The Trump-Musk Fallout + A DOGE Coder Speaks + ChefGPT

Summary

Hard Fork: The Trump-Musk Fallout + A DOGE Coder Speaks + ChefGPT
Release Date: June 6, 2025

Hard Fork by The New York Times delves into the intersection of technology, politics, and creativity in its June 6, 2025 episode. Hosted by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, the episode explores three main segments: the escalating feud between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, an insider's perspective from a former DOGE employee, and the innovative use of AI in the culinary world. Below is a detailed summary capturing the key discussions, insights, and conclusions from the episode.

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I. The Trump-Musk Fallout

Overview of the Feud

The episode opens with Kevin Roose announcing a significant development in the turbulent relationship between former President Donald Trump and tech magnate Elon Musk. Once allies, their "bromance" has deteriorated rapidly, leading to substantial repercussions for both figures and the broader political landscape.

Budget Bill Sparks Conflict

At the heart of the fallout is a contentious budget bill referred to as the "big, beautiful bill." President Trump has been pushing this package through Congress, but it has drawn sharp criticism from Musk. Specifically, the bill includes provisions that eliminate the electric vehicle tax credit, a critical incentive for Tesla—a company led by Musk. Additionally, Musk's efforts to secure a deal with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to utilize Starlink for communication infrastructure were thwarted by the bill.

Escalation and Public Dispute

The tension escalated when Trump publicly criticized Musk, labeling the bill as a “disgusting abomination” and targeting Musk's contributions to the 2024 election efforts. In retaliation, Musk has taken to social media, making inflammatory remarks about Trump’s involvement in controversial matters and even suggesting the formation of a new political party to represent a broader segment of Americans.

Implications for Elon Musk

The fallout has immediate financial implications for Musk. Tesla's stock plummeted by 14% following the feud, reflecting investor concerns over the loss of tax incentives. Additionally, Musk faces potential legal and regulatory challenges, including renewed scrutiny of his immigration status and possible congressional subpoenas. As Pete Wells notes, “This could complicate his naturalization,” referencing past reports about Musk's early career in the U.S.

Consequences for the Trump Administration

With Musk no longer acting as a “heat shield” within the administration, Trump is expected to take greater personal accountability for policy decisions. The removal of Musk's influence may alter the dynamics within the Trump administration, potentially leading to shifts in policy implementation and political alliances.

Quotes:

• Pete Wells (04:15): “This is not what he thought he was paying for when he tried to buy the 2024 election, right?”
• Casey Newton (07:10): “He is basically claiming credit for not only Trump's presidency, but also the Republican congressional majorities that that party currently enjoys.”

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II. A DOGE Coder Speaks: Interview with Sahil Lavingia

Background of Sahil Lavingia

Sahil Lavingia, an entrepreneur known for founding Gumroad and his stint at Pinterest, shares his unique experience working for DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) within the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). His journey reflects the challenges of integrating Silicon Valley approaches into federal government operations.

Motivation to Join DOGE

Sahil was driven by a desire to make a significant impact on public infrastructure through technology. He states, “I think if you’re a competent software engineer and you want to really have a maximized impact on the world, you have to work for the government eventually.”

Onboarding and Role at the VA

Upon joining, Sahil encountered significant cultural and operational differences. The government’s bureaucratic processes clashed with his startup mentality, making it difficult to implement technological efficiencies. He describes the experience as being “unable to run Python on it” and facing restrictive policies that hindered software development.

Culture Clash and Challenges

Sahil highlights the stark contrast between private sector agility and government rigidity. He recounts instances where his casual communication style and use of profanity did not resonate with the formal environment of the VA. This cultural disconnect extended to project execution, where DOGE’s focus on cost-cutting often overshadowed genuine problem-solving efforts.

Departure from DOGE

After publishing a blog post about his 55 days at DOGE and lacking support from his superiors, Sahil was abruptly let go without formal notice, signaling deeper systemic issues within DOGE’s integration with federal agencies. He reflects, “It made me feel like I wasn't misreading the room... this is just the culture of this weird entity.”

Impact on Future Tech Involvement in Government

Sahil remains optimistic about the potential for technology to modernize government operations but acknowledges the inherent challenges. He advocates for a balanced approach that respects governmental constraints while fostering innovation.

Quotes:

• Sahil Lavingia (21:36): “I think there's a synthesis here, which is because I think if you define the goals accurately, then efficiency is better.”
• Sahil Lavingia (38:11): “Of course the New York Times would say that.”

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III. ChefGPT: Artificial Intelligence in the Culinary World

Introduction to AI in Kitchens

The latter part of the episode shifts focus to the innovative use of AI in the culinary industry. Featuring insights from chef Pete Wells and food writer John Friedman, the discussion explores how top chefs are leveraging AI tools like ChatGPT to enhance creativity and operational efficiency in their kitchens.

Grant Achatz’s Embrace of AI

Grant Achatz, renowned chef of Alinea in Chicago, has integrated AI into his creative process. By using ChatGPT, Achatz generates unconventional cooking ideas and explores new culinary techniques. For instance, when opening his restaurant Fire, he utilized AI to discover unique cooking fuels from around the world, including unconventional options like avocado pits and cow dung.

AI as a Creative Partner

Chefs like Achatz view AI as a collaborative tool rather than a replacement for human creativity. They use it to brainstorm and refine ideas, allowing for a diverse range of culinary innovations. Pete Wells shares his experience with AI in recipe development, noting that iterative prompting can lead to surprisingly creative suggestions.

Resistance and Acceptance in the Culinary Field

While some chefs embrace AI for its potential to spark creativity, there remains significant resistance rooted in the desire to maintain traditional culinary artistry. The fear that AI-generated ideas may lead to generic or inauthentic dishes exists, but many top chefs find value in the AI’s ability to suggest novel combinations and techniques.

Practical Applications and Benefits

AI assists chefs in various ways, from optimizing ingredient usage to exploring cultural culinary influences. For example, AI can suggest regional spices to enhance a dish, enabling chefs to create more diverse and experimental menus without compromising on quality or creativity.

Quotes:

• John Friedman (52:31): “He was like, this sounds awesome. We should do it next week.”
• Pete Wells (57:23): “You have to become sort of unhappy. Your thoughts?”

Anecdote: Pete Wells' Dining Experience

Pete Wells recounts a personal story where his restaurant experience was marred by overcooking a steak despite specific instructions. This anecdote underscores the importance of human oversight in culinary operations, even as AI tools become more prevalent.

Closing Thoughts

The episode concludes by highlighting the transformative potential of AI across varied industries, from government efficiency to culinary innovation. It emphasizes the need for balanced integration that respects existing structures while embracing technological advancements.

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Conclusion

Hard Fork offers a comprehensive exploration of how technology intersects with politics and creativity. The Trump-Musk fallout underscores the volatile relationship between tech leaders and political figures, while Sahil Lavingia’s insights reveal the complexities of introducing Silicon Valley methodologies into government operations. Finally, the segment on ChefGPT illustrates the burgeoning role of AI in enhancing creative processes within the culinary arts. Together, these stories paint a nuanced picture of a rapidly evolving technological landscape and its multifaceted impact on society.

Transcript

[Kevin Roos]

There's one language everyone maps. Maps tell a story, turning complex data into powerful visuals everyone can understand. With a data rich map, urban planners can see where affordable housing is needed. Most logistics companies can get planes that need maintenance and the required parts to the same locations fast. Emergency responders can stay ahead of disasters so the worst never happens. Ready to see the bigger picture? Learn [e-mail] well, Casey, I don't know.

[Casey Newton]

If you know this, but today is my birthday.

[Pete Wells]

I did know that. Happy birthday, Kevin.

[Casey Newton]

Thank you.

[Pete Wells]

And what better way to celebrate than by making a podcast?

[Casey Newton]

It's true. Today I am 38, or as they call it in Silicon Valley, a senior citizen.

[Pete Wells]

And what is it like to sort of be entering your sunset years? Do you have enough put away for retirement yet?

[Casey Newton]

I have actually been rebalancing my 401k, which is a very 38 year old coded activity. It really is.

[Pete Wells]

I was trying to consider what to get you for your birthday, and I thought, well, you know, why not ask the chatbots if they have any good ideas? So I just said, hey, my friend is obsessed with AI, like, do you have any gifts that might be funny? And it gave me a lot of things I would say that were not funny. But one suggestion it did give me was, was I would. I would hand you a book, and on the COVID of the book it would say what to do after AGI. And then you would open it and it was just a blank notebook. I thought, that's actually pretty good.

[Casey Newton]

That's pretty good. So did you do that for me?

[Pete Wells]

No, it was very exp. Very expensive, I thought. Mmm, no, thanks.

[Casey Newton]

Okay, well, it's the thought that counts.

[Pete Wells]

Well, the nice thing about a podcast is you can just say it. It's as if it were real. You know what I mean?

[Casey Newton]

So here, pretend you're handing it to me.

[Pete Wells]

Yeah, enjoy it.

[Casey Newton]

Oh, thank you. I appreciate it.

[Pete Wells]

Crinkling the paper as he unwraps. Crinkle, crinkle.

[Casey Newton]

What a good friend you are.

[Pete Wells]

Yeah. So enjoy that.

[Casey Newton]

All right. I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times.

[Pete Wells]

I'm Casey Newton from Platformer, and this is Hard Fork. This week on the show, Elon and Trump's feud goes nucle. What does it mean for them and for America? Then entrepreneur Sahil Lavingia joins us to discuss his time at DOGE and why it came to an abrupt end. And finally, the Times Pete Wells is here to explain what some of America's best chefs are doing with AI. I hope it Involves cooking us dinner.

[Casey Newton]

Well, Casey, the big tech news this week is that there is trouble in Washington.

[Pete Wells]

That's right, Kevin. We're having a broligarchy blowup of the highest order.

[Casey Newton]

So for many months now, there has been speculation about if and when President Trump and Elon Musk would sort of come into conflict, would see their bromance fade. And that is happening today in a way that is pretty crazy.

[Pete Wells]

Yeah. And I have to say, Kevin, I was somewhat cynical when all of this started about how real it was, but I would say by approximately midday on Thursday, all of it seemed extremely real.

[Casey Newton]

Yes, it's very real. So we are recording this on Thursday, June 5, around 5pm Eastern Time. So by the time you hear this, things may have changed. It's all happening very quickly. But, Casey, let me set the scene for you. I'm in a meeting. I'm doing an interview. I'm not looking at my phone or Twitter or any of my incoming Slack messages or emails. I get out, and I have about 200 people yelling at me that Elon Musk and Donald Trump are fighting. And this was something that we had been sort of keeping our eyes out for. Obviously, these are two very combustible personalities who like to fight, especially on the Internet. But, Casey, what are they fighting about, and how did this start?

[Pete Wells]

Well, it all started with the one big, beautiful bill, Kevin, that is the giant budget package that President Trump has been trying to move through Congress. It passed the House and is now being debated in the Senate. And it emerged over the past several days that Elon Musk did not like the big, beautiful bill. In fact, he did not think it was beautiful at all. And earlier in the week, he called it, quote, a disgusting abomination.

[Casey Newton]

Yes. So he's not a big fan of this bill, but that by itself does not seem like grounds for a legendary falling out with one of your former top aides and political allies. So what else is going on here other than a dispute over this budget bill?

[Pete Wells]

Well, let's mention a couple of specifics about the bill, though, Kevin, because it is sort of the best evidence we have for what might be driving Elon to be so angry. So, one thing is that this bill would eliminate an electric vehicle tax credit, which is, of course, beloved by Tesla owners. Elon is, of course, the CEO of Tesla. So this could potentially be a big financial hit to Tesla at a time when its stock has been falling precipitously. In addition, Axios reported this week that Elon was seeking a deal with the Federal Aviation Administration. To get it to use Starlink for its communication infrastructure. Starlink is of course, the network of satellites owned by SpaceX, another Elon company. So we there have two examples of what would have been fairly big deals for Elon in two of his different businesses that he pushed very hard for and did not get. And that leads me to, I think, the emotional or psychological answer to your question, which is why Elon so mad. And to put it simply, Kevin, this is not what he thought he was paying for when he tried to buy the 2024 election, right?

[Casey Newton]

I mean, he was out on X this afternoon saying that basically Trump was only president because he was involved in the election. He donated all that money, he did all that campaigning. He is basically claiming credit for not only Trump's presidency, but also the Republican congressional majorities that that party currently enjoys. So I saw him claiming credit for that stuff and I thought, man, Trump is not going to like that. And as it turned out, Trump did not like that.

[Pete Wells]

No, he did not. He posted on his own social network, Truth Social, a number of things. He, he said that Elon was, quote, wearing thin. And so he had asked him to leave the administration, which, you know, I think was, was pretty well known. Later though, he escalated things by saying, quote, the way to save money in our budget, billions and billions of dollars, is to terminate Elon's governmental subsidies and contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn't do it.

[Casey Newton]

Right. And then Musk fired back, talking about how Trump is mentioned in the Epstein files and that's why they have not been released. He's also more recently talked about needing a new political party. And most recently his most recent post as of this taping is another share of a video in which Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein are talking in 1992.

[Pete Wells]

Well, and don't forget, Kevin, he also, quote, tweeted a right wing influencer who had asked in the wake of all this, should Trump be impeached? And Musk said yes. He said, essentially agreeing with a post that said Trump should be impeached and replaced by JD Vance. So that was the post when I saw it, where I was like, okay, this is not two guys, like playing drama for the media, like they're actually real mad at each other.

[Casey Newton]

Yes, this is a big fight and it has got a lot of people talking. But while we wait for the dust to settle here, I don't think it is too early to start thinking about what this means not only for the Trump administration, but for Elon Musk and for some of the projects that Elon Musk had undertaken while he was in Washington. So, Kasey, what do you think this feud and this breakup between Donald Trump and Elon Musk means for Elon Musk? Let's start there.

[Pete Wells]

Well, I think it has the potential to do a lot of damage. Damage to Musk. Remember, one of the reasons why he made his way out of the administration was because his businesses are increasingly in trouble. And that begins with Tesla. Tesla has a number of challenges that we don't have the time to get into today, but there's a real sense that Musk has not been focused on that business and needs to return to it. Instead of doing that, though, he just amped up his feud with Trump. And today, Kevin, Tesla stock declined 14%. So I would not be surprised if it continues to decline in the days ahead as people kind of process what this means. But let me throw out an even spicier possibility for why this could be trouble for Musk. And I wanna say that Elizabeth Lopato noted this in the Verge, but she reminded me that the Washington Post had reported that Musk began his career in the United States by working here illegally. And, you know, and Elizabeth is wondering, could this actually complicate his naturalization? Would Trump actually go after Musk and try to strip him of citizenship? Let's just say if that happened, it wouldn't be the first person who thought he was a citizen of the United States who found himself deported during this Trump administration.

[Casey Newton]

Well, right, and that seems a little, like, crazy when you just say it like that, but allies of the president are actually calling for this now. In fact, just recently, Times reporter, my colleague Tyler Pager says that Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, was calling for President Trump to not only cancel all of Musk's contracts, but to initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status and maybe deport him. So I don't know that this is likely to happen. This seems like maybe a bit of wishful thinking, but I do think it is going to be a very painful breakup for Elon Musk, not only because of his exposure through Tesla to some of these policy moves and the billions of dollars that he would stand to lose if Tesla's stock slide continues, but also because of things like government contracts for SpaceX. Right. This is a man who has billions of dollars in exposure to government contracts. If some of those contracts are canceled by President Trump, he does stand to lose out that way. So not a good day for Elon Musk and his portfolio.

[Pete Wells]

Well, and let me throw in one more Legal risk, Kevin, because Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have been trying to subpoena Musk. And recently Representative Nancy Mace, who is a Republican from South Carolina, suspended the hearing so that Republicans could come and vote against the subpoena. You can now imagine a world where Trump, it goes to the Republicans, say, hey, you know what? Go ahead and let that subpoena take place. Right. So there are a lot of legal risk here. And I would just say that often in cases where authoritarians take power, it's the billionaires in the country that think, I know how I can make my safe. I'm gonna cozy up to this person. And then they find that when something goes wrong, they're actually in more danger than anyone else.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. Casey, what do you think this breakup means for President Trump?

[Pete Wells]

Well, think about how Musk functioned during the first few months of this Trump administration. He was Trump's heat shield. He went out, he did a bunch of really unpopular things, and he largely took the blame for it. He took the blame for Doge dismantling wide swaths of the federal government. Right now, Musk is gone. And so there isn't that same kind of heat shield out there. Trump is going to have to own his decisions more, and I think his presidency is going to look differently because of that. Because while this feud is undeniably entertaining and actually hugely consequential, I worry that something that's going to be lost is how useful these two men were to each other during the period. They were useful to each other because they both got a lot out of this arrangement.

[Casey Newton]

Absolutely. It was a very lucrative arrangement for both of them in some sense. And I wonder if that doesn't end up sort of mending the, The. The feud here, if like, like these guys get all of their rage out on each other and then sort of decide, well, if I'm Elon, I don't really have anywhere else to go.

[Pete Wells]

Right.

[Casey Newton]

I have burned my bridges with Democrats and on the left, and the Republican Party now, you know, belongs to President Trump. And so I think if you're him, you just may decide to stay out of politics altogether. But if you want to stay involved, like, you're kind of politically homeless if you're Elon Musk. And so maybe you do end up wanting to come back to Trump at some point, but it's too soon to say, I think.

[Pete Wells]

And in the meantime, he's promising to create a third political party that will represent 80% of all Americans. And let's just say I'm looking forward to seeing how that one plays out.

[Casey Newton]

So Elon Musk no longer has a formal role in the Trump administration, but plenty of his allies and people that he brought in are still there. So I'm curious what you think this breakup will mean for people like, for example, David Sachs, who is the president's advisor on AI policy and crypto and a longtime ally of Elon Musk's. What do we think happens to the tech right if Elon Musk, who was responsible for some of that realignment behind Donald Trump, is no longer in the president's camp?

[Pete Wells]

You know, Kevin, have you ever been in a situation where, like, two of your friends broke up with each other and then you had to choose which one you were still going to be friends with?

[Casey Newton]

Yes, the friend divorce.

[Pete Wells]

Yes. Well, so there's about to be a major friend divorce in Washington, D.C. and we're going to have to see who sides with whom. You know, the way that Trump tends to operate is by sort of showing loyalty to anyone who is loyal to him. And so if in the days ahead, the David Sacks of the world go to him and say, elon is wrong, you are right. Make America great again. I can imagine those people continuing to have a role in the administration. If, on the other hand, they feel loyalty to Elon for whatever reason, and Elon is, you know, the world's richest man and could give people a lot of reasons to be loyal to him, then you might see more of a split. So this is one where we truly know the answer to it. But I think is one of the most interesting questions to watch in the week ahead, which is what do the members of the tech right, who Musk had brought to Washington? How do they respond to what has happened today?

[Casey Newton]

Well, and we should also talk about what happens to another group of people that Elon Musk and his allies brought to Washington, which is Doge. Doge still exists. They are still out there doing cost cutting measures in various federal agencies. If Elon Musk goes, does Doge go with him?

[Pete Wells]

Yes. Wither. Big balls might be another way to put it, Kevin.

[Casey Newton]

Big balls, of course, goes, so goes the nation.

[Pete Wells]

Big balls, of course, one of the most famous employees of Doge. And you can look up his accomplishments online. So here's why this is an interesting question. I was seeing some chatter about this online over the past couple of hours because many of these folks who are part of Doge are considered to be Elon people, Elon loyalists. I'm sure there is now a contingent within the Trump administration saying that Doge is now what they would call in Silicon Valley an insider threat. This is a group of people that you now have to be worried about doing some sort of sabotage, right? Showing loyalty to Elon somehow. And so I would not be surprised if this was actually a conversation being had right now at the White House, which is which of these folks is loyal to us, which are. Which is loyal to Elon. And so we may actually see a big doge purge coming. A doge purge. Kevin.

[Casey Newton]

It is just so wild to me to watch this breakup happening more or less in real time. I mean, I remember when Elon Musk threw his weight behind the Trump campaign, people were saying, oh, this will be short lived. There's no way. These two can sort of coexist. Neither one of them is good at sort of sharing the spotlight light. This is going to be a combustible situation. And I just thought there would be enough mutual benefit in it for both of them to keep this thing going for at least longer than it appears to have gone. But I don't know. Casey, are you surprised by what you've seen over the past couple hours?

[Pete Wells]

Not really. You know, I wrote a year end predictions post. One of those predictions was that the broligarchy would blow up. I am far from alone in making that prediction. I think maybe even, you know, most observers assume that something like this would happened just because we have enough data to know about how Donald Trump and Elon Musk tend to view other powerful people in their orbit. Typically when they don't get what they want, they get super mad and they turn on each other. And so when it finally happened, initially I was skeptical just because they were kind of playing footsie with each other a bit. And I thought, you know, Elon has a lot of good reason to make people like me believe that he is mad at Trump and he's creating this distance between himself and Washington. Maybe that, you know, makes it a little easier for him to sell Teslas to Democrats again. But when it went fully nuclear, there was actually a sense of relief because in a year where so many news developments have made me feel like I am crazy and no longer live on the same planet that I was born on, this was the moment where I was like, okay, some laws of gravity do still apply. Sometimes you can just trust what you see in front of your eyes. And this was that moment for me.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, it does make me really feel for the Tesla owners out there who are trying to figure out which bumper sticker to put on their Tesla to indicate that they're not on board with Elon Musk's political agenda. Agenda here. I'm not sure that any of them have changed their bumper stickers in the last few hours, but it does seem like Elon Musk has both alienated Democrats who no longer want to buy Teslas and now as of a couple hours ago, he has probably alienated the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. And you can assume that they will not be buying his Teslas and cybertrucks anymore either.

[Pete Wells]

Well Kevin, I'm sure you have a lot more questions for me, but I really should get back to reading social media posts and sharing them in my group chats. And if there was a social media post that seemed really important that we didn't talk about, it's probably because it was posted after 5:11pm Eastern Time on Thursday. When we come back, his Doge days are over. Sahil Lavingia is here to tell us what he did to the federal bureaucracy.

[John Friedman]

Support for this podcast comes from Comcast Business.

[Casey Newton]

At Comcast Business, we're not just solving technology problems, we're driving business outcomes for our customers.

[John Friedman]

That's John Friedman, SVP of Product Strategy and Operations at Comcast Business Business.

[Casey Newton]

We've spent a decade thinking about machine learning and AI and how that makes our network better. We've embedded AI into our next gen network security offering and it's out there protecting our customers business every day.

[John Friedman]

Find solutions that truly make a difference for your [e-mail] that's comcastbusiness.com this episode is supported by KPMG. Are you responsible for deploying AI? Because safe and secure AI deployment is critical. KPMG is making its groundbreaking AI risk and controls guide available at no cost. Their extensive experience in AI risk management, cybersecurity and tech can help you identify risks, design controls and protect your AI environment. To learn more, visit www.kpmg.us hardfork. That's www.kpmg.us/hard fork.

[Casey Newton]

Well Casey, speaking of Elon Musk and Doge and the Trump administration, we have a very exciting interview to share on the show today.

[Pete Wells]

Yes, an interview that we should say we conducted before all of the dramatics on social media on Thursday between Musk and Trump.

[Casey Newton]

Yes, so last week, before any of this happened, when Donald Trump and Elon Musk were still friends, a former Doge employee, Sahil Lavinga, published a really fascinating blog post about his 55 days that he spent working for Doge. Before he was fired, he was stationed inside the Department of Veterans affairs as a software engineer. He's a veteran startup worker. He worked at Pinterest. He then started a company called Gumroad, which is sort of an E commerce platform. And I think this is a really important conversation to have because despite the fact that Elon Musk is now Persona non grata in the Trump administration, Doge is still there. Its employees are still stationed throughout the federal government. And so I wanted to take the chance to have a rare conversation with someone who has actually worked for Doge inside the federal government and who has seen what it's like up close.

[Pete Wells]

Let's bring him in.

[Casey Newton]

Sahil Lavingia. Welcome to Hard Fork.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Thanks for having me.

[Casey Newton]

So, Sahil, you have been around Silicon Valley for a while. You had a pretty good thing going. You were one of the first employees at Pinterest. You then went on to to found your own company, Gumroad. What made you interested in stepping away and moving to Washington D.C. to work for the federal government?

[Sahil Lavingia]

Yeah, I've always wanted to work for the federal government. I think it's such a cool opportunity. I mean, as a software engineer, which is my background product designer, I think it's hard to think of another opportunity for such a large impact. I think when I was even in high school, I always felt like I would eventually want to work for the federal government when I left San Francisco. So I remember feeling like the only things that private businesses were responsible for were little jewel boxes on Mission Street. Everything else was powered by public infrastructure. And so eventually, if you're a competent software engineer and you want to really have a maximized impact on the world, the Steve Jobs dent in the universe, you'd have to go work for the government eventually.

[Pete Wells]

I can imagine that the past few administrations might have been happy to accept your help.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Help?

[Pete Wells]

Why? Was this the moment that you wanted to step in?

[Sahil Lavingia]

Yeah, I mean, I actually applied for to work at USDS back in the day. So I think around 2015, when Gumroad, we failed to raise our Series B, laid off most of the team, and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. I applied to usds, but I think my background at the time was still, it's very startupy, which is not exactly like the Venn diagram, overlap of skill sets with what you may need in the federal government, like the largest company on our. So I did apply and I never heard back. And when this sort of DOGE thing started to happen, I felt like this meets the criteria of shipping code for the federal government. And yeah, I Wanted to work there.

[Casey Newton]

Now, how did the hiring process go? Do they do any kind of ideological or political filtering? Did they ask you, what do you think about foreign aid or, you know, USAID or anything like that?

[Sahil Lavingia]

I was asked, you know, did I vote for Kamala Harris, for example? Right. And basically, like, if you voted for Kamala Harris, like, you shouldn't waste your time here. Like, you're not going to get through whatever the process ends up looking like. This is pre inauguration. So pre inauguration, there's a Trump. You know, this kind of has to flow through the Trump transition team. And I said, look, I actually didn't vote for Kamala. I didn't vote for Trump either. So it's, you know, if they need that, then it's not going to really work out. But anyway, yeah, so they asked these sorts of questions. I think my guess is this kind of came from Trump, and that side of the doge, I don't think cared too much.

[Pete Wells]

So they approve your application and then what happens? You just kind of get assigned a role.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I mean, I feel like I never even got sort of like an approval. It wasn't like, congratulations or here's your offer letter, here's your salary, here's your boss, here's your department, that sort of stuff. That basically what happened was I passed, I guess, to some degree. Then eventually they said, hey, we have a role for you at the va at va as a software engineer. You should go talk to this sort of DOGE team lead at the va. And if that seems like something you'd want to do, let us know. And so that's kind of what happened. And I talked to them, and eventually they said, if you're interested, you have to get fingerprinted here in dc. And so it's sort of this, like, chicken and egg thing where it's like you're not going to get any information until you move to dc. And if once you move to dc, you're kind of, you know, you're here. Right. So like, so I never actually. I mean, even today, I still don't know what, like, my salary was. I assume it's zero, but every once in a while I get like, a check in the mail for some, like, de minimis payment, which I assume is to, like, make sure I'm not violating Minimum Wallet.

[Casey Newton]

You didn't talk about your salary before you agreed to take this job.

[Sahil Lavingia]

I'm a phenomenal negotiator.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, that's.

[Sahil Lavingia]

I didn't know. I mean, the day I'll tell you the facts. I knew, right? So I knew that I was supposed to show up 7:45am at VA, the VACO sort of Veterans affairs central office in D.C. on March 17. And actually, that's all I knew. So, yeah, I didn't know. I didn't know who my boss was. I think I learned like, the third day or something, like who I like. I didn't know my role. It doesn't say your role on your badge. I basically got my PIV card and I got a government laptop, which they call gfe, Government Furnished Equipment. And then the sort of DOGE people there kind of walked me through what I was supposed to be doing, what they were working on, and I was sort of there to offer my technical expertise. Though the laptop I got, for example, I couldn't run Python on it. I couldn't run Git, I couldn't download anything. And so I had to work through this exercise of being able to cook without any equipment.

[Pete Wells]

I want to ask a little bit about the orientation. You mentioned that some of the folks at DOGE explained to you what they were working, working on. You know, you were there presumably to serve the veterans of the United States. Did you have discussions with DOGE about, this is sort of who we serve, this is what they need, this is sort of how we want to make things better for them, or was it sort of more focused on sort of cutting costs and that sort of thing?

[Sahil Lavingia]

Yeah, the DO the DOGE conversations were around cutting costs. I think there's the Venn diagram overlap of. At the end of the day, I'm an employee. At least that's what my badge said. I'm an employee for va. You know, you go through the VA specific onboarding. There's no DOGE specific onboarding. You've got a VA laptop. You know, I have the iCare, a little memorandum on my backpack now. And so, you know, I was always like, this has to meet the filter of, like, what the VA wants, right? Nothing's going to happen if the VA doesn't want it. And so it kind of has to meet two criteria for something to be interesting, right? You have to sort of save money and make the veteran experience better, or at least not make it worse. Worse. But it wasn't like an explicit conversation of like, okay, how do we actually ship software to make veteran experience better? I had a lot of those conversations because I was interested in doing that. So I just would meet with the office of the cto, which actually was pretty well developed at va because usds, OG had kind of built a lot of a coalition there. They use GitHub, they have Slack, that sort of stuff.

[Casey Newton]

That's really interesting because I think that the larger narrative that people have heard from Doge and from Elon Musk and people who are affiliated with. With him is that sort of, once you start looking, you know, under the hood inside these government agencies, you find all kinds of waste and fraud and abuse and skeletons in the closet. And like, basically what you. You're saying is that you were surprised by how well the VA worked. Am I hearing that?

[Sahil Lavingia]

Yeah. Yes, I was surprised by how effective the government is. At the end of the day, though, you're sort of defining effectiveness by what you're asked to do. And so I do think that government is asked to do a lot of weird stuff. They tend to be quite effective at doing those things. But Congress, I think, has a role to play in this. You can think of Congress as the worst PM you've ever met, and you're asked to build an app with all these weird specifications. You're doing a job, but you're kind of playing Twister as an organization to do it. But surprisingly, yeah. I mean, there are many meetings I was in where I sort of maybe came in a little bit antagonistic to, you know, adversarial. To like, why does. Why is this contract $40 million to like, you know, process claims or something? And I would leave being like, oh, I get it. You know, like, that makes. Actually, it's pretty impressive.

[Casey Newton]

You wrote in that post about this DOGE all hands meeting where Elon Musk was taking questions, that one of the things he was sort of asking the Doge employees for was ideas about how to improve the public perception of Doge, which I imagine at this point was getting, you know, sort of all kinds of criticism for gutting various agencies and laying people off and cutting foreign aid and things like that. Did it seem to you at any point during this experience that Elon Musk and other Doge leaders were interested in solving actual problems, or were they just concerned about the appearance of productivity and efficiency?

[Sahil Lavingia]

I think maybe I'm naively optimistic, but I think there was truly a desire to solve problems because that's how you save money at the end of the day, you solve problems. You kill two birds with one stone, that sort of thing. That's what software can do. I think. My guess is that, for example, at the meeting I suggested we should livestream this meeting. I think this sort of of this would help if people saw how the sausage was made and how we weren't scheming on how to kill a bunch of African children. I think it would help the brand image. And he embraced the idea. He was like, this sounds awesome. We should do it next week. Let's do it next week. We'll start digging next week. Unfortunately, there was no other meeting that I was a part of, so I never got to follow up on that next week thing. I didn't get the invite. Did it happen? I didn't hear about it on Twitter. What's going on on. My guess is the most optimistic good faith take would be that they were truly interested in these kinds of ideas, but the Trump admin wasn't. I think people realized pretty quickly this was not going to be this sort of walk in the park and let's just focus on what we can do. Which turned out to be cutting contracts. But at the end of the day, a bunch of software engineers, not really necessary for that effort.

[Pete Wells]

Well, so tell us a bit about the cutting contracts piece. You have this situation where folks like yourself who are sort of, you know, public spirited want to see if they can make a contribution, parachute in, they're assigned a role at an agency they have no prior familiarity with, and then are just sort of asked to hack millions of dollars out of the budget. How did that work?

[Sahil Lavingia]

Yeah, so, you know, one of the Trump eos is that the DOGE team gets to sit in on a lot of contracting meetings. And so we sort of helped them review as many contracts as they could. Could. And then beyond that, it's just like lending my technical expertise. Right. It's just basically sitting in on a meeting where someone will say, you know, we're, we're like paying, you know, $4 million for this, like chatbot on VA Gov. Like how, you know, and I'm like, well, you know, like that would take me like a week to build and integrate and you know, could you explain why that costs so much more money? And you know, just trying, you know, a lot of it was just like there was somebody in the room that had coded before. I think that was a lot of it. It's like you're, you're, you're, you're, you're paying a lot of money for things. Things without the domain expertise to understand how much it should cost. So I was like the, hopefully somewhat the credible expert, quote unquote, who would come in and talk to Booze or Deloitte and just be like, hey, do you guys use cursor? What are the efficiency gains could you pass them on to us? Could you shave 25% off the bill, that sort of thing? At the end of the day, we didn't have any.

[Pete Wells]

True.

[Sahil Lavingia]

I think a lot of people think DOGE had a lot of power to fire. And at least from my perspective at VA, we did not. The EOs don't give us that power unless VA is willing to give us the keys. We can't drive the car. But we could sit in meetings and we could sort of, you know, kind of be annoying. Right. And just ask questions.

[Casey Newton]

I mean, I wanted to ask you about these meetings because I think there's this popular image that at least was going around during the early days of Doge, that Doge was sort of just this group of, like, you know, kids in, you know, hoodies who would like, barge into these meetings with very experienced civil servants and, you know, demand to know what they were working on and would sort of run in and rip things up and that it offended a lot of the career employees of the agencies where they were stationed. Was that what you witnessed? Were you the sort of archetypal guy in a hoodie coming in and telling these people, these 30 year veterans of the VA how to do their jobs?

[Sahil Lavingia]

I was not that person. I did not wear a hoodie. You know, I wore a shacket. A little bit of an upgrade. But, yeah, I mean, I think that, I'm sure to some degree that was happening. Frankly, like, I do think. I'm not saying this. I don't think these stories are made up generally. You know, like, I think they come from truth. And there was generally this vibe of, like, you know, they're not gonna help us or like they're kind of gonna, like, give us the wrong information and cause us to go down this path, which I think is probably common in a transition period. Right. Like, I think every set of transitions, you have sort of a bunch of political appointees that come in and you have a new boss that doesn't really know what they're doing. Everyone's had that manager that doesn't really understand why is someone taking so long or why is it, you know, that sort of thing. But I don't think it was as much like this idea of this office space interview process, like, even the rif. Right.

[Casey Newton]

I learned RIF is the Reduction in Force, AKA layoffs.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Exactly. The Reduction in force, the Workforce Optimization initiative where Trump wants to cut the federal workforce first. That entire EO is basically about making a recommendation to the White House about what to do. It's not about actually firing anyone. And specifically for you, that eo, it gives Doge zero power to fire anyone. So this idea of these office space conversations where you're asking, so what are you doing here? There's no point in that. I was, however, I will say I was on the older side of the engineers. Of people who are identified as software engineers. I think There were maybe two or three people who are above the age of 30, and most people were relatively young, had probably not worked a ton in production, private companies even, like. And. And it's just different too, right? I think, like, the culture, there's this, like, culture clash, lost in translation thing.

[Casey Newton]

Are there any, like, anecdotes or stories from your time at Doge that would help illustrate the culture clash?

[Sahil Lavingia]

I would swear, you know, and I remember someone telling me something like that will get you fired. It's just like, interesting. Like the rules and, and regulations that exist that sort of define conduct, you know, there's just a lot of those things. Even the drp, the DRP massively did not work. Like, I think everyone's drp, the drp, the deferred resignation program, the fork in the road emails. I see, right. Which are incredible from someone who works in the private industry, you get eight months of severance. That's a lot. That's pretty good. But the numbers of people who took it was drastically low. And I think people. There's just this cultural disconnect of why are you here? Well, you're here to work for the government for life, so an extra eight months doesn't compute. You're on a completely different career path. It's not like you're just going to exit the government and then go work at X. There's completely different ways of thinking about how you want to live your entire life. It took time for me at least to understand that these people love their jobs. And I think that's kind of a lot of the sort of disconnect culturally is inefficiency versus efficiency. It's like everyone sounds the same, like, looks the same, dresses the same, but, like, the way they make decisions then manifests, you know, very, very, very differently.

[Pete Wells]

Well, what, what was making you swear so much, Sahil?

[Sahil Lavingia]

I swear a lot. I just swear a lot. I just think it's kind of a San Francisco pirate mentality or something like that. But, you know, it wasn't in anger, it wasn't at anybody. But just like, like, you know, like, why the fuck is this so weird? Like, it's just like this kind of like, surprised Emotion that I can't really help but express in that way.

[Casey Newton]

I can't believe you just swore on our podcast.

[Sahil Lavingia]

I know.

[Casey Newton]

Please put that get fired, get out of here.

[Sahil Lavingia]

I used to make. I'll give you one example, like, a little bit of a culture, like, sarcasm, like, sarcasm just doesn't exist in the government workplace for some of these reasons where I'd come in and they'd be like, what are you here for? And, like, I'm here to riff everybody and just, like, dead.

[Pete Wells]

Wait, you thought that was gonna go over well? You gotta read the room, dude.

[Sahil Lavingia]

I know. That's part of the culture. I'm not very good at reading. I'm good at writing code, not reading rooms.

[Pete Wells]

Right.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Like, it's like. It kind of tends to be a different.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, I can see how that one didn't go over well. Hey, I'm new here. I'm gonna let you all off.

[Sahil Lavingia]

So maybe that. Maybe I.

[Casey Newton]

Maybe the story was about Chop, that one Next time.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Yeah, let's work on that.

[Casey Newton]

I'm curious. I think a lot of people say Hill will be listening to this and thinking this guy sounds really naive. You know, he hears about this DOGE thing. I think a lot of people, especially on the left, think that DOGE is sort of just a kind of pretext for an ideological purge. If they look at what the, you know, the agency has been doing inside these various, you know, federal bureaucracies, you know, trying to essentially purge any hint of leftism or wokeism in what these agencies are doing. And they will say, say Sahil should have known better than to expect that he was going to go in and actually be valued for his expertise in coding. He did not know that he was signing up for. Or he should have known that he was signing up for something very different than that. What is your response to that?

[Sahil Lavingia]

Of course the New York Times would say that.

[Pete Wells]

Get his ass now.

[Sahil Lavingia]

I mean, look, at the end of the day, it's like. It's like, you know, when I joined Pinterest and people were like, you know, that startup's not going to work, right? And it's just like, statistically, no, but maybe.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes.

[Sahil Lavingia]

And if it's the maybe that has an outsized impact, then the math ends up working. And so that's what I felt. I felt like, look, I think all startup people are naive. I think that's part of what makes us startup people is that we're not willing to sort of just listen to the traditional. This is why we don't do that. Or it's just like, no, we're not going to do that thing. And then you learn the hard way. But also, every once in a while you get an iPhone or you get AI or something like that. But, yeah, if people are like, hey, you failed, I'd be like, yeah, that's like, what happens. You know, lots of things are a waste of time. And, you know, I have time, so, you know, I'm going to try.

[Casey Newton]

Let's just close the loop. Sahil, on why you were let go from the government. You suggested in your blog post that your leading theory for why you were rift, as you put it, is because you talked to a journalist at Fast Company. Is that still your understanding of why you were let go?

[Sahil Lavingia]

Yeah, I never heard anything from them. All I heard was like, did you run this by anyone at doge? I said, no, I did not run it by anybody. And then, you know, a day later, my. My access, I just got an email from GitHub, basically, that was just like, you. You're no longer a member of the. The VA on GitHub. And I was like, oh, sh. What happened? You know, and turned out I was. I was rift. But, yeah, that's all I've heard. I've never heard from anyone affiliated with DOGE since then, you know, so, like, on anything I've done that, like, they. They just kind of ghosted me.

[Casey Newton]

That seems very sudden as a way to get laid off or to find out that you have been laid off. Did that process, that ghosting, as you described it, change the way you felt about your time with Doge?

[Sahil Lavingia]

Yeah. I mean, it honestly made me feel like I wasn't going crazy. Like, I felt like I was misreading the room, and I was just like, clearly we have a good goal. Why do we keep making these kind of mistakes? Why are we so unempathetic? And when I just got ghosted, right, like, just disappeared, my access just stopped working. No response. Honestly, it made me feel good in a way that, like, I wasn't the problem here. Like, it's like just that this is just the culture of this weird entity. You know, it's like this emergent behavior of, like, lack of empathy that exists in these systems, I think. And everyone gets to blame somebody else and kind of opt out of their own. But, yeah, I mean, I think it gave me this sense of, like, you know, my wife was right. This was not exactly, like, the, you know, the best use of my time. Like, unfortunately, the only way to learn that, you know, was to kind of, you know, the FOMO was real, right. At the end of the day, it's.

[Pete Wells]

A powerful reminder that I think a lot of other, you know, Silicon Valley CEOs could learn, which is, listen to your wife, she's onto something.

[Sahil Lavingia]

I think it's helpful. I think it is. And, you know, now she tells me something, I'm like, my default is, yes.

[Casey Newton]

Well, if Doge has done one good thing, it's made your marriage more harmonious. So congratulations.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Thank you.

[Casey Newton]

I'm curious how you think about the theory of Doge. I think one thing that often occurs to me when I hear. Hear people in tech talking about the government and bureaucracy is the idea that efficiency is sort of the ultimate good, Right? That if you have a system that is slow moving and has friction involved in it and it's using outdated technology, that it is an unquestionable good to go in and kind of smooth those bumps to make things faster, more efficient, cheaper. There is also, I would say, something about government that is potentially inefficient by design. Right. You. Part of the reason that things in government take longer than they do in the private sector is because governments are not businesses. Right? They have to account for real constituents. They have to weigh various priorities against each other, sometimes conflicting priorities. They have to sort of do the deliberative process before they. They embark on something that could potentially change people's lives. And I'm curious if you still think this sort of the sort of Silicon Valley attitude is needed in Washington. If that is something that the government, the federal government should have more of, or if you are coming to the view that maybe these are just two different agendas.

[Sahil Lavingia]

I do think there's a. There's a synthesis here, which is because I think if you define the goals accurately, then efficiency is better. If you're able to meet those objectives but spend less money doing it, or make it faster or require people to fill out less forms, then it is better. Just efficiency is better. I think the loss in translation thing is Silicon Valley doesn't serve every person, but if the government has a program, it's going to have to serve everybody, right? So I think efficiency is still a good. I think it's just really important to understand what are the constraints. I personally think the better word would be sort of like modernization or simplification. Like efficiency, I think, has now just such a loaded connotation to it. Just like cut, get rid of things like that. But I do think simplifying things, taking two systems, that I think what tends to happen is the government Just stacks things on top of things that exist. It doesn't often refactor code and combine systems. There's a lot of agencies, each agency spun up to do a new thing. And I do think it would be good to simplify every once in a while and sort of say, hey, these three things that came up in three different eras, we could now sort of merge.

[Pete Wells]

I'm sure many people are sympathetic to the idea that the government is not as efficient as it could be, and they would love to see various aspects of it modernized so that the government was just easier to use. My instinct for how to do that would be to do it slowly and carefully by bringing in a lot of expertise and then giving them the time to work. The Doge approach was to sort of bring in a bunch of people who don't have the relative expertise, ask them to get a ton done in a hurry, and apply this kind of ready, fire, aim approach to the federal government. So I think there are a lot of Americans right now who are looking at Doge and seeing it as a kind of catastrophe where we've sort of disabled vast swaths of the federal government to no apparent benefit. And I wonder how, as somebody who worked on it, it. What you say to people who just see Doge as a catastrophe.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's unfortunate. You know, I don't regret my time there because I didn't work on those specific projects and I think I had a positive impact. You know, it's like, you know, do you throw the baby out with the bathwater? Hopefully I was more the baby. But yeah, it's unfortunate. As another Doge engineer said, like, mistakes were made. I don't know if the people who made the mistakes felt they were mistakes, but from the perspective of people who really wanted to come in and just work hard and make changes, I think it was less than ideal. But at the end of the day, this is a Trump administration. That's who Americans voted for. Some Americans are very happy with what's happened and would like more of it to happen. And we live in a democracy, and I'm just not an opt out type of person. I'm only on earth for a short amount of time. I can't wait for some person or some party that I really agree with, and I'm only going to work there if I really align with everything they do. And I have a lot of faith, frankly, that there are a lot of checks and balances, that either these systems will come back, that they were blocked. There are a lot of things that prevent this ready, aim, fire. That gun never actually goes off.

[Kevin Roos]

It looks like it goes off.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Everyone reports like it went off off, but then a judge rolls it back. And so I think, you know, it is this naive optimism and unfortunately, you know, it's kind of confirmat. It's like I am who I am. You know, I'm not going to change. Like I, I, I really believe in using software to make the world better.

[Casey Newton]

Well, I think that's a good place to end. Sahil, thank you so much for coming and welcome back to civilian life.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Thank you. It's great.

[Casey Newton]

Thanks. After our interview, we reached out to the White House for comment on Saha Lavingia's experience at Doge. In particular, a couple of things that he said about his vetting process. The White House said that basically you are allowed to ask people political questions when they're being vetted for political appointments like roles at Doge, and that Doge employees understood their general responsibilities to cut waste. We also asked for some more details about Seidel's termination. The White House referred those questions to the va, but the VA did not get back to us.

[Pete Wells]

When we cut back. Let him Cook with AI Pete Wells says America's top chefs are starting to do it. Cook with AI, I mean.

[Kevin Roos]

This episode is supported by Eleven Labs, the company behind AI voices that don't sound like AI voices. Developers use ElevenLabs to build lifelike conversational AI voices agents. Their voice agents are used today to handle customer support, queries, appointment scheduling, and even offer personalized one on one tutoring. Join the thousands of developers already building with their voice APIs. Experience what truly human like AI voices can do for your applications. Visit ElevenLabs IO hardfork to get started for free.

[John Friedman]

This episode is supported by kpmg. Are you responsible for deploying AI? Because safe and secure AI deployment is critical, KPMG is making its groundbreaking AI risk and controls guide available at no cost. Their extensive experience in AI risk management, cybersecurity and tech can help you identify risks, design controls, and protect your AI environment. To learn more, visit www.kpmg.us hardfork. That's www.kpmg us hardforce fork.

[Casey Newton]

Well, Casey, I know you are a big foodie. You're always telling me what restaurants to go to. We went out to dinner this week and you know you had gotten the, the clam chowder. I don't know where I'm going with this.

[Pete Wells]

That's a classic foodie thing to do, is to get the Ch Actually, the most foodie thing about me, Kevin, is that many weeks after the show, we go downstairs and we eat a sandwich from the Subway Corporation, which is known for their exquisite gourmet delicacies.

[Casey Newton]

No, but you are a foodie. I know this about you. And so this week, there was an article in the New York Times that made me think, well, I got to talk about that with Casey.

[Pete Wells]

Yes, and I love this story, too. It comes from Pete Wells, the great former food critic for the New York Times, who is now a food writer at the paper. And he had a great piece about how some of America's most famous chefs are starting to use AI in their work.

[Casey Newton]

So because this is going to be a segment about AI AI, let's do our disclosures. I work for the New York Times Company, which is suing OpenAI and Microsoft.

[Pete Wells]

And my boyfriend works for Anthropic.

[Casey Newton]

I love this genre of story that we started to see about, like how people in a specific occupation or field are using AI My sort of intuition is that you could do a version of this story for almost every profession, like how people are actually using this stuff, because people are using this stuff, and they're not always talking about how. And so I think it is a valuable service and a valuable journalistic mission to go into various industries and say, hey, what are you doing with this stuff?

[F]

Stuff.

[Pete Wells]

Exactly. And look, a lot of our listeners, they're going out to restaurants, and there is now the possibility that you're eating dishes that have been crafted or at least assisted in their development with AI And I thought it might be interesting to hear about how that works.

[Casey Newton]

You know, I wondered why I was seeing glue pizza on so many menus. Let's bring in Pete Wells.

[Pete Wells]

Let's bring him in. Pete Wells, welcome to Hard Fork.

[F]

Well, hello.

[Pete Wells]

So how did you get interested in how chefs are using artificial intelligence?

[F]

Well, there was this curious silence about it. Nobody was talking about it. So I wrote emails to a couple of chefs, and right away, one of them wrote back and said, I use it nonstop. It is my favorite kitchen tool. But strangely, none of the chefs. Chefs I'm in touch with ever mention it to me. So he had the impression he was sort of the only one. So of course I knew he can't be the only one. So I started asking more people and got some pretty interesting responses back.

[Casey Newton]

And tell us about this chef that you contacted who said that AI has become his favorite kitchen tool.

[F]

Oh, sure. This is Grant Achatz whose famous restaurant is Alinea in Chicago. And he also has next, and he's just, in the fall, opened a place called Fire, and he has been using it for all kinds of things. When he was opening fire, the idea was that everything would be cooked in some way on or over or in flames, you know, or coals or embers. And so he asked Chatgpt to sort of, like, you know, tell me some unusual cooking fuels from around the world and where it's used and what it's used for. And it started giving him back things like avocado pits and corn cobs, you know, some of which he knew about, but a lot of them he didn't. You know, of course, it also comes back with cow dung, which is a cooking fuel, but not one that you can, like, charge a lot of money for.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, I did that once in my house, and let's just say that smells never coming out of the upholstery.

[Pete Wells]

Yeah. One of the reasons that this is so interesting, Pete, is, you know, Grant A is one of the most famous chefs in America. Alinea, you know, I think, is one of its best restaurants. Have you ever eaten Alinea?

[Casey Newton]

No. Have you?

[Pete Wells]

I have, and it's one of the great meals of my life. I imagine you've eaten there once or twice.

[F]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was writing about Grant before he opened Delinea, so I've been, like, paying attention to what he does for a really long time. And he is probably one of the most focused on creativity and inventiveness. One of the chefs is most focused on that of anybody in the world.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Yeah.

[Pete Wells]

I think the last dish I had at Alinea was like an edible balloon that they had made. You know, I mean, every dish at Alinea contains some sort of surprise, right? This is not like a steakhouse. Everything there is designed to be original, which is what made it so interesting to me that he is one of the people who is sort of at the vanguard of using AI in his cooking. I could imagine Grant Achat saying, no, no, no. This is the most precious thing to me are the ideas behind what is in my food. I'm going to make sure that's always coming from, you know, sort of own brain. What do you think it is that has made him and some other chefs say, oh, no, no, no. This can actually be an excellent creative partner?

[F]

Well, he has always relied on collaboration. When I first met him, before he opened Delinea, he had this crew, this, like, the wrecking crew of these bright, young, ambitious chefs. And every night after service was finished, like, 11, 11:30, when the kitchen is clean down. They would sit around a table and talk about ideas and, like, what do you got? What do you got for, like, what if we did this? What if we tried that? And that's just always been a huge part of his process. So he's already, like, very accustomed to the idea of, like, ideas come from within, but they can also come from outside. They can come from traveling, some amazing meal that you had in Spain. They can come from a childhood memory of your grand grandmother, but they could also come from somebody else's childhood memory. They could also come from your sous chef's last trip, you know, and it's not a huge step, at least, for him, to start asking the same kinds of questions he would ask his sous chefs to type them into chatgpt. You know, when your sous chef suggests something, you think about it. It's not going to go straight on the menu anyway. Anyway, you're all going to critique it, discuss it, play around with it, elaborate it, refine it before it gets anywhere near the dining room. So it, I think, made a kind of sense to him. Like, let's get this machine that can suggest crazy stuff sometimes, but will also suggest things that might turn out to be good with a tweak here and a change there. Let's just bring it into the process.

[Casey Newton]

Now, Pete, you mentioned that you'd found, in addition to Grant, at a bunch of other chefs who were using AI tools in the kitchen, what were some of the ways they were using them? And who are these chefs?

[F]

So there's Ned Baldwin, who has a restaurant in Manhattan called Houseman, and he sent me a whole bunch of transcripts of his conversations about sausage making and different things you can can do to affect the texture of sausage, to make it firmer, to make it, if it's too firm, to make it a little softer. If you want that sort of springy, elastic feeling that you get in, like, Asian fish balls, which is its own thing. How do you get that? And then from there, like, okay, I've got my basic, like, recipe, but now I'd like to change the seasonings. Like, what? You know, what would I do do if I were making this in Malaysia? Right. What are the spices I would bring into it?

[Pete Wells]

Yeah, I mean, in. In our culture, chefs are often presented as these figures of towering authority who sort of know how to do anything. You know, if you just sort of toss them a few ingredients, they can make it. And I think what your story gets at is that actually these chefs have all sorts of questions about how to do things. And if they want to expand their skill set, they don't always know what is the next thing to do do. But chatbots are proving to be pretty good at that. And as you point out, those chatbots, they're extremely patient. You can ask them a question at any time of the day. And it sounds like the chefs have been pretty satisfied with the answers that they're getting.

[F]

I mean, more than one use the phrase out of the box as kind of what they go to it for, because they know what they know. Right. And they know that, that, that, you know, zucchini and basil go together. Right. And, and there are certain combinations that are just go tos for chefs over and over. And what they can get out of chat GPT is just something they'd never considered before. Just. And, and for a chef, that's really valuable because that, you know, they're in a high pressure, high volume environment. They're just, every night they've got, it's a grind and they've got a get the food out to the tables and it is, there is not a lot of time to just like sit and think. It's just, it's just not, it's not part of the job. And when you're under pressure, of course, you go to what you know, I know this is going to work. I've done it before, I'll just do it again. But if you do that too often, you know, you start to see, seem like you're not thinking anymore. You start like, whatever made you fresh and exciting to the world in the beginning starts to go away if you just rely on your proven, you know, formulas.

[Casey Newton]

I think that's so interesting because one of the knocks on these AI tools is that their outputs can be sometimes generic because they're essentially sort of taking the statistical average of whatever data they were trained on. And this has always been my hesitation about, about using AI for cooking. You know, I'm a home cook. I'm not a very good one, but I do use ChatGPT sometimes to sort of inspire myself. And I've just found that it often, like, recommends the most generic thing possible. It's like, oh, I have these five ingredients, what should I make? And it's like, it's not all that surprising, but maybe I'm just not good enough at prompting the models. Maybe the chefs who are spending serious time with these tools have figured out how to get more creative out of the box ideas out of them.

[F]

I think, you know, I, I've started playing around with it Just since I started reporting the story and what I found is, yeah, it, the, the first response you get might be, you know, like, yeah, thanks. I could have done that myself. But when you go back to it and say like, no, not, not that. Can you do better? You start to get interesting responses. I, just, before we got on, was thinking about j dinner and I said, look, I've got a couple fennel bulbs, I've got an onion, I've got some garlic, olive oil, a couple other things, can of sardines. What can I do for dinner? And it said, well, you know, pasta with sardines and fennel. And I said, I'm not so into the carbs. Like, what can we do that's lower? And then it gave me basically the same dish without the pasta, right? And I said, what if we just do a raw fennel? So I get a fennel salad. I said, oh, that looks interesting. Interesting. Is there a way to take this in a Turkish direction? And then it started to get really interesting. It was like, yes, you could add some braised zucchini, you could add some fried eggplant. Like, the more I went back to it, you know, and I never gets annoyed, like, hey, that recipe I gave you, that was a really good recipe. What's your problem, dude? Like, it's just, it will just keep batting the ball back at you, which is interesting. And like, the more specific you can be be, the more surprising it will be.

[Casey Newton]

Now, Pete, there has been a lot of resistance in creative fields to using AI. A lot of people in animation or art or music just think, like, this is taboo. We shouldn't be allowing these things into our creative process. Did you find anything similar among chefs and people who work in restaurants? Is there sort of a cultural resistance to AI?

[F]

There's a huge cultural resistance, although I think in, in some of those other fields, like animation in particular, like, it. It has a lot to do with the fact that this thing can do their jobs now. You know, it can, it can do their jobs already. It can't really do what a chef does. Not at the sort of high end creative level level that the, the restaurants I wrote about are dealing in. You know, it's. It's not there yet, but there's still a huge resistance just to the idea, to the romantic idea of that, that all of this stuff comes from the heart of the chef who's, you know, this heroic figure standing on a mountaintop and, and like lightning strikes him and that's dinner, you know, that bothers people. People are bothered by what they see as sort of the laziness of it or just all of the famous kind of crap that AI generates. Like, we don't want that crap in our food. It's actually really deep. I ran into a couple of food writers last night, and one of them walked up to me and said, I hate that AIP piece. And it was like, not. I. I think not the way I wrote it, but the. The facts in it. I hate. I hate what the reality is that you reported.

[Pete Wells]

You know, well, here's what I would say to that person. What's lazier? Using AI to try to come up with a new dish or putting a flowerless chocolate cake on your dessert menu?

[F]

Right, right. I mean, if. If. Yeah, if. If what you want is. Is to sort of a constant invention, reinvention, constant moving forward. Those ideas, they can come from anywhere.

[Pete Wells]

I have one question that's not actually about AI but that it's. It's on my mind, and I figured this would be a great time to ask the great Pete Wells about it.

[Casey Newton]

Please.

[Pete Wells]

Okay, Pete, so here's the story. So last night, if we use this, we should bleep out the name, But I went to wonderful institution. You know, went. There was. With three folks, and. And we did, of course, ordered the famous chicken, but there were four of us. We know we're going to, you know, need a little something else. And so they had a ribeye on the menu, and it cost $90. We said, well, that's a lot of money for ribeye. But you know what? There's four of us as a special occasion. Let's go nuts. We order the ribeye, and we order it medium rare because that's the proper temperature that you should order any piece of meat, in my opinion. So, no, you're right.

[F]

This is factual.

[Pete Wells]

Okay, thank you.

[F]

You heard it here.

[Pete Wells]

You heard it here first.

[F]

First.

[Pete Wells]

So the ribeye arrives, and we get into it, and it's rare. It is not medium rare. It is rare. And so you hate to be those people. I never feel worse in my life than when I have to ask somebody in the service industry for help in this way. But we keep looking at each other. We're like, we did pay $90 for this, and it feels like it should come at the temperature we order. So we say, it's kind of rare. Okay, we'll put it back on the grill. Okay, so here are my questions for you, Pete. Number one, there was some controversy in my table because one person was surprised that they just grilled the piece of meat again, because we. By this point, we've, you know, sort of hacked off half of it, and they sort of take away that piece of meat rather than, you know, bringing us a new one. So question one is, is that sort of the common way that this is addressed? And then number two is, is any sort of, like, extra warranted in this? Is this a situation where the restaurant should throw in a free desert dessert or, like, do sort of something nice? Or is that just a. Hey, these things happen in the kitchen. Sometime we're gonna grill your damn steak a little warmer. Get over yourselves. Your thoughts?

[F]

Well, yeah, I didn't understand the first part of the question. They took some of the steak back, but not the entire thing.

[Pete Wells]

Well, yeah, because we, you know, we'd kind of, like, hacked off a few pieces.

[Casey Newton]

They should have given him and his friends a whole new ribeye.

[Pete Wells]

That's right.

[F]

Ooh. I mean, that's a lot of. I mean, that's a lot of money for the restaurant, but it's a lot of money for you. It's typical, especially with something like that, to just take the uneaten part and send it back to the kitchen. I don't believe I've ever seen a whole new steak come out of the kitchen.

[Pete Wells]

That's what I thought, for what it's worth. Yeah.

[F]

I've been to a lot of steakhouses, and then, you know, as far as, you know, doing something unstrated, I mean. No, they're not obligated. They are, I think, kind of obligated to get it. Right.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Yes.

[F]

Right. This is what we ordered, and it's not what we ordered. And especially with something like that where, like, I mean, did it ruin your night to. To have a couple bites of rare steak? Right? So I. I don't. I wouldn't call that a traumatic experience when it gets into trauma, you know, like, wow, Casey P. Just said you.

[Casey Newton]

And your friends get over it.

[Pete Wells]

That's great. Listen, this is exactly what I wanted. I wanted my. My expectations to be managed by a professional. And now they've been managed.

[F]

Right? I mean, you. Like where I think you start to need. Or if. If you're a certain kind of restaurant and. And you really want to go over and above where you kind of need to. To send something out to the table or do something extra, knock something off. The check is. Is where they've kind of suffered a little bit. They waited 30 minutes, right? They waited 30 minutes for their steak or. Or, you know, or somebody spilled wine on the.

[Pete Wells]

You know, so in you. Something pretty major has to happen to get into the free dessert territory.

[F]

Yeah. You have to be, I think, become sort of unhappy. Right. And it doesn't sound like you. You got there.

[Pete Wells]

I will say I didn't feel rugged, but I will say that. And, you know, not that we needed some, like, grand apology or anything, but I was sort of expecting somebody would be like, oh, we're sorry about that. Let us take care of that. You know, just like a sort of like real quick thing that didn't really arrive. And so that was just sort of curious to me. I don't know.

[F]

Yeah, that's. That's definitely a service issue because you would hope your server would say, oh, I'm so sorry. It's not the way you'd like it. Even if they don't admit wrongdoing, they don't have, they don't have to say, oh, my God, I can't believe they. Chef, I don't know what's going on back there, like, but just to say, you know, I'm, I'm sorry that it's not what you were hoping for. Let me take care of that instead.

[Pete Wells]

I felt like we were getting the looks like, like, oh, here we go with these people. You know, it was one of the, it's like, oh, it's one of these kind of tables. Yeah. They've got opinions about the meat temperature.

[F]

Yeah. Now in my experience, like, that sort of very fine tuned sense of hospitality of like, I'll apologize. Even if I don't think the. The restaurant's in the wrong. I'll apologize because it'll make them feel better. That is sort of what separates 95, 6, 7% of the restaurants from the really, really good, careful ones.

[Pete Wells]

There you go.

[F]

So that's like a rare experience and you're lucky if you get it.

[Pete Wells]

Yeah. No, the rare experience I had was that the steak was too rare. So. Yeah.

[Casey Newton]

You were hoping for more of a.

[Pete Wells]

Me medium rare experience. Exactly. Let's just say it wasn't. Well done, Pete.

[Casey Newton]

Thank you so much for coming. Great to have you.

[Pete Wells]

Appreciate it.

[F]

Thank you. This has been so much fun. I'm glad you. You thought to call me up.

[Pete Wells]

Yeah, well, any time to have you back.

[Kevin Roos]

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[Sahil Lavingia]

Customers.

[Kevin Roos]

It's how logistics companies find the most fuel and cost efficient routes. Gain a decision making edge.

[John Friedman]

Learn [e-mail] support for this podcast comes from Comcast Business.

[Casey Newton]

This is John Friedman. I'm the SVP of Product Strategy at Comcast Business. We started as the best provider for small businesses with a great price value.

[Sahil Lavingia]

Proposition and customers loved us for that.

[Casey Newton]

Today we are the CIO's trusted partner to think through their business opportunities and growth strategies. Partnership is essential to Comcast Business.

[John Friedman]

Find the right solution for your business goals. Go to comcastbusiness.com for more. That's comcastbusiness.com.

[Pete Wells]

Hard Fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn were edited this week by Matt Collette. We're fact checked by Ana Alvarado and Will Pychl. Today's show was engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Marian Lozano, Sophia Landman, Rowan Nimisto and Dan Powell. Our executive producer is Jen Poyan. Video production by Sawyer Roque, Pat Gunther and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on [e-mail] hardfork Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Qui Wing Tam, Dahlia Haddad and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email [e-mail].

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