TBPN - 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 TVPN. 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 Minitis here with us today. Chairman of TPP. Chairman of TPPN, our first in-person guest. We're very excited to have him here today. Let's hear for 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. Well, let's hear for well again. It's going to be a fantastic show for you. I was given that for the journales. For the journal 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 Delian. Talk about the tension in the room, John. It was palpable. It was palpable. The so basically. We had three technology brothers.

Yes. And just a standing army effectively. Delian and Christian, Garrett, get up there to break down what's happening at Hillen Valley. and the journales were 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 Deli actually turned the crowd. They won hearts and minds. They won hearts and minds exactly with a message of unity across the aisle, bipartisanship, pro-America, pro-technology. And then the tears changed from tears of anger to tears of joy. Yeah. 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.

Yeah, truly. It was a turning point. Yeah, it was definitely a turning point. So you went to Hill and out of the valley into the hill. Yes, exactly. You went to Hill and Valley last year. Have you been previously? I have. Okay. Break down your experience for me. How is it evolved? What are you looking into for tomorrow? What's your game plan? I mean, it is. It is somewhat hilarious, like two years back. Like, tech people did not come to D.C. 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. Yeah, 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, he's 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 can track it from Hill and Valley. It's just incredible. It's like seeing like a Cheetah try to hunt in the Sahara, right? It's like a 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 be become, was supposed to become in the sense of like, is this place that everyone can descend on, have these like big events, and it's this like center of like, it's a third space for technology essentially. I mean, I don't know why you have

to me in Miami Tech Week like this. I know, I know. They're still kicking, but DC has become a place with higher 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 like to make it political, many of the sort of subjects should be very bipartisan.

It was also funny digging into what is the current thing with the mainstream media versus the current thing with us? Because Jordi asked a question, like, if we're talking Hill and Valley, if we're talking D.C. politics, geopolitics, and tech, the top story of the last week has been benchmark investing in management, a Chinese AI company that's the interesting angle that's the thing people want to dig into in tech And a lot of journalists were asking questions I asked a question it was like giving him a layup Yeah, you straight over the talk

But I but again I actually don't even think that was top of mind for the other media that was attending just all a re-industrialization from their side No no no no no no everybody wanted to talk about tariffs And even and even the the the discussion around around AI was very much like, oh, have you tried the new 4-0 model? Like you can search the web? Like that. Yeah. Like it wasn't talking about, like it wasn't talking about, you know, the, I asked

somebody, like Glazegate. Yeah, I asked one of the writer, I think from, journalists from Politico. Yeah. Who just covers AI policy and I asked her about Glazegate. She thought, she responded like she knew what I was talking about and then she was like talking about tool use and being like, yeah, I think it's really cool. It's strong evidence you have to get your news from only one place. 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? 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. all to handle on a platform like the ramp corporate card unnecessary but you're punching above your weight every single month yes I want a special man named Zach who's close in her heart yes monitor my individual

corporate cards spent it's good to have it's good 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 1.7 billion amissed, 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 188. And revenue was $43 billion instead of roughly $42 billion, probably driven by

the Corvette ZR1, I imagine, Hummers, what else do they, what else do they make? The CT5V Blackwing. That's right. They're probably selling a ton of those. Smart Zuckerberg in a draftwomen. Yeah. The Alligator Club. Yes, yes, yes, exactly.

Pfizer beat earnings, 62 cents a share. Do you want to give a round of applause for Big Farm? For Biotape. It's an incredible time to be receiving health care in America. COVID products felt a sales fell, but it was expected. The core business. oncology and vaccines showed moderate growth in the market reaction. 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 has fallen. 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. It's priced in. Yeah, it's kind of priced in. It hasn't been in as much of prefall as the news would have had you believe a few weeks ago, right? 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 MAG7. Those are really the earnings to watch. Tomorrow and Thursday after the market closes, we have meta, Google, no, Google already reported. but we have meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and NVIDIA, I believe. Tesla and Google already reported. And then Intel and TSM also reported, and we'll get into that when we can get into it now with the Ben Thompson analysis.

Have you dug into Liputon at all? Have you not? Are you familiar with the new Intel CEO, Lip Buton? Of course. Been doing the live work. Yeah, so he gave investors stark diagnosis of the chip makers problems on Thursday, along with the sense that it will,

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 Malays 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 or even worse than feared, the company gave a revenue forecast for the current quarter that was well below what analysts projected,

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% 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, fortunate thing for shareholders 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 seven-anameter consumer chips that go into budget systems, Raptor Lake, and that's what drove non-gap gross margin three points higher than expected. but obviously that 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 TSM. In other words, Intel benefited financially from being less competitive at the high end than expected. And this is the highlight. Will, have you been tracking any of the wild theories around Intel or what anyone's thinking, like break it up, put Elon in charge, the global founders thing?

It feels 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. What has been your full story of Pat Gelsinger? Like, giving more as to, you know, what he's like as a manager and as a CEO. I mean, I've met the man once. Sure. But Incredible seems to put his faith at the center of his work. He has built, I want to say,

seven churches in the best. area seems to spend one day a week praying for Intel employees which is fascinating and interesting maybe more companies should try that sure 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 yeah directly into it it's MMPI yeah maybe you don't want management teams posting daily Bible readings inspired based on material non-public information that feels correct yeah yeah

As long as he puts at the end, NFA. Yeah. Do you have a take on the split? Do you think that they should go pure fab or pure design shop in video style? I have no strong take on it now. No strong take on that. I have this take that there's a world where you rewound 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 chipfax. because he seems like the one person that could actually pull together all the talent and the culture to if he could build the XAI data center so quickly He could also turn around a fab There was somebody else saying that like you know he he's he's really owning like the stack of modern technology Whether it's space travel cars AI neural link etc That's missing semis What do you think about that theory? I mean he does seem to be amazing at taking you know very highly priced xAI equity and trading it for really highly priced XAI equity and trading it for real businesses. Right, it does seem like

actually a good moment to, you know, take a slightly overvalued AI foundation model provider, trade that for a real business and run that company with the kind of discipline that I think Intel has not had for like 30 years. Yeah, yeah. Like I think Elon going full stack is very good. Yeah, yeah, it'd be cool. There's actually, did you see the more, 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 two and a half 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 quad-mire. Did the election change its fortunes or did they just get efficient

and operated? Yeah, it doesn't even seem like it was the election to change the fortunes. It was more that X-A-I started ripping. Yeah, just reps. It was able to refinance based on that. So a little bit of truth zone. 98 cents in the dollar already priced in. Yeah, not bad. 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 and Drewson 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. The plan was to divvy up some $13 billion in debt, sell it to investors and earn millions in fees. 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 looked dimmer and dimmer. By the summer of 24, the X deal was considered the worst buy-up 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 is 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. So 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. Yep. Now it's an opportunity to sort of pledge allegiance to the Musk Empire and in some way kind of cozy up 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, you know, 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 left is more aggressive about like holding Musk to account for trying to get Trump elected. 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. 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 I feel like it's possible that that this was less of an issue because he could have built back up but certainly like the just being close to the 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 how this new $20 billion financing comes together.

I don't know where that capital is coming from. It already, and then as you start to- You mean for X-A-I? Yeah, X-A-I 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, like, you're investing in, you know, the mega data center project. And, like, oh, we also have that app. Yeah. And as an X user, all this stuff, again, like, it's just not, it's not default bullish for X, the social platform. Just because it 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, whoa, whoa, whoa, they launched 4K live streaming recently. 4K live streaming. 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 Q LED TV. You should be watching it in IMAX and a cinema. Get Starlink so you can watch this 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 like working. streaming it's like it's great just for you guys just for you guys we're gonna bet our guy you that's our guy you and Anthony poppio 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 it for a quarter of the price like they every single tech company sold off and Twitter would have sold off and more yeah it went down by 50 it would have been struggling to find a hundred percent a hundred percent

100%. It probably would have been like a five or ten billion dollar company. Yeah, even if you pay ten, it's still 75% off. Yeah, I know. I know, but remarkable timing and remarkable that he pulled it out despite like the 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 you to do exactly what he doesn't 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-

And then it will absolutely not happen. He must be doing more reverse psychology 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 doldrum 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. He paid 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. Yeah, and Twitter is the digital town square where it matters. Yeah, no, it did feel like post-acquisition that he basically spent He spent $44 billion to preserve free speech on the internet. Yeah, in many ways it actually did feel like that Yeah, yeah, it should be tax deductible. It's a nonprofit contribution. It should be yeah, I mean that that that was my take was that like if if he doesn't do something about it, there's gonna be like the the anti-musk aggression is just gonna keep building and building and building until he's in like real real things. I mean, like, if he doesn't do something about it. There's gonna be like, like, the anti-musk aggression is just gonna keep building and building and building until he's in like real real, danger and so it was a small price to pay.

Small price to pay. That he got out of it. Speaking of small prices to pay, go get a watch on Bezell. Go to get Bezell.com. We're going to get Will set up with something after the show. Yeah, Will's not a huge watch guy. He's not a huge watch guy, but we're going to convert him. I think this is considering, I need more gold material.

Yeah, yeah, the yellow gold, the yellow gold, the yellow gold champagne day date. That would look great on you. It's from Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, maybe the GMT. Texas Time X. The Texas time banks. They call it. When you're in the south. Anyway, let's move on to another story.

What are we got? I mean, TSM 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 zeroes the company. And so TSM has been having a much harder time in the market, even though their outlook has been bullish. They have a bullish outlook for growth in 2025 after reporting strong first quarter results suggesting the world's biggest chipmaker is confident. It can ride out the US China trade war. The main chipmaker 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 stuck with capital spending projection of $38 billion to $42 billion in 2025. TSM's 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 U.S. restrictions on the export of Nvidia chips to China and a disappointing report from ASML holdings, help triggered a broad market. So Ben says what you were alluding to earlier, which in stark contrast to Intel, TSM is killing it, and yet you wouldn't know from the share price.

Rough. Trading just down and to the right. Still priced in. What is priced in? Everything. Everything. The market is perfectly priced. Yeah, so he 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 TSM investment. Granted, the returns are a lot different if you go back even a year. Intel's are brutal, but it's clear that TSM is being much more impacted by recent geopolitical events than Intel is and for good reason. Above and beyond their location in Taiwan, TSM 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 at surely been tracking the heights of waves in the Taiwan Strait yeah That's all the matters to the stock price. That's all you get off of is the weather forecast Yard stick in the Taiwan Strait if it's low Yeah, it's low it's bad Yeah, that is true right you can't like you can only invade in certain times or something this is a when Eric Prince appears in 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 here to get landing craft across in the winter it's like 22 bad timing with the tariffs now they should not it's actually like a very narrow window isn't it like two weeks yeah

which is helpful if you're trying to prepare for an invasion but still not great um anyways so ben goes further here he says tsmc has however even beyond the last few months suffered from the china overhang 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 encounter to what I wrote last month is the depth of TSM's commitment to manufacturing

in the United States and again this was like we've been trying to pull out of some people on the show is kind of understanding how much of NVIDIA is saying oh we're investing $100 billion in the U.S. How much is 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 5 nanometer node. TSM. Love this.

Love it. TSM calls it the four nanometer node, but it's actually a third generation five nanometer node. Ben Thompson is truth zoning. Truth zoning, TSM. 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 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 in 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 you to a hundred and sixty five billion dollars to support the strong multi-year demand from our customers it makes sense like a lot of TSM'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 just sum a hundred billion dollars and a hundred billion dollars and get to a hundred and sixty five billion no he starts by saying let's talk about the hundred billion dollar investment and then he's like we're

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 capax which is all in like the 60 70 80 billion per hyper scaler it's not that crazy and of course this is over a number of years because 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 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 TSM, Foxcon is in the same boat where Foxcon's announcing new facilities. It's 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 a global company and

they want to do business in America. 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 TSM I think he's talking about, you know, the facility in Taiwan 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, that ribbon cutting ceremony. I think he was in Texas for the Mac. And it was like, they'd already been making it there. They weren't reshoring anything.

She's re-branding the dollar. He should really. They started bills. And then earlier in Trump, too, just a couple months ago, Apple like kind of repackaged a bunch of their like spend. And they were like, we're investing $100 billion in America. And it was like the salaries that were already going to spend here. We should just like build warehouse and just like let people rent it for ribbon cutting ceremony. It's like.

Huge. Yeah. Massive American flag on the wall. You can move in. We rent it by the hour. Yeah. We'll change the sign. It comes to a vibe real.

It comes with just getting into secret service has been there already. know the angle. Exactly. Getting into American-made ribbons specifically for, for, you know. And those big scissors. The big scissors have to be American as well. Those are made in China today. For sure.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Should we talk about Amazon. Oh, yeah. And all this drama around whether or not they were displaying, planned to display the tariff impact. Did you see this guy who ran this A-B test on his e-commerce website? He found, he makes his shower head in China. it's 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 he was like 100% of people chose the cheaper one zero we got zero made America but I was thinking about that more and I was 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 a $160 of which or $150 of which goes to tariffs versus $250 made in the American. No, it was a deeply flawed study. Yes, yes, yes.

Exceptionally viral. 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 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 life. 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 right yeah yeah it's also funny that that Bezos is still the first guy to get the call of course yeah yeah he's like desperately trying to retire yeah I just want to do the Lex Friedman podcast and be on a yacht and and go to space like

why are you calling me about my e-commerce business yeah yeah yeah I was a e-com and I was a yeah I was a 12-figure e-com entrepreneur but if he does save the global economy that's like his beautiful act right like if this works with who who basis of safety safety economy by rolling back tariffs and implementing this feature. That's a Nobel Peace Prize level achievement. Potentially. 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. Wait, really? This is real? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Punchball is okay. Yeah.

It says Trump called Bezos to raise concerns after Punch Bowl news report, 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 shower hat. Yeah, on your, on your, what did you know that Amazon launched a TEMU competitor? I did you see this so they so as in order to participate in their like TEMU competitor you had to guarantee like price ceilings for things and 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 TEMU reserve right just importing thousands of

Cheyenne items it's gonna be more stretch into the billions of items so who are gonna wear yoga pants gonna come from If not, she had poisoned you. Yeah, the cancer. Yeah, there's a post here from somebody who writes for his own. He has at big technology on X, great, great name. He says the punchbowl 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, and it says Amazon to display

tariff costs 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 is has a fact in chief AGI in sales tax in Chrome tab. Yeah. Because we often call it AGI for sales tax or a geog god. We were 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 because it's so powerful yes safety reasons all of 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 yeah yeah that's the end result of all these B2B SaaS products have we achieved the 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 get rid of everyone but anyway go to numeral HQ so put your sales tax and autopilot. Spenchmark series A. Five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Anyway, bargain starts, Timu 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 hall. They call it Hall. You're going to love this. The max you could sell a couch for. Yeah, $20. Again, I think we'll see this in cancer rates.

Okay. Once you get, you take this to like cheap polyester and stop putting it on your skin. Yes. Cancer rates might fall a little bit. Interesting. That's much to think about. Interesting.

Is that going to right size? Is that the ultimate right size in the government? I mean, it's less, it's just, it's proof of the Maha movement. It's totally in control, right? The tariffs get shamed. It's all part of the Maha. So is Maha the real one that's pulling the strings here? It's Bobby Kennedy at the top.

Bobby Kennedy at the top. Every other, the defense budget, it's all in the defense. It's all Bobby. Yeah, that makes sense. The tech giant has cost support agreements in place with some vendors to ensure that makes consistent margins on the products it buys from them. 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. Everyone's fighting over who pays the tariffs. Yeah, I mean it's Amazon's in a really tough place. They had been squeezing their their sellers for so long on both sides. Fees, advertising, you know, not dealing with with knockoffs very well. You know, sort of purely focused on the consumer, which is, again, Amazon's job is deliver for their core customer, which is the prime subscriber. But at the end of the day, this is only going to 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 satellite on every home yeah yeah yeah how do we get a TBPN dish on every home yeah we need dedicated network for sure dedicated network so they launched 27 cupier 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 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. Now I know. Now I'm a joint venture between Lockheed and Boeing. Yeah, okay, okay. So they are like the legacy.

But ULA has been, you know, 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, 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 constellation 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 school internet. Our entire audience

like going out. Yeah, it's like it's actually it's French. The company plans on having for 3,200 satellites in orbit over the next few years. Building a business in 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, TELASAT, is developing a new fleet called LightSpeed.

Everyone's got to have their own Leo cluster of satellites, I guess. Leaders at Coupier have been intensely focused. 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, of grocery. 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, actually grab anything infrastructure. but if everything moves to satellite, you can actually throw up a constellation. There's no stoning 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, 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 many tens of billions of dollars.

And launch is not a zero margin business for SpaceX. But it is when they launch Starlink satellites, and anytime that they have 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 which is probably why Bezos is also investing in Blue Origin, because if he can get that working and he can dump coupier satellites up there cheaply, that actually gives him the opportunity to challenge Musk. It is funny how much Bezos and Musk 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? It's an incredible truck. Yeah. What was your reaction to the truck? Incredible. T.J. Parker, you know, big endorsement from a certified car guy. I mean, it's incredible to have a small American-made truck. That said, I hate that it's an electric vehicle.

I'd buy one day one if that was combustible engine. I just feel like, you know, Europe doesn't have power right now. Why are you buying an electric EV? Sure. 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 L.S. swap. Yeah. Slate truck. The Slate truck for sure. Yeah. A kind of mini Raptor. Number one, I've seen some people, you know, I think it's going to be a hit almost as a golf cart.

Yeah. I mean, the question is like, who is the singer Porsche of Japanese small trucks? Like if I want to drop $2 million on a truck this big, who's going to provide that? Yeah. That's a real. But yeah, I mean, the big critique there, and we're going to get the slate 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 know, you have to look at it with any EV, you know, manufacture and assume that the range is only going to go up over time. Yeah. So it's fine. Do they drop a range number? It's like 150.

Oh, 150? That's really low. I mean, no, it's a golf car. It's a golf car. But it's even lower than that when you put stuff in. Yeah. Passengers, you have hills. But truly, like, if you're just going, like, around town and back,

You're not going to do more than 150 miles even if you drive to work 30 miles away and back You're 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 yeah yeah yeah yeah it's very not gonna pass the broomstick but the reason I brought up slate was because I think Bezos back slate He also backed Rivian so he has bets two different bets in two different trucks two different trucks In in EV going up against Tesla 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 subcategories. 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... Willmanitis. 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 being, is currently taking. by SaaS brands. It's never been like this ever. It's either really bullish or

bearish for SaaS. Is it bullish or bearish? Intercom by the way ad quick yeah customer oh really yeah fantastic yeah we are we are sponsored by ad quick go to adquick.com sorry to kind of home advertising made easy and measurable say goodbye to the headaches of ad home advertising only ad quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe anyway well bullish or bears for SaaS first For ad quick. For ad quick.

Yes, it's here for Agwick. The audience was. 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 add up back up. I can get us firing in all cylinders. Okay.

So, bullish or bearish? I just think Hope Hope Hope hopes, the, you know, replyer number one, also my favorite account on Twitter. Okay. It's correct. 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 an open A-I, California. Yeah, that'd be great. The towers there are targeting of an occupied state. Why not go all the way? What about just Altmanville? That would be even better.

We've been talking about Waltaville down in Nashville. If Salesforce really wants to have that tower, company towns or back. Company towns. Yeah. 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 Can they have like advertising everywhere? Blade Runner future, let's do it. Also, why do we need permission? Why don't we just project on the side of the Salesforce tower? That's great.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also drone shows, blimps, we should be doing much more advertising. Adquick, not to go back to AdQuick, but they do have a drone. No, no, please go back to ad quick. 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, it's good. Oh, wow, it's good. Yeah. All right, next post. Ian Siniment. 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 0.72 Ventures and co-led by ABC, alongside in Trison 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. Absolutely, you invented a bus. Do you remember that? Did he 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, 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 karetsu or something. Have you talked to Ian before? No, but I do like the idea of kind of a frinkle-esque roll-roll of all these kind of non-commercially viable, or, you know, soon-to-be-commercial-val launch providers. Yeah, well, it's not launch provided.

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 next, we got another post from, uh, Trace Stevens. Uh, so we have some news from Lockheed Martin. They said with,

Lockheed Martin says, without us, AI might have never taken off. It's said 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 giblified version. Yeah. Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise from top I was gonna say this looks like Trey Stevens to me but you know not a beard not enough body hair but I mean 40 years ago I feel like they're not using that word correctly 1885 like what what AI were they doing that's like Apple 2 like neural networks had not really been invented yeah that's a linear regression yeah yeah yeah yeah it's a T I 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 Ing's course on machine learning at Stanford starts with multiple regression. Does it? Yeah, that is the foundation of, and then he builds you up to neural networks. I mean, I hear that was a big secret in how GROC got to state of the art so quickly. Line regression. Doing the repressions by hand. Yes, by hand. Training the Transformers with artisanal craft. Yeah, yeah, 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 or some skunk works project. But it is hilarious that they're just like, yo, we're responsible for AI. You're welcome. Get it. 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.

We're absolutely humbled right now. We're so humbled to announce Thrive Holdings, a permanent capital vehicle, to 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 the only thing better than capital?

What? 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 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 sure and normally fee streams they stop at 10 years yes you know it's better than 10 years a lifetime of fees yes fees that you can pass on to your grandchild but I mean how is this different than I mean is it 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 at certain points and they can swap with other people in and stuff Brent B. Shore has some incredible he's the famous one right tell this yeah is he truly the golden standard for permanent capital or is there like a public company like does Black Rock 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 okay in the 90s there's dozens of these bring you sure I think is the most artisanal sure sure sure is a 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 H-OAs 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, right? Like, how do we think 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, like, 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 and you're thinking about buying like I think it's been widely reported they 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 stops a 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 Sequoheritage, right? It's like a continuity vehicle where you can pass the things over, get liquidity for the LPs, the initial set, and hold a basket of really high quality assets. So you won't hold for duration. Okay, so take me through some of the sizes of permanent capital vehicles.

Because with a VC fund, you hear people 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? I mean, Harkshire is 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.

Yeah. But that's a good way to think about it of, hey, we're not going to focus as much on raising new, you know, the best scenario is like you have cash flowing assets that produce capital that allow you to, you know, reinvest or buy other businesses to produce more. more cash flow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like sort of the holy grail and many people have said that cured a male loneliness is, you know, 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, you know, not making money for a very long time. All the capital, all the value capture happens at the very end. Obviously the types of companies that are typically rolled into permanent capital vehicles, cash flying 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 of private companies, probably not a bad idea to hold these really blue chip assets to duration. Yeah. So it's more just about fine great founders. If they're losing money in the super high growth phase, 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 Stripe and you're planning to go public in 2035, 20, you know, 2,300. 2300.

Like those. Well, once they've consumed 100% of GDP. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Process through Stripe. Global GDP, yeah. They need the space narrative. Look, you know, the space economy is growing rapidly. We need to go off planet.

It's just these continuity vehicles are going to get huge. Yeah. Wow. Okay, well, speaking of growth stuff, Hadley Harris, uh, venture capitalist actually wrote about vector databases which I think you might be a little bit familiar yeah I mean I was the first check into Chrome oh okay yeah I 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 so he's breaking down some hype and I'd be interested to hear how the market

has evolved and if Jeff has kind of altered his strategy Hadley's breaking down the story of pine cone two years ago today and recent announced a hundred million dollars in Pine County as everyone and their mother tripped over each other to invest in 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. ChatGPT 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 ships 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?

I think it's accurate in the hype cycle. I put it in the truth zone and that this feels like kind of terminal VC brain. Sure. 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. Sure, sure. 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 on structure data. And like, yes, you know, you can search vectors using it numpy. SORT, but like that's not an enterprise-grade database solution. And I just think this is a good excuse to, you know, have missed a lot of winning companies such as Chroma. Yeah, a lot of people are taking victory laps. John Choo at Coastless, as we told our LPs that we're staying out of the market because they were too trivial to build and commoditized. And we're never used without BM25. What is BM25?

Do you know what that is? I've heard of that. BCVec database thought leadership was a great filter for those who, for who's really technical and who has shallow understanding of ML infra. We got to have John on the show. He's always dropping spice on the timeline. Well, speaking of dropping bomb. the timeline hit me with a sound effect jordy because we're moving over to a post by deva about uh tech bros learning about convertibles uh there are two different posts here one from spore friend of

the show uh says we it's called we do a little bay area sightseeing uh and someone else bought a bmw z4 uh what's your take on convertibles my first car in high school was a 2002 honda s 2000 That's a great car. I still own it to this day. It's a single greatest thing I've ever driven. It's amazing that they've discovered convertibles. I mean, it's just like it's, you know, 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 all that. There's a generation of young people in tech. They have only owned Teslas. Yeah. And they don't make a convertible. And they're discovering 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 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 9-11, right? Like it's actually like an extremely smooth process where they will take your car, basically, not sight unseen, but they'll look at it,

they're 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 9-11 or another car that's going to change your life.

If you're not a permanent capital guy, can't afford the 9-11, meadas. Miata's, yeah. $5,000. Do you know the best-selling convertible in America? It has to be a mi-a-a-a-eat-a-a-old. right it's not it's the Jeep Wrangler no way yeah because they saw a lot of people

don't think of them as convertibles the technically are dropped up but yeah I think Tesla's missed out and Rivian's missed out the convertible market the all of the car companies are just coalescing around like everyone wants a crossover SUV that drives it's got a little more yeah yeah again the one one piece of feedback here guys yeah manual transmission yes yes like I will teach I will fly out I will teach you yeah that's gonna change you yeah yeah well maybe maybe Maybe that's next year. Next year will be tech bros learned about manual transmission.

Manual transmission. Yeah. We're going to put you on the bottom of the same. Except, except I, my, my first car was a very, very old Toyota Corolla hatchback.

Was it manual? That was manual. And I would drive it in San Francisco. It would be like a life or death. Going uphill and manual is really hard. No, and San Francisco hills are just a different degree. 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. Yep. But in the age of automatics, people will just pull up right, you know, 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 Tesla. It's like if you're self-driving, they don't see me in my Honda S-2000. They don't know there's going to be four feet a rollback. Self-driving is not prepared for me to stall five times to get up to the pill. 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 of a 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 just wants I I just want an electric car and I want a convertible yeah 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 DC2 and people actually love it a lot of the car guys have driven them and they're like because it injects sound that's pretty accurate and And a lot of them were like, yeah, it was weird for the first minute, but then I just got into it.

And it was exactly like that was ripping. Oh, totally, totally. Yeah. But it's like this funny like hashback, the Ionic 5N. It designed by the guy who did the M division at BMW. They poached him. The letter that comes after M is N. And so he made 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 Quinn 30B has dropped. and Will Brown is given the review. Let's hear it for Al-Nababa with their open source model. Hopefully the sound is balanced on the stream. Will Brown says, I really didn't expect 30B A3B 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 100 billion parameters. Have you been following Quinn 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're trained on 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 infiltrate it from Open AI. Or they should be letting the steel. 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 Tienn and stuff.

It's like the Tao BOW model. It's a rip off of the American provider. Exactly. Exactly. So maybe there's less to be worried about. Maybe the Manchurian candidate in Deep Seek is secretly a pro-American Manchran candidates. And once you get it, once you, once you know, 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. There's a little... 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.

To train these models. Put them in a barter capsule, send them down. This next post from Ev Randall, he asked GPD 4 or 5, 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 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 automation, and more. Ramp is on a mission to help customers save their most valuable resources time and money 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 like are you gonna pay Will your company like pay for your flight and he's like yeah yeah of course and I was like by any chance are you on on ramp they have corporate travel that makes it really We've got we booked this room yeah on ramp travel we did yeah it makes you wonder if open AI was actually incubated by a different new company makes possible well speaking of travel and corporate travel go to wander.com find your happy place find your happy place there we go welcome wander with inspiring views hotel grade a mini's dreamy bet top tier

getting 24-7 concert service getting Bill Minitis to sing your company jingle I mean I'm a happy wander investor oh yeah you're right one hand washes the other there you go there we go chill the investments you're good money goes right into 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. The thing that's beautiful is the word art. It's this massive Dragon Lawyers PLPC. Apparently their web their website is iconic too and also features the dragon. The dragon. It just cracks this. This is called

exercising free will this innovation the funny people don't realize that you could do whatever you want with a water what's incredible is that's not AI generated no someone drew that yeah the other thing the other thing that stands out here is that the the attorney at dragon lawyers uses a at yahoo.com email so that's how you know he's good he's been a game for a long time there's a whole there's a whole like you know cohort of hitters yeah well it's like astrology for business like when you see see the different domain names, you know, so, so, it tells a whole story about the person. Yeah, you never want to work with a lawyer that has a corporate branded email.

Absolutely. AOL, Outlook.com, Yahoo. Even better, Alta Vista. Altavista. That's a throwback. You gotta get a lawyer who has an altivista.com. And a dragon watermark. A dragon watermark for sure. You should, you should get your own watermark.

What would your watermark be? I think the dragon's pretty sad. The dragon's pretty sad. I think that's hard to be. Mine might be the ramp logo to help control the corporate spend. Yeah, exactly. Just a massive ramp card. Maybe Jordy does a photo of you in the jacket like this, like the dragon.

Yeah. But 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. We have logos up here. And so basically we'll set up like a glass box.

Physical glass. So every angle has a different. Has a logo. I mean, I listen. for the ad rates, right? The content in between is irrelevant. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we should just do all ad rates.

Yeah, well, speaking to that, just going to public.com. Thinking of setting up a premium subscription that's just the ads, yeah, you get rid of us. Yeah, it's. Public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, trusted by millions.

Go to public.com. Thank you to public. Anyway, did you see this post by Ben Sharf? Commerce, as we know it, has officially changed forever. Well done Shopify and Open. I thought the first line was a little dramatic, but it's very cool. It's basically an integrate it's shopping on open AI. Oh on chat

QT integration. Wow. The bear and and these are not these are not good red light. These are not the best red light therapy for anti-agent. How do you get one? Tractor supply. How do you get the horse? You get the chicken light. Chicken light. If you go to my desk in my house I have chicken lights all around. Why? They're because you get the same wavelength that's these expensive LEDs and chicken lights. And it's good for anti-A. Juja Alpha, you've heard it here first, chicken lights, TractorSupply.com.

TractorSupply.com. Well, as soon as we talk about this, this will be baked into the next training run of GPT5 and it'll be updated. But overall, this is very cool. People don't really realize, like, nothing makes me happier than reducing friction in commerce. So the fact that I can just go to Open AI,

do some product research, use ShopPay to check out with an Open AI, and do all of that. And wasn't Aiden 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 burned 10,000 hours of GPU time to figure out what paper towels are like. Or you're burning, the money's 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 assistance. 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 Open AIs 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 road map. 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. It is, it is funny. So in the meta lawsuit, they obviously avoid TikTok. And one reason that you could argue avoid TikTok is that it's state-backed and they had to raise 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 a state government backing you. Yeah, well, I mean, not for opening. Not for opening I. Put on a tinfoil hat. Put on the tinfoil hat. We don't have the tinfoil hat today.

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 people. PETA because they know where all the tastiest animals live. And we think that that could unlock potentially hundreds of billions.

Maybe trillions. Yeah. Just maps of just selling maps of the most delicious animals. Yeah. The most delicious. The PETA take private is going to be. Great. Bang.

Every fund is going to be in that for sure. Yeah. For sure. It's what thrives. Yeah. Yeah. I also think Red Cross, you put, you buy Brian Johnson at the helm. It's just all the blood goes through him.

It's a huge a huge opportunity. Blueprint, red cross, blueprint. They work together. Blue cross. Put it all together. Kretz of biohacking. Well, we have a post... Promote former guest that actually...

Did you know that we broke this story? And tech correct reported on us? We didn't break it. We caused the story. It was not one to be a story. The podcast, you got community. This is us. That's me.

I'm the podcast. Okay, so we at George, Jordi. Brady. Also, this is not a podcast. Yeah, no, no, no, it's not. It's a live show. We need to put, we need to put them in the truth zone. Anyway, Jordan, read it.

CEO of perplexity comes on the show. We talked 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 like click baity piece. Which I thought was wrong in so many ways. One is, if you actually listen to the interview, he's saying that the, the browser that they're building is a huge part of the companies, you know, a huge part of the

company's roadmap, very, very meaningful. He says this is their second act. It's got, it's, it's, you know, 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, you know, founders need to be aware and investors that tech crunch 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 through that. But I, I, I think they knew exactly what they were doing. And I support private equity broadly. Well, yeah, but now it's not private equity backed. No, it is. To another private equity. To another private equity.

Yeah, I remember when TechCrunch was for sale, 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 tech crunch being anti-tech I mean much like Gawker the most ethical thing to do is buy it and shut it down yeah true what was interesting about this to me

so 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 like I don't think it's a challenge to sell ads in LLM responses yeah I think it's actually very true there was initially a moment where it was like oh well if it's all text back and forth like what are you gonna do put display ads it's like no you're obviously just gonna have another LLM that runs on top of the response and before it spits it out you're gonna 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 totally be better districts will want so I've been always super bullish on the idea of advertising in text-based LLM responses I don't think it's a challenge at all I think it's very logical I think chat EBT will do it on the free tier I 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 TechCrunch flipped it around and made him sound,

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

for 50 bucks a month, you can have non-perience personalized ads in Chrome. Would you know I don't know I would yeah yeah I would pay a hundred dollars a month to have only ramp ads across every single vehicle. Yeah, yeah yeah you probably could do that if you just set up your own Google ads accounts and then just put your only your email in there you know how you used to get those like those like Facebook ads that were like you know I'm a monitis on a t-shirt like yeah I haven't don't talk to me until I've had my coffee or whatever you know there's like super cut the T-spring was like

really leveraging ramps. No, it's, I'm a monitis. Don't talk to me until I've had one banger on X. Yeah, exactly. Like, 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.

Yeah, but just 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, yeah. But we got the, we got the community note on it. And they did, they did actually credit us on it. in the TechCrunch article. Incorrectly. Incorrectly as a podcast. Yep. But they did give us the shout out.

And they didn't refer to us, our old name. They got the acronym correctly. Correct. They call it TBPN, which is great. And after there was a big debate on X about the post, there was eventually a community note that says, TechCrunch takes what Ervind said out of context. The podcast host, I think that's me, asked him a hypothetical

question. And Arvin tags Errington, Michael Arrington, the original founder of tech crunch and 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 you never never never I would never associate with anyone who sold their company ever never what do you have to say that what do you have to as chairman of TPPN we will never sell this media franchise to anyone we will have her buy a shutdown tech crunch yes yes I think all three of us have sold companies at this point um anyway Ray Dalio dropped a long piece.

I don't know if we want to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Skip over that. Let's skip over that one. Let's do Jason. I did say, I think it was a Bucco or Bucco. Yeah, Bucco Capital guy. He was basically saying if Dahlio is wrong again this time,

he was basically saying, like, I almost hope Dalia is 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 Bertwater associate employees, they've never seen someone actually place to trade. It's like possibly like 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 that it's one trade. This is like they like up until like a couple of years ago the media product was one

PDF that was learning out there called principles that eventually got turned into book like that's like that's the most tinfoil hack conspiracy theory in the world hilarious though anyway let's move on researchers secretly ran a massive unauthorized AI persuasion experiment on Reddit in a large debate sub the bots answers mind 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, you know, getting a DM that's like, hello, you forgot to log in. Yeah, here's your FedEx thing or something like, you know, 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 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 doing being able to do that at scale in order to influence opinion is is interesting our only are ready in grace is arch a GI puzzles on every single web page every time you click a new page you need to solve no no the IMO will be solved but the RKGI puzzle will not will not be solved you'll have to match the blocks for a minute every time you want to refresh the page say something else out of content safety guidelines yes that 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.

Let's move on to this design trend. Linear has for a long time been the design product building and everyone has been obsessed with and everyone's been kind of ripping it off but Ripping off the website but yeah the website but Kenan over at icon has completely changed the game in terms of design and built it's an AI ad maker but it looks like a T-moo design website it looks like a Coachella yeah it does he has his story his investors on the land including the ramp logo yeah I guess it's like someone from ramp invested the team

is examples wait wait have you seen it when you go and you click like get started it will actually say like only five slots remaining and there's like a timer for SaaS product that's so good it's so good so I mean this has been hotly debated 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, uh, uh, uh, comparison chart and, and he, his company was the only one with tier one investors. And two one engineers.

And two one engineers and open AI had neither and they have a lot of the same investors. So, uh, what is your take? Genius or, uh, or, you know, or is it the, the scary castle? I think 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 farmer.

Icons 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. Wait, has your ex payout gone up? My ex-payment, yeah, I got a lot.

You got a big check? That's great. Are you going to retire? Off the ex-payout alone. You know what you should spend your ex-payout on, an eight sleep. Go to eightsleep.com. Night's the fuel your best days. Turn an e-bed into the ultimate sleeping experience.

Apparently, this is from Sheel, X cracked down an engagement farm, so real creators are earning more, reminds me of Google's 2011 Panda Update at Crush Spammy sites like Mahalo, which I guess was Jason Calcanus' website. I had no idea about this, and boosted quality ones like Nerd Wallet. Cuders, I was the most brutal. Yeah, Sheel just like really slides that in there and made the internet a better place. It's interesting, so Sheel 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 premonoanctone. Right?

That has to be a DPI driver. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He can't pocket that. You can't pocket that. It's got to go back.

It's got to go back. Okay. We actually do do that, except, except John. John still as good as ever. No, but we put all of our... Yeah, we pool all of the TVPN accounts into one... to one... ...to one account.

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. We're rumors...

Watch the space. Yeah, watch the 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. 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 and they don't get enough credit. They don't get enough credit. Everyone talking, oh Brian Armstrong, so brave. No one says about the tier three bravery. Not last, not total coward, in the middle of the pack. It returns to being in the middle of curve. Pretty good. Pretty good.

Yeah. 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. 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 of every single person except the CEO and be the first. The one person, one billion dollar revenue company. And you just have to tap it for a second. I mean, yeah, I was thinking about rehire people. Rehires back. The fastest way to get to a billion dollar.

one employee it's to start with six billion dollars lots of employees fire everyone and then 20% of the clients just forget to stop paying everything breaks did this X did this yeah X proves this is possible what what 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 five hundred million dollars a year auto insurance companies are another good one oh yeah that makes sense pretty simple yeah pretty simple interesting imagine saying you're having a issue and you're saying talk to a human and it's like we just got one guy we only have the

see you have one guy like it's actually faster to talk to me and the CEOs at hill and valley having a dinner and shaking hands grease and ball on the side of the road cars on fire you're talking to open AI yeah that's great uh anyway uh congratulations it's glazing you it's He was like, sorry, you're a great driver, you're a great driver. I just crashed. That sign jumped into the street. How did he not see you? Yeah, how did that sign not see you coming?

Bicyclists shouldn't be on the road anyway. They should ride on the sidewalk. Have you tried having four wheel? Yeah, it makes no sense. Anyway, I need a sound effect because Joshua Steinman over at Galvanic has launched a vibe reel. And now something is coming. Vibreel alert. I mean, it was no, it was no, uh, uh, I've never, honestly, I've never just John, like that. It's so mean because obviously I love Josh. We saw him on the plane.

Um, no, this is the meme. This is the meme of like, you know, you shipped a name. But it is awesome. It's a great video. It's a great video. I love the aesthetics. And I think, I think he did. this because he knew we were gonna be he must have you know figured out from the airline that we were gonna be on the flight to right behind him do we know what galvanic does yes they secure the American industrial base it's a technology company yeah it's a technology company but more importantly it's run by our absolute boy Josh Steinman who we love it's fantastic it does have very cool that it's a great video go check it out I wish we could play it but we're working

off a PDF today yeah any any critiques on today's stream by the way just go to find Ben Kohler and shoot him a note he'll have an MPS survey for today's stream anyway what else is the news so we should wrap up soon this is getting a little too wild we got 10 months till four What else we got? We got a Pelosi bill. We got to cover the Pelosi Act. There's a new bill in Congress.

Have you 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, Holly sounds like an absolute dog for coming out with this. Yeah. What's your take on the insider trading on Capitol Hill? I want to announce that we are supporting the Ramp Act.

Yes. What does Ramp stand for? The Ramp Act. Running America. The right accounting company for your provider. That was extremely popular. We need to get you a pen and paper. See you can map these out beforehand.

The interesting impact here is that autopilot, which has run the Pelosi tracker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They made a lot of money off. Maybe it's their own undoing, though, because if they advertise how good, it too popular. Pelosi is at insider trading, made it too much in the public eye. Yeah. 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 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. Polymarket. Oh yeah. 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 is it's it's effectively like a decentralized crystal ball. It 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 Carney 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 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 actually haven't been tracking the news in Canada I don't know if 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 polymarket's role in the American election or if we like truly just laid it to rest and and prediction markets are just a thing that exists and everyone's just like oh yeah like they yeah because it seems like a you know election interference is obviously illegal but but conclave interference is not obviously illegal if you're a bishop yeah why not get some action on side gamble yeah yeah you think that's what's happening I think it might be happening we should check the odds yeah yeah following the the next who will be the next pope who will be the next pope I think these odds are wrong Do you have a pick over Paretro Powerway?

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 Pope. American pub. Well, that'd be great. 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 late space access the collective wisdom of humanity and expand my mind and I think it's a

2003 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 you how are you feeling about the idea that like the definition of AGI and and where we are in terms of the models what are they good at what aren't they good at Tyler Cowan said AGI is here. We had another guy on Will Brown who said, we have 10-minute AGI now.

Other people say, you know, 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, right? 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, you know, work for 10 minutes. I think long-duration, coherence is still a big challenge. If I had a handicap, I think we're still probably 5,000, 6,000 years away. But that's going to be a real slow and long takeoff. Yeah.

Where are you seeing... Famous last words. Where are you seeing AI be most valuable in your personal or work life, like in your daily driving? Like, I've been having just a lot of luck with 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 the 80s and then and then Apple I can just say

summarize it all pull it all in bake it 100% it's it's it's it's deep research is doing easily four hours 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 still 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 know and work with like O3 is an incredible tutor like there's a ton of health care 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 those sites

prepare research briefings for me it's really amazing just the amount of documentation we're able to generate is much higher yeah are you a ruin head text is the universal interface or do you think voice again is more important I think corporate expense accounts are really the universal interface yes those receipts really are the

receipts yeah universal interface 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. It's a screenshot. We should make it the screenshot of the week.

So I think all three of us are in this chat or were before we got docks to include. Were you? 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. If we'd been like, oh, David Sachs, I'm going to leave right now.

Imagine how low status it would be if you left and they cropped you out. they cropped you out. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, Shole McGuire, Tucker Carlson, not you. We were joking about, yeah, if you'd left right between David and Tucker, you could have changed your name to... Barack Obama. 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 famous for collecting rare PDFs, you're famous for collecting rare books. Do you think you're getting the rare screenshot game? I mean, this is just whoever leaked it, I do hope you face federal charges. 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. Yeah, I've thought about that. The RSS feed for just the partners that more the boys, yeah. Boys. All right, we got to cover this post from Dylan's

Fisle. He says Microsoft's initial plan was to leapfrog both Google and Amazon to begin the largest tech infrastructure company in the world. Then they got scared. They backed away from Open AI, backed away from some leases, and even slowed down their construction pace for major data centers. Shots fired. Shots fired. Get the same. 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, the, I read this piece in the plane and like the thing that was most clear to me is that it's extremely hard to sum up Microsoft's data center strategy in like a single pithy tweet 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 CoreWeave. And so there's a lot of like these weird things where the headline is that Microsoft

canceled two gigawatts worth of leases, but that only comes. covers non-binding LOIs, not firm contracts. And it fails to mention that Microsoft has five gigawatts of pre-leased 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, think about how much leverage they get from just coming out and saying we're pausing on a few of these things. Yeah.

Because then all the people that had data centers in construction that were just like, oh, one of the hyperscalers will buy it, right? They had raised hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to fill this stuff out. So basically, you know, potentially a great case study in exercising. This status is insane. Because so semi-analysis, like they don't just look at the, public reports of what the CAPEX number is they're actually looking at any they task satellites to take pictures of how the progress on buildouts is going they

dig into all this stuff is that 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 Microsoft's pre-lease capacity was larger than that of the four other major hyperscalers combined they We need a new term. They need to be like a giga-scaler. Gigas-caler. Gigas-caler.

Because they're doing so much more business here. What word comes after Giger? I don't know. Giga. What's more giga? Oh, in the, like, the, gigawatt, terra-watt, yeah. Terra-scaler.

Terra-scaler, that's what's next. Microsoft significantly ramped up its self-build efforts, acquiring tens of thousands of acres around the US and the globe, accelerating construction of existing sites and securing gigawatts of power for future sites, together these move 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 that pivot by satch and adela 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, scaling, 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, 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. Right. So as you think about like inference, demand scaling, model distillation going down, it's still, I think the Tyler Call intake is correct, the diffusion is gonna take forever. That makes sense. And you're gonna need a whole new class of companies,

you know, hint, hint, 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 gonna be much faster and was actually occurring. It's not like everyone's used. 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 has grown, obviously, because there's more of a consumer angle there. A lot of the different, like Salesforce has been upselling AI functionality. You know, what Microsoft did with teams could potentially play out here, but I agree with 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 Girovvara.

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Need backup code. Open password manager. Signed out. Enter password manager password. No backup codes. Try another way. QR code. iOS Octa app. Sign in. Face ID. Is this really you? 2FASMS code? The worst of us 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. It's like a proud big company guy now. Like Microsoft team sign in kind of elite. It's good.

It gives you a little my app, 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 unplus 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. You go to Nashville, you go to Charlotte, you go to any of these new tier-s through cities. They all look the same. They don't feel like real places. I think the models are going to 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 worth the reading. What is the prescription for actually avoiding the bad outcome? I think it's like it's much like cultural. It's like a food quality,

right? Like if we ignore the food supply and 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 the swamp. 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 odd yeah and it's so where's the hearse castle of today yeah I mean some people are building I think the Collison brothers are they bought a castle I mean Caspar and Boyle had a good take on this like all architecture kind of looks like Islamabad like it's all it's all Arabic

architecture and it's not 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 of 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 there's 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, I think. Powerful stuff. Powerful stuff. 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 going to 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 first on the ground. Yes, yes. We're in D.C. Well, thank you for joining us, Will. Thank you for having me. It's fitting. And thanks for tuning in, folks.

We will see you next. See you next time. Cheers. Bye. Bye.