The Exchanges

Q executives who've appeared as guests include meta platforms, Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft Satya Nadella, and OpenAI's Sam Altman. All right, I have some thoughts about whether this is a good purchase or not. Um, but Liz, I'm curious to hear your perspective. Um, can you explain what TBPN is, because there are some people that still don't know, and whether you think OpenAI is making the right move in buying them?

A Yeah, it's a really popular tech talk show. I mean, it's on air live for like a lot of hours every day. Um, and has, has actually has a real following in Silicon Valley has real executives come on. Um, I don't know whether, you know, they would call themselves journalists site and be an interesting question to ask them. Um, they are clearly, there's no doubt about what side they're on. They, they want The people on their show to succeed and, and it's generally a fairly light interview. Um, but they've, they've like captured a real portion of the sort of tech media brain space. Um, do I think it's a good move? I don't know. I mean, Sam Altman said he bought it cause he likes it. And, uh, and you know, one way to look at it is that, you know, billionaires buy media companies because they're influential and they like having a megaphone, you know, Rupert Murak owns a lot of media, uh, Mark Benioff bought time magazine, obviously Jeff Bezos bought the The Post. Jamie Dimon gave an interview recently where he was saying maybe what he'll do after he, uh, after he retires is start a media company. Um, you know, it is a sexy, fun thing to own. Um, you know, but, but also I think tech and particularly AI is sort of looking around and realizes that the country is not with them, uh, and that they have some questions that they need to Answer and some real pushback is starting to emerge. I d…

AI assessment note: “do I think it's a good move? I don't know.”

Q jobs, I think is a little bit overblown, but you had a very interesting conversation with Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, about a few things, and first is AI jobs that he talks about. He says, AI is going to create many jobs, and we're not prepared as a society to fulfill those jobs. That's a crisis. That's an interesting perspective. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

A He was really talking about blue collar jobs, um, that, you know, which were already really in, in short supply of the, the people to fill them talking about welders and electricians and, um, you know, which is in some ways like the last jobs that the robots will take that, you know, HVAC plumbing, that stuff seems hard for AI to do in the physical world. Um, and it's like acutely needed now to build all the data centers that BlackRock and others are, are financing and, and throwing up to, to service, you know, open AI's Compute needs and all of that. Um, you know, but on the broader jobs front, I guess it is a lot easier to see, and maybe this was true of past, you know, industrial revolutions. People talk about this as the fourth industrial revolution. It's a lot easier to see the jobs that AI will kill than the jobs that it will create. Um, and particularly in the knowledge economy, these are, you know, I've spent the last 15 years covering Wall Street, and these are big pyramid businesses where a lot of, you know, they hoover up these kind of young graduates from, You know, they're from the IVs and from business schools, and they spent a bunch of years doing, like, kind of, dredge work, like, consulting, investment banking, that kind of thing. A lot of PowerPoint presentations, a lot of spreadsheets, and I can actually, today, do almost all of that. Um, and so, you know, th…

AI assessment note: “He was really talking about blue collar jobs, um, that, you know, which were already”

Q Definitely. Have you been out there? Have you spent time out there before?

A You know, it's funny, I, I have, uh, I was in Saudi Arabia last year, I was in, in Abu Dhabi the end of, um, in December, and I remember flying in, and I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me, but you're flying into Abu Dhabi, and out the right side of the plane is, is the Arabian Peninsula and, and the Emirates, and then the left side, right across the, across the Gulf, is Iran. I mean, it is, it is, when you go, it's, it's easy to forget, because you're in Abu Dhabi, and there's a Galleria, and there's a Four Seasons, and like, it It feels, um, very Western and there's a lot of rich people in suits walking around, but it's, it's like, I, I heard about this a couple of weeks ago. It is a nice house in a bad neighborhood.

AI assessment note: “I have, uh, I was in Saudi Arabia last year, I was in, in Abu Dhabi”

Q And why are people making this run? Is it just behavior or talk about that?

A It is partly behavior. Um, it's partly look like for the first, you know, six years it was around blue algae raised money from sophisticated institutional investors. And it's not just Blue Owl. It's Blackstone and KKR and Apollo and all of these HBS big firms. And then they said, well, we're kind of tapped out there, but there's a whole bunch of individual people. What if we sold it to them too? And because people live their lives differently than institutions, you have to give them this quarterly liquidity. So this is sort of like they were, this is a consequence of their own actions and their own desire to keep growing and to find new, new places to raise Money. Um, the question of whether the loans themselves suck, that is a fair question. We don't actually know. A lot of them are, certainly there's this vintage of lending from, call it, twenty-twenty-one and twenty-twenty-two. Probably some real bad loans there. They raised too much money. This was the, the sort of peak software. They were making these loans, I don't know if you've talked about them on the show yet, called, um, ARR loans. Usually banks underwrite a company's ability to borrow based on its profits. But tech companies, especially fast growing ones don't have profits, they have revenue. And so they based it on annual recurring revenues said, well, this company's making a lot of top line money. Let's lend them.…

AI assessment note: “It is partly behavior. Um, it's partly look like for the first, you know, six years”

Q they do ask some good questions sometimes. And if you are open AI and you own that network, You can reach all the people who are making decisions. Do I want to go with open AI? Do I want to go with anthropic traditional content marketing? You know, maybe that makes sense, but this is a big swing, and in a big industry, you need big swings. Is that logical?

A I don't know. I think I would take the other side of that, which is that, you know, open AI seems to think that its future is mostly direct to consumer. Like maybe they're going to make a run and try to catch up with Anthropic on the enterprise side. Um, and not that they can't do both, but I don't know that that, I think that there's better, like if you really want distribution and enterprises go by Salesforce, right? Like fine, fine, whatever that last mile is into these big companies. And I think, you know, a lot of the spending that's going to determine whether Any AI really pays for itself, but, you know, who wins this race isn't gonna come from the, the companies whose executives are on TVPN. It's gonna come from, like, Goldman Sachs and Walmart. I mean, it's gotta, it's gotta escape the tech economy to have real enterprise customers that are just, like, out in other industries, and, like, those people are not watching TVPN. I don't know. I actually just sort of thought it of, is it a vanity play, and you were saying, yeah, that those, those other executives, those other billionaires bought those things personally. But like Sam, this, I assume this is an open AI stock. Actually, I'm not a hundred percent sure, but that is Sam Altman's, that is his vehicle, right? He, he is so intertwined personally, financially with open AI. I assume, you know, that, that that's, what's g…

AI assessment note: “I think I would take the other side of that”

Q Uh, we just got new jobs numbers in. Are you seeing anything in terms of AI job loss in the new, in the new numbers?

A Not really. The jobs numbers came out today for March. Pretty good actually. And on the, on the heels of some, a couple of months of like very, very bad ones. I think there was, uh, there was a report yesterday from a private, um, data tracker called Challenger Gray that, you know, it does track sort of what it counts as AI related job losses that are obviously growing quickly. I, my theory on this is that AI is an excuse For companies to do layoffs, just like the tech isn't good enough. It isn't embedded enough workflows to like maybe outside of tech companies, you know, Mark Zuckerberg has talked a lot about kind of what, what a, uh, meta engineer is and isn't doing right now. And, um, so maybe they're like, they will hire more slowly. I think it's air cover. These are companies that Massively overhired, you know, in the late 20 tens through the pandemic. Didn't want to fire people in the middle of a, of a pandemic cause it makes you look bad. And then couldn't, then we're kind of frozen for a couple of years and couldn't quite figure out what to do. I think AI is just air cover.

AI assessment note: “Not really. The jobs numbers came out today for March. Pretty good actually.”