Nvidia Earnings, Paramount Emerges Victorious, Block Layoffs | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console - https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:01John Coogan?

  First, we will tell you about Nvidia earnings. They crushed. Highly anticipated as always. Nvidia is permanently holding up the US economy. Continues to hold up the US economy, the global markets, but it's sold off even though they blew out earnings and it was a very good quarter. So earnings dropped yesterday after we got off the phone with Doug O'Laughlin from Semi Analysis. Semi Analysis did have some good breakdowns here, but the top line revenue came in at $68.1 billion, up 73% year over year and 20% quarter on quarter. And this beat consensus estimates by nearly 3%.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  The stock price popped around 3% immediately, but then sold out, sold off 5% after, at the market opened this, this morning, making it the stock's worst day since last April. They're now just a tiny, tiny $4.5 trillion company.

• 0:57Jordi Hays?

  April was DeepSeek?

• 0:59John Coogan?

  Last April? Last April was DeepSeek, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. People were saying you're, you won't need a whole bunch of Nvidia chips because you'll be able to inference cheap commodity hardware and the models will get-

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  And DeepSeek was climbing the App Store charts in America totally organically.

• 1:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was a lot of weird stuff going on.

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  They weren't using a massive bot farm at all.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess this sort of steel man the DeepSeek story, there was this interesting takeaway, which was that even though the numbers were sort of misreported-

• 1:28Jordi Hays?

  We had it, we had it wrong. I think it was January.

• 1:31John Coogan?

  DeepSeek was January?

• 1:32Jordi Hays?

  Liberation Day was-

• 1:32John Coogan?

  Oh, Liberation Day tariffs, yeah, chip, chip sanctions. But the DeepSeek lesson was you can distill models, you can get, you know, a certain level of intelligence at a much lower cost. And that is real, but the demand on the frontier is just incredible because people are like, oh, I, I have a strong opinion about 5.3 versus 4.6. Like, people really care about being on that perfect leading edge for exactly what their use case is. You see this with people having favorite models, favorite flavors all over the place. And so the, the demand and the Jevons paradox really just powered right through. What do you have to say about DeepSeek?

• 2:08Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, like, I think when the DeepSeek like moment happened, the narrative was not that they were distilling now. It was that they had built, like, they had trained a brand new model. With very few resources.

• 2:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  There was no like sense that they were just like distilling.

• 2:20John Coogan?

  There was rumors about it pretty quick.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  There were rumors, but the main narrative was not that like they're being distilled.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I think what I mean, what I mean about distilling is that like the, uh, the truth that came out over the, you know, news cycle was that distillation does get you somewhere near a particular frontier capability and allows you to reduce cost, but there is still another order of magnitude of demand for the next generation and the next level of the frontier. And we have yet to see a plateau emerge for demand for the, whatever the next frontier is.

• 2:54Jordi Hays?

  The story of the last year is that there's very, very, very, very little demand for number three.

• 3:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00Jordi Hays?

  There's some demand for number two, and there's an exceptional amount of demand for the most performant model for a specific, specific task.

• 3:09John Coogan?

  So going back to our newsletter today, our earnings recap, after the earnings call, semi-analysis called the results staggering, I love it, clean bill of health on gross margin revenue and the guide is firmly above buy side bogies, incredibly clean, really. They also pointed out what Nvidia said about supply commitments with $21.4 billion of inventory on hand, up from 19.8 billion. They have 95.2 billion of supply locked in with chip manufacturers, also stating, we have strategically secured inventory and capacity to meet demand beyond the next several quarters. In other words, we're not running out of chips anytime soon. That's good news for Nvidia. The second order effect

• 3:52John Coogan?

  that I think was interesting that Doug O'Laughlin flagged for us was that even if TSMC does scale up magically or, you know, they, they figure out how to build another fab, Arizona increases capacity, even if Nvidia has sharp elbows and is able to push out other, other demand and get all the line time they need to build all the accelerators that they need, soak up all the CPU demand, et cetera, et cetera. Well, then you could still wind up in a weird scenario where Nvidia has the chips. They are ready to sell them. The hyperscalers want to buy them. The AI labs want to inference them, but there's just not enough energy. When does the chip bottlenecks shift to the energy bottleneck? That could be part of what is sort of worrying people because you can see in the in the timeline. We have this chart.

• 4:37John Coogan?

  Are you not entertained from Nathan? He's taking a screenshot from the Financial Times and it is just one of the most incredible graphs I've ever seen. You have to wonder if there are any bottlenecks that they will run into. TSMC capacity is one.

• 4:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I asked Doug about this. I asked Doug about this. What does Nvidia do if their customers do have an energy bottleneck?

• 4:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:59Jordi Hays?

  I feel like they'll find a way to still ship the chips.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  I agree. And and truthfully, as big of a as big of a story data centers are, they're still consuming well under 1% of of US electricity. And so there are chips to be moved around. There are new new power plants to be brought online. We're actually talking to Doug Burnhour from Radiant about nuclear power today. And there are so many different ways to solve the energy bottleneck, but it is very real world. It is very slow. And if there's a timing mismatch, you could see a little bit of a flat line that I think people might be worried about. So Jensen himself strongly pushed back against the SaaS apocalypse narrative yesterday, which is interesting because he doesn't necessarily have to.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  He could be out there saying like, yes, all those SaaS CPU workloads, they're all going to be GPU workloads now. And yeah, you should actually sell all your SaaS because the future is infranced. Like every app that you use, it's not going to be code that's running on a CPU. It's going to be infranced on GPU on demand. And so, you know, demand for Nvidia should be even higher. Like, he doesn't really have that many bags with the SaaS companies necessarily. Of course, they'd be, you know, upset if he was talking trash, but he's not. He's defending them.

• 6:13Jordi Hays?

  But he buys a lot of software.

• 6:14John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah, of course. He said, I think the markets got it wrong on the SaaS apocalypse. This is Jensen Wong talking to CNBC's Becky Quick, pushing back on the fears that AI agents will cannibalize the enterprise software industry. Instead, he expects a broad swath of software firms to use Agentic AI to develop their software and boost efficiency in what he described as counterintuitive. Wong said that AI agents won't replace these software tools, but will use them instead. Why even waste the tokens building a calculator when you can just download the calculator SaaS or whatever? I don't know. And this is certainly what we've seen with databases. Certain databases have just skyrocketed in demand because they're the ones that the agents are pulling off the shelf.

• 6:57John Coogan?

  Nvidia is such a big deal. It's not just on the cover of the business section, it's on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. Nvidia results help soothe AI fears. The surge in profit comes as the AI industry's appetite for chips continues to grow. Data center hardware, the chips and networking equipment that Nvidia sells to AI and cloud computing companies accounted for 91.4% of the quarter's sales. Terrible news for gamers. Absolutely the worst numbers you could ever see if you're gamers. Maybe that's why they're launching a short attack.

• 7:32Jordi Hays?

  Teenage John would be punching a hole.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  I would be. Maybe the gamers have risen up and they are shorting Nvidia to try and get them to go back into gaming. Computing demand is growing exponentially, chief executive Jensen Wong said. The Agentic AI inflection point has arrived. With each passing quarter, the pressure grows on Nvidia, which at a market value of nearly $5 trillion is the world's largest publicly traded company. Is no longer enough for Nvidia to produce good quarterly results. They have to produce perfect quarterly results, said Daniel Newman.

• 8:05Jordi Hays?

  How could they have done better?

• 8:07John Coogan?

  Instead of net income of $43 billion in the quarter, they could have put up $50 billion, or $60 billion, or $100 trillion, or $10 trillion, quadrillion. I want to see a quadrillion dollar quarter, please, Jensen.

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  Gavin Baker gave some thoughts ahead of Nvidia. Shanyu pulled some out. The same point hit on by Gavin in Citadel Securities, it's a good one. Gavin said, "The world is fundamentally short, both watts and wafers, and it may take years to resolve these shortages. The shortage of watts and wafers may prevent an overbuild. Hyperscalers would overbuild if they could, but they simply cannot." My best guess is that we would need roughly a thousand X more compute for the unlikely hypothetical scenario described by Citrini to be remotely possible. And the time it takes us to get there will give humans time to adjust and maximize the many potential benefits of AI. Citadel said displacing white collar work would require orders of magnitude more compute intensity than the current level utilization.

• 9:06Jordi Hays?

  Even if the algorithms improve recursively, economic deployment remains bounded by physical capital, energy availability, regulatory approvals, and organizational change. And do you know what the title of Citadel's response was?

• 9:19John Coogan?

  No.

• 9:20Jordi Hays?

  The 2026 Global Intelligence Crisis, calling everyone idiots.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  We gotta write an intelligence crisis report now.

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  This is the perfect response, like very, very detailed.

• 9:30John Coogan?

  The interesting question about like, you know, replacing white collar work versus like augmenting in new things is that the AI labs are obviously selling into enterprises. That's growing a lot and the revenues are very real, tens of billions of dollars. But when you look to the other startups that have put up really big ARRs, it just, I'm trying to square like Suno just announced that they're selling 300 million in ARR for AI music. And that's a huge number. It's so big, but it doesn't feel like replacement work yet. It feels like it's just an additive new thing, like there were just a lot of people that wanted to pay $10 a month for a cool app.

• 10:11Jordi Hays?

  Same thing, same thing. How many, how many non-technical people had an idea for an app? How many people that weren't musicians had an idea for a song?

• 10:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

  They never could.

• 10:19John Coogan?

  That and then.

• 10:20Jordi Hays?

  It was just unlocking all this.

• 10:21John Coogan?

  And then you see it with like Higgs field two and, and all the viral loops and then not Webflow.

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  TBN simulator?

• 10:28John Coogan?

  No, no, no. But.

• 10:30Jordi Hays?

  Happy Bar.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Lovables one where, where huge, huge growth and, and it feels like, yes, Lovables like going into enterprises and whatnot. But it feels like there's a lot of just like net new software developers, website builders that are joining that platform and building stuff. And it feels very incremental. It does not feel very substitutional to me. And I'm wondering how much of the Suno story translates to the AI lab. Coding model story as well. Nvidia stock is falling because it needed to clear an options wall of $200 a share. So given a lot of folks were long calls into the print and it didn't clear 200, brokers are selling stock to reverse some sold calls. It's that simple. This isn't fundamentals. It's market mechanics, says Gordon Johnson.

• 11:15Jordi Hays?

  Samsung becomes the first Korean company to reach a $1 trillion market cap.

• 11:23John Coogan?

  Pretty remarkable.

• 11:24Jordi Hays?

  Over on companiesmarketcap.com, you can see they are sitting at number 12.

• 11:29John Coogan?

  That's your homepage, right?

• 11:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, homepage.

• 11:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  But Samsung passed Walmart.

• 11:34John Coogan?

  I mean, increasingly important in the AI era. I don't think it's all the TVs.

• 11:41John Coogan?

  There was some interesting stat about of the $1 trillion companies, isn't Samsung like the the most highest margin, the lowest margin or something? There was some post from yesterday we didn't get to, but there was a lot more context on that.

• 11:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Ramp Capital is sharing, says Patriot, and somebody says, "I have OpenClaw sending low-ball offers on Zillow all day just to make boomers start panicking." And he says, "Can you give me an update on the Zillow campaign today? The Zillow update. Listings contacted today, 372. Average offer, 70% below asking. Positive responses, zero. Negative responses, 270. One response was violent, but I have reported it to the Tampa Bay Police Department. No response, 102. Would you like me to keep making offers?"

• 12:24John Coogan?

  70% below asking, just you're selling a million dollar property and it's like, how's that? Can you do 300K?

• 12:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Let's.

• 12:32John Coogan?

  Let's bring in John Palmer.

• 12:33Jordi Hays?

  Let's bring in John Palmer, our surprise.

• 12:35John Coogan?

  He's live in the TVP and Ultra Dome.

• 12:37Jordi Hays?

  Coming in.

• 12:38John Coogan?

  You, you know.

• 12:39Jordi Hays?

  With a DC.

• 12:41John Coogan?

  Nice hat. You probably know John Palmer is the.

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  As being one inch shorter than you.

• 12:47John Coogan?

  Well, he's the face of leg lengthening surgery right now, right?

• 12:50Speaker 03

  No, they were saying I'm the Goldilocks technology brother. So they were saying, some people were saying you're a little too tall.

• 12:55John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 12:56Speaker 03

  And Jordy's tall in his own right, but maybe not quite tall enough.

• 12:58Jordi Hays?

  At this table.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. So they wanted someone right in between. So I was contacted by, by your team and happy to be here.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, I actually introduce yourself since, for those who've been living on the near data center.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. My name's John Palmer. I was a co-founder and CEO of a company called Party Dow recently. Announce that we're going to be joining Stripe soon. So that was a awesome five year journey and also work on a company called Area Technology, which does logo and graphic design for brands like yourself. Shout out to the new logo and graphics package. And yeah, that's

• 13:33Jordi Hays?

  We are honored. Well, we wanted to do, we wanted to hang and do some timeline with you as that is a sign of great respect.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  Donald Trump spins the wheel of tariffs and replaces a 5% tariff on Belarusian wheat with a 22.4% tariff on Pakistani jet engines. All stocks lose $2.6. Substack Newsletter publishes a story about DoorDash going badly. DoorDash down 862%. Global Financial System teeters on the brink. And three, Nvidia announces earnings of $100 trillion, beating expectations by 1,000x. Jensen Huang named new king of earth while his stockholders to form the new permanent ruling class. Nvidia down 3% on the news. Are you, are you a day trader guy?

• 14:11Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 14:13John Coogan?

  Are you an investor?

• 14:13Speaker 03

  I am an investor.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  Okay. How do you think about the markets?

• 14:16Jordi Hays?

  Are you a businessman?

• 14:17John Coogan?

  What's your strategy?

• 14:17Speaker 03

  I'm an investor. I'm a businessman. I don't know. I think my approach is like pretty smooth brain value investing, like good fundamentals. I'll buy the stock and hold it for a long time. Definitely not doing a lot of even, even intra-month trade. It's really like long

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  You're not like a one man Jane Street.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  I'm not a, not a one man Jane Street.

• 14:34John Coogan?

  What about, what about crypto? I feel like if you're working in crypto, even adjacent to crypto, there's just so much alpha from seeing essentially like angel investment style opportunities from someone who's building something that's, you just know it's going to be hyped and the token's going to moon.

• 14:51Jordi Hays?

  But the issue is that it's like wildly distracting because as soon as you have enough money

• 14:55John Coogan?

  Is that

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think I, I don't like doing a lot of like individual stock trading because as soon, then, then my attention is gravitating Towards this thing that's not actually productive.

• 15:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:11Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  What do you think?

• 15:12Speaker 03

  I think that's true. And I think, I mean, obviously, if you're trading like perps in crypto, like you better stay on top of it. Because like, there's a moment to exit, or if you just hold it long term, you'll probably get liquidated at some point. So I just don't touch any of that. You're right, though, that there are, there are like, yeah, weird things in crypto where like, someone you know, or someone's doing a project and they airdrop a token or something like this. And you wake up a week later and it's worth like, whatever, a month's worth of your salary. Um, so I think that's.

• 15:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's talk about Jane Street, because I've seen maybe 10,000 posts kind of blaming them entirely for crypto price action over the last couple of months. Have you been able to find anything that is like definitive? Obviously, the lawsuit came out and they were like, we were going back and forth on it because they pulled funds out of this liquidity pool.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:58Jordi Hays?

  Right after.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  Actually, I don't even think they, I don't think they pulled funds. I actually think they sold into the pool.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  Which is, I guess, the same thing.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 16:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but they did it five minutes after we were saying maybe yesterday or the day before that, okay, it's a public blockchain. So in theory, they, it's not actually a smoking gun necessarily.

• 16:20Speaker 03

  I'm only as informed as you are in terms of the tweets. I haven't verified anything. But yeah, my understanding is that Terra Luna had had a lot of money in this pool. And they had planned to pull 180 something million out of it. I guess the allegation is that Jane Street heard that this was coming before everyone else. That's like the material, non-public information. And so then also pulled their money or sold it just minutes after Terra did it. You're right that it's public. So I guess like, again, not a source of truth here. I'm like relaying secondhand with confidence, uh, information that I read on, on, on the timeline.

• 16:54Jordi Hays?

  Built for, for podcasts.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  But yeah, I guess you could say, hey, it was, anyone could see that and they just reacted quickest. I guess what that would come down to is what are the internal ops on moving those funds like that? I would imagine that a fund like Jane Street with $85 million in this pool isn't just sitting in someone's like hot wallet metamask, right?

• 17:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, at the same time, they could have, they could have like some type of protocol or actually software.

• 17:16John Coogan?

  A lot of stuff feels like conspiracy theories that, uh, it feels very similar to, uh, the Robin Hood GameStop fiasco, where there was like a lot of conspiracy theories about like Citadel purposely tanking markets and. The bailing out hedge funds at various points and I I always thought that was just like people looking for scapegoats and a whole bunch of market actors just playing hardball because that's the that's the default structure. I don't know.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I'm not that comfortable like speculate on this either because I'm just like, all right, I saw, you know, in the timeline.

• 17:52Jordi Hays?

  Burger King is launching an AI chatbot that will assess workers friendliness and will be trained to recognize certain words and phrases like, welcome to Burger King, please, and thank you.

• 18:02John Coogan?

  It's huge.

• 18:03Jordi Hays?

  The AI will be programmed into workers headsets, according to the Verge.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  I think Chick-fil-A got access to that technology like a decade early.

• 18:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  Because there's a my pleasure. There's a thank you. There's a my pleasure every time.

• 18:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, apparently when McDonald's opened in Russia, there's a quote, after several several days of training about customer service at McDonald's, a young Soviet teenager asked the McDonald's trainer a very serious question, why do we have to be so nice to the customers? After all, we have the hamburgers and they don't.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  They need to be nice to us if they want these hamburgers.

• 18:34Jordi Hays?

  Noah Smith is sharing the job postings for software engineers have picked up since vibe coding became a thing. They had been declining until the early part of last year, actually. Again, this is why, I mean, we've we've talked about this over and over and over. I feel like there's this like two different narratives being spread on Instagram. It's just like this like labor displacement narrative going super, super, super hard. And then over here, it's just an entirely different world.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean.

• 19:05John Coogan?

  Tyler, how do you interpret the the software engineering number? Have we talked about this yet?

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so I think I broadly agree. Like, so when Dario Wanda Drukesha had this take where it's like, you go from AI doing 90% of coding to 100%, and then it goes from 90% of like all suite tasks to 100%. And so when you're kind of in the interim period, engineers get super, super productive. But then there's a point where it's like, actually, it's like, instead of being super high level because they're the AI is doing 99%, now the AI is doing 100%, and it's actually like, it just kind of instantly goes to zero. You should see a lot of like hiring because everyone wants like a vibe coder at the company.

• 19:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  But then at some point, vibe coding comes so easy that like, you don't need any, any like special talent to be able to do it. And you just have the random person.

• 19:45John Coogan?

  I I mean.

• 19:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so basically, if if you if one day you're not sitting at your desk, you're like, you're kind of the vibe coder in the coal mine.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  Canary.

• 19:55John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, sure. There is a world where software engineering.

• 20:01John Coogan?

  Postings and jobs are substituted for other roles. Like, you can have someone whose job is like a business analyst and every day they open Excel and crunch some numbers. And then you could hire a software engineer to automate that task 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and a lot of companies did. And if vibe coding sort of eats into other things, you could see the rest of white, it's like, the white collar work could go away because the software engineers are doing it. And then the bigger question is like, you're sort of jumping ahead to like a full unemployment scenario where no one has a job. But in the world where there are like a few jobs, there, I keep thinking about this thing that Pavel Asperuhov said, where if the software engineering jobs go away, like, get ready

• 20:43John Coogan?

  to compete with software engineers in every category because they're going to learn financial analysis, they're going to learn to trade, they're going to learn to sell, they're going to learn all these things. Those people will still be employed, they'll just be in a different part of the economy.

• 20:54Jordi Hays?

  Avi Schiffman drops user interview number three. We're not going to play the video because it's kind of sad, but Gary Tan said, this is not the happy demo path. Apple or Google would never make this one of their launch videos. It's not what you will hear about in a TED Talk, but it's real. AI doesn't get tired, doesn't ghost. Lot to think about with this one. You know, Avi continues to find new ways to break through the noise, but in some ways, even though this video has been, feels somewhat dystopian, you know, this is someone who's struggling with mental health, like actually gets in an accident in the video. It does feel like the most kind of real, raw experience of AI companionship in this form factor.

• 21:39John Coogan?

  Reflection on like, do you remember his interaction with Paul Graham? He was like, I'm building like a hardware device for AI. He put out like some very vague posts about his plans and everyone was like, this is impossible. Like, Apple will crush you. They have the supply chain, they have the distribution, they have brand, like. You will never win in this category. And Paul Graham told him, like, in order to win, you have to do things that Apple would never do and be counter positioned. Yeah, this, this type of messaging is certainly in line with like the anti-Apple. And the breaking news is that Warner Brothers says Paramount's new offer is superior. Netflix now has four days to respond.

• 22:22John Coogan?

  The Kolski market is continuing to diverge. When we started tracking this, Netflix was up at 50%, Paramount at 40%. Now Paramount is starting to run away with it. They're at 62% and Netflix is down at 33%. Will they sweeten their offer? We don't know, but Netflix has four days to respond.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  More breaking news.

• 22:42John Coogan?

  More breaking news. What else?

• 22:44Jordi Hays?

  Square is cutting from 10,000 to 6,000 employees. A 40% reduction.

• 22:49John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 22:51Jordi Hays?

  Let's head over to Jack. He says, "We're making blocks smaller today. Here's my note to the company." So he says, "Today, we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company. We're reducing our organization by nearly half from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. That means 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. I'll be straight about what's happening. First off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks plus one week per year of tenure equity vested through the end of May, six months of healthcare, corporate devices and 5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help in this transition. We're not making this decision because we're in trouble. Our business is strong. Gross profit continues to grow. We continue to serve more customers and profitability is improving. But something has changed. We're already seeing that intelligence tools we're creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams are enabling a new way of working,

• 23:34Jordi Hays?

  which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company, and that's accelerating rapidly. I had two options, cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. I choose the latter. Repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. This feels a little bit..." More real.

• 23:55John Coogan?

  Like what Cetrini was sort of predicting a little bit. Yeah.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And it feels more real than some of these other cuts where they do like a eight, eight percent

• 24:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:03Jordi Hays?

  riff and then say, oh, we're getting, but going down by nearly half.

• 24:08John Coogan?

  Also, I mean, Block has been mostly spared the SaaS apocalypse. I mean, the, the, over the last one month, the stock's down seventeen percent. Over the last six months, it's down thirty percent. It's not, it's not, you know, down fifty, sixty.

• 24:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but still it's trading at like one, like, like somewhere around.

• 24:24John Coogan?

  It's way off peak. The, the peak stock price was two hundred and sixty-three dollars. Now it's at fifty-four. And so there's certainly a question about how they build back.

• 24:32Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's four thousand people, which is a huge number. I ran a, ran a deep research report to try to find, because it's certainly not, not the largest layoff ever. But it is the largest layoff as a percentage of the overall workforce in S and P five hundred history.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  Wait, how is that possible?

• 24:50Jordi Hays?

  So the second largest layoff in S and P five hundred history was

• 24:55John Coogan?

  Thirty percent.

• 24:56Jordi Hays?

  Phillips at twenty-two and a half percent, Chevron at seventeen and a half percent. Intel did fifteen percent in twenty twenty-four. GM did fifteen percent

• 25:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

  in twenty eighteen. Meta.

• 25:07John Coogan?

  So I guess, I guess Twitter, the Twitter restructuring doesn't count because it was delisted before that happened.

• 25:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:12John Coogan?

  So Twitter went from seven thousand five hundred to fifteen hundred. I think you're right. It might not have been in the S and P five hundred at the time.

• 25:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it wasn't.

• 25:20John Coogan?

  Well, there's some reactions. Will Slaughter, Bama Bond says in three years, from December twenty nineteen to December twenty twenty-two, Block more than tripled its headcount from three thousand nine hundred to twelve thousand five hundred, unwinding less than half. An insane COVID over-hiring binge has much more to do with Jack Dorsey's managerial incompetence than whether AI is going to take your job. And so people are immediately jumping to, is this AI? Is this not? The stock's up twenty-five percent on the news. So the investors certainly think it's the right move to make, the right hard thing to do. The other interesting thing is that Block, if I'm correct, did a fairly large merger with Afterpay. And I don't know how much overlap in the.

• 26:04John Coogan?

  Employee base there was, but it's not uncommon when a merger of those two sizes, $10 billion. I think Afterpay merger was in the tens of billions. It was 13.9 billion. It was an all-stock deal. It was originally announced at 29 billion. Afterpay had around 1,000, 1,500 employees. And so there's a few different things this go. Dan Primack says it's stunning in its candor. And if you're one of those spared, how could you not be wondering how long until AI comes for your job too? If CEOs get comfortable that this is okay, let alone if they believe shareholders will be rewarded for it, could set off a stunning layoff wave.

• 26:47Jordi Hays?

  The obvious pushback, Toly over at Solana is making it. He said, didn't Jack have 10,000 people running this website when only 75 were needed even before AI? So again, it doesn't really, it doesn't really matter whether or not a company is actually getting tremendous efficiency from AI. Every CEO is going to do this. And we've said over and over and over, I'm surprised more CEOs haven't done the Elon thing. Salesforce has 76,000 people at the company, right? It's basically a city. Yeah, it's really, really sad. Jared Sleeper, who has a fantastic episode on Odd Lots about the SaaS apocalypse.

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  He says, first of many sad days. As painful as it is, Jack stood focused service by being decisive. Of course, really sad day. These employees will be able to quickly go and hit the job market, which it probably gives them somewhat of an advantage over future layoffs like this.

• 27:48John Coogan?

  If you're not a software engineer, this should be a wake up call to what has happened in the past few months with AI engineering tools. Everything has changed. Now we get to watch as companies learn how to either use these tools in earnest or slowly fall behind, says Dustin Curtis. I'm very interested to learn the shape of the layoffs. Do they lean more software focused or less software focused? This is certainly just one company, one example, but interesting to see how this matches with the citadel rebuttal of the Citrini piece. A lot of people are seeing this as like vindication of the Citrini piece.

• 28:21Jordi Hays?

  Hey, Kim says, every media person, please read this before writing your narratives tomorrow. Jack Dorsey is Jack Dorsey. Do not extrapolate. Do not pass go. Responding to Will Slaughter's.

• 28:33John Coogan?

  Post that I just

• 28:34Jordi Hays?

  Post. Yeah, Square, for context, did around 24 billion in total revenue in 2025. They've been trading at around 30, even though the business is profitable and growing. And so had certainly been beat up, but a very sad day. Gavin Baker had a post that Kyle Harrison highlighted. He said, "The fact that Twitter is running well with headcount down significantly really matters. Whether they admit it or not, everyone in SV admires Elon. A lot of venture-funded CEOs are sending emails like this, inspired by Elon and taking drastic actions. Margins are going up." Blockage says, "This is the first AI cut, and it will send shockwaves. Remember, Jack is one of the greatest founders of all time.

• 29:18Jordi Hays?

  He created this platform that we're all on and has been early to many technological shifts. And Block is doing very well as a business. So for him to cut 40% headcount in this way is a signal to everyone in tech, get good now, become indispensable, work nights and weekends, learn the AI tools and raise your game, where you might not make the cut as an employee or as a company. I know that sucks, but capitalism is natural selection. The market is unforgiving because you are the market. After all, it's not like you're buying some random gallon of milk from the store. You're always buying the best product at the best price. So too for apps, your customers are always installing the best piece of code they can get. And because AI is going to create new winners, if you aren't the best in your market, someone may become better with AI. To be clear, Block's severance is generous by any measure. 20 weeks of pay, six months of health insurance, invested equity.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  All of that goes far beyond any typical package. Jack did his level best to cushion the disruption. The laid-off are a temporary unfortunate class as opposed to a permanent underclass. But had he not leaned into the AI transition, he might have had to lay off more people slowly and over time as faster competitors went after his market share. How would they do that? Sure, AI is not a panacea by any means, but the closer you are to software engineering, the more aggressively you need to embrace agentic workflows. The AI companies are already doing that in places like Stripe, Shopify, Coinbase, and now Block are pushing hard on this area. There will be overcorrection, but the fundamental technical innovation is real, and you need to either disrupt yourself or get disrupted. I think that's generally, generally good advice.

• 30:47Jordi Hays?

  Ace16Z says, "Every tech company can fire at least half their people, but most can probably do 80%."

• 30:53John Coogan?

  Blackmail, thanks.

• 30:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How much do you think Satriani paid Square to do this life?

• 31:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 31:01Jordi Hays?

  To validate.

• 31:03John Coogan?

  How deep does it go? Yeah, A-Lab's taking the victory lap.

• 31:05Jordi Hays?

  After being mocked for the last four days. Fed speak says, on one hand, Jack is a notoriously bad business operator, and on the other hand, it's over. Uh, yeah, the, the pushback on, on Bology saying Jack is one of the greatest founders ever is simply that, yes, he is one of the greatest founders ever. And I don't think anyone would say that he is the best operator.

• 31:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 31:27Jordi Hays?

  And, and that's okay.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:28Jordi Hays?

  Right? But sometimes being the best founder means making the super hard decision and having the foresight to get ahead.

• 31:34John Coogan?

  It would be a very weird situation if only Jack Dorsey founded companies. It can withstand an 80%.

• 31:39Jordi Hays?

  Same dude bought Jay-Z's title, not the greatest operator.

• 31:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, Ja, Take him's white pilling. He's always white pilling. I enjoy him. We have some affairs to attend to, and we will not be live tomorrow, but we will return on Monday.

• 31:53Jordi Hays?

  And I can't wait.

• 31:54John Coogan?

  Mark your calendars, 11 a.m. Pacific on Monday.

• 31:59Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 32:01John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 32:01Jordi Hays?

  Goodbye.