North Korea’s Secret US Workforce, Canceling the SaaSpocalypse, MSL’s Latest Exits | Diet TBPN

0:01John Coogan:We gotta take a victory lap. You want to start taking a lap, Jordi? You want to take a lap while I tell everyone about our Sasspocalypse victory lap? I was just appreciating some various software as a service companies charts yesterday. A bunch of companies up like crazy. And I was thinking, I texted John, I was like, when did we cancel the Sasspocalypse? Yep. You pulled up our original sub stack that we sent back in February. We just decided at that time. It's not happening. It's not happening. We canceled it. And maybe too early to take a victory lap. But in hindsight. But there were some good arguments.

0:43John Coogan:There were some interesting arguments. And there was a lot of fear. But there were a lot of companies that were getting thrown in the SaaS bucket as just like a pure pile of code. You could vibe code it. And while that thesis might play out over a few years, it was a little bit too soon. It seemed a little bit too aggressive. And so we wanted to revisit the SaaSpocalypse and the cancellation of the SaaSpocalypse, see where things are now. So just to set the stage, the SaaSpocalypse was a rough, rough go. $2 trillion of market cap lost across the SaaSpocalypse, the major sell-off of technology software companies broadly.

1:20John Coogan:two trillion dollars wiped out, gone. Over. Moment of silence. But a lot of it's come back. It appeared only logical at the time that every company would be vibe coding their own CRM and this would happen imminently and that any company built on a big pile of code would go to zero. Of course, the core thesis still holds over the long term, but it's a lot messier in reality. So yes, having a huge monolithic piece of software is less of a moat today than it was a decade ago. That's for sure. Competition is increasing, especially for point solutions. But many of those SaaS companies that were so beaten up in the SaaS-pocalypse were revealed to have sources of strength that didn't fit neatly into the lots of lines of code written bucket.

2:09John Coogan:So babies were thrown out. 1 ,000 business development representatives. Yeah. Sources of strength. That's big. Also, just another thing that's very valuable is what percent of revenue are you claiming from your customers? So if you are going to a customer and you're saying, I'm taking 30 % cut, you're probably at more risk than someone who's saying, I'm an IT solution and you're going to spend one-tenth of 1 % of revenue. Yeah, or Shopify is the best example, right? A lot of e-commerce entrepreneurs ask them, what's your biggest expense? None of them will say Shopify. I think even a brand that is like a day old.

2:53John Coogan:Shopify Plus, for a business that I know very intimately, I think is around$1 ,000 a month in cost. And the business is doing almost$100 million a year. And even with how good the models are today, you would need multiple people basically vibe coding around the clock to have a product that was comparable. Yeah. A lot of babies were thrown out with the bathwater. The most ridiculous one was, I think, DoorDash. But there were lots of people coming for Spotify and a whole bunch of different platforms that should be very enduring because their source of strength is a network effect or something like that.

3:33John Coogan:So six months ago, we identified six companies that we wanted to use as case studies for the Saspocalypse. It was Google, Meta, your favorite company, Spotify, Shopify, Roblox, and Salesforce as evidence that large-scale software companies – We have a minute to talk about Meta? I mean – I'm kidding. I'm kidding. This is doing great. I'm kidding. And it always should have been – Don't get me started. It never should have been beat up. Don't get me started. It never should have been beat up. Same with Google. And then Spotify and Shopify were the interesting ones. Spotify, of course, there is a world where you're listening to AI music, but there's also a world where you're listening to AI music on Spotify.

4:12John Coogan:Same thing for Roblox. Yes, you'll be able to vibe code a game, but having all the Roblox network infrastructure distribution, that should be valuable in the future. Now you have a long list of unsloppable SaaS companies, companies that can't just be immediately spun up and replaced by an AI app. They're AI winners now, and it's a lot of who you'd expect. Cybersecurity is more important than ever. You mentioned CrowdStrike, but Palo Alto Networks is also on a tear. Palo Alto Networks over the past year is up 121%. It's a$320 billion company. CrowdStrike's a$230 billion company up 107 % this year over the past 12 months.

4:52John Coogan:Palo Alto's CEO bought the dip five months later. He must have been reading us because a month after we canceled the SaaSpocalypse, He was like, I think I like this Palo Alto Network stock. No, he, of course, is the CEO of Palo Alto Network. But he put$10 million of his own money into the company. It's now worth$26 million. Nikesh Arora invested as investors. Question whether AI could disrupt cybersecurity. Palo Alto has reached an all-time high level. We've got to give him some trouble next time we see him. Why only 10? Oh, really? Does that really move the needle? Yeah, he should have been 10x levered.

5:26Yeah.

5:27John Coogan:If you really believed. Come on. But, you know, he has$16 million of basically play money now. I mean, it's boy math. You know, you make$16 million trading your own stock when you're the CEO. You've got to spend that on something fun. There are SaaSpocalypse victims that have not come back, are probably not coming back, need to completely reinvent the business because they have been made obsolete by just base level LLM capabilities. Chegg is the canonical example of SaaSpocalypse victim that has not made a comeback. The stock is down 99 % over the past five years. It was hot during COVID. And, of course, when it comes to looking up answers to homework, the basic free edition of ChatGPT gets you there.

6:13John Coogan:Gemini, whatever you want to use, is going to answer those questions and hold your hand alongside your homework while you're doing it. Yeah, so they had$376 million of revenue in 2025, but that was a 39 % decrease year over year from$617 in 2024. It's now roughly an$80 or$90 million market cap. Yeah, so it's a very shrinking business, very difficult. You have to continue cutting every year to make any money, pull any profit out of that business. The newer company that is more in the headlines these days is the information is reporting that Canva is slipping into a similar situation because a lot of Canva designs can be one shot by image models like ChatGPT images, Nana Banana Pro, Grok Imagine.

7:00John Coogan:I saw the new Grok image examples and a few of them were infographics. And then there's also tools companies like Twilio is doing incredibly well. I don't know if you've been tracking this. It's up 150 % over the past year. another story where huge boom during COVID sell-off. $38 billion company. If you asked me what Twilio was worth before I just checked this, I would have said, I don't know,$5 billion,$6 billion, something like that. And that's where it was a couple of years ago. But it's done really, really well. And I think a lot of that is that it is difficult to go and Vibe code all of the interactions that you need to actually send text messages across the network effectively.

7:42John Coogan:It's agentic infrastructure, John. If you historically were a SaaS company, pivot to just calling yourself agentic infrastructure. It's more like, yeah, I mean, it's funny. It's more like it's infrastructure that will be pulled off the shelf by the agent. And so, I mean, we use Twilio for our app where we want to be able to interface with an application via text message. and we use Twilio for that, even though we could go and vibe code that, all of a sudden you're dealing with the different mobile carriers and the cell networks and are they going to flag you as spam? And Twilio has all these huge decades of relationships built out in a real network there that even though it's just a tool and it's just consumption software at the end of the day, it has this moat and so it's been doing really, really well.

8:32We have to talk about Yahoo. You.

8:37John Coogan:Oh, yeah. He is. This was took us back in time as well. Let's try to pull up the original traded card that kicked it all off August of last year. jahoo you went from open ai to msl was one of the first high profile exits in that whole saga one year later he just announced this morning he said i'm leaving meta to start a new company building the tbd lab alongside mark and alex has been deeply inspiring and fulfilling i'm proud of what our multimodal team accomplish across muse spark voice mode muse image and use video and even prouder of the team that made it possible over time i felt increasingly drawn to a problem that will matter deeply to humanity's future yet remains largely underexplored i forget what day it was maybe it was monday or tuesday when um i was uh feeling a little spicy but i was just saying that uh msl is is basically operating up against a clock which is that they did this massive talent rate across all these companies about a year ago.

9:52And when you're paying these people nine figures, 10 figures, many of those people are going to basically spend a year and hit a point where they're like, okay, I have$100 million in the bank and I'm kind of good now.

10:07John Coogan:25 % of a huge pile of gold is still a huge pile of gold sometimes. Exactly. And a lot of those people are just going to basically see the number in their bank account and be like, am I happy doing what I'm doing? Is this fulfilling or do I want to go build a company? Maybe they've always wanted to build a company. And so in the case of Yahoo, you, whatever package he had, clearly he's down to go take a risk. I don't think this will be the last of the exits that we see out of MSL over the next even one or two months. What if he starts a social network? That would be risky. What if he's like, I'm coming for it all?

10:44I mean, he says, I've felt increasingly drawn to a problem that will matter deeply to humanity's future. So maybe he's figured out how to make aligned social media. Social media safety.

10:54John Coogan:I like that, yeah. Well, we should let Tyler pat himself on the back for this card. Reels that make you go like this. This card was the first TBPN trading card. And Tyler whipped it up by himself. and it doesn't even have our brand on it. And it also has a literal baseball field in the background. But this video or this image went so viral. The original post got 30 ,000 likes on X. It did around 100K on Instagram. Yeah. Random account that, again, wasn't ours. It was crazy. It actually broke containment. Thanks, Tyler, for not watermarking it. And it was the first moment where we had been talking about a story that really broke through to the mainstream.

11:42John Coogan:Because of this trading card, we wound up covering— On French television. French television. That's where I was going. That's where I was going. But because of this trading card, we talked about this story over a course of weeks. It was very interesting and dramatic. There were a whole bunch of scoops that came out around Mark Zuckerberg making people soup and stuff. It was a lot of really entertaining stuff. We were featured in the New York Times Daily podcast, I think once or twice for talking about it. They clipped us and included our coverage in their telling of the story for their broader audience.

12:15John Coogan:And then French television sent out a bunch of reporters and cameras to come and interview us, which was very funny because they kept asking us exactly how much money did this guy make. And we're like, look, we don't know exactly how much he makes. And even if we didn't, we probably wouldn't want to share that. But it was a very funny. We did tell them there's no salary caps. That's true. There are no salary caps. The head of Instagram, Adam Aseri, just posted a new wordmark after 10 years of leaving it unchanged. Adam says, the wordmark at the top of the app hasn't changed in 10 years, so it was time for a refresh, cleaner, and more modern with references to the original and the simplicity and craft that's always made it Instagram.

12:58People don't like it. I don't have necessarily super strong opinions on it personally immediately. I do think the original Instagram wordmark here on the left had started to feel extremely dated, but it's still iconic. I feel like we're headed back to this sort of maximalism and branding, right? like however i don't know how many years ago it was like five years ago all the big fashion houses started going from their like historical word marks to updating them and making them like much more simple and yeah the balenciaga yeah yeah and there's like 10 10 different examples yeah and so this this move almost feels a little bit like lagging in some ways where i actually like that the instagram logo was like it it did feel dated but it was so distinct yeah i sent a different

13:48John Coogan:treatment that I thought they should go with. I mean, it's not too late. I think that would speak to me personally a little bit better. But, you know, their treatment, it's a choice. It's clean. Louis Vuitton collaborated with Singer and created this insane Singer ex-Louis Vuitton collaboration for a 911 that looks like a handbag. They're calling it the most tacky car. I didn't know where you were going to go. I saw this all over the feed. I knew we were going to be talking about it, but I didn't know where you'd sit. Yeah, so... Why is it tacky? It looks pretty classic to me. Yeah, let's play this video.

14:30John Coogan:This isn't that tacky. I like the color. You don't like the color? The blue wheels are tacky? This part looks nice. Well, okay. The bag around. The interior is just brutal. The stick. is pretty cool the hood with the straps this part's sort of crazy yeah this part's helmets i i don't hate the helmet there's another version that doesn't have blue wheels it's a little more subdued but it it feels like ai slop irl this is like to me like a tacky unauthorized collab i know exactly the kind of person that would would buy this look at this people are saying next level gluttony aspirated slop people do not like it new bombshell reporting from the wall street journal reveals that north korea has built a secret workforce inside american companies using stolen identities ai and accomplices in the united states to cheat its way into remote jobs and funnel hundreds of millions of dollars back to Kim Jong-un's regime.

15:40John Coogan:It's a fascinating story. The Wall Street Journal article is posted. It's a 30-minute documentary. They spent over a year investigating this. The FBI says that there are thousands of North Korean IT workers applying for jobs across America. After a year-long investigation, the journal obtained a trove of leaked browser histories, emails, calendars, and screen recordings from one cell of workers providing a remarkable look at how the operation actually works. The North Koreans apply for jobs at enormous scale. One cell tracked by the journal applied to more than 1 ,000 companies over just three months using AI at nearly every step.

16:19John Coogan:And in the documentary, they show a product that is basically, clearly they will leave a voice agent running while they're being interviewed in a technical interview, give the answer when asked about a particular technology. If they are proficient, they will simply have AI look up the answer, give the answer to the interviewer, get the job. And in some cases, they're using real Americans as frontmen. Basically, they will do the interview and then they will ship a remote laptop to say, hey, you're our new remote worker. You are qualified to work on our software engineering team at this small company.

16:54John Coogan:We'll send you a laptop and then you just collect a check, send half of it to the North Koreans and you don't have to do any work. So it's like passive income, free money for you, the American. So you said they're real Americans, but they're not patriots. Yeah. That's what I'm hearing. The documentary is pretty gut-wrenching. The individual who they talked to who was participating in this obviously is probably going to see some legal consequences for this, but it did seem like he had a very, very tough go and got into a very rough situation to be in that situation. The operation also relies on help from inside the United States.

17:33John Coogan:North Korean IT workers pay American facilitators, they're called facilitators, to host company laptops in the United States, allowing the actual workers overseas to remotely connect to them while appearing to be employees working domestically. Also, the North Korean workers, they go to non-extradition countries. So they'll go to China and Russia and a few other countries. And then from there, they will be remoting into an American laptop. So it just looks like, okay, the web traffic is coming from, it's not coming from North Korea, but it's coming from a country where if the FBI says, hey, can you send us this person, they're a criminal, that country says, no way, we're not sending them to you.

18:12John Coogan:So for one job paying$75 ,000 a year, he said he and the North Koreans split the salary 50-50. The workers also used stolen American identities to pass employment screenings, often juggling multiple identities simultaneously and holding down several jobs under each name. This all boomed during COVID and the remote work boom. And the scale of the operation is enormous. Some North Korean IT workers earn as much as$300 ,000 a year. The Treasury Department says the North Korean government can seize as much as 90 % of the wages earned by its overseas IT workers and recently estimated that these operations generated nearly$800 million in 2024 alone.

18:53John Coogan:Pretty big. So the journal's 30-minute documentary titled Infiltrated, North Korea's Secret U.S. Workforce, follows the operation in detail. It's a fascinating watch, and I highly recommend that you check it out. So go take a look. A new luxury hotel canceled a YouTuber's$4 ,663 stay. Then came the viral feud, reports the Wall Street Journal. A dispute between Amman, which we've talked about a lot on the show, and content creator Ryan Walker illustrates the growing tension between commercial enterprises and influencers. It's a fascinating story. And somebody's got to stand up for the Amman. Somebody has to do it.

19:35John Coogan:I'm ready. No, the story is actually crazy. Honestly, I don't think the Amman actually needs that much standing up for it. No. The Wall Street Journal broke it down in great detail. And it looks bad for this guy. Anyway, let's go through it. The Wall Street Journal reports that it was supposed to be the hottest hotel opening of the year. Let's play a little bit of his video. If you don't know me, I am a luxury hotel reviewer here on YouTube. I specialize in very honest reviews of the world's best properties. I'm not going to give away too much as to what happened. I want you to watch the footage.

20:08And this is a cool thesis.

20:09John Coogan:Like, he pays for the hotels himself. He doesn't get paid by the hotel for the review. The hotel doesn't pay for his stay. and consequently he can be more independent. This was the Doug DeMuro strategy. Good morning, Mr. Walker. We don't have your reservation. Long story short, that video sparked a bunch of, you know, there's thousands of comments on there, people trashing the properties, you know, basically fully taking his side. Yeah. He says, I'm honest and transparent. I'll tell you exactly what to expect and why. He had previously paid$26 ,000 for a Four Seasons yacht trip that he panned in May.

20:48And sorry for the spoiler, he's not honest or transparent.

20:53John Coogan:Staff recognize him, inform him that he has no reservation, and according to Walker, eventually call the police to escort him away. Sounds terrible. As Walker drives off, he finds an email he says he missed, sent the day before, and apologizes for canceling his stay due to scaled back capacity during opening week. Not looking closely at the timestamp, he tells viewers the email arrived late the previous night. When later pressed by the journal, Walker revised his timeline, saying it arrived the previous morning. Walker did not amend the timeline in his video or in a subsequent live stream. The internet quickly took Walker's side.

21:27John Coogan:Viewers of his YouTube channel, including people who identified as Amman loyalists and travel industry professionals, expressed disbelief. We'll never book another Amman property again, read one of the more than 5 ,000 comments, many of which express similar sentiments. Amon's spokesperson said the company does not comment on bookings. The Amon spokesperson said Walker bypassed the main entrance and he was looking for trouble. My theory is he knows exactly what he was doing. So he comes during the first week, books one night, knows that he shouldn't be filming, still decides to film and is effectively looking for trouble the entire time.

22:09And the crowd over on the Wall Street Journal loves it. The top rated comment, Amman, here I come. Any hotel that bans influencers is doing regular guests a great service.

22:20John Coogan:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a big thing is that people go to certain places to not have cameras all over the place. And it's getting rarer and rarer. And if it's so it's so actually fascinating to look at the difference. YouTube comments are like, wow i'm never gonna go to the amman and then wall street journal i'm booking now walker is a complete tool says ray edward says edward says seems mr walker struggles with the truth anthropic is apparently in talks to buy the cart for six billion dollars generation we've had a bunch of awesome conversations with with dean over at descart he's always he's very very early he was willing to do live demos of their product, like in interviews, completely on, you know, we didn't even test with him before the show.

23:12He was just ripping them live. So always had a ton of confidence in the product. Um, and they've been just cooking.

23:19John Coogan:They were valued at 4 billion, a quarter ago. Uh, Hemanshu has some extra context here, says Deckard could be one of the first AI labs focused on world video models to be acquired by a frontier AI lab. I think this also could mark an initial phase where frontier labs start treating world models as a major strategic capability alongside inference optimization as a major offering from Descartes. Yeah, interesting to imagine how this actually links to the core thesis of, you know, B2B and enterprise and coding, but certainly an amazing technology that feels like on the verge of a breakout. The demos are amazing, but we haven't had the Ghibli moment for world models yet.