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

You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, April 29, 2025. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital. Capital. We are in Washington D.C. the nation's capital. We have a special guest, Will Menidis here with us today, Chairman of tbpn, our first in person guest. We're very excited to have him here today. Let's hear from Will.

Thank you for having us.

Earlier today we went to a press briefing. Our first press briefing. Will is in the studio, folks.

We're here.

Will. That's here for Will again. It's going to be a fantastic show.

For you, for the journos.

For the journos that we saw at the press briefing. It was the first time we've ever been to a press briefing. It was very official. And so Delian.

Talk about tension in the room, John.

It was palpable.

It was palpable.

It was palpable. The.

So basically technology brothers.

Yes.

And just Jacob Halber, army, effectively, of.

Delian and Christian Garrett, get up there to break down what's happening at Hill and Valley. And the journos were. Were not happy.

Not happy.

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 and Del actually turned the crowd.

They won hearts and minds.

They won hearts and minds. Exactly. With a message of unity across the aisle. Bipartisanship. Pro America, pro technology. And then the tears changed from tears of anger to tears of joy.

Yeah.

And people were crying. It was. It was something. You had to be there. And I think it will go down in history as one of, like the defining moments in technology history. Truly.

Truly.

It was fantastic.

It was a turning point.

Yeah, it was. It was definitely a turning point. So you went to Hill out of.

The valley into the hill.

Yes, exactly, into the hill. You went to Hillen Valley last year. Have you been previously?

I have.

Okay.

Two or three times.

Break down your experience for me. How has it evolved? What are you looking into for tomorrow? What's your game plan?

I mean, it is. It is somewhat hilarious. Like two years back, like, tech people did not come to DC.

Yeah.

And now it feels like there's 1200 people descending on the city. You can't go to any of the hotels without seeing poorly fitted suits. Like, you know, you're here. Technology is.

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. It's the last Hill and Valley.

I mean, you know, a man is deep on Hill and Valley when he doesn't even need to get business cards back out because they're already from Hill Valley last year. It's just incredible. It's like seeing like a cheetah try to hunt in the Sahara. Right. It's like a different environment, but it's beautiful. Unity matters here in D.C. matters.

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. This place that everyone can descend on, have these like, big events and it's this like, center of, like, it's a third space for technology.

I mean, I don't know why you have to last house music like this.

I know, I know they're still. Still kicking. But D.C. has become a place with. With higher profile events.

Yes.

It kind of came from behind.

On. On a more serious note.

Yes.

The, the thing, the takeaways from the press briefing is that this event is not about foreign policy as much as it's about, you know, basically, you know, the real theme of tomorrow is re. Industrialization. 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 sort of subjects should be very bipartisan.

It was also funny digging into, like, what is the current thing with the mainstream media versus the current thing with us, because Jordi asked a question like, if we're talking Hill and Valley, if we're talking D.C. politics, geopolitics and tech. The top story of the last week has been benchmark investing in Manus, a Chinese AI company. That's the interesting angle. That's the thing people want to dig into in tech. And a lot of the journalists.

I asked a question. It was like giving him a layup. Yeah, he did like an alley. Oops.

Straight over the top.

But I, but again, I actually don't even think that was top of mind for the other media that was attending.

Just all a re. Industrialization from their side.

No, no, no, no, no.

Everybody wanted to ban.

And even. And even the, The. The discussion around AI was very much like, oh, have you tried the new 4.0model? Like you can search the web like that. Yeah. Like it was at that level. It wasn't. It wasn't talking about. Like, it wasn't talking about, you know, I asked like, Glazegate.

Yeah, I Asked one of the writer I think from journalists from Politico who just covers AI policy and I asked her about Glazegate. She thought she responded like she knew what I was talking about and then she was like talking about tool use and being like yeah, I think it's really cool.

It's strong evidence. You have to get your news from only one place.

Right? Exactly.

The Technology Brothers media empire.

Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. If only somebody made a daily three hour live show just about technology and business.

Yeah. Sponsored by ram.

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The great companies in the world are focused on one thing and that is controlling spend which is best in the world handled on a platform like ram.

Corporate card going platform unnecessary. But you're punching above your weight already every single month. Yes.

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It's good to have.

Well, we do have some news from Tuesday. So UPS reported earnings they missed. EPS is supposed to be 217 came in at 205. Revenue down to 21.4 billion. Expected 21.7 billion amiss obviously bad news for the global economy. Domestic packages fell 3.5% on volume. People are worried about shipping stuff around Coca Cola beat though people are drinking the. The candy soda still that's good for the sugar.

Number go up economy.

General Motors had a massive beat. Earnings per share at $2.22 expected 1188 and revenue was 43 billion instead of roughly 42 billion. Probably driven by the Corvette ZR1. I imagine. Hunter Hummers. What else do they. What else do they make? The CT5V Blackwing.

That's right.

They're probably selling a ton of those. Mark Zuckerberg apparently dropped.

Yeah.

The Alligator club.

Yes, yes, yes, Exactly. Pfizer beat earnings 62 cents a share.

Do you want to give a.

Do you want to get a round.

Of applause for big Pharma?

It's an incredible time to be receiving healthcare in America.

Covid products sales fell, but it was expensive expected. The core business, oncology and vaccines showed moderate growth and the market reaction was that the Stock traded up 1%. Visa issues guidance tonight and consumer confidence was down. The biggest monthly drop since 2022. Big discussion over how all the news is falling with the consumer. People are worried about tariffs Even if they're not feeling it yet, they expect to feel it. And so consumer confidence is falling anyway. Market's pretty flat. And in general, the takeaway that I had from the, from the press briefing was there's all these big stories about tariffs and chaos and what's happening with TikTok. And the mood was very much like things are worse than ever, I guess, but the stock market is kind of resilient. It's like it's not as priced in. Yeah, it's kind of priced in. And it hasn't been in as much of free fall as the news would have had you believe a few weeks ago. Right.

Well, we still have more data coming in this week. We have jobs and GDP and then tech earnings. Just given how much of the growth over the last few years has just come from the Mag 7. Those are really the earnings to watch.

Tomorrow and Thursday after the market closes. We have Meta Gold, Google, no, Google already reported, but we have Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Nvidia. I believe Tesla and Google already reported and then intel and TSMC also reported and we'll get into that when we, we can get into it now with the Ben Thompson analysis. Have you dug into Lit Bhutan at all? Have you met him? Are you familiar with the new intel CEO Lit Bhutan been doing the legwork? Yeah. So he gave investors stark diagnosis of the chip maker's problems on Thursday, along with the sense that it will take a while to fix them. Tam, delivering his first earnings report as CEO, said Intel's bureaucratic corporate culture needs a shakeup. So he's going to cut jobs, remove layers of management and force everyone back to the office. His prescriptions for other areas of Malaysia, such as Intel's struggling foundry business, which makes chips for outside customers, were more vague. What's most clear is Intel's short term woes are even worse than feared. The company gave a revenue forecast for the current quarter that was well below what analysts projected. And Intel's chief financial officer warned that tariff fueled recession could torpedo chip demand. The grim outlook sent intel shares sliding by as much as 10% 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, fortunate thing for shareholders is that it was mostly priced in in total over the last month, only down just under 10%. Yes, the analysts were doing a good job effectively understanding even if they were off on, on some of their own forecasts.

Yeah. So the narrative is that intel has shifted to these 7 nanometer consumer chips that go into budget systems. Raptor Lake and that's what drove non GAAP gross margin 3 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. 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 feels like very important to have an American foundry company. Right. And it's such a shame Pat's no longer in the role. Truly one of the greatest CEOs. Right. Like great redemption arc at the company leaves the company, comes back out there doing amazing work today building churches. But would have loved to see him in the seat obviously until shareholders disagree.

Yeah but what is the full like what's been your full story of Pat Gelsinger? Like give me more as to, you know, what he's like as a manager and as a CEO.

I mean I met the man once but incredible. Seems to put his faith at the center of his work. He has built, I want to say seven churches in the Bay Area. Seems to spend one day a week praying for intel employees, which is fascinating and interesting. Maybe more companies should try that. Just seems like a man who has solved work, life, faith, integration in a way that others have not.

What about. Did you ever hear that take that like whatever type of scripture he's posting is like directly, directly into it.

It's mmpi.

Yeah.

Maybe you don't want management teams posting daily Bible readings inspired based on material non public information. That feels correct.

Yeah. Yeah.

As long as he puts at the end. Nfa.

Yeah. Do you have a take on the split? Do you think that they should go pure fab or pure design shop Nvidia style?

I have no, I have no strong take on anything. No strong take on it.

I have this. Take that. There's a world where you rewound the clock and instead of Elon spending 44 billion on Twitter now X he gets a bunch of money from the chips act and instead goes into chip fabrication. Because he seems like the one person that could actually pull together all the talent and the culture to if he can build the XAI data center so quickly, he could also turn around a fab. There was somebody else saying that like you know, he's really owning like the stack of modern technology, whether it's space travel, cars, AI neuralink et cetera.

Missing semis.

Missing semis. What do you think about that theory?

I mean, he does seem to be amazing at taking, you know, very highly priced Xai equity and trading it for real businesses. Right. It does seem like actually a good moment to, you know, take a slightly overvalued AI foundation model providers, trade that for a real business and run that company with kind of discipline that I think intel has not had for like 30 years. Yeah, like, I think Elon going full stack is very good.

Yeah, yeah, it'd be cool. There's actually. Did you see that? Did you see the other news about Elon? 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. A group of Wall Street's biggest banks have finally dug themselves out of a $13 billion election.

Did the election change, change its fortunes or did they just get efficient and operate?

Yeah, it doesn't even seem like it was the election that changed the fortunes. It was more that Xai started ripping based on that. So the truth zone.

98 cents on the dollar. Already priced in.

Yeah, not bad. So on Monday, banks sold the final slug of debt they lent for Musk's takeover of Twitter in 2022. According to people familiar with the matter, the $1.2 billion of loans sold at 98 cents on the dollar. Of course, when Elon purchased Twitter for 44 billion, he put up a bunch of equity from Tesla. There were a bunch of other investors that came in, Larry Ellison, Andreessen Horowitz. I think Sequoia came in as well. And then I think Morgan Stanley did a bunch of the debt. So the sale was a long time coming. In April 2022, Morgan Stanley, bank of America and five other banks agreed to lend the money to help Musk buy Twitter. The plan was to divvy up some $13 billion in debt, sell it to investors and earn millions in fees. By the time the deal closed, the markets had tanked and investors were wary of betting on Twitter's debt. The unloved loans sat on banks balance sheets for more than two years, while the financial prospects of the newly christened X looked dimmer and dimmer. By the summer of 2024, the X deal was considered the worst buyout banks had agreed to finance since the 2008 financial crisis. And then they say everything turned with the election of Donald Trump as president and the rise of Musk as a crucial, 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 exit. So I guess that's kind of a reasonable scenario that if he backs Trump, Trump loses, then maybe the advertisers don't come back. What do you think?

It's an interesting platform because historically, I just don't think the ad units were ever that good. So it was easy for advertisers to just say, okay, come back.

Yep.

Now it's an opportunity to sort of pledge allegiance to the Musk empire and in some way kind of cozy up to the. To the. To the power players by saying, yes, we're bringing our advertising back to the platform. Ensure that helps in terms of X getting properly. Basically just, you know, as long as Elon is heavily involved with politics, his companies will be impacted by his proximity to power.

Yeah, I mean, I guess the flip side is maybe if Trump loses, I mean, you could see a situation where the left is more aggressive about, like, holding Musk to account for trying to get Trump elected, but on the other side, you could see a world where it's just like, oh, Trump is a loser. He lost two elections in a row in this hypothetical. And Musk is, you know, like a failure for he couldn't even get Trump elected, and so he's less of a threat. And so, yeah, you can advertise on his silly little app. It doesn't matter anymore because he's irrelevant, because Trump is irrelevant, because he lost twice. He's never coming back. And so I feel like it's possible that this was less of an issue because he could have built back up, but certainly, 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 D.C. made a ton of sense.

I think the really interesting question is how this new $20 billion financing comes together. I don't know where. Where that capital is coming from. It.

It already.

And then. And then as you start to.

You mean for Xi.

Yeah. Xai doing this new financing that's been sort of reported on just based on rumors, I think it seems unclear to me if X, the social media platform, starts getting any credit at all for even existing just rolled in, it's like, oh, yeah, you're investing in the mega data center project, and we also have that app. And as an X user, all of this stuff, again, it's just not, it's not default bullish for X, the social platform, just because it's happens. Because that capital is certainly not being going to be diverted in any type of meaningful way to the social platform.

But it's also like, do you actually need to update X? Like, when was the last time there's a meaningful Twitter update?

Like I. Whoa, whoa, Whoa. They launched 4K live streaming.

4K live streaming.

We will be live streaming 4K very soon. But let's play the Sound Effect for 4K live streaming on X, folks. It's happening. You should be watching this on a QLED tv. You should be watching it in imax.

Get Starlink so you can watch it real time.

We were talking with Tyler and the video team and they were basically saying like, yeah, there's like one engineer who's working on streaming. It's like, it's great just for you guys.

Just for you guys.

That's our guy.

You and Anthony Pompeo.

Yeah. It is interesting to think like, you know, if, if Elon had just waited or been able to stall on the acquisition deal by like six months, he would have been able to buy for a quarter of the price. Like every single tech company sold off and Twitter would have sold off by more. Meta went down by 6%.

It would have been struggling to find 100% bottom.

100%. It probably would have been like a 5 or $10 billion company, right?

Yeah. Even if you pay 10, it's still 75% off.

Yeah, I know, I know. But remarkable timing and remarkable that he pulled it out despite like the, the leg weights that were the initial buyout valuation.

And it's crazy. They basically put a gun to his head and said, you're buying it, you.

Have to do it, you have to do it.

The court always forces Elon to do exactly what he says. Can't do the pay package. You have to buy this, you can't buy that.

What he should do is, is come out really in favor of the for profit conversion of OpenAI open AI and.

Then it will absolutely not happen.

He has to be doing more Reverse psychology for sure. For sure. In a sign of how eager investors were, Monday's sale of $1.2 billion in debt happened even while the markets have been in the 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. In the end, banks found a graceful exit from the $13 billion financing that weighed on them for some two and a half years. I mean the team, I know some of the team at Morgan Stanley and it looked really rough for a while but they got out. Elon doesn't do rounds and he knows how to steward capital. He's one of the greatest to do it. 40% premium. I forget how high the premium was. It wasn't even like trading at 44. He paid 40% premium. That is wild. Reflecting the potential he saw in the social media company. He said at the time free speech is the bedrock of a function functioning democracy and Twitter is the digital town square where it matters.

No, it's did feel like post acquisition that he, he basically spent, he, he spent $44 billion to preserve free speech on the Internet. Yeah, in many ways it actually did feel like that.

Yeah.

It should be tax deductible. That's a nonprofit contribution.

It should be. Yeah. I mean that, that was my take was that like if, if he doesn't do something about it, there's going to be like the anti musk aggression is just going to keep building and building and building until he's in like real, real danger. And so it was a small price to pay but he got out of it for Bill. Speaking of small prices to pay, go get a watch on Bezel. Go to get bezel.com. we're going to get Will set up with something after the show.

Yeah, Will's not a huge watch guy.

Watch guy. But we're going to convert him. I think this presidential.

I need more gold material.

Yeah, yeah, the I can't be yellow gold. The yellow gold champagne day date. That would look great on you. It's from Glengarry Glen Ross, maybe the gmt Texas Timex. The Texas Time Max they call it.

When you're in the South.

Anyway, let's move on to another story.

What do we got?

I mean TSMC earnings also paired well with intel earnings because interestingly intel is flat despite having a terrible couple months. Changing CEOs lots of fear around. Can they be competitive on the leading edge whatsoever. TSMC has been crushing it, been in the perfect position but has so much fear around global tensions. Invasion of Taiwan basically zeros the company. And so TSMC has been having a much harder time in the market. Even though their outlook has been bullish, they have a bullish outlook for growth in 2025 after reporting strong first quarter results suggesting the world's biggest chip maker is confident it can ride out the US China trade war. The main chip maker 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 billion to 42 billion in 2025. TSMC's US stock rose as much as 3.8% while while shares of suppliers including Tokyo Electron and Laser Tech climbed in Tokyo, the CEO stressed that demand, particularly for high end chips critical to developing AI has remained resilient. That may assuage investors who've struggled through a turbulent few days when US restrictions on the export of Nvidia chips to China and a disappointing report from ASML holdings trigger helped triggered a broad market.

So Ben says what you were alluding to earlier, which in stark contrast to Intel, TSMC is killing it. And yet you wouldn't know from the share price. Rough trading just down and to the right.

Still priced in what is priced in?

Everything.

Everything.

Everything. The market is perfectly priced.

Yeah. So he breaks it down here. He said you would had you invested at the beginning of this year been break even on an intel investment and significantly down on a TSMC investment. Granted the returns are a lot different if you go back even a year. Intels are brutal. But it's clear that TSMC is being much more impacted by recent geopolitical events than intel is and for good reason. Above and beyond their location in Taiwan, TSMC is actually relevant to the global economy in a way that intel is not. Boom roasted.

Have you been tracking any of the new chip companies that are doing like transformers on a chip?

Surely been tracking the heights of waves in the Taiwan Strait?

Yeah, that's all that matters to the stock price. That's all you trade off of is.

The weather forecast yardstick in the Taiwan Strait.

If it's low.

Yeah, if it's low, it's bad.

Yeah, that is true. Right. You can't like you can only invade in certain times or something.

This is when Eric Prince appears on the show.

Yes.

You know, less than 24 hours. That does feel like a question for him. But my understanding is in the summer the Taiwan Straits are flatter.

Okay.

Much easier to get landing craft across. In the winter it's like 22 bad.

Timing with the tariffs now they show.

Isn't it actually like a very narrow window, isn't it?

I think it's like two weeks.

Yeah, two weeks.

Which is helpful if you're trying to prepare, prepare for an invasion. But I guess you know when it's going to come anyway. So Ben goes further here. He says TSMC has, however, even beyond the last few months suffered from the China overhang. The reality that any sort of conflict over Taiwan would zero out TSMC and what he says, which is interesting and we'll get into this is what is notable to me however, and counter to what I wrote last month is the depth of TSMC's commitment to manufacturing in the United States. And again, this was like we've been trying to pull out of. Some people on the show is kind of understanding how much of Nvidia saying Oh we're investing $100 billion in the U.S. how much of this is sort of marketing to the admin versus like actual practical business planning. And this is cool to see. So Ben wrote last month. At the same time you can also view this announcement with some amount of cynicism, particularly given the lack of specificity about either timing or process. There's both an optimistic and a pessimistic way to look at this. On the optimistic side, that first fab was upgraded to a more advanced 5 nanometer node. TSM love this.

Love it.

TSMC calls it the 4 nanometer node, but it's actually a third generation 5 nanometer node.

Ben Thompson is Truth Zoning Numbers. Truth Zoning TSMC. The second fab meanwhile, will also produce 2 nanometer chips at some point in the future, although not in 2020.

That is crazy. 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. If they can actually hit that. It's crazy.

Yeah.

And so yeah, on the earnings call, the CEO of TSMC said, let me talk about TSMC's additional $100 billion investment plan to expand in Arizona. All of our overseas decisions are based on our customers need, as they value, some geographic flexibility and necessary level of government support. This is also to maximize the value of our shareholders. Love to hear. Let's hear it for maximizing shareholder value. With a strong collaboration and support from our leading U.S. customers and the Fed in the U.S. federal, state and city governments, we recently announced our intention to invest an additional 100 billion in advanced semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. This expansion includes major plans for three additional wafer manufacturing fabs, two advanced packaging Fabs and a major R and D center. Combined with our previously announced Plan to build 33 advanced semiconductor manufacturing fabs in Arizona, this brings our total investment in the U.S. to to $165 billion to support the strong multi year demand from our customers. It makes sense. Like a lot of TSMC'S customers are in America. Like there's no reason why you shouldn't make them here. But it was thought impossible for a long time.

How did you just sum $100 billion and $100 billion and get to 165 billion?

No, he starts by saying let's talk about the $100 billion investment. And then he's like, we're going to do all this stuff, which adds up to 100 billion. And then he says we've already invested 65, so let's add the new hundred to the previous 65. We're at 165, which sounds staggering. I guess when you compare it to what the hyperscalers are spending on Capex, which is all in like the 60, 70, 80 billion per hyperscaler. It's not that crazy. And of course this is over a number of years because they're building this out, but still very, very bullish for American manufacturing. Very bullish for re industrialization, which we love to see.

It's not a meme.

Not a meme. It's going to happen. It is, yeah. It is interesting to see that like they're actually making progress here that people thought was not possible for a long time or they thought it would never happen for a variety of reasons. But TSMC Foxconn's in the same, in the same boat where Foxconn's announcing new facilities. It's Taiwanese company, they obviously have a massive presence in China, but they're announcing a lot of new facilities in America because they see themselves as a Western company or global company and they want to do business.

I love when CEOs are super candid on earnings calls because it's so easy for them to go robotic. This was another quote. He was responding to a question. He said the first purpose in the Arizona Fab is that the Arizona Fab can operate independently. But of course we have done and we are doing it right now, some kind of pathfinding, exploratory work and to cooperate with the university, blah, blah. It's actually a lot of activities. 1000 engineers is not a small amount. Of course it's not comparable to tsmc. I think he's talking about, you know, the facility that has 10,000 R&D people. But it's the beginning. Okay, so we'll do a lot more.

That's great.

And anyways, yeah, I mean you were.

Talking about like the, the Capex as marketing to the admin. And probably the best example is from the first Trump administration where Apple did that, like that Ribbon cutting ceremony, I think it was in Texas for the Mac and it was like they'd already been making it there. They weren't reshoring anything really rebranding the dollars. And then earlier in Trump too, just a couple months ago, Apple like kind of repackaged a bunch of their like spend and they were like, we're investing $100 billion in America. And it was like the salaries that.

Were already gonna be spent a warehouse and just like let people rent it for ribbon cutting ceremony.

Huge bull market, massive American flag on the wall. You can move in. We rented by the hour. It comes with a vibreal. It comes with free birds. Pre installed.

Secret Service has been there already. You know the angle.

Exactly.

Getting into American made ribbons specifically for. For, you know.

And those big scissors, the big scissors have to be American.

Those are made in China today for sure.

Yeah, absolutely. Should we talk about Amazon?

Oh yeah.

And all this drama around whether or not they were displaying plan to display.

This guy this AB test on his e commerce website. He found he. So he makes his shower head in China. It's the tariffs are going to make a $100 product. Like $250 goes to an American manufacturer. It's going to cost him $250 to make it. So he puts an option on his website, $100 for the Chinese 1, 250. And he was like 100% of people chose the cheaper one.

Zero.

We got zero made in America.

But I was thinking about that more and I was. And I was thinking about how like no, it's not. That's not the option.

Yeah. That's not the trade.

Yeah. The actual trade is $250 for the Chinese made one, $160 of which or $150 of which goes to tariffs versus $250 made in the America.

It was a deeply flawed study.

Yes.

Exceptionally viral.

Yeah, yeah. But anyway, Amazon is thinking about doing something very similar, kind of, you know, lobbying popular support amongst the the American people, breaking out import charges.

And to be clear, they deny they had plans.

Sure, sure, sure. But the administration addressed it and said that breaking out import charges would be a hostile and political act. Andy Jassy is getting in trouble with the White House. I'm sure they will be fighting it out, although they're still going after Bezos. So Amazon.com was forced to play down a report that it was considering displaying the impact of tariffs during its online checkout process after President Trump called the company founder Jeff Bezos and the White House said such A move would be a hostile and political. I mean you have to imagine that as soon as the tariffs drop, like there's some Amazon PM who's like implementing this on day one. Right.

Yeah. It's also funny that that Bezos is still the first guy to get the call. It's been so long now he's like.

Desperately trying to retire.

Yeah, just like I just want to.

Do the Lex Friedman podcast and be on a yacht and, and go to space. Like why are you calling me about my e commerce business? Yeah, yeah, I was an E commerce. Yeah, I was a 12 figure e comm entrepreneur.

But if he does save the global economy, that's like his beautiful act, right? Like if this works, saves the economy by rolling back tariffs, implementing this feature. That's a Nobel Peace Prize level achievement.

Yeah, potentially it's possible. It's going to take an act of courage standing up to the administration by putting a new div on the checkout HTML page pressing.

Yeah, there's some controversy because Punchbowl was doing some reporting on this. But Punchbowl is corporate media really supported by Amazon? Wait, really? Yeah, yeah.

Punchbowl. Yeah. It says Trump called Bezos to raise concerns after Punchbowl news report, which I've never heard of, reported that Amazon was planning to disrupt display the impact of tariffs during its online checkout process according to people familiar with the matter. And now, I mean Amazon to be fair, does break out a ton of expenses. Like you see the shipping costs, you see the taxes, you see how the, how the receipt is calculated and now.

You'Re going to see 600% tariffs on your. On your shower head.

Yeah, on your. On your what? Did you know that Amazon launched a TEMU competitor?

I did not.

So they, so as in order to participate in their like TEMU competitor you, you had to guarantee like price ceilings for things and you could not sell a guitar for more than $12 and you could not sell a couch for more than $20.

I mean we have to start thinking about an American TEMU reserve.

Right.

Just importing thousands of shein items.

It's gonna be the stretch into the billions.

The billions of items. Where are yoga pants gonna come from.

If not poison you? Yeah, the cancer wasn't that you're lying to you.

There's a post here from somebody who writes for his own. He has IG technology on X. Great, great name. He says the Punchbowl story on Amazon sponsored by Amazon isn't completely true per Amazon. It's literally an article that's presented by Amazon and it says Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers. So little bit hard. Hard to imagine they weren't actually planning to do this.

This is going to be like when we report on numeral and numeral has to deny our reports that numeral is. Has a fact achieved AGI in sales tax on the Chrome tab. Yeah. Because we often call it AGI for sales tax or AGI. God.

You're talking to Sam, the CEO and you know what he said was basically like, you know, we have a new version that like we're actually not able to release because it's so powerful. Solve sales tax fully and then sort of like move on.

Yeah. It's like, how do we actually reduce the number of sales tax receipts to zero? Well, we eliminate humans. We kill everyone. The end result of all these B2B SaaS products.

Have we achieved AGI to numeral safeties?

Yeah, it's the same thing with Ramp. How do we get. No more receipts, no more employees. No more employees. Get rid of everyone. But anyway, go to numeral hq. Put your sales tax on autopilot.

Spend benchmark.

Per month on sales tax compliance. Anyway, bargains. Sheen also benefited from the exemption which helped keep. Helped them keep prices down on clothing and other goods shipped directly from China. So that loophole is closed. Yeah. It was Amazon's haul, they called it.

You're going to love this. The max you could sell a couch for again.

I think we'll see this in cancer rates.

Okay.

Once you get. You take this to like cheap polyester and stop putting it on your skin.

Yes.

Cancer rates might fall a little bit. Interesting much to think about.

Interesting. Is that going to right size? Is that the ultimate right? Sizing the government? Because I mean it's. There's less.

It's proof that movement's totally in control.

Right.

The tariffs get.

It's all part of the Maha. So is Maha the real one that's pulling the strings?

Bobby Kennedy.

Bobby Kennedy at the top. Everyone, every other. The defense budget. It's all. It's all Bobby. Yeah, that makes sense. The tech giant has cost support agreements in place with some vendors to ensure that it makes consistent margins on the products it buys from them and sells to customers. According to consultants, some vendors 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. So everyone's fighting over who pays the tariffs.

Yeah, I mean it's. Amazon's in a really tough place. They had been squeezing their. Their sellers for so long on Both sides, fees, advertising, you know, not dealing with. With knockoffs very well. You know, sort of purely focus on the consumer, which is. Which is, again, you know, Amazon's job is to deliver for their core customer, which is the prime subscriber. But at the end of the day, this is only going to create kind of more. More drama and chaos between Amazon and its sellers who already were not super happy.

Yeah, I mean, the other story, Amazon's in the news because they want to be a satellite Internet powerhouse.

Who doesn't? I mean, we've had long conversations off air about how do we turn TVPN into sort of, you know, get dish on every home satellite. Yeah, yeah.

Please do not share that.

How do we get a TVPN dish on every home?

Yeah, we need dedicated network for sure.

Dedicated network.

So they launched 27 Cooper satellites, but they need to get thousands more to space. To rival SpaceX's Starlink. Some of the company's biggest hurdles aren't in orbit, but on the ground. 27Amazon satellites were launched from the Florida coast to orbit Monday night, a mission handled by rocket rocket launch company United Launch Alliance. A year and a half ago, ULA sent two prototype satellites for Amazon to space.

How have I never heard about United States United Launch?

You don't know ula.

They're like the second biggest private launch provider.

It's a joint venture between Lockheed and Boeing.

Yeah, okay. Okay.

So they are like the legacy. Yeah, ULA is, but ULA has been, you know, they've had a lot of problems with a lot of different projects they've been worked on, and Elon's obviously coming for them very aggressively. To compete with established providers, Amazon needs to rapidly manufacture and deploy thousands more satellites on a narrow timeline. It also faces a set of challenges familiar to many companies pushing to scale up manufacturing rates. The Project Cooper venture aims to build large constellation of satellites. Yeah, how do you pronounce that? Cooper. Cooper. Cooper.

I think it's French.

Yeah. Okay. I have no idea.

Thanks for the misinformation.

So they're trying to provide high school Internet.

Our entire audience is like, going out saying, like, yeah, it's like, it's actually.

The company plans on having the 3200 satellites in orbit over the next few years, building a business it hopes will eventually provide meaningful operating income. Chief Executive Andy Jassy wrote in an Amazon in Amazon's recent annual letter to shareholders. But Elon Musk has demonstrated the power of such a fleet through his Starlink business, which has more than 7,000 satellites in orbit already and more than 5 million users. At least two similar Chinese systems are also in the works. While Canadian satellite operator Telesat is developing a new fleet called Lightspeed. Everyone's got to have their own LEO cluster of satellites, I guess. Leaders at Cooper.

Interesting to think about Amazon potentially over time just bundling in satellite to prime. Like it's not.

Yeah, you have tv, you have shopping, you have groceries.

Yeah. Deliver. Own the actual delivery and yeah, I mean it seems like it was really, really hard to actually own like cable or like wires in the ground. Like that was particularly hard monopolized to like build any, actually grab any of that infrastructure. But if everything moves to satellite, you can actually throw up a constellation.

Zoning walls in space.

Yeah, no, I mean at some point I imagine that it gets too, too crowded that you can't put up any more, any more constellations. But it seems like we're pretty far away from here. People already complaining about the space junk.

That feels far away. I mean the moat is that you have to spend however, like what, what 20, however many tens of of billions of dollars.

And Launch is not zero margin business for SpaceX. So. But it is when they launch Starlink satellites and anytime that they have, you know, a free seat on the bus, they can just throw Starlink satellites on there. So they're getting them up there way, way cheaper than Amazon is. Which is probably why Bezos is also investing in Blue Origin. Because if he can get that working and he can dump Cooper satellites up there cheaply like that actually gets gives him the opportunity to, to challenge Musk. It is funny how, how much Bezos and Musk like go after each other. Did you see that Bezos, I mean he already funded Rivian, but then he just funded that slate truck. Okay. Yeah. What was your reaction to the truck?

Incredible. T.J. parker, you know.

Yeah.

Big endorsement from a certified car guy. I mean it's incredible to have a small American made truck.

Yeah.

That said, I hate that it's an electric vehicle. I'd buy one day one if you that was a combustible engine. I just feel like, you know, Europe doesn't have power right now. Why are you buying an electric ev?

Sure.

But it's a beautiful car. It's an suv, it's a sedan.

Have you thought about buying one and swapping in like a turbocharged vehicle?

Yeah, I was going to LS swap.

Yeah.

Slate truck.

The slate truck for sure. Yeah, yeah.

Kind of mini Raptor number one. I, I, I've seen some people, you know, I think it's going to be a hit almost as a golf cart.

Who is the singer Porsche of Japanese small trucks? Like, if I want to drop $2 million on a truck this big.

That'S a real.

But, yeah, I mean, the big critique there, and we're going to get the Slate founding team on. But on the show, TJ actually made the intro. Shout out to tj. But, yeah, the big critique has been around range. I'm sure they have a lot of plans there. I assume you have to look at with any evidence, you know, manufacture, and assume that the range is only going to go up over time.

Yeah.

So it's fine.

Do they drop a range number?

It's like 150.

150. That's really low.

I mean, no, it's a golf cart.

But it's even lower than that. When you.

When you put stuff in. Yeah, yeah.

Passengers.

Yeah.

Hills.

But truly, like, if you're just going, like, around town and back, like, you're not going to do more than 150 miles, even if you drive to work 30 miles away and back, you're fine.

I mean, you can't even fit in it. Right.

You have to, like, cut a hole for sure. Well, don't they have a. Don't they have, like, a modular structure so I can get, like, a convertible version?

Yeah, you're not going to pass the broomstick.

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 two different trucks. Two different trucks in EV going up against Tesla. There was a conspiracy theory that Slate was actually a Tesla project because. Because it's an anagram. Have you heard of this?

I have heard this.

Yeah. It's a great one. And then they're competing in space. They're competing in social networking now, too, because Bezos owns Twitch, which is a very large social network. Streaming X obviously has streaming, as we're streaming on Axe right now. And then. Yeah, they've just been duking it out in all these little submarket subcategories. Yeah, it's a lot of fun to watch. Anyway, we should move on to some timeline. Let's break down the best.

This is the moment that you all have been waiting for. Timeline. With none other than Willmanitis.

King of the timeline.

King of the timeline. Let's do it. Let's dive in.

So, founder of Intercom says this is truly the golden age of B2B software. Out of home advertising. Literally 98% of billboard and shelter staff 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?

Intercom. By the way, Ad Quick.

Yeah.

Customer.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Fantastic. Yeah, we are. We are sponsored by Ad quick. Go to adquick.com Sorry to advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of home advertising only Ad Quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Anyway, well, bullish or bearish for SaaS.

First for AD for Ad Quick.

Yes, that's here. For Ad Quick. The audience was. Yeah, maybe we get the Ashton hall sound for every new post that we do during this timeline to really, really fire us up. Really get us firing on all cylinders. Okay. So bullish or bearish?

I just think hope, hope, hopes the, you know, reply or number one. Also, my favorite account on twitter.com is correct.

Revenge.

We do need to think bigger, right? We should be renaming San Francisco. One wonders if instead of San Francisco we could have Salesforce California.

Salesforce California.

We could have Open AI California.

Yeah.

Towers there. It's already kind of an occupied state. Why not go all the way?

I. What about just Altmanville?

That would be even better.

We've been talking about Voltaville down in.

Nashville if Salesforce really wants to have that.

Company towns.

Company towns.

I would like to see an ad unit hung from the Golden Gate Bridge. You know, just sort of like 100, 100ft by.

Like everyone always goes crazy over thousand videos of Chinese cities where they look so cyberpunk and they have like advertising everywhere. Blade Runner future. Let's do it.

Also, why do we need permission? Why don't we just project on the side of the Salesforce tower? There's business there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also drone shows. Blimps. We should be doing much more advertising Ad Quick.

Not to go back to Ad Quick. They do have a drone.

No, no, no. Please go back to Ad Quick.

No, please, please. They have a drone access to drone show ads, which is if you want.

To run a drone show.

All right, next post. Ian Cinnamon, Apex Space has closed another round of funding to scale production and meet demand for satellite platforms for critical projects like golden dome. The new 200 million in Series C funding is led by 0.72 Ventures & Co led by ABC alongside and Dries and Horowitz and a number of other funds. So massive milestone. Ian says this series C investment is a massive vote of confidence from our Backers. As demand for our bus platforms has exponentially increased. As we as are also seeing the underlying need for space based capabilities growing rapidly. With this capital we are excited to double down on supporting the needs of the US and allied warfighter as well as critical commercial applications.

Congratulations. Ian invented a bus. Do you remember that?

Created a space bus. I mean the speed at which Ian and the APEX team is moving. We had to go back and listen to our interview with Ian probably about a month ago at this point. But what an absolutely ambitious timeline they've been on.

It is cool how all of the different pieces of the satellite stack are disaggregating and now there's new companies in each of them. I wonder if eventually they'll kind of come together in some massive keiretsu or something. Have you talked to Ian before?

No, but I do like the idea of kind of a Frankel esque roll up of all these kind of non commercially viable or you know, soon to be commercially viable launch providers.

Yeah, well it's not launch provider. He doesn't do rockets. He does the, he does the bus that the satellite rides on. So you want to put a radio or camera in space. TVPN network, TPPN network will be using APEX buses to build on top of. And another example would be like Bridget Mendler, her company does the ground link. So how is TVPN going to beam down from these satellites? Well, she will have a ground link network of satellites that can receive the message from space.

So this next we got another post from Trey Stevens.

So we have some news from Lockheed Martin. They said with Lockheed Martin says without us, AI might have never taken off.

Said for over 40 years Lockheed Martin has used the power of AI and machine learning to help drive the future of defense, aerospace and national security. And it's just a giblified version.

Of Tom Cruise from top.

I was going to say this looks like Trey Stevens to me but you.

Know, not enough beard, not enough body hair. But I mean 40 years ago. I feel like they're not using that word correctly. 1985, like what, what AI were they doing?

That's like Apple II.

Like they're like, like neural networks had not really been invented yet.

Yeah, it's a linear regression.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a TI84.

Yeah, exactly.

They're basically saying when was the first time we mentioned the words artificial and intelligence not even together.

Yeah, but like it could have been.

In the same, same paragraph.

I mean at the same time. Like the lesson one of Andrew Ng's course on machine learning at Stanford. Starts with multiple regression, does it? Yeah. That is the foundation of. And then he builds you up to neural networks.

I mean, I hear there was a big secret in how Grok got to state of the art so quickly.

Linear regression.

Doing the regressions by hand.

Yes, by hand.

Training the transformers with artificial craft.

Yeah, we need to bring that back. I actually wouldn't be surprised if Lockheed did have some, you know, AI person that was foundational at some point. Like some, you know, some Jenga block in the massive stack, goes back to some Lockheed paper or some, some skunk works project. But it is hilarious that they're just like, yo, we're responsible for AI. You're welcome. Oh, this is huge. We got some huge news from Josh Kushner. Let's go. Josh Kushner says, we are humbled to announce. We are absolutely humble right now. We're so humbled to announce Thrive Holdings, a permanent capital vehicle to dedicate, dedicated to investing in, acquiring and operating businesses for the long term. The mission of Thrive holdings is to transform enterprises throughout the strategic application technology.

You know, the only thing better than capital.

What?

Permanent capital.

Permanent. You know.

You know what they say, Any man in possession of a good fortune only needs one thing. A permanent capital holding vehicle.

Yes, that's right. That's right.

Can you actually break down what a permanent capital holding vehicle means relative to like, everyone's familiar with like a VC fund, 10 year, 12 year continuation vehicles. What's permanent capital?

What matters is that closeness to God is closeness to fee streams.

Sure.

And normally fee streams, they stop at 10 years.

Yes.

You know what's better than 10 years of fees? A lifetime of fees.

Yes.

That you can pass on to your grandchildren.

But I mean, how is this different than. I mean, but is it structured different than a private equity fund that has a specific life or even like a hedge fund?

Yeah. I mean the standard permanent capital vehicle will have some degree of redemption schedule. Like LPs can pull out some degree.

Of points and they swap with other people in and stuff.

Brent B. Sure has some incredible.

He's the famous one, right? Yeah. Is he truly the golden standard for permanent capital or is there like a public company like, does blackrock have a permanent holding vehicle that we don't talk about?

I mean, there's plenty like the closed end vehicles were like a huge thing in the UK in the 90s. There's dozens of these. Brent Bishore, I think it's the most artisanal. His is printing cash at a rate no one else. I think is doing right now. But of course there's permanent capital vehicles we cannot name rolling up HOAs in the Midwest. Right.

Yeah. I think the opportunity here is for Josh and the Thrive team to think even more long term than they already do.

Right.

Like how do we think about, you know, not in this sort of like 10 year cycle? Josh, I think had posted something a long time ago, which is that like managers think in quarters like founders think in decades. And there's huge advantages in Alpha and just being able to think and plan on a longer timeline than everyone else.

And especially if you're Thrive and you're thinking about buying like I think it's been widely reported they bought an accounting firm to put AI in the middle and do automation on top of. That's a deal you need to hold for 40 years. And then this also solves the continuity vehicle issue. Right. You have lots of companies like Stripe, you're holding year 10, 11, 12. How the hell are you going to get liquidity on that? Well, you can pass it over to your permanent capital vehicle.

Oh, you think that's possible? I mean, it's similar to Sequoia Heritage.

Right. It's like a continuity vehicle.

Sure.

Pass those things over, get liquidity for the LPs, the initial set, and hold a basket of really high quality assets you want to hold for.

Okay, so take me through some of the sizes of permanent capital vehicles because with a VC fund, you know, you hear people raising a $50 million solo GB fund all the way up to a $5 billion 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 is like the best example. Oh, okay.

I wasn't actually sure. I didn't want to botch it, so I just looked it up. Yeah, but, but that's a good way to think about it of, hey, we're not going to focus as much on raising new, you know, the best scenario is like you, you have cash flowing assets that produce capital that allow you to, you know, reinvest or buy other businesses to produce more cash flow.

Right.

So it's like sort of the holy grail. And many people have said the cure to male loneliness is, you know, a permanent capital.

It would fix all you need. It would fix me. What about the mindset? What it takes to be great in venture capital is often high risk, you know, not making money for a very long time. All the capital, all the value capture happens at the very End Obviously, the types of companies that are typically rolled into permanent capital vehicles, cash flowing from day one.

I mean, I think like the single greatest Josh Kushner quote is like, you never lose money buying fifth Avenue real estate. If you think about thrive as a thematic bet on the fifth Avenue real estate to private companies, probably not a bad idea to hold these really blue chip assets to duration.

Yeah. So it's more just about find great founders if they're, if they're losing money in this 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 that go in the permanent capital vehicle.

I mean, if you're stripe and you're planning to go public in 2035, 20, you know, 2300.

20, 300. Once they've consumed 100% of US GDP, process through stripe. Global GDP.

Global GDP.

They need the space narrative. Look, the space.

They need to go off planet.

We need to go off planet.

It's just these, these continuity vehicles are going to get huge.

Huge. 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 with.

Yeah, I mean, I was the first check into Chroma.

Okay.

I think it's the fastest growing open source vector database.

Yeah. I love Jeff. We had him on the show.

Jeff's amazing.

He's great. So he's breaking down some hype and I'd be interested to hear how the market has evolved and if Jeff has kind of altered his strategy. Hadley's breaking down the story of pinecone. Two years ago today, Andreessen announced $100 million into pinecone as everyone and their mother tripped over each other to invest in vector databases. Given how little standalone vector databases are valued now, the hype cycle is wild to look back on. The timeline is late 2022 chat GPT launches, early rag architectures emerge. There's first buzz around these companies. Then there's a massive surge in demand for vector search. Vector databases seen as critical infrastructure. But then after there's peak hype, every AI info infrastructure diagram has a vector DB layer saturation hits postgres, redis mongodb, add native vector search clouds bundle it. The hype fades, vector search becomes commodity market tightens, attention shifts to agents. Fine tuning, orchestration. So is this a good telling of the history of the vector database hype cycle, or is there something you need.

To put in the checker? It 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.

Sure, sure, sure.

But if you look at even the traditional relational database market, there are hundreds of massive companies there. Right. And if you think about a huge amount of enterprise software, it's just different views on top of structured data elements. Like Salesforce is the world's greatest structured database.

Right.

There will be big winners in the vector database space in that you just need to be able to store unstructured data. And like yes, you know, you can search vectors using numpy sort but like that's not an enterprise grade database solution. And I just think this is a good excuse to, you know, have missed a lot of winning companies such as Chroma.

Yeah, a lot of people are taking victory laps. John Shu at Coastalist. As we told our LPs that we're staying out of the market because they were too trivial to build and commoditize and were Never used without BM25. What is BM25? Do you know what that is? I heard of that VC VEC database. Thought leadership was a great filter for those who for. For who's really technical and who has shallow understanding of ML infra.

We gotta have John on the show. He's always dropping bombs on the timeline.

Well, speaking of dropping bombs, the timeline hit me with a sound effect Jordy. Because we're. Wow.

I was under prepared.

But hey, here we go. By Deva about tech Bros learning about convertibles. There are two different posts here. One from Spore. Friend of the show says we. It's called we do a little Bay Area sightseeing and someone else bought a BMW Z4. What's your take on convertibles?

My first car in high school was a 2020 Honda S2000.

That's baby blue. Wow.

Sick. I still own it to this day. It's the single greatest thing I've ever driven. Yeah, it's amazing that they've discovered convertibles. I mean it's just like it's, you know, 25 years late. It's kind of weird to discover this in your 30s.

Especially in California. Especially obvious.

Also both of those.

There's a genera. There's a generation of. Of young people in tech that have only owned Teslas.

Yeah.

And they don't make discovering that that car manufacturers have been making pretty good cars. Lots of manufacturers have been making pretty good cars in a bunch of different categories for a long time. And it's a beautiful moment. I think it should be celebrated. And I also think, I think what I want to. What I want to. What I want to see people do more people I don't think realize like if you have a car, let's say you have a Honda Accord you can drive to any car dealership and within two hours have swapped it for a 9 11. Right. Like it's actually like an extremely smooth process where they will take your car basically not sight unseen, but they'll look at it close to it that your car has some amount of value. You can roll that into something else and you can within three hours on any day of the week you can be driving in a 911 or another car. That's going to change your life.

Also like one of the few things.

If you're not a permanent capital guy, I can't afford the 911 Miatas.

Miatas.

$5,000.

Do you know the best selling convertible in America has to be a Miata, right? It's not. It's the Jeep Wrangler.

No way.

Yeah. Because they sell a lot of them. People don't think of them as convertibles. Exactly. They are. Yeah.

Drop top.

But yeah, I think Tesla's missed out and Rivian's missed out on the convertible market. All of the car companies are just coalescing around. Like everyone wants a crossover SUV that drives. It's got a little more again the.

One, one piece of feedback here guys. Manual transmission.

Yes, yes.

Like I will teach, I will fly out.

I will teach you how to.

Yeah, that's going to change you.

Yeah, yeah. Well maybe, maybe that's next year. Next year will be tech bros learned about manual transmission. Yeah.

We're going to put you on the bottom of the same.

Except, except I, my, my first car was a very, very old Toyota Corolla hatchback.

Was it manual?

That was manual. And I would drive it in San Francisco and it would be like a life or death.

Going uphill is really hard.

No. And San Francisco hills are just a different degree there.

That's wild.

And I just remember like some of the, the peak fear of my teenage years was you know, hitting a stop sign or hitting a red light and.

Oh, it's so bad.

The issue is even by that even at the time when I was 16 people were so historically so many there were. Every car was manual. And so if you wouldn't pull up behind somebody on a hill, you wouldn't pull up right behind their bumper.

Yep.

But in the age of automatics, yeah. People will just pull up right, you know, behind your bumper. Maybe they're leaving a couple feet. And so I'd be looking in the rearview mirror being like if I don't pull this off.

Like yeah, that's my issue with Tesla is like if you're self driving, they don't see me in my Honda S2000. They don't know there's going to be four feet of rollback. Self, self, self driving is not prepared for me to stall five times to get up this hill.

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. Rivian doesn't sell one.

Can you not take the roof off?

No, you can't take the roof off. Lucid doesn't sell one. Taycan doesn't come in a convertible yet. Crazy. You have to get the Hummer ev, which is great. I think that's a very rational choice for somebody who just wants I, hey, I just want an electric car and I want a convertible.

Can we get a three speed manual on an ev? Can we get a three speed.

Well you know that, you know the Hyundai has the, the fake DCT and people actually love it. A lot of the car guys have driven them and they're like cuz it injects sound. That's pretty accurate. And a lot of them are like yeah, it was weird for the first minute but then I just got into it and it was exactly like electric vehicles. Oh totally, totally. Yeah. The, it's like this funny like hashback. The Ionic 5N. 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 N series. They're also doing this. Hyundai's on a tear. They're doing a whole bunch of random stuff. Anyway, we need the sound effect because Quen30B has dropped and Will Brown is given the review. Let's hear it for Alibaba with their open source model.

Hopefully the sound is balanced on.

Hopefully we'll see. Will Brown says I really didn't expect 30B A3B to be this good. I was hoping we'd get a small mixture of experts model as a useful research toy. Instead we got one of the strongest all around models under 100 billion parameters. Have you been following Quinn at all and what's going on?

I only use American made models.

Yes.

These Chinese models can't Use.

Well, have you heard the Tyler Cowen take that the Chinese models are actually American models because they are trained. Exactly. They're trained on the American Internet because that's where the data comes from. And they often export the data or exfiltrate it from OpenAI or they use.

We should be letting on the American models themselves.

Yeah, right. Yeah. And then they do maybe a little bit RLHF to say, hey, cut it with the Tiananmen stuff.

The Taobao model. It's a ripoff of the American provider.

Exactly, exactly. So maybe there's less to be worried about. Maybe the Manchurian Candidate in Deep Seat is secretly a pro American Manchurian Candidate. And once you get it, once you, once you, you know, actually prompt engineer it enough, it'll love talking about Tiananmen. Yeah, it gets fired. That's what it is every single day. It's like capitalism is the best system. It's. There's a little more people out of.

Poverty than any other Delian buried in the model.

I, I believe it.

We should send Delian into Shanghai like behind enemy lines to train these models. Put them in a VARTA capsule, send them down.

Anyway, this next post from Ev Randall, he asked GPT4.5, can you help me find some good Chinese food spots in SF that I may not have heard of previously? Absolutely. There are several Chinese spots in SF that will make your mouth water. And we'll get to that. But first, in case this is a business meal, I'd love to talk to you about Ramp. Ramp is the ultimate platform for modern finance teams. Combining corporate cards with expense management, bill payments, procurement, accounting, automation and more. RAMP is on a mission to help customers save their most valuable resources, time and money.

Did I tell you I've been doing this to random people too? There's somebody flying down from San Francisco and I was like, oh like, like, are you going to 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 Ramp? They have corporate travel that makes it.

Really fantastic travel product. We booked this room on Ramp Travel.

We did.

It makes you wonder if OpenAI was actually incubated buy. It's a different new company.

It's possible. Well, speaking of travel and corporate travel, go to wander.com. find your happy place. Find your happy place. There we go. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel graded minis dream. You get top tier getting 247 concert.

Getting bill manitis to sing your company jingle.

I mean I'm a happy Wanderer investor.

One hand washes the other. There you go.

There we go.

Shill the investments. You're good.

Money goes right into your own pocket. I like it. That's great. Did you see this from Jarvis? This is awesome. Firm called Dragon Lawyers filed court papers with the watermark on every single page until the judge ordered them to stop. The thing that's beautiful is word art. It's this massive Dragon Lawyers PC.

Apparently their web, their website is iconic too.

It also funny, the Dragon watermark, it just cracks.

This is called exercising free will.

This innovation. People don't realize that you could do whatever you want with watermark.

What's incredible is that's not AI generated.

No.

Someone drew that for sure.

The other thing that stands out here is that the, the, the attorney at Dragon Lawyers uses a. @yahoo.com email.

So amazing.

That's how you know he's been, you.

Know, he's good, he's. For a long time there's a whole, there's a whole like, you know, cohort of hitters. Yeah. It's like astrology for business. Like when you see the different domain names, you know, so, so it tells a whole story about.

You never want to work with a lawyer that has a corporate branded email.

Absolutely. AOL, Outlook.com, yahoo that are AltaVista. AltaVist. That's a throwback. You got to get a lawyer who has an altivist and a Dragon watermark for sure. You should, you should get your own watermark. What would your watermark be?

I think the Dragon's pretty sick.

The Dragon's pretty sick.

I think that's hard to beat. Mine might be the ramp logo down for all your corporate spend.

Yeah, exactly. Just a massive ramp card. Maybe, Maybe Jordy does a photo of you in the jacket like this. Like the Dragon. Yeah, in. In the TVPN jacket. That would be the way to do it. But we need to be watermarking more things. We're. We're thinking about selling the windshield of this show. So we already have the logos down.

So it'll be a piece of glass.

We have logos up here.

No. And, and so basically we'll set up like a glass, physical glass so every angle has a different.

Has a logo.

I mean I listen for the ad reads, the content in between. So relevant. I, I think we should just do all ad reads.

Well, speaking of that, thinking of setting.

Up a premium subs subscription. That's just the.

Yeah. You get rid of us public.com investing. For those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing Industry leading yields trusted by millions. Go to public.com thank you. Anyway, did you see this post by Ben Sharf? Commerce as we know it has officially changed forever. Well done, Shopify and Open AI.

I thought the first line was a little dramatic, but it's very cool. It's basically an integrate. You're shopping on OpenAI integration.

Wow.

The bar and thing is. Yes, these are not good red light.

These are not the best red light therapy for anti.

How do you get one tractorsupply.com the Chicken Light.

Chicken Light.

If you go to my desk in my house, I have chicken chicken all around. Why they're because you get the same wavelength as these expensive LEDs and chicken lights. 19 and it's good for anti.

Huge alpha. You heard it here first. Chicken Lights.

Chicken Lights tractorsupply.com tractor.

Well, I. As soon as we talk about this, this will be baked into the next training run of GPT5. It'll be up.

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, you know, do some product research, use shop, pay to check out with an open AI.

Yeah.

And do all of that.

And wasn't Aiden kind of, kind of teasing this a little bit? He was like, oh yeah, like every time I shop for anything, I do a whole deep research report. I burned 10,000 hours of GPU time to figure out what paper towels I like.

Or you're burning the money's getting burned on Google Ads. I mean. Yeah, the interesting thing here is that there were a lot of companies, there are a lot of companies that have raised venture capital to build AI shopping assistance.

Yeah.

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

Yeah, 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.

It is, it is funny. So, so in the, in the, in the meta lawsuit, they obviously avoid TikTok.

Yeah.

And one reason that you could argue, you know, avoid TikTok is that it's state backed and they had to raise 10, you know, however many tens of billions of dollars to do it. But it seems now you can build new consumer tech giants. You just need tens of billions of.

Dollars and a state government backing you.

Yeah, well, I mean, not for open AI. Not for open AI.

Put on the tinfoil hat.

Put on the tinfoil hat. We don't have the tinfoil hats.

But it is like a novel financing process.

But it is an interesting and legal process.

Yes, yes. But I think it will set an important precedent. We've been advocating for more nonprofit to. For profit conversions. We're really looking into PETA because they know where all the tastiest animals live. And we think that that could unlock potentially hundreds of billions.

Maybe trillions.

Maybe trillions. Just maps of. Just selling maps of the most delicious animals. Yeah, the most delicious. The PETA. The PETA Take private is going to be crazy banger. Every fund is going to be in that for sure. For sure.

It's what thrives.

Yeah. I also think Red cross you. But Brian Johnson at the helm, it's just all the blood goes through him. It's. It's a huge, A huge opportunity. Blueprint. Red Cross blueprint. They work. Put it all together. K. Retsu of Biohacking.

Well, we have a post from a.

Former guest that actually. Did you know that we broke this story and TechCrunch reported on us? We didn't break it. We caused the story with the podcast.

You got Community.

This is us. That's me. Okay, so we had Jordy not.

Not a podcast.

Yeah, I know. It's not. It's a live show. We need to put a community note on the community. Anyway, Jordan read it.

CEO of Perplexity comes on the show. We talk for 30 minutes about a bunch of different things. Ads were brought up in a hypothetical. He answered the hypothetical question. TechCrunch basically used it to do this sort of like clickbaity piece, which I thought was wrong in so many ways. One is, if you actually listen to the interview, he's saying that 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's says this is their second act. It's got, it's, it's, you know, he's really betting the company on it in many ways. And so to do something, to write something like this in a way that is just objectively damaging to Perplexity's brand. Because what user. No, yeah, of course, over time, every consumer tech company on a long enough time horizon runs ads, right? Netflix, Instacart, anybody with a large audience eventually runs ads. But that said, there's nothing about our conversation with him that said that that's the top priority or that's how they're planning to monetize all these different things. And so I thought it was just, you know, founders need to be aware and investors that TechCrunch is not the publication that it was. And you have to assume that they are a hostile actor now. And sure, they might cover your fundraise, they might do this or that, but I think they knew exactly what they were doing. And you know, I support private equity broadly.

Well. Yeah, but now it's not private equity backed.

They sold to another private equity.

Traded hand.

Yeah, and I remember when, when, when TechCrunch was for sale, my, my thought was, you know, worthless asset. Just because. Not a worthless asset. That's a little bit harsh. I, we weren't interested in exploring it, but it almost would have been worth buying it just so that it didn't turn into TechCrunch being anti tech.

I mean, much like Gawker, the most ethical thing to do is buy it and shut it down.

Shut it down.

Yeah, true.

What was interesting about this to me. So the actual title of the article is Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online and sell hyper personalized ads. Now I have always said that I don't think it's a challenge to sell ads in LLM responses. I think it's actually very trivial. There was initially a moment where it was like, oh, well, if it's all text back and forth, like what are you going to do? Put display ads? It's like, no, you're obviously just going to have another LLM that runs on top of the response and before it spits it out, you're going to say, hey, add an ad into this paragraph at this point and add a sponsored.

Block and those ads will be more topical. Totally better. Want that.

So I've been always super bullish on the idea of advertising in text based LLM responses. I don't think it's a challenge at all. I think it's very logical. I think ChatGPT will do it on the free tier. I think Perplexity should do it. But his response to me was actually more bearish on ads in the short term than I Thought it was going to be, but then TechCrunch flipped it around and made him sound. It was very, very odd.

But it is interesting to think about what Google would have to.

Google already doing this too.

Google made products.

Google results. Yeah, you already have AI results in the AI results. They already are doing this. Yeah.

No, but I was going to say, what if Google said, you know, for 50 bucks a month, you can have non personalized ads in Chrome. Would you?

No, I don't want that.

I would pay a hundred dollars a month to have only ramp ads across every single vehicle.

You probably could do that if you. If you just set up your own Google Ads account and then just put your. Only your email in there. You know how you used to get those, like, those like Facebook ads that were like, you know, I'm a manitis on a T shirt. Like, like, I haven't. Don't talk to me until I've had my coffee or whatever. You know, there's like super, like Teespring was like really leveled.

No, it's. I'm a manitis. Don't talk to me until I've had one banger on X.

Yes, exactly. Like. And you're just like, how did they think to target me with that? But it was all based on like the Facebook ad targeting.

Building a custom adblock Chrome extension.

Yeah.

Replace it with ramp.

People have done that with like, you know, replace it with cats or replace it with random stuff. So, yeah, we should build that for ramp for sure. But we got the community note on it and they did actually credit us in the TechCrunch article.

Incorrectly.

Incorrectly. As a podcast. Yep. But they did give us the shout out. And they didn't refer to us by our old name. They got the acronym correctly correct. They called it tbpn, which is great. 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 Arvind 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.

Never sell.

Yeah.

Whatever you're doing, make it your. Never.

Never sell. I would never associate with anyone who sold their company ever. Never. What do you have to say?

What do you have to say for.

Yourself as chairman of tpp? And we will never sell this Media franchise to anyone. We will, however, buy and shut down TechCrunch.

Yes, yes. I think all three of us have sold companies anyway. Ray, Dalio dropped a long piece. I don't know if we want to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, skip over that. Skip over that one.

Let's do Jason.

I did say, I think it was Buko or Bucko.

Yeah, Buco Capital Guy.

He was basically saying if Dalio is wrong again this time. He was. He was basically saying like, I almost hope Dalio is right about this changing world order.

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

Dalio, it's a media business. Yeah, hilarious. Because it's like they, they like. Up until like a couple years ago, the media product was one PDF that was floating out there called Principles that eventually got turned into a book. Like that's like, that's the most tinfoil hack conspiracy theory in the world. Hilarious though. Anyway, let's move on. Researchers secretly ran a massive unauthorized AI persuasion experiment on Reddit. In a large debate sub, the bots answers mined the original poster's identity and post history to personalize answers and created identities such as rape survivor. This is dark.

Yeah, super dark. I mean a lot of updates here.

Interesting formal legal demands against the researchers who ran this experiment.

The reason I thought this was interesting is that we tend to associate bots with low quality actors. You know, getting a DM that's like, hello, you've got. You forgot to log in.

Yeah, here's your FedEx thing or some like, you know, credit card thing.

But, but the, the, the Internet is full of bots from sophisticated groups in this way. This is just one story to break out of, out of many. Yeah, and I thought it was an interesting use case of like being able to influence opinion at scale in a way of not just in, in a hyper personalized way. So they would, they would be responding to a, a comment or a post and they would go. And whatever software they were using would go to the user's profile that they were commenting to look back at all their previous history and craft a response specifically for that person. And again, a human can do that, but being able to do that at scale in order to influence opinion is interesting.

Grace's Arc AGI puzzles on every single webpage. Every time you click a new page, you need to solve. No, no, the IMO will be solved, but the RKGI puzzle will not be solved. You'll have to mash the blocks for a minute. Every time you want to refresh the.

Page, say something outside of content safety guidelines.

Yes, that is a big one.

And so on this Reddit's top lawyer, Ben Lee, said the company is considering legal action against researchers from the University of Zurich who ran what he called an improper and highly unethical experiment. Experiment. So anyways, Reddit not happy that their users are being turned into lab rats.

But I'm sure let's move on to this design trend. LINEAR has for a long time been the design.

Product building product that everyone.

Has been obsessed with and everyone's been kind of ripping it off, but ripping off the website. Yeah, the website. But Ken 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 TEMU design website.

Looks like a Coachella poster.

Yeah, it does. He has his story, his investors on the landing page, including the Ramp logo. Yeah, I guess it's like someone from Ramp invested the team is examples. Have you seen when you go and you click like get started, it will actually say like only five slots remaining and there's like a timer for SAS product. That's so good. It's so good. So, I mean, this has been hotly debated with like, is he in on the joke? Is he going too far? He's clearly pushing the limits in terms of baiting people and creating frustration. He. I don't know if you saw this earlier, but he put out Icon, put out comparison chart and. And his company was the only one with tier one investors and tier one engineers. Engineers and OpenAI had neither and they have a lot of the same investors. So what is your take? Genius or. Or, you know, or is it the scary castle?

I think it's if you're going to be the machine that generates slop, you have to become slop. You have to go all the way.

Yeah, it is a slop. Like slop farmer.

Icon's terminal business is TikTok's slop. If you're going to be in that business, you might as well live in it.

Live in it.

Yeah, I think that's a good take.

A life's work of slop. That's great. Has you. Wait. Has your ex payout gone up?

My X pay? Yeah, I got a lot. A lot.

You got a big chat.

Big check.

That's great. There we go.

Are you going to retire off the X payout alone?

Yeah.

Yeah. You know what? You should spend your ex payout on an Eight Sleep. Go to Eight Sleep.com nights that feel your best days turn an E bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Apparently this is from Shiel X cracked down an engagement farm so real creators are earning more. Reminds me of Google's 2011 Panda update. It crushed spammy sites like Mahalo, which I guess was Jason Calacanis's website. I had no idea about this. And boosting quality ones like Nerd Wallet. Yeah. SHIELD and made the Internet a better place. It's interesting. So Shield shares his payouts. It went from around $200. 240 to 700 and then to over $1,300. Let's hear from Shield pulling in the big bucks for his post.

I mean if you.

4 figure paycheck.

Pretty good. Pretty good, Pretty good. I mean that's getting up into YouTube money.

If you have, if you're an LP of Shields, you have prima nocta on that check. Right?

Like that.

That has to be a DPI driver. Yeah, that has to go back up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He can't pocket that. You can't pocket that. It's got to go back in.

We actually do do that. Except, except John together. No, but we, we, we put all of our, our.

Yeah, we pull all of all the x accounts into 1, 1, 1, 1 account. But, but it has gone up. I'm excited to see where our TBPN official check lands because we've been pumping out a lot of content, getting a lot of views.

My understanding to finance a goo based energy drink in Nashville, Tennessee.

Yes, yes, yes.

Watch this space.

Yeah, watch this. Let's go to Lulu. She says an example of what I call the cascade of courage. When a brave CEO does something that everyone wants to, but no one dares to, the somewhat brave CEOs are emboldened to join and eventually everyone else follows suit. Until even the Most risk averse CEOs do it.

Let's give it up for the somewhat brave in the risk adversity.

Somewhat brave. They don't get enough.

They're brave too.

They don't get enough credit. Everyone talks. Oh, Brian Armstrong. So brave. No one says about the Tier 3 bravery not last, not total coward in the middle of the path.

It returns to being in the middle of the curve.

Pretty good.

Pretty good.

But Duolingo, I actually don't know if the CEO is the founder but you know Duolingo was started by the guy who created Captchas. Yeah, yeah. Amazing legendary story. But Anyway Duolingo says BLO is an all hands email from our CEO. We will be going AI first. Just like how betting on mobile in 2012 made all the difference. We're making a similar call. Now it's time for the platform shift. What doesn't change? We remain a company that cares deeply about its employees and they said Duolingo is going to be AI first. Changing how work gets done. It's not just a product productivity boast boost it gets us closer to our mission.

This gets me thinking. There is an opportunity for a company to basically let go of every single person except the CEO and be the first, the one person. One person, one billion dollar revenue company. And you just have to tap it for a second.

I mean yeah, I was thinking about that.

And then rehire people. Yeah.

The fastest way to get to a billion dollars one employee is to start with six billion dollars. Lots of employees fire everyone and then see what happens.

20% of the clients just forget to stop paying. Everything breaks. X proves what, what, what company do you think is plus a billion in revenue that you think you could actually run solo? I was thinking, I was looking at BlackBerry recently they still make $500 million a year.

Auto insurance companies are another good one.

Oh yeah.

Adjudication kind of problem.

Yeah. Yeah. Pretty simple. Interesting.

Imagine saying you're having an issue and you're saying talk to a human. And it's like we just got one guy.

We only have this.

We just got one guy. Like it's actually faster to talk.

The CEOs at Hill and Valley having a dinner, shaking hands, greasing.

You're on the side of the road, cars on fire. You're talking to open AI operator.

Yeah, that's great. Anyway, congratulations.

It's glazing.

You're sorry.

I just crashed that sign jumped into the street.

Yeah. How did he not see you?

Yeah, how did that sign not see you?

Bicyclists shouldn't be on the road anyway. They should ride on the sidewalk.

Have you tried having four wheels?

Yeah, it makes no sense. Anyway, I need a sound effect because Joshua Steinman over at Galvanic has launched a vibreal announcing his coming.

Vibe. Real alert. I mean it Was. No. It was. No. I've never. Honestly, I've never seen John.

It's so mean. Because obviously I love Josh. We saw him on the plane. This is the meme. This is the meme of, like, you know, you ship the. But it is awesome. It's a great video.

It's a great video.

I love the aesthetics.

And I think. I think he did this because he knew we were gonna be. He must have, you know, figured out from the airline that we were gonna be on the flight, too. Sitting right behind him.

Do we know what Galvanic does?

Yes. They secure the American industrial base.

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

Yeah. Any critiques on today's stream? By the way, just go to find Ben Kohler, shoot him a note. He'll have an NPS survey for today's stream anyway.

What else is in the news? We should wrap up soon. This is getting a little too wild. We got 10 minutes till 4.

Else we got. Oh, we got to cover the Pelosi Act. There's a new bill in Congress. If you've been living under a rock since yesterday, it's the Preventing elected leaders Owning securities and Investments.

They get super creative with these acronyms.

The Pelosi Act. And yeah, Josh Hawley sounds like an absolute dog for coming out with this. Yeah.

And what's your take on the insider trading on Capitol Hill?

I want to announce that we are supporting the Ramp Act.

Yes.

The.

What is ramp stand for?

The Ramp Running America.

The right accounting company for your provider.

Extremely. Bottle. We need to get you a pen and paper so you can map these out.

Interesting impact here is that autopilot, which has run the Pelosi tracker account forever.

They made a lot of money off of that.

Their own undoing, though, because if they advertise how they made it too popular. Pelosi is at. Insider trading made it too much in the public eye.

Yeah.

And they're going to have to find another goated copy. You know, I've always said that.

I've always said that the elected leader should be primarily optimizing for the stock market going up in the short term. And we should ultimately just give Jane Street. Right. Access to the legal code.

Don't need elections.

We don't need elections.

We need markets.

We need markets and we need, we need high frequency trading firms to decide what laws and they can toggle laws off within microseconds.

Does that tie into our sponsor?

Which one? We got a bunch.

Polymarket.

Polymarket. Oh yeah, Market polymarket. Did you see polymarket predicted the Canadian election correctly?

They absolutely nailed it. I don't what they basically made. I mean, the way to think about polymarket is it's, it's effectively like a decentralized crystal ball is the best way to describe it, right?

It is.

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 just going up and to the right. And again, this is back to back to back to back in terms of calling elections. It is.

Yeah. I do like this story that they got it right has been not really in the news and I think a lot of it's driven by the fact that the, I mean the Liberal won, the Conservative lost. Right. And it was kind of like an upset. But polymarker called it correctly. I don't, I actually haven't been tracking the news in Canada. I don't know if, if, if it's been like as much of an issue. But during the 2024 election, obviously the question about like, is poly market 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 Poly market role, Poly markets role in the American election or if we've like truly just laid it to rest and, and prediction markets are just a thing that exists and everyone say, oh yeah, like they, yeah.

Because it seems like, you know, election interference is obviously illegal, but, but conclave interference is not obviously illegal if you're a bishop.

Yeah.

Why not get some action on the side? Gamble.

Yep. You think that's what's happening?

I think it might be happening. We should check the odds.

Yeah, yeah.

Following the next, you can track who.

Will be the next pope.

Polymarket.

I think these odds are wrong.

Do you have a, do you have a pick over Pareto?

All I can say on this is I think these odds are bad. I think it's all off.

Oh, you think it's all off?

I think we're headed for an American Pope.

Well, that'd be great.

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

And when O3 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, of the models, what are they good at? What aren't they good at? Tyler Cowen said AI AGI is here. We had another guy on Will Brown who said we have 10 minute AGI. Now other people say, you know, it can't even solve an ARC AGI puzzle, therefore it is by definition not AGI.

I just think long duration tasks are clearly the challenge. Like operator does not work particularly well today. Like we are seeing incredible returns to very well scoped, very narrow tasks with very specific, specific models. However, you can do more than, you know, work for 10 minutes. I think long duration coherence is still a big challenge. Yeah, if I had a handicap it. I think we're still probably 5,000, 6,000 years away, but that's going to be a real slow and long takeoff.

Yeah. Where are you seeing famous last? Where are you seeing AI be most valuable in your personal work life? Like, like in your daily driving? Like I've had been. I've been having just a lot of luck with using the deep research function to basically build like what's essentially just a really detailed Wikipedia page or aggregation of a bunch of Wikipedia pages instead of just oh, I gotta go to the Microsoft wiki to understand what they were doing in the 80s and then, and then Apple. I can just say summarize it all, pull it all in, bake it all in.

It's deep research is doing easily four hours. I think it's fantastic on the average query like that.

Right.

Even if you knew exactly the sources to pull from.

Totally, totally. It just saves me opening a ton of tabs. But what have you been finding useful?

I mean even just as an interface to stuff I already like know and work with. Like O3 is an incredible tutor. Like there's a ton of healthcare regulation that's on websites I don't know how to read that are like horrible to interface with. Even just using O3 to interface with those sites. Prepare research briefings for me, it's really amazing. Just the amount of documentation we're able to generate is much higher.

Yeah. Are you a rune head text is the universal interface or do you think voice again, is more important?

I think corporate expense accounts are really.

In the universal interface. There's receipts, really.

Well, we got to talk about this post from Luke Metro. He says my most online opinion is that there should be awards for best screenshots like they do with photography. And I think this is one of the best take of the week. We should screenshot this and make it hard.

Yeah, yeah, we. So. So I think all three of us are in this chat or. Or were. Before it got doxed. You were probably right above this.

I did. I did not leave.

I know, I know, I know. We were saying we should have left because then we'd be in the screenshot if we'd been like, oh, David Sacks, I'm going to leave right now.

Imagine how status it would be if you left and they cropped you out.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Sean McGuire.

Tucker Carlson.

Not you.

We were joking about. Yeah. If you'd left, right between D. David and. And Tucker, you could have changed your name to Barack Obama or. Or ramp.com tvpn. Watch TVPN on X& then you leave and boom, you're part of history.

Part of history. They would have cropped you out anyway.

You're famous for collecting rare PDFs, you're famous for collecting rare books. Do you think you'll get in the rare screenshot game?

I mean, this is just. Whoever leaked it. I do have rare federal charges.

That is a bold statement. But I will. I will say I feel like Will has already has his screenshot collection.

I do. I have a lot of great rare screenshots. The real alpha these days is rare RSS feeds.

Yes, yes.

Private podcasting networks.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I've thought about that. The RSS feed for just the partners.

Just for the bars, boys.

All right, we got to cover this.

Dylan tweet about that.

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. Shots fired. This was interesting. I mean, I do feel like Satya has taken a big step back from the media even in the last. Even, you know, in the last month. Clearly felt like he was flying a little too close to the sun, maybe.

Yeah, I don't know. 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 inference happening on the hyperscalers, but now there's the Neo clouds as well with Crusoe and coreweave. And so there's a lot of like these weird things where the headline is that Microsoft canceled 2 gigawatts worth of leases but that only covers non binding Lois, not firm contracts. And it fails to mention that Microsoft has 5 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 2 gigawatts of non binding contracts. But you don't hear about those people because they're just like in the handshake deal in the LoI phase but then at the same time they're also like the number one buyer or they're growing a ton.

And no, and it's interesting, it's interesting to think about how much leverage they get from just coming out and saying we're pausing on a few of these things because then all the people that had data centers and construction that were just like oh, one of the hyperscalers will buy it, right? And like they had raised hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to build this stuff out. So basically, you know, potentially a great case study in exercising leverage that is.

Insane full of buyers because so semianalysis like they don't just look at the public reports of what the CapEx number is, they're actually looking. I mean they task satellites to take pictures of how the progress on build outs is going. They dig into all this stuff. They said the estimates suggest that Microsoft accounted for more than 60% of all new leased turnkey capacity from Q1 2023 to Q2 2024. Just absolute domination. And in June of 2024 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 gigascaler because they're so, they're they're doing so much more business business here.

And what word comes after hyper?

I don't know, giga. What's more, oh oh, in the, in like the sizing Gigawatt. Terawatt. Yeah, yeah. Terascular terrascaler. 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 for what was the most ambitious infrastructure build out in history. While the leasing slowdown is material, these changes are not material to the short and medium term and they only impact 2027 plus. So this is like that, that pivot by 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 deep seek moment. The idea that these models can be distilled. Maybe there's a pre training scaling wall that, you know, yes, there's going to be a ton of rl, but we're not necessarily going to need stuff in the short term. But at the same time when I look at this I feel like I want data center build out to continue and accelerate in energy production. To build, to accelerate like it is in China. But what's your take?

I just feel like enterprise enterprise diffusion is still so far away. Like getting O3 like capabilities in all of the Fortune 500 is like a 20 year project.

Interesting, right?

So as you think about like inference, demand scaling, model distillation going down, it's still, I think the Tyler Cowen take is correct. The diffusion is going to take forever.

That makes sense.

And you're going to 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 30 years. Microsoft built, I think for a world where that diffusion was going to be much faster than what is actually occurring. It's not like everyone's using OpenAI and Fortune 500s today, certainly not Fortune 20s.

Yeah, he actually has a Google trends chart here. Claude versus Gemini versus Copilot. And Copilot peaked last year and has been kind of flat in terms of interest while Gemini has grown obviously because there's more of a consumer angle there. A lot of the different like Salesforce has been upselling AI functionality. You know what Microsoft did with teams could potentially play out here. But I agree with you, I think it will take a very, very long time.

Well, we got one more ad before we get our last post. Linear is A purpose built tool for planning and building products. I've used it basically my entire career. It is a system that allows teams to work more efficiently, including ours and it is absolutely beautiful. So the overlay that you see, that's very much a product that we are building every single day. And thank you to Linear for powering the show. I have one more post which is fun signing into stuff in 2025 from Kuravora says sign in Forgot password Check email no email Try Google Auth Hooray works. Is this really you grab iPhone open YouTube app yes it's me Okta sign in required Enter passkey Passkey expired need backup code Open password manager signed out Enter password manager password no backup codes Try another way QR code iOS Okta app sign in face ID is this really you2 FA SMS code the worst.

Of all this is when is when you try and you're like oh I should sign in 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.

Proud big company guy now like Microsoft Teams sign in kind of a leak.

It's good, it's good.

It gives you a little my apps Microsoft Teams shows you all the stuff you're signed into. Pretty hard to beat.

That's good. Before we close we should do Will's post. Craft is the antidote to slop. Can you take us through this?

This is. Yeah. No, I will not. I'll spare you two pages of paper. But the, the argument here is that we, we should be better about selecting the kind of problems we try to automate. And I'm trying to draw a distinction here between labor and toil. Right. Labor is, you know toil is this unpleasant formatting, spreadsheets, doing your expenses before you have ramp. Right. All this unpleasant work labor is the meaningful thing that God put you on earth to do. This is an argument that I think we are working on the wrong types of AI problems that we're trying to automate things away that will lead to kind of disgusting outcomes. Right. You go to Nashville, you go to Charlotte, you go to any of these new tier 3 cities. They all look the same. They don't feel like real places. I think the models are going to drive kind of a similar thing happening to the timeline, to online spaces, to physical objects. I think we can afford avoid it. I think we can get more places and things that feel magical by dividing this labor. The essay is two pages I think it's, it's worth reading.

What is the prescription for actually avoiding the bad outcome?

I think it's like, it's much like cultural. It's like a food quality. Right. Like if we, we ignore the food supply and then we get sick in 20 years. I think if we ignore the supply of language, being gmo essentially, like know the source of inspiration being gmo, we will just eradicate ourselves and it will solve itself.

Is there some sort of like tipping point where you need, you need more than 50% of humanity on the craft, you know, train.

We need better elite taste. I feel like our cultural elites certainly, you know, the people that are running corporate expense providers today are not buying castles on the continent. They're not buying really high quality furniture. It just feels obvious. So we need to turn away from.

I did notice that when I was in. I think in some of these cities you just see like everyone, they're all rich, but they all have the exact same house. It's the glass box.

Yeah. It's incredible. It looks like. Yeah.

Instead of where's the Hearst Castle of today? I mean some people are building, I think the Collison brothers are building a lot.

They bought a castle. I mean Catherine Boyle had a good take on this. Like all architecture kind of looks like Islamabad. Like it's all, it's all Arabic architecture. It's not, it's, it's not pretty or it's at least not set in stage. My argument here is orient yourself in history. Build meaningful things, let it rock.

Yeah. Interesting. Are there more like tactical things to do on the actual foundation model side? Are there things that you want to see? Like a lot of people say, oh, Claude has more personality or is this an AI safety issue or guidelines?

Much like you can drive, you know, a automatic Ferrari versus as you know, a six speed manual. It's all about choosing the right things to find enjoyment in. And I think a lot of what we're doing is seeing a culture that is downstream of slop, that people are choosing the kind of junk calories rather than the meaningful engagement. And I just think much like we're seeing in diet today, like that shift will be natural. I actually don't, I'm not worried about the future. Right. Like the Bible ends in revelation, like God wins. We've read the final chapter already, but I think we need to get past the slop on the way there.

Interesting. Jordy, Anything?

Powerful stuff.

Powerful stuff.

Well, we are in Washington D.C. yeah, Hillen Valley. And we're at Hillen Valley. And I'm very excited for tomorrow.

Me, too.

And we've said it before, but we'll say it again. We will be live from Hillen Valley tomorrow. We're going to be pulling in people that are talking, people that are attending, getting that boots on the ground perspective on many of our nation's most important issues.

Loafers on the ground. Loafers on the ground.

Yes. Yes.

We're in dc.

We're in dc. Well, thank you for joining us, Will.

Thank you for having me.

It's fitting. And thanks for tuning in, folks. We will see you. See you tomorrow.

See you next time.

Cheers.

Bye.