SPEAKER_00: all right everybody welcome back it's monday i'm still sick but i'm gonna power through

SPEAKER_01: lots of talk about despite my best advice he is gonna in fact power through the news is too interesting what are you gonna do you know yeah we've got um there were lots

SPEAKER_02: of reactions over the weekend to google's layoffs and how they were handled and also just

SPEAKER_01: the reckoning coming to the culture that in many ways google created yeah we have tons of tick tock

SPEAKER_00: videos people are trying to process uh this massive layoff by google after microsoft and

SPEAKER_05: salesforce and amazon and facebook and we have a talk about perhaps reaching peak employment

SPEAKER_01: feels like we've reached peak employment it does and that feeling is only exacerbated by

SPEAKER_02: the rise of open ai and chat gpt and how quickly ai is progressing microsoft codified its deal with open ai so we have a couple new details about that including that open ai will be

SPEAKER_09: we'll have a lot more access to a lot more real-time information elliott management uh the activist

SPEAKER_00: investors also made a multi-billion dollar deal to invest in salesforce i think we all know what that means uh and this is after other activist investors got involved with google which resulted in layoffs now it looks like elliott management uh is going to probably pressure salesforce to make

SPEAKER_02: some more cuts i gotta say i thought salesforce was untouchable for so long that this is a pretty big deal and then finally we have a cool and creepy and fascinating and super useful we live in the future nvidia made a kind of insane update to their broadcast 1.4 software ai generated eye contact yes

SPEAKER_05: you you don't have to get trained on this anymore uh you can just have the software do it it's going to

SPEAKER_13: be richo stick with us this week in startups is brought to you by and brokers startup insurance program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle save up to 20 off of traditional insurance today at a broker.com twist and while you're there get an extra 10 off using offer code twist linkedin jobs a business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters post your first job for free at linkedin.com twist and meowtel traveling soon book a local and insured sitter on meowtel the number one cat sitting app save 25 on your first

SPEAKER_16: booking with code twist 25. all right everybody i can't believe it's monday i'm still sick god you really are the worst sickness i've had perhaps in my life i mean this is like five covet five times or ten times coveted i've lost my voice just upper respiratory uh but it's broken so over the weekend

SPEAKER_05: it broke and i've been steaming and uh yeah around the road to recovery i've got another friend who has

SPEAKER_01: this right now and it is scary it's got i definitely i'm like i'm don't i'm either not gonna leave the house or wear a mask everywhere because it seems bad bad bad bad there anyway i'm glad you're feeling

SPEAKER_05: better this upper respiratory um thing has been going around i probably got it from the kids rsb rsb man yeah and so which is interesting because at the same time this is all happening there seems to be some

SPEAKER_16: ongoing debate and not just amongst like french people of like did the vaccines work i don't want to open that whole thing up here but um there's like a whole like what actually happened during covet and because the vaccines obviously are not super effective in preventing you from getting

SPEAKER_36: something but they do mitigate the they're not for rsb though no no no no not that all you mean

SPEAKER_16: like because there's this whole like sickness right now yeah there seems to be a whole um re hashing of you know who are the smart people the people who took the vaccine or the people who didn't take the vaccine and so i'm trying people are trying to drag me into this conversation don't

SPEAKER_12: who the hell knows because well it's hard to ask the dead ones right so there's that people did die from

SPEAKER_16: it and there's also covet has been like four or five major waves in different versions yeah so they said the whole time it's going to get they said covet was going to get weaker and weaker right that's the trajectory of these and that's like a pretty well-known fact so if you're comparing the version people are getting now to the version people were getting at the start it's like two different goal posts um and so your decision making might be very different now than it was during the height

SPEAKER_20: of this thing right right i mean and then we also know stuff about age like what age we definitely know

SPEAKER_01: things about age and comorbidities i mean it's like unvaccinated people had 13 and 53 times the risks

SPEAKER_02: for infection and death respectively so you were 53 times more likely to die from covet if you were

Jason Calacanis: unvaccinated according to the cdc i mean you know like nobody ever i think we also sort of i i don't

SPEAKER_02: what what is wrong with me why would i sit here and get drawn into this conversation i'm one people

SPEAKER_01: i'm totally guilty i am 100 guilty of being like i'm i got four freaking boosters like why do i have to still worry about getting this thing i mean i've had four shots i think i did three yeah i did one booster i guess i'm you know at this point it's like you know my ex-husband's one of those people he's like

Jason Calacanis: we got to get them all or whatever um and you know the thing with my mom and how it's definitely going to kill her way sooner as a result because it's done so much damage to her body and she was vaccinated

SPEAKER_01: yeah like i mean i think i think there's no i don't think there's any doubt in the scientific community like ask any doctor like my friend's husband is an er doctor the people who are in the hospital dying from covet are unvaccinated period like it's just that simple it doesn't mean like the coveted vaccine maybe the mistake was thinking you wouldn't ever get it yeah and that might have been a failure of communication they may be oversold it a little bit but like you know everybody you get

SPEAKER_20: a flu shot you could still get the flu like people sort of know that they seem to think i think at the beginning that you know everybody was going to be a blocker and you were not going to get it and you

SPEAKER_75: were not going to transmit it and you know it was more like it's going to prevent you from dying it's

SPEAKER_05: going to lower the risk of death yeah but i just wish people would do some more research on this like oh maybe we should fund some research i just wish i would do some more actual like marketing and

SPEAKER_80: information about it because like the research exists well i don't think we know um like you don't

SPEAKER_16: remember when they did the 9-11 commission like they kind of like did a a really yes i wish we would get a commission hundred percent to do like a 9-11 style commission on this because it's became so partisan and then you add to it conspiracy theories and then you add to it it changes constantly like

SPEAKER_05: it would be great if they just did like a 9-11 style commission i felt like the 9-11 commission did

SPEAKER_75: a really good job yes of like what we knew when we knew it how we can avoid it in the future it wasn't like partisan it was very informational so i completely agree we need a covet 19 commission badly

SPEAKER_03: badly badly and i hope we don't let that just like die i hope we don't know the origin too maybe it's

SPEAKER_16: just the like uh detective in me i just would really like to know if this was penguins or a lab leak or

SPEAKER_91: whatever in between i just want to know where it came from so we can avoid it in the future i'm a

SPEAKER_02: hundred percent open to a commission that truly finds that out and tells us yeah tell us like just

David Friedberg: yeah i'm with you listen i've been dealing with business insurance for three decades i kid you not switching providers has always been a nightmare too expensive takes too much time and and often doesn't guarantee you're going to get any better coverage but now you can make switching radically simple with in broker in broker is the perfect destination for industry tailored commercial

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SPEAKER_16: our industry these google layoffs um were quite significant and there has been a lot of hand wringing about it over the last couple of days and i think it's worth us double clicking on because to set the table for this as we've discussed google created the culture of entitlement in silicon valley this is a known fact they said let's make a campus let's provide neiman ranch steaks let's put uh infinite swimming pool in and volleyball and you'll never want to leave the campus because our employees are so dedicated we just want to make it like you don't even have to grow up you can be peter pan here we'll do your we'll give you dinner three square meals a day you know like you got wi-fi on the

SPEAKER_101: buses you never have to stop working and you know yeah yeah just go all in and don't worry about doing

SPEAKER_16: any other work it's and it was cynical right to get you to work more and it was also a result of them having a money printing machine they never had to think about costs because my lord so many people were using google and so many people were clicking on ads that it was irrelevant the spend for that

SPEAKER_01: business was largely irrelevant yep and then all of a sudden all at once like a bolt of lightning from the sky it was no longer irrelevant and on friday google uh laid off over kind of on friday and over the weekend google laid off 12 000 people roughly sent an email to the company's staff sundar google ceo sent an email on friday saying that they would lay off these 20 000 these 12 000 people reaching a total number of about 28 000 rolls i think um and then these layoffs you know a couple things about this have been really interesting the reverberations of the layoffs have been non-stop and because i think there were a couple big differences one when meta and amazon both had huge layoffs recently those were leaked which means they were effectively announced in advance so people were a little bit prepared for these layoffs and those companies were fairly transparent about the divisions within the company that would be cut the information about the google layoffs was not leaked or announced in advance it was effectively announced at the same time the layoffs were happening yeah and even in some even like a teeny bit after some of them happened and then the um cuts themselves were not confined to any particular low performing division or you know area that we knew they wanted to restructure it was like really i know someone you know like a very high level high performing employee who got cut off who got cut and then there were sort of lower level like last in first out kind of layoffs but it was like it did not feel that there was a big kind of rhyme or reason yeah and so as a result and then sundar pachai's statement about it was very vague right he said we've undertaken a rigorous review across product areas and functions to ensure that our people and roles are aligned with our highest priorities as a company the roles we're eliminating reflect the outcome of that review they cut across alphabet product areas functions levels and regions which is like anywhere you are you're not safe nobody's safe yeah and so then as a result there has been collective of everything you said right about how like how happy and cushy it was to be there and this kind of like haphazard and extremely abrupt execution oh my god people are losing their minds multiple things can be true at the

SPEAKER_16: same time yeah what makes this very unique is the culture of entitlement and the packages at google

SPEAKER_36: were so extraordinary and again who and again who created the culture of entitlement man it so not created by the employees this was offered to the employees and obviously they took the matcha lattes they took the dry cleaning they they took what was offered to them they rode their little bikes whatever it is you know you know um this was google strategy is to make it so good to work there that

SPEAKER_75: you would never think of leaving or it'd be very difficult to leave yeah for them to then cut people off was shocking to those people but for the rest of the world they're watching this or even in the rest of

SPEAKER_36: tech a lot of people are watching this and going like are these people for real or like um there was

SPEAKER_75: this um a day in the life of trend on tick tock where people would say like here's my day and i go to the gym and i go to a yoga room and then i get my matcha latte and it and people found it let's be honest a lot of people found it offensive yeah of how good these people had it how well paid they are so there's a little schreudenfreude schreudenfreude uh occurring here but what's very unique about this

SPEAKER_53: in the in the google case is they're all going to tick tock i mean and explaining what happened uh and

SPEAKER_16: this one is kimberly diaz um we didn't contact her so we assume this is a real tick tock um that this isn't an actor doing it but uh she's done a ton of videos and here's 61 seconds of her talking about

SPEAKER_128: her layoff we cut this down a little bit for brevity i was on a client site client visit i had dinner

SPEAKER_131: the night before with a client and i was specifically working for youtube what i was doing was working with influencers and creators the night before like meeting all the way up to the cmo so we had a great dinner and i was like okay great um i'll be there tomorrow and my uh colleagues who were also on the business trip that weren't impacted thank god i get up at like 6 a.m or so and i'm like okay i'm gonna put the final touches on the presentation and then i'm gonna get ready for this 10 a.m call and so i couldn't get into my email but for some reason my chat still worked i think i got in it before they closed it down because it was so early so i texted my colleague who was there who was also leading the meeting to be like hey are you having an issue with your email here's my phone number and then maybe 10 minutes later i got a follow-up email from google that was like your position's eliminated effective immediately and so she was kind enough to share her credit card with me so i could like change my flight and and get home as soon as possible and that speaks to the caliber of

SPEAKER_02: people that are at google your reaction mine i heard a similar story so and again this is the kind of um it is not uncommon when you get laid off to then lose access to your work accounts right that's like a super standard layoff procedure yeah what seems to have happened

SPEAKER_141: at google is that they turned off people's access laid them off then announced the layoffs

SPEAKER_01: like there seems to be some ordering things that are happening here yeah um but it is also interesting that seemingly as we watch more of uh this woman's videos she works in creator partnerships at youtube and youtube is one of of course google's fastest growing segments but according to reports is not profitable so maybe they were you know i mean like again we don't know there hasn't been a lot of transparency and and on some level they don't have to tell us what divisions they're cutting and why and whatever but yeah i mean what's super interesting about this is that like this google has had not only this culture of of i'm so like allergic to that word entitlement and i'm trying to figure out a better

SPEAKER_02: word even though i guess it is that right like yeah like i don't know luxury yeah and also and and

SPEAKER_01: cushy and kind of i mean i guess entitlement like as a as the literal definition of the word entitlement goes yes that is the best word here and they've also had this like culture of outspokenness and you know it's sort of it's funny because we used to speculate like way back in the day when i was at marketplace like the we would speculate that it's because of stock compensation that tech employees got this sense of entitlement also right it was like oh we're owners here we're shareholders like we are just as entitled as anybody else to like have our opinion about the way things are have been been run and google in particular's got an outspoken employee base oh they do yeah and now they have an outspoken laid off employee base pulling no punches out here naming names you know this woman went on to make another video calling it corporate greed there was like one about a big investor who thought they should have made more cuts like this is not landing that well out in the world so there's a lot of

SPEAKER_05: cognitive dissonance i mean that's really i think challenging for people um now there's no way to do

SPEAKER_141: a layoff correctly there are only unless everybody's of poorly that airbnb nailed it i maintain forever airbnb did it perfectly at the beginning of the pandemic but yes uh so you can you know nobody is

SPEAKER_05: complaining about the severance packages and all these tick tock videos and everything people are like oh my god this is incredible the severance so great job there but you do have to take people's access off there seems to be some consensus in hr that like you can't let people back into the building you have to do it on friday you got to do it at like whatever time so that you don't have the office god forbid some office violence occurs or some sabotage occurs there seems to be some legal insurance best practice that's now been established that it has to be swift and there is no goodbyes there's no goodbye party unless people self-organize it there's no hanging

SPEAKER_16: around the office which is different than google did it in the past when they did their last like little quiet riff they had said you know you have like 60 days to find another job so go explore

SPEAKER_05: other jobs in this case they were just sort of cutthroat about it if you're a small business

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SPEAKER_05: but there's a cognitive dissonance here between why is a company that's so wildly profitable

SPEAKER_75: with so much cash making these cuts and that's i think what she points out in her next video which we can play here really quick which is why is this happening if they're so profitable answer why

SPEAKER_169: layoffs are happening and that is corporate greed carbs don't count this week before i went to business school i didn't really understand layoffs i thought it was because like the company must have been in real dire financial strain like maybe they wouldn't be able to pay people and like keep going but it is

SPEAKER_131: because of greed and i will show you why guess how much google did in profits last quarter like

SPEAKER_169: literally take two seconds and guess did you guess 17 billion in profit that's your revenue minus your

SPEAKER_175: expenses it's about though is short-term profits and so they lay all of us off and what happens stock

SPEAKER_177: went up five percent yep there you have it i mean that she is not wrong no this is about the stock price this is about the shareholders the large shareholders and we talked about this last week

SPEAKER_01: when meta you know we talked about it when meta did it we talked about when microsoft did it this is about countering for shareholders and large investors the ongoing drop in stock price and creating an air and look this is this is the this is the bargain of work right work doesn't love you

SPEAKER_02: back no matter how comfortable you feel at any point priorities can change business goals can change

SPEAKER_01: stock price can trump a bigger investor can trump the needs of you know your rank and file employees and

SPEAKER_02: that is true and i'm talking to a lot of friends who are you know highly placed at companies who are having to make really really tough calls right now and who do kind of want to say to like this poor woman with the macarons who had a crappy layoff i'm not gonna like say that she didn't that

SPEAKER_112: sucks yeah and this is work this is business yeah it's not personal it's business it feels google

SPEAKER_186: i think google like google this is a classic google action in that google has never been good at people

SPEAKER_01: it is not that surprising to me that they were going to come along and do this like kind of ham-fistedly and like screw up the timing a little and just be like well you have to turn off the access of the of the person yeah but you also could like announce that you're going to have some layoffs and people have time to prepare right there's there are ways to soften the blow a little bit it's sort of classically like non-eq google this is all about these activists do it this way the

SPEAKER_53: activist investors see an opportunity to buy these shares at a very low price i just opened jtrading.com

SPEAKER_36: today and i was like oh i beat the market now suddenly i'm back in the game now i'm excited and start buying stocks again it was really interesting to see my own psychology right second i see i'm like compared to the market i'm like i should place more bets but i wasn't placing i did place some bets in the in the really down market right remember that it's really hard to make those bets when things are on the floor and now i'm like why did i make more bets in the down market i'm sure it'll go down again but it's part of the reason i'm trying to be like a more active public market investor is to try to understand this and i the best trade i made was the day facebook

SPEAKER_75: decided they would lay people off and i made that trade and it's up 50 i think wow in two months

SPEAKER_16: right yeah so there is something here and if you remember this activist investor named tci they gave sundar this five-point plan and they said you know hey and i'm just giving a quote here

SPEAKER_05: we acknowledge that alphabet employs some of the most talented and brightest computer scientists in years but they represent only a fraction of the employer base many employees are performing general sales marketing and administrative tasks who should be compensated in line with other technology companies so this woman who we just saw who's in sales this is who tci was talking

SPEAKER_36: about i think very specifically like we just want you to fire people who are in tci's mind i'm not

SPEAKER_16: saying in reality overcompensated and uh there's and this is the chart that they showed like here's the median here's microsoft here's alphabet and microsoft obviously did theirs what's also stunning

SPEAKER_53: is they they let go of people who've been there for 10 15 years i saw somebody 16 and a half years at google and they should have i think taken a different approach with anybody over 10 years i think so too i think they should have had people with under over 10 years they should have brought them into a room and said your time at google is coming to a close um we want to celebrate you for

SPEAKER_75: the next 60 days you have the option to wrap things up whatever and had a different path for them probably but yeah i kind of think so too like i i just there is a way to do this that that is a

SPEAKER_01: conscious uncoupling of your employment right that like makes people understand that this is a business priority this is a change this is like this these are things that have to happen we're sad we've treated you with respect like that we're gonna look at you know in a year or two we're gonna look around and some and look at the kind of like the twitter effect and talk about the companies that treated their departing employees with respect and acknowledge their role in creating the entitlement culture and the ones who were just like we're done with that now goodbye yeah and booted them right on

SPEAKER_20: there you know don't let the door hit you you know these companies can run with a a lot a much smaller

SPEAKER_05: footprint and if that's what these tcis of the world if that's what the brad gersers of the world want

SPEAKER_16: in order to buy the shares in the company again management will eventually acquiesce and that's what we're seeing here the only company that has it is apple which was very slow in adding people um but tci was not pleased with the 12 000. so as hardcore as sundar went um here's they wanted more christopher hahn of tci uh said to sundar i'm encouraged to see that you're now taking some actions to right size off of its cost base and understand that is never an

SPEAKER_75: easy decision left people go okay decision cut 12 000 is a step in the right direction

SPEAKER_53: it does not reverse alphabet's headcount growth in 2022 ultimate management will need to go further

SPEAKER_211: i mean it's true leaves they reduce the amount of employees to 150 bring them to 2021 and address

SPEAKER_01: excessive employee compensation he thinks they should pay people less i let's do go back though and put a

SPEAKER_02: file put a little spotlight on the fact that the median compensation at google is three hundred

SPEAKER_05: thousand dollars the median so if you put a hundred employee put a hundred employees number 50 would be

SPEAKER_75: this the one right in the middle median yeah not average because you have some huge paid people there uh like ceos and management but the median yeah i mean it's bonkers 67 percent higher than microsoft

SPEAKER_80: like that's pretty nutty it's pretty nutty um one thing to take in to you know to realize here

SPEAKER_05: uh as people deal with this cognitive different dissonance right um two things number one

SPEAKER_53: you as an employee at google are part of the machine you know this they look at you like any other expense

SPEAKER_16: item slightly more than the nut milk or the office space or the servers certainly right but ultimately tci and these other places do not no they look at you as a line item and they've analyzed the line item and said too much just enough servers too much nut milk too many non-technical people but whatever

SPEAKER_05: it is they're just looking at it like private equity you know market participants who are picking one

SPEAKER_16: stock over another and and they've deemed you know a number here and then everybody who is part of

SPEAKER_75: that number now has to um you know deal with this cognitive dissonance but how you frame it as an

SPEAKER_05: individual i think is what's critically important you could frame it as um i am no good uh they only let go of this small percentage of people and therefore i was let go you could also say well i negotiated an

SPEAKER_53: incredible salary for a large number of years was amongst the highest paid in the world at my profession

SPEAKER_36: so i did a great job of negotiating myself out of the job i was one of the first people let go because i did such an amazing job you know uh getting comp compensated and so you could take a very positive

SPEAKER_75: view of it yeah in that way and then you could also take a positive view of this as i said on twitter which is really tweaking for a certain group of people and i kind of made the tweet for that

SPEAKER_223: reason yeah it's like being honest yeah i was like 10 000 people laid off uh three founders per 3 000

SPEAKER_53: new startups you have six to 12 to 18 months of runway go find two of your cohorts and do a revenge startup now will everybody do that is everybody in a position to do that obviously not people well

SPEAKER_02: not everybody want to start a company exactly like it's a entrepreneurs what is it six or seven there was that story that was like there's a genetic predisposition toward becoming a founder and they were like it's six or seven percent of the population maybe that might be true i have to acknowledge that most people are simply not like of that cloth i think all people could be though

SPEAKER_36: yeah so while i mean i like that outlook all could yeah and that's where i get myself in trouble on the social media because i actually believe all people could do it because i've watched all kinds of

SPEAKER_236: people do it i think if you said that actually it would be pretty inspiring it's the earth surplus

SPEAKER_16: elite part that oh well no i think people have to take that head on if the surplus elites term is a little bit jarring i think for people but i think people should own it like you are if you now push everybody to a remote culture what you've done is you've said okay learn how to manage people remote great

SPEAKER_05: congratulations you won that battle now you're up against people in canada you're up against people in manila san paulo that's the back channel i heard too as well was you know microsoft has many

SPEAKER_75: offices around the world and it's a lot cheaper in those international offices to hire and find you know high quality tech talent so that's the other thing that's happened i think here yeah which other

SPEAKER_01: video should we play i i mean i like we should play the one who is the google employee who is basically like yeah we've spent we have we google created an arms race for spending and coddling

SPEAKER_02: that we do in fact need to reverse like you had sort of a more of an analysis about it

SPEAKER_244: okay let's hear it 12 000 employees were laid off today at google i was lucky enough to not be one

SPEAKER_245: of those 12 000 but i think the fact that this happened signals a huge shift in the tech industry

SPEAKER_250: as a whole in the next few years historically google has been one of those rest invest companies you go there towards the middle or end of your career they have great culture great perks great pay and you write it out till the end you're not gonna have to overwork yourself like you will at some other companies and you're gonna get to work on things that ideally you enjoy working on i think google breaking precedent and doing these layouts despite the images that they have historically had is big because it shows that at a ton of these big companies the problems that need solving are towards the end of their lifespan think of instagram for example how do you handle someone with 100 million followers like a kim kardashian that's a huge engineering problem but now that's solvable and a ton of companies know how to do that it's common knowledge you can figure it out on the internet for free so i think we're going to see a shift a lot of these traditional companies need engineers for maintenance but they don't need a ton of engineers to improve anything really because we're at the max of what this technology can be so i think i think the shift is going to be over to ai chat gpt its parent company open ai and all of those companies are going to become the new rocket ships that people are going to want to ride to the top i know it wasn't just google that was affected a ton of employees from really great companies were also affected so all the best to everyone in the job market right now use the comments to reach out if you're hiring let

SPEAKER_244: people know if you're looking let people know um but i think we're going to see a huge shift in the

SPEAKER_02: tech industry in 2023 your reaction i think that's what i think is the most interesting part first of all i love him how darling is he like if you're in the comments like let people know if you're hiring very sweet yeah i mean i think he makes such an outstanding executive point which is that

SPEAKER_01: companies hired for the business they were building when building that business was really hard the technology it took to build those businesses i mean like you know my opinion on learn to code yeah don't bother machines will be doing that any minute now so they hired for the companies they were building then they don't need as many people the technology is not as hard the technology itself

SPEAKER_02: is commoditized and the businesses are mature so these are now growth companies instead of high

SPEAKER_01: growth companies but they have high growth numbers of employees but honestly i keep going back to the fact that so many of those employees that more than 12 000 of those employees were added in 2022. this is where i think there was massive leadership failure at these companies to be like yeah hot damn

SPEAKER_05: this happens people tend to point fingers and try to like find you know somebody who's wrong and all

SPEAKER_36: of this i think this guy nailed it yeah a lot of the problems like how do you scale servers you know how do you make a feed of all the followers all that stuff like these were very hard technical things you put hundreds of engineers on it and now it's like oh no you can just use this piece of software there's a cloud software for that there's an open source kit boom press the button it's done yeah

SPEAKER_01: um you know that so and we're transitioning to a totally new type of business maybe yeah with ai and the all the people who are here working on like creator stuff that's not what we do anymore maybe

SPEAKER_267: and milk it for profits you know at the end of aol's lifespan when they had millions of people

SPEAKER_129: or you know they peaked at 30 million people paying 30 bucks a month pretty incredible you know over 10 billion dollars a year in access fees for dial-up towards the end they just they laid off a ton of

SPEAKER_53: people and they just would milk hundreds of millions of dollars in profits per month yeah out of the aol dial-up business and then reinvest it in content businesses that they bought including

SPEAKER_05: my own and so you know it's he's not wrong here when you get to the end of a cycle you want to milk google search or chrome or google docs or youtube you want to milk it for profits and that was i think one of the other problems here is everybody was what i saw a lot of videos is like i don't understand my my report was great my review was great i hit all my numbers we hit our numbers collectively why am i losing my job and it's like we need to be more profitable going into a recession etc and yes i'm

SPEAKER_02: sorry to tell you everybody 17 billion dollars in profit is not enough for for late stage capitalism

SPEAKER_274: it's just not well i mean it has to grow if your stock price is not going up exactly that number has

SPEAKER_156: to keep going up that's the deal yes i'm sorry that's the deal it can be very frustrating we all agree there are things that are very frustrating about late stage american capitalism but that is

SPEAKER_05: the freaking deal i do think what we're going to see here is like perhaps we just witnessed peak employment like a peak employment moment i mean history of humanity yeah actually like you know the idea that people could be this incredibly compensated and this incredibly coddled um they're no fault of

SPEAKER_267: their own again it's a free market uh people participated in this uh on the buy side you know

SPEAKER_53: willingly but i think this might have been peak and now with this globalization that's occurring through remote work globalization kind of changes everything uh and and ai and ai just gonna accelerate

SPEAKER_80: it even more i mean those two things those two tides are crashing together right now yeah in the

SPEAKER_05: perfect storm my understanding is like when people use one of these github like auto completing suggesting development tools that it's starting to have like a 10 20 30 percent impact on people making them that much faster and so you might not need as many developers you certainly don't need it to maintain a

SPEAKER_267: product but even creating new product it might take a much smaller number of developers to make really

SPEAKER_00: interesting uh things um there's a rumor going on silicon valley that sergey larry coming back

SPEAKER_01: that's do we have thoughts on that rumor i think i think a lot i think a big earthquake just hit google and that earthquake is named chat gpt like no i do not i think they thought they had all the time in the world to keep on incubating the cool stuff the demine the whatever and it was like all of a sudden

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SPEAKER_267: for in the app store open ai just codified the partnership with microsoft like as we were getting on air and so all the stuff we've been talking about over the past couple of weeks about hey this was a non-profit company for-profit company basically that's been answered um uh there was a series of blog post today they're going to have open ai um as a for-profit company that is owned somali maybe

SPEAKER_65: you could tee this up for us just what's going on now with open ai and microsoft yeah so their deal

SPEAKER_02: so basically a new blog post came out today from open ai and microsoft that actually just codifies a lot of the stuff we already told you um it's stuff we've been seeing over the past few weeks for example microsoft and open ai worked together to build super computing systems powered by azure

SPEAKER_01: which open ai uses to train all their models we told you some of that microsoft will increase its investment in azure systems to accelerate open ai's independent research we told you that azure will remain the exclusive cloud provider for all open ai workloads across its research apis and products and then open ai is focused on learning from real world use of the products now this is one of the things that we didn't tell you it is fairly obvious because for open ai to continue to get smarter it's going to need to interact with the real world but i would say that even though this is sort of like a bland little line in that blog post that's the headline that's the thing that's going to go one of two ways it's either going to be like the time that microsoft released that chat bot that immediately became like the most racist mega grandpa you ever met or open ai is going to get

SPEAKER_02: smarter and smarter and smarter in a safe and health way that's healthy for society but like

SPEAKER_301: reinforcement learning i think is the uh term of art rl and it's an area of machine learning uh and so

SPEAKER_05: you take actions making your powerpoint it learns just like sometimes if you do a google search it might ask you like did this give you an answer how good was this answer or chat gpt asks you how good was this answer so that reinforcement learning that'll happen over time uh people driving through certain in a self-driving sense uh in a self-driving ai how do people take this particularly gnarly uh traffic circle well if you have a million people navigate the traffic circle you can kind of infer

SPEAKER_240: some behaviors and if there's accidents you can infer uh solutions for it so but that's uh it is also

SPEAKER_01: open ai like starting to now get trained on real world constantly incoming data and that's a big that's a big shift i don't know if that's going to be reflected in its interface in chat gpt yeah um but to the extent that it is it makes it one way more useful right no more of those like my information stopped at 2021 or i can't give you any information about individuals like when you like chat gpt yourself and it's like i can't tell you anything about yourself it'll be really really interesting to see what that interface starts to look like once the whole firehose of internet maybe not the whole thing but

SPEAKER_05: more of it is turned on and i think chat gpt is floating this 42 per month premium version i think the 42 a month premium version is you know for 600 bucks a year or whatever it winds up being for a business individual uh you know it's like do you need a researcher do you need a personal assistant if they can actually do things like book hotels for you or you know what we thought would happen with what were called intelligent agents back in the day this could be quite transformative

SPEAKER_75: so people are starting to see some solicitation people are posting screenshots um and i i told people earlier i'd taken the survey to become a chat gpt pro user uh and i put my pricing at 50 bucks a month so seems like they're going with 420 i'm sorry 42 uh dollars and zero cents seems like the pricing

SPEAKER_02: is getting pretty predictable in our market it seems to be um open ai speaking of pricing will remain

SPEAKER_01: they confirmed well open ai will remain a capped profit company returns for the first round of investors are capped at 100x investment uh microsoft will invest that 10 billion dollars remember we reported this at a 29 billion dollar valuation and get 75 of open ai's profits until it recoups that 10 billion and then after that if they ever have profits if they ever have profits and that's not

SPEAKER_267: revenue that's profits right so if they have a 20 margin they have to make 50 billion in profits for

SPEAKER_00: no more there'd be more than that because they only get 75 of them so yeah um fascinating uh congrats to microsoft and i think you know the rumors based on my sources are true that uh larry and sergey will be spending more time at google this is what i've heard yeah that's a fire that fire

SPEAKER_53: got great it'd be great to have them super engaged and thinking about how to manifest this stuff into a product that actually generates revenue at the core of google success you have to remember is the

SPEAKER_05: google click-based ad network the search and the spider and page rank all of that was incredible that was the use case then there was a business case uh you know a way to monetize that which was also insane we have to see if chat gpt can come up with something for that it might be you know just a subscription model and who in the world is not going to pay 42 a month 600 a year anybody who makes even but 20 an hour that's only 30 hours a year if this makes you if a person works 2 000 hours a year you need only be 15 percent more effective to hit the break-even point right so just to go through that math 20 an hour divided into 600 a year for chat gpt or a competitive product is 30 hours average human

SPEAKER_75: uh puts in 50 40 hours a week times 50 weeks 2 000 hours a year 30 hours so it's like even a fraction of them it's not even not even 300 it's not 50 it's 1.5 1.5 percent of your year like you're certainly going to be more than 1.5 more percent or five percent more efficient with a chat gpt like service

SPEAKER_01: and that friends is the back of the envelope math that gets you to point two to round two of peak

SPEAKER_07: employment it might be a peak remember peak oil we're gonna hit peak oil i have this is i haven't

SPEAKER_02: i have only written half of it so far but the title of my forthcoming newsletter this week is don't

SPEAKER_09: learn to code learn to wire like become an electrician now is the time to do that uh mollywood.substack.com

SPEAKER_267: that's right that's right uh and i did see across the wire that activist investor elliot management

SPEAKER_02: made a multi-billion dollar was making in salesforce so elliot management um has by the way is the activist investor that instigated jack dorsey's departure in some ways as ceo of twitter certainly stopped him from like goofing off to africa for a year to run the company from there africa yeah moving to africa yeah um elliot has taken a quote multi or made a multi-billion dollar investment in salesforce according to wall street journal sources salesforce has 156 billion dollar market cap so assuming a you know single digit percentage ownership but uh elliot is not the first apparently activist investor to come in another one came in saying uh that they were worried about it margins and overall profitability elliot usually asks for things like board representation pushes for operational improvements like changing up sales and executives starboard value is the one that came in in october and said uh that the company had a valuation discount because of the subpar mix of growth and profitability and i think this is so dishy because as you know i think something's going on at salesforce and to

SPEAKER_01: be honest i've had a decade of like spidey senses about this company like i'm like they feel like they make too much money and i can't quite tell how even though i understand the pricing model

SPEAKER_00: salesforce isn't cheap you know it's uh they charge they have they have a lot of sas products they've

SPEAKER_05: bought over time subscriptions were a booming business um now people are tightening their belts their customers might be renegotiating contracts so there's going to be um sas duration sas duration has occurred as you said yeah so that that cycle is well underway this means more layoffs i mean let's just call it what it is they said there's a layer of 10 000 i think this means like you know 20. yeah maybe it means 20. uh and that's really the only cost they have i mean it's real estate etc but you know the reoccurring cost of highly paid tech employees is now these activist investors they smell

SPEAKER_75: blood in the water i think that's what's happening here the sharks smell blood in the water oh yeah these companies are under priced they could be highly profitable if they cut even deeper and let's see um is in their mind they're like let's see if you put another 10 000 people out of the a job and we have 20 000 laid off salesforce employees what this looks like i wonder if we see

SPEAKER_02: like a a slack i mean salesforce also went on a big buying spree i wonder if we see like a slack go

SPEAKER_345: back up on the block problem that would be i think it's doing decent revenue and so you

SPEAKER_75: might just want to operate it for you know to continue to get profits from it i guess i sort

SPEAKER_02: of feel like at some point other than the stock bump i mean granted we're talking about tens and tens of that in some cases hundreds of thousands of employees but like how much marginal savings can you actually accomplish over time with cuts like some but if an elliott management is wanting

SPEAKER_163: growth in the bees they could cut half the staff um that's the truth in a lot of that's what they would have to cut right to really have a meaningful 20 would have meaningful yeah like because it all

SPEAKER_05: that just throws right to the bottom line right after three months or six months of the severance payments once that gets washed out and so i think what people are doing is they're making two bets

SPEAKER_75: the economy comes back you know in three or four quarters we start to see growth in the economy

SPEAKER_05: and you make these cuts and so then the cots come and they hit let's say two three four quarters out and the economy comes back three four five quarters out you have two tailwinds you lowered costs

SPEAKER_75: and revenue started to grow again so i think this is why savvy shark-like investors are making these

SPEAKER_02: bets now right that makes sense yep all right well that's what's happening uh at salesforce and then

SPEAKER_05: we got to do this quick we live in the future oh yes i saw this go by my feed nvidia has broadcasting software so i just downloaded it on my windows machine on my dell

SPEAKER_75: um it's called nvidia broadcast 1.4 uh but they had this really cool feature where it will

SPEAKER_53: change your eyes to make you look into the camera perfectly and so here watch this video it's kind of this one is pretty good you'll see his eyeballs if you're watching are staring directly into the camera instead of reading a script like i'm doing now or like reading another monitor off to my right

SPEAKER_05: and and it's not real it's not real do you notice his uh pupils seem a little bigger yeah

SPEAKER_01: um also slightly pretty close slightly fixed and terrifying because well and the only reason it's fixed and terrifying is because he's reading right you make a different like you don't if you're just making eye contact with someone you look away occasionally or you kind of look down you you know it looks unnatural because he's reading a script with a sort of a fixed gaze and then that fixed gaze yeah is right at the camera so then it starts to be like oh bro okay you are really staring me down right now but let's not gloss over the fact that ai made his eyeballs look at the camera instead of off

SPEAKER_05: of the screen like that is what yeah it's pretty cool um you're going to you know the uncanny valley valley is here this is just on desktops you know we talked about luke skywalker appearing in mandalorian or de-aging uh in the obi-wan series like all this technology is kind of the same and so you can touch up your appearance in zoom nvidia lets you look directly into the camera i mean all these things are going to the point where you're going to you know be able to do all of this at a operating system level so when you use something like this nvidia one it rechannels your camera basically in your audio so your speaker and your video when you're using zoom microsoft teams discord slack you know we use huddles you can basically feed in your nvidia studio so kind of cool how it works you know instead of picking whatever your current camera is creates that new input of like here's the nvidia camera it's

SPEAKER_02: pretty neat it really is i mean honestly because so many now especially that we're doing so much live streaming or video conferencing or you know presentations like we're doing meetings that involve

SPEAKER_01: notes and it's so it's hard to figure out where to look like we have cameras positioned above our monitor so that it looks like there's a natural eye line as i'm like talking to you the audience for

SPEAKER_02: example but if i have to look down at my notes then i'm like um looking down here and then what and i could conceivably you would never notice the difference between me talking directly to you via camera and me glancing down at my notes to read that it's broadcast 1.4 it's pretty neat uh it also

SPEAKER_05: on top of the eye contact it does um pretty cool feature where if you move around in the frame it will re-center you so for people who are doing a live stream like if they're djing or they're a video gamer and i go to the left here i go to the right it just re-centers you even if you're moving as if a

SPEAKER_07: camera operator was tracking you pretty neat feature um to have tracking built in um yeah it's a neat piece of software and i think it's just the beginning so i'll be sure yeah it's pretty bananas pretty bananas

Jason Calacanis: friends see you soon you won't need us okay thanks everybody uh on that creepy uncanny valley note we

SPEAKER_01: are going to leave as far as i know we will not be replaced by ai we should be in fact back here

SPEAKER_02: tomorrow but yeah the ai might be so good that you can't even tell it'd be great if the ai could get

SPEAKER_05: rid of this raspy voice in real time and just make me not seem sick uh if you want to help out the show uh fill out the uh listener survey this week in startups.com survey i'm going to give 10 people a 50 gift card from amazon uh for filling out the gift card this week in startups.com survey fill it out completely takes a couple minutes and it helps us when we sell ads uh which then helps us

SPEAKER_163: keep the show uh thriving yeah you want us here every day right you don't want to ai fill out the

SPEAKER_10: survey fill out the survey yeah have your ai fill out the survey there you go don't please don't lie

SPEAKER_05: on the survey please don't have a computer lie for you uh i mean eventually your ai may actually

SPEAKER_77: might actually do a better job on surveys i mean like makes up all kinds of lies apparently which is

SPEAKER_05: hysterical i mean it's going to be very interesting when your doctor's uh ai talks to your ai

SPEAKER_345: about like your health plan i think that's going to be like the next piece of this everybody has

SPEAKER_35: got to you have to all go read a diamond age or diamond age by neil stevenson because it is like

SPEAKER_01: the perfect it shows you what this is going to look like when we all have what is effectively a tablet it's called a lady's primer that's just our like constant companion and informational

SPEAKER_384: butler there you have it all right we'll see you tomorrow bye-bye