Tae Kim Sounds Off, Big Companies Are Hiring Again, NVIDIA $50B Tenant | Tae Kim, Ben Zweig, Aakash Thumaty

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**John Coogan** (0:02)
And you're tuned in Tuesday, July 28th, 2026 We are live from TBPN Ultra Dome. The Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We've been having a lot of fun with Suno. Hope you have been enjoying it too. I'm sure we'll have a new one available soon. But first, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Bunch of news today.
Jordi's laughing, laughing, laughing.

**Jordi Hays** (0:35)
All right, I think we're good.

**John Coogan** (0:36)
That's enough of that. Yeah, nothing like a couple pints of Guinness.

**Jordi Hays** (0:41)
Codex and Guinness.

**John Coogan** (0:42)
Prompt engineering, some vibe coding going on.
Well, Anthropics responded. We're gonna go through that proposal, the facts and the proposal for what happens next in the open model debate over whether or not they should be banned, restricted, tested, limited in some ways, sued. There's a whole bunch of different possible outcomes, but we'll take you all through it. And we have Tae Kim joining from First Adopter at 1130 But first, we are going to talk about the hiring market because the Wall Street Journal has a very interesting report that large, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that large companies are beginning to hire.

**Jordi Hays** (1:23)
A large white pill.

**John Coogan** (1:24)
Yes, it is a large white pill.

**Jordi Hays** (1:26)
Has hit the front page of the journal.

**John Coogan** (1:28)
Yes, and I think people have been going back and forth on this. This is a story that's just getting digested by the tech folks, like the actual AI lab leaders who had predicted crazy job losses and are now not really seeing that. They're seeing productivity boosts and different diffusion, taking time in certain places, and there's new capabilities, but it's not exactly a drop-in replacement for a coworker, at least in most scenarios, and that's what the Wall Street Journal is reporting. So let me set the table, and then we can debate it a little bit. First, I'm going to tell you about Consul. Consul built AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. So after roughly a year of cautious hiring, companies across technology, transportation, defense, and other industries now say they need more employees to work alongside AI systems. Total victory for both humans and AI. We're working together.
Peace is possible.
It's an example of Jevons Paradox. Jevons Paradox, when a technology makes something more efficient, demand often rises enough, the total use and the need for people actually increases. For roughly the past year, many companies pointed to AI while announcing layoffs. This was a huge thorn in your side. I think you hated this more than anyone else, and you were right to because it did seem like it was just PR, spin, etc.

**Jordi Hays** (2:56)
Yeah, it was a way for CEOs and management teams to save their own ass instead of saying, hey, we over hired or the business isn't doing as well as we would like, and we need to basically settle down for a second and get our mojo back. Obviously, no one wants to say that, but I think one of my favorite posts was the, and obviously, these circumstances are never great, but the new CEO of Xbox came out and just was very honest about the situation.

**John Coogan** (3:29)
Yeah.

**Jordi Hays** (3:30)
And I think that more of that is necessary.

**John Coogan** (3:34)
Yeah. Also, there's a lot of firms where once they get to 10,000, 20,000 employees, they might say, look, 20,000 might be the right number, but the bottom thousand people are not performing. We would like to lay them off and then bring in a new thousand people that are better fit for the company and the current trajectory that we're on, the current skills that we need. Maybe we need more salespeople.

**Jordi Hays** (3:57)
And those bottom thousand people might be top 10 percent at another company.

**John Coogan** (4:02)
Exactly. Yeah. So the narrative appears to be shifting.
Companies like CSX, Alphabet, ServiceNow, Snap-on, and consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton have all recently signaled plans to expand hiring, particularly in areas where employees can use AI to become more productive. We have Ben Zweig from Revelio Labs coming on at 1210 to talk about the difference in the AI-driven hiring market. Some very interesting data about how AI-enabled firms are hiring faster than those that aren't adopting AI. But at the same time, there's a bunch of weird dynamics in the labor market where there's way more job postings than actual hireings. So that can look like there's a fall off and it's harder to get a job, but that might just be because everyone's slopping it up in the job postings. Everyone's like, put up a job posting for everything because I'd love if somebody, if some insane sales guy walks in the door, we might have a position. So let's keep it up.