Why My Article Just Tanked the Market

This is our full interview with Alap Shah, recorded live on TBPN. We discuss whether AI is triggering a structural decline in white collar jobs, why agentic AI may compress platform margins at companies like DoorDash and Uber, how labs like Anthropic and OpenAI could capture enormous value as public markets struggle, and what political and economic solutions might prevent an AI driven contagion. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to podcast platforms immediately after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com AppLovin - https://axon.ai Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Cognition - https://cognition.ai Console - https://console.com CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io Figma - https://figma.com Fin - https://fin.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Graphite - https://graphite.com Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kashi - https://kalshi.com Labelbox - https://labelbox.com Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app MongoDB - https://mongodb.com NYSE - https://nyse.com Okta - https://www.okta.com Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com Public - https://public.com Railway - https://railway.com Ramp - https://ramp.com Restream - https://restream.io Sentry - https://sentry.io Shopify - https://shopify.com Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Vibe - https://vibe.co Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  And without further ado, we'll bring in our first guest of the show. How are you doing?

• 0:04Speaker 01

  What's going on? Oh, great. How are you guys?

• 0:08Jordi Hays?

  Doing great. Is this your first time?

• 0:11John Coogan?

  Is it over?

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  Triggering a global sell-off?

• 0:16Speaker 01

  The first time so far, but you know, I'm just a messenger. That's the way I look at it.

• 0:19John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  We've got a lot of opportunities and a lot of scary things coming down the pipe.

• 0:23John Coogan?

  Okay, so yeah, take us through the thought process. Like, how long has this been simmering? What was the actual process of putting together this report? And then what do you want people to take away from it? And then maybe we can go into some of the reactions and your reactions to those reactions.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Absolutely. The process ultimately is that, you know, I've been building in AI for 15 years and I've been an investor for 20. And so especially the last six months, as I've just been using agentic coding myself and my teams have adopted it, it's just been a step change function and how much we can get done. And just thinking through, hey, how is this gonna... We're early, we're a startup, you know, we're gonna be at the leading edge of how people are adopting things. You know, assuming the corporate world is a year or two years away, it's gonna be pretty profound. And I think the underlying thing, you know, as, you know, sort of an amateur macroeconomist, is we're just not producing white collar jobs to begin with. I hadn't actually seen the extent of that until I kind of looked at, you know, specifically what we call like the information sector, so different parts of kind of technology.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Those jobs are down 8% from the peak in 2022 already. And so those are the places where people are adopting the most aggressively already. And we know, you know, every week there's firings out of like big tech.

• 1:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  And so in that world, what happens when the technology that big tech's been using for a while has gotten a lot better and now, you know, your average corporate starts using it as well? It can get quite scary. And so, you know, we wanted to kind of think through the implications of that. And, you know, the piece...

• 1:50Jordi Hays?

  But how much of those layoffs do you think are... You know, we've talked about a bunch of those layoffs on the show. They're usually attributed to AI. But if you dig under the hood, it's like they just wanted to kind of resize or get more efficient or they're reprioritizing resources. And not actually because they just launched some new agent and suddenly everything's changed. Hey, we don't need these thousand engineers anymore.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  So I think, you know, those are all great corporate euphemisms and of course that's how they're going to say it. But I think the way I would think about this is it's not necessarily like agentic powers happened and now everyone's going to get fired. You know, agents and LLMs broadly are just sort of on the tech tree as a continuum from software. And so software has been making companies more efficient for decades and you know, that has caused a lot of downstream effects and now that software has just become much more intelligent. And so in that sense, I think, you know, companies that are efficient have been doing a form of this for a really long time. And we think about, you know, the age starting now in 26 is just something that's going to accelerate that.

• 2:57John Coogan?

  Okay. So, yeah, what else was like key in the thesis or maybe potentially overlooked that you think people should be really focusing on?

• 3:08Speaker 01

  I think the problem, A, first thing, the most important thing is just the labor market dynamics. We've just been in a really weak labor market for a while and that's before these things roll out. But then you put that together with the fact that, you know, we just have a very structural environment where what is the thing that drives our entire economy? It's wages. Most of those wages that are ultimately driving all the discretionary spending is coming from the white collar worker. And the problem with that is that we're now entering this place where you made all these assumptions on like loaning money to all these companies, you know, to mortgages and everything else, like white collar economy is our economy.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  If you all of a sudden just take a leg out of that economy, it has a contagion effect into basically every asset in the world. And so that I think is the part that people haven't thought about because when, you know, people were making these loans, no one ever consumed of a world in which, wow, okay, now like white collar jobs are in sort of permanent decline, right? If that's at 2% a year, then I think we can skate through. But if it's at 4% or 5% a year, then, you know, we have to, we need action a lot more quickly.

• 4:15John Coogan?

  Is the, is the white collar economy actually the full economy or is it more just like the stock market? Because it feels like white collar workers are disproportionately allocated to assets versus consumption and you see things like, you know, like there's a lot of health in more blue collar sectors, healthcare is growing, and then you also see dynamics like...

• 4:39John Coogan?

  Just, you know, like, we've seen, like, jitters in the consumer market for a long time, and then we just see the health of the American consumer just continue and continue and continue, and it feels like it's maybe driven by something like lower level, and there's always this disconnect in my mind between like, the economy and the market.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  It's a great question. I think the issue here is that it's all just one labor market. And right now, blue collar is doing better because there are not firings there.

• 5:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  I don't think, you know, I think robots are probably eighteen, like, twenty-four to thirty-six months behind.

• 5:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Other forms of LLMs that are, you know, just diffusing through society. But the problem is, let's just say that it's one labor market ultimately. If there's no more white, if the white collar jobs are going away, let's say, you know, in our scenario, we talk about five percent of folks might get fired in a couple of years. Those five percent, if there aren't white collar jobs for them to relocate into, then they're gonna have to move into the gig economy and the blue collar labor force. And so that puts pressure on the entire labor market, not just the white collar one. And to answer your other question, healthcare is growing, education is growing.

• 5:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  The reason those things are growing ultimately, and we did some work in our piece to try and isolate white collar that is not government-driven. And so the government continues to spend more.

• 5:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  That's why healthcare is growing. They're the biggest payer in healthcare.

• 5:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  They're guaranteeing all the loans in the education industry. And so those sectors continue to grow because government spending grows. But that's, again, it gets very circular. If government spending is coming primarily from taxes, and primarily payroll taxes, because the average worker pays a lot more in taxes, you know, per dollar than the average corporate does. And so some corporates make a lot more money, workers' payroll taxes go down more, then there is a bit of a contagion effect into bonds as well there, too.

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  On Saturday, John and I were going back and forth about some of the really wild predictions around the impact of the internet that were being made in the nineties. There was clicks replace bricks. People were predicting total die-off.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Clicks did. Well, I mean, to be fair.

• 6:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, to be, like, I'll just finish. They were expecting a total die-off of all brick and mortar stores in five to ten years, which was like, widely discussed prediction. It was like, why would you ever go to a store to buy something if you could just get it online, sent to you directly?

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  And I think it depends on the category.

• 7:02Jordi Hays?

  A couple of others, so like, uh, not as relevant to your piece, but, uh, people were predicting like permanent high growth, the end of business cycles.

• 7:12Jordi Hays?

  There was the like media disintermediation narrative, which was like the, the Napster era. Everyone was going to get all media for free forever. Newspapers would, would die off, record labels would die off.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Aren't you guys the, aren't you guys the media disintermediation narrative at large?

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we are, but you know, twenty, twenty years later and CNBC is still a much, much bigger business than all, all business.

• 7:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:36Jordi Hays?

  Media, uh, at least in our world.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  But like newspapers, newspapers, like magazines completely gone, right? All of that has moved to the internet.

• 7:45John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. It's, it's just like, like a five percent unemployment shock in a quarter is way different. I, I mean, like a five percent unemployment shock is completely different if it happens over a quarter than if it happens over two decades, right? Like these are just fundamentally way different things.

• 7:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the other, the other thing.

• 8:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:02Jordi Hays?

  The last thing I would say is like, there was like this concept of like frictionless capitalism, meaning that like middlemen would be eliminated because you could just go directly to the source and that would push pricing pressure down. My question, and I know you guys are not writing your piece saying like, you know, this, we, we believe, we will stake our entire reputation on, on this sort of, uh, narrative. But what do you think? What, what, how much did you pay attention to like the nineties, early two thousands internet predictions? What do you think they got wrong? Why is this time different in terms of how a new technology will diffuse to the economy?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Uh, I think the difference is if you just plot, uh, what's happening to technology, it's all just going exponential. These are all just continuous timelines of like, we have microcomputers, we have the internet, we have mobile phones and today, you know, we have very, very powerful AI. And so I think most of the predictions that you, you ticked off there, it's kind of interesting. I would, you know, just looking at them today, you know, I would say they couldn't really happen until you had proper AI. Cause like, if you have the ability to.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Just freely, you know, commer- like have commerce the way you do today doesn't work if you still have to do all the work. Ultimately, like you have to go and you have to log and think about the friction, amount of friction there is in buying a product for most people today, right? You still have to go to the website, you have to put your credit card in, it's all work. We only have gotten to kind of the tech required for those predictions, I think, this year. And that's why this is the year that I think it really begins, because now it is completely seamless. You just, and no one's really doing this yet, but it's gonna happen, I think, you know, in the next six months, is just tell your agent, you know, tell Gemini, tell ChatGPT, go buy these things, it has your credit card.

• 9:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  And now that world that they were describing is truly gonna come to pass.

• 9:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about the canary in the coal mine analogy? I was looking at unemployment statistics in India and the Philippines, and it doesn't seem to be doom and gloom over there. I don't know, I didn't dig in super far, but would you at least expect that the unemployment rate would spike overseas before it spikes in America? Or do you think this all happens simultaneously?

• 10:20Speaker 01

  It's a tricky question. I think ultimately white collar work is a lot more of our economy than it is the economy of India and the Philippines. And they're much sort of like more immature economies that are growing through investment and things like that.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  But certainly, I think we called it out, the consulting sectors in India are certainly gonna be challenged in other places as well. But the reality is like, the timing, timing is everything in the markets, clearly. But the trick here is, if you're a corporate and you are hard pressed to get AI into your organization today, you know, ChatGPT and OpenAI will send you a forward deployed engineer if you have billion dollars in budget, right?

• 10:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  If you have a $10 million budget, they're not going to. And so who are those folks turning to? They can't usually do it themselves. And so they are going to the outsourced providers, the centers of the world. And so I think those businesses are likely gonna be in a lot of trouble over the medium term, but they probably will have a big bump from people really putting that AI into their organizations first. And so it's a bit of a tricky timeline there.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  What moats do you think hold beyond this? Because I think a lot of people latched on to like the DoorDash example as something that they thought had a moat, and that in the post, you sort of underline like how that could maybe not be as durable as a moat as people thought. But

• 11:40John Coogan?

  In the long case, like what moats do exist? Like, do network effects stay? Do complex coordination, intellectual property, like what doesn't break down?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  You know, real brand value, where people are choosing you over other things because of the brand and the status signaling across brands matters a ton.

• 12:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Network effects are more powerful than ever, I think, in this world.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  So things like Meta really have a lot to sort of gain in that sense. But I think things that look like they're network effect businesses, but in fact are just the ones that are doing the hard work of aggregating demand and supply. I think will be more challenging. So DoorDash is a good example there. It's not necessarily the biggest risk versus some of the other things. But I just was in a thread with Gavin Baker talking about this. But the problem for DoorDash and Uber and folks like that is right now, they're doing two jobs. They're doing the job of aggregating demand and the job of aggregating supply. They're both hard jobs, but the demand side is the harder side. And in we think the world of the future, there are lots of folks, like in, let's say, food delivery. You know, Instacart wants to get a bunch of market share.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  And, you know, Grubhub wants to get a bunch of market share. And so let's say the agents are the ones doing the buying. It's 2028 and 40% of the sales are through agents. You just tell Gemini, hey, order me some noodles. In that world, instead of, it's going to go to each and every provider. And right now, there are four providers that do that. But now it's very easy, as if I'm building a startup in this space, previously I had to get all the drivers on board, get all the restaurants on board and acquire customers. Now Gemini and ChatGPT are acquiring the customers for me and all I have to do is get the supply side going. So it makes it much easier for new entrants to come in and for existing, you know, second, third, fourth tier players can really sort of say, I'm going to like relax my margins, try to get more top line.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  And so you think that, you know, whatever the 15% vig is that DoorDash gets today, maybe it's more than that. You know, some of that, I would think Gemini and ChatGPT are going to ask for themselves. Wherever I send the traffic, I'm going to get a piece of that. And then some of that's going to go back to the consumer.

• 13:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like, was this the most like stretched or controversial prediction?

• 13:54Speaker 01

  It seems like it was certainly the one that got, you know, that's getting the most chatter. And I think we did it for a reason. We wanted to be a little provocative in thinking, thinking it through because, you know, it's an amazing business and they're gaining a much market share. But the fundamental idea that you're, because what did the lock in, right? Like, do the drivers have lock in on DoorDash or on Uber? Not really, right? They're, you know, most, most drivers are doing Lyft and Uber, so they're, they're not locked in. The real lock in, the real business value, the franchise value of an Uber or a DoorDash is the customer lock in. Because the customer gets comfortable, they've got everything saved, they want to hit a couple of buttons, they don't, they don't price shop. Agents are happy to price shop as much as possible. And so if you take that away, then it's a real problem for businesses that, you know, are ultimately built on customer lock in.

• 14:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't know. I think the interviews that we've had with the Lyft, I mean, you know, again, take, take it with a grain of salt. They have a narrative that is important to their business, but like, if you ask these people, what is the greatest challenge? It is managing, managing the supply side. It is not, the demand side is not where they're saying like, hey, like, this is really what we need to solve. It's like, hey, as we get more drivers on the platform, revenue naturally, naturally goes up. And so I just, I'm, I'm just hard pressed to imagine a world in which, uh, you know, somebody, think, think about if somebody

• 15:16Jordi Hays?

  in my town, which is like 15,000 people, like vibe codes, a delivery, a delivery app. And I go into chat GPT or with another agent and I say like, I want food. It's like, the agent wants to get the best possible service. I would imagine the agent to route to the platform with the supply that is going to be able to deliver in the shortest possible time horizon. And imagining a world where there's like this, you know, vibe coded, small team operating that just happens to aggregate as much supply, which is just as increases the likelihood that my order will be delivered on the best possible timeline, which is going to be the number one factor for customer satisfaction.

• 16:00Jordi Hays?

  I just don't see how solving the front end kind of demand piece actually. Makes a better consumer experience, which I assume the agent would optimize for on behalf of the user.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  So let's, let's consider what actually happens here, right? You make the, the, the order on DoorDash.

• 16:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  DoorDash sends it to the restaurant.

• 16:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Uh, restaurant essentially, you know, sometimes they use their own drivers. Sometimes they send the drivers from DoorDash. Uh, but now imagine the agent can take you directly to the restaurant site and place the order directly with the restaurant. Uh, and you can keep half the, the savings and, uh, the agent can keep half the savings, right?

• 16:40Jordi Hays?

  But where's the driver, where's the driver?

• 16:42John Coogan?

  Where's the driver coming from? Because I, I feel like I understand, I understand the, the, the customer demand side, like you start with an L L M or an agent who shops around for you. So maybe that's solved. Maybe it'll find you just via S E O. And you can just put out like, we only take a 5% cut instead of 15% and the agent picks you. I understand getting all the restaurants on board because you email them and say, hey, it's 5% instead of 15%. They're sure we'll turn it on. But for the drivers, how do you actually reach out to them and get them on the platform? And how, how, how does A I like lower that cost? Because right now I, I think about like, what was the driver marketing budget? Over the last decade at Uber or at DoorDash?

• 17:26John Coogan?

  And it's probably like in the billions of dollars. And so I feel like to, to, to generate that much liquidity, I have to invest that much to onboard all those drivers, build awareness. Maybe it just goes viral because they're like, hey, I can make more money here, but that feels hard.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  I, I think it's going to take time, but I think there are a bunch of smaller sort of driver aggregation networks that exist today that are not the ones that we know about. For instance, I started a business called Thistle and we do delivery of healthy foods to your door.

• 17:55John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Uh, we, we split it between half of them are our own employee drivers and the other half. You know, I think we have like, like 500 or 700 drivers that we just use a, a third party service to provide. So I think there are a lot more of these businesses. All of those businesses now will also just have huge opportunities to kind of take market share. Ultimately, what we're saying is the friction in doing commerce is going way down. Places where there are rents, the prices can go down, but ultimately this is just an opportunity for more entrepreneurs to kind of build businesses, uh, for the new world.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think the the it's interesting because we're here like debating like this this like somewhat temporary thing because like self-driving cars, robotics like changes all of that like in a huge way. But but but we we use the term sloppable for companies that are that can be vibe-coded away and clankable for companies that can be disrupted by robotics. And I've always put the delivery services more in the clankable category than the sloppable category. So I was I was shocked

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  to see. What are the what would you have spent more time on if you knew you were going to get 50 million views and the markets would react in the way that they have?

• 19:02Speaker 01

  I would have finished writing the third piece where I talk about solutions, which I have not yet.

• 19:08John Coogan?

  A lot of people are demanding solutions. You just got to you just hit me with a ton of problems. That's funny. Do you think that there's any there's this question about like in my mind, like, yes, Google and Nvidia are public, but Anthropic, OpenAI, and XAI through SpaceX are not public. There's sort of like this massive, you know, multiple hundred billion dollar sell-off in the public markets that sort of should, if you believe your thesis, that should sort of funnel to the labs, I would imagine. When I read it, like, there's a lot of doom and gloom about companies that are out there, but it's a lot of bull it's a lot of bull case for AI labs. And but

• 19:49John Coogan?

  that can't happen in one day, because like rounds happen every once in a while, they're private, there's all these different things. But do you think that the world would change when the big labs get out in the public markets?

• 20:03Speaker 01

  I think it's absolutely going to change. I have a strong suspicion that Anthropic is going to go, you know, in the next three to six months. They just have so much momentum and there's a lot of value in being first. P and L also just looks a lot better than anyone else. So I would think that gets public and it's going to be pretty interesting if it happens. Certainly, labs are ultimately they seem like they're very well positioned to win. I would wonder over the medium term, like, You know, what happens with some of the Chinese models and whatnot if people actually want just something that's more local and something that they own, but it does seem like the most likely outcome is going to be that the existing incumbents are going to get the most share. And I think Google is particularly well positioned since they already own all those customers today and they can finance losses from inference a

• 20:46Speaker 01

  lot longer than everyone else. But I think ultimately, like, there's a world in which the labs are the biggest winners here. There's also a world in which like you end up with just a lot more competition and people trade and change. But the thing that seems very clear to me that the absolute like, there's no way they won't be the hugest winners here is going to be the underlying tech, meaning the semiconductors. So, you know.

• 21:05John Coogan?

  You could go even deeper. You could go into like, you know, commodities and like copper and energy and oil and natural gas and stuff. And people have.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:14Jordi Hays?

  Did you see the, did you see the, the, some of the criticism was that the essay was very Marxist. Mahit said, Marx, Marx's writing during the industrial revolution predicted capitalism would periodically devour itself. Firms replace labor with machinery to boost profits, but competition diffuses the technology, drives prices to marginal costs and the gains get competed away. Meanwhile, displaced workers lose purchasing power, hollowing out the demand the whole system depends on. Production rises, but no one can afford to buy what's produced. The contradiction between production and realization. Zatkins' piece describes this exact dynamic, then declares, there's no natural break. It's the most Marxist piece of financial analysis. Not my word.

• 21:56John Coogan?

  I don't think you were expecting that critique.

• 21:58Jordi Hays?

  It makes the same air as Marx did. Yeah. Creative destruction doesn't just destroy, it creates industries we can't yet conceive of.

• 22:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, maybe that's going in the solutions.

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  Is that it going in the solutions?

• 22:11Speaker 01

  So let me address it a few ways. Marx was a really smart dude. He got a lot of things right very early. Marxist can mean communist. Marxist can also mean just understanding how capital and labor interact. And in that sense, yes, it was Marxist. He had, he was very insightful. But I think the thing that, that we're missing here is that it's, there's, there's the economic layer, but ultimately it's the political layer that matters. And, you know, we're in a world where We've had two parties and both parties economically have a little bit of difference, but not a huge amount of difference. And so we kind of bicker. But in a world in which jobs are going away really fast, I think there's going to be a much stronger alignment

• 22:53Speaker 01

  for just the laboring class overall to say, hey, we need to fix this problem.

• 22:57Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  It's a very fixable problem. What we're actually expounding here is that GDP, if done properly, will absolutely explode, right? We're getting way more efficient. We have, you know, we've built a machine dot. We build machine intelligence.

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  But we have to structure our society such that as those things happen, very, hopefully very slowly, you know, we do the right thing from a taxation perspective to say the winners should win. But, you know, if that's what's causing the displacement, let's sort of make the pie a little bit bigger for everyone. And that, I think, ultimately should be something that appeals to a lot of folks in the AI complex.

• 23:30Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Because if we don't, then something like this is likely to happen. And, you know, AI progress will slow down because we'll have an economic crisis and we're not going to be able to finance nearly as much of it as we otherwise would.

• 23:39Jordi Hays?

  So do you think the future is what Anthropic's head of sales position in France? The company will be spending 530,000 euros per year. The government will get 340,000 euros and the employee will get 190,000. Is that the level of taxation do you think we're headed for?

• 24:00Speaker 01

  I think when we're at, you know, France's level of government spending, then, you know, the math probably means roughly that. I would say that, you know, government spending would be at France's level, I'm guessing, like, you know, five, seven years from now, if this scenario kind of comes to pass. And so I think we'll head there over time. But I think it's less a question of the percent of spending and how much goes to the employee versus goes to the government. And ultimately, what is the size of the total pie?

• 24:25Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  So the bet here is that the pie, if done properly, can just increase multiples of what it is today. And thus, you know, it's just a win-win.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  One question, I mean, it sounds like you're working on potential solutions post, which I'm very excited to read. Thank you. I'm interested to know your reflection on the messaging that's coming from the leaders of the AI labs because they've outlined many sort of low probability, but you know, potentially negative scenarios. You know, we have the white collar work number. We've had many of these comments from lab leaders, but I rarely hear them follow it up with, and the answer is print, print, print, or interest rates will be, will save us, or unemployment insurance, or UBI, like all

• 25:16John Coogan?

  of those like solutions that I think people, it's funny because people are quoting your post being like, this is easily solved with this solution. It's like, okay, well, that's great if we all agree. And I think you might, with some of the, some of the quotes, people are all over the place. But I'm wondering about your reflection on like the, like the messaging from the labs around solutions versus pure focus on problems.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  I think it's a really interesting question and very interesting setup in that the labs are, on the one hand, you know, want to get the word out there. And so, you know, Dario especially has been the loudest here. There's a really good Axios article from last May where he's kind of on the sound of the alarm bells. People aren't really, he's like saying people are not listening. Obviously, a lot's changed since then. But they can't go so far as to say like, hey, if you put the pieces together, then this is how it's going to play out. I think it's too sort of damaging to sort of their reputations and like, you know, their ability to fundraise and things like that. And so I think it's other folks like ourselves that kind of have that duty to go and really start thinking that through. I, it seems like Anthropic is pretty engaged. You know, should that conversation really

• 26:23Speaker 01

  start happening? And I think this is the year it needs to really start happening. And so I think they all kind of get it. And so it's just a question of like, how do we as a society start moving in that direction?

• 26:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I think, you know, obviously, there's, I'm still processing part of the piece. I agree with some of it. I disagree with some of it. But what's really underrated is just like, how useful this process of writing an article for a particular audience is. Like, I disagreed with a lot of, you know, something big is happening, but It hit with a very different audience than machines of loving grace or the adolescence of AI or of machine intelligence. And there's pieces that are written for like, you know, AI insiders, leaders, researchers. Then there's like the broader tech community. Then there's

• 27:13John Coogan?

  like everyday people and you clearly hit the nail on the head with like speaking to the financial community. And we see that in the markets, not amazing results, but maybe it's worthwhile because we will get really great solutions and a better conversation around it. So I think in due time, this discussion needed to be had. So, thank you.

• 27:34Jordi Hays?

  What's an industry or job of the future that you could see emerging?

• 27:41Speaker 01

  I think, again, if we solve this, like, everything related to sort of leisure is going to absolutely zoom and that those are going to be the biggest growth industries of the future, right? Like, what do humans want to do?

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  Total Chesky victory.

• 27:55John Coogan?

  Watch polo. Watch a cloned horse play polo, for sure. Yeah.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  So, you know, imagine humans have like the entire day to just enjoy themselves instead of having to work.

• 28:07John Coogan?

  Now, that is something I've been promised for 100 years. So I'm deeply skeptical, but this time is different. I want it to be different. Let's bring on the leisure. Boom. I'm here for it. I'm here.

• 28:19Jordi Hays?

  On anything in your solutions stock around reindustrialization? I mean, the frustration that so many people in tech that have been building in kind of hardware in the real world, or trying to recruit people that are getting offers from social media companies or now labs or SaaS companies. You know, one of the problems of, you know, for America in the last 20 years was that if you just wanted to make $100 million, you probably were much more likely to do that building enterprise software than building critical infrastructure or anything in the real world. So is that is kind of new, new infrastructure

• 29:01Jordi Hays?

  and reindustrialization like a potential landing point for people that had the 180K a year PM job that might be going away?

• 29:13Speaker 01

  It's a great question. I think there's certainly going to be a lot more opportunity in those sectors, and I think we've done some pretty smart policy things that are moving us in that direction. But we're also, you know, just in a lot of ways, so far behind China there. And doesn't AI affect kind of those jobs, both for, you know, on the reindustrialization side, just like it does for writing code? And so that's where I think it will get trickier. I think as a country, we're going to spend an awful lot more on that, and I think we're going to catch up. But we're not, it's not clear that's going to be through just creating a bunch of additional jobs versus, you know, the ultimate thing we're seeing with AI period is just high agency people who really know how to reuse the tools can just do the work of many, many people. And I think that trend applies in every industry to some extent.

• 29:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. What an exciting time. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 30:02Jordi Hays?

  When's the next piece dropping?

• 30:04Speaker 01

  Hopefully by the end of the week, but don't hold me to that.

• 30:08Jordi Hays?

  When you know that it could, it'd be hard for the follow-up to get as much reach as this one. That's kind of the way these things go. But now the pressure's on to really pay attention.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  Just don't have any sequel anxiety. Anxiety. You'll be fine. We're excited to read it, and we'll talk to you soon.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, great to meet you.

• 30:26John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Thanks so much.