meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
Conversations with Tyler

Brendan Foody on Teaching AI and the Future of Knowledge Work

Conversations with Tyler

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2026

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

At 22, Brendan Foody is both the youngest Conversations with Tyler guest ever and the youngest unicorn founder on record. His company Mercor hires the experts who train frontier AI models—from poets grading verse to economists building evaluation frameworks—and has become one of the fastest-growing startups in history.

Tyler and Brendan discuss why Mercor pays poets $150 an hour, why AI labs need rubrics more than raw text, whether we should enshrine the aesthetic standards of past eras rather than current ones, how quickly models are improving at economically valuable tasks, how long until AI can stump Cass Sunstein, the coming shift toward knowledge workers building RL environments instead of doing repetitive analysis, how to interview without falling for vibes, why nepotism might make a comeback as AI optimizes everyone's cover letters, scaling the Thiel Fellowship 100,000X, what his 8th-grade donut empire taught him about driving out competition, the link between dyslexia and entrepreneurship, dining out and dating in San Francisco, Mercor's next steps, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded October 16th, 2025.

Other ways to connect

Timestamps

00:00:00 - Hiring poets to teach AI

00:05:29 - Measuring real-world AI progress 

00:13:25 - Why rubrics are the new oil 

00:18:44 - Enshrining taste in LLMs

00:22:38 - Turning society into one giant RL machine

00:26:37 - When AI will stump experts

00:30:46 - AI and employment

00:35:05 - Why vibes-based hiring fails

00:39:55 - Solving labor market matching problems 

00:45:01 - Scaling the Thiel Fellowship 

00:48:11 - A hypothetical gap year

00:50:31 - Donuts, debates, and dyslexia

00:56:15 - Dating and dining out

00:59:01 - Mercor's next steps

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,

0:09.4

bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.

0:13.5

Learn more at Mercadis.org.

0:15.7

For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links,

0:20.4

visit Conversationswithtyler.com.

0:26.7

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.

0:30.5

Today, I'm sitting here chatting with Brendan Foodie at the offices of Mercore.

0:35.1

Mercore is an AI company.

0:36.8

We'll get into more detail soon enough,

0:38.6

which dates from early 2023. Brendan is the CEO and co-founder. I believe he's the youngest

0:45.6

unicorn founder ever. Mercore, by some estimates, is the fastest growing company ever. For instance,

0:52.3

the quickest speed to $400 million.

0:56.0

Brendan also at age 22 is the youngest conversations with Tyler guest ever.

1:02.0

My proudest achievement. There's more we'll get to soon enough, but Brendan, welcome.

1:06.0

Thank you so much for having me, Tyler. I'm excited to be here.

1:08.0

Now, I saw an ad online not too long ago from

1:11.4

Air Corps, and it said $150 an hour for a poet. Why would you pay a poet, $150 an hour?

1:19.5

That's a phenomenal place to start. I think it's because, so for background on what the company does,

1:25.2

we hire all of the experts that teach the leading AI models.

1:29.0

And so when one of the AI labs wants to teach their models how to be better at poetry, we'll

1:34.7

find some of the best poets in the world that can help to measure success via creating e-vals

1:40.3

and examples of how the model should behave. And one of the reasons that we're able to pay so well to attract the best talent is that

...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 18 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Conversations with Tyler, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Conversations with Tyler and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.