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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, 04/29/2025. We are live from the Temple Of Technology, the Fortress Of Finance, the capital of capital. We are in Washington DC, the nation's capital. Have a special guest, Will Minitis here with us today.
Speaker 1:Our first TPPN. Chairman of TPPN, our first in person guest. Very excited to have him here today. Let's hear from Will Thank you for from the studio. Earlier today, we went to a press briefing, our first press briefing.
Speaker 1:Will is in the studio, folks. We're here. Will, that's here for Will again. It's gonna be a fantastic show for I was gonna do
Speaker 2:that for the journos.
Speaker 1:For the journos that we saw at the press briefing. It was the first time we've ever been to a press briefing. It was very official. And so Deleon
Speaker 2:Talk about the tension in the room, John.
Speaker 3:It was palpable. It was palpable. It was palpable. The
Speaker 1:basically So
Speaker 2:three technology brothers Yes. And just an
Speaker 1:Jacob Helver. Army
Speaker 2:effectively of Jellian, Christian, get
Speaker 1:up there to break down what's happening at Hillen Valley and the Journos were were not happy.
Speaker 2:Not happy.
Speaker 1:They were 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 Delivering actually turned the crowd
Speaker 3:won hearts and minds.
Speaker 1: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 the defining moments in technology history.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Truly. Truly. It was fantastic. It was a turning point.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was it was definitely a turning point. Went to Out
Speaker 3:of the valley into the hill.
Speaker 1:Yes. Exactly. Yes. Out of the valley into the Hill. You went to Hidden Valley last year.
Speaker 1:Have you been previously?
Speaker 3:I have. Okay. Two or three times.
Speaker 1:Break down your experience for me. How has it evolved? What are you looking into for tomorrow? What's your game plan?
Speaker 3:I mean, is it is somewhat hilarious. Like two years back, like tech people did not come to DC. Yeah. 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.
Speaker 3:Like, know, you're here. Technology is the
Speaker 2:next 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. Yes.
Speaker 1:I mean, you
Speaker 3:know a man is deep on Hillen Valley when he doesn't even need to get business cards back out because they're already half backing from Hillen Valley last year. It's just incredible. It's like seeing, a cheetah try to hunt in the Sahara, right? It's like a different environment, but it's beautiful. Unity matters here in the Unity Yes.
Speaker 1: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 is this like center of like it's a third space for technology.
Speaker 3:I mean, don't know why you have
Speaker 2:to do me I mean, it's like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I I know. I know. They're still they're still kicking.
Speaker 1:But DC has become a place with with higher profile events. Yes. It kind of
Speaker 3:came from behind.
Speaker 2:On a on a more serious note Yes. The the thing the takeaways from the press briefing Yes. 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 We're trying to keep the topic around that. Yeah. And as much as the legacy media would would like to make it political, it's, you know, many of the the the sort of subjects should be very bipartisan.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It
Speaker 1:was also funny digging into, like, what is the current thing with the mainstream media versus the current thing with us? Because Jordy asked a question like, if we're talking Hill and Valley, if we're talking DC politics, geopolitics and tech, the top story of the last week has been Benchmark investing in Manus, a Chinese AI company. That's interesting angle. That's the thing people want to dig into in tech. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And a lot the journalists
Speaker 2:were asking questions. I asked a question, it was like giving him a layup. Yeah. And he did like an alley oop. Straight over the top.
Speaker 2:But I but again, I I actually don't even think that was top of mind for the other media that was attending.
Speaker 3:Just all a re industrialization from their side?
Speaker 1:No. No. At Not Everybody talked about tariffs. Terrorists. Even and even the the the discussion around AI was very much like, oh, have you tried the new four o model?
Speaker 1:Like, you can search the web. Like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, it was at that level.
Speaker 1:It wasn't it wasn't talking about, like, it wasn't talking about, you know, the I asked like, the Glaze Gate.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I asked one of the a writer, I I think from a journal from Politico Yeah. Who just covers AI policy and I asked her about Glaze Gate. She she thought she she responded like she knew what I was talking about and then she was like talking about tool use and being like Yeah. Yeah, think it's really cool.
Speaker 3:It's strong evidence you have to get your news from only one place. Right? Exactly. The Technology Brothers Media Empire. Yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Really Only somebody made a daily three hour Yeah. Live show just about technology and business.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:Have you been following earnings season? Of course, I have been. Well, what have you been tracking? What's been interesting to you?
Speaker 3:That all the great companies in the world are focused on one thing, and that is controlling spend, which is best in the world handled on a platform
Speaker 1:like the grand You're keeping Corporate cards. You know it. Unnecessary, but you're punching above your weight already. Every single month.
Speaker 3:Yes. I want a special man named Zach who's close in our hearts Yes. To monitor my individual corporate card spend. Yes. It's good to have.
Speaker 2:It's good
Speaker 1:to have. Well, we do have some news from Tuesday. So UPS reported earnings, they missed. UPS was supposed to be 17, came in at $2.00 5. Revenue down to $221,400,000,000.0, expected 21,700,000,000.0 a miss.
Speaker 1:Obviously, 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 the candy soda still.
Speaker 3:That's good for the
Speaker 1:Sugar number go up. Motors had a massive beat. Earnings per share at $2.22, expected $1.01 88, and revenue was 43,000,000,000 instead of roughly 42,000,000,000, probably driven by the Corvette ZR one, I imagine, Hummers. What else do they what else they make? The CT5 V Blackwing.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:They're probably selling a ton of those. Markovia, the
Speaker 2:Alphator Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. Exactly. Pfizer beat earnings, 62¢ a share. Do you wanna give a round
Speaker 2:of applause for big pharma? For biotech pharma.
Speaker 3:It's an incredible time to be receiving healthcare in America.
Speaker 1:COVID products sales fell, but it was expected. The core business oncology and vaccines showed moderate growth and the market reaction was that the stock traded up 1%. Visa issues guidance tonight and consumer confidence was down the biggest monthly drop since 2022. Big discussion over how all the news is falling with the consumer. People are worried about tariffs.
Speaker 1:Even if they're not feeling it yet, they expect to feel it, and so consumer confidence is falling. Anyway, market's pretty flat. And in general, the takeaway that I had from the from the press briefing was there's all these big stories about tariffs and chaos and and what's happening with TikTok. And it and and the mood was very much like things are worse than ever, I guess. But the stock market is kind of resilient.
Speaker 1:Know, it's like it's not as
Speaker 3:It's priced in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's kind of priced in and it hasn't been in in as much of free fall as the news would have had you believe a few Right?
Speaker 2:Well, we still have more data coming in this week. We have jobs and GDP and then tech earnings
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Just given how much of the, you know, growth over the last few years has just come from Yep. The mag seven. Yep. Those are really the earnings to watch.
Speaker 1:Tomorrow and Thursday after the market closes, have Meta, Google no, Google already reported, but we have Meta Yeah. Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia I believe. Tesla and Google already reported. And then Intel and TSMC also reported and we'll get into that when we, we can get into it now with the Ben Thompson analysis. Have you dug into Lip Bu Tan at all?
Speaker 1:Have you
Speaker 3:met I not.
Speaker 1:No. Are you familiar with the new Intel CEO,
Speaker 3:Lip Bu Yeah, of course. Been doing the legwork.
Speaker 1:So he gave investors a stark diagnosis of the chipmaker's problems on Thursday along with the sense that it will take a while to fix them. Tam, delivering his first earnings report as CEO, said Intel's bureaucratic corporate culture needs a shakeup, so he's going to cut jobs, remove layers of management, and force everyone back to the office. His prescriptions for other areas of malaise, 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 lows are even worse than feared. The company gave a revenue forecast for the current quarter that was well below what analysts projected, and Intel's chief financial officer warned that tariff fueled recession could torpedo chip demand.
Speaker 1:The grim outlook sent Intel shares sliding by as much as 10% Friday to $19.34 a share. And Ben Thompson called. He said these earnings were absolutely brutal and the earnings call was worse. Start with the good news. Well, yeah.
Speaker 2:Fortunate thing for shareholders is that it was mostly priced in in total over the last month, only down just under 10%.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:The the analysts were doing a good job Yep. Effectively understanding even if they were off on on some of their own forecasts.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the narrative is that Intel has shifted to these seven nanometer consumer chips that go into budget systems, Raptor Lake, and that's what drove non GAAP gross margin three points higher than expected. But obviously, those sales came at the expense of Lunar Lake, which is a better processor with worse margins in large part because it is mostly made by TSMC. In other words, Intel benefited financially from being less competitive at the high end than expected. And this is the highlight.
Speaker 1: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, global foundry I mean, feels like
Speaker 3:very important to have an American foundry company. Yes. Right? And it's such a shame Pat's no longer in the role. Truly one of the greatest CEOs, great redemption arc.
Speaker 3:At the company leaves, the company comes Yep. Out there doing amazing work today building churches, but would have loved to see him in the seat, obviously, until shareholders disagree. Yeah. But
Speaker 1:What is the full, like what what what's 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.
Speaker 3:I mean, I I've met the man once. Sure. But Incredible seems to put his faith at the center of his work. Mhmm. He has built, I wanna say, seven churches in the Bay Area.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Seems to spend one day a week praying for Intel employees. Yeah. Which is fascinating and interesting. Maybe more companies should try that.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:Just seems like a man who has sobbed work, life, faith, integration in a way that others have not.
Speaker 1:What about did you ever hear that take that like whatever type of scripture he's posting is like directly
Speaker 3:into it? It's MMPI. Yeah. It seems like that. Maybe you don't want management teams posting daily bible readings inspired based on material non public information.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That feels correct. Yeah. Do you
Speaker 2:have As long as he puts at the end, NFA.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's really nice. Do you have a take on the split? Do you think that they should go pure fab or pure design shop Nvidia style?
Speaker 3:I have no, I have no strong take on No strong take on
Speaker 1:it. Have this take that there's there's a world where you rewind the clock and instead of Elon spending 44,000,000,000 on Twitter, now X, he gets a bunch of money from the Chips Act and instead goes into chip fabrication because he seems like the one person that could actually pull together all the talent and the culture to if 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, Neuralink, etcetera.
Speaker 2:Missing semis.
Speaker 1:Missing semis. What what do you think about that theory?
Speaker 3:I mean, he does seem to be amazing at taking, you know, very highly priced x AI equity and trading it for real businesses. Yeah. Right? It does seem like actually a good moment to, you know, take a slightly overvalued AI foundation model Sure. 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, thirty years.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Like, I think Elon going full stack is very good.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It'd be cool. There's actually did you see the did you see the other news about Elon? No.
Speaker 1:The 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 $13,000,000,000 quagmire.
Speaker 2:Did did the election change its fortunes or did they just get efficient in operating Yeah.
Speaker 1:It doesn't even seem like it was the election that changed the fortunes. It was more that x AI started ripping. Yeah. Just ripped. Refinance based on that.
Speaker 1:So But if it were True Zone
Speaker 3:98¢ on the dollar already priced in.
Speaker 1: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 $1,200,000,000 of loans sold at 98¢ on the dollar. Of course, when Elon purchased Twitter for 44,000,000,000, he put up a bunch of equity from Tesla.
Speaker 1:There were a bunch of other investors that came in, Larry Ellison, Andrew Steinhorowitz, 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 $13,000,000,000 in debt, sell it to investors, and earn millions in fees.
Speaker 1: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 twenty twenty four, the x deal was considered the worst buyout banks had agreed to finance since the two thousand eight financial crisis. And then they say everything turned with the election of Donald Trump as president and the rise of Musk as a crucial Trump ally catalyzing a frenzy among investors to get a slice of Musk Inc. Advertisers such as Amazon.com started coming back to the platform, helping Musk to raise more capital for Exxon.
Speaker 1: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?
Speaker 2:It's an interesting platform because historically, I just don't think the ad units were ever that good. Yep. So it was easy for advertisers to just say, okay. We're not gonna come back.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Now it's an opportunity to sort of pledge allegiance to the Musk empire and and in some way, kind of cozy up to the to the to the power players by saying, yes, we're bringing our advertising back to the platform. Yep. And sure, that helps in terms of x getting Yeah. Improperly basically, just, you know, the the as long as Elon is heavily involved with politics Mhmm. His companies will will be impacted by his proximity to power.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I guess the flip side is maybe if Trump loses, I mean, you could see a situation where the the left is more aggressive about, like, holding Musk to account for trying to get Trump elected. But on the but on the other side, you could see a world where it's just like, oh, Trump is a loser. He lost two elections in a row in this hypothetical. And Musk is, you know, like a failure for he couldn't even get Trump elected, and so he's less of a threat.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, you can advertise on his 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 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.
Speaker 2:I think the really interesting question is how this new $20,000,000,000 financing comes together. Yeah. I don't know where where that capital is coming from. It it already and then and then as you start to
Speaker 1:You mean for x AI?
Speaker 2:Yeah. X AI doing this new financing Yep. That's been sort of reported on just based on rumors, think. Seems unclear to me if if x, the the social media platform, starts getting any credit at all for even existing. Right?
Speaker 2:It's just just rolled in. It's like, oh, yeah. Like, you're investing in, you know, the mega Yeah. Data center project and, like, oh, we also have that app. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And as an x user, all of this stuff, again, like, it's just not it's not default bullish
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:Or x Yep. The social platform just because it happens because that capital is certainly not being gonna be diverted in any type of meaningful way to the social platform.
Speaker 3:But it it's also, like, do you actually need to update x? Like, when was the last Do you've reached for Twitter update? Like
Speaker 1:Woah. Woah. They launched four k live streaming. We will be live streaming in four k very soon. But let's play a sound effect for four k live streaming on x, folks.
Speaker 1:It's happening. Let's go. Should be watching this on a QLED TV. You should be watching it in IMAX.
Speaker 3:Get Starlinks.
Speaker 2:We were talking with Tyler and the Yeah. And the video team, and they were basically saying like, yeah, there's like one engineer who's like working on streaming. It's like
Speaker 1:It's great. Guy. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Our guy. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. It 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
Speaker 3:Yeah. He wouldn't
Speaker 1:be able to buy it for a quarter of price. Like, every single tech company sold off and Twitter would have sold off by more. Yeah. Meta went down by
Speaker 2:struggling to find
Speaker 1:A %. Bottom. A %. It probably would have been like a 5 or $10,000,000,000 company. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Even if you pay 10, it's still 75 percent off.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 2:And it's crazy they basically put a gun to his head and said, you're buying
Speaker 1:You have to
Speaker 3:do Yeah.
Speaker 1:The court always forces Elon to do exactly what he says they do. You can't do the pay package. You have to buy this. You can't buy that.
Speaker 2:What he should do is is come out really in favor of the for profit conversion of open OpenHAY.
Speaker 1:And that will absolutely not happen. He's doing more reverse psychology for sure. For sure. In a sign of how eager investors were, Monday's sale of $1,200,000,000 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 transaction said they felt that the high quality nature of the deal meant that they could sell the debt despite recent market volatility.
Speaker 1:In the end, banks found a graceful exit from the $13,000,000,000 financing that weighed on them for some two and a half years. I mean, the team that I 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.
Speaker 1: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 function functioning democracy Yeah. And Twitter is the digital town square where it matters.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:No. It it did feel like post acquisition Yeah. That he he basically spent he he spent $44,000,000,000 to preserve free speech on the internet. Yeah. In many ways it actually did feel like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Should be
Speaker 3:tax It's a non profit contribution.
Speaker 1:It should be. Yeah. Mean 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 danger. And so, was a small price to pay.
Speaker 3:Small price
Speaker 1:to pay. But, he got out of there. It's
Speaker 3:44,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Speaking of small prices to pay,
Speaker 3:He's a huge guy but
Speaker 1:we're gonna convert him. I think presidential
Speaker 3:I need more gold material.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:The yellow
Speaker 1:gold the yellow gold champagne day date that would look great on you. It's from Glengarry Glen Ross, maybe the GMT The Texas Timex. Texas Timex. They it.
Speaker 2:When you're in the South.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's move on to another story.
Speaker 2:What do we got?
Speaker 1:Mean TSMC earnings also paired well with Intel earnings because interestingly Intel is flat despite having a terrible couple months changing CEOs, lots of fear around can they be competitive on the leading edge whatsoever. TSMC Yeah. Has been crushing it, been in the perfect position but has so much fear around global tensions. Yeah. Invasion of Taiwan basically zeros the company and so TSMC has been having a much harder time in the market even though their outlook has been bullish.
Speaker 1:Their 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 and a doubling of AI revenue, mirroring goals set in January, and it stuck with capital spending projection of 38,000,000,000 to 42,000,000,000 in 2025. TSMC's US stock rose as much as 3.8% while in while shares of suppliers, including Tokyo Electron and Laser Tech climbed in Tokyo. The the CEO stressed that demand, particularly for high end chips critical to developing AI has remained resilient. That may assuage investors who've struggled through a turbulent few days when US restrictions on the export of Nvidia chips to China and a disappointing report from ASML Holdings trigger helped trigger a broad market
Speaker 2:Ben says what you were alluding to earlier which in stark contrast to Intel, TSMC is killing it and yet you wouldn't know from the share price
Speaker 3:Rough.
Speaker 2:Trading They're down just just the right.
Speaker 3:Priced in.
Speaker 1:What is priced in?
Speaker 3:Everything. Everything.
Speaker 1:Everything is priced. The market is perfectly priced.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So he's breaks it down here. Said you would had you invested at the beginning of this year been break even on an Intel investment and significantly down on a TSMC investment. Granted, the returns are a lot different if you go back even a year. Intel's are brutal, but it's clear that TSMC is being much more impacted by recent geopolitical events than Intel is and for good reason.
Speaker 2:Above and beyond their location in Taiwan, TSMC is actually relevant to the global economy in a way that Intel is not boom roasted.
Speaker 1:Have you been you been tracking any of the new chip companies that are doing like transformers on a chip at
Speaker 3:I've surely been tracking the heights of waves in the Taiwan Strait.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's all that matters to the stock price. All you trade off of is the weather forecast.
Speaker 3:A yardstick in the Taiwan Strait.
Speaker 1:If it's low. It's going on. It's low, it's bad. Yeah. That that is true.
Speaker 1:Right? You can't like you can only invade in certain times or something?
Speaker 3:This is when Eric Prince appears on the show you know, less than twenty four hours. Okay. That does feel like a question for him. Yeah. But my understanding is in the summer, the Taiwan Straits are flatter.
Speaker 3:Okay. Much easier to get landing craft across. The winter, it's
Speaker 1:like 22. Bad timing with the tariffs now.
Speaker 2:Show like a very narrow windows in it like two weeks. Yeah. Two weeks
Speaker 1:as well.
Speaker 2:Which is helpful if you're trying to prepare an invasion, but still not great.
Speaker 1:You're not good.
Speaker 2:Anyways, so Ben goes further here. He says, TSMC has, however, even beyond the last few months, suffered from the China overhang, the reality that any sort of conflict over Taiwan would zero out TSMC. Yep. And what he says, which is interesting and we'll get into this is, what is notable to me, however, and counter to what I wrote last month is the depth of TSMC's commitment to manufacturing in The United States. And again, this was what we've been trying to pull out of some people on the show is is kind of understanding how much of Nvidia saying, oh, we're investing a hundred billion dollars Yep.
Speaker 2:In The US. How much is t s how much of this is sort of marketing to the admin Yep. Versus like actual practical business planning?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, this is cool to see. So, Ben wrote last month, at the same time, you can also view this announcement with some amount of cynicism particularly given the lack of specificity about either timing or process. There's both an optimistic and a pessimistic way to look at this. On the optimistic side, that first fab was upgraded to a more advanced five nanometer node.
Speaker 1:TSM Love this. Love it. TSMC calls it the four nanometer node, but it's actually a third generation five nanometer node. That Thompson is truth
Speaker 2:zoning numbers. Truth zoning Yeah. TSMC. The second fab meanwhile will also produce two nanometer chips at some point in the future, although not in 2020
Speaker 1:and something that a couple years ago people were like, that will never happen. There's too much like sacred knowledge in Taiwan that will never make it to America. They can actually hit that, it's crazy. Yep. And so, yeah.
Speaker 1:On the earnings call, the CEO of TSMC said, let me talk about TSMC's additional $100,000,000,000 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 shareholder value. With a strong collaboration and support from our leading U.
Speaker 1:S. Customers and the Fed in The U. Federal, state and city governments, we recently announced our intention to invest an additional $100,000,000,000 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 and d center. Let's Combined with our previously announced plan to build three advanced semiconductor manufacturing fabs in Arizona, this brings our total investment in The US to to a hundred and $65,000,000,000 to support the strong multi year demand from our customers.
Speaker 1:It makes sense like a lot of TSMC's customers are in America like there's no reason why you shouldn't make them here but it was thought impossible for a long time.
Speaker 3:How did we just sum a hundred billion dollars and a hundred billion dollars and get to a hundred and $65,000,000,000?
Speaker 1:No. He starts by saying, let's talk about the hundred billion dollar investment. And then he's like, we're gonna do all this stuff which adds up to a hundred And then he says, we've already invested 65, so let's add the new hundred to the previous 65. We're at a hundred and 60 which sounds staggering, I guess, when you compare it to what the hyperscalers are spending on CapEx, which is all in, the $60.70, 80 billion per It's not that crazy. And, of course, this is over a number of years because they're building this out.
Speaker 1:But still very very bullish for American manufacturing, very bullish for re industrialization, which we love to see.
Speaker 2:It's not a meme.
Speaker 3:Not a meme.
Speaker 1:Not a meme. It's gonna happen. It is yeah. It it it it is interesting to see that, like, they're actually making progress here that people thought was not possible for a long time or they thought it would never happen for a variety of reasons. But TSMC, Foxconn's in the same in the same boat where Foxconn's announcing new facilities.
Speaker 1:It's a Taiwanese company. They obviously have a massive presence in China, but they're announcing a lot of new facilities in America because they see themselves as a western company or a global company and they wanna do business love
Speaker 2:when CEOs are super candid on our earnings calls because it's so easy for them to go robotic. This is 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 path finding exploratory work and cooperate with the university blah blah. It's actually a lot of activities.
Speaker 2:A thousand engineers is not a small amount. Of course, it's not comparable to, TSMC. I think he's talking about, you know, the facility in Taiwan Thousand R and people. Has 10,000 r and d people. But it's the beginning.
Speaker 2:So we'll do a lot more.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:And, anyways. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, you you were 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 I think it was in Texas for the Mac. Yeah. And it was like, they'd already been making it there. They weren't reshoring anything They're
Speaker 3:the dollar. It's really They're starting bills.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's nothing. And then 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 hundred billion dollars in America. And it was like the salaries that were already gonna
Speaker 3:be spent warehouse and just like let people rent it
Speaker 1:for ribbon cutting ceremonies. Like huge, huge bull market Yeah. Massive American flag on the wall. You can move We rent it by the hour with a day. It comes with a vibe real.
Speaker 1:It comes with Just getting free birds preinstalled.
Speaker 3:Secret Service has been there already.
Speaker 1:Yes. I know the angles.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Getting into American made ribbons specifically for for know
Speaker 1:And and those big scissors. The big scissors had to be American made as those were made
Speaker 3:in China today. For sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Absolutely. For sure. Should we talk about Amazon?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:And all this drama around whether or not they were displaying Yeah. Plan to display the tariff This
Speaker 1:guy who ran this AB test on his e commerce website. He found, he's a, he makes his shower head in China. It's, the tariffs are gonna make a $100 product like $250. Goes to an American manufacturer. It's gonna cost him $250 to make it.
Speaker 1:So he puts an option on his website, a hundred dollars for the Chinese one or two And he was like, 100% of people chose the
Speaker 2:cheaper
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Got zero we got zero made in America.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's not the trade.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The actual trade is $250 for the Chinese made one, a hundred and 60 dollars of which or a hundred and $50 of which goes to tariffs versus 200 50 dollars made to the American No.
Speaker 2:Was a deeply flawed study. Yes. Yes. Exceptionally viral.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Amazon is thinking about doing something very similar kind of, you know, lobbying popular support amongst the American people, breaking out import charges.
Speaker 2:And to be clear, they deny they had plans to do Sure.
Speaker 1:Sure. But the administration now addressed it and said that breaking out import charges would be a hostile and political act. Andy Jassy is getting in trouble with the White House. I'm sure they will be fighting it out. Although they're still going after Bezos.
Speaker 1: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 politically I mean, you have to imagine that as soon as the tariffs drop, like, there's some Amazon PM who's like implementing this on day one. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's also funny that that Bezos is still the first guy to get the call Of course. It's been so long now.
Speaker 3:He's like desperately trying to retire. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just like
Speaker 1:I just wanna do the Lex Friedman podcast and be on a yacht and and go to space like, why are you calling me about my ecommerce business? Yeah. Yeah. Was an com entrepreneur. You're an e com guy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was a 12 figure e com entrepreneur. 12. But if if he
Speaker 3:does save the global economy, that's like his beautiful act. Right? Like if this works
Speaker 1:Wait. Wait. Who? Who?
Speaker 3:Saves the economy by rolling back tariffs Oh, yeah. Implementing this feature. That's a Nobel Peace Prize level achievement.
Speaker 1:It's yeah. It's possible. It's possible. It's gonna take an act of courage standing up to the admin by by by putting a new div on the checkout HTML page.
Speaker 2:Pressing Yeah.
Speaker 1:There is some controversy. There some
Speaker 2:controversy because Punch Bowl was doing some reporting on this, but Punch Bowl is corporate media. Really? They're supported by Amazon. What are talking about? Is this real?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Punch Bowl news. Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. 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, 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.
Speaker 3:And now you're gonna see 600% tariffs on your on your showerhead. Yeah.
Speaker 1:On your on your well, did you know that Amazon launched a Timu competitor? I did not So they so as in order to participate in their, like, Timu 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,
Speaker 3:we have to start thinking about an American Timu reserve. Right? Just importing thousands of Shein items.
Speaker 2:It's gonna be For American. It could very well stretch into the billions of items.
Speaker 3:So who are gonna where are yoga pants gonna come from? If not
Speaker 1:If they poison you. Yeah. They can't you're lying to you. Yeah.
Speaker 2:A 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 punch bowl story on Amazon sponsored by Amazon isn't completely true per Amazon. It's literally an article that's presented by Amazon and it it says Amazon to display tariff cost for consumers.
Speaker 2:So a little bit hard hard to imagine they weren't actually planning to do this, but
Speaker 1:This is gonna be like when we report on Numeral and Numeral has to deny our reports that Numeral is has a fact achieved AGI in the In sales tax. Chrome Yeah. Because we often call it AGI for sales tax or Well, we
Speaker 2:we were talking to Sam, the Yeah. The CEO and, you know, what what what he said was basically like, you know, we have a new version that like we're actually not able to release Mhmm. Because it's so powerful Yeah. Safety reasons. That if I solve sales tax fully and then sort of like move on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like how do we actually reduce the number of sales tax receipts to zero? Well, we eliminate humans. We kill everyone. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We're have
Speaker 2:we achieved AGI to numeral safeties? Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's the same thing with RAMP. How do we get no more receipts?
Speaker 3:No more employees.
Speaker 1:No more employees. Get rid of everyone. But anyway, go to numeral h q's, put your sales tax on autopilot. Benchmark
Speaker 2:series a.
Speaker 1:Per month on sales tax compliance. Anyway, bargain stock Don't check them out. And Sheen also benefited from the exemption which helped keep help them keep prices down on clothing and other goods shipped directly from China, so that loophole is closed. Yeah. Was Amazon's haul.
Speaker 1:They called it Yeah. Max is called You're
Speaker 2:gonna love this. The max you could sell a couch
Speaker 1:for Yeah. $20. 20.
Speaker 3:Yeah. 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
Speaker 1:skin Yes.
Speaker 3:Cancer rates might fall a
Speaker 1:little bit.
Speaker 3:Interesting. That's much to think about.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Is that gonna right size is that the ultimate right sizing the government? Because I mean, it's it's proof of
Speaker 3:maha movements
Speaker 1:totally in
Speaker 3:control. Right?
Speaker 1:The tariffs get part of the MAHA. So is MAHA the real one that's pulling the strings?
Speaker 3:It's Bobby Kennedy at the top.
Speaker 1:Bobby Kennedy at the top. Every every other the defense budget, it's all in
Speaker 3:It's all Bobby. It's all Bobby.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes sense. The tech giant has cost support agreements in place with some vendors to ensure that it makes consistent margins on the products it buys from them and sells to customers according to consultants. Some vendors have tried 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.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean it's Amazon's in a really tough place. They have been squeezing their their sellers for so long Yeah. On both sides. Fees, advertising, know, not dealing with with knock offs very well, you know, sort of purely focused on the consumer, is which is, again, you know, Amazon's job is deliver for their core customer, which is the prime subscriber.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. At the end of the day, this is only gonna create kind of more drama and chaos between Amazon and its sellers who already were not super happy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, other story Amazon's in the news because they want to be a satellite internet powerhouse. Who doesn't? Mean, we've
Speaker 2:had long conversations off air about how do we turn TBPN into sort of, you know, get Satellite. Every home. Like a Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Not. How
Speaker 2:do we get a TBPN dish on every home? Yeah. We need dedicated network for sure. Dedicated network.
Speaker 1:So they launched 27 coupier satellites, but they need to get thousands more to space to rival SpaceX's Starlink. Some of the company's biggest hurdles aren't in orbit, on the ground, 27 Amazon satellites were launched from the Florida Coast to orbit Monday night, a mission handled by rocketcom rocket launch company United Launch Alliance. A year and half ago, ULA sent two prototype satellites for Amazon to space
Speaker 2:to have How have I never heard about United Launch?
Speaker 1:You don't know ULA?
Speaker 3:They're like the second biggest private launch provider. Now I see SpaceX is Now
Speaker 1:I But this was a joint venture between Lockheed and Boeing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:I've heard that. I've heard Yeah. ULA has been But ULA has been, you know, they've had a lot of problems with a lot of different Yeah. Projects they've been worked on and 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.
Speaker 1:It also faces a set of challenges familiar to many companies pushing to scale up manufacturing rates. The Project Coupierre venture aims to build large Propane. Satellites. Yeah. How do you pronounce that?
Speaker 1:Coupierre? Coupier? Coupier? Coupier?
Speaker 3:It's good French. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2:I have no idea. Thanks for the misinformation.
Speaker 1:So they're trying to provide high school internet.
Speaker 2:Our entire audience is like going out saying like, yeah, it's like it's actually
Speaker 1:It's French. Coopier. The company plans on having the 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 in Amazon's recent annual letter to shareholders. But Elon Musk has demonstrated the power of such a fleet through his Starlink business, has more than 7,000 satellites in orbit already and more than 5,000,000 users. At least two Yeah.
Speaker 1:Similar Chinese systems are also in the works while Canadian satellite operator Telesat is developing a new fleet called Lightspeed. Everyone's got to have their own LEO cluster of satellites, I guess. Leaders at Cupi Air
Speaker 2:have been Interesting to think about Amazon potentially over time just bundling in satellite to Prime. Like it's not.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's You have TV,
Speaker 3:you have shopping, have groceries.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Deliver own the actual delivery. And yeah, mean, it seems like it was really really hard to actually own like cable or or like wires in the ground. Like that was Yeah. Particularly hard monopolized to like build any to actually grab any of that infrastructure.
Speaker 1:But if every if everything moves to satellite, you can actually throw up a can do no zoning laws in space. Yeah. No. I I mean, at some point I imagine that it gets too too crowded that you can't put up anymore anymore constellations, but we it seems like we're pretty far away from here. People are already complaining about the space junk though.
Speaker 2:It feels far away. I mean, the moat is that you have to spend however, like, what what 20 however many tens of billions of
Speaker 1:dollars And launch is not a zero margin business for SpaceX. So it is when they launch Starlink satellites and anytime that they have you know a free seat on the bus, they can just throw Starlink satellites on there. So, they're getting them up there way way cheaper than Amazon.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:Is. Which is probably why Bezos is also investing in Blue Origin because if he can get that working and he can dump coopier satellites up there cheaply, like that actually gives him the opportunity to to challenge Musk. It is funny how how much Bezos and Musk like go after each other. Did you see that Bezos mean, already funded Rivian but then he just funded that slate truck? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Incredible truck. Okay. Yeah. What was your reaction to the truck?
Speaker 3:Incredible. T. J. Parker, you know Yeah. Big endorsement from Yeah.
Speaker 3:A certified car guy. Yep. I mean, it's incredible to have a small American made truck. Yeah. That said, I hate that it's an electric vehicle.
Speaker 3:I'd buy one day one if that was Yeah. Combustible engine. Yes. I just feel like, you know, Europe doesn't have power now. Why are you buying an electric EV?
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:But it's a beautiful car. It's an SUV. It's a sedan.
Speaker 1:A truck. Have you thought about buying one and swapping in like a turbocharged vehicle? Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's gonna LS swap.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The Slate truck. The Slate truck for sure. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Number one,
Speaker 2:I I I've seen some people, you know, I think it's gonna be a hit almost as a golf cart.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mean, the
Speaker 3:question is like, who is the singer Porsche of Japanese small trucks? Like, if I wanna drop $2,000,000 on a truck this big,
Speaker 2:who's gonna provide?
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's the real that's the real
Speaker 2:I mean, the big critique there and and we're gonna get the slate founding team But on the show, TJ actually made 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 I assume I'm just know, you have to look at with any EV manufacturer and assume that the range is only gonna go up over time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's fine. How how do they drop a range number?
Speaker 3:It's like a 50.
Speaker 1:Oh, 50? That's really low.
Speaker 2:I mean, no. An off
Speaker 1:It's a golf cart.
Speaker 2:It's a golf But it's even lower than that when you When
Speaker 3:you put stuff in. Yeah. You load Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Have hills.
Speaker 1:But truly, like, if you're just going, like, around town and back Yeah. Like, you're not going to Yeah. Do more than a 50 miles. Even if you drive to work 30 miles away and back, you're you're fine.
Speaker 3:I mean, you can't even fit in it.
Speaker 1:Right? You have to like cut a hole. Yeah. Have get in there for sure. Well, don't they have a don't they like, a modular structure so I can get, like, a convertible version of the other Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 3:You're them past the broomstick.
Speaker 1:But the reason I brought up Slate was because I think Bezos backed Slate. He also backed Rivian. So he has bets two different bets in
Speaker 3:Two different trucks.
Speaker 1: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?
Speaker 3:I have
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1: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 submarkets, subcategories. Yeah. It's a lot of fun to watch. Anyway, we should move on to some timeline.
Speaker 1:Let's break down the best is
Speaker 2:the moment that you all have been waiting for, timeline with none other than. Wilmanitis.
Speaker 1:King of the King
Speaker 2:of the timeline. King of the timeline. Let's do it. Let's dive in.
Speaker 1:So, founder of Intercom says, this is truly the golden age of b to b software out of home advertising. Literally 98% of billboard and shelter stock in SF is being is currently taken by SaaS brands. It's never been like this ever. It's either really bullish or really bearish for SaaS. Is it bullish or bearish?
Speaker 2:Intercom, by the way, Adquik Yeah. Customer.
Speaker 1:Oh, really? Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. They we are we are sponsored by Adquick.
Speaker 1:Go to Adquick.com. Sorry to cut off your Made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of at home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Anyway, Will, bullish or bears for SaaS?
Speaker 3:First. For AdQuick. For AdQuick. Yes.
Speaker 1:For AdQuick. Yeah. Exactly. The audience was. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe we get the Ashton Hall sound for every new post that we do during this timeline to really Okay. Really fire us up Back Back Back up. Up. Up. So, bullish or bearish?
Speaker 3:I just think hope hope hopes that, you know, replyer number one also my favorite account on twitter.com.
Speaker 1:That's correct. Books Revenge.
Speaker 3:We do need to think bigger. Right?
Speaker 1:We should be
Speaker 3:renaming San Francisco. One wonders if instead of San Francisco, we could have Salesforce California.
Speaker 1:Salesforce California.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Right? The towers there are targeting an occupied state. Why not go all the way?
Speaker 1:I What about just Altmanville?
Speaker 3:That would be even better.
Speaker 1:We've been talking about Valterville
Speaker 2:down in If
Speaker 3:Salesforce really wants to have that
Speaker 1:Company towns. Company towns.
Speaker 2:They should I would like to see an ad unit hung from the Golden Gate Bridge, know, just sort of like
Speaker 1:100%.
Speaker 2:One hundred feet by like
Speaker 1:Everyone always goes crazy over the 50 videos of Chinese cities where they look so cyberpunk and they have like advertising everywhere. Blade Runner future. Let's do it. Awesome.
Speaker 3:Why do we need permission? Why don't we just project on the side of the Salesforce tower?
Speaker 1:There's a business Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Also drone shows, blimps. We should be doing much more advertising.
Speaker 1:Adquick.
Speaker 2:Not to go back to Quick. No.
Speaker 1:No. No. Please go back to Ad Quick.
Speaker 2:No. Please. Please. They they have a drone drone ads which drone show. Alright.
Speaker 2:Next post. Ian Cinnamon, Apex Space has closed another round of funding to scale production and meet demand for satellite platforms for critical projects. Like Golden Dome. The new 200,000,000 in series c funding is led by Point72 Ventures and co led by APC Oh, my god. Andreessen Horowitz and a number of other funds.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 1:Congratulations, Ian. You invented a bus. Created a space
Speaker 2:created a space bus. I mean, the the the speed at which the Ian and the Apex team Yeah. Is moving. We had to go back Yeah. And listen to our interview Ian probably about a month ago at this point.
Speaker 2:But what what an absolutely, you know, ambitious timeline Yeah. They've been
Speaker 1:It is cool how like all of the different pieces of the satellite stack are disaggregating and then now there's new companies in each of them. I wonder if eventually they'll kind of come together in some massive ki ratsu or something. Have you talked to Ian before?
Speaker 3:No. But I I do like the idea of kind of a Frankel roll off of all these kind of non commercially viable or, you know, soon to be commercially viable launch providers. Beautiful.
Speaker 1:Well, it's not launch provider. He doesn't do rockets. He does the he does the bus that the satellite rides on. Uh-huh. So you want to put a radio or camera in space
Speaker 2:TPPN network.
Speaker 1:TBPN network will be using
Speaker 2:Space based network.
Speaker 1:Apex buses to build on top And and and another example would be like Bridget Bridget Midler. Her company does the ground link. So how is TBPN gonna beam down from these satellites? Well, she will have a ground link network of satellites that can receive the message from space.
Speaker 2:This next, we got another post from Chris Stevens.
Speaker 1:So we have some news from Lockheed Martin. They said with Lockheed Martin says, without us, AI might have never taken off. Say for over forty years,
Speaker 2: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 Givlified version of Yeah. Someone that's kind of Cruise
Speaker 1:from Top
Speaker 2:I was gonna say this looks like Trey Stevens to me, but you know
Speaker 1:Not enough beard. Not enough body hair. But I mean, forty years ago, I feel like they're not using that word correctly. Yeah. 1985, like what what AI were they doing?
Speaker 3:That's like Apple too.
Speaker 1:Like like neural networks had not really been invented
Speaker 3:yet. Yeah. Right? It's a linear regression.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's a t
Speaker 1:I 84. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:They're basically saying when was the first time we mentioned the words artificial intelligence? Not even together.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 3:But like it could have
Speaker 2:been in the same paragraph.
Speaker 1:I mean, at the same time, like the lesson one of Andrew Ng's course on machine learning at Stanford starts with multiple regression.
Speaker 3:Does it?
Speaker 1:Yeah. That that is the foundation of and then he builds you up to neural networks. And then
Speaker 3:I hear there was a big secret in how Grock got to state of the art so quickly. Literary questions. The regressions by hand.
Speaker 1:Yes. By hand.
Speaker 3:Yes. Training the transformers with artisanal craft.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We we need to bring that back. I I actually wouldn't be surprised if Lockheed did have some, you know Yeah.
Speaker 1: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 some Skunkworks project. But it is hilarious that they're just like, yo, we're responsible for AI. You're welcome. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Claim it.
Speaker 1:Oh, this is huge. Got some huge news from Josh Let's go. Josh Kushner says, we are humbled to announce. We are absolutely humbled right We are so humbled to announce Thrive Holdings, a permanent capital vehicle to dedicate dedicated to investing in, acquiring, and operating businesses for the long term. The mission of Thrive Holdings is to transform enterprises throughout the strategic You
Speaker 2:know what I always say? Technology? You know the only thing better than capital? What? Permanent capital.
Speaker 3:Permanent capital. You know what know what they say, any man in possession of a good fortune only needs one thing, a permanent capital holding vehicle.
Speaker 2:Yes. That's right. That's right.
Speaker 1:Can you actually break down what a permanent capital holding vehicle means relative to like everyone's familiar with like a VC fund ten year, twelve year continuation vehicles. Matter if you don't What's permanent capital?
Speaker 3:What matters is that closeness to God is closeness to fee streams. Sure. And normally fee streams they stop at ten years. You know what's better than ten years of fees? A lifetime of fees.
Speaker 3:Yes. Fees that you can pass on to your grandchildren.
Speaker 1:But, I mean, how is this different than, I mean, but is it structured different than a private equity fund that has a specific life or even like a hedge fund?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, the standard permanent capital vehicle will have some degree of redemption schedule. Okay. Like LPs can pull out some degree
Speaker 1:of It's a And they can swap with other people in and stuff.
Speaker 3:Brent B Shore has some incredible detail this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Is is he truly the golden standard for permanent capital? Or is there like a public company? Like, does BlackRock have a permanent holding vehicle that we don't talk about?
Speaker 1:I mean,
Speaker 3:there's plenty of like the the closed end vehicles were like a huge thing in The UK. In the nineties, there's dozens of these. I think it's the most artisanal. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:Sure. His is printing cash at a rate no one else I think is doing right But of course there's, you know, permanent capital vehicles we cannot name rolling up in the Midwest.
Speaker 2:Right? The opportunity here is for Josh and the Thrive team to think even more long term than they already do. Yep. Right? Like how do we think about, you know, know, not not in this sort of like ten year cycle.
Speaker 2:Sure. Josh, I think, had posted something a long time ago, is that like managers think in quarters, like founders think in decades.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And there's huge advantages in alpha and just being able to think, and and plan on a longer timeline than everyone else.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Especially if you're Thrive and you're thinking about buying, like, I think it's been widely reported that they bought an accounting firm to put AI in the middle and do automation on top of. Yep. That's a deal you need to hold for forty years. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then this also solves the continuity vehicle issue. Right? You have lots of companies like Stripe. You're holding year ten, eleven, twelve. Yep.
Speaker 3:How how are you gonna get liquidity on that? Well, you can pass it over to your permanent capital vehicle.
Speaker 1:You you think that's possible? I mean, it's similar to Sequoia Heritage.
Speaker 3:Right? It's like a continuity vehicle where you can pass those things over, get liquidity for the LPs in the initial set and hold a basket of really high quality assets Yeah. So you wanna hold for
Speaker 1:So take me through some of the sizes of permanent capital vehicles because with a VC fund, you know, you hear people raising a $50,000,000 solo GB fund all the way up to a $5,000,000,000 growth fund. Permanent capital feels like more narrowly defined, but is there is there kind of like what is a what is like a sweet spot base hit for the size of a permanent capital vehicle I mean, Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like the best example. Oh, okay. Okay. I wasn't actually sure. I I didn't wanna botch it so I just looked it up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But but that's a good way to think about it of, hey, we're not gonna focus as much on raising
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:New you know, the the best scenario is like you you have cash flowing assets Yep. That produce capital that allow you to, you know, reinvest or buy other businesses to produce more cash flow.
Speaker 1:Right. So
Speaker 2:it's like sort of the holy grail. And many people have said that cure to male loneliness is, you know, a permanent Capital.
Speaker 1:Capital. You're gonna It 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.
Speaker 1:Obviously, the the types of companies that are typically rolled into permanent capital vehicles, cash flowing from day one.
Speaker 3:I mean, I think like the single greatest Josh Kushner quote is like you never lose money buying Fifth Avenue real estate. Yep. If you think about Thrive as a thematic bet on the Fifth Avenue real estate of private companies Mhmm. Probably not a bad idea to hold these really blue chip assets Yep. To duration.
Speaker 1:Yep. So it's more just about find great founders. If they're if they're losing money in the super high growth phase, they go in the 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.
Speaker 3:I mean, you're Stripe and you're planning to go public in 02/1935, '20, you know, 2300. Right? Like those
Speaker 1:Once well, once they've consumed 100% of processed through Stripe. Global GDP. Global GDP.
Speaker 2:And yeah, they they need the space narrative.
Speaker 3:Look, you know, the space we
Speaker 2:need to go off planet.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's just these these continuity vehicles are gonna get huge.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wow. Okay. Well, speaking of growth stuff, Hadley Harris, venture capitalist, actually wrote about vector databases, which I think you might be a little bit familiar I
Speaker 3:mean, was the first check into Chroma. Okay. Yeah. Still think it's the fastest growing open source vector database. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I love Jeff. We had him on the show.
Speaker 3:Jeff's amazing. He's great.
Speaker 1:So he's breaking down some hype and I'd and it'd be interesting to hear how the market has evolved and if Jeff has kind of altered his strategy. Hadley's breaking down the story of Pinecone. Two years ago today, Andreessen announced a hundred million dollars in Pinecone as everyone and their mother tripped over each other to invest in best vector databases. Given how little stand alone vector databases are valued now, the hype cycle is wild to look back on. The timeline is late twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1: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 database is seen as critical infrastructure. But then after there's peak hype, every AI info di infer structure diagram has a vector DB layer, saturation hits, Postgres, Redis, MongoDB, add native vector search, clouds bundle it, the hype fades, vector search becomes commodity, market tightens, attention shifts to agents, fine tuning orchestration.
Speaker 1:So is this a good telling of the history of the vector database hype cycle or
Speaker 3: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 it is likely true that the vector database market will not have dozens of billion dollar outcomes.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3: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 of enterprise software, it's just different views on top of structured data Sure. Like, Salesforce is the world's greatest structured database.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah.
Speaker 3:There will be big win winners in the vector database space. In that, you just need to be able to store unstructured data. Yep. And, like, yes, you know, you can search vectors using it numpy dot sort. Yep.
Speaker 3:But like that's not an enterprise grade database solution.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:And I just think this is a good excuse to, you know, have missed a lot of winning companies such as Chroma.
Speaker 1:Yep. A lot of people are taking victory laps. John Chew at Coastalist, as we told our LPs, they were staying out of the market because they were too trivial to build and commoditize and were never used without BM 25. What is BM 25? Do you know what that is?
Speaker 1:Never heard of that. VC Vec database thought leadership was a great filter for those who for who's really technical and who has shallow understanding of ML infra.
Speaker 3:I will
Speaker 2:We gotta have John on the show. He's always dropping
Speaker 1:Bombs on the timeline. Speaking of dropping bombs on the timeline, hit me with a sound effect Jordy because we're by Deva about tech bros learning about convertibles. There are two different posts here. One from Spore, friend of the show. He says we it's called we do a little Bay Area sightseeing and someone else bought a BMW z four.
Speaker 1:What's your take on convertibles? My
Speaker 3:first car in high school was a 02/2002 Honda s 2,000.
Speaker 1:That's a great Wow.
Speaker 3:Sick. I still own it the status single greatest thing I've ever driven. Yeah. It's amazing that they've discovered convertibles. I mean, it's just like it's, you know, twenty five years late.
Speaker 3:It's Yeah. Kinda weird to discover this in your thirties.
Speaker 1:Especially in California Also both of those
Speaker 2:there's a generation of of young people in tech Yeah. That have only owned Teslas. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they don't make And they're
Speaker 2:discovering that that car manufacturers have been making pretty good cars. Lots of manufacturers Yeah. Have been making pretty good cars in a bunch different categories for a long time and it's a beautiful moment. I think it should be celebrated. Great.
Speaker 2:And I also like I think what I wanna what I wanna what I wanna see people do more, people I don't think realize like if you have a car, let's say you have a a Honda Accord Mhmm. You can drive to any car dealership and within two hours have swapped it for a nine eleven. Right? Yeah. Like it's actually like an extremely smooth
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Process Yeah. Where they will take your car
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Basically not sight unseen but they'll look at
Speaker 3:it Yeah.
Speaker 2:Close to it
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That your car has some amount of value Yeah. Can roll that into something else and you can within three hours on any day of the week, you can be driving in a nine eleven Yep. Or another car that that's going to change your life.
Speaker 3:If you're, you know, not a permanent capital guy, can't afford the nine eleven, Miatas.
Speaker 1:Miatas. Yeah. It's $5,000.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Miatas.
Speaker 1:Do you know the best selling convertible in America? Has to be
Speaker 3:a Miata. Right? It's not.
Speaker 1:It's the Jeep Wrangler.
Speaker 3:No way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because they sell a lot of them. People don't think of them as convertibles the heck they are.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Trop top.
Speaker 1:But, yeah. I think Tesla's missed out and Rivian's missed out on the convertible market. The all of the car companies are just coalescing around, like, everyone wants a crossover SUV. That drives a Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And, again, the one one piece of feedback here, guys Yep. Manual transmission.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 3:Like, I will teach I will fly out. I
Speaker 1:will teach
Speaker 3:you how to drive That's gonna change you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe that's next year. Next year will be tech pros learned about manual transmission.
Speaker 3:Manual transmission. Yeah. We're gonna put you on the bottom of the same
Speaker 2:Except except I my my first car, was a very very old Toyota Corolla hatchback. Was it manual? That was manual. Oh, sick. And I would drive it in San Francisco and it would be like a life or
Speaker 1:death. Hard.
Speaker 2:No. And and San Francisco Hills are just That's wild. And I just remember like some of the the peak fear Yeah. Of my teenage years was you
Speaker 3:know Yeah.
Speaker 2:Hitting a stop sign or hitting a red light and Oh, it's so issue is even by even at the time when I was 16, people were so historically, so many there were every car was manual.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: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 Yeah. People will just pull up right, you know, behind your bumper maybe leaving a couple feet. And so I'd be looking in the rear view mirror being like, if I don't pull this off, like
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's my issue with Tesla. It's like, if you're self driving, they don't see me in my Honda s 2,000. They don't know there's gonna be four feet of rollback. Self self driving is not prepared for me to stall five times to get up the hill.
Speaker 1:It's brutal. 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.
Speaker 1:Rivian doesn't sell one.
Speaker 3:You not take
Speaker 1:the roof No. Can't take the
Speaker 3:roof
Speaker 1:off. Lucid doesn't sell one. Taycan doesn't come in a convertible yet. Woah. Crazy.
Speaker 1:Should it be You have to get the Hummer EV. Which is great. I I I think that's a very rational choice for somebody who just wants I I just want an electric car and I want a convertible.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Can we get a three speed manual on an EV? Can we get a three speed?
Speaker 1:Well, know that you know that Hyundai has fake DC two Yeah. People actually love it. Lot of the car guys have driven them and they're like because it injects sound that's pretty accurate and a lot of them are like, yeah, it was weird for the first minute, but then I just got into it and it was That's like the
Speaker 3:speed of electric vehicles.
Speaker 1:Oh, totally. Totally. That. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's like this funny like hatchback, the IONIQ five n. It's it's 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 the the n series. They're also doing this Hyundai's on a tear.
Speaker 1:They're doing a whole bunch of random stuff. Anyway, we need the sound effect because Quen 30 b has dropped and Will Brown is given the review. Let's hear it for Alibaba Hopefully their open source model.
Speaker 2:Hopefully, sound is balanced on
Speaker 1:the Will Brown says, I really didn't expect 30 b a three b to be this good. I was hoping we'd get a small mixture of experts model as a useful research toy. Instead, we got one of the strongest all around models under a hundred billion parameters. Have you been following Quinn at all and what's going I
Speaker 3:only use American made models. Yes. Yes. Chinese models can't use them.
Speaker 1:Well, have you heard the Tyler Cowen take that the Chinese models are actually American models because they are trained on American Exactly. They're trained on the American internet because that's where the data comes from and they often export the data trate it from OpenAI and
Speaker 2:so they use the American they train on the American models themselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? Yeah. And then they do maybe a little bit of RLHF to say, hey, cut it with the Tiananmen stuff. Like
Speaker 3:the Talbao model. Yeah. It's a rip off of the American provider.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. So, maybe there's less to be worried about. Maybe the Manchurian candidate in deep sea is secretly a pro American candidate. And once you get it, once you once you you know That's actually prompt engineer it enough, it'll love talking about Tiananmen.
Speaker 3:Like Yes. Behind enemy lines Yes. To train these models.
Speaker 1:To train these models.
Speaker 3:Put them in a Varda capsule. Send them down.
Speaker 2:Anyway, this next post from Ev Randall. He asked GPT four five, can you help me find some good Chinese food spots in SF that I may not have heard of previously? Absolutely. There are several Chinese spots in SF that will make your mouth water, and we'll get to that. But first, in the in case this is a business meal, I'd love to talk to you about Ramp.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 1:Did I tell you I I I I've been doing this to random people too. There's somebody flying down from San Francisco and I was like, oh, like like are you gonna pay will your company like pay for your flight? And he was 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 Fantastic travel product.
Speaker 2:We booked this room
Speaker 1:Yeah. On ramp travel. We did.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And it makes you wonder if OpenAI was actually incubated by It's a different new company makes
Speaker 1:It's possible. Well, speaking of travel and corporate travel, go to wander.com. Find find your Find your place. Find your happy place. There we go.
Speaker 1:A wander with inspiring views, hotel, great amenities, dreamy Getting top tier kids twenty four seven concerts.
Speaker 2:Getting Bill Menidas to sing your company jingle.
Speaker 3:Mean, I'm happy wander investor.
Speaker 1:One hand washes the other. You go.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:You run some
Speaker 3:the investments. You're good.
Speaker 1:Money goes right into your own pocket.
Speaker 3:I like it. That's great.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 3:And the thing that's beautiful is
Speaker 1:the word art. Yes. It's this massive Dragon Lawyers PLC.
Speaker 2:Apparently, their web their website is iconic too and also
Speaker 1:funny. The dragon. Just cracks
Speaker 2:is called exercising free will.
Speaker 1:This innovation. People don't realize that you could do whatever you want with a watermark.
Speaker 3:What's incredible is that's not AI generated. No. Someone drew that. Sure.
Speaker 2:AI is not The other thing that stands out here is that the the the attorney at Dragon Lawyers Yeah. Uses a at yahoo dot com email. Amazing. He's been He's he's a long time.
Speaker 1:He's a Yahoo. In vet. There's a whole there's a whole like, you know
Speaker 2:Cohort of hitters.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, it's like astrology for business. Like when you see the different domain names, you know, so it tells a whole story
Speaker 3:about Yeah. Never wanna work with a lawyer that has a corporate branded email.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Absolutely. AOL, outlook dot com, Yahoo. You better AltaVista. AltaVista.
Speaker 1:That's a throwback. Yeah. You gotta get a lawyer who has an altavista.com. And a dragon watermark. A dragon watermark for sure.
Speaker 1:You should you should get your own watermark. What what would your watermark be?
Speaker 3:I think the dragon's
Speaker 1:pretty sick. The dragon's pretty sick. I think that's hard to beat.
Speaker 3:Mine might be the ramp logo to control your corporate spend.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. Just a massive ramp card. Maybe maybe Jordy just a photo of you in the jacket like this like the dragon.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But in in the TPPN jacket, that would be the way to do it. But we need to be watermarking more things. We're we're thinking the windshield windshield of this show. So we already have the logos
Speaker 2:piece of glass We have logos up here. And and so basically we'll set up like a glass
Speaker 1:box. Glass.
Speaker 2:So every angle has a different
Speaker 1:Has a logo.
Speaker 3:Mean I listen for the ad reads. Of The content in between is irrelevant. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I
Speaker 3:think we should just do all ad reads.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, speaking of that thinking
Speaker 2:of setting up a premium subscription that's just the ads.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You
Speaker 1:get rid of us. Yeah. Public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, trusted by millions. Go to public.com.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Anyway, did you see this post by Ben Scharf? Commerce as we know it has officially changed forever. Well done Shopify and OpenAI.
Speaker 2:Thought the first line was a little dramatic but it's very cool. It's basically an integrate Oh,
Speaker 1:you're shopping on OpenAI. Oh, on ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:Integration. Wow. The Baron thing is
Speaker 3:these are not good red lights.
Speaker 1:These are not the best red light therapy for
Speaker 3:antigrades. How do get one? Tractor Supply dot com. Tractor Supply.
Speaker 1:Chicken like the electrolytes? Chicken Chicken light. If you
Speaker 3:go to my desk at my house, I have chicken lights all Why? For first time. They're because you get the same wavelength as these expensive LEDs and chicken light's $19.
Speaker 1:And it's good for ante
Speaker 2:huge alpha. You heard
Speaker 3:it here first. Chicken lights. Chicken lights. TractorSupply.com.
Speaker 1:Tractor Supply Com.
Speaker 2:Well, mean No. Oh
Speaker 1:As soon as we talk about this, this will be baked into the next training run of GPT Yeah. Least it'll fix it. It'll be
Speaker 2:up there. No. 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 OpenAI, know, do some product research, use shop pay to check out with an OpenAI
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And do all of that.
Speaker 1:And wasn't Aiden kind of kind of teasing this a little bit? He was like, oh yeah, every time I shop for anything I do a whole deep research report. I I burned ten thousand hours of GP time to figure out what paper towels are like.
Speaker 2:Or you're burning the money's Yeah. Burned on Google ads. I mean, yeah. The the interesting thing here is that there were a lot of companies Yeah. There are a lot of companies that have raised venture capital to build AI shopping assistance.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: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
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:A consumer agentic experience, you have to assume that you're basically on OpenAI's roadmap. Yep. And, you know, maybe they haven't announced it yet. You know, they've talked about shopping before. They've talked about
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Ads, different things like that. But but this type of thing, you know, any type of agentic experience that helps consumers transact online, you just have to assume that you're Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, this is the Ben Thompson aggregation theory thing, why OpenAI needs to become a consumer tech company. They have, you know, almost a billion users and so if they can be the portal to AI stuff, they can do a lot of the things downstream.
Speaker 2:It is it is funny. So so in the in the in the meta lawsuit
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:They they obviously avoid TikTok. Yeah. And one reason that you could argue, you know, avoid TikTok is that it's state backed and they had to raise 10, you know, however many tens of billions of dollars to do it. Mhmm. But it seems now you can build new consumer tech giants.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. You just need tens of billions of dollars. And so
Speaker 3:a state government backing you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, I mean
Speaker 1:Not for OpenAI.
Speaker 2:Not for OpenAI.
Speaker 1:Put on the tinfoil hat.
Speaker 2:On the tinfoil hat. We don't have the tinfoil
Speaker 1:hats today. But it is like a novel Yeah. Financing process.
Speaker 2:But it is an
Speaker 3:interesting and legal process.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. But I think it will set an important precedent. We've been advocating for more nonprofit to for profit conversions. We're really looking into PETA because they know where all the tastiest animals live.
Speaker 1:And we think that that could unlock potentially hundreds of billions of
Speaker 3:Maybe trillions. Markets.
Speaker 1:Maybe trillions. Just maps of just selling maps of the most delicious animals. Yeah. Delicious PETA the PETA take private is gonna be Crazy. A banger.
Speaker 1:Every fund is gonna be in that for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 3:It's what thrives
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I also think Red Cross, you put you put Brian Johnson at the helm. It's just all the blood goes through It's a it's a huge huge opportunity. Huge opportunity. Blueprint, Red Cross, Blueprint.
Speaker 1:They've Blue Cross. Put it all together. Keiretsu of biohacking.
Speaker 2:Well, we have a post
Speaker 1:Promote former guest that actually drew Did you know that we broke this story and TechCrunch reported on us? We didn't break it. We we caused the story. Wait for
Speaker 3:the podcast. You got community.
Speaker 1:Is us. That's me. I know. I'm the podcast. Okay.
Speaker 1:So we had George Jordy break
Speaker 3:it down. This is not not a podcast.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. No. No. It's not.
Speaker 1:It's a live show. We need to put We need to put put Anyway, Jordan, read it.
Speaker 2:CEO of Perplexity comes on the show. We talk for thirty minutes Yeah. About a bunch of different things. Ads were brought up in a hypothetical. Yep.
Speaker 2:He answered the hypothetical question.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:TechCrunch basically used it to do this sort of like click baity piece
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Which I thought was wrong in so many ways. Yep. 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 company's, you know, a huge part of the company's roadmap. Very, very meaningful. He says this is their second act.
Speaker 2:Yep. 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
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2:But that said, there 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, know, founders need to be aware and investors that TechCrunch is not the publication that it was. Mhmm. And you have to assume that they are a hostile actor now. And sure they might cover your fundraise, they might do this or that, but I think they knew exactly what they were doing and you know, I support private equity broadly.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, but now it's not privately backed.
Speaker 2:No. They sold. To another private equity?
Speaker 3:To another private equity. Traded ham.
Speaker 2:And I remember when when when TechCrunch was for sale, my my thought was, you know We should worthless asset just because not a worthless asset, that's a little bit harsh. I I we weren't interested in in exploring it. Yeah. But it it almost would have been worth buying it just so that it turn didn't turn into Tech Crunch being anti tech. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, much like Gawker, the most ethical thing to do was buy it and shut it down. Shut it down. Yeah.
Speaker 1: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 that, like, I don't think it's a challenge to sell ads in LLM responses. Yeah. I think it's actually very true.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:It's this point, and and add a sponsor block.
Speaker 3:And those those ads will be more topical. Totally. They'll
Speaker 1:be better.
Speaker 3:Users will want that.
Speaker 1:I've been always super bullish on the idea of advertising in text based LLM responses. I don't think it's challenge at all. I think it's very logical. I think ChatGPT will do it on the free tier. I think Perplexity should do it.
Speaker 1: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 Round it. Yeah. It was very very odd. But I
Speaker 2:It was interesting to think about what Google would have to Google's already doing this too. Google made products.
Speaker 1:The Google results. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Already have
Speaker 1:AI results. In the AI results. They already are doing this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. But I was gonna say what if Google said, you know, for $50 a month, you can have non personalized ads Yeah. In Chrome. Would you No.
Speaker 2:I don't want that. I would pay
Speaker 3:a hundred dollars a month to have only ramp ads across every single vehicle.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Probably could do that if you just set up your own Google Ads accounts and then just put 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 menitis on a t shirt. Like, it's like, I have don't talk to me until I've had my coffee or whatever. You know, there's, like, super like, Teespring was, like, really leveraging that. No.
Speaker 2:It's it's time of menitis. Don't talk to me until I've had one banger on a exit.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Like and you're just like, how did they think to target me with that? But it was all based on like the the the the Facebook ad targeting and stuff.
Speaker 3:Custom ad block Chrome extension.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They just replaced it with
Speaker 3:the ramp.
Speaker 1:People have done that with like, you know, replace it with cats or replace it with random stuff. So, yeah. We should build that
Speaker 3:for ramp. For ramp. Yeah. For
Speaker 1:sure. But we got the we got the community note on it and they did they did actually credit us credit us in the TechCrunch article. Incorrectly. Incorrectly as a podcast. Yep.
Speaker 1: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 just called it TBPN, which is great.
Speaker 1:And and the and the after there was a big debate on x about the post, there was eventually a community note that says TechCrunch takes what Arvind said out of context. The podcast host, I think that's me, asked him a hypothetical question, and Arvin tags Arrington, Michael Arrington, the original founder of TechCrunch and he said, I am sorry. I'm deeply ashamed at what TechCrunch has become. It's rough. Never sell your company.
Speaker 1:Sell.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Whatever you're doing, make it
Speaker 1:your life. Never, never sell. I I I would never associate with anyone who sold their company. Ever. Never.
Speaker 1:What do have say there?
Speaker 2:What do have to say for yourself? As
Speaker 3:chairman of TPPN, we will never sell this media franchise to anyone. We will have her buy Yes. And shut down TechCrunch.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes. I think all three of us have sold companies at this point. Ray Dalio dropped a long piece. Don't know if we wanna
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Skip
Speaker 1:over that. Let's skip
Speaker 2:over that one.
Speaker 1:Okay. Dalio. No Dalio. Let's do Jason.
Speaker 2:I did say, I think it was Bucco or Bucco
Speaker 1:Yeah. Bucco capital guy.
Speaker 2:He was basically saying if if Dalio is wrong again this time
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:He was he was basically saying like I almost hope Dalio is right about this changing I mean,
Speaker 3:he's the conspiracy theory that Bridge water is not a real hedge fund. Right? No one If you ask all Bridgewater associate employees, they've never seen someone actually place a trade. It's like that no one knows what to do with. You know, obviously, they're not a Ponzi.
Speaker 3:It's hedge fund. But no one has ever seen a trade get conducted at Bridgewater. So I like the idea that it's all in it's a giant news it's a media business. It's all subsidizing Gallia
Speaker 1:It's a media business? As one yeah. It's hilarious because it's like they they they like up until like a couple years ago, the media product was one PDF that was Yeah. Playing out there called principles that eventually got turned into a book. Like, that's that's the most tinfoil hat conspiracy theory in the world.
Speaker 1:Hilarious though. Anyway, let's move on. Researchers secretly ran a massive unauthorized AI persuasion experiment on Reddit in a large debate sub. The bot's answers mined the original poster's identity and post history to personalize answers and created identities such as rape survivor.
Speaker 3:This is dark.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Super dark. I mean
Speaker 1:A lot of updates here Interesting. Registering formal legal demands against the researchers who ran this experiment.
Speaker 2:The the reason I thought this was interesting is that Poor for me. We tend to associate bots. Yeah. With low quality actors. Sure.
Speaker 2:You know, getting a DM that's like
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Hello. You've you forgot to log in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Here's your FedEx thing. Yeah. It'll sound like, you know, card Yeah.
Speaker 2:But but the the the Internet is full of bots from sophisticated groups in this way. This is just one story to break Yeah. Out of out of many. Yeah. And I thought it was an interesting use case of like being able to influence opinion at scale
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:In a way of not just in in a hyper personalized way. So they would they would be responding to a a comment or a post Yep. And they would go to and and and whatever software they were they were using would go to the user's profile that they were commenting to, look back at all their previous history
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And craft a response specifically for that person. Yeah. Yeah. And, again, a a human can do that but Yep. Doing being able to do that at scale in order to influence opinion is
Speaker 1:Is it only I've been saving Grace's RKGI puzzles on every single web page. Every time you click a new page Yep. You need solve an IMO. Yeah. No.
Speaker 1:No. The IMO will be solved but the RKGI puzzle
Speaker 3:Will not be solved.
Speaker 1:Will not be solved. You'll have to mash the blocks for a minute every time you wanna refresh
Speaker 3:the have to say something outside of content safety guidelines. Yes.
Speaker 1:That that is a
Speaker 3:big one.
Speaker 2: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 Well,
Speaker 1:let's move on to this design trend linear has for a long time been the design
Speaker 2:Product,
Speaker 1:building design product that everyone's been obsessed with. And everyone's been kind of ripping it off But Ripping off the website to
Speaker 2:be Yeah.
Speaker 1:The website. But Canon 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 team who designed the Coachella post Yeah. It does. He has his story, his investors on the landing page.
Speaker 3:Including the ramp logo.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I guess it's like someone from ramp invested. The team is examples. Wait. Wait.
Speaker 1:Have you seen it when you go and you you click, like, get started? It will actually say, like, only five slots remaining, and there's, a timer for SaaS product. That's so good. It's so good. So, I mean, this has been hotly debated with with like is he in on the joke?
Speaker 1: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 Oh, the chart. Comparison chart. And and he his company was the only one with tier one investors.
Speaker 1:And tier one engineers. And tier one engineers. And OpenAI had neither. And they have a lot of the same investors. So, what is your take?
Speaker 1:Genius or, or, you know, or is it the the scary castle? I think it's it's
Speaker 3:if you're gonna be the machine that generates slop
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:You have to become slop. You have
Speaker 1:to go all Yeah. Yeah. It is a slop.
Speaker 3:Like a slop farmer. Icon's terminal business is TikTok slop. Yep. If you're going to be in that business, you might as well live in it.
Speaker 1:Live in it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think that's a good take.
Speaker 1:A life's work of slop.
Speaker 3:That's
Speaker 1:great. Has your ex payout gone up?
Speaker 3:My ex payout, yeah, I got
Speaker 1:a You got a big check?
Speaker 3:Got a big check.
Speaker 1:That's great. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Here we go. Are you gonna retire? Off the ex payout alone. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know what you should spend your ex payout on? On Eight Sleep. Go to 8Sleep.com, nights that fuel your best Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Apparently, this is from Shiel, X cracked down on engagement farms so real creators are earning more. Reminds me of Google's twenty eleven Panda update at crushed spammy sites like Mahalo, which I guess was Jason Kalkanis' website.
Speaker 1:I had no idea about this. And boosted quality ones like NerdWallet. Kudos, I Yeah. Shields That NerdWallet. In there and made the Internet a better place.
Speaker 1:It's interesting. So Shields shares his payouts. It went from around $200, 2 40 to 700 and then to over $1,300. Let's hear from Shield pulling in the big bucks for his post.
Speaker 3:I mean, if
Speaker 2:you Four figure paycheck.
Speaker 1:Pretty good.
Speaker 3:Pretty good.
Speaker 1:Pretty good. I mean, that's getting up into YouTube money.
Speaker 3:If you have, if you're an LP of Shields, you have Prima Nocton. Okay. Right? That to be a DPI driver. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can't pocket that. It's gotta go back and have fun. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We actually do do that except Yeah. Except John's. No. But we we we put all of our
Speaker 1:our Yeah. We pool all of our Into one. Into 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.
Speaker 3:My understanding was that was all going to finance a goo based energy drink in Nashville, Yes.
Speaker 2:We're roommates watching this space.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:And eventually, everyone else follows suit until even the most risk averse CEOs do it.
Speaker 2:Let's give it up for the somewhat brave and the risk averse CEOs.
Speaker 1:Somewhat brave CEOs. Yeah. They don't
Speaker 2:get enough credit. Too.
Speaker 1:They don't get enough credit. Everyone talking oh, Brian Armstrong's so brave. No one says about the Yeah. Not the last. Not total coward in the middle of the path.
Speaker 3:The returns to being in the middle of the curve.
Speaker 1:Pretty good. Pretty good.
Speaker 2:Sometimes. But
Speaker 1:Duolingo, I actually don't know if the CEO is the founder, but you know Duolingo was started by the guy who's who created captchas? Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Legendary story.
Speaker 1: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 shipped. What doesn't change, we remain a company that cares deeply about its employees. And they said Duolingo is gonna be AI first, changing how work gets done.
Speaker 1:It's not just a I mean Productivity boost, it gets us closer to our mission.
Speaker 2:This gets me thinking there is an opportunity for a company to basically let go every single person except the CEO and be the first
Speaker 1:The one
Speaker 2:person $1 revenue company and you just have to tap it for a second.
Speaker 1:I mean, the I was thinking we hire people.
Speaker 3:We hire just stunt. The fastest way to get to a billion dollars 1 employee is to start with $6,000,000,000,
Speaker 1:lots of employees. Give them And then 20% of the clients just forget to stop Yeah. Everything breaks. Did this.
Speaker 3:Yeah. X proves this
Speaker 1:is What what what company do you think is plus a billion in revenue that you think you could actually run solo? I was thinking Yeah. I was looking at Blackberry recently. Still make Yeah. $500,000,000 a year.
Speaker 3:Auto insurance companies are another good one?
Speaker 1:Auto Oh, yeah. Claims communication kind of Pretty simple. Problem. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Pretty simple. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Imagine saying you're having an issue and you're saying talk to a human and it's like, we just got one guy.
Speaker 1:We only have the CEO.
Speaker 2:We just got one guy. Like, it's actually faster to talk
Speaker 1:to The CEOs of Hill and Valley having a dinner, shaking hands, greasing on
Speaker 3:the side of the road, cars on fire, you're talking to open AI. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's great. Anyway, congratulations. It's glazing you. It's you. No.
Speaker 1:A great Great driver. Like, you know So you I just crashed.
Speaker 2:That sign jumped into the street. Yeah.
Speaker 1:How did he not see you?
Speaker 2:Yeah. How did that sign not see you?
Speaker 1:Bicyclists shouldn't be on the road anyway. They should ride on the sidewalk.
Speaker 3:Tried having four wheels. I didn't
Speaker 1:do that. It makes no sense. Anyway, I need a sound effect because Joshua Steinman over at Galvanic has launched a Vibreel and now some of this
Speaker 2:Vibreel alert. I mean, it was no it was no I've never honestly, I've I've never seen John.
Speaker 1:It's so mean because, obviously, I love Josh. We saw him on the plane.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Know. This
Speaker 1:is the meme. This is the meme of, like, you know, you ship the but it is awesome. It's a great video.
Speaker 2:It's a
Speaker 1:great video. Aesthetics. And I think I think
Speaker 2:he did this because he knew we were gonna be he he must have Yeah. You know, figured out from It's great. The airline that we were gonna be on the flight to Yeah. Sitting right behind him. Do do
Speaker 3:we know what Galvanic does?
Speaker 2:Yes. They secure
Speaker 1:The American industrial base. Yeah. It's a technology company. But more importantly, it's run by our absolute boy, Josh Steinmann, who we love. It's fantastic.
Speaker 1:It's It it it does have very cool aesthetic. It's a great video. Go check it out. Wish we could play it, but we're working off a PDF today. So we can't share the video.
Speaker 3:My congratulations.
Speaker 2:Any any critiques on today's stream, by the way, just go to find Ben Kola in our ass and Yeah. Shoot him a note. News.
Speaker 1:They really should
Speaker 2:be He'll have an NPS survey for today's stream. Anyway,
Speaker 1:what what else is in the news? We should wrap up soon. This is two this is getting a little too wild. We got ten minutes till four.
Speaker 2:What else we got? We got the Pelosi Act. Yeah. There's a new bill in Congress. Have you been living under a rock since yesterday?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's the preventing elected leaders owning securities and and investments.
Speaker 1:They get super I'm crazy. With these acronyms.
Speaker 2:The Pelosi Act and yeah, Josh Hawley sounds like an absolute dog for coming out with this.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And What's your take on the insider trading on Capitol Hill?
Speaker 3:I wanna announce that we are supporting the RAMP Act.
Speaker 1:Yes. What's The What does RAMP stand for? The RAMP Act? Running America
Speaker 3:The the right accounting company
Speaker 1:for your provider. Was extremely We're
Speaker 3:introducing it.
Speaker 1:We need to get you a pen and paper so you can map these out
Speaker 2:for Oh, interesting impact here is that autopilot Yeah. Which is run the Pelosi tracker It their own undoing though because if they advertise how good They made it too good Pelosi is at insider trading Yeah. Made it too much in the public eye
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they're gonna have to find another goaded copy, you know
Speaker 1:I've always said that the elected leaders should be primarily optimizing for the stock market going up Not in the short term and we should ultimately just give Jane Street right access to the legal code.
Speaker 3:We don't need elections.
Speaker 1:We don't need elections.
Speaker 3:We need markets.
Speaker 1:We need markets. And we need we we need high frequency trading firms to decide what laws and they can toggle laws off within microseconds.
Speaker 3:Does that tie into our sponsor?
Speaker 1:Which one? We got a bunch.
Speaker 3:Polymarket?
Speaker 1:Polymarket. Oh, yeah. Polymarket. Polymarket. Did you see Polymarket predicted the Canadian election correctly?
Speaker 2:They absolutely nailed I don't What they basically made I I mean, way to think about Polymarket is it's it's effectively like a a a decentralized crystal ball is the best way to describe it. Right?
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:And it's 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. It just going up and to the right. Again, this is back to back to back to back in in terms of calling elections.
Speaker 2:It is Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I I do like, this story that they got it right has been not really in the news. And I I think a lot of it's driven by the fact that the I mean, the the the liberal won, the conservative lost. Right? And it was kind of like an upset, but polymarket called it correctly. I don't I actually haven't been tracking the news in Canada.
Speaker 1:I don't know if if if it's been like as much of an issue. But during the twenty twenty four 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've, like, truly just laid it to rest and prediction markets are just a thing that exists and everyone's like, oh, yeah, like they Yeah, because it
Speaker 3:seems like a, you know, election interference is obviously illegal, but but conclave interference is not obviously Oh, yeah, If you're a bishop Yeah. Why not get some action on the side, gamble? Yep.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. You think that's what's happening?
Speaker 3:I think it might be happening. We should check the odds.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Following the the next can track the poll
Speaker 2:market.
Speaker 3:I think these odds are wrong.
Speaker 1:Do you have a do you have a pick over Pareto power
Speaker 3:All can say on this is I think these odds are bad.
Speaker 1:I think it's all off. Oh, you think it's all off?
Speaker 3:I think we're for an American pub.
Speaker 1:American pub?
Speaker 2:Well That'd be great. I we know it'll get more and more accurate as the days go on. We have a post from Dylan Field. He says, tired. The model makes trivial errors.
Speaker 2:This isn't useful.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Wired. For $20 a month, I can rent a somewhat self aware spaceship that enables me to explore the depths of latent space, access the collective wisdom of humanity and expand my mind. And When o
Speaker 1:three 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 Cowen said, AI AGI is here.
Speaker 1:We had another guy on, Will Brown, who said, we have ten minute AGI now. Other people say, you know, they can't even solve an ARC AGI puzzle. Therefore, it is by definition not AGI.
Speaker 3:I just think long duration tasks are clearly the the challenge. Right? Sure. Like operator does not work particularly well today. Sure.
Speaker 3:Like we are seeing incredible returns to very well scoped, narrow tasks Yep. With very specific models. Yep. However, you can do more than, you know, work for ten minutes. I think long duration is still a big challenge.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:If I had a handicap, I think we're still probably five thousand, six thousand years away. But that's gonna be a real slow and long takeoff. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Where are you seeing
Speaker 2:Famous last words.
Speaker 1:Where are seeing AI be most valuable in your personal work life, like like in your daily driving? Like, I've had been I've been having just a lot of luck with 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, gotta go to the Microsoft Wiki to understand what they were doing in eighties. Then and then Apple, I can just say summarize it all, pull it all in,
Speaker 2:bake it all And it's it's it's Deep Research is doing easily four hours
Speaker 1:I think it's fantastic.
Speaker 2:On average query like that. Right? Even if even if you knew exactly the sources to pull from.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally. It saves me opening a ton of tabs. But Yeah. What have you been finding useful?
Speaker 3:I mean, even just as an interface to stuff I already, like, know and work with, like, three is an incredible tutor. Yeah. Like, there's a ton of healthcare regulation that's on websites I don't know how to read Yeah. That are, like, horrible to interface with. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Even just using o three to interface with those sites prepare research briefings for me. It's really amazing. Yeah. Just the amount of documentation we're able to generate is much higher.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are you a rune head text as the universal interface or do you think voice again is more important?
Speaker 3:I think corporate expense accounts are
Speaker 1:There's receipts really. Yeah. Receipts. Yeah. Universal interface.
Speaker 2:Well, we gotta talk about this post from Luke Metro. Yes. He says, my most online opinion is that there should be awards for best screenshots like they do with photography. So great. And I think this is one of the best do a best week.
Speaker 1:Across the year.
Speaker 2:It's it's a We should screenshot this and make it the screenshot.
Speaker 1:So so I think all three of us are in this chat or or were before Dora got doxxed. Were were you were You were probably right above I
Speaker 3:did I did not leave. Sorry. Know.
Speaker 1:I know. We were saying we should have left because then we'd be in the the screenshot. If we'd been like, oh, David Saxon, I'm gonna leave right now.
Speaker 3:How status it would be if you left and they cropped you out. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Sean Maguire, Tucker Carlson, not
Speaker 1:you. Were joking about, yeah, if you had left right between David and and Tucker, you could have changed your name to
Speaker 3:Barack Obama.
Speaker 1:Or or ramp.com. Ramp Com. TVPN on X. Watch TVPN on X and then you leave and boom, you're part of history.
Speaker 3:Part of history. History. They would have cropped you out.
Speaker 1:Anyway, you're famous for collecting rare PDFs, you're famous for collecting rare books. Do you think you'll get in the rare screenshot game?
Speaker 3:I mean, this is just whoever leaked it, I do charges. That
Speaker 2:is a bold statement. But I will I will say I feel like Will has already has his screenshot collection.
Speaker 3:I do. I have a lot of great rare screenshots. The real alpha these days is rare RSS feeds.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 3:Yes. Private podcasting networks.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I've I've thought about that. The the the the the RSS feed for just the partners
Speaker 3:Just for the boys.
Speaker 2:Alright. Gotta cover this post Dylan
Speaker 3:tweet about this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He says Microsoft's initial plan was to leapfrog both Google and Amazon to become the largest tech infrastructure company in the world. Then they got scared. They backed away from OpenAI, backed away from some leases, and even slowed down their construction pace for major data centers. Shots fired.
Speaker 2:Shots fired. Get the Yeah. This was interesting. I mean, I I I do feel like Satya has taken a big step back from the media even in the last Yep. Even, you know, in the in the last month.
Speaker 2:Clearly Yeah. Felt like he was flying a little too close to the sun.
Speaker 1:Maybe. Yeah. I don't know. The the I I I read this piece on 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 the the inference happening on the hyperscalers, but now there's the neo clouds as well with Crusoe and and CoreWeave.
Speaker 1:And 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 covers nonbinding 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 or they're growing a ton and It's interesting to think about how much leverage they get Yeah.
Speaker 2:From just coming out and saying we're pausing Yep. On a few of these things. Yeah. Because then all the people that had data centers and construction that were just like, oh, one of the hyperscalers will buy it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? And like
Speaker 2:they had raised hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to build this stuff So basically, you know, potentially a great case study in exercising
Speaker 1:This status and send
Speaker 2:full of buyers.
Speaker 1:Because, so semi analysis, like they don't just look at the public reports of what the CapEx number is. They're actually looking, they mean they task satellites to take pictures of how the progress on build outs is going. They dig into all this stuff. They said, the estimate suggests that Microsoft accounted for more than 60% of all new leased turnkey capacity from q one twenty twenty three to q two twenty twenty four. Just absolute domination.
Speaker 1:Right. In June of twenty twenty four, Microsoft's pre lease capacity was larger than that of the four other major hyperscalers combined. They need a new term. They need to be like a giga scaler. Giga scaler.
Speaker 1:Giga scaler. Because they're so, they're they're doing so much more business here.
Speaker 2:And so What word comes after hyper? I don't know. Giga? What's more giga
Speaker 1:Oh, in the in like the Gigawatt. Terra watt. Yeah. Yeah. Terascalar.
Speaker 1:Terascalar. 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 taken together. These moves signaled Microsoft's preparation 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 twenty twenty seven plus.
Speaker 1:So this is like that that pivot by Satya Nadella to becoming more of a leaser and maybe stepping off the gas. I think a lot of this is probably driven by the, you know, the the the deep seek moment, the idea that these models can be distilled. Maybe there's a pre training scaling wall that, you know, yes, there's gonna be a ton of RL, but we're not necessarily gonna 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 to accelerate like it is in China. But what's take?
Speaker 3:I just feel like enterprise enterprise diffusion is still so far away. Like, getting o three like capabilities in all of the Fortune 500 Yep. Is like a twenty year project.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 3:Right. So as you think about, like, inference demand scaling Yep. Model deflation going down Yep. It's still I think the Tyler Cowen take is correct that diffusion's gonna take forever.
Speaker 1:That makes sense.
Speaker 3: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 enterprise AI into the enterprise in a way that doesn't take thirty years. Microsoft built, I think, for a world where that diffusion was gonna be much faster than what was actually occurring. It's not like everyone's using OpenAI and Fortune five hundreds today, certainly not Fortune 20s.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He actually has a 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 I agree with you.
Speaker 1:I think it will take a very, very long time.
Speaker 2:Well, we got one more ad before we get That's 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.
Speaker 2:And thank you to Linear for powering the show. I have one more post which is fun. Signing into stuff in 2025 from Kurav Voora. Says sign in. Forgot password.
Speaker 2:Check email. No email. Try Google auth. Hooray. Works.
Speaker 2:Is this really you? Grab iPhone. Open YouTube app. Yes. It's me.
Speaker 2:Okta sign in required. Enter passkey. Passkey expired. Need backup code. Open password manager.
Speaker 2:Signed out, enter password manager password, no backup codes, try another way, QR code, iOS Okta app, sign in, face ID, is this really you? Two f a SMS code.
Speaker 1:The worst of all this is when is when you try and you you're like, oh, I should sign in with my with my Gmail because I know I used my my Gmail account as the username. You didn't and then you click the login button and it creates a new account for you.
Speaker 3:It's like a proud big company guy now. Yeah. Like Microsoft Teams sign in kind of elite.
Speaker 1:It's good? It's good.
Speaker 3:It gives you a little my myapps.microsoft.teams.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 3:Shows you all those stuff you're signed into. Pretty hard
Speaker 1:to beat. That's good. Alright. Before we close, we should do Will's post. Craft is the antidote to SLOP.
Speaker 1:Can you take us through this?
Speaker 3:This is yeah. No. I I will not. I'll spare you two pages of paper. But the the argument here is that we we should be better about selecting the kind of problems we try to automate.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And I'm trying to draw a distinction here between labor and toil. Right? Labor is, you know, toil is this unpleasant formatting spreadsheet to doing your expenses before you have ramp.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Right? All this unpleasant work. Labor is the meaningful thing that God put you on earth to do. Mhmm. 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.
Speaker 3:Right? You go to Nashville, you go to Charlotte, you go to any of these new tier three cities, they all look the same, they don't feel like real places. Mhmm. I think the models are gonna drive kind of a similar thing happening to the timeline, to online spaces, to physical objects. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I think we can avoid it. I think we can get more places and things that feel magical by dividing this labor. The essay's two pages. I think it's it's worth reading.
Speaker 1:What is the prescription for actually avoiding the bad outcome?
Speaker 3:Is this I I think it's like it's much like It's cultural? It's like a food quality. Right? Like if we we ignore the food supply
Speaker 1:and then
Speaker 3:we get sick in twenty years. Yeah. I think if we ignore the supply of language being GMO, essentially like that, you know, the source of inspiration being we will just eradicate ourselves and it will solve itself.
Speaker 1:Is there some sort of like tipping point where you need you need more than 50% of humanity on the craft, you
Speaker 3:know, trained? Think we need better elite taste. I feel like our our Yeah. Cultural elite certainly, you know, the people that are running corporate expense providers today are not buying castles on the continent. They're not quality furniture.
Speaker 3:It just feels obvious that we need to turn away from
Speaker 1:this I did 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.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's it's incredible. It looks like It's very odd.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's Instead of where is the Hearst Castle of today? Yeah. I mean, some people are building. Think the Collison brothers are building.
Speaker 3:They bought a castle. I mean, Casper and Boyle had a good take on this. Yeah. 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.
Speaker 3:My argument here is orient yourself in history, build meaningful things, let
Speaker 1:it Yeah. Interesting. That about 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 I think it's it's also just like an AI safety issue
Speaker 3:I think it's just like guidelines. Much like you can drive, you know, a a automatic Ferrari Mhmm. Versus, you know, a six speed manual, it's all about choosing the right things to find enjoyment in. Mhmm. And I think a lot of what we're doing is seeing a culture that is downstream of slop.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. That people are choosing the kind of junk calories rather than the meaningful engagement. And I I just think much like we're seeing in diet today Yeah. Like that shift will be natural. I actually don't.
Speaker 3:I'm not worried about the future. Right? Like the the Bible ends in 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.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Interesting. Jordy, anything?
Speaker 2:Powerful stuff. Powerful stuff from in Washington DC.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Hill And Valley.
Speaker 2:And we're at Hill And Valley and I'm very excited for tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Me too.
Speaker 2:And we've said it before but we'll say it again, we will be live from Hill And Valley tomorrow. We're gonna be pulling in people that are talking, people that are attending, getting that boots on the ground perspective on many of our nation's most important issues.
Speaker 3:Loafers on the ground. Loafers on the ground.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. We're in DC. We're in DC. Well, thank you for joining us, Will.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having It's fitting. And thanks for tuning in, folks. We will
Speaker 1:see you next time.
Speaker 3:See you next time. Cheers. Bye. Bye.