The Trump-Musk Fallout + A DOGE Coder Speaks + ChefGPT

“We're having a broligarchy blowup of the highest order.”

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 0:35Kevin Roose?

  Well, Casey, I don't know if you know this, but today is my birthday.

• 0:38Casey Newton?

  I did know that. Happy birthday, Kevin.

• 0:40Kevin Roose?

  Thank you.

• 0:41Casey Newton?

  And what better way to celebrate than by making a podcast?

• 0:43Kevin Roose?

  It's true. Today, I am 38, or as they call it in Silicon Valley, a senior citizen.

• 0:51Casey Newton?

  And what is it like to sort of be entering your sunset years? Do you have enough put away for retirement yet?

• 0:56Kevin Roose?

  I have actually been rebalancing my 401K, which is a very 38-year-old-coded activity.

• 1:02Casey Newton?

  It really is. I was trying to consider what to get you for your birthday, and I thought, well, you know, why not ask the chatbots if they have any good ideas? So I just said, hey, my friend is obsessed with AI. Like, do you have any gifts that might be funny? And it gave me a lot of things, I would say, that were not funny. But one suggestion it did give me was, I would hand you a book, and on the cover of the book, it would say, what to do after AGI. And then you would open it, and it was just a blank notebook. I thought, that's actually pretty good.

• 1:34Kevin Roose?

  That's pretty good. So did you do that for me?

• 1:36Casey Newton?

  No, it was very expensive. Very expensive. I thought, hmm, no thanks.

• 1:41Kevin Roose?

  OK, well, it's the thought that counts.

• 1:42Casey Newton?

  Well, the nice thing about a podcast is you can just say it. It's as if it were real. You know what I mean?

• 1:46Kevin Roose?

  So pretend you're handing it to me.

• 1:47Casey Newton?

  Yeah, enjoy.

• 1:47Kevin Roose?

  Oh, thank you. I appreciate it.

• 1:49Casey Newton?

  Crinkle, crinkling the paper as he unwraps. Crinkle, crinkle.

• 1:52Kevin Roose?

  What a good friend you are.

• 1:53Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so enjoy that.

• 1:54Kevin Roose?

  All right.

• 2:00Casey Newton?

  I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at The New York Times. I'm Casey Doon from Platformer.

• 2:04Kevin Roose?

  And this is Hard Fork.

• 2:06Casey Newton?

  This week on the show, Elon and Trump's feud goes nuclear. What does it mean for them and for America? Then, entrepreneur Sahil Lavingia joins us to discuss his time at Doge and why it came to an abrupt end. And finally, The Times' Pete Wells is here to explain what some of America's best chefs are doing with AI. I hope it involves cooking us dinner.

• 2:32Kevin Roose?

  Well, Casey, the big tech news this week is that there is trouble in Washington.

• 2:37Casey Newton?

  That's right, Kevin. We're having a bro-ligarchy blow-up of the highest order.

• 2:42Kevin Roose?

  So, for many months now, there has been speculation about if and when President Trump and Elon Musk would sort of come into conflict, would see their bromance fade, and that is happening today in a way that is pretty crazy.

• 2:59Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and I have to say, Kevin, I was somewhat cynical when all of this started about how real it was, but I would say by approximately midday on Thursday, all of it seemed extremely real.

• 3:10Kevin Roose?

  Yes, it's very real. So, we are recording this on Thursday, June 5th, around 5:00 PM Eastern Time. So, by the time you hear this, things may have changed. It's all happening very quickly. But Casey, let me set the scene for you. I'm in a meeting. I'm doing an interview. I'm not looking at my phone, or Twitter, or any of my incoming Slack messages or emails. I get out, and I have about 200 people yelling at me that Elon Musk and Donald Trump are fighting. And this was something that we had been sort of keeping our eyes out for. Obviously, these are two very combustible personalities who like to fight, especially on the internet. But Casey, what are they fighting about, and how did this start?

• 3:54Casey Newton?

  Well, it all started with the one big, beautiful bill, Kevin. That is the giant budget package that President Trump has been trying to move through Congress. It passed the House and is now being debated in the Senate. And it emerged over the past several days that Elon Musk did not like the big, beautiful bill. In fact, he did not think it was beautiful at all. And earlier in the week, he called it, quote, "a disgusting abomination."

• 4:22Kevin Roose?

  Yes, so he's not a big fan of this bill. But that by itself does not seem like grounds for a legendary falling out with one of your former top aides and political allies. So what else is going on here other than a dispute over this budget bill?

• 4:40Casey Newton?

  Well, let's mention a couple of specifics about the bill, though, Kevin, because it is sort of the best evidence we have for what might be driving Elon to be so angry. So one thing is that this bill would eliminate an electric vehicle tax credit, which is, of course, beloved by Tesla owners. Elon is, of course, the CEO of Tesla. So this could potentially be a big financial hit to Tesla at a time when its stock has been falling precipitously. In addition, Axios reported this week that Elon was seeking a deal with the Federal Aviation Administration to get it to use Starlink for its communication infrastructure.

• 5:20Casey Newton?

  Starlink is, of course, the network of satellites owned by SpaceX, another Elon company. So we there have two examples of what would have been fairly big deals for Elon in two of his different businesses that he pushed very hard for and did not get. And that leads me to, I think, the emotional or psychological answer to your question, which is why is Elon so mad? And to put it simply, Kevin, this is not what he thought he was paying for when he tried to buy the 2024 election.

• 5:49Kevin Roose?

  Right. I mean, he was out on X this afternoon saying that, basically, Trump was only president because he was involved in the election. He donated all that money. He did all that campaigning. He is basically claiming credit for not only Trump's presidency, but also the Republican congressional majorities that that party currently enjoys. So I saw him claiming credit for that stuff, and I thought, man, Trump is not going to like that. And as it turned out, Trump did not like that.

• 6:20Casey Newton?

  No, he did not. He posted on his own social network, Truth Social, a number of things. He said that Elon was, quote, "wearing..." thin and so he had asked him to leave the administration which you know what I think was was pretty well known later though he escalated things by saying quote the easiest way to save money in our budget billions and billions of dollars is to terminate Elon's governmental subsidies and contracts I was always surprised that Biden didn't do it.

• 6:51Kevin Roose?

  Right and then Musk fired back talking about how Trump is mentioned in the Epstein files and that's why they have not been released he's also more recently talked about needing a new political party and most recently his most recent post as of this taping is another share of a video in which Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein are talking in 1992.

• 7:17Casey Newton?

  Well and don't forget Kevin he also quote tweeted a right wing influencers who had asked in the wake of all this should Trump be impeached and Musk said yes he said essentially agreeing with the post that said Trump should be impeached and replaced by JD Vance so that was the post when I saw it where I was like okay these this is not two guys like playing drama for the media like they're actually real mad at each other.

• 7:45Kevin Roose?

  Yes this is a big fight and it has got a lot of people talking but while we wait for the dust to settle here I don't think it is too early to start thinking about what this means not only for the Trump administration but for Elon Musk and for some of the projects that Elon Musk had undertaken while he was in Washington so Casey what do you think this feud and this breakup between Donald Trump and Elon Musk means for Elon Musk let's start there.

• 8:14Casey Newton?

  Well I think it has the potential to do a lot of damage to Musk remember one of the reasons why he made his way out of the administration was because his businesses are increasingly in trouble and that begins with Tesla Tesla has a number of challenges that we don't have the time to get into today but there's a real sense that Musk has not been focused on that business and needs to return to it instead of doing that though he just amped up his feud with Trump and today. Tesla's stock declined 14%. So I would not be surprised if it continues to decline in the days ahead as people kind of process what this means. But let me throw out an even spicier possibility for why this could be trouble for Musk.

• 8:58Casey Newton?

  And I want to say that Elizabeth Lopato noted this in The Verge, but she reminded me that The Washington Post had reported that Musk began his career in the United States by working here illegally. And, you know, and Elizabeth is wondering, could this actually complicate his naturalization? Would Trump actually go after Musk and try to strip him of his citizenship? Let's just say if that happened, it wouldn't be the first person who thought he was a citizen of the United States who found himself deported during this Trump administration.

• 9:26Kevin Roose?

  Well, right, and that seems a little like crazy when you just say it like that, but allies of the president are actually calling for this now. In fact, just recently, Times reporter, my colleague Tyler Pager, says that Steve Bannon, the former Trump advisor, was calling for President Trump to not only cancel all of Musk's contracts, but to initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status and maybe deport him. So I don't know that this is likely to happen. This seems like maybe a bit of wishful thinking, but I do think it is going to be a very painful breakup for Elon Musk, not only because of his exposure through Tesla to some of these

• 10:07Kevin Roose?

  policy moves and the billions of dollars that he would stand to lose if Tesla's stock slide continues, but also because of things like government contracts for SpaceX, right? This is a man who has billions of dollars in exposure to government contracts. If some or all of those contracts are canceled by President Trump, he does stand to lose out that way. So not a good day for Elon Musk and his portfolio.

• 10:31Casey Newton?

  Well, and let me throw in one more legal risk, Kevin, because Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have been trying to subpoena Musk. And recently Representative Nancy Mace, who is a Republican from South Carolina, suspended the hearing so that Republicans could come and vote against the subpoena. You can now imagine a world where Trump goes to the Republicans and say, hey, you know what? Go ahead and let that subpoena take place, right? So there are a lot of legal risks here, and I would just say that often in cases where authoritarians take power, it's the billionaires in the country that think, I know how I can make my save. I'm going to cozy up to this person. And then they find that when something goes wrong, they're actually in more danger than anyone else.

• 11:10Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. Casey, what do you think this breakup means for President Trump?

• 11:14Casey Newton?

  Well, think about how Musk functioned during the first few months of this Trump administration. He was Trump's heat shield. He went out, he did a bunch of really unpopular things, and he largely took the blame for it. He took the blame for Doge dismantling wide swaths of the federal government, right? Now Musk is gone, and so there isn't that same kind of heat shield out there. Trump is gonna have to own his decisions more, and I think his presidency is going to look differently because of that. Because while this feud is undeniably entertaining and actually hugely consequential, I worry that something that's going to be lost is how useful these two men were to each other during the period they were useful to each other, because they both got a lot out of this arrangement.

• 11:59Kevin Roose?

  Absolutely. It was a very lucrative arrangement for both of them in some sense. And I wonder if that doesn't end up sort of mending the feud here. If like, these guys get all of their rage out on each other and then sort of decide, well, if I'm Elon, I don't really have anywhere else to go, right? I have burned my bridges with Democrats and on the left, and the Republican Party now, you know, belongs to President Trump. And so I think if you're him, you just may decide to stay out of politics altogether. But if you want to stay involved, like, you're kind of politically homeless if you're Elon Musk. And so maybe you do end up wanting to come back to Trump at some point. But it's too soon to say, I think.

• 12:43Casey Newton?

  And in the meantime, he's promising to create a third political party that will represent 80% of all Americans. And let's just say, I'm looking forward to seeing how that one plays out.

• 12:53Kevin Roose?

  So Elon Musk no longer has a formal role in the Trump administration, but plenty of his allies and people that he brought in are still there. So I'm curious what you think this breakup will mean for people like, for example, David Sacks, who is the president's advisor on AI policy and crypto, and a longtime ally of Elon Musk's. What do we think happens to the tech right? If Elon Musk, who was responsible for some of that realignment behind Donald Trump, is no longer in the president's camp.

• 13:28Casey Newton?

  Well, you know, Kevin, have you ever been in a situation where like two of your friends broke up with each other and then you had to choose which one you were still going to be friends with?

• 13:35Kevin Roose?

  Yes, the friend divorce.

• 13:37Casey Newton?

  Yes, well, so there's about to be a major friend divorce in Washington DC and we're going to have to see who sides with who. You know, the way that Trump tends to operate is by sort of showing loyalty to anyone who is loyal to him. And so if in the days ahead, the David Saxes of the world go to him and say, Elon is wrong, you are right, make America great again, I can imagine those people continuing to have a role in the administration. If on the other hand, they feel loyalty to Elon for whatever reason, and Elon is, you know, the world's richest man and could give people a lot of reasons to be loyal to him, then you might see more of a split. So this is one where we truly don't know the answer to it, but I think is one of the most interesting questions to watch in the week ahead, which is what do the members

• 14:21Casey Newton?

  of the tech right who Musk had brought to Washington, how do they respond to what has happened today?

• 14:27Kevin Roose?

  Well, and we should also talk about what happens to another group of people that Elon Musk and his allies brought to Washington, which is Doge. Doge still exists, they are still out there doing cost-cutting measures in various federal agencies. If Elon Musk goes, does Doge go with him?

• 14:46Casey Newton?

  Yes, wither big balls might be another way to put it, Kevin.

• 14:50Kevin Roose?

  As big balls goes, so goes the nation.

• 14:54Casey Newton?

  Big balls, of course, one of the most famous employees of Doge, and you can look up his accomplishments online. So here's why this is an interesting question. I was seeing some chatter about this online over the past couple of hours. Because many of these folks who are part of Doge are considered to be Elon people, Elon loyalists, I'm sure there is now a contingent within the Trump administration saying that Doge is now what they would call in Silicon Valley, an insider threat. This is a group of people that you now have to be worried about doing some sort of sabotage, right? Showing loyalty to Elon somehow. And so I would not be surprised if this was actually a conversation being had right now

• 15:35Casey Newton?

  at the White House, which is which of these folks is loyal to us, which is loyal to Elon? And so we may actually see a big Doge purge coming. A Doge purge, Kevin?

• 15:46Kevin Roose?

  It is just so wild to me to watch this breakup happening more or less in real time. I mean, I remember when Elon Musk threw his weight behind the Trump campaign, people were saying, oh, this will be short-lived. There's no way these two can sort of coexist. Neither one of them is good at sort of sharing the spotlight. This is going to be a combustible situation. And I just thought there would be enough mutual benefit in it for both of them to keep this thing going for at least longer than it appears to have gone. But I don't know. Casey, are you surprised by what you've seen over the past couple hours?

• 16:28Casey Newton?

  Not really. You know, I wrote a year-end predictions post. One of those predictions was that the bro-ligarchy would blow up. I am far from alone in making that prediction. I think maybe even, you know, most observers assume that something like this would happen just because we have enough data to know about how Donald Trump and Elon Musk tend to view other powerful people in their orbit. Typically, when they don't get what they want, they get super mad and they turn on each other. And so when it finally happened, initially, I was skeptical just because they were kind of playing footsie with each other a bit. And I thought, you know, Elon has a lot of good reason to make people like me believe that he is mad at Trump and he's creating this distance between himself and Washington. Maybe that, you know, makes it a little easier for him to sell Teslas to

• 17:09Casey Newton?

  Democrats again. But when it went fully nuclear, there was actually a sense of relief because in a year where so many news developments have made me feel like I am crazy and no longer live on the same planet that I was born on, this was the moment where I was like, okay, some laws of gravity do still apply. Sometimes you can just trust what you see in front of your eyes. And this was that moment for me.

• 17:33Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it does make me really feel for the Tesla owners out there who are trying to figure out which bumper sticker to put on their Tesla to indicate that they're not on board with Elon Musk's political agenda here. I'm not sure that any of them have changed their bumper stickers in the last few hours, but it does seem like Elon Musk has both alienated Democrats who no longer want to buy Teslas. And now, as of a couple hours ago, he has probably alienated the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. And you can assume that they will not be buying his Teslas and Cybertrucks anymore either.

• 18:10Casey Newton?

  Well, Kevin, I'm sure you have a lot more questions for me, but I really should get back to reading social media posts and sharing them in my group chats. And if there was a social media post that seemed really important that we didn't talk about, it's probably because it was posted after 5:11 PM Eastern Time on Thursday.

• 18:33Casey Newton?

  When we come back, his Doge days are over. Sahil Lavingia is here to tell us what he did to the federal bureaucracy.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner. Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 19:25Speaker 03

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• 20:00Speaker 04

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• 20:33Kevin Roose?

  Well, Casey, speaking of Elon Musk and Doge and the Trump administration, we have a very exciting interview to share on the show today.

• 20:41Casey Newton?

  Yes, an interview that we should say we conducted before all of the dramatics on social media on Thursday between Musk and Trump.

• 20:49Kevin Roose?

  Yes, so last week, before any of this happened, when Donald Trump and Elon Musk were still friends, a former Doge employee, Sahil Lavingia, published a really fascinating blog post about his 55 days that he spent working for Doge before he was fired. He was stationed inside the Department of Veterans Affairs as a software engineer. He's a veteran startup worker. He worked at Pinterest. He then started a company called Gumroad, which is sort of an e-commerce platform. And I think this is a really important conversation to have because despite the fact that Elon Musk is now persona non grata in the Trump administration, Doge is still there. Its employees are still stationed throughout the federal government.

• 21:32Kevin Roose?

  And so I wanted to take the chance to have a rare conversation with someone who has actually worked for Doge inside the federal government and who has seen what it's like up close.

• 21:43Casey Newton?

  Let's bring him in.

• 21:52Kevin Roose?

  Sahil Lavingia, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 21:54Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me.

• 21:55Kevin Roose?

  So Sahil, you have been around Silicon Valley for a while. You had a pretty good thing going. You were one of the first employees at Pinterest. You then went on to found your own company, Gumroad. What made you interested in stepping away and moving to Washington DC to work for the federal government?

• 22:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, I've always wanted to work for the federal government. I think it's such a cool opportunity. I mean, as a software engineer, which is my background, product designer, I think it's hard to think of another opportunity for such a large impact. I think when I was even in high school, I always felt like I would eventually want to work for the federal government. When I left San Francisco, I remember feeling like the only things that's like private businesses were responsible for were like little jewel boxes on Mission Street. Everything else was like powered by... Public infrastructure. And so eventually, if you're a competent software engineer and you want to really have a maximized impact on the world, you know, the Steve Jobs sort of dent in the universe, you'd have to go at work for the government eventually.

• 22:54Casey Newton?

  I can imagine that the past few administrations might have been happy to accept your help. Why was this the moment that you wanted to step in?

• 23:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I actually applied for to work at USDS back in the day. So I think around 2015, when Gumroad, we failed to raise our Series B, laid off most of the team, and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. I applied to USDS. But I think my background at the time was still, it's very startup-y, which is not exactly, you know, like the Venn diagram overlap of skill sets with what you may need in the federal government, you know, like the largest company on earth. So I did apply and I never heard back. And when this sort of dote thing started to happen, I felt like, you know, this meets the criteria of shipping code for the federal government. And yeah, I wanted to work there.

• 23:43Casey Newton?

  Now, how did the hiring process go? Like, do they do any kind of like ideological or political filtering? Did they ask you, like, what do you think about, you know, foreign aid or, you know, USAID or anything like that?

• 23:55Speaker 05

  I was asked, you know, did I vote for Kamala Harris, for example? Right? And basically, like, if you voted for Kamala Harris, like, you shouldn't waste your time here. Like, you're not going to get through whatever the process ends up looking like. This is pre inauguration. So pre inauguration, there's a Trump, you know, this kind of has to flow through the Trump transition team. And I said, look, I actually didn't vote for Kamala. I didn't also, I didn't vote for Trump either. So it's, you know, if they need that, then it's not going to really work out. But anyway, yeah, so they asked these sorts of questions. I think my guess is, you know, this kind of came from Trump and that side of the doge, I don't think cared too much, but.

• 24:30Casey Newton?

  So they approve your application and like, then what happens? You just kind of get assigned a role?

• 24:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I mean, I feel like I never even got like sort of like an approval, you know, like it wasn't like congratulations, or you know, here's your offer letter, here's your salary, here's your boss, here's your department, that sort of stuff. Basically, what happened was I passed, I guess, to some degree, and eventually they said, hey, we have a role for you at the VA, as a software engineer, you should go talk to like this sort of Doge team lead at the VA, and if that seems like something you'd want to do, like let us know. And so that's kind of what happened. And I talked to them, and eventually they said, you know, if you're interested, you have to get fingerprinted here in DC. And so it's sort of this like chicken and egg thing, where it's like, you're

• 25:20Speaker 05

  not going to get any information until you move to DC. And if, once you move to DC, you're kind of, you know, you're here, right? So I never, actually, I mean, even today, I still don't know what like my salary was. I assume it's zero, but every once in a while, I get like a check in the mail for some like de minimis payment, which I assume is to like make sure I'm not violating some minimum wage law.

• 25:36Casey Newton?

  Wait, you didn't talk about your salary before you agreed to take this job?

• 25:39Speaker 05

  I'm a phenomenal negotiator.

• 25:40Casey Newton?

  Yeah, that's, um...

• 25:45Speaker 05

  I didn't know, I mean, the day, I'll tell you the facts I knew, right? So I knew that I was supposed to show up 7:45 AM at the VA, the VACO sort of Veterans Affairs Central Office in DC, you know, on March 17th. And, actually, that's all I knew. So, yeah, I didn't know. I didn't know who my boss was. I think I learned like the third day or something, like who I, like I didn't know my role, it doesn't say your role like on your badge. I basically got my PIV card, and I got a government laptop, which they called GFE, you know, government furnished equipment. And then the sort of Doge people there kind of walked me through what I was supposed to be doing, what they were working on, and, you know, I was sort of there to like offer my technical expertise. Though

• 26:30Speaker 05

  the laptop I got, for example, I couldn't run Python on it, couldn't run Git, I couldn't download anything. And so I had to like work through this exercise of being able to cook without any equipment.

• 26:41Casey Newton?

  I want to ask a little bit about the orientation. You know, you mentioned that some of the folks at Doge explained to you what they were working on. You know, you're there presumably to serve the veterans of the United States. Did you have discussions with Doge about this is sort of who we serve, this is what they need, this is sort of how we want to make things better for them? Or was it sort of more focused on sort of cutting costs and that sort of thing?

• 27:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, the Doge conversations were around cutting costs. I think there's the Venn diagram overlap of, at the end of the day, I'm an employee. At least that's what my badge said. I'm an employee for VA. You know, you go through the VA specific onboarding. There's no Doge specific onboarding. You've got a VA laptop. You know, I have the iCare, a little memorandum on my backpack now. And so, you know, I was always like, this has to meet the filter of like what the VA wants, right? Nothing's gonna happen if the VA doesn't want it. And so it kind of has to meet two criteria for something to be interesting, right? You have to sort of save money and make the veteran experience better, or at least not make it worse. But it wasn't like an explicit conversation of like, okay, how do we actually ship software

• 27:51Speaker 05

  to make veteran experience better? I had a lot of those conversations, you know, because I was interested in doing that. So I just would meet with the Office of the CTO, which actually was like pretty well-developed at VA, because USDS OG had kind of built a lot of coalition there. They use GitHub, they have Slack, that sort of stuff.

• 28:09Kevin Roose?

  That's really interesting, because I think that the larger narrative that people have heard from Doge and from Elon Musk and people who are affiliated with him is that sort of, once you start looking, you know, under the hood, inside these government agencies, you find all kinds of waste and fraud and abuse and skeletons in the closet. And like, basically what you're saying is that you were surprised by how well the VA worked.

• 28:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was, yes, I was surprised by how effective the government is. You know, at the end of the day, though, like you're sort of defining effectiveness by like what you're asked to do. And so I do think that government is asked to do a lot of weird stuff. They tend to be quite effective at doing those things. But Congress, I think, has a role to play in this. You can think of Congress as like the worst PM you've ever met, right? And you're asked to like build an app with all these weird specifications. Like, you're doing a job, but you're kind of like playing Twister as an organization to like do it. But surprisingly, yeah, I mean, there are many meetings I was in where I sort of maybe came in a little bit antagonistic to, you know, adversarial to like, why is this contract $40 million to like, you know, process claims or something? And I would leave being like, oh, I get it, you know?

• 29:22Speaker 05

  Like, that makes, actually, it's pretty impressive.

• 29:25Kevin Roose?

  You wrote in that post about this Doge all hands meeting where Elon Musk was taking questions that one of the things he was sort of asking the Doge employees for was ideas about how to improve the public perception of Doge, which I imagine at this point was getting sort of all kinds of criticism for gutting various agencies and laying people off and cutting foreign aid and things like that. Did it seem to you at any point during this experience that Elon Musk and other Doge leaders were interested in solving actual problems or were they just concerned about the appearance of productivity and efficiency?

• 30:04Speaker 05

  I think, I mean, maybe I'm naively optimistic, but I think there was truly like a desire to solve problems because that's how you save money at the end of the day is you solve problems, you kill two birds with one stone, that sort of thing. That's what software can do. I think my guess is, is that, for example, at the meeting, I suggested like we should livestream this meeting. I think like this sort of, this would help, right? Like if people saw like how the sausage was made and how, you know, we weren't like scheming on like how to, you know, kill a bunch of African children. Like, I think it would sort of help the, the, the brand image. And he's, he embraced the idea. I mean, you know, he was like, that sounds awesome. We should do it next week. Let's do it next week. We'll start doing next week. Unfortunately, there

• 30:48Speaker 05

  was no other meeting that I was a part of. So I never like got to follow up on that like next week thing. Like I didn't get the invite to happen. I didn't hear about on Twitter, like what's going on. My guess is like to sort of like the most optimistic, you know, good faith take would be that like, like they were truly interested in these kinds of ideas, but the Trump admin wasn't. I think people realized pretty quickly like this was not going to be like this sort of walk in the park and let's just focus on what we can do, which turned out to be like cutting contracts. But at the end of the day, like a bunch of software engineers don't, not really necessary for that effort.

• 31:18Kevin Roose?

  Well, so tell us a bit about the, the cutting contracts piece. You know, you, you have this situation where folks like yourself who are sort of, you know, public spirited, want to see if they can make a contribution, parachuted in, they're assigned a role at an agency they have no prior familiarity with, and then are just sort of asked to hack millions of dollars out of the budget. How did that work?

• 31:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, so you know, one of the Trump EOs is that the Doge team gets to sit in on a lot of contracting meetings. And so we sort of helped them review as many contracts as they could. And then beyond that, it's just like lending my technical expertise, right? It's just basically sitting in on a meeting where someone will say, you know, we're like paying, you know, $4 million for this like chatbot on VA.gov. Like how, you know, and I'm like, well, you know, like that would take me like a week to build and integrate. And, you know, could you explain why that costs so much more money? And, you know, just trying, you know, a lot of it was just like there was somebody in the room that had coded before. I think that was a lot of it. It's like you're, you're, you're, you're paying a lot of money for things without the domain expertise to understand how much

• 32:25Speaker 05

  it should cost. So I was like the, hopefully somewhat the credible expert, quote unquote, who would come in and talk to Booz or Deloitte and just be like, hey, do you guys use Cursor? Like, how, you know, what are, what are the efficiency gains? Like, could you pass them on to us? Like, could you shave like 25% off the bill? That sort of thing. At the end of the day, like, we didn't have any true, I think a lot of people think Doge had a lot of power to fire. And, at least from my perspective at VA, we did not. Like, the EOs don't give us that power. Like, unless VA is willing to give us the keys, like, we can't drive the car. But we could sit in meetings and we could sort of, you know, kind of be annoying, right? And just ask questions.

• 33:00Kevin Roose?

  I mean, I wanted to ask you about these meetings, because I think there's this popular image that at least was going around during the early days of Doge, that Doge was sort of just this group of like, you know, kids in, you know, hoodies, who would like barge into these meetings with very experienced civil servants and, you know, demand to know what they were working on and would sort of, just sort of run in and rip things up and, and that had offended a lot of the career employees of the agencies where they were stationed. Was that what you witnessed? Were you the, the, you know, sort of archetypal

• 33:43Kevin Roose?

  guy in a hoodie coming in and telling these people, these 30-year veterans of the VA, how to do their jobs?

• 33:51Speaker 05

  I was not that person. I did not wear a hoodie, you know, I wore a shacket, a little bit of an upgrade. But yeah, I mean, I think that I'm sure to some degree that was happening, frankly, like I do think, I'm not saying this. I don't think these stories are made up generally, you know, like I think they come from truth. And there was generally this vibe of like, you know, they're not going to help us or like they're kind of going to like, give us the wrong information and cause us to go down this path, which I think is probably common in a transition period, right? Like I think every set of transitions, you have sort of a bunch of political appointees that come in and you have a new boss that doesn't really know what they're doing. Everyone's had that manager that doesn't really understand like why someone takes so long or why, you know, that sort of thing.

• 34:30Speaker 05

  But I don't, I don't think it was like as much like this idea of this office space, you know, interview process, like even the RIF, right? I learned.

• 34:38Kevin Roose?

  RIF is the Reduction in Force, AKA layoffs?

• 34:42Speaker 05

  Exactly. The Reduction in Force, the Workforce Optimization Initiative where Trump wants to cut the federal workforce. That entire EO is basically about making a recommendation to the White House about what to do. It's not about actually firing anyone and specifically for me, that EO gives Doge zero power to, to, to fire anyone. So this idea of these office space conversations where you're asking like, so what are you doing here? Like, there's no point in that. I was, however, I will say, like, I was on the older side of the engineers, you know, like of people who are like identified as software engineers. I think there were maybe two or three people who were like above the age of 30 and most people were like relatively young and probably not worked a ton in private companies even like. And it's just different too, right? I think like the culture, there's this like culture clash, loss and translation thing.

• 35:26Kevin Roose?

  Are there any like anecdotes or stories from your time at Doge that would help illustrate the culture clash?

• 35:32Speaker 05

  I would swear, you know, and I remember someone telling me something like, that will get you fired. It's just like interesting, like the rules and regulations that exist, that sort of define conduct. You know, there's just a lot of those things, even the DRP, the DRP massively did not work, like I think.

• 35:50Kevin Roose?

  What's the DRP?

• 35:51Speaker 05

  The DRP, the Deferred Resignation Program, the fork in the road emails.

• 35:55Kevin Roose?

  I see.

• 35:55Speaker 05

  Which are incredibly like in a, as a, from someone who works in the private industry, like you get eight months of severance, like that's like, that's a lot. That's pretty good, you know, but like the numbers of people who took it was like drastically low. And I think people, there's just like this cultural disconnect of like. Why are you here? Well, you're here to like work for the government for life. Like, so like an extra eight months of being like, doesn't compute like you're on a different, completely different career path. It's not like you're just gonna exit the government and then go work at X, or you know, like there's a completely different ways of thinking about how you want to live your entire life. It took time for me at least to understand that like, what, like, these people love their jobs. And I think that's kind of a lot of like the, the sort of disconnect culturally is like inefficiency versus efficiency.

• 36:39Speaker 05

  It's like, everyone sounds the same, like, looks the same, dresses the same, but like, the way they make decisions then manifests, you know, very, very, very differently.

• 36:48Kevin Roose?

  Well, what was making you swear so much, Sahil?

• 36:52Speaker 05

  I swear a lot. I just swear a lot. I just think, uh, it's kind of a San Francisco pirate mentality or, or something like that. But, you know, it wasn't in anger. It wasn't at anybody, but just like, like, you know, like, why the fuck is this so weird? Like, it's just like this kind of like surprised emotion that I can't really help uh, but express in that, in that way.

• 37:12Kevin Roose?

  I can't believe you just swore on our podcast, Sahil.

• 37:14Speaker 05

  I know, please cut that out.

• 37:16Kevin Roose?

  Get out of here.

• 37:17Speaker 05

  I used, I used to make, like, for, I'll give you one example, like, like a little bit of a culture. Like sarcasm, like sarcasm just doesn't exist in the work, in the government workplace for some of these reasons. Where I'd come in and they'd be like, what are you here for? And like, I'm here to riff everybody. And it's like, dead.

• 37:31Kevin Roose?

  Wait, you thought that was gonna go over well? You gotta read the room, dude.

• 37:37Speaker 05

  I know, I, that's part of the culture. I'm not very good at reading. I'm good at writing code, not reading rooms, right? Like, it's like, it kind of tends to be a different set of skills.

• 37:45Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I can see how that one didn't go over well. Hey, I'm new here. I'm gonna lay you all off.

• 37:53Speaker 05

  So maybe that, maybe I, maybe the story was about me.

• 37:55Kevin Roose?

  Maybe workshop that one next time.

• 37:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, let's work on that.

• 37:59Kevin Roose?

  I'm curious. I think a lot of people, Sahil, will be listening to this and thinking. This guy sounds really naive. You know, he hears about this Doge thing. I think a lot of people, especially on the left, think that Doge is sort of just a kind of pretext for an ideological purge. If they look at what the, you know, the agency has been doing inside these various, you know, federal bureaucracies, you know, trying to essentially purge any hint of leftism or woke-ism in what these agencies are doing. And they will say Sahil should have known better than to expect that he was going to go in and actually be valued for his expertise in coding.

• 38:42Kevin Roose?

  He did not know that he was signing up for, or he should have known that he was signing up for something very different than that. What is your response to that?

• 38:49Speaker 05

  Of course, the New York Times would say that.

• 38:51Kevin Roose?

  Get his ass.

• 38:53Speaker 05

  No, I mean, look, at the end of the day, it's like, it's like, you know, when I joined Pinterest and people were like, you know, that startup's not going to work, right? And it's just like statistically, no, but maybe yes. And if it's the maybe is, you know, that has an outsized impact, then it sort of, the math ends up working. And that's what I felt. I felt like, look, I think all startup people are naive. I think that's part of like what makes us startup people is that we're not willing to sort of just like listen to the traditional, you know, this is why we don't do that. Or it's just like, no, we're not going to do that thing. And then you learn the hard way, you know? But also every once in a while, you get an iPhone or you get AI or something like that.

• 39:29Speaker 05

  But yeah, if people are like, hey, you failed, I'd be like, yeah, that's like what happens. You know, lots of things are a waste of time and, you know, I have time, so, you know, I'm going to try.

• 39:37Kevin Roose?

  Let's just close the loop Sahil on why you were let go from the government. You suggested in your blog post that your leading theory for why you were riffed, as you put it, is because you talked to a journalist at Fast Company. Is that still your understanding of why you were let go?

• 39:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, I never heard anything from them. All I heard was like, did you run this by anyone at Doge? I said, no, I did not run it by anybody. And then, you know, a day later, my access, I just got an email from GitHub, basically. That was just like, you're no longer a member of the VA on GitHub. And I was like, oh, what happened? You know? And turned out I was riffed. But yeah, that's all I've heard. I've never heard from anyone. Affiliated with Doge since then, you know? So like on anything I've done that like they they just kind of ghosted ghosted me.

• 40:23Kevin Roose?

  That seems very sudden as a way to get laid off or to find out that you have been laid off. Did that process, that ghosting, as you described, it changed the way you felt about your time with Doge?

• 40:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it honestly made me feel like I wasn't going crazy. Like, I felt like I was misreading the room. And I would just like, clearly, we have a good goal. We, you know, like, why, why do we keep making these kind of mistakes? Why are we so unempathetic? And when I just got ghosted, right, like, just disappeared, my access just stopped working. No response. Honestly, it made me feel good in a way that like I wasn't the problem here. Like, it's like just that this, that this is just the culture of this weird entity, you know? It's like this emergent behavior of like, lack of empathy that exists in this, in these, in these systems, I think. And everyone gets to blame somebody else and kind of opt out of their own.

• 41:23Speaker 05

  But yeah, I mean, I think it gave me this sense of like, you know, my wife was right. This was not exactly like the, you know, the best use of my time. Unfortunately, the only way, the only way to learn that, you know, was to kind of, you know, the FOMO was real, right? At the end of the day.

• 41:39Kevin Roose?

  It's a powerful reminder that I think a lot of other, you know, Silicon Valley CEOs could learn, which is, listen to your wife. She's on to something.

• 41:47Speaker 05

  I think it's helpful. I think it is, and you know, now, now she tells me something, I'm like, my default is yes.

• 41:55Kevin Roose?

  Well, if Doge has done one good thing, it's made your marriage more harmonious. So congratulations.

• 42:02Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 42:03Kevin Roose?

  I'm curious how you think about the theory of Doge. I think one thing that often occurs to me when I hear people in tech talking about the government and bureaucracy is

• 42:18Kevin Roose?

  The idea that efficiency is sort of the ultimate good, right? That if you have a system that is slow-moving and has friction involved in it, and it's using outdated technology, that it is an unquestionable good to go in and kind of smooth those bumps, to make things faster, more efficient, cheaper. There is also, I would say, something about government that is potentially inefficient by design, right? Part of the reason that things in government take longer than they do in the private sector is because governments are not businesses, right? They have to account for real constituents, they have to weigh various priorities against

• 43:01Kevin Roose?

  each other, sometimes conflicting priorities. They have to sort of do the deliberative process before they embark on something that could potentially change people's lives. And I'm curious if you still think this sort of Silicon Valley attitude is needed in Washington? If that is something that the federal government should have more of? Or if you are coming to the view that maybe these are just two different agendas?

• 43:29Speaker 05

  I do think there's a synthesis here, which is, I think if you define the goals accurately, then efficiency is better. Like, if you're able to meet those objectives, but spend less money doing it, or make it faster, or require people to fill out less forms, then it is better. Just, efficiency is better. I think the loss in translation thing is Silicon Valley doesn't serve every person. But if the government has a program, it's going to have to serve everybody, right? So I think efficiency is still a good. I think it's just really important to understand, like, what are the constraints? I personally think that the better word would be sort of like modernization, or simplification.

• 44:13Speaker 05

  Like, efficiency, I think, has now just such a loaded connotation to it, just like cut, get rid of, things like that. But I do think simplifying things, taking two systems that, you know, I think what tends to happen is the government just stacks things on top of things that exist. It doesn't often refactor code and, like, combine systems. Like, there's a lot of agencies, each agency spun up to do a new thing. And I do think it would be good to simplify every once in a while, and sort of say, hey, these three things that came up in three different eras, we could now sort of merge.

• 44:42Casey Newton?

  I'm sure many people are sympathetic to the idea that the government is not as efficient as it could be, and they would love to see various aspects of it modernized so that the government was just easier to use. My instinct for how to do that would be to do it slowly and carefully by bringing in a lot of expertise and then giving them the time to work. The DOGE approach was to sort of bring in a bunch of people who don't have the relative expertise, ask them to get a ton done in a hurry, and apply this kind of ready-fire-aim approach to the federal government. So I think there are a lot of Americans right now who are looking at DOGE and seeing it as a kind of catastrophe, where we've sort of disabled vast swaths of the federal government

• 45:27Casey Newton?

  to no apparent benefit. And I wonder how, as somebody who worked on it, what you say to people who just see DOGE as a catastrophe?

• 45:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it's unfortunate, you know? I don't regret my time there because I didn't work on those specific projects, and I think I had a positive impact. You know, it's like, you know, do you throw the baby out with the bathwater? Hopefully, I was more the baby. But, uh, yeah, it's unfortunate. As another DOGE engineer said, like, mistakes were made. I don't know if the people who made the mistakes felt they were mistakes, but from the perspective of people who really wanted to come in and just work hard and make changes, I think it was less than ideal. But at the end of the day, this is like a Trump administration. That's who Americans voted for. Some Americans are very happy with what's happened, you know, and would like more of it to happen. And we live in a democracy.

• 46:21Speaker 05

  And I'm just not like an opt-out type of person. Like, I'm only on Earth for a short amount of time. I can't wait for like some, you know, some person or some party that I really agree with, and I'm only going to work there if I really align with everything they do. And I have a lot of faith, frankly, that there are a lot of checks and balances, that either these systems will come back, that they were blocked. You know, there are a lot of things that prevent, you know, this ready, aim, fire, that gun never actually goes off. It looks like it goes off. Everyone reports like it went off, but then a judge rolls it back. And so I think, you know, it is this naive optimism, and unfortunately, you know, it's kind of confirmation. It's like, I am who I am, you know? I'm not going to change. Like, I really believe in using software to make the world better.

• 47:07Kevin Roose?

  Well, I think that's a good place to end. Sahil, thank you so much for coming and welcome back to civilian life. Thank you. It's great. Thanks, Sahil.

• 47:20Kevin Roose?

  After our interview, we reached out to the White House for a comment on Sahil Lavingia's experience at Doge, in particular, a couple of things that he said about his vetting process. The White House said that, basically, you are allowed to ask people political questions when they're being vetted for political appointments, like roles at Doge, and that Doge employees understood their general responsibilities to cut waste. We also asked for some more details about Sahil's termination. The White House referred those questions to the VA, but the VA did not get back to us.

• 47:54Kevin Roose?

  When we cut back, let him cook. With AI? Pete Wells says America's top chefs are starting to do it. Cook with AI, I mean.

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• 49:54Kevin Roose?

  Well, Casey, I know you are a big foodie. You're always telling me what restaurants to go to. We went out to dinner this week and, you know, you had gotten the clam chowder. I don't know where I'm going with this.

• 50:07Casey Newton?

  That's a classic foodie thing to do is to get the chowder. Actually, the most foodie thing about me, Kevin, is that many weeks after the show, we go downstairs and we eat a sandwich from the Subway Corporation, which is known for their exquisite gourmet delicacies.

• 50:21Kevin Roose?

  No, but you are a foodie. I know this about you. And so this week, there was an article in the New York Times that made me think, well, I gotta talk about that with Casey.

• 50:30Casey Newton?

  Yes, and I love this story, too. It comes from Pete Wells, the great former food critic for the New York Times, who is now a food writer at the paper. And he had a great piece about how some of America's most famous chefs are starting to use AI in their work.

• 50:47Kevin Roose?

  So because this is going to be a segment about AI, let's do our disclosures. I work for the New York Times Company, which is suing OpenAI and Microsoft.

• 50:54Casey Newton?

  And my boyfriend works for Anthropic.

• 50:55Kevin Roose?

  I love this genre of story that we've started to see about like how people in a specific occupation or field are using AI. My sort of intuition is that you could do a version of this story for almost every profession, like how people are actually using this stuff. Because people are using this stuff and they're not always talking about how. And so I think it is a valuable service and a valuable journalistic mission to go into various industries and say, hey, what are you doing with this stuff?

• 51:21Casey Newton?

  Exactly. And look, a lot of our listeners, they're going out to restaurants and there is now the possibility that you're eating dishes that have been crafted or at least assisted in their development with AI. And I thought it might be interesting to hear about how that works.

• 51:36Kevin Roose?

  You know, I wondered why I was seeing Glue Pizza on so many menus. Let's bring in Pete Wells.

• 51:42Casey Newton?

  Let's bring him in.

• 51:48Kevin Roose?

  Pete Wells, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 51:49Speaker 06

  Well, hello.

• 51:50Kevin Roose?

  So, how did you get interested in how chefs are using artificial intelligence?

• 51:56Speaker 06

  Well, there was this curious silence about it. Nobody was talking about it. So I wrote emails to a couple of chefs and right away, one of them wrote back and said, "I use it nonstop. It is my favorite kitchen tool." But strangely, none of the chefs I am in touch with ever mention it to me. So he had the impression he was sort of the only one. And so of course I knew he can't be the only one. But so I started asking more people and got some pretty interesting responses back.

• 52:34Kevin Roose?

  And tell us about this chef that you contacted who said that AI has become his favorite kitchen tool.

• 52:40Speaker 06

  Oh, sure. This is Grant Aketz, whose famous restaurant is Alinia in Chicago. And he also has Next. And he's just in the fall opened a place called Fire. And he has been using it for all kinds of things. When he was opening Fire, the idea was that everything would be cooked in some way on or over or in flames, you know, or coals or embers. And so he asked ChatGPT to sort of like, you know, "Tell me some unusual cooking fuels from around the world and where it's used and what it's used for."

• 53:25Speaker 06

  And it started giving him back things like avocado pits and corn cobs, you know, some of which he knew about, but a lot of them he didn't. You know, of course, it also comes back with cow dung, which is a cooking fuel, but not one that you can like charge a lot of money for.

• 53:45Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I did that once in my house. Let's just say that smell's never coming out of the upholstery.

• 53:51Casey Newton?

  One of the reasons that this is so interesting, Pete, is Grant Aketz is one of the most famous chefs in America. Alinia, I think is one of its best restaurants. Have you ever eaten at Alinia?

• 54:01Speaker 06

  No, have you?

• 54:02Casey Newton?

  I have, and it was one of the great meals of my life. Pete, I imagine you've eaten there once or twice.

• 54:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was writing about Grant before he opened Alinia. So I've been paying attention to what he does for a really long time. And he is probably one of the most focused on creativity and inventiveness. One of the chefs is most focused on that of anybody in the world.

• 54:34Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I think the last dish I had at Alinia was like an edible balloon that they had made. You know, I mean, every dish at Alinia contains some sort of surprise, right? This is not like a steakhouse. Everything there is designed to be original, which is what made it so interesting to me that he is one of the people who is sort of at the vanguard of using AI in his cooking. I could imagine Grant Aketz saying, no, no, no, this is the most precious thing to me are the ideas behind what is in my food. I'm going to make sure that's always coming from, you know, sort of my own brain. What do you think it is that has made him and some other chefs say, oh, no, no, no, this can actually be an excellent creative partner?

• 55:14Speaker 06

  Well, he has always relied on collaboration. When I first met him before he opened Alinia, he had this crew, this like the wrecking crew of these bright, young, ambitious chefs. And every night after service was finished, like 11, 11:30, when the kitchen is cleaned down, they would sit around a table and talk about ideas and like, what do you got? What do you got for like, what if we did this? What if we tried that? And that's just always been a huge part of his process. So he's already like very accustomed to the idea of like ideas come from.

• 55:52Speaker 06

  Within, but they can also come from outside. They can come from traveling, some amazing meal that you had in Spain. They can come from a childhood memory of your grandmother. They could also come from somebody else's childhood memory. They could also come from your sous chef's last trip, you know? And it's not a huge step, at least for him, to start asking the same kinds of questions he would ask his sous chefs to type them into ChatGPT. You know, when your sous chef suggests something, you think about it. It's not going to go straight on the menu anyway. You're all gonna, you know, critique it, discuss it, play around with it,

• 56:33Speaker 06

  elaborate it, refine it before it gets anywhere near the dining room. So, you know, it, I think, made a kind of sense to him. Like, let's get this machine that can suggest crazy stuff sometimes, but will also suggest things that might turn out to be good with a, you know, a tweak here and a change there. Let's just bring it into the process.

• 57:00Kevin Roose?

  Now, Pete, you mentioned that you'd found, in addition to Grant Aket's, a bunch of other chefs who were using AI tools in the kitchen. What were some of the ways they were using them? And who are these chefs?

• 57:13Speaker 06

  So there's Ned Baldwin, who has a restaurant in Manhattan called Houseman. And he sent me a whole bunch of transcripts of his conversations about sausage making and different things you can do to affect the texture of sausage, to make it firmer, to make it, if it's too firm, to make it a little softer. If you want that sort of springy elastic feeling that you get in like Asian fish balls, which is its own thing. How do you get that? And then from there, like, okay, I've got my basic like recipe, but now I'd like. To change the seasonings, like what, you know, what would I do if I were making this in Malaysia, right? What are the spices I would bring into it?

• 57:57Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I mean, in our culture, chefs are often presented as these figures of towering authority who sort of know how to do anything, you know, if you just sort of toss them a few ingredients, they can make it. And I think what your story gets at is that actually, these chefs have all sorts of questions about how to do things. And if they want to expand their skill set, they don't always know what is the next thing to do. But chatbots are proving to be pretty good at that. And as you point out, those chatbots, they're extremely patient. You can ask them a question at any time of the day. And it sounds like the chefs have been pretty satisfied with the answers that they're getting.

• 58:37Speaker 06

  I mean, more than one use the phrase out of the box as kind of what they go to it for, because they know what they know, right? And they know, you know, that zucchini and basil go together, right? And there are certain combinations that are just go to's for chefs over and over. And what they can get out of chat GPT is just something they'd never considered before. Just and for a chef, that's really valuable because, you know, they're in a high pressure, high volume environment. They're just every night, they've got, it's a grind and they've got to get the food out to the tables. And it is, there is not a

• 59:20Speaker 06

  lot of time to just like, sit and think. It's just, it's just not, it's not part of the job. And when you're under pressure, of course, you go to what you know. I know this is going to work. I've done it before. I'll just do it again. But if you do that too often, you know, you started to seem

• 59:43Speaker 06

  Like you're not thinking anymore. You start like whatever made you fresh and exciting to the world in the beginning starts to go away if you just rely on your proven, you know, formulas.

• 59:54Kevin Roose?

  I think that's so interesting because one of the knocks on these AI tools is that their outputs can be sometimes generic because they're essentially sort of taking the statistical average of whatever data they were trained on. And this has always been my hesitation about using AI for cooking. You know, I'm a home cook. I'm not a very good one, but I do use chat GPT sometimes to sort of inspire myself. And I've just found that it often like recommends the most generic thing possible. It's like, oh, I have these five ingredients. What should I make? And it's like, it's not all that surprising. But maybe I'm just not good enough at prompting the models. Maybe the chefs who are spending serious time with these tools have figured out how to get more creative out of the box ideas out of them.

• 1:00:40Speaker 06

  I think, you know, I've started playing around with it just since I started reporting this story. And what I've found is, yeah, the first response you get might be, you know, like, yeah, thanks. I could have done that myself. But when you go back to it and say like, no, not that. Can you do better? You start to get interesting responses. I just, before we got on, was thinking about dinner. And I said, look, I've got a couple fennel bulbs. I've got an onion. I've got some garlic, olive oil, a couple other things, can of sardines. What can I do for dinner? And it said, well, you know, pasta with sardines and fennel. And I said, I'm not so into the carbs. Like, what can we do that's lower?

• 1:01:24Speaker 06

  And then it gave me basically, you know, the same dish without the pasta, right? And I said, hmm, what if we just do a raw fennel? So I get a fennel salad. I said, oh, that's looks interesting. Is there a way to take this in a Turkish direction? And then it started to get really interesting. It was like, yes, you could add some braised zucchini. You could add some fried eggplant. Like, the more I went back to it, you know, and it never gets. Annoyed, like, hey, that recipe I gave you, that was a really good recipe. What's your problem, dude? Like, it's, it will just keep batting the ball back at you, which is interesting. And, and like, the more specific you can be, the more surprising it will be.

• 1:02:08Kevin Roose?

  Now, Pete, there has been a lot of resistance in creative fields to using AI. A lot of people in animation, or art, or music, just think like, this is taboo. We shouldn't be allowing these things into our creative process. Did you find anything similar among chefs and people who work in restaurants? Is there sort of a cultural resistance to AI?

• 1:02:32Speaker 06

  There's a huge cultural resistance. Although, I think in, in some of those other fields, like animation in particular, like, it, it has a lot to do with the fact that this thing can do their jobs now. You know, it can, it can do their jobs already. It can't really do what a chef does. Not at the sort of high-end creative level that the, the restaurants I wrote about are, are dealing in. You know, it's, it's not there yet. But there's still a huge resistance just to the idea, to the romantic idea of that, that all of this stuff comes from the heart of the chef is, you know, this heroic figure

• 1:03:16Speaker 06

  standing on a mountaintop and, and like, lightning strikes him and that's dinner, you know? That, that bothers people. There, people are bothered by what they, they see as sort of the laziness of it, or the, the, just the, the, all of the famous, like, kind of crap that AI generates. Like, we don't want that crap in our food. It's, it's actually really deep. I, I ran into a couple of food writers last night, and one of them walked up to me and said, I hate that AI piece. And it was like, not. I think not the way I wrote it, but the facts in it.

• 1:03:58Speaker 06

  I hate, I hate what the reality is that you reported.

• 1:04:02Casey Newton?

  Well, here's what I would say to that person. What's lazier, using AI to try to come up with a new dish? Or putting a flourless chocolate cake on your dessert menu?

• 1:04:11Speaker 06

  Right, right. I mean, if, if, yeah, if, if what you want is to sort of a constant invention, reinvention, constant moving forward, those ideas, they can come from anywhere.

• 1:04:26Casey Newton?

  I have one question that's not actually about AI, but that it's, it's on my mind. And I figured this would be a great time to ask the great Pete Wells about it.

• 1:04:32Speaker 06

  Please.

• 1:04:33Casey Newton?

  Okay, Pete, so here's the story. So last night, if we use this, we should bleep out the name, but I went to

• 1:04:39Casey Newton?

  wonderful institution, you know, went there with three folks and, and we did of course, order the famous chicken, but there were four of us. We know we're gonna, you know, need a little something else. And so they had a ribeye on the menu and it cost $90. We said, well, that's a lot of money for a ribeye. But you know what? There's four of us, it's a special occasion, let's go nuts. We ordered the ribeye and we order it medium rare because that's the proper temperature that you should order any piece of meat, in my opinion.

• 1:05:03Speaker 06

  So the No, you're right. You're, this is factual.

• 1:05:06Casey Newton?

  Okay, thank you.

• 1:05:07Speaker 06

  You heard it here.

• 1:05:07Casey Newton?

  We, you heard it here first. So the ribeye arrives and we get into it and it's, it's rare. It is, it is just, it is not medium rare, it is rare. And so, you know, you hate to be those people, you know? I never feel worse in my life than when I have to like ask somebody in the service industry for help in this way.

• 1:05:24Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:05:24Casey Newton?

  But we keep looking at each other, we're like, we did pay $90 for this and like, it feels like it should come at the temperature we order. So we say, it's kind of rare. Okay, well, we'll put it back on the grill. Okay. So here are my questions for you, Pete. Number one, there was some controversy in my table because one person was surprised that they just grilled the piece of meat again, because we, by this point, we've, you know, sort of hacked off half of it. And they sort of take away that piece of meat rather than, you know, bringing us in new ones. So question one is, is that sort of the common way that this is addressed? And then number two is, is any sort of like extra warranted in this? Is this a situation where the restaurant should throw in a free dessert? Or like do sort of something nice? Or is that just a, hey, these things happen in the kitchen sometime, we're gonna grill

• 1:06:08Casey Newton?

  your damn steak a little warmer, get over yourselves? Your thoughts?

• 1:06:13Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, I didn't understand the first part of the question.

• 1:06:16Casey Newton?

  Yes.

• 1:06:16Speaker 06

  They took some of the steak back, but not the entire steak?

• 1:06:19Casey Newton?

  Well, yeah, cuz we, you know, we kind of like hacked off a few pieces.

• 1:06:22Speaker 06

  He's asking whether they should have given him and his friends a whole new ribeye.

• 1:06:25Casey Newton?

  That's right.

• 1:06:26Speaker 06

  Ooh, I mean, that's a lot of, I mean, that's a lot of money for the restaurant, but it's a lot of money for you.

• 1:06:32Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:32Speaker 06

  Uh, it's typical, especially with something like that, to just take the uneaten part and send it back to the kitchen. I don't believe I've ever seen a whole new steak.

• 1:06:42Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 1:06:42Speaker 06

  Come out of the kitchen.

• 1:06:43Casey Newton?

  That's what I thought, for what it's worth.

• 1:06:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I'm on your side.

• 1:06:45Speaker 06

  I've been to a lot of steakhouses.

• 1:06:46Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Speaker 06

  And then, you know, as far as, you know, doing something extra, I mean, no, they're not obligated. They, they are, I think, kind of obligated to get it right.

• 1:06:56Casey Newton?

  Yes.

• 1:06:57Speaker 06

  Right?

• 1:06:58Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:58Speaker 06

  This is what we ordered, and it's not what we ordered. And especially with something like that, where like, I mean, did it ruin your night to have a couple bites of rare steak, right? So I, I don't, I wouldn't call that a traumatic experience. It, it, when it gets into trauma, you know, like.

• 1:07:13Casey Newton?

  Wow, Casey, people just said, you and your friends, get over it. That's great. Listen, this is exactly what I wanted. I wanted my, my expectations to be managed by a professional, and now they've been managed.

• 1:07:24Speaker 06

  Right. I mean, you, like, where I think you start to need, or if, if you're a certain kind of restaurant and you, and you really wanna go over and above, where you kind of need to, to send something out to the table or do something extra or knock something off the check is, is where they've kind of suffered a little bit. They waited 30 minutes.

• 1:07:42Casey Newton?

  That's right.

• 1:07:43Speaker 06

  They waited 30 minutes for their steak, or, or, you know, or somebody spilled wine on them, you know?

• 1:07:48Casey Newton?

  So in your view, something pretty major has to happen to get into the free dessert territory.

• 1:07:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, you have to be, I think, become sort of unhappy, right? And it doesn't sound like you, you got there.

• 1:07:59Casey Newton?

  I will say, I didn't feel wronged, but I will say that, and, you know, not that we needed some like grand apology or anything, but I was sort of expecting somebody would be like, oh, we're sorry about that, let us take care of that. You know, just like a sort of like real quick thing. That didn't really arrive, and so that was just sort of curious to me. I don't know.

• 1:08:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's definitely a service issue because you would hope your server would say, "Oh, I'm so sorry. It's not the way you'd like it." Even if they don't admit wrongdoing, they don't have, they don't have to say, "Oh, my God. I can't believe that chef did. I don't know what's going on back there." Like, but just to say, you know, "I'm sorry. It's not what you were hoping for. Let me take care of that."

• 1:08:38Casey Newton?

  Exactly. Instead, I felt like we were getting the looks like, "Oh, here we go with these people." You know, it was one of the, it's like, "Oh, it's one of these kind of tables."

• 1:08:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:08:46Casey Newton?

  "They've got opinions about the meat temperature."

• 1:08:48Speaker 06

  Yeah. Now, in my experience, like, that sort of very fine-tuned sense of hospitality of like, "I'll apologize even if I don't think the restaurant's in the wrong." "I'll apologize because it'll make them feel better." That is sort of what separates 95, 6, 7% of the restaurants from the really, really good, careful ones.

• 1:09:11Casey Newton?

  There you go.

• 1:09:11Speaker 06

  So that's like a rare experience and you're lucky if you get it.

• 1:09:15Casey Newton?

  Yeah. No, the rare experience I had was that the steak was too rare.

• 1:09:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, you were hoping for more of a medium rare experience.

• 1:09:20Casey Newton?

  Yeah, exactly. Let's just say it wasn't well done.

• 1:09:23Speaker 06

  Pete, thank you so much for coming.

• 1:09:25Casey Newton?

  Thank you, Pete.

• 1:09:25Speaker 06

  Great to have you.

• 1:09:26Casey Newton?

  Appreciate it.

• 1:09:27Speaker 06

  Thank you. This has been so much fun. I'm glad you thought to call me up.

• 1:09:31Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:32Speaker 06

  Anytime.

• 1:09:32Casey Newton?

  We'd love to have you back.

• 1:09:54Speaker 00

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• 1:11:37Casey Newton?

  Hard Fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn. We're edited this week by Matt Collette. We're fact-checked by Ana Alvarado and Will Peichl. Today's show was engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Marian Lozano, Sophia Landman, Rowan Nemisto, and Dan Powell. Our executive producer is Jen Poyant. Video production by Soya Roque, Pat Gunther, and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Hui Wing Tam, Daya Hadad, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at [email protected].

• 1:12:36Speaker 04

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