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

(00:03) - The Soham Parek Drama (05:39) - Soham Parek Interview (27:20) - Flo Crivello (Lindy) (38:13) - Emily Sundberg (Feed Me) (01:09:33) - Senate Passes Trump's Megabill (01:13:46) - Zak Kukoff (Lewis-Bruke Associates) (01:28:23) - Matthew Prince (Cloudflare) (02:00:03) - Meta Poaches OpenAI Engineers (02:39:51) - Will Brown (Prime Intellect) (03:10:05) - Sam Altman Slams Meta TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev 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.

• 0:00Will Brown?

  You're watching TBN.

• 0:03John Coogan?

  We have some breaking news from TBN. Let's go to the printer cam, which I believe

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  The timeline is in

• 0:12John Coogan?

  Here it goes. Printer cam's ready.

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  Terminal.

• 0:14John Coogan?

  I see it spinning up. We got some breaking news. We got some breaking news. What is this? Traded. We got a trade deal. He's wanted.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  The timeline is in turmoil. Special segment starting now.

• 0:27John Coogan?

  I love this because it's

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  Soham Parekh just became famous in the last few hours, not for the reasons that he would necessarily want to be famous.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  No, no. Is this a real picture of him? Do we know?

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  But this is from Var Epsilon, says breaking Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have signed Soham Parekh as fractional chief AI officer. Obviously a joke, but he's been on the timeline all day because apparently he's been working at multiple YC companies, multiple companies at the same time. What's funny is that we were, we were working on a, during the show, we were working on a post. We couldn't decide how to frame the trade deal of Soham and some fan just did it for us and nailed it and got a thousand likes.

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  Fully scented. So Matt Parkers from Anti-Metal was, actually Soham was their first engineering hire in 2022. Really smart and likable. Enjoyed working with him. We realized pretty quickly that he was working at multiple companies and we let him go. I can't imagine the amount of equity he's left on the table. Matt says hiring Soham is, is a new rite of passage, TBH. Any great company should go through it. So Soham was the first person to call this out. He said this morning, or actually it was last night. So this has been, this has been building. PSA, there's a guy named Soham Parekh in India who works at three to four startups at the same time. He's been preying on YC companies and more.

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  Gary is not going to be happy about this. You do not, you don't want to put up the bat, you know, you don't want Gary, people to put up the Gary sign.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  No, you don't want to go up against the dork.

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  But apparently he's been preying on YC companies. I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying, scamming people.

• 2:09John Coogan?

  This is fascinating. Did you see this from Pratika Meta? Tyler put this in that you want to read this one for us?

• 2:15Jordi Hays?

  He's been all over the place. Roy said, I interviewed this guy yesterday.

• 2:19John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Tyler, break it down for us. What does Pratika have to say?

• 2:21Speaker 03

  Okay, so apparently, I mean, this is still unconfirmed. I've actually, I've sent him an email.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  I've, I've attained his email. I'm not sure if it's the real one. We'll see. But he says, the dude clears interviews. He's good with that. After clearing, he has junior people doing all the work.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  And he has around 20 employees and interns, basically a small dev shop.

• 2:38John Coogan?

  Wow. So he's just figured out the economics of like, hey, if I'm making 200K or 300K.

• 2:42Jordi Hays?

  He's basically signing people do a 20K a month retainer. He knows he's going to have some churn.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:47Jordi Hays?

  But it doesn't matter. He's picking up some equity.

• 2:49John Coogan?

  This is fascinating.

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  Equity comp as well.

• 2:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:51Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if he's vested. I wonder if he's vested.

• 2:55John Coogan?

  He has some shares on the balance sheet.

• 2:56Jordi Hays?

  At, at, at any of these companies.

• 2:58John Coogan?

  This is crazy.

• 2:59Jordi Hays?

  Ken Watana says Soham Parek is the Bonnie Blue of YC. Very vulgar. SAR says, all recruiting must stop until we get Soham on TBPN to figure out what is going on.

• 3:11John Coogan?

  Open invite to Soham. We'll, we'll talk to him.

• 3:13Jordi Hays?

  Santiago says Soham on TBPN. When? Daniel, Growing Daniel says, Microsoft just laid out.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  Here we go.

• 3:20Jordi Hays?

  Laid off 9,000 workers, all of them Soham Parek.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  If your CEO doesn't have a Soham Parek email in their inbox, it's time to start polishing your resume. Cause he hasn't reached out. It means he's not bullish on you.

• 3:34Jordi Hays?

  Austin Allred says, must suck being an unemployed software engineer and realizing that Soham Parek has been hired 79 times in the past four years. And then Matthew Berman says, are you think AI is killing software jobs? Tell that to Soham Parek. Signal says, not now, honey. There is a Soham gate happening on X.

• 3:56Jordi Hays?

  It is really funny. It's basically say, I'm going to build a dev shop, but it's going to be my name and I'm, you know, he, he probably, no. He probably could have had a just very successful dev shop.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But, but, but there's a stigma around hiring dev shops. You want to hire founding engineers. Like, you know, the title matters. And the idea of like, okay, we have a full-time employee. We got somebody who's delivering. They're a high performer. Our team is cracking. We don't have to outsource. The whole thing with Uber, remember Uber's initial build out was all outsourced and it was like, it was like a mark on the company. Obviously it didn't affect them. They went on a generational run. It was fantastic. But there's this, there's this idea of like, if you're building a startup, you need, the founders need to be coding, the employees need to be coding, needs to be handcrafted. Can't outsource.

• 4:42Jordi Hays?

  True.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  You know, he's proven us all wrong, I guess.

• 4:45Jordi Hays?

  True, so we're working on getting him live. We got another post here from Growing Daniel.

• 4:51John Coogan?

  Has he gotten back to you Tyler on email? It seems like he might not come on today, but maybe we can pitch him and try to get him on.

• 4:56Speaker 03

  Hasn't got back. I sent it 20 minutes ago.

• 4:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 4:59Jordi Hays?

  I think he needs to come out and say he's sorry. He needs to come out and say he's sorry.

• 5:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:04Jordi Hays?

  And he needs to say, this is the right time to launch his dev shop.

• 5:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And it should be called the dev shop of Soham Parek.

• 5:13John Coogan?

  Yes. This is, I mean, I don't know, maybe he's delivering, but.

• 5:17Jordi Hays?

  Growing Daniel has a post, "Your Chief of Staff Brings List of Applicants. Really Likes This One Indian Guy. Asked If It's A Rune Or A Soham She Doesn't Understand. Pull Out Illustrated Diagram Explaining The Difference Between Runes And Soham. She Laughs And Says It's A Good Engineer Sir." It's a Soham.

• 5:36John Coogan?

  Oh, that's a wild post. That's great. We believe he's here in the studio with us here, so welcome to the stream. Soham. Good to meet you. How are you doing?

• 5:47Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  Welcome.

• 5:49Jordi Hays?

  The man himself.

• 5:50John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining.

• 5:54John Coogan?

  Uh, why don't you, uh, why don't you introduce yourself and, uh, just take a few minutes to just, uh, give us what's going on in your world? What's the last 24 hours been like? Um, how would you describe yourself? What, what, what do you have to say to people? And then I'm sure.

• 6:10Jordi Hays?

  Let's go back to the very beginning. Who are you? Where do you come from?

• 6:15Soham Parekh?

  I mean, um, I'm, you know, I'm originally from Mumbai. I kind of grew up, you know, here all my life. Obviously drove into computer science, like, you know, coding and everything kind of without a choice, kind of process of elimination. Fell in love with it, you know? As you're aware, at this point, I'm like everyone's like favorite founding engineer pretty much or worker 17 or whatever you might call it, like AI bot or Soham as a service. I don't know. Um, but yeah, um, don't have much to my story essentially, uh, you know, I've just been always passionate about, you know.

• 6:45John Coogan?

  What was your first job?

• 6:48Soham Parekh?

  My first job was actually at a company called Allen. It was like a voice assisted like conversational startup. You know, this is back in like twenty twenty, twenty twenty one.

• 6:56John Coogan?

  Twenty twenty. And when did you come to the States? Because I know I was talking to Matt and he said you you would go to the anti metal off sites and you're very much a part of the team.

• 7:06Soham Parekh?

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

• 7:31John Coogan?

  Okay, so the main claim that was levied against you on X yesterday kind of started with Sue Hill over at Playground. He accused you of working at multiple jobs simultaneously. Is that true?

• 7:46Soham Parekh?

  It is true. And yeah, I would, you know, love to add color to it, but you know, that is true.

• 7:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess the question is, do you believe that you were in violation of your own employment contracts? Or do you believe that there was some sort of legal loophole that allowed you to do this without committing any sort of legal violation?

• 8:10Soham Parekh?

  I mean, honestly, I think going back to like how it even like started to happen and what the motivations were.

• 8:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, please.

• 8:17Soham Parekh?

  Would probably have, you know, obviously, I would want to like preface with saying like, I'm not proud of what I've done. You know, that's not something that I endorse either. But, you know, financial circumstances essentially, like no one really likes to work one forty hours a week, right? But I had to do this kind of out of necessity, like I was in extremely like dire financial circumstances and somehow like, you know, I don't, I'm not a very people person. I don't share much in terms of like what's going on with my life and kind of in my internal thought process, you know, was kind of like getting more stressed with like, hey, you know, I want to like come out of the situation, what should I do? So it's more not, it was not more so kind of out of greed, but essentially like necessity. And just like thought that if I work like multiple places.

• 8:59Soham Parekh?

  You know, like I can basically like help myself like alleviate the situation I was in much faster.

• 9:05John Coogan?

  No, it's very economically rational. What about the conjecture that that you had

• 9:12John Coogan?

  a team of junior developers underneath you, helping you actually accomplish the tasks? Is there any truth to that?

• 9:20Soham Parekh?

  I wish I had the money and I wish that was true, but that is not true. Any of the founders that, you know, I worked with can watch with that. I have multiple occasions like bed program with people. You know, I've written every single inch of the code. You know, Anti-Met is one of the companies I worked at. You know, they have pretty high bar for design, as you might know. They did a launch recently. You know, there were two occasions where, you know, just before the launch, like, you know, the contractor who was going to do the front end for us essentially had bailed out and, you know, we as a team had to figure out and do everything, which was a team of only three engineers, right?

• 9:55Jordi Hays?

  So how did it originally happen though? You started with one job in 2020, then you realized, hey, I could add another. And then you realized you could just continuously add them. Did you create any type of financial models to kind of model out potential churn? As you would get, you know, I'm curious if you're operating this, looking at it as basically a SaaS business, the SaaS of Soham.

• 10:18Soham Parekh?

  This was, this was not a business to me. Every company that I've worked with, I have deeply cared about, like, you know. And again, people who spend, you know, a lot of time with me can like bat that on multiple occasions. The, and again, I did not have any financial model. The, like I said, the only motivation for me was, hey, you know, I'm in a financial jeopardy. You know, so I didn't do this until 2022. 2022 is actually when I was, you know, running into issues. I had deferred my, you know, grad school admit. And, you know, did like an online degree, but basically, you know, did not have like enough, you know, like. Essentially, like, you know, just to get out of the situation I was in.

• 11:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 11:01Soham Parekh?

  Don't want to talk like too much deeply about it, but.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  No, no, that's fine.

• 11:05Soham Parekh?

  Yeah, so that's kind of why.

• 11:06Jordi Hays?

  Talk about your own, talk about your own abilities. Every, it seemed universal that the, the teams that you worked on said that you were extremely talented, that you interviewed incredibly well. It's, you know, easy for, you know, new CS grads to be frustrated because you were probably running laps around them in the interview process, but, um, but yeah, uh, it's very impressive if you actually didn't have a junior team and you were just, you know, juggling, you know, it seems, uh, estimates seem to put it at maybe five, five companies at once.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, are you just, are you just like a hyper productive? Are you leveraging AI tools and coding assistance? Are you just able to move really quickly in a startup environment? Or are you also like talented, like systems engineering and algorithms and like solving really, really hard computational problems?

• 11:54Soham Parekh?

  So I'll preface with this, um, you know, some of these companies I worked at was before the co-pilot boom. Right? There were no AI assisted programming. At least three startups have went on the record like saying this, people who've programmed program that we can also watch with this. The real truth is, you know, there's this funny line in some of my interviews, like TRDR, I don't do anything outside coding, that is very true. And if you're like spending hours, like, you know, sitting in front of the computer, you will eventually like, at least I hope so, like get good at it. I, I, there's obviously a lot for me to learn in general. And I wouldn't say like I'm, you know, like a, uh, uh, like a, uh, I don't know what they call like, uh, you know, like a platform manager, something like, you know, top principal or whatever.

• 12:35Soham Parekh?

  But I, I would like to believe that I was a decent enough, a good enough engineer to essentially be able to work at three places because that's the only thing I did the entire day.

• 12:44John Coogan?

  So, so an average day for you, an average week for you, it feels like basically maybe you sleep for six to eight hours and then you're basically programming for 12 to 14 hours every single day for seven days a week.

• 12:58Jordi Hays?

  But as, as some of these, you know, new coding, uh, code gen tools came out, Claude code, cursor, Devon, et cetera, were, did you feel like you could add maybe a few more jobs? Were you getting, you know, more efficient or are you still handcrafted code, farm to table, organic, you know, handmade?

• 13:16Soham Parekh?

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

• 13:52Soham Parekh?

  But, yeah, and as far as the interviews go, right? Like, so one, there's also been a lot of things around like, hey, you know, I probably used, you know, some sort of like tool like Clouly, which, you know, I would love for the founder to essentially go on record and say if I'm a paying customer, I'm not. But, or some sort of like, you know, how to game the system. The truth is, a lot of these companies did not have lead code style problems. And if they did, I would have bombed interviews, you know, because I don't practice lead code as much. I'm, I know my data structure as well, I know what to use when, but, you know, like typically a gun.

• 14:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, you're also great at cold email. I saw some of these cold emails. You got a great format, it pulls people in, it, it, it shows your personality, it shows that you care about, you know, coding. And I think that helps a lot as well.

• 14:35John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 14:37Soham Parekh?

  Yeah, I mean, I do care about coding a lot, but, again, like, you know, most of these companies essentially had a take-home assessment or a work trial, right? So, it's very difficult to like game a work trial or game a take-home assessment. Like, you have to do it and then deliver it. And I did everything, you know, on my own. Like, I was also doing the work trials on my own and, yeah, like, I guess I'll leave it at that. If they did have lead code, I would have bombed the interviews, but luckily they didn't. Like startups usually just like care more about like.

• 15:07John Coogan?

  What can you do? Talk a little bit about the companies that you chose to work for, you applied to. Do you think you could have pulled this off with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and split three times? Or do they have defenses in place that would make this difficult? There's a variety of memes around maybe big tech companies. It's easier work, maybe startups are harder. I'm just kind of curious about, it seems like you went for a lot of startups. What was the reasoning behind that?

• 15:37Soham Parekh?

  Yeah, so it feels counterintuitive like if I was in the need of money like why would I work for, you know, startups as opposed to big time because they clearly pay well, they have a nine to five schedule. For the most part, like I would say, you know, people don't really care about like what you are essentially like doing. Um, the thing with me is like, if you're spending, you know, multiple hours a week, like working on something, you would have to at least decently be passionate about it because otherwise you'll just like burn out. Um, like I said, you know, each of these companies that I've worked for and again, uh, you know, founders, some of the founders who spend meaningful time with me can vouch, um, you know, would would say that I actually cared about these companies. So it wasn't like cold email without context.

• 16:18Soham Parekh?

  Like I deeply read into what a company was doing, what their business model was, you know, who their customers were. I had great ideas about like, you know, what to build for them, what not to build for them, you know, what the platform is like. Um, you know, I did deliver like beyond engineering for a lot of these companies and, um, yeah, like it was more kind of like, hey, if I'm spending like one forty hours, like, I want to do something that I actually care about. Like, I don't want to like, you know, do nine to five and kind of like centered a div in like six hours or something. Um, you know, that's, that's just not me because I do like what I do and, and that's kind of.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  Cold email hack. Send the cold emails from the heart. Put some real thought into them.

• 16:56John Coogan?

  Um, talk to me about, um, other alternatives that you may be considered or maybe didn't. Um, did you ever think about going to a startup and saying like, hey, I'm doing a great job. I'm working forty hours a week. I need to make more money. I'd like to take on a second job. It would, would, would that be amenable to you? Do you think that founders might be actually open to that?

• 17:19Jordi Hays?

  Or say, I'm working eighteen hours a day. Can you pay?

• 17:22John Coogan?

  Can you pay me three times as much?

• 17:23Jordi Hays?

  Pay me.

• 17:23John Coogan?

  I'm doing the work of three devs because there is a world where you could have allocated all that time and one startup would have gotten three times as much value, but they probably should have paid you three times as much, maybe to make that balance out. And so did you ever have those types of decisions? Like we're seeing this with the AI talent wars, the, the ten X, you can think of yourself as like a three to five X engineering. No offense, but you know, the hundred X engineers are getting a hundred million.

• 17:49Jordi Hays?

  You could maybe be ten X if you just, if you really focus.

• 17:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, and so it, it's almost a question of like, why couldn't you get the money that you wanted from a single job? What was, what was the, what was the stumbling block there?

• 18:01Soham Parekh?

  Yeah, I think the part where, you know, I should have basically done is like come clean with my situation.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 18:07Soham Parekh?

  You know, to be very frank with you, like I mentioned, like I'm not a good, uh, you know, person with sharing what my internal conflicts are. I do like to keep boundaries between my personal and private, you know, like whatever is like going with me mentally. And that's true with any person I'm with as well, like and that's outside of work. Um, so one, there was an embarrassment to essentially like admitting that, hey, you know, I have this struggles mentally. Uh, you know, like, uh, and talk in open about it. And then the second thing is, you know, I, uh, really did not like think through this because like I said, it was an action that was done more out of like desperation to get out of the situation I was in rather than like.

• 18:42John Coogan?

  I mean, the flip side here is that you, you don't necessarily need to have something going on in your family to justify a ten million dollar salary or a one million dollar salary like LeBron James doesn't need to say, oh, like, uh, you know, I have a sob story. And that's why I need fifty million dollar contract. He's like, I'm delivering this value to you and you should pay me the value that I'm creating. And so I'm wondering if you ever considered just coming to a founder and saying like, I can do the job of three engineers, but you gotta pay me three times as much.

• 19:09Soham Parekh?

  Honestly, I, uh, it again feels counterintuitive. Like I don't really care much about the money. I was really into it for building. So like greed was not like an incentive for me. Um, again, regardless of my financial circumstances, in most of these companies, I always took the lower, uh, you know, uh, pay a higher equity offer. Um, again, like equity for me was not even like vested until I would make the move to U S, which like I said, you know, I was based out of India. So I had to go through a whole visa process in order to make that happen. So I wouldn't even be getting equity and as long as my immigration was uncertain, which it was.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:44Soham Parekh?

  So all the decisions seem counterintuitive. Basically for me is like, hey, you know, I have to do something to kind of get out of the situation I'm in. I also want to do, spend time like building something meaningful.

• 19:55John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 19:55Soham Parekh?

  You know, as long as I like the startup and as long as it's not like hand to mouth.

• 19:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:59Soham Parekh?

  It did not matter too much. Like, you know.

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  So what are you going to do now? You have the intention of the entire tech ecosystem. The, uh, and I appreciate how candid you've been.

• 20:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:11Jordi Hays?

  Uh, with us and, and.

• 20:12John Coogan?

  I want to talk about Dev Shop.

• 20:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a few angles here. You could do the the dev shop of Soham Parek. I think you would be able to get a handful of clients immediately. I think you could sign a max out max out contract with Clouly. They would probably pay you a pretty penny to to join the team over there. And I also, it sounds like you're interested in joining as a founding engineer of a new AI startup. So how are you thinking about your opportunities right now? And how can you turn this into a win?

• 20:46Soham Parekh?

  Yeah, look like I've, you know, regardless of the situation, like I've been privileged to like work with some of these companies like, you know, Antimatter, you know, Shersman, the founders, like Sync Labs, you know, Praddy, you know, Rudaba. They're one of the most, you know, crack places I've been at in general, partly because they had me, maybe not, I don't know. I guess I'm a bit, but I think the main thing is like, I am really excited about what I'm going to be a part of next. So, you know, working with a company called Darwin, they are essentially like building a new like AI driven like data platform, like, you know, video platform essentially for more kind of like, you know, UGC style media. And we're going to release to the market very shortly. This is the only thing I'm going to focus on.

• 21:29Soham Parekh?

  I think, you know, they've put a bet on me. I have a lot to prove. And there's there's not a lot to say, so, yeah.

• 21:36John Coogan?

  How do you rebuild trust? How do you, how do you give them the confidence that this isn't just you're focused on it for a couple of weeks? And then the second job creeps in, and then the third job creeps in. Is there something that you see happening down the, down the line around, you know, worker monitoring? Or checking when the GitHub commits are coming in? Or doing something to understand if someone else is, is, is working multiple places? Somebody was saying we like tech needs a, like a, some sort of service to see, hey, are we employing the same company? How do you, how do you rebuild trust and guarantee that you won't be working multiple jobs against the will of the current employer?

• 22:21Soham Parekh?

  So I, I think like, you know, all, all of this that has taught me is like, you know, just coming in kind of like probably under makes people understand your situation after all, like we all are humans. Um, I don't anticipate like working on multiple gigs again, but you know, my financial circumstances have not changed. So if, even if it did came to them, which it won't like right now, I'm very clear that this is my sole focus. Um, you know, I would probably like approach with like being very candid with the founders and just letting them know. And if that's not a possibility, you know, that's fine. Um, you know, uh, maybe I can, uh, figure a way out where, you know, there is like a high P or whatever, kind of like to your point, right?

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 22:56Soham Parekh?

  But in, in, in another spectrum of the world, I think like what I've really realized is that I just, you know, I just want to be a part of like building something that I can like focus on a longer term. And that's always been the goal, uh, you know, it is always a goal with any of these companies I've worked with. So, um, you know, I, uh, ob- obviously, you know, like I, uh, I, I, I believe in actions more than words. Like I guess what we'll build and launch in a month would probably be a testament to what we've been able to build.

• 23:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, you're certainly going to have a lot of attention around that launch. I hope you, uh, uh, now is probably not the right time to renegotiate your, your, uh, offer letter for the new company. You should probably, uh, you know, stick with it. But, uh, I think you're going to bring a lot of marketing, uh, value to, to Darwin, the new company you're joining. What's the reaction been like, uh, at home? You getting a lot of messages from, from?

• 23:50John Coogan?

  Has this broken tech X and broken containment into kind of your, your, your, your world beyond just people asking you about this?

• 24:00Soham Parekh?

  Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, reaction is natural, like a ton of people have been asking about this. Uh, what's also funny is like, you know, some of the memes like, um, I, I am very new to Twitter. I joined Twitter yesterday, so this was a lesson for me in social media in general, like I'm not a social media person. So it just like, I was like, you know, very over then with it in general, um, obviously, you know. Feeling shitty about it as well. Like I, like I said, you know, I'm not very proud of what I did. I think there was a way where I could have course corrected in, in a much different manner. Um, so there's a lot of like reflection in general, but I think friends and family have been strong. Uh, you know, like I said, I was lucky to work at some of these places where I had really close relationships with the founders. Uh, a lot of them reached out, you know, they, uh, to essentially be like helpful here, kind of give advice on what I should be doing next.

• 24:43Soham Parekh?

  Um, even like, you know, sometimes like staying through with me, like, you know, uh, just to make sure that I'm like, all right. Um, you know, like, uh,

• 24:51Jordi Hays?

  No, I think it says a lot that, that a number of the people that, that you worked for that fired you because you were working multiple jobs still care about you. It shows that when you were working for them, at least it, you know, that, that it does seem like you really, you really did care.

• 25:04John Coogan?

  Are there any, uh, startups that you've worked for in the past that you were, uh, working multiple jobs for that you haven't gotten a chance to apologize to yet that you plan to?

• 25:14Soham Parekh?

  I mean, in general, like I plan to apologize to everyone. Like that's, that goes without saying. Um,

• 25:19Jordi Hays?

  Any companies that you still need to resign from?

• 25:24Soham Parekh?

  None whatsoever. Dachman is the only focus I have.

• 25:26John Coogan?

  That's great. Okay.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  He's on the record.

• 25:28Jordi Hays?

  You're on the right path.

• 25:30John Coogan?

  On the right path. Well, I'm rooting for you. I, I, I hope this is a story of redemption. I believe in forgiveness. I believe in mistakes and I'm, I'm, I'm optimistic that this can have a good ending.

• 25:39Jordi Hays?

  Me too. So to be clear, your ex account is at realsohamparik, right?

• 25:45Soham Parekh?

  Yeah.

• 25:46Jordi Hays?

  That's the real one?

• 25:46John Coogan?

  That's the real one.

• 25:47Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Cause there's a lot of fake ones floating out there trying to take, uh, trying to ride the hype wave.

• 25:52John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 25:53Soham Parekh?

  Yeah. I mean, a hundred percent that there's been so many fake accounts, um, and a lot of fake narratives as well. Uh, but yeah, that is my real account. Um, there's, there's one person who asked me to post a picture of banana on my head with a fork in my hand. And I did not have banana at my home at that point in time, but, uh, I was trying to do that just to show them.

• 26:14Jordi Hays?

  Parik.

• 26:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 26:17Soham Parekh?

  But it's been it's been interestingly like uh uh in a while to like notice how people are like taking this in different ways, but um yeah, that kind of helps like just feel a little bit less shitty about it, but yeah.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, what what what are the the questions here? Remote versus in office, US versus international AI.

• 26:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I think we we had this post from Ahmad at Mercury. I think I think the reason this struck such a chord uh is, you know, again, it's this remote angle, the international angle, the ideas around a 10x engineer, uh, the potential of new AI tools, but uh, this has been really helpful.

• 26:56John Coogan?

  It's been very helpful.

• 26:57Jordi Hays?

  And I think um you were getting uh, you provided uh entertainment for a lot of people the last 24 hours. So I'm glad to hear that you're going to apologize to everybody that that you misled. And uh, I am excited to follow uh what you do next.

• 27:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks for stopping by.

• 27:14Soham Parekh?

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 27:16John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 27:16Jordi Hays?

  We'll talk soon.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 27:20John Coogan?

  How are you doing? Good to have you back on the show.

• 27:22Flo Crivello?

  Yeah, thanks for having me. No, redemption isn't possible. When people show you who they are, believe them. Uh, no, there's plenty of very honest people like what are the ads that someone who's been lying compulsively and being been confronted about it for three years, like two or three years. And like, look, it's a it's a special kind of person too, who can do this thing to people who trust them, right? That you have a relationship with an employer, you know? And and I my understanding is that he basically has been averaging like getting fired once a month for the last three years. Like it's a special kind of person who can do that.

• 27:55Jordi Hays?

  So he could have learned his lesson like two years, three years ago.

• 27:58John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  Like the first time he was called out and and and.

• 28:01Flo Crivello?

  Totally, totally. I I wasn't I wasn't tuning in. I did. I didn't hear what he said.

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. To me, the to me, the argument of of sounds like he has some situation that's bad, but it's not a justification to go steal money from a bunch of Silicon Valley startups for years and years and years and years and use them as a piggy bank to solve his own problem.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  So really quickly, uh, how long did he work with you?

• 28:26Flo Crivello?

  Two weeks.

• 28:27John Coogan?

  Two weeks. And what was the result of that? I mean, I imagine you paid him for those two weeks of work. Did you get any good results?

• 28:34Flo Crivello?

  Uh, I am literally out of a meeting like an hour ago where the engineer described his impact as negative.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  Negative, okay.

• 28:41Flo Crivello?

  Well, because we we had to we had to onboard him.

• 28:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, onboarding.

• 28:46Flo Crivello?

  Yeah, it's wasted our time and money.

• 28:48John Coogan?

  Has he apologized to you?

• 28:50Flo Crivello?

  Not yet.

• 28:51John Coogan?

  Okay, he said he would apologize to everyone else. He would go on an apology tour. We'll see if that actually pans out.

• 28:57Jordi Hays?

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

• 29:14Flo Crivello?

  We never, we never compromise on ethics. Like that's just a thing I don't fuck with. He's gonna apologize. Is he gonna give the money back?

• 29:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  That's a good question. I don't know.

• 29:24Flo Crivello?

  Cause, cause, cause stock is cheap.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  That's a higher bar. If he wants to make a statement, that's what he would do.

• 29:31Flo Crivello?

  A hundred percent.

• 29:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense. How do you prevent this in the future? How does Silicon Valley prevent this in the future? Obviously, the valley is built on trust. This is a violation of trust. There's been discussions about like, maybe we need a Reddit for, are we dating the same man? Are we employing the same software engineer? Maybe we need an AI tool to, you know, check the GitHub commits and see that, oh, they're coming in at the same time every week.

• 29:55Jordi Hays?

  I was wondering if this could be done at the HRIS level. It's like this, this employee has accepted two offers.

• 30:00John Coogan?

  Why are they in two instances of, of rippling? That doesn't make any sense. Uh, yeah. How, how are we solving this?

• 30:08Flo Crivello?

  I, I don't want to over rotate on it. I think a large part of what makes Silicon Valley tick is its culture of, of trust. You know, there's this whole game theory around like hawks and doves. You know, and it's, it turns out there is no stable equilibrium. You're like in a constant state of, of, of shifting because if, if everyone's a dove, then the, the returns of being a hawk are very high and vice versa. If it runs a hawk, then you can have these like cliques of doves that, that start emerging. So, I, I'm really careful not to tip Silicon Valley towards this attractor state of like the hawk. And like a lot of industries end up in this state of like low trust and I really don't want to do that. Like, look, you're gonna get screwed over every so often. We had a good laugh. You know, the memes were amazing. Like,

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I hope, I hope your, your viral posts at least drove a bunch of new signups and maybe. He paid back a little bit.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, a little bit of it.

• 30:57Jordi Hays?

  Some customer.

• 30:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I completely agree. Like, yes, the handshake deal protocol is built on trust. Do some VCs violate it? Yes, every once in a while, a team, a term sheet falls through. It's not the best thing that ever happens, but the alternative is so much overhead on everyone that it's probably worth taking the risk of, yeah, occasionally the handshake deal is going to fall through.

• 31:21Flo Crivello?

  You're gonna get screwed over every so often and it's not worth over pivoting on it and like looking for your shoulder your entire life.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  So it sounds like he is, he's announced that he's taken a new role as a founding engineer at a single startup. He says he's not going to work at multiple companies. It seems like the jig, even if he, even if he is a pathological liar and continues to lie, like, people, like his, his SEO is terrible now. Like it will forever like be like very easy when you go to Google search for the person that you're hiring.

• 31:50Jordi Hays?

  He's like, oh, that's a different Soham Parek. There's a lot of, there's a lot of people.

• 31:53John Coogan?

  Change his name and it's going to be really complicated for him to get away with this longer. My question is like, if, uh, we, we were, we were kind of saying like, the Soham Parek dev shop makes much more sense here. Does that make sense to you? Would like, if he was saying, hey, I've been working at all these different startups. I'm starting a developer shop and yes, you can hire me, but I'm a contractor. Why, why are dev shops bad for startups? Why would this not work for him?

• 32:25Flo Crivello?

  I actually think for him, the real move is to start a course on how to crack coding interviews because he's really good. And he's incredible. He's actually incredible, right? So he can actually make lemonade here. Like he should do that and he can make a lot of money. It's very highly.

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was that and the cold email strategy. It was like, he had a very dialed in cold email approach where he would be, you know, he'd be like, say something nice and really clearly, he researched the company, I use the product, I love building. The funny thing is in his message, he said, he said, I'm pissed. And I, it's like.

• 32:58John Coogan?

  About what?

• 32:59Jordi Hays?

  What?

• 33:01Jordi Hays?

  Why are you pissed? You're pissed you got busted? And you kind of gave himself away a little bit.

• 33:04John Coogan?

  He was saying like, oh yeah, like I'm going to, you know, there, there's going to be a great reversal here. And he came on and was just like, the mainstream narrative is basically correct about me, but maybe I'm sorry.

• 33:14Jordi Hays?

  The redemption of being like, I'm going to prove everyone wrong by working at one company. It's like, you don't get, you don't get, you don't, we don't get. Yeah, yeah, we don't give a, that's like a second, the fourth place trophy. You worked at one company.

• 33:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's funny.

• 33:29Flo Crivello?

  Um, yeah, I mean, uh, look, he's, he's not sorry. He just got cut. Like, it's, it's, that's it. It's really simple. Um, and, and why do dev shops not work for startups? I mean, just like, uh, it does, I'm, I'm a nerd when it comes to like the, the, the theory of the film because of my experience at Uber and so forth.

• 33:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 33:47Flo Crivello?

  There's a book that's called managerial dilemmas that explains why dev shops don't work.

• 33:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 33:51Flo Crivello?

  It's, it's fascinating. Yeah.

• 33:53John Coogan?

  But can you unpack it a little bit more? Because Uber is interesting because didn't, wasn't the very first version of Uber done by a dev shop? And wasn't that part of the early, early Uber lore lore that like the code base was written in Spanish? And so everyone at Uber had like the Spanish to English dictionary there, which is hilarious because I'm pretty sure Google Translate existed at the time, but they still had the dictionary for some reason. It's like, it's like amazing lore regardless of how real it is.

• 34:16Flo Crivello?

  Yeah, I think people add a little bit to it. This is the first time I hear about it.

• 34:20John Coogan?

  Uh, but you know, like next time I hear about it, there's gonna be a guy with like a sombrero in the eye. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Travis was in Tijuana pulling random devs off the street. Yeah. They really, really amp it up. The apocryphalness of the story just needs to grow and grow and grow. It's a tall tale at this point.

• 34:37Flo Crivello?

  The, the reason why dev shops don't work is because there's like a complicated, there's a complicated game theoretic argument, which goes basically, the reason why you employ people is because they know things you don't know. And so there is a, an information asymmetry, which always makes it possible for someone to cheat, because they can basically bullshit their like, and, and you see it with engineering all the time. It's like, oh, this is so complicated. You said it'd be a day, but actually it's gonna be a month and you have no clue. You have no way to verify. And this is inevitable. Like the reason you hire them is because there is this information asymmetry gap, because otherwise might as well just do it yourself. Um, and so, um, basically it is, in a way, it is always possible to cheat, which is why we are not fucking around and hiring people who do cheat. Because there is no way you can always prevent them from cheating. If he doesn't cheat by doing this, he'll cheat by doing something else.

• 35:22Flo Crivello?

  So there is always a way to cheat. So you could say that to some extent, not cheating is irrational. You can cheat. You can. Get away with it. He's made millions. He's made so much money, right? Like, you can cheat, you can get away with it. And so in a way, you've got to solve for the equation where it's like, I can cheat. I can make a lot of money. I can get away with it. Nothing is ever going to happen to me, but I'm not going to do it because of X. And you have to solve for X. That's your job as a founder. You're like, why would you act irrationally? And the way you do that, thankfully, is you, we have that, that, that bit that you can flip in our brains as a humans. We have these tribal, pro-social tendencies that are like, I don't want to cheat because I like these people. Or because I'm bought into the mission, which is why they always say every startup is like a religion.

• 36:06Flo Crivello?

  Like the mission, the culture really matter and the camaraderie really matter as a startup. And that's what you lose when you have DevShops.

• 36:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, to be even more specific, the DevShop gives you a scope. They say it's going to take me X, Y, Z time to do roughly this. Or maybe they're on a retainer and then if they come back to you the next day and they say, well, actually it's going to take more time and it's going to be more money. Well, an employee is going to say, well, it's going to take more time maybe, but I'm not going to necessarily charge you astronomically more, right? I'm just a salaried team member. And because they have that equity compensation as well, they're bought and hopefully bought into the mission. It ends up working out.

• 36:44Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for jumping on. Give us the update on Lindy. I know you guys moved quickly. It's been a couple of months, maybe. What's the latest?

• 36:51Flo Crivello?

  It's going well. We are currently grinding. To my point about DevShops, like we were at the office last night until like 10:00 PM. Like you don't get that from a DevShop. So we're currently grinding. We're growing fast. We are making a big launch on August 4th.

• 37:05John Coogan?

  We're going to come back on the show then.

• 37:07Flo Crivello?

  We've got some really, really exciting stuff coming around. I couldn't be more excited.

• 37:12John Coogan?

  Amazing. Incredible. Last, last question on Soham.

• 37:17John Coogan?

  What should he do? What, what should he do next?

• 37:20Flo Crivello?

  He should totally start a course and he should raise a round from his 16Z.

• 37:27John Coogan?

  Start a course.

• 37:30John Coogan?

  Okay, we'll see. Maybe he'll drop.

• 37:32Jordi Hays?

  No, that, that, that.

• 37:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's.

• 37:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we've got, we've got laugh tracks around here. But yeah, it is, it is the part of why the whole thing was so controversial is you like the average new CS grad, even from elite universities, is not having the easiest time in the job market. So it's such, it's such a, you know, it's gotta be disappointing for them, but, but clearly Soham has cracked the, the entire flow.

• 37:58John Coogan?

  The interview code, yeah.

• 38:00Flo Crivello?

  Does it pretty well. He's figured it out, so he should, he should monetize that. It is, it is a monetizable skill.

• 38:05John Coogan?

  Interesting. Well, thanks for hopping on. This is fantastic. Good to get the other side.

• 38:10Jordi Hays?

  Enjoy the.

• 38:11John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 38:11Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 38:12John Coogan?

  Bye. We have to sing her a song.

• 38:15Jordi Hays?

  Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Emily. We're hitting the size gone for you.

• 38:30Jordi Hays?

  It was yesterday.

• 38:31John Coogan?

  It was yesterday, but.

• 38:32Jordi Hays?

  July 1st.

• 38:32John Coogan?

  You didn't come on the show yesterday, so, welcome.

• 38:35Emily Sundberg?

  I would have come on yesterday if you asked.

• 38:37John Coogan?

  We should have, we should have.

• 38:38Jordi Hays?

  We could have had a cake, we could have had a cake.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  What did you do for your birthday?

• 38:42Emily Sundberg?

  Um, I had a few meetings. I went to the YMCA. It was empty, which was nice. And then my husband took me to dinner.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 38:51Jordi Hays?

  YMCA, underrated. You're, you're.

• 38:54Emily Sundberg?

  Mine is nice. This New York weather, it's one of the only places blasting that air conditioning, so.

• 39:01John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. What, what is the gym tier list look like in New York today? You know, Equinox had a moment.

• 39:08Jordi Hays?

  Lifetime's making moves.

• 39:10Emily Sundberg?

  Lifetime's making moves. I, so I kind of do a high-low thing. I live in Park Slope, so the, the YMCA makes a lot of sense for me, but I'm also a member at a club called Casa Cipriani, which is really nice.

• 39:23Jordi Hays?

  Small members' club.

• 39:25John Coogan?

  Yep. It's fun.

• 39:26Jordi Hays?

  The high-low, the, the high-low. John, John's in favor of that, too. We just started going to a new gym, but John is like actively wants to be kicked out so he can go back to Gold's. Which I'm like, no, we're not, we can't do this.

• 39:38Emily Sundberg?

  There aren't, um, there don't seem to be as many YMCA's on the West Coast.

• 39:43John Coogan?

  No, no, not, not that many. Lots of 24 Hour Fitness.

• 39:47Emily Sundberg?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:47John Coogan?

  Lots of Gold's Gyms. I mean, Gold's Gym, it's the, it's the staple of Venice. It's where R.F.K.'s out there. It's a good crew.

• 39:55Jordi Hays?

  John, John thought Equinox was like a $75 a month gym while we were actively going there for a brief period. And I just loved how out of touch you are, you were.

• 40:05John Coogan?

  It felt like premium, you know, but not ultra premium. It's not, it's not the best. He's all on tequila level.

• 40:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the location matters a lot.

• 40:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, what, what else is new in your world?

• 40:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Give us a, give us a Hampton's update. People were.

• 40:18John Coogan?

  Assume no one's in the city right now.

• 40:21Emily Sundberg?

  So, yeah, I, I got out here this morning. I don't want to brag. I recently inherited a car from my late grandfather to 2006 Camry.

• 40:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 40:33Jordi Hays?

  Iconic era of really great vintage.

• 40:35John Coogan?

  Very reliable.

• 40:36Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah. Awesome. So I drove out here today. Uh, it's crowded. It's really crowded. I'm hoping that this sort of, um, level of crowds is due to the holiday weekend, but it might be a mistake that I, I rented a house out here, but we'll see. Um, what else is new since two weeks ago?

• 40:56John Coogan?

  Is there?

• 40:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, so, so the Hamptons broadly, people a month ago were saying that rentals were down massively year over year. Does it feel that way?

• 41:06Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah. I, I don't know how much of that was because of weather or, or, or people's finances. I think some people were less motivated to like make the move on booking a house because we had really bad weather the past few months in New York. It was really rainy and gross. It was sort of a late start to summer. Um, but I'm sure people's financial situation.

• 41:28Jordi Hays?

  There was also a trade war that's still ongoing. And if your portfolio is down tremendously, you're not exactly saying, yeah, I'd love to spend, you know, a hundred K for two weeks.

• 41:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. I had a friend who was dating a Wall Street, uh, like hedge fund guy. And, uh, she was like, yeah, it's going so great. Like it's amazing. And then like a couple of weeks later, she was like, yeah, he's just like really weird. Like, I don't think it's going to work out. And I was like showing her the stock market chart and being like, so his emotions perfectly mapped to the 10% sell off that we just saw. Uh, you're telling me that this guy, his entire, uh, his entire personality is derived from.

• 42:04Jordi Hays?

  State of the market.

• 42:05John Coogan?

  The state of the market. And she was like, oh, this makes so much more sense now. Okay.

• 42:09Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of women who went through similar situations.

• 42:12John Coogan?

  I'm sure. I'm sure. The kangaroo market's not good for the dating scene. Um, is, uh, is that, is that crazy white party going on? That's a Hampton's thing. Is that a, is that a July 4th thing? Or is that canceled? I thought Michael Rubin was like pulling back from that because it was like maybe too flashy. Is there an update?

• 42:27Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, I, I, I, we'll see. Is that supposed to be 4th of July? I think that's.

• 42:32Jordi Hays?

  She's like wearing, she's like white party.

• 42:34John Coogan?

  What are you talking about?

• 42:35Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 42:36Jordi Hays?

  Can't comment.

• 42:37John Coogan?

  Comment. No, not the Diddy one. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. I think that might've been a factor in, in, in pulling back from that. But, but, but I always see like everyone's like spying the watches, spying like, you know, what cars people showed up in, all this stuff.

• 42:48Emily Sundberg?

  There's a lot of paparazzi. There's a lot of TikTokers. So you can see everything happening in real time.

• 42:54John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 42:54Emily Sundberg?

  Nobody can really like leave with another man's wife anymore. Like there's so much, uh, coverage of these events now. It really takes away.

• 43:03John Coogan?

  The mystique. The mystique. Somebody might.

• 43:06Jordi Hays?

  What's up with, uh, what's up this, with this place drugstore? You were covering it. Let's try.

• 43:11Emily Sundberg?

  Oh, yeah, this is awful. Um, Bloomberg broke news yesterday that there's a new movie.

• 43:20Emily Sundberg?

  Smoothie pop-up chain from, uh, like a Jay-Z invested celebrity chef. And he's, these, these like very Instagrammable smoothies, which obviously Arowan started. But now there's a lot of places that are kind of hopping on the bandwagon of treating like smoothies as a billboard. Like brands can collab with them and then whoever's serving these smoothies is like making extra money from an advertising business, which is crazy. Like I think to get an Arowan smoothie for your brand, it's like 200K for a month or something.

• 43:52John Coogan?

  We have to do this.

• 43:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we, we, we've been working on it.

• 43:55John Coogan?

  You say that's crazy.

• 43:56Emily Sundberg?

  You guys don't have to do this.

• 43:57John Coogan?

  I think that's worth every penny for the TBPN Feed Me Arowan Smoothie. You're telling me that's not gonna net out?

• 44:04Emily Sundberg?

  No, you should do a drink at like the US Open or something. Like, yeah, don't do this movie.

• 44:08John Coogan?

  Don't do this movie. It's played out?

• 44:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's played, it's probably played out.

• 44:11John Coogan?

  Okay. Didn't, didn't Arowan have a collab with like Volkswagen or something? Or some really funny like car company they did?

• 44:18Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, you're right. They did do a car comp. I think they, they also do like beauty brands, like sunscreen and stuff. Like it's not.

• 44:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, Chevrolet. They did Chevrolet drink collab. And what the worst part is that I wouldn't have had a problem if they did the ZR1, like the really crazy Chevy sports car, but they did the 2025 Equinox EV.

• 44:39Emily Sundberg?

  What was in this smoothie?

• 44:41John Coogan?

  Uh, according to the manufacturer, the collaboration between, uh, it combines Chevy's commitment to emission-free vehicles and Arowan's mission to promote sustainability. As a merchant of organic foods and wellness products, the drink called the Electric Juice consists of choo-choo? Cho-cho? I don't even know this, which is the most protein-rich plant source and blue spirulina, the superfood that matches the Equinox's EV's blue color. The drink's ingredients are designed to energize and recharge consumers.

• 45:12Jordi Hays?

  I think the winner, the winner here was the ad agency that got paid half a million dollars to set this up.

• 45:18John Coogan?

  For sure. I don't know. I feel like, I feel like everyone's getting the Hailey Bieber smoothie. I'm about to rock the Equinox EV smoothie. I think it has a certain badge value.

• 45:28Emily Sundberg?

  They're like 70 grams of sugar. It's like four cokes.

• 45:32Jordi Hays?

  I'm long, I'm long sugar though. Four cokes is a lot.

• 45:34John Coogan?

  That is a lot.

• 45:35Jordi Hays?

  But I'm going long, I'm going long sugar from here. I did, I did an experiment. Uh, my, my wife is very afraid of.

• 45:42John Coogan?

  This is the worst experiment you would, I continue.

• 45:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but anyways, people, people are very afraid of sugar. I, to prove a point, I drank a soda every single day. I drank a Coke every single day for six months straight.

• 45:52John Coogan?

  I know that's not. And you work out every day and like, there's like a million ways to offset that.

• 45:57Emily Sundberg?

  It wouldn't be good.

• 45:58Jordi Hays?

  No, a lot of, a lot of people think.

• 46:00John Coogan?

  No, no, I agree. It is overblown. The people think like a single Coca-Cola is terrible. Like, but yeah, of course, of course. Everything's in, the, the dose is the poison with all of this stuff.

• 46:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What about, so, so this week on our side, we've been covering the AI talent wars, how, basically AI researchers are being comped, almost like pro athletes and sort of like, you know, these sort of nine, nine-figure massive offers. The reason I bring it up is because you obviously cover a lot of the, uh, media landscape and we had Derek Thompson on who left Atlantic. I imagine that he's already like run rating well, well beyond. I, I don't know, um, what it, what his metrics are, but I would imagine he's already.

• 46:43Emily Sundberg?

  He's brushing on Substack. He's catching up to me.

• 46:45John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 46:46Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 46:46Jordi Hays?

  Go subscribe to, subscribe to Feed Me right now and help, help win the race.

• 46:52John Coogan?

  But he's not winning the SCL award because his website doesn't come up.

• 46:55Jordi Hays?

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

• 47:34Emily Sundberg?

  I see traditional media companies more likely to start doing like handshakes with Substack writers than starting to completely restructure how they're paying their staff.

• 47:46Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. So like syndication, basically.

• 47:48Emily Sundberg?

  Syndication or like, I mean, I've talked to so many editors from traditional magazines and papers who are like trying to figure out how they can work with Feed Me. Is it like a co-publishing thing? Is it like creating a podcast together? And it's, it's been very interesting to experience firsthand, like talk to these people because I don't, I don't really need that. Like Derek doesn't need the Atlantic because the people who are reading him are reading him for him, not the whole surrounding.

• 48:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, just to set the table for the folks who might be listening, when Emily comes on the show, we pay her a hundred thousand dollars for her appearance. So just, just to say, kind of set the bar, just so.

• 48:27Jordi Hays?

  And it ramps up over time.

• 48:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. It obviously ramps up. But, but yes, I am interested in like the dynamic of like, you can still go and publish in, in traditional media. Is that just like freelance? What is the difference between?

• 48:41Emily Sundberg?

  What do you mean like when I write for GQ?

• 48:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 48:43Emily Sundberg?

  There's no reason that I'm doing that besides that I adore my editor there. And I think that it's just like, it's, it's working like a different part of my brain. Like, I don't, it's like a gift to get to be edited by GQ's editors.

• 48:57John Coogan?

  That's cool. Yeah. Do you, so are you a columnist over there? Or are you a contributor? Like, how does, with the actual shape? Do you get assigned things? Like, I've had reporters reach out to me and be like, "I was assigned a story on nicotine, so I need to talk to you as an expert," or whatever.

• 49:11Emily Sundberg?

  So with GQ specifically, my editor, Dan, when I wrote the Zin story and when I wrote the story about members' clubs last year, both were because I had written about both of those topics in my newsletter. And he was like, "I think it would be interesting for you to expand upon this in like a larger feature in a, in a print issue." And that's how that's happened. I, I don't really, but like, I'm at the point now where if I have an idea of a great story that I want to write, like, it doesn't make sense for me to pitch it to The Times or to New York Magazine because it, I can get it done faster on Feed Me.

• 49:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 49:49Emily Sundberg?

  I can outsource an editor if I need that. I can outsource legal services if I need that. And it, it's better for me to get, to be like breaking those sorts of stories, you know?

• 49:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:00Emily Sundberg?

  I just have like a good thing going with GQ. It's kind of fun.

• 50:02John Coogan?

  That's cool. I want to bounce an idea off you. There is this narrative that, like, when you go direct, when you're on Substack, like, it has a different texture, a different, different vibe, different, maybe more objective, maybe more pro-tech or pro, you know, creator or pro-whatever the topic is being covered. I think that it's less about the personalities or the views of the people and maybe just more about the economics that essentially, when you're in legacy media, you basically have a salary cap. And when you're outside of it, you have no salary cap. And that actually defines, the economic terms shape the, the type of content more than, than anything else. Do you think that's reasonable?

• 50:47John Coogan?

  Do you disagree? How, how would you wrestle with that?

• 50:51Emily Sundberg?

  Can you keep like expanding on that?

• 50:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 50:54Emily Sundberg?

  I want it.

• 50:55John Coogan?

  So, so I think that there's, there's something where if you, if you're working at a, at a particular outlet and there's some sort of like salary cap, it's like, imagine if there were two NBA teams playing against each other and one had a salary cap of $300,000 per player and the other had no salary cap. Like who would you expect to produce better basketball? Who would you expect to produce better content when you have, when you have one that where a person can make 10 million or Joe Rogan can make 100 million, like you're just going to attract the absolute top because that's where the Yeah, extremely ambitious. Yeah, and they're extremely incentivized to just work extra hard because if they work,

• 51:39John Coogan?

  if they work a little bit harder and they compound a little bit more and get that extra guest and write that extra piece, it could not, it, it doesn't mean, oh, here you got a $5,000 Christmas bonus. It means Spotify signed you to a hundred million dollar contract. And it's the difference between like when LeBron James shows up at midnight to shoot more three free, free, free throws, like that could be the difference between like a 50 million dollar contract and a hundred million dollar contract. So going that extra thing produces like better content.

• 52:06Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, it's really interesting to see so many traditional journalists, you know, give Substack a shot and like they just plateau.

• 52:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 52:14Emily Sundberg?

  But I'm like, I'm an animal. Like when my eyes are open, I'm working. Like this letter goes out every day. It's, I'm marketing it, I'm editing it, I'm pitching stories. But I've always had a really high tolerance for being told no. Like when I was getting paid 60K at a job and when I'm making like 10 times that now, right? Like, so I think that Substack and these sorts of platforms, even what you guys are doing, also attracts personality types that are, had less boundaries and rules in the ways that they work. And then when people who, who don't think like that, think that they can find the same success, like they get disappointed or confused or think that it's rigged or something like that.

• 52:56John Coogan?

  When really they're just getting outcompeted.

• 52:57Emily Sundberg?

  I mean, going, going above and beyond for a job where the cap might be like, what did that New York Magazine story say about the Atlantic 300K? That's what they were paying their journalists? Like?

• 53:11Emily Sundberg?

  Okay, so like you're you're gonna go as hard as you can to make 300K and get those benefits and whatever. But the other thing that I'll say like is you have to be willing to not have insurance. You have to be willing to, you know, have have months where you're you're not having like the support of a team. Um, and it's just like a very specific type of personality. Uh, but I think you're totally on to something like. I think I'm playing a different game than my peers who are working in an office at a at a magazine or a newspaper.

• 53:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, also that the insurance thing is real, but it's also a problem that is very quickly overcome. And you can quit your job and say, I'm gonna pay out of pocket for insurance for two years. And if this doesn't work out, then I'll I'll get a rollback. I'm curious, uh, you you were commenting on Vogue partnering with Nutri- Nutri Grain Bars. And, uh, I'm curious if you think, um, as people are so used to influencer creator-led advertising, like if if you were to partner with a brand and people are like, wait, like what? Like, why did she partner? Like, that makes no sense. Like, that's clearly a cash grab.

• 54:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:26Jordi Hays?

  That that feels like it it seems like legacy media brands could get away with that kind of thing for a long time, even though we're saying, you know, why is?

• 54:34John Coogan?

  Nutri Grain needs better marketing because the first thing I think about with Nutri Grain is. Uh, yeah, I I I always think about the the the, I I think that Nature Valley meme where it's like effing crumbs everywhere. I don't know if you've seen that one, but that's not Nutri Grain. And so my biggest association with Nutri Grain.

• 54:53Emily Sundberg?

  Big Newton.

• 54:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, they gotta work on that. Yeah, it's like, it's a is it a big Newton? Is it the crumbs one? Like, I just know it's not good, so they gotta step it up. But yeah, the Vogue audience, I mean, why why do you think that there was ever a pitch where it's like, okay, we're gonna go after the moms that read, uh, Vogue? And get them to buy it for their kids? And so it's some sort of like bank shot strategy?

• 55:14Emily Sundberg?

  For me, what stopped me in my tracks is it wasn't a banner ad in a newsletter. It wasn't like one of those, it wasn't like somebody writing about, uh, their wellness routine sponsored by Nutri Grain, Nutri Grain. It was a produced video of a stylist sort of like gallivanting through the streets of New York City. And I really like this girl, Michelle.

• 55:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:33Emily Sundberg?

  And I saw her post it and I saw that it was between Vogue and Nutri Grain. Like, there was. Who was in the room? Who sold this ad? And how much was it for? And how much did Michelle get? And how much did Vogue get? Like, it was very confusing to me because there were, there are other ways that that could have been executed and made a lot more sense. And they probably didn't think that somebody would screenshot it and start that conversation. But unfortunately.

• 55:58Jordi Hays?

  Conversation was started.

• 55:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 55:59Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, there's so many media reporters. If I didn't pick up on it, somebody else would have. Um, but I think that Conde, Nast overall right now is on life support. Like, we had this conversation when Vanity Fair is looking for their next editor. Um, unfortunately, like, it's happening immediately right after that with this new, this new Vogue editor. Um, it's a lot of, it's a lot of pressure for like, I don't know what, like, a few more years of running this magazine. It just doesn't really seem like how, um, it doesn't, Vogue doesn't seem, I don't know what I would look to Vogue for right now.

• 56:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it kind of goes back to that idea of like the, the independent media creator versus the legacy media creator. Like, we just released an ad for Wander that, we said they asked us, they barely even asked us to make it. And we just wrote it, shot it, directed it, like edited it. We just did everything. We sent them the final thing and they were like, yeah, cool. Um, and so I think the brand carried through.

• 56:56Jordi Hays?

  There was like a second that they asked for a tweak.

• 56:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, they were like, uh, actually, our font is this one instead of that one.

• 57:02Emily Sundberg?

  I love it.

• 57:03John Coogan?

  And so, and so, like, that is the type of, like, you know, entrepreneurial energy that I'm sure the particular partner that worked on, where they actually starred in the commercial, would bring to a partnership and select and, and coordinate with a brand that was actually aligned. But there were just like too many spreadsheet monkeys in the office that day. And so it just wound up being there.

• 57:25Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, like, I was like, why wouldn't you just hand these to the hungover girls at Barstool? And like, have them talk about like, how this is like the bar, like the hangover snack? Like, that, I think, would have moved the needle more.

• 57:36John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 57:37Emily Sundberg?

  I don't know.

• 57:37John Coogan?

  Our, our, when I, when I think of logical Vogue partnerships, I think of like luxury brands. Are luxury brands pulling back from that type of partnership? Like, have you seen anything there? Like, what are, what are the innovative things that you're seeing from like, the really top tier, uh, brands out there? Have you seen anything cool?

• 57:56Emily Sundberg?

  You know what I saw today? Do you know those David bars, like the metallic?

• 57:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, we had him on the show.

• 58:01Emily Sundberg?

  I love them.

• 58:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:03Emily Sundberg?

  I saw that Balenciaga at their show this week. Somebody posted a photo of like Balenciaga bars like

• 58:09John Coogan?

  Oh, there we go.

• 58:10Emily Sundberg?

  Same sort of metallic.

• 58:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 58:12Emily Sundberg?

  Metallic label. I took a photo of it. I'll send it to you guys after this.

• 58:15John Coogan?

  That's very cool.

• 58:16Emily Sundberg?

  Um, so I, I mean, like, is that going to move their, their hoodies? I don't know, but like that's those sort of fun, weird moments are more exciting to me. Um, if we're talking about nutrition bars.

• 58:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it certainly shows that like Balenciaga is still on the, you know, hip or just aware because like Peter Hall, he's kind of, you know, known in consumer packaged goods world and a little bit intact. And some people know the story of our, of RX Bar and then David Barr with the revenue ramp. Like the business is doing well, but it's still like a complete insider industry story. Like the average person on the street doesn't know that. So Balenciaga is kind of signaling a little bit to that.

• 58:55Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, yeah. And I'm sure that that took them like a couple thousand bucks like put together. Like, you know, it's not difficult. Um, as far as what, what luxury brands are doing, I think it's a lot of events now. Like they're putting a lot of money into events. Like I was just at a Chanel event. They do a lot of programming with Tribeca Film Festival, which is cool because everybody's in the city anyway. So they, they throw events and make sure that people show up to that. Um, I think that a lot of my social calendar in New York right now is dominated by brand events. It just seems to be what's moving the needle because people go and they get photos of themselves and they post it.

• 59:35Emily Sundberg?

  And it's like, the brand is the background. So you end up being like, New York just feels like a billboard every, every time you go out now. Because everything is a brand event. It's like dominating how people are organizing their social calendars.

• 59:48John Coogan?

  I don't go to events. I don't go outside. I just stream. Um, what makes for a good brand event? Like, is this just a happy hour? Is that what we're talking about? Is there dancing?

• 59:55Emily Sundberg?

  A bad brand is a bad event.

• 59:57Jordi Hays?

  It's actually interesting that, the thing I'll say, we were talking about SVB, uh, collapsed earlier. They, they would, they would throw dinners that

• 1:00:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:00:05Jordi Hays?

  Like, like there's an entire founder dinner industrial complex that are just like financial or, you know, uh, companies that, that. Throw these dinners. The funny thing is that within tech, the companies historically failed to make them social moments. So it'd be like, it'll say the name, it'll say SVB on the menu.

• 1:00:26Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:27Jordi Hays?

  Like taking a picture of the menu as much as they're just like taking pictures. So I think what the luxury brands do well is you're saying, hey, we're gonna invite

• 1:00:34John Coogan?

  Step and repeat.

• 1:00:35Jordi Hays?

  200 people into the space.

• 1:00:37John Coogan?

  Stressful photographer.

• 1:00:37Jordi Hays?

  And you're not going to be able, if you post any photos at all, we're going to be getting exposure.

• 1:00:41Emily Sundberg?

  We're gonna have a moment. Yeah. Um, I, I threw a brand dinner or a Feed Me dinner with my friend Paul from the Infatuation last year and Andrew Ross Sorkin was sitting next to me and I gave him a Feed Me keychain. That was my brand moment.

• 1:00:57Jordi Hays?

  That's a great moment.

• 1:00:58Emily Sundberg?

  So that's another thing, like, those dinners are all

• 1:01:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are brands being creative? Are we seeing like ice sculptures or step and repeats? Like, how, how can brands stand out with one of those?

• 1:01:11Emily Sundberg?

  Like, the worst possible brand event is a DJ and free drinks. Like, there's people standing in front of like a 22-year-old DJ with like free drinks. And then um, more innovative things are like, I think when you give people an activity to do, like if you are doing like bowling or, and making it like glamorous or like, um, you know, now brands are, if they're doing a collab with like an athletic brand, they'll, they'll take a bunch of women to like tennis courts or a golf club in Connecticut and like that's a photo op for everybody involved. Um, so like these mini

• 1:01:51Emily Sundberg?

  expeditions or like J Crew last year took a bunch of people on a gorgeous sailboat in the Hudson River off of like the seaport.

• 1:02:00Jordi Hays?

  It's basically like, take your customers on a date.

• 1:02:03Emily Sundberg?

  Right. Like, take them on a date, give them an Instagram photo.

• 1:02:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:07Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, exactly. Um, and then if you level up, then you're, you're gonna start talking about like brand trips. Like Hermes took people to Aspen last summer and Yeah.

• 1:02:18John Coogan?

  I mean, a ton of VC firms do that all the time. It could come with us and we'll do a track day or movie night, or we'll go out to, you know, the, the, some, you know,

• 1:02:27Jordi Hays?

  Ranch.

• 1:02:27John Coogan?

  beautiful place, some ranch and like shoot shotguns and have dinners and it's a whole weekend.

• 1:02:31Emily Sundberg?

  Where's my call? I want to do that.

• 1:02:33John Coogan?

  They should get you on the calls. We'll, we'll introduce you some folks.

• 1:02:36Jordi Hays?

  Um, postmortem on the Democratic primary, but just on the marketing, right? There was a lot of, um, coverage of, uh, Zoran's basically film, you know, vertical video making abilities that seems to have played a key role in the campaign. I'm curious.

• 1:02:56John Coogan?

  So are you talking to any like TikTokers or content creators that are like, I want to build a business around this for politicians? That'd be interesting.

• 1:03:04Emily Sundberg?

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

• 1:03:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:20Emily Sundberg?

  for, um, a political camp, political campaign, especially in the White House, because the turnaround times are insane and the levels of approvals that they need to go through are crazy, as they should be. Um, so I think there's like a mini network. I mean, there's, there are a lot of people that worked in the White House under Biden who used to work at Instagram. Like, they were recruited straight from Meta. So that's definitely a thing. Um, but I think that organizing is a tremendous amount of work and like, part of that is digitally now, like, and, and Zoran did that really well.

• 1:03:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting to think about how the presidential election felt like the podcast election. And then the, the, this primary felt like the short form election. Uh, and that sort of, it makes sense, especially as you're trying to just appeal to younger and younger voters.

• 1:04:09Emily Sundberg?

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

• 1:04:29John Coogan?

  That's good. Uh, we've been talking a ton about, uh, the AI talent wars. A lot of people in Silicon Valley making a hundred million dollars for in signing bonuses. Uh, Silicon Valley notoriously bad at spending money. New York famously good at spending money. What are some recommendations that you can give to these PhD researchers that have a hundred million dollars burning a hole in their pocket? They want to get in the game. They want to step up their fashion, their cars, their houses. What would you recommend?

• 1:05:00Emily Sundberg?

  It's, it's funny that you go to fashion and cars because I think there's a real, uh, a Louis Mangione situation on our hands here with this kind of job. So I feel like you need a security guard.

• 1:05:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:05:13Emily Sundberg?

  Security guard.

• 1:05:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:05:15Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:05:16Emily Sundberg?

  Um, plainclothes, security guard, which means like those tight Lacoste polos, you know?

• 1:05:21John Coogan?

  Okay. Maybe they should be carrying too. Maybe they should, you know, if you got the, you gotta be everyday carry now if you're making a hundred million dollars.

• 1:05:30Jordi Hays?

  California has gotten more lenient.

• 1:05:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:33Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah. So I, I feel like you have to staff up in a, in a position like this. Like you want a driver who's trustworthy and isn't going to like leak your information, a personal trainer.

• 1:05:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:05:44Emily Sundberg?

  Trustworthy, a Feed Me subscription.

• 1:05:46John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:05:47Emily Sundberg?

  Um, and then I think it's like removing friction from areas of your life with, with like staffing up like that. I recently learned that, um, this neighborhood in the Hamptons called Sagaponik is a, a microclimate. And I'm, I feel like that's a good place to invest your money. Um.

• 1:06:05Jordi Hays?

  Wait, break that down a little bit, but a little bit more. It's just, it's just on an average day, it's nicer there?

• 1:06:12Emily Sundberg?

  I think it's not necessarily nicer. I think it might be like wetter and more humid than other areas. Like I am in a different neighborhood than that. And if you were there right now, it would feel different than here, even though it's not that far away.

• 1:06:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, like you can be like Long Island as a whole is hot today, but Saugaponah could have a different weather report because it's this micro sub climate.

• 1:06:34Emily Sundberg?

  Because of the dunes and the tides and the trees.

• 1:06:37John Coogan?

  There's different parts of LA that have the same kind of dynamic.

• 1:06:40Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, I mean, isn't San Francisco like that, too?

• 1:06:43John Coogan?

  Yes, famously, that's why in the summer it'll still be, it'll still be foggy and stuff, but then it's really warm later in the year.

• 1:06:49Emily Sundberg?

  Right, yeah, so I feel like investing in a micro climate is a good way to spend your money, that just sounds wise.

• 1:06:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're not making any more of them.

• 1:06:59Emily Sundberg?

  And then I think that you need to use your money to start taking some, some experts to dinner because you can't just start buying watches and clothes. There's a really high chance that you'll miss and go for like trendy items. So I would try to hang out with like, do you guys know the watch dealer, Mike Nuvo? Like somebody like him or like, you know, like take him out to dinner and talk to him and, and get some advice. I bought a watch from him last year and he seems like he knows his stuff.

• 1:07:25John Coogan?

  What'd you pick up?

• 1:07:26Emily Sundberg?

  Um, I got my husband a nice watch.

• 1:07:30John Coogan?

  Okay. Let's go, let's gear it for the husband.

• 1:07:36Jordi Hays?

  Two size gongs, one review. That's how you know it's a good one.

• 1:07:40John Coogan?

  A birthday and a gift.

• 1:07:41Emily Sundberg?

  And maybe like befriend Chris Black or like another stylish guy and get him to advise, consult on the closet.

• 1:07:51Jordi Hays?

  Can you get us, can you get us Chris Black on the show? Because I, the only podcast merch I've ever bought was their merch that they released where it was a cease and desist from the New York Times.

• 1:08:01Emily Sundberg?

  Got it.

• 1:08:01Jordi Hays?

  Cause they like copied the cover art and they just printed, made a shirt, sold it. It was a, it was a work of art.

• 1:08:08Emily Sundberg?

  Chris would definitely come on, I'll connect you guys.

• 1:08:13Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah, I think that the biggest mistake that people who come into a lot of money quickly make is just, you know, doing that automatic Apple Pay on, on, while they're shopping and then you end up with stuff that doesn't fit you or it looks horrible or something.

• 1:08:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so stylists, tech.

• 1:08:30Emily Sundberg?

  Stylists, or just like paid friends. You know, like take, take people out to dinner, host parties, like keep them around, you know?

• 1:08:39John Coogan?

  Do you think it's good to surround yourself with Yesman?

• 1:08:43Emily Sundberg?

  What do you, what's, how do you?

• 1:08:45John Coogan?

  So if you surround yourself with yes men, then whatever ideas you have, all your yes men will just tell you, yes, that's the best idea ever. A lot of people say, don't do it, but maybe.

• 1:08:57Emily Sundberg?

  I would not do that.

• 1:08:58John Coogan?

  Everyone around me has been saying that it's a good idea.

• 1:09:03Emily Sundberg?

  No, I would not. That's not good.

• 1:09:05John Coogan?

  Okay. So stay away from the yes men.

• 1:09:07Emily Sundberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:08Jordi Hays?

  You want yes people on your team where you say, I want to do the impossible and they just say,

• 1:09:12John Coogan?

  yes.

• 1:09:13Jordi Hays?

  Yes, we're going to do it. But there's, there's a line, you know, you don't, you don't want to cross it.

• 1:09:17John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This is fantastic.

• 1:09:20Emily Sundberg?

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:09:21Jordi Hays?

  Hampton's checkup.

• 1:09:22John Coogan?

  So send us the invoice for the 100K appearance fee and we'll look forward to doing it soon.

• 1:09:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, send the next few too.

• 1:09:27Emily Sundberg?

  Happy 4th of July.

• 1:09:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, happy 4th. Have fun. We'll talk soon.

• 1:09:32John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:09:33Jordi Hays?

  Other news, the Senate passes Trump's mega bill, the big beautiful bill after an all night session. They went all night.

• 1:09:41John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 1:09:42Jordi Hays?

  And it's got to get through the house still, but Elon is fuming.

• 1:09:47John Coogan?

  Play the Ashton Hall sound effect for Elon coming, coming for the bill. It's coming to absolute war on the timeline. The timeline's in turmoil because Elon Musk said, anyone who campaigned on the promise of reducing spending but continues to vote on the biggest debt ceiling increase in history will see their face on this poster in the primary next year.

• 1:10:08Jordi Hays?

  Pinocchio mode.

• 1:10:09John Coogan?

  Liar voted to increase America's debt by five trillion.

• 1:10:12Jordi Hays?

  It's actually never been easier to make your enemies look like Pinocchio.

• 1:10:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I feel like if you put like, I don't know, I don't even know who voted for it. Like, let's just say like Ted Cruz or something. If you put like Ted Cruz's face on here, like, are you going to lose the Pinocchioness?

• 1:10:27Jordi Hays?

  AI will find a way.

• 1:10:29John Coogan?

  I feel like it could be a little bit, a little bit rough. Anyway, Elon's upset. He's trying to start a new party.

• 1:10:35Jordi Hays?

  The America Party.

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  He said vox popula, populae vox dei. He wants to start the American Party.

• 1:10:41Jordi Hays?

  And he is pissed because Polly Market is showing that the, is expecting the reconciliation bill, the big beautiful bill to pass by July 4th.

• 1:10:54John Coogan?

  And 62%, yeah, 62% by July 4th and almost certainly by the end of the month.

• 1:11:00Jordi Hays?

  So this will be the one to watch. They're voting, I guess the first vote is tomorrow.

• 1:11:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:05Jordi Hays?

  We'll be following that.

• 1:11:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, it'd be interesting. Lots of pork. But if you're AGI-pilled, it doesn't matter.

• 1:11:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:13John Coogan?

  Uh, we are gonna be printing at 10% GDP, folks, in just, just a few thousand days when superintelligence arrives. These, these debts-

• 1:11:20Jordi Hays?

  We're weeks, if not days, away. Many people, many people are saying-

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  And so, if you're, if you're against this bill, you're just telling yourself about your AGI timelines. You're like, "I don't really think superintelligence is coming."

• 1:11:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is, um, uh, I, I think Thiel was pushing, uh, generally pushing on Elon a bit in the interview he did last week around like, "Okay, so are, are humanoids, humanoids are gonna be important, you're obviously making them. Are they going to impact the economy? Are they gonna accelerate growth?"

• 1:11:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:51Jordi Hays?

  Um, you know?

• 1:11:53John Coogan?

  This is the post-1970 stagnation. You know, we've been growing at 2%. Satya Nadella's asking the question of will AI accelerate GDP growth? Because if, if GDP growth accelerates a lot, it changes the dynamic around everything. Like, not just this debt, which we've been kind of lightly joking about, but also like redistribution-

• 1:12:11Jordi Hays?

  To Elon's credit, he's also said, when, when he initially exited Doge-

• 1:12:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17Jordi Hays?

  And just stopped being a special employee, he did say the only way out is growth. So he knows this too.

• 1:12:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:22Jordi Hays?

  But I think he can hold both of these ideas, which is we need to grow, but he's also frustrated.

• 1:12:27John Coogan?

  The Hegelian dialectic, of course. Um, yeah, I mean, if, if GDP is growing really, really fast, you could even keep tax rates the same or lower them and still pay down the debt and do more redistribution. Like, you could be paying people, like, you could have like, something that feels like a massive social safety net, something that feels like UBI or, or socialism, but actually tax people less, because the growth is so significant. So, it all changes when superintelligence arrives.

• 1:12:54Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe Zoron is just so AGI-pilled himself-

• 1:12:58John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 1:12:58Jordi Hays?

  That he's like, "Yeah, we're gonna have plenty, we're-"

• 1:13:01John Coogan?

  You have plenty to go around.

• 1:13:02Jordi Hays?

  "We're gonna have-" Such high levels of production, sure, the state can just seize a little bit.

• 1:13:08John Coogan?

  Alternatively, maybe he's a hardcore Bitcoiner. And so if he wants, if he wants there to be no billionaires, no, it is impossible mathematically to be a billionaire in Bitcoin, because there's only 21 million of them. So the richest you could possibly be is a millionaire if you owned over 5% of the Bitcoin supply, right? So there will never be a Bitcoin billionaire, because there aren't a billion of them. Whereas there are billions of dollars.

• 1:13:32Jordi Hays?

  Maybe he doesn't want people in the network to vote to expand the supply.

• 1:13:36John Coogan?

  Yes, so he's probably against the expansion of the Bitcoin supply, but maybe he's a hardcore Bitcoiner.

• 1:13:40Jordi Hays?

  He's a hardcore Bitcoiner, he's against inflation.

• 1:13:44John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, exactly. Zach Kukoff.

• 1:13:48Zak Kukoff?

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:13:49John Coogan?

  Live from Washington.

• 1:13:50Jordi Hays?

  Mr. Washington.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  Washington correspondent.

• 1:13:52Zak Kukoff?

  Mr. Washington. I even set up, I don't know if you can see, that's, oh, that's the monument right there.

• 1:14:00John Coogan?

  Wow, no way.

• 1:14:00Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:14:01John Coogan?

  Beautiful.

• 1:14:01Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:14:02John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:14:03Jordi Hays?

  We'll just have our production team zoom in, zoom in just on the monument, so you won't be on camera.

• 1:14:08Zak Kukoff?

  Perfect, just, I'll get out of the way, but you can see the good stuff behind me, that's the important thing.

• 1:14:13John Coogan?

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

• 1:14:37Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, so there's a couple trip lines. The first trip line, I would say, you guys have been tracking the moratorium, the 10-year moratorium on AI development. This was the, on AI regulation. This was the, first it was in, Ted Cruz put it in, then it was out, then it was back in, there was a compromise, there was a five-year agreement, instead of a 10-year agreement, and Blackburn has been sort of a key driver of getting it back out again. It's out, now it was done 99 to 1 in the Senate, almost unanimous in the Senate to get this out. This was a big win for Dario, of Anthropic, probably the number one beneficiary, and by the way, somebody who certainly used a fair bit of political capital pushing for this, that's fault line number one. I would say fault line number two.

• 1:15:22John Coogan?

  Really quickly, stay on that, it's, it's a, it's a potential ban on AI regulation that was removed.

• 1:15:31John Coogan?

  And so the current bill does not have a has a does not have a moratorium on regulation.

• 1:15:37Zak Kukoff?

  There is no moratorium on federal regulation. That's right. So you can have California, yeah, states, whatever, who want to Marsha Blackburn, her home state, Tennessee, passed last year something called the Elvis Act, which was cutely named, but basically said, look, if you are building like a, you know, an AI audio business, you cannot use any likeness of a real performer's sound. So if you want to have John singing the blues or Jory singing the blues, I cannot do that without a prior deal. That's because in Tennessee, Nashville is a dominant industry, a music industry, is a dominant industry. And so part of Blackburn's opposition to the moratorium, which would have prevented bills like that from taking

• 1:16:21Zak Kukoff?

  effect, is that it ended up superseding the work that her home state has done to protect its dominant industries. By the way, net, net, this moratorium, the time that they got to a compromise was so watered down, it really wouldn't have impacted Tennessee or California anyway. But it was a very dramatic swing from in, outs, in, and now out once again for good.

• 1:16:45Jordi Hays?

  And what do you, what do you expect at the state level around AI safety going forward? Is this gonna, is the fact that this was removed gonna inspire certain governors to say, you know, make this a part of their platform?

• 1:17:01John Coogan?

  And I guess like I want to know more about like, if I'm 11 labs and I'm, and I'm training a voice agent and I can't be sure that some clip from, you know, Elvis or, you know, some Justin Bieber worked its way in there. Does that mean that I just turn off Tennessee at like the DNS level or do some geo fencing? Or is it more risky than that? Where I have to, I have to comply kind of at the national level and they're kind of forcing me to comply everywhere? Or can I just pull back out of that state? Because we've seen this with, with Apple intelligence not being available in China, not being available in Europe, for example. But yeah, what would the impact on something like that be?

• 1:17:43Zak Kukoff?

  Well, think about states in two categories, right? There are some states that are so large. And by the way, the analog that I would think about here is what happens in the textbook market. So if you're a textbook publisher and you want to write some textbook about biology or whatever, if the largest states in the country, it's category one, pass a law mandating something needs to be in a textbook, suddenly you're going to comply nationally because they are so large, they warp the market. Exactly. You have to. That's right. And so if California tomorrow says, look, we're passing a European style bill to severely curtail, which I think would be a disaster, to severely curtail AI development, that would in effect be a national bill. And part of the, in my view, mistake that's happening tactically right now

• 1:18:26Zak Kukoff?

  is this self-imposed July 4th deadline is so restrictive that it forces all of these more nuanced negotiating points to fall by the wayside, right? It becomes blanket, either it's in or it's out. There's just not time to get to a more nuanced middle ground. So 11 labs of Tennessee have the Elvis Act, probably says, look, we just toured around Tennessee. I don't, I haven't spoken to 11 labs. But if California passes, then suddenly you have the whole country warped by this. And Gavin Newsom and the California legislature are certainly ambitious enough to try, as they did last session, to try to pass something that would impact the whole country.

• 1:19:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, wasn't, wasn't there news out of California this week or last week around some of this stuff?

• 1:19:08Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, yeah, there was a huge fight, which had an unlikely set of bedfellows, where you saw Andreessen and others leading the anti-legislative, anti-regulatory brigade against some other folks who are much more pro-curtailing. By the way, I will just say, the other interesting takeaway for tech, not to totally dovetail away from your question, but the other interesting takeaway for us, I think, in this is the deciding vote in the Senate on the overall package, the reconciliation bill, was J.D. Vance. And so if you're a Vance head, looking at 2028, right? You already see that a Cosio Cortez and others, AOC and others, are going to use his deciding vote on this bill, which includes huge amounts of Medicaid cuts that Tom Tillis from North Carolina,

• 1:19:52Zak Kukoff?

  in particular, thought were politically toxic, as a wedge against him when he comes and runs for president in four years. So, sorry, that was, you asked a question about California and I dovetailed it back to the federal level.

• 1:20:03Jordi Hays?

  No, that's super interesting.

• 1:20:05Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, yeah, that's the big, the big shock. So you asked about tripwires, the AI tripwire was one. Medicaid cuts, which are politically really toxic, right? Because who wants the idea that you voted for the government to take away your healthcare? That's another huge tripwire. And then there's a package of things that maybe we care about that are nuanced, like, for example, IRA tax incentives for clean energy, right? Or new taxes on wind and solar from China. These are all things that might enrage the Republican, the very conservative Republican faction in the House, which now has to still pass the bill and now complicates the negotiating posture because the Senate watered down. The Senate preserved the IRA tax incentives and watered down some of the tax cuts, got rid of some of the tax cuts on Chinese imports,

• 1:20:49Zak Kukoff?

  which means basically you have a bill that's actually financially harder to pass because it's less balanced. And at the same time, you now alienated a huge faction of the GOP, the super conservative GOP side of the party, who still have to vote for the bill to happen. So it's up in the air if it passes or not.

• 1:21:06John Coogan?

  Can you tell me about the EV tax credits? I know Americans are struggling more than ever to buy naturally aspirated V12s. I'm hoping that there's some move there to subsidize things like the Ferrari 12-cylinder, the Dolce Trillendi. It's a multi-hundred thousand dollar car. Even if we can't subsidize that, maybe we can just take away the subsidies from electric cars to tilt the, to tilt the playing field in favor of the, of the larger engines, the supercharged V8s, the twin turbos, the G63s, these types of cars that Americans, you know, deserve to be driving. So what's the news on the EV credit front?

• 1:21:43Zak Kukoff?

  I agree with you that the backbone of the American economy is the Ferrari, right? It's impossible to me to imagine a world, thank you for the laugh track, I appreciate that, where a blue collar factory worker cannot own a sports car is beyond me. This bill doesn't address that. I wish it did. It'd be great if it did. It's not going to solve that huge unsolved problem. What it will do, by the way, is continue to drive a wedge between Elon and Trump, right? Then you saw Elon take to Twitter, I imagine you guys probably mentioned earlier. You saw Elon take to Twitter and start to really crusade. Against people voting for this, that is in part because at least the House version of the bill was much worse on a lot of the subsidies for electric vehicles than a Senate version. The big challenge is going to be going into now the conference committee.

• 1:22:27Zak Kukoff?

  It's going to be how do they reconcile these two challenges? So that they can hopefully tilt the market back in favor, of course, of Ferraris and supercars nonetheless, while also not alienating one of the two power centers of the GOP, at least today, in Elon, who could easily primary somebody who votes against.

• 1:22:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What about, uh, how, how are the Democrats feeling about EVs these days? Because it used to, I used to feel like it was a democratic cause to be pro EV incentive. Let's save the environment. Let's get people out of the gas cars. I'm joking about the V12s, obviously, but, but now it's become maybe let's punish Elon, but is this a cut your nose to spite your face situation for the Democrats?

• 1:23:09Zak Kukoff?

  I think it's a rough spot. I mean, you guys remember when Elon wasn't invited to the big EV summit under the Biden administration, right? That's part of what kicked off his political awakening. Is he hasn't, he hasn't used unionized labor and so he was excluded from this EV summit. There's been a huge polarization, a negative polarization against EVs among not only Dems in office, but the Democratic base too, which is to all the points you brought up, quite ironic. You're not going to find many Dems willing to cross the aisle in support of electric vehicles to save this bill. This is a bill that will live or die by Republican whip count and Republican unity. If the whip count isn't there, it's going to be really hard to get it done before July 4th.

• 1:23:48Jordi Hays?

  What about Elon's America Party? You think that's real or, or just exciting?

• 1:23:56Zak Kukoff?

  Are those my only two options? Real or exciting? There's no door, there's no door number three?

• 1:24:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's obviously like, you know, we were talking earlier, uh, third parties haven't, haven't historically done well.

• 1:24:07John Coogan?

  Well, he has the America PAC. So when you say Elon could primary someone, he could potentially primary a Republican on the Republican ticket with the American PAC. And he could almost like be kind of like a head fake, like, oh, this is part of the America Party, but it's not really a third party. Is, is that more what we're thinking here?

• 1:24:26Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe one historical analog. It's not perfect, but think about like a Theodore Roosevelt, like a Teddy Roosevelt with the Bull Moose Party, right? You think about, it's a faction within a larger established party, to your point, that can serve as an engine to primary people who are in disagreement.

• 1:24:43Zak Kukoff?

  Exactly, like the Tea Party, or frankly, what's happening now, look at Zoron.

• 1:24:46John Coogan?

  MAGA, MAGA is also like a wing of the Republican Party.

• 1:24:51Zak Kukoff?

  That's right, that's right. MAGA, the Tea Party, and now on the left, the polarization from the Zoron and democratic socialist world. All of these folks are new factions in a way that, by the way, we haven't seen before, the same way that fifty years ago, you basically watched Mash on television, that was your only option. And now I tune into CBPN while I play Subway Surfers and have thirty other things hitting me at the same time. This is the political version of that, right? Where you say, okay, it used to be my options were a platform that I accepted wholesale on the Republican side or the Dem side. Now I can be a MAGA guy, can be a tech right guy, can be a populist guy, and I'm a new right guy. And on the left, I can be a democratic socialist, I can be an abundance bro, I have an infinite menu of things. The America Party is more likely, if it sticks, one more menu on the side of the right.

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 1:25:36Jordi Hays?

  What, what, uh, what time, wha- what do you expect out of the next twenty-four hours?

• 1:25:42Zak Kukoff?

  So tomorrow morning at nine, House Rules Committee votes, that's going to be a key vote to see how this thing does. What I would say is, if this gets done by July fourth, the thing that you're going to have to look to is that nine AM Eastern vote to see how much unity is there in the Republican Party. They can barely lose any votes if this thing goes through the House in its current form. But I think it's unlikely that it's going to happen immediately. It'll happen, this will get passed. But on their timeline, I don't know, in the next twenty-four hours, if you see more senators like Murkowski from Alaska, who are saying things like, "The bill is flawed, please send it back to the Senate so we can work on it again." That's a key indicator this thing may not have the legs it needs the next couple of days.

• 1:26:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, we heard about, I mean, everyone's saying like, it's the biggest bill, there's all this pork.

• 1:26:24Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:24John Coogan?

  Are there any like green shoots where there's some random startup out there that's just super excited? Because maybe it's not a headline grabbing, you know, ten billion dollar thing, but it's like, that's a hundred million dollars that I can go after in energy or in defense.

• 1:26:40Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:41John Coogan?

  Or in shipbuilding or any, have you seen any of these like, they're called riders, right?

• 1:26:45Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, yeah. It's a good question. Biden was famous for stacking a lot of these, like the Inflation Reduction Act had a million ways you could go participate. This one's got fewer. I'll say one funny piece of pork and I'll say one actual opportunity. The real opportunity I would say is for fintech folks who are looking at the Trump accounts, right? Which is now giving huge amounts of new Americans who are underbanked or not banked before access to capital for the first time. If I'm Robin Hood, I am loving. That's a big change for me. Funniest piece of pork in the bill. Murkowski, who was the key holdout in the Senate from Alaska, got a tax exemption for Alaskan, native Alaskan whalers. She said basically native Alaskan whalers need to be...

• 1:27:27Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, that was honestly a big delivery for her constituency of people who kill whales in Alaska.

• 1:27:33Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up. Let's give it up for the whalers. They don't get enough attention in Washington.

• 1:27:37John Coogan?

  I mean, we've talked about it before, but you know, energy is really important for the AI data center race.

• 1:27:42Zak Kukoff?

  That's right.

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  Whales, they produce oil that you can burn.

• 1:27:45Jordi Hays?

  Sure, sure. Wasn't it Chase who said he would, he would burn whale?

• 1:27:49John Coogan?

  He didn't say he would do it. He said that the hyperscalers are so desperate for energy right now that they would burn whale oil.

• 1:27:55Jordi Hays?

  It's more fun to think about Chase personally.

• 1:27:58John Coogan?

  Launching Crusoe for whales.

• 1:28:01Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, that's right. Well, VCs are the new whalers.

• 1:28:04John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. And the old whalers.

• 1:28:07Zak Kukoff?

  And the old whalers, that's true.

• 1:28:08Jordi Hays?

  Zach, this was so much fun. We'll have to have you call in tomorrow or Thursday.

• 1:28:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, when there's more news.

• 1:28:13Zak Kukoff?

  Please, I'll be around. It's my first wedding anniversary, so I'll be around.

• 1:28:16John Coogan?

  Oh, congratulations.

• 1:28:17Zak Kukoff?

  Plenty of time to call in. Thank you very much.

• 1:28:18Jordi Hays?

  Incredible, incredible.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:28:20Zak Kukoff?

  Thanks for having me, boys. See you soon.

• 1:28:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:22John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:28:24John Coogan?

  Next up, we have Matthew Prince from CloudFlare coming in to TBPM. Welcome to the stream. Some huge news from CloudFlare. We'll let him tell us the story. How are you doing? Good to meet you.

• 1:28:41John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. I would love to start with the news today and then I want to go into some of the the history of the company and when you faced similar junction points and kind of turning points in the past. So why don't you kick us off with the big announcement, the big news today from Cloudflare?

• 1:29:01Matthew Prince?

  Sure. So about 18 months ago, we started getting approached by a number of content creators saying that they faced a new new threat online. We spend most of our days, most of our business trying to fight cyber hackers, Iranians, Russians, North Koreans. And so I was surprised when the new threat was AI companies. And frankly, I kind of rolled my eyes at publishers. I was like, publishers are always complaining about, you know, the next new technology. And they said, just pull the data, look at what is is going on. And it was really striking that over time, you could watch as the sort of deal that publishers had made with Google, you know, starting 30 years ago, which was,

• 1:29:42Matthew Prince?

  you can copy all of my content, and in exchange, you send us traffic. That deal just didn't hold up anymore, where they were copying the content, but because they were providing answer boxes, AI overviews, they just weren't sending nearly as much traffic. And that was the good news. As you looked at OpenAI, it was about 750 times harder than with the kind of Google of old to get traffic with something like Anthropic is 30,000 times harder. And the reason why is because people are reading the derivatives, they're not reading the content. It'd be effectively like if I asked an AI system, you know, summarize what happened on the Technology Brothers show today, I have less incentive to actually go and watch your actual show. And that means that if you're making money through advertising,

• 1:30:25Matthew Prince?

  if you're making money through subscriptions, if you're just, you know, getting value out of the ego of knowing that people are watching your show, that's going away in an increasingly AI driven web. And we worried about that quite a bit. And more and more, as we talk to publishers, we realized there was something that we could do about it because Cloudflare runs one of the world's largest networks, a huge amount of the internet already sits behind us. We could partner with literally publishers, everyone from Adweek to Jeff Davis and everything in between to say that let's change the way that the internet works and let's change the sort of model where if you're going to take content, you should actually compensate the content creators for it. And so, starting on July 1st, we flipped

• 1:31:06Matthew Prince?

  the script. We made it as a default that if you're using CloudFlare, that you can by default for free block any AI crawlers from taking your content without compensating you. And I think now the hard work begins where we have to figure out now the business model around how we get compensation back to these content creators and make sure that folks like you who are creating real original content can continue to be compensated for the hard work that you're doing.

• 1:31:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, we used to joke saying that the labs are welcome to scrape our content because we want to influence the outputs of the model. But no, it's a serious, it's a serious issue. We were covering one of Ben Thompson's pieces about this whole debacle a few weeks ago. And it was funny because at the time, we were like, this is, there's so many different stakeholders here. Who could possibly try to figure out a solution to this problem? And I obviously the answer, you guys are a key player in this, and you have the scale in order to kind of make changes happen. Can you, yeah, can you, I guess, like, break down more kind of like the kind of

• 1:32:13Jordi Hays?

  the market structure between and how you see this actually working out and who really?

• 1:32:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess what deals have been done in over the past year? Because I know, didn't News Corp. do a bespoke deal with OpenAI for that exact thing? It sounds like you are more equipped to kind of handle like the longer tail, but also some of the bigger publishers. So, talk to me about kind of the state of the art of what those deals look like when they're one to one, and then what things might look like going forward?

• 1:32:41Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, so I think that, first of all, I think for some time to come, large publishers will do deals with large AI companies where there might be places that people need help, or either small publishers or small AI companies, you know, and figuring out what has to happen there. But I think even in the case of places where deals have been struck, what the challenge is,

• 1:33:07Matthew Prince?

  You know, someone like OpenAI is paying a lot of publishers for their content. And doesn't actually object to the the basic idea that they should pay for the content that they're using. But but they do object to the fact that they're paying where all of their competitors are getting content for free. Sure. Any market that exists has to have scarcity. And the problem, the reason why there hasn't been a market in this place, space, is that there isn't scarcity. And so what changed yesterday is scarcity was introduced really for the first time. And I I think the closest analogy is, if you think back to, you know, before iTunes launched, we were all downloading music on Napster and, you know, all the the free pirate services.

• 1:33:49Matthew Prince?

  That's effectively how the AI companies are taking data from any content creators today. And what you need is an iTunes. You need someone to come in and say, okay, let's provide a way where people can pay for that content and then can go back. Now, now, that's evolved over time. I think our first version of the marketplace will probably be relatively naive and will figure it out. We didn't know it was paying 99 cents for songs anymore. We've moved to something that's closer to a subscription model like a Spotify. And and and I think that that's what what we will evolve to have over time. And and if we do it right, you know, I think that we can have a large number of sellers of content, obviously, but also a large number of buyers of content, both the big sort of general purpose models, but then also very specific models. And we've got to make sure that new entrants can come into this market and have have a

• 1:34:34Matthew Prince?

  vibrant way of of participating and competing. And so I think that for now, most of the deals will be one on one bespoke deals between publishers and AI companies. You'll need to have some way of enforcing those deals and making sure that if you're charging someone, they can get access, but their competitors can't. And then over time, I think we'll develop something that looks much more like a robust marketplace where content providers can set sort of what their price is, there can be a bid for maybe getting that that content exclusively for some period of time or or or whatever else. And that's going to develop over over the next, over the coming months.

• 1:35:11John Coogan?

  Is that the correct, is that the correct model to think that the, the content producer would set the price? I mean, that's certainly what happens on Substack and, you know, the, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal set their price. But I've always thought that this might evolve a little bit more like YouTube or like Spotify, where there is a pool of dollars that are going into ChatGPT subscriptions. I personally pay $200 a month and occasionally I fire off queries that probably land on the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times and I would be happy for them to send 10 cents or a dollar or split off 50% of what I'm paying. So you have a hundred dollars to kind of parcel out in the pool and then you see how much inference pulled what data from what, what sources?

• 1:35:55John Coogan?

  And, and kind of have it all be driven by the, like kind of the same volume,

• 1:36:03John Coogan?

  like the volume algorithm that you see on, on, on YouTube or Spotify. Does that seem like kind of what the long-term outcome might look like? Or do we need to also get to some sort of like ad-driven marketplace? Because that's ultimately where YouTube, how YouTube prices these things.

• 1:36:21Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, you know, I think it's gonna be, I, I think that we, there's, there's a lot that we still have to figure out. I, I last week traveled up to Stockholm to meet with Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify. And, and it was, you know, it was really, it was, it was interesting. He said, you know, that the ultimate model that Spotify settled on, I think it's, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but, but he was basically like, it was, it was sort of the most naive of all of the different options that he had come up with. And it is, works as it is a pool of funds and then they divide it up based on basically how many minutes of, of content you, you consume and there are different rates for music versus podcasts versus audiobooks.

• 1:37:03Matthew Prince?

  And, and it was fascinating to, to see. So you could imagine a version where Cloudflare effectively negotiates on behalf of all of the content that sits behind us with the big AI companies. People can opt in or opt out of being a part of that pool. The more content that's part of that, the more valuable it is to the AI companies. And then we would look at how we could split that up across how much crawling is actually done across that. I think one of the real keys will be, how can we give hints to the AI companies on what is the content which is the most valuable to them? So for instance, if Taylor Swift releases a brand new song, maybe does an interview about it. That's incredibly valuable content if you're a chatbot for teen lonely teen girls, right?

• 1:37:47Matthew Prince?

  On the other hand, it's probably not so valuable if you're sort of a chatbot trying to be the world's best doctor. You know, maybe there's some value in sort of bedside manner, but largely, you know, that's not going to be a big deal in your in your care. On the other hand, if a research study comes out on acetaminophen's effects on on, you know, different types of chemotherapy. Very little value for the chatbot for teen girls, but incredibly valuable for the doctor. And so what we have to do is actually, I think, on a on an LLM or an AI model by AI model basis. Be able to give them signals back to say, this is the sort of thing that you should be paying attention to, that you should be indexing. That you should be actually scraping and paying for. And the same way that in, you know, the music industry, we've got reviews.

• 1:38:32Matthew Prince?

  We've got different types of music that that people are, you know, that you might be into country, you might be in a classical. And it kind of allows you to compartmentalize that. I think that whole ecosystem has to develop, but once that does, something very much like Spotify could be the right answer. Long term. And again, I think we're in a unique position to pull it together.

• 1:38:51Jordi Hays?

  Talk briefly about stable coins. I remember in this Ben Thompson piece, he was the people have been suggesting this idea that stable coins. Could be some part of the solution to or a backbone for a new business model for the internet. At the same time, while I'm bullish on stable coins, someone like a CloudFlare can set up the infrastructure to just use traditional financial rails to. Process payments. So I'm guessing that it's not part of of what you're.

• 1:39:20John Coogan?

  This was Ben's reaction to the the original sin of the internet was advertising and this idea that. Mark Andreessen, when he built the browser, didn't build in payments because it was this multi-party discussion to figure out how to actually integrate payments into HTTP. Didn't happen. The first MCP spec, that's the model context protocol spec for AI agents to interact with each other doesn't include payments. But he was kind of saying that it might be on the horizon, but would love your take.

• 1:39:49Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, you know, I think the answer doesn't have to be 100% one or the other. And so I would guess that there are going to be very traditional, kind of traditional financial rails that will be ways to pay people out. But there will also likely be something that is blockchain based or stablecoin based. And again, I think we're looking at all of the different providers that are in this space, including potentially creating our own stablecoin that would be part of how these transactions, you know, take place. And I think you're exactly right that there's a natural extension from what we're doing here to how we figure out around what the payment rails look like for MCPs. Because as your agent is going around interacting with things, that's also going to be something

• 1:40:34Matthew Prince?

  that is either, you know, charged for or that you actually get paid to do. And there's got to be a way for those transactions to take place. And to the extent that you can reduce the transaction costs for those transactions as far as possible, then that's a pretty interesting way of being able to process, you know, very high volume, low dollar amount transactions. So I think that's right. My only one quibble is that I think that the original sin of the internet is not that it didn't include payments, it's that it was, that there was no privacy built into it and your IP address reveals far too much about you as and who you are. We don't even have to get to cookies, but that's.

• 1:41:17Jordi Hays?

  No, we totally can. What about, we've talked about content creators, publishers. What about the apps of the world, the Ubers, the Instacarts that actually have really meaningful advertiser businesses, you know, businesses built on top of them? Do you expect there to be any type of this functionality rolled out to them over time? Or is that something you think they're thinking about quite a bit? Because if I can go into ChatGPT and that's my default daily assistant, let's say in a few years from now, and I'm like, hey, order me groceries and order me this Uber, you know, I'm not in the app seeing ads potentially, you know, being upsold. And that could be a problem for those types of companies.

• 1:42:00Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, totally. And I think that, I mean. You know, robots don't click on ads. And so the sort of model that part of the revenue stream to support these services has to come from somewhere. And if today Uber is able to monetize the time where I'm waiting for a car to come by showing me an advertisement, that means that they can effectively charge me less for the ride. And so it may be that if that ride is booked through an agent instead and they don't get that advertising experience. And again, I don't know enough about Uber's business model to know how important that is to them.

• 1:42:45Matthew Prince?

  But if they don't get that, then maybe it is that there's some sort of premium that an agent booked ride receives versus a human booked ride. And again, I think that that's just we've got to figure out what that looks like. I think that's going to be less up to Cloudflare. I think it's going to be, you know, our job will be how do we provide those payment rails? How do we provide the systems? How do we make it so that we can have guardrails on as agents interact with applications that are there that you as the application provider can set those rules and controls and then agents can interact within that system? And MCP is sort of the leading candidate for providing that.

• 1:43:27Matthew Prince?

  But you're right that it's a sort of draft version of that specification and there are a lot of things that have to, you know, mature in order for that to be something that is the real kind of agent to agent system that runs, that is likely to run what will be an increasingly AI-driven web.

• 1:43:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you talk about any previous crucible moments for either Cloudflare or just like the Internet history broadly? This feels like a moment where you're potentially trying to, I mean, deal with a shift in the overall Internet structure or the incentive structure. But it's a reaction, but it's also an action that should reshape the relationship between different parties on the Internet. Are there different moments in the history of Cloudflare or the history of the Internet that you think we could draw on as historical analogies to learn from to see how this might play out?

• 1:44:26Matthew Prince?

  You know, I think that, you know, Google really thirty years ago defined what was the business model for the web, which was you you create content, search drives traffic, and then you monetize that content through advertising or subscriptions or ego. And ego and monetization, not quite the right thing, but you drive value from it in one of those three ways. And that that's held up for the last thirty years. I think that this is the first time that I've I've seen something where I thought, wow, there there are really going to be very, very, very fundamental changes to the structure

• 1:45:09Matthew Prince?

  of how the Internet works if we move from a search-driven model to an AI-driven model. And and I think that what I hope is that we can actually make this something where what gets rewarded is not what gets rewarded today, which largely is, you know, who can write the headline that produces the most, you know, sort of inflammatory response in in all of us, you know, who basically drives the most cortisol, you know, gets the most clicks and and therefore the most ad revenue or the most subscriptions. That's that's not a that's not a healthy way of looking at the world. I think, you know, the alternative is if you imagine that kind of all of the AI models

• 1:45:54Matthew Prince?

  together are a good kind of assemblage of of an approximation on human knowledge, if we can identify where the holes are and then create incentives for content creators to actually fill in those holes, that actually is going to move humanity forward, it's going to make the AIs better, it's going to it's going to be a much more interesting thing. And that's, I think, how we're going to we're going to be creating it. I can't think in the last thirty years of of a seminal moment. I think there are some things that are along the way. I think twenty sixteen was a really a big turning point year for for a lot of reasons. It was sort of the year that it went, you know, technology went from being able to do no wrong to being able to do no right, and sort of rise in populism around the world.

• 1:46:36Matthew Prince?

  You have you have Brexit in the EU, you have the first Donald Trump election, you've got Xi and Modi consolidating power in Asia, the Filipino election. And I think that that was a point in time where You know, also driven by Snowden shortly before that in 2015, that a lot of the world lost faith in kind of the US model of internet governance. And it wasn't quite ready to adopt the Chinese model, but that's definitely been a shift, which is substantial. And I think we're still watching that play out. That, I think, is probably still remains the biggest threat to the overall internet. But this shift to AI as well, you know, again, I think is a real challenge, but it's also an incredible opportunity.

• 1:47:18Matthew Prince?

  If, again, we can make the rewards incentives for content creators not be who can produce the most cortisol, but who can produce the biggest sort of incremental improvement in human knowledge, that'd be an incredible win. And something that, you know, I don't quite know how to get there yet. But I think yesterday or today, and, you know, we took, in July 1st, we took a real step in moving in that direction and making sure that content creators can be compensated for really producing information which is valuable to advance human knowledge.

• 1:47:56John Coogan?

  What do you think about the future of investigative journalism? There's been a big shift in just content creation into independent creators. But a lot of that is actually downstream or separate from the type of work that investigative journalists do. I'm thinking of like Seymour Hersh hanging out at a local army bar for a year before he gets one scoop that he can write a book about. And these investigative journalists, they tend to, you know, John Kerryru was on the payroll of the Wall Street Journal for years. He was writing stuff, but then he blows the Theranos case wide open, eventually a book and then a movie. And I imagine that with artificial intelligence, the value of a scoop could actually go up

• 1:48:39John Coogan?

  because you could use an LLM to read through the clickbait repurposed version of the article to find, wait, they're sourcing actually, this person posted it on the internet earlier. They're the one that actually did the hard work to get the scoop. They should get 90% of the value and 10% should go to the repurposed rage bait version as opposed to the economic model now, which is maybe you get 90% more clicks on the viral, you know, repurposed content and the scooper actually gets 10%. Do you think that's possible or how do you think that investigative journalism will evolve?

• 1:49:14Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, I don't know if this is an answer to your question, but it's, I thought it was interesting. As I said, I met with Daniel Ak up in Stockholm. And he told me, he said, you know, we were talking about this and he said, you know, one of the things we do at Spotify is we actually surface all of the different queries that are sent to Spotify that we don't feel like we have a really good response for. So if somebody searches for, you know, I want a song to a reggae kind of beat with, and it's all about how much it sucks when your sister steals your car and your dog.

• 1:49:53Jordi Hays?

  Not to get too specific.

• 1:49:57Matthew Prince?

  I don't know what these are, but they're musicians who take this list and they actually write songs based on what people are looking for.

• 1:50:06John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:50:07Matthew Prince?

  And that they make tens of millions of dollars a year doing just exactly that. And there's something about that that I think is really beautiful. As opposed to the alternative of just, you know, just trying to do a little more me too of what everybody else is doing, like taking a different twist, using signals from the market in order to go find that. So, you know, again, that's not investigative journalism by any means, but I think it is actually advancing kind of the sort of good of humanity. It's taking a place where there's a missing need and it's filling that missing need. And so I am hopeful, you know, and relatively, I mean, I'm a relatively optimistic person

• 1:50:49Matthew Prince?

  and I'm hopeful that if we get this right, that we might be on a golden age of content creation where people actually are rewarded for doing things that advance human knowledge as opposed to just doing things that produce as much cortisol as possible.

• 1:51:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the idea of a knowledge bounty, right? It's like, hey, there's groups of people or a single entity online that will just pay you to produce really high quality information around this specific topic. And the internet always did this sort of organically, but it would just be somebody spinning up a blog or maybe an Instagram account or something like that. They would just start blogging about something that was niche. And then an entire network would form around it and other people would contribute to it. So I think there's quite a lot of precedent, but it would be exciting to like, put that reward out. Before and not saying, hey, you have to do this and then maybe you'll get some ads associated with it.

• 1:51:41Jordi Hays?

  Later, but like, basically like the pool of capital is here and you just have to deliver that knowledge that that people already want. And we know it because they're searching it on L L Ms and things like that.

• 1:51:51John Coogan?

  Can I free you?

• 1:51:52Matthew Prince?

  I think I think I'll tell you the sort of Black Mirror kind of dystopian outcome. If we don't get this right, which is, I don't think that I don't think journalism goes away. I don't think that research goes away. But you could imagine a world in which we go back to something kind of like the Medici's. Where there are five big A I companies and they basically employ each of them, all of the journalists, all the researchers, all the academics. To be able to do the research to feed their systems because you're still going to have to have original content. People are still going to have to be able to produce that in order for the A I systems to, you know, fill in the holes in their kind of effective block of Swiss cheese. Or that is that is their model.

• 1:52:34Matthew Prince?

  But but I think that's that's a bad, that's a pretty bad world where where again, because you then probably have like the conservative A I and the liberal A I. And I mean, all these things that we've kind of that the Internet kind of broke apart. You could imagine A I is a system that is just this massive consolidator in the future. And I think that's a bad outcome. And I think a better outcome is if we can figure out how can we reward people for, again, driving knowledge. But but but not get to a place where all of them have to be employed by by one of the five, you know, big.

• 1:53:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I actually talked to somebody very high up at one of the labs who said that was was saying that like, if you take the total. The total salaries of all the journalists in America, it would be a fraction of what the A I labs are spending right now, just acquiring data. And so it's not a financial question. It is a political, cultural question. It's interesting.

• 1:53:28Matthew Prince?

  That's also the argument why I think that, and I've been really positively surprised as we've talked with, because we've talked with all the big tech companies, all the A I companies about this. And they and they all like. With maybe one or two very small exceptions. They all say, yes, we understand over the long term, we have to pay for content. And so they get that. What's key, though, is it has to be a fair playing field. And that fair playing field, everyone sees that slightly differently. So if you're a new incumbent, you want to say, well, Google can't be advantaged. If you're Google, you have to say, you know, well, we have to be respected for the ecosystem that we've helped build and flourish and we should be able to. And so everyone's got a slightly different take on this.

• 1:54:11Matthew Prince?

  But I'm actually encouraged that the dollars are there. That there is an acceptance that this is something that needs to happen. And that if you ask them, everyone says, yes, we need to do this as long as you can create a level playing field. And again, that's where I think our role comes in is how can we create that level playing field? How can we create scarcity? And then how can we make sure that content creators are being compensated for the hard work that they're doing?

• 1:54:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Zooming out just for a second. What is the state? How's the internet been for the last few weeks? It's been a busy month or last month in geopolitics. And I know that makes your job a bit harder, or at least I would imagine things get a little bit busier.

• 1:54:56Matthew Prince?

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

• 1:55:37Matthew Prince?

  One of Iran's largest banks was hacked by what looked like a group of Israeli hacktivists. The largest cryptocurrency exchange in Iran was hacked and all its funds were drained. Again, looking like it was either by the Israeli. Israelis or Israeli sympathetic attackers. Iran has tried to do the same thing against Israel. Israel's cyber defenses are much stronger. But we're starting to see that Iran is targeting other

• 1:56:07Matthew Prince?

  largely US financial services firms, critical infrastructure firms, to try and see, to sort of try and strike back from what is, you know, how do they strike back against the US in a way that is harmful but doesn't start World War III? And I think that increasingly, unfortunately, cyber will be a big piece of that. And so we're, you know, we're doing everything we can to stay in front of that, make sure that anyone who needs it has protection and that we can keep the lights on everywhere in the world.

• 1:56:39John Coogan?

  Last question for me.

• 1:56:40Matthew Prince?

  Go for it.

• 1:56:41John Coogan?

  There's a number of larger overarching tech narratives. I'm interested in if you're losing sleep over any or tracking any in particular focus. The AI talent wars and kind of pay inflation for top performers. Is that an issue or something you've been tracking? Or the difficulty to build larger data centers and infrastructure? The GPU shortage, the chip wars? Any of those topics kind of particularly relevant to you or your business? Or we're kind of keeping you up at night?

• 1:57:13Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, you know, I think we're not trying to build a foundational model LLM. So we're not, we're not as much competing for the bleeding edge AI researchers. I will say that we've, I've been really amazed at both from an academic side and then also just, you know, pure talent side. How many people are interested in working on that problem of something like, how do you score content in order to be able to create a marketplace? And so, and so that's something that's been, you know, pretty exciting. We're very excited about the, the people who are coming to apply to work for CloudFlare, to work on problems like that. And like today has been a record applicant day for us.

• 1:57:51John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:57:52Matthew Prince?

  On the, on the.

• 1:57:53John Coogan?

  Congratulations, record.

• 1:57:55Matthew Prince?

  Sorry, I hit the air horn for you on the record applicant day.

• 1:57:58John Coogan?

  But it's good, it's good news.

• 1:58:00Matthew Prince?

  And then, you know, I think, you know, we've, we tend to put a little bit of equipment in a lot of places. And so that we don't tend not to have kind of massive, multi-

• 1:58:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're not running into like power constraints or rare earth element constraints or water rights and strengths.

• 1:58:17Matthew Prince?

  We do, but in kind of a micro way where, you know, we put GPUs at the edge of our network. We have to live with a power envelope that we're given by an ISP. And so we're doing things to try and figure out how to just get the best power efficiency out of the GPUs there. The answer to, you know, more and more need of GPUs can't be everyone has to turn up their own nuclear power station. So I do think the place where we're pushing suppliers and AMD is doing some really interesting things in the space. Qualcomm is doing some interesting things in the space. The fruit company down in Cupertino is doing some interesting things in the space. Or how do you focus on, yes, performance, but performance per watt? And we've seen this game before with, with Intel saying, oh, that doesn't matter. Like just, just get the most performance possible. You can water cool things, all kinds of things.

• 1:59:03Matthew Prince?

  That, that tends to not be the winning strategy over the long term. And so we do think that there will be a renewed focus on just energy efficiency around GPUs. And we're really pushing that in a way that, because, because again, we can't build our own data centers in the business that we're in. And then, and then chip shortage, the chip shortages are funny. Like it's, there's never been a chip shortage in any time in the history of silicon that doesn't turn into a glut. Because it's-

• 1:59:31Jordi Hays?

  Hey, but this time it's different.

• 1:59:33Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, this time it's totally different. So I think that I think you're going to see both, you're going to just see shifting demand that's there. And, and, and a lot more. It's, Nvidia is not going to be the only chip supplier of GPUs. There are some really, again, great, great other providers that are out there.

• 1:59:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, thank you so much for stopping by.

• 1:59:52Jordi Hays?

  Really enjoyed the conversation. Congrats on the launch and come back on again soon.

• 1:59:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:56Matthew Prince?

  Yeah. Thanks for, thanks for having me on.

• 1:59:57John Coogan?

  Good luck filtering through all those job applicants. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:00:01Jordi Hays?

  See ya.

• 2:00:01John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:00:03Jordi Hays?

  There's no, there's no decency anymore. You can't even take a summer weekend in June.

• 2:00:07John Coogan?

  You can't even send an email to a 3,000 person organization without it leaking to Wired. Mark Chen, the chief research officer at OpenAI, sent a forceful memo to staff on Saturday, promising to go head to head with the social giant in the war for top research talent. This memo, which was sent to OpenAI employees in Slack and obtained by Wired, came days after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg successfully recruited four senior researchers from the company to join Meta's superintelligence lab. "I have a visceral feeling right now as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something," Chen wrote. "Please trust that we haven't been sitting idly by." I mean, this makes sense. Like, you need to, you need to tell the troops that, like, you know, "We're prepared to go on the counterattack. Like, we got attacked, but we're ready to go back."

• 2:00:52John Coogan?

  What's interesting is like, is like, I don't think that, I don't think that Meta is necessarily going to try and go eat ChatGPT's lunch. Like, I was revisiting that conversation that we had with Jeff Huber, and he was saying like, you know, he was kind of reiterating, like, "Never bet against Zuck." Like, he's working on an open source model, but a lot of it is, is more of this, like, B2B-applied AI necessarily than trying to go and, and disrupt ChatGPT, because Google's already running that playbook. Like, Mark can see that and see that, like, what happens when you're a trillion-dollar company and you roll out a, basically a direct clone of the ChatGPT app? It's like, yeah, you can get a decent amount of users in a, in a notional terms.

• 2:01:36John Coogan?

  Like, I'm pretty sure the Gemini app has like 100,000 users or 100 million users and like lots of five-star reviews, but it just doesn't have anywhere near the penetration of ChatGPT. And so when you pull someone off the street and you say, "What do you use for AI?", they say, "Chat." They don't even say ChatGPT anymore. It's so dominant. And so I think Mark knows that he shouldn't necessarily try and go after that, but he should be going after the next thing and the next, next thing and have a model that he can pipe into all sorts of different features within the meta ecosystem.

• 2:02:06John Coogan?

  But

• 2:02:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the crazy thing is there's not, it doesn't seem like there's clear precedent for a raid of a talent raid of this magnitude, right? We covered Ken Griffin raiding Enron.

• 2:02:19John Coogan?

  But it was after.

• 2:02:19Jordi Hays?

  Post the collapse.

• 2:02:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:02:21Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 2:02:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:02:22Jordi Hays?

  Apple heavily recruited out of Xerox PARC in 1979 in the early eighties.

• 2:02:28John Coogan?

  But like It was kind of a downswing.

• 2:02:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't.

• 2:02:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:32Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't anything of this magnitude, nor, nor was it, hey, we're going to come in and just give you these like nine-figure off, you know,

• 2:02:39John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 2:02:40Jordi Hays?

  Packages and things like that.

• 2:02:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it's very common for a startup to be able to pull people from the big legacy company that's kind of sclerotic. And, you know, we've seen a lot of people that were at Apple or Google or Microsoft or Xerox. And then they went to Google and then they went to Meta and then they went to OpenAI. I mean, Brett Taylor, who's the, who's the chairman of the board at OpenAI, was the CTO of Meta. Right? And it's like, okay, he clearly just wants to be in like the hot thing and he's like a startup guy almost. And I believe he was at Google before because he worked, he, yeah, he redid Google Maps. And so like the, like the story of Brett Taylor is really like the default, I think, for most like startup people. It's like he's at, he's, he's early at Google. He works with Paul Buchheit on Gmail.

• 2:03:26John Coogan?

  He works on Google Maps. Then he goes over to Meta, CTO there. Then he goes to OpenAI, chairman of the board there. And it's like, he is a, he's a startup guy. And so he's always riding like the new, wait, you usually can't poach them back into the older company. That's rare.

• 2:03:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one, one other, some other precedent here in 2010 and 2011. Zuck and Facebook went super aggressive poaching from Google.

• 2:03:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:03:52Jordi Hays?

  So Facebook had crossed half a billion users. They were in that period of transitioning from a super scrappy startup.

• 2:04:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:04:01Jordi Hays?

  And they went heavy into Google. So they went and got high performers from ads, search, mobile on the Android side. And, and some of the social product people from Google Plus. And Zuck did something similar, not to the same scale, but Just went and with these sort of heavy, heavy, heavy comp packages and was very successful. Google had to respond and increase comp in, in a number of different.

• 2:04:25John Coogan?

  Do they poach any designers, any people that use Figma.com? Any people that think bigger, build faster, anyone that, you know, because Figma helps design and development teams.

• 2:04:33Jordi Hays?

  The web would be a different place.

• 2:04:34John Coogan?

  It would be a different place.

• 2:04:35Jordi Hays?

  Existed back then.

• 2:04:36John Coogan?

  But fortunately you can go to Figma.com.

• 2:04:37Jordi Hays?

  You can think bigger.

• 2:04:38John Coogan?

  And you can get started for free. Anyway, what do you think of the, the buzzword superintelligence? This whole, like they've, they've really rebranded it. Is it a goalpost shifting thing?

• 2:04:49Jordi Hays?

  Smart. I think he poached the, the, the word superintelligence. It's mine now.

• 2:04:56John Coogan?

  Yes, mine now, because.

• 2:04:58Jordi Hays?

  And he's not saying, and he's not saying the safe superintelligence team is just saying.

• 2:05:02John Coogan?

  Unsafe.

• 2:05:04Jordi Hays?

  Reckless.

• 2:05:04John Coogan?

  Safe superintelligence.

• 2:05:06Jordi Hays?

  Implies reckless.

• 2:05:06John Coogan?

  Implies reckless superintelligence. I like that. But it's funny because, uh, you know, uh, everyone was focused on like AI as a buzzword. Then it was, uh, AGI, then it was, now it's superintelligence. But like, you know, within our group, like we all think like superintelligence is kind of the old thing. Like everyone, like me and you, like we, we know the secrets to this stuff. Like, like it's kind of, it's kind of already priced in. The real killers, they're focused on the next thing. You know what I'm talking about, right? Giga intelligence. That's the one that people are getting, right? Really? Like the real killers are like, yeah, well, like AGI is basically here. Superintelligence is basically here, but Giga intelligence, that's the one we're working on. Cause we're going to need a new buzzword because we're burning through buzzwords at an increasing rate.

• 2:05:49John Coogan?

  And so we're just, uh, we, we, we just steamrolled the Turing test, completely blasted through, uh, AGI. No one talks about AGI anymore. AGI is here.

• 2:05:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:59John Coogan?

  But you got, you know, superintelligence, we're going to solve this buzzword. We're going to churn through this in a year or two. We got to start working on Giga intelligence now.

• 2:06:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:07John Coogan?

  This is the way.

• 2:06:09Jordi Hays?

  Start adopting it.

• 2:06:10John Coogan?

  Chen promised that he was working with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and other leaders of the company around the clock to talk to those with offers, adding, "We've been more proactive than ever before. We're recalibrating comp and we're scooping out and we're scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent." Still, even as OpenAI, even as OpenAI leadership appears desperate to retain its staff, Chen said that he has high personal standards of fairness and wants to retain top talent with that in mind. "While I'll fight for, to keep every one of you, I won't do it at the price of fairness to others," he wrote.

• 2:06:45Jordi Hays?

  It's such a brutal dynamic if you're Mark Chen, if you're Sam, because not everybody at OpenAI is getting poached, but presumably Zuck is working with all the people he's poached already to identify who are the best people at OpenAI, who do we really want?

• 2:07:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:07:02Jordi Hays?

  And then going to them and making the maxed out offers. Meanwhile, it, you can't, like, the team dynamic, if you have a few researchers on a team and somebody gets, you know, somebody's potentially getting poached by Meta and you say to retain them, you're like, "Okay, we're going to give you this sort of massive incremental grant." And the other people on their team are going to be like, "Wait, well, is that my market value? I didn't go talk to Facebook or I didn't, I turned down, I never took the meeting or whatever. So you should pay me the same thing, too."

• 2:07:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:33Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 2:07:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:07:33Jordi Hays?

  I'm loyal. Shouldn't, don't you want to pay?

• 2:07:35John Coogan?

  I'm a missionary.

• 2:07:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm a missionary.

• 2:07:36John Coogan?

  Why are you paying the mercenaries more? You should pay, you should pay the missionaries the same price just because they're missionaries. Rough, for sure.

• 2:07:45Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 2:07:45John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 2:07:48John Coogan?

  Let me talk about.

• 2:07:51Jordi Hays?

  No, the other, the other thing is, is it creates this like really nasty incentive to basically be like, "Oh yeah, you know, you maybe got hit up by a Meta recruiter like many months ago." And you can be like, "Yeah, I mean, they reached out to me." And suddenly they're like hovering around you, like being like, "All right, what's it gonna take? We really don't want to lose you."

• 2:08:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:10Jordi Hays?

  It is a...

• 2:08:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's crazy game theory. Like, every single conversation in a company is like this constant game theory.

• 2:08:17Jordi Hays?

  And then timing that, um, timing that with.

• 2:08:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:22Jordi Hays?

  With this like summer break that I guess OpenAI was saying like, hey, everybody should take the week of the 4th off, or not the week of the 4th, but anyways, you wanted to say something more important.

• 2:08:34John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, you know, if you want to see who your high performers are, just look in the linear, right? Linear's a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps.

• 2:08:45Jordi Hays?

  If Zuck were able to gain access to OpenAI's linear, it would be illegal, but it would also tell him a lot.

• 2:08:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, you don't want to do anything illegal, Zuck. You want to be on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. So, the news comes as competition for top AI researchers heating up in Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg has been particularly aggressive in his approach, offering $100 million signing bonuses to some OpenAI staffers, according to comments Altman made on a podcast with his brother, Jack Altman. So, this $100 million signing bonus, this just got baked into the lexicon, but I was listening to Dylan Patel on Jordan Snyder's China Talk podcast, it's actually transistor

• 2:09:37John Coogan?

  radio, but it goes out on China Talk, anyway, and Dylan Patel was saying that that might be, that might be a kind of a game of telephone, a little bit, in the sense that it's possible that you could maybe be making $100 million over a number of years in stock, based on appreciation, but he was very skeptical that anyone was getting $100 million on day one without any sort of strings attached for like a true signing bonus. So, I don't know how real that number is.

• 2:10:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and remember that the Zurich team came out and said, the Zurich team explicitly said, but

• 2:10:16John Coogan?

  I know, I know.

• 2:10:17Jordi Hays?

  The way that he phrased it, clearly we're getting

• 2:10:20John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no, I do think that the round numbers are easy to latch on to. Like, why is Mom Donnie talking about billionaire specifically? He doesn't have a problem with 999 millionaires because like that's not easy to grasp like people latch on to round numbers 100 million is so much a billionaire is so much and it's easy to it's easy to quantify and so the 100 million if it was 80 million it wouldn't be going nearly as viral as 100 million and so so I don't know I don't know how real that is maybe that was thrown out as a total package and then it got kind of telephoned into well you know they it's basically a signing bonus because they they got the deal on the on the as soon as they signed but they do have

• 2:11:05John Coogan?

  some sort of earn out or the shares are locked up in some way but there's a bunch of creative accounting that can go into basically delivering someone what feels like 100 million dollars of value which is not far off from okay what would it take you know Johnny I've got you know a huge offer to go to openai and it was structured in an interesting way with like an acquisition and you know but he got

• 2:11:28Jordi Hays?

  Got a few points?

• 2:11:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were it was a few it was a few percentage points and when you think about the scale of openai and the scale of Johnny Ives legacy like yeah like what would it take to get someone like that to join here? He's a founding designer basically so it's a couple couple percentage points so multiple sources of openai with direct knowledge of the offers confirmed the number to wired so I don't know because they kind of benefits like both sides to to have that number out there it's kind of unclear who would who would really want to confirm that and then what the nature of these things were

• 2:12:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other thing that's interesting though, the other thing that's interesting is if you're working at openai and let's say their top researchers have on average 100 million dollars in openai shares that they're like the truly top people and then you get an offer that's like a 20 million dollars signing bonus but it's you know it's kind of paid out over time and that or they can claw it back if you don't stay past a certain date and you're kind of looking at and be like okay I'm already a senti And I'm getting an offer to like go to a new team that I don't know if I'm gonna like and it's and it's unclear like the vision is not quite as clear at Meta, right?

• 2:12:45Jordi Hays?

  I'm joining the super intelligence team. It's gonna be an incredible group of people with a ton of resources. That's exciting, but it is a big switch if you're already happily vesting out tens of millions of dollars. So it would make sense that these $20 million, you know, if it's $20 million, I can see that if it's $100 million for the for the top, top, top people, it makes total sense.

• 2:13:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, like, what was the, I mean, the the deal to bring on Alex Wang was probably like way over $100 million to him personally, based on his ownership in that company, which was acquired. And so like, that number doesn't feel impossible. I would just be surprised if there's not some structure around it, based on based on what Dylan was talking about.

• 2:13:33Jordi Hays?

  There's just enough precedent here that, again, going back to Zuck rating Google in in 2010, 2011, he was offering tens of millions of dollars in stock packages to mid-level engineers, just because he was like, I need a really good ad product. I want to make my ad product great.

• 2:13:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, have you seen the, why am I even asking this? Have you seen the BlackBerry movie? Of course not. But the but in the BlackBerry movie, there's this whole story about they go and and they try and poach someone. And then it was controversial because they like backdated some stock options for someone to basically give them more like cash, but without having like the the the initial impact of that cash. It's kind of interesting. But yeah, I mean, to poach top talent, it's expensive. It kind of benefits both, maybe. I mean, I don't know, like, on on the Meta side, do they want, does Zuck want the idea that he's willing to pay up to $100 million out there? Like, maybe, because that that certainly leads to more people taking the phone call of like, oh, wow, Mark

• 2:14:33John Coogan?

  is really taking this seriously. I should I should talk to Meta's recruiting team. I should actually hear them out. And then if they wind up coming back to me with a $50 million offer or a $10 Million dollar offer like, you know, we can discuss that and I can see and they can evaluate how much I'm worth. They can make an offer, but at least it got the conversation started. But I don't know, there was also the theory that Sam Altman put that hundred million dollar number out in order to kind of like poison the well, because if if Mark comes to you and says, hey, you're a top AI researcher. Come over here and then the top AI researcher says like, yeah, great. I hear I hear a hundred million dollars is the going rate and Mark's like, no, no, no, that's like fake news that that Sam was spreading.

• 2:15:17John Coogan?

  Like, we're actually paying 15, then you're like, well, no, like I was I was hoping for a hundred.

• 2:15:23Jordi Hays?

  Sam is one of the most Machiavellian people and.

• 2:15:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, you see, it could be like 4D chess on both sides. I don't know.

• 2:15:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:31John Coogan?

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

• 2:16:15John Coogan?

  They're like, we're building God here.

• 2:16:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:19John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 2:16:19Jordi Hays?

  Hundred million dollars is a hundred million dollars.

• 2:16:21John Coogan?

  Not for not for Anthropic guys. Anthropic guys are true believers. They don't care. What's a hundred million dollars in a post scarcity world? Doesn't matter. You want to be on the you want to be on this on the on the post scarcity train. Chen's note.

• 2:16:36Jordi Hays?

  It is so, it is so telling though, like how you how you like sort of like try to, you know, pinpoint like Zuck's views on AI. He's like, I'm not even going to bother with those people at Anthropic. Not a culture fit.

• 2:16:52Jordi Hays?

  Two AGI pilled.

• 2:16:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 2:16:54Jordi Hays?

  Senator, we sell ads.

• 2:16:56John Coogan?

  Anyway, if you're looking for sales tax superintelligence, go to numeralhq.com. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance with superintelligence for sales tax.

• 2:17:07Jordi Hays?

  The official sales tax automation provider for Lucy.

• 2:17:12John Coogan?

  Yes, that's true. Chen's note included messages from seven other research leaders at the company where they wrote notes to staffers in an apparent effort to encourage them to stay. One leader on the research team encouraged staff to reach out if they received an offer for Meta. If they pressure you or make ridiculous exploding offers, just tell them to back off. It's not nice to pressure people and potentially the most important decision. Wired is not naming the leader as they are not a C suite executive.

• 2:17:38John Coogan?

  This is weird. Where's the, where's the end of this quote? That's odd. I'd like to be able to talk you through it and I know all about their offers. The remarks come as OpenAI's staff grapple with an intense workload that has many staffers grinding 80 hours a week. OpenAI is largely shutting down next week as the company tries to give employees time to recharge.

• 2:17:58Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for OpenAI's grindset.

• 2:18:00John Coogan?

  It's really fantastic. Also extremely American to give a full week off right around July 4th. Like I'm normally pretty anti taking time off, but if you're gonna go really hard on a particular holiday, make it July 4th, you know? Give a week off around July 4th. I love it. I was, I was posting, you know, the over, I need a poly market on whether or not we get a Zuck American flag video on July 4th. Do you think it'll happen?

• 2:18:28Jordi Hays?

  I actually think there 100% should be a poly market on that.

• 2:18:31John Coogan?

  Right? It's kind of 50 50, right? Like he is definitely locked in, very busy, probably not a lot of time off. He sees that he knows from this that OpenAI is down this week. So that's probably like really encouraging to be like, I want to go harder this week. They're off.

• 2:18:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my, my.

• 2:18:48John Coogan?

  At the same time.

• 2:18:48Jordi Hays?

  My advice for founders this week is.

• 2:18:50John Coogan?

  Greatest pieces of content he puts out.

• 2:18:51Jordi Hays?

  Think about how hard Zuck is going right now.

• 2:18:55John Coogan?

  Go harder.

• 2:18:56Jordi Hays?

  Of July 4th. And just don't get outworked by him.

• 2:18:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:19:00Jordi Hays?

  Just don't get outworked by Zach this week. It's gonna be tough.

• 2:19:03John Coogan?

  He's in year 20. What excuses do you have? You're you're three months into your startup.

• 2:19:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, go harder.

• 2:19:09John Coogan?

  Go harder. I love it.

• 2:19:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Meta knows we're taking this week to recharge and we'll take advantage of it to try and pressure you to make decisions fast and in isolation. Another leader at the company wrote, if you're feeling that pressure, don't be afraid to reach out. I and Mark are around and want to support you. So.

• 2:19:27John Coogan?

  While OpenAI's leadership is taking Meta's efforts seriously, Chen also said that the company is getting too caught up in the cadence of regular product launches and in short term comparison with the competition. The sentiment is backed by a former OpenAI staffer who worked closely with Altman and this and said the CEO wanted to see buzzy announcements announcements every few months. This was a really, this was key to their strategy was like.

• 2:19:49Jordi Hays?

  Always have a buzzy announcement ready if the competition does anything, just drop a.

• 2:19:53John Coogan?

  Oh, Google I/O is happening. Wouldn't it be crazy if we acquired a company called I/O the day before or something like that? Like, we're like, oh, they're Google's announcing the new Gemini. Let's just steamroll them in the timeline that 24 hours before.

• 2:20:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'd love to introduce you deep research.

• 2:20:09John Coogan?

  I mean, it's it's masterful and like, but that's the game you gotta play. That's the game on the field. Like, I, I, I think.

• 2:20:14Jordi Hays?

  No, he really is the best.

• 2:20:16John Coogan?

  But he's not doing anything wrong.

• 2:20:18Jordi Hays?

  He, he is up there with Elon in terms of

• 2:20:24John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:20:25Jordi Hays?

  creating and riding hype and constantly delivering enough

• 2:20:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:20:29Jordi Hays?

  real product value.

• 2:20:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:20:31Jordi Hays?

  To justify the hype that that was being sold.

• 2:20:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:20:34Jordi Hays?

  You know, six months ago, basically. So like staying on the bleeding edge.

• 2:20:38John Coogan?

  And this is why the anti-tech people hate hate him and Elon so much. Because they're like, they're like, it's overhyped. It's not useful. And then like a year later, it's like there's Tesla cars everywhere. The rockets are landing and like 90% of people are eating Chachi every day.

• 2:20:51Jordi Hays?

  Tens of billions of visits monthly.

• 2:20:54John Coogan?

  Okay, so it was real, but also he was overpromising, but he delivered at a, at a higher level than anyone in human history. And that's just like, it's, it, those two things are in, in, in conflict. Someone said this, like Elon is both Thomas Edison and Barnum and Bailey or whatever. P T Barnum, like he's a circus man who can put on a show and put a robot in a, a human in a suit acting like a robot, but then he can actually go and deliver the thing, which is just, it just breaks people's brains. Anyway, we need to remain focused on the real prize of finding ways to to compute. A lot more supercomputers are coming on later this year into intelligence. Chen wrote, this is the main quest, and it's important to remember that skirmishes with meta are the side quest.

• 2:21:39John Coogan?

  Last but not least, I'll be around this week, recharged and ready to go pound for pound. DM me anytime. I love it. He's ready to go.

• 2:21:46Jordi Hays?

  He's fired up.

• 2:21:47John Coogan?

  Get him in the ring.

• 2:21:48Jordi Hays?

  I love talking with Mark.

• 2:21:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:49Jordi Hays?

  That was a, that was a fun conversation.

• 2:21:51John Coogan?

  Also, I mean, guy's in shape. Let's get him in the, let's get him in the octagon with Zuck. Mark on Mark violence. Let's see it.

• 2:21:57Jordi Hays?

  I mean, if, if there was a pound for pound list for the top AI researcher in the world, he's in the conversation.

• 2:22:05John Coogan?

  He's in the conversation. It's amazing. It's really been amazing to watch Mark's leadership and integrity through this process, especially when he has had to make tough decisions. Altman wrote in on Slack in response to Chen's message, very grateful to, we have him as our leader.

• 2:22:18Jordi Hays?

  I mean, these, it can't be overstated, making these decisions, right?

• 2:22:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:25Jordi Hays?

  One of your best people comes, comes to you and says,

• 2:22:28John Coogan?

  It's hard.

• 2:22:29Jordi Hays?

  Hey, I'm really happy here at OpenAI.

• 2:22:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:33Jordi Hays?

  I have $80 million of stock.

• 2:22:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:37Jordi Hays?

  And I was just offered 150 over the next year and it's highly lick, or over the next few years. It's highly liquid, meaning that I can market sell it quarterly forever.

• 2:22:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:49Jordi Hays?

  And meanwhile, you're going through this for-profit conversion.

• 2:22:53John Coogan?

  Do you think the liquidity thing is real at all?

• 2:22:55Jordi Hays?

  I mean, obviously.

• 2:22:56John Coogan?

  What are you, I mean, like, if you want to, let's say you want to buy a $50 million house and you have $100 million in like illiquid OpenAI. Like, is that going to be hard at all? I feel like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley Private Wealth Management are going to be beating down your doors to give you a loan that's backed by the shares.

• 2:23:14Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:23:14John Coogan?

  You're only going to have to put down 10%.

• 2:23:16Jordi Hays?

  Sure, but, but meanwhile, the company's failing to go through a for-profit conversion.

• 2:23:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, so that applies.

• 2:23:23Jordi Hays?

  Satya's taken 20% off the top.

• 2:23:26John Coogan?

  I mean, that applies.

• 2:23:27Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm just, I'm just saying.

• 2:23:28John Coogan?

  That applies like a, a small haircut, I, I would say.

• 2:23:30Jordi Hays?

  I'm just saying, there, there is always,

• 2:23:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:33Jordi Hays?

  There is always going to be a tension of somebody having massive wealth, but not having greenbacks.

• 2:23:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:41Jordi Hays?

  There's always going to be that tension.

• 2:23:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:43Jordi Hays?

  And people seeing that Meta is one of the most liquid stocks in the world. Can constantly trade in and out of it. And it's ultimately

• 2:23:56Jordi Hays?

  just it's stable.

• 2:23:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:58Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 2:23:58John Coogan?

  I mean, if you're interested in liquid stocks, go to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing, industry leading yields.

• 2:24:04Jordi Hays?

  Fashion stocks.

• 2:24:05John Coogan?

  Trusted by millions. And who knows, maybe they'll have OpenAI soon, anything.

• 2:24:10Jordi Hays?

  Anything's possible.

• 2:24:11John Coogan?

  You, yeah, we should, we should, you know, Robin Hood has, you know, the, the tokens around private companies. Maybe we should tokenize nonprofits. I want to be able to trade, you know,

• 2:24:26John Coogan?

  PETA. You know, let me, let me, let me go long PETA. Let me get some, let me get some leverage on that. I want some levered options on PETA. Look at Tyler right now.

• 2:24:37Jordi Hays?

  Let's get on the Tyler cam.

• 2:24:39John Coogan?

  How are we doing on time?

• 2:24:40Speaker 03

  I think I'm, I think I'm in the right mission.

• 2:24:42John Coogan?

  Oh, you did it? No way. 15 minutes left. Let's see it.

• 2:24:45Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:24:45John Coogan?

  Okay. I can't believe he got it set up so fast. That's amazing. Okay.

• 2:24:51Jordi Hays?

  That's honestly.

• 2:24:52John Coogan?

  He's sitting at, he's sitting at 26 minutes so far.

• 2:24:56Jordi Hays?

  All right, well, have fun in there, Tyler.

• 2:24:58John Coogan?

  Just look over and I just didn't realize he was on VR. It's amazing. I think he's actually playing it. This is crazy because my number one complaint with, with the quest was that it just takes a long time to set up. And I think that.

• 2:25:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, you intentionally did this challenge.

• 2:25:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:25:13Jordi Hays?

  Made it seem like, oh, I'm going to happily give away my, my new VR Xbox.

• 2:25:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:19Jordi Hays?

  Thinking that there's no way he could finish it in 40 minutes. But now, now he's.

• 2:25:24John Coogan?

  I think he's going to do it.

• 2:25:25Jordi Hays?

  Speedrunning.

• 2:25:27John Coogan?

  Pillar of Autumn, it's happening. Anyway, Swigs has the story. He's breaking it down.

• 2:25:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, some good highlights here. The mark, mark the mark war has resulted in going from, oh, the good people don't leave to someone has broken into our home and stolen something. One week company shut down? Question mark, question mark. I mean, I.

• 2:25:50Jordi Hays?

  I was going back and forth here. I wouldn't be surprised if the shutdown was somewhat strategic in that, hey, people already need a break. We shouldn't have them walking around the office.

• 2:26:01John Coogan?

  The way they were writing it, it felt like this had been on the table for months because the company has been working really hard, launching a ton of stuff. And it seems like if it just seems like an odd, an odd choice to, if you're in the middle of this Mark v Mark war, that that would be what you choose to do would be a one week company shutdown. But I don't know, maybe. I just, I'm not 100% that like the AI talent war has resulted in the shutdown. It's more just like the shutdown is happening at a weird time. Anyway, this third point is very interesting. Pivoting product launch calendar to AGI race, especially when Stargate comes online. Dylan Patel says December is when Stargate's coming online.

• 2:26:43John Coogan?

  And that should be a big, like the biggest, the biggest cluster ever and unlock even, even more maybe pre-training scale, but there's a question about how important that is. And maybe you can do more reinforcement learning in a more distributed way. So I don't know. Also, like, it's not exactly like Zuck is GPU poor. So I don't know. I don't know how big of a deal it is, the Stargate thing. We'll see. But number four, for some reason, Meta is ignoring Anthropic. It don't care about safety. If this is true, of course, the Anthropic point was very funny. Anyway, there's other posts in here that we should cover.

• 2:27:21John Coogan?

  Satwik Singh says, what Sam never understood was that Zuckerberg torched 20 billion over VR headsets with Nintendo Wii graphics and didn't even flinch.

• 2:27:29Jordi Hays?

  Didn't even flinch.

• 2:27:30John Coogan?

  You know what's so funny? Like those, the Nintendo Wii graphics thing, that was like, that was like three months. And then after that, it was, he was doing that Lex interview in the metaverse. Did you ever see that? Where it's like, it is like photo real immediately.

• 2:27:45Jordi Hays?

  We got a wild demo at Meta HQ of all the new products and we were blown away. I'm not even sure. I don't think we can say much.

• 2:27:53John Coogan?

  Talk about it in like the abstract, but, but yeah, I mean, none of that was like Nintendo Wii level graphics. But, but, but I mean, that, that was, that one picture was like iconic and kind of like, it felt like, oh, this is kind of a step back in terms of.

• 2:28:07Jordi Hays?

  Well, many more people saw that picture than actually use the product.

• 2:28:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:11Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 2:28:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, because there were plenty of, there were plenty of VR games that didn't have Nintendo Wii graphics, like the Hero game for the, for the Quest when it came out was Robo Recall, which looked super sci-fi and just looked awesome. And it was, it was, it was great. And there were a bunch of other games. But yes, I mean, the point is, is that like, uh, Mark is totally ready to spend $20 billion on a big project if he thinks it's valuable. And here he clearly does. And so he's going after it. Um, anyway, uh, similar founder led company that's building amazing AI stuff. Finn, the number one AI agent for customer service. We've had Owen on the show before. He's been on.

• 2:28:49Jordi Hays?

  Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in bank offs, number one.

• 2:28:53John Coogan?

  Ranking on G2. Let's go. So if you're looking to do customer service, head over to Finn.

• 2:28:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm saying this, they're not saying this, but I'm going to say this is the official, the official, uh, uh,

• 2:29:08Jordi Hays?

  AI CX tool of A, both AI safety and being AGI pil, because Anthropic uses.

• 2:29:15John Coogan?

  Really? No way. There we go. Okay. Awesome. Um, yeah, I'm sure Anthropic will love that. They're like, we said you could put our logo on your website. We didn't say these.

• 2:29:25Jordi Hays?

  Two podcasters.

• 2:29:27John Coogan?

  Could say it's the official. Way over their skis on this endorsement.

• 2:29:31Jordi Hays?

  The official CX agent.

• 2:29:32John Coogan?

  Anyway, Rune had an interesting, uh, take here, uh, diving into the, the, why the, these trade deals are so, they're not really trade deals, but these poachings can be so, can be so damaging. And he's trying to put it in broader consumer terms. We're going to debate whether or not his point is well taken. Uh, he of course works at OpenAI and has for a number of years. Rune says, intellectual property by default is a market failure. Single, well-informed, talented defectors can walk away from organizations with billions of dollars of tacit value of knowing what works and what doesn't. The athlete metaphor is somewhat wrong. In industries where patents and such aren't viable market participant, aren't viable,

• 2:30:16John Coogan?

  market participants will drastically under invest in R and D efforts due to IP seepage, just like the I drink your milkshake, milkshake effect of oil seepage and land rights. There is a compelling pro-consumer case for non-competes. Interesting. Very rare that you hear a tech person argue in favor of non-competes. Interesting. I mean, the, the, the immediate impact of non-competes in this context would be dramatically lower wages for AI researchers like Rune, uh, which is interesting. The other question is.

• 2:30:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. You'd have to move AI out of California.

• 2:30:56John Coogan?

  Oh, people would then maybe, or they, or they would.

• 2:30:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm just saying, I'm saying if you really want to use non-competes,

• 2:31:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:31:03Jordi Hays?

  Go where they can be enforced, right?

• 2:31:05John Coogan?

  Yes, but then as a.

• 2:31:07Jordi Hays?

  Historically.

• 2:31:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, but then as a, as an AI researcher, you'd say, I definitely don't want to leave California. I'm gonna get a much better deal here.

• 2:31:15Jordi Hays?

  School here.

• 2:31:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, my, my, my question is like, I've always been interested in like, why can, you know, like the consumer packaged goods industry, like patent, like a tab on a can for 25 years and like, Walt Disney can own like the shape of mouse ears for like 80 years, but like Google can't own the transformer for like even a minute. Like, I get that it's like some sort of fundamental discovery, but I've always been interested in how little IP works in technology. So that's interesting.

• 2:31:45Jordi Hays?

  It just is, is, is a byproduct of hacker.

• 2:31:50Jordi Hays?

  Culture, sort of like positive some culture of Silicon Valley.

• 2:31:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you'd think that would change if there was tens of billions of dollars on the table, right?

• 2:31:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a culture of, you know.

• 2:32:01John Coogan?

  So I agree with you, and I'll give you an example. So, so pull to refresh on the iPhone was created by a Twitter employee. Like a Twitter UX UI developer built that, built that user interaction and then Twitter had a patent on it.

• 2:32:19Jordi Hays?

  Lauren Brichter.

• 2:32:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:32:21Jordi Hays?

  American soft software developer, best known for creating tweety.

• 2:32:25John Coogan?

  Pull to refresh, yeah.

• 2:32:26Jordi Hays?

  The pull to refresh interaction.

• 2:32:28John Coogan?

  So he created that, that design pattern and then he had a patent on it. Twitter owned the patent and Jack Dorsey and the Twitter crew were libertarian and said, you know, we're not going to enforce this. And then it got baked into Instagram and it's, it's now natively in iOS and it's in, in all of, you know, it's basically like one button to like.

• 2:32:47Jordi Hays?

  If you're, if you're true, if you're truly terminally online, you're using it hundreds of times a day.

• 2:32:53John Coogan?

  True, but now we've actually moved past that. We've moved into endless scroll where you actually don't need, like if you're on TikTok, you're never pulling to refresh. You're just keep, you just keep scrolling to the bottom. So, so we're actually post pull to refresh and now we're in the endless scroll. But endless scroll, I believe was developed by Pinterest and they had a patent on it for a while. I think I might be wrong here, but,

• 2:33:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:15John Coogan?

  But, but endless scroll was also something that was not able to be owned, uh, which is just odd to me. Um, and then, and then there's the other question of like Coca-Cola has been able to keep the, the, the, you know, the formula as a trade secret for like a hundred years or something. And it's just odd that, that tech companies can't seem to do either. They can't keep the secrets.

• 2:33:34Jordi Hays?

  You can have trade secrets, right? It's not like an open AI researcher can go over and say, here's, here's a bunch of code. Let's roll, let's roll it out, right?

• 2:33:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:33:44Jordi Hays?

  It, it's basically there, the in. The the sort of way of doing things that they've internalized from being at a company

• 2:33:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:52Jordi Hays?

  For a certain amount of time.

• 2:33:53John Coogan?

  Tactic value of knowing what works and what doesn't. And so the my my like naive read on this is that if you had had a top tier OpenAI researcher at Meta during the Lama four build out, that researcher would have said, hey, don't focus on pre-training scale as much. We need to get a reasoning model out and we need to focus on RL and post-training much more.

• 2:34:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:16John Coogan?

  Much more. And and when you talk to Dylan Patel, I was asking him about

• 2:34:20Jordi Hays?

  You think?

• 2:34:20John Coogan?

  DeepSeek and how DeepSeek was was was doing all these innovations and like moving to floating point eight, like smaller, uh, smaller, basically smaller numbers storing the weights. And he was like, oh, yeah, but OpenAI was doing that like two years ago. DeepSeek just open sourced it. And so it's like, the world found out, if you found out the best practices from DeepSeek because they open sourced it, like you were not on the cutting edge and you should have been coaching AI researchers from the top labs earlier.

• 2:34:46Jordi Hays?

  So two things could be

• 2:34:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:48Jordi Hays?

  Could be happening here. One, Zuck is right to just go and overpay

• 2:34:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:53Jordi Hays?

  And and try to recreate some of the magic and and get a, you know, leading, a leading model, uh, or or set of models out of it that he can use in a bunch of different ways that we've discussed. Or none of this matters and Rune is is baiting, baiting Zuck into just overpaying.

• 2:35:13John Coogan?

  This is like

• 2:35:13Jordi Hays?

  The forty chess is like, oh, yeah, this is, they're getting everything.

• 2:35:17John Coogan?

  They're taking everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:35:19Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:35:19John Coogan?

  No, I I I don't, I don't necessarily believe that because I I did talk to Rune like years ago and I was like, but like, is this going to commoditize? Like, is the foundation model layer going to going to commoditize? And he was like, they're like, there are like, the secret to OpenAI in many ways is like the Thelian secrets. Like, they understand things at a lower level that other that other people just don't. And so that will compound and stay at advantage. And he hadn't even predicted the, uh, the the dominance of the consumer and like the aggregation theory that happens when you're the front end to consumer AI. That's incredibly valuable. But just on the research side, just on the research side, like, they can stay ahead just by understanding, like, the secrets of what works and what doesn't. Um, but it's interesting. Anyway, uh, let's tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic.

• 2:36:04John Coogan?

  Adio is the new, is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.

• 2:36:10Jordi Hays?

  Next level.

• 2:36:11John Coogan?

  Next level. It well, I mean, you know, we have a light guest booking today. But, you know, we're spending an hour talking about one story because it's fun stuff. We can continue. We can do the go over the Wall Street Journal. Because in the exchange section, there is a fantastic article related to this. Says, "It's known as the list, and it's a secret file of geniuses." And I'm looking at this, it says, "Mishka Balenko, Yu Zhong, Mark Zuckerberg's been reviewing this list, Lucas Byers on this, the new guy." Says Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Tyler Cosgrove, Ben Kohler, a couple other folks. But, you know, it's just the usual people that we know.

• 2:36:54John Coogan?

  Anyway, "It's known as the list, and it's a secret file of geniuses. Only select AI researchers have the skills for the hottest area in tech. Mark Zuckerberg and his rivals want to hire them, even if it costs ungodly sums." We love ungodly sums. We should be ringing the gong more to this, this, this episode. "All over Silicon Valley, the brightest minds in AI are buzzing about the list. A compilation of the most talented researchers and engineers in artificial intelligence that Mark Zuckerberg has spent months putting together. Lucas Byer works in multimodal vision research, which Tyler broke down for us."

• 2:37:29Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine if, if, if Zach spun up like basically like a hot or not style tool? That's just like pins, pins to researchers together. And like he makes other researchers like just do the test. And then just puts out a list of like, these are the, this is the, the top 50 people.

• 2:37:46John Coogan?

  Yep. This is so good. So, Lucas Byer describes himself as a scientist dedicated to the creation, creation of awesomeness.

• 2:37:59Jordi Hays?

  Very Reddit coded.

• 2:38:03John Coogan?

  But he's a poster on X as well.

• 2:38:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:04John Coogan?

  Yu Zhong specializes in automatic speech recognition and barely has an online presence besides his influential papers. Misha Balenko is an expert in large scale machine learning, who also enjoys hiking and skiing, or as he puts it on his website, "applying hill climbing, search and gradient descent algorithms to real world domains." That's very cute. The recruits on the list typically have PhDs from elite schools like Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon. They also have experience at places like OpenAI in San Francisco or Google DeepMind in London. They're usually in their 20s and 30s and they all know each other. They spend their days staring at screens to solve the kinds of inscrutable problems

• 2:38:46John Coogan?

  that require spectacular amounts of computing power, and their previously obscure talents have never been so highly valued. The chief executives of Tech Goliaths and heavyweight venture capitalists are cozying up with a few dozen nerdy researchers because their specialized knowledge is the key to cashing in on the artificial intelligence.

• 2:39:03Jordi Hays?

  It is funny, some of the losers out of this talent war are just VCs because how do you compete? How do you compete when historically you could have gone to some of these and really overpaid to invest? You could have come to them with ridiculous, what would be very ridiculous for a VC, which is, "I will spin up a new company." Not ridiculous, it happens, but it is kind of ridiculous in some ways. Spin up a new company, "I'll give you 200 on a billion and you can take 10 million personally in secondary, immediately."

• 2:39:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:39:37Jordi Hays?

  And that is no longer even that compelling of an offer if the odds of actually winning are low and you just want the most access to compute and be...

• 2:39:49John Coogan?

  Traded. Will is in the studio. Welcome back to TVPN. How are you doing? How's it going? Congratulations on the trade deal. Thank you for having me back, yeah. What supercar did you buy? Did you go Bugatti Chiron? Or you go F80? I mean, we hear that the numbers are huge right now for folks like you.

• 2:40:12Will Brown?

  I mean, I'm taking a plane more, so like, that was a lot of fun.

• 2:40:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, people say, you know, we wanted flying cars.

• 2:40:19Jordi Hays?

  The fact that you would imply that Will drives himself is offensive.

• 2:40:27Will Brown?

  I mean, Waymo for the first time recently. I've like, I've been to like SF, but like, I haven't been around SF proper that much since the Waymo craze took off. And so like, that's been like the car experience really, just like self-driving cars, damn.

• 2:40:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. So are you in SF full-time now?

• 2:40:47Will Brown?

  Uh, still back and forth New York. I'm like, kind of slowly starting to spend more time in SF.

• 2:40:53John Coogan?

  It's on brand. You're decentralized. You're decentralizing AI. It's, it's, it's perfect fit. Perfect fit. Uh, anyway.

• 2:41:01Jordi Hays?

  Did you touch grass at all this weekend or were you locked into the timeline?

• 2:41:06Will Brown?

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

• 2:41:28Will Brown?

  But yeah, it's exciting times. Open AI, open model soon, hopefully, but not this week.

• 2:41:37Will Brown?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:38John Coogan?

  So yeah, I mean, the first place I want to start with is the actual trade deals. Did, do any of these people jump out to you as particularly interesting? Have they been on your radar? Have you met any of these folks? Can you give us more context on how, how academic are they? How product oriented are they? It does, it's, it feels like this is purely research, you know, beefing up of the research team. And Meta kind of has products solved. Is that the right model to think about this? What, how can you characterize like the shape of the team that Zucks built?

• 2:42:15Jordi Hays?

  There's thousands of really great software engineers that work in AI.

• 2:42:20Will Brown?

  Yeah, sure.

• 2:42:21Jordi Hays?

  And but what, you know, even kind of getting a sense of like, how many people was were Zuck really going after? Was it 250? Was it 100? The list that came out today is, you know, somewhere, somewhere, I don't know, there's like 20 people on it, something like that.

• 2:42:38Will Brown?

  Right, right. Yeah, I mean, it's a great list. It's a lot of like very senior, senior researchers who know, who have like been through some like real product cycles who like, I think the goal is people who can bridge the gap of research to product. Because like, like one thing Meta has a strength of, but I think doesn't translate in like this era is they have a lot of really good like academic researchers. Like Jan LeCoon's whole org has a lot of very talented, very capable researchers who write important papers. But it's the kind of stuff that doesn't really turn into exciting products. It's like more betting five or 10 years out, how do we want to do things eventually? Versus like going through a pre-training cycle for a Gemini or a Claude or an OpenAI model like

• 2:43:22Will Brown?

  that has a different set of considerations. And so this to me looks like they want like 10, 15 great people who have been through those research to product cycles in terms of the model being the product.

• 2:43:38Will Brown?

  And it seems like they probably like they got Alex and then supposedly Nat and or Daniel to kind of handle a little more of the, not the business side, but producty business stuff.

• 2:43:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a management role.

• 2:43:56Will Brown?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:43:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, what, what is your take on Jan LeCoon right now? How should we think about his position in the AI world? There's, you know, I see these memes of like, he's a non-believer. He doesn't believe in like superintelligence and like AI God. He's a little more practical. It seems like he's been, he's been right about some things in the sense that like we haven't had, we, we're not feeling a fast take off. Off right now. So I think you gotta give him some credit for that. At the same time, like there's Ben Thompson's been criticizing on Lacun a little bit for not driving the the product side of the business.

• 2:44:36John Coogan?

  It's like, it's one thing to say that, hey, we're not going to go straight shot to AGI God, but then the the the downstream implication of that is that if you believe that we're going to be living in like B two B SaaS world of AI implementation and productization, productization, then like go do that and like make sure that the models work really well for business. And so, uh, I don't know. What is your take? How would you? How would you describe Jan Lacun in his history and kind of where he sits in the organization to like a layman?

• 2:45:07Will Brown?

  Sure. Yeah. So I think people over index on thinking of Jan as the meta guy like too much.

• 2:45:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:45:12Will Brown?

  I think it's a shame that they didn't necessarily have someone in the Lama org who was as visible as him. Because he was not involved with Lama at all, like fair fundamental AI research is like a whole other group that they mostly write papers and do very academic work. Jan Lacun's work is very academic. Um, and it's really like, it's, I think he's like, I think on one hand, he like is right in the sense of like, we don't have the full picture yet. Like, we don't have full on AGI that can like do a human's job forever. And I think that's kind of the drum he's beating is like, there's more work to do. There's more science to do. It's not just productized the current set of techniques.

• 2:45:54Will Brown?

  In terms of like the end of AI forever. Um, but his goal is not to do the productization like he like the org he's in at Meta is really isolated from products. Um, he's there to kind of boost the uh, reputation of the org academically. As well as to be able to potentially advise on other stuff that's more productive, but his job is not to like go train a business model. That you train a model that is going to be used by businesses and like, I think people like that org fair, the friends I have who are there like, are there because they essentially wanted to be a professor, but they want tech company resources and not to have to teach. And that is essentially what that org is.

• 2:46:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Does that lead to better recruiting on campus essentially? Like you can go get researchers because Jan Lacun can come do a really powerful lecture.

• 2:46:51Will Brown?

  Maybe, but I think of it more as like the same way that Zuck did Metaverse stuff. Zuck is very willing to make 10-year bets.

• 2:46:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:46:59Will Brown?

  Um, and so that org for Meta is not about what product to release next quarter. It's what are our 10-year bets?

• 2:47:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay, uh, I want to. What about? Sorry. Yeah, you can go.

• 2:47:11Jordi Hays?

  So Meta shares just hitting all time high.

• 2:47:14John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:47:14Jordi Hays?

  So the stocks, the stocks performing. I'm curious, um, from your time at Morgan's.

• 2:47:22Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for that, John.

• 2:47:23John Coogan?

  Uh, it's incredible. That is, it is incredible.

• 2:47:26Jordi Hays?

  But generally up 5% over the last week.

• 2:47:28John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:47:30Jordi Hays?

  What, how, what, how did Wall Street, uh, generally sort of like process the like Meta AI story? Cause now, obviously, at least the market seems generally excited. Uh, it may get to the point where we did with VR where people are like, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa. Cool it on the Metaverse, you know?

• 2:47:48John Coogan?

  Well, it's funny because like, like, like you add, you add all this up, even if it's the $100 million offer number is real. It's like, okay, so now we're at like $1 billion in spend. It's 5% of the Metaverse hole that was burning. And it's like, you know, from a Wall Street perspective, you're like, I don't care about, I don't care about $1 billion. I care about $20 billion because that was what was weighing on the stock during the Metaverse build. But this is like, AI is so much more productizable. You can make so much more money from it upfront. And it seems like even though it's a big number, $100 million offer, it feels like the spend is maybe less, but I don't know. What do you think, Will?

• 2:48:26Will Brown?

  Right, yeah, I mean, I think the, I don't know the context fully of the 100 million. I know people have all these theories, but like the, the scale AI numbers we do know.

• 2:48:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:35Will Brown?

  And like that, that's a big chunk of their like, I don't know, they don't do those every day.

• 2:48:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:42Will Brown?

  Um, but they've done a handful in the past at that scale, like WhatsApp was 20 billion or something like that. Um, and

• 2:48:53Will Brown?

  I mean, it's hard to read into like the, the charts. Like I, I think people are generally like expecting that Meta will take AI seriously and are kind of happy to see change.

• 2:49:06Will Brown?

  Whether that is like justified or not, I mean, we'll see. Um.

• 2:49:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was interesting.

• 2:49:13Will Brown?

  But yeah, I think the product side is gonna be interesting because like they're not a B2B SaaS company.

• 2:49:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, so I want to push back on that.

• 2:49:20Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:50:04John Coogan?

  Dark bull case, yeah.

• 2:50:06Jordi Hays?

  Dark bull case for Meta in the context of AI because it's like, it's possible that, that Facebook is already the best ad advertising product in human history, like period, hands down, there's nothing better. And then could you make it like two, three times better? It's very possible.

• 2:50:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to push back on the B2B thing because yes, yes, they don't sell B2B software, but I was thinking about it in this terms, like if you, if you were running a company where your entire, you only had one client and that client was Meta and you sold them CRM and infrastructure and LLMs to improve the back office and do, you know, censorship and, and, you know, and reality checking and, and looking for bad words and looking for improper posts and recommendation algorithms, like how much would that company be worth? And how much revenue would they be making just from that one client?

• 2:51:05John Coogan?

  And I think it's in the billions because it's just such a large organization that it's potent, it's potentially like just the B2B applications of AI inside of Meta are like, it's a multi-billion dollar like cost center or revenue driver or something like that. I don't know.

• 2:51:20Will Brown?

  I think a company at Meta's scale has already rewritten all that stuff themselves for the most, like they probably have some services

• 2:51:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:26Will Brown?

  that they're using, but like they, like they, could they rebuild their own cloud? Like, cause they use AWS for a lot of time.

• 2:51:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:51:33Will Brown?

  Can, they're not a compute company though. And in terms of like platform stuff.

• 2:51:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:39Will Brown?

  I feel like those companies, once you hit a certain size and you just like have so many engineers that you want everything like Google rewrites all their own stuff.

• 2:51:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:47Will Brown?

  Microsoft rewrites all their own stuff. And can they, is there another like a tale of end of that that has not been done yet that they can squeeze some more money out of her?

• 2:51:58Will Brown?

  Entertainment will be interesting. So one thing that just I was just reminded of, have you seen the Italian brain rot videos?

• 2:52:03John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Love them.

• 2:52:04Will Brown?

  Yeah, yeah. So like, I know people, it's like silly, it's stupid. But there is something there in terms of this like communal narrative storytelling with a level of vibrancy that we haven't seen so far. It's like Looney Tunes. But people just like come up with these where you could imagine Meta kind of eating a good chunk of the like video gen market. If they have an answer to like V O three. Where that becomes part of the platform. It ties into the whole metaverse thing of like creating stories and sharing these stories with your friends. But instead of like Instagram stories, it's like, okay, what's, what's the evolution of stories?

• 2:52:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Have you, have you seen Higgs field?

• 2:52:47Will Brown?

  No.

• 2:52:47Jordi Hays?

  Field AI, I think it's an ex Snapchat team. Their new image model is basically already at a point where it's creating images that are photo realistic. But in the sense photo realistic.

• 2:53:01John Coogan?

  It looks like Instagram photos, not like.

• 2:53:03Jordi Hays?

  Full time influencer generated it after spending hours trying to create it and you can't tell that it's not real. And so it feels like, it feels like Meta integrating that kind of thing where it's like. It, it'll be interesting to see how this actually plays out because everybody will be able to be a super tasteful creator. Or like generate these sort of unique styles and I'm sure at that point it'll switch. Everybody will be like, well, I only follow organic farm to table influencers.

• 2:53:35John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 2:53:37Will Brown?

  Yeah, I feel like they, their AI integration so far have all been kind of weird. Like there's these like Instagram accounts you can chat with. And then there was the whole Meta AI homepage disaster where old people were like leaking personal info without realizing it. But I guess Facebook's always had that.

• 2:53:59Will Brown?

  Yeah, I think it'll, they'll have to thread the needle on product in a way that will have, they'll have to get creative because they haven't. Like, it's been a while since they had a product innovation that was homegrown that really stuck. Like.

• 2:54:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is interesting that they haven't tried to create a Studio Ghibli moment by you're like going.

• 2:54:21John Coogan?

  I was saying this, they should just pre-render everyone's profile picture as a Ghibli. And just when you open the Instagram app, it's just like, here, we did this for you. It would be incredibly expensive from an inference cost, but then it's just like you could share it and it's just more virality around it. But I don't know. And like even baking that down into a filter. No, it can't be.

• 2:54:43Will Brown?

  So like OpenAI branded now, they have to.

• 2:54:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm not saying, yeah, I'm saying like an entirely new.

• 2:54:49John Coogan?

  But yeah, yeah, basically like the, the, the filters in the Instagram app should be like style transfer or like fully generative. Instead of just like color grades, that's clearly the next thing and they should just, and they should just do that. But what, what do you think of Sam Altman's ability to get through this? Like he's had a series of exoduses and seemed to continue to march on the anthropic departures, then SSI and thinking machines like XAI. Like this is not the first time.

• 2:55:21Jordi Hays?

  Not his first rodeo.

• 2:55:22John Coogan?

  It's not his first rodeo.

• 2:55:22Will Brown?

  Right, not his first rodeo.

• 2:55:23John Coogan?

  And so there's this whole narrative like never bet against Zuck, he's been down on the metaverse, came back, he's been down on mobile with the HTML5 thing. And he came back from that, went native and super dominant and bought Instagram, WhatsApp, super dominant in mobile. Uh, and so never bet against Zuck, but then also maybe never get, bet against Sam, maybe they both win and maybe like the real loser is like, I don't know, some, some other company or something. I don't know.

• 2:55:48Will Brown?

  I think as long as OpenAI doesn't totally drop the ball on product or research, like they have the center of gravity for the AI world. Like in the same way that no matter what Android ships, people are not going to switch from their iPhones, like. Someone that have to go very wrong for people to not see OpenAI as the winner, I think. Or there's the kind of the default.

• 2:56:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the other thing is the average ChatGPT users not waking up today being like, oh, I can't believe OpenAI lost a handful of its top researchers, right? They're they're just still using ChatGPT as a Google replacement or they're talking with it as a companion. So, yeah, I think the lead is still very, very real. And and I just and again, it's going to create opportunities for people to say, hey, I want to go work on this product that hundreds of millions and soon billions of people use every single day.

• 2:56:51Will Brown?

  Right, and I do think it'll get to a point, especially with like 2025 into 26, where there's a lot of product stuff that people seem like it. I think we're early on products and we'll keep getting better versions of the same things in a way that's like kind of predictable, like the image models will keep getting better, the agents will mess up less. But like, we can already use those things and we can start building deeper concepts around that. And the question is like, okay, what are the winning apps?

• 2:57:22Will Brown?

  Like, I imagine that like the real time clearly kind of thing. Some OpenAI is going to do their version of that at some point. Other people probably will too, like, does that become modality that people really want? Like, live overview on their screen, on their phone? Like, what's the what's the way that people are going to be interacting with AI generally? Because a lot of those use cases, like, it's they're already smart enough. It's not about making the models like way smarter at whatever. It's like, how do you have the model be useful or fun, engaging?

• 2:58:00Jordi Hays?

  There's a bunch of paths here, going back to the Clouly thing where one Roy is like right about the UX and like wins the market. And the other option is like, he's right about the UX, but like doesn't win the market. And then there's like, you know, it's just not the right form factor or whatever. But any of, at least the first two outcomes are hilarious in that, in that Roy Lee ushers in the new, the new paradigm of, uh, for, for engaging with, with language models. I'm curious, uh, any, um, is all the stuff around every B2B SaaS player descending on the sort of like

• 2:58:39Jordi Hays?

  single interface, like a chat interface that generates software. Was that predictable to you? Do you think that's, do you think that that's like part of a multi-year trend or is that just FOMO?

• 2:58:52Will Brown?

  I mean, like Copilot was early. It was like 2020, 21, like the first GPT-3 Copilot came out and like, that was already one of the early like LLM applications that people were interested in at all. And then it took until Cursor for it to really, like, I think Cursor plus like 35 Sonnet was when it became a thing that was good enough that people were excited about it. Um, and it really ushered in the trend because people were starting to find it more useful than a toy and like a thing that actually want to use day to day. Um, and so I think that that's one path is like, and then the more background agent kind of things are like starting to take off now, which I imagine like those will get reliable enough that they're like useful for cranking stuff out. Um,

• 2:59:38Will Brown?

  they already are kind of depending on what you're doing.

• 2:59:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:42Will Brown?

  Like, I think, yeah.

• 2:59:44Jordi Hays?

  We're about halfway through the year. What, what are, what are kind of like the big moments that you're kind of tracking? The, the OpenAI open source model could be one. Whatever Meta launches next, right? I'm assuming they're going to be dark until this new team can, can really cook and bring something great. It may, maybe they don't do anything this year, but I would assume they, they come with, with something. What else are you, are you tracking?

• 3:00:13Will Brown?

  Yeah, I mean, for me, the oh three release in chat GPT was like a pretty like game changer kind of thing where it was like, we saw with like deep research that like, okay, they kind of figured out how to make agents work, but it was also just like this one version of an agent. And oh, three, you can kind of get it to be a pretty general agent where it can like, do some pretty complex stuff that was kind of new to see from like the GeoGuessr thing was crazy.

• 3:00:39Will Brown?

  And having that as a like vision of like what AGI starts to look like, I think is pretty cool. Of course, from the like research open source world, there was a deep seek as like the RL craze taking off, but like, I mean, I'm I work on RL, so I like, obsess over it and like, think about it a lot, but I do think we're really starting to see these recipes, at least in the broad strokes of like, okay, here's how the LM thing can go. We figure out what we want it to do. We give it some tools. We set up these environments. We figure out how to evaluate it. And then we can just kind of like, let it go. And these things get better at doing those things via trial and error.

• 3:01:18Will Brown?

  And so like, I like, I think that is one way to kind of forecast where things are going is just like, what are the plausible use cases that people want to use LM's for? They want an agent to do XYZ. And then how do you make this a thing that you can help climb? And I think like, you see a lot, like, there's been a lot of news about OpenAI trying to like sell their RFT service. There's these startups popping up. There was a

• 3:01:40John Coogan?

  Was the RFT service again?

• 3:01:43Will Brown?

  Uh, reinforcement fine tuning.

• 3:01:44John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 3:01:45Will Brown?

  And so like, they're pushing this pretty hard.

• 3:01:48John Coogan?

  You're spending over $10 million like Palantir, uh, OpenAI will also customize a model for you.

• 3:01:54Will Brown?

  So they have like a uh, serious, heavy, uh, like a heavy paying customer one, but they also have like a more, like in the thousands of dollars service.

• 3:02:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:02:04Will Brown?

  Where you are getting to essentially do fine tuning on opor mini.

• 3:02:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:02:09Will Brown?

  And that is a little more self-serve, um, but they're also like doing consulting around that, the forward deployed thing around that.

• 3:02:17John Coogan?

  Is that an important strategy for OpenAI? To to to kind of stay in the game against open source models like Llama?

• 3:02:28Will Brown?

  Yeah, but I think also against other like thinking machines, there was some report that this is a version of the strategy they're getting is like go to enterprises, talk to them about their problems, turn these problems into things where you can create really good customized agent models. And

• 3:02:48Will Brown?

  if the like, that's one potential roadmap towards like having more like AI everywhere is just like having services that were whose job is to like come in, whether or not it's fine tuning or not, just like make them into agent shaped tasks.

• 3:03:05Will Brown?

  Where you can then optimize the model and have someone craft the model experience like for you.

• 3:03:11Will Brown?

  Because like, I think a lot of enterprises are still like in the spot where they don't really like, there's, there's not, as you see by the like the talent war, there's just not that many people in the world or in the market who really understand this stuff at a level where they can go make it happen. And so like the open source thing, on one hand, it's cool that you in theory can go do it. But it's also like, there's not that many hands who can, who are equipped to like, go make the thing happen.

• 3:03:39John Coogan?

  Actually, fine tune Llama four or whatever.

• 3:03:42Will Brown?

  Exactly.

• 3:03:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we actually talked to a startup that's doing basically that, like small models for specific business use cases like, okay, you just have a ton of CSVs that need to be turned into JSON and we build you an L and that just does that or whatever. Interesting.

• 3:03:57Jordi Hays?

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

• 3:04:32Will Brown?

  Yeah, I mean, I think like the the broader sphere of like creating stuff to train models on with humans in the loop to do that curation is going to be important. Especially for these domain specific applications.

• 3:04:51Will Brown?

  I think it's gonna be less like, oh, we just need more tokens. And it's more about we need a curation of goals and objectives.

• 3:05:03Will Brown?

  Because like tokens, you kind of hit diminishing returns pretty quick in terms of just like more internet texts or more like human written math solution examples.

• 3:05:15Will Brown?

  And it doesn't scale super well. But the thing, but nice thing about the past expectations is you can kind of like pour in more compute without necessarily needing more data. It scales much better with compute.

• 3:05:29Will Brown?

  Whereas we don't really have like a great way of like spending 100x more compute per pre-shamed token other than make a giant model.

• 3:05:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think Llama will stay open source for the foreseeable future?

• 3:05:43Will Brown?

  We'll see. I it wouldn't surprise me if they go kind of the Google route where like they are still, they still do open source. They still have the Llama brand, but it isn't like their flagship thing where they start doing, whether it's for internal products or it's they really want to show that they're the winner, releasing closed models via API or other services where.

• 3:06:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do they really, do they have the infrastructure to serve a closed model? I mean, you mentioned that they use AWS, so it'd be kind of awkward, right?

• 3:06:13Will Brown?

  Yeah. I mean, I don't know that they really want to that much. I think that it'd be something that comes in a product.

• 3:06:20John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah, makes sense.

• 3:06:21Will Brown?

  Or maybe they partner with like, you could see them partnering with someone like a Core Weave.

• 3:06:27Will Brown?

  Or Nvidia directly. Nvidia is hoping to get into the inference serving game, it sounds like.

• 3:06:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think, so one of Swix's takeaways from the Wired article was that like one big development that's coming is when Stargate comes online, OpenAI will have the largest single cluster for pre-training, but it feels like we might be at the end of that game and we might be doing more compute intensive work in a distributed fashion. And so maybe having it all in one place is a little bit less relevant to just, you know, oh, trump card, Stargate, boom, I win, I have the best model by far. How, how do you think about the impact of Stargate on like the AGI race?

• 3:07:21Will Brown?

  I mean, I think the biggest experiment that they're definitely gonna do is take a pretty big model. I don't know if it'll be like quite as big as like a 4.5, but like a big model and do way more RL on it than anyone's on the app. Like, what does like an O5 level of RL look like?

• 3:07:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:07:36Will Brown?

  See how good that is. See what

• 3:07:38John Coogan?

  Do you need Stargate to do that, though? Or could you do that just across a bunch of data centers? Because I've heard like a lot of RL is like you're generating, you're doing verifiable rewards, you're generating in a bunch of different data centers, you could do it completely distributed, and you don't necessarily need a Stargate to do that.

• 3:07:53Will Brown?

  You can do it distributed. Like, it is very inference heavy. There is still like a lot of weight updating. You have to sync the model across. You have to keep sending the training model to your inference workers.

• 3:08:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:08:04Will Brown?

  And so having it colocated certainly makes it easier. It's easier to do it in a distributed way if you want to versus pre-training. But it's not like trivial.

• 3:08:17Will Brown?

  But I think like a lot of this is just data, people are building the data centers without necessarily knowing exactly what experiments they're gonna run. They just know more stuff is coming. But also, a lot of this is gonna be inference. We're like, they want to be able to do, like, Meta has a ton of GPUs they just use for Insta-Ran ads. Recommendations. A lot of Stargate will probably be serving Ghibli, like.

• 3:08:40John Coogan?

  I mean, that makes a ton of sense. Like, I'm running into rate limits on

• 3:08:44Jordi Hays?

  Except I haven't seen one in two weeks.

• 3:08:45John Coogan?

  Literally everything. Like, like, Google. It's like, how, how do they run out of GPUs? They spend $60 billion on GapX every year, at least.

• 3:08:53Jordi Hays?

  What did you read into?

• 3:08:54John Coogan?

  And O3 Pro, too. I mean, I get timeouts on this stuff.

• 3:08:57Jordi Hays?

  Last question. I'm guessing you weren't surprised to see OpenAI leveraging the TPU for inference or reporting to be starting to use it? Was that kind of?

• 3:09:10Will Brown?

  I mean, it makes sense that they are considering all options, given the friction with Microsoft. Like, they don't have a core cloud that they're super close with. They're not, like, there's, they need to both try to lower their costs for inference as well. Like, that maybe was a factor behind the, because the O3 had a big price drop that might have been TP related, I don't know, pure speculation. But, like, Google has TPUs and they can serve Gemini really cheap and really well, really fast.

• 3:09:44Will Brown?

  If OpenAI wants to compete at that level, they have to consider all options.

• 3:09:49Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Makes sense. Well, great day to have you pop on.

• 3:09:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

• 3:09:54Jordi Hays?

  Knowing how things are unfolding, we'll probably, we'll probably ping you to jump on again later this week.

• 3:10:01Jordi Hays?

  Stay ready. Great to have you. Cheers.

• 3:10:05John Coogan?

  Talent wars continue to rage on. Sam Altman slams Meta AI's talent poaching spree missionaries will beat mercenaries. He says, quote, "What Meta is doing will, in my opinion, lead to very deep cultural problems," said Sam Altman in leaked memo sent to OpenAI researchers. So, big, big question. Paula says, "With all the AI labs in SF being in the mission, who called them members of technical staff and not missionaries?" It's funny. Oh, wow. This is an old post, yeah, from, from over six months ago. And there's a bunch of other new details emerging from the new Meta superintelligence team. Dee Dee, who's coming on the show, wait, in like three minutes?

• 3:10:49John Coogan?

  Wow. Yeah, we've highlighted a lot of his posts. Every single one of the 11 Meta, Meta superintelligence hires has, is an immigrant who did their undergrad abroad. Seven from China, one from India, one from Australia, one from UK, one from South Africa. Eight are PhDs or PhD dropouts in the US. Immigration is key to US AI innovation. Jeff, Bev Jezos has a hilarious post here. "The foreshadowing here was insane." And it's Sam Altman interviewing Mark Zuckerberg, and Mark Zuckerberg says, "The thing that I think Facebook has done exceptionally well is hiring."

• 3:11:28John Coogan?

  This is, this is an incredible series, the Startup School series that Sam did while he was at YC. He interviewed Zuck, Elon, a ton of really interesting folks, and got these really definitive interviews from the top tech leaders of the next generation, like right as they were kind of on the, on the biggest moment in their come up. Why are you laughing?

• 3:11:49Jordi Hays?

  It's just, I love, I love this business.

• 3:11:54John Coogan?

  You're like tearing up, looking, how happy, how happy.

• 3:11:58Jordi Hays?

  No, it's just, it's.

• 3:12:01Jordi Hays?

  Watching this great power conflict play out in real time is wildly entertaining.

• 3:12:09John Coogan?

  It's entertaining.

• 3:12:09Jordi Hays?

  And the consumer is going to be the net winner.

• 3:12:14John Coogan?

  I was about to say that, and also America.

• 3:12:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:16John Coogan?

  It's extremely, this is a pressure cooker of the highest, it's so competitive. But the good thing is that at the end, like we aren't playing this game where someone goes to jail or someone gets, you know, like goes to the Gulag if they don't perform or they get locked up. Like this is, this is, you know, the difference between being a, having $10 billion or $100 billion. It's like, it's kind of all fake, but it's all, it's all like, it's super high stakes, but it's still capitalism and it's still like, the consolation prize is still being able to build something cool, even if you get beaten. But the end result is that we have this hyper competitive race to build the best thing with like kind of a safety cushion so that you're not, you're like,

• 3:13:00John Coogan?

  it's not like the government's putting a gun to your head.

• 3:13:02Jordi Hays?

  And it's global, right? It's greatest minds from all over the world coming to compete in this market.