Marc Benioff vs. Verizon CEO Dan Schulman on AI, Blue Origin’s Latest Flight | Diet TBPN
TL;DR
Marc Benioff says the SaaS apocalypse isn’t showing up in the numbers — despite Salesforce stock being down 28% YTD and AI fears everywhere, the hosts note public SaaS names like Snowflake (30%), Cloudflare (34%), HubSpot (20%), GitLab (23%), and Monday.com (25%) are still growing, with Salesforce itself reaccelerating from 8.7% to 10.8%.
Salesforce’s real AI problem is proof, not existence — Benioff argues customers aren’t ripping out Salesforce for AI, but Agentforce has only reached 23,000 of 150,000 customers and still needs more “Jason Lemkin”-style stories where it directly wins back revenue or cuts real work.
The most striking contrast in the episode is Verizon CEO Dan Schulman’s doomerism — while Benioff is basically saying “I dare you” to replace Salesforce, Schulman told the Wall Street Journal AI could drive 20–30% unemployment in 2–5 years, a prediction the hosts call far more extreme than even Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s much narrower warnings on entry-level white-collar work.
TBPN’s pushback is simple: the scary AI narratives aren’t in the data yet — just as SaaS revenues haven’t collapsed, US unemployment data hasn’t shown AI-driven carnage either, and the hosts mock inflated claims like customer service being “90%” of the Philippines economy when it’s actually closer to 6–7%.
Blue Origin had a very mixed win on New Glenn — the booster landing worked, putting Blue Origin in the tiny club with SpaceX that has returned an orbital-class booster, but AST SpaceMobile’s satellite ended up in an off-nominal orbit and will be deorbited, though the loss is insured.
The back half turns into a mini-white-pill roundup on real-world infrastructure — the hosts gush over Sphere as “the most important piece of architecture in 100 years,” cite its stock being up 442%, and praise Meta’s free 4-week fiber-tech training program as a concrete answer to booming data-center demand.
The Breakdown
Benioff opens with a dare, not a defense
The show starts with a great setup: two similarly valued CEOs, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Verizon’s Dan Schulman, giving almost perfectly opposite takes on AI. Benioff’s posture is pure swagger — customers are not ripping out Salesforce for AI, and the hosts frame it as him basically saying, “I dare you.”
The SaaS apocalypse still isn’t visible in revenue
They dig into the actual numbers and argue the market narrative has outrun the fundamentals. Salesforce’s growth has slowed from the 30%+ era, but it’s still growing and even reaccelerating this year, while a long list of public SaaS companies — Snowflake, Datadog, HubSpot, Cloudflare, Monday.com, GitLab — are all still posting healthy growth instead of obvious AI-driven shrinkage.
Agentforce: promising, useful, but not yet a breakout proof point
The hosts don’t pretend Salesforce has nailed it. Agentforce is only used by 23,000 of 150,000 customers, and early complaints centered on how much prep work customers had to do to make the AI understand their data. Still, there are bright spots: Pearson says agents now handle order status, refund, and access-code questions well enough to increase no-human-interaction resolutions by 40%, even if Pandora Jewelry says vaguer asks like “my wife likes dogs, what should I buy her?” still stump the system.
Verizon’s CEO goes full blackpill on AI jobs
Then comes the tonal whiplash. Dan Schulman, new at Verizon, predicts 20–30% unemployment within two to five years and warns even manual labor could get hit by humanoid robots, which the hosts call one of the most aggressive public-company AI takes they’ve seen. They contrast it with Dario Amodei’s viral warning about entry-level white-collar work and say Schulman’s numbers imply something closer to Great Depression conditions with basically zero policy response.
The hosts keep coming back to raw numbers, not vibes
A big theme here is that scary claims often fall apart when you do the math. They laugh at a podcast claim that 90% of the Philippines economy depends on customer service, then note the real figure is more like 6–7%, still important but nowhere near economy-ending concentration. Same point with US jobs: AI disruption may come, but they stress it’s not showing up in unemployment data yet, just like SaaS replacement isn’t showing up in revenues yet.
Verizon’s layoffs make the messaging even weirder
Schulman’s rhetoric lands especially oddly because Verizon says its 13,000 layoffs weren’t AI-related at all — just a cleanup of a company he describes as too hierarchical and process-oriented. The hosts are incredulous at some of the details, especially that he encouraged employees to ask AI to write their obituary, joking that it sounds like “AI is coming for your job, everyone knows it, write your obituary.”
Blue Origin nails the booster, misses the orbit
The show then shifts to Blue Origin’s latest New Glenn mission, which had a very real split-screen outcome. The booster returned safely to Earth — a huge milestone only Blue Origin and SpaceX have achieved with orbital rockets — but AST SpaceMobile’s payload was deployed into the wrong orbit and will be taken out of orbit, though insurance should cover the loss.
A fast closing lap: Sphere, laundromats, and Meta’s fiber-tech program
The ending turns more playful and optimistic. They love the take that Sphere is what VR was trying to be in real life, noting its stock is up 442%, joke that a laundromat is now getting a better multiple than many public SaaS companies, and praise Meta’s free four-week “Level Up” fiber-tech training as the kind of grounded workforce bet that actually matches the data-center boom.