do care about coding a lot, but again, most of these companies essentially had a take-home assessment or a work trial, right? 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 and I did everything, you know on my own like I was also doing the work trials on my own and

Yeah, like I guess I'll leave it at that if they did have lead court I would have bombed the interviews, but luckily they didn't like startups usually just like care more about like talk a little bit about the companies that you chose to work for you applied to. Do you think you could have pulled this off with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and split three times, or do they have defenses in place that would make this difficult? There's a variety of memes around maybe big tech companies. It's easier work. Maybe startups are harder. I'm just kind of curious about,

it seems like you went for a lot of startups. What was the reasoning behind that? Yeah. So it feels counterintuitive. Like if I wasn't in need of money, like why would I work for startups as opposed to big time? Because they clearly pay well, they have a nine to five schedule. For the most part, I would say people don't really care about what you are essentially doing. The thing with me is if you're spending multiple hours a week working on something, you would have to at least be decently passionate about it because otherwise you'll just like burn out.

Like I said, each of these companies that I've worked for and again, founders, some of the founders have spent meaningful time with me and vouch, would say that I actually cared about these companies. So it wasn't like cold email without context. Like I deeply read into what a company was doing, what the business model was, who their customers were.

I had great ideas about like what to build for them, what not to build for them, what the business model was, you know, who their customers were. 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. You know, I did deliver like beyond engineering for a lot of these companies. And 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 nine to five and kind of like center a div in like six hours or something. You know that's that's just not me because I do like what I do and that's kind of cold email hack. Send the cold emails from the heart. Put some real thought into them. Talk to me about other alternatives that you may be considered or maybe didn't. Did you ever think about going to a startup and saying like, Hey, I'm doing a great job. I'm working 40 hours a week. I need to make more money. I'd like to take on a second job. It would, would,

would that be amenable to you? Do you think that founders might be actually open to that or say I'm working 18 hours a day? Can you pay me three times as much? Can you 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 out. And so did you ever have those types of decisions,

like we're seeing this with the AI talent wars, the 10X, you can think of yourself as like a three to five X engineer I guess, no offense,, the 10X, you can think of yourself as like a three to five X engineer I guess, no offense, but the 100X engineers are getting a hundred million. You can maybe be 10X if you really focus. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and so it's almost a question of like, why couldn't you get the money that you wanted

from a single job? What was the stumbling block there? Yeah, I think the part where I should have basically done is like come clean with my situation, 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, I do like to keep boundaries between my personal and private, you know, like whatever's like going with me mentally.

And that's true with any person I'm with as well, like, and that's outside of work. Um, so when there was an embarrassment to essentially like admitting that, Hey, you know, I have this struggles mentally, uh, you know, like, uh, and talk in open about it. And then the second thing is, you know, I, uh, really did not like think through this because like I said, it was an action that was done more out of like desperation to get out of the situation I was in rather than like, I mean the flip side here is that 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, oh, like, you know, I have a sob story and that's why I need $50 million contract. He's like, I'm delivering this value to you and you should pay me the value that I'm creating. 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 gotta pay me three times as much. Honestly, it again feels counterintuitive. Like I don't really care much about the money. I was really into it for building. So like greed was not like an incentive for me. Again, regardless of my financial circumstances,

in most of these companies, I always took the lower, you know, pay higher equity offer. 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.

So I wouldn't even be getting equity as long as my immigration was uncertain, which it was. So all of the decisions seem counterintuitive. Basically for me it's like, hey, you know, I have to do something to kind of get out of the situation I'm in, I also want to do spend time like building something meaningful. As long as I like the startup

and as long as it's not like hand to mouth, it did not matter too much. So what are you gonna do now? You have the intention of the entire tech ecosystem and I appreciate how candid you've been with us and I want to talk about Dev Shop. Yeah I mean there's a few angles here you could do the the Dev Shop of Soham Parikh. I think you would be able to get a handful of clients immediately. I think you could sign a maxed out contract with Cluely. They would probably pay you a pretty penny

to join the team over there. And also, it sounds like you're interested in joining as a founding engineer of a new AI startup. So how are you thinking about your opportunities right now, and how can you turn this into a win? 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, Antimetal, you know, shares in mind the founders like Sync Labs, you know, Prady, you know, Ruthaba. They're one of the

most, you know, crack places I've been at in general, partly because they had me maybe not, I don't know. I guess I'm with that. But 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 AI driven like data platform, like, you know, video platform,

essentially for more kind of like, you know, UGC style media. And we're going to release to the market very shortly This is the only thing I'm going to focus on I think you know, they've put a bet on me. I have a lot to prove How do you rebuild trust 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? Is there something that you see happening down the line around worker monitoring or checking when the GitHub commits are coming in or doing something to understand if someone else is working multiple places. Somebody was saying tech needs some sort of service to see, hey, are we employing the same company?

How do you rebuild trust and guarantee that you won't be working multiple jobs against the will of the current employer? So I think all of this that has taught me is just coming to Canada probably makes people understand your situation. After all, we all are humans. I don't anticipate working on multiple gigs again, but my financial circumstances have not changed. So even if it did come to them, which it won't, right now I'm very clear that this is my sole

focus. I would probably approach with being very candid with the founders and just letting them know. And if that's not a possibility, that's fine. Maybe I can figure a way out where there is a higher pay or whatever, kind of like to your point. But in another spectrum of the world, I think what I've really realized

is that I just want to a part of like building something that I can like focus on the longer term. And that's always been the goal. It is always a goal with any of these companies I've worked with. So, you know, I obviously, you know, like I, I believe in actions more than words, like I guess what we'll build and launch in a month

would probably be a testament to what we've been able to build. Well you're certainly gonna have a lot of attention around that launch I hope you now is probably not the right time to renegotiate your your offer letter for the new company you should probably you know stick with it but I think you're gonna bring a lot of marketing value to Darwin, the new company you're joining. What's the reaction been like at home? You're getting a lot of messages from friends. Has this broken tech acts and broken containment

into kind of your world beyond just people asking you about this? Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, reaction is natural. Like a ton of people have been asking about this. What's also funny is like, you know, some of the memes, like I am very new to Twitter. I joined Twitter yesterday. So this was a lesson for me in social media in general.

Like I am not a social media person. So you just like, I was like, you know, very overwhelmed with it in general. Obviously, you know, feeling shitty about it as well. Like I said, you know, I'm not very proud of what I did. I think there was a way where I could have course corrected in a much different manner. So there was a lot of reflection in general,

but I think friends and family have been strong. Like I said, I was lucky to work at some of these places where I had really close relationships with the founders. A lot of them reached out. They do essentially be like, helpfully, kind of give advice on what I should be doing next. Even sometimes staying through with me, like, just to make sure that I'm like, all right.

I think it says a lot that a number of the people that you work for that fired you because you were working multiple jobs still care about you. It shows that when you were working for them, at least it does seem like you really did care. Are there any startups that you've worked for in the past that you were working multiple jobs for

that you haven't gotten a chance to apologize to yet that you plan to? I mean, in general, like I plan to apologize to everyone. Like that goes without saying. Any companies that you still need to resign from? Ha ha ha. None whatsoever. I mean, it's the only focus I have.

That's great. Okay. Okay. He's on the record. You're on the right path. On the right path. While I'm waiting for you, I hope this is a story of redemption.

I believe in forgiveness. I believe in mistakes. And I'm optimistic that this can have a good ending. Me too. So to be clear, your ex account is at real Soham Perique, right? That's the real one?

That's the real one. Cause there's a lot of fake ones floating out there trying to take, trying to ride the hype wave. Yeah, I mean, a hundred percent. There's been so many fake accounts and a lot of fake narratives as well. But yeah, that is my real account. 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 I was trying to do that just to show you. But it's been interestingly like, in a while to like notice how people are like taking this in different ways, but yeah, that kind of helps like just feel a little bit less, less shitty about it. But yeah. Yeah. What are the questions here? Remote versus in office, US versus international? Yeah, I mean, I think we had this struck such a chord Is you know again? It's this remote angle the international angle the ideas around a 10x engineer

the potential of new AI tools, but This has been really helpful. It's good to know you and I think you were getting you provided 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 I am excited to follow what you do next. Yeah. Thanks for stopping by. Thank you so much for having me. Cheers. We'll talk soon.

Bye. How are you doing? Good to have you back on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. No, redemption isn't possible when people people show you who they are, believe them. No, there's plenty of very honest people like, what are the odds that someone who's been lying compulsively and being confronted about it for three years, like two or three years. And like, look, it's a special kind of person too, who can do this thing to people who trust them. You have a relationship with an employer. And my understanding is that he basically has been

averaging like getting fired once a month for the last three years. Like it's a special kind of person who can do that. So he could have learned his lesson like two years, three years ago. Yes, yes. Like the first time he was called out and... totally. I wasn't tuning in, I didn't hear what he said. Yeah, to me the argument of, 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. So really quickly, how long did he work with you? Two weeks. Two weeks. And what was the result of that? I mean, I imagine you paid him for those two weeks of work. Did you get any good results? I am literally out of a meeting like an hour ago,

where the engineer described his impact as negative. Negative, okay. Well, because we had to onboard him. Yeah, you had to onboard him, yeah. Yeah, it's, he wasted all time and money. Has he apologized to you? Not yet. Okay, he said he would apologize to everyone else.

He would go on an apology tour. We'll see if that actually pans out. 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 Soham gate.

We never compromise on ethics. Like that's just a thing I don't fuck with. He's gonna apologize, is he gonna give the money back? Yeah. That's a good question. I don't know. Cause stock is cheap. Yeah. That's a good question. I don't know. Cause stock is cheap. Yeah.

That's a higher bar. If he wants to make a statement, that's what he would do. A hundred percent. Yeah, makes sense. How do you prevent this in the future? How does Silicon Valley prevent this in the future? Obviously the Valley is built on trust.

This is a violation of trust. There's been discussions about like, maybe we need a Reddit for, are we dating the same man? Are we employing the same software engineer? Maybe we need an AI tool to check the GitHub commits and see that, oh, they're coming in at the same time every week. I was wondering if this could be done at the HRIS level.

Yes, that's a good question. This employee has accepted two offers. Why are they in two instances of rippling? That doesn't make any sense. Yeah, how are they in two instances of rippling? That doesn't make any sense. Yeah, how are we solving this? I don't want to over-rotate on it. I think a lot of what makes Silicon Valley tick is its sculpture of trust.

You know, there's this whole game theory around like hawks and doves, you know? And it turns out there is no stable equilibrium. You're like in a constant state of shifting because if everyone's a dove, then the returns of being a hawk are very high and vice versa. If everyone's a hawk,

then you can have these like cliques of doves that start emitting. So 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. Like, look, you're gonna to get screwed over so often. We had a good laugh.

You know, the memes are amazing. Yeah, I hope your viral posts at least drove a bunch of new signups, and maybe he paid back a little bit by some customer. Yeah, I mean, I completely agree. Yes, the handshake deal protocol is built on trust. Do some VCs Violate it. Yes every once in a while a team's a term sheet falls through

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 gonna fall through You're gonna get screwed over every so often and it's not worth over pivoting on it and like looking over your shoulder your entire life. 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. He says he's not going to work at multiple companies. 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.

Like it will forever be like very easy When you go to Google search for the person that you're hiring is like, oh, that's a different so hamper reek There's a lot of there's a lot of things name and it's gonna be really complicated for him to get away with this longer my question is like if We were we were kind of saying like the so hamperumpery dev shop makes much more sense here. Does that make sense to you? Like if he was saying, hey, I've been working at all these different startups,

I'm starting a developer shop and yes, you can hire me, but I'm a contractor. I don't think so, I was hiring dev shops. Why are dev shops bad for startups? Why would this not work for him? I actually think for him the real move is to start a course on how to crack coding interviews because he's really good. Interesting. And he's credible.

He's actually credible, right? So he can actually make lemonade here. Like he should do that and he can make a lot of money. It's very high leverage. And do you think he was cheating? Yeah, it was that and the cold email strategy. It 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 he researched the company. I know the product. I love building. He's actually the funny thing is in his message, he said, he said, I'm pissed. And I was like, about what? What? Why are you pissed?

You're pissed you got busted? And he kind of gave himself away a little bit. He was saying like, oh, yeah, like I'm gonna put you know There's gonna be a great reversal here and he came on and was like the mainstream narrative is basically correct about me But maybe I'm sorry the the redemption of being like I'm gonna prove everyone wrong. I working at one company It's like you don't get you don't Yeah, yeah, that's like a second, the fourth place trophy. You worked at one company. Yeah, it's funny. Yeah. I mean, uh, look, he's, he's not sorry. He just got cut.

Like that's it. It's really simple. Um, and, and why do dev shops not work for startups? I mean, just like, I'm a nerd when it comes to the theory of the film because of my experience at Uber and so forth. There's a book that's called Managerial Dilemmas that explains why dev shops don't work. It's fascinating. Yeah. But can you unpack it a little bit more? Because Uber is interesting because it wasn't the very first version of Uber done by a dev

shop and wasn't that part of the early Uber lore that the code base was written in Spanish and so everyone at Uber had the Spanish early uber lore that like the code base 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 it's like it's like amazing lore regardless of how real it is yeah I think people add a little bit to it this is a person yeah yeah yeah but that you know like next time I hear about it there's gonna be a guy with a sombrero in the other. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, Travis was in Tijuana pulling random devs off the street. Yeah, really, really amping up. The apocryphal-ness of the story just needs to grow and grow and grow. It's a tall tale at this point. The reason why devsops don't work is because 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. And so there is an information asymmetry,

which always makes it possible for someone to cheat, because they can basically bullshit, and you see it with engineering all the time. It's like, oh, this is so complicated. You thought it'd be a day, but actually it's going to be a month. And you have no clue. You have no way to verify. And this is inevitable. Like, the reason you hire them is because there is this information

asymmetry gap, because otherwise, you might as well just do it yourself. Basically, in a way, it is always possible to cheat, which is why we are not fucking around and hiring people who do cheat, because there is no way you can always prevent them from cheating. If he doesn't cheat by doing this, he'll cheat by doing something else. So there is always a way to cheat. So you could say that to some extent, not cheating is irrational. You can't cheat. You can't get away with it. He's made millions. He's made so much money, right? Like you can't cheat. You can get away with it. And so in a way, you've got to solve for the equation where it's like,

I can't cheat. I can make a lot of money. I can get away with it. Nothing is ever going to happen to me, but I'm not going to do it because of X. And you have to solve for X. That's your job as a founder. You're like, why would you act irrationally? And the way you do that, thankfully, is you have that bit that you can flip in our brains as humans. We have these tribal pro-social tendencies that are like, I don't want to cheat because I like these people or because I'm bad 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

the shops. We had the to be even more specific, the dev shop gives you a scope. They say it's going to take me X, Y, Z time to do roughly this or maybe they're on a retainer. 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. 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?

I'm just a salaried team member. And because they have that equity compensation as well, they're bought and hopefully bought into the mission. It ends up working out. Thank you for jumping on. Give us the update on Lindy. I know you guys moved quickly. It's been a couple months maybe.

What's the latest? It's going well. We are currently grinding, to my point about DevShop, like we were at the office last night until like 10 p.m. Like you don't get that from the DevShop. So we're currently grinding. We're growing fast. We are making a big launch on August 4th.

I'm going to come back on the show. Then we've got some really, really exciting stuff coming around. I'm, I couldn't be more excited. Last last question on so hum, what should he do? What, what should he do next? He should totally start a course and he should raise around 26 and Z. Start a course. Okay. We'll see. Maybe he'll drop a course. Yeah, we've got, we've got laugh tracks around here. Um, but yeah, it is, it is the part of why the whole thing was so controversial as you like the

average new CS grad? Even from elite universities is not having the easiest time in the job market So it's such it's such a you know, it's got to be disappointing for them But but clearly so Hamas cracked the the entire flow the code. Yeah, so it's pretty well He's figured it out. So he should he should monetize that it is it is a monetizable skill Interesting. Well, thanks forize that. It is a monetizable skill. Interesting. Well, thanks for hopping on. This is fantastic.

Good to get the other side. Thanks everyone. Enjoy the fourth time. Talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. We have to sing her a song. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you.

Happy birthday dear Emily. We're hitting the size gong for you. Congratulations. It was yesterday. It was yesterday, but July 1st. You just didn't come on the show yesterday, so welcome. I would have come on yesterday if you asked. We should have, we should have.

We could have had a cake. We could have had a cake. What did you do for your birthday? I had a few meetings. I went to the YMCA. It was empty, which was nice. And then my husband took me to dinner. Oh, that's nice. YMCA, underrated?

Mine is nice. This New York weather, it's one of the only places blasting that air conditioning. Oh, interesting. What does the gym tier list look like in New York today? You know, Equinox had a moment. Lifetimes making moves. Lifetimes making moves. I, so I kind of do a high low thing. I live in Park Slope.

So the YMCA makes a lot of sense for me, but I'm also a member at a club called Casa Cipriani. Which I really like. Oh, okay. Very small members club. Yep, that's fun. The high low, the high low. John's in favor of that too.

We just started going to a new gym, but John is like actively wants to be kicked out so he can go back to Gold's. Which I'm like no, we're not, we can't do this. There aren't, there don't seem to be as many YMCAs on the West Coast. No, no, not that many. Lots of 24 hour fitness.

Lots of Gold's gyms. I mean, Gold's gym, it's the staple of Venice. It's where our nutrition works out. RFK's out there. It's a good crew. John thought Equinox was like a $75 a month gym while we were actively going there for a brief period. And I just loved how out of touch you were. It it felt like premium you know ultra premium yeah the location matters a lot

yeah what else is new in your world yeah give us a give us a update yeah I got out here this morning I don't want to brag. I recently inherited a car from my late grandfather to 2006 Camry. Okay. Very nice. There we go. Iconic era of really great vintage.

Very reliable. Yeah, awesome. So I drove out here today. It's crowded. It's really crowded. I'm hoping that this sort of level of crowds is due to the holiday weekend, but it might be a mistake that I rented a house out here,

but we'll see. What else is new since two weeks ago? Is there that crazy- Well, so the Hamptons broadly, people a month ago were saying that rentals were down massively year over year. Does it feel that way? Yeah, I don't know how much of that was because of weather

or people's finances. 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. It was really rainy and gross. It was sort of a late start to summer. 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, 100K for two weeks. Yeah, I had a friend who was dating a Wall Street, like hedge fund guy. And she was like, yeah, it's going so great. Like, it's amazing. And then like a couple of weeks later, she was like, yeah, it's going so great. Like it's amazing.

And then like a couple of weeks later, she's like, yeah, he's just like really weird. Like I don't think it's going to work out. And I was like showing her the stock market chart and being like, so his emotions perfectly mapped to the 10% sell off that we just saw. You're telling me that this guy, his entire, his entire personality is derived from the state of the market. And she was like, Oh, this makes so much more sense now. Okay. Yeah. I'm sure there's a lot of women who went through similar situations. I'm sure. I'm sure the kangaroo market's not good for the dating scene. Um, is,

uh, is that, is that crazy white party going on? That's a Hamptons thing. Is that a, is that a July 4th thing or is that canceled? I thought Michael Rubin was pulling back from that because it was maybe too flashy. Is there an update there? Yeah, I will see. Is that supposed to be 4th of July? I think that's late.

She's wearing, she's like, white party. What are you talking about? Yeah, I was like, the ditty one. Can't comment. No, not the ditty one. Oh yeah, I think that might have been a factor in pulling back from that. But I always see everyone's spying the watches, spying,

like, you know, what cars people showed up in all this stuff. There's a lot of paparazzi. There's a lot of Tik Tokers. See everything happening in real time. Interesting. Nobody can really like leave with another man's wife anymore. Like, there's so much, uh, coverage of these events now. It's really takes away. The mystique, the mystique. Somebody might have meant to bring it up. What's up with this place drugstore?

You were covering it. Let's try it. Oh yeah, this is awful. Bloomberg broke news yesterday that there's a new movie, a new smoothie pop-up chain from a Jay-Z invested celebrity chef. And he's these like very Instagramable smoothies, which obviously Aeroon 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 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 Aero on smoothie for your brand it's like 200k for a month or something we have to do this yeah we're you say that's crazy don't have to do it's worth every penny for the TBP and feed me Aero on smoothie you're telling me that's not gonna net out? No, you could do a drink at the US Open or something. Like, don't do the smoothie.

Don't do the smoothie. It's played out? Yeah, it's probably played out. Oh, it's played out. Okay. Didn't Erawan have a collab with Volkswagen or something or some really funny car company they did? Yeah, you're right. They did do a car comp. I think they also do beauty brands, like sunscreen and stuff. It's not.

Yeah. Chevrolet, Chevrolet drink collab. And what the worst part is that I wouldn't have had a problem if they did the ZR one, like the really crazy Chevy sports car, but they did the 2025 equinox EV. So you're drinking, according to the manufacturer of the collaboration between, uh, it combines Chevy's commitment to emission-free vehicles and Arwan's mission to promote sustainability

as a merchant of organic foods and wellness products. The drink called the Electric Juice consists of Choo Choo, Choo Choo? I don't even know what this is, which is the most protein-rich plant source and blue spirulina, the superfood that matches the Equinox's EV's blue color. The drink's ingredients are designed to energize

and recharge consumers according to Chevrolet. The winner here was the ad agency that got paid half a million dollars to set this up. I don't know, I feel like everyone's getting the Hailey Bieber smoothie. I'm about to rock the Equinox EBC smoothie. I think it has a certain badge value. They're like 70 grams of sugar.

It's like four cokes. I'm long sugar though. Four cokes is a lot. That is a lot. But I'm going long sugar from here. I did an experiment. My wife was very afraid of- This is the worst experiment I continue.

Yeah, but anyways, people are very afraid of the worst experiment you would I continue? Yeah But anyways people people are very afraid of sugar. I had to prove a point. I drank a soda every single day Yeah, I drank a coke every single day for six months And you work out every day No a lot of a lot of people think no, I agree it is over I think like a single Coca-Cola was terrible Yeah, of course, of course, everything's in, the dose is the poison with all of this stuff. Yeah.

You drink the full gallon of Bigel. So this week on our side, we've been covering the AI talent wars, how basically AI researchers are being comped almost like pro athletes and sort of like, these sort of nine- nine figure massive offers. The reason I bring it up is because you obviously cover a lot of the media landscape. And we had Derek Thompson on who left Atlantic.

I imagine that he's already like run rating well, well beyond. I, I don't know what his metrics are, but I would imagine he's already. He's catching up to me. Oh really? Yeah, it's a problem. Well, go subscribe to FeedMe right now and help win the race. But I was curious if you, it feels like

if legacy media companies, I won't call anyone out, want real attention, not just the sort of attention that comes from their logo to some degree in the prestige, but like actually quality content. At some point they'll have to like kind of reevaluate their comp structures. I think the Atlantic was like 300k was being reported as like the kind of range and when you can go on sub stack as a superstar writer and immediately be making somewhere in the seven figure range at some point or another it just becomes really difficult. I see traditional media companies more likely to start doing like

handshakes with sub stack writers than starting to completely restructure how they're paying their staff. I don't understand. 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. Is it like a co-publishing thing? Is it like creating a podcast together?

And it's been very interesting to experience firsthand, like talk to these people because I don't, I don't really need that. Like Derek doesn't need the Atlantic because the people who are reading him are reading him for him, not the whole surrounding. Yeah. I mean, just to set the table for the folks who might be listening, when Emily comes on the show, we pay her a hundred thousand dollars for her appearance. So just, just to say, kind of set the bar just so and it ramps up. Yeah. Yeah, it obviously ramps up But but yes, I am interested in like the dynamic of like you can still go and publish in in traditional media

Is that just like freelance? What is the difference between? What do you mean? Like when I write for GQ? Yeah, exactly Are you a columnist? I'm doing that besides that. I adore my editor there and I think that it's just like it's it's working like a different part of my brain Like I don't it's like a gift to get to be edited by GQ's editors. That's cool. Yeah, do you so are are you a Columnist over there or are you a contributor? Like how does with the actual shape? Do you get assigned things? 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. So with GQ specifically, my editor Dan, when I wrote the Zen story and when I wrote the story about members clubs last year, both were because 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 print issue. And that's how that's happened. I don't really, but like, I'm at the point now where if I have an idea of a great story that I wanna 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 feed me. Sure. I can outsource an editor. If I need that, I can outsource legal services if I need that. And it,

it's better for me to get to be like breaking those sorts of stories, you know? I just have like a good thing going in GQ. It's kind of fun. That's cool. I want to bounce an idea off you. There is this narrative that like when you go direct, when you're on Substack, like it has a different texture, a different vibe, maybe more objective, maybe more pro tech or pro creator or pro whatever the topic is being covered.

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 the type of content more than anything else. Do you think that's reasonable? Do you disagree? How would you wrestle with that? Can you keep expanding on that?

I want it. So I think that there's something where if you're working at a particular outlet and there's some sort of salary cap. 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. Who would you expect to produce better basketball?

Who would you expect to produce better content when you have one where a person can make 10 million or Joe Rogan can make 100 million. You're just going to attract the absolute top because that's where the... Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, and they're extremely incentivized to just work extra hard because 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 five thousand dollar Christmas bonus it means Spotify signed you to a hundred million dollar contract and it's the difference between like when LeBron James

shows up at midnight to shoot more three free free free throws like that could be the difference between like a fifty million dollar contract a hundred million dollar contract so I think going that extra thing produces better content. Yeah, it's really interesting to see so many traditional journalists, you know, give subsack a shot and like they just plateau. Yes, I'm like, I'm an animal. Like when my eyes are open, I'm working like this letter goes out every day. It's I'm marketing it, I'm editing it, I'm pitching stories. But

I've always had a really high tolerance for being told no. When I was getting paid $60K at a job and when I'm making like 10 times that now. I think that Substack and these sorts of platforms, even what you guys are doing, also attracts personality types that had less boundaries and rules in the ways that they work. Yeah. And then when people 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.

When really they're just getting outcomputed. Yeah. I mean, 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're paying their journalists? Okay, so you're gonna go as hard as you can to make 300K and get those benefits and whatever. But the other thing that I'll say is,

you have to be willing to not have insurance. You have to be willing to not have insurance. You have to be willing to have months where you're not having the support of a team. And it's just a very specific type of personality. But I think you're totally onto something. I think I'm playing a different game than my peers who are working in an office at a magazine or a newspaper.

Yeah. Yeah, also 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 two years. And if this doesn't work out, then I'll get a rollback. I'm curious, you were commenting on Vogue partnering with NutriGrain bars.

And I'm curious if you think, as people are so used to influencer, creator led advertising, like if you were to partner with a brand and people are like, wait, like what? Like why did she partner? That makes no sense. Like that's clearly a cash grab

Yeah, 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 saying, you know, why is neutral grain needs better marketing because the first thing I think Yeah, I always think about the the the I think that nature valley meme where it's like effing crumbs everywhere. I don't know if you've seen that one, but that's not NutriGrain. So my biggest association with NutriGrain. NutriGrain is like a long Fig Newton. Yeah, they gotta work on that.

Yeah. It's like, is it a Fig Newton or is it the crumb one? I just know it's not good. So they got to step it up. But yeah, the Vogue audience. I mean, do you think that there was ever a pitch where it was like, okay, we're going to go after the moms that read Vogue and get them to buy it for the kids. And so it's some sort of like bank shot strategy.

For me, what stopped me in my tracks was it wasn't a banner ad in a newsletter. It wasn't like one of those, it wasn't like somebody writing about their wellness routine sponsored by NutriGrain. It was a produced video of a stylist sort of like gallivanting through the streets of New York City. And I really liked this girl, Michelle. When I saw her post it and I saw that it was between Vogue and NutriGrain, like there was two, 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? Like it was very confusing to me because there were other ways that that could have been executed and made a lot more sense. And they probably didn't think that somebody would screenshot it and start that conversation, but unfortunately- The conversation was started. Yes.

Yeah. There's so many media reporters. If I didn't pick up on it, somebody else would have. But I think that Conde Nast overall right now is on life support. We had this conversation when Vanity Fair is looking for their next editor. Unfortunately, it's happening immediately right after that

with this new Vogue editor. It's a lot of pressure for I don't know what, a few more years of running this magazine. It just doesn't really seem like how, Vogue doesn't seem, I don't know what I would look to Vogue for right now. Yeah, yeah, it kind of goes back to that idea of like the independent media creator

versus the legacy media creator. Like we just released an ad for Wander that we said they asked us, they barely even asked us to make it and we just wrote it, shot it, directed it, like edited it, we just did everything, we sent them the final thing and they were like yeah cool and so yeah. There was like a second that they asked for a tweak. Yeah they were like actually our font is this one instead of that one. I loved it. And so like that is the type of like, you know,

entrepreneurial energy that I'm sure the particular partner that worked on, where they were actually starred in the commercial would bring to a partnership and select and, and coordinated with a brand that was actually aligned. But there were just like too many spreadsheet monkeys in the office that day. And so it just, I was like, why wouldn't you just hand these to the hungover girls at Barstool and have them talk about how this is the hangover snack? That I think would have moved the needle more. Totally.

Then, I don't know. When I think of logical vote partnerships, I think of like luxury brands, are luxury brands pulling back from that type of partnership? Like, have you seen anything there? Like what are, what are the innovative things that you're seeing from like the really top tier brands out there? Have you seen anything cool? You know what I saw today? Do you know those David bars? Like the metallic. Yeah, we had him on the show. I love them. Um,

I saw that Balenciaga at their show this week. Somebody posted a photo of like Balenciaga bars, like in the same sort of metallic. Okay. Metallic label. I took a photo of it. I'll send it to you guys after this. That's very cool.

Um, so I mean like, is that going to move their, their hoodies? I don't know, but like that's those sort of fun, weird moments are more exciting to me if we're talking about nutrition bars. Yeah, I mean, it certainly shows that like Balenciaga is still on the hip or just a wear because like Peter Rahal, he's kind of known in consumer packaged goods world

and a little bit in tech and some people know the story of RX Bar and then David Barr with the revenue ramp, like the business is doing well, but it's still like a complete insider industry story. Like the average person on the street doesn't know that. So Balenciaga's kind of signaling a little bit to that. Yeah, yeah. Like they, and I'm sure that that took them

like a couple thousand bucks like put together. Like, you know, it's not difficult. As far as 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 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. I think that a lot of my social calendar in New York right now is

dominated by brand events. 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. 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. 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. Um,

what makes for a good brand event? Like, is this just a happy hour? Is that what we're talking about? Is there a dance? It's actually interesting that the thing I'll say, we were talking about SVB, uh, they, they would, they would throw dinners that, like there's an entire founder dinner industrial complex that are just like financial companies that throw these dinners.

The funny thing is that within tech, the companies historically failed to make them social moments. So it'd be like, it'll say the name, it'll say SVB on the menu and people aren't like taking a picture of the menu as much as they're just like taking pictures. So I think what the luxury brands do well is you're saying hey we're gonna invite 200 people into the space and you're not going to be able if you post any photos at all we're going to be getting exposure.

We're gonna have a moment yeah. I threw a brand dinner, or a feed me dinner with my friend Paul from the Infatuation last year and Andrew Ross Sorkin was sitting next to me and I gave him a feed me key chain, that was my brand moment. That's a great moment. So that's another thing, like, those dinners are off. Yeah, how are brands being creative?

Are we seeing like ice sculptures or step and repeats? Like, like how, how can brands stand out with one of those? Like the worst possible brand event is a DJ and free drinks. Like just people standing in front of like a 22 year old DJ with like free drinks. 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 making it like glamorous or like, you know, now brands are, if they're doing a collab with like an athletic brand, 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. 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 seaport. And it's basically like, take your customers on a date. Right, like on an extravagant, adventurous date. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then if you level up, then you're going to start talking about like brand trips. Like, Hermes took people to Aspen last summer and yeah. I mean, a ton of VC firms do that all the time.

They could 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 ranch, some ranch and like shoot shotguns and have dinners and it's a whole weekend. Where's my call? I want to do that. They should get you on the calls. We'll introduce you some folks. Post-mortem on the Democratic primary but just on the marketing, right? There was a lot of, um, coverage of, uh, Zoran's basically film, you know, vertical video making abilities that seems to have played a key role in the campaign. I'm curious. Are you talking to any like tick talkers or content creators that are like, I want to build a business around this for politicians.

That'd be interesting. Yeah. I had a friend who I used, actually used to work with at Conde Nast who worked in the White House for Biden. And I think that she helped out with Zoran's campaign. Like there are people who know, I think like you have to be excellent at that job if you're working for a political campaign,

and especially in the White House, because the turnaround times are insane and the levels of approvals that they need to go through are crazy, as they should be. So I think there's like a mini network. I mean, there are a lot of people that worked in the White House under Biden who used to work at Instagram. Like they were recruited straight from Metta.

So that's definitely a thing. But I think that organizing is a tremendous amount of work. And like part of that is digitally now. Like and and Zorin did that really well. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting to think about how the presidential election felt like the podcast election and then the this primary felt like the short form election. And that sort of, it makes sense, especially as you're trying to just appeal to younger and younger voters. Yeah.

I mean, his team invited me to start covering his campaign back in February. Like I was, I was at a party, I think in March for him, but he's, he also went on like throwing fits and a few other podcasts and he did like a Q and A with me for Feed Me. So his team knew where to act. Where to go.

That's good. We've been talking a ton about the AI talent wars. There's a lot of people in Silicon Valley making a hundred million dollars for inciting bonuses. Silicon Valley notoriously bad at spending money. New York famously good at spending money. What are some recommendations that you can give to these PhD researchers that have $100 million

burning a hole in their pocket. They wanna get in the game, they wanna step up their fashion, their cars, their houses. What would you recommend? It's funny that you go to fashion and cars because I think there's a real Louis Mangione situation on our hands here with this kind of job. So I feel like you need a security guard. Okay, security guard for sure.

Yep. Plain clothes, security guard, which means like those tight lacoste polos, you know. Okay, class. Maybe they should be carrying too. Maybe they should, you know, if you got the, you gotta be everyday carry now if you're making a hundred million dollars. In California, it's gotten more lenient. Yep.

Yeah, so I feel like you have to staff up in a position like this. Like you want a driver who's trustworthy and isn't gonna like leak your information, a personal trainer who's trustworthy, a feed me subscription. Of course. And then I think it's like removing friction

from areas of your life with like staffing up like that. I recently learned that this neighborhood in the Hamptons called Sagaponack is a microclimate. And I feel like that's a good place to invest your money. Wait, break that down a little bit, but a little bit more. It's just, it's just on an average day, it's nicer there. I think it's not necessarily nicer. I think it might be like wetter and more humid than other areas. Like I am in a different neighborhood than that.

And if you were there right now, it would feel different than here, even though it's not that far away. Yeah. Like you can be like Long Island as a whole is hot today, but Saucupana could have a different weather report because it's this micro subclimate. Because of the dunes and the tides and the trees. There's different parts of LA that have the same kind of dynamic as well. I mean, isn't San Francisco like that too?

Yes, famously. That's why in the summer it'll still be, it'll still be foggy and stuff. But then it's really warm later in the year. Right. Yeah. So I feel like investing in a microclimate is a good way to spend your, that just sounds wise. Yeah. They're not making any more of them. And then I think that you'd need to use your money to start taking some, some experts to dinner because you can't just start buying watches and clothes.

There's a really high chance that you'll miss and go for like trendy items. So I would try to hang out with like, do you guys know the watch dealer, Mike Nuvo? Like somebody like him or like, you know, like take him out to dinner and talk to him and get some advice. I bought a watch from him last year

and he seems like he knows his stuff. Would you pick up? I got my husband a nice watch. Okay Two size gongs one of you that's how you know, it's a good one and Maybe like thefriend Chris Black or like another stylish guy and get him to advise, consult on the closet. Can you get us Chris Black on the show

because the only podcast merch I've ever bought was their merch that they released or was the cease and desist from the New York Times. Cause they like copied the cover art and they just printed, a shirt sold it. It's great. It was a work of art. Chris would definitely come on.

I'll connect you guys. Yeah, 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 it looks horrible or something. Yeah, so stylists, tech, stylists, paid friends, you know, take people out to dinner, host parties, like keep them around, you know,

do you think it's good to surround yourself with yes men? What do you what's how do you so if you surround yourself with yes men? 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. A lot of people say, don't do it, but maybe. I would not do that. Everyone around me has been saying that it's a good idea. No, I would not.

That's not good. So, stay away from the yes men. You want yes people on your team where you say, I want to do the impossible and they just say, yes, we're going to do it. But there's a line, you don't want to cross it. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This was fantastic.

Thanks guys. Send us the invoice for the 100k appearance fee and we'll look forward to doing it soon. Yeah, send the next few too. Happy Fourth of July. Yeah, Happy Fourth of July. Have fun.

We'll talk soon. Bye. Other news, the Senate passes Trump's mega bill, the big beautiful bill, after an all-night session. They went all night. I like that. And it's got to get through the house still but Elon is fuming play the Ashton Hall sound effect for he is that coming on coming for the bill

It's absolutely war on the timeline the timelines and turmoil because Elon Musk said anyone who campaigned on the promise of reducing Spending but continues to vote on the biggest debt ceiling increase in history We'll see their face on this poster in the primary next year. Pinocchio mode. Liar, voted to increase America's debt by five trillion. It's actually never been easier to make your enemies look like Pinocchio.

Yeah, but I feel like if you put, I don't know, I don't even know who voted for it. Let's just say Ted Cruz or something. If you put Ted Cruz's face on here, are you going to lose the Pinocchio-ness? Yeah, I will find a way. I feel like it could be a little bit rough. Anyway, Elon's upset.

He's trying to start a new party. The America party. He said Vox Popula, Populi, Vox Dei. He wants to start the American party. And he is pissed because polymarket is showing that the is expecting the reconciliation bill the big beautiful bill to pass July 5th and 62% oh yeah 62% by July 4th and almost certainly by the end of the month so this will be the one to watch they're voting I guess the first vote

is tomorrow. Yeah. We'll be following that. Yeah, it'll be interesting. Lots of pork. But if you're AGI-pilled, it doesn't matter. Yeah. We are gonna be printing at 10% GDP, folks,

in just a few thousand days when super intelligence arrives. These debts are gonna matter. Where weeks, if not days away, many people are saying. And so if you're against this bill You're just telling yourself about your a GI timelines. You're like, I don't really think super intelligence is coming. Yeah, it is I Think teal was pushing Generally pushing on Elon a bit in the interview he did last week around like okay, so our humanoids

Humanoids are gonna be important, you're obviously making them, are they going to impact the economy? Are they gonna accelerate growth? This is the post 1970s stagnation. We've been growing at 2%, Satya Nadella's asking the question of will AI accelerate GDP growth?

Because 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 You on credit. He's also said when when he initially exited doge. Yeah, just stopped being a special employee He did say the only way out is growth so he knows this too Yeah, 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 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. 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 to actually attack people less because the growth is so significant So it all changes once super intelligence arrives, maybe maybe Zoran is just so a GI pill himself true that He's like yeah, we're gonna have plenty

We're gonna have Such high levels of production. Sure. The state can just see a little bit alternatively. Maybe he's a hardcore Bitcoiner. 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. So the richest you could possibly be as a millionaire, if you owned over 5% of the Bitcoin supply, right?

So there will never be a Bitcoin billionaire because there aren't a billion of them Whereas there are billions of dollars. Maybe he doesn't want people in the network to vote to expand the supply Yes, so he's probably against the expansion of the bitcoin supply, but maybe he's a hardcore bitcoiner. He's a hardcore bitcoin if he's against Inflation. Yes. Yes. Exactly. Zach Kukoff. Thanks for having me. Live from Mr. Washington. Washington correspondent.

I even set up, I don't know if you can see that's great. Oh, that's the monument right there. Wow. No way. There we go. Beautiful. Yeah, it's great. We'll just have our production team zoom in. Zoom in just on the monument, so you won't be on camera. Perfect. I'll get out of the way, but you can see the good stuff behind me. That's the important thing.

So yeah, break it down for us. The Wall Street Journal has a story. Senate passes Trump's mega bill after all night session. Tax cuts and Medicaid spending reductions head to the house with a July 4th deadline reachable. What's interesting in the bill? How likely do you think it is to pass? What are the major reads on this? And then we want to get your, your takeaway from like where the dividing lines are around the bill.

Yeah. So there's a couple of trip lines. Uh, the first trip line, I would say you guys been tracking the moratorium, the 10 year moratorium on AI development. This was the on AI regulation. 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. There was a five year agreement set of a 10 year agreements and Blackburn has been sort of the key driver of getting it back out again.

It's out now. It was done 99 to one in the Senate, almost unanimous in the Senate to get this out. This was a big win for Dario, the philanthropic, probably the number one beneficiary. And by the way, somebody who's certainly used a fair bit of political capital pushing for this, that's fault line number one. I would say fault line number two, before that it's, it's a, it's a potential ban on AI regulation that was removed. And so the current bill does not have a, has a, does not have a moratorium on regulation.

So it's kind of a double moratorium on federal regulation. That's right. So you can have California states, whatever, who wants to, Marsha Blackburn, her home state, Tennessee, passed last year something called the Elvis Act, which was cutely named, but basically said, look, if you are building like an AI audio business, you cannot use any likeness of a real performer's sound. So if you want to have John singing the blues or Jory singing the blues, I cannot do that without a prior deal.

That's because in Tennessee, Nashville is a dominant industry, a music industry is a dominant industry. 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. By the way,

Netnet, this moratorium, the time that they got to a compromise was so watered down, it 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. And what do you expect at the state level around AI safety going forward? Is the fact that this was removed gonna inspire certain governors to say, make this a part of their platform? And I guess I wanna know more about,

if I'm 11 Labs and I'm training a voice agent and I can't be sure that some clip from Elvis or some Justin Bieber worked its way in there, does that mean that I just turn off Tennessee at like the DNS level or do some geo-fencing or is it more risky than that? Um, where I have to, 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?

Cause we've seen this with, with, uh, Apple intelligence, not being available in China, not being available in Europe, for example, but yeah, what, what would the impact on something like that be? Well, think about states in two categories, right? 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, 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 is category one has a law mandating something needs to be in a textbook Suddenly you're gonna comply nationally because they are so large. they work the market exactly. You have to. That's right. And so if

California tomorrow says, look, we're passing a European style bill to severely curtail, which I think would be a disaster, the severely curtail AI development that would in effect be a national bill. And part of the, in my view, a 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 either it's in or it's out. There's just not time to get to a more nuanced middle ground. So 11 labs of Tennessee has the Elvis act probably says, look, we just screwed around Tennessee. 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 Newsom and the California legislature are certainly ambitious enough to try as they did last session to try to pass something that would impact the whole country. Yeah. Wasn't't wasn't there news out of California this week or last week around some of the stuff? Yeah, yeah, there's there was a huge fight which had an unlikely set of bedfellows where you saw Andreessen and others leading the anti-legislative, anti-regulatory brigade against some other folks who are much more pro curtailing. By the way, I will just say the other interesting takeaway for tech, not to totally dovetail away from your question,

but the interesting takeaway for us, I think, in this is the deciding vote in the Senate on the overall package, the reconciliation bill, was J.D. Vance. And so if you're a Vance head looking at 2028, right, you already see that Ocasio-Cortez 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.

So sorry, you asked a question about California and I dovetailed it back to the federal level. No, that's super interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the big shock. So you asked about tripwires. The AI tripwire was one. Medicaid cuts, which are politically really toxic, right? Because who wants the idea that you voted for the government to take away your healthcare? That's another huge tripwire.

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? Or new taxes on wind and solar from China. These are all things that might enrage the Republican, the very conservative Republican faction in the House, which now has to still pass the bill and now complicates the negotiating posture because the Senate 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 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. So it's up in the air if it passes or not. Can you tell me about the EV tax credits? I know Americans are struggling more than ever to buy naturally aspirated V12s. I'm hoping that there's some move there to subsidize things like the Ferrari 12th, the Dolce Trilindee multi-hundred thousand dollar car. 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. So what's the doors on the EV credit front? I agree with you that the backbone of the American economy is the Ferrari, right? It's impossible for me to imagine a world. Thank you for the last track. I appreciate that. Where a blue collar factory worker cannot own

a sports car is beyond me. This bill doesn't address that. I wish it did. It would be great if it did. It's not gonna solve that huge unsolved problem. What it will do, by the way, is continue to drive a wedge between Elon and Trump. Then you saw Elon take the Twitter. I imagine you guys probably mentioned earlier, you saw

Elon take the Twitter and start to really crusade against people voting for this. 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 a Senate version. The big challenge is going to be going into now the conference committee. 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. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What, what, what about, uh, how,

how are the Democrats feeling about EVs these days? Because it used to, I used to feel like it was a democratic cause to be pro EV incentive. Let's save the environment. Let's get people out of the gas cars. 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? I think it's a rough spot. I mean, you guys remember when Elon wasn't invited to the big EV summit under the Biden

administration, right? That's part of what kicked off his political awakening is he hasn't used unionized labor. And so he was excluded from this EV summit. There's been a huge polarization, a 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. You're not going to find many Dems willing to cross the aisle in support of electric vehicles to save this bill. This is a bill that will live or die by Republican whip count and Republican unity. If the whip count isn't there, it's gonna be really hard to get it done before July 4th. Mm-hmm.

What about Elon's America party? You think that's real or just exciting? Are those my only two options, real or exciting? There's no door number three. Yeah, I mean, it's obvious, like, you know, we were talking earlier, third parties haven't historically done well. Well, I mean, it's obvious, like, you know, we were talking earlier, third parties haven't haven't historically done well.

Well, he has the America pack. So when you say that's right, 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.

Is that more of what we're thinking here? How does maybe, maybe one historical analog, it's not perfect, but think about like a fewer Roosevelt, like a Teddy Roosevelt with the bull moose party, right? 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, like the tea party, exactly like the tea party, or frankly, what's happening now. Look at Zoran. Maga is also like a wing of the Republican party. That's right. That's right. Maga, the tea party and now on the left, the polarization from the Zoran and democratic socialist world. All of these folks are new factions in a way that by the way, we haven't seen before the same way that 50 years ago, you basically watched a mash on television.

That was your only option. And now I tune into TBPN while I play subway surfers and have 30 other things hitting me at the same time. This is the political version of that, right? 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 mega guy, I can be a tech, right guy, can be a populist guy and I'm a new right guy.. On the left, I can be a democratic socialist. I can be an abundance bro. I have an infinite menu of things. The America party is more likely if it sticks one more menu on the side of the right. Sure, sure.

That makes a lot of sense. What, what, what time? What do you expect out of the next 24 hours? So tomorrow morning at nine house rules committee votes, that's going to be a key vote to see how this thing does. But I would say is if this gets done by July 4th, the thing that you're going to have to look to is that nine a.m. Eastern vote to see how much unity is there in Republican Party. They can barely lose any votes.

So this thing goes through the House in its current form. But I think it's unlikely that it's going to happen immediately. It'll happen. This will get passed. but on their timeline, I don't know. In the next 24 hours, if you see more senators like Murkowski from Alaska who are saying things like the bill is flawed, please send it back to the Senate so we can work on it again. That's a key indicator of this thing may not have the legs it needs the next couple of days.

Yeah, we heard about, I mean, everyone's saying like it's the biggest bill. There's all this pork. 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 dollars that I can go after in energy or in defense and shipbuilding or any, have you seen any of these like they're called riders, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's a good question. Um,

Biden was famous for stacking a lot of these, like the inflation reduction act had a million ways you can go participate. This one's got fewer. I'll say one funny piece of pork. And I'll say one actual opportunity. 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. If I'm Robin Hood, I am loving, that's a big change for me. Funniest piece of work in the bill,

Murkowski, who was the key holdout in the Senate from Alaska, got a tax exemption for Alaskan, native Alaskan whalers. She said basically native Alaskan whalers. She said basically native Alaskan whalers need to be. Yeah, that was honestly big delivery for her constituency of people who kill whales and Alaskan expo. Let's give it up for the whalers. Yeah. They don't get enough attention in Washington.

Well, I mean, we've talked about it before, you know, energy is really important for the AI data center race. Whales, they produce oil that you can burn. Sure, sure. Wasn't it Chase who said he would burn whale blood? No, he didn't say he would do it. He said that the hyperscalers are so desperate for energy right now that they would burn whale oil.

It's more fun to think about Chase personally. Launching Cruso for whales. Yeah, that's right. Cruso blood. Well, VCs are the new whalers. Yes, yes, they really are. And the old whalers. And the new whalers yes yes they really are the old whalers and the old whalers that's true Zach this was so much fun we'll have to have you call in tomorrow or Thursday when there's more news please I'll be around to my first wedding

anniversary so I'll be around to call in thank you very much incredible incredible we'll talk to you guys see you soon yeah bye next up for having me, boys. See you soon. See you. Bye. Next up, we have Matthew Prince from CloudFlare coming in to TBPN. Welcome to the stream. Some huge news from CloudFlare. We'll let him tell us the story. How are you doing?

Good to meet you. Nice to meet you too. Welcome to the stream. I would love to start with the news today and then I want to go into some of the the history of the company and when you faced similar junction points and kind of turning points in the past. So why don't you kick us off with the big announcement, the big news today from CloudFlare. Sure, so about 18 months ago, we started getting approached by a number of content creators saying that they faced a new threat online. We spend most of our days, most of our business

trying to fight cyber hackers, Iranians, Russians, North Koreans, and so I was surprised when the new threat was AI companies, and frankly, I kind of rolled my eyes at publishers, I was like, publishers are always complaining about the next new technology and they said just pull the data look at what is going on and it was really striking that over time you could watch as the sort of deal that publishers have made with Google you know starting 30 years ago which was you can copy all of my content and exchange you send us and us traffic.

That deal just didn't hold up anymore, where they were copying the content, but because they were providing answer boxes, AI overviews, they just weren't sending nearly as much traffic. And that was the good news. As you looked at OpenAI, it was about 750 times harder than with the kind of Google of old to get traffic with something like Anthropic is 30,000 times harder. And the reason why is because people are reading the derivatives, they're not reading the content.

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. And that means that if you're making money through advertising, if you're making money through subscriptions, 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, that's going away in an increasingly AI driven web. And we worried about that quite a bit.

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, a huge amount of the internet already sits behind us. We could partner with literally publishers, everyone from Adweek to Ziff Davis and everything in between to say that let's change the way that 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.

And so starting on July 1st, we flipped the script. We made it as a default that if you're using CloudFlare, that you can by default for free, block any AI outcrawlers from taking your content without compensating you. And I think now the hard work 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 Creating real original content can continue to be compensated for the hard work that you're doing. Yeah, well we used to joke saying that The labs are welcome to scrape our content because we want to influence It's a serious issue 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, there's so many different stakeholders here who could possibly try to figure out a solution

to this problem. And obviously the answer, you guys are a key player in this and you have the scale in order to kind of make changes happen Can you yeah? Can you I guess like break down more kind of like the kind of the market structure between and how you see this actually? Yeah, I mean I guess what you really have been done in over the past year because I know Didn't News Corp do a bespoke deal with OpenAI for that exact thing. It sounds like you are more equipped to kind of handle like the longer tail,

but also some of the bigger publishers. So talk to me about kind of the state of the art of what those deals look like when they're one-to-one and then what things might look like going forward. Yeah, so I think that first of all, I think for first of all, I think for some time to come, large publishers will do deals with large AI companies where there might be places that people need help or either small publishers or small AI companies

and figuring out what has to happen there. But I think even in the case of places where deals have been struck, what the challenge is, is someone like OpenAI is paying a lot of publishers for their content, and doesn't actually object to the basic idea that they should pay for the content that they're using. But they do object to the fact that they're

paying where all of their competitors are getting content for free. Any market that exists has to have scarcity. And the problem, the reason why there hasn't been a market in this place, space, is that there isn't scarcity. And so what changed yesterday is scarcity was introduced really for the first time. And I think the closest analogy is if you think back to before iTunes launched, we were all downloading music on Napster and all the free pirate services. That's effectively how the AI companies are

taking data from any content creators today. And what you need is an iTunes. You need someone to come in and say, okay, let's provide a way where people can pay for that content and then go back. Now, that's evolved over time. I think our first version in the marketplace will probably be relatively naive and we'll figure it out. Night we know is paying 99 cents for songs anymore. We've moved to something that's closer to a subscription model like a Spotify. And I think that that's what we will evolve

to have over time. And if we do it right, I think that we can have a large number of sellers of content obviously, but also a large number of buyers of content, both the big sort of general purpose models but then also very specific models. And we've got to make sure that new entrants can come into this market and have a vibrant way of participating and competing.

And so I think that for now, most of the deals will be one-on-one bespoke deals between publishers and AI companies. 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. And then over time, I think we'll develop something that looks much more like a robust marketplace where content providers can set sort of what their price is. There can be a bid for maybe getting that content exclusively for some period of time or whatever else.

And that's going to develop over the next, over the coming months. Is that the correct model to think that the content producer would set the price? I mean, that's certainly what happens on Substack and 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 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 ten cents or a dollar or split off 50% of what I'm paying so you have a hundred dollars to

kind of be a 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 the like kind of the same volume like the volume algorithm that you see on YouTube or Spotify. Does that seem like kind of what the long-term 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? Yeah, you know, I think it's gonna be,

I think that there's, there's a lot that we still have to figure out. I, I, I last week, um, traveled up to Stockholm to meet with Daniel Lack, the founder of Spotify. And, and it was, you know, it was really, um, it was, it was interesting. He said, you know, that the ultimate model that Spotify settled on, uh, I think it's, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but it was basically like it was sort of the most naive of all of the different options that he had come up with.

And it works as it is a pool of funds, and then they divide it up based on basically how many minutes of content you consume. And there are different rates for music versus podcasts versus audio books. And it was fascinating to see. 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. People can opt in or opt out of being a part of that pool. The more content that's part of that, the more valuable it is to the AI companies. And then we would look at how we could split that up across how much crawling is actually done across that. 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.

So for instance, if Taylor Swift releases a brand new song and maybe does an interview about it, that's incredibly valuable content if you're a chatbot for lonely teen girls, right? On the other hand, it's probably not so valuable if you're sort of a chatbot trying to be the world's best doctor. You know, maybe there's some value in sort of bedside manner, but largely, you know, that's not gonna be a big deal in your care. On the other hand, if a research study comes out on acetaminophen effects on different types of chemotherapy, very little value for the chatbot for teen girls, but

incredibly valuable for the doctor. And so what we have to do is actually, I think, on a LLM or an 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 scraping and paying for. And the same way that in the music industry we've got reviews, we've got different types of music that people are, you might be into country, you might be into classical, and it kind of allows you to compartmentalize that. I think that whole ecosystem has to develop, But once that does, something very much like Spotify could be the right answer long-term.

And again, I think we're in a unique position to pull it together. Rudy? Talk briefly about stable coins. I remember in this Ben Thompson piece, people have been suggesting this idea that stable coins could be some part of the solution to, or a backbone for a new business model

for the internet at the same time, while I'm bullish on stable coins, someone like a cloud flare can set up the infrastructure to just use traditional financial rails to process payments. So I'm guessing that it's not part of, of, of what you're, this was Ben's reaction to the, the, the original sin of the internet was advertising and this idea that Mark Andreessen 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 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 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 the answer doesn't have to be a hundred percent one or the other and so I would guess that there are There are gonna be very traditional kind of traditional Financial rails that will be ways to pay pay people out, but there will also likely be something that is will be ways to pay people out. But there will also likely be something that is blockchain-based or stablecoin-based. And again, I think we're looking at all of the different providers

that are in this space, including potentially creating our own stablecoin that would be part of how these transactions take place. And I think you're exactly right that 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, that's also going to be something that is either charged for or that you actually get paid to do. And there's got to be a way for those transactions to take place, and to the extent that you can reduce

the transaction costs for those transactions as far as possible, then that's a pretty interesting way of being able to process very high volume, low dollar amount transactions. So I think that's right. My only one quibble is that I think that the original set of the internet is not that it didn't include payments. It's that there was no privacy built into it, and your IP

address reveals far too much about you and who you are. We don't even have to get to cookies, but that's it. Another story. No, we totally can. We've talked about content creators, publishers. What about the apps of the world, the Ubers, the Instacarts that actually have really meaningful advertiser businesses built on top of them?

Do you expect there to be any type of this functionality rolled out to them over time? Or is that something you think they're thinking about quite a bit? Because if I can go into ChatGPT, 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, I'm not in the app seeing ads potentially being upsold. And that could be a problem for those types of companies. Yeah, totally. And I think that robots don't click on ads. And so the sort of model that part of the revenue stream to support these services has to come from somewhere. And if today Uber is able to monetize the time where I'm waiting for a car to come

by showing me an advertisement, that means that they can effectively charge me less for the ride. And so it may be that if that ride is booked through an agent instead and they don't get that advertising experience, and again, I don't know enough about Uber's business model to know how important that is to them. But if they don't get that, then maybe it is that there's some sort of premium that an agent booked ride receives versus a human booked ride.

And again, I think that that's just, we've got to figure out what that looks like. I think that's gonna be less up to Cloudflare. I think it's gonna 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 that we can have guardrails on as agents interact with applications that are there

that you as the application provider can set those rules and controls and then agents can interact within that system. And MCP is sort of the leading candidate for providing that. and controls and then agents can interact within that system. And MCP is sort of the leading candidate for providing that, but you're right, that it's a sort of draft version of that specification and there are a lot of things that have to mature in order for that to be something that is the real kind of agent-to-agent system that is likely to run what will be an increasingly AI driven web.

Yeah, can you talk about any previous crucible moments for either CloudFlare or just like the internet history broadly? This feels like a moment where you're potentially trying to, I mean, deal with a shift in the overall internet structure or the incentive structure, but it's a reaction, but it's also an action that should reshape the relationship between different parties on the internet. Are there different moments in the history of CloudFlare or the history of the internet that you think

we could draw on as historical analogies to learn from to see how this might play out. You know, I think that, um, you know, the 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 subscriptions or ego.

And ego and monetization, not quite the right thing, but you drive value from it in one of those three ways. And that's held up for the last 30 years. I think that this is the first time that I've seen something where I thought, well, there are really going to be very, very, very fundamental changes to the structure of how the internet works if we move from a search-driven model to an AI-driven model. And I think that what I hope is that we can actually

make this something where what gets rewarded is not what gets rewarded today, which largely is who can write the headline that produces the most sort of inflammatory response in all of us, who basically drives the most cortisol, gets the most clicks, and therefore the most ad revenue or the most subscriptions. That's not a healthy way of looking at the world. I think the alternative is if you imagine that all of the AI models together are a good

kind of assemblage of an approximation on human knowledge, 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. It's going to make the AIs better. It's going to be a much more interesting thing. And that's, I think, how we're going to be creating it. I can't think in the last 30 years of a seminal moment. I think there are some things that are along the way.

I think 2016 was really a big turning point year for a lot of reasons. 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 and sort of rise in populism around the world. You have Brexit in the EU, you have the first Donald Trump election, you've got Xi and Modi consolidating power in Asia, the Filipino election. And I think that that was a point in time where, you know, also driven by Snowden, shortly before that in 2015, 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.

But that's definitely been a shift, which is substantial. And I think we're still watching that play out. That I think probably still remains the biggest threat to the overall internet. But this shift to AI as well, again, I think is a real challenge, but it's also an incredible opportunity. If, again, we can make the rewards incentives for content creators not be who can produce the most cortisol, but who can produce the biggest sort of incremental improvement in human knowledge.

That would be an incredible win, and something that, you know, I don't quite know how to get there yet, but I think yesterday or today, and you know, we took, in July 1st, we took a real step in, uh, in, in moving in, in that direction and making sure that composite content creators can be compensated for, for really producing, uh, information, which is valuable to advance human knowledge.

What do you think about the future of investigative journalism? 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. I'm thinking of like Seymour Hersh hanging out at a local army bar for a year before he gets one scoop that he can write a book about. And, and he, and these investigative journalists, they tend to, you know,

John Carey Rue was on the payroll of the Wall Street Journal for years he was writing stuff but then he blows the Theranos case wide open eventually a book and then a movie 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, they're sourcing actually, this person posted it on the internet earlier, they're the one that actually did the hard work

to get the scoop, they should get 90% of the value and 10% should go to the repurposed rage bait version as opposed to the economic model now, which is maybe you get 90% more clicks on the viral repurposed content and the scooper actually gets 10%. Do you think that's possible? How do you think that investigative journalism will evolve?

Yeah, I don't know if this is an answer to your question, but I thought it was interesting. As I said, I met with Daniel Ack up in Stockholm 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. So if somebody searches for, you know, I want a song to a reggae kind of beats with, and it's all about how much it sucks when your sister steals your car and your dog. Um, like. Not to get too specific. I mean, again, I don't know what, what, what these are, but they're called, they're musicians who take this list and they actually write songs based on what

people are looking for. No way. And that they make tens of millions of dollars a year doing just exactly that. And there's something about that that I think is really beautiful as opposed to the alternative of just, you know, just trying to do a little more me too of what everybody else is doing, like taking a different twist, using signals from the market in order to go find that. And so, you know, I, again, that's not investigative journalism by any means,

but I think it is actually advancing kind of the sort of good of humanity where it's taking what a place where there's a missing need and it's filling that missing need. And so I am hopeful, and I'm a relatively optimistic person, and I'm hopeful that if we get this right, that we might be on a golden age 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, the idea of a knowledge bounty, right? It's like, hey, there's groups of people or a single entity online that will just pay you to produce really high quality information around this specific topic. And 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. So I think there's quite a lot of precedent, 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 pool of capital is here and you just have to deliver that knowledge that people already want and we know it because they're searching it on LLMs and things like that. Can I throw you, oh sorry. I think I'll tell you the sort of black mirror

kind of dystopian outcome if we don't get this right. Which is I don't think that journalism goes away, I don't think that research goes away, but you could imagine a world in which we go back to something kind of like the Mediches 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 gonna have to have original content. People are still gonna have to be able to produce that in order for the AI systems to fill in the holes in their effective block of Swiss cheese that is their model. But I think that's a pretty bad world where, again,

because you then probably have the conservative AI, and the liberal AI, and all these things that the Internet broke apart, you could imagine AI as a system that is just this massive consolidator, uh, in the future. And I 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 big I. Yeah, I actually talked to somebody very high up at one of the AI labs who said that, was saying that if you take 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 data. And so it's not a financial question. It is a political cultural question. It's interesting. I have one follow up.

That's also the argument why I think that, and I've been really positively surprised as we've talked with, because we've talked with all the big tech companies, all the AI companies about this, and they all, like with maybe one or two very small exceptions, they all say, yes, we understand over the long term, we have to pay for content.

And so they get that. What's key though is it has to be a fair playing field. And that fair playing field, everyone sees that slightly differently. So if you're a new incumbent, you want to say, well, Google can't be advantaged if you're Google, you have to say, you know, well, 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 thing. And so everyone's got a slightly different take on this, but I'm actually encouraged

that the dollars are there, that there is an acceptance that this is something that needs to happen. And that if you ask them, everyone says, yes, we need to do this as long as you can create a level playing field. And again, that's where I think our role comes in is, how can we create that level playing field? How can we create scarcity?

And then how can we make sure that content creators are being compensated for the hard work that they're doing? Zooming out just for a second, what is the state, how's the internet been for the last few weeks? It's been a busy month or last month in geopolitics. And I know that makes your job a bit harder, or at least I would imagine. Things get a little bit busier.

Keeps it interesting. I mean, whatever you see sort of in the sort of kinetic side, the physical side of a conflict is usually replicated in the cyber side of the conflict. We as the hostilities ramped up between Israel and Iran, first of all, we saw very clear signals that something was coming ahead of time, which is it's interesting how there's sort of a digital residue, which shows when there's going to be kinetic action taken. And so we were watching that pretty carefully. Big attacks targeting both Iran. One of Iran's largest banks was hacked by what looked like a

group of Israeli hacktivists, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Iran was hacked and all its funds were drained. Again, looking back, it was either by the Israelis or Israeli sympathetic attackers. Iran has tried to do the same thing against Israel. Israel's cyber defenses are much stronger, but we're starting to see that Iran is targeting other, other largely US financial services firms, critical infrastructure firms to try and see, to sort of try and strike back from what is, you know, how do they strike back against the US in a way that is harmful but doesn't start World War III. And in a way that, um, that, that is harmful, but doesn't start world war three.

And I think that increasingly, um, unfortunately cyber will be a big piece of that. And so we're, um, you know, we're, 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. Um, there's a number of larger overarching tech narratives. I'm interested in if you're losing sleep over any or

tracking any in particular focus. The AI talent wars and kind of pay inflation for top performers. Is that an issue or something you've been tracking or the difficulty to build larger data centers and infrastructure, the GPU, short of the chip wars, any, any of those topics kind of particularly relevant to you or your business or we're kind of keeping you up at night. Yeah, you know, I think we're, we're not trying to build a foundational model.

LLM. So, so we're not, we're not as much competing, um, for the, the bleeding edge AI researchers. I will say that I've been really amazed at both from an academic side and then also just 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 that's something that's been pretty exciting. We're very excited about the people who are coming to apply to work for CloudFlare to work on problems like that. And today has been a record applicant day for us. Congratulations. Record. Sorry, I hit the air horn for you on the record applicant day.

But it's good. It's good news., w we, 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. You're not running into like power constraints or rare earth element constraints or water, right? We get, we, we do in, but in, in, in kind of a micro way where, you know, you, we put GPUs at the edge of our network.

We have to live with a power envelope that we're given by an ISP. And so doing things to try and figure out how to just get the best power efficiency out of the, the GPUs that are there, the answer to, you know, more and more need of GPUs can't be everyone has to turn up their own nuclear power station. Um, so, so I do think the place where we're pushing suppliers and AMD is doing some really interesting things in the space, Qualcomm is doing some interesting things in space, Fruit Company down in Cupertino is doing some interesting things in space, or how do you focus on, yes, performance, but performance per

watt. And we've seen this game before with Intel saying, oh, that doesn't matter, like just get the most performance possible, you can water cool things, all kinds of things. That tends to not be the winning strategy over the longterm. And so we do think that there will be a renewed focus on just energy efficiency around GPUs and we're really pushing that in a way that, cause 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 chip shortage are funny. Like it's there's never been a chip shortage in any time

in the history of silicon that doesn't turn into a glut. Cause it's- Hey, but this time it's different. Yeah, that's time is totally different. So I think that you're gonna see both, you're gonna just see shifting demand that's there and a lot more. Nvidia is not gonna be the only chip supplier of GPUs.

There are some really, again, great, great other providers that are out there. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Yeah, really enjoyed the conversation. Congrats on the launch. And come back on again soon. Yeah.

Yeah. Thanks for having me on. Congratulations. Good luck filtering through all those job applicants. We'll talk to you soon. See you. Bye. There's no decency anymore.

You can't even take a summer weekend in June. You can't even send an email to a 3,000 person organization without it leaking to Wired. 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. 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. I have a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something, Chen wrote. Please trust that we haven't been sitting idly by.

I mean, this makes sense. You need to tell the troops that we're prepared to go on the counterattack. We got attacked, but we're ready to go back. What's interesting is I don't think that, I don't think that Metta is necessarily gonna try and go eat chat GPT's lunch. I was revisiting that conversation

that we had with Jeff Huber, and he was saying, he was reiterating like never bet against Zuck like he's working on an open source model but a lot of it is is more of this like B2B applied AI necessarily than trying to go and and and disrupt chat GPT because Google's already running that playbook like yeah Mark can see that and see that, what happens when you're a trillion dollar company and you roll out basically a direct clone of the Chat GPT app? It's like, yeah, you can get a decent amount of users in a notional terms.

I'm pretty sure the Gemini app has 100,000 users or 100 million users and lots of five star reviews, but it just doesn't have anywhere near the penetration of Chat GPT. And so when you pull someone off the street and you say what do you use for AI, they say chat. They don't even say chat GPT anymore. Yeah, so dominant. 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 features within the meta ecosystem. Yeah, the crazy thing is there's not, it doesn't seem like there's clear precedent for a raid, a talent raid of this magnitude, right? We covered Ken Griffin raiding Enron,

but it was after the collapse, right? Apple heavily recruited out of Xerox Park in its 1979 in the early 80s but like it was kind of a downswing yeah it wasn't it wasn't yeah it wasn't anything of this magnitude nor nor was it hey we're gonna come in and just give you these like nine-figure off you know totally totally and things like that yeah and it's very common for a startup to be able to pull people from a big legacy company That's kind of sclerotic and yeah, you know

We've seen a lot of people That were at Apple or Google or Microsoft or Xerox and then they went to Google and then they went to Meta And then they went to open AI I mean Brett Taylor who's the who's the chairman of the board at OpenAI was the CTO of Metta, right? And it's like okay He clearly just wants to be in like the hot thing and he's like a startup guy almost And I believe he was at Google before because he worked he yeah Yeah, he redid Google Maps and so like the like the story of Brett Taylor is really like the default

I think for most like startup people. It's like he's that's he's early at Google He works with Paul Bukite on gmail He works on Google Maps then he goes over to meta CTO there Then he goes to open eyes chairman of the board there and it's like he is a he's a startup guy And so he's always writing like the new with you usually can't poach them back into the older company. That's rare Yeah, one one other some other precedent here in 2011 in 2010 and 2011 Zuck and Facebook went super aggressive poaching from Google yeah so Facebook had crossed half a billion users they were trained in that period of transitioning from a super scrappy startup yep and they went heavy into Google so they went and got high performers from ads,

search, mobile on the Android side, and some of the social product people from Google+. And Zach did something similar, not to the same scale, but just went in with these sort of heavy, heavy, heavy comp packages and was very successful. Google had to respond and increase comp in a number of different roles. Did they poach any designers,

any people that use figma.com? Any people that think bigger, build faster? Anyone that, you know, because Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. The web would be a different place if Figma had even existed back then. But fortunately, you can go to figma.com.

You can think bigger. And you can get started for free. You can build faster. Anyway, what do you think of the buzzword superintelligence? This whole, like they they really rebranded it. Is it a goal post shifting smart? I think he poached Yeah, the the word superintelligence It's mine now Because uh, and he's not saying and he's not saying safe superintelligence team. He's just saying Reckless Reckless superintelligence team is just saying superintelligence. Reckless, reckless, implies reckless superintelligence.

I like that. But it's funny because everyone was focused on AI as a buzzword, then it was AGI, then it was now it's superintelligence. But within our group, we all think superintelligence is kind of the old thing. Like me and you like we know the secrets To this stuff like like it's kind of it's kind of already priced in The real killers they're focused on the next thing. You know I'm talking about right giga intelligence That's the one that people are getting like really like the real killers are like yeah, well like

AGI is basically here super intelligence basically here, but giga intelligence That's the one we're working on. Because we're gonna need a new buzzword, because we're burning through buzzwords and increasing rate. And so we're just, we just steamrolled the Turing test, completely blasted through AGI. No one talks about AGI anymore, AGI is here. But you know, super intelligence,

we're gonna solve this buzzword, we're gonna churn through this in a year or two. We gotta start working on giga intelligence now. This is the way. Anyway. Start adopting it. Chen promised that he was working with Sam Altman, 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, we're recalibrating comp and we're scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent still even as open AI even even as open a leadership appears desperate to retain its staff Chen said that he has high personal standards of fairness and wants to retain top talent with that in mind Well, I'll fight for to keep every one of you. I won't do it at the price of fairness to others. He wrote It's such a brutal dynamic if you're Mark Chen yeah if you're Sam because not everybody at open AI is getting poached but presumably Zuck is working with all

the people he's poached already to identify who are the best people at open AI who do we really want yep and then going to them and making the maxed out offers. Meanwhile, you can't, like the team dynamic, if you have a few researchers on a team and somebody gets, somebody's potentially getting poached by Metta and you say to retain them, you're like, okay, we're gonna give you this sort of massive incremental grant. And the other people on their team are gonna be like, wait, well, is that my market market value I didn't go talk to

Facebook or I I didn't I I turned down I never took the meeting or whatever so you should pay me the same thing too yeah right Yeah, I'm loyal shouldn't don't you want to pay? I'm a missionary. Yeah, I'm a missionary Why are you paying the mercenaries more you should yeah, you should pay them and then missionaries the same price just because they're missionaries rough for sure. Anyway. Let me talk about that. No, the other thing is it creates this 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're gonna be like, yeah, I mean, they reached out to me and suddenly they're like hovering around you being like All right. What's it gonna take? Don't want to lose you Yeah, it is a Yeah, I mean it's crazy game theory like every single conversation in a company is like this constant game theory and then timing that timing that with yeah

With this like summer break that I guess OpenAI was saying like, hey, everybody should take the week of the fourth off, or not the week of the fourth, but anyways, you wanted to say something more important. Well, I mean, if you wanna see who your high performers are, just look in the linear, right? Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.

Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps if zuck We're able to gain access to open eyes linear It would be illegal, but yeah, it would also tell him tell him a lot Yeah, you don't want to do anything illegal zuck you want to be on Vanta automate compliance manage risk prove trust Continuously Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program

so the news comes as competition for For top AI researchers heating up in Silicon Valley Zuckerberg has been particularly aggressive in his approach Offering 100 million dollar signing bonuses to some open AI staffers according to comments Altman made on a podcast with his brother Jack Altman So this this hundred million dollar signing bonus this just got baked into the lexicon But I was listening to Dylan Patel on Jordan Schneider's China talk podcast It's actually transistor radio, but it goes out on China talk anyway 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 hundred million dollars over a number of years In stock based on appreciation 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 skeptical that anyone was getting a hundred million on day one without any sort of strings attached for like a true signing bonus so I don't know how real yeah and remember that the team came out and said the Zurich team explicitly

said they didn't get but I know I know the way that he phrased it could have been more clearly we're getting no no no no no I I do think that that the round numbers are upset are easy to latch on to like Why is mom Donnie talking about billionaire specifically? It doesn't have a problem with nine hundred ninety nine millionaires because like that's not that's not easy to grasp like people latch on to round numbers a hundred million is so much a Billionaire is so much and it's easy to it's And so the 100 million, if it was 80 million, it wouldn't be going nearly as viral as 100 million.

And so I don't know how real that is. Maybe that was thrown out as a total package and then it got kind of telephoned into, well, it's basically a signing bonus because they got the deal as soon as they signed, but they do have some sort of earn out or the shares are locked up in some way. But there's a bunch of creative accounting

that can go into basically delivering someone what feels like $100 million of value, which is not far off from, okay, what would it take? You know, Johnny, I've got 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, well, it was a few points. Yeah, we were, it was a few, it was a few percentage points.

And when you think about the scale of open AI 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. So multiple sources of OpenAI with direct knowledge of the offers confirmed the number to Wired. So I don't know, because it kind of benefits like both sides to have that number out there. It's kind of unclear who would really wanna confirm that

and then what the nature of these things were. 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 million signing bonus, but it's kind of paid out over time or they can claw it back if you don't stay past a certain date. And you're kind of looking at it and be like, okay, I'm already a centy and I'm getting an offer to like go to a new team that I don't know if I'm gonna like, and it's unclean.

The vision is not quite as clear at Metta, right? I'm joining the super intelligence team. It's going to be an incredible group of people with a ton of resources. That's exciting. But it is a big switch if you're already happily vesting out tens of millions of dollars. So it would make sense that these $20 million,

you know, if it's $20 million, I can see that. If it's a hundred million dollars for the for the top top top people it makes total sense yeah I mean like what was the I mean the the deal to bring on Alex Wang was probably like way over a hundred million dollars to him personally based on his ownership in that company which was acquired and so like that number doesn't feel impossible. I would just be surprised if there's not some structure around it

based on what Dylan was talking about. There's just enough precedent here that again, going back to Zuck rating Google in 2010, 2011, 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. Yeah, I want to make my ad product great Yeah, I mean have you seen the why am I even asking this have you seen the Blackberry movie? Of course not, but the but in the Blackberry movie

There's this whole story about 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 like cash but without having like the initial impact of that cash. It's kind of interesting. But yeah, I mean, to poach top talent, it's expensive. It kind of benefits both maybe, I mean, I don't know, like on the meta side, do they want, does Zuck want the idea that he's willing to pay up

to $100 million out there? Like maybe, because that certainly leads to more people taking the phone call of like, oh wow, Mark is really taking this seriously. I should talk to Meta's recruiting team. I should actually hear them out. And then if they wind up coming back to me with a $50 million offer or $10 million offer,

like we can discuss that and I can see it and they can evaluate how much I'm worth, they can make an offer. But at least it got the conversation started. But I don't know, there was also the theory that Sam Altman put that $100 million number out in order to kind of like poison the well. Because if Mark comes to you and says hey you're a top AI researcher come over here and then the top a AI researcher says like yeah great I hear I hear a hundred million dollars at the going rate and marks like no no

No, that's like fake news that that Sam was spreading like we're actually paying 15. Then you're like, oh no I was hoping for a hundred Machiavellian people and. Yeah, you see, it could be like 40 chess on both sides. I don't know. Yeah. 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 comp-focused packages Chen wrote on Slack. A source close to the efforts at Metta confirmed the company has been significantly ramping up its research recruiting with a particular eye toward talent from OpenAI and Google. Anthropic, while also a top rival, is thought to be less of a culture fit at Metta,

one source tells Wired. They haven't necessarily expanded the band, but for top talent, the sky's the limit. Which is funny because, yeah, of coursehropics like so missionary driven like it's gonna be very hard to go to entropic and research scientists and be like ads Better ads they're like we're building God here. Yeah Anyway hundred million dollars is a hundred million dollars not for not for enthropic. They're often guys are true believers. They don't care

What's a hundred million dollars in a post scarcity world doesn't matter you want to be on the when we on this on the On the post scarcity train Chen's no is pretty it is so it is so telling though like how you how you like sort of like try to you know Pinpoint like Z's views on AI. He's like, I'm not even gonna bother with this. Anthropic, not a culture fit. Two AGI pills.

Yeah, that's great. Senator, we sell ads. Anyway, if you're looking for sales tax super intelligence, go to numeralhq.com, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance with Super Intelligence for sales tax. The official sales tax automation provider for Lucy.

Yes, that's true. 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. One leader on the research team encouraged staff to reach out if they received an offer for Metta. If they pressure you or make ridiculous, exploding offers, just tell them to stay. One leader on the research team encouraged staff to reach out if they received an offer for meta. If they pressure you or make ridiculous, exploding offers, just tell them to back off.

It's not nice to pressure people in potentially the most important decision. Wired is not naming the leader as they are not a C-suite executive. This is weird. Where's the end of this quote? That's odd. I'd like to be able to talk you through it

and I know All about their offers the remarks come as open AI staff grapple with an intense workload that has many staffers grinding 80 hours a week Open AI is largely shutting down next week as the company tries to give employees time to recharge Let's give it up for opening eyes grind set Also extremely American to give a full week off right around July 4th. 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, give a week off around July 4th. I love it. Um, I was, I was posting, you know, the over,

I need a poly market on whether or not we get a Zuck American flag video on July 4th do you think it'll happen I actually think there 100% should be a poly market on that right it's kind of 50-50 right like he is definitely locked in very busy probably not a lot of time off he sees that he knows from this that open AI is down this week so that's probably like really encouraging to be like I want to go harder this week. They're off. Yeah. My, my, uh, at the same time, my advice for founders is the content he puts out. Think about how hard Zuck is going right now. Go hard of July 4th and just don't get out worked by him. Yes, just don't get

out work by Zach. This week is going to be tough. He's in year 20. What excuses do you have? You're three months into your startup. Yeah, come on. Go harder. Go harder. I love it. Yeah, Metta 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. Another leader at the company wrote, if you're feeling that pressure, don't be afraid to reach out. I and Mark are around and want to support you. So.

While OpenAI's 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. The sentiment is backed by a former OpenAI staffer who worked closely with Altman and said the CEO wanted to see buzzy announcements every few months. This was a really, this was key to their strategy,

was like, oh Google. Always have a buzzy announcement ready if the competition has anything. Just drop a absolutely. Oh, Google I.O. is happening? Wouldn't it be crazy if we acquired a company called I.O. the day before or something like that? We're like, oh, Google's announcing the new Gemini.

Let's just steamroll them in the timeline that 24 hours seek Yeah, I'd love to introduce you deep research It's like it's masterful and like but that's the game you got to play That's the game on the field like I I think no he really is aggressive, but he's not doing anything wrong. He yeah he Is up there with Elon in terms of creating and riding hype and constantly delivering enough real product value to justify the hype that was being sold

six months ago basically. So like staying on the bleeding edge. And this is why the anti-tech people hate him and Elon so much because they're like, it's overhyped, it's not useful. And then like a year later, it's like, there's Tesla cars everywhere. The rockets are landing and like 90% of people are getting to every day. Okay. So it was real, but also he was over promising,

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 conflict. Someone said this, like, Elon is both Thomas Edison and Barnum and Bailey, or whatever, P.T. Barnum. He's a circus man who can put on a show and put a robot, a human in a suit acting like a robot, but then he can actually go and deliver the thing,

which is just, it just breaks people's brains. Anyway, we need to remain focused on the real prize of finding ways to to compute a lot more supercomputers are coming on later this year into intelligence Chen wrote this is the main quest and it's important to remember that skirmishes with meta are the side quest last but not least I'll be around this week recharged and ready to go pound for pound DM me anytime I love love it. He's ready. He's fired up get away. I love talking with Mark Yeah, that was a fun conversation also. I mean guys in shape. Let's get him in the let's get him in the octagon with Zuck

Mark on Mark violence. Let's see it. I mean if there was a pound for pound list for the top AI researcher World he's in the researcher in the world. He's in the conversation. He's in the conversation. It's amazing. It's really been amazing to watch Mark's leadership and integrity through this process, especially when he has had to make tough decisions, Altman wrote in on Slack in response to Chen's message.

Very grateful to, we have him as our leader. I mean, these, it can't be overstated making these decisions, right? Yeah. One of your best people comes comes to you and says It's hard. Hey, yep. I'm really happy here at opening. I Yeah, I have 80 million dollars of stock. Yeah, and I was just offered 150 over the next year and it's highly lick or over the next few years. It's highly liquid Yep, meaning that I can market sell it quarterly forever.

And meanwhile, you're going through this for-profit conversion. Do you think the liquidity thing is real at all? 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 illiquid open AI. Like, is that gonna be hard at all all I feel like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley private wealth management are gonna be beating down your doors to give

you a loan that's backed by the shares sure we're gonna have to put a 10% sure but but meanwhile there's so many sailing to go through a for-profit conversion yeah but I mean it's not just taking 20% off the top. I mean that applies. I'm just saying. That applies like a small haircut, I would say. I'm just saying there is always, there's always gonna be a tension of somebody having massive wealth but not having greenbacks. Yeah. There's always to be that tension. And people seeing that meta is one of the most liquid stocks in the world can constantly trade in and out of it. And it's ultimately just, it's stable.

I mean, if you're interested in liquid stocks, go to public.com, investing for those who take it seriously, multi-asset investing, industry leading yields. Good old fashioned stocks. Trusted by millions. And who knows, maybe they'll have open AI soon. Go to public.com investing for those who take it seriously multi-ass investing the industry leading yield fashion stocks Trusted by millions and who knows maybe they'll have open eyes soon anything's barely things possible you yeah We should we should you know Robin Hood has you know? The the tokens around private companies, maybe we should tokenize nonprofits. I want to be able to trade you know we should tokenize nonprofits. I want to be able to trade, you know,

PETA, you know? Let me go long PETA. Let me get some leverage on that. I want some levered options on PETA. Tyler right now. How's it going? Let's get on the Tyler cam. How are we doing on time?

I think I'm in the right mission. Oh, you did it? No way, 15 minutes left. Let's see it Okay, okay. I can't believe you got it set up so fast. That's amazing Okay, you see he's sitting at he's sitting at 26 minutes so far All right. We'll have fun in there Tyler. Just look over. I just didn't realize he was on VR. It's amazing I think he's actually playing it This is crazy because my number one complaint with the Quest

was that it just takes a long time to set up. And I think that it caused a lot of dust and stuff. You intentionally did this challenge. Yes. And made it seem like, oh, I'm going to happily give away my new VR Xbox. Yeah. And thinking that there's no way he could finish it in one

minute, but now he's speed running. Wow. Speed running. Pillar of Autumn, it's happening. Anyway, Swigs has the story. He's breaking it down. Yeah, some good highlights here. The 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. One week company shut down, question mark, question mark. don't leave to someone has broken into our home and stolen something one week company shut down question mark question mark I mean I I was going back and forth here I wouldn't be surprised if the shutdown was somewhat strategic yeah in that hey people already need a break we shouldn't have them walking around the office 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. 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 V Mark war, that that would be what you choose to do would be a one week company shutdown. But I don't know. Maybe, um, I, I, I, I, I just, I'm not a hundred percent, like the, the AI talent war has resulted in the shutdown It's more just like the shutdown is happening at a weird time Anyway, this third point is very interesting pivoting product launch calendar to a GI race, especially when Stargate comes online

Dylan Patel says December is when Stargate's coming online and that should be a big Patel says December is when Stargate's coming online and that should be 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 much how important that is and maybe you can do more reinforcement learning in a more distributed way 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 but number four For some reason meta is ignoring anthropic. I don't care about safety if this is true, of course The anthropic point was very funny. Anyway, there's other posts in here that we should cover

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. You know what's so funny? Like those, the Nintendo Wii graphics thing, that was like three months. And then after that, he was doing that Lex interview in the metaverse.

Did you ever see that? Where it's like, it is like photo real immediately. We got a wild demo at Meta HQ of all the new products and we were blown away, I'm not even sure, I don't think we can say much more. I think we can talk about it in like the abstract, but yeah, I mean, none of that was like Nintendo Wii level graphics, but I mean,

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, and so yeah because there were plenty of there were plenty of VR games that didn't have Nintendo Wii graphics 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 was it was great and there were a bunch of other games but yes, I mean the point is is that like Mark is totally ready to spend 20 billion dollars on a big project if he thinks it's valuable and here

He clearly does and so he's going after it Anyway Similar founder led company that's building amazing AI stuff Finn the number one AI agent for customer service we've had own on the show before he's been on number one in performance benchmarks number one in bank offs number one ranking on you too let's go so if you're looking to do customer service head over to thin I'm saying this they're not saying this but I'm gonna say this is the official, the official AI CX tool of

both AI safety and being AGI built because Anthropic uses this thing. Really, no way. There we go, okay, awesome. So. Yeah, I'm sure Anthropic will love that. They're like, we said you could put our logo on your website. We didn't say these,

the technologists daily, the two podcasters could say it's the official. We said you could put our logo on your website. We didn't say these, the technologists daily, the two podcasters could go way over their skis on this endorsement. It's the official CX agent. Anyway, Roon had an interesting take here. Diving into the why these trade deals are so, not really trade deals, but these poachings can be so damaging and he's trying to put it in broader consumer terms we're

gonna debate whether or not his point is well taken he of course works at open AI and has for a number of years rune says intellectual property by default is a market failure single well-informed talented defectors can walk away from organizations with billions of dollars of tacit value of knowing what works and what doesn't. The athlete metaphor is somewhat wrong. In industries where patents and such aren't viable, market participants will drastically under-invest in R&D efforts due to IP seepage, just like the I drink your milkshake milkshake

effect of oil seepage, just like the, I drink your milkshake milkshake effect of oil seepage and land rights. There is a compelling pro-consumer case for non-competes. Interesting. Very rare that you hear a tech person argue in favor of non-competes. Interesting. I mean, the immediate impact of non-competes

in this context would be dramatically lower wages for AI researchers like Roon, which is interesting. The other question is- Yeah, and it's interesting you'd have to move AI out of California. Oh, people would then, maybe. Or they would choose to be there. I'm just saying, I'm saying if you really want to

use non-competes- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Go where they can be enforced, right? Yes, but then as a historically impossible. 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. Kids at school here. Yeah, my question is like,

I've always been interested in like, why can 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 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 So that's interesting.

Do you think it just is a byproduct of hacker culture? Culture? Sort of like positive sum culture of Silicon Valley? Yeah, but you think that would change if there were tens of billions of dollars on the table. Yeah, right? Yeah, I mean there's a culture of competition doesn't kill businesses. So I agree with you,

and I'll give you an example. 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 Lauren Brickter. Yes. American soft software developer best Yeah best known for creating pool refresh yeah pull to refresh interaction we created that that design pattern and then he had a patent on it Twitter owned the patent and Jack Dorsey and the Twitter crew were libertarian and said you know we're not going to

enforce this and then it got baked into Instagram and it's it's now natively in iOS and it's in in all of you you know, it's basically like one button. If you're truly terminally online, you're using it hundreds of times a day. True, but now we've actually moved past that. We've moved into endless scroll, where you actually don't need, like if you're on TikTok, you're never pulling to refresh. You just keep scrolling to the bottom. So we're actually post-pulled to refresh and now we're in the endless scroll but endless scroll I believe was developed by Pinterest and they had a patent on it for a while I think it might be wrong here

But yeah, but but endless scroll was also something that was not able to be owned which is just odd to me and then and then there's the other question of like Coca-Cola has been able to keep the you know the formula is a trade secret for like a hundred years or something and it's just odd that that tech companies can't seem to do either they can't keep the secret you can have trade secrets yeah it's not like an open AI researcher can go over and say here's here's a bunch of code let's roll let's roll it out Yep. It's basically there the in The the sort of way of doing things that they've internalized from being in a company Yeah for a certain amount tacit value of knowing what works and what doesn't and so the my my like naive read on this

Is that if you had had a top-tier open AI? researcher at meta top tier open AI researcher at Meta during the Llama 4 build out, 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 when you talked to Dylan Patel, I was asking him about DeepSeq, and how DeepSeq was doing all these innovations, and like moving to floating point eight, like smaller, basically smaller numbers storing the weights. And he was like, oh yeah, but OpenAI was doing that like two years ago. 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, you were not on the cutting edge and you should have been coaching AI researchers from the top labs earlier. So two things could be happening here. One, Zuck is right to just go and overpay

and try to recreate some of the magic and get a leading model 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 runes is baiting baiting zack into just overpay the 40 chest is like oh yeah this is they're getting everything they're taking everything yeah yeah no no i i i don't i don't necessarily believe that because i i did talk to rune like years ago and i was like but like like is this gonna commoditize?

Like is the foundation model layer gonna commoditize? And he was like there like there are like the secret to open AI in many ways is like the tealian secrets like they understand things at a lower level that other that other people just don't and so that will compound and stay at advantage and he hadn't even predicted the and so that will compound and stay at advantage. And he hadn't even predicted the dominance of the consumer and like the aggregation theory that happens when you're the front end consumer AI, that's incredibly valuable.

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. But it's interesting. Anyway, let's tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the new, is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company

to the next level. Next level. Next level. It will, I mean, we, you know, we have a light guest booking today, but, you know, we're spending an hour talking about one story, because it's fun stuff. We can continue, we can do go over to the Wall Street Journal

Because in the exchange section there is a fantastic article related to this says It's known as the list and it's a secret file of geniuses and looking at this it says Mishka Belenko you Jong Mark Zuckerberg's been reviewing this list Lucas By Byers on this, the new guy, says, Jordy Hayes, John Coogan, Tyler Cosgrove, Ben Kohler, a couple other folks, but you know, just the usual people that we know. Anyway, it's known as the list, and it's a secret file of geniuses.

Only select AI researchers have the skills for the hottest area in tech. Mark Zuckerberg and his rivals want to hire them, even if it costs ungodly sums. We love ungodly sums. We should be ringing the gong more this episode. All over Silicon Valley, the brightest minds in AI are buzzing about The List,

a compilation of the most talented researchers and engineers in artificial intelligence that Mark Zuckerberg has spent months putting together. Lucas Beyer works in multimodal vision research, which Tyler broke down for us. Can you imagine if Zach spun up like basically like a hot or not style tool that just like pins to 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 top 50 people yep this is so good so Lucas Byer describes himself as a scientist dedicated to the creation of creation of awesomeness you're very reticent but he's opposed poster on X as well. Ruzhong specializes in automatic speech recognition and barely has an online presence. Besides his influential papers, Misha Bilenko is an expert in large scale machine learning who also enjoys 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 the recruits on the list typically have PhDs from elite schools like Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon They also have experience at places like open AI in San Francisco or Google DeepMind in London They're usually in their 20s and 30s and they all know each other They spend their days staring at screens to solve the kinds of inscrutable problems that require Spectacular amounts of computing power and their previously obscure talents have never been so highly valued 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 art It is funny

It is funny some of the you know some of the losers out of this talent war just VCs because how do you compete? How do you compete when, you know, historically you could have gone to some of these and really overpaid to invest. You could have come to them with a ridiculous, what would be very ridiculous for a VC, which is I will spin up a new company. Not ridiculous, ridiculous it happens but it is kind of ridiculous in some ways spin up a new company I'll give you 200 on a billion and you can take 10 million personally and secondary immediately yeah 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 TVP. How are you doing? Congratulations on the trade deal What supercar did you buy You got a she run Yeah. What supercar did you buy? Did you go Bugatti Chiron? Or you go F80? I mean we hear that the numbers are huge right now for folks like you. I mean I'm taking a plane more so like...

Okay yeah. That was a lot of fun. Yeah yeah yeah. Yeah yeah. People say you know we wanted flying cars. We got the idea. The fact that you would imply that Will drives himself is offensive. Offensive.

I mean... Yeah. I think the fact that you would imply that will drives himself. Yes. It's offensive. That's it. I mean, yeah, a lot of way I wame over the first time recently, I'd like, I'd been to like SF, but like, I hadn't been around SF proper that much since the, the way Mo craze took off. And so like that's been like the car experience really just like, sure. So I'll drive in cars. Damn.

Yeah. So are you in SF full-time now Still back and forth New York. I'm like kind of slowly starting to spend more time in SF. It's on brand You're decentralized your decentralized It's it's it's perfect fit perfect fit Anyway, did you touch grass at all this weekend or were you locked into the timeline? It's a lot of stuff was happening on the timeline. I did. I mean, I'm in New York right now. I did some New York stuff on Saturday.

But yeah, I mean, it's been it's been good. Lots of drama intrigue as usual. The trade deals. I know I've been tuning into earlier. I know you guys have gone over all the the major roster updates But yeah, it's uh Exciting times opening. I open model soon. Hopefully but not this week Yeah, so yeah, I mean the first place I want to start with is

the actual trade deals did it do any of these people jump out to you as particularly interesting? Had they been on your radar? Have you met any of these folks? Can you give us more context on, uh, how, how academic are they? How product oriented are they? It does, it's, it feels like this is purely research, you know, uh, beefing up of the research team and Metta kind of has product solved. Is that the right model to think about this?

What, how can you characterize the shape of the team that Zuck's building? Even there's thousands of really great software engineers that work in AI. Yeah, sure, sure. And, but what, you know, even kind of getting a sense of like how many people was Zuck really going after? Was it 250?

Was it a hundred? 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. Right, right. Yeah, I mean, it's a great list. 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 and

research your product. 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 Yann LeCun's whole org 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. 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 opening eye model, like,

that has a different set of considerations. 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. And it seems like they probably, like they got Alex And then supposedly Nat and or Daniel to kind of handle a little more of the, not the business side, but product, the business stuff. Yeah. It's a management role. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What, what is your take on Yon Lacoon right now? How should we think about his position in the AI world?

There's, you know, I see these memes of like, he's a non-believer, he doesn't believe in like super intelligence and like AI God, he's a little more practical. It seems like he's been, he's been right about some things in the sense that like, we haven't had, we're not feeling a fast takeoff right now. So I think you got to give him some credit for that. At the same time, like there's, Ben Thompson's been criticizing on Lacuna a little bit for not driving the product side of the 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 downstream implication of that is that if you believe that we're going to be living in like B2B SaaS world of AI implementation and productization, 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, what is your take? How, how would you, how would you describe Yann LeCun in his history and kind of where he sits in the

organization to like a layman? Sure. Yeah. So I think people over index on thinking of Yon as the meta guy, like too much. Sure. 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. Like fair fundamental layer research is like a whole other group that they mostly write papers and do very academic work. Yon Lacoon's work is very academic. And it's really like, it's I think, he's like, I think

on one hand, he'd like, is right in the sense of like, we don't have the full picture yet. Like we don't have full on AGI that can like do a human's job forever. And I think that's kind of the drum he's beating is like, there's more work to do, there's more science to do. It's not just productize the current set of techniques in terms of like the end of AI forever. But his goal is not to do the productization.

Like he, like the org he's in at Meta is really isolated from products. He's there to kind of boost the reputation of the org academically, as well as to be able to potentially advise on other stuff that's more productive. But his job is not to like go train a business model, that you're trying to model that is going to be used by businesses. And like, I think people like that org 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 teach. And that is essentially what that org is. Yeah. Does that lead to better recruiting on campus essentially? Like you can go get researchers because Yann LeCun can come do 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 10 year bets. And so that org for Metta is not about what product or release next quarter. It's what are our 10 year bets? Yeah. Okay. I wonder about. Sorry. Yeah, you can go. Metta shares just hit an all time high.

Really? So the stocks, the stocks performing. I'm curious from your time at Morgan's. Thank you for that, John. It's incredible. But generally up 5% over the last week. Wow. What, how did Wall Street

generally sort of like process the like meta AI story? Cause now obviously at least the market seems generally excited. It may get to the point where we did with VR where people are like, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, cool it on the metaverse, you know? Well, it's funny because like, you add all this up, even if the $100 million offer number is real,

it's like, okay, so now we're at like $1 billion in spend. It's 5% of the metaverse whole that was burning. 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. I care about $20 billion. Cause that was what was weighing on the stock during the Metaverse buildup. But this is like, AI is so much more productizable. You can make so much more money from it upfront.

And it seems like even though it's a big number, a hundred million dollar offer, it feels like the spend is maybe less, but I don't know. What do you think? Well, right. Yeah. I mean, I think the, I don't know the context fully of the a hundred million, I know people have all these theories, but like the, the scale AI numbers we do know. Yeah.

And like that, that's a big chunk of their, like, I don't know, they don't do those every day. Yeah. But they've done a handful in the past at that scale, like WhatsApp was 20 billion or something like that. And. I mean, it's hard to read into like the charts like I, I think people are generally like expecting that Meadow will take AI seriously and are kind of

happy to see change change whether that is like justified or not I mean we'll see yeah it was interesting George the product side is gonna be interesting because like yeah they're not a B2B SaaS company yeah well so they're an entertainment company and I I think that I don't think that people are fully understand the potential of Gen.A.I. around entertainment. Like it gets talked a lot around, oh, you're going to be able to generate an entire movie or generate video games or things like that.

And I think that we haven't seen, we've seen some fantastic examples so far, but nothing that is, I think like George Hotz was on our show and he was talking about how like, basically AI is gonna be like, having five CIA agents follow you around all the time, convincing you to buy products.

And like that is like one kind of a dark bowl case for, dark bowl case, yeah. Dark bowl case for dark bowl case. Dark full case for Metta 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.

Yeah. I want to push back on the B2B thing because yes, 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 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 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 larger organization that it's potentially like just the B2B applications of AI inside of Metta are like it's a multi-billion dollar like cost center or revenue driver or something like that. I don't know. I think a company at Metta scale has already rewritten all that stuff themselves for the most. Like they probably have some services Yeah, that they're using but like

They like they could they rebuild their own cloud like because they use aws for a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Um Ken They're not a compute company though and in terms of like platform stuff. Yeah I feel like those companies once you hit a certain size and, you just have so many engineers that you want everything. Google rewrites all their own stuff. Yeah. Microsoft rewrites all their own stuff. And is there another tale end of that

that has not been done yet that they can squeeze some more money out of? Entertainment will be interesting. So one thing that I was just reminded of, have you seen the Italian Brain Rot videos? Oh yeah, love them. Yeah, yeah. So know people, it's like silly, it's stupid, but 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. Um, but people just like come up with these where you could imagine meta kind of eating a good chunk of the like video gen market. If they have an answer to like the O3 where that becomes part of the platform, it ties into the whole metaverse thing of like creating stories and sharing these stories with your friends. But instead of like Instagram stories, it's like, okay, what's what's the evolution of stories? Yeah, have you seen Higgs Field? No. Higgs Field AI, I think it's an ex Snapchat team.

Their new image model is basically already at a point where it's creating images that are photo realistic, but in the sense, photo realistic. It looks like Instagram photos, not like. Full-time influencer generated it after spending hours trying to create it and you can't tell that it's not real. And so it's really feels like it feels like meta integrating that kind of thing where it's like, 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 be like, well, I only follow organic farm to table influencers. Yeah. I feel like they're AI integration so far have all been kind of weird. Like there's these like Instagram accounts you can chat with and then there was the whole

meta AI homepage disaster where old people were like leaking personal info without realizing it. But I guess Facebook's always had that. Yeah, I think it'll they'll have to thread the needle on product in a way that will have built 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.

Like. Yeah, it is interesting that they haven't tried to create a Studio Ghibli moment by you're like going. I was saying this, they should just pre-render everyone's profile picture as a Ghibli and just when you open the Instagram app, it's just like, here, we did this for you. 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 like even baking that down into a filter. No, it can't be so like OpenAI branded now. They have to go with their new version. Yeah, I'm saying like an entirely new. But yeah, basically like the filters in the Instagram app

should be like style transfer or like fully generative instead of just like color grades. That's clearly the next thing and they should just do that. But what do you think of Sam Altman's ability to get through this? Like he's had a series of exodus is and seems to continue to march on the anthropic departures, then SSI and thinking machines like X AI. Like this is not the first time it's not his first rodeo. And so there's this whole narrative never bet against his uck. He's been down on the metaverse came back

he's been down on mobile with the HTML5 thing and he came back from that went native and Super dominant and bought Instagram. What's app super dominant and mobile and so never been against zuck But then also maybe never get it better get bet against Sam 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. I think as long as open AI doesn't totally drop the ball on product or research, like they have the center of gravity for the AI world, like in the same way that no matter what

Android ships, people are not going to switch from their iPhones, like someone that have to go very wrong for people to not see OpenAI as the winner, I think. Or there's the kind of the default. Yeah, I mean, the other thing is the average chat GPT users not waking up today being like, oh, I can't believe OpenAI lost a handful of its top researchers, right? They're just still using ChatGPT as a Google replacement, or they're talking with it as a companion. So yeah, I think the lead is still very, very real.

And again, it's going to create opportunities for people to say, hey, I wanna go work on this product that hundreds of millions and soon billions of people use every single day. Right, 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, 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 group of concepts around that. And the question is like, okay, what are the winning apps? Like I imagine that like the real, clearly kind of thing, OpenAI is going to do their version of that at some point. Other people probably will too. Does that become modality that people really want live overview on their screen, on their phone? What's the way that people are going to be interacting with AI generally? Because a lot of those use cases, like it's they're already smart enough. It's not about making the models like way smarter or whatever.

It's like, how do you have the model be useful or fun, engaging? There's a bunch of paths here, going back to the Clueless thing, where one Roy is like right about the UX and like ends 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, but and Eve at least the first two outcomes are hilarious and that in that Royley ushers in the new paradigm of for engaging with language models.

I'm curious, is all the stuff around every B2B SaaS player descending on the sort of like single interface, like a chat interface that generates software, was that predictable to you? Do you think that's, do you think that that's like part of a multi-year trend or is that just FOMO? I mean like Copilot was early, it was like 2020, 2001, like the first GPT-3 Copilot came out and like that was already one of the early like L, LM applications that people were interested in at all. And then it took until cursor for it to really like I think cursor plus

like, three, five sonnet was when it became a thing that was good enough that people were excited about it. 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. And so I think that 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. They already are kind of depending on what you're doing. Yeah. Like I think, yeah. We're about halfway through the year. What are kind of like the big moments that you're kind of tracking the OpenAI? Open source model could be one, whatever meta launches next, right?

I'm assuming they're gonna be dark until this new team can really cook and bring something great. Maybe they don't do anything this year, but I would assume they come with something. What else are you tracking? Yeah, I mean, for me, the 03 release in Chat GPT was like a pretty 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 oh, three, you can kind of get it to be a pretty general agent, or can like, do some pretty complex stuff that was kind of new to see what the geoguessing thing was crazy. And having that as a like vision of like what a GI starts to look like, I think it's pretty cool. Of course, from the like

research open source world, there was a deep seek as like the RL craze taking off. But like, I mean, I work on RL. So I like obsess over it and like think about it a lot. 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, we figure out what we want it to do, we give it some tools, we set up these environments, we figure out 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. 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 all on this for? They want an agent to do X, Y, Z. And then how do you make this a thing that you can help climb?

And I think like, you see a lot, like there's been a lot of news about OpenAI trying to like sell their RFT service. There was these startups popping up. There was a machine seems to be reinforcing. Okay, Yeah. And so like they're pushing this pretty hard. This is you're spending over $10 million like Palantir opening.

I will also customize a model for you. So they have like a, uh, serious heavy, uh, hell, like a heavy paying customer one, but they also have like a more, like in the thousands of dollars service where you are getting to essentially do fine tuning on Oprah mini. Yep. And that is a little more self-serve. But they're also like doing consulting around the forward deployed thing around that. Is that important strategy for open AI to kind of stay in the game against open source models like llama.

Yeah. But I think also against other like thinking machines, there was some report that this is a version of the strategy they're getting. It's like go to enterprises, talk to them about their problems, turn these problems into things where you can create really good customized agent models. And if the, like that's one potential roadmap towards like having more like AI everywhere, it's just like having services that were whose job is to like come in, whether or not it's finding or not, just like make them into agent shaped tasks,

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 not as you see by the like the talent war there's just not that many 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 fine tune llama for whatever. Yeah. Yeah. 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 turning into JSON and we build UNLM that just does that or whatever interesting how do you after the the

scale news and then there's a bunch of players popping up or you know everyone from Mercor to Labelbox to Handshake a lot of different people competing for that market how do you see that market evolving over the next one to two years I think there were certain people saying scale got out at the perfect time in many ways, but clearly there's a lot of at least gross revenue up for grabs right now in the near term. Yeah, I mean, I think like the broader sphere

of like creating stuff to train models on with humans in the loop to do that curation is gonna be important, especially for these domain specific applications. I think it's going to be less like, oh, we just need more tokens. And it's more about we need curation of goals and objectives. Because like tokens, you kind of hit diminishing returns pretty quick in terms of just like more internet tax or more like human written math solution examples and it doesn't scale super well but the thing but nice thing about the past specification is you can kind of like pour in more compute

without necessarily needing more data. It scales much better with compute. Whereas we don't really have like a great way of like spending a hundred bucks more compute per pre-sharing token other than make a giant model. Yeah, do you think llama will stay open source for the foreseeable future? We'll see. I wouldn't surprise me if they go kind of the Google route where like they are still, they still do open source. 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 clothes models, uh, the API or other services where, yeah, did they have the infrastructure to serve a closed model? I mean, you mentioned that they use AWS, so it'd be kind of awkward, right? Yeah. I mean, I don't know that they really want to that much. I think that it'd be something that comes in a product. Sure. Yeah. That makes sense.

Or maybe they partner with like you could see them partnering with someone like a coreweave. Yeah. Or Nvidia directly. Nvidia's hoping to get into the inference serving game, it sounds like. Yeah, do you think, so one of Swix's takeaways from the Wired article was that, like, from the Wired article was that 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-intensive work in a distributed. 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.

I have the best model by far. Um, how, how do you think about the impact of Stargate on like the AGI race? I mean, I think the biggest experiment that they're definitely going to do is take a pretty big model. I don't know if it'll be like quite as big as like a 4.5, but like a big model and do way more RL on it than anyone's done the app. Like what does like an O five level of RL look like?

Okay. See how good that is. See what do you want to do that though? Or could you do that just across a bunch of data centers? Cause 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. You could do it completely distributed and you don't necessarily need a stargate

to do that. You can do it distributed. Like it is very inference heavy. There is still like a lot of weight updating. You have to sync the model across. You have to keep sending the training model to your inference workers. Okay. And so having it co- it located certainly makes it easier. You sure it's easier to do it in a distributed way if you want to versus pre-training. But it's not like trivial. 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. They just know more stuff is coming but also a lot of this is gonna be inference where like they want to be able to do like meta has a ton of GPUs they just use for Instagram ads recommendations a lot of Stargate will probably be serving Ghibli like I mean that makes a ton of sense like I'm running into real limits I haven't seen one literally everything like like Google it's like how how do they run out of TV? They spend 60 billion on CapEx every year at least Pro too, I mean I buy I get timeouts on this stuff last question

I'm guessing you weren't surprised to see open AI leveraging the TPU for inference or reporting to be starting to use it. Was that kind of- I mean, it makes sense that they are considering all options given the friction with Microsoft. Like they don't have a core cloud that they're super close with.

They're not like there's, they need to both try to lower their cost for inference as well like that maybe was a factor behind because the 03 had a big price drop that might have been to be related I don't know your speculation but like Google has TPUs and they can serve Gemini really cheap and really well really fast if open AI wants to compete at that level, they kind of have to consider all options. Yep.

Makes sense. Well, great day to have you pop on. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Knowing how things are unfolding, we'll probably ping you to jump on again later this week. Yeah. Stay ready. Great to have you all.

Cheers. Yeah. Bye. Talent wars continue to rage on. So stay ready. Great to have you all. Cheers. Yeah. Bye. Talent wars continue to rage on. Sam Altman slams meta AIs. Talent poaching spree, missionaries will beat mercenaries.

He says, quote, what meta is doing will, in my opinion, lead to very deep cultural problems, said Sam Altman in leaked memo sent to OpenAI researchers. So big, big question. Paula says, with all the AI labs in SF being in the mission, who called them members of technical staff

and not missionaries? Funny. Oh wow, this is an old post, yeah, from over six months ago. And there's a bunch of other new details emerging from the new meta super intelligence team. Dee Dee, who's coming on the show, right? In like three minutes.

Okay. I have to think, wow. Yeah, we've highlighted a lot of his posts. Every single one of the 11 meta super intelligence hires is an immigrant who did their undergrad abroad. 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.

Immigration is key to US AI innovation. Bef Jaisos has a hilarious post here. The foreshadowing here was insane. And it's Sam Altman interviewing Mark Zuckerberg. And Mark Zuckerberg says, the thing that I think Facebook has done exceptionally well is hiring. This is an incredible series, the startup school series that Sam did

while he was at YC. He interviewed Zuck, Elon, a ton of really interesting folks and got these really definitive interviews from the top tech leaders of the next generation right as they were kind of on the biggest moment in their come up. Why are you laughing?

It's just, I love this business. You're like tearing up looking at how happy you are. No, it's just, it's, watching this great power conflict play out in real time is is wildly entertaining. It's entertaining. And the consumer is going to be the net winner. I was about to say that and also America. Yeah, it's extremely.

This is a pressure cooker of the highest. It's it's so competitive. But the good thing is that at the end, we aren't playing this game where someone goes to jail or someone goes to the gulag if they don't perform or they get locked up. This is the difference between having $10 billion or $100 billion. It's kind of all fake, but it's all like'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 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 you're like

It's not like the government and it's global right? It's greatest minds from all over the world coming to compete in this market.