Hey everybody, I'm back. We're back.
Eric, Tom, Madeline, we're all back on the Newcomer Podcast.
I've been here, I've been here. Yeah, So the show that you may
have liked or may not have liked is now returned.
Listen, I think we got a lot to go through.
It's been a lot happening in AI. And I understand this is not the
Cerebral Valley podcast specifically, but money is
flying. Money is flying here in tech.
If you are an AI researcher, you should be making at least 8
figures. You should probably start
claiming that you're an AI researcher to just see like what
the offers look like. Where do we even start?
Yeah, Madeline, you want to give us a rundown?
I mean, you've been digging into, I feel like there are
tables on tables of different Meta employees making a bunch of
money. We've tried to make the table to
end all tables, just pulling them all together with What's
your read right now on Mark Zuckerberg's, uh, recruiting
frenzy spending bonanza here? Right.
Well, 8 figure comp packages from Zuckerberg are the entry
level some people are getting, you know, 9 figure comp packages
out of this hiring spree. But it really kicked off in
earnest last month with Meta's Aqua hire of Alexander Wang from
Scale AI to lead the new Meta Super Intelligence Lab team
within the company. Meta paid over 14 billion for a
14% stake in Scale just to get Alex over on the team.
But since then, he's also poached Nat Friedman and Daniel
Gross there and is, you know, buying out a stake in their
investment fund to have them come work for.
So really just unprecedented amounts of capital wrangling to
get the biggest names in AI to lead the team.
And they've got, you know, obviously they've been picking
open a is pocket. They've got more than a half
dozen people from Open AI. They've got people from
DeepMind, Anthropic, Apple. As of this week, as of Thursday
recording, they've poached at least 10 people from Open AI to
join this team, in addition to those other big names.
As a side point to all of this, I mean, you know, a lot of the
narrative really kicked off, you know, when, like you said, the
scale deal happened. But then Sam, I thought really
unstrategically goes on I think his brothers podcast.
And he's just like, yeah, they're coming at us, but they
haven't gotten anyone good yet, which is a stupid thing to say.
He's like getting them on. On all on all fronts, it's we
have one clearly Zach, one of the most psychotically
competitive people in the history of, you know,
civilization saying like you can't get our people is like
just red meat for him. But also like you're basically
saying everyone that they did get was shitty and they did end
up getting shitty people. And like I understand like Sam
is still figuring out how to like measure his.
Like I'm a deep thinking AI guy and I'm very calm with the fact
that he also is psychotically competitive and doesn't like the
fact that Zuck is coming at. The the Philosopher king posture
with the cutthroat business leader of our AI future. 11
could also say missionary versus mercenary in that dichotomy
there. It's not just open AI, to be
clear, they've poached a lot of deep mind researchers.
And then roaming Peng from Apple Bloomberg is now reporting that
they have poached with a 200,000,000 / 4 years total comp
package. So these are serious offers just
from across the table of AI research.
People should be cheering for this.
This is my my first take I think.
You know gone are the old days when Apple and Google had anti
competitive alliances to artificially repress salaries.
I mean, these, this is the working class these these are
workers getting paid a lot of money for producing or Tom, I'm
curious what you take that like it's like.
Yeah, this is ultimately the proletariat winning.
Yeah, sure. The white collar proletariat,
that they're all basically creating technology that will
one day make white collar jobs no longer viable.
Yeah, you're right. There's a certain logic.
If you're the last man to ever work, it's like, yeah, you take
the money, man. A lot.
Like, right, like this is generational wealth because your
children, if they're also white collar workers, will never have
jobs. Yeah, I don't know.
I, I guess like we've been following the kind of turmoil at
meta on their AI team for as long as I've been with, with you
guys. I think it was like the first
story I wrote at newcomer was like, man, Llama is, is sucking
right now. Like they just have not done a
good job keeping up and DeepSeek, I think really fuck
things up for them. And so at some point, and there
were some good stories in the, you know, New York Times and
elsewhere about kind of like internally at meta what's been
going on, but suck. Just realized, like, either if
we're going to be playing at this, we need to use the only
asset that we really have here right now, which is like, you
know, endless, deep, deep, deep pockets.
It's just money. Yeah.
And that's always kind of Ben Zuck's thing, right?
You know, like the ideas side of him is not always sharp.
He he has money and he has network effects.
There's a lot of users, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
So like Facebook is, you know, not growing at all almost.
And so you buy Instagram and you and you get WhatsApp, you
basically just buy your way into like continued relevance as a
company. And like there's no specific
company to buy really an AI, an AI that's going to make you, you
know, top, you know, top tier. So just get the research because
it's really just talent. Well.
There's some, there's, there's a very, very limited pool of
researchers that can be building these models at this scale.
So it is really like a small pool of people that can be bid
on at the Super high comp packages.
Like there is just a limited pool of worker resources to go
around. You guys are a little deeper in
it than I am, but I have to imagine open AI's weird
shareholder structure is not helping it retain these
employees. Like, first of all, you have
this question mark around what these shares really mean and how
how the company sort of sorts out.
Where is it meta? You know, you're getting public,
public shares, you know what they're worth.
And then there have been all these secondaries that allowed
open AI people to get liquidity. And so it's like, whoa, I've
already gotten paid out from you, I can go on to the next
thing. Or what's your read on how
opening I set this thing up? Yeah, I think well the the this
was brings back to like Sam's, you know like hubristic comment
like you can't poach from U.S. Open AI has been losing people
constantly over it's life as a company.
This is not like a a company full of lifers.
There are. Some, I mean Anthropic exists as
a defection from open AI. The story of Open AI is a story
of people leaving open AI. Basically right?
Like like Elon, Dario, you know, Mira Ilia, like it's, it's, it's
an endless list of alumni that, that come there.
So this idea that these guys are like all missionaries who want
to stay there for life, it's just not true.
And it's a complete, I think they're the sympathetic argument
is that they're missionaries in that they want to be there when
AGI is bored. I think a lot of them do want to
be be in the place where it's born.
And if you can convince them like, hey, you know, our our
superstar team is moving from this place to this place, you'll
have another shot at it. Or you think this is about money
and not not about well, it is AGI.
Yeah. Well, I also like in reporting
out that piece that I did a couple weeks ago about basically
all of this and and Meta's recruitment, I was really struck
by 1 researcher I talked to who was like basically creating an
AI model as a recipe. And there are certain people who
have the recipe in their brain and the what you're paying for
when you poach someone from a labs to go to the new place so
they can recreate the recipe. And what's going to end up
happening is that like you have all the recipe knowers at the
different labs around the, the industry and they're probably
all going to reach AGI at the same time or very close to each
other. And so I think what my guess is
like the realization a lot of researchers had is like, there
isn't the place that it's going to happen.
It's all leafy. Now, and everybody's going to
have it, might as well get paid the most along the way, yeah?
So why not, why not get yours? Like, if that money's out there,
what are you going to be like a missionary and take less money
with like weirdly illiquid stock so that you can like maybe get
AGI two weeks before the next lab does?
Like, it doesn't really compute. And so I think that more than
anything, which is man. We need to build a business just
for these 100 million employee like whatever they want to read
and then just the advertising budget on that, like get in
front of like the ludantic. Just like just people pays.
Like a ten person e-mail, you know, they're like hedge fund
newsletters we'll have just like the AI researcher, you know,
like 20 person. How much would Zuck pay us so
that we could have like, you know, ads in front of like the
10 most important research? Exactly.
Just like on their minds. Yeah, so like that, that's,
that's all been very funny to watch.
Yeah, play out. And then you know, like we'll
see how it all happens with meta, right?
Like they have the teams in place and I'm interested to see
how long it takes for them to like redo the llama training to
get to a point where this was all worth.
At least they'll get a model that's competitive because
that's the problem. I mean, making money off of it
is a whole different story with with that company.
They're open source. They've never really made a dime
off of it. Like this is going to be a long
term play for for for meta to make it work.
But in the meantime, all these guys get rich.
So what does this all mean for Llama?
Obviously Llama 4 was sort of a disaster.
Do you think Meta sticks with its open source strategy of just
making no money and foiling the competition?
Or you think, now spend all this money and better come up with a
a proprietary product for itself?
I hope they do. I hope they keep with the open
source thing because to me if Zuck's whole play is about
fucking over Sam just. Burn the forest down.
That would be the best way to do it, right?
And I always thought that was the smartest aspect that he had
there in the 1st places, like looking, because he's very
jealous, I'm assuming, of Sam. And as he was coming up to being
like the voice of Silicon Valley in this moment that he's like,
oh, well, what if we just take the same technology but release
it for free? That'll destroy these people.
They'll have no business, which I thought was cool.
I actually thought that was like an actually badass play.
And if he decides to get rid of it because he just wants to make
money in some consumer product, I will be really disappointed.
There is a very subtle monetization mechanic on this,
which I saw YouTube said that people who dump like AI stuff
onto YouTube will not be allowed to monetize it.
And there's certain argument that like Google and Facebook,
they could be the content providers.
You know, it's like if, if there's this AI appealing
content, it's like you block everyone else from it and you
are sort of the exclusive content provider.
I don't, I don't know that's. I haven't heard that.
That's interesting. I mean, The funny thing with
Facebook and AI or Meta and AI is that, you know, like when
stories would come out that like Llama 4 Behemoth is delayed,
their stock drops. And I didn't ever really
understood that because they don't make any money off of it.
But there's just this general acceptance on the part of
investors that like, well, AI has to matter for everyone.
So it's important that you like have a, you know, a.
And there is like, you know, open source projects if you're,
you know, if you're around them, usually you know, people have
figured out how to make money. Sure, it's a distribution play
like that's what it is with Google and Chrome and and and
Android. Did I say Chrome?
I mean, Android with Google and Android, so yeah, sure, I don't
worry too much about like their ability to make money off of it.
But for this in the short term, having this, you know, open
source high level model, like like we saw DeepSeek really
through the industry in a turmoil for at least a little
bit. You know, you think Meta could
do that at a much larger scale. So it's kind of exciting.
I'm betting on closed source to be clear.
I mean, that's the smarter bet, but also the two biggest
companies that are succeeding on it right now are closed source,
right, and Tropic and Open AI and then I guess Google as well.
So yeah, that's a. That's a safe bet.
Well, moving on, outside of open source or closed source, you
probably don't want your model of becoming Mecca Hitler.
So that was the other big story, political.
Orientation. These days, that's.
True, I don't know. If it happens, it happens, yeah.
Unfortunately, we probably don't want the API to be Mecca Hitler
on this podcast. But yes, we're talking of course
about Grok 4. XA is new model that was debuted
by Elon Musk earlier this week, which was overshadowed by its
Grok chatbot interface on X. Just ramping up the racism and
politically incorrect speech in all of its replies to 11.
So you can't. Really be like, oh, we know what
that last name means, you know, just like it's it's so.
Bad. I couldn't tell if it was real,
right? Did you see the tweet or it was
like a screenshot of one that was like Grok 4 was getting
really explicit about Linda Yak or Reno.
Did you see that? One I I saw something about Will
Stansel. Yeah.
How did Will Stancil get inserted?
That was true. Oh, no.
Will Stancil is like the lead anecdote to the journal story
about this, which I think is a little ridiculous.
Like, you know, come on, It's like I.
Mean people are like walking. They're like convincing the
model to do this right. It's like they're doing like
thought experiments sort of stuff.
Yeah, it's like, don't, I don't know, I there's clearly an issue
in terms of it's like, you know, guidelines and and and how it's
allowed to interact with people. I don't honestly think Rock was
giving people specific ideas on how to like attack and rape Will
Stancil. And this was like a, you know,
he. Was a random Lib Twitter account
that's too deeply ingrained in our brains.
He also ran. Thanks to thanks to you and I
guess. Can I speak out in defense of
Mecca Hitler for one second? Sure.
Not a take I expected. I can't believe I'm going to say
this. I think X AI deserves a lot of
credit for what they've built within the model game.
They are a far smaller lab than almost all the other companies.
They basically were made-up by, you know, Igor Babushkin, who is
this ex DeepMind guy who came in there definitely on the, you
know, premise of wanting to build the anti woke open AI, the
anti woke, you know, woke chap GBT and they fucking did it.
Like Grok 3 is a really good model.
It it like it's absolutely competitive with all the other
big models. They built this giant database
in Nashville Colossus. I don't know yet how good Grok 4
is, but like according to the benchmarks, which are can be
which can be games, so you don't want to give too much credit to
it. And as we saw with with Llama 4,
you can do well on the benchmarks and actually have a
completely useless model. But like I look at Microsoft and
what they tried to do with Mustafa in hiring a top tier
researcher. They had tons of resources.
They have not put out a large model.
You look at Meta, they have completely fucked up their whole
thing. Grok is out there putting out
models that seem to be fairly competitive, if not better than
the rest that's out there. So like, I can't believe I'm
defending Elon in all of this, but like maybe you get a little
Mecca Hitler on the way to doing it.
It's like smart enough, who cares what it's?
I mean, maybe the smart, yeah, it's like, you know, we all have
friends like that, that sometimes they're really smart,
but sometimes they, you know, advocate Mecca Hitler ideology.
I just think about. Your your tanks are all over the
place, no? No, no, I mean, I I'm I'm
obviously joking about Mecca Hitler, but genuinely speaking,
like I think you know what, like Maddie, you said like it
overshadowed like the release of Grok 4, which is maybe true
because Mecca Hitler was very funny, maybe scary, if you're
will Stancil. And also inadvertently led to
Linda Yakarino stepping down, I think in some big parts.
So we. We don't know.
I haven't read a good story
about it yet. Yeah, it could have.
It could have, I just, I don't know.
I, I, I don't even want to come off as contrarian here.
I just think like what Xai is doing is impressive.
Like in the world where like most labs do not put out very
good models, like they consistently or at least twice
in a row put out something that seemed to matter.
I mean, somebody was commenting that, you know, xai like their
their presentation was like the stuff of engineers.
It just feels like a company that's all engineers, no
philosopher kings, and I would prefer one of the philosopher
king companies win or xai get some scruples.
I mean, what is freedom in the context of a model?
You know, I mean, the model has like a point of view, you know
what I mean? What there isn't this sort of no
matter they're going to direct it towards one thing or away
from another. I'm interested in seeing how it
actually is implemented and used by people because if it's like
actually impressive, you know, people shouldn't just discount
all of that because, you know, it seemed to have some post
training issues. Right.
I mean, I don't think they will. I mean, first of all, Grok has
this huge advantage of being in front of everybody on X.
So if they have something good, it's it's got the users in a way
that people like Anthropic don't.
Yeah, they also have a great base of text based training data
with all of this, you know, real human text data.
Well, that's clearly where the Nazi shit came from.
I, I will do the classic reporter thing, which is I, I
wrote in a story. I forget if it was my bear case
in opening an eye or what, but I've been pretty bullish on Grok
for a while, despite, you know, being somewhat of an Elon.
Testing. I didn't know that.
What's your? What's your argument for that?
What? Was we're just like talking to
investors that they really thought like Grok was going to
catch up. And that like the internal signs
were that they had really good people and that just investors
were taking it very seriously in a way that, you know, they still
had to prove to the public. I mean, it's raised a ton of
money, you know, and I, I don't think the people making those
investments are idiots. You know, I think they thought
Elon will catch up, and it seems like he has.
It's always unclear with the Elon investments, right?
Like to a degree, it always feels like it's a little bit of
like, well, if we give Elon money for this maybe idiotic
project, we'll get access to space.
But Rock was so much the X AI stuff and Twitter, there's a lot
of money to do it. Also, I think those started to
need to pay off. Those were the ones I think, you
know, like Boring Company. Some of those you're like, oh,
OK, well, I'll throw them a bone.
Hope some of the other ones workout.
But like, I think X AI was one of the ones that needed to
workout. You know, it'll be interesting.
What financial machinations he pulls between Tesla and XAI?
Think he already said that Tesla would soon start having Grok in
the cars, so I'm sure there's going to be all sorts of self
dealing between these companies. Well, yeah, that's that's kind
of his thing. Which the investors want.
It's like, how do we make sure they all make money like?
Basically it's like, it's like, yeah, yeah, if you could end up,
if you were an ex, you know, Holder and you ended up with
XAI, that's a little bit better. But yeah, if you can somehow
spin this off into Tesla stock or or even better, SpaceX stock,
that would be nice. Well, that's one of the core
reporting questions. I, I think we didn't really ever
answer was like did X shareholders or XAI shareholders
get a better deal in that merger.
And I think the answer was like on metrics at the time, you
would have said obviously X shareholders, but based on what
you just said and what a lot of people think, like XAI has this
unlimited valuation potential. So you're getting a good deal
getting access to XAI. That said, they don't really
make all that much money, right? Now, right, it's all, I mean,
it's like, but yeah, with Elon, what is making money, you know,
it's like about it's, it's a valuation thing.
So while we're talking about unlimited valuation for for XAI,
guess you guys have been spending a lot of time thinking
about, and I was talking to our colleague Jonathan Weber about
this. Are we in a bubble?
Why now do you think we potentially are in a bubble?
Stocks have been going up for for some time.
Like what's what's particularly bubble like about what's
happening now? I think the biggest thing really
was just the RAMP report that the RAMPS research data put out,
which is of course based, it's a smaller sample size of people,
you know, using RAMP and what their customers are spending
money on. But I think there was a
noticeable kind of peak hit in the last month around tool
adoption. And while it's not a bubble, I
would say on AI, it could be a bubble on how much people are
willing to pay for AI tools, especially at the enterprise
level. So while that may not hurt AI
overall in the long run, all of these companies that are
building the next big tool for enterprise AI may have been
charging a bit too much. And I mean, we saw that, you
know, with cursor prices going way up and people complaining
and the getting subsequently reversed.
Like it could be just a point where not everyone is willing to
pay for infinite AI anymore if they think it'll get them ahead.
They may want to focus on cost at this point.
Let me take a stab at this. I mean, first of all, newcomer
is not declaring it's a bubble. I think we're pointing out that
there are a couple, an impressionistic take that there
are some things that might raise bubble questions. 1, is this
survey from Ramp showing that sort of spending on new AI apps
is going down, right? The number of apps I'm also
interested in sort of core Weave and the infrastructure companies
and the heavy valuations. That those companies have
received you know they've seen a lot of valuation growth and now
people are starting to ask questions about how they account
for things so so yeah I think they're they're cut there's the
sort of highly valued infrastructure players racing
into AI. There's this sort of ramp data
turn. So the, I think there are
questions about things. I think the, the key, the key
point here though, is like you can have like sort of a
correction in one sector, but not necessarily in AI.
Like I, I think the mood could turn against infrastructure
plays like.com era what there was this huge telecom build out
that was sort of correct, but they, they did it way too fast
and it wasn't that valuable. And so I think they're going to
be definitely nobody, nobody can test that there will be bubbles
within AI where some pieces of the stack are not that valuable,
but need to exist. People spend a lot of money to
build them and then it turns out they don't get to retain a lot
of the actual profits from AI. So it could be foundation model
companies, it could be infrastructure companies.
But certainly I think there are pieces of this where a lot of
money will be spent and not a lot of money will be sort of
retained by that category. And, and we don't know how
that's going to play out, but it's it's been to the benefit of
everybody who wants to build an AI.
I mean, say, we've also kind of seen this with sort of the
initial chat bot wave, right? Like there was a period of time
where there were all these start-ups coming out with chat
bots, which ultimately kind of just absorbed into a few players
and that wasn't actually monetizable.
And that wasn't the end of chat bots.
That just meant that that frame of how to make money off of AI
with chat bots wasn't going to be the way that everything
became as an individual company or application and had to be
blended into something like an open AI which could provide all
these other services. So I think there certainly will
be winners. It just may not be so stratified
across all these different products.
It's also, if you buy the argument that a lot of the bulls
have on AI that this is like a multi year, you know,
transformational cycle, we're gonna have dips in it, right?
It's just, it's just the nature of it.
Very bullish on AI while saying there's seems like maybe a
bubble right now. Yeah, I'm not even sure where I
fall in it necessarily, but I just don't think we're going to
be see like the peak bubble now. Like I think there's going to
be, it could be a couple years down the line where we see like,
oh, in fact, this did not turn out to be as lucrative as a lot
of the people thought it was going to be.
And the investments were well out of their skis.
I'm just not ready to call it now.
You know, I just haven't seen enough indication.
Catalyst beside we're over extrapolating from one ramp
survey otherwise, I mean, yeah. Yeah.
Well, there were things that were, well, there were things
that I think caused people to take notice, like, you know,
Microsoft pulling out and kind of rejiggering some of its
leases on data centres, which people for a time were deciding
that meant that they no longer wanted to build data centers,
which just isn't true, May not seem very specific to Microsoft
and its open AI relationship. But people look at those sort of
things and private equity companies that own a lot of the
data center companies may be changing their their leases.
So this has been going on for some time, but I just don't
think like, like you're saying, I just don't think we would have
seen it now. It felt very out of the blue.
Here's Here's what's sort of confusing about this situation.
OK. If NVIDIA produces high quality
AI chips at a faster pace like they say they're going to, if
they're going to refresh these chips, will that be catalyst to
a bubble bursting or will that be good for AI, right.
In some ways, if they update their chips more often, the
infrastructure companies which have spent a lot of money on
chips may be miscalculating how valuable that investment is and
may need to spend a lot of money to move on to the next one.
So, but obviously improving technology will be good for what
consumers experience in terms of AI, but it could disrupt some of
the infrastructure providers. So these are really sort of
complicated questions in terms of which companies get hit and
which companies do really well. Yeah, totally.
And I think you could see AI being as transformative as a lot
of the bulls expected to be. And NVIDIA takes a hit in in a
different way because there's more competition or because
there doesn't need to be, you know, the next generation of
chips being as expensive as they are, you have real breakthroughs
in terms of efficiency that makes it a better product for
people, more affordable for businesses.
But someone like it, NVIDIA gets its valuation just kind of
decimated. Not predicting that, but I'm
saying like, yeah. Both can be true.
I mean, I'm, I'm very bullish still on what's to be built in
AI in a lot of these start-ups. What we're hearing from people
like to me, I think there's, yeah, it remains my point of
view that there's a lot of capability available from the
existing models that people have not figured out how to turn into
products and people are going to turn those into products and
those products will make money. What is not clear to me is if
the foundation models get to keep return all the money they
spent to build up that capability, and whether the
infrastructure companies are properly valued based on
everything they've contributed to creating all that value.
Right. And then, you know, on the
enterprise side of things, like I still think we're not at a
point where businesses are seeing a great amount of benefit
from this technology. They fair indicator they just
haven't figured it out yet. Like I did this panel a month or
so ago with like all these chief data officers at fairly, you
know, old line companies, you know, like a Ford Credit Union
or Danone, like the yogurt company and they have the.
Earth business guy now. Well, I mean, I was invited to
do it. You know, I don't, I don't, I
didn't prior to this have a deep relationship with the yogurt
industry. But but, but like, you know,
they all have chief data officers.
They all want to figure this thing out.
But none of them, as I could tell, had really gotten like,
oh, we've implemented it in this way and now we've transformed
our business across the company to use this.
So they all want to do it. They don't really know how to.
And I think the agent buzzword, as exciting of an idea as it is,
I think we are far away from regular enterprises really
implementing agents as sort of employee equivalents that are
running around spending budget making decisions.
And so that conversation, to me is sort of a signal of hype
getting out of control. Yeah.
As a daughter of as a daughter of a lawyer who works in this
kind of space, I can just report back that a lot of these
companies are a little bit risk averse in letting agents run
rampant, even if they are in theory very excited about this.
So I do think it's going to be kind of a multi year adoption
curve on this one, but it could mean that the hype right now is
a little bit too much. So far as I can tell, the
biggest adopters this stuff is like the makers of the
technology themselves who seem to be all about laying people
off in order to like take advantage of the efficiency.
Like Microsoft just laid off like another several 1000 people
and it really seems like were. They middle managers or which?
Which tier were they? Do you know?
They had they had a middle manager layoff a couple months
ago, but this one was mostly in the sales org.
Do you know what percentage? Because I, I, one of my, you
know, the other version of the newcomer podcast is the through
Bull Valley podcast, which we've been recording with Max and
James. And in that we have these
predictions and I think one of mine is that people, a Fortune
500 will attribute layoffs to AI.
So I I'm I'm unfortunately for workers rooting I think for a
mass AI attributed layoff in terms of my prediction becoming
true. Just for just for the the Cal C
bet. Just so I could say I was right,
you know? Yeah, Microsoft was not explicit
about it at all, but there were some interesting pieces that
came out afterwards that like in the meeting after they laid off
all their, you know, 50% of the sales team in certain
departments, you know, the head of the unit, the CVP was like,
by the way, you guys should really start using AI more.
It can make your life a lot better.
And so there, you know, I don't we're not quite like the quiet
part out loud, but it seems like we're at least with those
companies like leaning towards that they want to set an
example. Here's how you lay people off
when you when you use our products.
Just mood check before we move on to the next subject.
Are you bullish or bearish on AI over the next six months?
Six months. I, I think there's wait.
Oh, it's, it's, I mean, it's gonna continue to grow up to go
up. There's no indication that
things are going off a Cliff. All right, same.
We're all bullish in six months, but maybe that means we're all
blind. We're all bought into the hype.
You know the the air comes out at some point.
You got to do better than the ramp data for me to just decide
to be bearish though. I agree.
We're that's why this is an impressionistic certain signals
to pay attention to. We're not saying this this thing
is a bubble. All right, the last topic, an
exciting one. Spicy.
Complaining about tweets, Tom, you're all fired up about this.
Somehow. You are OK with Mecca Hitler,
but you're can't stomach Sequoia's Sean McGuire.
I can't, I can't deal with Sequoia, his earnest.
Political has political views. Sean McGuire is the guy I don't
know personally. I have, you know, I've met many
Sequoia partners. I've gone to the Sequoia spring
mixers and fall mixers and there's quite a lot of people
there that I like. I don't think Sean McGuire is
oh, I'm sorry, let me, let me before we get into that.
He has been going off on Twitter for about two years almost,
mostly with his hardline right wing, pro Israel politics.
He likes to make people mad. This is very exciting to him.
He really got into hot water, so to speak, over the 4th of July
weekend when he, after the story in the New York Times about
Zaran Mamdani maybe being misleading on his Columbia
application, Sean goes out there and says, you know, Mamdani is a
liar because he's an Islamist. And this is culturally baked
into what Islamists do. And then people got mad because
it really sounded like he was saying all Muslims are liars,
culturally speaking. And then he goes out and says
that's not true. I wasn't talking about all
Islamists. They're all, all Muslims talking
about Islamists. And then that became a whole
conversation about what it means to be and whether or not Sean is
a racist. And I don't really know.
And Bill Ackman and people have rallied around.
Sean was offense. I saw Josh Wolf also rallying to
his defense. Too Josh Wolf.
There was a petition of people condemning Sean.
There was a counter petition of people supporting Sean with
signatures from all walks of this world.
We we, we're not cancelling Sean McGuire that that is that is
we're being very clear. And I think you you do a good
job of pointing this out, Tom. But like, yeah, the one thing
everybody in Silicon Valley can agree on is no more
cancellations. And we're we're we're sticking
to that Armistice. Like we're not trying.
Nobody on this podcast is trying to cancel Sean McGuire.
Yeah, the idea of someone losing their job because of their
opinions in general, I'm, I'm generally against it.
I think that's not a great thing for societies to have happen.
I wouldn't advocate for it, I don't think, Sean.
So OK, before I get into my personal opinion, I listen to a
podcast interview Sean McGuire did with Jack Altman.
Second time he's come up on this episode when which he talked
about his decision to kind of come out as an opinion haver and
talk about all of his right wing politics.
And he was saying after October 7th, you know, and he Sean was
pulling from his history. I think he worked for the DoD.
He understands information warfare and the way that
misinformation can be spread online.
It was extremely important for him to start talking about his
politics and he even said on this podcast on that, on that
episode, I'd be willing to die for, you know, for the things
that I believe and I don't advocate for that at all.
That would be awful. I don't really think the things
that Sean is saying are necessary to say.
I don't really think. And he has a pretty large
platform. He has 250,000 followers.
He really thinks that he is putting important stuff into the
discourse based on that podcast and the fact that he keeps going
on about this stuff. And this is very common now
within Silicon Valley. Oh, it's very common.
There are certain VCs that have decided that their platform and
their takes are so important that they want to build a whole
media empire around it. And we've got, you know, the
best version of that is the all in guys who have built an
actually successful show with their takes on things.
Mike Solana, who I also don't know, he's not really an
investor, but he's in, you know, he's obviously in the VC world.
He's got. CMO.
Yeah, yeah. He's not AVC, but but you know,
whatever he's he's in that world.
He built Pirate wires, which is like actually an interesting
publication. And I and I totally give him
credit for all of that. You're basically saying, Sean,
if you're gonna make us listen to you constantly, these, you
need to be a little more creative.
It can't just be like have. Something interesting to say.
Like yes, have something. More interesting to say than
just like what I. Find racially tinged things that
get everybody into fury. It's sort of like the lowest
common denominator way to get people.
To right, It's a hack. It's a hack to get people to to
to think that you're interesting because you're saying stuff
that's kind of pushing the envelope in a racial way and,
or, or whatever way and culture of a bigoted way.
And I just think if it's that important to you, Sean, that you
really want to like be flooding those of us who want to maybe
see your takes on other things, you know, within the the tech
world, talk about your politics, start up a sub stack, like let's
just see how interesting your views really are.
Like build up a little media empire around you and see if
people actually care. Because he believes in all sorts
of conspiracies too. He's like.
Yeah, he does have his election denier stuff.
I mean, I guess I could just be furthering your take, Tom, with
this. I first of all, clearly it
hasn't affected Sequoia's brand standing at all.
So anyone who's concerned about cancellation, the attendant, you
don't think so? I.
Think it hurts the brand a little bit or like it's looms so
large in terms of what Sequoia's brand is like.
I think of Sequoia again, I don't wanna go after Sean or
have them tell him to stop, but I do think just from a brand
perspective, it's one of the loudest parts of their brand
right now. But I think they're still really
regarded as, yeah, I think they're still, I think the
results is overwhelmingly supersedes this.
Like I really don't think it's hurt at all.
And I think if you're kind of in the ecosystem, especially where
maybe you hold some of these views too, or you're like a
little bit enjoying the kind of vocal trolley posture, which I
will say is kind of a case for a lot of people in certain sectors
and different industries. Like it could be a value add for
you. You could be like signaling
like, hey, we don't care. People think we just want the
returns. And so I don't think it hurts
them really at all. And so, yeah, let me.
Make a couple quick points. I mean, 1, you know, being close
to Elon and being in having somebody in this sort of
conservative troll world gets you a certain contingent of
people. And so if Sequoia can get away
with, OK, we're the normie guys, but we also are friendly with
Elon world, you know, that's, that's there's a financial play
there. And I think that's part of
what's going on. The other thing I just want to
say on this conversation is that, like, kudos to Amjad, the
CEO of Replit, I'll put it that way.
I mean, he's been very bold in, you know, voicing unpopular
opinions. And I think Sean represents
himself as like articulating this sort of like, I don't know,
out of consensus point of view. Well, but Amjad is an
interesting case here because, you know, he went on Joe Rogan a
couple of weeks ago, talked about all, all kinds of things.
But, you know, within that he talked about, you know, his
being of Palestinian descent and he's Jordanian.
And he was like, yeah, it's not easy being, you know, one of the
few people in Silicon Valley willing to speak up, you know,
speak out against Israel and and for the Palestinian.
Yeah, right. Paul Graham is an interesting
case and all of that, but it feels more personal with Amjad.
And he's gotten into it a little bit with Sean on X.
And Sean completely took out of context something that Amjad had
said and cut off the date and like a Washington Post article
so that he could claim that what he had said on Rogan was
inaccurate. And you know, that's standard
trollish behavior on on she's part like he was trying to get a
rise out of people. I don't even think I'm John.
Is that honestly, like, you know, the politics that he was
describing on Rogan doesn't even really conform with like the
most leftist stuff. He was talking about two state
solutions. He was, you know, like I I care
a lot about what happens to the Israeli people.
I mean, that kind of stuff would not actually, you know, get
endear you too much to the left. Sure.
But the stuff you're hearing on tech Twitter right now is like,
just like, let's send every weapon we have over to Israel
and like, let let the chips fall.
They may. Sure, Joe Lonsdale is probably
the extreme version of that. And and like, I don't know, I
should be interested in your take, Eric, but like Sequoia,
you know, with Doug Leone as the head of the firm also like
fairly well known conservative like as the firm, they certainly
if you want to look at the personality.
They had Doug Leone and they had Mike Moritz, both really strong
investors, opposite sides of the political spectrum.
Clearly Doug Leone won. I mean, Moritz isn't even part
of the firm anymore. And it seems like that ideology
is 1. I mean, I, I Rudolf doesn't talk
about his politics a ton, but my sense is he's on the more
conservative side of things. And so yeah, I don't, I don't
see who the beacon of liberal or left wing thought of, at least
publicly as Sequoia is right now.
And does do you think Doug being there gives Sean a lot more
cover to be able to to say the stuff that he does?
I mean, my first piece for the newsletter was about, you know,
him being a Trump watching conservative.
It was about China and about how this what the circle the center
could not hold with Sequoia having China while having anti
China sort of anyway, I was I was right that China spun out.
But anyway, that was my first piece and it, it talked about
how Doug Leone was a big Trumper.
And so, yeah, I, I mean, Doug's not in charge anymore, but he's
still around the firm. And I think that the fact that
if if Sean was so out of step with the rest of Sequoia, it
wouldn't last. Yeah, but he also kind of wants
to be maybe fired a little bit, a little bit like, I mean, look,
he I don't know, I, I, I mean, on that podcast he talked about
the fact that, you know, he's independently wealthy now
because he had sold the company earlier.
So he has a lot of money. So he's able to, you know, take
these risks, these risks with his, with his opinions.
And then, you know, he changed his Twitter bio or his ex bio
for a bit to say like Sequoia partner in parentheses for now.
Like he's he's certainly baiting people to to and, you know, he
talked about how the the petition, you know, was was
another example of cancel culture.
And these people love to be, you know, victims before the fact.
So yeah, I don't know if like I don't, I don't even talk to
Sean. I don't know.
Why? It would it would play into his
martyr. This Islam is narrative Muslim
distinction like why? Why, why why say something
that's so easily misinterpreted? I guess is my my issue here.
Because he's a troll, right? And I hate that kind of
communication. I just like I, at my core, want
to speak sort of earnestly and openly and say be heard as I'm
what I'm intending to say, you know?
And I feel like he's trying to hack engagement.
And that is what I object to. Right, right.
No. And that was sort of the point
of my column is, is I don't even really deal with the specifics
of what he's saying and interrogating the logic.
I mean, that's a whole other thing.
But like, he is kind of claiming that he is on this holy war to
put his opinions out there because it's extremely
necessary. And in fact, I don't think these
opinions are that surprising. I don't think they're all that
necessary. And he's hacking the system
anyway to get them out there. Like he's not really saying.
And he's friends with the guy who runs the platform, the guy
who's shifting his own AI to bring this full circle to sound.
More like him, you know? It's like, oh, I could be one of
the voices that says the things that Elon wants me to say, you
know? Yeah, there, there are certain
people there, there are certain people who I think have been
elevated by the Elon, you know, Elon era Twitter and the 4U page
and the algorithm and it's like Sean McGuire is one of them.
So also is the die work wear guy but but you know different
different sides of the. I mean, one of the most iconic
things that has been said on this podcast is Ben Smith saying
we're all in the courts of billionaires.
And I think that theme has continued to play out.
And yeah, Sean Mcguire's in the court of Elon Musk.
Right. And, and, and benefited from it
in lots of ways financially and also like in this little mini
unimpressive media thing that he's put together.
But we are not cancelling you, Sean.
Keep tweeting. Godspeed.
Just make him less hate, more more thought.
Well, he's not hateful only towards Islamofascists or
Islamists those who can hate which.
Which it is offensive. It is offensive to say that
Mamdani is an Islamist. Like there, there's nothing
there's. It's like he's a normal mayoral
candidate. Like I feel like we can't let
that part of it slip by. Like it's just like.
That point like it is just blatantly false.
Also, it's very it's, it's just, I don't want to let that slide.
Have you done the research though, Madeleine?
Have you done done the research? I'm familiar with who his father
is, is a professor at Columbia. I'm, I will just say I don't
think that Zoran Mamdani is an Islamist and there's no evidence
to that to be supported and to say that is inherently
inflammatory. Correct me if I'm wrong, by the
way. As the non New Yorker over as
the as the non New Yorker on this pod, as the non New Yorker
on this podcast, He didn't even really run on like he didn't run
like an identitarian campaign. Right now that's all the right
wing effort now is to basically say you were misled like this
happy go lucky campaign that you saw.
That's not who he really is. It's all bullshit.
I'm sorry he ran a campaign on affordability.
But anyway. I feel like the substance of it
matters, you know, not just the optics.
Anyway, that's our episode. We'll see you next week.
Thanks for listening. See you next week with Sean
McGuire Co hosting and I'm. Sure.
There you put that on to the world.
There's some percentage. Is Brock still too woke next
week? All right, see ya.
Bye.