TBPN - 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 will be working. 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? We got a trade deal. He's wanted. The timeline is in turmoil, special segment starting now. I love this because it's... So-Hamp-Hareek just became a trade deal. Rieke 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. Says breaking meta, open AI, anthropic and Google have signed Sohan Parique 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 working on a, during the show, we were, we were working on a, uh, during the show we were working on a post we couldn't decide how to frame the trade deal of soham and some fan just did it for us this guy and got a thousand likes fully sent it so uh matt parker's from anti metal was uh actually so hum 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 right of passage, DBAH, 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 Soham Parikh in India who works at three or four startups at the same time. He's been praying on YC companies and more. Gary is not going to 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. Nope. You don't want to go up against it. But apparently he's been praying on YC companies.

I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying. Scaming people. Oh, this is fascinating. Did you see this from Pratica Meta? Tyler put this in that you want to read this one for us? He's been all over the place. Roy said I interviewed this guy yesterday. No way. That's amazing.

Tyler, break it down for us. What is Pratica have to say? Okay. So apparently, I mean, this is still unconfirmed. I've actually, I've sent him an email. Okay. I've attained his email. I'm not sure if it's the real one, we'll see. But he says the dude clears interviews. He's good with that. After clearing, he has junior people doing all the work. And he has around 20 employees 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 to a 20K a month retainer. He knows he's going to have

some churn. Yep. But it doesn't matter. He's picking up some equity. This is fascinating. equity comp as well. Yes. I wonder if he's vested. I wonder if he's vested at some shares on the balance sheet at any of these companies. This is crazy. Ken Watanah says Soham Parika is the Bonnie Blue of YC. Very vulgar.

Sarr says all recruiting must stop until we get Soham on TBPN to figure out what is going on. Open invite to Soham. We'll talk to him. Santiago says Soham on TBPN when. Daniel, growing Daniel says Microsoft just laid out. Here we go. laid off 9,000 workers, all of them. Soham Parique.

I wonder if he's picking up a Sohan Parique email 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 Sohan Parique has been hired 79 times in the past four years. And then Matthew Berman says, are you think AI is killing software jobs? Tell that to Sohan Parique. signal says not now honey there is a soham gate happening on x

it is really funny it's basically say i'm going to build a dev shop but it's going to be my name and i'm you know he probably no he probably could have had a just very successful dev shop yeah yeah 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 like, okay, we have a full-time employee. We got somebody who's delivering. They're a high performer.

Our team is cracked. We don't have to outsource. The whole thing with Uber. Remember Uber's initial buildout 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, you need the founders need to be coding. The employees need to be coding. It needs to be handcrafted. Can't outsource. But, you know, he's proven us all wrong, I guess. True. So we're working on.

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 get him on. Hasn't got back. I sent it 20 minutes ago. Okay. Um, yeah, no. I think 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, and this is the right time to launch, uh, his, his dev shop. Yeah. Yeah. And it should be called the dev shop of Soham Parique. Yes. Because I mean, I don't know. Maybe he's to live. delivering but growing Daniel has a post here chief of staff brings lists of applicants really likes this one Indian guy asked if it's a ruin or a soham she doesn't

understand pull out illustrated diagram explaining the difference between ruins and so on she laughs and says it's a good engineer sir it's a so so home oh that's wild pest 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 you do it there he is welcome man himself thanks so much for joining uh why don't you uh why don't you introduce yourself and uh just take a few minutes to just uh give us what's going on in your world what's the last 24 hours been like um how would you describe yourself what what what do you have to say to people and then i'm let's go back to the very beginning

who are you where do you come from i mean um i'm you know i'm originally from um um I kind of grew up, you know, here all my life. Obviously, drove into computer science, like, you know, coding and everything, kind of without a choice, kind of process of elimination. Fell in love with it, you know, as you were aware, at this point, I'm like everyone's like favorite founding engineer pretty much, or Worker 17 or whatever you might call it, like AI bot or Soam as a service. I don't know.

But, yeah, don't have much to my story, essentially. You know, I've just been always passionate about, you know, building things. Who was your first job? My first job was actually at a company called Allen. It was like a voice-assisted conversational startup. This is back in like 2020, 2020. 2020.

And when did you come to the States? Because I know I was talking to Matt and he said 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, you know, different financial circumstances. couldn't do that, had to kind of like, you know, not go with that plant. But obviously, you know, I have visited, you know, America mostly for like off-sides 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 Sue Hill over at Playground. He accused you of working at multiple jobs simultaneously. Is that true? It is true. And yeah, I would love to add color to it, but that is true. Yeah. 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, I think going back to like how it even like started to happen and what the motivations were. Yeah, please. obviously I would want to like preface with saying like I'm not proud of what I've done you know that'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'm not a very people person I don't share much in terms of like what's going on with my life and

Sure. And of my internal thought process, you know, was kind of like getting more stressed with like, hey, you know, I want to like come out of the situation. What should I do? So it was not more so kind of about greed, but essentially like necessity. And just like thought that if I work like multiple places, you know, like I can basically like help myself like alleviate the situation. I wasn't much faster.

No, it's very economically rational. What about the conjecture that, that you had a team of junior developers under 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, you know, I worked with can vouch with that. I have multiple locations like pair programs with people. You know, I've written every single inch of the court.

You know, anti-metals is one of the companies I've worked at. You know, they have pretty high bar for design, as you might know, they did a lot recently. You know, there were two occasions where, you know, just before the last launch like, you know, the contractor who was going to do the front end for us essentially had bailed out and, you know, we as a team had to figure out and do everything, which 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, you know, 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 have worked with I have deeply cared about. And again, people who spend, you know, a lot of time with me can back that on multiple locations. And again, I did not have any financial model. Like I said, the only motivation for me was, hey, I'm in a financial jeopardy.

So I didn't do this until 2022. 2022 is actually when I was you know running into issues I had deferred my you know grad school admit and you know did like an online degree but basically you know did not have like enough you know like essentially like you know just to get out a situation I was in sure don't want to talk like too much deeply about it but no no that's fine yeah so that's kind of why talk about your own talk about your own abilities every it seemed universal that that's 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 were 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. You know, it seems estimates seem to put it at maybe five, companies at once. Yeah, are you just like hyperproductive? Are you leveraging AI tools and coding assistance? Are you just able to move really quickly in a startup environment? Or are you also talented like systems engineering and algorithms and like solving really, really hard computational problems? So I preface with this, you know, some of these companies I worked at was before the co-pilot boom, right?

There were no AI assisted program. At least three startups have went on the record like saying this. People who have proved that program with we can also watch with this. But the real truth is, you know, there's this funny line in some of my intramers like TLDR, I don't do anything outside coding, that is very true. And if you're like spending hours, like, you know, sitting in front of the computer, you will eventually like, at least I hope so like get good at it. There's obviously a lot for me to learn in general.

You know, I wouldn't say like I'm, you know, like a, I don't know what they call like, like a platform engine or something like, you know, top principle or whatever. But I would like to believe that I was a decent enough, good enough engineer to do 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, ClaudeCode, cursor, devon, etc., 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, you know, handmade. Obviously, like, you know, having more, like, you know, AI-assisted tooling, like, definitely helped, but it did not amount to me working on more jobs. Because, like, I would still love to spend, you know, a justify, but a lot of, 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 first with that company.

Like, I was essentially, like, working until, like, 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? Like so one, there's also been a lot of things around like, hey, you know, I probably used, you know, some sort of like, too, like Cluley, 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 like you know how 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 you know because I don't practice lead code as much I know my data structure as well I know what to use when but you know

like typically a gun for 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 you know coding and I think that helped a lot as well totally Yeah, I mean, I do care about coding a lot. But again, like, you know, most of these companies essentially had a take-home assessment or a work trial, right? 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 code, I would have bombed 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 was in the need of money, like why would I work for, you know, startups as opposed to big tech because they clearly pay well. They have a 9 to 5 schedule. For the most part, like I would say, you know, people don't really care about like what you are essentially like doing. The thing with me is like if you're spending, you know, multiple hours a week like working on something, you would have to at least decently be passionate about it because otherwise you'll just like burn out.

I said, you know, each of these companies that I work for and again, you know, founders, some of the founders who spend meaningful time with me can vouch, you know, 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, 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 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. 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, but you know, the 100x engineers are getting a hundred million. You can maybe be 10x if you just, if you really focus. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so, 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, what was the, what was the stumbling block there? Yeah, I think the part where, you know, I should have basically done is like, come clean with my situation. You know, to be very frank with you, like I mentioned, like, I'm not a good, 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 is like going with me mentally. And that's true with any person I'm with as well, like, you know, that's outside of work. So when there was an embarrassment to essentially like admitting that, hey, you know, I have this struggles mentally, you know, like,

and talk in open about it. And, and then. And then the second thing is, you know, I 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 wasn't rather than like it. I mean, the flip side here is that you, you don't necessarily need to have something going on in your family to justify a $10 million salary or $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 got to pay me three times as much Honestly, I 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 a 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 yeah so the decisions seem counterintitive basically for me is like hey you know I have to do something to kind of get out the situation I'm in I also want to spend time like building something meaningful you know as long as

I like the startup and as long as it's not like hand to mouth yeah it did not matter too much like you know so what are you going to do now you have the intention of the entire tech ecosystem the and i appreciate how candid you've been yeah uh with us and and i want to talk about dev shop specifically yeah i mean there's a few angles here you could do the the dev shop of soham parique i think you would be able to get a handful of clients immediately uh i think you could sign a max out uh max out contract with cluley they would probably pay you a pretty penny to join the team over there. And I 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, anti-metal, you know, shares in mind the founders, like Synclabs, you know, Pradi, you know, Rutherba. 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. And there's not a lot of me to say itself. How do you rebuild trust? 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, you know, worker monitoring or checking when the GitHub commits are coming in or doing something to understand if someone else is is working multiple places. Somebody was saying we like a tech needs a like a some sort of service to see hey are we employing the same company. How do you how do you rebuild trust and and guarantee that you won't be working multiple jobs against the will of the current employer? So I think like you know all of this that has taught me is like, know, just coming into kind of like probably makes people understand your situation. After all, like we all are humans.

I don't anticipate like working on multiple gigs again, but you know, my financial circumstances have not changed. So even if it did came to them, which it won't, like right now I'm very clear that this is my sole focus. You know, I would probably like approach with like being very candid with the founders and just letting them know and if that's not a possibility, you know, that's fine. You know, maybe I can figure a way out where, you know, there is like a higher pay or whatever. kind of like to your point, right?

But in another spectrum of the world, I think, like, what I've really realized is that I just, you know, I just want to be a part of, like, building something that I can, like, focus on a longer term. And that's always been the goal. You know, it is always the goal with any of these companies I've worked with. So, you know, I, obviously, you know, like 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 going to have a lot of attention around that launch. I hope you now is probably not the right time to renegotiate your offer letter for the new company. You should probably, you know, stick with it. But I think you're going to 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 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 overrun with it in general obviously you know feeling shitty about it as well

like I like I said you know I'm not a 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 like reflection in general, but I think friends and family have been strong. You know, 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, you know, to essentially be like helpful here, kind of give advice on what I should be doing next. Even like, you know, sometimes like staying through with me like, you know, just to make sure that I'm like all right. I think it says a lot that a number of the people that you worked 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's what that goes without saying um any companies that you still need to resign from none whatsoever man is the only focus i have okay okay he's on the record you're on the right path on the right path well i'm reading for you i i hope this is a story of redemption i believe in forgiveness i believe so mistakes and i'm i'm optimistic that this can have a good ending me too

so to be clear your ex account is at real so ham perique right yeah that's the real one That's the real one. Because there's a lot of fake ones floating out there trying to take, trying to ride the hype wave. Yeah, I mean, 100% that 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 them. Perik. Okay. But it's been 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 shitty about it but yeah Yeah what what what are the the questions here remote versus in office US versus international yeah I mean I think we had exposed from a mod at Mercury I think I think the reason 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 to get 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 you misled. And I am excited to follow what you do next.

Yeah. Thanks for stopping by. Thank you so much for having me. We'll talk to you soon. 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 show you who they all believe them. No, there's plenty of very honest people. Like, what are the odds that someone who's been lying compulsively and been confronted about it for three years, like two or three years? And look, it's a special kind of person, too, who can do this thing to people who trust them, right?

You have a relationship with an employer, you know. 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.

Totally. I wasn't tuning in. I didn't hear what he said. Yeah. Yeah. To me, 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 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. Well, the engineer described his impact as negative. Negative. Well, because we had to onboard him. Yeah, you had to onboard him. Yeah. It's wasted our time and running.

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. Yeah, my big, my big question is, is somebody like this, you could have them working in your office as a full-time employee, and they would probably still, there's a good chance they would still keep doing this thing with people on LinkedIn that didn't see it. I didn't see the whole so hot, uh, so home gate.

We never, we never compromise on ethics. Like that's just a thing I don't fuck with. Uh, he's going to apologize. Is he going to give the money back? Yeah. That's a good question. I don't know. Cause, 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, you know, check the GitHub commits and see that, oh, they're coming in at the same time. I was wondering if this could be done at the HRIS level. Yep. 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 we solving this? I don't want to over rotate on it.

I think the last part of what makes Silicon Valley tick is its culture 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 a melting. So I'm really careful not to tip Silicon Valley towards this attract. state of like the hook 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 going to get screwed over very often we had a good laugh you know the memes are amazing like I hope I hope your your viral posts at least drove a bunch

of new signups and maybe he paid back a little bit yeah a little bit some customer yeah I mean I I completely agree like yes the handshake deal protocol is built on trust do some VCs violate it yes every once in a while, 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 going to fall through. You're going to get screwed over every so often,

and it's not worth over piloting on it and, like, looking for your shoulder your entire life. So it sounds like he is, he's announced that he's taking 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 is a pathological liar and continues to lie, like, people, like, his SEO is terrible now. Like, it will forever, like, be, like, very easy when you go to Google search for the person that you're hiring. He's like, oh, that's a different Soham Perich.

There's a lot of people in his name. And it's going to 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 Soham Parik dev shop makes much more sense here. Does that make sense to you? 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. 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 into interviews, because he's really good. And it's incredible.

He's actually incredible, 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 and right and it was that in the cold email strategy yeah yeah 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 i've 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 you you're pissed you got busted and you kind of gave himself yeah 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

yeah that's like the mainstream narrative is basically correct about me but maybe I'm sorry the redemption of being like I'm gonna prove everyone wrong yeah working at one company it's like you don't get you don't you don't get yeah yeah we don't give uh that's like a second at the fourth place trophy you worked at one company yeah that's funny um yeah i mean uh look he's he's not sorry he just got cut like it's it's really simple And why do dev shops not work for startups? I mean, 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's interesting because wasn't the very first version of Uber done by a dev shop and wasn't that part of the 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 the first time I hear about it. But, you know, like next time I hear about it, there's going to be a guy with like a sombrero in the other. Yeah, yeah, Travis was in Tijuana, pulling random dives off the street. Yeah, they really, really amp it up. The apocryfulness of the story just needs to grow and grow and grow. It's a tall tale at this point.

The reason why devshabs don't work is because there's a complicated game theory 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. They're like, and you see it with engineering all the time. It's like, oh, this is so complicated. You certainly 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 in the military gap, because otherwise might as well just do it yourself. And so 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 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 we have that bit that you can flip in our brains as a humans.

We have these tribal prosocial tendencies that are like, I don't want to cheat. because I like these people, or because I'm budding to the mission, which is why they always say every startup is like a religion, like the mission, the culture really matter on the camaraderie, really matter as a startup. And that's what you lose when you have dev shops. Well, yeah, 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 salary 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 move quickly. It's been a couple months maybe.

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

We've got to come back on the show then. We've got some really, really exciting stuff coming around. I couldn't be more excited. Amazing. Incredible. Last question on Soham. What should he do? What should he do next?

He should totally start a course. And he should raise a round from a six and Z. Start a course. Okay. We'll see. Maybe he'll drop a course. Yeah, that's a laugh track. Yeah, we've got laugh tracks around here. But yeah, it is, it is the part of why the whole thing was so controversial is you, like,

the average new CS grad, even from elite universities, is not having the easiest time in the job market. So it's such, it's such a, you know, it's got to be disappointing for them. But, but clearly Soham has cracked the entire flow. The interview code, yeah. So. He's figured it out, so he should monetize that. It is a monetizable skill. Interesting.

Well, thanks for hopping on. This is fantastic. Good to get the other side. Thanks for all. Enjoy the fourth. 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 gone for you. It was yesterday. It was yesterday, but it's... July 1st. She 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. Your, a lot of people are... This New York weather, it's one of the only places blasting that air conditioning. Oh, interesting.

What is the gym tier list look like in New York today? You know, Equinox had a moment. Lifetimes making moves. Lifetimes making moves. 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 Chifriani, which is a really nice. Small members club.

Yep. Yeah. That's fun. The high low. The high love. 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 you can go back to Gold's Gym which I'm like no we're not we can't do this There aren't there don't seem to be as many YMCA's on the West Coast No no not that many Lots of 24 hour fitness Oh yeah

I mean Gold's Gym it's the it's the staple of Venice It's where Arnold Schwarzenaer works out you know RFK's out there it's a good crew John 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 are, you were. It felt like premium, you know, but that ultra premium.

It's not the best. He's all on tequila level. Yeah, the location matters a lot. Yeah. What else is new in your world? Yeah, give us a, give us a Hampton's update. People were, assume no one's in the city right now. So, 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. 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 that crazy? 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 or 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 and 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 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 personality is derived from the state of the market. 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.

Is that crazy white party going on? That's a Hampton's thing. Is that a, is that a July 4th thing? Or is that canceled. I thought Michael Rubin was like pulling back from that because it was like maybe too flashy. Is there an update thing? Yeah, I will see. Is that supposed to be fourth of July? I think that's like wearing, she's like a white party. What are you talking about? Yeah, I was like the did you know, can't comment. Can't comment. No, not the ditty one. Oh yeah. I think that might have been a factor in pulling back for that. But but I always see like everyone's like spying the watches, spying like you know, what cars people showed up in all this stuff. Yeah, there's a lot of paparazzi. There's a lot of TikTokers.

Okay. See everything happening in real time. Interesting. Nobody can really like leave with another man's wife anymore. Like there's so much coverage of these events now that really takes away. The mystique. Somebody might. What's up with what's up this with this place drugstore?

You were covering it. Oh yeah. This is awful. Bloomberg broke news yesterday that there's a new movie. A smoothie pop-up chain from like a Jay-Z-invested celebrity chef. And these 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 Airwine smoothie for your brand, it's like 200K for a month or something. We have to do this. Yeah, we're we've been working on it. You say that's crazy. You guys don't have to do this.

It's worth every penny for the TBPN Feed Me Airwan smoothie. You're telling me that's not going to net out. No, you should do a drink at like the US Open or something. Like get, don't do the smoothie. Don't do the smoothie. It's played out. Yeah, it's played. Oh, it's played out.

Okay. Didn't Erwan have a collab with like Volkswagen or something or some really funny like car company they did? Yeah, you're right. They did do a car company. I think they also do like beauty brands, like sunscreen and stuff. Like it's not. Yeah, Chevrolet. They did Chevrolet drink collab.

And what the worst part is that I wouldn't have had a problem if they did the ZR1, like the really crazy Chevy sports car. But they did the 2025 Equinox EV. So you're joking. According to the manufacturer, the collaboration between, it combines Chevy's commitment to a mission-free vehicle. and Arawan's mission to promote sustainability as a merchant of organic foods and wellness products. The drink called the electric juice consists of Choo-Choo-Cho-cho? I don't even know this. Which is the most protein-rich plant source and blue spirulina, the superfood, that matches the Equinox's EV's blue color.

The drinks 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 the sure i don't know i feel like i feel like everyone's getting the haley beaver smoothie i'm about to rock the equinox edi i think it has a certain badge value they're also all like they're like 70 grams of sugar it's like oh yeah i'm long i'm long sugar though four coax is a lot that is a lot but i'm going long i'm going long sugar from here i did i did an experiment um my my wife was very afraid of this is the worst experiment you would i continue yeah but anyways people people are very afraid of sugar i to prove a I drank a soda every single day.

I drank a Coke every single day for six months straight. I know that's not you. You're young and you work out every day. It's like a million ways to offset that. It wouldn't be good. No, a lot of people think. No, no, I agree. It is overblood.

People think like a single Coca-Cola is terrible. Yeah, of course, of course. Everything is in the dose is the poison with all of this stuff. Yeah. You drink a full gallon of a big goal. 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, you know,

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 don't know what his metrics are, but I would imagine He's already... He's catching up to me. Oh, really? Yeah. To probably.

Subscribe to feed me 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 to 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 substack as a superstar writer and immediately be making somewhere in the seven figure range at some point or another, it just becomes really difficult. I see traditional media company is more likely to. start doing like handshakes with substack writers than starting to completely restructure how they're paying their staff. I don't mean. So like 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, 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 $100,000 for her appearance. So just to kind of set the bar. And it ramps up. Yeah, yeah, it obviously ramps up.

But, yes, I am interested in, like, the dynamic of, like, you can still go and publish in traditional media. Is that just like freelance? What is the difference? What do you mean? Like when I write for GQ? Yeah, exactly. Are you a columnist?

There's no reason that I'm doing that besides that I adore my editor there. And I think that it's just like 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 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 Zinn story and when I wrote a 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 want to write, like it doesn't make sense for me to pitch it to The Times or to New York Magazine because it, I can get it done faster on FeedMe. I can outsource an editor if I need that. I can outsource legal services if I need that. And it's better for me to get, to be like breaking those sorts of stories, you know? Yeah, yeah.

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 uh different vibe different maybe more objective maybe more pro tech or pro you know creator or pro whatever the topic is being covered uh i think that it's less about the personalities or the views of the people and maybe just more about the economics that

essentially when you're in legacy media you basically have a salary cap and when you're outside of it you have no salary cap and that actually defines the economic terms shape the type of content more than than anything else do you think that's reasonable do you disagree how would you wrestle with that can you can you keep like expanding on that i want it so so uh i think that there's there's something where if you if you're working at a at a particular outlet and there's some sort of like salary cap. It's like imagine if there were two NBA teams playing it against each other and one had a salary cap of $300,000 per player and the other had no salary cap.

Like who would you expect to produce better basketball? Who would you expect to produce better content when you have, when you have one that where a person can make 10 million or Joe Rogan can make 100 million? Like you're just going to attract the absolute top. because that's where the yeah extremely ambitious yeah and they're extremely incentivized to just work extra hard because if they work if they work a little bit harder and they compound a little bit more and get that extra guest and write that extra piece it could not it doesn't mean oh here you got a 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 $50 million contract and $100 million contract. So going to that extra thing produces better content. Yeah, it's really interesting to see so many traditional journalists, you know, give substack a shot and like they just plateau. Yes.

But 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. Like when I was getting paid 60K at a job and when I was getting paid 60K at a job and when I'm making like 10 times that now, right?

Like, so I think that substack and these sorts of platforms, even what you guys are doing, also attract personality types that are, had less boundaries and rules in the ways that they work. 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. I mean, going going above and beyond for a. job where the cap might be like what did that New York magazine story say about the Atlantic 300k that's what they're paying their journalists like okay so like you're going to go as hard as

you can to make 300k and get those benefits and whatever but the other thing that I'll say like is you have to be willing to not have insurance you have to be willing to you know have have months where you're you're not having like the support of a team and it's just like a very specific type of personality. But I think you're totally onto something. Like, I think I'm playing a different game than my peers who are working in an office at a magazine or 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 the NutraGrain 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 that makes no sense like that's clearly a cash grab that that feels like it seems like legacy media brands could get away with that kind of thing for a long time,

even though we're saying, you know, why is... NutraGrain needs better marketing, because the first thing I think about with Notre Grange... I think they can shut down. Yeah, I always think about 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 Nutragrine. No. And so my biggest association with Nutri-Rane is like a long Big Newton. Yeah, they got to work on that. Yeah, it's like, is it a fig Newton? Is it the Crum 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's like, okay, we're going to go after the moms that read Vogue and get them to buy it for their 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 gallivine. through the streets of New York City. And I really like this girl, Michelle.

Yeah. And I saw her post it, and I saw that it was between Vogue and NutraGrain. 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, 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, but I didn't pick up on it. Somebody else would have.

But I think that Kande Nast overall right now is on life support. Like we had this conversation when Vanity Fair is looking for their next editor. Unfortunately, like it's happening immediately right after that with this new, this new Vogue editor. It's a lot of pressure for like, I don't know what, like a few more years of running this magazine. It just doesn't really seem like how it doesn't. 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 I think the brand carried through.

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 that is the type of, like, you know, entrepreneurial energy that I'm sure the particular partner that worked on, whether it actually starred in the commercial, would bring to a partnership and select and coordinate 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 wound up being very honest. I was like, why wouldn't you just hand these to the hungover girls at bar stool and like have. them talk about like how this is like the bar like the hangover snack like that I think would have moved the needle totally I don't know are the 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

Valenciaaga at their show this week somebody posted a photo of like Valenciaaga bars like oh there we go 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. I mean, it certainly shows that, like, Balenciaga is still on the, you know, hip or just aware because, like, Peter Rahal, he's kind of, you know, known in consumer package goods world and a little bit in tech.

And some people know the story of RX 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 is kind of signaling a little bit to that. Yeah. Yeah. We're cool with the new business community. And I'm sure that that took them like a couple thousand bucks like put together.

Like, you know, it's not difficult. 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 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 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. what makes for a good brand event?

Like is this just a happy hour? Is that we're talking about? Is there a bad brand event? It's actually interesting that the thing I'll say, we were talking about SVB collapsed earlier. They would throw dinners that, like there's an entire founder dinner

industrial complex that are just like financial or you know, companies that throw these dinners. The funny thing is that within tech, the company has historically failed to make them social moments. So it'd be like it'll say the name. It'll say SVB on the menu. 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 going to 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 going to have a moment. Yeah. I threw a brand dinner or I 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 keychain. That was my brand moment. That's a great moment. So that's another thing. Like at those dinners are all. Yeah. How are brands being creative? Are we seeing like ice sculptures or step and repeats? Like 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 more innovative things are like, I think when you give people an activity to do, like if you are doing like bowling or and making it like glamorous or like, 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 it's basically like take your customers on a date right like on an extravagant adventurous date yeah yeah exactly um and then if you level up then you're you're going to start talking about like brand trips like armes took people to aspen last summer And yeah. I mean, a ton of VC firms do that all the time. It could come with us and we'll do a track day or movie night or we'll go out to, you know, some, you know, 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. Postmortem on the Democratic primary, but just on the marketing, right? There was a lot of coverage of Zoron. 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, TikTokers or content creators that are like, I want to build a business around this for politicians? That would be interesting. Yeah, I had a friend who I actually used to work with at Condé 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, 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 meta. 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 zoran 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 uh 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&A with me for feed me so he his team knew where to where to

I go. That's good We've been talking a ton about the AI talent wars a lot of people in Silicon Valley making a hundred million dollars for in signing 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 a hundred million dollars burning a hole in their pocket? They want to get in the game. They want to 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 a Louis-Mangioni 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 LaCost polos, you know. Okay. Maybe they should be carrying too. Maybe they should be, you know,

if you got the, you got to be everyday carry now if you're making $100 million. In California, it's gotten more lenient. Yeah. 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 going to 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 Sagaponic is a microclimate. And I feel like that's a good place to invest your money. Wait, break that down a little bit, a little bit more. 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 Sagapana could have a different weather report because it's this micro subclimates. Because of the dunes and the tides and the trees. There's different parts of L.A. that have the same kind of dynamic. Yeah.

I mean, isn't San Francisco? 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 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 Nouveau like somebody like him or like you know like

take him out dinner talk to him and and get some advice I bought a watch from him last year and he seems like he knows his stuff would you pick up um I got my husband a nice watch okay let's go let's hear it for the husband yeah two size gongs one of you that's how you know it's a good one A birthday and a gift. And maybe like befriend 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

where it was a cease and desist from the New York Times because they like copied the cover art and they just printed, made a shirt, sold it. That'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 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. A lot of technologists. We're just like 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 then whatever ideas you have all you yes men just tell you yes that's the best idea ever a lot of people say don't do it but maybe it's 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 okay so stay away from the yes man yeah you want yes people on your team where you say i want to do the impossible and they just say yes yes We're going to do it, but there's a line, you know, you don't want to cross it. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This is 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 to.

Happy Fourth of July. Yeah, happy for it. 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 Elon coming for the bill. It's absolutely war on the timeline. The timelines in 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 will see their face on this poster in the primary next year. Pinocchio mode.

Lyer voted to increase America's debt. It's actually never been easier to make your enemies look like Pinocchio. Yeah, but I feel like if you put like, I don't know, I don't even know who voted for. Like let's just say like Ted Cruz or something. If you put like Ted Cruz's face on here, like are you going to lose the Pinocchio-ness? AI will find a way. I feel like it can be a little bit rough. Anyway, Elon's upset.

He's trying to start a new party. He's America party. He said Vox Populi, Vox Dei. He wants to start the American Party. And he is pissed because Polly Market is showing that the is expecting the reconciliation bill, the big beautiful bill to pass by July 4th and 62% 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'd be interesting. Lots of pork. But if you're AGI-pilled, it doesn't matter. Yeah. We are going to be printing at 10% GDP folks in just a few thousand days when superintelligence arrives.

These debts are- We're weeks, if not days away. Many people are saying. And so if you're against this bill, you're just telling yourself about your AGI 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 are humanoids,

humanoids are going to be important? You're obviously making them. Are they going to impact the economy? Are they going to accelerate growth? Yeah. This is the post-1970 stagnation. You know, we've been growing at 2%. Satina adela is 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, like, redistribution. To Elon's credit, he's also said when he initially exited Doge and just stopped being a special employee, he did say the only way out is growth. So he knows this too. But I think he can hold both of these ideas, which is we need to grow.

But he's also frustrated. The Hegelian dialectic, of course. Yeah, I mean, 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 redistribal. You could be paying people like you could have like something that feels like a massive social safety net Something that feels like UBI or or socialism But actually attack people less because the growth is so significant So it all changes when super intelligence arise maybe maybe Zoron is just so a GI pilled 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 or 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 bitcoiner. He's against inflation.

Yes, yes, exactly. Is that Kukov? Thanks for having me. Live for Mr. Washington. Washington correspondent. Mr. Washington. I even set up. I don't know if you can see that's great. That's the monument right there. Wow, no way. There we go. Beautiful. 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. I'll get out of the way, but you can see the good stuff behind me. That's the important fact.

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 takeaway from like where the dividing lines are around the bill.

Yeah. So there's a couple trip lines. 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 instead of a 10-year agreement. And Blackburn has been sort of a key driver of getting it back out again. It's out. Now it was done 99 to 1 in the Senate, almost unanimous in the Senate, to get this out. this was a big win for Gario, anthropic, probably the number one beneficiary. And by the way,

somebody who certainly used a fair bit of political capital pushing for this, that's fault line number one. I would say fault line number two. Really quickly, stay on that. It's a potential ban on AI regulation that was removed. And so the current bill does not have a,

does not have a moratorium on regulation. So it's kind of a double negative. There's no moratorium on federal regulation. That's right. So you can have California states, whatever, who want 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, the 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, net net, this moratorium, the time that they got to a compromise was so watered down. really wouldn't have impacted Tennessee or California anyway. But it was a very dramatic swing from in, out, in, and now out once again for good. And what do you expect at the state level around AI safety going forward? Is this going to, is the fact that this was removed going to inspire certain governors to say,

you know, make this a part of their platform? And I guess like I want to know more about like if I'm 11 labs and I'm training a voice agent and I can't be sure that some clip from, you know, Elvis or, you know, some Justin Bieber worked its way in there. 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 where 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? Because we've seen this with Apple intelligence not being available in China, not being available in Europe, for example.

But yeah, 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, this category one, has a law mandating something needs to be in a textbook. But suddenly you're going to comply nationally because they are so large, they warp 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, 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, if Tennessee had the Elvis Act probably says, look, we just skirt around Tennessee. I don't know. I haven't spoken to 11 labs. But

if California passes, then suddenly you have the whole country warped by this. And Gavin Newsome and the California legislature are certainly ambitious enough to try, as they did last session, to try to pass something that would impact the whole country. Yeah, wasn't there news out of California this week or last week around some of the stuff? Yeah.

Yeah, there was a huge fight, which had an unlikely set of bedfellows where you saw Andresen 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 other 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 Vancehead looking at 2028, right, you already see that Ocasio-C 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, for in particular, thought were politically toxic as a wedge against him when he comes and runs for president in four years. So sorry, that was, you didn't answer, 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, 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 health care? 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 Vigy 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 V-12s.

I'm hoping that there's some move there to subsidize things like the Ferrari 12-cylindry, the Dolce Trilindia. It's a 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 playing field in favor of the larger engines, the supercharged V8s, the twin turbos, the G63s, these types of cars that Americans deserve to be driving. So what's the news on the EV credit front?

I agree with you that the backbone of the American economy is the Ferrari, right? It's impossible to 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. great if it did. It's not going to solve that huge unsolved problem. What it will do, by the way,

is continue to drive a wedge between Elon and Trump, right? 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, the 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 about 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 now it's become maybe let's punish Elon, but is this 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. He doesn't use 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 a 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 going to be really hard to get it done before July 4th. What about Elon's America party? You think that's real or just exciting. Are those my only two options? Real are exciting? There's no door number three.

Yeah, I mean, it's obviously, like, you know, we were talking earlier. Third parties haven't haven't historically done well. Well, he has the America PAC. So when you say Elon could primary someone, he could potentially primary a Republican on the Republican ticket with the American PAC. 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? Yeah, 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 Zoron in New York. 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 Zoron 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, and that was your only option. And now I tune into TBPN while I play Subway Surpers 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 MAGA guy, it can be a tech right guy, can be a populist guy,

I'm a new right guy. And 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 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. What I would say is if this gets done by July 4th, the thing that you're going to have to look to is that 9 a.m. Eastern vote to see how much unity is there in Republican Party. They can barely lose any votes that 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 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 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 dollar thing, but it's like that's a hundred million dollars that I can go after in energy or in defense or in shipbuilding or any. Have you seen any of these like they're called riders, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's a good question. Biden was famous for stacking a lot of these, like the Inflation Reduction Act had a million ways you could 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 that going to be 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. Fonnierce piece of pork in the bill, Murkowski, who was the key holdout.

the Senate from Alaska, got a tax exemption for Alaskan, native Alaskan whalers. She said basically native Alaskan Whalers need to be, yeah, that was honestly big delivery for her constituency, a people who kill whales in Alaska, I suppose. Let's give it up for the whalers. They don't get enough attention in Washington. Well, I mean, we've talked about the before, but, you know, energy is really important for the AI data center race. That's right.

They produce oil that you can burn. Wasn't it Chase who said he would burn whale blubber? 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. Just being like launching crusoe for whales. Yeah. So VCs are the new whalers.

Yes, yes. They really are. And the old whalers. That's true. Zach, this was so much fun. We'll have to have you call in tomorrow or Thursday. Yeah, when there's more news. Please.

It's my first. wedding anniversary. So I'll be around. Congratulations. Funny a time to call in. Thank you very much. Incredible. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers on me, boys. See you soon. 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. That's me, too. Welcome to the stream. I would love to start with

the news today and then I want to go into some of 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 and 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 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. In exchange, you send 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 Anthropics, 30,000 times harder. And the reason why is because people are reading the derivatives, they're not reading the content. and 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 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 talk to publishers, we realize there was something that we could do about it because Cloudflare runs one of the world, world's largest networks, a huge amount of the internet already sits behind us. We could partner with literally publishers, everyone from AdWeek to Zip 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 buy. default for free, block any AIC crawlers 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 the outputs of the model. No, 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, 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 working out and who really have been done in over the past year because I know didn't news corp do a bespoke deal with open AI 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 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, you know, 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, you know, someone like Open AI 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 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, you know, before iTunes launched, we were all downloading music on Napster and, you know, 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 they can 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. We don't know it's 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, 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 or whatever else and that's going to develop over over the next uh over the coming months is that the correct is that the correct model to think that the the content producer would set the price I mean that's certainly what happens on sub stack and you know the the the New York Times 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 dollars a month and occasionally I fire off queries that probably land on the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times and I would be happy for them to send 10 cents or a dollar or split off 50% of what I'm paying 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 like the

volume algorithm that you see on on on on YouTube or Spotify. Uh, does that seem like kind of what the long term, um, outcome might look like or do we need to also get to some sort of like ad driven marketplace because that's ultimately where YouTube, how YouTube prices these things. Yeah, you know, I think it's going to be, um, I think that we 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 Danielack, the, uh, the founder of Spotify.

And it was, you know, it was really, it was interesting. He said, you know, that the ultimate model that Spotify settled on, 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 podcast versus audiobooks. 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 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 to be that big deal in your care. On the other hand, of a research study comes out on acetaminopin's effects on, on, you know, different types of chemotherapy, very little value for the chapop for teen girls, but incredibly valuable for the doctor.

And so what we have to do is actually, I think, on an 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 know, that 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. Do you? Talk briefly about stable coins.

I remember in this Ben Thompson piece, people have been suggesting this idea that St. Stablecoins could be some part of the solution to a, or backbone for a new business model for the internet. At the same time, while I'm bullish on Stablecoins, 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 what your... This was Ben's reaction to the original sin of the internet was advertising and this idea that Mark Andreson was. 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. Yeah, you know, I think the answer doesn't have to be 100% one or the other. And so I would guess that there are going to be very traditional kind of traditional financial rails that will be ways to pay people out. But there will also likely be something that is blockchain-based or stable-coin-based. And again, I think we're looking at all of the different providers that are in this space, including potentially creating our own stable coin 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, you know, charged for or that you actually get paid to do. And there's got to be a way for those transactions 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, you know, very high

volume, low dollar amount, uh, uh, transaction. So I think that's right. My only one quibble is that I think that the original sin of the internet is not that it didn't include payments. It's that it was, uh, there was no privacy, uh, built into it in your IP address reveals far too much about you as and who you are. We don't even have to get to cookies, but that's a, no, we totally can. What about we, we've talked about content creators, publishers. What about, uh, the, the apps of the world, the ubers, the Instacarts that actually have 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 in a chat GPT and that's my default daily assistant, let's say in a few years from now, and I'm like, hey, order me groceries and order me this Uber, you know, I'm not in the app seeing ads potentially, you know, being upsold, and that could be a problem for those types of companies. Yeah, totally. And I think that, I mean, you know, 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, you know, 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, that advertising experience, and again, I don't know enough about, you know, 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, what that looks like. I think that's going to be less up to Cloudflare. I think it's going to be, you know, our job will be how do we provide those payment rails,

how do we provide the systems, how do we make it so that we can have guard rails 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, but you're right that's a sort of draft version of that specification, and there are a lot of things that have to, you know, mature in order for that to be something that is the real kind of agent-to-agent system that runs, that is likely to run what will be an increasingly AI-driven web.

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, you know, Google really 30 years ago defined what was the business model for the web,

which was 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, you know, who can write the headline that produces the most, you know, sort of inflammatory response in all of us, you know, who basically drives the most cortisol, you know, 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, you know, the alternative is if you imagine that kind of 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 AI's 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 a really a big turning point year for a lot of reasons. It was sort of the year that 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 and in the EU. You have the first Donald Trump election. You've got G 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 U.S. 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, is probably still remains the biggest threat to the overall Internet.

But this shift to AI as well, you know, 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, you know, we took in July 1st, we took a real step in moving in that direction and making sure that content creators can be compensated for really producing information, which is valuable to advance human knowledge. What do you think about the future of investigative journalism? There's been a big shift in just content creation into independent creators, but a lot of that is actually down. own stream 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 he and these investigative journalists, they tend to, you know, John Kerry 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 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, you know, repurposed content and the scubaid version. scooper actually gets 10%. Do you think that's possible or how do you think that investigative journalism will evolve? Yeah, I don't know this is an answer to a question, but it, but it's, I thought it was interesting. As I said, I met with Daniel Ack up in 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. Not to get too specific. I mean, I don't know what these are, but they're people called 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-to of what everybody else is doing, like taking a different twist, using signals from the market in order to go find that. So, you know, again, that's not investigative journalism by any means.

But I think it is actually advancing kind of the sort of good of humanity where it's taking. taking what a place where there's a missing need and is filling that missing need. And so I am hopeful, you know, and relative, I mean, 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, 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 free? I think that the, 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 Medici's, where there are five big AI companies and they basically employ each of them, all of the journalists, all the researchers, all the academics to be able to do the research to feed their systems because

you're still going to have to have original content. People are still going to have to be able to produce that in order for the AI systems to fill in the holes in their kind of effective block of Swiss cheese that is their model. But I think that's a back. That's a pretty bad world where, again, because you then probably have like the conservative AI and the liberal AI. I mean, all these things that we've kind of, that the Internet kind of broke apart. You could imagine AI is a system that is just this massive consolidator in the future. And I think that's a bad outcome. And I think a better outcome is if we can figure out how can we reward people for, again, driving knowledge, but not get to a place where all of them have to be employed by.

by one of the five, you know, big eye. Yeah, I actually talked to somebody very high up at one of the labs who said that, was saying that, like, if you take the total, uh, the total salaries of all the journalists in America, it would be a fraction of what the AI labs are spending right now,

just acquiring data. And so it's not a financial question. It is a political, cultural question. It's interesting. Yeah. I have one follow up. That's also the argument why I think that,

and I've been really positively, um, surprised as we've talked. with, because we've talked with all the big tech companies, all the AI companies about this, and they 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, 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? Yeah. Zooming out just for a second, what is the state? How has 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, it's whatever you see sort of in a, in the sort of, kinetic side, the physical side of a conflict is usually replicated in the cyber side of the conflict. And so, you know, 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 like it was either by the Israelis or Israeli sympathetic attackers. Iran has tried to do the same thing against Israel. cyber defenses are much stronger, but we're starting to see that Iran is targeting other, other largely U.S., 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 U.S. in a way that is harmful but doesn't start World War III.

And I think that increasingly, unfortunately, cyber will be a big piece of that. And so we're, you know, we're doing everything we can 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. 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, sort of the chip wars, 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 not trying to build a foundational model LLM, so we're not, we're not as much competing for the, the leading edge AI researchers. I will say that we've, I've been really amazed at both from an action. 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 like today has been a record applicant day for us. On the on the on the, congratulations, record. Sorry, I hit the air horn for you on the record applicant day. But it's good. It's good news. And then, you know, I think, you know, we've, 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 rights constraints.

We do in, but in kind of a micro way where, you know, you 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 GPs 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. 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,

the fruit company down in Cooper Tino 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 long term. 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, because again, we can't build our own data centers in the business that we're in.

And then chip shortage, the chip shortages are funny. Like, it's, there's never been a chip shortage in any time in the history of, of, silicon that doesn't turn into a glut. Hey, but this time it's different. Yeah, that's time. It's totally different. So I think that you're going to see both, you're going to just see shifting demand that's there and a lot more.

InVitia is not going to 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, we've got to have a launch and come back on again soon. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for us.

Good luck filtering through all those job applicants. We'll talk to you soon. See, yeah. Bye. There's no, 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 Open AI 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 superintelligence 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, like, you know, we're prepared to go on the counterattack. Like, we got attacked, but we're ready to go back.

What's interesting is, like, I don't think that, I don't think that meta is necessary. going to try and go eat chat GPT's lunch. Like I was revisiting that conversation that we had with Jeff Huber. And he was saying like, you know, he was kind of reiterating like never bet against Zuck. Like he's working on 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 disrupt chat GPT. Because Google's already running that playbook. Like Mark can see that and see that like what happens when you're a trillion dollar company and you roll out a basically a direct clone of the chat gpti app it's like yeah you can get a decent amount of users in a num in a notional terms like i'm pretty sure the jemini app has like a hundred thousand user or a hundred million users and like lots of five-star reviews but it just doesn't have anywhere near the penetration of chat gpti and so when you pull someone off the street and you say what do you use for a i 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 of a talent raid of this magnitude, right? We covered Ken Griffin rating Enron, but it was after. post the collapse, right? Apple heavily recruited out of Xerox Park in 1979 in the early 80s.

But like, it was kind of a down swing. Yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't, it wasn't anything of this magnitude, nor, nor was it, hey, we're going to come in and just give you these like nine figure off, you know, total, totally, packages and things like that. Yeah. And it's very common for a startup to be able to pull people from the big legacy company

that's kind of sclerotic. And, 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 OpenAI. I mean, Brett Taylor, who's the chairman of the board at OpenAI, was the CTO of Meta. 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. 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 at, he's early at Google. He works with Paul Buchite on Gmail. He works on Google Maps.

Then he goes over to Meta CTO there. Then he goes to Open AI, chairman of the board there. And it's like he is a, he's a startup guy. And so he's always riding like the new way. You usually can't poach them back into the older company. That's rare. Yeah. One other, some other precedent here in 2010 and 2011,

Zuck and Facebook went super aggressive poaching from Google. So Facebook had crossed half a billion users. They were in that period of transitioning from a super scrappy startup. 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 Plus. And Zuck did something similar, not to the same scale, but just went 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 or build faster? Anyone that, you know, because Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. It would be a different place. But fortunately, you can go to figma.com. You can think bigger.

And you can get started for free. Anyway, what do you think of the buzzword super intelligence? this whole, like they've really rebranded it. Is it a goal post shifting thing? I think it's smart. I think he poached the, the word superintelligence. It's mine now. It's mine now.

Because, uh, and he's not saying, and he's not saying, the safe super intelligence team. He's just saying super intelligence implies reckless. Safe super intelligence implies reckless super intelligence. I like that. Um, but it's funny because, uh, you know, uh, everyone was focused on like AI as a buzzword then it was a GI then it was now it's super intelligence but like you know within our group like we all think like super intelligence kind of the old

thing like everyone 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 what 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 AGIs basically here super intelligence is basically here but Giga intelligence. That's the one we're working on. Because we're going to need a new buzzword because we're burning through buzzwords and increasing rate. And so we're just, we, we just steamrolled the touring test, completely blasted through

AGI. No one talks about AGI anymore. AGI is here. Yeah. But, you know, super intelligence. We're going to solve this buzzword. We're going to churn through this in a year or two. We've got to start working on giga intelligence now. Yeah. This is the way. Anyway, start adopting it. Chen promised that he was working with Sam,

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, and we're scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent. Still, even as Open AI 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. While I'll fight for to keep every one of you, I won't do it at the price of fairness to others, he wrote. It's such a brutal dynamic if you're Mark Chen, 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, 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, you know, somebody's potentially getting poached by meta and you say to retain them, you're like, okay, we're going to give you this sort of massive incremental grant and the other people on their team are going to be like,

wait, well, is that my market value? I didn't go talk to Facebook or I didn't, I turned down, I never took the meeting or whatever. So you should pay me the same thing too. Yeah. I'm loyal. I shouldn't, don't you want to pay them? I'm a missionary. Yeah, I'm a missionary. Why are you paying the mercenaries more? You should pay, you should pay them. The missionaries, the same price, just because they're missionaries. Rough, for sure. Durdal. Anyway.

Let me talk about living. No, the other thing is it creates this like really nasty incentive to basically be like, oh yeah, you know, you maybe got hit up by a met a recruiter like many months ago. And you can be like, yeah, I mean, they reached out to me. And suddenly they're like hovering around you, like, being like, all right, what's it going to take? We really 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 opening eye, we're 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, you know, if you want to see who your high performers are, just look in the linear, right?

Linear's purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. If Zuck were able to gain access to Open AIs linear, it would be illegal, but it would also tell them, tell them 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.

Vantas 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 top AI researchers heating up in Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg has been particularly aggressive in his approach, offering $100 million signing bonuses to some open AI staffers. According to comments Altman made on a podcast with his brother, Jack Altman. So this $100 million 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 a kind of a game of telephone a little bit in the sense that it's possible that you could maybe be making $100 million over a number of years in stock based on appreciation. But he was very skeptical that anyone was getting $100 million on day one without any sort of strings attached for like a true signing bonus. So I don't know how real that numbers. Yeah. And remember that the Zurich, the Zurich team came out and said, the Zurich team explicitly said we didn't get it. But I know, I know.

The way that he phrased that it could have been more. Clearly we're getting. No, no, no, no. No, I do think that the round numbers are upset, are easy to latch on to. Like, why is Mom Dani talking about billionaire specifically? He doesn't have a problem with 99 millionaires because like 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 easy to quantify. And so the hundred million, if it was 80 million, it wouldn't be going nearly as viral as 100 million. And so, so I don't know, 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, you know, they, it's basically a signing bonus because they, they got the deal on the, on the, as soon as they signed, but they do have some sort of earn out or the shares are locked up in some 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, you know, a huge offer to go to Open AI.

And it was structured in an interesting way with like an acquisition. And, you know, but he got what it got a few points. Yeah, 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's a founding designer? He's a founding designer, basically. So it's a couple percentage points. So multiple sources at 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 want to 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 Open AI, 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 clot 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 Senti. and I'm getting an offer to like go to a new team that I don't know if I'm going to like and it's unclear like the vision is not quite as clear at meta 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 dollars you know if it's 20 million dollars I can see that if it's $100 million for the top, top, top people. It makes total sense. Yeah, I mean, like, what was the, I mean, the deal to bring on Alex Wang was probably, like, way over $100 million 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, based on what Dillon was. Yeah, there's just enough precedent here that, again, going back to Zuck raiding 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. 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 in the Blackberry movie, there's this whole story about they go 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 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 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 that certainly leads to more people taking. the phone call of like, oh, wow, Mark is really taking this seriously. I should, 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 a $10 million offer, like, you know, 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 if mark comes to you and says hey you're a top a AI researcher come over here and then the top of the AI researcher says like yeah great I hear I hear a hundred million dollars is the going rate and Mark's like no no no that's like fake news that Sam was spreading like we're actually paying 15 then you're like oh no like I was I was hoping you for a hundred but it kind of benefits both mocky-vellian people and yeah you see it could be like 40 chess on both sides I don't know yeah um

Over the past month, Meta has been aggressively building out their new AI effort and has repeatedly and most unsuccessfully tried to recruit some of our strongest talent with comp-focused packages, Chen wrote on Slack. A source close to the efforts at Meta confirmed the company has been significantly ramping up its research recruiting with a particular eye toward talent from Open AI and Google. Anthropic, while also a top rival, is thought to be less of a culture fit at Meta. One source tells Wired. They haven't necessarily expanded the band, but for top talent, the sky is the limit, which is funny because, yeah, of course, like, Anthropics are like so missionary-driven. Like, it's going to be very hard to go to Anthropic and research scientists and be like, ads. Better ads. They're like, we're building God here.

Yeah. Anyway. $100 million is $100 million. Not for, not for anthropic guys. Anthropic guys are true believers. They don't care. What's $100 million in a post-scarcity world? It doesn't matter.

You want to be on the post-scarcity train. Chen's note. It is so, it is so telling, though, like, how you, like, sort of, like, try to, you know, pinpoint, like, Zuck's views on AI. He's like, I'm not even going to bother with those people anthropic, not a culture fit. Two AGI pill. 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 meta. If they pressure you or make ridiculous exploding offers, just tell them to back off. It's not nice to pressure people and 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 a problem.

opening eyes grinds at. It's really fantastic. 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. I was posting, you know, the over, I need a polymarket on whether or not we get a Zuck American flag video on July 4th. Do you think it'll happen? I actually think they're 100% should be a polymarket on that. Right? It's kind of 50-50, right?

Like he's 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 this week is one of the greatest pieces of content he puts out. Think about how hard Zuck is going right now. Go harder.

of July 4th. And just don't get outworked by him. Yes. Just don't get out worked by Zach this week. It's 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. Meta knows we're taking this week to recharge and we'll take advantage of it to try and pressure you to make decisions fast in an 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. While opening eyes leadership is taking meta's effort 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 opening AI staffer who worked closely with Altman and said the CEO wanted to see Buzzy announcements every few months. This was a really, this was a key to their strategy was like, always have a buzzy announcement ready if the competition does 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. Like,

we're like, oh, Google's announcing the new Gemini. Let's just steamroll them in the timeline. Oh, 24 hours before. Yeah. I'd love to introduce you deep research. Like, I mean, it's, it's masterful. And like, but that's the game you got to play. That's the game on the field. Like, I, I, I think he's being aggressive, but he's not doing anything wrong. He, he, he, he, um, is up there with Elon in terms of. of creating and riding hype and constantly delivering enough real product value to justify the hype that was being sold, you know, 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,

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 eating Chachipiti every day. Tens of billions of visits. Like, 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, in conflict. So someone said this like, Elon is both Thomas Edison and Barnum and Bailey or whatever,

P.T. Barnum. Yeah. He's a circus man who can put on a show and put a robot in a, uh, 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 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 it. He's ready to go. it up. Get him to ring. 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 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. 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, hey, I'm really happy here at opening eye. Yeah. I have $80 million of stock. Yeah. And I was just offered 150 over the next year and it's highly or over the next few years, it's highly liquid. Yeah. Meaning that I can market sell it,

quarterly forever. Yeah. 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 dollars in like illiquid open AI. Like, is that going to be hard at all? I feel like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, private wealth management are going to be beating down your doors to give you a loan that's backed by the shares. Sure. You're only going to have to put down 10%. Sure, but meanwhile, the company's failing to go through a for-profit conversion. Yeah, but I mean, Sotia has taken 20% off the top.

I mean, that applies. No, I'm just saying. That applies like a small haircut, I would say. I'm just saying there is always, there's always going to be a tension of somebody having massive wealth, but not having greenbacks. Yeah. There's always going to be that tension. Yeah. and people seeing that meta is one of the most liquid stocks in the world.

Yeah. Can constantly trade in and out of it. And it's ultimately just, it's stable. Yeah. So. I mean, if you're interested in liquid stocks, go to public.com investing for those to take it seriously, multi-asset investing, industry leading yields. Good old-fashioned stocks.

Trusted by millions. And who knows, maybe they'll have open a eye soon. Anything's possible. You, yeah, we should, we should, you know, Robin Hood has, you know, the tokens around private companies. Maybe we should tokenize non-profits. I want to be able to trade, you know, PETA, you know. Let me, let me go along PETA. Let me get some leverage on that.

I want some levered options on PETA. Look at Tyler right now. 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. That's honestly. He's sitting at 26 minutes so far.

All right. We'll have fun in there, Tyler. Just look over it. 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

Did this challenge It made it seem like, oh, I'm going to happily give away my new My VR Xbox. Yeah. And thinking that there's no way he could finish it in 40 minutes. But now he's,

I think he's going to do it. He's speed running. Wow. Okay. Pillar of autumn. It's happening. Anyway, Swix has the story.

He's breaking it down. Yeah, some good highlights here. The mark, Mark V. Mark war has resulted in going from, Oh, the good people don't leave to someone has broken into our home and stolen something. One week company shut down, question mark, question mark.

I mean, I was going back and forth here. I wouldn't be surprised if the shutdown was somewhat strategic in that, hey, people already need a break. We shouldn't have them walking around the office. 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. 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. I'm just, I'm not 100% that like 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 AGI race, especially when Stargate comes on. line. Dylan 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 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. 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, 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 reel 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. I think we can talk about it in like the abstract. But, but yeah, I mean, none of that was like Nintendo Wii level graphics. But, but, but, I mean, that was, that one picture was like iconic and kind of like, it felt like, oh, this is kind of a step back in terms of... Well, many more people saw that picture than actually

use the product. Yeah. 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 quest when it came out was Robo Recall, which looked super sci-fi and just looked awesome. And 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 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 a commercial run. Number one in performance benchmarks. Number one in bankoffs. Number one on G2. Ranking on G2. Let's go. So if you're looking to do customer service, head over to Finn.

I'm saying this. They're not saying this. But I'm going to say this is the official, the official, AI CX tool of both AI safety and being AGIPILT because Anthropic uses. Oh, really? No way. There we go. Okay.

Awesome. Yeah, I'm sure Anthropical will love that. We said you could put our logo on your website. We didn't say these technologies daily. These two podcasters could go way over their skis on this endorsement. It's the official CX agent. Anyway, Rune had an interesting take here. Diving into why these trade deals are so not really trade deals for these poachings can be so, can be so damaging.

And he's trying to put it in broader consumer terms. We're going to debate whether or not his point is well taken. He, of course, works at Open AI and has for a number of years. Roon says, intellectual property by default is a market failure. Single well-informed talented defectors can watch. 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 underinvest in R&D efforts due to IP seepage, just like the

I Drink Your 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 Rune, 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 saying if you really want to use non-competes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Go where they can be enforced, right? Yes, but then as, uh, historically impossible. Yeah, but then as an AI researcher, you'd say, I definitely don't want to leave California. I love actually, I'm going to get a much better deal here.

Yeah, my, my question is like, I've always been interested in like, why can, you know, like the consumer packaged goods industry, like, patent like a tab on a can for 25 years and like, Walt Disney can own like the shape of mouse ears for like 80 years, but, like, Google can't own the transformer for like even a minute. 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. Is it is a byproduct of hacker culture,

and 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, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a culture of, you know, competition doesn't. I'll give you an example. So, so a poll to refresh on the iPhone was created by a Twitter employee,

like a Twitter UX, UI developer built that, built that user interaction. And then Twitter had a patent on it. Lauren Brickter. Yes. American software developer, best known for creating POLD to refresh.

Yeah. The Pohl to refresh interaction. So we created that, that design pattern. And then he had a patent on it. Twitter has, own 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 now

natively in iOS and it's in all of, you know, it's basically like one button to like if you're, if you're true, 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're just, just keep, you just keep scrolling to the bottom. So, so we're actually post-pull 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, but endless scroll was also something that was not able to be owned, which is just odd to me. And then there's the other question of, like, Coca-Cola's been able to keep the, you know, the formula is a trade secret for like 100 years or something. And it's just odd that tech companies can't seem to do either. They can't keep the secrets. You can have trade secrets, right? It's not like an open AI researcher can go over and say,

here's a bunch of code. Let's roll it out, right? Yep. It's basically the sort of way of doing things that they've internalized from being at a company for a certain amount of time. Tacit value of knowing what works and what doesn't. And so my naive read on this is that if you had had a top tier open AI researcher, at meta during the Lama 4 buildout,

that researcher would have said, hey, don't focus on pre-training scale as much. We need to get a reasoning model out and we need to focus on RL and post-training, much more, much more. And when you talk to Dylan Patel, I was asking him about deep seek and how Deep Seek was doing all these innovations

and moving to Floating Point 8, like smaller, basically smaller numbers storing the weights. And he was like, oh yeah, but Open A, I was doing that like two years ago. deep seek just open sourced it. And so it's like the world found out, if you found out the best practices from deep seek, because they open sourced it,

like 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,

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 Roon is baiting, baiting Zach into just overpaying. The 40 chess is like, oh yeah, this is, they're getting everything. They're taking everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I don't, I don't necessarily believe that because I did talk to Roon like years ago.

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

Um, 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. Well, I mean, we have a light guest booking today,

but we're spending an hour talking about one story because it's fun stuff. We can continue. We can go over to the Wall Street Journal because in the exchange section, there is a fantastic article related to this. It says, it's known as the list,

and it's a secret file of geniuses. And I'm looking at this. It says, Mishka Belenco, Yu-Zong, Mark Zuckerberg's been reviewing this list. Lucas Byers on this, the new guy.

It says Jordy Hayes, John Coogan, Tyler Cosgrove, Ben Kohler, a couple other folks, but, you know, it's 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 to 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 if Zuck spun up like basically like a hot or not style tool that's just like pins pins to researchers together? Yeah.

Like he makes other researchers like just do the test and then just puts out a list of like these are the this is the the top 50 people. Yep. Yeah. This is so good. Um, so he, uh, Lucas Beyer describes himself as a scientist dedicated to the creation, creation of awesomeness. Very reddit coded. But he's a poster on X as well.

Yeah. Jong specializes in automatic speech recognition and barely has an online presence besides his influential papers. Misha Belenco is an expert in large-scale machine learning who also enjoys hiking and 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 OpenAI 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 artificial intelligence revolution. It is funny. Some of the, you know, some of the losers out of this talent war are 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 invests. You could

have come to them with a ridiculous. What would be very ridiculous for VC, which is I will spin up a new company. Not 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. Yep. And that is no longer even that compelling of an offer. If the odds of actually winning are low and you just want the most access to compute and be traded.

Will is in the studio. Welcome back to TVPN. How are you doing? How's it going? Congratulations on the trade deal. So what supercar did you buy? You go Bugatti-Sheron or you go F-80. 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 that was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. People say, you know, we wanted flying cars. We got a hundred 40-year characters. The fact that you would imply that Will drives himself is offensive. Offensive.

I mean yeah well I've waymo for the first time recently I'd like I'd been to like SF but like I didn't been around SF proper that much since the

way Mo Crays took off and so like that's been like the car experience really just like sure it's on driving 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 than SF it's on brand you're decentralized, you're decentralized.

You're decentralized. Exactly. AI. It's a perfect fit. Perfect fit. Anyway. Did you touch grass at all this weekend or were you locked into the timeline? A lot of stuff was happening on the timeline.

I mean, I'm in New York right now. I did some New York stuff on Saturday. But yeah, I mean, it's been good. Lots of drama, intrigue, as usual. The trade deals. I know I've been tuning in to earlier. I know you guys have gone over. all the major roster updates.

But yeah, it's exciting times. Open AI, 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. 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 how, how actually?

academic are they? How product oriented are they? It does it's it feels like this is purely research you know beefing up of the research team and meta kind of has products solved. Is that the right model to think about this? How can you characterize like the shape of the team that sucks building? Even um there's thousands of really great at software engineers that work in AI. Sure. And but what, you know, even kind of getting a sense of like how many people was, was Zuck really going after? Was it 250? Was it 100? 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. 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 from research your product. Because 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, Yon-Lakoun'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 they got Alex and then supposedly Nat and or Daniel to kind of. kind of handle a little more of the, not the business side, but producty business stuff. Yeah, it's a management role. Yeah. Yeah. What, what is your take on Jan Lacoon right now? How should we think about

his position in the AI world? There's, uh, I, 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 me some credit for that at the same time like there's Ben Thompson's been criticizing on Lacoon a little bit for not driving the 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 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, then like, go do that and like make sure that the models work really well for business. And so I don't know. What is your take? How would you, how would you describe Jan Lacoon in his history and kind of where he sits in the organization to like a layman? Sure. Yeah. So I think people overindex on thinking of Jan as the meta guy like too much. Sure. I think it's a shame that they didn't necessarily have someone. in the Lama org who was as visible as him because he was not involved with Lama at all. Like fair fundamental area research is like a whole other group that they mostly write papers and do very academic work. Jan Lekun's work is very academic.

And it's really like it's I think he's like I think on one hand he like is right in the sense of like we don't have the full picture yet. 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 product.

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 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 not have 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 Jan 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. Yeah. And so that org for meta is not about what product are released next quarter. It's what are our 10-year bets. Yeah. Okay. What about? Sorry.

Yeah, you can go. So Metasures 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. That is incredible.

But generally up 5% for the last week. How did Wall Street generally sort of process the meta-AI story? Because 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, 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 hole 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. Because that was what was weighing on the stock during the Metaverse. versus build out. But this is like AI is so much more productizable. You can make so much more money from it up front. 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 100 million. I know people have all these theories. But like 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. Um, 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 think people are generally like expecting that Meadow will take AI seriously and are kind of happy to see change. Whether that is like justified or not. I mean, we'll see. Yeah, it was interesting. George. The product side is going to be interesting because like they're not a beat to be SaaS company. Well, so I want to push back on that.

They're a content. They're an entertainment company. And I think that I don't, I don't think that people are, are fully understand the potential of Gen. AI around entertainment. Like it gets talked a lot around, oh, you're going to be able to generate, you know, an entire movie or generate video games or things like that. And I, and I think that we haven't seen, we've seen some fantastic examples so far, but nothing. nothing that is, I think like George Hatz was on our show and he was talking about how like basically AI is going to be like having five CIA agents follow you around all the time convincing you to buy products. And like that is like one kind of dark bowl case for dark bowl case.

Dark bull case for meta in the context of AI because it's like it's possible that that Facebook is already the best 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 censorship and, you know, reality checking and 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 large organization that it's potentially like just the B2B applications of AI. inside of meta are like it's a multi-billion dollar like cost center or revenue driver or something like that i don't know i think a company at meta 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 a ws for a lot yeah yeah um can 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 like have so many engineers that you want everything like Google rewrites all their own stuff. Yeah. Microsoft rewrites all their own stuff. And can they, is there another like a tale of end of that has not been done yet that they can squeeze some more money out of her?

Entertainment will be interesting. So one thing that just I was just reminded of, have you seen the Italian brain rot videos? Oh yeah. Love them. Yeah. Yeah. So like I 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. 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 V-O-3, 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 have you

have you seen Higgsfield no field AI I think it's an ex-snapchat team yeah their new image model is basically already at a point where it's creating images that oh yeah I've seen this photo realistic but in the sent photo realistic it looks like some 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 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. Who knows? Yeah. I feel like their 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 has always had that. Yeah, I think it'll they'll have to thread the needle on product in a way that we'll have to get creative because they haven't like it's been a one. while since they had a product innovation that was homegrown that really stuck. Yeah, it is interesting that they haven't tried to create a studio Ghibli moment by you're like going to share an image. 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 and like even baking that down into a filter no it can be so like open AI branded now they have to yeah I'm not saying yeah I'm saying like an entirely like but yeah but yeah basically like the 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 and they should just do that but what do you think of uh Sam Altman's ability to get through this. Like he's had a series of exodus and seemed to continue to march on the anthropic departures, then SSI and thinking machines like XAI. Like this is not the first time. It's not his first rodeo. It's not his first rodeo. And so there's this whole narrative like never been against Zuck.

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, WhatsApp. super dominant and mobile. And so never been against Zuck, but then also maybe never get bet against Sam. Maybe they both win and maybe like the real loser is like, I don't know,

some other company or something. I don't know. I think as long as Open AI doesn't totally drop the ball on product of 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 something that has to go very wrong for people to not, 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 Open AI lost a handful of its top researchers, right? They're just still using chat GPT 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 I just, and again, it's going to create opportunities for people to say, hey, I want to go work on this product that hundreds of millions and soon billions of people use every single day. Right.

And I do think it'll get to a point, especially with like 20, 25 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 a group of concepts around them. And the question is like, okay, what are the winning apps?

Like I imagine that like the real time, clearly kind of thing, opening eyes going to do the version of that at some point. Other people probably will too. Like does that become a modality to do that? People really want like live overview on their screen, on their phone. Like, what's the way that people are going to be interacting with AI generally? Because a lot of those use cases, like, they're already smart enough. It's not about making the models like way smarter at 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 Cluelly thing where one, Roy is like right about the U.X and like wins the market. And the other option is like he's right about the UX but like doesn't win the market. And then there's like, you know, it's just not the right form factor or whatever. But any of, at least the first two outcomes are hilarious

in that, and that Roy Lee ushers in the new paradigm of, for engaging with language models. I'm curious, any, is all the same? 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 co-pilot was early. It was like 2020, 2001, like the first GPT3 copilot came out and like that was already one of the early like LLN 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 summit 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'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. or 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 open AI open source model could be one, whatever meta launches next, right? I'm assuming they're going to 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 CPT

was like a pretty like game changer kind of thing where it was like, we saw with like deep research that like, okay, they kind of figured out how to make agents work, but it was also just like this one version of an agent. And 03, you can kind of get it to be a pretty general agent where it can like do some pretty complex. stuff that was kind of new to see from like the geogessor thing was crazy. And having that as a like vision of like what AGI and I 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. It's just like what are the plausible use cases that people want to use all this for? They want an agent to do XYZ. 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 opening I trying to like sell their RFT service. There's these startups popping off. There was a was the machine. Was the RFT service again? Reinforce reinforcement. Okay. Yeah. And so like they're pushing this pretty hard.

This is the, you're spending over $10 million like Palantier. Open AI will also customize a model for you. So they have like a serious heavy 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 O4 Mini and that is a little more self-serve

but they're also like doing consulting around that before we're deployed thing around that is that important strategy for open AI to kind of stay in the game against open source models like Lama 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 is 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, just like having services that were whose job is to like come in, whether or not it's fine doing or not, just like make them into agent shaped tasks. where you can then optimize the model and have someone craft the model experience for you. Because like I think a lot of enterprises are still like in the spot where they don't really,

like there's there's not, as you see by the like the talent war, there's just not that many 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, you 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-tuned Lama 4 or whatever. Exactly. 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 you an LLM that just does that or whatever. Interesting. How do you, after the scale news and then there's a bunch of players. popping up or, you know, everyone from Merckor to label box 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 going to 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 texts or more like human written math solution examples. And it doesn't scale super well. But the 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 100 X more.

compute per pre-chain token other than make a giant model. Yeah. Do you think Lama 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 Lama brand, but it isn't like their flagship thing where they start doing whether it's for internal products or it's they really want to show that they're the winner, um, releasing closed models via a API or other services where not all the do 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 core weave.

Yeah. Um, or in video directly. Um, invidia is hoping to get into the inference serving game. sounds like. Yeah. Do you think, so one of SWIX's takeaways from the, the wired article was that, um, like one big development that's coming is when Stargate comes online, open AI 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 fashion. 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. 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 big as like a 4.5,

but like a big model and do way more RL on it than anyone's on the app. Like what does like an 05 level of RL look like? Okay. See how good that is. See what new tag to do that though? Or could you do that just across a bunch of data centers? Because I've heard like a lot of RL is like you're generating, you're doing verifiable rewards, you're generating in a bunch of different data centers.

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-located certainly makes it easier. 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 going to be inference where like they want to be able to do like meta has a ton of GPUs that they just use.

for Instagram ads. Yeah. Recommendations. A lot of Stargate will probably be serving Ghibli. I mean, that makes a ton of sense. Like, I'm running into rate limits on. I haven't seen one. Literally everything.

Like, like, Google. It's like, how do they run out of TV? They spend $60 billion on GapEx every year, at least. And, O3 Pro, too. I mean, I get timeouts on this stuff. Last question. I'm guessing you weren't surprised to see OpenAI. leveraging the TPU for for inference or reporting to be starting to use it was was that kind of

I mean it makes sense that they are considering all options given the friction with Microsofts um like they don't have a a core cloud that they're super close with they're not like they need to both try to lower their cost for inference um as well like that maybe was a factor behind because the O3 had a big price drop that might have been TPU 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 Eye 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 helping. Knowing how things are unfolding, we'll probably ping you to jump on again later this week. Stay ready. Good. 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 Open AI researchers. So big, big question.

Paula says, with all the AI labs and SF being, in the mission, who called them members of technical staff and not missionaries. It's funny. Oh wow, this is an old post, yeah, from over six months ago. And there's a bunch of other new details emerging from the new meta-superintelligence team, D-D, who's coming on the show,

wait, in like three minutes. Okay. I think, wow, yeah, we've highlighted a lot of his posts. Every single one of the 11 meta-superintelligence hires has 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. Jeff, Beth 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, like right as they were kind of on the biggest moment in their come up. Why are you laughing? It's just, I love, I love this business. You're like tearing up, looking at how happy. No, it's just, it's, um, 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, don't, like, we aren't playing this game where someone goes to jail or someone gets you know like goes to the gulag if they don't perform or they get locked up like this is this is you know the difference between being a having 10 billion dollars or 100 billion dollars it's like it's kind of all fake but it's all it's all it's all like it's super high stakes but it's still capitalism and it's still like the consolation prize is still being able to build something cool even if you get beaten but the end result is that we have this hyper competitive race to build the best thing with 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.