Catastrophe in the Name: ETF, Trades, AI

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Should I give a really quick bird update?

Oh, yeah.

Well, we put out the Cliff Astness episode, which was very well received, but we did get a few comments about

there not being a bird update.

Really quick.

Bird is doing.

I'm just not interested in your bird.

Maybe you would have been actually.

I feel like

he would have rolled with it.

Yeah, he would have rolled with it.

Yeah.

The bird's doing really well, flying really well.

We need to work on perching.

So he's in a big room.

Interesting.

He's regressed on perching.

Well, the thing is,

it's hard.

He's very comfortable perching on people.

He's very comfortable perching on his cage.

I put in an old cat tree that I had at my parents' house in the room where he is.

He refuses to perch on it.

And so if you open that.

If I were a bird.

Yeah, you probably wouldn't perch on the cat tree.

I wouldn't stay away from stuff that smells like a tree.

Yeah, maybe.

I don't mean my cat hasn't touched it in several years, so I thought maybe the cat smell had faded.

Never.

I think I need to get like a potted.

The owner of a wheat and terrier, I can tell you.

The cat smell never fades.

Never fades.

I think I need to get him like an indoor potted tree or something, because if you open the cage and then run to the other side of the room, he will fly directly to you.

He will not land on anything other than his cage and humans.

So we need to work on that.

Also, we're calling it a he, but it could be a ladybird.

Is this whole project still in the service of like one day releasing him or her into the wild or is it more just like

it'd be nice if he wasn't clinging to your shoulder all the time?

I think given that it's so attached to humans, it would be very hard to release this bird right now.

It won't perch.

I mean, we'll see when we get at a tree if it'll perch on the tree.

I guess I'll stop asking that question.

I guess that's just your bird now.

And its name is bird.

Bird.

Hello, and welcome to the Money Stuff Podcast, your weekly podcast where we talk about stuff related to money.

I'm Matt Levine, and I write the Money Stuff column for Bloomberg Opinion.

And I'm Katie Greifeld, a reporter for Bloomberg News and an anchor for Bloomberg Television.

Katie, I came to you this week and I was like, I want to talk about ETFs.

Which sounds great.

And you're like, sounds great.

And I was like, I want to talk about autocallable ETFs.

And you're like, no.

You know, that's the thing.

It really feels like a monkey's paw situation or something.

I should be psyched.

This is the thing.

This is the thing.

The thing about ETFs is that eventually all of financial products and ultimately all of human existence will be sucked into an ETF.

And like, you have to be able to roll with all of the possible forms of ETFs.

I, you know, I'm like super comfortable with the idea that, you know, there's structured products in ETFs.

Yeah, I know what a buffer ETF is.

The concept of an autocallable ETF is a little bit of a tougher chew, but the first one launched this past week.

Yeah, Calamos.

Calamos with JP Morgan is the swap counterparty.

Yeah.

So

you did a breakdown in your money stuff column about how theoretically this would work.

You provided an example.

I still don't quite get it.

Okay.

So like if you're a JP Morgan,

you're in the business of like manufacturing products that clients want to buy.

One thing that clients come to you with a lot is we would like to hedge our

stock market risk.

It would be nice if when the market crashed, we could get some insurance.

And so there's a big business in manufacturing insurance against market crashes because like

fundamentally, most people, most investors are long equities and they want to have insurance.

Some of them want to have insurance against the market crashing.

And how do you manufacture that insurance?

Because no one wants to sell that insurance, right?

Like who wants to be in the business of saying, if the market crashes, I'll give you money.

It was a terrible wrong way situation to be in.

And so a lot of like the world of like equity derivatives trading is figuring out how to manufacture that sort of market market risk insurance like crash insurance and

there are ways to do it like

the dispersion trade and hedge funds is like a

kitty's eyes are closing it's like a complicated way to take single stock vol and turn it into index vol so that you can sell people insurance against market crashes but like a classic way to do it is to say we're gonna have

retail investors sell us insurance against market crashes.

And the way retail investors sell insurance is essentially they buy bonds.

And the bonds, you know, they put in $100, they get back $100 plus like a very high rate of interest, except if the market crashes, they get back like nothing or they lose money, right?

So the thing they buy is sort of a catastrophe bond for market crash.

Like if the market crashes, they don't get back all their money, and the money they don't get back gets used to pay someone else's insurance.

One of the main, like the classic form of that is called an autocallable.

It's just like the name of it.

But it's basically you put in money.

If the market stays flat or up or even goes down a little bit, you get back like 115 cents on a dollar in a year.

And if the market goes down a lot, you know, you lose the amount of the market crash.

And, you know, when JP Morgan sells that to you, it gives them index volatility that they can turn around and sell to

institutional clients who want a hedge against market crash.

So that is the auto-callable.

It is a classic structured note, structured product that banks love to sell to retailer, high-net worth investors.

And

now it's going into an ETF.

Which was inevitable.

I mean, buffers have been so popular.

Yeah.

I think actually the press release for this ETF said something like, this is the latest flavor of boomer candy.

Pretty much.

Just the name of these kinds of ETFs now.

Yeah.

And it's like a little bit similar to a buffer in that it's like a fixed income replacement that like maybe has a little extra juice.

But even still, and you know, I'm prepared to be proven wrong, but I feel like this is a tougher sell.

Like buffers.

Well, I should say it's different from a buffer in that a buffer is buffered.

And this is like in a crash, you lose your money.

Yeah, a buffer is, okay, you're giving up upside, but you're going to be cushioned, buffered on the downside.

This is like you're getting a nice coupon, except in bad states of the world, in which case you lose a lot of money.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, I don't know.

I mean, who is this for?

Like, I hear

people love them.

I know.

people love them i know i know i just wonder like these are like famously like you know sold to agent high net worth investors and there was a story a while back that i remember i quoted about

korean autocallables or some broker says something like

no one's ever only bought one once you buy them you keep coming back from work because they're so great i just love them so much and it's like you know you you think of the profile of it for a second and you're like yeah of course that's true right you keep buying them because you get paid a 15 yield you keep buying them until there's one crash and then you stop right yeah maybe yeah but right it pays a 15 15% yield unless the market crashes and then it just crashes.

Yeah.

So Calamos is first out the gate.

I think you have Innovator and First Trust have also filed for similar products.

It's interesting that JP Morgan hasn't.

JP Morgan sort of pioneered this category in the ETF space, this derivatives powered, defined outcome space.

They have Jeppy, which is a household name in my household, maybe not in yours.

But then, you know, there were a bunch of Jeppy copycats and you've also seen buffers rise up in the last few years.

But I don't know.

It's somewhat interesting to me that, you know, it's not JP Morgan that's.

Well, JP Morgan is the swap counter party.

Yeah.

Which means it's their Vol that is being bought.

They're buying the Vol from the retail customers to sell to their institutional customers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But they're not the ones headlining the CTF necessarily.

Yeah.

Right.

I never fully understood the structured notes business, but like part of it is like the retail and high net worth and like private wealth bankers are sitting around saying like, what can we sell to our customers to make money?

And then part of it is like the institutional vol traders are sitting around thinking, where can we get some vol

and like there's a meeting of the minds.

So here like the you know the JP Morgan vault traders are happy even if they're not like making the ETF fee.

I mean they're making some sort of fee.

And your point about who this is for.

Yeah.

I wrote about this this week and a reader emailed me to remind me of there's a catastrophe bond ETF.

Yes, I love this one.

ILS is the ticker.

ILS.

Launched without a lead market maker.

Yeah.

And there's like a Bloomberg article about it from April saying securities can be a hard sell for retail investors who have never before had to price the risk of a typhoon or earthquake.

By the way, they're not pricing it now.

So

they're a price taker.

But anyway, they quote someone saying, the asset class does itself no favors by having catastrophe in the name.

Right.

At least it's clear, though.

At least you kind of know like the basic contours of what you're doing when it says catastrophe in the name.

Here it's called an autocallable, which is like tells you nothing.

No.

And, you know, there's a big like headline: this is how much yield you get.

And you're like, oh, yield, great.

But then you're like, oh, I can lose all my money.

Yeah.

Also, it's like, if you're into this sort of thing, which I know you're not.

No, but if you're into this sort of thing, it's really cool because it's like the structure of it is basically,

you know, it's an auto-call.

So there's like knock-ins and knockouts and stuff.

Basically, if the index is down, 40%

is when you start to lose money.

Like instead of getting the nice coupon, which like very rarely happens, but okay.

You say that.

Yeah.

You sale.

But the reason you say that is because you and I, and probably most of the people buying it, have an intuition of what the index is.

But the index that they use is not the SP.

The index that they use is a like volatility targeted SP.

Oh, no.

So basically they like lever the SP to get you to a 35% volatility.

Okay.

Which is like in the ballpark of 2x levered.

Okay.

A little more than 2x levered.

So a 20% drop in the SP is not that common either, but it's like, it's happens.

Yeah.

And like you see 40%, you're like, yeah, 40%.

That never happens.

But like if the index drops like 20-ish percent, you lose 40% of your money.

So it's like the structure is not

like a lot of structured notes, it's like you can tell the story in a simple, you know, you're like, if the market is down 20%, you lose 20%.

It's like very easy to understand.

Here it's like you get this nice yield and sometimes you don't.

And it's not like when the market is down 20%, it's like, yeah, like

math.

And like, sometimes you don't.

Yeah.

So it's an unintuitive product for retail investors.

Yeah.

I'm interested to see if, I mean, just given how popular these types of ETFs would be, if we were recording this in 2019, which we wouldn't, but I'd be like, oh, who's going to buy this?

But I don't know.

It could happen.

It could see some uptake, but I don't really get it.

So we'll see.

Like, if you can't explain it in an elevator ride.

You can explain it.

It pays a high yield, except when the market crashes.

Except when the market crashes.

Yeah, but it's, you know, if the index is above this level, if it's a level.

It's not even numbers, it's hard to explain.

But

there's not, it's not a lot of stuff.

It's not like floors and caps and everything.

It's just like pays 15%, except when the market's down more than

X percent.

Something else I was wondering, you know, this has typically been the domain of, you know, high net worth individuals.

Who is making less money as a result of this being put in the ETF wrapper?

Like, does JP Morgan care if they're selling these to Calamos versus selling this in some other structure.

I always used to have the impression that structured notes had very juicy fees.

Yeah.

But I actually think it's like kind of a competitive business.

It's not that juicy.

Yeah.

Well, this ETF charges like 74 basis points.

Yeah, but like with anything like this, like there's a lot of mouths to feed.

And like,

they're doing a swap with JP Morgan, which is probably JP Morgan expects to make a certain amount of money on the swap.

I don't know.

It's hard to exactly

compare the pricing of this to a structured note, but I don't get the sense that, like, I think these are

very comparable products, right?

Like, these are sort of advisor-sold, like,

upper-end retail products.

And so, like, you know, they're all kind of competitive spaces, but this is not like wildly undercutting some super lucrative, uncompetitive business, right?

Like, the structured notes is like everyone's kind of in on that game.

Okay, good.

You were worried.

JP Morgan isn't losing out on anything.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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To move on to the next Morgan story.

I guess.

The prior credit trading, sorry.

Private credit trading.

It's so good.

Yeah.

So, right, there's a Bloomberg story this week by Alan Schneider and Carmen Arroyo about how

JP Morgan has set up this entire private credit trading desk, which is so smart, like getting in early on what is quite plausibly going to be like bank loan trading, like a huge business.

But unfortunately, they don't do any trades.

No one wants to trade with them.

This is how you have to start, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not that no one wants to trade with them.

The product doesn't trade.

Yeah.

Like, it's not entirely true.

Some of it is that no one wants to trade with JP Morgan.

And like there are some private credit firms trying to stand up trading desks.

And like maybe that's just the competitive dynamic, but I think 95% of it is that these loans don't trade and people don't want them to trade.

Yeah.

And so JP Morgan constantly sends out runs saying, we're looking to buy $5 million chunks of like these 40 loans.

And here are our bids.

And everyone's like no thank you shooting out those runs into the void and then they're calling and saying hey just want to see if you got my run and everyone's like goodbye go ahead yeah it's really bad it's great the human psychology of that is just brutal i know but it's what you got to do right and you know that like the people doing that are like well this is my shot at like being the person who invented a whole new category and bringing in you know hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and being a superstar but one it's not guaranteed that it'll work out.

And two, it is guaranteed that before it works out, I will spend a lot of time cold calling people and getting nowhere.

Yeah.

And I mean, as a journalist, I sympathize with you.

Yeah.

Jeez, Louise, I hate cold calling.

As a not very good investment banker in my former life, I think about like how long one could have zero in one's PL.

Yeah.

Like, you know, like they've got some runway, right?

No one's expecting them to do a lot of trades this month.

Yeah.

You know, like at some point, someone will be like, hey, guys.

Well, there's

a few interesting reasons in the article that are raised for why JP Morgan is getting shut out.

One is that the private credit firms want big banks to stay out of their turf.

I don't think that's the main reason.

It's presented as a reason.

That's part of it.

The competitive dynamic of like, we don't want to freeze up banks.

I mean, that might be part of it.

I think the main reasons.

Okay, so I think an important reason that the article highlights that I think is the second most important reason is that this is what Cliff was talking about when he came on.

Nice callback.

Private markets are very attractive to a lot of investors because they are less volatile than public markets.

And if you think about that for a fraction of a second, or if you talk to Cliff, you'll be like, weird.

They're not actually less volatile.

It's just they don't trade.

So you don't see the fluctuations in the values that you see in public markets because they trade constantly.

And so

nonetheless,

as Cliff has written about,

there is

for some classes of investors, like a real value in not having to mark down your positions.

And if private credit

loans traded constantly in a liquid market that everyone could see, it would be harder to not mark down your positions when they went down in the market.

Yeah.

And then some of the perceived advantage of private credit would go away.

And nobody trying to stuff private credit into 401ks is going to be all that excited about like increasing the volatility of the market.

So that is, I think, the second most important reason.

But even still, I mean, you have Apollo trying to do that, trying to make trading a thing but they're also trying to shove private credit into 401ks yeah so this is the tension right like you don't want volatility yeah but like you want retail customers and it is hard to build a retail product that is completely illiquid yeah like it makes sense there's like an economic intuition for like you can put private credit into your 401k or your target data fund and you'll know with certainty that you won't need the money for 30 years so that you can take the illiquidity risk.

You don't need liquidity because you're a long-term saver.

Right.

But nobody actually believes that because, like, retail is like, it's hard to lock up retail for 10 years.

Right.

And so, in practice, to have a retail product, you need something like at least an interval fund and maybe an ETF.

Right.

And an ETF, you need trading, right?

Like, you need to be able to trade the stuff.

So, yeah, like, there is definitely a push for trading of private credit to get it into retail.

So, right.

So, it goes the other way.

But I do think the most important reason that it's hard to trade private credit

is that the deal that private credit firms are offering to borrowers, like private equity sponsors, is

we will look you in the eye and write you this loan, and we will own that loan for the duration of the loan.

And if you have problems, you come to us and like we won't be jerks because we're repeat players in this game.

And so

once private credit trades, like you know, there's opportunities for vulture funds and activists and like, you know, loan-to-own investors.

And so it's less pleasant for the private equity sponsors.

And so, you know, as they say in the article, you know, unlike most bonds, private credit loans require the approval of the lead lender and the private equity sponsor to trade.

Yeah.

So even if JP Morgan could get someone to sell something, they'd have to go to the sponsor and say, hey, can we buy this loan?

And the sponsor could say no.

Yeah.

Which that's a damn.

So they have veto power, basically.

Yeah.

It's not just veto power.

It's not just like, we don't want our loans to end up in the hands of like activists we're scared of.

It's also just like we want our loans to be held by five people we negotiated with rather than like any random person.

Yeah.

Because we want to be able to have a like relationship with them.

If we need to, you know, extend or refinance the loan or, you know, if we run into problems and we need to restructure, like we want to be able to talk to people who we know and who like we have a long-term repeat relationship with rather than

some random CLO manager.

Yeah.

And so that makes it hard to trade private credit.

So how does this evolve?

I know that you're in the camp.

It seems that it kind of feels inevitable.

Yeah, I think so.

But there's like a real cut argument.

Yeah.

And you also have, I mean, like you said, the private equity sponsors don't want this.

You also have like the likes of Blue Owl who thinks that private should stay private.

I mean, like, how do you see this evolving?

Will there be a corner that remains in the shadows?

Or do you think that everything eventually will be out in the open and traded?

You know, I think it's going to be contractual.

And so, like, you know, you see a little of this in the broadly syndicated loan market, where some loans are very restrictive about who can buy them.

And, you know, for the most part, people think of the broadly syndicated loan market as like, you know, kind of trading.

And like banks have trading desks and it trades and it's, you know, you can get like marks and stuff.

But it's not as liquid as the bond market.

And like some loans, you know, have long, restricted lists where people can't buy it.

You can have that in private credit, right?

Where like some sponsors, some deals don't trade very much because they're very restrictive.

And other people say,

I don't really care.

I will get a better price if I allow more trading with my loans.

And so I'll just take the better price.

And it's like, interestingly,

there aren't that many private credit firms and there aren't that many private equity sponsors, right?

Like it's all kind of like...

oligopolistic and so you can imagine like you know people just come into arrangements and say okay fine we'll

you know or like

you

have your your reasons for borrowing from firms that really don't allow trading, or you have your reasons for borrowing from firms that love trading, and like, you know, you get, maybe you get a better price with more liquidity and, you know, all the other stuff.

Yeah.

Another possibility, I've gotten a couple of reader emails about this is like you can sort of like halfway allow private credit trading where instead of

selling the loan to someone, you sell like a participation in the loan where the original lender keeps like the servicing rights and keeps the relationship with the borrower, but someone else is buying the economic value of the loan.

That's like sort of a compromise that might work and might, you know, give you some of the things that you want, like letting the original lenders cash out a little bit or de-risk a little bit.

It's like a little hard to imagine because, like, with leveraged loans, a lot of what people do want is like the control rights and the servicing rights and the ability to like have a seat at the table in the restructuring, but maybe that's the way for it to go.

Yeah.

It'll be fun to find out.

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Katie, this is my last podcast because

you got the call from Mark Zuckerberg.

Me too.

I think it was fake, though.

It's hard to know because

apparently we're not alone in thinking that our Mark Zuckerberg calls were fake.

I'm just kidding, but in fact, it is.

Oh, I'm not.

No, no, I'm kidding.

It does seem to be the case that every single AI researcher in the world has gotten Mark Zuckerberg sliding into their DMs.

Yeah.

And 95% of them have been like, that's not Mark Zuckerberg.

Which is weird, right?

Yeah.

Which is weird because I don't know.

AI is so weird.

I was writing a little bit.

Like just the concept?

No, the job market.

Oh, yeah.

I was writing a a little bit about this.

I'm used to the financial industry where the job is to pay people enough that they don't leave for your competitors, but not so much that they leave to sit on a beach.

You need them to still want more money, but not be able to get it elsewhere.

And like, you know, there's like a range, right?

Like, there's like, if you pay them more than X, they won't go to your competitors.

And if you pay them less than Y, they won't quit to go to the beach.

And like, you know, Y is good to the next.

In AI, it's like, it's flipped.

like in ai to

out compete your competitors for the best ai talent you need to pay the best ai talent a hundred million dollars yeah it's an

old like to like a 28 year old right yeah

i i love my job but like yeah for sure if i got a hundred million dollars i wouldn't do it anymore yeah yeah that's true that's too much money so are you

are you implying it's just more important that they don't work at Open AI?

What do you mean?

Listening to your talk, it sounds like you're saying that Mark Zuckerberg is hiring these people just so they're not working at Open AI.

It's very bizarre to me.

I assume there's some sort of like structure on their compensation where they don't just get a bag of money on the first day.

And then leave.

But no, I don't think he's like hiring them to get them out of OpenAI.

I think he's genuinely trying to build a giant AI research project.

Yeah,

super intelligent.

Super intelligence.

Thank you.

And it's apparently intended to include every AI researcher in the world at $100 million million a pop.

And it's amazing.

I think their desks are also going to be close to Mark Zuckerberg.

They're going to be physically close to him as well.

And they're going to be made out of diamonds.

Yeah.

I truly,

like, I'm used to finance, but like, in tech, it's like a famous concept of like resting, investing, right?

Like, it's famously like there are people who,

by virtue of being early employees at successful companies,

don't need to work anymore.

Yeah.

And in AI, there are only those people.

Every person who works in AI doesn't need to work anymore.

It's so strange.

They must all be really motivated by building AI.

Yeah.

I mean, I just find.

I'm exaggerating.

I'm sure there's like some listeners who are like, I don't think I paid like $8 million a year.

And I work in AI.

And it's really like, you're really exaggerating.

I agree.

I'm really exaggerating, but you keep reading stories about people getting

really enormous comments.

Yeah, super disheartening.

I find

I love when people get paid a lot of money.

It's just like Rise and Tides left all buttons.

He's just a good guy.

I find Mark Zuckerberg just a fascinating individual.

I find Meta fascinating as well.

You know, Meta used to be called Facebook, and then he spent so much money on the metaverse,

tanked the stock.

This was a huge thing.

Like, how much money he was funneling in for no return.

Then they had to do the year of efficiency or whatever.

They fired a bunch of people.

I do wonder if we're watching this build up again when it comes specifically.

Like, as a general matter, I kind of think that, like, AI is the real version of the metaverse.

I don't know.

You think AI is more real than the metaverse?

I just feel like

the grown-up version?

I just feel like you can look at

the LLMs and ask them to do useful things, and they do useful things.

And you're like, oh, that was useful, right?

And then the metaverse, it's like, ah, I don't have legs.

And a video of, you know, like.

Here's the Eiffel Tower.

Right.

Like, the metaverse was obviously intuitively stupid the whole time.

I don't know.

He spent so much money.

No, I know.

No, we're not cutting this.

This is good.

I don't know if I've made this point on the podcast before, but I truly, truly, truly believe that if he had just waited like a year or two, it would be AI platforms.

I feel like

in his heart of heart, does he regret naming it meta platforms?

I would like to say that.

At another level, like meta platforms is a fine name for whatever nonsense you're doing.

Like, it's fine.

If you need a metaverse platform, it's terrible.

That's true.

It's like meta.

It's like meta.

Yeah, I feel like everyone has kind of forgotten the metaverse of the metaverse.

I do seriously wonder, though, if we're watching round two of this, though, this buildup, and that in a couple of years, maybe we're going to be talking about massive layoffs and, you know, meta's next year.

There's a layoff at the AI researchers because, like,

if it stops being fun, they'll just leave because they have $100 million.

That's true.

That's true.

It is interesting to contrast how hard Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are going at AI versus like Apple, where the narrative is very much that they've fallen behind.

And then you think about Microsoft, which has just been shutting thousands and thousands of jobs.

Like Meta stands.

Yeah, but Microsoft has like the open AI.

Well, sort of.

It's like complicated, but Microsoft sort of has like, you know, open AI as its AI horse.

Yeah, that's true.

Just simply making the point that like Meta is moving in a lot of different ways than some of its magnificent seven peers.

Sure.

Right.

No, I'm sure that a lot of the peers are having the same thought you are, which is like spending billions and billions of dollars to hire 20 people is surely not an efficient

way to do anything.

Yeah.

Seems like shareholders are on board for the time being, though.

I think enough reasonable people think there's some sort of like winner-take-all aspect to this that it's not insane to be like, we're going to spend billions and billions of dollars to hire every AI researcher so that no one else can have them.

I mean, it's a little insane, but it's like, it's within the parameters.

I do want to say, I've been talking about people getting paid $100 million, but that's not the cap.

There's like, what is it, scale AI that they bought?

Yeah, that's the other thing.

The store bought for $14 billion.

Yeah.

Of which not all of it goes to the handful of founders they wanted, but those people are getting paid more than $100 million to come work for Meta.

It's not called salary.

It's called like acquisition.

I think you jokingly referred to 28-year-olds, but isn't the co-founder i think he's 28

this is the thing like for one thing these salaries are so much higher than like 28 year olds usually get paid in like the financial industry

but for another thing like i joked about this but it's kind of true like you work in finance like you start out making like a nice living but like you see everyone around you with like their compounds and ammonia and you're like oh i want that and then like as you move up the ladder you get paid like millions of dollars but you're like i need more millions of dollars to have the lifestyle that I've come to expect.

Right.

In Haley, like all these people started two years ago.

They don't need anymore.

I don't, it's like a bizarre.

So just retire?

It's just like finance is a good job of creating the wants in people

that lead them to want to keep working, even if they're making tens of millions of dollars a year.

Yeah.

Like, I guess that's true in the tech industry, too.

But it seems less reliable.

Like all these people are right out of grad school and they're getting paid $100 million.

They weren't getting paid $100 million five years ago.

They weren't starting at firms where

the CEOs of those firms were making hundreds of millions of dollars because five years ago, the AI people weren't making hundreds of millions of dollars.

This is vaguely reminding me of a conversation I believe that we had on this podcast a couple of weeks ago about how like it feels like every tech founder or like social media site, like there has to be like some element of like, we're saving the world or like we're changing humanity or something like that.

I wish I could remember what exactly we were talking about.

And I think I made the point, or at least I was thinking, like, I wish that they would just say, I'm making a social media site that I'm going to sell ads on or something.

Like, I feel like with these people that are making so much money, though, maybe it is true that like they view their mission as like higher than

well, I think that AI, I mean, whatever, like, I think AI is

like, there is some level at which

you are like, ultimately selling ads on social media sites right but like not it's

not as much

yeah no no no no and i think that like there are a lot of grandiose claims about like the effect on humanity of like you know these lolms but like some of it's true i don't know man it seems like a more fundamental thing to work on than

no this seems

this seems a little bit more like i could see like a real you know we're changing the world you have a real mission statement when it comes to this yeah but i can't remember what exactly we're going to do also you can get paid a hundred million dollars that's really important That's true.

I would take one year at $100 million and then I'd probably leave.

Well, that's all I'm saying.

Yeah, we're in alignment.

I feel like.

Okay, so I feel like...

That's why we both picked up the phone call from Mark Zuckerberg.

And that was the Money Stuff Podcast.

I'm Matt Levian.

And I'm Katie Greifeld.

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