TBPN Live - Live from Washington, DC: Will Manidis, Analysis of Intel Earnings, Analysis of TSMC Earnings, Amazon Denies Plans to Display Tariff Impact at Checkout

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

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You're watching TBPN. Today is Tuesday, April 29, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We are in Washington, D.C., the nation's capital. We have a special guest, Will Minaitis, here with us today. Our first chairman of TBPN, our first in-person guest. We're very excited to have him here today. Let's hear from Will in the studio. Earlier today, we went to a press briefing, our first press briefing. Will is in the studio, folks. We're here.

Will, let's hear from Will again. It's gonna be a fantastic show for you. I was giving that for the journos. For the journos that we saw at the press briefing. It was the first time we've ever been to a press briefing. It was very official. And so Deleon, Jacob. Talk about the tension in the room, John.

It was palpable. It was palpable. It was palpable. It was palpable. It was palpable. The three technology brothers. Yes. And just a standing army effectively of journalists. Deleon and Christian, Garrett.

Get up there to break down what's happening at Hillen Valley. And the journals were not happy. Not happy. They were screaming, they were crying. It was very tense, It was very hostile. A lot of the questions were extremely underhanded. Clearly lots of folks trying to write hit pieces, but then the mood changed over time and Delhi actually turned the crowd. They won hearts and minds. Exactly. With a message of unity

across the aisle, bipartisanship, pro-America, pro- pro technology. And then the tears changed from tears of anger to tears of joy. And people were crying. It was, it was something you had to be there. And I think it will go down in history as one of like the defining moments in technology history. Truly, truly. It was fantastic. It was a turning point. Yeah, it was, it was definitely a turning point. So you went out of the valley, into the hill. Yes, exactly. Out of the valley into the hill. You went to Hill and Valley last year.

Have you been previously? I have, yeah. Two or three times. Okay, break down your experience for me. How has it evolved? What are you looking into for tomorrow? What's your game plan? I mean, it is somewhat hilarious.

Like two years back, tech people did not come to DC. And now it feels like there's 1,200 people descending on the city. You can't go to any of the hotels without seeing poorly fitted suits. Like you know, you're here, technology is in the city. There are a number of suits that I've seen so far that look like they haven't been worn

in potentially about a year. Yeah, since the last Hill and Valley. I mean, you know a man is deep on Hill and Valley when he doesn't even need to get business cards back out because they're already It's just incredible it's like seeing an like a cheetah try to hunt in the Sahara, right? Yes, different environment, but it's beautiful unity matters here I was thinking about how in a weird twist I feel like DC has become what Miami was supposed to become,

was supposed to become in the sense of like, is this place that everyone can descend on, have these like big events, and is this like center of like, it's a third space for technology essentially. I mean, I don't know why you have to demean Miami Tech Week like this. I know, I know, they're still kicking, but DC has become a place with higher profile events profile events. It kind of came from behind.

On a more serious note, the thing, the takeaways from the press briefing is that this event is not about foreign policy as much as it's about, you know, basically, you know, the real theme of tomorrow is reindustrialization. We're trying to keep the topic around that. And as much as the legacy media would, would like to make it political, it's, you know, many of the, the, the sort of, um, subjects should be, uh, very bipartisan.

It was also funny digging into like, what is the current thing with the mainstream media versus the current thing with us is Jordy asked a question like, uh, uh, thing with the mainstream media versus the current thing with us? Because Jordy asked a question, like if we're talking Hill and Valley, if we're talking DC politics, geopolitics and tech, the top story of the last week has been benchmark investing in Manus, a Chinese AI company.

That's the interesting angle. That's the thing people wanna dig into in tech. And a lot of journalists were asking questions. I asked a question, it was like giving him a layup. He did like an out-of-hue. Strito was a dog. But again, I actually don't even think that was top of mind for the other media that was attending. Just all a reindustrialization from their side? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Everybody wanted to talk about tariffs. Tariffs. And even the discussion around AI was very much like, oh, have you tried the new 4.0 model?

You can search the web. Like that. Yeah. Like it was at that level. It wasn't talking about, like, it wasn't talking about, you know, like Glazegate. Yeah, I asked one of the writer, I think, from a journalist from Politico, who just covers AI policy. And I asked her about the writer, I think, from a journalist from Politico who just covers AI policy,

and I asked her about Glazegate. She responded like she knew what I was talking about, and then she was talking about tool use and being like, yeah, I think it's really cool. It's the strong evidence you have to get your news from only one place, right? Exactly. The Technology Brothers Media Empire.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Only somebody made a daily three hour live show just about technology and business. Yeah, sponsored by RAM. Sponsored by RAM. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

Have you been following earnings season this week? Of course I have been. Well, what have you been tracking? What's been interesting to you? That all the great companies in the world are focused on one thing, and that is controlling spend, which is best in the world handled on a platform, like ramps, corporate cards, platform.

I think you're keeping the money going, unnecessary, but you're punching above your weight already. Every single month, I want a special man named Zach, who's close in our hearts, to monitor my individual corporate card spend. Yes. It's good to have, it's good to have. Well, we do have some news from Tuesday.

So UPS reported earnings. They missed EPS was supposed to be 217, came in at 205 revenue down to 21.4 billion, expected 21.7 billion amiss. Obviously, bad news for the global economy. Domestic packages fell 3.5% on volume. People are worried about shipping stuff around. Coca-Cola beat though. People are drinking the candy soda still. That's good for the economy. Sugar number go up. General Motors had a massive beat, earnings per share at $2.22, expected $1.88, and revenue was forty three billion instead of roughly forty two billion probably driven by the

Corvette ZR one I imagine Hummers, what else do they what else do they make the CT 5v black wing? That's right They're probably selling a ton of those marks like the word Yeah, the alakazam. Yes. Yes. Yes, exactly Pfizer beat earnings Sixty two cents a share you want to give a round of applause for Big Pharma? It's an incredible time to be receiving health care in America. COVID products sales fell, but it was expected the core business oncology and vaccines showed

moderate growth and the market reaction was that the stock traded up 1% Visa issues guidance tonight and consumer confidence was down the biggest monthly drop since 2022. Big discussion over how all the news is falling with the consumer. People are worried about tariffs. Even if they're not feeling it yet, they expect to feel it. And so consumer confidence is falling. Anyway, market's pretty flat. And in general, the takeaway that I had from the press briefing was there's all these big stories about tariffs and chaos and what's happening with TikTok. And the mood was very much like things are worse than ever,

I guess, but the stock market is kind of resilient. It's like, it's not as it's kind of priced in. And it hasn't been in as much of freefall as the news would have had you believe a few weeks ago. Well, we still have more data coming in this week. We have jobs and GDP and then tech earnings, just given how much of the growth over the last few years has just come from the Mag 7. Those are really the earnings to watch.

Tomorrow and Thursday after the market closes, we have Meta, Google, Google already reported, but we have Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia, I believe. Tesla and Google already reported. And then Intel and TSMC also reported, and we'll get into that when we... We can get into it now with the Ben Thompson analysis. Have you dug into Liputon at all? Have you met him? No, I have not. Are you familiar with the new Intel CEO, Liputon? Of course. I've been doing the light work.

Yeah. So he gave investors stark diagnosis of the chip maker's problems on Thursday, along with the sense that it will take a while to fix them. Tam, delivering his first earnings report as CEO, said Intel's bureaucratic corporate culture needs a shakeup, so he's going to cut jobs, remove layers of management, and force everyone back to the office.

His prescriptions for other areas of Malaya, such as Intel's struggling foundry business, which makes chips for outside customers, were more vague. What's most clear is Intel's short-term woes are even worse than feared. The company gave a revenue forecast for the current quarter that was well below what analysts projected and Intel's chief financial officer warned that tariff-fueled recession could torpedo chip demand. The grim outlook sent Intel shares sliding by as much as 10 percent

Friday to $19.34 a share. And then Thompson called. He said these earnings were absolutely brutal and the earnings call was worse. Start with the good news. Well, yeah, fortunate thing for shareholders is that it was mostly priced in in total over

the last month, only down just under 10 percent. Yes. The analysts were doing a good job is that it was mostly priced in in total over the last month, only down just under 10%. So the analysts were doing a good job effectively understanding, even if they were off on some of their own forecasts. Yeah. So the narrative is that Intel has shifted to these 7-nanometer consumer chips that go into budget systems, Raptor Lake, and that's what drove non-GAAP gross margin three points higher than expected, but obviously those sales came at the

expense of Lunar Lake, which is a better processor with worse margins in large part because it is mostly made by TSMC. In other words, Intel benefited financially from being less competitive at the high end than expected, and this is the highlight. Uh, well, have you been tracking any of the wild theories around Intel or what anyone's thinking like break it up, put Elon in charge. I mean, it feels like very important to have an American Foundry company, right? And it's such a shame. Pat's no longer in the role. Truly one of the greatest CEOs, right? Like great redemption arc at the company, leaves the company, comes back out there doing amazing work today, building churches,

but would have loved to see him in the seat, obviously until shareholders disagree. Yeah. But what is the full, like, uh, what's been your full story of Pat Gelsinger? Like, uh, give me more as to, you know, what he's like as a manager and as a CEO. I mean, I, I've met the man once, um, but incredible seems to put his faith at the center of his work. He has built, I wanna say, seven churches in the Bay Area.

Seems to spend one day a week praying for Intel employees, which is fascinating and interesting. Maybe more companies should try that. Just seems like a man who has solved work, life, faith integration in a way that others have not. What about, did you ever hear that take that like whatever type of scripture he's posting is like directly into it? It's MMPI. Maybe you don't want management teams posting daily Bible readings inspired based on material non-public information.

That feels correct. As long as he puts at the end, NFA. Do you have a take on the split? Do you think that they should go pure fab or pure design shop Nvidia style? I have no strong take on it. You have no strong take? No strong take on it. I have this take that there's a world where you rewind the clock and instead of Elon

spending 44 billion on Twitter, now X, he gets a bunch of money from the chips act and instead goes into chip fabrication because he seems like the one person that could actually pull together all the talent and the culture to if you can build the X AI data center so quickly he could also turn around a fab there was somebody else saying that like you know he he's really owning like the stack of modern technology whether it's space travel, cars, AI, Neuralink, et cetera. But missing semis.

What do you think about that theory? I mean, he does seem to be amazing at taking very highly priced XAI equity and trading it for real businesses. It does seem like actually a good moment to take a slightly overvalued AI foundation model provider, trade that for a real business, and run that company with kind of discipline that I think Intel has not had for like 30 years.

Yeah. Like I think Elon going full stack is very good. Yeah. Yeah, it'd be cool. There's actually, did you see the other news about Elon? No. The Wall Street banks sold the final slug of Elon Musk's ex debt. The loan sat on the bank's books for 2 and 1 1

years until Donald Trump's election rapidly changed the company's fortunes. The group of Wall Street's biggest banks have finally dug themselves out of a $13 billion quagmire. Did the election change its fortunes, or did they just get efficient and operate it? Yeah, it doesn't even seem like it was the election that

changed the fortunes. It was more that XAI started ripping. Yeah, it just rips. It was a re-finance based on. It was more that XAI started ripping. It was a little refinance based on that. So a little bit of truth zone. 98 cents on the dollar, already priced in. Yeah, not bad. Everything's priced in.

So on Monday, banks sold the final slug of debt they lent for Musk's takeover of Twitter in 2022. According to people familiar with the matter, the $1.2 billion of loans sold at 98 cents on the dollar. Of course, when Elon purchased Twitter for 44 billion, he put up a bunch of equity from Tesla. There were a bunch of other investors that came in, Larry Ellison, Andrews Horowitz, I think Sequoia came in as well.

And then I think Morgan Stanley did a bunch of the debt. So the sale was a long time coming. In April 2022, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and five other banks agreed to lend the money to help Musk buy Twitter. By the time the deal closed, the markets had tanked and investors were wary of betting on Twitter's debt. The unloved loans sat on banks' balance sheets for more than two years while the financial prospects of the newly christened X look dimmer and dimmer. By the summer of 2024, the X deal was considered the worst buyout banks had agreed to finance since the 2008 financial crisis.

And then they say everything turned with the election of Donald Trump as president and the rise of Musk as a crucial Trump ally, catalyzing a frenzy among investors to get a slice of Musk Inc. Advertisers such as Amazon.com started coming back to the platform, helping Musk to raise more capital for X. I guess that's kind of a reasonable scenario that if he backs Trump, Trump loses, then maybe the advertisers don't come back. What do you think?

It's an interesting platform because historically, I just don't think the ad units were ever that good. So it was easy for advertisers to just say, okay, we're not going to come back. Now it's an opportunity to sort of pledge allegiance to the Musk empire and in some way kind of cozy up to the, to the, to the power players by saying, yes, we're bringing our advertising back to the platform and sure that helps in terms of X getting properly. Basically just as long as Elon is heavily involved with politics, his companies will be impacted by his proximity to power.

Yeah. I mean, I guess the flip side is maybe if Trump loses, I mean, you could see a situation where the, the left is more aggressive about like holding Musk to account for trying to get Trump elected. But on the, but on the other side, you could see a world where it's just like, Oh, Trump is a loser. He lost two elections in a row in this hypothetical and Musk is, you know, like a failure for, he couldn't even get Trump elected. And so he's less of a threat. And so yeah, you can advertise on his silly little app.

It doesn't matter anymore because he's irrelevant, because Trump is irrelevant because he lost twice. He's never coming back. And so I feel like it's possible that this was less of an issue because he could have built back up. But certainly, just being close to the president and having the whole vibe shift in Silicon president and having kind of the whole vibe shift in Silicon Valley and all the Silicon Valley CEOs going out to DC made

a ton of sense. I think the really interesting question is how this new 20 billion dollar financing comes together. I don't know where where that capital is coming from. It already and then and then as you start to you mean for XAI? Yeah, XAI doing this new financing that's been sort of reported on, just based on rumors, I think. It seems unclear to me if X, the social media platform starts getting any credit at all for even existing, right?

Just rolled in, it's like, oh yeah, you're investing in the mega data center project and like, oh, we also have that app. And as an X user, all of this stuff again, like it's just not, it's not default bullish for X, the social platform, just because it's happens because that capital is certainly not being going to be diverted in any type of meaningful way to the social platform. But it's also like, do you actually need to update X?

Like when was the last time there was a meaningful Twitter update? Like I feel like- Whoa, whoa, whoa, they launched 4K live streaming recently. We will be live streaming in 4K very soon. But let's play the sound effect for 4K live streaming on X folks. It's happening.

You should be watching this on a QLED TV. You should be watching it in IMAX and a cinema. Get Starlink so you can watch it in real time. We were talking with Tyler and the video team and they were basically saying like, yeah, there's like one engineer who's working on streaming. It's like, great. Just for you guys, just for you guys. You're gonna bet our guy. Yeah, it's our guy. You and Anthony Pappio

Yeah, it is interesting to think like, you know If if Elon had just waited or been able to stall on the acquisition deal by like six months He would have been able to buy for a quarter of the price like every single tech company sold off and Twitter would have sold off and more. Meta went down by 50%. It would have been struggling to find a bottom. 100%. It probably would have been like a five or ten billion dollar company. Yeah, even if you pay 10 it's still 75% off. Yeah, I know. I know, but remarkable timing and remarkable that he pulled it out despite

like the leg weights that were the initial buyout valuation. And it's crazy they basically put a gun to his head and said, you're buying it. You have to do it. Yeah, you have to do it. The court always forces Elon to do exactly what he wants to do. You can't do the pay package. You have to buy this. You can't buy that.

What he should do is come out really in favor of the for-profit conversion of open hand. Yes. And it will absolutely not happen. He needs to be doing more reverse psychology for sure. For sure. In a sign of how eager investors were, Monday's sale of $1.2 billion in debt happened even while the markets have been in the doldrums since President Trump announced his tariff plan this month.

Bankers working on the transactions said they felt that the high quality nature of the deal meant that they could sell the debt despite recent market volatility. In the end, banks found a graceful exit from the $13 billion financing that weighed on them for some two and a half years. I mean, the team, I know some of the team at Morgan Stanley and it looked really rough for a while, but they got out. Elon doesn't do down rounds and he knows how to steward capital. He's one of the greatest to do it. 40% premium.

I forget how high the premium was. It wasn't even like trading at 44, 40% premium. That is wild reflecting the potential he saw in the social media company. He said at the time, free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy and Twitter is the digital town square where it mattered. No, it did feel like post acquisition that he basically spent, he spent $44 billion to preserve free speech on the internet. In many ways it actually did feel like that.

That should be tax deductible. It's a nonprofit contribution. It should be. Yeah. I mean, that, that was my take was that like, if, if he doesn't do something about it, there's going to be like the, the anti-Musk aggression is just going to keep building and building and building until he's in like real, real danger. And so it was a small price to pay. Speaking of small prices to pay, go get a watch on bezel, go to get bezel.com. We're going to get will set up with something after the show. Yeah. Will's not a huge watch guy, but we're going to convert him.

I think this presidential, I need more gold material. Yeah. Yeah, Will's not a huge watch guy. But I think this is considering presidential gold. Yeah, yeah, the yellow gold, the yellow gold champagne day date that would look great on you from Glen Gary Glen Ross, maybe the GMT, Texas Timex, Texas Timex call it when you're in the south. Anyway, let's move on to another story. What do we got? I mean, TSMC earnings also paired well with Intel earnings because interestingly, Intel is flat despite having a terrible couple months changing CEOs, lots of fear around can they be competitive on the leading edge whatsoever. TSMC has been crushing it, been in the perfect position,

but has so much fear around global tensions, invasion of Taiwan basically zeros the company. And so TSMC has been having a much harder time in the market, even though their outlook has been bullish. They're, they have a bullish outlook for growth in 2025 after reporting strong first quarter results, suggesting the world's biggest chip maker is confident it can ride out the U S China trade war. The main chip maker for Nvidia, Apple, and other companies said it still expects

mid 20% growth this year in a doubling of AI revenue, mirroring goals set in January, and it's stuck with capital spending projection of 38 billion to 42 billion in 2025. TSMC is U S stock rose as much as 3.8% while shares of suppliers including Tokyo Electron and Laser Tech climbed in Tokyo. The CEO stressed that demand, particularly for high-end chips critical to developing AI,

has remained resilient. That may assuage investors who've struggled through a turbulent few days when US restrictions on the export of Nvidia chips to China and a disappointing report from ASML Holdings helped trigger a broad market. So Ben says what you were alluding to earlier, which in stark contrast to Intel,

TSMC is killing it and yet you wouldn't know from the share price trading just down into the right. Still priced in. What is priced in? Everything. Everything right. Still priced in. What is priced in? Everything. Everything. Everything is priced in. The market is perfectly priced.

Yeah, so he's breaks it down here. He said you would had you invested at the beginning of this year, been break even on an Intel investment and significantly down on a TSMC investment. Granted, the returns are a lot different if you go back even a year. Intels are brutal, but it's clear that TSMC is being much more impacted by recent geopolitical

events than Intel is. And for good reason, above and beyond their location in Taiwan, TSMC is actually relevant to the global economy in a way that Intel is not boom roasted. Have you been tracking any of the new chip companies that are doing like transformers on a chip? I've surely been tracking the heights of waves in the Taiwan Strait. Yeah, that's all that matters to the stock price.

That's all you trade off of is the weather forecast. Yard stick in the Taiwan Strait. If it's low. If it's low, it's bad. That is true, right? You can only invade in certain times or something This is a when Eric Prince appears on the show. Yes, you know less than 24 hours Okay, that does feel like a question for him. Yeah, my understanding is in the summer the Taiwan Straits are flatter

Okay, much easier to get landing craft across and the winter. It's like 22 bad timing with the tariffs now They show you to the end of summer. Isn't it actually like a very narrow window isn't it? I think it's like two weeks Yeah, two weeks, which is helpful if you're trying to prepare for an invasion, but still not great. I guess you know when it's gonna come. Anyway, so Ben goes further here. He says, TSMC has, however, even beyond the last few months suffered from the China overhang,

the reality that any sort of conflict over Taiwan would zero out TSMC. And what he says, which is interesting, and we'll get into this, is what is notable to me, however, and counter to what I wrote last month, is the depth of TSMC's commitment to manufacturing in the United States. And again, this was what we've been trying to pull out

of some people on the show, is kind of understanding how much of Nvidia's saying, oh, we're investing a hundred billion dollars in the US. How much of this is sort of marketing to the admin versus like actual practical business planning? And this is cool to see. So Ben wrote last month, at the same time, you can also view this announcement

with some amount of cynicism, particularly given the lack of specificity about either timing or process. There's both an optimistic and a pessimistic way to look at this. On the optimistic side, that first fab was upgraded to a more advanced five nanometer node TSM. Love this. TSMC calls it the four nanometer node, but it's actually a third generation five nanometer

node. Ben Thompson is truth zoning. Truth zoning TSMC. The second fab meanwhile will also produce two nanometer chips at some point in the future, although not in 2026. That is crazy and something that a couple of years ago, people were like, that will never happen.

There's too much like sacred knowledge in Taiwan that will never make it to America. If they can actually hit that, it's crazy. Yep. And so yeah, on the earnings call, the CEO of TSMC said, let me talk about TSMC's additional $100 billion investment plan to expand in Arizona.

All of our overseas decisions are based on our customers' need as they value some geographic flexibility and necessary level of government support. This is also to maximize the value of our shareholders, which we love to hear, let's hear it for maximizing the shareholder value. With a strong collaboration and support from our leading US customers and the US federal, state and city governments, we recently announced our intention to invest an additional $100

billion in advanced semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. This expansion includes major plans for three additional wafer manufacturing fabs, two advanced packaging fabs, and a major R&D center. Combined with our previously announced plan to build three advanced semiconductor manufacturing fabs in Arizona. This brings our total investment in the US to $165 billion to support the strong multi-year demand

from our customers. It makes sense, like a lot of TSMC's customers are in America, like there's no reason why you shouldn't make them here, but it was thought impossible for a long time. How did we just sum $100 billion dollars and a hundred billion dollars and get to 165 billion? No, he starts by saying, let's talk about the a hundred billion dollar

investment. And then he's like, we're going to do all this stuff, which adds up to a hundred billion. And then he says, we've already invested 65. So let's add the new hundred to the previous 65. We're at 165, which sounds staggering. I guess when you compare it to what the hyperscalers are spending on CapEx, which was all in like the 60, 70, 80 billion per hyperscaler. It's not that crazy. And of course this is over a number of years, cause they're building this out, but still very,

very bullish for American manufacturing, very bullish for reindustrialization, which we love to see. It's not a meme, not a meme. It's going to happen. It is, yeah, it, it, it, it is interesting to see that like they're actually making progress here that people thought was not possible for a long time, or they thought it would never happen for a variety of reasons. But, uh, TSMC, Foxconn's in the same, in the same boat where, uh, Foxconn's announcing new facilities. It's a Taiwanese company. They obviously have a massive presence in China,

but they're announcing a lot of new facilities in America because they see themselves as a Western company or global company and they want to do business. I love when CEOs are super candid on earnings calls because it's so easy for them to go robotic. This was another quote. He was responding to a question. He said, the first purpose in the Arizona fab is that the Arizona Fab can operate independently But of course we have done and we are doing it right now some kind of pathfinding Exploratory work and to cooperate with the university blah blah. It's actually a lot of activities

a thousand engineers is not a small amount of course, it's not comparable to TSMC I think he's talking about you know the That has 10,000 R&D people, but it's a beginning. Okay? So we'll do a lot more. That's great. And Anyways, yeah, I mean you were talking about like the the capex as marketing to the admin and probably the best example is from the first Trump administration where Apple did that like Riven cutting ceremony. I think it was in Texas for the Mac. Uh, and it was like, they'd already been making it there.

They weren't reshoring anything really. Branding the dollar. And then earlier in Trump too, just a couple of months ago, Apple like kind of repackaged a bunch of their like spend and they were like, we're investing a hundred billion dollars in America. And it was like the salaries that we're already going to spend. And just like let people run it for ribbon cutting. Massive American flag on the wall. You can move in. We rented by the hour.

Actually comes with a vibrial. It comes with this getting rebirth, pre-installed secret service has been there already. Yes. Exactly. Getting into American made ribbons specifically for, for, you know, and those big scissors, the big scissors. How did the American make it as well? Those are made in China today. Yeah. Absolutely. Um, should we talk about, uh, Amazon? Oh yeah. And, uh, all this drama around whether or not they were displaying plan to display this guy who ran this, uh, AB test on his e-commerce website? He makes his showerhead in China.

The tariffs are going to make a $100 product like $250. Goes to an American manufacturer. It's going to cost him $250 to make it. So he puts an option on his website, $100 for the Chinese one or $250. And here's like 100% of people chose the cheaper one. We got zero made in America. But I was thinking about that more and I was thinking about how like, no, it's not, that's not the option. Yeah, that's not the trade.

Yeah. The actual trade is $250 for the Chinese made one, $160 of which, or $150 of which goes to tariffs versus $250 made in America. It was a deeply flawed study. Yes, yes, yes. Exceptionally viral. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway, Amazon is thinking about doing something very similar, kind of, you know, lobbying popular support amongst the American people, breaking out import charges.

And to be clear, they deny they had plans to do this. Sure, sure, sure. But the administration now addressed it and said that breaking out import charges would be a hostile and political act. Andy Jassy is getting in trouble with the White House. I'm sure they will be fighting it out, although they're still going after Bezos. So Amazon.com was forced to play down a report that it was considering displaying the impact of tariffs during its online checkout

process after President Trump called the company founder, Jeff Bezos, and the White House said such a move would be a hostile and political act. I mean, you have to imagine that as soon as the tariffs drop, like there's some Amazon PM who's like implementing this on day one, right? Yeah. It's also funny that Bezos is still the first guy to get the call. Of course. It's been so long now.

He's like desperately trying to retire. Yeah, he's just like, oh. I just wanna do the Lex Friedman podcast and be on a yacht and go to space. Why are you calling me about my e-commerce business? Yeah, yeah, I was an e-com entrepreneur. I was an e-com guy. Yeah, I was a 12-figure e-com entrepreneur.

If he does save the global economy, that's like his beautiful act, right? Like if this works. Who, who? Bezos. If Bezos saves the global economy, that's like his beautiful act, right? Like if this works, Who? If he saves the economy by rolling back tariffs implementing this feature, that's a Nobel Peace Prize level achievement. It's possible. It's going to take an act of courage standing up to the admin by putting a new div on the checkout HTML page.

Pressing tab. There was some controversy because Punchbowl was doing some reporting on this, but Punchbowl is corporate media. Really? They're supported by Amazon. What are you talking about? Wait, really?

Is this real? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Punchbowl, it's okay. Yeah, it says Trump called Bezos to raise concerns after Punchbowl News, which I've never heard of, reported that Amazon was planning to display the impact of tariffs during its online checkout process, according to people familiar with the matter. And now,

I mean, Amazon, to be fair, does break out a ton of expenses. Like you see the shipping costs, you see the taxes, you see how the how the receipt is calculated. And now you're going to see 600% tariffs on your, on your shower. Yeah. On your, on your, what, did you know that Amazon launched a team and competitor? I did not know this. So they, so as in order to participate in their like team,

who competitor you had to guarantee like price ceilings for things. And, uh, you could not sell a guitar for more than $12 and you could not sell a couch for more than $20. I mean, we have to start thinking about an American team, who reserve right? Just importing thousands of Sheann items items. It's gonna be, it could very well stretch into the billions of items. The billions of items. So who are gonna, where are yoga pants gonna come from if not Xi'an? That poison you. Yeah, the cancer too.

You're lying. There's a post here from somebody who writes for his own. He has at big technology on X, great name. He says the punch bowl story on Amazon sponsored by Amazon isn't completely true per Amazon. It's literally an article that's presented by Amazon and it says Amazon to display a tariff cost for consumers. So a little bit hard to imagine they weren't actually planning to do this. This is going to be like when we report on Numeral and Numeral has to deny our reports that Numeral has achieved AGI in sales tax in the Chrome tab.

Because we often call it AGI for sales tax or You're talking to Sam the CEO and You know what he said was basically like, you know, we have a new version that like we're actually not able to release It's so powerful. Yes All sales tax fully and then sort of like move on Yeah, it's like how do we actually reduce the number of sales tax receipts to zero? Well, we eliminate humans. We kill everyone. Have we achieved AGI to numeral safety? Yeah. It's the same thing with ramp. How do we get no more receipts? No more employees, no more employees. But anyway, go to numeral HQ, put your sales tax on autopilot,

spend five months per month on sales tax compliance. Anyway, bargain sellers, Timo and Sheen also benefited from the exemption, which helped them keep prices down on clothing and other goods shipped directly from China. So that loophole is closed. Yeah, it was Amazon's haul. They call it haul. They just call it slob.

You're going to love this. The max you could sell a couch for. Yeah, 20 bucks. Again, I think we'll see this in cancer rates. I think once you take this cheap polyester and you stop putting it on your skin, cancer rates might fall a little bit. That's much to think about. Interesting.

Is that going to rate size? Is that the ultimate rate size in the government? I mean, it's proof of the maha movement is totally in control. The tariffs get shanty. It's all part of the maha. So is maha the real one that's pulling the strings? It's Bobby Kennedy the Maha movement. It's totally in control. Right? The tariffs get shambles. It's all part of the Maha. So is Maha the real one that's pulling the strings? It's Bobby Kennedy at the top. Bobby Kennedy at the top. Every other, the defense budget, it's all Bobby. Yeah, that makes sense. The tech giant has cost support agreements in place with some

vendors to ensure that it makes consistent margins on the products it buys from them and sells to customers according to consultants. Some vendors that have tried to charge Amazon more after tariffs were imposed have been asked to pay the online shopping giant to make up the increase. So everyone's fighting over who pays the tariffs. Yeah, I mean, Amazon's in a really tough place. They had been squeezing their sellers for so long on both sides, Fees, advertising, you know, not dealing with

with knockoffs very well, you know, sort of purely focus on the consumer which is which is again, you know, Amazon's job is to deliver for their core customer which is the prime subscriber but at the end of the day this is only gonna create kind of more drama and chaos between Amazon and its sellers who already were not super happy. Yeah. I mean, the other story Amazon's in the news because they want to be a satellite internet powerhouse.

Who doesn't? I mean, we've had long conversations off air about how do we turn TBPN and to sort of, you know, get sad. How do we get a TBPN dish on every home? Yeah, we need a dedicated network. So they launched 27 coupier satellites, but they need to get thousands more to space to rival SpaceX's Starlink. Some of the company's biggest hurdles aren't in orbit, but on the ground, 27 Amazon satellites were launched from the Florida coast to orbit Monday night, a mission handled by rocket launch company United Launch Alliance.

A year and a half ago, ULA sent two prototype satellites for Amazon to space. How have I never heard about United Launch? You don't know ULA? They're like the second biggest private launch provider. SpaceX is so much bigger. But it's supposed to be a joint venture between Lockheed and Boeing. So they are like the legacy. ULA is like the...

But ULA has been, they've had a lot of problems with a lot of different projects they've been worked on and Elon's obviously coming for them very aggressively. To compete with established providers, Amazon needs to rapidly manufacture and deploy thousands more satellites on a narrow timeline. It also faces a set of challenges familiar to many companies pushing to scale up manufacturing rates. The project Coupier Venture aims to build large translation of satellites.

Yeah, how do you pronounce that? Coupier? Coupier? Coupier? It's French. Yeah, okay. I have no idea. Thanks for the misinformation. So they're trying to provide high speed internet. Our entire audience is going out saying, yeah, it's actually coupier. The company plans on having 3,200 satellites in orbit over the next few years. Building a business it hopes will eventually provide meaningful operating income, Chief

Executive Andy Jassy wrote in Amazon's recent annual letter to shareholders. But Elon Musk has demonstrated the power of such a fleet through his Starlink business, which has more than 7,000 satellites in orbit already and more than 5 million users. At least two similar Chinese systems are also in the works while Canadian satellite operator, Telesat, is developing a new fleet called Lightspeed. Everyone's gotta have their own

LEO cluster of satellites, I guess. Leaders at Coupier have been- Interesting to think about Amazon potentially over time just bundling in satellite to Prime. Like it's not. Yeah. You have TV, you have shopping, you have groceries. Yeah, deliver, own the actual delivery.

And yeah, I mean, it seems like it was really, really hard to actually own like cable or like wires in the ground. Like that was particularly hard, monopolized, to like build any, to actually grab anything in infrastructure, but if everything moves to satellite, you can actually throw up a constellation. There's no zoning laws in space.

Yeah, no, I mean at some point I imagine that it gets too crowded that you can't put up any more constellations, but it seems like we're pretty far away from here. People are already complaining about the space junk though. That feels far away, I mean the moat is that you have to spend however What what 20? How many tens of billions of dollars and launch is not zero margin business for SpaceX so but it is when they launch

Starlink satellites and anytime that they have you know a free seat on the bus they can just throw Starlink satellites on there, so they're getting them up there way, way cheaper than Amazon is, which is probably why Bezos is also investing in Blue Origin because if he can get that working and he can dump, uh, coupier satellites up there cheaply like that actually gives him the opportunity to, to challenge Musk. It is funny how, how much Bezos and Musk like go after each other. Did you see that Bezos, I mean, he already funded Rivian,

but then he just funded that slate truck. Did you see that thing? Yeah, it's an incredible truck. Okay, yeah. What was your reaction to the truck? Incredible. TJ Parker, you know, big endorsement from a certified car guy.

I mean, it's incredible to have a small American made truck. That's that, I hate that it's an electric vehicle. I'd buy one day one if that was a combustible engine. I just feel like, you know, Europe doesn't have power right now. Why are you buying an electric EV? But it's a beautiful car. It's an electric vehicle. I'd buy one day one if that was a combustible engine. I just feel like, you know, Europe doesn't have power right now. Why are you buying an electric EV? But it's a beautiful car. It's an SUV. It's a sedan. Have you thought about buying one and swapping in like a turbocharged vehicle?

Yeah, I was going to LS swap. Yeah, the slate truck. The slate truck for sure. Yeah. Yeah. A kind of mini Raptor. That has been the number one. I've seen some people, you know, I think it's going to be a hit almost as a golf cart. Totally. Yeah.

I mean the question is like, who is the singer Porsche of Japanese small trucks? Like if I want to drop two million dollars on a truck this big That's real yeah, I mean the big critique there and we're gonna get this late Founding team on but on the show TJ actually made the intro. Shout out to TJ. But yeah, the big critique has been around range. I'm sure they have a lot of plans there. I assume you have to look at with any EV manufacturer and assume that the range is only gonna go up over time.

So it's fine. Do they drop a range number? It's like 150. Oh, 150, that's really low. I mean, it's a golf cart. It's a golf cart, yeah. But it's even lower than that when you put stuff in. Yeah. Yeah. Passengers. Yeah. But truly like if you're just going like around town and back,

like you're not going to do more than 150 miles, even if you drive to work 30 miles away and back, you're fine. I mean, you can't even fit in it, right? You have to like cut a hole. Well, don't they have a, don't they have like a modular structure so I can get like a convertible version yeah i think it is yeah yeah yeah that's great not gonna pass the broomstick but the reason i brought up slate was because i think bezos backed slate he also backed rivian so he has uh bets two different bets in two different trucks two different trucks in in ev going up against tesla uh there was a conspiracy theory

that slate was actually a tesla project because it's an anagram. Have you heard of this? I have heard this. Yeah. That's a great one. And then, and then they're competing in space. They're competing in social networking now too, because Bezos owns Twitch, which is a very large social network streaming. X obviously has streaming as we're streaming on X right now. And then yeah, they've just been duking it out in all these little sub-market sub-categories. Yeah, it's a lot of fun to watch.

Anyway, we should move on to some timeline. Let's break down the best posts of the day. This is the moment that you all have been waiting for, timeline with none other than. Will Minaitis, king of the timeline. Chef, king of the timeline. King of the timeline. Let's do it, king of the timeline. King of the timeline. King of the timeline. Let's do it.

Let's dive in. So founder of Intercom says, this is truly the golden age of B2B software out of home advertising. Literally 98% of billboard and shelter stock in SF is currently taken by SaaS brands. It's never been like this ever. It's either really bullish or really bearish for SaaS. Is it bullish or bearish?

Intercom, by the way, AdQuick customer. Oh really? Yeah. Fantastic, yeah. We are sponsored by AdQuick. Go to adquick.com. Sorry to cut you off. Ad of home advertising made easy and measurable.

Say goodbye to the headaches of ad home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, ad of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Anyway, Will, bullish or bearish for SaaS? First. For AdQuick.

For AdQuick, yes, that's it for AdQuick. You got the audience applause. Yeah, maybe we get the Ashton Hall sound for every new post that we do during this timeline to really, really fire us up. I can do that. Really get us firing in all cylinders. Okay, so bullish or bearish?

I just think Hope, Hope, Hope's, you know, replyer number one, also my favorite account on Twitter.com, is correct. Hope's Revenge. We do need to think bigger, right? We should be renaming San Francisco. One wonders if instead of San Francisco, we could have Salesforce, California.

Salesforce, California. That has a nice ring to it. Or we could have OpenAI, California. Yeah, that'd be great. The towers there are targeting an occupied state. Why not go all the way? I would imagine Altmanville. That would be even better.

That'd be great. We've been talking about Waltaville down in Nashville. If Salesforce really wants to have that tower. Company towns are back. Company towns. They should provide the police. I would like to see an ad unit hung from the Golden Gate Bridge, you know,

just sort of like 100%. 100 feet by like, Everyone always goes crazy over those videos of Chinese cities where they look so Cyberpunk and they have like advertising everywhere the Blade Runner future. Let's do it Let's actually put mission. Why don't we just project on the side of the Salesforce tower? Yeah, yeah, yeah Also drone shows blimps. We should be doing much more advertising Not to go back to add quickly. Do you have a drone?Quick, not to go back to AdQuick, but they do have a drone.

No, no, no, please go back to AdQuick. Yeah, please. They have a drone, access to drone show ads, which is pretty cool. If you want to run a drone show. Oh wow, that's pretty cool. Yeah. All right, next post.

Ian Cinnamon, Apex Space has closed another round of funding to scale production and meet demand for satellite platforms for critical projects like Golden Dome. The new 200 million in series C funding is led by point 72 ventures and co-led by ABC alongside and recent Horowitz and a number of other funds so massive milestone Ian says this series C investment is a massive vote of confidence from our backers as demand for our bus platforms has exponentially increased as we as are also seeing the underlying need for space-based capabilities growing rapidly with this capital we are excited to double down on supporting the needs of the US and allied warfighter as well as critical commercial applications.

Congratulations Ian, you invented a bus. Do you remember that discrepancy? Created a space bus, I mean the speed at which Ian and the Apex team is moving, we had to go back and listen to our interview with Ian probably about a month ago at this point, but what an absolutely ambitious you know, ambitious timeline they've been on. It is cool how like all of the different pieces of the satellite stack are disaggregating and now there's new companies in each of them.

I wonder if eventually they'll kind of come together in some massive Kei Ratsu or something. Have you talked to Ian before? No, but I do like the idea of kind of a Frankel-esque role of all these kind of non-commercially viable, or you know, soon to be commercially viable launch providers. It's beautiful. Yeah, well it's not launch providers. He doesn't do rockets. He does the bus that the satellite rides on.

So you want to put a radio or a camera in space. TBPN Network. TBPN Network will be using Apex buses to build on top of. And another example would be like Bridget Midler, her company does the ground link. So how is TBPN going to beam down from these satellites? Well she will have a ground link network of satellites that can receive the message from space. So this next we got another post from Trey Stevens. So we have some news from Lockheed Martin.

They said, Lockheed Martin says, without us, AI might have never taken off. Say for over 40 years, Lockheed Martin has used the power of AI and machine learning to help drive the future of defense, aerospace and national security. And it's just a gibbified version of someone that kind of. Tom Cruise from Topper.

I was gonna say this looks like Trey Stevens to me, but you know. Not enough beard. Not enough body hair. But I mean, 40 years ago, I feel like they're not using that word correctly. That's 1980. Yeah, 1985.

Like what AI were they doing? That's like Apple II. Like neural networks had not really been invented yet. Yeah, that's a linear regression. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a TI-84. Yeah, exactly. They're basically saying, when was the first time

we mentioned the words artificial and intelligence? Not even together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like it could have been in the same paragraph. I mean, at the same time, like the lesson one of Andrew Ng's course on machine learning at Stanford starts with multiple regression. Yeah. That is the foundation of, and then he builds you up to neural networks. I hear that was a big secret and how Grok got to state of the art so quickly,

doing the regressions by hand, training the transformers with our craft. We need to bring that back. Yes, by hand. Training the transformers with our technical craft. Yeah, we need to bring that back. I actually wouldn't be surprised if Lockheed did have some, you know, AI person that was foundational at some point, like some, you know, some Django block in the massive stack goes back to some Lockheed paper, some some Skunk Works project. But it is hilarious that they're just like, yo, we're responsible for AI. You're welcome.

Oh, this is huge. We got some huge news from Josh Kushner. Let's go. Josh Kushner says, we are humbled to announce, we are absolutely humbled right now. We're so humbled to announce Thrive Holdings, a permanent capital vehicle, to dedicate dedicated to investing in acquiring and operating businesses for the long term. The mission of Thrive Holdings is to transform enterprises throughout the strategic application technology.

You know what I always say, you know the only thing better than capital? What? Permanent capital. Permanent capital. You know what they say, any man in possession of a good fortune only needs one thing, a permanent capital holding vehicle.

Yes. That's right, that's right. Can you actually break down what a permanent capital holding vehicle. That's right. That's right. Can you actually break down what a permanent capital holding vehicle means relative to like, everyone's familiar with like a VC fund, 10 year, 12 year, continuation vehicles. What's permanent capital? What matters is that closeness to God is closeness to fee streams. And normally fee streams, they stop at 10 years. You know, it's better than 10 years of fees, a lifetime of fees. You can pass on to your grandchildren.

But I mean, how is this different than, I mean, but is it structured different than a private equity fund that has a specific life or even like a hedge fund? Yeah. I mean, the standard permanent capital vehicle will have some degree of redemption schedule, right? Like LPs can pull out some degree of profit. Brent B. Shore has some incredible assets. He's the famous one, right? To detail this.

Yeah. Is he truly the golden standard for permanent capital or is there like a public company? Like does BlackRock have a permanent holding vehicle that we don't talk about? I mean there's plenty of like the close end vehicles were like a huge thing in the UK in the 90s. There's dozens of these. Brent B. Shore I think is the most artisanal. Sure, sure, sure.

His is printing cash at a rate no one else I think is doing right now. But of course there's you know permanent capital vehicles we cannot name rolling up eight delays in the Midwest, right? Yeah and I think the opportunity here is for Josh and the Thrive team to think even more long term than they already do. Like how do about, you know, not in this sort of like 10 year cycle, which Josh I think had posted something a long time ago, which is that managers think in quarters, like founders think in decades, and there's huge advantages in alpha

and just being able to think and plan on a longer timeline than everyone else. And especially if you're thriving, you're thinking about buying, like I think it's been widely reported they've bought an accounting firm to put AI in the middle and do automation on top of. That's a deal you need to hold for 40 years. And then this also solves the continuity vehicle issue, right?

You have lots of companies like Stripe, you're holding a year 10, 11, 12. How are you going to get liquidity on that? Well, you can pass it over to your permanent capital vehicle. You think that's possible? I mean, it's similar to Sequoia Heritage, right? It's like a continuity vehicle. Sure, sure, sure. Pass those things over, get liquidity for the LPs,

the initial set, and hold a basket of really high quality assets that you want to hold for duration. Okay, so take me through some of the sizes of permanent capital vehicles. Because with a VC fund, you know, you hear people raising a $50 million solo GB fund all the way up raising a $50 million solo GB fund all the way up to a $5 billion growth fund. Permanent capital feels like more narrowly defined, but is there kind of like,

what is like a sweet spot base hit for the size of a permanent capital vehicle? Yeah, you're a hard shot. It's like the best example. Oh, okay, okay. I wasn't actually sure. I didn't want to botch it, so I just looked it up. But that's a good way to think about it of, hey, we're not going to focus as much on

raising new... The best scenario is you have cash flowing assets that produce capital that allow you to reinvest or buy other businesses to produce more cash flow. So it's sort of the holy grail. And many people have said that CURTA mail loneliness is a permanent capital vehicle. It would fix all you need. It would fix me. What about the mindset, what it takes to be great in venture capital is often high risk, not making money for a very long time. All the value capture happens at the very end.

Obviously the types of companies that are typically rolled into permanent capital vehicles, cash flowing from day one. I mean, I think like the single greatest Josh Kushner quote is like, you never lose money buying fifth Avenue real estate. If you think about thrive as a thematic bet on the fifth Avenue real estate, a private company is probably not a bad idea to hold these really blue chip assets to duration. So it's more just about fine grade founders. If they're,

if they're losing money in the super high growth phase, they go in, they go in the growth fund, they go in the venture fund if they're cash flowing, but they're still fantastic entrepreneurs, fantastic assets, they go in the permanent capital vehicle. I mean, if you're a stripe and you're planning to go public in 2035, 20, you know, 2300, well, once they've consumed 100% of US GDP, yeah,

yeah, process through Stripe. Global GDP, actually. They need the space narrative. Look, yeah, the space economy is growing rapidly. We need to go off the planet. Off planet. It's just these continuity vehicles are going to get huge.

Yeah. Wow. Okay. Well, speaking of growth stuff, Hadley Harris, uh, uh, venture capitalist actually wrote about, uh, vector databases, which I think you might be a little bit familiar. Yeah. I mean, I was the first check into Chromo. Okay. I still think it's the fastest growing open source vector database. Yeah. I love Jeff. We had him on the show. Jeff's amazing. He's great. Um, so he's breaking down some hype and I'd be interesting to hear how the market has evolved and if Jeff has kind of altered his strategy. Hadley's breaking down the story of Pinecone.

Two years ago today, Andreessen announced $100 million into Pinecone as everyone and their mother tripped over each other to invest in best vector databases, given how little standalone vector databases are valued now. The hype cycle is wild to look back on. The timeline is late 2022, chat GPT launches early rag architectures emerge.

There's first buzz around these companies. Then there's a massive surge in demand for vector search, vector databases seen as critical infrastructure. But then after there's peak hype, every AI infrastructure diagram has a vector DB layer, saturation hits, Postgres, Redis, MongoDB, add native vector search, clouds bundle it, the hype fades, vector search becomes commodity market, tightens attention shifts to agents, fine tuning orchestration.

So is this a good telling of the history of the vector database hype cycle? Or is there something you need to put in the truth zone? It's accurate in the hype cycle. I put in the truth zone and that this feels like kind of terminal VC brain. Like it is likely true that the vector database market will not have dozens of billion dollar outcomes. Sure, sure, sure. But if you look at even the traditional relational database market, there are hundreds of massive

companies there, right? And if you think about a huge amount of enterprise software, it's just different views on top of structured data elements. Like Salesforce is the world's greatest structured database, right? There will be big winners in the vector database space in that you just need to be able to store unstructured data. And like, yes, you can search vectors using numpy.sort, but that's not an enterprise-grade database solution.

And I just think this is a good excuse to, uh, you know, have missed a lot of winning companies such as Chroma. A lot of people are taking victory laps. John, Schuett coastless as we told our LPs that were staying out of the market because they were too trivial to build and commoditize and were never used without BM 25. What is BM 25? Do you know what that is? I heard of that. Uh, VC VEC database thought leadership was a great filter for those who, for who's really technical

and who has shallow understanding of ML infra. We gotta have John on the show. He's always dropping bombs on the timeline. Well, speaking of dropping bombs on the timeline, hit me with a sound effect, Jordy, cause we're moving over to a post by Deva about Tech Bros learning about convertibles. There are two different posts here, one from Spore, a friend of the show, says it's called

we do a little Bay Area sightseeing and someone else bought a BMW Z4. What's your take on convertibles? My first car in high school was a 2002 Honda S2000. That's a great car. In baby blue. Wow. Sick. I still own it to this day.

That's amazing. It's the single greatest thing I've ever driven. Yeah. It's amazing that they've discovered convertibles. I mean, it's just like, it's 25 years late. It's kind of weird to discover this in your 30s. Especially in California. Especially like, also both of those look like automatics.

There's a generation of young people in tech. Yeah, only owned Tesla's yeah, and they don't and they're discovering that that car manufacturers Have been making pretty good cars lots of manufacturers have been making pretty good cars in a bunch of different categories for a long time And it's a beautiful moment. I think it should be celebrated I also think I think what I want to what I also think what I want to see people do more, people I don't think realize like if you have a car, let's say you have a Honda Accord, you can drive to any car dealership and within two hours have swapped it for a 911. It's actually like an extremely smooth process where they will take your car, basically not sight unseen,

but they'll look at it, maybe close to it, that your car has some amount of value. You can roll that into something else and you can, within three hours on any day of the week, you can be driving in a 911 or another car that's going to change your life. It's one of the few things. If you're not a permanent capital guy,

can't afford the 911, Miata's. Miata's, yeah. $5,000. Yeah. Do you know the best selling convertible in America? Has to be a Miata, right? It's not. It's the Jeep Wrangler.

No way. Yeah, because they sell a lot of them. People don't think of them as convertibles the second they are. Yeah, drop top. But yeah, I think Tesla's missed out and Rivian's missed out on the convertible market the all of the car companies Are just coalescing around like everyone wants a crossover SUV that drives a little more Yeah, again the one one piece of feedback here guys. Yep manual transmission. Yes. Yes, like I will teach I will fly out

Yeah, that's gonna change. Yeah. Yeah Well, maybe next year next year will be tech learned about Transmission I know transmission. Yeah, we're gonna put you on the bottom of the same except except I might my first car was a Very very old Toyota Corolla hatchback. Was it manual? That was man No, and I would drive it in San Francisco and it would be like a life or death. Going uphill and manual is really hard. No, and San Francisco hills are just a different breeze. It's terrible. That's wild. And I just remember like some of the peak fear of my teenage years was, you know, hitting a stop sign or hitting a red light. Oh, it's so bad. The issue is even by then, even at the time when I was 16, people were so, historically,

so many, every car was manual. And so if you wouldn't pull up behind somebody on a hill, you wouldn't pull up right behind their bumper. But in the age of automatics, people would just pull up right behind your bumper, maybe they're leaving a couple feet. And so I'd be looking in the rear view mirror being like, if I don't pull this off. Yeah, that's my issue with Teslas. It's like, if you're self-driving, bumper maybe they're leaving a couple It's really true. Okay. So if you do want an electric vehicle that's also a convertible,

do you know what you have to get? Tesla doesn't sell one. Rivian doesn't sell one. Can you not take the roof off? Lucid doesn't sell one. Tycon doesn't come in a convertible yet. Crazy. You have to get the Hummer EV. I think that's a very rational choice for somebody who just wants, I just want an electric car and I want a convertible. Yeah. Can we get a three speed manual on an EV? Can we get a three speed?

Well, you know that, you know, the Hyundai has the fake DCT now and people actually love it. A lot of the car guys have driven them and they're like, cause it injects sound that's pretty accurate. And a lot of them are like, yeah, it was weird for the first minute, but then I just got into it. And it was exactly like that. It's like the beat of electric video. Oh, totally, totally. Yeah. Yeah. But it's like this funny, like,

hashback, the Ionic five N is, but it designed by the guy who did the M division at BMW. They post him, the letter that comes after M is N. And so he made the, the, the N series. They're also doing this Hyundai's on a tear. They're doing a whole bunch of random stuff Anyway, we need the sound effect because quen 30 B has dropped and will brown is given the review Let's hear it for Alibaba Hopefully the sound is balanced on hopefully we'll see will Brown says I really didn't expect 30 B a 3 B to be this good I was hoping we'd get a small mixture of experts model as a useful research toy instead

We got one of the strongest all-around models under a hundred billion parameters Have you been following quen at all and what's going on? I only use American made models Yes, yes, yes Chinese models can't use well Have you heard the Tyler Cowan take that the Chinese models are actually American models because they are trained on the American data. Exactly. They're trained on the American internet because that's where the data comes from and they often export the data or exfiltrate it from open AI. And so we should be letting them steal.

Or they train on the American models themselves. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And then they do maybe a little bit RLHF to say, Hey, cut it with the Tiananmen stuff. It's like the Taobao model. It's a ripoff of the American provider. Exactly, exactly. So maybe there's less to be worried about. Maybe the Manchurian candidate in DeepSeek

is secretly a pro-American Manchurian candidate. And once you actually prompt engineer it enough, it'll love talking about Tiananmen. Yeah. It gets fired. That's what it lives for. Every single day. That's what it lives for.

It's like capitalism is the best system. It's lifted more people out of poverty than any other system. There's a little delian buried in the model. I believe it. We should send delian into Shanghai, like behind enemy lines to train these models. Put them in a Varda capsule, send them down.

All right, this next post from Ed Randall. He asked GPT-45, can you help me find some good Chinese food spots in SF that I may not have heard of previously absolutely there are several Chinese spots in SF that will make your mouth water and we'll get to that but first in the in case this is a business meal I'd love to talk to you about ramp ramp is the ultimate platform for modern finance teams combining corporate cards with expense management bill payments procurement accounting procurement, accounting automation, and more.

Ramp is on a mission to help customers save their most valuable resources, time and money. Did I tell you? I've been doing this to random people too. There's somebody flying down from San Francisco, and I was like, oh, are you gonna pay, will your company pay for your flight? And he was like, yeah, yeah, of course.

And I was like, by any chance, are you on Ramp? They have corporate travel that makes it really fantastic. We booked this room. Yeah. We did. Yeah. It makes you wonder if open AI was actually incubated by.

It's possible new company. It's possible. Well, speaking of travel and corporate travel, go to wander.com. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. There we go. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities,

dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 customer service. Getting Bill Minaitis to sing your company Jingle is priceless. I'm a happy Wanderer investor. Oh, right. You are. It's the world's greatest property.

One hand washes the other. You come on the show. There we go. You run some ads. Chill the investments. You're good. Money goes right into your own pocket. I like it. That's great.

Did you see this from Jarvis? This is awesome. Firm called Dragon Lawyers filed court papers with the watermark on every single page until the judge ordered them to stop. I mean the thing that's beautiful is the word art. It's just this massive, it's this massive Dragon Lawyers PC.

Apparently their website is iconic too. And also I think that's just so funny. The dragon watermark. It just cracks. This is called exercising free will. This is innovation. The funny thing is people don't realize that you could do whatever you want with the watermark.

What's incredible is that's not AI generated. No, no. Someone drew that. For sure. Yeah. It does not go to make that. The other thing that stands out here is the attorney at Dragon Lawyers uses a at yahoo.com email.

Amazing. That's how you know he's been in the game for a long time. You see Yahoo. There's a whole like, you know. Cohort of hitters. Yeah, it's like astrology for business. Like when you see the different domain names, you know, so, so it tells a whole story about. You never want to work with a lawyer that has a corporate branded email.

Absolutely. AOL outlook.com Yahoo. Altavista. Altavista. That's a throwback. You gotta get a lawyer who has an altavista.com. You should, you should get your own watermark. What would your watermark be? I think the dragon's pretty sick. I think that's hard to be. Mine might be the ramp logo to help control your corporate spend. Yeah, exactly. Just a massive ramp card.

Maybe Jordy just has a photo of you in the jacket like this, like the dragon. Yeah. In the TBPN jacket. That would be the way to do it. But we need to be watermarking more things. We're thinking about selling the windshield of this show. So we already have the logos down there. So it'll be a piece of glass that separates between, and so basically we'll set up like a glass box.

Physical glass. Every angle has a different. Has a logo on it. I mean, I listen for the ad rates. Of course, of course. The content in between is irrelevant. I think we should just do all ad Thank you for setting up a premium subscription, that's just

Public calm investing for those who take it seriously they got multi-asset investing industry leading yields trusted by millions go to public.com Relating yields trusted by millions. Go to public.com. Thank you. Anyway, did you see this post by Ben Sharf? Commerce as we know it has officially changed forever. Well done Shopify and OpenAI. I thought the first line was a little dramatic, but it's very cool.

It's basically an integrate. It's a shopping on open AI. Oh, on chat. GPT. Integration. Wow. The barest thing is these are not good red lights. These are not the best red light there

You can get a red light. How do you get one tractor supply? Chicken light if you go to my desk in my house I have chicken chicken all around why for seven there because you get the same wavelength That's these expensive LEDs and chicken lights $19 and it's good for a huge alpha You heard it your first chicken like chicken lights tractor supply calm Well, I know as we talk about this this will be baked into the next training run of GPT-5 It'll be up now, but overall. This is very cool People don't really realize like you nothing makes me happier than reducing friction in commerce

So the fact that I can just go to openAI, you know, do some product research, use Shop Pay to check out with an OpenAI, and do all of that. And wasn't Aidan kind of teasing this a little bit? He was like, oh yeah, like every time I shop for anything, I do a whole deep research report, I burn 10,000 hours of GPU time to figure out what paper towels I like.

Or you're burning, the money going to burn on Google Ads. I mean, yeah, the interesting thing here is that there were a lot of companies, there are a lot of companies that have raised venture capital to build AI shopping assistants. And this is kind of what we've talked about on the show quite a bit, which is that if you're building an agent, a consumer agentic experience, you have to assume

that you're basically on OpenAI's roadmap. And maybe they haven't announced it yet. They've talked about shopping before. They've talked about ads, different things like that. But this type of thing, any type of agentic experience that helps consumers transact online, you just have to assume that you're on the roadmap. Yeah, well, I mean, this is the Ben Thompson

aggregation theory thing, why OpenAI needs to become a consumer tech company. They have almost a billion users, and so if they can be the portal to AI stuff, they can do a lot of the things downstream of that question. It is funny, so so in the in the in the meta lawsuit, they obviously avoid TikTok. Yeah. And one reason that you could argue, you know, avoid TikTok

is that it's state backed and they had to raise 10, you know, however many tens of billions of dollars to do it. But it seems now you can build new consumer tech giants. You just need tens of billions of dollars. And so a state government backing you. Yeah. Well, I mean not for opening up for opening I Put on the tinfoil hat put on the tinfoil hat we don't have the tinfoil hat but it is like a novel Financing process, but it is an interesting and legal process. Yes. Yes, but I think it will set an important precedent We've been advocating for more nonprofit to for-profit conversions.

We're really looking into PETA because they know where all the tastiest animals live. And we think that that could unlock potentially hundreds of billions and maybe trillions, just maps of just selling maps, the most delicious animals. The PETA take private is going to be crazy. Every fund is going to be in that for sure. For sure. It's what thrives. Yeah. Yeah. I also think Red Cross you put, you put Brian Johnson at the helm. It's just all the blood goes through him.

It's a, it's a huge, a huge opportunity. Red Cross blueprint Put it all together k-rats of biohacking well, we have a Post from a former guest that actually drew. Did you know that we broke this story and tech crunch reporters on us? We didn't break it we caused the story with the podcast you got community So this is us that's me. I'm the producer, I'm the podcast. Okay, so we had Jordy, break it down.

This is not a podcast. It's a live show, we need to put the community note on the community note. Anyway, Jordy, read it. CEO of Perplexity comes on the show. We talk for 30 minutes about a bunch of different things. Ads were brought up in a hypothetical. He answered the hypothetical question. TechCrunch basically used it to do this sort of click-baity piece, which I

thought was wrong in so many ways. One is, if you actually listen to the interviewer, he's saying that the browser that they're building is a huge part of the company's roadmap. Very, very meaningful. He says this is their second act. He's really betting the company on it in many ways. And so to do something, to write something like this in a way that is just objectively damaging to Perplexity's brand, because what user,

no, yeah, of course over time every consumer tech company on a long enough time horizon runs ads, right? Netflix, Instacart, anybody with a large audience eventually runs ads. But that said, there's nothing about our conversation with him that said that that's the top priority or that's how they're planning to monetize all these different things.

And so I thought it was just, founders need to be aware and investors that TechCrunch is not the publication that it was and you have to assume that they are a hostile actor now and sure they might cover your fundraise they might do this or that but I think they knew exactly what they were doing and you know I support private equity broadly. Well yeah but now it's not private equity backed. They sold. To another private equity. Yeah I remember when when when TechCrunch was for sale my my thought was you know worthless asset just because not a worthless asset that's a little bit harsh. We weren't interested in exploring it,

but it almost would have been worth buying it just so that it didn't turn into TechCrunch being anti-tech. I mean, much like Gawker, the most ethical thing to do was buy it and shut it down. Yeah, true. What was interesting about this to me, so the actual title of the article is Perplexity CEO Says its browser will track everything users do online and sell

hyper personalized ads. Now I have always said that, that like I don't think it's a challenge to sell ads in LLM responses. I think it's actually very true. There was initially a moment where it was like, Oh, well if it's all texts back and forth, like what are you going to do? Put display ads. It's like, no, you're obviously just going to have another LLM that runs on top of the response. And before it spits it out, you're going to say, Hey, add an ad into this paragraph. It's this point and, and add a sponsor block.

And those ads will be more topical. It'll be better. It'll be better. So I've been always super bullish on the idea of advertising in text-based LLM responses. I don't think it's challenged at all. I think it's very logical. I think Chat GPT will do it on the free tier. I think perplexity should do it. But his response to me was actually more bearish on ads in the short term than I thought it was going to be. But then tech crunch flipped it around and made him sound, it was very, very odd.

But it was interesting to think about what Google would have to, if Google made products. Google made products. In the Google results. Yeah, you already have AI results. You already have ads in the AI results. They already are doing this. No, but I was gonna say, if Google said,

for 50 bucks a month, you can have non-personalized ads in Chrome, would you? No, I don't want that. No, I would pay $100 a month to have only ramp ads across every single vehicle. You probably could do that if you just set up your own Google Ads account and then just put only your email in there. You know how you used to get those Facebook ads that were like, I'm a monitist on a t-shirt. Don't talk to me until I've had my coffee or whatever.

There's like super color, like Teespring was like really leveraging that. I'm the ultimate ramp customer. No, it's like I'm a monitist. Don't talk to me until I've had one banger on X. Yeah, exactly. And you're just like, how did they think to target me with that? But it was all based on like the Facebook ad targeting at the time. Building a custom ad block Chrome extension that replaces it with ramp.

People have done that with like, you know, replace it with cats or replace it with random stuff. So yeah, we should build that for ramp for sure. Um, but, uh, uh, we got the, uh, we got the community note on it. Uh, and they did, they did actually credit credit us in the tech wrench article incorrectly, incorrectly as a podcast. Yep. But they did give us the shout out, uh, and they didn't refer to us as our old name. They got the acronym correctly, correct. They called it TBPN, which is great. And the, and the, um, after there was a big debate on X about the post, there was eventually

a community note that says tech crunch takes what Irvind said out of context. The podcast host, I think that's me asked him a hypothetical question and Irvind tags Arrington, Errington, Michael Michael Arrington the original founder of tech crunch He said I am sorry. I'm deeply ashamed at what tech crunch has become It's rough. Never sell your company never sell. Yeah, whatever you're doing. Make it your never never sell I would never associate with anyone who sold their company ever never what you have to say that what do you have to say? who sold their company ever, never. What do you have to say? What do you have to say for yourself? As chairman of TPPN, we will never sell this media franchise to anyone. We will hover by and shut down TAC crunch.

Yes. Yes. I think all three of us have sold companies at this point. Anyway, Ray Dalio dropped a long piece. I don't know if we want to skip over that. Let's skip over that one. Let's do Jason. I did say, I think it was Buko or Bucko. Yeah, Buko Capital guy. He was basically saying, if Dalio is wrong again this time, he was basically saying, I almost hope Dalio's right about this changing world order.

You've heard the conspiracy theory that Bridgewater is not a real hedge fund, right? No one, if you ask all Bridgewater associate employees, they've never seen someone actually place a trade. It's like possibly a giant Ponzi that no one knows what to do with. You know, obviously they're not a Ponzi. It's a real hedge fund, but no one has ever seen a trade get conducted at Bridgewater. So I like the idea that it's all in, it's a giant news. It's a media business.

It's all subsidizing. It's a media business. This is like, yeah, it's hilarious. Cause it's like, they, they, they, like, up until like a couple of years ago, the media product was one PDF that was floating out there called principles that eventually got turned into a book. Like that's like, that's the most tinfoil hack and spears theory in the world. Um, hilarious though. Anyway, uh, let's move on.

Researchers secretly ran a massive, unauthorized AI persuasion experiment on Reddit in a large debate sub. The bots answers, mined the original poster's identity and post history to personalize answers and created identities such as rape survivor. This is dark. Yeah, super dark.

I mean, interesting. Formal legal demands against the researchers who ran this experiment. The reason I thought this was interesting is that we tend to associate bots with low quality actors. Sure. You know, getting a DM that's like,

hello, you forgot to log in. Yeah, here's your FedEx thing. Yeah. Or some like credit card thing. But the internet is full of bots from sophisticated groups in this way. This is just one story to break out of many. And I thought it was an interesting use case

of like being able to influence opinion at scale in a way of not just in a hyper-personalized way. So they would be responding to a comment or a post and they would go to, and whatever software they were using would go to the user's profile that they were commenting to look back at all their previous history and craft a response specifically for that person.

And again, a human can do that, but being able to do that at scale in order to influence opinion is interesting. But Reddit- Our only saving grace is ArcGi puzzles on every single webpage. Every time you click a new page, you need to solve an IMO.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, the IMO will be solved, but the ArcGi puzzle will not be solved. You'll have to match the blocks for a minute every time you wanna refresh the page. You'll have to save something else out a minute every time you want to refresh the page. You have to save something outside of content safety guidelines. Yes, that is a big one. And so on this Reddit's top lawyer, Ben Lee said the company is considering legal action against researchers from the University of Zurich who ran what he

called an improper and highly unethical experiment. So anyways, Reddit not happy that their users are being turned into lab rats, but I'm sure it's happening. This design trend linear has for a long time been the design the product building product that everyone has been obsessed with. And everyone's been kind of ripping it off, but

ripping off the website, but yeah, Yeah, the website. But Kenan over at Icon has uh, completely changed the game in terms of design and built, it's an AI ad maker but it looks like a team who designed the website. It looks like a Coachella poster. Yeah it does. He has his story, his investors on the landing page, including the ramp logo. I guess it's like someone from ramp invested. Um, the team is examples. Wait, wait. Have you seen it when you go and you, you click, like get started, it will actually say like only five slots remaining. And there's like a timer for SAS product. So good. So good. So,

I mean this has been hotly debated with, with like, is he in on the joke? Is he going too far? He's clearly pushing the limits in terms of baiting people and creating frustration. He, I don't know if you saw this earlier, but he put out, Icon put out a comparison chart and his company was the only one with tier one investors. And tier one engineers. and tier one engineers and open AI had neither and they have a lot of the same investors. So what is your take? Genius or, or, you know, or is it the scary castle?

I think it's, it's, if you're going to be the machine that generates slop, you have to become slop. You have to go all the way. Yeah. It is a slop. Like a slop farmer. Icon's terminal business is TikTok slop. If you're going to be in that business, you might as well live in it. Live in it. Yeah. I think that's a good take. A life's work of slop. That's great. Uh, has you, wait, has your ex payout gone up? My ex payout? Yeah, I got a lot. You got a big check. That's great. There we go. Are you going to retire? Uh? Off the ex payout alone.

Yeah, yeah. You know what you should spend your ex payout on? An eight sleep. Go to eightsleep.com. Nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Apparently, this is from Sheil. Ex cracked down on an engagement farm,

so real creators are earning more. Reminds me of Google's 2011 Panda update at crushed spammy sites like Mahalo, which I guess was Jason Calacanisis website. I had no idea about this. And boosted quality ones like Nerdwall. Yeah. Shields is like really slideth in there and made the internet a better place. It's interesting. So Shields shares his payouts. It went from around $200, $240 to $700 and then to over

$1,300. Let's hear it for Shield pulling in the big bucks for his post. I mean, if you are- A four figure paycheck. Pretty good. Pretty good. I mean, that's getting up into YouTube money.

If you have, if you're an LP of Shields, you have premonoctone, right? You think so? That has to be a DPI driver. Yeah, yeah. You think so? That has to go back up. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He can't pocket that. It's gotta go back. It's gotta go back. Okay.

We actually do do that. Except, except John's still got his ever. No, but we, we, we put all of our, our, our, Yeah. We pull all of the, all of the accounts into one, one, one, one account. Um, but, but it has gone up. I'm excited to see where our TBPN official check lands because we've been pumping out a lot of content, getting a lot of views. My understanding is that was all going to finance a goo based energy drink in Nashville, Tennessee. Yes, yes, yes.

There were rumors of it. Watch this space. Yeah, watch this space. Let's go to Lulu. She says an example of what I call the cascade of courage when a brave CEO does something that everyone wants to, but no one dares to. Let's go to Lulu. She says, an example of what I call the cascade of courage when a brave CEO does something that everyone wants to, but no one dares to. The somewhat brave CEOs are emboldened to join and eventually everyone else follows suit until even the most risk averse CEOs do it. Let's give it up for the somewhat brave and the risk averse CEOs.

The somewhat brave CEOs. They don't get enough credit. They're brave too. They don't get enough credit. They don't get enough credit. Everyone talks, oh, Brian Armstrong, so brave. No one says about the tier three bravery. Not last, not total coward in the middle of the path.

It returns to being in the middle of the curve. Pretty good. Pretty good. Yeah. But Duolingo, I actually don't know if the CEO is the founder, but you know Duolingo was started by the guy who created Captchas? Yeah. Amazing.

Legendary story. But anyway, Duolingo says, BLO is an all hands email from our CEO. We will be going AI first, just like how betting on mobile in 2012 made all the difference. We're making a similar call now. It's time for the platform shift. What doesn't change? We remain a company that cares deeply about its employees. And they said, Duolingo is going to be AI first, changing how work gets done. It's not just a productivity boost. It gets us closer to

our mission. This gets me thinking there is an opportunity for a company to basically let go every single person except the CEO and be the first one person, one billion dollar revenue company. And you just have to tap it for a second. I mean, yeah, I was thinking of that. Rehire people, yeah. The fastest way to get to a billion dollars one employee is to start with six billion dollars.

Lots of employees. Fire everyone and see what happens. 20% of the clients just forget to stop paying. Everything breaks. X did this. X did this, yeah. X proves this is possible. What company do you think is plus a billion in revenue that you think you could actually

run solo? I was thinking, I was looking at Blackberry recently. They still make $500 million a year. Auto insurance companies are another good one. Oh yeah, that makes sense. Claims adjudication, kind of an AI problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, pretty simple. Interesting.

Imagine saying you're having an issue and you're saying talk to a human and it's like, we just got one guy. We only have the CEO. We just got one guy. It's actually faster to talk to me. And the CEO is at Hill and Valley having a dinner, shaking hands, greasing barbs. You're on the side of the road, car's on fire. You're talking to open AI.

Yeah. That's great. Anyway, congratulations. It's glazing you. It's glazing you. It's like, sorry, you're a great driver. No, you're a great driver. You're a great driver. It's anyway, I congratulate it's glazing you Just crashed jumped into the street How did he not see you

Bicyclists shouldn't be on the road anyway, they should ride on the side. Have you tried having four wheels? Anyway, I need a sound effect because Joshua Steinman over at galvanic Has launched a vibe real? Vibrial alert, I mean it was no it was no I've never honestly I've never seen John laugh. It's so mean because obviously I love Josh. We saw him on the plane. This is the meme of like you know you ship the meme. But it is awesome.

It's a great video. It's a great video. I love the aesthetic. And I think he did this because he knew we were gonna be, he must have figured out from the airline that we were gonna be on the flight too, sitting right behind him. Do we know what Galvanic does? Yes, they secure-

The American Industrial Base. The American Industrial Base. It's a technology company. The more importantly, it's run by our absolute boy, Josh Steinman, who we love. It's fantastic. It does have a very cool aesthetic. It's a great video. Go check it out. I wish we could play it, but we're working off a PDF today.

So share the video. Yeah. Any critiques on today's stream, by the way, just go to find Ben Kohler. Yeah. Shoot him a note. He'll have an MPS survey for today's stream. Anyway, what else is the news? We should wrap up soon. This is getting a little too wild. We got 10 minutes till four. What else we got? We got the Pelosi bill. Oh, we gotta cover the Pelosi Act. There's a new bill in Congress.

If you've been living under a rock since yesterday. It's the preventing elected leaders owning securities and investments. They get super creative with these acronyms. The Pelosi Act and yeah, Josh how Holly sounds like an absolute dog for coming out with this yeah and what's your take on the insider trading on Capitol Hill I want to announce that we are supporting the ramp act yes the what is ramp stand for the ramp out running America, the right accounting company for your provider.

Extremely original. We need to get you a pen and paper so you can map these out. The interesting impact here is that autopilot, which has run the Pelosi a tracker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It may be their own undoing though, because if they advertise how good, how good Pelosi is at insider trading, made it

too much in the public eye and they're going to have to find another goaded copy. I've always said that the elected leader should be primarily optimizing for the stock market going up in the short term and we should ultimately just give Jane Street right access to the legal code. We don't need elections. We don't need elections. We don't need elections. We need markets. We need markets.

And we need high frequency trading firms to decide what laws, and they can toggle laws off within microseconds. Does that tie into our sponsor? Which one? We got a bunch. Polymarket? Polymarket. Oh yeah.

Polymarket. Polymarket. Did you see Polymarket predicted the Canadian election correctly? They absolutely nailed it. I don't. What they basically made, I mean, the way to think about Polymarket. Polymarket. Did you see Polymarket predicted the Canadian election correctly? They absolutely nailed it. I don't follow. What they basically made, I mean, the way to think about Polymarket is it's effectively like a decentralized crystal ball is the best way to describe it, right? It is. And it's really interesting to watch this chart. Unfortunately, we can't screen share it, but about a month ago, they had a carny at 60% and you can just watch as we get closer

and closer to yesterday, just going up and to the right. And again, this is back to back to back to back in terms of calling elections. It is. Yeah, I do, like this story that they got it right has been not really in the news and I think a lot of it's driven by the fact that the, I mean, the liberal one, the conservative lost, right?

And it was kind of like an upset but Polymarket called it correctly. I don't, I actually haven't been tracking the news in Canada. I don't know if it's been like as much of an issue but during the 2024 election, obviously the question about like, is polymarket biased was a huge one. And then they called it correctly. And so I'm wondering in the next American election, if, there will be debate over polymarket role,

polymarkets role in the American election, or if we've like truly just laid it to rest and prediction markets are markets are just a thing that exists and everyone's like, Oh yeah. Like they, it seems like a, you know, election interference is obviously illegal, but, but conclave interference is not. If you're a Bishop, why not get some actual inside gamble? Yeah. You think that's what's happening? I think it might be happening. We should check the odds. Yeah. Yeah. Following the next pope. You think that's what's happening? I think it might be happening. We should check the odds. Yeah, following the odds.

You can track the con claim on Polymarket. I think these odds are wrong. Do you have a pick over Pareto? All I can say on this is I think these odds are bad. I think it's all off. Oh, you think it's all off? I think we're headed for an American post. American post.

Well, I think we know it'll get more and more accurate as the days go on We have a post from Dylan field He says tired. Hmm. The model makes trivial errors. This isn't useful wired for $20 a month I can rent a somewhat self-aware spaceship that enables me to explore the depths of latent space access the collective wisdom of humanity, and expand my mind. And I think it's a- When 03 makes trivial errors,

like claiming two terms cancel when they clearly don't, it becomes apparent that the model doesn't actually understand anything. These models aren't remotely close to AGI. They're latent space search engines. How are you feeling about the idea, like the definition of AGI and where we are in terms of the models?

What are they good at? What aren't they good at? Tyler Cowen said AGI is here. We had another guy on, Will Brown, who said we have 10 minute AGI now. Other people say it can't even solve an Arc AGI puzzle, therefore it is by definition not AGI. I just think long duration tasks

are clearly the challenge. Like operator does not work particularly well today. Like we are seeing incredible returns to very well scoped, very narrow tasks with very specific models. However, you can do more than work for 10 minutes. I think long duration coherence is still a big challenge. If I had a handicap, but I think we're still probably 5,000, 6,000 years away,

but that's gonna be a real slow and long takeoff. Yeah. Where are you seeing, uh, where are you seeing AI be most valuable in your personal work life? Like like in your daily driving, like I've had been, I've been having just a lot of luck with, uh, using the deep research function to basically build like what's essentially just a really detailed Wikipedia page or aggregation of a bunch of Wikipedia pages instead of just, Oh, I got to go to the Microsoft Wiki to understand what they

were doing in the eighties. And then, and then Apple, I can just say, summarize it all, pull it all in, bake it all in and it's great. Deep research is doing easily four hours of work. I think it's fantastic. On the average query like that, right? Even if, even if you knew exactly the sources to pull from totally totally So it just saves me opening a ton of tabs, but what have you been finding useful? I mean even just as an interface to stuff

I already like now and work with like oh three is an incredible tutor like there's a ton of healthcare regulation That's on websites I don't know how to read that are like horrible to interface with even just using O3 to interface with the sites prepare research briefings for me it's really amazing just the amount of documentation we're able to generate it's much higher yeah are you a runehead text is the universal interface or do you think voice again is more important I think corporate expense accounts are really the universal interface yeah those receipts really receipts yeah well we got to talk about this post from Luke Metro.

He says, my most online opinion is that there should be awards for best screenshots like they do with photography. And I think this is one of the best takes. Take it a week. We should make quite this and make it the screen shot of the week. So I think all three of us are in this chat or were before it got doxxed.

Were you? Were you like? You were probably right above this, right were before Dora got doxed. Were you? Were you? Were you like? You were probably right above this, right? I did not leave. I know. I know. We were saying we should have left because then we'd be in the screenshot.

It would be in the screenshot. If we'd been like, oh, David Sacks, I'm going to leave right now. Imagine how low status it would be if you left and they cropped you out. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like Sean Maguire or Tucker Carlson. Not you. We were joking about, yeah, if you had left right between David and Tucker, you could have changed your name to Barack Obama or, or ramp.com

or TVPN on X, watch TVPN on X. And then you leave and boom, you're part of history. Part of history. They would have cropped you out. Anyway, you're, you're famous for collecting rare PDFs. You're famous for collecting rare books. Do you think you'll get in the rare screenshot game? I mean, this is just, whoever leaked it,

I do hope you face federal charges. Will does. Oh! That is a bold statement, but I will say, I feel like Will has already, has his screenshot collection. I do, I have a lot of great rare screenshots. The real alpha these days is rare RSS feeds. Yes, yes, yes.

Private podcasting networks. Yes, yes, yes. Yes. Yeah. I've thought about that. The RSS feed for just the partners, just for the firm or just for the boys. All right. We got to cover this post from Dylan Pissigel. He says, Microsoft's initial plan was to leapfrog both Google and Amazon to become the largest tech infrastructure company in the world. Then they got scared.

They backed away from OpenAI, backed away from some leases and even slowed down their construction pays for major data centers. Shots fired, shots fired. Get the thing. Yeah. This was interesting. I mean, I do feel like Satya has taken a big step back from the media even in the last, even, you know, in the last month, clearly felt

like he was flying a little too close to the sun. Maybe. Yeah, I don't know. The I the, uh, I, I, I read this piece in the plane and, um, like the thing that was most clear to me is that it's extremely hard to sum up, uh, Microsoft's data center strategy and like a single pithy tweet. Um, because Dylan's clearly gone so much deeper on all the different levers that they're pulling to access power and access data center capacity and not only are the inference happening on the hyperscalers, but now there's the neo clouds as well with Crusoe and and core weave and and so there's a lot of like these weird things where

The headline is that Microsoft cancelled two gigawatts worth of leases is that Microsoft canceled two gigawatts worth of leases, but that only covers non-binding LOIs, not firm contracts. And it fails to mention that Microsoft has five gigawatts of pre-lease capacity under binding contracts that will start operations between 2025 and 2028. So it's not like they're like, so in reality, they walked away from more than two gigawatts of non-binding contracts, but you don't hear about those because they're just like in the handshake deal in the LOI phase. But then at the same time, they're also like the number one buyer or they're growing a ton.

And it's interesting. It's interesting to think about how much leverage they get from just coming out and saying we're pausing on a few of these things. Because then all the people that had data centers and construction that were just like, oh, one of the hyperscalers will buy it, right? And they had raised hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to build this stuff out. So basically, you know, potentially a great case study

in exercising leverage. It's one of those handful of buyers. Because so semi-analysis, like they don't just look at the public reports of what the capex number is. They're actually looking, they mean they task satellites to take pictures of how the progress on build outs is going. They dig into all this stuff. They said the estimates suggest that Microsoft accounted for more than 60% of

all new leased turnkey capacity from Q1, 2023 to Q2, 2024, just absolute domination. And in June of 2024, new least turnkey capacity from Q1, 2023 to Q2, 2024. Just absolute domination. And in June of 2024, Microsoft's pre-lease capacity was larger than that of the four other major hyper scalers combined. They need a new term. They need to be like a giga scaler.

Giga scaler. Because they're doing so much more business here. And so- What word comes after giga? After hyper? I don't know. Giga? What's more giga than giga? Oh, in like the- In the sizing. They're doing so much more business here. And so word comes after hyper. I don't know. Giga. What's more?

Oh, in the, in like the gigawatt, terawatt. Yeah. Yeah. Terrascaler. Terrascaler. That's what's next. Microsoft significantly ramped up its self-build efforts acquiring tens of thousands of acres around the U S and the globe,

accelerating construction of existing sites and securing gigawatts of power for future sites taken together. These moves signaled Microsoft's preparation for what was the most ambitious infrastructure build out in history. While the leasing slowdown is material, these changes are not material to the short and medium term, and they only impact 2027 plus. So this is like that pivot by Sacha Nadella to becoming more of a leaser and maybe stepping off the gas. I think a lot of this is probably driven by the, you know, the, the, the deep seek moment, the idea that these models can be distilled. Maybe there's a pre-training, uh, scaling, um, wall that, you know, yes, there's going

to be a ton of RL, but we're not necessarily going to need stuff in the short term. But at the same time, when I look at this, I feel like I want data center build out to continue and accelerate and energy production to build, to accelerate like it is in China. But what's your take? I just feel like enterprise diffusion is still so far away. Like getting O3 like capabilities

in all of the Fortune 500 is like a 20 year project. Interesting. So as you think about like inference demand scaling, model distillation going down, it's still, I think the Tyler Cowan take is correct, that diffusion is gonna take forever. That makes sense. And you're gonna need a whole new class of companies.

My dear friend Dan Ashton runs one of these, where it's like you can actually diffuse AI into the enterprise in a way that doesn't take 30 years. Microsoft built, I think, for a world where that diffusion was going to be much faster than what was actually occurring. It's not like everyone's using open AI in Fortune 500s today, certainly not Fortune 20s.

Yeah, he actually has a Google Trends chart here, Claude versus Gemini versus Copilot, and Copilot peaked last year and has been kind of flat in terms of interest, while Gemini versus Copilot and Copilot peaked last year and has been kind of flat in terms of interest while Gemini has grown obviously because there's more of a consumer angle there. Uh, a lot of the different, um, like Salesforce has been upselling AI functionality, you know, what Microsoft did with teams could potentially play out here, but I agree with you. I think it will take a very, very long time. Well, we got one more ad before we get our last post. Linear is a purpose built

tool for planning and building products. I've used it basically my entire career. It is a system that allows teams to work more efficiently, including ours. And it is absolutely beautiful. So the overlay that you see, that's very much a product that we are building every single day. And thank you to Linear for powering the show. I have one more post, which is fun. Signing into stuff in 2025 from Kirov Vora.

He says, sign in, forgot password, check email, no email. Try Google Auth, hooray, works. Is this really you? Grab iPhone, open YouTube app. Yes, it's me. Okta sign in required. Enter passkey, passkey expired. Need backup code. Open password manager, signed out.

Enter password manager password. No backup codes. Try another way. QR code, iOS Okta app. Sign in. Face ID, is this really you? 2FA SMS code. The worst about this is when you try and,

you're like, oh, I should sign in with my Gmail because I know I used my Gmail account as the username. You didn't, and then you click the login button and it creates a new account for you. That's like a proud big company guy now. Like Microsoft Teams sign in, kind of elite. It's good. It's good. It gives you a little my app stuff. Microsoft.teams shows you all the stuff you're signed into.

Pretty hard to beat. That's good. Before we close, we should do Will's post. Craft is the antidote to slop. Can you take us through this? This is, yeah, no, I will not. I'll spare you two pages of paper. But the argument here is that we should be better about selecting the kind of problems we try to automate. And I'm trying to draw a distinction here between labor and toil, right? Labor is, you know, toil is this unpleasant formatting spreadsheets, doing your expenses before you have ramp, right? All this

unpleasant work. Labor is the meaningful thing that God put you on earth to do. This is an argument that I think we are working on the wrong types of AI problems, that we're trying to automate things away that will lead to kind of disgusting outcomes, right? You go to Nashville, you go to Charlotte, you go to any of these new tier cities,

they all look the same, they don't feel like real places. I think the models are gonna drive kind of a similar thing happening to the timeline, to online spaces, to physical objects. I think we can avoid it. I think we can get more places and things that feel magical by dividing this labor. The essay is two pages. I think it's, it's worth reading. What is the prescription for actually avoiding the bad outcome? I think it's like, it's much like, it's like a food quality, right? Like if we, we ignore the food supply and then we get sick in 20 years,

I think if we ignore the supply of language being GMO essentially like that, you know, the source of inspiration being GMO, we will just eradicate ourselves and it will solve itself. Is there some sort of like tipping point where you need, you need more than 50% of humanity on the craft, you know, train. We need better elite taste. I feel like our cultural elites, certainly, you know, the people that are running corporate expense providers today are not buying

castles on the continent. They're not buying really high quality furniture. It just feels obvious that we need to turn away from this. I did notice that when I was in, I think in some of these cities, you just see like everyone, they're all rich but they all have the exact same house. It's the glass box. Yeah, it's incredible. It looks like a...

It's very odd. Yeah. Instead of where is the Hearst Castle of today? Yeah. I mean some people are building it. I think the Collison brothers are building it. They bought a castle. I mean, Casper and Boyle had a good take on this.

Like all architecture kind of looks like Islamabad. Like it's all Arabic architecture. It's not pretty or it's at least not set in stage. My argument here is orient yourself in history, build meaningful things. Let it rock. Yeah. Interesting. Are there more like tactical things to do on the actual foundation model side? Are there things that you want to see? Like a lot of people say, Oh,

Claude has more personality or is this an AI safety issue? Or is this like guidelines? Much like you can drive, you know, a automatic Ferrari versus, you know, a six speed manual. It's all about choosing the right things to find enjoyment in. And I think a lot of what we're doing is seeing a culture that is downstream of slop, that people are choosing the kind of junk calories rather than the meaningful engagement. And I just think much like we're seeing in diet today, like that shift will be natural. I actually don't. I'm not worried about the future, right?

Like the Bible ends in Revelation, like God wins. We've read the final chapter already, but I think we need to get past the slop on the way there. Interesting. Jordy, anything? Powerful stuff. Interesting. Jordy, anything? Powerful stuff. Powerful stuff from the United States. Well, we are in Washington, D.C.

Hill and Valley. And we're at Hill and Valley, and I'm very excited for tomorrow. Me too. And we've said it before, but we'll say it again. We will be live from Hill and Valley tomorrow. We're gonna be pulling in people that are talking, people that are attending,

getting that boots on the ground perspective on many of our nation's most important issues. Low firsts on the ground, low first boots on the ground perspective on many of our nation's most important issues. Low first on the ground. Low first on the ground. Yes, yes. We're in DC. We're in DC.

Well, thank you for joining us, Will. Thank you for having me. First live guest. It's fitting. And thanks for tuning in, folks. We will see you next time. See you tomorrow. See you next time.

Cheers. Bye. Bye.