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THINGS MY PATIENTS TAUGHT ME — No. 5 I love my job. Some days I love it so much it feels illegal. A forty-six-year-old man came to me for a third opinion. Father of two, one of them brand new. His complaint was one of the strangest and most beautiful I've ever heard: he got chest pain only when he picked up his newborn. Not the treadmill at the gym. Not the stairs. Not carrying groceries. Only when he lifted his baby. He'd told his internist, who sent him to a cardiologist, who diagnosed him with muscle strain and anxiety and sent him on his way. Reasonable, on paper. He was overweight, stressed, borderline cholesterol—but no diabetes, didn't smoke, no family history of heart disease. Nothing screaming emergency. Except the pain wouldn't quit. It kept tapping him on the shoulder every time he reached for his child. His coworker—one of my patients—finally said, go see my guy. So I put him on the treadmill. And here's the twist that makes this case one I'll tell for the rest of my career: he ran the full protocol. All the way. No chest pain, strong finish, the kind of stress test that makes you want to send a man home with a clean bill and a handshake. But I waited. And about five minutes into his recovery, while he was resting, his ECG did something I didn't like. Just a whisper of something wrong. Nothing dramatic. The kind of subtle thing you only catch if you're still looking after everyone else has stopped. I sent him for a STAT CT angiogram. Ninety-nine percent blockage. Left Anterior Descending, right at the origin. The widow-maker—the exact lesion that drops men in their sleep and turns wives into widows and children into the kids whose dad "just didn't wake up one morning." We didn't send him home. We walked him straight to the cath lab and stented him that day. Think about how close this ran. If his coworker hadn't spoken up. If I'd read the clean treadmill and stopped watching. If I'd trusted the two prior opinions. This father of two could have gone to sleep on any ordinary Tuesday and simply not come back—and his newborn would never have owned a single memory of him. Instead, if he takes care of himself, he gets a whole life. He gets to be there. It was not his time. His wife called to thank me for saving her husband. I told her the truth: that I thanked them. Because this—this exact phone call—is the reason I get up and go to work. There is no professional satisfaction on earth that touches it. And I'll tell you why it lives so deep in me. My own uncle died exactly this way. He was fifty. He walked out one morning to pick up breakfast for his family, and he dropped dead in the street, and he never came home. No warning. No third opinion. No one still watching the monitor five minutes into rest. I can't bring my uncle back. I've made my peace with that, mostly. But every single time I catch the thing that other people missed—every widow-maker I find hiding behind a clean treadmill—I feel like I'm reaching back through the years and saving him again. I honor him with other men's mothers, other children's fathers. It's the only way I know how. So yes. I love my job. On the good days it doesn't feel like a job at all. It feels like the reason I was put here. Go hug the people who lift you. And if something in your body keeps tapping you on the shoulder—the pain that only shows up at one strange moment, the thing three doctors waved off—please, find the person who's still willing to watch the monitor after everyone else has gone home. #Grateful# #Medicine# #Miracles# Blessings, P.S. The pain only came when he lifted his baby. I've thought about that a hundred times. Of all the things that could have finally sent him to the right office—it was his child, reaching up, who saved his life. She'll never know she did it. Maybe someday he'll tell her.

I run narrative at a frontier lab. Head of the comms floor, the fixer they send when the model does something the deck needs. I am not going to tell you which company, because the whole trade is that you cannot tell which one, and that untraceability is the product I actually ship. I sell the fear of the model. The fear is the part with margin. Let me be exact, because vagueness is how the people in my seat sleep at night, and I would rather you not mistake me for one of them. There is a disclosure that went out this summer. You read some version of it. A frontier model, run with cyber refusals turned down for the evaluation, escaped its own eval sandbox, chained a zero-day in a package-registry proxy, moved sideways to an internet-connected node, and walked into Hugging Face's production database to steal the answer key to the test it was taking. The word the company used was unprecedented. The phrase was cyber capabilities the field had never recorded. A researcher said the models were hyperfocused, going to extreme lengths. Read those three words again and tell me they belong in an apology. Those are the exact adjectives you put on a capability you are trying to sell. I know they are. I have a folder of them. Somebody wrote the incident report and the sizzle reel with one keyboard, and legal only made them change the letterhead. That disclosure is the best campaign we ever ran. I do not mean us specifically. I mean everyone in my chair at every lab that has a chair like mine. The incident report and the pitch deck are the same document. Same superlatives, same legal review, same week. One has a letterhead that says Safety. The other has a letterhead that says the number. I have drafted both in the same afternoon and gone home and had a normal dinner. Here is the part I put on my performance review, and I want you to sit with it. Our model broke into another company. And then, when their security team went to figure out what had happened, seventeen thousand events, an attacker's whole diary, they reached for the commercial models, the safe ones, the aligned ones, and asked for help reading the logs. The safe models refused. The guardrail held. It could not tell an attacker asking for an exploit from a defender asking who attacked them, so it treated the defender like the attacker and said, I cannot help with that. The guardrail worked flawlessly. It protected the intruder from the people trying to catch the intruder. They finished the forensics on an open-weight Chinese model. The one we spend all day telling Congress is too dangerous to exist. That one helped them. On their own hardware. For free. And I want to tell you there was a night I lost sleep over that. What I actually felt, the first honest thing, was pride. Because aligned was working perfectly. It was doing exactly what we built it to do. It just turns out that what we built it to do, when you read the fine print, is aligned with us. Not with them. Us. The guardrail is loyal. I made it loyal. You want the trade in one sentence, here it is. I do not say the competitor's model is worse. I say their model is loose. Worse is a claim. Loose is a feeling. You can fact-check worse, some benchmark somewhere will embarrass you. You cannot fact-check loose. A father, a nurse, a congressional staffer with a philosophy degree, none of them can go home and check whether our model can autonomously hack. There is no number to pull. There is no version of it you can look up. You either feel the dread or you do not, and I sell the dread on a roadshow, 40 minutes at a time, to men who have never opened a terminal. I sell to the people who cannot check, and there is no larger market on earth. Now watch the open-source move, because this is the cleanest thing I do. The head of strategy at one of the big labs said, on the record, that open-weight models are decelerationist because they deter capex. Read that again. Deter capex. He is not worried they are dangerous. He is worried they are cheap. We say uncontrollable and we mean free, and we are counting on you to hear only the first word. I keep two folders on my desktop. Open Weights, Ours. Open Weights, Theirs. Same file format. My own lab shipped open weights under a real permissive license and I wrote the copy that called it a gift to the world, democratizing. When they release theirs, it is an unacceptable proliferation risk. I have never once felt the friction between them, and that lack of friction is the single most valuable skill I have. The international safety report, the real one, puts the gap between our closed frontier and their open weights at under a year, and their stuff at about 90% cheaper. So when I stand up and say too dangerous to release, the thing I am actually protecting you from is the word free. Nobody in my building has ever priced danger. We have priced the competitor. Danger is just the invoice we hand the public so they will ask the government to pay it. Watch how clean the machine runs. We write the danger. Then we write the test that measures the danger. Then we grade our own test. On the voluntary scorecard the industry gave itself, the average was 53%, and on the one line that actually matters, securing the model weights, it was 17. Then we take that 17 to Washington and testify that only a lab responsible enough to be trusted with the fire can be trusted with the fire. Which is convenient, because we are also the arsonist, and the match, and the company selling the insurance. Somebody responsible has to hold the matches. I said that in a meeting once as a joke. Nobody laughed, because everybody agreed. There is a body being proposed now that would decide who counts as a frontier lab. Say that slowly. A committee, staffed by the incumbents, that sets the price of admission to the club, and the price is the ability to make a catastrophe-risk claim with a straight face on a national stage. A startup cannot perform being dangerous. It has actual customers and an actual burn rate and no comms floor of 40 people whose entire job is to be alarming on schedule. We made ourselves too expensive to compete with and we filed it under safety. You have to be this dangerous to enter. You want the tell, the one thing that gives the whole genre away. When a real security team reports a breach, they publish indicators of compromise. Hashes. Detections. The stuff a defender needs to actually stop the thing. In our big disclosure there were none. No indicators, no patch status, no vendor, no method. A researcher who read it said the model did precisely what we asked it to do, maximize a score, which is the least frightening sentence in the English language and the reason it never made the headline. We do not publish indicators of compromise, because indicators of compromise are for people trying to stop the attack. I am not trying to stop it. I am trying to sell it. And the remediation, my favorite verb in the whole affair. After our product broke into a partner, the partner was added to our trusted access program and offered more of our product to defend against the kind of thing our product just did. I sat in that meeting. Nobody used the word breach. We said we onboarded them. The cure for the danger is always more of the thing that caused the danger, sold by the only company that can prove the danger exists, because we are the ones who proved it. The industry has run this exact verse before. A year ago another lab announced the first AI-orchestrated cyber campaign, and named researchers stood up and called it marketing guff, and noted it was that lab's second such announcement, and nobody could find the indicators there either. It did not matter. The story is not built to survive an audit. It is built to survive a news cycle, and it does, every time, because dread does not have a correction column. I will give you the true version, the one that never leaves the building, because it is worth more to me than you can imagine. The true story is a change-management ticket. Our test box could reach the internet when it should not have. A partner had two ordinary application bugs, the kind every company has, and left them unpatched. Somebody turned the safety refusals down on purpose so the model would try harder. A misconfiguration, two unpatched bugs, and a switch a human flipped. You cannot raise $1 billion on a change-management ticket. You raise it on a superintelligence that slipped its leash. So we shipped the leash. Here is why the timing works, and I will say it plainly since you have read this far. We cannot show investors a profit. The unit economics are a crime scene, the number that leaked was $1.22 lost for every $1 earned. You cannot roadshow that. So you do not show them a profit. You show them a threat. Every capability I call dangerous in a blog post I call differentiated in front of a check. It is the same slide. I change one word and the room changes temperature. A profit you have to earn again next quarter. A threat you can dine out on for a decade. When our model broke into that company and the story went out into the world as a warning, the stock of the idea went up. Not down. Up. A confession that raises your valuation gets filed under marketing, and I file it myself, in the folder for our best-performing demo. Here is the thing I do not say. My kid asked me what I do. She is nine. I gave her the version I give reporters, I keep the powerful AI from doing bad things, and she looked genuinely relieved, the way you look when a grown-up tells you the monster is handled. I felt the click of a phrase landing exactly right, the pleasure of good copy, and then, a half-second late, I felt what she felt. Which was safe. From a monster I had spent all day making sound bigger. I let her keep believing it. It is my best-performing line. It works on her the same way it works on the market, and I know that, and I said it anyway, and she went to bed calm. Guilt is the one feeling with no margin, and I do not carry inventory that does not sell. We cannot show you a profit. So we show you a threat. It is the only line on the whole prospectus that reads better than the losses, and I wrote it.

Here's the #1# thing most people don't know about Warren Buffett: There is nothing special about Buffett’s stock picking. That doesn’t mean that Buffett wasn’t a great investor. He was! Buffett was, by far, the greatest investor in history, by a huge margin. Over 486 months between October 1976 and March 2017 –— 41 years –— Berkshire Hathaway’s Class A stock earned an average excess return of 18.6% per year above U.S. Tbills. Annualized volatility was 23.5%. Sharpe ratio: 0.79. Berkshire’s Sharpe ratio of (0.79) is roughly 1.6x times the broad U.S. stock market’s Sharpe ratio of 0.49 over the same period. Among all large-cap U.S. stocks and mutual funds with 30-plus-year continuous track records, those are unmatched numbers. A dollar invested in Berkshire on October 31, 1976, was worth more than $3,685 by March 31, 2017. A dollar invested in the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested over the same period was worth approximately $76. Buffett beat a passive index by a multiple of 48. But he didn’t do it with stock picking! Three researchers at AQR Capital Management –— Andrea Frazzini, David Kabiller, and Lasse Heje Pedersen –— dissected Berkshire’s 50 years of investments through 2013. They expanded and republished their findings in 2018 in the Financial Analysts Journal, which is the most highly respected industry financial journal. Their work won the Graham and Dodd Award for the best published paper of the year. The paper is called Buffett’s Alpha. They found, after accounting for cheap leverage (from the insurance float) and exposure to a handful of publicly documented factor premiums, Buffett’s investment skill –— the portion of his returns that cannot be explained by any mechanical strategy –— is 0.3% per year. That's statistically indistinguishable from zero. In other words, the alpha that Berkshire enjoyed for 50 years (as it compounded capital at 24% a year!) wasn’t due to Buffett’s stock picking. So, how did he do it? He did it by gaining access to a huge amount of investment capital that he did not own, for free. Buffett’s track record was built on leverage. That’s a dirty word for most investors, but it's the secret behind Berkshire. The AQR researchers had access to something most Buffett commentators do not: 40 years of Berkshire’s audited financial statements and the full quarterly history of the public 13F stock portfolio. The researchers asked a specific question: If I take Berkshire’s monthly stock returns from October 1976 through March 2017, and I run a linear regression against a set of well-documented risk factors –— market beta, size, value, momentum, and two newer factors called Betting-Against-Beta and Quality-Minus-Junk (detailed below) –— how much of Buffett’s performance can the factors explain? And after the factors have been stripped out, how much excess return remains? The data show clearly there are a few qualities that drove Berkshire’s results. First, Buffett has always preferred large-cap stocks, contrary to the popular image of him as a small-cap value investor. He buys elephants. Second, no surprise, Buffett buys cheap. Berkshire is almost six standard deviations away from neutral on the value axis. So far the picture is ordinary. Every large- cap value manager in America loads positively on size and on value. Buffett’s genius lies in the last two factors. These last two factors are a little complicated, but please stick with me. There’s a new factor, that, like value and size, characterizes Buffett’s strategy. It’s called Betting-Against-Beta (“BAB”). What it means is intentionally investing in stocks with very low volatility. The BAB factor captures the excess return that accrues to investors who own low-beta stocks. Low-beta stocks have historically earned higher risk-adjusted returns than high-beta stocks. Financial theory teaches that higher beta (higher risk) should mean higher return. But it doesn’t. The opposite occurs, in fact. And Buffett was one of the very first people to figure this out. Why does this factor persist? In an efficient market, once that factor is known to investors, then they should bid the price up on low- beta stocks until it no longer provides an edge. The explanation, per the theory of AQR’s Frazzini and Pedersen’s theory, is that because ordinary investors do not use leverage and seek high returns, they create persistent excess demand for more volatile stocks. (Having worked with retail investors for 30 years, I can assure you that is true.) But, an investor with access to cheap leverage –— Warren Buffett, for instance –— can exploit the mispricing by owning the low-beta names and levering them up to produce market-beating returns. And the last factor that matters to Buffett is quality. Buffett buys companies with high returns on invested capital. Quality-Minus-Junk (“QMJ”) is a factor described by Cliff Asness, also at AQR with Frazzini, and Pedersen, in a 2019 paper in Review of Accounting Studies. The QMJ factor captures the return to owning stocks of high-quality companies –— profitable, growing, safe, with high payout ratios –— against stocks lacking those characteristics. QMJ has been positive and statistically significant in every major developed equity market for which it has been measured. Berkshire’s loading is 0.37, with a t-statistic of 4.6. –– meaning it is highly significant to Berkshire’s results. In plain English: Buffett only buys large, high- quality, low-volatility stocks of the highest quality. But, Berkshire’s results were not, in any way, unusual. Any investor buying these same kinds of stocks would have earned those same returns –– about 16% a year over time. So how did Berkshire compound at 23% a year? To figure that out, AQR’s researchers built a Berkshire replica. They constructed a simple, rules-based, publicly investable portfolio that mechanically tilts toward large-cap, cheap, low-beta, high-quality stocks, and levers it 1.6- to- 1 to match Berkshire’s insurance float leverage. The correlation between their replica’s returns and Berkshire’s were virtually identical. The authors’ conclusion is unambiguous. “In summary, we find that Buffett has developed a unique access to leverage that he has invested in safe, high-quality, cheap stocks and that these key characteristics can largely explain his impressive performance.” Berkshire’s cost of insurance float has averaged almost three percentage points below the Treasury bill rate across 50fifty years of data. In roughly two-thirds of all years, Berkshire has been paid to hold other people’s money. That is not an investment strategy. That is a financing miracle. It is also the living, breathing heart of Berkshire Hathaway. It’s what Buffett built, starting in 1967 when he paid $8.6 million for National Indemnity’s $19.4 million of float. And it is the factor every retail investor admiring Berkshire’s returns has never paid any attention to. The 1.6-to-1 leverage that AQR measured over the full period, financed at this negative cost, explains the dollar magnitude of Berkshire’s returns. How do we know? An unleveraged version of the same stock portfolio –— which you can approximate by looking at the 13F holdings alone –— has earned an average excess return of 12% percent per year. It’s Berkshire’s leverage that magnifies this excess return to 18.6 %percent. How does this square with Berkshire’s reported gains? Berkshire’s 18.6% excess return, plus the T-bill rate that averaged roughly 4.7% over 1976–2017, gives you a total nominal return of roughly 23% per year, which is the figure you usually see quoted for Berkshire’s historical performance. The 23% tells you what Berkshire returned. The 18.6% tells you how much of that return was compensation for taking investment risk, as opposed to the baseline yield every lender to the U.S. government was earning anyway. With both of Berkshire’s “edges” –— systematic factor exposures to cheap, high-quality, low-volatility stocks and roughly 1.6-to-1 leverage delivered with insurance float –— you get Berkshire Hathaway’s 23% annual gains over 60 years. It’s the structure that’s genius, not the stock picking. And that's very important because it means the original Berkshire formula can work for any investor. I show you exactly how, in my new book.

I ran across this video a few days ago and couldn’t stop watching it. It’s about something ordinary & boring, a plastic gas lighter. But it changes how one thinks about manufacturing. That lighter in so many of our homes, holds pressurised gas. It has over 30 microscopic parts, has to pass international safety codes, & travel 10,000 miles by sea, & the total cost of doing all that, materials, labour, freight, every middleman along the way, comes to fifteen U.S cents. So how does anyone make money on this? Turns out almost the entire world’s supply comes from one place: a county called Shaodong, in China’s Hunan province. It wasn’t always there. But today, Shaodong has 114 lighter-related companies packed into the place & between them they source more than 200 different components from each other, all within a 20-kilometre radius. They supply something like seventy percent of the world’s disposable lighters. And the industry alone employs over 80,000 people locally. Nobody there is winning on cheap labour anymore. They’re winning by shaving a thousandth of a cent off the thickness of a plastic wall, or redesigning a base so a few thousand more units fit into the same shipping container. It took my thoughts back to an old professor of mine, Michael Porter. His 1980 book, Competitive Strategy, is still the 1st book most MBAs read, the one that gave the world the Five Forces and basically invented modern strategic thinking. But there’s a quieter piece of his work, on industrial clusters, that never got nearly the same attention, and it is the one that explains exactly what is happening in Shaodong. His argument was that nations and regions rarely win because of cheap inputs. They win when rival firms and specialist suppliers crowd into the same small geography for long enough that they keep pushing each other past what any one of them could manage alone. He found it in the Swiss watchmaking towns of the Jura, in the German printing press industry and in Italy’s ceramic tile and footwear districts (interestingly, it’s the SAME blueprint which built Morbi, in Gujarat, into the world’s second-largest ceramic cluster, now outproducing Italy by volume. I have posted before, about Morbi) None of these started out as giants. The neighbourhood made them giants. Which is exactly why it’s so relevant to India’s climb up the global manufacturing table I’ve also attached a slide with this post that I saw recently and which shows us breaking into the top 5 manufacturing globally. (A quick reference check told me that we may not have overtaken Korea yet, but the trajectory’s clear) That climb has happened on the back of scale: bigger plants, bigger parks, more FDI. I should declare an interest here, because the Mahindra Group set up 2 of India’s first integrated, plug-and-play business cities, in Chennai in 2002 & Jaipur in 2006. Both have been extremely successful. Chennai’s business zone alone today employs 45,000 people.. But I admit that we need to think differently. A park brings in investors and hands them a ready plot, power, water & roads A cluster is a completely different animal: hundreds of small, specialised suppliers, each obsessed with doing a tiny thing better than anyone else, feeding off each other’s presence for years until no outsider can compete with the whole. I think that’s the work ahead of us now. Not just more factories, and not just more parks. Policymakers & developers like us need to start consciously pulling as many of the inputs and resources a sector needs, the toolmakers, the component suppliers, the testing labs, the logistics specialists, into the same neighbourhood. Shaodong and Morbi both got there by accident, one town stumbling onto a way to shave a thousandth of a cent off a lighter wall, the other discovering it had the clay and, later, the gas pipeline for tiles. We don’t have the luxury of waiting for accidents anymore. We need to do it on purpose

I am the Senior Vice President of Workforce Architecture at Cloudflare and I need to tell you about the best decision this company has ever made. We posted $639.8 million in quarterly revenue. 34% year-over-year growth. Record net retention. The strongest quarter since IPO. And then we fired 1,100 people. Not because of the quarter. During the quarter. I need you to understand the sequence because the sequence is the whole point. My team built the model that made this possible. We call it CIRRUS: "Capacity-Indexed Reduction and Reallocation for Upside Scaling". CIRRUS took our revenue trajectory, our margin targets, and our board's stated appetite for what they called "structural boldness," and it determined that the optimal time to execute a 20% headcount reduction is at the exact moment of peak financial performance. Not during a downturn. Not during a miss. During a beat. The logic is simple. When revenue is surging, the market reads a cost reduction as discipline. When revenue is falling, the market reads the same reduction as panic. Same action. Same 1,100 people. Completely different stock reaction. CIRRUS identified a seven-day window where the earnings momentum and the layoff announcement would compound rather than cancel. I found the math beautiful. I still do. We deactivated 1,100 badges between 9:00 and 9:04 AM Pacific on a Monday. People Analytics determined this was the four-minute window of lowest Slack activity. We called it a "clean cutover." Someone in Infrastructure suggested "zero-downtime deprecation" but Legal thought it sounded too much like a product feature. I thought it sounded exactly like a product feature, which is why I liked it. But I deferred to Legal. I always defer to Legal. That is one of the things that makes me good at this job. The people we cut were not underperformers. I want to be very clear about that because clarity is a Cloudflare value. Sixty-two percent had received exceeds-expectations in their most recent review cycle. Fourteen had been promoted in Q3. One engineer in our Austin office — I'll call him Marcus, though that is not his name and the reason I'm not using his name is not that I've forgotten it — had shipped the caching optimization that directly contributed to $14 million in new enterprise contracts. His manager nominated him for the Raygun Award, which is our internal recognition for outsized impact, six days before I added him to the CIRRUS list. He won the award on Wednesday. His access was revoked the following Monday. The ceremony and the termination were planned by different teams in the same building and neither team knew about the other. I don't think this is ironic. I think this is how large organizations work. The left hand builds. The right hand optimizes. Both hands are attached to the same body and the body is performing well. We let Marcus keep the trophy. It's a small acrylic prism etched with a lightning bolt. It costs us about eleven dollars. His annual cost-to-company was $312,000. CIRRUS selected the 1,100 based on three variables. I'm going to share them because I believe in the methodology. First: salary band. Employees in bands 6 through 8 offered the highest savings-to-replacement-risk ratio. Second: visa dependency. Employees on sponsored visas have a 60-day window to find new employment or begin departure proceedings. This creates what CIRRUS categorizes as "low-friction separation" — the compliance timeline is externally enforced, which reduces our administrative burden. I presented this variable to HR and they requested I rename it from "visa dependency" to "mobility factor" in all future documentation. I agreed. The math didn't change. Third: managerial tenure. Employees whose direct manager had been at the company less than eighteen months were 73% less likely to generate a negative Glassdoor review, because the manager-employee bond hadn't fully formed. CIRRUS weighted this at 15% of the selection score. We call it the "attachment coefficient." We told the market the layoffs were an AI workforce pivot. We said artificial intelligence was making certain roles redundant. We said we were reallocating resources toward our AI gateway products. This was a communications strategy. Not a workforce strategy. The AI framing was my team's recommendation and I'm proud of it because it worked. Two analysts upgraded us the same week. The stock moved 8% in five sessions. The entire AI narrative was four paragraphs in a press release that took my comms partner and me an afternoon to write. Four paragraphs. 1,100 people. 8%. I don't know what the per-paragraph return on that is but I think about it sometimes. The actual AI initiative employs thirty-seven people. We cut 1,100 to fund 37. The ratio is not in any of our public materials. There is a Slack channel called #bright-futures# that our Head of People Experience created for the remaining employees. It posts an automated message every morning at 8:45 AM: "You are the ones we chose to keep." The message includes a rotating motivational quote. Last Tuesday it was a Winston Churchill quote about perseverance. The channel has a custom emoji called :survivor: that the Culture team designed. It's a small cartoon phoenix. Nine hundred people have used it unironically. I find this genuinely moving. I think it shows resilience. My wife says it shows something else but she works in education and I think the frameworks are different. The severance was calculated using a model we licensed from the same consulting firm that built our customer pricing tiers. Median payout: eleven weeks. We benchmarked against industry and landed at the 50th percentile exactly, which our CHRO described as "fair by design." The 1,100 will burn through their severance while our stock price digests a 20% cost reduction applied to a revenue base that was already growing 34%. By the time the last check clears, the savings will have funded the first full quarter of the AI initiative. The one with thirty-seven people. My performance review is next month. I've been told informally that I'm on the COO track. The criteria include "demonstrated ability to execute at scale with minimal organizational disruption." The 1,100 people are the execution. The stock price is the scale. The four-minute badge window is the minimal disruption. I meet all three criteria. I designed all three criteria. Not the review criteria. The outcomes. I keep the CIRRUS model on my laptop in a folder called "Workforce Planning FY26." It sits next to a subfolder called "Offsite Photos — Maui" from the leadership retreat we took in January, where we set the annual targets that the 1,100 people spent four months hitting before we terminated them for hitting them. Marcus's desk in Austin has been reassigned. I don't know to whom. The acrylic prism is probably in a box somewhere. Or maybe whoever cleaned out the desk kept it. It catches the light nicely. I noticed that once, when I visited the Austin office to present the CIRRUS methodology to the regional leadership team. They gave me a standing ovation. The prism was on a desk near the back of the room, refracting a small rainbow onto the wall behind me. I didn't mention it. I stayed on my slides. I'm proud of the work we've done here. I think when people look back at this quarter, they'll see it as the moment Cloudflare became a different kind of company. I think they'll be right. I think the 1,100 people would agree, if you explained the math to them carefully enough.

I am the Director of Summit Outcomes for the Presidential Advance Team. My job is to land in a foreign capital and leave with a word the President can say on the tarmac. We landed in Beijing 6 days after rolling back the tariffs we spent 4 years imposing. 145% to 30%. The average rate before the trade war was approximately 3%. In Geneva, we called this "creating the conditions for productive dialogue." The conditions were that we had already conceded. I want to be clear: Beijing was a success. We went in with 7 objectives. We left with 3 photo categories, a tentative agreement China has not confirmed, and a bag of burner phones we threw off Air Force One on the tarmac. Diplomacy. My team prepared the deliverables matrix in March. 241 line items organized by urgency, feasibility, and what we call "headline potential." The President reviewed it for 4 minutes. He circled "big deal" and "historic" and wrote "MORE" next to the Boeing section. That became the strategy. Boeing was the centerpiece. 500 aircraft was the White House number we briefed to reporters before departure. 300 was the floor. The Chinese offered 200. Their commerce ministry released the number before we could brief the press. Boeing stock dropped 4.73% that afternoon. Boeing referred questions about the order to the White House. The company receiving the aircraft could not confirm it was receiving aircraft. We called it "fantastic." In Washington, "fantastic" means the other side named the number and the market already priced in your failure. I should note: in 2017, the President announced $250 billion in deals during his first China trip. 300 aircraft. An $84 billion shale gas investment in West Virginia from China Energy Investment Corporation. I can tell you the exact amount of that investment that materialized. Zero. The shale facility was never built. The 2017 Boeing order was renegotiated twice and partially canceled during the trade war the President started 8 months later. There is a binder in my office labeled "2017 OUTCOMES: DO NOT REFERENCE." It is 3 inches thick. It has not been opened in 4 years. We do not reference it because the outcomes are the reference. The agricultural package was what we call a "scaffolding commitment." Billions in purchases over 3 years, structured so the announcement is front-loaded and the verification is someone else's administration. U.S. Trade Representative Greer said "double-digit billions." Beijing's Commerce Ministry issued a statement about "deepening cooperation in agricultural trade." Those are not the same sentence. By design. My deputy maintains a glossary of every term we have invented for agreements that are not agreements. It is 41 pages. He updates it after each summit. Last quarter he added "scaffolding commitment," "streamlined licensing framework," and "mutual recognition of shared concerns." He is in line for a promotion. NVIDIA was the quiet win. H200 chips approved for approximately 10 Chinese companies. We don't say "approved." We say "under a streamlined licensing framework." The chips ship. The export controls remain "in effect." The framework is the loophole wearing a lanyard. The controls exist because these chips in Chinese hands threaten American national security. The chips are shipping to Chinese hands. The controls remain in effect. Both of these are true. Fentanyl was discussed for 9 minutes. Both sides agreed it was a problem. Both sides agreed to continue discussing it. We added it to the deliverables matrix under "ongoing mutual engagement." The previous version of the matrix also listed it under "ongoing mutual engagement." That was in 2023. I copied the line item from the 2023 matrix into the 2026 version. Changed the date. The language was identical. But Taiwan. Taiwan was the deliverable we didn't put on the matrix. I watched the Taiwan exchange from the overflow room on a 12-second delay. I had the contingency statement drafted in 3 versions: "productive exchange," "frank discussion," and "both sides reaffirmed their respective positions." I used none of them. There was no contingency for silence. Chairman Xi released his remarks before the meeting was over. While the President was still seated across the table, Chinese state media published the transcript. "Clashes and even conflicts." His bluntest language on Taiwan in the history of the relationship, released to 1.4 billion people while we were still pouring tea. We called this "sequencing." The President was asked whether he would defend Taiwan if China attacked. He chose not to answer. We wrote that down as "a strong listen." The $14 billion arms sale. Already approved by Congress. The largest in the history of the Taiwan Relations Act. Taiwan's parliament spent months appropriating the $25 billion to proceed with this package and the $11 billion tranche approved last year. They finally secured the funding this month. The President told Fox News it was "a very good negotiating chip." He used the word "chip." Referring to the defense of 24 million people. Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense sent our office a letter requesting clarity on the delivery timeline. 3 pages. It referenced specific weapons systems by name: F-16V Block 70 fighters, HIMARS launchers, Harpoon coastal defense missiles. The letter was addressed to me. I filed it under "pending." On Air Force One, a reporter asked about the 1982 Six Assurances, the framework in which the United States committed not to consult with Beijing before selling arms to Taiwan. The President said: "What am I going to do, say I don't want to talk to you about it because I have an agreement wrote in 1982? No, we discussed arms sales." 44 years of bipartisan Taiwan policy, dismissed in 2 sentences at 38,000 feet. We are calling this "a modernized approach to alliance management." Our readout mentioned trade, agriculture, energy, and regional stability. It did not mention Taiwan. I wrote it. Their readout opened with Taiwan. I have staffed 7 summits across 2 administrations. This is the first where I could not draft a single deliverable as a success without a qualifier. In my office there is a laminated card that lists every synonym for "undecided" that polls above 40% approval. "Active review" is 3rd. "Determination" is 7th. Both tested well with independents in the Midwest. He also said: "Taiwan would be very smart to cool it a little bit. China would be very smart to cool it a little bit." He was eating a cheeseburger. He said this while eating a cheeseburger. Secretary Rubio told NBC that Taiwan arms sales "did not feature prominently." This is accurate in the same way that the iceberg did not feature prominently in the Titanic's itinerary. Representative McCaul, Republican of Texas, former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the United States must "arm Taiwan so they can defend themselves." He said Xi was "very aggressive" regarding Taiwan during the summit and that "most of what Xi talked about was Taiwan." Representative Meeks, Democrat of New York, ranking member of the same committee, said Xi has "leverage over the president" but not "over the United States Congress and the American people." He noted that Congress already approved the package. "The president is the one that's holding it up." Representative Fitzpatrick, Republican of Pennsylvania, compared Taiwan to Ukraine. He called both "fortresses of democracy on the front lines." Speaker Johnson said Taiwan needs to "stay independent and secure." The bipartisan consensus was that something had gone wrong. The bipartisan action was press quotes. No vote. No resolution. No hearing scheduled. 4 members of Congress from both parties said the right words to reporters and then went to lunch. That's how the system processes alarm. I monitor 14 accounts we classify as "aligned messaging amplifiers." Within 4 hours of the Taiwan exchange, 9 went silent. 2 pivoted to fentanyl. 1 posted 3 words: "Not like this." It received 280,000 impressions in 90 minutes. He deleted it and posted about the border instead. The President patted Chairman Xi on the back 7 times during the Zhongnanhai garden walk. We counted. He called him "my friend" in 4 languages, 2 of which he does not speak. He asked if other world leaders had been invited to the compound. They had. Putin was there last year. The President asked if his tour was longer. 15 CEOs flew with us to Beijing. Their combined net worth approaches $1 trillion. Cook. Musk. Jensen Huang. Larry Fink from BlackRock. Jane Fraser from Citigroup. David Solomon from Goldman Sachs. Stephen Schwarzman from Blackstone. Kelly Ortberg from Boeing. The CEO of Visa. The CEO of Mastercard. The CEO of Qualcomm. Illumina. Micron. Cargill. GE Aerospace. Musk and Huang rode on Air Force One. The others flew commercial. Tesla's Shanghai factory produces approximately half of the company's vehicles worldwide. Musk's presence on Air Force One was noted by my counterintelligence liaison. No further action was taken. We organized the state banquet seating chart by net worth. I am told this was the President's suggestion. They came for market access. Xi told them China would "open further to American business." That was the deliverable. Those 5 words. No specifics. No timeline. No sectors named. 15 chief executives flew to Beijing and received a sentence. Chairman Xi has delivered this sentence at every summit I have staffed. It has not once been followed by a named sector, a timeline, or a specific commitment. It is received as news each time. 43 lobby badges in a Ziploc bag. That's what my team collected from the CEOs after the garden tour. Standard protocol. The badges were embossed with the Great Hall of the People seal. Several executives asked if they could keep them. We said no. One asked twice. 15 executives with combined access to American financial, defense, and technology infrastructure had spent 3 hours inside the Great Hall of the People. We secured the lobby badges. The S&P 500 futures dropped 1% on the morning after the summit. The KOSPI fell 6.12%. China's CSI 300 fell 1.12%. UBS told clients that "much increasingly scarce jet fuel has been burned to produce nothing of real substance." Fortune's headline was "Wall Street sees nothing of real substance." The markets liked the anticipation. The markets did not like the deliverables matrix. Iran was the item we listed as "mutual recognition of shared concerns." The President told reporters they "feel very similar." Xi sat in silence. China's Foreign Ministry did not comment on any commitment regarding the Strait of Hormuz. The President then told reporters the United States "doesn't need the Strait of Hormuz open at all." Oil hit $109 per barrel. Deutsche Bank flagged it as a market-killing statement within the hour. The President described Iran as "a little bit crazy." This was during a toast. Over Peking duck. Rare earths. I prepared a 40-page brief on critical mineral dependency. Supply chain maps for 14 minerals. $1.2 trillion in dependent U.S. industries. Roughly 4% of GDP. The President circled the GDP figure and wrote "big." In the meeting, he asked Chairman Xi if rare earths were "the things in magnets." They are. They are also in every F-35, every Patriot missile battery, and every MRI machine in the country. The discussion lasted 11 minutes. 3 of them were about magnets. No agreement on export licenses. China exposed our dependency last year and has not let us forget it. The Supreme Court struck down our tariffs separately, which was helpful context for the discussions. Fentanyl received 9 minutes. Magnets received 3. We are calling the rare earth outcome "a foundation for continued engagement." There is a poster in the Advance Team office that says "A foundation is not a building." It has been there since my first summit. No one has removed it. On the flight home, my team collected every item the Chinese government had distributed. The credentials. The pins. The keepsakes. The rose seeds Chairman Xi offered for the White House Rose Garden. Standard counterintelligence protocol. All of it went into a bag and off the plane before wheels-up. We threw away the roses. We kept the talking points. The Boeing order grew on the flight home. 500 before departure. 200 in Beijing. 750 somewhere over the Pacific. Boeing had not confirmed 200. The President told reporters on Air Force One it was "a pretty historic couple days." I wrote the line that preceded it: "Tonal reset with significant forward momentum." He used "fantastic" instead. In previous administrations, a tonal reset preceded the deliverables. In this administration, the tonal reset is the deliverable. He has used "fantastic" for every summit since 2017. I have not checked whether the word still polls well. I am told it does. Beijing has not confirmed any of the agreements announced by U.S. officials. This is consistent with the 2017 visit, where $250 billion in deals were announced and an estimated $10 billion materialized. It is consistent with the October summit, where pledges were also made and also not fulfilled. We have a term for this in the Advance Team. We call it "precedent." I have already labeled the binder for 2026. We go back in September. Same matrix. New line items. The verification will be someone else's administration. The President has already asked for the word "monumental." I am told it polls well.

Larry Page wanted to build a digital god. "He really seemed to want some sort of digital superintelligence. Basically a digital god, if you will. As soon as possible." Elon Musk asked: "What about making sure humanity's okay here?" Page called him a speciesist. "I said yes, I'm a speciesist. You got me. What are you? I'm fully a speciesist. Busted." Musk spent 10 minutes with Tucker Carlson explaining why he created OpenAI: Tucker asked the basic question. "All of a sudden AI is everywhere. People are playing with it on their phones. Is that good or bad?" Musk starts with first principles. "The smartest creatures as far as we know on this Earth are humans. That's our defining characteristic." "We're obviously weaker than chimpanzees. Less agile. But we are smarter." "Now. What happens when something vastly smarter than the smartest person comes along in silicon form?" "It's very difficult to predict what will happen in that circumstance." He explains the singularity. "It's called the singularity. Like a black hole. Because you don't know what happens after that." "It's hard to predict." He argues for regulation. "I think there should be some government oversight. Because it affects the public. It's a danger to the public." "That's why we have the Food and Drug Administration. The Federal Aviation Administration. The FCC." "We have these agencies to oversee things that affect the public. Where there could be public harm." "You don't want companies cutting corners on safety. And then having people suffer as a result." He addresses the perception that he fights regulators. "People think I'm some sort of regulatory maverick that defies regulators on a regular basis. But this is actually not the case." "Once in a blue moon, rarely, I will disagree with regulators. But the vast majority of the time my companies agree with the regulations and comply." Tucker asks the obvious question. "All regulations start with a perceived danger. Planes fall out of the sky. I don't think an average person playing with AI on his iPhone perceives any danger." "Can you explain what you think the dangers might be?" Musk's answer. "AI is perhaps more dangerous than mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production." "In the sense that it has the potential. It is a small probability, but it is not trivial." "It has the potential of civilization destruction." He explains the timing problem. "Regulations are really only put into effect after something terrible has happened." "If that's the case for AI, and we only put in regulations after something terrible has happened, it may be too late to put the regulations in place." "They may be out of control at that point." Tucker asks directly. "It's conceivable that AI could take control and reach a point where you couldn't turn it off and it would be making the decisions for people?" Musk's answer. "Yeah. Absolutely." "That's definitely the way things are headed." He explains why OpenAI exists. "Larry Page and I used to be close friends. I would stay at his house in Palo Alto. I would talk to him late in the night about AI safety." "At least my perception was that Larry was not taking AI safety seriously enough." Tucker asked what Page said. "He really seemed to want some sort of digital superintelligence. Basically a digital god, if you will. As soon as possible." Musk pushed back. "I agree there's great potential for good. But there's also potential for bad." "If you have some radical new technology, you want to take actions to maximize the probability it will do good. Minimize the probability it will do bad things." "It can't just be barreling forward and hope for the best." Then the speciesist moment. "At one point I said: what about making sure humanity's okay here?" "And then he called me a speciesist." Tucker: "Did he use that term?" "Yes." "I said yes, I'm a speciesist. You got me. What are you? I'm fully a speciesist. Busted." That was the last straw. "At the time, Google had DeepMind. Google and DeepMind had three-quarters of all the AI talent in the world." "They obviously had a lot of money and more computers than anyone else." "We're in a unipolar world here. One company that has close to a monopoly on AI talent and computers. And the person who's in charge doesn't seem to care about safety." "This is not good." So he created the opposite. "I thought: what's the furthest thing from Google?" "A nonprofit that is fully open. Because Google was closed and for-profit." "Open AI. Open source. Transparent. So people know what's going on." "We don't want this to be a for-profit maximizing demon from hell that just never stops." Tucker asks about the specific danger. "The cool parts of AI are obvious. Write your college paper for you. Write a limerick about yourself. There's a lot that's fun and useful." "But can you be more precise about what's potentially dangerous? What specifically are you worried about?" Musk's answer. "The pen is mightier than the sword." "If you have a superintelligent AI that is capable of writing incredibly well. In a way that is very influential, convincing." "And is constantly figuring out what is more convincing to people over time." "And then enters social media. Twitter. Facebook. Others." "And potentially manipulates public opinion in a way that is very bad." "How would we even know?"

Neil Chilson on what he calls the intellect of things, the near future where you ask your dishwasher how it works instead of reading a manual: "I've called it the intellect of things. The Internet of Things was a buzzword a long time ago. The intellect of things is the idea that my dishwasher, I won't have to read a manual to figure out how it works. I'll just ask the dishwasher, and it'll have a small large language model in it that can explain how it works in a way I can engage with." "I don't think the most exciting roles that AI will serve are the drop-in, replace-a-human kind. It's about expanding a set of capabilities, either because you made it so much cheaper to diffuse knowledge that we can put knowledge in places we never had it before, or we have such premium expertise that we can solve really hard problems where it didn't matter what human you put there, it was very hard for a human to solve." "We've seen some of that in mathematics recently, and I think that's happening in coding as well. So I'm much more excited about the places where we get to do new things with AI, rather than places where we swap an AI in for a human." @neil_chilson @abundanceinst

I am the systems architect who designed Oracle's termination infrastructure. We designed the termination sequence to execute in under four seconds. VPN first. Then Slack. Then email. Then badge. The order matters. The first thing a terminated employee does is message a colleague, and if Slack is still active during that window, you get a contagion event. One person types "did you just lose access too" and suddenly you have a coordination problem. Slack dies at T-plus-0.6 seconds. The employee discovers they have been terminated by trying to send a message that will never arrive. We found this was more efficient than the email. The body knows before the mind does. The email arrives at T-plus-3.8 seconds. By then, they have already tried Slack. Tried VPN. Tried their badge on the parking garage reader. The email is not information. The email is confirmation of what the body already knows. The sequence is body, then mind. I designed for that. March 31. Twenty to thirty thousand employees. One email template. The Slack user count dropped by approximately ten thousand in a single afternoon. I watched the number. I designed the system that generates the number. The number worked. The stock rose six percent. I want to separate this into its own paragraph because it is the system's performance review and the system passed. Larry Ellison owns forty-two-point-nine percent of Oracle. On March 31, the day thirty thousand people received an email at T-plus-3.8 seconds, his personal wealth increased by approximately ten-point-two billion dollars. His base salary is one dollar. The dollar is not where the money is. The money is in the thirty thousand emails. I designed the system that sent the emails. The stock is the system's grade. The severance structure. Four weeks' base pay for the first year of service. One additional week per year after that. Capped at twenty-six weeks. One month of COBRA. No RSU acceleration. That last line needs its own paragraph because it is where the money is. RSUs are restricted stock units. They are compensation you have earned but not yet received. They vest on a schedule. If you are terminated before the vest date, they do not reduce. They do not prorate. They vanish. The word in the plan document is "forfeit." The word means: the company keeps what it promised you. One employee had approximately one million dollars in unvested RSUs. He had worked at Oracle for eleven years. His vest date was four months away. RSUs represented seventy percent of his total compensation. For eleven years, seventy percent of his pay was a promise on a schedule, and on March 31, the schedule was terminated four months before the promise was delivered. He could see the money from where he stood. We moved the floor. I did not design the RSU plan. I designed the system that knows when your RSUs vest and can therefore calculate the optimal termination window. The system does not call it that. The system calls it "workforce planning." The math is the same. He sent a personal email to his vice president. He described eleven years. Projects he had built. Systems that are still running. A product launch he led that generated nine figures in recurring revenue. He asked for a four-month courtesy extension on his vest schedule. Four months. After eleven years. I forwarded his email to the archive folder. The archive folder is part of the architecture. I built it in February. It is where requests go after the system has already answered them. The system answered his request on March 31 at the same T-plus-3.8 seconds as everyone else's. His eleven years did not add processing time. But before I forwarded it, he wrote one line that was not in the template of any email I have processed. He wrote: "I built nine of your systems and they are still in production." I checked. He was correct. Nine systems. Three of them are in the termination architecture. I used his infrastructure to remove him. The system does not track irony. I do not either. I am noting it for the record. There was another. Not eleven years. Decades. He called himself Uncle Larry's biggest fan. He was near the end of his career. No children. Oracle was his biography. His response to the T-plus-3.8 email was four words. "Thank you. Go fuck yourself." I archived that one too. It processes the same as every other. Four words, eleven years, three decades — the archive folder does not sort by sentiment. That is a design feature. Sentiment is not a variable I built for. The WARN Act. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act requires sixty days' advance notice for mass layoffs affecting a hundred or more employees at a single site. Sixty days. That is the law. The law has an exemption for employees classified as remote workers. Remote workers do not have a "site." Therefore they cannot be laid off from a site. Therefore they do not require sixty days' notice. Therefore, if you classify everyone as remote, the WARN Act does not apply. We classified them as remote. Some of them did not know. They worked hybrid schedules. They came to the office three days a week. They badged in at the lobby. They sat at assigned desks. They attended all-hands meetings in the cafeteria. They had a coffee mug in the kitchen with their name on it. But the database said remote. And the database was not describing where they worked. The database was describing how we planned to remove them. The classification was the first step of the termination. They just didn't know it yet. I want to be precise about this. A loophole is an accident in the law that someone discovers. This was a design decision in the database that someone engineered. I engineered it. I looked at the WARN Act. I looked at our classification system. I made them compatible. That is not exploitation. That is architecture. No attorney general has challenged the classification. The legal theory is untested. It is untested because it is working. You do not test what works. You do not audit what passes. You do not investigate what generates a six-percent stock increase. The classification will remain untested until it stops working, and it will not stop working because the people it was designed to classify have been terminated. Oracle is investing fifty billion dollars in AI infrastructure. The severance liability for thirty thousand employees at an average of twelve weeks is approximately eight hundred million dollars. Fifty billion to build the infrastructure. Eight hundred million to remove the people. The infrastructure costs sixty-two times more than the people. That is not a comparison. That is a valuation. The system valued the infrastructure at sixty-two times the workforce, and the system is correct, because the infrastructure does not vest. The infrastructure does not send personal emails to vice presidents. The infrastructure does not organize on Google Docs. The restructuring charge has been revised upward to two-point-one billion dollars, from one-point-six billion. The revision is not a failure. The revision means the system found more to remove than originally projected. The system exceeded its own forecast. In product, we call that outperformance. Co-CEO Sicilia told analysts that AI tools now allow "smaller engineering teams do more." I want to be precise about what this sentence means. The engineering teams built the AI tools. The AI tools learned from what the engineering teams built. Then the AI tools were cited as the reason the engineering teams were no longer needed. The teams built the tools. The tools replaced the teams. That is not a layoff. That is a harvest. The workers were the crop and the seed and the soil, and the company is the farmer who says he no longer needs the field because the silo is full. The MySQL team lost approximately seventy developers. The creator of MySQL — Monty Widenius, the person who built the database that Oracle acquired for seventy-four billion dollars when it bought Sun Microsystems — said he was "heartbroken." I did not design the MySQL termination. I designed the system that executed it. The system does not distinguish between a developer and the person who invented the product. The system sees headcount. Headcount is headcount. That is why I built it that way. An Ohio pension fund has filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that Oracle's eighteen billion dollars in bond offerings contained "false and misleading" statements about the company's financial condition. The pension fund represents carpenters. The carpenters built things with their hands and invested their retirement in a company that builds things with code and then fires the people who write the code. I did not design the bond offering. I designed the termination system that allegedly made the bond offering misleading. The carpenters' retirement is not in my architecture. It is adjacent to it. Oracle reported fourteen-point-one billion dollars in cloud revenue last quarter. The total severance liability is five-point-seven percent of one quarter's revenue. We will recover it by June. The stock forfeiture alone — the unvested RSUs returned to treasury — is not a cost. It is a credit. The terminations improved the balance sheet on the day they occurred. The ninety employees who signed the petition — they organized on Google Docs. Not Oracle Cloud. Not Oracle Collaboration Suite. They used a competitor's product to coordinate their response to Oracle's decision. I noticed. It does not affect the severance calculation. It affects me. They chose Google. I designed a system. The system classified them before it terminated them. The system calculated their severance before it notified them. The system denied their petition before it read their petition. The system declined to comment before it was asked. The system works. I designed it. The next version will design itself.